Category: News

Brooklyn-based Aereo lets subscribers watch and record over-the-air TV anywhere they go on computers, iPhones or iPads. The service is available for now in New York City but will soon be unveiled in dozens more cities across the country for $1 a day or $8 a month.

Media attention to the service has focused primarily on the legal dispute between Aereo and TV broadcasters who have tried, and so far failed, to shut it down. The legal controversy is real but also overshadows the implications of the service for TV viewing and the technological wizardry that makes Aereo work.

To get a better idea of just how Aereo is serving up TV, we went to the company’s plant in Brooklyn to get some up-close photos. Here’s our tour:

From the Empire State Building to your iPhone

Aereo transmits from the top floor of a nondescript government building on Vanderbilt Avenue on the edge of downtown Brooklyn. You can see it on the right: 

Aereo chose this location for a reason. The floor on which it operates has a direct line of sight to they city’s biggest transmission tower. Here’s a picture of the tower and the view from Aereo’s window:

These direct sight lines make it easy for Aereo to pick up the powerful signals emitted from over-the-air broadcast services like ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and local community stations. Aereo’s technology then transcodes and relays those signals to its customers who can watch TV, change channels and record shows with their phones or iPads:

Tiny antennas for everyone in the city

Aereo works by letting every subscriber rent a pair of tiny antennas. Customers get two antennas so that they can watch live TV while also recording a show or, alternately, to watch live TV on two different devices at the same time. While Aereo created the personal antenna system as a way to comply with copyright rules (you can read about the legal issues here), the antennas themselves are remarkable in that they give Aereo the capacity to serve 1 million New York City customers from the single floor in Brooklyn and an adjoining rooftop.

Here’s a close up look of the dime-sized antennas in action:

Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia explained that the device is a simple copper antenna but that, rather than picking up the entire TV spectrum like a typical cable antenna, it picks up only the 6 megahertz block of spectrum that a viewer wants to see at a given time. He describes it as a “switched antenna” that’s beautiful in its simplicity. The ingenuity, Kanojia said, is that Aereo’s 1.5 inch antenna changes its electrical and magnetic characteristics in order to replicate the tasks of a standard 35 inch UFH and three foot VHF antennas.

The size of the antenna allows Aereo to cram many of them into a small space which is one reason Aereo is able to relay TV to so many people at the same time. Another reason is that the antennas are “multitenant” which means that, when one Aereo subscribers is not using an antenna at a given time, it is available to all other subscribers.

Cheap storage and high-performance fiber

Aereo relies on the antenna system to offer a cheap TV services that subscribers can easily add or drop at any time. But the antenna is only part of the equation. To make the service economically viable, Aereo is also capitalizing on major advances in transcoding technology and cloud storage. It is these advances that now make it affordable for Aereo to translate the over-the-air TV signals into iPhone video streams and to let people store hours of television on remote servers.

According to Kanojia, commercial transcoding costs per stream would have been $8,000 per customer two years ago but now the company can do it for under $20 (these figures relate to capital expenditures, not monthly costs). He also notes that a terabyte of storage, which once cost over $1 million, can now be had for under $100. The new efficiency, he said, is not just in raw storage capacity but better spindle speeds on hard drives that improve transmission times.

Here is a look at Kanojia standing in front of Aereo’s proprietary transcoding devices and a close-up of the servers which act as a private cloud service and on which Aereo customers store thousands of hours of TV to watch later:

To connect the antenna system with the transcoding and recording devices, Aereo relies on multiple 10 gigabit fiber links that look like this:

Aereo also relies on leased fiber networks in different spots around New York City to deliver TV content to its subscribers. This system means it doesn’t have to rely on content delivery networks or other middlemen.

“What’s the point of long-hauling something when you’re already 80 percent there?. There’s no CDN’s. It’s a local to local product,” said Kanojia.

Next: the man who would break the cable industry

Aereo wants to overturn the current TV business model in which viewers shell a hundred dollars for a bundle of channels, many of which they don’t want to watch. Aereo’s challenge comes by way of its technology but also in the form of Kanojia himself, who is picking a fight that many have lost before (iCravetv, ivi, etc) — and is so far holding his own. Tomorrow, we will be writing about Kanojia and his vision for the future of television.

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It makes sense to call Yandex Russia’s answer to Google, because it’s doing all sorts of interesting things with data and in mobile. And of course, like Google, Yandex’s core business is in search.

And it seems to be doing surprisingly well in that field. In fact, according to the latest comScore qSearch data covering the end of last year, Yandex has definitely now overtaken Microsoft in search, measured on a worldwide basis.

That actually first showed up in November’s stats, when Yandex processed 4.62 billion search requests to Microsoft’s 4.48 billion requests, but that meant each had roughly 2.6 percent share, and with such things you want to see a continuing trend. Sure enough, in December 2012 Yandex handled 4.84 billion requests (2.8 percent share) and Microsoft 4.48 billion (2.5 percent share). It’s a trend.

By way of comparison, Google is still thrashing everyone else, handling 114.73 billion requests in the same month for a 65.2 percent market share. China’s Baidu is next with 14.5 billion (8.2 percent), then Yahoo with 8.63 billion (4.9 percent). Yeah, I know Bing powers Yahoo search, but we’re talking about those consciously searching through what comScore terms “Microsoft sites” here — some of that will be searches through Office and Windows Live, but most will be explicitly through Bing itself.

The weird thing about the stats is the number of unique searchers — for December, Microsoft had 268.6 million of them, and Yandex just 74.4 million. Here we need to bear in mind that language is a factor. In English-speaking countries for example, people may use a variety of search engines when they’re not using Google, the clear market leader. In Russia, Yandex has more than 60 percent of the search market, and people who use it probably just use it a lot on average.

Then there’s the fact that Russia’s internet market is growing really quickly, and so is the market in Turkey – another key country for Yandex.

Whatever the reasons, Microsoft is now down to fifth place in the global search stats, at least according to comScore’s data.

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I’ll be frank: Causata’s marketing software is a little creepy in the level of personal data it collects and analyzes, but it also seems very good at what it does. Good enough for the company to close a $7.5 million Series C round from Accel Partners in December, bringing its total funding to $23 million (all from Accel) since launching in 2009. It’s latest wrinkle: machine-learning algorithms that automatically figure out which campaigns are most likely to work on what customers.

If you’re not familiar with Causata, it’s a true big-data application dedicated solely to stitching together customer identities so marketers know what they want. It collects first-party data — cookies, email addresses, usernames, site activity, customer service phone calls and everything it can, really — and stuffs it into an event store, from where users can run predictive algorithms against the data. Because it takes in such a wide variety of data, Causata stores everything in HBase, the NoSQL database that sits atop the Hadoop Distributed File System and is designed with such unstructured or semi-structured data in mind.

Previously, though, as VP of Marketing Brian Stone explained to me, analytics and predictive modeling within Causata were solely an offline function. Analysts used R, Tableau, Qliktech, plain SQL or their data-analysis tool of choice in order to work thr0ugh data, learn who’s who among customers and then ultimately build their models. With the new machine-learning capabilities, the system is always looking at how companies are targeting consumers and how those consumers are behaving, and then generating models to predict how certain actions might influence behavior one or even many steps down the line.

Once the data analysts figure out who’s who and how particular microsegments are likely to respond to particular actions, the marketing team can put these models to work in their existing platforms for placing advertising, surfacing offers or whatever other methods they might use to try and reach consumers.

About that personal data …

Any time we’re talking about personal data, though, a certain subset of consumers is likely to get creeped out — and rightfully so. It comes down to that now well-known tradeoff between how much we value personalization and how much we value privacy. Not surprisingly, Stone says he’s open to advertising when it’s “personalized, timely, relevant and intelligent.” If his bank didn’t “continually misfire” in trying to make him loan offers that don’t match his situation — something they should know based on his account information, online banking and site activity — he might actually be willing to take it up on an offer.

Besides, he noted, the only time a human being (at least using Causata’s software) would ever really have reason to look at personal-level data is during troubleshooting or when trying to figure out better methods for segmenting customers. Ideally, this is by activity-based data such as price-consciousness or loyalty rather than classical demographic data such as age, sex or race. But in terms of actual ads or offers served, the system clocks your activity, runs a predictive analysis against your identity profile and returns a result in well under a second.

This happens to be the same method, or at least a similar method, undertaken every time we see personalized ads online: No human being is sitting around, looking at our data and deciding we need hemorrhoid cream.

Given the amount of digital data we’re contractually giving away every time we use surf the web or use our smartphones, combined with the number of companies out there trying to help marketers make sense of it, the personalization genie probably isn’t going back into its bottle. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with IBM Fellow and overall identity-data genius Jeff Jonas nearly three years ago. He explained his theory on how extensive data tracking will ultimately lead to a surveillance society but we’ll love it because we love optimization. “It’s seemingly irresistible to us,” he said.

When someone actually gets targeted advertising right, maybe it will be.

To learn more about machine learning, privacy, Hadoop and everything else driving the discussion around big data, come to our Structure: Data event March 20-21 in New York.

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On Sunday evening, Anonymous leaked over 4,000 banker profiles it claimed to have stolen from the federal reserve. The information contained names, addresses, IP addresses, hashed passwords and other sensitive information. Now the federal reserve has confirmed the hack, but says no “critical functions” were affected.

ZDNet reports that the Federal Reserve sent out notices to affected individuals earlier this week confirming an intrusion on their system. In a statement to Reuters, a spokesperson said the Federal Reserve was “aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a Web site vendor product.” The vulnerability was reportedly fixed, and should cause no more problems in the future.

Of course, that doesn’t fix the fact that a list containing the personal data of over 4,000 bankers is still floating around the Internet. The Federal Reserve downplayed the hack by telling those affected that their passwords were not compromised. That’s technically true, but there’s still cause for concern.

Speaking to ZDNet, Jon Waldman, a senior information security consultant for financial institutions, said the hashed passwords included in the leak could be easily decrypted by hackers. The list which contained the information is no longer on the original hacked Alabama Web site, but it’s reportedly being hosted on a Chinese Web site for hackers to get a hold of. Waldman says the existence of this information means that banking executives “will be specific targets of Social Engineering and hacking attacks.”

It remains to be seen if any of the leaked information has led to attacks on individual banks. Waldman certainly thinks they’re at risk, but you would hope that banks would be wary of any attempts to solicit info after this latest attack.

We’ll continue to follow the exploits of Anonymous in #OpLastResort. It doesn’t appear that the hacktivist collective is done just yet, and likely has more attacks planned in the coming weeks.

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Robin Sachs, who played the mortal enemy of Watcher Rupert Giles on “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, has died of undisclosed causes. He was 61 years old.

Sachs enjoyed a long career in the entertainment industry, which began in 1972 and included roles in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and on the television shows “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Babylon 5″. He also did voice work for several popular video games, such as Mass Effect 2 and 3 and the Resident Evil series. Sachs enjoyed the sci-fi genre and his passion for it can be seen in many of the roles he chose.

Few details are available at this time regarding his death, but sources say he did pass away last Friday. A note was posted on his website and is being used as the official statement.

“This is a post we never thought we would have to write…

It is with great sadness that we have to announce the sudden and unexpected passing of Robin Sachs.

Please join us in raising a glass to Robin – goodbye, dear friend. Thank you for all the laughter and the cookies. We will miss you so very much.

Di, Sharon and everyone at robinsachs.com”

When you think about a “connected car,” you probably think of fancy car stereos that can play songs from  your smartphone. But the connected car is evolving into something much more complex. In the next couple of years, automakers like Ford, GM, BMW and Honda will be pushing way beyond the dashboard to connect our cars in all kinds of new ways. Our cars won’t just be connected to our phones and the internet, but to other cars and even the highway itself.

And automakers aren’t the only ones vying for a piece of the connected car of the future. Carriers see the car as the next big device on their networks, while device makers like Apple and technology developers like Nuance Communications want to ditch the whole concept of a dashboard screen and replace it with a system of voice-activated commands. When that happens, we’ll be able not only to dictate emails while driving– we’ll be able to program our home TVs from the car, too.

But building a connected car presents some unusual challenges. For one, if carmakers don’t pick the right technology, they can be handcuffed for years. The planning for a new car starts years before it hits the showrooms, and carmakers then have to continue to support those technologies for as long as their customers are driving those vehicles.  If they make a bad technology bet, carmakers can be living with the consequences for a long time.

Another challenge: Open development platforms have allowed companies like Google and Apple to thrive, but carmakers can’t fully take advantage of that movement: For safety reasons, they can’t just give developers access to, say, the engine — they need to have some restrictions.

Hover over the yellow buttons to see how we at GigaOM see the connected car evolving in the coming years:

Image map by Rani Molla

Click here for a text version. 

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Facebook has just announced Developers Live, a new destination (in the form of a Facebook app) that allows developers to keep up with all of the latest news.

Facebook says that it will be “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.”

Developers Live will also feature tutorials and other speaking sessions – both live and recorded. There will also be interactive broadcasts at some point down the line.

Here’s more on what Facebook will offer on the new video channel:

• Mobile developers will learn how to go deeper and grow their apps with Facebook
• Game developers will learn how to build better games across web and mobile
• Websites and publishers will learn how to use Facebook to drive traffic

The new video channel was announced on Facebook’s Developer Blog, which up until now has been to premier destination for developers to learn about the happenings in Facebook land. You can head on over to the Developers Live app today, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there yet.

The first live event will take place on February 19th and will feature Director of Product Doug Purdy. You can register for that event here.

Astronomers this week published a new study that estimates six percent of red dwarf stars may have Earth-sized planets orbiting within their “habitable zone” – the area around a star in which liquid water can exist on the surface of an orbiting body. Since many stars close to our solar system are red dwarfs, astronomers say an Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away.

“We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet.,” said Courtney Dressing, lead author of the paper and an astronomer at Harvard University. “Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted.”

The research, to be published published in The Astrophysical Journal, came from data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. 95 planet candidates orbiting 64 red dwarf stars were analyzed, and three of them were found to be smaller than twice the size of earth and orbiting in their stars’ habitable zone.

“We don’t know if life could exist on a planet orbiting a red dwarf, but the findings pique my curiosity and leave me wondering if the cosmic cradles of life are more diverse than we humans have imagined,” said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Though the planets may be similar to Earth in some ways, the nature of a red dwarf system could mean they are very different in others. Since the habitable zone of a red dwarf is closer to those stars than our own, planets within that zone would be more susceptible to solar flares. Also, such planets would likely be very old and tidally locked to their star, leaving one side of the planet in perpetual darkness. Astronomers suggest, however, that a thick atmosphere could counteract these effects, and that such stresses could even help life evolve.

“You don’t need an Earth clone to have life,” said Dressing.

(Image courtesy D. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

“Dog with human face” isn’t something you hear everyday (unless it’s a photoshopped meme), but when a photo of a dog with soulful eyes hit Buzzfeed recently, it went viral.

Turns out the pup’s name is Tonik and he hails from a kill shelter in Kentucky, where he was rescued by the Homeward Bound Animal Welfare Group in Indiana. Authorities there say he’s a sweet-natured boy who gets along well with other dogs, and they’re hoping to find someone to adopt him.

For info on how to meet or adopt Tonik, contact Homeward Bound.

Twitter has just announced some search and discovery updates to their iOS and Android apps as well as mobile.twitter.com that they say will help users “better find what’s most important to you when you’re on the go.”

What they’ve done is tweaked their discovery and search functions to provide a single steam of information – tweets, users, activity, trends. According to Twitter, it will all be in one place now.

The Discover tab now aggregates all kinds of activity into one stream on both iOS and Android. Twitter has also added the ability to access activity and trends from the top of the Discover tab.

Search has been updated in a similar fashion:

“Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet,” says Twitter.

Twitter has also updated the @connect tab, which now defaults to showing all types of interactions. You can go into your settings and set the default to simply show @mentions if that’s what you want.

Also, they changed the way the apps manage links to outside sites. If you click on a URL inside a tweet, you now go directly to the site no matter where you are in the Twitter app. Before, you would have to tap the tweet as a whole, go to and expanded view, and then click on the outside link to be directed out.

Twitter says that the updates should be available in both the App Store and Google Play, but as of the writing of this article neither seem to be available yet. We’ll let you know when they drop.

Police are saying that a tragic shooting in Denver today which left one adult and two children dead may have been a murder-suicide committed by a mother.

While details are still coming in, it has been reported that the children were under the age of ten. A third child, believed to be two years old, was rushed to surgery. The child’s father allegedly spoke to 911 operators and was hysterical while relaying the incident.

Officers are still investigating the events that led up to the shooting after responding early this morning. One witness–a neighbor–said he heard a gunshot around five a.m. before a vehicle sped down the street, but investigators say they don’t believe an outside party is involved.

“It appears to be an isolated incident. We are talking to people, we are now talking to witnesses, but we have no indication that there is a shooter out there on the loose in Denver,” Lt. Matt Murray said.

Detectives are sympathetic to a neighborhood in shock and ask for patience while they sort out the details.

“I would ask that we all keep those involved — those that are going to be faced with this horrible tragedy — in our thoughts,” Denver Police Chief Robert White said.

Image: KMGH-TV

Earlier today a story popped up on the popular gaming website Edge Magazine that cites “sources with first-hand experience of Microsoft’s next generation console”. That, of course, immediately raises red flags, but it has not stopped many news sites and blogs from running with the information contained in the “leak”. There is a lot of information in the post, but one particular piece caught big attention and is viral.

That is a claim that “Microsoft’s next console will require an Internet connection in order to function, ruling out a second-hand game market for the platform”. If true, that would be a disaster for customers and cause the company a public relations nightmare on a massive scale.

Currently customers, when tiring of a game, have the option to sell or trade it for store credit at multiple game stores around the country and the internet. This is not a black market either, but a legitimate source of revenue for retail outlets like Amazon, Game Stop, Best Buy and more. Not only would such restriction hurt customers but businesses as well.

Trading in albums, CDs, DVDs and games that are no longer wanted is a time-honored tradition. It is a win-win for two people — the one tired of the content and the one hungry to get it and looking for a deal. The practice is a source of entertainment for students who in many cases cannot afford the much higher price of buying new.

Of course we have absolutely no way of knowing if any of this is true. For now it remains in the wait-and-see category. However, if Microsoft chooses to implement the plan then here are two things I expect.

1. The company feels pressured by gaming studios that, like the MPAA and RIAA, live in fear of losing revenue to piracy or, in this case, two people being able to play one copy of a game. This is a bit ridiculous given that piracy will continue to take place and my friends can still stop by to play Call of Duty.

2. Microsoft will face a full-fledged revolt. And that uprising will not come from just its customers but also from retailers that profit from this market.

Let me stress one more time that we really do not know if this development will come to pass, but if it turns out to be true then it would likely be a nightmare for Microsoft, retailers and customers alike. Only time will tell.

BetaNews rarely jumps on rumor stories, but understands such restriction would affect many of our readers, who by voicing their opinions now could change Microsoft’s plans (if there are any).

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

Departing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently urged his China leadership not to pursue an urbanization policy that neglects the needs and wants of China’s significant rural population. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Wen underscored how important it would be for China “to consistently apply scientific principles, to steadily push forward targeted policies, and to coordinate with rural modernization and the establishment of a new countryside.” Wen also remarked that China, “cannot sacrifice rural industry and the interests of rural residents.” Wen has been widely credited with helping lift many rural Chinese citizens out of poverty through a number of targeted policies, including removing agricultural income taxes previously imposed on farmers.

To be sure, rural China still has large pockets of poverty and deprivation. Still, many of China’s agrarian communities have undergone an undeniably radical transformation over the past 20 years. In the 1980s, and even the early 1990s, rural life focused on farming, and it was a hard existence: most people were grindingly poor and lacked basic amenities, including decent schools and health care, paved roads, and a reliable power supply.

Fast-forward two decades and life is much better. Nearly everyone has access to electricity, about 95 percent of towns and 80 percent of villages have paved roads, and some 96 percent have access to basic health care. Incomes remain low, relative to those in the city: average disposable income per person amounts to RMB 5,000 ($760), which is about one-fifth of the income in tier 1 cities. On the other hand, incomes are on the rise. In 2005, average income was $407. Four years later, it was $845 — a 20 percent compound annual growth rate. And while only 34 percent of the rural population earned more than $882 per year in 2009, this proportion is expected to reach 54 percent in 2015.

A major contributor to this increase in living standards is the diversification of employment. Farming practices in rural China have improved marginally over this period. And farmer incomes have only inched up slightly. But rural China is now about forestry, fishing, construction, and the production of bricks and cement. This is expected to continue as the Chinese government, even as it promotes urbanization, also undertakes a substantial and sustained effort to reinvest in the rural communities — to promote growth and social harmony.

For example, in our book we tell the story of Farmer Liu. She is a 58 year-0ld farmer who has seen a dramatic increase in household income as a result of the factory job her son has and the retail earnings of her daughter in law.

Our analysis shows that by the year 2020, the combined consumer markets of China and India will amount to some $10 trillion annually. Approximately $6.2 trillion of that spending will occur in China — $1 trillion of which will occur in rural towns and villages (with the other $5.2 trillion in China’s numerous booming cities).

Although China’s major current focus is urbanization, there is a significant effort on the part of the Chinese government to reinvest in the country’s rural communities, too. On the face of it, the rural population seems to offer limited interest to companies, as people increasingly migrate to cities. In China, we calculate that the rural population will fall from 53 percent of the total in 2010 to 45 percent in 2020, with rural households’ share of the country’s disposable income falling to about 15 percent, down from 25 percent today.

But the rural markets have pockets of rising wealth. Underpinning the transformation of both the urban and rural communities are two revolutions in China: one relating to infrastructure, the other to agriculture. With respect to the latter, there is no doubt that major changes are required in the years ahead, especially those that can help China meet rising urban food demand while also improving the incomes of farmers and rural residents. Specifically, China will hopefully continue to pursue:

• Enhanced education and technical training;
• Improved investment in rural infrastructure, farm mechanization, and irrigation;
• Improved R&D in advanced crop science and new farming techniques;
• Continued land reform to enable formation of more productively sized farms;
• Rural job creation in nonfarm sectors to diversify the income stream; and
• Greater use of information technology and mobile communications to empower farmers.

The good news is that many of these changes are already afoot, and Mr. Wen’s legacy will likely include an historic surge in newly affluent citizens across China’s full landscape both rural and urban.

While Betanews isn’t usually a place for political discourse, I’m going against the grain on this one. It’s because I strongly believe the real answer to solving our serious gun crime problem in America rests in something most readers on this site tend to embrace: technology. More specifically, what we refer to as Big Data. I fully believe we have a data problem, not a gun problem. While the debate at large focuses on reaching the same end goal, the fingers point at the wrong solution.

Big Data, in my opinion, does have a spot in this debate. While Robert Cringely one month ago wrote why he believed just the opposite, I think we have more than enough examples of where Big Data has been helping more than hurting. If you listened solely to the press conferences politicians hold in Washington, you’d almost come to the conclusion that all the guns used in recent crimes pulled their own triggers. There seems to be a steady forgetfulness that nearly every recent mass tragedy was actually perpetrated by individuals with some form of mental illness. But this doesn’t stir the headlines the same way gun debates do, so the topic gets swept to the wayside.

We’ve got a serious problem in America, and I don’t think it lies in magazine round capacities or (mislabeled) assault weapons. It’s that we have no reasonable technological backbone in the form of data collection and sharing that can track individuals at risk for committing these types of violent crimes. New York City successfully leveraged Big Data (CompStat) to fight its own crime problem; we’ve tracked sex offenders with ease down to the city block for many years already; and the USA has managed a national detailed terror “No Fly List” for nearly a decade now.

So why can’t we effectively track mass data on potentially violent threats afflicted with mental illness? It’s a very good question, and one that will only be logically tackled once we get over the largely theatrical gun control debate.

The Dead End that is New Proposed Gun Control

It’s a shame that so much congressional energy is being spent on clarifying what visual aspects of guns constitute assault weapons that politicos like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) want to ban. The biggest sham about the new proposed assault weapons ban, for example, is the established fact that most violent crime isn’t even committed with so-called “assault weapons”. Handguns are the most prevalent choice for mass shootings.

If you’re hesitant to believe the true numbers, have a look at some of the most violent recent school shooting suspects in the United States:

• Adam Lamza (Sandy Hook shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, yes.
• One L. Goh (Oikos University shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, no.
• Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, no.
• Steven Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, no.
• Charles Carl Roberts IV (Amish School shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, no.
• Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine shootings): Semi-Automatic Rifle used, yes.

Of just the above sampling of 6 recent violent US school shootings, only two instances involved semi-automatic rifles (the center of the current assault weapons ban controversy.) Of the rest, all involved some form of handguns, supporting the established statistics on US gun crimes at large.

A standard S&W MP15 sporting rifle, commonly referred to as an AR-15. Contrary to reports, “AR” merely stands for “Armalite” — the company which originated this style of weapon. And doubly, it can only fire at semi-automatic levels, unlike a true “assault rifle” that can handle fully-automatic. Gun paranoia fuels this kind of media misinformation.

While there is no strong correlation between assault weapons and recent mass school shootings, mental illness definitely has a staggering presence among the involved suspects. Using the same sampling of perpetrators, have a look at just how many had some form of mental illness that has been publicly reported:

• Adam Lamza (Sandy Hook shootings): Reported to have a personality disorder in combination with Asperger syndrome.
• One L. Goh (Oikos University shootings): Afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia and to-date determined mentally unfit to stand trial for crimes committed.
• Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shootings): Declared mentally ill by Virginia in 2005, two years before the infamous shootings.
• Steven Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois shootings): Long history of mental illness; multiple suicide attempts; strong interest in Columbine shootings; sympathetic towards Palestinian terror group Hamas.
• Charles Carl Roberts IV (Amish School shootings): Suspected sexual attraction to children due to falsities told before shootings and sexual lubricant found at crime scene where young girls were murdered.
• Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine shootings): Described in multiple reports as “psycopathic” and “depressive” among other social and mental related issues that affected the duo.

In some form or fashion, all of these individuals above had one thing in common: mental instability. That’s right, every single one of them. In fact, a majority of them had traceable histories of instability that was brought to light only after it was too late. I’d argue it’s not a gun problem at all that we’re fighting, but a lack of coherent direction on information sharing and mental health access. Both sides on the issue are at fault to some degree.

New gun legislation is likewise doomed for failure in solving the core issue of gun access because even the US Department of Justice concedes that among state prisoners in jail for gun crimes, 80 percent obtained their weapon in part by “street buys” or “illegal sources”. So this begs the question: if criminals aren’t following the law to begin with, what makes us believe these new regulations are going to keep weapons out of their hands? If I’m connecting the dots right here, these stricter gun laws will merely give the bad guys another leg up over law-abiding citizens.

If there’s one thing I would recommend in light of all the above data, it’s that broadening our concealed carry laws could likely have the biggest impact on keeping death tolls down when shock killers decide to strike. The evidence already points to lower murder rates among states that have concealed carry in contrast to those that do not. And there’s even movement to get teachers prepared to fight back, like these Utah educational workers who are training to carry concealed weapons in school, something already legal in the state.

Renowned security expert Larry Correia said it best on a recent blog post surrounding the gun control debate: “Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period”.

The Data is out There, We just refuse to make sense of It

If there was a posterboy for the mess that is our state of mental health information sharing in America, it would be Seung-Hui Cho. This was the 23 year-old troubled college student who took 32 lives plus his own on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007. The signs that were present, and data that was already available, was insurmountable. For example, Lucinda Roy was the co-director of Virginia Tech’s creative writing program, and experienced Cho’s conditions first hand. “[He was] the loneliest person I have ever met in my life”, she told ABC News.

Roy attempted to get Cho help through official channels, but met resistance from higher-ups who noted “legal hurdles” in getting Cho the help he needed. The University even made public mental health records they held on Cho, noting several instances of discussions between Cho and school health specialists where he described ongoing symptoms for depression and anxiety. Three therapists had the chance to talk with Cho before his murder spree, to no true avail. They are not to blame necessarily — the broken system is.

The more you look into the past lives of these school shooting perpetrators, the more commonalities you find with similar signs and data. While every single shooter doesn’t leave behind such a vivid trail of mental illness evidence, most instances do have enough concrete data to say that “something” could have been done. The problem at hand is that we have no discernible way of making sense of all this data. How do we store it all? Where do we organize it? Who’s to manage it?

These are the kinds of questions we should ask now, and work towards to a solution once and for all. The terror tragedies of 9/11 forced Washington to get serious about a No Fly List, and the results have been impressive overall. Many recorded (and some likely unrecorded) instances of potential terrorism were stopped dead in their tracks due to this cohesive national database.

The New York Police Department also showed how the right technology can empower change. Specifically, reducing crime and predicting future problems, edging on the lines of what the movie “Minority Report” made famous in its screenplay. GIS and database technology helped form the basis for CompStat, a comprehensive system that has been so powerful, it is now in use in numerous US cities such as Austin, San Francisco, Baltimore, and other large urban centers. In fact, CompStat has been so effective that by 2001, one third of the country’s 515 biggest police departments had adopted some iteration of the CompStat methodology in place.

Big Data isn’t perfect, however, especially when government is involved. Take for example the FBI’s spotty recent history in getting its multi-million dollar pet project running, Sentinel. That Big Data project went completely overbudget, overran on its entire projected launch date and was eventually taken back in-house for final development. The in-sourcing effort by the FBI further bloated costs and finally produced a usable data warehousing platform by 2012 — over a full decade after the information mess that allowed 9/11 to take place.

Information Sharing is Key to Preventing the Next Sandy Hook

I’m not an expert in the topic of federal information systems, or even smaller state level database platforms. I don’t have the single answer to what our next steps should look like. But I do know, as a rational American, that connecting the dots surrounding the real issue with mental health information sharing isn’t that difficult. The patterns exposed among a majority of these school shooting suspects should provide some immediacy to the question of how we plan on getting already collected information shared, and how to best leverage it to help prevent the next disasters.

Sadly, until we get real about tackling our information sharing problem, the Adam Lamzas and Seung-Hui Chos will continue slipping through the cracks. The unfortunate part is that the breadcrumbs are already out there. Without a technologically powered way to sift it, sort it and make use of it at the proper levels, we can’t do much about it. And so the political theater will continue in Washington, while the underlying cause of mass shootings gets swept aside because gun control debates steal more headlines then mental health discussions ever could.

Want to get involved in making real change? Contact your congressional leaders and tell them to address the mental health information problem. Even banning every future assault weapon sale won’t in the least prevent the next Sandy Hook or Columbine.

Photo Credit: mashe/Shutterstock

Derrick Wlodarz is an IT professional who owns Park Ridge, IL (USA) based computer repair company FireLogic. He has over 7+ years of experience in the private and public technology sectors, holds numerous credentials from CompTIA and Microsoft, and is one of a handful of Google Apps Certified Trainers & Deployment Specialists in the States. He is an active member of CompTIA’s Subject Matter Expert Technical Advisory Council that shapes the future of CompTIA examinations across the globe. You can reach out to him at [email protected].

Now that Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, he’s been steadily putting out new Webmaster Help videos on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see how long this continues.

Today’s is particularly timely considering Google just pushed out a toolbar PageRank update (the first of the year).

Cutts responds to the following user-submitted question:

Why don’t you switch off the PageRank Toolbar feature? It is widely used by link sellers as a link grading system. Why do you continue to display PageRank publicly? It appears to have little relevance, except to spammers.

“My rough answer is: there are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well,” says Cutts. “You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google Toolbar, and user PageRank as a way to figure out…how reputable at something…I know it seems kind of strange, but it also seems strange that nofollow is only a single digit percentage of links on the web. We get into our tunnel vision, and we sort of say, ‘Oh, well no one else uses the PageRank toolbar,’ but the fact is a lot of people do.”

He continues, “Now, one interesting twist is Chrome doesn’t really have a PageRank toolbar feature built in, and Internet Explorer 10, as I understand it, doesn’t allow toolbars or add-ins, or as Microsoft calls it, it provides an ‘add-in free experience,’ so if IE 10 becomes more popular, eventually it might be the case that the Google Toolbar is not as commonly used, and in that case, it might be the case that, it might be such that over time, maybe the PageRank feature is not used by as many people, and so maybe it will go away on its own or eventually we’ll reach the point where we say, ‘Okay, maintaining this is not worth the amount of work.’”

He says Google will probably continue to support the feature as long as people are using it. With IE 10, however, he says, “the writing is on the wall,” so they’ll see how that affects things in the future (particularly for Windows users).

Google announced today that it has added 38 run and lift maps for some of the most popular ski resorts in the U.S. and Canada to Google Maps.

The maps show blue, green, and black runs as solid colored lines. Ski lifts are red dotted lines.

“Whether you’re shredding Squaw Valley, Big Sky, or Okemo, Google Maps are a comprehensive, accurate and easy way to find the best route down the hill,” says Google Maps strategic partner manager Ryan Poscharsky.

Here’s the full list of maps:

Alpine Meadows – CO
Alyeska Resort – AK
Aspen Highlands – CO
Aspen Mountain – CO
Attitash Mountain Resort – NH
Big Sky Resort – MT
Big White Ski Resort – BC
Breckenridge Ski Resort – CO
Brighton – UT
Buttermilk – CO
Copper Mountain – CO
Crested Butte Mountain Resort – CO
Deer Valley Resort – UT
Granite Gorge – NH
Heavenly Mountain Resort – CA
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort – WY
Lake Louise Ski Area – AB
Mammoth Mountain – CA
Mount Bachelor – OR
Mount Shasta – CA
Okemo Mountain Resort – VT
Panorama Mountain Village – BC
Park City Mountain Resort – UT
Revelstoke Mountain Resort – BC
Schweitzer Mountain Resort – ID
Sierra-at-Tahoe Resort – CA
Snowbasin – UT
Snowmass – CO
Squaw Valley – CA
Steamboat Ski Resort – CO
Stowe Mountain Resort – VT
Sugar Bowl Resort – CA
Sun Valley Resort – ID
Telluride Ski Resort – CO
Vail Mountain – CO
Whistler Blackcomb – BC
Wildcat Mountain – NH
Winter Park Resort – CO

The maps are available on Android and iPhone.

Stephanie Alexis couldn’t get out of her car. If she sat there much longer, she’d be late for a meeting with her board member and friend Rob Cooley, but she still had no idea what she was going to say to him — hence the paralysis.

Rob had asked Steph to his office in downtown Vancouver to discuss the future of Alexis Products, the company she’d launched three years ago with one great product: the Brrrd, the first interactive language-learning tool to incorporate artificial intelligence. It looked like a stuffed animal — a cartoonish plush bird with a beetling brow and goofy eyes — but it contained a microphone, tiny speaker, headphone jack, computer chip, and enough speech-recognition and voice-generation technology to engage in sassy banter in Mandarin.

(Editor’s Note: This fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and email address.)

The Brrrd couldn’t teach you a lot of grammar or vocabulary, or help you to recognize or write Chinese characters, but it was a fun, effective way to learn the basics of the language — key words and phrases having to do with food, transportation, clothing, movies, music, money, personal hygiene, and, of course, business. For a while it had been wildly popular, especially with students and young professionals trying to learn a little conversational Mandarin before their first trips to Shanghai or Guangzhou.

But the Brrrd’s heyday had come and gone. The media attention generated by its novelty had died down and, in spite of incremental technological improvements, sales were slipping. For Alexis Products to survive, Steph needed to either come up with another hit — quickly — or formulate a cohesive strategy to take on the language-learning market as a serious competitor. Rob had summoned her because the company stood at a crossroads. He was one of her most important investors and a leader on the board; if she could earn his support for a new strategy, the other members would follow. So what should the company do for its second act? Her loyal employees and her investors were counting on her to make the right decision.

Fun or Functional?
The Brrrd was hatched during a laughter-filled car ride. Steph and Tina, one of her grad-school classmates at MIT’s Media Lab, were driving to Chicago for a conference and heard an ad on the radio for the language-learning company SimpleLanguage.

“I keep meaning to order that for Mandarin,” Tina said. “I’ll be in Shanghai next semester. I’ve tried books and CDs, but nothing is sticking. I just can’t seem to retain it.”

“Oh, stop complaining and try harder!” Steph blurted out — in Mandarin.

“Don’t rub it in! Not everyone grows up in a bilingual family,” Tina moaned. “Actually — talk to me in Mandarin. Help me learn — in a way that’s fun, not boring.”

Steph was no teacher. She was an engineer and programmer. But she’d learned Mandarin just by listening to her Taiwan-born mother. Maybe Steph could teach Tina the same way. So Steph launched into Mandarin, chatting about passing cars and the faces of kids on a bus and Tina’s new purple eyeglasses — pretty much anything that came into her head. When Tina hesitatingly repeated the vocabulary, Steph mimicked her atrocious intonation, and they laughed and joked until Tina got it right.

“I wish you could make me a little ‘Steph Robot’ to carry around,” Tina said near the end of the ride. For the next few days Steph couldn’t get the comment out of her head.

Back at the Media Lab, she started working on the Brrrd, and within a year she had found a manufacturer in China and turned her prototype into a commercial product priced at $79.99 and sold through high-end retailers such as The Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer.

It immediately became a media darling, and sales hit $3 million in the first year. Reporters, retailers, and customers seemed to embrace it because it was a category smasher — both a toy and an educational product. Its speech-recognition software and AI “brain” could figure out what language areas were giving a user trouble — so it was a highly functional tool — while its deep reservoir of conversational phrases, including jokes and retorts as well as praise and encouragement, made it a welcome companion.

Steph had gotten used to explaining the Brrrd’s dual nature to anyone who asked. But lately her marketing chief, Gregoire Ferron, had been raising difficult questions about what that duality meant for Alexis Products.

“Are we a toy company or a language company?” he had asked testily at a team meeting just that morning. “We can’t be both.”

Steph was worried about Gregoire — worried that he might leave the company now that sales and morale were sagging. She knew he felt outnumbered by the gadget people on the staff. She was trying to formulate an answer that would be respectful of his viewpoint when Mia Yoon, Steph’s top sales executive, piped up. “We all know what our unique selling point is,” she said. “Fun.”

Steph sensed Gregoire’s exasperation and jumped in. “What’s cool about the Brrrd is that it’s both. It plays with you in an educational way. It teases you into learning.”

“But as a language-learning tool, it has significant shortcomings, which is why sales are down,” Gregoire said. “I think we should turn the Brrrd into a gateway to a suite of language offerings that can really compete with SimpleLanguage from a pedagogical standpoint.” SimpleLanguage, whose computer-based courses had disrupted the language-learning establishment more than a decade ago, was Gregoire’s former employer.

“Pedagogical?” Mia asked scornfully. “Who cares about that? People buy the Brrrd because it’s a blast to talk to, and maybe they learn a little Chinese. Once we start using education buzzwords like ‘pedagogical,’ we lose our customers.”

“Well, even if we decide to pursue the ‘fun gadget’ path, we need a strategic focus,” Gregoire responded, his voice rising. “And call me biased, but languages are the obvious answer. The Brrrd has launched us into a market that’s lucrative and fast-growing. I’m not saying our new product shouldn’t be fun. Just that it needs to provide more in the way of tangible benefits. If we could find a way to be fun and stay on the cutting-edge of AI while also adopting best practices for teaching languages, we could dominate.” He paused to let his words sink in. “But when the fun outweighs the functional, you’re just a toy company trying to churn out — or worse, chase — the latest fad.”

“But Steph has so many great ideas,” Mia said. “Why would we want to confine ourselves to just one category? What about using our AI and speech capabilities to motivate people to exercise? Or to help elderly folks keep their minds nimble? Or to teach people how to cook?”

Mia was biased, too — toward diversification. She had bounced around from retail to media to tech throughout her career, but she had great instincts and Steph valued her outlook. On her first day of work at Alexis Products, she had walked into Steph’s office and said, “I’m here now, which means you can stop thinking about sales and start inventing again. Come up with something cutting edge that will make me laugh — whether it has anything to do with languages or not.”

It was just like Tina’s challenge years before, and Steph had been inspired. Now, every morning, she made it a point to spend at least an hour doodling, opening her mind to all sorts of ideas. And yet she still hadn’t come up with a killer new product.

Once, during one of those periods of creative thinking, she had picked up the Brrrd and asked: “Are you just a toy?” and it had shot back the Mandarin equivalent of, “I won’t dignify that with an answer,” which had made her laugh.

But she had to take the company’s future seriously. Should it aspire to become the next Wham-O, maker of an incredible series of iconic toys, from the Frisbee and the Hula Hoop to the Slip ‘N Slide and the Super Ball? Or should it model itself after iRobot, which launched with the fun Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and then carved out a niche with new products aimed at solving other household cleaning problems?

Going the Wham-O route would mean coming up with great new product ideas all the time, and then finding new customers for each one in the fiercely competitive $855 million electronic-toy industry. The concepts she had sketched during her doodle time were pretty interesting — there was the Snowman, a talking gadget that would stand in the refrigerator and tell you what you were running low on, and the FoeFriend, which would play word games with you — but she suspected they lacked a wow factor. She’d have to rely heavily on Mia to sell them. She wondered whether Mia could be an effective brainstorming partner and whether Mia might use her sales expertise to exert even more influence over the company’s strategy.

Going the iRobot route would mean acknowledging that Alexis Products was focused on just one market and didn’t expect to produce another blockbuster idea. But maybe that was OK. There was certainly a lot of money to be made in the $956 million language-instruction business, and she could see how, with Gregoire’s help, the company might capitalize on the Brrrd brand and provide an advanced-level product for customers who wanted more than the basics of Mandarin. There were other possibilities too. Since kids were a natural audience for language learning and the company had already established a reputation for injecting fun into education, she could focus on the elementary-school market. She could also develop an image-recognition capability for the Brrrd to help people learn to write Chinese characters. She could have fun with that.

Still, thinking about becoming an “educational content publisher” made her feel tired and overwhelmed. To succeed, Alexis Products would have to grab share from the likes of SimpleLanguage, a tough and experienced competitor. The company would have to hire a cadre of language experts, who would no doubt find fault with the Brrrd’s “teaching methods.” Plus, Apple’s problems with Siri had exposed real limits to the power of artificial intelligence and computerized speech. It would be business suicide to promise more than the company could deliver.

Maybe she was just a toy queen at heart.

“Steph?” Mia prompted.

“You both make good arguments,” she replied. “I’m torn myself. Let me think a bit more about it.”

Other People’s Money
Steph overcame her paralysis, grabbed her briefcase out of the back of the car, and walked into Rob’s building. She had mixed feelings about their working relationship. Initially she hadn’t needed investors. She’d inherited a trust from her grandfather, the founder of a Canadian timber company, and had used those funds for product development. Her uncle offered her space in a building he owned in Vancouver, where Steph had grown up, and she had accepted.

When product-development companies in the U.S. and Canada had besieged her with tempting licensing and commercialization offers for the Brrrd, she had used her independent means to retain full control.

But when sales declined to $2.2 million in her second year of business, the reduced cash flow began to pose a problem. Steph’s uncle persuaded her to seek outside funding and introduced her to Rob, a retired computer magnate. They’d immediately hit it off. He and several of his angel-investor friends had put money into the company and become directors. At first, they’d assured her that they loved the Brrrd and had full confidence in her ability to lead the company.

But by the third year, when sales had sunk to $1.5 million and a hoped-for distribution relationship with Best Buy fell through, the board meetings started to become more contentious. Beefing up sales and marketing by hiring Mia and Gregoire had allayed the directors’ concerns for a while. But they were clearly growing impatient. In his affable and tactful way, Rob had spelled it out when he called to set up the meeting. Steph needed to remember that she was playing with other people’s money — a lot of it. “The investors want to know whether to keep their money in or not,” he’d said. “It’s as simple as that. Why don’t you come over here tomorrow and help me understand your vision. Where is Alexis Products heading?”

Now, standing in the elevator of his building, she had to decide.

Question: Should Steph create another gadget or focus on language learning?

Please remember to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and email address.

At the start of January, a group of Nokia refugees in Copenhagen launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new wristwatch. And it’s quite a different beast from the Pebble, that greater poster-child for the crowdfunding platform; this one, the Leikr, does color maps too.

It’s a handy feature for runners — the maps use OpenStreetMap data and can integrate routes and online analytics with fitness app Endomondo — and it reflects the fact that the ex-Nokians in question are themselves keen athletes.

And now it’s definitely going to happen. The Leikr campaign shot for $250,000 and scored $267,389 at its closing a couple days ago. According to Seed Capital, which has already invested in Leikr company Acorn (not to be confused with the British computer manufacturer that spawned ARM some 23 years ago), this is a record for any Danish Kickstarter project.

The Leikr displays its maps and six data tiles on a 2-inch screen protected by Gorilla Glass, and it comes with downloadable workouts. One of the main features for athletes, though, is the zippy GPS fix time: 30 seconds max, apparently. I hear (I’ve not dived into the whole sports watch thing myself yet) that this is a sore point for rivals such as the Nike+ SportWatch.

The first units of the Leikr should be delivered in the U.S. sometime in the summer. With this and Jolla now going concerns, I wonder what else we will see come out of the Nokia-downsizing diaspora.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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