Author: Serkadis

(NaturalNews)On March 21, 2013, Hawaii had their largest hearing on a GMO lableing bill since fluoridation got defeated in 2003. Unfortunately, due to the genetic modification of our politicians, the bill got “deferred”, which is euphemism for ‘flushed down the toilet’. Here’s…

A new study by Canadian researchers has found that some depression may be linked to a vitamin D deficiency. ”A systematic review and meta-analysis of 14 studies with a total of 31,424 participants revealed an association between vitamin D levels and depression,” said…

You might have heard recently about a study finding that liking “curly fries” on Facebook correlates strongly with high intelligence. Publications such as Wired have written about it. Quid Founder and CEO Sean Gourley cited it during a presentation at Structure: Data last week. A faction of the European Union parliament even pointed to the study as yet another reason to prohibit data mining by web companies.

However, if you’re like me, hearing anybody repeat that curly fries data point as fact likely sends shiver down your spine. It’s not that it’s not true — it very well might be — but that it’s nearly useless information without more background.

That’s right, the old correlation versus causation argument is front and center once again. In all the big data world, it’s probably the biggest fallacy there is, no matter how you look at it. No, getting value from big data always doesn’t require giving greater credence to correlation than causation. And, no, relying on correlation isn’t inherently some sort of an ethically or scientifically questionable practice.

Really, the choice between relying on correlation or striving to find causation probably depends on what you’re trying to do.

When there’s nothing at stake, correlate away

Let’s be honest: If all I’m concerned with doing is boosting clickthroughs, selling more products or predicting the movies you want to see, correlations probably will work just fine. I don’t really care why, for example, Mac users book more-expensive rooms on Orbitz — I just care that they do.

You visit my site, my system sees you’re using a Mac (or that you like curly fries, or any other attribute it can associate with you) and it shows you content that it thinks you’ll want to see. It’s not a perfect approach, but it’s probably a far cry better than the old method of just showing everybody the exact same content.

And when you’re collecting potentially petabytes of user data and trying to serve ads in near real time, strong correlations might be about the best things you can hope to find. It’s a volume-and-velocity business, and heavy examinations of why any two (or more) things are related to one another might not always provide a high return on investment.

A more extreme example of when correlations might suffice would be something like machine-to-machine systems that need to make decisions in real-time in order to prevent disasters. The people charged with running these systems might not know why a certain series of events often precedes a particular outcome, but it’s better safe than sorry.

You can’t make a difference — or real decisions — with correlations

But if you’re trying to use big data to make a meaningful difference in the word or to make decisions that can have significant real-world consequences, mere correlations probably won’t cut it. This is what Evgeny Morozov warns about in relation to crime in a recent New York Times column. It’s what Gourley had in mind when talking about data science versus data intelligence. It’s why the current discussion around machine learning almost always includes a human aspect, as well.

Many of the reasons for not acting on correlations alone are based on privacy and a whole collection of civil, constitutional and human rights. You simply can’t profile and then arrest, for example, people based on what their Likes suggest they might be. You probably shouldn’t make decisions about people’s financial, health or general well being based on mere correlations, either.

Heck, I wouldn’t even serve ads that delve into personal information such as health, sexual orientation or intelligence without a very strong reason to believe I was accurate (and express consent to serve those ads). And the Facebook-curly-fries study is full of correlations that could be potential landmines, a small portion of which are visible in the chart below.

But these are all situations where the fear of incorrectly profiling someone occasionally — and being sued as a result — might overpower the desire to do good most of the time. The data Darwinism that my colleague Om Malik wrote about recently extends beyond just peer reviews and social-media ratings, and one shouldn’t take the role of playing God (or catalyst for evolutionary change, to continue the Darwin metaphor) lightly.

Sometimes, though, correlations aren’t enough because you really want to solve a problem or perhaps build a great product. As Gourley explained at Structure: Data, even using correlative data to predict insurgent attacks in a place like Iraq is relatively easy, but predicting the likelihood of events doesn’t stop them. Stopping them requires really understanding and addressing the root causes of the attacks.

The same goes for stopping disease outbreaks, figuring out why programmers make more mistakes during certain seasons, stopping gun violence, or just capitalizing on that knowledge about curly fries or hotel-room bookers in order to build products that touch upon the deeper rationales for liking those things. You can fight the symptoms, so to speak, or you can cure the disease.

So feel free to try selling the next guy you see eating curly fries on a documentary about Dostoevsky, but don’t expect him to care. It might be that there’s some strong connection between curly fries and intelligence; of course, it might also be that intelligent people — entirely coincidentally — tend to live within walking distances of an Arby’s. But no one has asked about that.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tobias Arhelger.

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Google updates just keep on coming. Earlier today new versions of Google+ for Android and iOS pushed out, and I’ve been too busy to handle the goods (Later! Promise!). Two key areas of focus: Sharing and sharing — as in primping photos and being better part of Communities. The updates are somewhat different for both platforms.

In an unsurprising move, the iOS app picks up some features from Snapseed, which Google acquired last autumn. So now, when you’re sharing a photo, you can: “Do basic edits like rotate and crop, as well as select filters like Drama and Retrolux; adjust saturation, contrast, brightness and lots more by sliding your fingers up-and-down, then left-and-right; single tap at any time to compare your creation with the original”, Amar Gandhi, Google+ director of product management, says.

Snapseed remains a separate app for iOS, and that’s where the real Instagram-like photo-editing capabilities can be found.

What about the Android app? He highlights some new features:

• Posts include more text up front — from the original message, and from comments
• Tapping video, photo or link attachments takes you directly to a watch page, lightbox or website
• Image previews are rarely cropped, so you’ll see portrait photos (for instance) in all their glory
• Key actions like +1, reshare and comment are displayed more prominently in each post
• You can swipe through photo albums inline

The Communities component is updated on both platforms. Enhancements include:

• The ability to adjust the volume of community posts in your Home stream
• The option to invite people to a community, or reshare items with a community
• Member search, content moderation, and report-remove-ban support for community managers

Reviews are generally positive on both platforms. Average rating for the new version is 4.5 stars at Apple’s App Store. Overall average is 4.2 stars for all versions on Google Play, where Bryan Lambert writes: “Excellent!! This such a great app, easy to navigate, very smooth and detailed. With the new update looks fabulous, great job Google!”

Amir Abdullah would “take this over facebook twitter and instagram. That’s just my opinion but it just looks better and is the easiest to use. It’s better than I thought it would be. Thinking bout switching. This is the place to go if you do. Shoud’ve done it a long time ago. Stunned. Keep it up”.

But other reviewers see things differently. “Every single release this app gets worse as Google panders to the techTards”, Shane Monroe opines. “Why does EVERYTHING have to look and act like magazine flow? How is it that I can see shifting comments under posts — but I can’t do something simple like LONG PRESS->MUTE a post in my stream? Sigh”.

Similarly, Frank Chagas is “disappointed. Used to use Google+ regularly for news and jokes etc., but latest update killed it for me. Looks better but these Facebook-esque suggestions are a hindrance”.

Google+ for Android 3.6 requires version 2.2 or higher of the operating system. Google+ for iOS 4.2 requires version 5.1 or greater of the operating system.

Certain bacteria can breathe iron like we breathe oxygen. Understanding how they do so will help researchers use the microbes for cleaning up soil contaminants, for trapping carbon dioxide or for making batteries out of bacteria. Now, a team of researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that proteins on the surface of bacteria produce an electric current by simply touching a mineral surface, allowing them to breathe the iron in the rock.

To do so, the team created a simulated bacterium using just the proteins thought to shuttle the electrons from the inside of the microbe to the rock. They inserted these proteins into lipid layers of vesicles, which are small bubbles of lipids such as the ones that make up a bacterial membrane. Using instruments and expertise at EMSL, the Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, the team showed that the proteins protruded through the lipid bubbles in the same way they do in real bacteria, known as Shewanella oneidensis.

Then they tested how well electrons traveled between an electron donor on the inside and an iron-bearing mineral on the outside. The electron transfer rate they measured was fast enough to support bacterial respiration, showing that those proteins were the only ones the bacteria would need to conduct electricity.

In addition to contaminant cleanup and bio-batteries, the finding is important for understanding how carbon works its way through the atmosphere, land and oceans. If researchers understand electron transfer, they can learn how bacteria control the carbon cycle.

The team of researchers included Thomas A Clarke, Gaye White, Julea N Butt, and David J Richardson from the University of East Anglia and Zhi Shi, Liang Shi, Zheming Wang, Alice C Dohnalkova, Matthew J Marshall, James K Fredrickson and John M Zachara at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science and UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Read the entire release from the University of East Anglia.

A few years ago, I received a panicked phone call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in months. His Internet connection was on the fritz, and he had a huge project due the next morning. He’d called his ISP, and they were no help. As his only friend that, as he said, “knew computers and stuff”*, I was bound by International Homie Law to fix his crap.

“You’ve reset your modem, right?”

“Yeah, man — Comcast had me do that.”

“You reset your router, too, right?”

“Yeah. It’s still broken!”

“I’ll be over in a while.”

I arrive at his house a bit later, and have him point me toward his networking gear. It’s stuffed behind the TV in his living room, as it’s the only place in his apartment with a functioning coax cable coming out of the wall.

I ask him to reset his modem again. He reaches over and unplugs his modem. So far, so good.

I ask him to reset his router again. He reaches over and unplugs his roommate’s AppleTV.

Whoops.

---

Every geek has a story (or 10) like this one. The Amazing Jellybean, an ongoing Kickstarter project, wants to make them a little less common.

The Amazing Jellybean is, at its core, a power switch. But it’s a power switch with smarts.

You see, the modem/router reset dance is a bit more complicated than it probably should be. Unplug both. Wait 60 seconds. Plug in modem. Wait 60 seconds. Plug in router. Wait 60 seconds. That’s 180+ seconds! Nicholas Cage could have stolen your car like three times by then.

The Amazing Jellybean (a name which I am starting to feel ridiculous typing) handles all that with a single button push. Push the button, walk away. It’ll kill both the modem and the router, then bring them back online in the right order and with enough time in between for a proper boot sequence.

That alone makes it a pretty killer product to get for, say, your mom. Or your uncle. Or that one friend who has no idea how he keeps getting spyware from all of the totally legit sites he browses on his curiously sticky Dell. Cough.

But you, you don’t need this, right? You’re a titan of technology! You don’t nee no stinkin’ box rebooting your modem for you! Oh, did I mention it has Bluetooth connectivity so you can reset your broken connection without getting out of your chair to battle dust bunnies? Yeah, that’s what sold me on it, too.

Is it a more of a band-aid than a permanent solution to a bigger problem? Sure — but it’s a problem that has been lurkin’ around consumer grade networking gear for decades now. It’s probably not gonna disappear anytime soon.

As for why it’s shaped like a Jellybean? I have absolutely no idea.

Find the Kickstarter page here.

[* Pro tip: When a conversation starts with “Hey, you know computers and stuff, right?”, the only correct answer is a straight-faced “What’s a computer?”]

Debra Chrapaty, who has served in infrastructure leadership positions for some of the Internet’s largest players, is now calling the shots for a cloud service provider. Chrapaty is departing Zynga, where she had been CIO, to become the chief executive officer at enterprise cloud storage specialist Nirvanix.

Chrapaty’s tenure at Zynga spanned the company’s effort to shift away from a heavy dependence upon cloud services, moving much of the gaming company’s infrastructure to in-house data centers. Her experience prior to Zynga included a stint as VP of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft . She also served as Senior VP of the software collaboration group at Cisco Systems and COO of E-TRADE Technologies.

Nirvanix provides cloud storage services focused on enterprises with massive amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments. Last year the company raised $25 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures. Customers include Cerner Corporation, IBM, USC Digital Repository, National Geographic and Relativity Media.

“I believe there is room for innovation in the enterprise storage market,” said Chrapaty. “Nirvanix is already ahead of the game and differentiating services and gaining traction against some of the storage goliaths. Having built and run some of the industry’s largest cloud environments, I know the importance of secure, available, cost efficient infrastructure and storage. Now we have the chance to build a truly differentiated cloud offering and pass that value on to our enterprise customers. That’s exciting for me and, more important, for the industry.”  

 

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to wait until September before hearing arguments in a case that challenges the Federal Communication Commission’s right to implement network neutrality, according to a research note. This would delay a decision until the end of this year or early 2014. Originally the arguments in the case, which was filed by Verizon and Metro PCS, were anticipated by May, with a decision made some time over the summer.

At this point the excruciating slog that has been the network neutrality rule-making process just continues to play out like some sort of successful Disney franchise moving from movie theaters to several straight-to-video releases. The news about the shift in timing from the court comes via a research note penned by Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank, on Monday afternoon. The note said:

The briefing schedule was completed in January and there seemed to be a good chance a three-judge panel would be named any day to hear the case, with oral argument scheduled for no later than May and a ruling possible over the summer. But our understanding is the case will not be scheduled for oral argument before next September (absent unforeseen circumstances), though the panel could be named sooner. The court generally takes a break from oral arguments between May and September.

Analysts Chris King and David Kaut note that the timing for the eventual ruling would subsequently get pushed back to the fourth quarter of this year or early next year. They also note that the timing is likely a disappointment for both Verizon and Metro PCS. Recall that the network neutrality regulations were released in Dec. 2010 and weren’t published in the Federal Register (and thus becoming both real regulation and now open to a lawsuit) until November 2011.

I suppose another nine months or a year before the fate of those rules will be decided is just par for this particular regulatory course.

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OK, so your NCAA tournament bracket has officially been busted. Don’t feel so bad. ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas, stat-geek superstar Nate Silver and even SAP’s vaunted predictive analytics software all missed the upsets, too. So did President Obama.

Three of the four correctly picked 11 of the Sweet 16 teams, while Bilas correctly chose 10. But despite the similariy in results between men and models, I’d follow Silver’s model-based forecast every time. Not only is it accurate, but it stands to make people a lot of money.

Just to be clear, though, Silver doesn’t actually pick winners and losers (at least not publicly, as far as I can tell). Rather, he uses a model that takes into account a number of variables — including a handful of popular computer rankings — and produces the probability of each team advancing through each round of the tournament. That’s what makes his forecast so effective if you’re a betting man: It’s easy enough to pick the winner and most of the final four by just choosing the top seeds (I’m looking at you, POTUS), but the way to accel past everyone else in points is to spot the Cinderellas.

If I were ESPN, I’d pay Silver a boatload of money to come on TV once a year and present his forecast to a March-Madness-obsessed nation. I’m fairly certain the network could extend the broadcast out to about three hours and charge Super-Bowl-like advertising rates. Here’s why.

It’s the probabilities, stupid

As I was saying, anyone, including Silver, can spot the best teams in the tournament by watching enough basketball, settling on some important data points to analyze or just following the NCAA’s seeding. Here are the seeds my experts, data analysts and the leader of the free world chose for the Sweet 16:

• Bilas: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5
• Obama: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5
• SAP: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8
• Silver: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5

Here are the actual seeds that advanced to the Sweet 16: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 15.

The smart money is always on the higher seeds from a pure probability standpoint (although I have no idea how SAP built its model to get so many 5-8 seeds in the Sweet 16). But strange things can, and often do, happen in the NCAA tournament. This year, those strange things are called Wichita State (9-seed), Oregon (12-seed), LaSalle (13-seed) and Florida Gulf Coast University (15-seed).

So why am I so high on Silver if his Sweet 16 probabilities were just as off-base as the two non model-based human brackets and SAP’s model-based picks? Because if I were looking for a few upsets, he might have helped me spot them. Here some of his notable projections for lower-seeded teams most likely to advance:

• Arizona (6-seed): 38.1 percent of reaching the Sweet 16 — they made it (SAP picked this correctly)
• Florida Gulf Coast (15-seed): 3.3 percent chance of making the Sweet 16 — they made it
• Oregon (12-seed): 17.5 percent chance of making the Sweet 16 — they made it
• Minnesota (11-seed): 61.9 percent chance of winning its first game — it won (Bilas, SAP and Obama picked this, too)
• California (12-seed): 32.8 percent chance of winning its first game — it won (SAP picked this correctly)

And in my neck of the woods — Las Vegas — being smarter than the sportsbooks means big money. No. 12 Oregon and No. 13 LaSalle didn’t really sneak up on the oddsmakers (60-1 and 100-1 odds to make the Final Four, respectively), but No. 15 Florida Gulf Coast is paying out 1,000-1 should it reach the Final Four.

I wouldn’t count on that happening, though. Silver now gives those teams a 1 percent, 5.1 percent and 0.8 percent chance, respectively, of making the Final Four. Louisville, Florida and Indiana look like locks to make it, and one of them should win the tournament.

Men vs. models: Let’s call it a draw

If you’re looking at these selections as some sort of man-versus-machine competition, I don’t think you’ll find a clear winner. Although Silver comes out looking the best of the four brackets I analyzed, his projections aren’t that much different than Bilas’s picks. And although SAP’s picks fall apart in the end — two of its Final Four selections (including its national champion pick) are out — it did correctly pick a couple upsets. President Obama, well, he pretty much picked chalk.

The better way to look at these results is probably as further evidence that man and machine need to work together more closely, something we highlighted heavily at our Structure: Data conference last week. Men create models, but men probably don’t crunch the numbers. And when there’s pride or money on the line, knowing which No. 15 seed has the best chances of making a run is probably what matters most.

Your chances of picking every upset without a little help: not good at all.

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If we persist in thinking of the internet as an information superhighway, then we’ll continue to handle congestion by adding more lanes, via expensive upgrades in the core network, at the edge and at the last mile. The end result of our love affair with connectivity is a losing proposition for ISPs who are forced to upgrade their networks to meet the ongoing demand for broadband without taking enough of a share from the growing internet economy to meet their margins.

Or so writes Eric Klinker, in the Harvard Business Review blog, in a solid post about how we’re going to manage the growth of the internet. While Klinker sounds like many a telco-funded astroturfer in his worries about ISP profits, he’s actually the CEO of file sharing site, BitTorrent. And his arguments are worth listening to on both sides of the internet divide — the ISPs and the content companies looking to ride those pipes.

In the post, which is similar in spirit to one he wrote for GigaOM in 2011, he agues that the problem on the Internet is congestion, and that there are far more ways to address congestion than just adding more lanes. And of course as the CEO of BitTorrent, which has a proprietary file transfer system that is composed of masses of distributed computers, his main idea is distributed computing. From the article:

Distributed computing systems work with unprecedented efficiency. You don’t need to build server farms, or new networks, to bring an application to life. Each computer acts as its own server; leveraging existing network connections distributed across the entirety of the internet. BitTorrent is a primary example of distributed computing systems at work. Each month, via BitTorrent, millions of machines work together to deliver petabytes of data across the web, to millions of users, at zero cost. And BitTorrent isn’t the only example of distributed technology at work today. Skype uses distributed computing systems to deliver calls. Spotify uses distributed computing systems to deliver music.

The challenges associated with this are obvious. Customers have to download clients in order to use such networks, and they will still affect the end user’s connection at the last mile or in the airwaves and at cell sites on mobile networks. Thus, they can tax ISP networks (although they can be optimized). But with video a huge driver of congestion on the consumer side, it’s a solution that could work, since people will download software in order to watch TV. Even ISPs have tested distributed computing when they tried out the P4P network protocol way back in 2008.

Distributed computing would force many popular web services to reconsider how they build their applications and stream their files, which could have a large effect on big web sites such as Facebook or Google as well as content companies and content delivery networks. Another option, and one that we’re inching toward, is smart routers and prioritization schemes where the user can set their own network parameters to best use the bandwidth they have available. Software-defined networks will also make such prioritization easier and cheaper to manage inside the core telco network as well.

There’s also a more controversial idea of ISPs charging more for broadband during peaks times, as opposed to current data caps that limit people no matter if they download information at 2AM or during prime time. True congestion pricing would also force users to bear to cost of overburdening the ISP network, although ISPs would then have to be open about how often their networks are congested and would risk consumers losing their appetite for broadband. My hunch is that neither the ISPs or the content companies want that to happen, although it’s still far from clear that upgrades are the death knell for the cable and telco companies, as opposed to a painful shift in their margin profiles.

Regardless, we’re only asking for more broadband and more internet services, so Klinker’s article is a welcome reminder that none of that will come for free.

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If you’re a fan of AMC’s hit television series Mad Men (or Jon Hamm’s penis), you will be happy to know that season 5 is now streaming on Netflix.

Here’s Netflix’s description of the season:

Brilliant, hard-drinking advertising exec Don Draper is back for more drama in this critically acclaimed show’s long-awaited fifth season, which charts the volatile ups and downs Draper and his colleagues endure at their Manhattan-based ad agency.

Yeah, not really that descriptive. Just watch it.

Fans are gearing up for the start of season 6, which premieres April 7 on AMC. Now, Netflix subscribers have a couple weeks to get caught up or revisit the last season to refresh their memories on what happened. Here’s a new trailer for season 6:

Now watch the cast of Mad Men make their March Madness predictions.

The latest Google Webmaster Help video deals with getting your site’s rankings back after experiencing some downtime.

Google’s Matt Cutts will often provides answers to his own questions in these videos. This time the question comes from Googler Pierre Far, a Webmaster Trends analyst at Google UK. The question is:

My website was down for a couple of days and now has lost all of its Google rankings. What can I do to get them back?

Basically, Cutts’ answer is just to put the site back up, make sure it’s reliable, and make sure the pages that were there before are still there.

“There’s a tension at Google where if a page goes away (maybe there’s a 404), we don’t know if it’s really gone away or whether that page will be back,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a server time out, you know, the server is kind of slow. And so, on one hand, you don’t want to keep showing a page that would be a bad user experience, like it’s really gone away. On the other hand, it’s very common for websites to go down for an hour, two hours, a day, two days…and so you also want to give the benefit of the doubt, so you can revisit those pages and see whether they’ve gone up.”

“So we do have different varying time periods where we basically allow, if a domain looks like it’s gone away, but it comes back – you know, it’s back online, then we just sort of say, ‘Okay, it was a transient error,’ so the short and simple advice is just make sure you put the website back up the way it was, and hopefully things should recover relatively quickly,” says Cutts.

This may not be quite the answer you were looking for, but that’s the one Google is giving. It would certainly be interesting to know more about these “varying periods of time”.

“So?” You say. Yesterday, when writing about the Windows Blue leak, I emphasized the importance of Microsoft picking up the pace, by releasing new features faster. Brandon LeBlanc says the updates will come today, but I surely don’t see them yet — so can’t authoritatively write about refinements.

Get used to it, these three updates tip changes ahead, like others, such as SkyDrive and Skype. It’s a new Microsoft, and the push to the cloud and subscription computing are major reasons, along with competitive need and BYOD. The company’s longstanding priority providing backward-compatibility drags development. Some innovations are held back, while enterprise customers using the same software for years keeps new features out of market even if Microsoft releases them. Microsoft lumbers along, in part because core customers do. No longer.

As Microsoft pushes out more cloud and subscription products, the company seizes control of when customers get new features rather than IT organizations acting as bottlenecks or fussy workers whining about change. There is more flow of ideas to innovation to implementation.Think about it. Why invest millions of dollars developing something customers won’t use? Cloud and subscriptions bring forward new features, giving Microsoft developers incentive to do more sooner.

Then there is the whole bring-your-own-device to work thing, which is nowhere as new as many analysts (who want to sell services and reports) or bloggers (many of whom are too young to remember) would have you believe. I was BYOD back in the Windows 3.1 era. The first cell phones, Palm Pilots and BlackBerries all came to the enterprise by the back door. B. Y. O. D. What’s different now is volume and the economy.

According to “Good Technology’s 2nd Annual State of BYOD Report”, 76 percent of enterprises with more than 2,000 employees have programs in place, and the total is expected to reach 88 percent this year. However, there is a startling shift in costs — to employee up rather than organization down. Good finds that in half the companies with BYOD programs, employees pay for devices and supporting services, such as cellular data for cell phones, tablets and some laptops. Corporate IT is more willing to let employees use their own stuff, as long as they pay. Consumers, unlike enterprises, accept — even demand change.

Shake it all up and suddenly some of the logjam shakes free and creates opportunity for Microsoft to speed up development and crank out new features as they are ready rather than save them up for big, cumulative releases. Hence, enhancements to, say, Mail, Calendar and People apps ahead of any major changes to Windows. Actually, we haven’t seen pace like this since the U.S. antitrust case squashed Microsoft innovation, easily ending any speedy updates to so-called middleware promised for Windows XP.

That’s what these three updates mean and sudden pace developing Windows Blue.

So it’s no surprise then that LeBlanc promises: “These updates are part of our ongoing focus and commitment to continually improving your Windows experience. This means that the experience on Windows PCs and tablets will keep getting richer”.

With Google cranking out updates fast and furiously, the approach is good business and is great for users. There’s nothing like competition to make products better.

Photo Credit: Lighthunter/Shutterstock

Few may have ordered them, but the LTE version of Google’s Chromebook Pixel is set to ship by April 8. That’s the date currently showing on the Pixel product page in the Google Play store, as noted by Jeff Jarvis. The Wi-Fi models of Google’s newest Chromebook began shipping out several weeks ago, so only the LTE models have been held up from delivery.

To add mobile broadband connection in the Chromebook Pixel, potential buyers not only had to wait a few extra weeks, but they had to also pay an additional $150: The LTE version costs $1,449 as compared to $1,299 for the Wi-Fi only Pixel. Aside from the broadband radio, there is no difference in the two devices aside from 64 GB of local storage capacity in the LTE Pixel, which is double that of the Wi-Fi edition. Both machines get access to 1 terabyte of Google Drive storage for 3 year after purchase.

The $150 premium for the LTE model also includes a small bit of LTE service: 100 MB each month for two years. After that, it will cost an additional amount for mobile broadband service on Verizon’s LTE network. I spoke with a Google representative a few weeks back to verify this no-contract plan pricing for the Chromebook Pixel:

• $9.99 = an unlimited day pass
• $20 = 1 GB good for one month
• $35 = 3 GB good for one month
• $50 = 5 GB good for one month

Given that the LTE model can still use any Wi-Fi hotspot, including one created by a smartphone, having these pay-as-you-go plans are a reasonable way to ensure connectivity in a pinch on the Pixel. Even better: I was told that the Pixel can also be added to an existing Verizon Share Everything plan for $10 per month. That way, you can just use the data you’re already paying for.

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The mobile phone is today’s PC, but not necessarily in the way you think. Fifteen years ago, the PC was the central hub in one’s interactions with the wider world. This was largely because of the state of miniaturization; our electronics simply weren’t small or efficient enough to make mobile phones and laptops nearly as powerful as desktops.

So we made do with the PC — it was a jack of most trades, and getting more powerful all the time. Then, cue the proliferation of smaller devices like iPods, feature phones, and pocket GPS units that were fairly powerful and useful. The PC declined in the universality of its application, and while it remains popular to this day (however one defines it), its usefulness has been honed to a finer point — stationary productivity, gaming, storage, and so on.

Imagine, if you will, a graph with power (roughly speaking, including efficiency and variety of capabilities as well as raw horsepower) on the X axis and intended use cases on the Y. The PC usually ended up in the top right corner, a sort of computing Swiss Army knife that lacked only portability. On the bottom left you have things like calculators. The bottom right, corresponding to high power and few intended use cases, was empty until those new devices took up residence there, using advanced technology to accomplish more narrowly-defined tasks — playing music, finding one’s location, checking email, etc. Keep this graph in mind.

Fast forward to the present. Smartphones are enjoying their salad days at the moment, as PCs were in the late 90s. We have reached a pleasant plateau hardware-wise (barring any major breakthroughs), and divergence in software is now the word.

Smorgasbord

Samsung’s recent press conference, although excruciating in every other respect, was fun for me because of the sheer amount of features being discussed. It reminded me of that trick where a clown pulls scarves or the like from his mouth, and they just keep coming out (it was about as funny, too).

I don’t blame them for throwing the kitchen sink at us, even if the feature list ends up reading like a Skymall catalogue. They love technology! They love what it can do! We can all be positive about that. And believe it or not, there are millions of people who love gadgets like this. My dad, for instance, would flip over the two-way video thing. And built-in automatic spoken translation? It’s really quite impressive!

But here’s what interested me about it. Remember that graph from earlier? Let’s tweak it a little bit. If we only include mobile devices, what you find at the top right is almost certainly the latest Galaxy, a “life companion” device meant to be applied to practically every situation you could ever encounter.

At the lower left is the lowly feature phone, humble in its capabilities and its ambitions. Towards the upper right you have the iPhone, which, despite being advanced and versatile, is not explicitly intended for quite so many uses as the larger, more intense Samsung (witness the extra sensors, larger screen, etc on the latter). In fact, most everything would likely be clustered loosely around a line between the origin and the Galaxy.

Solve for Y

Now, if you’ll recall, the lower right was, previously, where the world shifted to as soon as it was possible. What do we see there now?

Not a lot.

There are a few, arguably. Wearable devices like the Fitbit or iPod shuffle, for instance, or e-paper devices imitating paper but communicating over 3G. And while wearable devices are indeed an increasingly popular area of development, they don’t quite scratch the itch I’m reaching for here. For one thing, they mostly offload their interfaces and many functions to other devices, and as such act more as an extension of your phone or PC, an extra accelerometer or temperature sensor that’s more convenient to carry or embed than a whole phone.

What the generation of devices succeeding the PC (back to the first graph, now) added was portability, certainly, but more importantly, they added focus. They took the idea of the PC and redesigned it around a single purpose. This produced some wonderful devices: The original iPod and dedicated GPS units I mentioned were incredibly good at what they did.

Now we have come full circle: Mobile devices built around the idea of the original PC — Swiss Army knives once more.

But think about what you do with your phone. The readers of this site probably do a lot more than the average user, but still, most use would fall within the basic categories of calling, written communication, web, imaging, gaming, and location.

I think we’re going to see devices laser-focused on one or two of these categories fairly soon. Maybe that sounds a little weird, first because there are already devices like that, and second because one might credibly argue that there’s no point to them. But I disagree with both points, thou man of straw.

Devices like the Galaxy Camera and Xperia Play (and to a certain extent Google Glass) may appear in some ways to be an attempt at a totally refocused mobile device, but let’s be honest: they are grotesque frankengadgets, the modern equivalent of CD-MP3 players, combining the drawbacks of two device classes in one handy package. We haven’t seen, for example, a device that truly marries the accessibility and connectivity of an iPhone with the picture-taking prowess of a DSLR, or a device that revolves entirely around your location while providing the versatility of apps and services, or a device focused specifically on the storing and organization of rich silent media like articles and books. Instead, every device is a compromise rather than a reinvention.

…When there’s nothing left to take away

But the iPhone’s camera is great, you say! And you can get apps that provide the functionality you speak of, without removing other functionality from the device!

This perspective, however, is a by-product of peak multifarity. The more the better! Go Samsung! Ten pages of apps! But good design, which one encounters surprisingly seldom these days in the devices and interfaces we use the most, may be considered the result of subtraction rather than addition. People didn’t stop buying regular knives when Swiss Army knives came out. And of course people didn’t stop buying PCs when BlackBerries, iPods, and GPS units came out. Some things do one thing well, and some do many things adequately. It’s good to be able to choose between them.

Because you want the right tool for the job, of course. And right now we’re using the same tool for every job — which is a natural thing when we are exploring the capabilities of a technology. The first guy to build a hammer probably didn’t stop banging on things for days. And we’re so enamored of our all-purpose pocket computers that we haven’t thought how we might improve them by reducing their scope rather than increasing it.

People want focus, and people want to belong to a niche. We gravitate naturally towards these things as reflections of our personality and of our needs. Those needs and, it goes without saying, our personalities, differ widely. One person wants a six-inch screen with LTE and unlimited data so he can watch Netflix on the train. Another wants one with no audio at all, because it’s used entirely for pictures and email. Another (me, in fact) wants an e-ink screen on one side and a solar panel on the other.

The variety we crave does not exist yet; the variety we have is of the most limited sort. It may take a while, and there will probably be a few false starts, but I think (and hope) that this will be one of the next steps in the evolution and further proliferation of our companion devices.

I’ve seen a few articles promoting telecommuting in Minnesota since Best Buy and Yahoo pulled in the reins on telecommuting in their offices. Over the weekend I noticed another vote for telecommuting from Brent Christensen at the Minnesota Telecom Alliance in the Minneapolis Star Tribune…

Today it’s more and more common for a Twin Cities company to employ talented people from throughout the state who do their work from home, taking advantage of the growing rural broadband network that makes the remote workstation a reality in every corner of Minnesota. Rural communities and regional centers — once concerned about a “brain drain” in which talented, educated young people were moving away, often to the metro area, seeking jobs — are now seeing the opposite trend, as Minnesotans who want the pace of a Greater Minnesota lifestyle can often depart the city and the suburbs, and take their good jobs with them.

It’s that trend that is fueling efforts like eWorkPlace, a Minnesota Department of Transportation initiative designed to facilitate more telecommuting throughout the state. Scientists are not needed to prove that the infrastructure for providing high-speed Internet service throughout Greater Minnesota is far less costly than maintenance of our network of highways. And more people working from home means less traffic, fewer emissions and less-frequent need for road construction.

From the start of this trend, the state’s telecommunications providers have worked with employers and communities to provide and continually upgrade the state’s communications network, providing the high-speed, high-capacity and reliable broadband Internet that is increasingly in demand. The biggest names in the Internet world, like Google, have even come to Minnesota in the past year for free workshops to help hundreds of the state’s small businesses establish a Web presence and take their operations worldwide.

NRG Energy, one of the most aggressive power companies to invest in solar projects, is considering getting into offering leases for solar panel roof systems for home owners and businesses. NRG Energy’s CEO David Crane tells Bloomberg that it is something that they’re “looking at in a very serious way,” and NRG Solar’s CEO Tom Doyle told me last month that the company has been inreasingly talking about financing options for solar roofs and in particular exploring the lease structure.

NRG Energy already builds solar panel projects for commercial and industrial building owners. Doyle told me that the company has been “heartened” by the amount of Fortune 300 companies that have wanted to install solar panels on their rooftops. Distributed solar panel systems have been gaining momentum, said Doyle, adding that they’ve been delivering higher growth than utility solar systems. In an interesting twist, that puts NRG Energy in grwoing competition directly with utilities, notes Bloomberg.

The emergence of the solar lease, or other financing options for solar, has helped unlock huge growth in solar panel rooftop installations in recent years. Essentially a third party, like SolarCity or Sungevity, raises a few hundred million dollar fund from a bank or a big company like Google, and uses that money to provide the up front capital for a home roof top system, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to install. The homeowner doesn’t have to pay that upfront cost, but pays the solar leasing company a monthly bill that is usually lower than its former utility bill. Over time the bank or “the Google” gets paid back with a return that can be around ten to twelve percent.

As I reported last month, three quarters of the solar panels installed on home roofs in 2012 in California were financed and owned by these solar service companies, and not the home owner. These “third-party owned” solar systems collectively generated $938 million in revenues last year.

It’s one of the more lucrative businesses in the solar market these days. So why wouldn’t NRG Energy want to be in it. SolarCity, a former startup that has helped pioneer the business, went public in December 2012 at $9.25, saw its stock soar 40 percent on its debut day, and has now more than doubled to $18.57 Monday morning. Other companies that offer solar financing options include Sunrun, and Clean Power Finance.

The emergence of NRG Energy in the solar leasing business could be a real threat to the companies already operating in it. NRG Energy earned $1.59 billion last year, which was a decline from the previous year, but which is clearly far larger than the fairly new companies like Clean Power Finance and Sungevity.

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Google announced some updates to its AdWords trademark policy. Beginning on April 23, AdWords keywords that were restricted as a result of a trademark investigation will no longer be restricted in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Brazil.

“While we will not prevent the use of trademarks as keywords in the affected regions, trademark owners will still be able to complain about the use of their trademark in ad text,” Google says, adding, “Google’s goal is to provide our users with the most relevant information, whether from search results or advertisements, and we believe users benefit from having more choice. Our policy aims to balance the interests of users, advertisers and trademark owners, so we will continue to investigate trademark complaints concerning use of trademarks in ad text. In addition, this change means that the AdWords policy on trademarks as keywords is now harmonised throughout the world. A consistent policy and user experience worldwide benefits users, advertisers and trademark owners alike.”

Google won’t prevent advertisers from selecting a third party’s trademark as a keyword in ads targeting the specified regions. The policy change does not impact the usage of trademarks in ad text. Google will continue to restrict use of trademarks in ad text for those in the affected regions that have already filed existing complaints about keywords and ad text.

Keywords that were restricted as a result of a trademark investigation may start triggering ads in the affected regions. If you don’t want this to happen, you can remove the keywords from the campaigns or add them as negative keywords.

You can read the FAQ here.

The changes bring Google’s policy in the affected regions in line with its policy in the rest of the world.

Hat tip to Ginny Marvin

It doesn’t come with all the fanfare of Facebook’s Graph Search, but another important social network has just revamped its search engine.

LinkedIn announced some new search capabilities, which it describes as “smarter and more streamlined,” and though Facebook’s Graph Search has plenty of ramifications for businesses, LinkedIn is used almost exclusively as a business tool.

“We’ve unified the search experience so you no longer need to search for people, companies, or jobs separately,” explains LinkedIn’s Johnathan Podemsky. “Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies.”

They’ve also added auto-complete, suggested searches, a “smarter” query intent algorithm, enhanced advanced search, and automated alerts. As you search more on LinkedIn, the algorithm learns more about your intent to improve your results. Enhanced search includes filers like location, company, school, etc. Searchers can save their searches to be alerted when results change.

Smarter LinkedIn Search from LinkedIn

“No two professionals are alike on LinkedIn,” says Podemsky. “This means even if you search for the same thing as someone else, your results will be customized to you. LinkedIn’s search efforts are founded on the ability to take into account who you are, who you know, and what your network is doing to help you find what you’re looking for. And we’ll continue iterating on this with better ways to surface new kinds of content across Linkedin as well as more personalized results.”

The changes will start rolling out today, and should be available to all within the coming weeks. According to the company, there were 5.7 billion “professionally oriented” searches performed on LinkedIn in 2012.

Today, comScore started a new service that ranks the top U.S. websites by desktop and mobile views — the latter is a new measurement. Some of them really pop off the chart, with Apple glaring among traditional companies. More than one-third of unique visitors in February accessed the site via mobile device-only. That compares to 5 percent for Microsoft properties. Analysts, bloggers and journalists often portray the fruit-logo company as best representative of the so-called Post-PC era, and Windows’ maker the epoch in decline.

The numbers aren’t shocking, if you think about them. Windows has little presence on smartphones or tablets. Microsoft mobile OS smartphones share was just 3 percent during fourth quarter, according to Gartner. IDC forecasts Windows tablet market share, based on unit shipments, will be less than 5 percent this year. By comparison, iOS has greater reach, with, according to the company, cumulative shipments exceeding 500 million. Hell, Apple sold 43.5 million iPhones just in Q4, according to Gartner.

That’s where the numbers get wonky. Microsoft’s presence is so low, comScore ignores it. The data only compiles from Android and iOS users. So, looked at differently, is it surprising that Microsoft has such low showing from mobile users on devices running competing operating systems?

Apple’s showing is surprising and yet not. Cofounder Steve Jobs aggressively promoted the post-PC concept, and the company incorporates it into all iOS devices. Of course, not everyone going to the company’s web properties does from iOS. But there are enough core users out there to make reasonable assumptions about broader trends.

Some of the other numbers are worth a gander. Mobile-only to Google sites is surprisingly low: 13.7 percent. Remember, the numbers include search and other services, and Google is all about the cloud. Amazon is 21.5 percent mobile-only and Facebook is 16.8 percent.

For the broader U.S. market, just 6 percent of total unique “digital population” views come from mobile-only, which makes the percentage for Apple — and also Amazon — really stand out. Services that strongly cater to mobile audiences are unsurprising, by comparison. Groupon and Pandora are 69 percent and 64.6 percent, respectively.

The comScore chart below also provides non-exclusive mobile and desktop numbers. The mobile-only figures show how few Americans have truly gone Post-PC and suggests that among them, Apple users are considerably higher than average.

Media Metrix Multi-Platform Top 50 Properties February 2013 Total U.S. (Age 18+ on iOS & Android platforms for Mobile) Source: comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform
		Unique Visitors/Viewers (000)
		Total Digital Population	Desktop*	Mobile**	Mobile-Only	Mobile Audience Incremental % to Desktop
	Total Internet : Total Audience	235,855	221,379	127,106	14,475	7%
1	Google Sites	228,084	196,782	107,604	31,302	16%
2	Yahoo! Sites	210,603	186,596	88,876	24,007	13%
3	Microsoft Sites	175,902	166,346	48,867	9,556	6%
4	Facebook	174,800	145,306	99,698	29,494	20%
5	Amazon Sites	147,031	115,363	74,122	31,668	27%
6	AOL, Inc.	130,619	115,202	54,010	15,417	13%
7	Glam Media	126,117	104,517	48,016	21,600	21%
8	Apple Inc.	115,920	75,358	62,104	40,562	54%
9	Wikimedia Foundation Sites	109,523	85,856	49,296	23,667	28%
10	CBS Interactive	100,772	85,783	34,029	14,989	17%
11	Turner Digital	98,311	81,501	38,424	16,810	21%
12	Demand Media	97,250	78,512	35,800	18,738	24%
13	eBay	84,677	65,764	41,355	18,913	29%
14	About	83,743	64,782	30,000	18,962	29%
15	Ask Network	81,430	69,355	20,933	12,075	17%
16	Comcast NBCUniversal	81,275	67,183	32,193	14,092	21%
17	Viacom Digital	79,966	70,446	20,194	9,520	14%
18	The Weather Company	76,642	56,120	37,368	20,522	37%
19	Pandora.com	65,142	23,035	51,977	42,107	183%
20	Gannett Sites	63,055	47,611	27,023	15,445	32%
21	Answers.com Sites	60,861	47,738	17,832	13,123	27%
22	VEVO	58,010	55,953	4,586	2,057	4%
23	Yelp.com	55,641	36,775	27,569	18,866	51%
24	Twitter.com	55,540	35,963	31,372	19,577	54%
25	craigslist, inc.	55,520	46,380	18,839	9,140	20%
26	Adobe Sites	54,840	40,984	19,810	13,856	34%
27	Federated Media Publishing	54,607	39,577	24,297	15,030	38%
28	Hearst Corporation	54,498	41,514	20,967	12,984	31%
29	Linkedin	54,071	45,699	14,978	8,371	18%
30	Wal-Mart	52,857	38,854	22,397	14,004	36%
31	WebMD Health	50,841	32,641	27,614	18,200	56%
32	NDN	46,262	46,260	N/A	N/A	N/A
33	Meredith Women’s Network	45,533	32,253	19,771	13,280	41%
34	ESPN	44,759	30,348	27,735	14,411	47%
35	Tribune Interactive	44,618	32,991	17,982	11,627	35%
36	New York Times Digital	44,206	33,175	19,869	11,031	33%
37	YP Local Media Network	43,191	30,112	17,539	13,079	43%
38	Pinterest.com	41,210	26,972	22,994	14,238	53%
39	Disney Online	39,551	27,621	18,022	11,930	43%
40	Netflix.com	38,987	29,205	21,480	9,782	33%
41	Everyday Health	38,720	27,143	16,141	11,577	43%
42	Intuit	38,029	29,091	15,105	8,938	31%
43	Discovery Digital Media Sites	37,590	30,504	10,622	7,085	23%
44	Zynga	37,459	12,051	29,936	25,408	211%
45	Fox News Digital Network	37,340	29,829	15,276	7,512	25%
46	Scripps Networks Interactive Inc.	37,050	26,514	15,469	10,536	40%
47	Groupon	36,924	11,421	28,722	25,503	223%
48	WordPress.com	36,846	27,964	11,976	8,882	32%
49	Target Corporation	36,061	23,043	18,028	13,018	56%
50	Time Warner (Excl. Turner/WB)	35,142	25,729	13,693	9,413	37%

Photo Credit: jkirsh/Shutterstock