Category: News

  • The CamBoard Pico Wants To Take On Leap Motion, Offers Full Depth Gesture Control In A Smaller Package

    pmd-camboard-pico

    Gesture control is heating up, with a host of new entries finally following Microsoft’s example with the Kinect, including Leap Motion and MYO. A German company called pmdtechnologies has also been in the space for a few years (they’ve been working on their tech for 10 years, in fact), and their latest reference design, the CamBoard pico, is a 3D depth sensor based on what pmd calls its “time-of-flight” tech to delivery extremely accurate depth measurement for gesture control of PCs.

    The CamBoard pico follows the CamBoard nano, the company’s previous reference design, and improves on pmd’s existing depth sensor by offering more accurate, touch-free gesture control. It works by offering a “3D interaction volume,” made up of a point cloud, which pmd says means it can be more accurate than Leap Motion, which just identifies points for fingertips to help it determine relative spacial distance.

    pmd offers its designs for sale to consumer electronics companies and other clients (it creates a lot of car safety and industrial robotics sensors, for instance) to help them build their own gesture sensing devices, which means the tech found in the CamBoard pico reference design could find its way to modules integrated into notebooks, into webcams, or into dedicated motion controllers from to OEM brands.

    The gesture control market is definitely picking up steam, and that means some companies like pmd which have been around for a long time but have largely served niche industries will get a chance to move more to the foreground. With something like a new mode of interaction, quality of experience is the key to stickiness, however, so both veteran and rookie players here will sink or swim based on how pleasant or frustrating using their devices proves to be.

  • The BlackBerry Z10 is NOW available for pre-order on AT&T

    Great news for BlackBerry fans! Just yesterday AT&T announced that it will carry the BlackBerry Z10 in its smartphone portfolio, and today the recently-introduced device is available to pre-order at the US mobile operator.

    On a two-year contract at AT&T, the BlackBerry Z10 goes for $199.99 alongside a qualifying data plan and new activation. The US carrier also offers a one-year contract option at which point the price of the device goes up by $250 to $449.99. And, if you want to pay for the BlackBerry Z10 upfront AT&T charges you $549.99.

    Right after the Canadian manufacturer unveiled the new BlackBerry my colleague Joe Wilcox posted one of his traditional articles asking “Will you buy the BlackBerry Z10?” to gauge the market interest (and that of BetaNews readers) for the new smartphone.

    A whopping 33.43 percent responded that they will buy the BlackBerry Z10 as soon as it is available, while 16.21 percent of respondents have plans to purchase the device in up to six months after sales start.

    The BlackBerry Z10 will be available “through all AT&T channels” beginning from March 22, 10 days after the pre-ordering went live. Will you be or are you one of the proud owners of a new BlackBerry Z10?

  • Surefire Predictions and Why Doomsayers are Wrong

    If you want certainty, here it is: my surefire predictions about the future. The next two Popes won’t be a woman. At least three more corporate executives will be fired for shady financial dealings. Despite best efforts, the proposed American Airlines-US Airways merger will hit points of turbulence.

    Everything else is up in the air.

    Forecasting is a dicey business in times of rapid change, especially when the predictions involve scary scenarios of gloom and doom. For example, take these recent dire predictions: Machines will steal all the jobs. Youth violence will grow. Aging populations will drain national resources. Democracy will disappear as power shifts to developing countries with authoritarian regimes where no one cares about voice and participation.

    Predictions like these assume a straight line from some problematic perturbations to disastrous conclusions — without any human intervention. They assume that everything we invent to solve one problem creates other, more serious problems (like those job-stealing computers), taking the law of unintended consequences to an extreme. They assume that people are helpless victims of powerful forces beyond their control. They assume that there are no counter-trends or embryonic developments.

    Why give the gloom-mongers that much attention? Why not make an opposite set of assumptions, that our most human characteristics — imagination, creativity — will appear in new guises to save ourselves, our jobs, and even democracy?

    Consider these plausible scenarios based on small but already-visible phenomena that might become big future trends:

    1. New enterprises, often led by rising generations, will fill gaps and plant seeds of hope. Teenagers will start social ventures to address nearly every concern — e.g., to raise awareness of carbon footprints, to get laws passed about emissions, to raise money to find a cure for cancer. Even pre-teens will participate, like the 9-year-old who started Katy’s Krops to grow vegetables to feed the homeless. In itself, that’s a sign that cities will become greener, as social entrepreneurs, supported by mayors, promote urban agriculture. Young scientists will invent energy-saving or health-promoting products, incubate new ventures while still in college, and sell them to markets eager for ways to control energy or health care costs. Innovative forms of financing, such as Kickstarter, will continue to grow, also invented by social entrepreneurs.

    2. Visual and performing arts will be resurgent, especially on the local level, and they will compete effectively with broadcast media and digital media. The arts are at the center of the next wave of revitalization in cities such as Miami, where big new performing arts facilities and museums accompany a lively new set of artists’ studios in a formerly bleak warehouse district. Designers will become even more valued members of product development and planning teams in every field. Connections will be forged between between tech start-ups and the arts, marrying two formerly isolated communities around apps, for example. The inherent exclusivity and uniqueness of live events will grow in importance as content can be accessed virtually — and virtual reach will increase demand for attendance at live events. Live performances will fuel economic booms; performers will make more money from merchandise sales at events than from albums, as Jazz Roots founder (and my friend) Larry Rosen observed. Machines like Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner, will do the dirty work while people do the emotional work, with the expressiveness of the arts.

    3. New alliances will be struck across the generations, and society will benefit. Aging baby boomers will balance golf with giving back, and they will want to join the rising generation in creating social ventures. For the young, these change-the-world efforts will ensure a better future and maybe enhance resumes; for those in their post-career days, social ventures are the focus of their next life stage and the legacy they want to create. Already the idea of encore careers is taking hold. At Harvard, the Advanced Leadership Initiative that I chair helps accomplished leaders transition from their income-earning years to their next years of service; among the many benefits are the partnerships they form with students. An aging population means that more experienced leaders live longer. That is an asset and societal resource. And when effectively put to work, these leaders are healthier; they can improve health care rather than drain resources.

    To be sure, there are problems and always will be — another surefire prediction. But as long as people populate the earth, we can solve them. Maybe we should sprinkle a few more of those seeds that built Katie’s Krops and top it off with a jazz concert. Rather than being victims of uncontrollable forces, we can use our imaginations and creativity to create the future.

  • Nuance targets enterprise IT with new voiceprint recognition technology

    Nuance Communications will put voice recognition in just about anything — smartphones, apps, cars, even TVs. Now it’s bringing speech interpretation to the enterprise IT department in the form of biometric identification.

    Nuance aims to automate what is an increasing headache for IT managers: resetting passwords on corporate computers or software. Anyone who has every worked for a big company is familiar with the situation – too many failed login attempts or letting a password expire suddenly locks you out of your laptop or email. The next step is a call to the IT help desk to get your account privileges reinstated and a temporary password issued.

    Nuance proposes to automate that identification process with a new service called FastReset, which allows an employee to authenticate their voice against a biometric print on file. The software can either be embedded directly into a Windows PC and accessed through the computer’s login screen or implemented externally, requiring an employee to call an automated system.

    While Nuance is most famous for providing the core natural language understanding technology behind Apple’s Siri, it’s been branching out into security as of late. Instead of trying to interpret words and meaning from the tremendous variety of human speech, it’s using the unique characteristics of each individual’s speech as a kind of vocal fingerprint. Nuance is already supporting similar technology in the consumer mobile market, using voice ID as a means of unlocking handsets.

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  • This startup’s new router sends bits at the speed of light

    Given our obsession with connectivity, wireline and wireless networks are taking a beating as some service providers struggle to bring their costs in line with their revenue. To address the fears of decreasing margins, the communications industry is experimenting with technologies such as OpenFlow and bigger routers and faster networking gear as an effort to help them lower their costs.

    Compass-EOS has been quietly working on these problems for six years and is now ready for its formal launch with a product aimed at the service providers’ core networks. The company has raised $120 million and spent more than half a decade developing a silicon-photonics-based router that would be faster, consume less power and is also more modular.

    Pitango Venture Capital, Benchmark Capital, Northbridge Venture Partners, Crescent Point, Cisco Systems, Comcast Ventures and T-Ventures have all backed the company, which is based in Milpitas, Calif., and Netanya, Israel.

    Routers are the workhorses of the internet. They determine where and how packets should travel around the web, and for years they’ve done this using specialty silicon that relied on electronic signals. But Compass-EOS’ technology is a new type of optical chip that allows the router to think at the speed of light — not at the speed of electrons.

    Compass-EOS r10004 RouterThe resulting box is faster, consumes less energy and takes up less space. All of these things will help network operators keep pumping more traffic over their infrastructure, especially as they deploying faster networks. After all, if routers are the brains of the operation, they need to speed up too.

    Optical chips are coming not just to the core of telco networks, but also to the data center as companies such as Intel, Cisco and IBM invest in photonics research, but also as startups like Plexxi and Skorpios, Kortura build chips and equipment that can process optical signals, as opposed to electric ones.

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  • Now Autonomy is under investigation for fraud in the U.K.

    The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has opened an investigation into Autonomy, the British data management firm that HP bought in 2011, much to its eventual regret. Autonomy’s accounting methods leading up to the sale are already being scrutinized by U.K. accountancy authorities — HP claims the firm inflated its figures ahead of the sale — but the involvement of the SFO is, as its name suggests, a much more serious matter.

    The SFO investigation was revealed in a filing that HP lodged with the U.S. SEC on Monday:

    “As a result of the findings of an ongoing investigation, HP has provided information to the U.K. Serious Fraud Office, the U.S. Department of Justice and the SEC related to the accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and misrepresentations at Autonomy that occurred prior to and in connection with HP’s acquisition of Autonomy. On November 21, 2012, representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice advised HP that they had opened an investigation relating to Autonomy. On February 6, 2013, representatives of the U.K. Serious Fraud Office advised HP that they had also opened an investigation relating to Autonomy. HP is cooperating with the three investigating agencies.”

    This whole matter is strange. HP’s anger was sparked by having to take a $5 billion write-down on the Autonomy deal roughly a year after it took place, not long after poor initial results saw Autonomy chief Mike Lynch jump ship. Lynch has protested his and his team’s innocence ever since, even setting up a blog to put forward his case.

    Just this month – so, after the SFO investigation was launched — Lynch was on stage at the London Web Summit repeating his assertion that HP has never fully explained what accounting improprieties the Autonomy team was supposed to have perpetrated.

    In that interview, Lynch suggested that HP’s problem was in its lack of strategy. He said erstwhile HP CEO Leo Apotheker bought Autonomy because he had understood the value of data, but HP had switched back to its previous hardware focus after defenestrating Apotheker and bringing in Meg Whitman as CEO. He also hinted that he and the former management of Autonomy had had no choice about the sale, due to the premium HP was offering.

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  • Nokia Lumia 720 and 520 available for pre-order in the UK

    Finnish phone manufacturer Nokia’s latest Window Phone 8 handsets, the mid-range Lumia 720 and the entry-level Lumia 520, will go on sale in the UK from the 1 April, but would-be purchasers can pre-order the devices now.

    Contract-free prices will vary slightly depending on the retailer (naturally). Clove will be selling the Lumia 520 for £169.99, while the Lumia 720 is priced at £299.99. Unlocked Mobiles has the Lumia 520 for £159.98 and the Lumia 720 for £294.98. For comparison, in the US the Lumia 520 costs $185 and the Lumia 720 $338, both before taxes.

    Both handsets were launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Lumia 520 boasts a 4-inch display, at a resolution of 800 by 480, and is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor. It comes with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.

    The 720 has a 4.3-inch display at 800 by 480 with a ClearBlack filter for better outdoors viewing. It has the same specs as its sibling, but boasts a rear 6.7-megapixel camera and a front-facing shooter with a 1.3-megapixel HD wide angle lens for taking better group shots.

    When Nokia announced the Lumia 720 it said the smartphone would initially only be available in the Asia Pacific market, so it’s good to see it coming to the UK so swiftly.

  • Samsung teases Galaxy S IV with first official image

    Samsung Galaxy S IV Teaser
    Samsung (005930) just can’t resist teasing us with the Galaxy S IV. The company has posted an image of a silhouetted device on its official Twitter account with a caption that reads, “The countdown for #TheNextBigThing has begun. Who’s ready for the Global Unpacked Event on March 14?” From a design perspective, the image shows a device that looks very similar to the Galaxy S III in terms of shape. In fact, the image teased on Samsung’s Twitter page looks a lot like the leaked images we saw yesterday that were purportedly of the Galaxy S IV, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Samsung sticks with the same design that brought it so much success over the past year.

  • More Bad News For Mobile Maker HTC As Haptics Company Immersion Applies To Restart Patent Litigation & Push For Damages

    htc-logo

    As if smartphone maker HTC doesn’t have enough to worry about in an Android space so saturated with Samsung-branded hardware it’s driving HTC’s sales back to 2010 levels. But now the Taiwanese company is facing the prospect of having to fork out for damages if haptics company Immersion gets its way. Immersion, which counts Samsung among the licensees for its “touch feedback technology”, had been content to stay a U.S. lawsuit against HTC — in order to wait for the completion of an International Trade Commission investigation into whether HTC has been infringing some of its patents. But, given HTC’s recent performance in the mobile space, Immersion has decided this strategy is no longer appropriate and today said it plans to ask for the stay of its lawsuit to be lifted — so that it “may prosecute its claim against HTC for damages immediately”.

    The ITC action was originally scheduled for “final determination” on October 28, 2013 — after which Immersion may have been able to secure an exclusion order against HTC preventing infringing devices being imported into the United States. But with HTC’s fortunes in the doldrums, Immersion reckons it can get a better outcome via the U.S. District Court route, where it can win damages, attorneys’ fees, and potentially injunctive relief.

    “Given HTC’s recent performance in the mobile market, we believe an exclusion order preventing HTC from importing infringing devices would no longer be an impactful win, and we are turning our energies to seeking damages for past and ongoing shipments of infringing devices,” noted Immersion CEO Victor Viegas in a statement.

    Immersion filed its original complaint against HTC (and also Motorola) with the ITC on February 7, 2012, alleging infringement of six U.S. patents relating to the use of haptics technology — namely: 6,429,846 (“the ’846 patent”); 7,592,999 (“the ’999 patent”); 7,969,288 (“the ’288 patent”); 7,982,720 (“the ’720 patent”); 8,031,181 (“the ’181 patent”); and 8,059,105 (“the ’105 patent”).

    A multi-year license for Immersion’s haptics technology signed by Samsung last week included a patent license covering “Samsung’s prior and future use of simple forms of haptic effects, sometimes referred to as Basic Haptics, in its smartphones and other mobile devices”, according to the company.

    Immersion, which was founded back in 1993, says it has more than 1,300 issued or pending patents in the U.S. and other countries.

  • Reuters – WhaleShark Media Changes Name to RetailMeNot

    Online coupon company WhaleShark Media said it was changing its name to RetailMeNot and acquiring the leading online coupon site in Holland, Actiepangina.nl, Reuters reported. The acquisition marks RetailMeNot’s fourth in Europe, in addition to online-coupon companies VoucherCodes in the United Kingdom; Poulpeo in France; and Deals.com in Germany.

    (Reuters) – Online coupon company WhaleShark Media said it was changing its name to RetailMeNot and acquiring the leading online coupon site in Holland, Actiepangina.nl.

    The acquisition marks RetailMeNot’s fourth in Europe, in addition to online-coupon companies VoucherCodes in the United Kingdom; Poulpeo in France; and Deals.com in Germany.

    The company did not disclose the dollar amount of the latest deal, but a person familiar with the matter said Actiepangina cost under $10 million.

    Bankers consider RetailMeNot a likely initial public offering candidate for late 2013.

    Unlike companies like Groupon, known for working with small companies to provide one-off discounts, RetailMeNot works with larger companies to create online coupons that give smaller discounts, but more regularly. The model is closer to the traditional clipped coupon.

    The post Reuters – WhaleShark Media Changes Name to RetailMeNot appeared first on peHUB.

  • Samsung teases the next Galaxy (again) with a pic of the GS III

    As if the hype surrounding the next Galaxy flagship was not enough, after a couple of teasers Samsung released yet another one on Tuesday with a picture showing what appears to be the new Galaxy S IV. Well, is it?

    Samsung asked us “Who’s ready for the Global Unpacked Event on March 14?”, but if that’s what “the next big thing” looks like, count me out. All the blogs were raving today with big headlines suggesting that Samsung actually released a teaser showing the Galaxy S IV in a shadowy background, when in fact the device in question is the plain old Galaxy S III bar the headphone grill and likely surrounding sensors and front-facing camera.

    Of course, we don’t really know what the next Galaxy smartphone looks like (yes, there are leaked photos, but being leaked don’t make them real), but judging by the design of previous iterations it’s unlikely that the company will simply slap a different badge on a current flagship and sell it as the successor.

    Samsung could just as well take the Apple route and slightly tweak the Galaxy S IV to look similar to its predecessor, like the fruit logo company did with the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S. That would certainly fit in line with the device from the teaser photo, but it seems unlikely that it would be a 1:1 reproduction with the same curvatures and overall look of the top half.

    What we do know for certain is Samsung has got us talking again about a product that has not yet been released. If that’s what the company had in mind, then it certainly succeeded.

  • Motorbikes and marathons: new ideas for providing healthcare

    My name is Thomas Baylem and I work on the Education and Partnerships Team as part of the DFID graduate scheme. On 14th April, I’ll be running the Brighton Marathon to raise as much money as I can to support Riders for Health’s vital work in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Last weekend, being the good grandson that I am, I visited my 94-year-old Gran out in the Essex countryside and naturally I took advantage of the chance to do some serious running away from commuters, traffic lights and tempting odours emanating from fast food restaurants.

    I think it must have been around kilometre number 46 of the weekend that I suddenly realised the irony of my endeavour. It was just barely above zero degrees and, of course, I’d only packed some shorts and a t-shirt, so I was probably more or less hypothermic by this point. To compound my suffering, I was caked in thick mud from the waist up from when I had been forced to dive into a deep ditch about an hour earlier to avoid an oncoming Landrover that seemed determined to run me over. Freezing, hungry and starting to cramp up, I thought…why don’t they give me a motorbike?

    Yes, I essentially intend to travel 42.195 kilometres on foot to help Riders for Health make sure health workers providing essential medical care in rural sub-Saharan Africa don’t have to.

    A health worker with Riders for Health speaks to a mother and child. Photo: Riders for Health

    Riders for Health provide vehicles (usually motorcycles) to health workers in some of the poorest parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, which enables them to deliver vital health care directly to communities on a reliable and cost-effective basis.

    But what’s really impressive is that they also provide training on how to maintain and repair the vehicles and build the capacity of their partners who gradually take on financial responsibility for maintaining the system. It’s a really effective model that generates a sustainable improvement in health service access.

    Riders for Health train health workers to maintain their vehicles, gradually giving them the responsibility for their upkeep. Photo: Riders for Health.

    DFID supports Riders for Health through the UK Aid Match scheme and pledged to match all funds raised through the charity’s recent “Two Wheel Appeal,” pound for pound. Following the enormous success of the appeal, this additional funding has enabled Riders to significantly expand programmes in Zambia and Kenya and mobilise more health workers than would otherwise have been possible.

    If nothing else, my marathon training has proven the necessity of what Riders for Health do. After a heavy week of running in which I covered about 90km in total, I arrived at work on Monday sore and physically exhausted. However, the average mobilised health worker travels 250km a week without even breaking a sweat, providing a crucial lifeline to rural communities in the process.

    I’ll be writing an occasional blog here to update on my training progress and talk more about the charity I’m fundraising for. You can also follow my progress via Twitter or Facebook.

     

     

  • Sponsored post: U.K. at the heart of mobile content

    Mobile content is a great example of the U.K.’s growing international reputation for high-tech innovation. The overall U.K. mobile content market is worth some $1.6 billion each year. This is an irresistible draw for overseas investors.

    Lucrative opportunities exist across the board. The U.K. app market, for example, is currently valued at $720 million, while the number of smartphones in the U.K. is expected to double to around 64 million by 2015. Mobile advertising is growing by over 200 percent, while the U.K. mobile internet services market, worth $620 million, is expected to rise to over $1.5 billion by 2015. Furthermore, the rollout of 4G across the U.K.’s main cities will complement our already expansive Wi-Fi network.

    To succeed in the mobile content market, companies are realizing that they require experienced content developers, with tested design and interaction skills, as well as good partnerships across traditional and new media sectors. Home to all the world’s largest media platform and content players, the U.K. is uniquely positioned to take the lead in this area.

    Supported by world-class high-tech talent and an early-adopter consumer market, innovation is at the heart of the U.K.’s fast-growing mobile content industry. Our ambitious companies, many of which are still small and in the early stages of growth, realize that creative forward thinking is an essential ingredient of commercial success. It’s a vibrant and dynamic community, and one that offers great inward investment potential.

    –Tony Hughes, business sector specialist, UK Trade & Investment

    To find out more visit here.

  • Chinese Version Of Samsung Galaxy S IV Apparently Captured In Hands-On Video

    galaxy s iv leak video

    After yesterday’s photos posted to a Chinese forum of a device claimed to be the Samsung Galaxy S IV, a video of what looks like the same device has landed on YouTube —  again purporting to be the sequel to Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III. As with the leaked photos, the video was spotted by SammyHub. The video shows a large handset, initially with the back off and the battery removed, before the battery is inserted, the plastic back snapped on and the phone turned on. As it boots up, it displays Chinese carrier China Unicom’s Wo logo before loading what appears to be a version of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.

    The design of the device looks very similar to the Galaxy S III, with a high gloss plastic casing — tallying with other S IV reports – and metallic looking bands around the edges. The physical home button is present and correct, below a screen that looks longer than the S III’s pane — in keeping with rumours that Samsung is upping the touchscreen inch count to 5 inches (from the 4.8 inch pane on the S III). A five inch screen will push Samsung’s flagship handset into phablet territory, alongside Samsung’s Galaxy Note range.

    The demo of the device goes on to showcase the camera function, the dialler and the settings menu — including the about page (in Chinese) which shows it’s apparently running Android 4.2.1 (Jelly Bean). In the background of the video, another video can be heard (and briefly seen reflected in the device’s screen) running Apple’s iPad Mini promo — doubtless to suggest that the Galaxy S IV is hoping to tread on the mini iOS tablet’s toes.

    As with all such leaks, it’s not possible to confirm whether this is the real deal — although, being a video, it’s certainly more elaborate than many of the blurry leaked photos that crop up online ahead of flagship product releases. Either way, Galaxy fans don’t have long to wait as Samsung is due to unveil the real deal at an event in New York on Thursday.

    Update: For a bona fide glimpse of the real deal, Samsung’s US Twitter account tweeted the following graphic, ahead of Thursday’s event:

  • Politico hits 1,000 Pro subscriptions and plans to launch a magazine

    Over a thousand organizations are now using subscription site Politico Pro, the politics website announced Tuesday. Politico says the site reaches 7,000 professionals per month and has a renewal rate of 96 percent.

    Politico launched Politico Pro in February 2011; while it was originally aimed at individual subscribers, Pro quickly switched its focus to the group subscriptions that now make up the vast majority of its base. Pro offers some subscriber-only articles, early access to morning newsletters, customizable instant alerts and other perks. Pro started out covering energy, health care and technology and added more coverage areas — defense, financial services, tax and transportation — last year. Starting this month, Pro subscribers can also receive an afternoon policy newsletter called Pro Report.

    In an attempt to drive more Pro subscriptions, Politico is launching a free quarterly print magazine that will feature past Pro coverage. On March 22, it will be delivered to “every member of Congress, the White House and all federal agencies as well as to 160 newspaper boxes and 100 Washington-area Starbucks.”

    Politico is tight-lipped on what a subscription to Pro actually costs. Subscription fees vary based on the type of organization (government, nonprofit and so on) and how many employees it has, as well as the number of coverage areas an organization wants. Nieman Journalism Lab reported last year that an individual subscription starts at $3,295 a year, with group memberships starting at $8,000 for five people and one coverage area.

    Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Morning Advantage: You Can Still Tweet When You’re Dead

    Want to send a message from the great beyond? There’s an app for that. Lizzy Duffy at NPR reports on several services that will maintain your online presence for you long after you’re dead and gone. DeadSoci.al, which launched at SXSW last week, is a service that will stash away future-dated Facebook or Twitter posts for after your death, so you can continue to send well-wishes for special occasions, or keep some long-running joke running even longer. _LivesOn (your social afterlife) is a service that learns your social media habits, and then predicts what you would like or tweet if you were alive — and does it for you. Their tag line? “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” A Facebook app called if i die lets you create a video or text message (your last words, a long-kept secret, an old score you wanted to settle, or some valuable advice, for example) that will only be published after you die. Duffy offers readers her condolences in advance: May you tweet in peace.

    TIME FOR TIME BUDGETS?

    Executive Time Isn’t the Infinite Resource That Companies Assume It Is (McKinsey Quarterly)

    Just 52% of executives surveyed worldwide say the way they spend their time fits well with their organizations’ strategic priorities. What’s more, nearly half of these leaders acknowledge that they aren’t concentrating sufficiently on guiding the strategic direction of the business, write McKinsey’s Frankki Bevins and Aaron De Smet. This suggests that time challenges aren’t just a major hassle for executives but are hurting business performance too. The problem, Bevins and De Smet say, is that companies don’t treat executive time as the precious resource it really is. Too often, new projects are heaped on “day jobs.” Companies should establish “time budgets” for priority initiatives, the writers say. — Andy O’Connell

    SEEING INTO THE FUTURE

    A 1936 Insight About Technology Was Prescient (Nature)

    Before there was Moore’s Law predicting the exponential fall in the cost of manufacturing a transistor, there was Wright’s Law: Aeronautical engineer Theodore Wright, having noticed that the cost of airplanes fell as the number of planes manufactured rose, proposed in 1936 that the cost of making planes was proportional to the inverse of the number of planes manufactured raised to some power. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT recently tested Wright’s Law and found that it described the trajectories of numerous modern technologies over a span of decades. Moore’s Law did almost as well, they found, implying that Moore’s Law applies to many industries, not just computers. What does all this prove? That the more we make stuff, the better and more efficient we get at making it. — Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Airing of the Grievances

    How Frustrated Are Small Business Owners With Washington? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
    When People Write for Free, Who Pays? (Gawker)
    Google Is Working on a Talking Shoe (Business Insider)

  • NoteTab Light gives you what Windows doesn’t

    Notepad is such a horribly basic editor that there’s now a host of more powerful alternatives, all competing for your attention. But if you’ve sampled these then you’ll know that they’re often complex, aimed at programmers, and not so useful to people who don’t need Perl syntax highlighting, 18 clipboards, or whatever other high-end options they’re offering.

    NoteTab Light, fortunately, takes a more mid-range approach. It has plenty of advanced features, it’s very configurable (the Options dialog splits its many settings across 17 tabs), but is also easy to learn, and you’ll quickly feel at home.

    Launch the program, for instance, and it displays Readme.txt, WhatsNew.txt and templates files in separate tabs. And so browsing through these not only provides useful information on the program, but also gives you a basic feel for how the interface works.

    Check out the menus and you’ll find a nicely judged editing engine. It has plenty of functionality: you can drag and drop text selections; sort, split and join lines; indent and align text; create bulleted and numbered lists; run Find and Replace operations with regular expression support, and more. But it’s also not as overwhelming as some of the more developer-oriented tools can be, and you may actually feel like you’ll use most of the features (one day, anyway).

    It’s a similar story with the HTML functions. An HTML-CSS library displays all the important tags; double-click these, a dialog appears (when necessary) to help you configure them properly, and the code is automatically wrapped around the selected text.

    There’s also a neat Document to HTML feature, where you can create or open a text document, then have NoteTab Light add an HTML header, line breaks, paragraph tags and everything you need to transform it into a web page.

    Extras like HTML Tidy integration help to clean up your code. But again, while these aren’t aimed at beginners, they’re not overly complex, either. You’ll quickly get a feel for how everything works.

    And there are plenty of interesting and more general editing options available. Like built-in expression evaluation (enter 2.481^3= , press Ctrl+E and the solution will be inserted for you). Tools to automatically capture text as it’s pasted to the clipboard, and insert it into documents. And a series of Clipbook Libraries to automatically correct text, download and edit files from remote FTP servers, create websites with Twitter’s Bootstrap framework, and more.

    NoteTab Light does also have one or two restrictions (it’s the free version of a commercial tool, and the developers are hoping you’ll upgrade). The most notable issue is probably that you only have a single level of Undo. But it also has no spell checker, URL highlighting (in plain text files), or syntax highlighting.

    On the plus side, though, NoteTab Light has no adware, no nag screens or other marketing annoyances. It’s free for personal or commercial use, and has no major dependencies on .NET or anything else, so runs happily on anything from Windows 98 through to Windows 8. And it’s both powerful and usable, an awkward balancing act to pull off, but in our view the program gets it just right.

    Photo Credit: SueC/Shutterstock

  • Software-defined storage stays hot as SwiftStack gets $6.1M

    Software-defined storage vendor SwiftStack has taken on $6.1 million in Series A venture funding, giving more momentum to the movement to make object storage in the data center more flexible.

    Mayfield Fund led the round, bringing the total raised to $7.6 million and enabling San Francisco-based SwiftStack to add employees and further build out its software.

    Software like SwiftStack’s, which can run on hardware inside a company’s data centers and in private clouds, offers the public cloud’s advantage of easy and quick scalability inside private clouds, similar to what Amazon Web Services uses to power its S3 public-cloud storage product. It works with OpenStack Swift.

    A handful of other software-defined storage startups with varying specialties have taken on venture capital in recent months including ScaleIO, Convergent.io and Nutanix. Last month Jeda Networks, a company that wants to move storage around the data center using virtualized networks, said it had raised venture capital, too.

    SwiftStack thinks it can stand out in the software-defined storage space by catering its product to the needs of companies developing web, mobile and as-a-service applications, CEO Joe Arnold said. Those types of companies can benefit from being able to easily distribute storage on commodity hardware during usage and enrollment peaks.

    Don’t expect the area to fade into the background. Navin Chaddha, managing director of the Mayfield Fund told me he thinks “it is the beginning of an era” for software-defined storage as a whole.

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  • Zero-Sustainment Aircraft for the U.S. Air Force: A Workshop Summary

    Final Book Now Available

    Overall Air Force weapon system sustainment (WSS) costs are growing at more than 4 percent per year, while budgets have remained essentially flat. The cost growth is due partly to aging of the aircraft fleet, and partly to the cost of supporting higher-performance aircraft and new capabilities provided by more complex and sophisticated systems, such as the latest intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. Furthermore, the expectation for the foreseeable future is that sustainment budgets are likely to decrease, so that the gap between budgets and sustainment needs will likely continue to grow wider. Most observers accept that the Air Force will have to adopt new approaches to WSS if it is going to address this problem and remain capable of carrying out its missions.

    In this context, the original intent of this 3-day workshop was to focus on ways that science and technology (S&T) could help the Air Force reduce sustainment costs. However, as the workshop evolved, the discussions focused more and more on Air Force leadership, management authority, and culture as the more critical factors that need to change in order to solve sustainment problems. Many participants felt that while S&T investments could certainly help–particularly if applied in the early stages (“to the left”) of the product life cycle–adopting a transformational management approach that defines the user-driven goals of the enterprise, empowers people to achieve them, and holds them accountable, down to the shop level. Several workshop participants urged Air Force leaders to start the process now, even though it will take years to percolate down through the entire organization. These sustainment concerns are not new and have been studied extensively, including recent reports from the National Research Council’s Air Force Studies Board and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

    [Read the full report]

    Topics: Conflict and Security Issues | Engineering and Technology

  • Apple reportedly threatened by Samsung’s Sharp investment

    Samsung Sharp Investment Analysis
    News of Samsung’s (005930) strategic investment in Sharp emerged last week, and it looks like there maybe be some added benefits for Samsung beyond strengthening its relationship with the struggling panel maker. According to market analysis firm Trefis, Samsung’s $110 million investment in Sharp is also a dirt cheap way for the South Korean company to apply pressure to Apple (AAPL), which it says is threatened by Samsung’s move.

    Continue reading…