Category: News

A hundred years ago, a Chicago lawyer named Sigmund Livingston raised his voice and launched a movement. He declared his mission was “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” Today, we congratulate the Anti-Defamation League on its 100th anniversary.

We all know the quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But there’s a corollary:  that arc bends faster when it is pushed, and the ADL has always pushed. The ADL was there at the height of World War II, defying hate groups and fighting against the brutal onslaught of anti-Semitism. The ADL was there in the 1950s, during Brown v. Board of Education, fighting for desegregation. And the ADL was there pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Today, we are proud to work with the ADL on a wide range of issues, as we follow President Obama’s charge to work towards a country that is “more fair, more just, and more equal for every single child of God.”

With enormous support from ADL, the President signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. This act extends the coverage of the Federal hate crimes law to include attacks based on the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

President Obama upheld this country’s highest ideals by repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” As he put it, “we are not a nation that says, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ We are a nation that says, ‘Out of many, we are one.’”

Together with the ADL, we stand against bullying.  In 2011, we held the first-ever White House Conference on Bullying Prevention, attended by the President and First Lady. The ADL has been out front in equipping families and educators in the fight against bullying, both in person and online.

Together with the ADL, we stand with the Dreamers who were brought into this country as children, many of whom found out as adults they weren’t citizens when they tried to apply for a job and for college.

In his ADL address in 1963, President Kennedy described citizenship to the United States as “a proud privilege.” He spoke of the millions of people who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to build a new life and make a new opportunity for themselves and their children. In fifty years, that American dream has remained unchanged.

Together with the ADL, we stand with women and girls. Just a couple of months ago, President Obama signed a bill that both strengthened and reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Thanks to this bipartisan agreement, thousands of women, men, girls and boys across the country who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking will be able to access the resources they need to help heal from their trauma.

Together with the ADL, we stand against hate. President Obama made clear during his recent trip to Israel that anti-Semitism has no place in this world. He heeded the words of Dr. King, that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That’s why we must defend justice so vigorously. That’s why we cannot tolerate anti-Semitism or any hate, at home or abroad.

President Obama said, “Not in the classrooms of children. Not in the corridors of power. And let us never forget the link between the two. For our sons and daughters are not born to hate, they are taught to hate. So let us fill their young hearts with the same understanding, the same compassion we hope others have for them.”

And together, we congratulate the ADL on their anniversary, and look forward to working with the ADL toward the day when our world is free from hate.

Valerie B. Jarrett is a Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. She oversees the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs and chairs the White House Council on Women and Girls.

While some folks out there may find road rage amusing, I can assure you that there’s nothing funny about it. The following video shows us an irate Toyota Camry driver doing everything they can to cause an accident with a gray and red sports car. Now, unfortunately the driver of the striped car didn’t call the police, but that is exactly what should’ve be done in a situation such as this. In a day and age when dash cameras are all the rage pulling a stunt like this and getting away with it is going to be harder and harder to do. Click through and check it out.

Source: Youtube.com

Two years ago, President Obama announced a challenge to the private sector to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013.

Today, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden, and Dr. Jill Biden all participated in a Joining Forces Employment event at the White House.

President Obama set a goal of asking the private sector to hire or train 100,000 veterans and military spouses by the end of 2013.

Today, the First Lady announced that America’s businesses nearly tripled the goal set by President Obama and did so eight months early. The private sector has already hired or trained 290,000 veterans and military spouses.

The First Lady also announced that American companies have committed to hire or train another 435,000 veterans and military spouses over the next five years. 

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Charles Phan, author of “Vietnamese Home Cooking” recently participated in an “At Google” talk, discussing his book.

“In his eagerly awaited first cookbook, award-winning chef Charles Phan from San Francisco’s Slanted Door restaurant introduces traditional Vietnamese cooking to home cooks by focusing on fundamental techniques and ingredients,” says Google in the video description.

Google offers the book itself on Google Play.

More At Google talks here.

“I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together.”

Such was the kernel of an idea from one Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer working at CERN back in the 1980s. Working on this idea was a side project for Berners-Lee, one dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the time. Yet today, the results of the experiment turn 20 years old. As his former employer puts it, “On 30 April 1993, CERN published a statement making W3 technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.” That’s a very less-than-vague achievement we should all take a moment to celebrate.

In 2009, Berners-Lee gave a TED Talk in which he described some of the history of developing the web, and detailed some of his ideas for what might happen next. He essentially documents principles of innovation that hold as true today as they did back when he was experimenting with his radical idea of web-style interoperability, and they’re certainly worth any would-be entrepreneur thinking about in the go-go bubble days of the current tech climate. Innovation, it turns out, is often very less than the result of a Eureka moment of genius insight. Instead, it’s the result of hard work and deep application.

Here, some lessons from Berners-Lee and his twenty-something baby, the World Wide Web.

1. Harness Your Own Frustration

Berners-Lee was annoyed that he couldn’t collaborate easily and seamlessly with the many colleagues who came through CERN’s doors, each one clutching potentially valuable insights and information locked away behind a ton of different formats. He became obsessed with wanting to figure out a way to develop a system to break this problem once and for all. Focusing on solving an actual tangible issue provides a solid foundation for unlocking true innovation potential, yet it’s one that many founders too often seem to overlook. For Berners-Lee, the potential was in the solution it would afford him personally, not in developing a particular technology per se.

2. Involve Others Early

In fact, Berners-Lee is explicit about his focus. “The most exciting thing was not the technology but the community and spirit of people getting together,” he says. It’s a philosophy echoed by a fellow Internet pioneer, Danny Hillis, who described the close-knit spirit of early experimentation in a talk given at TED2013. (Watch the talk below, and do check out his copy of the ARPANET Directory, which included the names and addresses of everyone with an email address in 1982.)

This idea holds particularly true in our age of “launch first, re-launch often.” The point: find your people and figure out how to harness their ideas and input. The web has enabled people from all sorts of locations and backgrounds to connect; there’s simply no excuse for existing in a lone bubble.

3. Don’t Stop

You might think that if you were responsible for launching the World Wide Web, you could kick back, pop open the champagne, and watch the praise and plaudits roll in. Not Berners-Lee. What’s inspiring about his 2009 TED Talk is the passion he clearly shows for his latest project, linked data. It’s clear that he’s proud of his baby, now leaving its teen years and entering adulthood. But it’s also apparent that he feels the conditions are ripe for new invention. His frustration at the walled gardens that have taken over the web (see 1), his excitement at persuading people to provide sources of data (see 2), and his clear drive and excitement at what might be next (see, um, 3) make it clear. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

It used to be that when a heavy storm hit South Bend, Indiana, waste water spilled into the St. Joseph River and backed up in basements. That’s because, like some 800 other cities in the United States with combined storm and sanitary sewers, South Bend’s pipes and treatment plants were easily overwhelmed.

The city was faced with the prospect of a major infrastructure overhaul that could have cost $120 million. Instead, the city teamed up with Notre Dame University, local technology company Emnet, and IBM to seek a low-cost but effective solution to the sewage problem. The three groups came together and brainstormed new ways to automate the analysis of large volumes of data, much of it real-time in nature. They set out to find new ways to predict problems before they occur and respond more effectively. The group also wanted to ensure that municipal workers had the right information to easily spot trouble before damage occurred.

First, professors at Notre Dame designed a network of sensors to monitor the flows of water throughout the system. Some graduate students working on the project formed a start-up company, Emnet, to commercialize the technology. Notre Dame received software from IBM designed to allow research students to develop creative applications for managing water. From the possibility of smart phone apps that let people report flooding, to social media tools that gather insight on water systems, students were turned loose to innovate using new software tools they would not have otherwise been exposed to. In turn, the technology was used to automate otherwise manual and labor-intensive data collection.

The result: a new method for monitoring and pro-actively controlling the city’s wastewater collection system that dramatically decreased back-up and sewer overflows, costing only $6 million to implement (compared to the estimated $120 million). Now, South Bend’s combined sewer management system lives in the cloud. To cut costs, the city rents technology services delivered over the Internet rather than buying computers and going to all the trouble of setting things up. This way, they can view the collection system’s vital signs on a computer dashboard to find out instantly what’s working well, and when it isn’t, to kick off activities to address issues before they mushroom into bigger problems.

But the role of strong leadership in this success story must not be overlooked. In the case of South Bend, it started with Gary Gillot, the now retired director of Public Works. He had a vision that the city could ultimately find a better way to collect and visualize data about water, solving a tremendous problem faced by hundreds of cities just like South Bend. He teamed with then Mayor Steve Luecke who helped pave the way for the required approvals, and overcoming funding obstacles to make the vision a reality. When the City changed mayors recently, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was brought into the team, understanding the importance of the issues and further supporting the ongoing initiative.

Ultimately, this public-private collaboration combined the expertise of the city, academia, and the tech industry to create an innovative approach to water management that can be replicated elsewhere in cities with similar systems. Time and again, we have seen city leaders rise up, set a bold vision and then take the practical steps to make progress. In Dubuque, Iowa, city leaders such as Mayor Roy Buol set out to build a more sustainable city, engaging citizens in the process. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, under the leadership of Mayor Carlos Gimenez the Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department is pioneering a project that will save some $1 million a year in water costs. City leaders such as these are to be commended for their willingness to try something different.

Corporations and small businesses use new technology and strong leadership to make their operations more successful, why not cities? This remarkable success story in South Bend, a city of 130,000, shows how strong leadership, next-generation technologies, and public-private collaboration can help make cities work a lot better, even at a time when public funds are in short supply. These days, cities are tremendous engines for innovation and economic growth. Young people, professionals, and empty-nesters are drawn to them in search of excitement, culture, and career opportunities. We have the potential to spark a true renaissance for cities, so they’re not just bigger — they’re better.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) today released an updated oil and gas resource assessment for the Bakken Formation and a new assessment for the Three Forks Formation in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.

At Google I/O last year, Google showed that it was serious about making Android a serious contender in the tablet space with the Nexus 7. It inched in on Apple’s turf later that year with the Nexus 10, a Samsung-built tablet sporting the largest resolution yet seen on a mobile device. Now Google may be teaming up with Samsung to do it all over again.

SamMobile reports that Samsung and Google are teaming up in 2013 to bring a Nexus 11 to market. The rumored tablet would feature an 11-inch display, a 8MP back-facing camera, a 2MP front-facing camera, and an Exynos Octa-core processor. The CPU is notable as it would be the first tablet to feature an octa-core processor. Samsung’s newest octa-core CPU has only been made available in the international Galaxy S4 thus far.

Of course, Samsung doesn’t intend to let Google have all the fun. The company is rumored to also be releasing an 11-inch tablet under its own Galaxy Tab brand. The rumored Galaxy Tab 11 would feature the same specs as the Nexus 7, but it would be powered by a dual-core Exynos CPU to cut down on costs.

As for other tablets, the report says that Samsung is planning to release a new Galaxy Tab 7 and Tab 8 later this year. The company is already releasing a Wi-Fi and 3G capable 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3 in May, but the rumored Galaxy Tab 7 would come with dual-sim support for those who frequently travel or want to operate on two carriers.

All of this is just a rumor for now, but most of it sounds pretty legit. The Nexus 11 sounds like a natural evolution of Google’s Nexus line. As for Samsung’s other tablets, it loves to release its Galaxy Tab and Note hardware in multiple sizes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more Galaxy Tabs in the coming months.

Windows Phone customers have options for driving apps — both Bing and Nokia produce excellent solutions. Now one of the most intriguing options for Android and iOS is preparing for a push to the Microsoft mobile platform and impending competition with the existing solutions already in place.

Waze, which happens to be my GPS app of choice on Android, announces early beta testing on Windows Phone 8: “We are now opening a beta program for Windows Phone users and we’d like you to join” says the company in its announcement.

Waze brings quite a few options to the table. The app crowdsources information to get real-time updates on everything from traffic jams to construction closures, even speed traps. The maps are community vetted and updated, keeping the service current. Waze also displays your friends on the map and tells you where to get the cheapest gas for your next fill-up.

There is no guarantee you will get to try this out just yet. The company is taking applications at waze.centercode.com right now. You will need a Centercode account (it’s free) and you must be accepted into the program. In return, Waze promises you will be the first to drive with the newest Waze version, get a chance to win some awesome swag and take part in the process of creating a better app. In exchange, users are asked to use the app on their daily commutes, give feedback and install new betas whenever available.

Waze promises the first version will be available to testers within the next two weeks. The app is already on both Android and iOS and is free to use.

Photo Credit: Krivosheev Vitaly/Shutterstock

Chris Kimball, author of the book, “The Science of Good Cooking,” recently gave an “Authors at Google” talk at the company’s headquarters. Google has now made it available for all to watch.

More recent At Google talks here.

Twitter’s 6-second video app Vine has just received an update. Version 1.1 add front-facing camera support, mentions, and improved people search.

When shooting your Vine, all you have to do is tap a new button on the bottom-left=hand corner to toggle between using the front-facing and regular camera on your device. Naturally, this will help Vine auteurs who fancy including selfies in their videos.

Vine finally supports @mentions as well.

“Vine now supports mentions, so you can tag people in your post. Users who are mentioned will receive a notification in Activity. To mention a user, type @username and select the name among the suggestions you’ll see. See the screenshot below for an example — when I type @chris, I see suggestions for Chris Fry, Chris Hardwick and Christofer Drew. When I select Chris Hardwick, his Vine profile will automatically link in my post’s caption,” says Vine engineer Kristian Bauer.

Vine’s last iOS app update added trending hashtags to help users surface more content. Vine also recently made videos embeddable via both the web and on mobile.

Last week, Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann confirmed that Vine is coming to Android soon.

You can grab the update for Vine for iOS over at the App Store.

Hulu now has more than four million paying users subscribing to its Hulu Plus service, and the number of subscribers has doubled since last year. The service also streamed more than one billion videos in the first quarter of 2013, which is another record for Hulu.

The numbers were released on Hulu’s blog Tuesday, with Andy Forssell, in his new role as acting CEO, sharing a few other key stats as well:

• The service now offers around 57,000 hours of content on Hulu and Hulu Plus, including more than 70,000 full TV episodes from nearly 2,500 TV series.
• Hulu has more than 470 content partners.
• Hulu has served more than 1000 brand advertisers since launch.
• Hulu Plus is now available on more than 350 million mobile and connected devices.

Forssell also used his post as well as his appearance at the Newfronts in New York to announce a number of new exclusive productions for the site, as well as the addition of All My Children and One Life To Live.

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Self-serve advertising on Twitter will now be widely available to all users rather than invite-only, the company announced Tuesday.

The move, while not surprising, formally opens the doors for Twitter to make more money on its advertising platform and demonstrates that the company is now ready to sell ads on a larger scale. The success of the advertising network Twitter is creating will likely have a significant impact on its business model, and therefore the success of an IPO if the company goes public later this year or next, as many expect.

“Over the past year we’ve listened carefully to feedback from the thousands of businesses and individuals who’ve had access to the self-serve tool, and madeenhancements based on their suggestions, including more targeting and reporting in the UI. It’s because of this feedback that effective today, we’re ending our invite-only period and opening signups for our self-serve ad platform to all users in the U.S.”

Twitter first launched the self-serve ad product in March 2012 and started working with a limited group of partners, and over the past year the company has announced a variety of improvements to the product that have initially been available to those invite-only clients.

For instance, Twitter started allowing companies to advertise based on the words people use in their tweets (so if you tweet about wanting ice cream, you might see a Ben & Jerry’s ad), and based on the accounts you follow (so if you follow a lot of basketball-related accounts, you might see a March Madness promoted tweet.) The changes have been focused on refining the ads to make them more relevant and hopefully interesting to users, which could then benefit Twitter and the businesses if users are more likely to click.

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Continue reading…

Machine learning is everywhere these days as companies and organizations find themselves trying to make sense of data sets far too large and complex for the human brain alone. On Tuesday, Skytree cashed in on the hype with with an $18 million Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners along with delivery giant UPS and Sun Microsystems co-founder and former CEO Scott McNealy. Skytree launched in February 2012 with $1.5 million in seed funding.

Machine learning is such a hot topic right now because data volumes are becoming so large and complex that humans alone can’t query their ways through them fast enough or intelligently enough to spot latent patterns among the mess of data. It’s the algorithmic engine that powers a bunch of Google services and your Netflix recommendations, as well as web content-curation service Prismatic and alternative-underwriting platform ZestFinance. As we covered in some detail at this year’s Structure: Data conference, machine learning is particularly powerful when its ability to correlate tens of thousands of variables is paired with human judgment about what really matters.

Skytree co-founder Alexander Gray (second from left) at Structure: Data 2012. (c) Pinar Ozger

Skytree, for its part, sells a product called Skytree Server that lets users run a wide variety of machine learning algorithms across whatever data they have. It might be an oversimplification, but Skytree is essentially a souped-up version of statistical-analysis packages like SPSS or SAS that’s designed to run fast — and, more importantly — without sampling across a scale-out server architecture. In March, the company also rolled out the beta version of a new product called Adviser that can run on a laptop and walks more-novice users through the analysis of their data, including what methods were used and why, and whether the findings are statistically significant.

I suspect we’re just seeing the opening salvo in what will be a rush to fund machine learning startups over the next couple of years. Skytree is among a number of increasingly promising startups in the space, including (but certainly not limited to) Ayasdi and Quid. As more individuals see the promise of machine learning and get skilled in applying it to their particular problems and datasets — as UPS apparently has — it could become become one of the go-to analytic methods in the big data era.

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“Trust is the key to our community,” says Airbnb’s Vivek Wagle. “There is no place for anonymity in a trusted community.”

And with that, Airbnb announces a move that is likely to ruffle the feathers of some users, while engendering a more serious trust in the service in others. Today, the online service that connects travelers with location renters all across the world is unveiling a heightened verification process which they call Airbnb Verified ID. It will force users to match their online IDs (via Airbnb accounts, Facebook, or LinkedIn) with their offline identities, verifiable with a government-issued ID or some sort of official questionnaire.

“Verified ID provides a connection between the online and offline spaces. Airbnb users can earn a “Verified ID” badge on their profile by providing their online identity (via existing Airbnb reviews, LinkedIn, or Facebook) and matching it to offline ID documentation, such as confirming personal information or scanning a photo ID. The name provided by both channels must match for verification to succeed,” says Wagle.

Airbnb is dipping its toes into the new verification, only requiring a random 25% of users to get verified. Users who wish to make last-minute bookings will also be asked to verify their identities. That percentage is likely to increase quickly, as Airbnb says that their end goal is to make all users have a verified ID.

Of course, you may be forced into verifying your account if you want to book certain locations. Hosts can now require that guests are verified.

At Airbnb, hosts can set reservation requirements that they feel comfortable with. Some may choose to only invite guests into their homes who have verified their IDs. If you would like to book with a host who requires their guests to verify their IDs, we’ll prompt you to do so in order to complete the booking process. Any host who requests their guests to verify their ID must also get verified.

If you want to verify your account, you can start the process here. Or, you can simply wait for Airbnb to require it. If Airbnb asks you to do so during a booking, you’ll have 12 hours to complete the process.

Airbnb has to know that this is a bold move. For some users, this will be a deal breaker. That’s unavoidable from Airbnb’s perspective. But there are few online services other the Airbnb where this sort of thing makes sense. I mean, people are hosting and booking homes and apartments with strangers. For a company that has had its share of negative press regarding poor user experiences, this is definitely a strong move to show that they’re all about trust and legitimacy.

Alpha Payments Cloud said Tuesday it raised $12 million from an angel investor. Singapore-based Alpha Payments is a payments-focused cloud-based IT firm. The company has launched an enterprise app store for the payments industry.

PRESS RELEASE

Alpha Payments Cloud (APC), a payments-focused cloud-based IT startup, launched today the payments industry’s first comprehensive enterprise app store. The company raised $12 million from an angel investor to introduce new cloud-based payment platforms that change the way payment products are developed while simplifying and connecting the payments world.

APC’s enterprise app store is designed to connect merchants, banks and payment products to one payments ecosystem and provide the flexibility to easily find, select, switch and combine products.

“We are positioning ourselves to be the Android of the payments industry,” said Oliver Rajic, CEO of Alpha Payments Cloud. “We are removing barriers of entry like upfront costs, providing access to global distribution channels and boosting time to market for all parties. Our new technology and fresh approach create a frictionless payments ecosystem that fosters product innovation.”

Benefits for Merchants
· Merchants can easily select and switch among a variety of payment products in more than 35 categories, including fraud, chargeback management and multi-currency acquiring.
· APC’s dynamic API enables merchants to customize product combinations and consolidate current integrations.
· APC offers a unique business intelligence tool that allows merchants to consolidate multiple reports into a single smart reporting tool.

Benefits for Banks
· APC provides banks with instant access to dozens of new products, which leads to additional revenue channels and speeds product development.
· APC’s global acquiring solution and international footprint enable banks to service multi-national merchant volume across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Benefits for Payment Product Providers
· Payment products can expand reach and revenue with quick access to global merchants as well as Asia-Pacific, EU and U.S.-based distribution channels.
· With shorter integration cycles, product providers see a simplified sales cycle and quicker access to revenue.

By hosting its products entirely in the cloud, APC can achieve processing speeds up to 100 times faster than traditional methods, which provides improved decision-making capability when it matters the most – at the time of the transaction.

For a personalized demo of Alpha Payments Cloud’s enterprise app store, email [email protected] or fill out the website contact form.

About Alpha Payments Cloud
Alpha Payments Cloud is a payments-focused cloud-based IT firm dedicated to providing merchants, banks and payment product providers unprecedented access to the global payments world via one integration and platform. Alpha Payments Cloud developed the industry’s first comprehensive cloud-based enterprise app store for payments. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Singapore with offices in Dublin and New York City. For more information, visit www.alphapaymentscloud.com.

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