Author: Tom Krazit

Google’s Sundar Pichai does not have an easy job: he’s now overseeing both of Google’s key computing projects — Android and Chrome — while attempting to convince everyone that Google won’t play favorites with its Motorola division. Clearly, however, not all Android partners are created equal.

Pichai’s appearance at D11 Thursday didn’t break a lot of new ground, save for the “pure Google” version of the HTC One handset that Pichai showed off to the crowd and the news that the curiously named Google Play Music All Access service is coming to iOS. He showed off the HTC One, curiously enough, in response to a question from All Things D’s Walt Mossberg about Google’s relationship with Android partners and specifically its relationship with Samsung, a company which dominates the Android world and which introduced a smaller version of its flagship Galaxy S 4 Thursday that Pichai claimed he first learned about on Techmeme this morning.

If that’s true, then Google certainly has different relationships with different partners. Later in the session, Pichai said he was “very excited” about what Motorola has planned over the next six months. While we first heard confirmation of the Moto X Wednesday, the remaining products in what CEO Dennis Woodside called “a portfolio of phones” Wednesday are not something widely known beyond the rumor mills.

There are a couple of interpretations here.

1. Communication between Samsung and Google has dried up if the head of Android didn’t know (or didn’t care to know) that his most important partner was releasing a smaller version of its highest-profile phone until the rest of us did, the same day he was making a high-profile public appearance to show off a competitor-designed phone.
2. Not only is Pichai aware of all the Android products that Motorola has planned for 2013, he’s had a chance to discuss the thinking behind the decisions made in designing the phones, even if the Android team isn’t doing anything special for Motorola, as both Pichai and Woodside insisted this week.
3. This is probably most likely: Nothing has really changed and that Android continues to be a chaotic mess that Google makes a half-hearted attempt to stay on top of but which no one can really manage, given the sheer number of partners and devices involved. Google has certainly worked closely with Android partners in the past as they got their first phones out the door, including Samsung, HTC, and LG, so it’s not that surprising that Android leaders would have worked closely with Motorola as it reboots.

It’s an interesting time for Pichai and Android as he assumes the guiding role vacated by Android founder and longtime leader Andy Rubin, who Pichai said “stepped back” two months ago to pursue other interests at Google. There’s a lot of “co-opetition” in the Android world at the moment, and Pichai has the fun task of dealing with it.

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Elon Musk is generally not at a loss for words, and I’ll attempt to live blog his appearance this evening at D11 starting at 730pm PT. That time is probably approximate; dinner and cocktails will happen first.

Musk has a lot to talk about. Tesla is on a roll, reaching profitability amid a stock surge and expanded production. And he’s got that other little project called SpaceX that’s doing some pretty interesting things. Before things get started, check out Katie Fehrenbacher’s epic tale of how Tesla got to this point.

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Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed Wednesday at D11 that Motorola will introduce the Moto X smartphone later this year, calling it a “hero” device that the Google-owned company hopes will make Motorola relevant once again. The device will also be built in the U.S. just outside of Fort Worth, Tex., in what Woodside called “a first.”

The Moto X is “more contextually aware of what’s going on around it,” Woodside said, teasing attendees by saying he’s carrying the phone in his pocket but declining to show it off. Other products are coming later, but expect this device to be the centerpiece of Motorola’s strategy this fall. Reports have been circulating for some time about the “X” project inside Motorola but this is the first time the company has confirmed it.

The smartphone industry is famously concentrated in China, where low-cost manufacturing and a lot of specialized factories and suppliers have set up shop. Motorola will assemble 70 percent of the Moto X in Texas, with other component work having to be sourced and manufactured elsewhere. It will employ 2,000 people at the plant.

Woodside reiterated that Motorola, despite being owned by the creator of Android, has “no access to Android code. … There is no advantage that has been conferred to us.” He defended Google’s decision to invest $12.5 billion in Motorola by saying “we don’t need necessarily to see the exact strategic fit with our current business” in order to pull the trigger on a deal; it’s more about investing in technologies that will help shape the future, he said.

Woodside was joined onstage by Regina Dugan, formerly of DARPA and now currently senior vice president for Advanced Technology & Projects at Motorola. She showed off an “electronic tattoo” that could be used for authentication as well as a concept called “vitamin authentication,” producing a tiny pill with a tiny chip in it that apparently can be swallowed and kept inside the body to unlock something. It appears to be a take on the “ingestible sensor” developed and marketed by Proteus Digital Health.

Here’s a look at the electronic tattoo courtesy of AllThingsD’s Asa Mathat:

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The wall that broadcasters and cable companies have built around their services is not long for this world, according to Barry Diller, chairman of IAC. It’s not clear who will tear it down, and it’s not clear when it will actually happen, but the “centricity” of the video world is going to shift from cable and satellite to the internet, he said at D11 Wednesday.

Diller, of course, is doing all he can to help that along by investing in projects like Aereo, which has the established broadcasters running to the courtroom in an effort to get it shut down. Aereo allows people to purchase a digital antenna and receive over-the-air television shows, and as we’ve covered extensively, broadcasters are not happy that Aereo isn’t paying them for that right.

“Cable is a great closed system where the masses, now 100 million subscribers of cable, support ESPN that is only watched by 10 percent. That’s a great little plot so long as you can keep everybody inside the closed circle,” Diller said. “We’re out to get the centricity moved to the internet.”

CNN’s Jeff Zucker, who was billed as a joint speaker alongside Diller but wound up playing second fiddle to questions for Diller, agreed that a shift will take place but wasn’t totally sure, as might be expected given the company that pays his bills, that it would happen all that quickly. Still, “at the end of the day we don’t care which platform you get your information from,” he said, emphasizing CNN’s digital products.

Younger folks are the ones who are going to make this happen, according to Diller. “I think that young people that don’t now subscribe to cable are maybe going to think of Aereo as an alternative because they don’t want to pay 100 bucks a month for cable,” he said.

Which tech companies will make this happen? Diller listed Apple (“I don’t think it’s some big secret that they’ve been working for years on trying to solve television”), Amazon and Microsoft.

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Now that it’s been a year since Facebook went public, the next big IPO circus is likely to involve Twitter. CEO Dick Costolo — as expected — didn’t announce concrete plans for such an IPO Wednesday during his appearance at D11, but held forth on a number of interesting topics during his session.

Advertising seems to be booming at Twitter (although Costolo wouldn’t share any numbers) but while Twitter is working more and more with traditional media companies, it doesn’t see the need as of yet to start creating its own news content, Costolo said.

“I see us partnering more with news organizations,” he said. He thinks of Twitter as a tool for news organizations and individuals to distribute content and while it’s messy at times, Costolo doesn’t seem to think that Twitter has a responsibility to verify the content itself; it does, however, want to help news organizations verify themselves on Twitter with better security tools. No specifics were provided, but Costolo addressed the question of security very seriously (for a guy that jokes around a lot), admitting “we haven’t moved as quickly there as we wanted to.”

Twitter has famously cracked down on how third-party developers use that content in their own apps, but Costolo claimed his company’s relationship with developers is “great.” Since the crack-down last summer, the company has certainly worked to mend relationships with developers through partnerships and integrations around Twitter Cards, which bring more content to the site. Costolo alluded to a special relationship with Yahoo over data-feed licensing but didn’t get into specifics regarding that announcement from earlier this month.

Twitter’s own developers have an interesting privilege: they’re allowed to roll out any tweak to the system that reaches one percent of users without clearance from upper management in hopes of sparking experimentation, Costolo said. That being said, what Twitter really needs is “simplicity:” it’s still too hard for new users to get the hang of Twitter, like having to put a period in front of a user name at the beginning of a tweet so your tweets reach all your followers.

He sees Apple as a “mentor company,” when it comes to that simplicity. “We like the way they think about simplicity in design.”

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The photo wars aren’t over, but a shift is about to take place in terms of the content we upload and share to the internet, according to Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker and her trademark Powerpoint slides at D11. After years of uploading each and every photo to the web, we’re about to start uploading personal data and sound files to the web in greater and greater numbers as wearable computing develops.

Meeker’s annual attempt to present more than 100 slides in 10 minutes is a little tough on the eyes, but a few key trends emerged Wednesday at D11 (the full deck is embedded below):

• 500 million photos are being uploaded and shared each day, doubling year over year as Snapchat turns into a real phenomenon. But photo-sharing is relatively mature compared to…
• Video, which as Janko noted earlier today is on a tear. At the moment, video growth is being spurred by short-form video sharing like Vine and Dropcam, Meeker said.
• Both of those content types, however, are relatively well understood compared to the next big wave: sound files and data from wearable computers. That’s because we’re at the cusp of a computing shift in which wearables take precedent over mobile.
• Fitness and health data will be a huge percentage of that personal data, Meeker said, as more and more people realize how behavioral shifts can improve their health and how new devices can help people track those behaviors.
• The platform change to wearables will help create that world, Meeker said. While the past ten years have been about mobile computing and the ten years before that were about the PC, the next ten years will be about wearable computers with sensors.

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Last year when Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at D10, it occurred to me that he had probably the hardest job in American business: certainly the hardest job in technology, following in Steve Jobs’ shadow. This year at D11, it’s clear Cook is up to the job; but he needs something new to talk about to move Apple firmly into the post-Jobs era.

It’s been ages since the last Apple public event in September 2012 to introduce the iPhone 5. Since then, one of the premier sources of showmanship in the tech industry has kept a very low profile, surfacing only to deflect pesky questions about taxes and wax poetic about the magic of Apple for a network television audience. Those aren’t exactly the kinds of topics that have made Apple events and appearances must-see theater for going on six or seven years.

And despite Cook’s best efforts to explain his thinking about how Apple works, he covered well-trodden ground Tuesday evening at the exclusive Terranea Resort just outside Los Angeles:

• Cook isn’t worried about Android’s market share. He’s more fixated on stats that show iOS users actually seem to use their devices way more than Android users.
• Cook isn’t worried about the scrutiny over Apple’s taxes. The U.S. tax system is ridiculous, and Apple navigates it the same way any multinational corporation does.
• Cook isn’t worried about TV. “Many of us agree there are things about the TV experience that could be better,” he said, but believe it or not, he didn’t have a TV to talk about.
• Cook isn’t worried about Google Glass. “I would say that the (wearable computers) that are doing more than one thing, that there’s nothing … great out there that I’ve seen. There’s nothing that’s going to convince a kid that’s never worn glasses or a band or a watch to wear one.” Is Apple making a wearable computer? Maybe … “It’s ripe for exploration.”
• Cook isn’t worried about making a lower-cost iPhone. Apple once made a bunch of different kinds of iPods, but “those products all serve a different person. And so on the phone, that is the question: are we now at a point to serve enough people that we need to do that?”

You get the picture. For two straight years at the highest profile executive conference in the tech industry, Cook has been unable to talk about anything relatively new or exciting for Apple. Obviously no CEO worth a damn is going to preannounce a consumer electronics product at a show like D11. But Apple’s crown jewels are old news in a tech industry that moves at light speed: the iPhone will be six years old this summer, and the iPad just turned three. Six years before the iPhone was introduced, the personal digital assistant represented the vanguard of mobile computing.

We know the story of those products. They’re still growing strongly despite shipping in immense volumes, they’re still the favorite of mobile software developers, and they still (for the most part) set the standard by which all other mobile devices are measured.

Cook is talking about mature products and mature businesses when he takes the stage on behalf of Apple. That’s a weird place for a company that has always prided itself on being outside the mainstream to be, and it shows. Ours is an industry that is always searching for that next big thing, and for many years, Apple has been a reliable source for that item.

In mid-2013, we’re in a collective lull. Mobile is old news, dominated by Apple and Android. The Mac/PC market is in freefall, even if Apple is still doing better than the competition. And with apologies to Samsung, the next big thing — disruptive TV, wearable computing, the internet of things, or robot butlers that make drinks and crack jokes — is not here yet.

The Apple that will attempt to shape that next era has yet to show its hand, leaving Cook in a holding pattern talking about the strategies of the past and present while buying time until Apple’s wizards figure out how they’re going to put their stamp on the products of the future.

Let’s be very clear: should these next-generation products Cook has teased for years actually exist somewhere in a secretive lab in Cupertino, this is a blip in time for Apple. We’re simply between breakthroughs as an industry, searching for something that will galvanize a generation of technologists the way the iPhone did. Apple produced the last breakthrough, and people naturally expect that it will produce the next one given that so much of the company remains intact despite the loss of Jobs.

That may or may not happen. But until then either Apple or someone else produces that breakthrough, Cook’s public appearances grow less and less important: if all he’s going to do is cover ground he’s covered before without a new story to tell, the need to pay attention to Apple’s every word becomes less and less important.

Let’s hope that next breakthrough comes soon. Technology is a more interesting subject when we’re all watching something new and exciting bloom.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t make a ton of public appearances outside a few friendly media interviews, the occasional (well, it happened once anyway) congressional hearing, and his company’s carefully choreographed press events. He’ll make one tonight at the AllThingsD D11 conference in Southern California, and I’ll live blog the event here.

Cook is a very well-trained CEO when it comes to the media spotlight. His appearance last year at D10 didn’t produce a lot of fireworks but shed a little light on a man who was a bit of an enigma until he was thrust into the spotlight upon the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in October 2011. Nonetheless, like Jobs, he’s the only public representative of Apple that anyone can take seriously when trying to predict what tech’s most influential company will do next, and his appearance tonight will be dissected like a Federal Reserve meeting.

The event kicks off at 6pm PT, and (Verizon LTE connectivity willing) I’ll update this page frequently. Until then, here’s what I wrote last year at D10, reflecting on Cook’s appearance.

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At this point in its history, Google is like that good friend who is extremely accomplished and successful but who you really, really hope doesn’t fall in love with a relative.

One of Silicon Valley’s greatest contributions to the tech industry is a company that most of us gladly put at the center of our online world every day in some form or another to help us manage our lives, yet it’s a company that makes us a little queasy when we stop to think about the side effects of its relentless push forward. Perhaps that was best evidenced this past week in San Francisco during Google I/O, when Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page took the stage at the end of the company’s seemingly interminable keynote to deliver a heartfelt speech about the role of technology in our lives and Google’s quest to make the world a better place.

Most of what Page said (in a hoarse, whispery voice that is a lingering gift from a bout of vocal-cord paralysis) was exactly the type of aspirational thinking you want to see from technology leaders: (all quotes courtesy of TechHive’s transcription of Page’s talk)

“And I’m amazed every day I come to work, the list of things that needs to be done is longer than the day before. And the opportunity of those things is bigger than it was before. And because of that we, as Google, and as an industry–all of you–really only have one percent of what is possible. Probably even less than that.”

As Page spoke, Google’s stock price rose noticeably. It closed the week at an all-time high of $909.19, a price which valued the company at just over $300 billion. While the advertising market that underwrites Google’s ambitions is going through a bit of flux as we switch the center of our online lives from desktop computing to mobile computing, it’s pretty clear from the breadth of products showcased at Google I/O that if even a few of Google’s long-term bets pay off, the company is well-positioned to be a force in technology for decades to come with products that are, at times, remarkably useful.

But then Page kept talking.

First he decried negativity in the tech industry, which while indeed a bit over the top at times, is a pretty silly thing to highlight considering that one of Google’s early goals — once it had established itself as a search superstar in the early 2000s — was to destroy Microsoft’s hammerlock on the tech industry. And one of its more recent goals was to prevent Apple from seizing control of the smartphone market with the iPhone.

Things like Google Docs were conceived in part to dent Microsoft’s monopoly over office-productivity software and move more people onto the web, where Google benefits. The early marketing campaigns that Google and its partners chose for Android were similarly adversarial, highlighting the fact that “Droid Does” as a response to Apple’s tight control of the App Store approval process. And in 2010, summoning perhaps the greatest rhetorical flair showcased at a Google I/O, Google’s Vic Gundotra compared Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to the faceless overlords of George Orwell’s books, warning that if it wasn’t for Android, we “faced a draconian future where one man, one phone, one carrier were our choice.”

That selective memory wasn’t enough. Page proceeded to uncork some of the most truly head-scratching things a Google CEO has ever said, and that’s something considering the pace at which former Google CEO and current Chairman Eric Schmidt used to poorly execute jokes about identity and privacy concerns with a condescending smarmy tone.

“You know, if you look different kinds of laws we make, and things like that, they’re very old. I mean, the laws when we went public were 50 years old. (A) law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet.”

Page did not follow up with a request to dismantle the Bill of Rights, but even casual thoughts that laws predating the Kennedy assassination have no relevance today should raise eyebrows when expressed by one of the world’s richest men, especially one who is sitting on a treasure trove of personally identifiable data. Sure, there are things like copyright laws that make less sense in today’s era, but why not single those out instead painting with such a wide brush?

And then there was this gem:

“There’s many, many exciting and important things you could do that you just can’t do ’cause they’re illegal or they’re not allowed by regulation. And that makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast. … I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out: What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world.”

Imagine: an area of the world set aside for totally unregulated and unsupervised experimentation. What could possibly go wrong?

So stands Google at this moment in its history. It has brought so many wonderful products into our lives, from search and Google Maps to Android and Google Fiber. Yet it is clearly bent on accelerating the pace of change in our world without fully comprehending, as Page’s comments show, the need to avoid fixing things that aren’t broken.

New technologies are always going to have positive and negative effects on society, and it’s our job as consumers, observers, and regulators to sort those out. Perhaps more than any other single company at present, Google is at the forefront of those positive and negative changes; organizing the world’s information and connecting the planet to the web so that personally identifiable databases of one’s likes, dislikes and peccadillos can be served up on a platter to the advertising industry.

That makes Google worth a lot of money. It also makes Google worth a lot of scrutiny. If Page thinks his company and industry is currently beset by what he considers “negativity,” he’s in for a surprise over the next decade.

Larry Page image courtesy Getty Images / Justin Sullivan. Billboard image courtesy Flickr user Thomas Leuthard.

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Tumblr’s fate could be decided Sunday by Yahoo’s board of directors. AllThingsD reported late Friday that Yahoo is closing in on a $1.1 billion deal for the site, moving quickly to cement what would be the biggest deal of CEO Marissa Mayer’s tenure at the venerable but lackluster internet pioneer.

After reporting Thursday that Yahoo was considering a number of options for Tumblr, including partnerships or strategic investments, ATD reported Friday that Mayer had decided to go all in. Om reported Thursday that Yahoo was worried about counteroffers from Facebook, much how Facebook stole Instagram from Twitter after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s courtship of the photo-sharing site. Now the board plans to meet Sunday to consider giving final approval to the offer.

Tumblr’s backers will likely be pleased with a $1.1 billion price tag, especially if, as reported, it involves cash However, it’s far from certain that such an outlay would do anything to revive Yahoo’s fortunes. Mayer certainly has been trying to bring new blood into the company of late, snapping up a number of smaller mobile startups before focusing on Tumblr over the last month.

Yahoo has scheduled a press event for Monday evening in New York to discuss “something special,” but it wouldn’t hint at anything else. We’ll be there to cover the event, but in the meantime, here’s Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp’s appearance at our paidContent Live conference in April, discussing his company’s fortunes:

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In just a few short years, Google I/O has evolved into one of the must-attend-or-watch events on the technology calendar. Thousands of developers are expected to take part in the 2013 edition, which kicks off Wednesday morning at Moscone West in San Francisco, and we’ll be bringing you coverage of the show all week, including live coverage of Wednesday’s keynote address featuring top Google executives and likely to feature news about Android, Chrome, YouTube, and Google’s suite of enterprise-oriented cloud computing services.

While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Pre-show expectations:

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Day 1:

Featured photo courtesy Flickr user Thomas Hawk.

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The only constant in the modern media business is chaos. We can all agree we’re in the midst of an historic and seismic shift in which all media becomes digital, but the business models, technologies, winners and losers that will define that digital era are very much up in the air.

At paidContent Live on Wednesday in New York, we’re convening some of the people most responsible for that disruption as well as those tasked with turning big media companies on a dime. That schedule includes upstarts like Chet Kanojia, founder and CEO of Aereo, who has the old broadcasting powers scrambling to quash his innovative startup in the courtroom. It involves financiers like Lerer Ventures’ Kenneth Lerer, whose firm has backed buzzy media startups like Branch and Buzzfeed. And it features publishing veterans like Andrew Sullivan, who is attempting to remake the concept of paid content.

A live stream of the event can be found here, and all of our coverage from the event will be featured below. We hope you can join us.

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It’s official: the second city to participate in Google Fiber’s mission to bring super fast internet access at affordable prices will be Austin, Texas. Our own Austinite Stacey Higginbotham has been beside herself since the news broke last week, and as Tuesday’s official event winds down, here’s all of our coverage so far.

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We’re not sure if T-Mobile is now an “uncarrier,” as it declared at Tuesday’s event in New York City at which it finally introduced an iPhone 5 for its network, unveiled new pricing plans that could change the way people think about buying smartphones, and shed a little more light on how its LTE networks will operate. However, the carrier certainly came out swinging as it tries to embrace its underdog status and set itself apart from larger rivals.

Here are the stories that emerged from the event:

• T-Mobile launches LTE with a bang, the iPhone 5 and no contracts
• It’s finally here: T-Mobile iPhone 5 goes on sale April 12
• T-Mobile is ending subsidies and contracts, but it’s still locking phones
• T-Mobile’s new LTE network is fast, but it’s going to get a lot faster
• Samsung Galaxy S 4 hits T-Mobile around May 1 for $99 plus monthly payments
• Why Apple doesn’t need a cheap iPhone if T-Mobile does it for them

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284

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Looking back on the nearly 20 years since we’ve embraced the World Wide Web, the social media revolution is probably the most important thing that’s emerged from the medium. However, it’s pretty clear that we are not sure to handle the power that revolution can allow us to wield.

We were reminded of this once again this past week by two separate stories: Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, was fired by her employer after tweeting a picture of two men at a Silicon Valley tech conference who she said were making inappropriate and harassing sexual comments. A firestorm erupted, as one of the men was fired from his job at Playhaven, Richards was subjected to horrifying abuse from anonymous internet trolls who were outraged that she used Twitter to shame men for making juvenile and inappropriate but not exactly hateful comments, and bystanders were left shaking their heads by the speed at which two people lost their jobs over a dongle joke.

And in San Francisco, the capital of the social media revolution, laid-off Uber drivers protested the company’s business model after they felt they were wrongly fired for receiving poor feedback in the company’s user-rating system. among other things. At first glances, this seems like exactly the sort of thing a social-media driven on-demand service should do: give its customers a way to identify the bad drivers while rewarding the good ones.

But like all crowdsourced feedback systems, Uber’s feedback system depends on the notion that all the feedback presented to it is genuine, as opposed to the feedback from a rich, entitled and drunk San Francisco resident who spends three seconds leaving a one-star rating if his black Town Car doesn’t arrive exactly when it should because traffic was bad. (Om explored the ramifications of this on labor rights in a recent piece on “data Darwinism.”) Uber drivers can rate passengers, but as long as the passenger isn’t obnoxious or threatening, it’s hard to know which passengers are merely aloof jerks; and Uber doesn’t have a lot of incentive to shame its paying customers.

These types of problems will continue to happen so long as we continue to find immense value in social media. And for the most part that value is deserved: social media gives a voice to important and creative people who otherwise would have been ignored, allows strangers to meet and old friends to stay in touch, and has even helped organize political revolutions. The public values of companies like Google, Facebook, and (soon enough) Twitter are not a mirage; they provide services people adore while allowing marketers to find their best customers.

But as we explored last year in our discussion on ComfortablySmug, the use of these services to publicly shame individuals is a very tricky thing. Some people deserve it, and some people don’t; but the speed at which pointed accusations can fly can have permanent consequences that don’t necessarily fit the crime.

This has always been true with media, social or not. But now reports can appear in search engines almost immediately tied to an individual’s name, regardless of how large a media entity picks up the story. They can spread like wildfire before the person even has a chance to respond, and they can be used to determine if you keep your job. There’s a reason online reputation management firms are growing.

Some feel that identifying and shaming inappropriate (not illegal or dangerous, but out of line) behavior on the web will lead to a reduction in such behavior, as people learn there are consequences to their actions. But that presumes that the shamers always correctly interpret the situation; that the two men at the conference were creating a hostile environment, or that the driver actually provided you with subpar service.

And even if they do correctly interpret the situation, is it right to conclude that digitally shaming those you feel have wronged you is the proper response? The use of public shaming in the criminal justice system is certainly controversial; why should ordinary folks feel the right to employ such tactics indiscriminately?

This is far from the first time we’ve had such a discussion, and it’s not going to be the last. We’re hopefully going to be able to figure this out as a society: we need to create a digital code of conduct that extends the grace and decency human beings generally show each other in public to the web, where an astonishing number of people leave those traits behind.

But the problem is that we’re trying to do this at warp speed, and it’s only getting faster. We’re walking around with ever-more sophisticated recording instruments and we might even soon wear them on our faces.

Are we really heading toward a future in which we feel it’s appropriate to judge each other’s behavior in an instant and publicly share it with the world?

Featured photo courtesy Flickr user jetheriot, text photo courtesy Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa.

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If you’re a regular reader of GigaOM you know that we’re big believers in the power of data — both big and, well, bigger — to change the way we think about our world. Until relatively recently, it hasn’t been possible to gather enough data at scale to truly understand the patterns around us. But as our smartphones turn us into walking sensors and we live ever-increasing amounts of our lives online, we’re generating massive amounts of data that can improve the health of a business (or a person), help us make rational decisions about resource prioritization and finally convince NFL coaches that they should go for it more often on fourth down.

The key is developing the tools and techniques to properly collect, harvest, and analyze that data. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, we’ve gathered some of the top minds in this emerging field in New York at Structure:Data to help you understand how data and data analysis can improve your business and your life. They include Paul Maritz, chief strategist at EMC and a leader of The Pivotal Initiative; data experts from companies like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and a host of startups; and even the CTO for the Central Intelligence Agency, Ira “Gus” Hunt.

More information about the conference can be found here. If you can’t join us in New York, follow along with the livestream here, or join the conversation on Twitter with #dataconf. We’ll also post a roundup of all our coverage from what should be a very interesting two days of data.

Thumbnail image courtesy Thinkstock Images.

Wednesday’s posts:

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• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Why the big data startup boom will likely be short-lived
• The Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?

As we gear up for our Structure:Data conference next week in New York, we wanted to create a home for our four-part special report published over the course of last week on Hadoop, the big data engine that could. Links to the series follow below, and you can find more information on Structure:Data here.

• The history of Hadoop: From 4 nodes to the future of data
• The Hadoop ecosystem: the (welcome) elephant in the room (infographic)
• 5 reasons why the future of Hadoop is real-time (relatively speaking)
• Hadoop through the years: A GigaOM retrospective

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• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• Don’t hold your breath for a single big data stack
• Big data budgets on the rise

We get a lot of unsolicited business and technology books at GigaOM: our editorial group table in San Francisco is littered with inspirational tomes, visionary essays, and other tips for people who hope to become highly effective. Most of these books gather dust or serve as makeshift monitor stands. But along with a lot of folks, we’ve been looking forward to the release of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In.

The book — which goes on sale today — has already been subject to an amazing amount of discussion, a fair portion of which clearly took place before people had read the book. We decided to try something novel and actually read the book before commenting on it or the important discussion it has provoked about women, men, Corporate America, technology, and leadership. After our paidContent book expert Laura Owen obtained advance copies of the book from its publisher, Random House’s Knopf, we distributed them to our female editorial staffers (and one earnest-yet-intimidated male staffer) and organized a virtual book club discussion on Socialcast, our internal collaboration site. We present that discussion in the same fashion as our debate about Twitter anonymity and web vigilantes last year.

Here’s what the GigaLadies had to say about Sandberg’s book.

One of the things we had wondered about was whether Sandberg’s book was just another portrait of insular Silicon Valley culture — interesting and noteworthy but not necessarily applicable to those outside the industry.

Stacey Higginbotham wondered if Sandberg’s book actually encouraged the wrong kind of stereotypes about women in the workplace.

Barb Darrow thought she perhaps could have chosen a better role model.

Eliza Kern, the youngest member of the GigaLadies, found the book interesting and useful but also a little weird.

Clearly, Sandberg raised a lot of good questions about the current state of gender relations in the workplace. How can we address those questions?

At least one guy was glad to see a nuanced but important discussion.

Any good book club discussion involves stories or situations from real life and how they relate to the topic of the book.

The anecdotes continued.

Ki Mae Heussner wondered if the GigaLadies saw themselves as competing against other women, rather than competing against people in general, as the book noted has been the case in the past. Speaking of competition, Sandberg’s book has been linked with an essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and Slaughter reviewed Sandberg’s book for The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review section.

Finally, I attempted to figure out how best to change the situation so that books like this don’t have to be written.

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If you like technology, brisket and huge crowds of harried people, there’s no better place to be this weekend than SXSW. We’ve got five of our writers on the ground dodging raindrops and wacky startups in Austin, Texas, and here’s what they’ve found. (Check out this post for an idea of what we expected going into the legendary event.)

• Here’s what cell phone coverage looks like for SXSW
• Bill Gates: education needs much more than just 1 percent of R&D spending
• Liftoff! Your design plus a 3-D printer could power the next rockets in space
• The King of 3D printing kicks off a SXSW focused on the physical world
• Designing for health tech? Remember the 7 deadly sins
• A wish list for education technology
• The internet of weird things at SXSW: smart porta potties, light books and a robot zen gardener
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on female workplace equality: it’s about men, too
• Where WordPress is headed: Longform content, curation and maybe even native ads
• Eric Ries-backed Neo Innovation launches new fund focused on lean startups
• Elon Musk on his one regret from the NYT incident, spaceship scares & Russian missiles
• Dalton Caldwell on our software choices: You are what you eat
• Lean government? How HHS is following Silicon Valley’s lead
• 5 things I’ve learned in 24 hours as a SXSW newbie

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It’s all over but the complaining: Facebook unveiled a new look for its News Feed Thursday at an event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The new design places greater emphasis on photos and content, and also strives for a consistent look across the Facebook experience on desktop, tablet, and smartphone apps. But as with past changes to the Facebook experience, it’s likely to prompt some whining from users accustomed to the old way of doing things.

Eliza Kern live-blogged the event for us this morning, hosted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several Facebook product executives, and will have more on the new design later today. But here are the highlights:

• Facebook introduced new dedicated feeds that allow you to see just the photos, music, and business pages that you’re following on the service, in addition to being able to follow all of your friends’ updates as usual.
• It also changed the left-hand menu navigation bar, which is also now consistent across devices. It will always be present, as opposed to previous designs where it could be hidden behind the main page.
• Facebook didn’t spend a lot of time talking about ads, rather surprisingly.
• The new design will be rolling out to Facebook’s 1 billion users over the next few weeks, but you can speed up the process by getting on a waiting list here.

Here’s a link to Facebook’s press release on the redesign.

And here’s a before and after comparison provided by Facebook:

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