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A cryptic blog post from Google last week took aim at “bad apples” among its advertising partners, and required pre-approval for certain software offerings that wanted to use Google advertising services. It was hard at first to discern the target of the mysterious message, but now it’s pretty clear that Google fired a shot across the bow of security site AVG and others that might be tempted to trick people into installing unwanted products.

The dispute between Google and its “bad apples” involves technical details but, fundamentally, it’s about crummy products designed to force feed ads.

In the case of AVG, it worked like this: when people downloaded its free security software, they automatically received a “safe search” product (unless they were alert enough to uncheck a box during the download process). The unwanted product then installed itself on their browser toolbars as a default search engine. It also — and this is the critical part — served as a platform for AVG to collect money by showing ads, and proved about as easy to uninstall as resigning from the French Foreign Legion.

Veteran tech writer Emil Protalinski was first to report AVG’s hijinks last summer, calling it the “worst foistware I’ve ever seen.” Since then, investor site Seeking Alpha warned that AVG’s aggressive tactics to get ad revenue would lead Google, which supplies ads to AVG through its AdSense program, to take action. The search giant apparently decided it could do without AVG and, in its new policy announcement, explained:

For example, in the last 90 days, we have seen over 100,000 complaints about software that changed users’ browser settings or about toolbars that they couldn’t uninstall.  We want to avoid these kinds of bad user experiences.

Seeking Alpha also warned that if Google jilted AVG, the site would be forced to live on Yahoo ad revenue — which would bring in less money. This prospect appears to have had its intended effect on AVG.

The outgoing CEO of AVG, JR Smith, explained in a Monday phone interview that its “safe search” product was no longer bundled in a way that forced consumers to opt out. He added that AVG recently signed a new two-year deal with Google and said it complied with all the company’s conditions.

“They’ll send you default letters and kick you off the network,” said Smith, adding that Google takes tough lines to promote a clean ad ecosystem.

Google, in response to a request for comment, only repeated its policy announcement. Yahoo did not respond at all.

Tough line or just tip of the iceberg?

Google’s new policy aims to reign in AVG-style tactics by forcing software that uses its ad services to provide “one-click uninstall” and to go through a Google approval process. In the bigger picture, the policy appears to be part of a bigger effort by Google to clean up scammy ad practices involving toolbars.

While toolbars have legitimate uses, they can also be a vehicle for mischief. In addition to AVG, other public companies like Babylon have acquired a reputation for malware; the latter offers a translation program but the installation process can also lead to browser hijacking. Some techniques are even more nasty.

Certain scams typically invite users to download a program like “Find out who unfriended you on Facebook” but really serve to inject unauthorized ads. One example is Sambreel, a notorious ad outfit that forced its way onto the webpages of the New York Times and other prominent publishers last year; the hijacked ad space likely cost the Times and others millions in lost revenues. Even Google itself has been a victim through its YouTube video site.

An executive at a major publisher forwarded new screenshots this month like the one below which shows how a “Browse to Save” toolbar device (which claims to find deals for shoppers as they search the web) has used a Sambreel product to take over YouTube’s ads:

According to the executive, who did not want to be named, Google is doing the right thing but faces an uphill battle. While it can whip sites like AVG into line, unlike companies, sleazy actors will simply shop around for another ad exchange to do the dirty work. He said that some exchanges — which act as trading houses for digital ad inventory — often turn a blind eye to bad advertisers so long as they bring in money. In this bigger picture, Google appears to be trying to raise the bar in the industry in order to prevent a crisis of confidence in the online ads that are its lifeblood.

The toolbar policy comes at a critical juncture for the online display ad industry. On one hand, the industry recently suffered another black eye from a botnet scandal and may also be losing ground to the current mania for native advertising. On the other hand, Google, AOL, Facebook and others are developing a sophisticated suite of programmatic ad tools that could make the industry more efficient than ever before.

(Image by  BMJ via Shutterstock)

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The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) is a multiagency, multidisciplinary federal initiative comprising a collection of research programs and other activities funded by the participating agencies and linked by the vision of “a future in which the ability to understand and control matter at the nanoscale leads to a revolution in technology and industry that benefits society.” As first stated in the 2004 NNI strategic plan, the participating agencies intend to make progress in realizing that vision by working toward four goals. Planning, coordination, and management of the NNI are carried out by the interagency Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Technology (CoT) with support from the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO).

Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative is the latest National Research Council review of the NNI, an assessment called for by the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003. The overall objective of the review is to make recommendations to the NSET Subcommittee and the NNCO that will improve the NNI’s value for basic and applied research and for development of applications in nanotechnology that will provide economic, societal, and national security benefits to the United States. In its assessment, the committee found it important to understand in some detail—and to describe in its report—the NNI’s structure and organization; how the NNI fits within the larger federal research enterprise, as well as how it can and should be organized for management purposes; and the initiative’s various stakeholders and their roles with respect to research. Because technology transfer, one of the four NNI goals, is dependent on management and coordination, the committee chose to address the topic of technology transfer last, following its discussion of definitions of success and metrics for assessing progress toward achieving the four goals and management and coordination. Addressing its tasks in this order would, the committee hoped, better reflect the logic of its approach to review of the NNI. Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative also provides concluding remarks in the last chapter.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Engineering and Technology

Well what do you know – look who’s back on Twitter.

It’s former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose indiscretions on the social media platform led to embarrassment and his eventual political demise.

It appears that Weiner is migrating his Twitter presence to a new handle, @anthonyweiner. His previous handle, @repweiner, tweeted out the new handle Monday evening. It was the first tweet from that account since early February. That account was silent for 17 months following the lewd photograph scandal, with Weiner breaking his silence last November by tweeting out a video in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Here’s the final tweet from the old account:

It makes sense that Weiner would want to start fresh, tweeting from a brand new Twitter account. Of course, there’s quite a bit of bad memories associated with the old account. Plus, Weiner is no longer a U.S. Representative, so @repweiner doesn’t make much sense anymore.

And ‘Representative” is not the political office that Weiner is looking to be associated with. Speculations that Weiner has aspirations to dethrone Michael Bloomberg as Mayor of New York City continue to gain traction. It seems like a return to Twitter is a logical move for someone gearing up for that kind of run. Especially when the only things that you’re tweeting out are links to a 20-page document called “Keys to the City.” That document is described as “64 Ideas to Keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class.”

The new account is less than a day old, and has already been verified by Twitter. He currently boasts nearly 8,000 followers in less than 24 hours.

The remaining suspect in the Boston bombings is blaming the whole thing on the dead suspect.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been talking to authorities (or writing rather, as he can’t talk because of a gunshot wound to the throat), and says that his brother, the late Tamerlan Tsarnaev, masterminded the whole thing.

According to a report from CNN, Tsarnaev told authorities that there is not any international terrorist group involved, and that his brother orchestrated the attack. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Matt Smith report:

Tsarnaev has conveyed to investigators that Tamerlan’s motivation stemmed from jihadist thought and the idea that Islam is under attack, and jihadists need to fight back, the source said Monday.

The government source cautioned that the interviews were preliminary, and that Tsarnaev’s account needs to be checked out and followed up on by investigators.

So far, officials have not found evidence that the suspects collaborated with other people on the attacks, though Tamerlan had taken a long trip to Russia last year. The details of this trip are unclear, though he had posted and taken down a YouTube video of Islamic militant Abu Dujana, who was killed in a gun battle with Russian security forces a few months after Tamerlan’s trip.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged on Monday with one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (an improvised explosive device) against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. He could face, upon conviction, the death penalty or life imprisonment.

More details about Tsarnaev’s conversations with authorities will no doubt emerge in time.

It was revealed last week that the Firefox OS dev units from Geeksphone would finally be shipping after missing their originally planned launch in February. Now the phones are available, but you’re still going to have to wait.

Engadget reports that both the Keon and Peak Firefox OS dev units are now available from the Geeksphone online store. The Keon will cost you $119 and the Peak goes for $194. The phones may be cheap, but good luck actually buying one. Geeksphone’s online store has been taken offline because of incredible demand, or unplanned maintenance. It’s hard to say at this point.

Maybe you should reacquaint yourself with the Firefox OS hardware while you wait for the store to go back up. First up, the Keon is the budget phone that Mozilla plans to get into the hands of as many people as possible in developing countries. For $119, you get a Qualcomm Snapdragon S1, 3.5-inch display, and 512MB of RAM. The slightly more expensive Peak has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, 4.3-inch display, and 512MB of RAM.

Both devices will be able to connect to either 2G or 3G networks. Both also come unlocked so you can add it whatever carrier you like.

The site should be available again later today if you really want to get your hands on the first Firefox OS dev units. We’ll update this story once the site is available again. If you find yourself unable to wait, however, you can always install Firefox OS on one of Sony’s Xperia E smartphones.

Over the past year, more organizations have jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon. There’s really no doubt that many companies have already adopted some part of the cloud model. IT administrators are seeing the direct benefits in moving towards a cloud computing platform. There is the clear ability to scale, become more efficient and even simplify management.

Still with cloud computing being a relatively new concept for some organizations, managers have to be clear in what their cloud goals really are. Because the cloud is still only beginning to make its way into the corporate data center, ccompanies face a number of obstacles to cloud adoption. In this white paper from HP, you’ll learn about these challenges and how to overcome such cloud obstacles.  In working with a cloud model, some obstacles may include:

• Differences between business and IT executives about the pace of adoption;
• Differing stages of maturity within the cloud adoption continuum; and
• The need to avoid compromising the cloud’s benefits with scattershot, uncoordinated adoption.

The general idea behind cloud computing is that the platform can delivery some pretty powerful benefits. They key sits in the planning, use-case and deployment. Using a step-by-step deployment approach is one way to control the cloud initiative. It’s also important to work with a very agile cloud platform. In this white paper, you learn about the HP CloudSystem and how this technology is tailored for the requirements of enterprises and service providers at various stages of cloud maturity. These offerings include:

• Entry configuration for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with HP CloudSystem Matrix that lets IT customers provision infrastructure and applications in minutes.
• Full-scale deployment of private and hybrid cloud environments with HP CloudSystem Enterprise, which lets customers unify management across private, public, and hybrid clouds and adds advanced infrastructure-to-application lifecycle management.
• Advanced capabilities for service providers with HP CloudSystem Service Provider, facilitating deployment of public and hosted private clouds that deliver complete service aggregation and management.

Download this white paper today to learn how the HP Cloud platform can help your organization become more agile and ready for the cloud environment. Remember, with BYOD, IT consumerization, more data and more users – there will only be a greater reliance on the data center and the cloud.

As we’ve been hearing, application programming interfaces (APIs) and their management is a hot battleground. And it got hotter Tuesday morning with MuleSoft buying ProgrammableWeb.

With this acquisition MuleSoft gets a popular online site used by web, mobile and other developers who want to connect their applications to third-party applications and data sources. San Francisco-based MuleSoft paints itself as a de facto hub for new-fangled web and mobile APIs as well as the more mature APIs behind enterprise applications.  It’s a wide world. MuleSoft estimates there are more than 13,000 active APIs  currently.

What ProgrammableWeb brings to the table is a sort of white pages directory of APIs, said Richard Seroter, a product manager for Tier 3, who uses the service. ProgrammableWeb has “lots of API content on the blog and is a good source of stats on API proliferation,” he said via Twitter.

The Next Web reported Tuesday morning that Alcatel-Lucent bought ProgrammableWeb three years ago; but i just double checked and there is no reference in MuleSoft’s statement about Alca-Lu ownership. I’ve asked MuleSoft for follow up and will update this when i hear.

This news comes a day after CA Technologies bought Layer 7, an API management company and five days after Intel purchased Mashery, another API management company.

This story was updated at 9:22 a.m. PST with the Next Web link.

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There’s another video game movie adaptation coming. Luckily, it’s not another slapped-together live-action action movie that’s only resemblance to a game is character names and some professional cosplay.

Sony and Insomniac Games, the developers of the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance games (and Spyro), have announced that a Ratchet & Clank movie is currently in the works, to be released sometime in 2015. The movie now has a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account where fans can follow the movie’s development.

Blockade Entertainment and Rainmaker Entertainment are working on the animated film, though Insomniac is involved in a consulting role for the characters, screenplay, and animation. Rainmaker is known for producing many Barbie straight-to-DVD titles, but was also the company behind ReBoot, Beast Wars: Transformers, and this year’s Escape From Planet Earth.

Check out the teser trailer for the movie below.

Oh, and to celebrate the announcement, Sony is putting all Ratchet & Clank games on PSN on sale next week.

The Infinity Cell is a kinetic charger for the iPhone that uses your body’s movement to generate electricity. The current prototype for the Infinity Cell is a crude 3D printed rectangle, roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes, linked up to the iPhone with a cable. The plan is to create a more streamlined version during the product’s Kickstarter campaign.

When you shake the Infinity Cell for 30 minutes, that provides enough power to give the iPhone a 20 percent charge. When you shake the Infinity Cell for three hours, that provides enough power to fully charge the iPhone. Of course, no sane person is going to sit around shaking his iPhone for three hours to grab a charge. The Infinity Cell eventually aims to generate power from the slightest bit of movement.

The finished model will resemble a Mophie or MaxBoost battery case. You simply slip your iPhone into the case, put in your pocket, and the movement you create when you’re walking, jogging, or biking will power your iPhone. They’re also planning on releasing an Infinity Cell iOS app that will track your energy saving, carbon offset, and gamify the experience by granting users badges as they reach different energy saving rankings.

The creators of Infinity Cell are seeking to raise $155,000 on Kickstarter by June 6th. A $125 contribution will nab you an Infinity Cell of your own, although it’s only compatible with iPhone 4 and 4S for now.

As Apple prepares to file its March-quarter earnings report on Tuesday afternoon after the bell, the company finds itself in a position it hasn’t been in for quite some time. Apple shares have lost more than 40% of their value since hitting a record high in late September and a growing mob of Apple bears is beginning to question whether or not the company should seek a replacement for CEO Tim Cook. Bulls immediately dismiss the idea as lunacy — it does seem pretty crazy, considering Apple’s revenue and profit are still growing despite soured investor sentiment — but The New York Times took a step back on Tuesday to draw some interesting parallels between Tim Cook and another CEO who is no stranger to angry mobs brandishing pitch forks: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer.

Continue reading…

As you probably know, Coachella’s second weekend just wrapped up, and by most accounts it was a great festival filled with great bands.

Jimmy Kimmel decided to ask festival goers about some of the more obscure bands that played Coachella this year. So obscure, in fact, that they don’t even exist.

When I first met Datahero Co-founder Chris Neumann a year ago, I was pretty excited about what he claimed his new company was going to do. Essentially, he told me, it was going to offer a simple, cloud-based data analysis and visualization service that anyone could use. About a month later, in late May, I got a demo of a very-early-stage Datahero and was impressed with the vision. On Tuesday, the company is officially opening its service to a public beta, and the more-finished product still strikes the right chord.

Before evaluating Datahero, though, it’s important to know what it’s not. Namely: it’s not enterprise software, it’s not even business intelligence software and it’s not designed for people who hope to run complex analyses. Neumann nicely summed up what Datahero is during a recent call: “We’re gonna make it usable by the masses,” he said, which means there are going to be some things advanced users want that the service doesn’t do.

By and large, what I wrote in May about the company’s vision and product holds true today (although the product is obviously more polished in terms of aesthetics and functionality). The service’s “data decoder” — which Neumann said received a majority of the development resources over the past year — does a good job characterizing data types and determining whether they’re quantities, dates, email addresses, currencies or whatever else they might be. As I explained in my “data for dummies” post in January, formatting data can be a pain, sometimes even after it’s uploaded to a service, so easing that burden is critical.

Probably the biggest difference since last May is the addition of an import feature from data sources that lots of Datahero’s core audience of individual developers, startup employees, and other resource- and analytics-skill-strapped professionals are likely to use. These include Salesforce.com, Google Drive, Stripe, Github, MailChimp, Box and Dropbox. Really, Neumann explained about the decision-making process, the Datahero team just asked “what were the ones [its users] were clicking ‘export to Excel’ on the most.”

Salesforce.com easily has the most difficult APIs to work with when it came to building an easy import process, Neumann said, but it was necessary to connect with “if only because so many people use Salesforce and so many people hate it.” It’s pretty much held together with duct tape, he joked, and the recommended process for building a report is essentially to dump everything into Excel and go from there.

Once you’re actually visualizing, though, it’s quite literally as simple as drag, drop and maybe a few mouse clicks to filter stuff. Using a process Neumann and co-founder Jeff Zabel call “chart magic,” Datahero suggests certain charts based on the data set or let users make their own. Then, the app automatically creates what it thinks is the best chart for visualizng those particular variables (although switching to other types is really easy). Neumann said this capability is the result of lots of research about best practices for visualization, as well as the company’s own user testing and a little common sense.

“Every time I would think something is simple and intuitive, [Zabel] would say, ‘You’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Neumann joked. And, overall, Datahero’s Odd Couple approach to building an analytics service (Neumann is a data engineer who cut his teeth at Aster Data, while Zabel is a UI specialist formerly at BMW) seems to be working out.

Among planned features for later iterations is the ability to personalize chart selections based on a user’s past decisions and transitions from chart to chart.

But nothing’s perfect. After experimenting with it, other things that would be nice to have include the ability annotate points on a graph and perhaps to embed finished charts rather than just export as an image file (although perhaps that shortcoming is just in the pre-release version I have been using). And although Datahero isn’t trying to compete with Platfora in big data visualization or ClearStory in business analytics, it could take a page from their playbooks and render charts in HTML5 to make them easier to slice, dice, zoom in on and generally interact with.

Still, Datahero by and large does what it claims to do, and that’s important as we transition into a society consumed by data. But even with more and more data available, it will be more a dictatorship than a democracy if only a few people control the means to analyze it. I think Datahero, along with statistics-focused startup Statwing, fills a necessary place on the spectrum between Infogram and Tableau Public in terms of offering a simple product for doing analytics that does more than just make charts.

It’s not yet the easiest place to make a living, but that could change as more people get interested in digging into the piles of data they’re generating on their own terms.

You can check out the gallery below for a step-by-step process of the Datahero service and some example visualizations. I used two data sets from the Guardian’s DataBlog to experiment with — one on the 100 most-followed musicians on Twitter, and another on terrorism in the United States between 1970 and 2011.

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SRCH2 said it raised funding, but offered no detail. Investors include Data Collective, Redpoint’s Brad Jones, Horizen Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures, the company said.

PRESS RELEASE

Enterprise Search Software Innovator, SRCH2 Attracts High Profile Investors

Sets New Playbook for eCommerce, Big Data, and Mobile Apps as Search Becomes a Key Differentiator and Linchpin for Profits

IRVINE, Calif., April 23, 2013 – In an age where everyone Googles to find answers, restaurants, definitions, goods and more, the expectations for enterprise search couldn’t be higher.  Trouble is, enterprise search happens outside the confines of general web searches and existing search software is failing to keep up with burgeoning data and its delivery on varied mobile and social platforms.

It’s a scene that is played out over and over again in the information technology field, where one set of technologies leads to great advances that inadvertently create a need for a new approach that begins with a question.  In this case, the question is:  How fast is your “instant” search?

Instant search is the type-forward or type-ahead search recommendation shown to you as you type.  Google is the model for instant search, but try it on any other search box and the results can often be slow or imprecise.

SRCH2, a new enterprise search software provider for mobile and Big Data, has raised funding from 10 industry-savvy veterans to make instant search faster. SRCH2 is a new kind of search software, developed by Stanford Ph.D.s and Google alums.  The company is poised to establish a new playbook for the C-suite and IT managers focused on data as an asset critical to their corporate success.

The most widely deployed search software today is built upon the Lucene platform.  According to Dev Bhatia, SRCH2 CEO, “SRCH2 has reimagined search as a profit center and value driver. Advanced search is not a commodity, but rather, a crucial differentiator for best-in-class players. We’re now rewriting the playbook for how search is done – and it’s blazing fast, tolerant of misspellings and never misses a record.”

Investors in the insider round include Data Collective, Redpoint’s Brad Jones, Horizen Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures, a new Southern California venture firm created by Gil Elbaz and David Waxman, both high-profile tech entrepreneurs.

Elbaz was a co-founder of Applied Semantics, the pioneering company which was bought by an early Google and turned into Google AdSense. Waxman was a co-founder of Firefly Networks, PeoplePC and SpotRunner. “SRCH2 is among our first investments out of the new TenOneTenVentures portfolio,” said David Waxman, TenOneTen’s Managing Partner. “We see SRCH2 as a breakthrough technology– an advanced search tool that does what other search software just can’t.”

“Enterprise Search is a massive market still ripe for innovation,” said new SRCH2 investor Matt Ocko, Co-Managing Partner at Data Collective. “We have been active investors in this market, and we think SRCH2 can do something that is both disruptive enough to build a large and profitable business, while still supportive of and complementary to many other members of the ecosystem.”

SRCH2’s team includes Dev Bhatia, CEO, and Chen Li, Founder. Bhatia is an Internet and mobile startup veteran. Li is a Stanford Ph.D. and ex-Googler with years of search expertise. Li was recently awarded 10-year Best Awards by both the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGMOD (Special Interest Group on Management of Data) and DASFAA (Database Systems for Advanced Applications) for his work in search and cloud technologies. Li will receive the 2013 DASFAA Award this week in Wuhan, China.
Other prominent SRCH2 investors include Dr. Jeffrey Ullman, a world-renowned data scientist at Stanford, who has served as an advisor to several startups including Google, Manyam Mallela, first employee at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs), Clark Landry, Co-Founder of Shift.com, David Beyer, Co-Founder of Chartio, Andy Rankin, angel investor, and Taher Haveliwala, Co-Founder of Kaltix, a personalized-search startup acquired by Google in 2003.

View SRCH2 demos at http://srch2.com/#demos  or download SRCH2’s latest release at http://srch2.com/#try.

About SRCH2
For data-driven sites, apps and devices in mobile, e-commerce, social, and emerging platforms who view search as a mission-critical differentiator, SRCH2 is search software reimagined. It gives them advanced search features with zero investment in development, reconfiguration, or modification, 31 times faster than what they might have otherwise. Unlike Lucene and search engines built on top of it, SRCH2 was built from the ground up to address the unmet needs of the data-driven world. SRCH2 is Search Forward. To learn more, please visit www.SRCH2.com.

The post SRCH2 Raises Round From Data Collective, Horizen, Others appeared first on peHUB.

Do you ever wonder why cars aren’t called “horseless carriages” anymore? Today’s cars are just as horseless as they were a century ago. Horselessness is standard equipment on most new and late models, both foreign and domestic.

Framing the question this way may seem a bit absurd; yet, it’s a playful reminder that innovation does not emerge out of nothing. New innovations evolve from historical, iterative processes. The automobile developed out of, and in opposition to, concepts associated with the horse and carriage. This was the familiar frame of reference when the automobile first emerged. Early automobiles extended and adapted the accustomed 19th century understanding of locomotion.

However, long after the automobile had made the horse and carriage obsolete and the association had faded, the concepts of each still defined one another; this synthesis is still present today. Traces of the horse and carriage are found in terms like “horsepower” and in the names of classic cars like the Mustang, Colt, and Bronco. Consider the form of a car’s design. You can see how four legs evolved into four wheels and headlights into the eyes of our metal beasts of burden. The vestiges of formative features still affect how we make sense of the built environment and our material culture, even if the original antecedent has long been forgotten.

Often, when searching for a new way to understand a familiar idea, we look for its opposite. By doing this, we create a spectrum of possibilities between what it is and what it is not. This strategy is somewhat similar to what is often referred to as the Hegelian Dialectic, although Hegel himself probably never used this term, or its familiar formula: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis:

• Thesis is a proposition about a prevalent paradigm; e.g. a horse and carriage;
• Antithesis is a counter proposition that opposes or negates the Thesis; e.g. the first generation of automobiles called “horseless carriages”;
• Synthesis emerges from the tension between the Thesis and the Antithesis, blending the opposing ideas without fully negating either of them completely; e.g. our modern understanding of the car.

A creative, innovative mind also seeks to move beyond the given categories of thought established by binary either/or frameworks (such as the Hegelian model just described). This is still a move towards synthesis, but it includes opposing concepts that are internal to that binary framework and to ideas outside of it. If you’re a visual thinker, you can think of the internal concepts as a “vertical” axis and the external concepts as a “horizontal” axis. Lateral thinking, the ability to move horizontally across different categories of thought, often manifests itself as a synthesis between seemingly incongruent ideas; think of Roger Martin’s classic, Opposable Minds.

Let’s extend the horselessness example to imagine how horizontal moves across categories can play out. Beyond the familiar four-wheeled vehicle, which may have evolved in response to animal anatomy, we can imagine other categories of vehicles. We might imagine a vehicle with three wheels or five wheels or no wheels at all. But why stop there? We can imagine even more divergent, lateral moves across other categories as we consider vehicles that fly or hover. Once upon a time legs became wheels, which eventually took on a variety of divergent configurations, so why can’t wheels become something else entirely?

Consider the astonishing fact that within about 60 years we went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11, from flying just a few feet above the earth’s surface to traveling the 234,000 miles to the moon. Flying vehicles went from wings to wingless, from within the earth’s atmosphere to outside of it in a single lifetime. This is just one example of how lateral thinking and quick iteration can produce astonishing results in a relatively short amount of time. Students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design had the opportunity to explore this principle at the 2012 Better World By Design Conference, where they iteratively designed, constructed, and tested paper airplanes. They extended familiar categories of the paper airplane to include designs inspired by frisbees, helicopters, and birds. Within about an hour, participants had completely reimagined the paper airplane, exploring categories that went well beyond their initial conceptions about what a paper airplane was and could be.

The creative process is just that: a process. Recognizing value that others have missed doesn’t require preternatural clairvoyance. A well-honed creative process enables us to intuitively recognize patterns and use those insights to make inductive predictions about divergent ideas, both vertically within categories, and horizontally across categories. By understanding the genealogy of innovation within a given category, we can imagine what might come next.

We need to break out of thinking that is solely based on what we know, what we assume, and what we’ve experienced. Many of us are so entrenched in our industries that we don’t know how to think laterally or horizontally. We usually go a mile deep but only an inch wide. We haven’t given our people and ourselves the time and opportunities to explore other industries, cultures designs, ways of being and doing, and other “adjacent possibilities.”

If you want to take your “car” far beyond horses, even to the moon perhaps, you and your team need to understand the genealogy of innovation, of how you got to where you are, and look outside of that familiar world to see where you can go.

Suspicious about the origins of an article you’re reading online? A new browser extension and website, Churnalism U.S., claims to help detect plagiarism by comparing web content to Wikipedia and a database of press releases.

Churnalism was built by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that aims to make government more transparent and accountable, and Media Standards Trust, a U.K.-based nonprofit that advocates for transparency in news. The organizations previously created a U.K. version of Churnalism that compares web content to articles from the U.K. national press and the BBC.

“Here at Sunlight, we’re increasingly interested in tracking not just the flow of money in politics, but the flow of ideas, whether in legislation or floor speeches or news articles,” Sunlight Labs director Tom Lee said in a statement. “When we learned of what Media Standards Trust developed, it seemed natural for us to help them bring it to the U.S. news consumer.”

Churnalism U.S. is available as a web extension for Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers, or users can simply paste a URL into a website. The service then highlights possible similarities between the article and source material from Wikipedia and press releases. On its blog, Churnalism explains a little more about how the technology works to detect plagiarism. The database of press releases includes PRNewsWire, PR NewsWeb, MarketWire, EurekaAlert, Congressional Leadership and press releases from the White House, trade organizations, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit research institutes and think tanks.

Because Churnalism U.S. is only searching Wikipedia and press releases, it doesn’t detect “classic” forms of plagiarism — an author copying another author’s original content from somewhere else on the web or in a printed work. Churnalism doesn’t pick up (yes, I checked) Atlantic writer Nate Thayer’s failure to credit his sources, for example, or Jonah Lehrer’s self-borrowing. For that, you’ll have to use a paid tool like Turn It In. But Churnalism plans to open up its API soon so that users can add more sources.

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Porsha Stewart, one of the stars of “The Real Housewives Of Atlanta”, is headed for divorce despite her adamant protests during the show’s reunion that everything was fine with her marriage to Kordell Stewart. And though the break-up was surprising enough, fans were even more shocked to hear that the two of them are still living together and that she found out about the dissolution of her marriage on Twitter. She says her sister was the first to break the news.

“She said, ‘Have you heard?’ And I’m like, ‘Heard what?’ So I went to Twitter and the first thing I see is, ‘Kordell divorcing Porsha,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘This is just a crazy joke…’ I found out from Twitter.”

Stewart says she feels betrayed by her husband and insists she did everything she could to keep their relationship together, including marriage counseling, but Kordell wasn’t into it.

“I was totally blindsided,” Stewart said. “But when I found out about the divorce, it was absolutely a surprise.”

As for living together during such a difficult time, Porsha says it’s not ideal but it’s what they have to do for the moment.

“It’s a difficult, difficult situation right now,” she said. “It’s something I did not want at all.”

The New York Times announced on Tuesday that it will no longer count video views as part of the 10-article limit it imposes on non-subscribers who visit its website. The move comes as part of a plan by the Times to increase its overall video investment and to develop video franchises around its writers and columns.

The free videos, which can be viewed on all desktop and mobile devices, are for now being sponsored by Acura and by Microsoft.

“We have a desire to grow and invest in our video content,” said NYT executive vice president Denise Warren in a phone interview. “Part of the reason we’re doing this is because we’re already distributing on other channels like YouTube. Since it’s already available […] it seems inconsistent to keep it behind the gate.”

Warren added that the Times is still in the process of ramping up its video strategy but that its eventual plan is to build franchises around brands associated with the paper. One hypothetical example she cited is the Times’ “36 Hours” travel column. Prominent writers may also become video brands (bloggers like Nate Silver seem likely candidates, though Warren refused to name names).

The plan comes at a time when newspapers like the Times and the Wall Street Journal are still learning how to translate their famous brands into a video format. The task is a challenge because the bulk of their editorial staff consists of text-based journalists who don’t necessarily possess the aptitude or charisma for video. In response, the Times has so far adopted a go-slow approach, producing about 60 short videos a week, though Warren says streaming rates took off during the November election and have remained high.

Warren suggested the Times‘ video output will go into high gear in response to the extra advertising investment, and the February arrival of Rebecca Howard from the Huffington Post, who occupies the new position of general manager of video production.

The Times’ decision to offer unlimited video is intriguing because it will test the paper’s ability to master the format, but also because it contrasts with the company’s recent efforts to make its paywall less porous. In recent months, for instance, it has blocked easy tricks that let readers circumvent the article limit.

Here’s a recent example of the Times’ video efforts:

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The former Miss Delaware Teen USA has now been put on probation.

Melissa King, who resigned from her position as Miss Delaware in February, has been hit with probation for the underage possession of alcohol, according to a report from the Associated Press. The 19-year-old former beauty queen was reportedly driving her father’s truck home from work when she was stopped for a broken taillight. A bottle of rum was found in the vehicle.

King has been placed on one year of unsupervised probation for the violation. She had also been charged for stealing money from a city bus fare box, but those charges were dropped. King’s lawyer explained the incident, saying that she and a friend took back their bus fares after deciding not to ride a bus.

King resigned as Miss Delaware following the surfacing of a pornographic video she had starred in. Though she denied starring in the video, producers for GirlsDoPorn.com stated that King was paid $1,500 for the scene. The intro to the video (SFW) can be seen below.

A consortium has completed its buy of Duff & Phelps Corp. in a deal valued at about $665.5 million. The group includes The Carlyle Group, Stone Point Capital LLC, Pictet & Cie, on behalf of certain of its clients, and funds managed by Edmond de Rothschild Group. Duff & Phelps is a financial advisory and investment banking firm.

PRESS RELEASE

Duff & Phelps Corporation (“the Company”) today announced the completion of its acquisition by a consortium comprising The Carlyle Group, Stone Point Capital LLC, Pictet & Cie, on behalf of certain of its clients, and funds managed by Edmond de Rothschild Group in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $665.5 million.

As previously disclosed, the transaction was approved by the Company’s stockholders at a special meeting of stockholders held April 22, 2013. Pursuant to the terms of the merger agreement, the Company’s Class A stockholders are entitled to receive $15.55 per share of Class A common stock in cash without interest. As a result of the merger, the Company’s Class A common stock will no longer be listed for trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Stockholders of record will receive a letter of transmittal and instructions on how to surrender their shares of the Company’s Class A common stock in exchange for the merger consideration. Stockholders of record should wait to receive the letter of transmittal before surrendering their shares.

Advisors

Duff & Phelps:
· M&A: Centerview Partners
· Legal: Kirkland & Ellis LLP

The Consortium:
· M&A: Sandler O’Neill + Partners, L.P. (Lead Advisor), Credit Suisse, Barclays, RBC Capital Markets
· Financing: Credit Suisse, Barclays, RBC Capital Markets
· Legal: Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

* * * * *
About Duff & Phelps

As a leading global financial advisory and investment banking firm, Duff & Phelps leverages analytical skills, deep market insight and independence to help clients make sound decisions. The firm provides expertise in valuation, M&A and transaction advisory, restructuring, alternative asset advisory, disputes, taxation and transfer pricing – with more than 1,000 employees serving clients from offices in North America, Europe and Asia. Investment banking services in the United States are provided by Duff & Phelps Securities, LLC; Pagemill Partners; and GCP Securities, LLC. Member FINRA/SIPC. M&A advisory services in the United Kingdom and Germany are provided by Duff & Phelps Securities Ltd. Duff & Phelps Securities Ltd. is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. For more information, visit www.duffandphelps.com.

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