Author: Serkadis

Learning thermostat startup Nest plans to announce a variety of energy services Monday that, in partnership with utilities, can help consumers reduce their home energy consumption and save money on their energy bills. While Nest has been focused on selling its thermostats directly to consumers, these new energy efficiency services show the undercover power that Nest’s hardware can deliver while working with a utility partner.

Nest is initially launching three different types of energy efficiency services working with a couple of utilities in Texas, including Reliant Energy and Austin Energy, California utility Southern California Edison, and east coast utility National Grid. Nest has been working with Reliant Energy, the utility arm of NRG Energy, since the summer of 2012 to offer Reliant’s customers’ its thermostat.

Nest’s most important new service is its answer to a demand response program, which it’s calling Rush Hour Rewards. Demand response programs are widely used by utilities to better manage the grid, and utilities use them to collectively get some of their customers to curb their energy consumption during peak grid events, like late afternoon on a hot summer’s day. For Rush Hour Rewards, the Nest thermostat uses a variety of techniques to shave off energy consumption during a peak grid event, but while maintaining comfort levels within the home.

Customers opt into the Rush Hour Rewards program and agree to have their thermostat automatically managed during that time period; in return, they save money on their energy bill. They can override the programs whenever they want. Customers who participate can save between $20 to $60 per season, according to Nest.

The startup went out of its way to not use the words “demand response” in its service’s name and marketing, and it seems to have put substantial thought into how to market this to consumers to make it attractive. Nest has also been piloting Rush Hour Rewards for over two years, it said.

Nest’s two other programs include an instant online rebate program, where customers can get one of the learning thermostats when they sign up for an energy plan, and a service called Seasonal Savings, which is a reoccurring energy efficiency tuneup. Seasonal Savings nudges the temperature or cooling slightly to see if the tiny changes affect your daily behavior. If you override those changes, the software will remember that and adjust, but Nest says that 80 percent of the time people acclimated to the small adjustments.

Behind these new services is the cloud-based big data algorithms that are the secret sauce of Nest, and which Nest has now named Auto-Tune. Now that Nest has gotten hundreds of thousands of thermostats out there in the market, and has done two years of field trials, it has been able to collect a large amount of data about how customers use and react to temperature and cooling changes. Nest uses this data about behavioral changes to inform its services and how its algorithms work.

Nest combines this behavioral data with utility data, weather data, personal use data, demographics data and more to collectively manage the thermostats and deliver energy savings. Nest said its services sit between the consumer and the utility, and they approve eligible customers, monitor how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

Nest’s offering could be powerful because the company first worked to begin to build a brand and a consumer-focused buzz. Other startups are offering next-generation demand response services with utilities, including EcoFactor, Opower, EnergyHub and others. But the biggest difference between these startups and Nest is that Nest has developed and sells its own learning thermostat.

Nest was founded by a team from Apple, and is led by designer Tony Fadell, who developed versions of the iPod and iPhone. The company is backed by Google Ventures, Venrock, and Kleiner Perkins.

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• Big data meets the smart grid
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The Nest thermostat has already gone through a hardware revision or two and found its way onto plenty of physical and virtual store shelves, but parent company Nest Labs is eager to get it into even more households in short order.

The Palo Alto company has just announced that it has teamed up with energy providers from across the country that will see new climate-control services (not to mention some rebates) go live for customers in a handful of markets.

So far, the list of partners includes National Grid, NRG Energy, NRG subsidiaries Reliant and Green Mountain Energy, Austin Energy and Southern California Edison. You can probably guess what markets those last two serve. These newly forged partnerships could see adoption of the household gadget surge — customers who ink deals with National Grid, for instance, can claim a $100 rebate to help defray the costs of a Nest thermostat.

While the others don’t offer much in the way of actual cash back, Nest’s tie-ups emphasize the long-term value of having a Nest over a run-of-the-mill thermostat. The way the folks at Nest look at it, their gadget is only going to become more useful as the days get longer and warmer, and those new services I mentioned earlier should only help matters when it comes to the cost-conscious.

First up is Nest’s so-called Rush Hour Rewards, which are meant to reduce the load on already-strained power stations once it starts getting really hot outside. Rather than cranking the temperature down low and leaving it there as a hapless human might, the Nest instead gets a feel for the sorts of climates its users prefer and will sporadically turn down the temperature to keep things within that preferred range. By occasionally introducing blasts of cold air instead of just leaving things to run at full blast, the Nest can keep your house at about the same temperature as before without much of a corresponding bump on the bill.

Also part of the package is what Nest calls “seasonal savings,” which will see the smart thermostat measure user temperature preferences over the course of the year and make minor modifications over the course of a few weeks. The idea is to reduce a user’s heating bill by carefully acclimating them to a new, more cost-efficient temperature scheme without the residents even noticing.

For now, only customers who select certain plans with those power companies can use these new services, but I very much doubt that team Nest is content to leave things as they are. These sorts of deals will only serve to raise the company’s profile, and buy-in from power partners is a big deal for Nest especially as the company’s rivals have moved to make their own wares smarter. Consider Honeywell: it already filed a lawsuit against Nest last year for supposed acts of copyright infringement, an allegation that Nest Labs vigorously disagrees with. Meanwhile, the conglomerate is gearing up to release a rather handsome smart thermostat of its own, so deals like these could help Nest stay a step ahead of the pack.

Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across this week in our reading of data center industry blogs for April 22nd:

Microsoft’s ITPAC – Perfect for Off-the-Grid Computing – At the Microsoft Global Foundation Services blog, Sean James discusses the durability and portability of the company’s ITPAC modules: “You might wonder how temperatures as low as 20-below zero would affect the functionality of an ITPAC and the servers inside. The answer, it doesn’t. They are pre-manufactured with a recycled steel shell that will protect the hundreds of servers inside it from the harsh Wyoming climate. On cold days, say below 50 Fahrenheit, a portion of the hot exhaust air from the servers is redirected internally through a mixing unit on top of the ITPAC where it mixes and warms the air to a temperature suitable for the servers. On hot days, the ITPAC can pull outside air in to help cool the servers.”

Six Months After Sandy – Now What? – At The WHIR, Philip Koblence of NYI shares reflections on life after the hurricane: “Six months after Sandy, what have we learned? With the devastation that storm tore through the Metro New York area, planning for critical events has been redefined. No Business Continuity Training Program, no Uptime Institute report, could ever predict what happens under such extreme circumstances.”

Navigating China’s Paradox & Possibility: 4 Keys to Success – A the Equinix Interconnections blog, David Wilkinson offers insights on the Chinese market: “Moving into China’s capital markets as an institutional or individual investor, broker, fund manager, technology provider or any company can be daunting amidst so many variables. There are numerous regulations and policies that need to be followed for any segment of the industry and often the entrenched domestic competition are hard to displace. For companies coming into the Chinese market it is a move that requires a great deal of research and insight into the machinations of the economy – how it operates – and a keen eye for the paradoxical.”

Energy Savings for Federal Data Center Consolidation – At the Schneider Electric blog, Miles Auvil looks at a potential savings opportunity for federal agencies: “Energy Service Companies (ESCO’s) and the Department of Energy have advocated the use of Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC’s) for Data Centers. A few projects have emerged in the past year, some of which are viewed as pilots, but we have yet to see wide scale adoption. In light of FDCCI and the current fiscal environment a significant opportunity for IT is being missed. ESPC’s allow federal agencies to conduct energy projects with no upfront capital costs, minimizing the need for Congressional appropriations.”

Critical Considerations during a Data Center Migration – At the Data Center Design blog, Larry Davis of PTD Data Center Solutions offers tips on migrations: “Planning and perspective are critical when it’s time to complete a migration (or consolidation) of data center assets. Planning and perspective allow you to take a step back and make sure your approach holds water, allow you to check with peers in the industry for accepted best practices, and allow you to keep your job when the migration goes smoothly.”

What is a “Working” Data Center – At SwitchScribe, Mark Thiele looks at criteria for data center success: “My idea of successful isn’t just that the task was accomplished, but that it was accomplished the best way possible with the least risk and with excellent operational efficiency. I’m also a little bit of a worry wart when it comes to the environment. So when I see industry players and enterprises touting data centers that I know don’t meet my criteria for sustainable, successful and efficient operations, it bugs me.”

I continue to be amazed by some of the things Google captures in Street View imagery for Google Maps. We’ve seen everything from dead bodies to people having sex on the side of the road, and of course some stunning imagery of underwater scenes, the Grand Canyon, and maybe even a portal to Hell.

This isn’t so much amazing as it is just kind of weird. Worth a look, nevertheless.

This is the interior of a company called NMedia Solutions in Drummondville, QC. Let’s enter the party:

There’s plenty more where those came from.

This is obviously just a business having some fun with Google’s indoor photography, and should probably serve as encouragement to other businesses not to be so boring if you have Google taking photos of your office or store’s interior.

[via reddit]

Carl’s Jr. has a Pop-Tart ice cream sandwich. Yep.

At least one restaurant in Newport Beach, California has them, though it is not on the Carls. Jr. website menu.

A sign for the product has made its way onto Instagram.

(via user spec_j)

Apparently it’s a slab of ice cream placed between two halves of a strawberry Pop-Tart, packaged, and sold for $1.49.

Here’s a video of a couple of guys getting their hands on one (NSFW language):

One guy gives it a “six out of ten”.

It’s unclear how many restaurants are selling these, and whether or not they’ll make it to a wider release. I’m sure the Internet buzz will help its cause (unless it all comes out like the video above).

As previously reported, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been officially charged with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (an improvised explosive device) against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.

If convicted, Tsarnaev faces the death penalty or life in prison.

The Justice Department released a statement, as well as the complaint document. In this, we learn some interesting details. For example, there is a description of a carjacking episode the suspects engaged in. Here’s the relevant section from the document:

Near midnight on April 18, 2013, an individual carjacked a vehicle at gunpoint in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A victim of the carjacking was interviewed by law enforcement and provided the following information. The victim stated that while he was sitting in his car on a road in Cambridge, a man approached and tapped on his passenger-side window. When the victim rolled down the window, the man reached in, opened the door, and entered the victim’s vehicle. The man pointed a firearm at the victim and stated, “Did you hear about the Boston explosion?” and “I did that.” The man removed the magazine from his gun and showed the victim that it had a bullet in it, and then re-inserted the magazine. The man then stated, “I am serious.”

The man with the gun forced the victim to drive to another location, where they picked up a second man. The two men put something in the trunk of the victim’s vehicle. The man with the gun took the victim’s vehicle. The man with the gun took the victim’s keys and sat in the driver’s seat, while the victim moved to the front passenger seat. The second man entered the victim’s vehicle and sat in the rear passenger seat. The man with the gun and the second man spoke to each other in a foreign language.

While they were driving, the man with the gun demanded money from the victim, who gabe the man 45 dollars. One of the men compelled the victim to hand over his ATM card and password. They then drove to an ATM machine and attempted to withdraw money from the victim’s account. The two men and the victim then drove to a gas station/convenience store in the vicinity of 816 Memorial Drive, Cambridge. The two men got out of the car, at which point the victim managed to escape.

You can read the full complaint here (pdf).

In related news, this afternoon, reddit issued an apology for “dangerous speculation” that occurred on its site in the wake of the bombings.

Because I like sharing cool watches with you guys I decided to share this cool watch with you guys. It’s called the Ressence Type 3 and it’s actually a liquid-filled mechanical watch with a nearly featureless face. Each of those dials – registers in the parlance – look like they are seamlessly embedded in the face surface and the watch, being suspended in synthetic oil, has no crown and is wound automatically.

Arguably the movement itself isn’t very special – it’s a standard timekeeper that displays the date and includes a rotating seconds wheel – but the way the entire package is put together is a feat of horology. The sapphire crystal surrounds the face almost completely and the back of the watch hides the manual winding mechanism and a switch that allows you to change the time.

On the wrist, the watch looks like a blob of liquid with markings suspended in it. It’s as if you were wearing a slug of liquid metal or a dollop of crude oil. The entire face spins (you can see it in action here) and a pressure valve compensates for temperature-related changes in the liquid.

You can see hands-on photos right here or visit the product page. The watch, sadly, costs $34,000 and comes in a wildly limited edition but it may be worth it just to say that your watch is literally full of alien liquids.

Google’s Matt Cutts takes on an interesting question in today’s Webmaster Help video:

What is being done to detect and remove results from larger sites when they don’t have unique content that is relevant to a query (e.g. yelp.com results with no reviews, Facebook “business” pages that weren’t actually created by the business)?

Cutts says he likes the question, but wouldn’t just restrict it to larger sites.

“In general, we look at the value add, or you know, whether there’s some compelling value add, even at a page level, and we try to write algorithms to reflect that, but it is the case that sometimes you will find pages that get indexed that say, you know, ‘Zero reviews found,’ and so there’s basically no content to actually base your opinion on when you visit that page,” says Cutts.

He continues, “So even starting back in 2009, I found a blog post that I did – ‘Give Google Feedback on No Results Pages,’ and so if people – it was a complaint even back then – people didn’t like having empty review sites, where you click through and it says there are no reviews for that product. So either do a spam report or show up at the forum or you might even still be able to use the form that I mentioned in that 2009 blog post.”

He adds, “But basically, we are happy to say, ‘Hey look, if you are even doing search, and there’s no search results on that page, that’s the sort of thing that users get really angry about – they complain about. And so that is the sort of thing that, under our technical guidelines (if you look at our quality guidelines), we do say that we’re willing to prune out those sort of search results.”

Here is the blog post he references. Here is a link to Google’s Quality Guidelines.

Nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been officially charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the Boston Marathon bombings on on April 15.

He has been charged specifically with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (an improvised explosive device) against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. This is all punishable, upon conviction, by death or life imprisonment.

Tsarnaev’s initial court appearance took place today from his hospital room, where he has reportedly been communicating by writing, as he is unable to speak due to a gunshot wound to the throat.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement, “Although our investigation is ongoing, today’s charges bring a successful end to a tragic week for the city of Boston, and for our country. Our thoughts and prayers remain with each of the bombing victims and brave law enforcement professionals who lost their lives or suffered serious injuries as a result of this week’s senseless violence.”

“Thanks to the valor of state and local police, the dedication of federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the vigilance of members of the public, we’ve once again shown that those who target innocent Americans and attempt to terrorize our cities will not escape from justice,” Holder added. ” We will hold those who are responsible for these heinous acts accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

John Carlin, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, added, “The events of the past week underscore in stark terms the need for continued vigilance against terrorist threats both at home and abroad. Friday’s arrest and today’s charges demonstrate what can be achieved by a collaborative, round-the clock response involving law enforcement officers, intelligence professionals, prosecutors and the general public.”

Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said, “Today’s charges are the culmination of extraordinary law enforcement coordination and the tireless efforts of so many, including ordinary citizens who became heroes as they responded to the call for help in the hours and days following the Marathon tragedy. The impact of these crimes has been far-reaching, affecting a worldwide community that is looking for peace and justice. We hope that this prosecution will bring some small measure of comfort both to the public at large and to the victims and their families that justice will be served. While we will not be able to comment on any possible communications between the suspect and law enforcement at this time, as a general rule, the government will always seek to elicit all the actionable intelligence and information we can from terrorist suspects taken into our custody.”

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys William Weinreb and Aloke Chakravarty from the Anti-Terrorism and National Security Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts. The Counterterrorism Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division is assisting.

The Justice Department’s announcement concludes by reminding the public that the charges are “merely allegations” and that Tsarnaev remains innocent until proven guilty.

The official complaint against Tsarnaev can be viewed here (pdf).

How’s this for an understatement: Operational databases are important for many, if not the majority, of web applications. And if you’re doing big business on the web, finding one that can scale with your data volumes and still perform like you need it to is critical. MapReduce for batch data processing and analysis? Not so much, actually.

That’s why as Hadoop keeps thundering toward its destination as the de facto data platform for next-generation applications, companies such as Cloudera and Hortonworks that are making a killing off it might want to stop and thank the guys from Powerset for building HBase. Because the database — a columnar Google BigTable clone that runs on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System — is so fast and scalable, it’s helping Hadoop find a home in companies and with applications that HDFS and MapReduce alone might not have been able to penetrate so easily.

The latest HBase user I’ve come across is Gravity, the interest graph company that powers content recommendations for some of the biggest publishers on the web.

From big MySQL at MySpace to big data with HBase

Its co-founders were all senior executives at MySpace, including Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto, who was SVP of technology for the social networking pioneer. He was actually MySpace’s first architect and helped build platform’s MySQL database. Although MySpace never reached Facebook’s scale, it did have 150 millions users at its peak, all able to store unlimited numbers of wall posts, messages and photos. Benedetto eventually oversaw a 600-instance cluster that required about 30 database adminstrators to keep it up and running.

Benedetto (center) at Structure: Data 2012. (c) Pinar Ozger

So naturally, when it came time to build out the Gravity architecture, Benedetto opted for the MySQL he knew so well. Until about three years ago, he told me recently, that database held about 95 percent of the company’s data. At some point, though, Benedetto and his team realized they were spending way too much time keeping their MySQL environment up insteading of building new things, so it was time for a change.

It ultimately opted for HBase, but the decision wasn’t easy. “For us,” Benedetto said, “our data and algorithms are our company,” so making the move from a relational database to a column-based database that can serve MapReduce jobs was nerve-racking. After all, he explained, “You never want to migrate your data … and if you have to, you never want to migrate it more than once.” In fact, he added, “you’re not going back.”

But Benedetto says the move to HBase as Gravity’s primary data store has been “life-saving,” and it’s arguably a more important component of the company’s infrastructure than is Hadoop MapReduce. HBase handles the company’s real-time recommendation algorithms, and it does it across the entire Gravity platform rather than on a site-by-site basis. And although it’s not banking-grade when it comes to the consistency of transactions, Benedetto says it’s about 99.95 percent consistent in real time. Later on, batch MapReduce jobs swoop in and pick up whatever HBase dropped earlier, and process it all against the company’s graph algorithms.

An example of an interest graph from Gravity,

Scalable for sure, and getting easier to use

And although it took some serious engineering effort to get HBase operational when Gravity began working with it three years ago, Benedetto thinks HBase is getting to the point (as is rival NoSQL database Cassandra, he acknowledged) where one could safely call it “enterprise-ready.” Right now, he noted, “You’re not gonna to see HBase in a company that just buys Oracle because Oracle is the name and Oracle has been around for 20 years,” but for web startups that hope to reach a certain scale and even for existing companies that are running into the MySQL wall, he sees a shift occurring.

“The web farm is the easiest part of your infrastructure to scale because all it does is cost more money,” Benedetto explained. Databases, on the other hand, require a lot of thinking about how to migrate data, shard the database and otherwise make a piece of software likely designed for a handful of servers, max, spread across dozens or hundreds. HBase really eases the scaling process, as well as the subsequent management, he said. Now, Gravity’s 100-node HBase cluster has only two operations engineers dedicated to it.

Indeed, there are startups trying to capitalize on HBase by using it to power SQL and even MongoDB-compliant databases that can scale beyond what most relational databases can do.

Aside from scale HBase might soon start catching on because of the work companies like Gravity have been doing to make it more user-friendly. It might scale easily, but, as Benedetto noted, it’s not always easy to get started with — especially without some deep understanding of the intricacies of the underlying HDFS infrastructure. Last year, eBay VP of Experience, Search and Platforms Hugh Williams told me that although HBase is one of the big data tools the company is most excited about, it’s also the area where he’d like to see the most improvement.

To help alleviate some of the learning curve, Gravity has developed an open-source tool called HPaste that lets developers access data and run jobs on HBase data using Scala rather than the more-bloated Java programming language on which Hadoop and HBase are built. One of the biggest benefits of HPaste, Benedetto said, is that it lets new HBase developers see the data in a way that makes sense to them: HBase stores everything in byte arrays, he explained, and “when a human tries to read a byte array, it looks like ancient hieroglyphics.”

The Kiji architecture

Elsewhere, a startup called Wibidata has created an open-source framework called Kiji that aims to provide a collection of high-level APIs that should make it easier to store different data types in and develop applications on HBase. The company envisions Kiji being to HBase what the Spring Framework has become to Java over the course of the past decade.

Hadoop’s weapon for the mainstream?

But user experience aside, a lot of companies already invested in Hadoop — aside from expert users such as Facebook — are starting to see the promise of HBase and are incorporating it into their architectures.

Wibidata co-founder Christophe Bisciglia, who also co-founded Hadoop pioneer Cloudera in 2008, gave me his take on the state of HBase while discussing its role in the future of Hadoop earlier this year. ”If you talk to anyone from Cloudera or any of the platform vendors, I think they will tell you that a large percentage of their customers use HBase. It’s something that I only expect to see increasing,”  he explained. “… HBase is gonna be what takes Hadoop from an ETL and BI platform into a real-time application platform.”

The Cloudera Hadoop stack (Gravity uses Cloudera’s distro).

Benedetto appears to agree. He considers Hadoop as a whole incredibly important, almost on par with what Amazon Web Services did for computing resources, because it lets startups use commercial-grade open source software to do data storage and processing that previously was only available to massive web companies. “More and more … the shining star in that suite is HBase,” he said. “If I were Oracle, I’d be scared.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• A near-term outlook for big data
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

Here’s our review of noteworthy links for the data center industry for April 22nd:

Digital Realty Appoints Bernard Geoghegan Managing Director, EMEA – Bernard Geoghegan has rejoined Digital Realty Trust as managing director, EMEA. Geoghegan will be responsible for overseeing all Digital Realty’s operations in EMEA, which currently comprises of approximately 2.1 million rentable square feet. Geoghegan returns to Digital Realty from Colt, where he was executive vice president of the Data Centre Services division and was instrumental in developing its modular data centre offering. Prior to joining Colt, Geoghegan served as senior vice president of International Operations at Digital Realty from 2008 through 2010 after joining the Company in 2006 as vice president, Europe.

Milldam Public Relations Appoints Adam Fairbanks – MilldamPR announced today that Adam Fairbanks has joined the firm as Executive Vice President, managing business development and client relations. In his role, Fairbanks will assist clients with nuanced messaging of technical products and services to media, end-users and product stakeholders, and will work with MilldamPR’s Director of Content on white papers and case studies. Fairbanks will also oversee MilldamPR’s continued expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NYI Names Mark Ward Director of Business Development – NYI, a specialty provider of colocation, dedicated servers, managed services and enterprise Cloud, has appointed Mark Ward Director of Business Development. Ward, a UK native, brings 9+ years of experience to the position as well as a global customer portfolio. Prior to NYI, Ward was Business Development Manager at Tata Communications. He has also been Business Development Manager at PacketExchange, a leading provider of private network services with Internet economics, and The Filter, a world-class recommendation platform with more than 100 million unique users, funded by Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures.

Virtus Data Centres Appoints New CEO – Virtus Data Centres has appointed Neil Cresswell as its Chief Executive Officer. Neil joins Virtus from Savvis (a leading global supplier of cloud and datacentre services) where he spent 6 years, latterly as Managing Director of the EMEA Region. Neil has more than 25 years of experience in the technology sector building successful, high growth, profitable businesses with a reputation for quality, innovation and customer service. He has worked across the UK, Europe, Asia and the U.S for companies such as Savvis, Attenda, BNP Paribas, IBM and Fiserv.

FalconStor Names Robert Zecha Chief Product Officer – FalconStor Software (NASDAQ: FALC), a market leader in disk-based data protection, today announced that Robert Zecha has joined the company as executive vice president and chief product officer, a newly formed strategic position. In this role, Zecha will be responsible for all aspects of product development, product management, quality assurance and program management.

For years, Tumblr CEO David Karp balked at running ads. But, hey, you can only run a free service on startup capital for so long. Karp caved in 2012, allowing sponsored posts on the website. Today Tumblr brings them to the mobile app. Click carefully.

The first one I see is for General Electronic. Surely there’s some pithy wisecrack to be made about GE, because of “30 Rock” — you know incorporating microwave ovens and other products into fictious “TGS with Tracy Jordan”.

Gartner forecasts that mobile ad spending will reach $11.4 billion this year, up from $9.6 billion in 2012, and grow by 400 percent — to $24.5 billion — in 2016. I suppose Tumblr could leave money on the table, but why not cash in, eh? IDC puts mobile publishers like Tumblr in a category sure to take ad revenues away from mobile ad networks — right, Google, high among them. In 2012, Facebook, Pandora and Twitter took in more mobile advertising among mobile publishers, with the social network close to the search giant ($234 million to $243 million, respectively).

“Mobile ad networks are losing market share to publishers, and we expect them to lose even more going forward”, Karsten Weide, IDC veep, says. “Networks, especially independent ones, are entering a difficult phase, in which, with an ever smaller share of revenue, they’ll have to compete with publishers, which will only grow in strength”.

Tumblr is one of the first and most successful social sharing blog services, but some newer cloud startups gobble up pageviews, with Pinterest surging ahead of Karp’s baby last year.

Tumblr’s official take on mobile ads:

It’s been almost a year since our first sponsored post appeared in Tumblr Radar. Since then, our fashion, entertainment, and brand partners have created some truly delightful blogs and racked up tens of millions notes on their posts.

We’re incredibly proud of our partners’ creativity and have been constantly amazed by how well these creations can fit into our Dashboards. So today we’re bringing these posts over to our mobile apps.

It works very simply: Every now and then you’ll see posts from our partners as you scroll through your mobile Dashboard.

While sponsored, I find the marketing posts to be one of the least-intrusive forms of advertising among popular websites or mobile apps. You?

Actress/musician Zooey Deschanel was named as the 19-year old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing in an erroneous caption on FOX 4 in Dallas.

Peter Ogburn noticed this, and tweeted the screencap:

This was retweeted by Joel McHale:

Then by Deschanel herself:

The actual suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is said to be responding to questioning by authorities, though he has to do so through writing, as a gunshot wound to the throat has left him unable to speak.

[via TheFW]

Google announced social annotations and for enhanced campaigns and enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers today.

Google announced enhanced campaigns earlier this year as the next evolutionary phase of AdWords. The move, which was designed to provide advertisers with the ability to manage bids across devices from a single campaign, has been a controversial one with some advertisers embracing it and others decrying it. Bing has even tried to capitalize on the controversy, telling advertisers it won’t implement the same strategy.

According to Google, over 1.5 million campaigns have already been upgraded to enhanced campaigns.

The new social annotations tie into Google+. “Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings,” explains Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management for the Google Display Network. All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads.”

Discussing enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers, Oestlien says, “Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps. Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns. For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level. All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.”

Google has regularly been hosting webinars discussing how to get the most out of enhanced campaigns. Another one will take place on Tuesday.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt a greater amount of hatred radiating from a dog than that of each of the dogs in this video (and I’ve been bitten by dogs).

[via The Bored Ninja]

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has been unable to speak, but has been responding to questioning from authorities, according to reports.

Since being apprehended on Friday, Tsarnaev has been too badly injured to speak, after receiving a gunshot wound to the throat, but CNN reports it was told by a senior federal official, that he has been communicating in writing as he has been questioned since Sunday.

CNN’s Holly Yan and Chelsea Carter write:

Neither source would say what, if anything, Tsarnaev has been telling investigators about his alleged role in the bombing that killed three and wounded more than 170 a week ago Monday.

But if he’s talking, perhaps authorities will learn some valuable information that could potentially prevent further attacks.

According to The Boston Globe, Tsarnaev’s brother, the other suspect, was actually killed by Dzhokhar running him over, rather than the police shootout that transpired. This graphic photo of his corpse shows the wounds.

Apple’s fifth-generation iPad hasn’t yet been unveiled, but at this point we likely have a fairly good idea of what to expect. The new “iPad 5” will be thinner and lighter than Apple’s current model — which seems like an obvious assumption unless you consider the fact that the third-generation iPad was both thicker and heavier than its predecessor — and it will seemingly have a smaller overall footprint as well. In line with a series of earlier leaks, a newly published photo from case maker Tactus allegedly shows the next-generation iPad’s rear shell. It also reinforces numerous earlier reports suggesting the iPad 5 will feature a big redesign that adopts the iPad mini’s design aesthetic. According to a recent report from KGI Securities, which has a solid track record when it comes to information about unannounced Apple devices, the next-generation iPad will launch this coming August or September.

The “cinnamon challenge” is one of those Internet things that you just can’t help but see from time to time. You know the deal. You take a tablespoon of cinnamon and try to swallow it within sixty seconds without taking a drink.

You don’t have to try it to be able to tell that it won’t be a lot of fun. It turns out that it may actually be physically harmful. A new report out Monday indicates that it can lead to inflamed and scarred tissue. Chicago Tribune reporter Rachael Levy discusses the report:

The report, whose results will also be published in an article in the May edition of the Pediatrics health journal, was based on testing with rats. Dr. Steven Lipshultz, the lead researcher, said the rats were made to breathe in cinnamon powder one time, then were followed as they aged.

“(The) cinnamon would coat the airways and the lungs (of the animals) and it would lead to inflammation,” Lipshultz said. “It wouldn’t stop there. The inflammation led to scarring in the lungs, something called pulmonary fibrosis.”

Symptoms of pulmonary fibrosis can include shortness of breath, chronic dry/hacking cough, fatigue and weakness, chest discomfort, loss of appetite, and rapid weight loss. It is often a secondary effect of interstitial lung diseases, including autoimmune disorders. Causes for the condition can include inhalation of asbestosis, cigarette smoking, and radiation therapy to the chest.

Based on this new research, we might be able to add inhaling cinnamon to the list. Of couse, the research is not conclusive, but still, this seems like another reason (in case you needed one) to avoid the challenge.

The following video has nearly 30 million views on YouTube, and that’s one of MANY: