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Here’s a good way for Microsoft to attract new users to its Outlook web mail platform that doesn’t involve convincing people that Gmail is too scary to use. Microsoft’s Skype blog announced this week that it has started rolling out a preview version of Outlook that will give users the ability to make Skype calls directly from their web browsers. The video demonstration that Microsoft has posted of Skype in Outlook shows that the integration is very smooth — when you click over someone’s email profile, you can now see voice and video calling icons that you can click to connect with someone over Skype. The preview version of Outlook is launching in the United Kingdom this week and will roll out in the United States over the next couple of weeks. Microsoft’s full video of Skype in Outlook is posted below.

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While cost tends to dominate discussions about prescriptions drugs and health care policy, lawmakers probably shouldn’t overlook the economic problems caused by abuse and misuse. According to prescription-management specialist Express Scripts, people selling or obtaining prescription drugs illegally or not taking them according to the directions combine for more than $500 billion in wasted health care spending each year. But, armed with a boatload of data, Express Scripts is trying to get those problems under control.

If Express Scripts’ numbers are correct, the abuse and misuse (which the company calls “nonadherence”) of prescription drugs can have a pretty staggering effect on the health care market. Nonadherence, the company claims, results in expenditures of $317.4 billion a year treating conditions that could have been avoided had people just taken their prescriptions as directed. Every dollar spent on potentially abused drugs results in an additional $41 spent on associated claims, and the health care system loses between 3 and 10 percent of every dollar — or about $224 billion — to fraud and abuse every year.

Express Scripts’ strategy for solving the problem is all about data. Because it manages 1.4 billion prescriptions each year covering about 100 million Americans and 65,000 pharmacies, the company is able to identify patterns that signal potential problems. But it’s also using data to try solving some cases before it ever has to spot them. Here’s how Express Scripts does what it does.

No one needs 20,000 pills

When it comes to fighting fraud and abuse, there’s not a whole lot anyone can do to stem the tide of issues that cause those behaviors, but data analysis can certainly help flag problems and eliminate them from the system. Having such a large dataset to analyze helps Express Scripts easily spot outliers in patient behavior, explained Michael Klein, a senior manager in the company’s program integrity division. Prescriptions for narcotics, for example, often include limitations on the amount that any given pharmacy can dispense in a month, so individuals addicted to those drugs might seek multiple prescriptions from multiple physicians and try filling them at multiple pharmacies, often geographically distant from one another.

In one instance, Express Scripts’ models helped Klein and his team identify a husband-and-wife team that had obtained approximately 7,000 pills — worth about $150,000 in total — by using 17 doctors and pharmacies in different cities. They had actually signed multiple exclusivity contracts with doctors, stating they would only get narcotics prescriptions from those doctors. In another case, an Express Scripts flagged an individual who had received 808 days’ worth of narcotics in one year, with the pills spread across 21 pharmacies, 19 doctors and multiple schedule 2 controlled substances.

And where there’s addiction, there will always be people trying to make a buck by feeding it. Although the number of individuals abusing prescription drugs or trying to defraud the system to make money is a difficult problem to tackle in terms of sheer scale, Klein noted, there’s an equally important problem around what he calls “pill mills.” As the name term implies, these are essentially doctors who overprescribe medication. “A line of people … go into their office and they just write those prescriptions,” Klein explained.

Express Scripts uses its models to track doctors’ prescription activity across its entire network of pharmacies and patients, but a sheer quantity of prescriptions or even dosage doesn’t necessarily prove there’s anything insiduous going on. Rather, Klein said, the company also looks at things such as the types of medications they’re prescribing and even what people are saying about doctors online. If a doctor’s behavior raises a red flag, there’s a chance — surprisingly high, in fact — that he or she has been mentioned on an online forum as a good person to see if you need drugs.

Jo-Ellen Abou Nader, a senior director for program integrity at Express Scripts, noted that, much like with other criminal networks, identifying one member in a pill mill scheme can help uncover a much bigger picture. One particularly high-profile case involved a single doctor prescribing an average of 55 pills per day to 30 patients over the course of a year — that’s an average of 20,000 apiece and more than 600,000 in total. That’s more than anyone could ever take, she said, and just flagging one of those recipients could be enough to expose the entire operation.

However, not everyone prescribing too much medication is trying to profit from the system, and not everyone trying to profit from the system is involved with dealing drugs. Abou Nader explained that Express Scripts has models to flag Medicare Part D fraud, in which people sell Medicare IDs to pharmacies that then issue claims for pills they never dispensed, as well as plain old waste. The latter, which the company defines as “overfilling,” can look like small-scale fraud, she said, only doctors or pharmacies are unintentionally doling out too much medication.

We have (or will have) ways to make you follow directions

As big of a problem as waste, fraud and abuse combine to be, nonadherence is an even bigger problem in terms of extra costs. According to Bob Nease, chief scientist at Express Scripts, people who don’t properly take their prescriptions make up a more-expensive medical condition than heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. “Those are the statistics we tell to scare people,” he said.

What might be even scarier for Express Scripts’ clients, however, is that the problem is still very difficult to prevent. Human beings just aren’t wired to remember to take pills at the same time every day, Nease explained, and there’s an instrumentation problem when it comes to spotting missed medication times as they’re happening. “Right now,” he said, “the only way we know someone isn’t taking their prescriptions as prescribed … is looking at refill patterns.”

This is somewhat problematic because it can be difficult to tell the difference between someone who takes their pills regularly but just forgot to refill on time and someone who consistently skips days altogether. So what Nease would really like to see is a way to incorporate sensors into the prescription process, perhaps like a Bluetooth-enabled cap could that communicate with a person’s smartphone to alert him if he hasn’t opened the bottle today or that it’s time to take medicine (GlowCaps are probably a good starting point). Sensors that measure weight or volume could give people like Nease a better sense of when people are taking medicine and how much they’re taking.

It’s this latter type of information — how actual medication-taking behavior relates to improvements or deteriorations in health — that Nease really wants to know. Express Scripts uses the FDA definition of “adherence,” which means taking medication as prescribed 80 percent of the time, but Nease says no one really knows the difference between someone moving from 50 percent to 60 percent adherence or from 70 percent to 80 percent. For some conditions, he posited, small improvements might actually be medically significant even if the patient never approaches that 80 percent threshold.

But for now, Express Scripts relies pretty heavily on models that Nease said are more than 90 percent accurate at predicting whether someone will get lax on following directions.

Most people who are nonadherent will naturally become more adherent over time (and vice versa), Nease said, with rates waning and waxing by about 20 percent. Using simple methods such as beepers that go off when it’s time to take a medication or bottles that remind someone whether or not they’ve taken their medication, people who Express Scripts predict have a mid-range probability of nonadherence see their adherence rates rise an additional 14 percent on average.

“It’s not earth shattering,” Nease admits, “but it’s better than anything else we’ve got.”

Those models turn out to be pretty interesting, however, taking into account some 400 variables including classic demographic information, the types and numbers of prescriptions someone is getting, and even whether people respond to Express Scripts’ letters and phone calls.

The most surprising variable, one that Nease says is material to every nonadherence model Express Scripts builds, might be how a person rates as a consumer. The company buys data from a consumer marketing agency that categorizes people as belonging to 1 of 66 separate microsegments such as “young digerati,” which is how the university-area-living, cord-cutting, high-speed-internet-having and fifty-something Nease is categorized. “It turns out these general consumer behaviors tend to bleed over into these health behaviors,” Nease said, “but not in a consistent fashion.”

And although no single variable has too big an effect on its own, how they interact with each other turns out to be rather important. For example, Nease explained, the patient’s gender and doctor’s gender can be relatively telling depending on the patient’s ZIP code. Male patients living in lower-income areas and seeing female doctors tend to have higher nonadherence rates than do otherwise similar patients in higher-income areas.

Of course, he added, “It really doesn’t matter to us whether someone is high-risk or low-risk unless we can do something about it.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user pogonici.

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That chomping sound you hear is the iPad mini eating into the sales of its older sibling. Unnamed sources have told Digitimes that Apple shipped 12.5 million iPad minis last quarter that accounted for roughly 64% of all iPads shipped. The reported iPad mini shipment numbers would give Apple’s 8-inch tablet a significant edge over the rival Google Nexus 7 tablet, which Digitimes‘ sources say has totalled around 4.5 million units shipped since its launch last summer. Earlier rumors have indicated that Apple might be working on two newer versions of the iPad mini for fall release: A more expensive version with a full Retina display and a cheaper version that could be priced competitively with the Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Belkin, the maker of myriad Apple accessories, USB widgets and even the WeMo connected outlets, has a big business in industrial products as well. And today it announced a series of sensors aimed at helping commercial companies and utilities better manage electricity and water usage.

It has a pilot project with the Department of Defense related to the electric sensor technology as well as an exclusive partnership on the water side with HydroPoint Data Systems, a company that helps companies analyze and monitor water usage. The Belkin sensors are one of 22 projects that the DoD selected to pilot, and those 22 were selected from 468 proposals.

To learn more about these sensors, branded Echo Water and Echo Electricity, I spoke with Kevin Ashton, the general manager, global product management for Belkin Business, and the guy who says he coined the term “internet of things.” Ashton joined Belkin when it acquired his startup, Zensi, three years ago. Now he’s excited to share the last three years of his work with the world.

There are two elements to the Echo sensors: a water management platform and an electricity management platform. Customers deploy sensors in buildings or on pipes to measure electricity by tracking voltage and a few other elements to determine what’s sucking power and how it’s behaving, and then the sensors send that data to the cloud. On the water side, sensors located under a sink detect pressure and vibration to understand water usage, and sends that information to a cloud-based service.

Once the data is collected, Belkin runs algorithms to figure out if things are behaving properly, where energy savings might be had and general patterns around usage that might help companies or homeowners optimize their appliances or even behaviors. At Zensi, the original plan for the voltage-reading technology was to create an itemized electric bill for different apartments or even different gadgets inside the home.

Now, Ashton said the system is still as precise, but the use case is still evolving. He said that the plan is to open this data up to utilities and other services eventually, but right now the focus is on getting this deployed and in use in different buildings. Ashton said that so far partners and Belkin are fielding calls from commercial customers but also new homebuilders, who see this as a good way to help “green” new homes for high-end clients.

Of course, the real power for these sensors — the algorithms, data and insights they produce — is linking them to other gadgets, perhaps enabling a true demand-response system between a customer and utility or even helping a homeowner set devices to react to the cost of power. Aston realizes this, which is why he’s a proponent of open standards and making it easy for people to switch out devices and talk to management systems. “We hope to let the magic happen with well implemented open standards,” Ashton said in an interview. “The value in this system may be in places we don’t expect.”

I’m pretty confident that the value is in the algorithms that Belkin’s Echo sensors use to glean insights, but I’m glad Belkin’s planning to let others build on those smarts to make the overall information exchange even better.

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If you’ve read anything about the social network Path over the last year or so, you’d know that it’s an attractive app with some interesting social and design features, but one that has been struggling for years now to get enough users to move it into the big leagues of social networks. Path needs more people using its app. And clearly, the company got the message.

Path announced this week that it hit 10 million users, hoping to reinforce that the company is on a growth track. But just as soon as Path announced that number, stories that hint at less-than-ideal user-acquisition strategies came out, highlighting yet again that attracting new users doesn’t mean much if those new users feel that they can’t trust you.

As many people have already written, the concept of “registered users” is essentially a meaningless metric. A registered user could be someone who downloads your app once and never opens it again — hardly a valuable customer to have. There are also a variety of shady ways companies can acquire new downloads.

On Tuesday, The Verge reported that several users had done just that — downloaded the app, tried it out, and then uninstalled when they found they didn’t like it or need it. However, those users then reported that Path had then sent a message to all of the contacts in their address book, urging them to check out photos that the user had shared on Path — even after the user had uninstalled the app — which in order to see the photos requires one to download the app and sign up. This is also an issue that commenters on Reddit have complained about before.

When I spoke to the company about those complaints Tuesday, a representative explained that when a user signs up to download Path, that user can choose whether to grant Path access to their contacts and Facebook friends. So presumably, if you unselect your friends and contacts from the suggested lists when you sign up, you’re set.

But in regards to today’s story of the user’s contacts getting messaged after he uninstalled the app, Path VP of Marketing Nate Johnson said the company is investigating how that happened, and the current guess is that there was a delay in sending messages to the person’s contacts after he signed up, that went out after he’d uninstalled the app.

“That’s something we’re investigating very closely,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to do anything without your knowledge, that’s not the Path way.”

Maybe contacting your Facebook friends is fair game on Path’s part if the user doesn’t realize he needs to uncheck some boxes, but if I uninstalled an app and then discovered it had spammed all my contacts after that app was gone from my phone? I would would be livid, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend the app to any of my friends.

It’s not an uncommon strategy in Silicon Valley for companies to take first and ask later when it comes to user privacy and sharing — Facebook, where Path founder Dave Morin played an integral role, practically pioneered the strategy.

But for Path, it’s a much more dangerous road to travel than it is for Facebook, and not just because Path doesn’t have the 1 billion strong user base to serve as a buffer. Path already had to settle with the FTC and pay an $800,000 fine for acquiring the numbers of minors, and back in its earlier days it made headlines when the company apologized for storing user address book data on its servers.

So yes, Path absolutely needs to acquire new users to remain relevant, and there are several ways the company could achieve this. That road to users and revenue could come with the company’s new messaging and stickers (which I was just using this weekend, and are stupidly, addictively entertaining.)

But if that growth comes from violating user trust and spamming their address books to effectively cold-call a user’s friends? That’s a surefire way to alienate both existing users and deter any future ones.

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How would Netflix’s iPad app look like if you scrapped everything and restarted from scratch? That’s exactly what Joel Grenier, director of UX for the Ottawa-based design agency YOU i Labs did.

“Now that I use Netflix every day and love the service on many levels, I find myself frustrated with the current state of the application experience and design,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this month. That’s why he came up with a very different approach.

Grenier’s prototype comes complete with a sign-in option for personalized profiles — which Netflix is set to roll out in the coming months — custom artwork for movies and TV show pages, the ability to drag and drop titles for custom watch lists and more. And everything is tied together with some very smooth animations.

Grenier even mocked up some second-screen functionality for the Netflix iPad app, allowing users to tweet about titles they’re currently watching and even buy things related to a movie or a show.

It’s unlikely that the Netflix iPad app would ever get such a radical overhaul — Netflix famously A/B-tests each and every potential new feature and only implements features that notably lead to higher engagement — and some features don’t actually make all that much sense. For example, one could argue that a pure on-demand service doesn’t really need a live Twitter stream, as the viewing experience is largely asynchronous.

But Grenier’s app mockup is nonetheless food for thought — and proof that there is still a lot media services can experiment with on mobile devices.

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Workspot said it raised $1.9 million of seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and angel investors, including Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg. The company also launched a bring-your-own-mobile-device service for IT administrators, Workspot Control, and a mobile application for IPads, called Workspot.

PRESS RELEASE

Workspot Launches New Bring-Your-Own-Device Solution for IT Departments and End Users; Reveals Founding Team and Announces Seed Funding

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers backed startup to Present at TechCrunch Disrupt NY

TechCrunch Disrupt, New York, NY and Menlo Park, CA – April 30, 2013 – Workspot launched a new bring-your-own-device solution for the mobile workplace.  Workspot has created both a SaaS service for IT administrators, Workspot Control, and a mobile application for IPads called Workspot.  Workspot also announced that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding from Kleiner Perkins, Norwest, Redpoint, and angel investors including Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg.

Workspot is a single app and secure mobile workplace that helps end-users and IT departments conveniently separate work-related content and personal information stored on the device. End-users can flip between applications inside Workspot with ease, in a single, contained workspace including Intranet, SharePoint, Email, and Microsoft Office documents.  Collaboration with co-workers is possible through applications that reside behind their organization’s firewall making full use of SaaS applications.

Workspot was founded by a trio of experienced San Francisco Bay Area technologists including CEO Amitabh Sinha, formerly of Citrix; CTO Puneet Chawla, formerly of VMWare; and Vice President Ty Wang, formerly of Oracle and Twilio.  Its team also includes experienced engineers from companies including Juniper Networks, Dell, F5, and Microsoft.

“Workspot is a cloud-based, BYOD solution that provides a secure, ‘no new infrastructure or server software’ implementation for IT Network professionals, and delights their end users who require a seamless, easy-to-use solution,” said Amitabh Sinha, CEO, Workspot.  “Our approach stands apart because IT departments can get critical business applications to their end-users typically in less than 30 minutes.”

The new app, also called Workspot, underwent pre-launch testing as part of Spiceworks’ SpicePanel program, an initiative that connects start-up and established technology companies with more than 2.4 million IT professionals. Workspot is comprised of Workspot Control, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) interface for BYOD configuration and analytics, and the Workspot mobile application for Apple iPad devices. Workspot intelligently connects to customers’ existing security infrastructure, embracing and extending the authentication schemes IT professionals have already implemented with SSL-VPN appliances. No credentials are stored in the cloud, and all authentication is done directly against existing security appliances.

“The small-to-midsize business market represents an enormous opportunity for technology brands who can move quickly to address a specific need or pain point, such as BYOD management,” said Jay Hallberg, co-founder and VP of Marketing at Spiceworks. “Early access to the latest technologies, like Workspot, provides the Spiceworks Community with the opportunity to shape the products and services they purchase to do their jobs.”

“In the face of the BYOD explosion, this is a great method of helping users while still meeting compliance.” Scott Chille, IT Director, Mason City Clinic.  “My users are glad to have access to clinic applications and information on their iPads.  Before, they were hiking their laptops around with them and wouldn’t bring it into a meeting – now they can multitask.”
Workspot will be competing in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield in New York City  Tuesday, April 30, as part of the ‘Mobile First’ category.

About Workspot
Workspot is a bring-your-own-device solution for the mobile workplace. It was created by a team of experienced San Francisco, Bay Area technologists with backgrounds from Citrix, Oracle, Juniper Networks, VMware, Symantec, Microsoft, and Cisco.  Workspot received a seed round of funding Summer of 2012 from Kleiner Perkins, Norwest, Redpoint, and angel investors.  Workspot is now available in the Apple App Store. To learn more, visit www.workspot.com or follow us on Twitter (@workspotinc).

The post Workspot Raises $1.9M From Kleiner, Norwest, Redpoint, Others appeared first on peHUB.

Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy didn’t refer to any competitor by name when he pointed out AWS’ advantages before a crowd of around 4,000 at the AWS Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. But it’s not hard to take a guess on who he was talking about. With Microsoft hyping its Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Amazon is trying to persuade people — Amazon faithful or not — that Azure just doesn’t compare.

The Amazon experience

Amazon has a fair amount of experience in the public-cloud realm, having launched AWS in 2006 and, Jassy said, having envisioned it a decade ago. Since then, Amazon’s S3 offering has grown to encompass 2 trillion objects stored on behalf of third-party developers who can’t necessarily afford to run their own infrastructure or don’t want the management hassles.

As for Microsoft, it made Windows Azure generally available as an IaaS cloud earlier this month. As my colleague Barb Darrow reported, Microsoft initially went for Platform as a Service (PaaS) instead of IaaS, and developers kept moving toward AWS for all of its standard services. But that’s a different story.

Amazon doesn’t want to rest on its history: Jassy talked up the smorgasbord of AWS technologies and services, from the Elastic MapReduce Hadoop implementation to the Redshift data warehouse. “What (customers) don’t want to settle for is an AWS 2009 type of platform,” Jassy said. “As a lot of other companies are just launching their solutions, we have much better technology than anybody else. We are iterating and innovating at a very fast clip.” Since the beginning of 2013, Jassy said, AWS has introduced 71 services and features. Compare that with, say, 82 new services and features Amazon rolled out in the entirety of 2011.

The virtuous price cycle

Jassy also talked up the “virtuous cycle” of adding AWS customers, increasing usage, creating economics of scale and, in turn, getting new customers. Through its Trusted Advisor feature, the company can suggest to customers that they scale down compute instances if they’re sitting idle, and at the same time AWS keeps lowering prices again and again — 31 times since 2006, Jassy said. In other words, Amazon’s pitch is that AWS can be good at a low price. (To be fair, other cloud providers can outperform Amazon’s EC2 computing service in certain instances when it comes to running an application and serving up the result.)

On top of those traits, AWS already has built up an ecosystem of customers, from startups such as Mailbox to enterprises such as Shell. A marketplace has sprung up for products that customers can run on top of AWS. And with operations in nine regions, AWS is global, permitting its customers to become global, too.

Is public better?

Jassy took a minute to talk about how “old-guard tech companies” are pitching private clouds as secure, even though private clouds might not be able to match the benefits of sharing Amazon infrastructure. But he did say he understands that some companies need to keep certain operations on premise, and in that case companies should consider services such as Direct Connect to bridge the divide between an AWS deployment and a local data center.

How did all of this play with conference attendees? Many people I spoke with said Amazon was ready when people needed elastic compute and storage services and now, even if Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and others can match up, they’ve already committed to Amazon, at least for core features such as S3 and EC2, and are looking at paying for other services. One entrepreneur working at a startup said he relies on AWS to run his applications, and his fallback is to deploy in a second AWS region. Only if that doesn’t work would he look at other public-cloud providers.

Of course, this is an Amazon event, so it’s not surprising to hear such things. But perhaps as Google, Microsoft and Rackspace get their own virtuous cycles going, the story will be different in a year or so.

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Digg hopes to capitalize on Google Reader’s unceremonious execution, scheduled for July 1, and no last-minute reprieve from the governor appears to be coming. Today the social-sharing site released more details about its plans, including a timeframe for the beta and results from its survey of RSS users.

The new Digg reader app will arrive in June, at least in beta form. However, the company promises that this is only the start of the work. “Our beta release in June will be just the beginning, a product built with experimentation in mind by a team eager to work with you to build something you love”, Digg says in an announcement today.

The company also reveals some results from the survey seeking out what customers want in an RSS reader. For instance, more people share stories via email than any other method. This is followed by Facebook, with Twitter close behind. In contrast, personal social service Path barely registered a blip on the radar.

More than one-third of respondents do not use a “read it later” service, but those who do prefer Pocket. A sparse 17 percent of Google Reader customers used the social features and a surprising 40 percent of customers say they would be willing to pay for an RSS service.

Digg is still soliciting feedback to perfect its app and users can sign up to help by visiting digg.com/reader. Google Reader will be going away soon, and alternatives still jockey for the position of being your replacement of choice. Digg seems to be making all of the right moves in an effort to be the winner, but it will be an uphill battle against existing and established services like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.

Photo Credit:  jörg röse-oberreich/Shutterstock

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, coauthor of Innovation as Usual, explains how to drive innovation on a daily basis.

Munich-based startup and TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield contestant KISI Systems is launching its Indiegogo campaign today. KISI and KISIBox together comprise a keyless entry solution that lets users provide timed, revokable access to their own apartments on an as-needed basis. It’s the perfect complement to collaborative consumption services like Airbnb and TaskRabbit and in general a very useful addition to any household.

KISI takes its cues from enterprise-grade tools that allow businesses to control who can and can’t gain access to a facility – co-founder Bernhard Mehl explained that he and his co-founders decided it was an idea that would make perfect sense when applied to a consumer setting, too.

The KISI system is a combination of hardware and software, with a set price of $479 up front when it hits retail. Initially, backers can get it for $249 for the first Indiegogo supporters, and the best part is that the service is included with the hardware purchase, so this isn’t something that you end up necessarily paying for on a continual basis. There is a SaaS model planned as well, for people who’d like access to premium features, but Mehl says that in general, they aren’t interested in making homeowners feel like they’re renting the locks on their doors.

“We stripped an enterprise product down to a consumer-friendly version, and provide very easy-to-use key-management tools, so we have a web app and you can manage or see who accessed your apartment, or who currently has access on their smartphones,” Mehl says. “It’s a more decentralized or democratized access, so that it’s not the house owner who controls all the keys, but the resident themselves.”

KISI is designed for apartment tenants primarily, and can be made to integrated with your intercom system to provide complete building access from a web-based dashboard. Mehl says that where in the past this has been accomplished through sharing of hardware keys, that’s a dramatically outdated prospect, since it involves granting a type of access you can’t easily revoke, at least not without changing your locks. The platform is why KISI isn’t just another Lockitron, providing things like integration with an intercom system, and a record of when keyholders have accessed your apartment, and for how long.

The big opportunity for KISI is to take advantage of the rise of services like Airbnb, Exec and TaskRabbit, and collaborate with those companies to help provide temporary access to service pros who might only need it for a few minutes, a week or an afternoon.

“All the hardware parts are installed in your apartment, and you can open even the front door of the house with your smartphone, and yet nothing changes for anyone else who has physical key access” he said. “Up to now, you had to change the whole system to get automated access, but the cool thing is that we’ve managed to accomplish that without requiring a complete overhaul.”

KISI has already impressed enough to win an entrepreneurial startup grant from the German government, and they’ve won various prizes, including from the NYCEDC, which provided them with $25,000 for the “Next Idea” award.

KISI will launch in New York City and Munich first, and will then expand to other markets after that. It doesn’t replace existing standards like Z-Wave, but works with them, and can also be used in combination with existing devices like Lockitron, so there’s opportunity for it to grow into existing home automation systems.

In the wake of grim PC sales, HP may be preparing to release a high-end Android tablet in the coming months. A listing on the AnTuTu benchmark network, per TabTech, revealed a new tablet known as the HP SlateBook 10 X2. The slate is equipped with a 10.1-inch display, a new quad-core Tegra 4 processor clocked at 1.8GHz and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. HP recently entered the Android tablet market with the mid-range Slate 7 that’s selling for only $169.99. The affordable tablet is equipped with a 7-inch 1024 x 600 pixel resolution display, a 1.6GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of internal storage, 1GB of RAM, Beats Audio, a microSD card and a 3-megapixel rear camera.

CISPA is all but dead once again, and the Senate is moving ahead with its own cybersecurity legislation. That doesn’t mean the fight is over though. In fact, the Senate might just propose a bill that’s worse, but the White House says that it won’t let that happen.

In an official response to the “Stop CISPA” petition on the We The People Web site, the White House says that any new cybersecurity legislation “must not violate Americans’ right to privacy.” The administration says that’s the reason why it issued a veto threat against CISPA earlier this month. That veto threat may led to CISPA’s death, but the White House says it’s still open to working with everybody to pass cybersecurity legislation.

To that end, the White House says that cybersecurity legislation is a must to counter the “constant threat of cyber crime, espionage, and attacks.” The administration, unlike the House, does admit there are already tools in place, however, to facilitate cooperation between the government and private companies to share threat information. It just feels that the current tools in place aren’t enough:

But you might ask, “Isn’t this collaboration already happening?” The simple answer is yes, but inefficiently. When it comes to information sharing, we need clearer rules to promote collaboration and protect privacy. Right now, each company has to work out an individual arrangement with the government and other companies on what information to share about cyberthreats. This ambiguity can lead to harmful delays.

There is broad consensus on the need for more threat-related information sharing — including among the leading privacy advocates we regularly engage on the issue. The essential question on which people across the spectrum disagree isn’t if we can share cybersecurity information and preserve the principles of privacy and liberty that make the United States a free and open society — but how.

The White House has admirable goals, but we’ve heard all of this before from the House. We were promised that CISPA would respect privacy and civil liberties, but that obviously wasn’t the case in the end.

To allieve the concerns of citizens, the White House says that it will only support cybersecurity legislation that adheres to these three principles:

It’s important that any information shared under a new cybersecurity law must be limited to what’s relevant and necessary for cybersecurity purposes. That also means minimizing information that can be used to identify specific individuals. For example, if a utility company is looking for government assistance to respond to a cyber attack, it is unlikely that it needs to share the personal information of its customers, like contact information or energy-use history, with the government.

Cybersecurity legislation needs to preserve the traditional roles for civilian and intelligence agencies that we all understand. Specifically, if legislation authorizes new information sharing between the private sector and the government, then that new information should enter the government through a civilian department rather than an intelligence agency. That doesn’t mean breaking the existing mechanisms that already work. For example, victims of cyber crime ought to continue to report those violations to federal law enforcement agencies and public-private information-sharing relationships that already exist should be preserved.

Any new legislation ought to provide legal clarity for companies that follow the rules and appropriately share data with the government. But it should not provide broad immunity for businesses and organizations that act in ways likely to cause damage to third parties or result in the unwarranted disclosure of personal information.

In short, the above takes care of pretty much every complaint privacy advocates had with the original CISPA. The White House says it will continue to apply the above principles in its on-going discussions with those in the Senate currently crafting cybersecurity legislation.

CISPA may be dead, but the issue of cybersecurity is far from over. We’ll continue to follow the Senate’s efforts as it works on its own cybersecurity legislation.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty worldwide marketing campaign is nearly a decade old, and in that time the company has spent millions on telling women that their natural beauty is just that – real beauty. Their latest viral campaign with that message, Dove Real Beauty Sketches, went viral earlier this month.

You may recall the video, which featured an artist comparing women’s perceptions of their physical appearance to descriptions from other people. In the end, it showed that people sell themselves short. You are most likely a lot more beautiful than you think you are. Great message. Well, men need that sort of confidence boost from time to time. Especially when it involves their balls. I don’t think that I have to explain that this excellent parody video is a little bit NFSW (some ball drawings):

[via AdhocVids]

It seems like only yesterday that Google was showing us the concept video for Glass, and now here we are with the “getting started” video showing people how to use it, because it exists.

While still not available to consumers (just the lucky chosen few), there are plenty of the devices out in the wild, and developers are working hard building apps.

Here’s a quick tutorial for how to basically use Glass that you could enjoy if you had the privilege of having one.

[via The Verge]

Some days, I look at Google and my mind’s eye sees Microsoft. This is one of them. Developers adopting Google+ Sign-In will get a big benefit in search results. The tie-in — to monopoly search — feels oh-so like Microsoft tactics to woo and keep developers on Windows during the 1980s and 90s. Yeah, I feel déjà vu right about now.

In February, the search and information giant added Google+ Sign-In as an option developers can include with their apps. In my news analysis then, I called the authentication service “bold and disruptive” and a “Facebook killer“. The direct search tie-in makes my early sentiment a gross understatement. Google gives developers every reason to prefer its authentication mechanism, which hugely benefits the social network. The monopoly product is used to extend reach into an adjacent market. Say, didn’t trustbusters on two continents prosecute Microsoft for tying together Windows and browser?

The potential benefits to developers are indisputable. “Soon, if you search for a site or app on Google.com (and that app has integrated with Google+ Sign-In app activities), you’ll see popular and aggregate user activity to the right of search results”, Seth Sternberg, director of Google+ product marketing, explains. “Searching for Fandango, for example, will show the top movies among Google users. And when you click on a movie, you’ll go directly to its page on Fandango”.

Google will roll out the search changes over the next couple weeks. Among the first developers: Deezer, Fandango, Flixster, Slacker Radio, Songza, SoundCloud and TuneIn. Other developers adopting Google+ Sign-In will follow.

In many markets, Google search share exceeds 70 percent — in some, reaches 90 percent. Google’s U.S. share was 67.1 percent in March, according to comScore. However, when including all products “powered by Google”, search share was 69.2 percent. The point: Google is the place to be, and developers can improve their visibility, if they support Google+ Sign-In.

Microsoft got in trouble for integrating Internet Explorer into Windows, a tactic government trustbusters viewed as leveraging monopoly to squash a rival platform. Microsoft developers had no choice. IE was there. Likewise, while agreed somewhat different circumstances, Google requires one thing for another. To get that extra search edge, developers must support Google+ Sign-In.

The approach personifies Google’s core business and product strategy since Larry Page returned as CEO in April 2011. There is tighter product and service cross-integration everywhere, particularly search leveraged to boost adoption of other things. Look at how much the Google search page has changed, too — the company’s other services are far more visible.

Google+ is by far one of the biggest beneficiaries, and increasingly, as the company ties more other stuff to the social network. Chrome, Maps and YouTube are the other three major beneficiaries, but they’re not alone. Drive, Gmail, News and Play are others.

The question to ask: Google and developers benefit, but do you? Please answer up in comments below.

Image Credit: Google

Kristen Cavallari recently spoke about being both a wife and mother and a working gal, and says she’s willing to put her personal projects on hold in order to spend time with her family.

“It’s easy to get wrapped up in your career and have that be your only focus, and I want my marriage to work and last – and family comes first,” she said.

Between design projects, a jewelry line, and a shoe line, Cavallari–who got her start on the MTV “reality” show “The Hills” as Lauren Conrad’s mortal enemy–is a busy lady. The 26-year old and Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler became parents to baby Camden eight months ago, and are planning a wedding very soon. Cavallari says the two of them make a good team.

“Having Jay is really helpful,” she said. “It’s important to talk about parenting philosophies before having a child. You want to go in knowing how to raise them to avoid the arguments that can ensue. Being good parents is our top priority.”

Since the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the capture of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the American public has been able to stop holding its breath, confident that authorities have found those responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing and that justice will be served. Now, a DNA test on some of the bomb material found at the scene has uncovered female DNA, leading to authorities taking a harder look at the Tsarnaev’s female associates and family members.

A Wall Street Journal report on the revelation cites unnamed “U.S. officials” as stating the source of the DNA has not been determined. In fact, those same officials have said that the DNA may have come from many different sources, including store clerks or even bombing victims.

Soon after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police, his life in the U.S. began to be revealed, including his wife, Katherine Russell, and his 3-year-old daughter. According to the Journal report, FBI agents this week took a DNA sample from Russell to see if it matches the DNA found on the bomb material. Russell has been staying with her parents since the bombing, and is being guarded by the FBI.

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Apple was criticized by a number of pundits when it finally unveiled the iPad mini last November. While the device itself was well received by reviewers and consumers alike, some industry watchers felt Apple wasn’t doing enough to compete on price. Starting at $329, the iPad mini is far more expensive than devices like the Kindle Fire or Nexus 7. If Apple’s recent earnings beat showed us anything, however, it’s that squeezing as much profit as possible out of the iPad mini was definitely the right move — iPad sales hit a new March-quarter record in 2013 and margins were sustained enough to help deliver $9.5 billion in profit. Not everyone has adopted Apple’s strategy though, and a new report suggests the race to the bottom in the 7-inch tablet segment is squeezing profits across the board.

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