Category: News

The new Apple

Tuesday evening’s Apple results were beyond dramatic. The company buried a massive 18% drop in profits under an even bigger pile of cash, announcing that it will take on debt and create value for investors by increasing its stock buyback and dividend programs to return $100 billion to investors between now and 2015. The stock immediately shot up by more than 4.5% in after-hours trading, but those gains were completely wiped away when CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple doesn’t have plans to launch any exciting new products until this coming fall. Quite the roller coaster ride, indeed.

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April 24, 2013
Thor: The Dark World Trailer Released

Fans of Marvel superheroes have a big year ahead of them. In addition to the third Iron Man movie coming this summer, Chris Hemsworth will also be returning as Thor in Thor: The Dark World this November.

Marvel Studios today released an early trailer for the movie that teases new villains and more politics in Asgard. The trailer shows that Natalie Portman will be reprising her role as Jane Foster, and the very end of the trailer teases that Thor may have to make an alliance with Avengers villain Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston. It also shows at bit of the new enemies Thor will be facing: the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, led by Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith.

April 24, 2013
MightyText moves beyond cloud SMS, starts synching photos to the PC
MightyText may have the word “text” in its name, but its plans are bigger than just synchronizing SMS between your Android smartphone and PC. On Wednesday it launched a new version of its app that will sync your smartphone’s photos and videos with a PC or Android tablet as well.

Does that sound like Dropbox, Google Drive, or any of the numerous cloud storage and synchronization services out there? Well, that’s the idea, said MightyText founder Maneesh Arora. MightyText isn’t claiming to be technologically better than any of those services, Arora said, but it is claiming to be more convenient.

While Dropbox may be a profoundly useful service for storing and managing files, people don’t check their Dropbox folders everyday, Arora said. But MightyText’s customers do engage with its browser apps and tablet apps every day, Arora said, using them as desktop extensions of the SMS clients in their smartphones. Since customers are already receiving and sending text messages through MightyText, it’s a logical place to manage and share their smartphones photos and videos as well, Arora concluded.

As with similar services, photos and videos aren’t actually shipped to the PC, but stored in the cloud. From MightyText’s browser extensions, customers can view the files, send them off as MMS messages to anyone in the phones address book or generate a private link that customers can share through other messaging formats. The smartphone client can be set so it only uploads files when connected to Wi-Fi – otherwise data fees might get out of control for shutter flies.

Arora said the MightyText plans to add other synchronization capabilities in the future. He didn’t give any specifics, but he said the end goal is recreate as many smartphone capabilities as possible on the desktop. For instance, MightyText recently added a battery meter to its apps so customers can track their phone’s charge from their PCs.

The more immediate goal is to expand its reach. It now has 3 million users, and is developing desktop apps for the PC and Mac for customers, which will allow more people to use its services features, as well as an iPad app.

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April 24, 2013
Mini rotation

Well, I think we’ve successfully put to bed the idea that there’s any structural shift from bonds to equities going on (see here, here and here). Maybe time to look a little more closely at the numbers to pull out some more discrete swings in allocations.

We’ve just published the latest data on mutual fund and ETF flows from Lipper and there are, as ever, some clues. The snapshot of our interactive graphic below shows flows into and out of bond funds during March. You can click on the image to access the full graphic, or just click here.

One notable trend, and it represents a continuation from last month too, is the move away from corporate debt funds.

In fact, on a two month view, the 2,500 or so corporate debt funds and ETFs tracked by Lipper in four categories (EUR, USD, GBP and Global) show net outflows of $3.7 billion. That accounts for a little over 1 percent of the latest reported AUM at the funds in question. For euro-denominated corporate debt funds alone the rate is double that; sterling-denominated funds sit in between the two.

Talk to some of the players involved and they’re adamant there is no structural shift away from the sector. One source at a major fund firm said redemption rates – the rate of attrition expected as a rule – were steady or even marginally improved. What had happened was a switch by investors to push their ‘marginal’ money into equities instead of corporate debt. Two months’ data don’t make a trend, but we could label it a ‘mini rotation’.

Some other nuggets from among the data include a clear swing away from emerging market equities during March, with EM categories accounting for 10 of the top 25 for net outflows during the month.

April 24, 2013
How to Tell a Story with Data
An excellent visualization, according to Edward Tufte, expresses “complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency.” I would add that an excellent visualization also tells a story through the graphical depiction of statistical information. As I discussed in an earlier post, visualization in its educational or confirmational role is really a dynamic form of persuasion. Few forms of communication are as persuasive as a compelling narrative. To this end, the visualization needs to tell a story to the audience. Storytelling helps the viewer gain insight from the data. (For a great example, how much do you think steroids have influenced baseball?)

So how does a visual designer tell a story with a visualization? The analysis has to find the story that the data supports. Traditional journalism does this all the time, and journalists have become very good at storytelling with visualization via infographics. In that vein, here are some journalistic strategies on telling a good story that apply to data visualizations as well.
1. Find the compelling narrative. Along with giving an account of the facts and establishing the connections between them, don’t be boring. You are competing for the viewer’s time and attention, so make sure the narrative has a hook, momentum, or a captivating purpose. Finding the narrative structure will help you decide whether you actually have a story to tell. If you don’t, then perhaps this visualization should support exploratory data analysis (EDA) rather than convey information. However, for the designer of an exploratory visualization it is still important to spark the viewers’ imagination to encourage examining relationships among and facilitate interacting with the data – think gameification.
2. Think about your audience. What does the audience know about the topic? Is it meant for decision makers, general interested parties, or others? The visualization needs to be framed around the level of information the audience already has, correct and incorrect:
3. Be objective and offer balance. A visualization should be devoid of bias. Even if it is arguing to influence, it should be based upon what the data says–not what you want it to say. Tufte found numerous charts that misled viewers about the underlying data, and created a formula to quantify such a misleading graphic called the “Lie Factor.” The Lie Factor is equivalent to the size of the effect shown in the graphic, divided by the size of the effect in the data. Sometimes it is unintentional-a number that is three times bigger than another will be perceived nine times bigger if represented in 3D. There are simple ways to encourage objectivity: labeling to avoid ambiguity, have graphic dimensions match data dimensions, using standardized units, and keeping design elements from compromising the data. Balance can come from alternative representations (multiple clustering’s; confidence intervals instead of lines; changing timelines; alternative color palettes and assignments; variable scaling) of the data in the same visualization. Maintaining objectivity and balance is not a trivial effort and is easily unintentionally violated. Viewers and decision makers will eventually sniff out inconsistencies which in turn will cause the designer to lose trust and credibility, no matter how good the story.
4. Don’t Censor. Don’t be selective about the data you include or exclude, unless you’re confident you’re giving your audience the best representation of what the data “says”. This selectivity includes using discrete values when the data is continuous; how you deal with missing, outlier and out of range values; arbitrary temporal ranges; capped values, volumes, ranges, and intervals. Viewers will eventually figure that out and lose trust in the visualization (and any others you might produce).
5. Finally, Edit, Edit, Edit. Also, take care to really try to explain the data, not just decorate it. Don’t fall into “it looks cool” trap, when it might not be the best way explain the data. As journalists and writers know, if you are spending more time editing and improving your visualization than creating it, you are probably doing something right.
April 24, 2013
Internap Steps Closer to “Cloudy Colo” Dashboard
An illustration of the front facade of Internap’s newest data center, located in Los Angeles. It will be one of the launch facilities for the company’s “Cloudy Colo” dashboard.

There’s a continued movement toward using a single dashboard to see and control all IT assets, concurrent with the movement to use hybrid infrastructures. Internap, positioned squarely in the center of this thanks to a diverse portfolio of colocation, cloud and managed services, has moved closer to this one dashboard vision.

The company has formally announced its “cloudy colo” capabilities it teased earlier. The universal customer portal is now in limited release for Internap Labs customers and generally available at the end of the second quarter for customers in the company’s Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Dallas data centers. The rollout will gradually be extended across the entire footprint.

The company is bringing cloud-like remote visibility and management benefits to colocation customers and enable hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints through a universal customer portal. The portal will be provided as a standard part of Internap’s offering and will deliver granular visibility and management of the colocation environment, increasing control while reducing costly visits to the data center or the use of remote hands services.

Making Colo Feel Like Cloud

“Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure,” said Carl Brooks, analyst, Internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. “As a result, there’s a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use, and infrastructure hybridization.”

Rather than replacing traditional services like colo, cloud often acts as a complement or breeding ground for future colo customers.

“Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations’ diverse application requirements,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Internap’s universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with ‘cloudy colo’ capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team.”

The portal will initially include the following colocation management features:
- Inventory management with integrated support tracking: Customers can review their entire colocation footprint; check device power status and create alerts; deploy stencils for device-level inventory tracking and management; and open support tickets instantly and receive feedback directly from Internap’s NOC.
- Power utilization monitoring and management: Customers can view circuit-level power utilization trends; remotely reboot or power down any configured device without incurring charges; and easily access and view log files of all initiated power actions.
- Environmental and bandwidth monitoring: Customers can view rack-level temperature and humidity conditions; track IP traffic and conduct trend analyses; and capture and analyze device health and usage stats.
- On-demand provisioning of hybrid services: Customers can integrate management of colocation – typically a “siloed” environment – with on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud compute, bare metal and cloud storage assets to rapidly align their infrastructure portfolio with changing business and application needs.The company calls it on-demand hybridization. It’s made possible by its PlatformConnect service which provides private network connectivity between multiple Internap services – including colocation, managed hosting and cloud – within the same data center. Customers can hybridize application environments as needed via the universal portal, rather than in days or weeks.
April 24, 2013
Ella Fitzgerald Gets Some Google Doodle Love

Google has begun to show a doodle honoring Ella Fitzgerald on its homepage in regions where the date has already changed to April 25th. Thursday would have been her 96th birthday.

This excludes Australia and New Zealand, as Google chooses to honor Anzac Day instead, with a small flower image:

Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in these countries, commemorating Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations.

Google is sometimes criticized for its choice of doodles when it falls on the same day as another significant day in history. For example, Google celebrated the opening of the first drive-in theater last year, some people complained that Google chose this over a D Day doodle, but Google has indicated various times that it likes to keep doodles more about upbeat kinds of events. That’s probably why the company elected to go with the simple flower rather than a full-on doodle for Anzac Day.

Elsewhere in the world, however, it’s about Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. She was born on April 25, 1917, and died on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79. She is commonly known as the “First Lady of Song” and the “Queen of Jazz”.

The Fitzgerald doodle can currently be seen at Google.com.fj, and no doubt on other Google international properties as the hours move forward.

April 24, 2013
Messaging mania: Nokia launches a WhatsApp phone while Kik raises $19.5 million

Nokia on Wednesday launched a WhatsApp phone that includes unlimited WhatsApp messaging rolled into the retail price. And the retail price is just $72. The Asha 210 has a dedicated WhatsApp button that gives instant access to the service. This is a bold move, since it effectively means the hardware is specifically designed to draw consumers away from SMS services, which are very lucrative for emerging market carriers. This move is the opening salvo in Nokia’s new bid to revive the flagging fortunes of its Asha feature phone line with new software features.

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April 24, 2013
Congresswoman Proposes Broadband Internet Subsidies For Low-Income Families

For years, it was essential that every family had a phone line. The U.S. government started the Lifeline program to help impoverished families afford this essential communication tool. Now the Internet has overwhelmingly replaced traditional phone lines, but the Lifeline program hasn’t adapted to this reality. One Congresswoman is hoping to change that.

Ars Technica reports that Rep. Doris Matsui has introduced the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013. The bill would modify the Lifeline program to provide cheaper broadband Internet services to low-income families across the country.

“In today’s digital economy, if you don’t have access to the Internet you are simply at a competitive disadvantage. For example, more than 80 percent of available jobs now require online applications,” said Congresswoman Matsui. “The Internet is increasingly the economic engine for growth and innovation. The Lifeline program provides a tangible service to lower-income Americans and it is imperative that the Lifeline program be reformed and modernized to account for broadband services. We must ensure lower-income Americans have a greater opportunity to participate in the digital economy, whether it be for workforce training, education, finding a job or creating the next big idea.”

Matsui says that a recent FCC report found that nearly 100 million Americans are without broadband Internet services. She places the blame squarely on the high cost of broadband Internet in America. Many low income families simply can’t afford the high cost of broadband Internet. The bill would help to make faster Internet affordable to all.

Of course, the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013 isn’t just about providing faster Internet to low-income families. Matsui has envisioned a number of reforms to the Lifeline program for the FCC to enact if the bill were to become law:
The bill directs the FCC to establish a broadband Lifeline Assistance program that provides low-income Americans living in rural and urban areas with assistance in subscribing to affordable broadband service.
The proposal would require the FCC, in calculating the amount of support, to routinely study the prevailing market price for service and the prevailing speed adopted by consumers of broadband service.
The bill is technology neutral to promote competition from broadband service providers under the program.
The bill allows eligible consumers to choose how they would like their Lifeline support- whether for broadband, mobile, basic telephone services or a bundle of these services. The bill clarifies that eligible households will qualify for only one lifeline support amount for one of those functions, not for multiple purposes.
The bill requires the FCC to establish a national database to determine consumer eligibility for Lifeline and to prevent duplication.
The bill encourages the FCC to consider providing a preference to participating broadband service providers that include components involving digital literacy programs as part of their offerings.
Eligible households must meet federal low-income guidelines or qualify for one of a handful of social service programs including, but not limited to: SNAP, Head Start, WIC, National School Lunch Program, Tribal TANF or Medicaid.

It’s hard to see how anybody in the telecom industry would be opposed to this bill. It would net ISPs more subscribers to their expensive broadband plans while receiving plenty of free government money. There’s an argument to be had that we can’t be spending more money on social welfare programs, but the counterargument is that universal Internet access is worth it.

April 24, 2013

After the success of gesture-based keyboards such as Swype the next obvious disruption to keyboard technology is optimisation of the legacy Qwerty layout that’s persisted since the typewriter era. Not that people haven’t tried alternatives to Qwerty already (e.g. Dvorak et al) – and generally failed to make them stick. But that’s not stopping a group of academic researchers — including the co-inventor of the gesture IP behind Swype — from devising a new touchscreen keyboard layout in the hope that people can finally be persuaded to shift their typing habits.

KALQ, which is named like Qwerty after a string of its keys, is designed to speed up thumb typing on tablets and phablets (aka big phones). Its creators, who are from the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech, claim that once users have accustomed themselves to the non-Qwerty layout — with about eight hours practice required to be as fast as Qwerty and 13-19 hours to surpass your Qwerty typing speed — typing performance can be about a third (34%) more efficient than thumb typing on split screen Qwerty layouts.

They are planning to release KALQ as a free Android app for tablets & phablets which will also work on smaller screen smartphones but stress their research and performance claims relate specifically to larger devices, rather than phones. They are also not directly comparing the performance of the new layout against any of the gesture keyboard input methods (Swype, SwiftKey’s Flow etc) — their performance data is based on a direct comparison with thumb typing on a split Qwerty.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, who is one of the academics involved in the research, told Techcrunch they tested KALQ on a Galaxy Tab 7.7, adding that while the keyboard may also offer speed improvements on smartphones it’s not a claim they have tested. Kristensson is no stranger to keyboard disruption, being the man who wrote the pattern recognition algorithm underlying Swype, and co-founder of ShapeWriter, the startup which commercialised the gesture keyboard system in 2007 — before being acquired by Nuance in 2010 (the company that now owns Swype).

Kristensson said the KALQ researchers used a subset of publicly available emails from the Enron trial that were tagged ‘Sent from my BlackBerry’ as their data pool, analysing the mobile users’ use of language to figure out the best positions for the keys. As well as using computational optimisation techniques and looking at how devices behave when users are touch typing, they also modelled thumb movements with the aim of making a fast yet comfortable keyboard. KALQ is an English-language optimised letter layout, but the process that came up with its layout is “general”, said Kristensson: “You can feed it whatever language you want. So the layout may change, depending on your country.”

There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed… The problem with a lot of them is they are not fast enough.

For English speakers, KALQ’s split screen layout repositions the alphabet into two unequal blocks of letters, with consonants in the left block (plus Y which can be classed as either) and vowels plus the remaining consonants (including K, L and Q) in the right. A space key is included towards the edge of each block for easy reach with either thumb. The letter order is specifically designed to minimise typing long sentences with just one thumb — which is cumbersome and slows touchscreen typists down — and also places frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other to minimise thumb movements. In addition, the layout generally aims to encourage typing on alternating sides of the keyboard — which Kristensson said is a more ergonomic and comfortable way to type.

As well as learning the new letter layout, KALQ typists need to learn to move both thumbs at once to get the fastest speeds. “Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one thumb is selecting a particular key, the other thumb is approaching its next target. From these insights we derived a predictive behavioural model we could use to optimise the keyboard,” noted Dr Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute, in a statement.

The researchers said trained KALQ users were able to reach speeds of 37 words per minute — which they said is the highest ever reported entry rate for two-thumb typing on touchscreen devices, and “significantly higher” than the approximately 20 words per minute entry rate users can normally reach on a regular split Qwerty layout. The group will be presenting its research next month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris. The Android KALQ app will be available for download in due course.

Persuading users to adopt a new keyboard layout is likely to be a tough ask but Kristensson said the problem with most of the Qwerty layout challengers to-date has been that they are not disruptive enough — in terms of the performance bump they offer users who have to go through the pain of learning how to type quickly again.

“If you want to get people to change their layout you basically have to get people to invest, you have to get them to give up the assigned cost, their previous investment in Qwerty typing. And then we have to invest new time in learning KALQ,” he said. “There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed. Actually hundreds of them. Most of them have failed. I would say probably 99% of them have filed but the problem with a lot of them is actually they are not fast enough so why would people reinvest in learning a new text entry method if it doesn’t provide a substantial performance advantage so I think [KALQ] is one of the few keyboards that can provide that. So I’m hopeful.”

Asked whether the group might look to commercialise the research, he said the priority is to try to encourage people to adjust their typing behaviour and accept a Qwerty alternative but added that the group may look to monetise their algorithms in other ways — by, for example, using them to optimise other menu-based user interfaces.

“What I’m hoping here is that we will have impact,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get people away from thinking about the Qwerty keyboard. And I think impact here may mean that we will release [KALQ] for free — but remember we are the ones who have all the algorithms to come up with optimal keyboards so we learn a lot about how to optimise user interfaces in general. My co-investigator, Antti Oulasvirta, he’s completely passionate about optimising any sort of user interface. So the process we use here can also be used to optimise other user interfaces like menu structures for example so there is lots of potential for the underlying technology. This is just one instantiation of that. But I think trying to sell a new keyboard — that’s a risky proposition. I’m not sure a venture capitalist would go for it.”