With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!
Rumors are circulating that the concrete prime time schedule at Fox News could be due for a shake up with the recent contract renewal of up-and-coming news anchor – Megyn Kelly. She has been the host of “America Live” for the past three years, and has gained renowned for her anchoring duties during election nights. Along with Kelly, Fox News veteran, Greta Van Susteren has renewed her contract as well.
There have been whispers that Kelly could be replacing Susteren’s coveted 10pm spot, due to Kelly’s heightened popularity, and falling viewership for Susteren’s show. A move of this size would be considered huge, considering most of the nighttime personnel has been the same for years, with – Hannity, O’Reilly, and Susteren.
Kelly has owned the 1pm-3pm slot, enjoying the highest viewership of the programs in the Fox New’s afternoon lineup. Fox News, according to Mediaite, is staying hush-hush about the contract renewals and time slot shake-up.
If you’re curious to learn more about Megyn Kelly, in anticipation for a potential move to prime time television, enjoy this revealing interview with Howard Stern back in 2010. She actually handles herself pretty well.
Ready for a different spin, at least visually, on a boxing game? If so, you might want to check out Monkey Boxing from Crescent Moon Games, which was released in the Google Play Store today. The title is no play on words or anything like that. Gameplay is monkeys boxing against each other. Crescent Moon claims there are 269 billion combinations of monkeys, colors and props available to the player to choose from when customizing your monkey boxer.
In between matches, the game provides training opportunities so players can hone their skills in pressing the punch and block buttons in just the right combination and with the right timing to launch increasingly powerful attacks and defenses. Once you step into the ring against an opponent, your monkey launches a career that begins with the challenge of defeating 50 opponents to win the WMB Cup. If you achieve that distinction, you can continue indefinitely to take on new challengers. If you want to spice things up a bit, the game supports a two-player mode over WiFi.
Check out the video and screen shots below for a little better idea of how monkeys may box if monkeys boxed. If you want to give Monkey Boxing a try, use one of the Google Play download links to grab the $2.99 game.
Duke University researchers who previously demonstrated invisibility cloaking in the lab have employed 3D printing to build their latest “cloak” – a disk that can block microwaves.
The thickness of the donut-like disk roughly matches one wavelength, and its combination of air and dielectric (insulating, nonconducting) composite material deflects microwaves. An object placed in the center effectively “disappears” when microwaves are aimed at it. Because of the properties of transformation optics (physics of electromagnetic radiation that behaves similarly to relativistic warping of space-time), the shell of the disk eliminates any backward reflection that a viewer or detector would use to see the object, and also suppresses shadows and scattering.
The cloaking disk is made of plastic, but another transparent polymer or glass would work equally well, the researchers say. Simulations shows that the cloak could be made thinner and larger in area, and could potentially work for shorter wavelengths, like visible light.
Transformation optics also underlies another advance towards invisibility with metamaterials. These are engineered materials with new kinds of properties that don’t normally exist in nature. The key development by the researchers from Stanford and Spain is tailoring the new metamaterial’s refractive index, or the degree to which it can bend light. Only positive refractive indices (like 1.33 for water) exist in nature, but using transformation optics the investigators were able to design constituents of the new material that have a negative refractive index.
In order for metamaterials to have the interesting properties they were designed for, they need to interact with both magnetic and electric fields. The constituent “atoms” of the new material can do both, which means their interactions with light over broader wavelengths can be controlled. The visible spectrum of light extends from 400-700 nanometers, but previous invisibility efforts have only been able to cover about 50 nm of this range.
In their theoretical analysis, the researchers started with an infinite sheet of material that they fold into a crescent-shape on the nanometer scale. This is their constituent “atom,” which is placed into an array with other identical ones in a background material. The result is a structure that has negative refractive index, i.e. “invisibility” over much of the visible spectrum, in a band over 200 nm wide. Engineering a material from the bottom up opens up new optical potentials, like precisely controlling the light path, and changing the geometry of the nano-crescents or shrinking them could help the invisibility band grow to cover the whole visible spectrum. The material’s negative refraction is shown in the video below.
Ah, high school, rife with awkward growth, social situations, and trying to just make it to college so you can party somewhere other than a field or at a parent’s house. A high school in Issaquah, Washington has taken the awkwardness to a whole other level, by none other than rating the hotness of their female peers. In an online tournament called ‘May Madness’. The high school females are pitted against one another, and the boys vote on who’s the sexiest.
According to a local news affiliate, the tournament has become a tradition in the last five years, and there’s nothing the local school district can do to shut it down.
According to the local school district, they’re powerless to do anything beyond discouraging the tournament since the contest doesn’t take place on school grounds. The police have gotten involved in the past, able to shut the site down temporarily due to vulgar and profane comments attached to people’s names, but were only able to do so much. Many parents, students, and community members have spoken out against the contest, claiming it sexualizes young girls, leading to self-esteem issues.
Sarah Niegowski, the district’s spokesperson, said this about the people running the website, “These are pretty smart folks behind this. They know their first amendment rights. They’re very quiet about who it is and the group behind it”
There is a May Madness Facebook page, however, there are only photos of the boys attending the school. According to those who have been tracking the contest, the people running it have done a good job in keeping outsiders from accessing it.
If you’re confused about all the action with EMC, VMware and Pivotal over the past several months, you’re not alone. CEOs have traded places, joint ventures have been struck, product lines have been sold and GE even came on board. And that’s before you even start talking about all the new technology.
I sat down with EMC SVP and CTO John Roese on Tuesday at the company’s annual EMC World conference to find out what’s up. Here’s what he had to say.
On three companies under one roof
While they’re technically three separate companies, EMC is really in control. It’s the majority shareholder in VMware and owns more than 60 percent of Pivotal, its new joint venture with VMware that includes the Greenplum, Pivotal Labs, SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Cetas business lines. When it comes to everyone working toward a common goal, Roese said, “The good news is that while there is independence, Joe Tucci is the chairman of all these companies.”
Roese calls himself the “gravitational center” of the three companies when it comes to technology. This is a reinvention of the CTO role at EMC, which used to be more of a research position. Now, he puts the stake in the ground and generally directs everyone toward it, even if they’re not all taking the same path to get there.
On why Pivotal happened and why it matters
My takeaway from Roese’s comments on formation of Pivotal is that Greenplum is really the linchpin of the whole company. At its core, Pivotal is about building big data infrastructure that can handle next-generation workloads, but it’s aware that broad adoption is only possible if that high technology becomes easier to consume. That means new higher-level applications, which is where SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs come into play.
All of this technically could have been accomplished by just selling Greenplum and Pivotal Labs (the only assets of the new company that was under the EMC umbrella) to VMware, but Roese said VMware wasn’t the right home because VMware is not so important in the places where next-generation workloads are popping up. There’s not a lot of VMware inside carriers’ data centers, he acknowledged, but there is a lot of OpenStack popping up. And there’s a lot of Amazon Web Services everywhere you look.
“We would like the big data infrastructure to not care about that,” Roese explained. From EMC’s perspective, it doesn’t need to own the middle — the cloud operating system, if you will — if it can still engage customers at the storage and application-platform layers.
On keeping independent while working an ‘unfair advantage’
Roese doesn’t think a vertically integrated approach is the best way to do business in today’s technology world, which is why EMC, VMware and Pivotal all operate independently and no one relies on another in order to work within customers’ data centers. That’s why VMware has its own cloud computing efforts but Pivotal is cloud-agnostic, why EMC storage can operate with any higher-level software and why VMware doesn’t care about what’s running underneath or, usually, above it.
However, he added, it’s only natural the three companies seek an “unfair advantage” from the incestuous bonds they share. What he means, of course, is that they should keep a close eye on what the others are doing and work together to ensure they’re all optimized for the same types of workloads. For example, Roese said, if EMC didn’t reconsider how storage had to perform given that virtualization is the norm or that technology like Hadoop exists, it would “become suboptimal or generic.”
From EMC’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this all matters. It is at its core an information infrastructure company, but “the challenging thing with that is that it’s a moving target,” Roese said. A company like EMC can’t get by on storage arrays alone anymore, but it also can’t be dumb enough to think it can be everything to everyone and still be good at anything.
We’ve been big fans of cult strategy game Auralux for some time now, but one of our major complaints of the game is well— it was only intended for owners of Tegra-based devices. Fortunately, those of you out there who have been hankering to get in on the great action will now have a shot as Auralux received an extensive update which not only features expanded features and stability enhancements, but now owners of any Android 3.0+ device can finally get in on the action as the game is no longer limited to Tegra-based devices.
In case you aren’t familiar with the basic game concept, Auralux allows gamers to begin campaigns with one type of unit upon one planet and the end goal is to send your units to other neighboring planets with the hope of taking them over. The basic premise of the game allows for hours of addictive gameplay, but as an added treat, there is a new level pack that has been tossed in with the update for even more awesome potential. Oh and lest we forget— there’s third-party controller support, so if you find that playing with the touchscreen doesn’t strike your fancy, you’ll have at least one alternative to choose from. Sweet.
The update is now available in the Play Store for all Android 3.0+ devices— tablet or smartphone. You’ll want to make sure that you have at least 33MB of free storage space in order to run the game, but trust us— the download of this game will be worth it.
There’s a place in Switzerland where scientists travel on bicycles through tunnels filled with atom-smashing tubes, where the first webpage was born, and where a giant wooden globe watches over researchers replicating the very beginnings of our universe. That place is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and last Friday, it held its first TEDx event: TEDxCERN.
At the event, 23 speakers and performers — including a Nobel laureate, an Ig Nobel Prize founder, a Google Science Fair winner, and an opera singer — gathered together in CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation to talk about the Higgs boson, science education, classifying galaxies, and — naturally — an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep.
So what did we at TED HQ learn at TEDxCERN? A lot. But to make things easy, here are seven takeaways from TEDxCERN:
1. In 2010, when prompted to draw a “scientist,” only 33% of schoolchildren asked drew a woman.
In 1980, the figure was 8%. At TEDxCERN, Londa Schiebinger, head of the Gendered Innovations project at Stanford University, talked about some of the issues women in the sciences face today, and the importance of recognizing gender bias in science and technology.
2. Animated elephants and double scoops of ice cream make pondering particle physics a lot more palatable.
Thanks to a collaboration between the whip-smart scientists at CERN and the talented animators at TED-Ed, four new TED-Ed lessons premiered at TEDxCERN — bringing mind-boggling concepts like antimatter, big data, the Higgs boson, and the origins of the universe to life in a way that even the most science-averse student could appreciate: with chocolate-almond ice cream, a lemon, and a giant pile of leaves.
3. Brian May from the band Queen is an astrophysicist.
Yeah, we didn’t know that either. But thanks to a talk from Zooniverse head Chris Lintott, we learned that not only is May a card-carrying astrophysicist (he earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007), he is a fan of Lintott’s Galaxy Zoo project — a herculean effort to gamify and crowdsource galaxy classification.
4. Science goes beyond geography.
People called SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) “an impossible project.” But this lab in Jordan, built around a giant synchrotron particle accelerator, has brought together Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian, Turkish, Pakistani and Iranian scientists to study a universe bigger than us all. At TEDxCERN, SESAME scientists Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers talked about the project’s groundbreaking work.
5. Cool teachers bring their students on field trips via Google Glass.
Physics class can be boring. But not so much if your teacher is Andrew Vanden Heuvel, the TEDxCERN presenter and online physics teacher who traveled to Switzerland to give his students a live tour of the world’s largest particle collider live through his eyes, using Google Glass. At TEDxCERN, we got to see a video diary of his trip, and it is mesmerizing:
6. Herrings communicate by farting. Really.
When you’re a scientist, what you think you’re looking for isn’t always what you find, and Marc Abrahams — organizer of the Ig Nobel Prize, the annual celebration of “improbable” science — thinks this is awesome. At TEDxCERN, he spoke on improbable findings, and shared some surprising discoveries by past Ig Noble winners, including one Robert Batty, who — with his team at the Scottish Association for Marine Science — discovered that strategically released gas allows herrings to communicate at night.
7. The Higgs field is a big deal. In fact, if its value changed too much, it’s quite possible “all atomic matter would collapse.”
Theoretical physicist Gian Giudice knows a lot about the Higgs boson, the Higgs field, and researchers’ attempts to understand it better. At TEDxCERN, he pondered the question, “What might the Higgs mean for the fate of the universe?” and got us all flustered when he said that new discoveries about the famed boson might mean that someday the value of the Higgs field could change and all would be doomed. But not to worry — whatever happens, we’ve got a lot of time before it does.
For more dispatches from TEDxCERN, including some killer photos, visit the website or check out their Facebook or Instagram.
The war-torn country of Syria effectively disappeared from the Internet Tuesday afternoon, according to multiple monitoring services. The disruption, which appears to have affected all Internet traffic from the country, began about 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, which is about 9:45 p.m. in Syria.
The dropoff in Internet traffic is clearly visible in monitoring from Google (see chart above). It has been confirmed by Rensys, a leading network monitoring service. “Renesys confirms loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC.BGP routes down, inbound traces failing,” the company tweeted.
The outage was quickly noted by Umbrella Security Labs in a blog post by CTO Dan Hubbard.
“Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world,” wrote Hubbard. “It’s unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages.”
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time this has happened. Syria was previously cut off from the Internet last November.
“Many Syria-watchers feared that the (November) Web shutdown was a precursor to some sort of coordinated regime counterattack or campaign; that President Bashar al-Assad had not wanted the world to see what he was about to do,” notes the Washington Post. “No such campaign ever appeared to come, however. Later, many Syria analysts concluded that the regime may have been seeking to hamper rebel communication.”
While just about everyone is sick and tired of the constant barrage of patent lawsuits among smartphone vendors, it seems that tech companies themselves keep plugging precious resources into suing one another despite having fairly little to show for it. Analysis by The Wall Street Journal has found that “courts have proven as likely to deliver plaintiffs a rebuke as a win, and the slow grinding of the justice system has sapped the impact of the occasional big victories” in patent lawsuits.
Three bodies were found on a farm in Kansas on Monday, and investigators believe one of them belongs to a young mother who disappeared with her 18-month old daughter last week.
The bodies were discovered when two friends of 21-year old Kaylie Bailey visited the home–which belonged to her boyfriend, Andrew Stout, and his roommate, Steven Eugene White–to check on some animals there. The women–Kortni McGill and Corey Schlotzhauer–quickly smelled a foul odor coming from the garage and called police, who did a brief search of the home and found nothing. After they left, the women decided they weren’t satisfied with the quick inspection and returned with another friend, 21-year old Shona Osladil, to investigate. They then found a decaying body beneath a tarp that had been weighted down.
“I reached down and saw teeth through the square in the cinder block. I said, ‘Corey, there’s a body here,’” Kortni McGill said.
The reported reason the police didn’t find the body is that it was covered in trash, but Osladil is extremely unhappy with the way things have been handled.
“I’m very frustrated,” she said. “Without us going out there how long would it have been before they found that body?”
Investigators aren’t releasing details regarding how the victims died, saying it is crucial to their investigation. The baby, Lana Bailey, has yet to be found. They are, however, looking for two men in connection with the murders: Kyle Flack, 27, and Cyle Mathew Bailey, 22. They are believed to be driving a Toyota Corolla.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, the largest investor in DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc, has entered an agreement allowing it to nearly double its stake in the largest U.S. operator of dialysis clinics to 25 percent, Reuters is reporting.
(Reuters) – Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, the largest investor in DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc, has entered an agreement allowing it to nearly double its stake in the largest U.S. operator of dialysis clinics to 25 percent.
According to a regulatory filing, the companies on Tuesday entered a “standstill” agreement, which is often used to prevent unsolicited takeovers, indicating the maximum percentage of shares that Berkshire can own.
DaVita shares rose $3.84, or 3.3 percent, to $121.40 in after-hours trading after the agreement was disclosed.
Berkshire owned about 15 million DaVita shares, or 14.2 percent, as of March 4, according to another regulatory filing.
These shares were worth about $1.76 billion, based on Tuesday’s closing price of $117.56 for DaVita. That price gave DaVita a market value of about $12.4 billion.
Buffett’s company ended March with $49.1 billion of cash, of which $12.1 billion is being used to help fund the pending purchase of ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co (HNZ.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)
DaVita has long been a favorite investment of Ted Weschler, one of two portfolio managers Buffett hired to run portions of Berkshire’s $95.9 billion portfolio of equities.
Buffett recently gave Weschler and the other portfolio manager, Todd Combs, an additional $1 billion each to invest.
Within the last five years, Berkshire has held stakes exceeding 20 percent in railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp, which it later bought, and credit rating company Moody’s Corp (MCO.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), whose shares it has recently been selling.
Separately, Denver-based DaVita reported on Tuesday an adjusted first-quarter operating profit excluding a legal reserve of $196.9 million, or $1.84 per share. Analysts on average expected $1.79 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Chancellor Gene Block and UCLA staff members gathered today for 10 minutes of exercise to honor Dr. Antronette (Toni) Yancey, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and advocate for health equity and proponent of “Instant Recess.” She died April 23 following a battle with lung cancer. The 1 p.m. tribute at UCLA’s CHS Plaza coincided with “Instant Recess” events by public health professionals and supporters across the United States.
In move that Sigmund Freud would certainly approve of, T-Mobile has released a new ad that claims its network “pipes” are able to gush out more data at a faster rate than AT&T’s, which can apparently only muster a slow trickle. The point of the new ad seems to be that T-Mobile’s network can give iPhone 5 users faster data service despite having very limited LTE availability because it’s not as “overcrowded” as AT&T’s, which is just a nifty way of saying that AT&T has tens of millions more subscribers. T-Mobile has made AT&T its biggest target for ridicule in its “UNcarrier” campaign where it’s been trying to redefine itself as a more consumer-friendly wireless carrier. AT&T so far has responded to T-Mobile’s barbs with a one-word response of “whatever.” A video of the ad is posted below.
That’s the word late today from Microsoft. The next version of Windows will be available, as a preview, during Microsoft’s BUILD developer conference June 27-29 in San Francisco.
To ship this year, as the company plans, the preview would need to be brief, with release to manufacturing ideally coming by end of August latest. PC makers generally need four to six weeks of testing before qualifying final images. That makes the timetable tight to get Windows Blue on holiday 2013 PCs.
The new version comes as Windows 8 fails to lift PC shipments and some analysts contending the operating system hurts them. “At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market”, Bob O’Donnell, IDC vice president, says.
“While some consumers appreciate the new form factors and touch capabilities of Windows 8, the radical changes to the UI, removal of the familiar Start button, and the costs associated with touch have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices”, he says. “Microsoft will have to make some very tough decisions moving forward if it wants to help reinvigorate the PC market”.
Most analysts cite Microsoft’s emphasis on touch but PC manufacturers’ inability to bring appropriate models to market as a big problem. Apps selection is one reason.
“Thus far, Windows 8 has had a limited impact on driving touch adoption in notebook PCs, due to a lack of applications needing touch and the high cost of touch on notebook PCs”, Richard Shim, NPD DisplaySearch senior analyst, says. He emphasizes: “Form factors aimed at differentiation from standard clamshell notebooks will help to drive consumer adoption of touch-enabled notebook PCs, starting in the second half of 2013”.
That said, DisplaySearch and IDC predict touch models will comprise a small number of PC shipments for the foreseeable future. That circumstance leads to much speculation that Microsoft will make the Desktop mode more a priority in Windows Blue.
My question: What do you want Microsoft to change in Windows Blue?
Haystax Technology, which is backed by Edgewater Funds, said Tuesday that it acquired FlexPoint Technology. Financial terms weren’t announced. Reston, Va.-based Flexpoint, professional services company, provides private and public cloud solutions that supplies secure collaboration and application development capabilities.
PRESS RELEASE
Haystax Technology, Inc. (Haystax), a portfolio company of the Edgewater Funds, today announced the acquisition of FlexPoint Technology, LLC. Haystax provides multi-source information integration, big data analytics and visualization to address the challenges posed by exponential increases in data volume to customers in the intelligence, defense and security communities. The FlexPoint acquisition extends Haystax products and services in defense and intelligence markets and marks their second acquisition in three weeks.
FlexPoint Technology is a professional services company providing private and public cloud solutions that deliver secure collaboration and application development capabilities to security-demanding environments. Defense and intelligence community customers rely on FlexPoint solutions to rapidly deploy secure cloud computing environments for substantial improvements in performance and reduced operating expenses. FlexPoint software and engineering services deliver custom mission applications and manage internal users and external partners, ensuring the right people have the right information to make the right decisions
Haystax Technology CEO, William B. Van Vleet , said, “The addition of FlexPoint Technology’s cloud computing and security services perfectly complements our existing capabilities in big data analytics and mobile solutions. This combination results in a full spectrum of products and services with expertise in each of the four technology forces that are revolutionizing government and private industry.”
FlexPoint Technology President, David Conrad , added, “Haystax Technology provides additional capabilities and resources in real-time analytics and mobile solutions to extend the range of our capabilities for our clients’ critical missions. Joining this team strengthens our overall capabilities and provides an outstanding cultural match for our employees and customers.”
Following the acquisition, FlexPoint will be known as FlexPoint Technology, a Haystax Company, and will continue to be led by its president, David Conrad . The terms of the transaction were not released.
About FlexPoint Technology, LLC
FlexPoint Technology is a Virginia-based IT professional services company that specializes in delivering cloud computing and enterprise content management services to government customers with extremely demanding security requirements. FlexPoint solutions leverage commercial off-the-shelf technology to deliver identity management, secure collaboration services, infrastructure management and application development. Visit FlexPoint on the Web at www.flexpointtech.com
About Haystax Technology
Haystax Technology, Inc. provides next generation products, systems and service solutions to sift, refine and analyze large, disparate and unstructured volumes of data to reveal undiscovered connections and enable precise, actionable intelligence for government and commercial market clients. In essence, these technologies allow users to find “the needle in the haystack” quickly and reliably. For further information about Haystax Technology, visit our website at www.haystaxtechnology.com.
About The Edgewater Funds
The Edgewater Funds is a Chicago-based private equity firm with $1.4 billion in committed capital. Edgewater Growth Capital Partners with management to help accelerate growth in their businesses. Edgewater focuses on funding high quality middle market companies where we can add substantial value through our capital, our experience and our broad network. Edgewater leverages the experiences of its Partners and Advisory Board who have distinguished themselves as successful CEOs and business leaders.
Microsoft fights an uphill battle against iOS and Android, but it is a war the company is determined to persevere in, especially given the latest TV ad, which is viral. Now within back-to-back days the mobile platform adds both Foursquare, Hulu and updated YouTube.
Today, an updated YouTube app joins the party, with Microsoft announcing a new version that allows pinning videos, playlists, channels, and search queries to Start as Live Tiles, gives new playlist design, plays videos in the background when the screen is locked (perfect for music videos) and makes easy video sharing to social sites. It even leverages the YouTube safety mode to keep the little ones from viewing unfit content. However, as my colleague Mihaita Bamburic points out, “You can’t upload videos, sadly. That’s a pretty basic feature, albeit one that’s missing”.
Before you get the impression that Microsoft and Google have mended fences and made nice with each other, let me explain. The new YouTube app is not produced by the Google team, but by Microsoft. Version 3.0 was released today, is free and is compatible with both Windows Phone 7.5 and 8.
Windows Phone fans also got another gift today, with Foursquare announcing an app for the handset. “We’ve been working closely with Nokia and Microsoft, and today, we’re finally taking the covers off a brand new version of Foursquare for Windows Phone 8, specially optimized for Nokia’s shiny new Lumia phones”, the company tells us. This brings 33 million users with it, along with the ability to view maps, get insider tips and browse trending places.
Yesterday Hulu announced the premium video service, known as Plus, was launching on the Microsoft platform, telling us that its “team has been focused on creating a beautiful and comprehensive Hulu Plus experience that is optimized for Windows Phone 8”. Clicking on the app will launch a panorama of clips, episodes and shows that are organized neatly, making for quick and easy access. Hulu Plus is free, but requires a subscription for content.
Nine months into her tenure as Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer offered some insights into what might lie ahead for the company and its mish-mash of products. Speaking at a Wired Business conference in New York City, Mayer emphasized the role of video but downplayed the role of Google Glass and the prospect of a Facebook-style takeover over smartphone homescreens.
“We want to have a portfolio approach — no one is going to use the whole suite of products,” said Mayer, adding that Yahoo is fine with an à la carte approach where different users pull up two or three of what the company calls its “daily dozen” tools such as stocks or weather.
Speaking with Wired’s senior writer, Stephen Levy, Mayer also addressed the role of video; the company has earned some buzz in this area with announcements that it acquired the rights to Saturday Night Live clips and that it will be putting out original shows like “Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos.”
This appears to be part of what Mayer calls a “tiered approach” in which Yahoo will put out a small tier of original content alongside a larger tranche of curated content from across the web, as well as encouraging user-generated fare on Flickr.
The CEO also addressed, once again, her diktat to curtail working from home — a controversial decision that’s provided nearly endless grist for debates over gender and workplace.
“I didn’t mean for it to be an industry narrative,” she said. “We were just saying it wasn’t right for us right now … Everyone at Yahoo works in teams [and] stopping “causes drag.”
She added that the policy has lots of exceptions and been really well-received inside the company, and argued that it has produced a “Reese’s peanut butter effect” that can only happen when disparate people run into each other on the job.
In response to Levy’s question about search, Mayer said she “believed in it” and “understands it” (which is no doubt true after her long tenure at Google) but that the company will continue to hitch its wagon with Microsoft on the search front for the time being.
As for a description of the company’s “moonshot,” Mayer said it was to be on billions of screens. And, in a note that may give hope to exasperated investors, she added that she wants the company to return to faster-than-market growth.
It’s not a secret that replicating what the human brain and senses do naturally still presents a substantial challenge in engineering. New advances in restoring and improving hearing are getting closer to the real thing by going mobile and taking cues from nature.
A little yellow fly that lays parasitic eggs is actually the inspiration for a next-gen hearing aid. Its complex “ear” near the base of the front legs responds to male cricket calls, and is the model for tiny microphones. Two or more microphones detecting the pressure changes in sound waves are better for hearing aids, but the smaller and closer the microphones, the harder it is to accurately detect those waves. The mechanics of the MEMS microphone design come directly from the fly, and new research scheduled to be presented at the International Congress of Acoustics in June shows that by tweaking certain parameters, the prototype hearing aid can be made much smaller than conventional ones, with a greater tolerance to noise.
Of more immediate impact are hearing aid apps for smartphones, which contain the microphone, processor, and headphones needed for a hearing aid at a fraction of the cost of a separate device. Hearing aid apps with diverse features and prices are available, but one recent app that stands out is BioAid, a free and open source hearing aid.
The difference with BioAid is that its algorithm performs compression and amplification selectively across different frequency bands, instead of a uniform gain across all frequencies, like turning up the volume. Since it was built by hearing researchers in the U.K., it has been lab tested with real hearing-impaired volunteers. With the app’s sliders, users can adjust and save filters for different background noise levels. Plus, the phone’s touchscreen and charger save users from the tiny-battery-fat-fingers dilemma.
On a regulatory note, the Food and Drug Administration is paying close attention to mobile health services, which may explain why some apps shun the “hearing aid” label or are plastered with heavy disclaimers. Congressional hearings in March were a prelude to upcoming new FDA guidelines on smartphone and mobile health apps; 75 apps have been approved so far.
The bulky cochlear implant, one of the great successes of sensory prosthetics, is also getting a makeover. Georgia Tech researchers, for example, have developed a thin film electrode array that flexes to fit the tiny, two-millimeter diameter cochlear surface to better stimulate the auditory nerve. This still needs to be connected to a battery, microphones, and processor; the externally visible part of conventional cochlear implants. A fully internal system, trialed by industry leader Cochlear in 2007, means users never have to remove it to swim, sleep, or shower. The downside with an internal microphone, apparently, is that you can really hear your chewing and heartbeat, but with signal processing this effect can be mitigated.
With the cost of conventional implants being reduced by upstarts like Nurotron thanks to cheap manufacturing and fast-tracked regulatory approval in China, and biotech providing new materials and designs, a true bionic ear (3D printed of course) may be arriving at the speed of sound.
That’s the word late today from Microsoft. The next version of Windows will be available, as a preview, during Microsoft’s 
