Category: News

Amsterdam-based online music startup Shuffler.fm is venturing into the music video space with its new ShufflerTV offering that turns the web’s leading voices in music into your personal VJs.

The idea behind ShufflerTV, which is set to officially launch Wednesday, is pretty simple: The site aggregates videos posted on music blogs and online music magazines like Pitchfork, XLR8R, Urb.com and the Fader, and compiles them to individual stations. The result are continuous streams of music videos that have been curated by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Shuffler.fm combines this with a really neat player that allows users to skip songs, check out what’s coming next, change stations, subscribe to specific stations to easily access them and share individual videos on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

ShufflerTV integrates with Shuffler.fm’s audio site, which has been doing this kind of curated music programming sans video for some time. Users can for example subscribe to a station like Urb.com on ShufflerTV, and then listen to the songs posted there as part of their personal RadioMagazine, which is kind of like a megamix of all the songs of their favorite audio and video surces.

Shuffler isn’t the only one looking to offer a new take on music television online. Major label joint venture Vevo launched its own continuously playing music video station dubbed Vevo TV in March. However, Vevo is currently very much a take on the traditional MTV model, with a one-size-fits-all approach towards curation. ShufflerTV on the other hand comes with a much more targeted approach. Both has its merits. But if you ask me, Shuffler simply sounds better.

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The Boston bombings, like so many public emergencies, saw heroes who risked their lives. But the tragedy also produced jerks like the person who created @_bostonmarathon, a fake Twitter account claiming to raise money for victims. Here’s a screenshot (via CBS):

The episode is the latest example of how Twitter has become a critical source of information in a crisis — but also shows how people are able to abuse the service’s role as an emergency channel. Recall that a similar situation arose during Hurricane Sandy, when a hedge fund trader named Shashank Tripathi spread panic by tweeting fake news that was retweeted thousands of times.

What should be done with these people? In debating Tripathi’s actions, most of our readers at the time agreed that his action were immoral but not illegal. Now, though, it’s clear that a Tripathi may emerge on Twitter any time there’s an emergency — raising the question of whether the company should adopt a more hands-on policy to quell potential panic.

Fortunately, that may not be necessary. In the case of the fake Boston Marathon handle, a flood of warnings caused Twitter to suspend the account within hours. A Twitter spokesperson later explained that the company can rely on its own users to police bad behavior:

“We don’t mediate users’ content. Users have the ability to flag accounts as spam or block accounts, and those actions are signals that feed into our automated systems,” said the spokesperson by email.

This automated system promises both efficiency and autonomy — it permits a high degree of free speech while also weeding out bad or dangerous actors. And it’s proven durable. Twitter has relied on it even as the company has become the central news outlet for everything from the Osama Bin Laden killing to the Arab Spring.

But can the company continue keep up this hands-off approach as it becomes ever more important as a news source? In a recent post, my colleague Mathew Ingram argues that it can. He writes, persuasively, that asking Twitter to step in is like “a little like asking AT&T to eavesdrop on phone calls in order to figure out who is a terrorist.”

For now, the system works on auto-pilot. It will be interesting to see if it holds up during future emergencies.

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The Wii U has been one of the least successful product launches in Nintendo’s history so far and Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter believes that there’s very little hope sales of the console will pick up anytime soon. Per Benzinga, Pachter says that “only 55,000 Wii U consoles were sold domestically in March,” which is down from the 66,000 consoles Nintendo sold in February and the 57,000 consoles it sold in January. What’s more, Pachter doesn’t think there’s much Nintendo can do to boost sales in the future as the Wii U’s “fortunes appear unlikely to improve for several months, even if Nintendo decides to drop [the] price, as there are an insufficient number of core titles that are generating interest in the console.” In other words, it’s not even clear at this point that issuing a PS Vita-style price cut can spark interest in the Wii U until the game selection for the console significantly improves.

This article originally appeared on GigaOM Pro, our premium research subscription service.

A couple weeks back cellulosic ethanol hopeful Mascoma quietly pulled its IPO after it had filed to go public. It’s safe to say that the abysmal performance of the 2011 crop of biofuels IPOs, that included Solazyme, Gevo and Kior, did not help Mascoma’s chances of finding public money. Gevo’s been a particular stinker, losing over 80 percent of its value, though Kior is down almost 70 percent from its IPO pricing.

My colleague Katie Fehrenbacher has analyzed the various issues related to high levels of risk and companies like Kior. With no revenue at IPO and no significant revenue on the horizon until the company built a capital intensive production facility costing tens of millions, Kior has carried a significant level of risk for a publicly traded company.

I mention the high risk world of biofuel investing and the fact that these companies went to public markets seeking capital because two years after the 2011 class of biofuels IPOs, cleantech investors find themselves in challenges situations where it’s difficult get IPOs done. And without those investors having access to liquidity and returns, late stage companies are having harder times finding capital to push through the commercialization phase of growth.

What happened?

The IPO market all but dried up with just three cleantech IPOs in 2012 and overall cleantech VC dropped by a third. IPOs are critical for venture investors to find liquidity and produce returns, as is significant M&A activity. But IPOs that significantly underperform the market make it harder for other companies in that sector to attract VC or to go public themselves.

Of greatest concern is that as financing for cleantech gets tight, the brightest startups will struggle to find early stage capital and those companies nearing the path to commercialization will find it hard to find scaling capital.

Many of these financing issues are cleantech specific. It’s worth looking at Matthew Nordan’s analysis of the state of cleantech investing but some of the key points he makes are:

• 1) The current value of cleantech funds is about 90 percent of what LPs put into those cleantech specific funds, versus about 123 percent for the overall venture sector.
• 2) The number of cleantech IPOs is lagging and their aftermarket performance is poor.
• 3) Cleantech companies tend to take longer to IPO or get acquired and require more capital to get to profitability than say, internet startups.

IPOs and long term investors

So what to do about the problem? I spoke recently with Mona Defrawi, the founder of Equidity, a startup that has built a platform to connect promising later stage startups with buy side investors. These are the investors who would typically buy IPOs, but who now are getting access to data on later stage startups so they can consider investing in growth companies a couple years pre-IPO at attractive valuations while giving up some liquidity by doing private deals.

Defrawi has some strong opinions about how the overall IPO system is broken, much of which she blames on decimalization, short term trading, Sarbanes Oxley, and the inability to have stable markets post IPOs because there aren’t enough long term investors sticking by companies through an IPO. The net result is a world where it takes close to ten years to go public versus about 5 years in the 90s, something that has a rough impact on venture capital firms that need liquidity and need to show LPs a return. Defrawi put together an infographic to detail her view of the IPO market and to promote Equidity:

Equidity launched its list of 135 GrowthSTARS in February. These are companies that Equidity wants to be the foundation of its list of companies that it can connect with long term investors pre-IPO. Scanning the list, it included a few cleantech names such as Bloom Energy, Opower, oDesk, and BrightSource. Some of the companies on the list, like Opower, I wouldn’t think would have any trouble finding capital given its continued success. Though other names like BrightSource, which specifically has had to ditch its IPO plans as it struggles with the competitive move to solar PV technology, may need capital to survive before it ever reconsiders a public offering.

But regardless of how attractive the various companies on Equidity’s list are, the real point of interest is that Equidity wants to offer up these companies to buy side investors before the IPO, particularly in a world where venture capital has grown somewhat tight.

There are other efforts to increase liquidity pre-IPO from the likes of SecondMarket and AngelList. Equidity is another such effort though it’s trying to do so at a much larger investment size and not with a focus on making a market pre-IPO but on bringing the big public investors into private deals pre-IPO.

And if Equidity is one small step toward making it easier for cleantech companies to get later stage capital and attract investors that will stick with the company post-IPO, that could aid a recovery in the upstream venture capital that’s needed to finance the next generation of cleantech startups.

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With what I can only presume is wry sense of humor, Netflix’s Anthony Park and Mark Watson post: “Since Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021, we need to find a replacement some time within the next 8 years”. Well, hell, that ought to be enough time. “We’d like to share some progress we’ve made towards our goal of moving to HTML5 video”.

Last month, Netflix finally brought video streaming to the Samsung ARM Chromebook. I wondered if that might be the future for everything. Sure enough, Netflix confirms.

HTML5 streaming support for the Chromebook is a work in progress. Netflix pursues three W3C-sanctioned specifications: Media Source Extensions, Encrypted Media Extensions and Web Cryptography API.

The Netflixers explain about early implementation:

Our player on this Chromebook device uses the Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions to adaptively stream protected content. WebCrypto hasn’t been implemented in Chrome yet, so we’re using a Netflix-developed PPAPI (Pepper Plugin API) plugin which provides these cryptographic operations for now. We will remove this last remaining browser plugin as soon as WebCrypto is available directly in the Chrome browser. At that point, we can begin testing our new HTML5 video player on Windows and OS X.

So Netflix has years to get this right. What scares me is if the joke is on me and they’re serious about the timeframe. 😉

Although it sometimes seems like Samsung and HTC are the only manufacturers fighting for Android device supremacy, there are others out there producing some top of the line smartphones that should satisfy even the most cutting edge buyer. A good candidate for this is the Sony Xperia Z which just succeeded at selling 4.6 million units during its first 40 days on the market. Sony appears to be ready to try to capitalize on this success and keep the momentum going, at least in the U.S., with plans to expand their retail footprint through the use of stand-alone stores and freestanding Galleries.

Analysts indicate the Xperia Z’s success can be attributed to three main factors. First, Sony got a jump on other manufacturers by releasing the Xperia Z early in the year and shipping in March, meaning they have not had to compete with other flagship devices that many people are waiting for. Second, with features like the Exmor RS camera lens and being waterproof and dustproof, the device not only competes well against other top-end smartphones, it is able to bring something unique to the table. Finally, the Xperia Z being made from glass is appealing to many buyers who perceive it as being an elegant device.

Riding on the success of the Xperia Z, Sony recently launched a new Sony Store in Palo Alto, California at the Stanford Shopping Center and plans to re-open stores in Miami, San Diego, and Orlando. All of the stores will use a similar design concept to help standardize the buying experience for customers. These openings will bring the number of Sony Stores in the U.S. up to eight. Carrying a smaller selection of Sony products, plans are in the works to open Sony Galleries throughout the country. The Gallery concept is basically a kiosk type location typically found in malls, both indoor and outdoor.

These moves will still leave Sony far behind smartphone giants like Samsung and Apple in terms of retail locations and units sold. However, Sony clearly has some buzz and should be able to convert some of that to increases in market share.

sources: GSM Insider, Slashgear

Come comment on this article: Sony planning to expand retail footprint amongst successful Sony Xperia Z sales

This week, Vice President Biden will host a virtual conversation with mayors around the country to discuss commonsense steps to reduce gun violence. Mayors know first hand the impact of gun violence on communities across the country – and they've come together to demand action.

On Wednesday, April 17th, at 2:45 p.m. EDT, the Vice President and mayors will discuss how we can protect our children and communities by reducing gun violence. We hope you'll tune in.

During the Google+ Hangout, Vice President Biden will be joined by:

• Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, Gary, IN
• Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore, MD
• Mayor R.T. Rybak, Minneapolis, MN
• Mayor Steve Scaffidi, Oak Creek, WI

Watch the hangout with Vice President Biden and mayors live on Wednesday, April 17th, at 2:45 p.m. EDT on WhiteHouse.gov, or tune in to the White House's Google+ page or YouTube channel.

read more

A constant in history since the invention of the printing press is that censorship is always a threat to publishers and authors. In more recent times, the fear of U.S. parents that children might be exposed to written descriptions of or allusions to sex (or, in some parts of the U.S., magic) has caused a predictable stream of complaints and bans on certain books.

The American Library Association (ALA) tracks such bans, and this week has issued its report on the state of America’s libraries in 2013. Though the sudden popularity of E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey novels might first come to mind when guessing which books have endured the most complaints in the past year, it turns out that parents across the U.S. are more concerned about a kid in his underpants.

The Adventures of Captain Underpants, the series of books that irreverently follows a superhero in ‘tighty whities’, were the most-challenged books of 2012. The Fifty Shades novels came in fourth place on the list.

In second and third place on the list were Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why. Alexie’s novel is a semi-autobiographical young adult novel about his difficulties growing up poor on a U.S. Indian reservation. The book includes adult topics, such as racism, his father’s alcoholism, and multiple instances of violence. After the book began eliciting complaints from parents, Alexie wrote in the Wall Street Journal why he believes those types of complaints are meaningless when it comes to protecting children:

Of course, all during my childhood, would-be saviors tried to rescue my fellow tribal members. They wanted to rescue me. But, even then, I could only laugh at their platitudes. In those days, the cultural conservatives thought that KISS and Black Sabbath were going to impede my moral development. They wanted to protect me from sex when I had already been raped. They wanted to protect me from evil though a future serial killer had already abused me. They wanted me to profess my love for God without considering that I was the child and grandchild of men and women who’d been sexually and physically abused by generations of clergy.

Below are the ALA’s top 10 most-challenged books of 2012:

1. Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
3. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
4. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
5. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
6. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
7. Looking for Alaska by John Green
8. Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz
9. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
10. Beloved by Toni Morrison
    

    

When it comes to installing an app on your phone or tablet, one of the most important things you need to look at is permissions. We have covered a few apps that help you with that, but online permissions is one that people often overlook. Online permissions pertains to various online social sites and what apps you have granted access to them. For example, if you use a third party Twitter app, you have to allow that app access to your Twitter account. This goes for any app that needs to communicate with Twitter or other similar sites like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Dropbox, Linkedin, Yahoo, Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr.

All of these sites will tell you what other applications were previously granted access, but they aren’t always easy to find, so most people never bother with them. An app called MyPermissions will make things very easy for you in that you can find all the permissions for all of these sites in one place. Now you might be thinking to yourself that if you granted access to a particular application, then it’s okay and there’s no reason to worry about it. You are partly right, but you will be surprised at how many older applications you will find that were granted permission, but you no longer use. You are also likely to find permissions for things you didn’t even realize that you granted. Now I’m not going to tell you that if you leave these old permissions in place, something awful is going to happen to you, but at the same time, why leave permissions in place that are no longer necessary? These services will have access to all your private information, but you don’t use them anymore. It doesn’t make sense does it?

You won’t find many apps that are as easy to use as MyPermissions yet very important at the same time. Just open the app and you will be presented with nine icons for each of the sites that I mentioned above. Just tap on the ones in which you have an account and enter your login information. Don’t worry, you won’t be granting MyPermissions access to your account. You are simply visiting the Web version of each site and going directly to their respective permissions page. You can look over all the permissions that you have granted and quickly revoke or remove any that are unnecessary. Nothing could be simpler. Now as I mentioned, permissions such as these always get forgotten so they have a reminders tab that lets you enter your email address (no password) to send you a reminder email to check your permissions either once a day, once a week, or once a month. I would say that daily and weekly are a bit of an overkill so that leaves monthly.

MyPermissions is absolutely Free and it won’t take you more than a couple of minutes to find out what old permissions need to be cleaned out. It really opened my eyes to how many permissions I granted in the past that I no longer needed. Since it’s the time of year where we should all be doing some spring cleaning, I recommend you download and install MyPermissions today and do a little cleaning yourself. It won’t take you more than a few minutes and it won’t cost you a dime. Check out my hands on video below and hit one of the download links to get started. Let me know how many permissions you needed to delete.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Featured Android App Review: MyPermissions [Tools]

Aberdare Ventures said Tuesday that Mohit Kaushal has joined the firm as a partner. He will focus on Aberdare’s investments in technologies and services that will drive healthcare efficiency. Kaushal was most recently West Health’s chief strategy officer and EVP of business development.

PRESS RELEASE

Aberdare Ventures, a leading healthcare venture capital firm, today announced that Mohit Kaushal has joined the firm as a partner. Mohit (Mo) Kaushal is a leading authority on information-enabled care delivery and will focus on Aberdare’s investments in technologies and services that will drive healthcare efficiency.

“Mo has lived at the intersection of medicine, technology, communications, and policy for years,” noted Paul Klingenstein, founder of Aberdare Ventures. “He’ll make an enormous contribution to our efforts in transformational health investing. The timing is superb for all of us.”

An MD and MBA by training, Kaushal was most recently the inaugural Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Business Development at West Health, a unique set of entities focused on lowering healthcare costs through medical research, healthcare policy, investment and entrepreneurship. He developed the West Health Investment Fund strategy, sourced and led investments in Humedica (acquired by Optum Health), Change Healthcare, RxAnte and goBalto.

Previously, Kaushal was the Director of Connected Health with the Federal Communications Commission, where he established the agency’s first dedicated healthcare team. During his time in the Obama administration, he was also a member of the White House Health IT task force, a cross-agency team focusing on implementing the technology aspects of Health Reform. Prior to this position, Kaushal was an investment professional at Polaris Venture Partners, and worked for Merrill Lynch’s Health Care Investment Banking Group and the World Health Organization. Kaushal holds an MBA from Stanford and an MD with distinction from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London.

“Aberdare has a wonderful reputation for advancing some of the most disruptive companies in healthcare,” said Kaushal. “The team shares my passion for working with great companies and entrepreneurs to produce a much more efficient, consumer-centric and efficacious healthcare system, and I am very excited to be on board.”

Kaushal joins existing Aberdare Venture partners Paul Klingenstein, Darren Hite, Sami Hamade, Jake Odden, and Sigrid Van Bladel.

About Aberdare Ventures

Formed in 1999, Aberdare Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in visionary entrepreneurs and technologies that are transforming healthcare with new biological, engineering, and information technologies. The firm has attracted and partnered with many superior early stage companies such as Ironwood, Pharmion, Clovis Oncology and MC10, repeatedly backing start-up’s that have grown to values exceeding $1 billion. The team of six investment professionals oversees a committed capital base in excess of $400 million in aggregate. For more information please visit: www.aberdare.com.

The post Kaushal Joins Aberdare Ventures appeared first on peHUB.

CLAIM: A recent Gallup Poll found that 71 percent of Americans want more emphasis on developing our wind resources.

FACT: The Gallup Poll Mr. Gramlich cites did ask Americans how much emphasis the U.S. should put on wind power production—with …

Earlier this week, we looked at a new Kmart ad entitled, “Ship My Pants”. It pretty much came out of left-field. I don’t think anyone would’ve expected an ad like this from Kmart, and perhaps that’s the point. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a moment:

Done? Go ahead, watch it again.

Yeah, that Kmart ad has almost ten million YouTube views. Ten MILLION. A Kmart ad. It hasn’t even been up a week yet.

Naturally, it’s generating a lot of buzz in social media. Here are some recent tweets (about 30 more have come in since I started writing this a few minutes ago):

thanks to @themisterjoshua for texting me a laugh this afternoon in the form of the #shipmypants video. Lolol! bit.ly/ZYsp5G

— Angela James (@angelajames) April 16, 2013

Kmart #shipmypants proves that clever and edgy outdoes star power on social media goo.gl/aynwr via @louiebaur

— Jeff Jacobs (@JeffreyPJacobs) April 16, 2013

KMart’s new ad for online shipping blows my mind. Kudos for edgy, different ads. #shipmypants youtu.be/I03UmJbK0lA

— Melissa Lyttle (@melissalyttle) April 16, 2013

I could watch this on repeat forever…#ShipMyPants: youtu.be/I03UmJbK0lA via @youtube

— Mark Hamsher (@MarkHamsher) April 16, 2013

Yep. This wins the Internet this week: Ship My Pants: youtu.be/I03UmJbK0lA

— Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) April 13, 2013

I love how Kmart is pushing boundaries: ‘Ship My Pants:’ Kmart’s Unexpected Viral Hit – Forbes onforb.es/105eMZO

— Shauna Mackenzie (@MsShaunaMack) April 16, 2013

#shipmypants say it

— Dominique (@nikki_pooh1993) April 16, 2013

Ship My Pants! This shit is too funny youtu.be/I03UmJbK0lA via @youtube

— Tyler Quill (@TQuill2) April 16, 2013

Kmart itself seems to be having a blast with it:

You’ll never guess what we’re letting you do at our stores now #ShipMyPants bit.ly/11Zkzhf

— Kmart (@Kmart) April 11, 2013

DUDES. Come ship your pants with us, anyday. #ShipMyPants RT @menshumor: This commercial just made our day… spr.ly/6011XJbR

— Kmart (@Kmart) April 16, 2013

Nothin’ wrong with that! #ShipMyPants RT @akelly249: I just shipped my PJ’s! #iswear @kmart

— Kmart (@Kmart) April 15, 2013

Whether all of the social buzz leads to more people going to Kmart and having things shipped remains to be seen.

The Nook HD+ came out last December to mixed reviews. The device had a great screen but problematic bugs caused laggy performance and low scores. The company has come out with an updated version and we took a look.

The 9-inch Nook HD+ is a Retina-quality tablet with a very simple mission – it wants to replace the iPad in the entry-level tablet market. It runs an acceptably fast 1.5 GHz processor that powers a 1,920×1,280-pixel screen. This means images are exceptionally bright on the device and video is more than acceptable. When we first looked at the HD+ in December on Fly or Die, I gave the HD+ a fly even with its limited functionality at the time and its lack of a camera.

The B&N party line is that this device is updated and I suspect there’s a reason they are running through these with a new round of reviews. Because I didn’t write a formal review when it first came out – I was far more impressed by the Nook HD – so it’s worth revisiting this tablet.

As it stands, the Nook HD+ is primarily a “dumb tablet” with a few smart tablet features. You can run a number of apps and games and view Nook Video alongside other video from providers like Crackle and Ultraviolet. This update also improves the speaker (it’s still mono) and improves performance.

Sadly, the quirks that plagued the original HD+ are present here. When turning on the device, for example, you see a brief “scrambled” picture that suggests a problem with either the backlight or the LCD. This “fuzz” appears sometimes while moving through apps and screens but it doesn’t show itself when you’re reading a book.

In terms of absolute performance the Nook suggests solidity but not pep. Switching between screens, at least while reading, is acceptably fast and much faster than it was in the initial launch. As for general app performance I saw a bit of an improvement over the previous software iteration but nothing to write home about. The HD+ is awful in direct sunlight, so don’t even think about going outside with it. This is an indoor ereader.

I think, sadly, the 9-inch tablet market has been flattened by the phablets and 7-inchers of the world. That said, the form factor is still good for folks looking for more screen real estate or larger fonts. For those customers, the HD+ excels. It is almost half a pound lighter than the iPad and even lighter than the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch. At $269 it’s priced just about right and, for a brief period, you could get a Nook Simple Touch for free with purchase. That promotion is over but you do get a $50 credit from Barnes & Noble for books and content.

So here’s what worries me: the ereader world has been stagnant since the holidays and the two-for-one deal, while generous, didn’t seem to bode well for B&N. This very slightly updated HD+ is a solid piece of hardware but it’s still not quite up to, say, the standards of similarly outfitted – but not similarly priced – Android tablets. The Nexus 10, is $100 more than the HD+ and, by all metrics, a better device. The iPad with Retina display is a bit more expensive, to be sure, and may not be exactly the device the novice, ereading user is looking for. However, the performance and build quality is far superior.

So who should get an HD+? I think folks who love to read on bigger screens. While there is a plethora of video content available, that’s not the draw here. The three main draws are, in order, price, price, and price. If you’re already a Nook user and you’re looking for a bigger reader, this may be the model for you. If you’re looking for a real tablet, you may need to look elsewhere.

Last week, the White House said that CISPA still had some problems that weren’t addressed by the amendments added during its markup period. Unfortunately, the administration didn’t issue a veto threat at that time, but now it has.

In a statement released by the White House today, the Obama administration laid out its beef with CISPA. The first issue it has with the legislation is that it still doesn’t do enough to protect private information:

The Administration, however, remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities. Citizens have a right to know that corporations will be held accountable – and not granted immunity – for failing to safeguard personal information adequately. The Administration is committed to working with all stakeholders to find a workable solution to this challenge. Moreover, the Administration is confident that such measures can be crafted in a way that is not overly onerous or cost prohibitive on the businesses sending the information.

Now this is huge. The administration is saying that companies should not be granted immunity if it uses your private information in an inappropriate fashion. Corporate immunity is one of the cornerstones of CISPA and one of the main reasons the tech industry is so in love with it. If the immunity provision is removed, the backing of the tech industry will vanish along with it.

The other issue is that it doesn’t like how CISPA allows companies to share private information with any agency of its choosing, including the NSA. The White Houses says that all private information should enter government through a civilian agency:

The Administration supports the longstanding tradition to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres, while recognizing that the Nation’s cybersecurity requires shared responsibility from individual users, private sector network owners and operators, and the appropriate collaboration of civilian, law enforcement, and national security entities in government. H.R. 624 appropriately seeks to make clear that existing public-private relationships – whether 2 voluntary, contractual, or regulatory – should be preserved and uninterrupted by this newly authorized information sharing. However, newly authorized information sharing for cybersecurity purposes from the private sector to the government should enter the government through a civilian agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

So, what does the White House want to see out of CISPA or any other cybersecurity bill? Pretty much what CISPA is now, but with better privacy protections:

The Administration believes that carefully updating laws to facilitate cybersecurity information sharing is one of several legislative changes essential to protect individuals’ privacy and improve the Nation’s cybersecurity. While there is bipartisan consensus on the need for such legislation, it should adhere to the following priorities: (1) carefully safeguard privacy and civil liberties; (2) preserve the long-standing, respective roles and missions of civilian and intelligence agencies; and (3) provide for appropriate sharing with targeted liability protections.

If Congress can’t agree on a cybersecurity bill that meets the above criteria, the White House says that “senior advisors would recommend that [the president] veto the bill” if it were presented as it is now.

The threat of a veto might help certain amendments to be added onto CISPA before it goes to the floor for a vote this week, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The bill’s authors seem pretty adamant on passing CISPA as is, and it will most likely die another ignoble death in the Senate as its members push for their own cybersecurity bill.

[h/t: TechDirt]

Quantum Energy Partners has formed Jagged Peak Energy with the former executive leadership team of Ute Energy. Denver-based Jagged Peak will engage in the acquisition, development, and exploration of oil and gas assets, primarily focusing on resource plays in select North American basins. Quantum, along with members of the management team, have committed more than $400 million to Jagged.

PRESS RELEASE

Quantum Energy Partners (“Quantum”), a leading energy private equity firm, is pleased to announce the formation of Jagged Peak Energy LLC (“Jagged Peak” or the “Company”) with the former executive leadership team of Ute Energy LLC led by industry veteran Joe Jaggers (“Jaggers”).
Jagged Peak will engage in the acquisition, development, and exploration of oil and gas assets, primarily focusing on resource plays in select North American basins. Quantum and members of the management team have collectively made capital commitments in excess of $400 million to the Company.
The Jagged Peak team will be led by Jaggers as Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President. Joining the executive management team alongside Jaggers will be Chief Operating Officer Greg Hinds and Chief Financial Officer Laurie Bales.
Quantum and Jaggers previously partnered together in building Ute Energy, LLC into one of the more successful resource play companies focused in the Uintah Basin. Ute Energy was sold last year for in excess of $1 billion. Jaggers and the management team successfully executed a lease, acquire and drill strategy, growing production at sale announcement to over 7,800 net boepd and undeveloped acreage to over 156,800 net acres.
Wil VanLoh, President and CEO of Quantum, commented, “We are excited to be partnering once again with Joe, Greg, and Laurie. They comprise the nucleus of an exceptional team of oil and gas professionals that have a proven track record of delivering superior returns in unconventional resource plays. They possess best in class execution capabilities and will be well positioned to capture producing property and acreage acquisitions and then build value through development drilling.”
Jaggers remarked on the closing, “We look forward to Jagged Peak building upon our prior success at Ute Energy. We see a great opportunity in the market today to capture resource-rich opportunities and accelerate the conversion into proved reserves and cash flow. We are also excited to continue our partnership with Quantum, whose strong financial sponsorship and energy industry expertise provides a great compliment to our team.”
About Jagged Peak Energy, LLC
Based in Denver, Colorado, Jagged Peak will focus on liquids resource opportunities onshore. The organization has proven skills in capital allocation, efficient operations and acquisition execution.
About Quantum Energy Partners
Founded in 1998, Quantum Energy Partners is a leading provider of private equity capital to the global energy industry, having managed together with its affiliates, more than $6.5 billion in equity commitments since inception. For more information on Quantum, please visit www.quantumep.com. For investor relations, please contact Michael Dalton at (713) 452-2000.

The post Quantum Forms Jagged Peak Energy appeared first on peHUB.

How do we get more women interested in programming? We can start by exposing them to more accessible learning tools earlier in life. That’s the idea behind iPad visual programming app Hopscotch, which will be released in beta on Tuesday.

Hopscotch is an object-oriented programming language that is purposely bright, colorful and welcoming to kids between ages 8 and 12. Rather than making young people wade through incomprehensible strings of words and numbers, writing code in Hopscotch consists of dragging and dropping different objects and running scripts on them. The objects are cutesy animal characters, and scripts can be selected from drop-down menus. The result is that kids can make short animations and games.

iPads are looked at by a lot of educators as ideal tools because they’re easy for kids to use and they’re so much less expensive than full-fledged computers. Hopscotch is in good company when it comes to teaching programming on Apple’s tablet: Codea, which is an iPad programming app that uses the Lua programming language, is an iPad-based coding app for anyone, not just kids. Tynker is another visual programming language that’s similar to Hopscotch; it too relies on kid-friendly objects that can be stacked together like Legos to build programs.

The language powering Hopscotch (like Tynker) is inspired by Scratch, a visual programming language for children developed at MIT. Scratch has been around for several years, although it doesn’t really work on mobile devices. But as Hopscotch co-founder and CEO Jocelyn Leavitt said, “it’s really popular and we really like it.”

Leavitt is a former history teacher, with a special interest in experiential learning methods. She doesn’t code, and that gets to the point of Hopscotch: she and her co-founder, Samantha John, both “wish this existed when we were growing up,” she told me. John taught herself to code after college, and she’s the one who led the engineering effort on Hopscotch.

But both founders want young people — especially girls — to be exposed to these kinds of tools as early in life as possible. The app is absolutely for boys too, but girls are the bigger challenge. Boys may get into programming because they like video games, but that’s not what drives young girls, she thinks. “Girls like creating things.” So they invested a lot of time in the artwork in the app designing characters that are cute, colorful and fun: “It’s something girls will like without being too girly,” Leavitt said.

Hopscotch is iPad only for now and it’s free. Though they haven’t decided on a business model yet, it will probably monetize the app through in-app purchases, like premium art, virtual goods or premium programming tutorials.

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In the past 30 years, major advances have been made when it comes to treating several serious diseases. Today, there are 85% fewer deaths from leukemia and 63% fewer fatalities from heart disease than there were then. Meanwhile, while AIDS was once considered a death sentence, people with the disease can now live to old age. Not to mention that a remarkable third of the people who have strokes not only live — but leave the hospital without any disability.

Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness “These are just remarkable changes,” says Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in today’s talk given at TEDxCaltech. “All of them boil down to understanding something about the disease that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early.”

Sadly though, Insel says, the news isn’t good across the board. The rate of suicide, he says, has not changed at all over the last three decades. About 90% of suicides are related to mental illness. And while 1 in 5 people will be affected by a psychiatric disorder, scientists still understand dangerously little about these diseases. In fact, says Insel, we don’t even know what to call them. The terms preferred at the moment – “mental disorders” and “behavioral disorders” — are misleading, because they point to symptoms rather than to the disease itself.

“Both of those terms which have been in play for a century or more are actually now impediments to progress,” says Insel. “What we need conceptually here is to rethink these disorders as ‘brain disorders.’”

In this talk, Insel reveals why he believes we are about to turn a corner in understanding the brain, which he calls an “organ of surreal complexity.” As scientists get a better understanding of its workings and development, they’ll start to understand the patterns of brain disorders. It’s possible that, as with heart disease, scientists will be able to identify risk factors. To hear how this could lead to early detection of brain disorders — and even interventions before a person so much as experiences or displays symptoms — watch this fascinating talk.

“The good news stories in medicine are early detection and early intervention,” explains Insel. “If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. That’s precisely what we do when we decide that everyone with one of these brain disorders has a ‘behavioral disorder’ – we wait until the behavior becomes manifest.”

Insel’s talk reminds us of two powerful TED playlists.

First it reminds us of the list “All Kinds of Minds,” which features several TED Talks from people who’ve had the experience of living with a brain disorder. It begins with legal scholar Elyn Saks describing her own experience of schizophrenia, moves on to activist autism activist Temple Grandin describing how her mind works, and builds to Joshua Walters, who is bipolar, asking: What’s the balance between medicating craziness away and riding its creative edge?

Insel’s talk also reminds us of the playlist “How does my brain work?,” which brings together talks about incredible research that’s helping scientists better understand our minds. It begins with neuroscientist Daniel Wolport giving a fascinating theory on why the brain evolved, moves on to Allan Jones and his initiative to map of the brain, and ends with Michael Merzenich giving evidence of the brain’s plasticity.

Also very worth checking out: Thomas Insel’s blog, where he just last week wrote about CLARITY, the newest way scientists at Stanford University are looking at the brain »

A handful of Boston-based companies have implemented disaster recovery plans with SunGard Availability Services, primarily due to access restrictions as the FBI and Boston police investigate Monday’s terrorist bombings at the Boston Marathon.

Five SunGard customers with offices on Boylston Street, where the bombings occurred, have declared disasters and are implementing plans for offsite operations, according to SunGard. A number of customers have moved staff to SunGard’s business continuity center in Marlborough, Mass., the company said.

One company that said it had employees working off-site in Marlborough was MFS Investment Management, which was among a number of investment firms in the Boylston Street area that had employees either working from home or from business recovery facilities.

On Tuesday a 12-block area of Boston’s Back Bay section was closed, as authorities combed the crime scene for evidence and clues to the identity of the bomber. Two explosions near the finish line of the marathon killed three people and injured 176 others. Copley Square was closed from Massachusetts Avenue to Clarendon and between Huntington and Newbury.

Boston police said the Copley Square area was “the most complex crime scene in the history of the department.” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told Boston.com that police hoped to reduce the size of the crime scene, but that he expected that much of the area would be closed off for “for another two days.”

 

Despite negative reception and poor sales, Dell remains committed to Microsoft’s Windows RT operating system. The company has confirmed that it plans to release “future generations” of ARM-based tablets that will be lighter and faster than before, IDG News reported. Neil Hand, Dell’s vice president, acknowledged that adoption hasn’t lived up to expectation, although he believes the platform has a good chance to succeed once users become more familiar with the new tile-based interface.

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The PC world is packed with supposed performance-boosting suites, most of which are almost exactly the same. You’ll have a program to list your Startup programs, another one to delete your temporary internet files, a few system tweaking options – all very predictable (and, usually, not even that effective).

The news that Synei are introducing a very similar range of free tools — a disk cleaner, services optimiser, startup manager and more — probably won’t fill you with excitement, then. But wait: while the tools are far from perfect, there’s more than enough functionality here to make them very interesting.

Take Synei Service Manager, for instance. Optimizing your PC services is a complex business, and even the most experienced user will need a little help occasionally. Just launch Synei Service Manager and the program will quickly recommend which services you should tweak, either to improve performance or restore your default settings.

And it’s a similar story with Synei’s Startup Manager. The program doesn’t just list your startup programs and leave you to decide what to do next; it can compare them with a database of 16,000 items, immediately highlighting anything it believes is unnecessary.

The Disk Cleaner is even better, helping you scan your hard drive for all the usual leftovers (browser histories, redundant system and application files). We’ve seen this many times before, but Disk Cleaner is unusual in that it actually freed up more space than CCleaner on our test system. And that’s before we ran its Deep Cleaner, an extra tool which searches for leftover files by extension (*.TMP, *.OLD and so on).

And Synei System Utilities makes each of these tools available from a single interface, as well as adding some extras (a simple backup module, a documentation-free Windows tweaker, and graphical front ends for Windows defrag and chkdsk). It’s nothing too special, but the program does include a scheduler which allows you to run any of its tools unattended, and that could be useful.

Synei’s tools do have a few problems. The startup program and service suggestions they make aren’t always good, for instance, and that means the utilities really aren’t for beginners. You’ll need to review the recommendations they make very carefully before accepting any changes.

If you just take any advice as a starting point, though, tools like Service Manager and Startup Manager could be very helpful. The Disk Cleaner is a particular highlight. And, best of all, Synei’s programs are particularly convenient to use: they’re tiny (the entire suite is under 5MB in size), adware free, portable, and run happily on anything from Windows XP through to 8.

We would still treat the programs with extreme caution. They’re new, and will have bugs — don’t run them anywhere that doesn’t have a full system backup to hand.

But, if you’re looking for some small and simple maintenance tools then Synei’s collection shows promise, and we’ll be interested to see where the company takes them next.

Photo Credit:  Denis Davydov/Shutterstock