Category: News

About 11 months ago, a severely obese 23-year-old named Robert Gibbs made an impassioned plea for help on his YouTube channel.

“I’m making this video because I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried losing weight on my own, I’ve tried doing everything possible – been on diets, been hospitalized. And I’ve always done what needed to be done at the time, then i’d always just gain the weight back,” he said in March of 2012.

Soon after posting, the video went viral, racking up over a million views and prompting a Twitter trend. The video made its way to reddit, where it received even more attention.

Well, he’s just posted an update in the form of a live weigh-in. And he says he’s down over 300 pounds.

In his original plea, Robert said that he was somewhere between 600-700 pounds. He must have started at over 700 pounds, as being down 300+ still leaves him at over 460 pounds.

We all know that YouTube commenters can be a cruel lot sometimes, but in Robert’s case the top comments are nothing but encouragement.

Humanity win.

[via reddit]

DitiTimes, a Taiwanese publication that covers the tech manufacturing industry in Taiwan, is reporting that the next version of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet could be coming as soon as May of 2013. Citing “sources from the upstream supply chain,” the report claims that Google is once again working with Asus on the tablet.

The device is rumored to feature a “Full HD resolution” display and a thinner bezel around the screen. These statements are similar to the rumors surrounding a retina display version of the iPad Mini and a new, much thinner full-sized iPad. Of course, the next nexus tablet would also come with the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, and would sell for the same price as current models of the Nexus 7.

By DigiTimes’ shipping estimates, over six million Nexus 7 devices will have been shipped by the end of this month, with the $249 32GB Wi-Fi-only version being the best-seller. DigiTimes’ sources estimated that, including the rumored next-generation Nexus 7 tablet, Google is expected to ship around 10 million of the tablets in 2013.

(via BGR)

They’re here! Today Microsoft released new versions of the flagship productivity suite alongside cloud companions. But if you look closely, all the chatter is about Office 365. The software giant wants your head in the cloud, and tidy, easy-to-account subscription revenue with it. CEO Steve Ballmer and team endlessly blather about “reimagining” Windows, but Office gets the bigger makeover — not just how people work, but how they pay to do it.

Subscription revenue is Microsoft’s Holy Grail, and one sought since the mid 1990s, because it smooths out revenue and locks in customers. New Office releases come about once every three years. Office 2007 launched six years ago tomorrow and its successor in May 2010. The company can’t depend on consistent sales, which tend to spike around new releases. Subscription — how Microsoft sells Office 365 — is smoother.

Holy Grail

Ballmer started the subscription Grail quest by putting profits before customers, and pissing off business and tech decision-makers in the process. In May 2001, Microsoft announced a radically new licensing method that removed off-the-shelf upgrades and pushed businesses to subscription-like model. Software Assurance raised the cost of upgrades by as much as 107 percent, according to Gartner.

Today, most organizations either pay full price or give Microsoft 29 percent of Office’s full price over two or three years. They pay cost per license upfront plus this additional fee annually. About 60 percent of Office revenue comes from annuity contracts, which is money in the bank and commitment that discourages switching to other products — at least through the contract period.

Businesses are on the hook, but consumers swim free, and that’s not good for Office, which faces increasing competition from services like Google Apps. There is the impact of slowing PC sales, too. During calendar fourth quarter (fiscal 2013 second for Microsoft), Business division consumer revenue declined 2 percent year over year, which is a consistent trend. By comparison, bookings rose 18 percent, to “near historical high renewal rates for Office”, Chris Suh, general manager of Microsoft investment relations, said during last week’s earnings call. Businesses bought or renewed licensing contracts.

There is no volume-licensing plan for consumers, or small businesses. Microsoft pushes real subscriptions instead. Marketing emphasis around Office 365 and pricing for subscriptions and suite reveal how Ballmer hopes to get the Holy Grail.

Pay-More Principle

If anything, Office 2013 pricing discourages suite sales. Let’s start with the traditional product — how 2013 versions cost compared to their predecessor — direct from Microsoft Store. The operation no longer offers Office 2010, but the prices below were valid before today:

• Home and Student: $139.99 for 2013; 119.99 for 2010
• Home and Business: $219.99; for 2013; $199.99 for 2010
• Professional: $399.99 for 2013; 349.99 for 2010

From one perspective, the new versions cost about 10 percent to 16 percent more, which says much about what Microsoft execs think of the newer suite’s value but also can be interpreted as intentional barrier to sales. However, Microsoft Store prices are for downloads, which, by the way, is in most markets the only way to get Office 2013. There are no DVDs, which is another sign the company seeks to dramatically change how consumers and small businesses consume and pay for the suite.

The older version was available on DVD and with more generous licensing rights. The 2010 Home and Student sold for $149.99 (up to three PCs); Home and Business, $249.99 (up to two PCs); and Professional, $499.99 (up to two PCs). So from a different perspective, the new pricing is substantially less, except Microsoft takes away licenses.

Like the direct download 2010 versions previously available, the 2013 retail replacements come with one PC license. That works out to a hidden, and quite substantial price increase. License to license: 180 percent increase between Office Home and Student 2010 and 2013 versions and 76 percent for Home and Business. When Microsoft introduced Software Assurance nearly a decade ago, prices increased mainly by taking away choices larger businesses had. Now it’s the consumer market’s turn.

Looked a differently, Microsoft nearly trebles Office Home and Student 2013 for anyone wanting rights for three PCs (from $149.99 to $419.97). For many consumers or small businesses, installing Office on two or more PCs for lower price hugely appeals.

Sun and Clouds

But the choice Microsoft takes away from one hand, it offers in another. Multiple device rights are still available for anyone buying into the subscription model, meaning Office 365, which includes desktop software and cloud services.

Microsoft really wants consumers choosing Office 365 Home Premium — just look at what greets them today at Office.com. The marketing is all about the cloud service, which costs $99 per year per household and comes with five Office licenses for Windows or OS X versions. That’s where Microsoft gives out the licenses, to subscribers. (Note: Microsoft refers to the suite available with Office 365 as one license for up to five devices, mainly PCs and Macs, in the household. For simplicity’s sake and so there is no confusion about semantics, I refer to it as multiples.)

What a bargain, right? That depends. Buying software grants the user a perpetual license. Technically, Microsoft still owns Office retail but buyers have rights to use it forever. It’s like you own the software. Office 365 is a subscription product that allows the user access to the software as long as he or she pays. If you don’t renew the service, that’s the end of Office.

So that $150 price for Office Home and Student 2010 is one time, for three licenses. The second year of Office 365 means the buyer pays about $50 more to continue using the product. Double that in year three: $99.99 x 3 = $299.97. Office Home and Student 2010 price: $149.99. That one-time payment covers you, while Office 365 is another $99.99 every year, and that’s assuming Microsoft doesn’t increase the subscription price later.

For Ballmer and team, which want to smooth out Microsoft revenue and generate more of it, Office 365 is gold. Most buyers will turn round the licensing comparison the other way. The subscription suite costs $99.99 for five devices. A family wanting just two would pay $279.98 for Office Home and Student 2013 outright, or $699.95 for five.

But the math isn’t that simple. The Office version included with 365 is equivalent to Professional, which adds Access, Outlook and Publisher to Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word. That version, with single perpetual license, sells for $399.99, or 300 percent more than Office 365 for one year. Then there are added incentives for the subscription version, such as Office app cloud access via browser on any PC, 20GB SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype calls per month.

So from another perspective, Office 365 is comparatively a helluva bargain, as long as the buyer doesn’t care about having a perpetual license. To be honest, I wouldn’t. The point: Microsoft really doesn’t want you to buy Office 2013 but subscribe to Office 365 instead.

Photo Credit: Vasiliy Koval/Shutterstock

A popular iOS photography app that was removed by Apple last week amid complaints of pornographic images, is back in the iOS App Store Tuesday. 500px has been updated with three fixes requested by Apple’s app reviewers, including a tweak that will prevent queries for explicit image searches from producing results, adding a function for users to report inappropriate content, and put a 17+ age rating on the app.

The incident was one of the most high-profile in recent memory of an iOS app being booted over inappropriate content and — combined with the concerns over explicit imagery on Twitter’s Vine app released just days later — served to highlight the inconsistency with which Apple sometimes applies its App Store reviews process.

“It’s been a very intense week,” COO Evgeny Tchebotarev told me by phone on Tuesday. In the days since 500px was removed, he said his team has worked very closely with Apple to address the company’s concerns and get the app back online as quickly as possible.

The app has millions of downloads, and has been on the iOS App Store for several years. But it was seemingly caught off guard by Apple’s public comments last week that not only was the app in violating of Apple’s strictures on any pornography, an Apple spokesman said Apple had received complaints about pornographic images involving children, which caused Apple to remove the app immediately.

Tchebotarev said Apple has still not given his company any evidence of explicit images containing children, nor has Apple given any examples of the complaints cited. In the last week 500px performed its own internal audit and found nothing, he said.

“This is something we are waiting to hear from Apple, if they can send us anything becuase this is a serious issue, criminal activity” that his company would report to the proper authorities if found, said Tchebotarev.

While 500px does not allow pornography to be posted on its app or on its website — users who do post it have their accounts deleted and images removed — it does allow “photos of an artistic nature that contain nudity.” 500px has always come with a safe search option by default that filters any images with nudity. But at Apple’s request, 500px is now filtering searches as well. “We made it harder [to find]. If you search ‘porn’ or ‘nudity’ you get zero results,” said Tchebotarev.

A few years ago, it was still possible to be one of those people on the receiving end of an incredulous stare when confronted with the question, “You haven’t seen “30 Rock”?!” Now, however–seven seasons into the show–many are familiar with the escapades of Liz Lemon and her coworkers, and the show has garnered so many awards it’s near-impossible to think of a time when it will all come to an end. Even if you came into it in the middle of its run, you more than likely loved it and quoted it the next day at work.

Unfortunately for fans, the end is indeed nigh. The show will unveil its finale on Thursday night, and for all those who lament its departure from the NBC lineup, there is a nice little consolation prize: a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s, created especially for the show.

The ice cream, which will be in Ben & Jerry’s stores throughout the month of February before heading to grocery stores, is getting a rare spring release in order to be available at the time of the finale. And while creators aren’t saying what the flavor is, it’s almost guaranteed to be a hit with fans of the show, who just might need a pint of it when they’re sitting on the couch in sweats, reliving their favorite moments on DVD.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt continues to make headlines. In fact, though he handed the CEO reins to Larry Page in 2011, he may still grab more headlines than page thanks to things like his imaginative speeches (like the one where he talked about replacing himself with a robot at parties) and a recent trip to North Korea.

His latest speech took place at Cambridge, and is his latest look at the future. Business Insider referred to Schmidt’s vision as “a chilling drone-filled future.”

The speech is about 45-minutes long, so if you have some time to spend, and want to have your mind blown by one of the most powerful executives of one of the most powerful companies in the world, hit the play button. By the way, he also talks a little about North Korea again and about Genghis Khan.

This weekend, nearly 70 people teamed up at the Google offices in Los Angeles for the engineer’s equivalent of a slumber party: The LA Video Hackathon, a two-day adventure in developing apps for the Google TV and YouTube APIs. The end result: 14 apps presented to a panel of judges including Machinima’s Nanea Reeves and Fullscreen’s George Strompolos, with a 55″ LG Google TV handed out as a grand prize.

I stopped by the hackathon in its final hours this Sunday to ask Paul Carff, senior developer advocate for Google TV, why Google was interested in sponsoring a giant sleepover for developers: I expected one or two reasons, but he had many. First off, it’s an opportunity to engage Google Developer Groups, the third-party enthusiasts developing apps for the Google TV and YouTube APIs.

It also proves to be a good testing ground for the APIs, giving the developer relations team an opportunity to see how easy or difficult it might be for developers to work with the code and documentation. It can even be an opportunity for fixing errors: This weekend, one participant caught a bug in an app — the team was able to pass it along for fixing.

Also, it was an opportunity to see what people might come up with, given the opportunity to work hands-on with the APIs. Of the people who attended this weekend’s hackathon, Carff estimated that 40 percent called themselves developers, while 20-25 percent volunteered themselves as designers and the rest claimed to be business development-types. “Which is cool, because you need all those people to fill in all the blanks,” he said.

Carff, as one of the judges, said that the criteria they would be using to judge the winning videos would include the level of completeness the developers were able to achieve in just two days, as well as the way in which they used the APIs and a certain “Wow” Factor.

The winning apps from this weekend’s hackathon included Vid Social, a timeline for comments on both live-streamed and hosted video and Giggle, which uses the SongKick app to generate playlists of music videos from bands that will be performing in your area soon. TVUS, which enables users to overlay any video (including Hangouts) over any Google TV screen, took home the grand prize.

So what will come of the projects developed this weekend? As the point wasn’t to complete an app, but to instead create enough of it for demo purposes, it’s still unsure. But there’s a track record for hackathons resulting in completed projects, such as Viki, an app curating Korean entertainment for Google TV.

Not only did the developers of that app conceive of it initially at the Mountain View headquarters hackathon, but because they had the opportunity to connect with the Google TV team, they were able to get featured on Google Play.

But that’s not the only reason people take part. And it’s not why Google employees volunteer their weekends to help. The biggest reason that people participate? Carff put it like this: “My first time, I wondered, who’s going to come in? Especially if they’ve been coding all weekend. But I was floored. The energy you get when people are excited about a new idea — it’s really invigorating.”

There are some manufacturers that you simply don’t equate with big dollars. Hyundai for instance, makers of some wonderful automobiles, simply can’t pull off a car in the $70K range. This is not because it’s not a good car, but people simply have an issue with a nameplate that shares ties with frugality. Volvo on the other hand is a car that falls directly into upper middle class territory, meaning paying $50k-$60k for one is not out of the question. $200,000 though, well that’s another story entirely. Chris Harris recently took a $200k Volvo out for a spin, and while he loved the car, that price tag may just be a wee bit off the mark.

Source: Youtube.com/DRIVE

The vendor-led OpenStack convoy is gathering pace. As Chris Kemp, NASA’s former CTO and now the head of OpenStack-based appliance firm Nebula, laid it out today at Cloud Expo Europe in London, the infrastructure-as-a-service project has more than half a million downloads and can count thousands of members from more than 850 companies in 88 countries.

Chinese adoption of OpenStack is growing particularly quickly, and the United States and India are doing well too, he said. But Europe? Not so much — yet.

Why is that? Well, one of the answers is entirely predictable: Europe is just a bit behind the curve when it comes to cloud adoption.

“My sense that there’s probably a bit more of a conservative attitude towards change and adoption of new technology here,” Kemp told me. “If you look at folks that are leading IT at a lot of America’s largest companies, there’s a lot of competition, a lot of folks encouraging people to take risks. We’re seeing more people in U.S. companies understand how to make apps work in a very reliable way, even on unreliable infrastructure, because the big internet companies there haven’t had a choice.

“There’s a cultural desire here to have more control over infrastructure. I think private cloud will be bigger in Europe than in the U.S. in the medium term.”

But that’s not the only reason. There’s another factor that seems backward given the first: it appears OpenStack, just a couple of years old, is feeling the effects of being a relative latecomer to this particular market.

“It’s a function of some of the earlier cloud technologies getting an earlier start here,” Kemp said. “Eucalyptus made an early run at Europe, and then there’s the OpenNebula project.”

(L to R) Jo Maitland, GigaOM; Chris Kemp, CEO Nebula and co-founder, OpenStack; Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Citrix; Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger [email protected]

That’s not to say Kemp, who’s naturally very bullish on OpenStack, thinks the market isn’t ripe for takeover. Particularly regarding OpenNebula, the one big European contender in this space, he was pretty scornful of that rival’s attempt to target the enterprise by adding an open-source service layer on top of its core product.

“You want interoperability, portability and a large ecosystem of tools that all work together at the end of the day – that’s especially what enterprises want,” he said. “The world doesn’t have enough attention for five cloud ecosystems. If you’re EMC or NetApp, are they working on an OpenNebula driver? Where are the OpenNebula conferences? If it’s not there, they’ve already lost this round.”

But let’s pull back here and consider whether this rivalry really matters. To a certain extent, according to cloud strategy researcher Simon Wardley, it doesn’t – he sees deeper issues facing the putative cloud service provider industry in Europe.

“The issues about public or private, or which stack to adopt, are all whats, hows and whens. There’s not enough of the why,” he told me. “These are implementation details and they are, to me, secondary to strategy.”

“In Silicon Valley there’s a lot more thinking about how you manipulate the value chain to compete. For example, if I’m a bank, should I be providing banking as a cloud? It’s that level of strategic play which is important. Most people [in Europe] are thinking about using the cloud because everyone else is doing it: they’re not thinking strategically about using IT as a weapon against others.”

After a week in App Store limbo, photography app 500px has made its return.

As you may remember, Apple booted the app from its App Store for violation of Apple’s rules on pornography. Apple said that the app was removed after many user complaints regarding the porn.

But apparently, Apple has rethought their decision. It looks like 500px has done enough to assuage Cupertino’s concerns.

Follow @500px

500px is Photography
@500px

We’re happy to announce that our app is now back in the Apple App Store. You can get it here: https://t.co/6IBfZaVH

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
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Upon yanking the app, Apple had this to say:

“The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We’ve asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app.”

It appears that 500px has inserted at least one new “safeguard” into the app – a new “report this photo” button.

They’ve also instituted a new age warning within iTunes. It now says that you must be 17 years or older to download to app due to “frequent/intent sexual content or nudity.”

But nudity is still accessible within the app. And Apple has approved it. Perhaps all of that media attention surrounding Vine and its porn problem (many pointed out that Apple was allowing it to stay in the App Store, alongside Twitter, which also contains frequent nudity) softened Apple up a bit. Or maybe it’s just another hard-to-explain move from a company whose nudity policies are notoriously hard-to-explain.

Last week, analyst predictions asserted that tablet shipments could reach 145 million in 2013. The market for tablets is only swelling, and now research firm ABI Research is predicting that an additional 1 billion tablets will be shipped over the next five years.

Even more interesting, though, is ABI’s research into how much consumers are spending through their devices. According to the firm’s survey, 22% of U.S. tablet owners are spending $50 or more per month through their tablets. 9% of U.S. tablet owners are spending $100 or more per month. ABI points out that these spending levels are far higher than those seen for smartphones.

“Tablets are quickly becoming the go-to transaction screen within the home,” said Jeff Orr, mobile devices senior practice director at ABI.

ABI stated that tablet spending hasn’t yet impacted physical retailers, who are concerned about “showroom” shoppers who use physical stores to shop, ask questions, and compare features before leaving to make their purchase online. The research showed that over half of consumers who shop on tablets had done price checking, used a coupon, and made a location-based search in the past three months.

“The opportunity to keep consumers buying in-store squarely remains with the retailer,” said Orr. “So far, the presence of a media tablet during the shopping experience has not altered the sales channel where consumers finally buy products,”

When Chick-Fil-A president Dan Cathy made remarks last summer regarding his beliefs on marriage, he sparked outrage across the country as gay rights activists and members of the LGBT community fired back, calling him out for the statements.

Cathy said that he and his company–which is rooted firmly in Christian values and keeps all stores closed on Sundays–are “very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives”, adding “we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.”

His words led to immediate backlash and even created protests staged at some of the restaurants, where there were also “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation” and “National Same-Sex Kiss” days set up in response.

But despite the chain of events that Cathy set off with his remarks, the company hasn’t suffered, according to sales data. In fact, they actually saw a spike in sales, pulling in a whopping $4.6 billion in 2012, compared to $4.1. billion the year before. And while the company has laid fairly low after the incident–only stepping forward a few times to comment on Cathy’s remarks or thank their customers through social media–some think they handled it just the right way. And despite the backlash, the ever-growing company offers up dozens of new jobs every time they expand, which is always welcome in communities.

“I think the flap last summer will not have any effect at all long term,” said Georgeia State University professor Ken Bernhardt. “When they open stores, they hire 50 or 60 people and that is good for the community. That means jobs.”

Image: Chick-Fil-A

Demand Media announced today that its domain registrar eNom’s Top Level Domain (TLD) program is included in the latest version of Parallels Plesk Panel and in Parallels Domain Name Network.

“The Internet is undergoing an historic change, and our valuable relationship with eNom enables us to provide solutions and information to educate customers who want to be on the forefront of this revolution,” said John Zanni, VP of marketing and alliances for Parallels. “Access to the new TLD space will tremendously benefit our customers, and eNom makes this possible.”

Parallels customers will be able to participate in “all aspects of the initial phases” of the new TLD launch, the two companies say. That means during the “sunrise” and “landrush” periods.

“The excitement around new TLDs is growing, and our integration with Parallels helps validate this,” said Chris Sheridan, VP of business development for eNom. “Through these integrations, we’re opening up the opportunity for a new group of businesses and consumers to become actively involved in the innovative new TLD market. eNom’s session on new TLDs is aimed at educating attendees on this exciting time for the web.”

The services, called “eNom New TLD Extension for Parallels Plesk Panel”, will be available through the Server Management Extensions in the Service Provider interface or from the Parallels Partner Products site.

Sheridan will be speaking about the new TLDs program at Parallels Summit next week in Vegas.

Funded in part by the Knight Foundation for Journalism, the Washington Post has just launched a new project called “Truth Teller,” which is designed to fact-check political speeches and comments in real time. It’s an ambitious effort that is based on an idea the Post‘s political editor had in 2011, and makes use of speech-to-text technology and a number of other tools. But the project raises a number of thorny questions, including: Is it even possible to fact-check the most egregious types of political disinformation? And if Truth Teller does manage to do this, will anyone care?

The funding for the venture comes from the Knight Prototype Fund, a relatively new effort from the foundation that is designed to help jump-start new ideas and startups — it invests via grants of up to $50,000 and says that the program is intended to help entrepreneurs “build fast [and] fail fast” while they try to reinvent the way that journalism works online.

The Washington Post‘s political editor, Steven Ginsberg, got the idea for a real-time fact-checking service while he was watching a speech given by former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann in 2011. During her talk at a sports bar in Iowa, the candidate repeatedly misled her audience and Ginsberg said he envisioned a mobile app that would have allowed anyone to check whether she was telling the truth as she was speaking, and then challenge her statements.

Truth Teller checks facts against a Post database

The beta prototype that the Post launched on Tuesday isn’t quite there yet — it is only capable of checking facts related to taxation law and proposed changes to those laws, information that has been hand-fed to the system. But eventually, the newspaper says that the application should be able to do this about a wide range of topics by checking the Post‘s database in real time.

The Post‘s executive producer for digital news, Cory Haik, explains that the application turns speech from a video into text and then checks statements from that text version with an algorithm (a modified Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance). While watching a video of House Speaker John Boehner, for example, when he says that raising the top tax rate would “kill 700,000 jobs,” the application pops up a large warning in red, saying: “False.”

Below the video, there is a transcript of the speech, and users can click on any sentence and go to that section of the video — and they can also “view source” and see the basis for the newspaper’s claim that something is false. In the case of the Speaker of the House’s claim, it’s a piece from Glenn Kesler, who writes a column called The Fact Checker, and wrote a post specifically addressing Boehner’s statement — and ultimately awarded it three Pinocchios, which are the newspaper’s version of a thumbs down on the facts.

Political truth can be a slippery thing

The topic of fact-checking political statements became the focus of much debate during the run-up to the election, especially after the former public editor for the New York Times wrote a post asking whether the newspaper’s reporters should be “truth vigilantes” — in other words, whether they should challenge politicians on their statements during the campaign, or just report what they said and fact-check them later. The reaction from readers was astonishment that the newspaper wouldn’t want to do the former, but Brisbane argued that fact-checking is often harder than it seems.

This is one of the potential flaws with an approach like the Post is taking with Truth Teller: such automated systems likely work best when they have specific facts to drawn on, such as Boehner’s claim about 700,000 jobs being lost. But in many cases, the mis-statements that politicians make are much more vague and subject to interpretation than that, and so would be difficult to check against a database of facts.

The other problem is that even Ginsberg’s example of the Bachmann speech assumes that any of those listening would have wanted to fact-check her comments in real time. In the same way, the Truth Teller system — and other similar efforts such as the “Truth Goggles” project, or even more established fact-checking services like Politifact — assume that anyone will take the time to actually go there and check the facts. But will they?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

New York City is bristling with tech companies, and many of them are whipping up new ideas for publishing, advertising and social media. This spring, a select few of them will get an invitation to strut their stuff inside the New York Times as part of what the paper hopes will be a “mutually beneficial relationship.”

In a program called TimeSpace announced Tuesday morning, the Grey Lady said it will accept three to five early-stage companies for four month partnerships. Those selected will get an opportunity to demonstrate their products while teaching and learning alongside Times employees in the company’s 8th Avenue headquarters. The Times suggests the best candidates will come with seed stage funding and be focused on products like mobile, social, video, advertising technology, analytics and e-commerce.

So will all this help the Times navigate a path to digital prosperity? On one hand, these type of projects can feel more like sizzle than substance. The Times already has an ideas lab called beta620 while the Boston Globe is partnering with MIT students to inject more technology into the news process. So far, nothing earth-shattering has emerged from either project. Likewise, Philadelphia’s major news outlets have been tinkering with incubator-style projects for a while with mixed results.

On the other hand, these type of ventures deliver intangible cultural benefits. Start-up companies, including those in the media space, typically have scant idea how the news works and how media companies actually run. Meanwhile, old line media types are often suspicious or dismissive of new technologies and the people wielding them. Opportunities like TimeSpace, which will also give the start-ups a gloss of prestige, thus represent a welcome occasion for the two cultures to rub shoulders in a real world news and business environment.

Would-be New York Times partners have until February 19 to apply.

The other week I met with the leader of a new growth business for a large Asian company. The meeting was miles away from the corporate headquarters. The leader proudly showed me around her office, pointing out how the open, energetic feel compared to the closed-door, corporate nature of headquarters. The young staff certainly seemed to be enjoying itself in the lounge that was well-stocked with booze and snacks.

“So, what does your corporate parent give you?” I asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” the leader replied without some degree of pride. “Except funding, of course. Otherwise, they completely leave me alone.”

I didn’t want to burst the leader’s bubble, but I gently explained to her that what she said was actually quite troubling. The reality is she is fighting a tough battle with one hand behind her back. And the odds are pretty high that she is going to lose.

Yale School of Management Professor Dick Foster notes that a single firm cannot innovate faster than the market in which it participates. Why is that? Consider three key differences between a startup and an autonomous business formed by a large company:

1. Talent. A startup chooses the very best talent it can find to tackle an opportunity. The autonomous business more often than not chooses key leaders from its parent company, even if they haven’t had relevant experience (a problem I described here).
2. Funding. The startup receives a finite slug of funding to demonstrate its viability. It has to zig and zag to find success before it runs out of money. The autonomous business will typically draw funding via the annual budgeting processes. As long as it doesn’t fall on its face, it can chug along with its predetermined strategy. Since that strategy is likely to be wrong, the lack of adjustment is bad, not good. Too much capital can be a curse.
3. Governance. The startup is governed by a Board of Directors that typically includes an eclectic mix of founders, financiers, and advisors. That Board probably meets at least monthly and is on call if any quick decisions need to be made. The autonomous business is controlled by the parent company. Reviews might happen quarterly. Just getting a meeting on a senior leader’s calendar can take weeks. Forget about quick decisions.

The end result too frequently is the market speeds ahead of the autonomous organization. A large company just can’t innovate faster than the market.

But a large company can innovate better than the market.

There are some things that only large companies can do, because they have unique assets like technology, channel relationships, relationships with regulators, scale operations, and so on. In my recent HBR article, “The New Corporate Garage” I profiled fourth-era corporations that created powerful growth businesses by combining these kind of difficult-to-replicate assets with “just enough” entrepreneurial behaviors. And in “Two Routes to Resilience,” Clark Gilbert, Matt Eyring, and Richard Foster described how companies that have successfully transformed their business in the face of disruptive change have made smart use of a “capabilities exchange” that allows new growth businesses to selectively draw on unique enabling capabilities without being overly constrained by legacy business models and mindsets.

If a company really wants pure unbridled entrepreneurialism, it should invest in a startup rather than creating a compromised organization that neither has complete freedom nor truly unique capabilities. If a company really wants to do something remarkable, it has to confront the very real tensions between operating a big business and supporting entrepreneurial behavior and between leveraging unique capabilities and being constrained by them. Those tensions will always make a company move more slowly than an unburdened startup. But mastering these tensions can allow companies to do what a startup cannot.

Cars.com is an award-winning online destination for car shoppers visited by approximately 12 million unique visitors each month. In addition to millions of listings, the website also offers a variety of comparison resources, pricing tools, expert automotive content and dealership reviews.

To support its high volume of site traffic, Cars.com must maintain optimal website performance and loading speed — especially given the expectations of today’s online consumers.

Uptime and site performance is a priority for the Cars.com application management team, which maintains a highly distributed, technical environment. As part of their duties, members of the team are responsible for application data collection, monitoring and analysis. According to the application management team, up to eight man-hours per week were spent on manual data acquisition, diverting staff from their core focus.

Splunk Enterprise was implemented to automate and standardize the collection, monitoring and analysis of application log files and make this machine-generated big data available across the organization. As a result, real-time Splunk dashboards have provided increased visibility into site traffic and usage patterns at Cars.com supporting both technical and business-driven analysis and decision making.

Read more about how Splunk is helping Cars.com drive revenue generation and cost savings.
Read the full analyst report: http://www.splunk.com/view/splunk-at-cars/SP-CAAAHF4?ac=exec_gigaom_cars_post

YouTube plans to launch paid subscriptions as early as this spring, according to unidentified sources cited in AdAge. The sources say that YouTube is asking media companies that have already gained large a YouTube following — like Machinima, Maker Studios and Fullscreen — to submit ideas for paid channels that would cost “somewhere between $1 and $5 a month.” A Google spokesperson confirmed to AdAge that YouTube is “looking at” subscriptions.

YouTube would initially launch around 25 paid channels, according to the report, and “is also considering charging for content libraries and access to live events, a la pay-per-view, as well as self-help or financial advice shows.” It’s unclear if the channels would cost $1 to $5 apiece or would be lumped together as an inexpensive bundle.

YouTube’s paid offerings might help the site compete against streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video, all of which are developing their own original content. But the subscriptions would also give content creators with large audiences a chance to pull in revenue beyond ads. And the opportunity to charge might provide brands that were previously wary to put video up on YouTube with the incentive to do so.

Will viewers pay? They might if transactions are easy — Google could integrate Google Payments, for instance — and might also be interested in perks like downloads for offline viewing, or bundles of videos that previously had to be tracked down individually.