Category: News

As I reported in October in 2011, and others picked up on about five months later, Google would be launching a Google+-based comment platform for blogs.

Today, Google made the announcement, but it’s only for Blogger blogs, at least at this point. The feature can be enabled from the Blogger dashboard.

“Now when you’re browsing your blog’s comment threads, you’ll see activity from direct visitors, and from people talking about your content on Google+,” says Google Principal Engineer Yonatan Zunger . “For example, if there’s a public Google+ discussion about one of your blog entries, those comments and replies will also appear on your Blogger blog. This way you can engage with more of your readers, all in one place.”

“Your blog readers will now have the option to comment publicly, or privately to their circles on Google+,” adds Zunger. “And when they’re browsing blog comments, they can view all of them, just the top ones, or only those from the people in their circles.”

Everyone will, of course, only see the comments they have permission to see.

Facebook has had a similar offering for quite some time, and it’s a bit surprising that it’s taken Google this long to offer something, and still only for Blogger.

You can see the feature in action here.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama today were at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross to attend Healing Our City, an interfaith service dedicated to those who were gravely wounded or killed in Monday’s bombing near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. 

In his remarks, the President paid tribute to those whose lives were taken by the bomb blasts on Boylston Street — to Krystle Campbell, 29, who was "always smiling." And to Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old graduate student from China who had come to "experience all this city has to offer." And finally to Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy from Dorchester whose mother and sister remain in the hospital, fighting to recover from their own injuries. Martin, said President Obama, leaves us with two enduring images, 'forever smiling for his beloved Bruins, and forever expressing a wish he made on a blue poster board: 'No more hurting people. Peace.'"

President Obama also praised the people of Boston, a city both he and the First Lady once called home. Like thousands every year, the two lived there as students — just one of the many reasons, the President said, that Boston has a hold on so many hearts. "Every fall, you welcome students from all across America and all across the globe, and every spring you graduate them back into the world — a Boston diaspora that excels in every field of human endeavor," he said. "Year after year, you welcome the greatest talents in the arts and science, research — you welcome them to your concert halls and your hospitals and your laboratories to exchange ideas and insights that draw this world together."

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Kaazing, a six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company whose software helps drive the real-time Web and mobile communications of customers like Google, Bechtel, and Intel, has raised a $15 million round of funding that brings its total funding to $39 million. New Enterprise Associates and Columbus Nova Technology Partners led the round, with previous investors participating. Kaazing’s last big round of funding came less than a year ago. In June 2012, it raised $17 million. Investors in that round were not disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE:

Kaazing, the leading provider of live web and mobile communication and authors of HTML5 WebSocket, today announced that it has closed an oversubscribed $15 million funding round bringing the company’s total financing to $39 million. The capital was raised through new investors New Enterprise Associates Inc. (NEA) and Columbus Nova Technology Partners (CNTP), as well as existing investors, to drive Kaazing’s plans for corporate growth.

“We’re very pleased to announce our latest round of funding that adds top-tier investors with outstanding track records”
Analysts are predicting an explosion in the number of connected mobile devices worldwide in the next few years, with communication across the web scaling to petabytes of data across both browsers and mobile devices. By 2020, there will be roughly 5 billion people using the web on a projected 28 billion internet-connected devices (IMS Research 2012). These increasingly sophisticated users demanding and expecting the same user experiences across all their devices.

“With iPads and other smart mobile devices rapidly displacing PCs and accelerating cloud adoption, enterprise application modernization is increasingly urgent,” said Rohini Chakravarthy, Partner at NEA. “Today’s static web architectures are expensive and ineffective in supporting this huge market shift – Kaazing’s leading communication products are critical to the emerging cloud and mobile architectures. We are excited to be investors in the leader in this space.”

“The web, a hyper-connected mesh of static and live information accessed daily by billions of online users, is rapidly expanding its boundaries beyond today’s browsers, and Kaazing is at the heart of this expansion,” said Mohsen Moazami, General Partner at CNTP. “We believe that Kaazing is well positioned to redefine the $12 billion application modernization market as the need for fast, scalable and secure mobile web infrastructure is accelerating rapidly.”

No longer restricted by the slow HTTP request and response protocols which dominated the early web, Kaazing has revolutionized modern web architecture for the “always on, always connected” mobile enterprise. Kaazing is powering production applications in areas as diverse as real-time trading, eCommerce, mobile notifications, monitoring, analytics, and collaboration. For IT executives and architects, Kaazing can support current and future web infrastructure that needs to be highly secure, massively scalable, and reliable. For developers, Kaazing enables web and mobile applications with dynamic, two-way data communication, and is easier and more cost-effective to manage and deploy. Kaazing’s standards-based platform easily integrates with existing enterprise architectures offering a more streamlined, flexible and unified web infrastructure approach.

“We’re very pleased to announce our latest round of funding that adds top-tier investors with outstanding track records,” said Jonas Jacobi, CEO and Co-Founder of Kaazing. “This influx of new capital will fuel our global expansion and further validates our market momentum with an enterprise-grade web communication platform built using the HTML5 WebSocket standard.”

About the investors

NEA, a leading venture capital firm with more than $13 billion in committed capital, invests in technology and healthcare companies across all stages of growth and in multiple geographies. The firm’s long track record includes more than 175 portfolio company IPOs and more than 295 acquisitions.

CNTP is a global technology investment firm combining the best attributes of venture capital and private equity operating out of Silicon Valley and New York. Their executive team is made up of veteran entrepreneurs and operating executives from start-ups to Fortune 50 companies.

About Kaazing

Kaazing provides the leading enterprise web and mobile communication platform for live data delivery and is author of the universally adopted HTML5 WebSocket standard. The company’s high-performance Web communication platform is essential for Web and mobile solutions that require secure, reliable, massively scalable, and instant two-way data delivery — critical for real-time transactions, eCommerce, trading, voting, analytics, and collaboration. The platform utilizes WebSocket and supports a comprehensive range of enterprise protocols including message-oriented protocols. Based in Mountain View, CA, Kaazing has offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. Customers and partners include HSBC, JPMC, BP, TIBCO, and Global 1000 financial, ecommerce, transportation, healthcare and entertainment companies. Learn more at www.kaazing.com or blog.kaazing.com, and follow @Kaazing on Twitter.

The post Kaazing Raises $15 Million, Boosting Total Financing to $39 Million appeared first on peHUB.

Lithopanes are objects created to let light through to different degrees, allowing you to create a sort of greyscale image that is visible when the plate is placed against a light source. Created by the folks at Makerbot, the lithopanes are completely customizable and you can upload your own images that will then print in about an hour on a standard printer.

You can see the Thingiverse Thing here and use the Customizer, the company’s own interactive API and object modeler, to upload your own photo. They recommend using a light plastic and choosing a square picture. I foolishly heeded neither of those recommendations so I essentially printed a black, opaque ABS coaster when I tried this on my Makerbot. I’m currently printing it out in light green ABS to see what happens.

The Customizer lets you do all sorts of amazing things, including DIY iPhone cases and customizable rings. It’s striking how close to magic a lot of this stuff is these days, especially with with online tools and inexpensive printers. We, in some ways, live in the future.

Enlighted, a startup using sensor and big data software to control lighting and power in large commercial buildings has hit a few milestones this week. The company, which we put on our 12 smart grid startups to watch in 2012, has raised a sizable $20 million round, and has also doubled the size of the building space under management over the last five months, to hit 10 million square feet of commercial real estate.

Enlighted says its customers include Google, LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. The sensors can detect light level, occupancy, temperature and power consumption in the 100 square feet under each light. The company says it’s saved some 15 gigawatts of electricity since it began installations two years ago.

Enlighted’s first customer was green carpet company Interface Global, which used the lighting management system on its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Interface says it was able to cut its lighting power by 70 percent, and achieved a return on investment in 18 months.

Big data analytics and sensor tech — IT — is appearing as one of the bright spots in cleantech startups these days. Some investors call this the so-called Clean Web, or using digital tech to manage resources from energy to water to food.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Power in the data center: Can it drive disruption?
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010

Sprint announced today the availability of 4G LTE service in 21 more markets. Some of the locations that Sprint highlights in their announcement include Los Angeles, Charlotte and Memphis. Sprint indicates they are offering a $100 discount through May 9th for new customers switching their number to Sprint when buying a new smartphone on a two-year agreement and a qualifying plan. It does not appear that the special offer is limited to the areas where the new 4G LTE service is now available. The new, official locations with 4G LTE service include:

• Albemarle, N.C.
• Bloomington, Ind.
• Charlotte, N.C.
• Contra Costa County, Calif.
• Denison, Texas
• Greeneville, Tenn.
• Joplin, Mo.
• Kerrville, Texas
• Lafayette, Ind.
• Lincolnton, N.C.
• Los Angeles
• Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.
• Palm Bay, Fla.
• Port St. Lucie, Fla.
• Rochelle, Ill.
• Salisbury, N.C.
• Shelby, N.C.
• Tullahoma, Tenn.
• West Palm Beach, Fla.

As we have reported in the past, Sprint customers are frequently able to pick up 4G LTE signals even in areas that have not been officially lit up. Sprint tipped their hat to these instances by indicating in their announcement that “Many Sprint customers are discovering Sprint 4G LTE in cities that haven’t yet officially been announced, including Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco.” Sprint currently has plans to turn on 4G LTE service in over 170 markets in the coming months. That list will be getting longer with the addition of the following locations:

• Fargo, N.D.
• Orlando, Fla.
• Portland, Ore.
• Spokane, Wash.
• Tallahassee, Fla.
• Albertville, Ala.
• Centralia, Wash.
• Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
• Durant, Okla.
• El Paso, Texas
• Enid, Okla.
• Enterprise/Ozark, Ala.
• Eugene/Springfield, Ore.
• Faribault/Northfield, Minn.
• Greenville, Miss.
• Hattiesburg, Miss.
• Jacksonville, Texas
• Kennewick/Pasco/Richland, Wash.
• LaGrange, Ga.
• Longview, Texas
• Longview, Wash.
• Milledgeville, Ga.
• Moses Lake, Wash.
• Paducah, Ky.
• Picayune, Miss.
• Poplar Bluff, Mo.
• Russellville, Ark.
• Seaford, Del.
• Sterling, Ill.
• Talladega/Sylacauga, Ala.
• Tulsa, Okla.
• Valdosta, Ga.
• Wenatchee/East Wenatchee, Wash.
• Yakima, Wash.

source: Sprint

Come comment on this article: Sprint 4G LTE now available in 21 new markets

The ongoing crash of the PC industry hasn’t just affected Windows-based vendors such as Dell and HP — it’s also reportedly taking a toll on Apple. Supply chain sources have told Digitimes that Apple “stopped placing component orders for its Mac series products recently,” an indication that the company had significantly overestimated how many Macs it would sell in the first half of 2013. The most recent numbers from IDC show that PC shipments in the first quarter of 2013 fell by 14% year-over-year, while big-name vendors such as HP and ASUS saw their shipment numbers decline by more than 20% year-over-year. IDC also said that while Apple “fared better than the overall U.S. market,” it “still saw shipments decline as its own PCs also face competition from iPads.”

At the Facebook Home unveiling, Mark Zuckerberg said that people are increasingly consuming content on mobile. It’s true for Facebook as is it true for just about everything else. That’s why Facebook needs to step up its mobile game, and it did just that today.

At its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City, Facebook announced that Open Graph is coming to mobile in a big way. The first step is making sure everybody can integrate Open Graph into their mobile apps without having to deal with the complexity of the Graph API. The answer is the Object API – tools that let developers “directly create Open Graph objects” while no longer needing “to host webpages with Open Graph tags.” The new API is available to both mobile and Web apps so that nobody is left out.

To make things even easier, Facebook is also introducing the Object Browser. It’s a “simple visual interface that helps you easily interact with the object data you publish.” For more on the Object API and the Object Browser, check out Facebook’s documentation.

One of the core tenets of Facebook is sharing, and the social network is making it even easier on mobile with the Native Share Dialog. This particular tool allows people to share in-app actions without having to open or log into the Facebook app. It’s also incredibly easy to implement as it only requires a single line of code. The Native Share Dialog is available starting today in a limited beta on iOS with Android support coming soon. Check out Facebook’s documentation for more info.

Users can look forward to an even friendlier Facebook mobile login experience as well as the social network is rolling out a number of enhancements to make things faster and more secure. The first is that Facebook has rebuilt its Login Dialog on mobile and Web to make it 20 percent faster. All Login Dialogs on mobile and non-game Web apps will be automatically upgraded to the new dialog today, but mobile apps can get even faster dialogs in the latest iOS and Android SDKs. If you want more info on Login Dialogs, check out Facebook’s documentation.

As for security, Facebook has split Facebook permissions in mobile apps into two separate dialogs. The first is a mandatory dialog that asks users to share their Facebook data with the app. The second asks users if the app can post content to their Facebook wall on their behalf. In the second dialog, users can either agree, skip the step or customize which people the app can share stories with.

On a final note, Facebook also released the latest version of its SDK for iOS. Version 3.5 of the iOS SDK includes support for all the above enhancements. The latest SDK only supports iOS 5 and above. You can download it here.

At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter. Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere, and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander. Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit.
It had come, unintentionally, 100 kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was 25 kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function. Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it.

The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion. The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990.) The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.)

When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.”

When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention. But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves? When things go the way they are supposed to. And because of this, roughly half of us — people we call prevention-focused — rarely get the credit we are due.

As I’ve written about before, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don’t succeed. They want to stay safe — to hold on to what they’ve already got. As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success. They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.

Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed — how they might advance or obtain rewards. Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities — exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.

But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn’t (or at least wasn’t) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs. It’s not really surprising — these people, after all, are rocket scientists. They devote their lives to exploring space — if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don’t know what it is. These folks pretty much own the phrase “going where no one has gone before.”

The heroes of the business world always seem to be the risk-taking promotion-focused innovators. But you see, it’s really not that there are no prevention-focused heroes — it’s that they are so often unsung. You rarely get the credit you deserve for averting disaster when it never happens. No one says “Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob. You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation. You rock!” Instead, the prevention-focused toil away, quietly and carefully, making sure that things work the way they are supposed to. They see to it that the airplane you are flying in won’t fall apart at the seams, that the medication you are taking wasn’t contaminated in the factory, and that your large skim mocha latte really is decaf so you won’t still be up at 4 a.m. watching The Weather Channel.

When what you’re good at is keeping things running smoothly, and things do run smoothly, your contribution is — sadly — less likely to be noticed. So you probably won’t get the praise you have in fact earned. (Unless you are the immediate successor to someone who let things go to hell in a handcart — then people will appreciate you, at least for a little while.) So pay attention when things are going right, as well as when they’re going wrong. There are two ways of looking at our goals, and these result in two sets of distinct strengths — both of which are critical to the success of any team or organization.

Portions of this post were adapted from my book with Tory Higgins, Focus: Use Different Ways of Perceiving The World For Success and Influence.

Editor’s Note: Due to a production error, this was initially published with the wrong author listed. It has since been corrected.

Jennifer Aniston. The former Friends actress’ love life, with all of its ups and downs, has been followed by the tabloids for years now, and her popularity doesn’t seem to be diminishing. The star’s clothing, hair choices, and nipples have also been the topic of conversation for over a decade. This week, the star was spotted at the premiere for the TV movie Call Me Crazy sporting marks from her latest cupping therapy session.

The Daily Mail spotted the marks in press photos from the event. Aniston was wearing a strapless black top with black shorts, and had put makeup on her back to try and disguise the round marks.

Having fully embraced acupuncture, cupping therapy is one of the popular new traditional Eastern alternative medicine procedures to have gained popularity in Hollywood. The procedure involves glass cups on a person’s back being heated to create a partial vacuum. It leaves circular red bruises on the skin, which fade over time.

(Image courtesy Tom Sorensen/Wikimedia Commons)

What were they thinking?

It made sense when Microsoft decided to update Windows to be an operating system not just for PCs, but for tablets. In fact, it was a rather clever strategy: Declare tablets to be PCs, and then show that Windows tablets do more than Android or iOS, including running all those existing Windows programs. So far, makes sense.

Then Microsoft went further, too far: Not only did the company create the touch-oriented Windows Modern UI, formerly known as Metro, but forced users to use it, even on conventional desktop PCs and notebooks with no touch. And then the the company went even further by making the Desktop Mode less usable.

The idea must have been to force quick growth of the Modern UI ecosystem, but we don’t have to wait any longer to know that this was a mistake. Microsoft didn’t need to disadvantage desktop users in order to promote the Modern UI. No wonder large institutional buyers are turned off to Windows 8. Maybe they’re buying lots of tablets for tablet tasks, but they still buy PCs for PC tasks.

The good news for Microsoft is that this problem is easily remedied. At least the technical part is easy. It does, however, require an act of profound public contrition: Microsoft admits miscalculation with the initial design of Windows 8. Here’s what the fixed version needs, and all of these things are fairly easy to do, whether in Windows Blue or some other update:

• Windows 7-like mode of operation, called the Old-Fashioned Mode if you want. Let users or administrators set the system to boot into this mode.
• Antique Mode should be able to launch Modern UI apps just like desktop apps. Running apps should appear in the taskbar.
• Modern UI home screen needs an obvious, fixed thing to click on to go to desktop mode.
• Modern UI also needs a fixed date/time display.

There are more-sophisticated, less urgent ideas related to these that would work well. I can see it preferring the Modern UI in some ways if the system is operating purely as a tablet, but desktop mode when a keyboard and mouse are connected.

Yes, the Modern UI has its own issues. Lots of people don’t like it, but that’s another matter and a less important one in the short term. The important thing for right now for Microsoft is to stop undermining the message that Windows 8 is a PC operating system.

The message that Windows 8 works with both tablets and PCs, and that tablets are just another kind of PC, is a good one and can still succeed. Personally, I think there is nobody as credible as he who freely admits his mistakes.

Photo Credit: JStaley401/Shutterstock

Microsoft announced that it is rolling out an upgrade to Microsoft accounts, which includes the addition of optional two-step verification.

Basically this means Microsoft asks you for two pieces of info when you try to access your account: your password, and a code it sends to your phone or by email. Google has had this available for quite some time, and regularly urges users to take advantage of it, so their accounts don’t become compromised. It’s kind of annoying when you want to log in on a different device, but probably worth the minor inconvenience in the long run.

Microsoft account Group Program Manager Eric Doerr says, “More than a year ago, we began bringing two-step verification for certain critical activities, like editing credit cards and subscriptions at commerce.microsoft.com and xbox.com, or accessing files on another one of your computers through SkyDrive.com. For these scenarios, two-step verification is required 100 percent of the time for everyone, given the sensitive nature of these tasks.”

“With this release you can choose to protect your entire account with two-step verification, regardless of what service (or device) you are using with your Microsoft account,” he adds. “It’s your choice whether you want to enable this, but for those of you that are looking for ways to add additional security to your account, we’ve worked hard to make set-up really easy.”

Google’s Matt Cutts approves:

Really happy to hear Microsoft is rolling out two-factor authentication: goo.gl/GDdUm Great news for users.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 17, 2013

For steps on setting up two-step verification with Microsoft, read Doerr’s blog post.

Google, along with a handful of other high-profile companies, has announced that they will join New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is participating in the “Carbon Challenge,” an initiative to “cut greenhouse gases, improve air quality, and fight climate change.”

Google has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its NYC offices by at least 30%, and up to 40% over the next 10 years.

As a whole, the “Carbon Challenge” hopes to cut emissions in municipal buildings by 30% by 2017.

“When it comes to greening Google’s office buildings, we apply the same focus that we use for any of our products: put the user first,” said Ben Fried, Chief Information Officer for Google. “Creating facilities with leading environmental performance improves the health and productivity of our employees around the world. It also helps us reduce waste, save energy and water, and improve indoor air quality. Through our participation in the NYC Mayor’s Carbon Challenge, we hope to inspire companies of all shapes and sizes to take innovative approaches to reduce their own environmental footprint.”

Bloomberg announced that the citywide emissions are down 16%, which is over half of their stated goal.

“The Carbon Challenge is an essential partnership between the City and our businesses, universities and organizations who share our commitment to a greener, greater New York,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “I want to applaud the commitment of the 10 companies making the Carbon Challenge pledge, as well as the universities and hospitals that have already taken steps to become more efficient. Their leadership on this issue is not only going to move our city toward a more sustainable future; we also hope it will inspire others to follow suit.”

The other companies joining Google in signing on to this initiative are American International Group, BlackRock, Bloomberg LP, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JetBlue Airways, JPMorgan Chase, and PVH. The initiative already has 17 universities and 11 major hospitals on board.

Amazon Web Services launched its Simple Storage Service (S3) way back in 2006. The company finally hit the 1 trillion objects in cloud storage mark in June of 2012. Just 10 short months later, that figure has doubled. Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr announced today on his blog that Amazon has now hit 2 trillion objects on its S3 cloud storage.

Earlier this month, The director of Amazon Web Services for UK and Ireland, Iain Gavin said the service had hit 1.7 trillion objects, and was peaking at 835,000 requests per second.

What’s driving this remarkable growth? AWS is an engine for startups and innovators across the web, and often serves (at least partially) as the backend for a lot of big time applications like Dropbox. The world is accepting storage of data in the cloud, and S3 is the biggest cloud storage service.

Barr tried to put this growth in perspective, as 2 trillion is a hard number to wrap your head around. Our galaxy is estimated to contain about 400 billion stars, writes Barr. That works out to five objects for every star in the galaxy. The field of Paleodemography estimates that 100 billion people have been born on planet Earth. Each of them can have 20 S3 objects. Our universe is about 13.6 billion years old. If you added one S3 object every 60 hours starting at the Big Bang, you’d have accumulated almost two trillion of them by now.

Amazon’s announcement serves as a revealing data point in documenting the demand for data center space. All that data needs a place to live. If Amazon’s storage cloud is doubling in 10 months, what impact will cloud applications have on data center requirements as other providers scale up their storage clouds? The numbers may appear to reside in the clouds, but the bits live in servers within physical data centers.

Google’s Glass project is one of the more intriguing products the company is currently working on — at least, among the few projects Google has revealed to the public. Google Glass is eyewear with a heads up display that connects to the wearer’s smartphone and displays information in the user’s line of sight. We all get the basic idea and we’ve seen some great demo videos, but how exactly does Google’s Glass accessory work? Graphic designer Martin Missfeldt recently put together a terrific infographic that explains the exiting accessory, and the full graphic follows below.

Continue reading…

It took three years, but OpenSignal finally has an iPhone app that will measure and track the performance of any mobile network it runs over. OpenSignal has been using its Android app to keep tabs on carriers’ networks around the world, crowdsourcing that data into detailed reports.

Why participate in OpenSignal’s crowdsourcing operations? Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – consumers get benefit out of the app’s features as well. You can use the app as a speed test tool to see if your carrier is living up to its mobile data claims, and it will keep a record of your own data, text, and minute usage.

The app also serves as a signal finder. It will point you in the direction of your carrier’s nearest cell tower and even find nearby open Wi-Fi access points if you’re looking for a faster connection. And if you happen to be shopping around for another service provider, the app will let you compare the performance of different carrier networks in your area.

Ironically, U.K.-based OpenSignal has been using its Android app data for years to extrapolate iPhone performance on U.S. networks. With the new iOS software, it will be able to track iPhone performance directly, as well as tap into a potentially huge pool of new crowdsourcers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• A look back at mobile in Q1
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
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A Maryland family this week won their lawsuit against the Prince George’s County Board of Education and were awarded $90 million.

According to a Washington Post report on the case, 13-year-old Ashley Davis died in 2009 while crossing the street to reach a school bus stop. A car traveling down the road hit her, a minivan, and a 17-year-old boy on Brinkley Road in Temple Hills, Maryland. Davis died from her injuries weeks later.

The six-member jury handed down the $90 million wrongful-death verdict after determining that the school board did not provide a safe bus stop for Davis. Davis’ family had accused her bus driver of not stopping at his designated stop, forcing Davis and other children to catch another school bus further down the road, where they would have to cross the street. According to the Post report, complaints of late school buses and “unsafe” routes to bus stops are nothing new for parents in the area.

The school board is expected to appeal the decision.

Hulu has hired Guggenheim Partners to advise on a sale of the company, even as the financial services firm is considering making its own bid for the video streaming service, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

(Reuters) – Hulu has hired Guggenheim Partners to advise on a sale of the company, even as the financial services firm is considering making its own bid for the video streaming service, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Guggenheim Executive Chairman Alan Schwartz was first hired by Hulu in 2011 to advise on a sale, but its owners were unable to find a buyer willing to pay the $2 billion that the company’s owners wanted.

Hulu, jointly controlled by Disney and News Corp, has re-engaged Guggenheim to handle another sale attempt, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the ongoing auction process is private.

Guggenheim is a New York-based investment firm with a fast-growing media business. A spokesman for the firm, Terry Fahn, declined to comment, as did Hulu spokeswoman Elisa Schreiber, News Corp spokesman Dan Berger and Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha.

Securities experts say financial services firms are increasingly both advising on and participating in deals as they become larger and expand into more areas. While permitted under securities regulations, some corporate governance experts have raised questions about conflicts of interest.

Guggenheim has established “a Chinese wall” between its investment banking and asset management businesses, said one of the sources.

Another source said Guggenheim has taken steps to keep the situation “transparent” and it is up to Hulu to decide whether to retain the financial services firm if it makes an offer for the company.

“It’s a definite conflict of interest,” said Ehud Kamar, a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law who specializes in securities law and is an expert on mergers and acquisitions.

“As financial firms get bigger and bigger, there is a greater likelihood that this will happen,” he said.

Other banks that have been on both sides of a deal include Goldman Sachs & Co, which was not paid a $20 million fee it billed for advising El Paso Corp on its sale to Kinder Morgan Inc. El Paso shareholders had sued Kinder Morgan, alleging that the sale was tainted by Goldman’s stake in the acquirer.

Kinder Morgan settled the suit for $110 million. The judge, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Leo Strine, described Goldman Sachs’ behavior as “furtive” and “troubling” though he also told lawyers for the El Paso shareholders that they may have a tough time holding the bank liable for its actions. Goldman has declined to comment on the matter.

POSSIBLE BIDDER

Guggenheim, which says on its website that it manages more than $170 billion in assets, created a separate Guggenheim Digital Media unit in January and put former Yahoo Inc and News Corp executive Ross Levinsohn in charge.

Levinsohn has been studying a bid for Hulu, according to the three sources.

Reuters previously reported that Hulu had reached out to potential buyers in March after initially contemplating a deal in which Disney and News Corp might buy the other out. It is not clear whether that transaction is still being considered. A third investor in Hulu, Comcast Corp, has given up control as a condition of buying NBC Universal.

Former News Corp President Peter Chernin, a one-time Hulu board member and one of its architects, has bid around $500 million for Hulu and offered to assume its $330 million in debt, sources told Reuters in April. A spokesman for Chernin had no comment on Guggenheim’s role.

Hulu says on its website that it has more than 3 million subscribers paying $7.99 a month for its premium service, and that it generated revenues of around $700 million last year. It sells advertising for its free service.

Guggenheim recently headed a group that spent $2.15 billion last year to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. Its media investments include Billboard, Adweek, The Hollywood Reporter and Dick Clark Productions.

(Editing by Edwin Chan, Alden Bentley and Tiffany Wu)

(The story corrects names of Hulu owners in third paragraph to Disney and News Corp, instead of Disney’s ABC and News Corp’s Fox network. Also corrects title of Dan Berger in fourth paragraph to News Corp spokesman, instead of Fox spokesman.)

The post Guggenheim Advises on Hulu Sale, May Also Bid – Sources appeared first on peHUB.

As you’ve probably heard by now, gun control legislation that would ban certain types of military-style assault rifles, limit magazine sizes, and enact more far-reaching background checks for buyers failed in the Senate on Wednesday. We already knew what was going to happen with most of the proposals, but the latter one concerning expanded background checks was up in the air until yesterday.

Although polls show a substantial (90% according to some) support for this measure among Americans, the Senate was unable to pass it through.

President Obama called it a “pretty shameful day for Washington.” You know all of that. Ok.

Well, it appears that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is basking in his victory with Facebook memes.

Here’s what was posted to the official Mitch McConnell Facebook page in the aftermath of the vote. It shows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) asking for some “gun control,” being denied by McConnell, and in the end hanging his head in defeat.

“We love the memes you send us! Keep them coming!” reads the post. So it looks like a supporter created the 5-panel graphic and Team McConnell decided to share it with their 32,000+ followers.

“Shame on you! You have sold out on the children of Newtown,” says one commenter.

“Shame on every senator who voted against background checks–supported by 90% of Americans. Do you represent us or the NRA?” says another.

The post is generating a lot of buzz with over 3,000 shares and over 5.600 comments. Team McConnell has a history of using the Facebook page to generate support with memes (just take a look at their past activity), but it seems they may have stepped in it here by posting such a flippant gloat over an issue which many Americans would consider of grave importance.

Although Google’s Android platform has been wildly successful, the company’s efforts to make its own consumer electronics have often faltered. While we’ve heard a lot about anemic Chromebook sales recently, Enders Analysis strategy consultant Benedict Evans has done some detective work and found that sales of Google’s Nexus 10 tablet likely aren’t doing that much better. Essentially, Evans has extrapolated traffic data from the Google Play store to produce a rough estimate that there are currently just 680,000 Nexus 10 tablets in use, versus around 6.8 million Nexus 7 tablets currently in use. As Evans notes, this estimate means that Nexus 10 sales were bested by Microsoft’s Surface tablet, which has almost universally been regarded as a flop.