Heading into the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2013 trade show this week, Fusion-io (FIO) announced that the ioFX workstation acceleration platform is now available with 1.6 TB of capacity, in addition to the original 420 GB form factor. The high capacity ioFX is ideal for video editing and computer assisted design (CAD),
“Digital production is undergoing a resolution revolution as production moves to 4K and beyond, while production budgets and deadlines continue to tighten,” said Vincent Brisebois, Fusion-io Director of Visual Computing. ”To overcome these opposing forces, the Fusion ioFX can help digital artists efficiently deliver creative work faster, even when faced with the most demanding production requirements. Fusion-io is proud to collaborate with industry leading software developers and hardware companies to deliver breakthrough acceleration for the tools used by professional artists worldwide.”
Targeted at artists who compose, edit, playback and finish digital content, the ioFX is also ideal for encoding, transcoding, particle simulations and working with large amounts of cached data. The 1.6 TB ioFX connects via PCI Express, and significantly improves workstation application performance. Fusion-io has worked closely with the industry’s leading entertainment hardware and software providers to optimize the ioFX for visual effects production.
“NVIDIA GPUs provide powerful performance to professional workstations, which is further boosted with the ioFX high speed memory platform,” said Greg Estes, industry executive, media and entertainment, NVIDIA. “ioFX dramatically increases the amount of high-resolution content that can be sent to NVIDIA Quadro graphics boards for processing at extremely high speeds, enabling better artist interactivity and, ultimately, better client satisfaction for our customers.”
“From accelerating 3D painting in MARI, to reviewing shots in HIERO, to compositing in NUKE, Fusion ioFX adds powerful acceleration that can significantly enhance our applications,” said Bruno Nicoletti, Head of Technology and Founder at The Foundry. “All of our software is designed to remove as many technical barriers from production as possible, and Fusion-io acceleration takes that one step further with the ioFX integrated into artist workstations. As the amount of data artists work with in today’s highresolution formats continues to increase, the ioFX can help creatives spendmore time manipulating their work with much more interactivity than before.”
Fusion ioMemory products such as the ioFX also include Fusion ioSphere remote monitoring and management software, allowing IT teams to monitor and manage all Fusion-io solutions deployed throughout a studio from a single interface. The 1.6 TB Fusion ioFX will be available in summer 2013, and will be on display at NAB 2013, at a number of leading Fusion-io software and hardware Technology Alliance Program member booths.
HP Z Workstations feature Fusion ioFX
Fusion-io also announced that it is collaborating with global workstation leader HP to integrate the Fusion ioFX into the award-winning HP Z820, Z620 and Z420 Workstations. Additionally, professionals interested in adding the Fusion ioFX to their current HP Workstation can purchase the ioFX as a custom integration component. The new solution will integrate the Fusion ioFX into the powerful HP Z Workstations with Intel Xeon processors. The architecture is designed to deliver an industry-leading platform for digital content creation applications by moving beyond the performance limitations and bottlenecks of traditional systems.
“I consider HP one of the best engineering companies in the world, so I’m thrilled to see HP and Fusion-io working together to advance workstation computing architectures,” said Steve Wozniak, Fusion-io Chief Scientist. “The Fusion ioFX brings the intelligence of the Fusion-io approach to HP’s incredible workstations, adding even more powerful application performance to the precision engineering HP is known for around the world.”
“HP is the workstation industry leader, and our customers demand to be the first to get cutting edge solutions that deliver performance, reliability and innovation,” said Jeff Wood, vice president of product management, Commercial Solutions Business Unit, HP. “Providing the Fusion ioFX in our high-end HP Z Workstations will offer customers improved performance to tackle their most challenging projects faster.”
Thin Reads, a website devoted to e-singles, launched Monday. The site offers reviews and author interviews, bestseller lists drawn from Amazon and a database of titles.
The site was launched by Howard Polskin, who was previously the EVP of communications and events for the Association of Magazine Media (formerly the Magazine Publishers’ Association). Polskin told me he loves the e-singles format — which he defines as a work of fiction nonfiction between 5,000 and 25,000 words, generally priced between $0.99 and $2.99 — and wants to help readers discover new titles.
Polskin shared a few findings from his database of about 700 e-singles:
54% of all e-singles available in the database are listed as Original, which means they were created especially as short works of nonfiction or fiction intended to be read on an electronic platform for its original release.
12% of all e-singles available in the database are listed as Encore, which means they were originally published or presented previously in another format. 2% of all e-singles in the database are listed as Encore+, which means that new or updated content was added to a story that was previously published.
31% of e-singles in the database are fiction. 69% are nonfiction. Narrative nonfiction accounted for 20% of all e-singles in the database.
More than 150 publishers are releasing content to the e-singles market, according to the findings of the Thin Reads database. Publishers include: The New York Times Company, Penguin, ProPublica, Random House, St. Martin’s Press, Byliner, the Atavist, HarperCollins, American Express Publishing, GQ Magazine, and TED Conferences.
Byliner, Penguin and New Word City have published the most e-singles, with more than 40 titles each.
Polskin doesn’t plan to monetize the site for now, and said he’s providing it as a service to readers. He also said he’s gotten feedback and input from Amazon, which runs Kindle Singles, and Apple, which has a “Quick Reads” section of the iBookstore.
China’s Miaozhen Systems, a third-party big data company in the advertising industry, closed on $10 million in Series C financing recently. CBC Capital, a Beijing-based TMT-focused private equity fund, led the round. Redpoint Ventures, KPCB, as well as WPP Digital, also participated.
PRESS RELEASE
Miaozhen Systems, a leading Chinese third-party big data company in the advertising industry, announced that the company has closed a US$10 million Series C round financing led by CBC Capital, a Beijing-based TMT-focused private equity fund.
Investors also participating in this round include Redpoint Ventures in the United States, KPCB, as well as WPP Digital, Miaozhen said in a statement.
“Leveraging on technical advantage and big data processing capacity, Miaozhen has become a leader in the industry. Its impressive daily capacity of handling 100 billion advertising requests through the cloud platform enables the company to help customers solve actual problems in marketing. Big data is reshaping the business community, as well as transforming the overall ecosystem of the new media advertising industry,” said Tian Suning, chairman of CBC.
“With big data application as core business, Miaozhen is seeking to help customers solve problems in marketing in a more scientific and intelligent way, especially those conundrums arising from information explosion and data piles-up due to large uncertainties,” said Zhu Wei, chief executive officer of Miaozhen.
About Miaozhen Systems
Miaozhen Systems is the leading third-party advertising technology company in China. Founded in 2006, with more than 280 employees, Miaozhen is a novel high-tech enterprise. Miaozhen headquarters in Beijing, with branch offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Singapore, providing products and solutions in Taiwan, Japan and Australia.
Miaozhen has data processing capability of 100 billion ad requests every day. The cumulative data storage is over 2PB. The exclusive Moment Tracking Technology helps advertisers, agencies and publishers in efficiently measuring online campaign impact (including reach, frequency and demography of target audience), and enhance their online advertising returns. Various leading multinational brands including P&G, Microsoft, Volkswagen, L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, YUM!, are using tools and solutions provided by Miaozhen.
The gap between what major corporations will owe retired workers and how much they have put aside grew last year despite a strong stock market rally, according to a study set to be released on Monday by Wilshire Associates. The cumulative liability among defined benefit pension plans sponsored by companies in the benchmark Standard and Poor’s 500 index increased to $1.56 trillion in 2012 from $1.38 trillion the year before, outpacing the growth in assets. As a result, the overall funding ratio – a measure of a plan’s assets divided by its commitments – for all plans fell from 79.7 percent to 78.1 percent, the study found.
(Reuters) – The gap between what major corporations will owe retired workers and how much they have put aside grew last year despite a strong stock market rally, according to a study set to be released on Monday by Wilshire Associates.
The cumulative liability among defined benefit pension plans sponsored by companies in the benchmark Standard and Poor’s 500 index increased to $1.56 trillion in 2012 from $1.38 trillion the year before, outpacing the growth in assets.
As a result, the overall funding ratio – a measure of a plan’s assets divided by its commitments – for all plans fell from 79.7 percent to 78.1 percent, the study found.
Low interest rates – which are used to calculate future benefits – were a significant factor behind the increase in pension liabilities, said Russell Walker, a vice president at Wilshire and one of the authors of the report. Mergers and acquisitions also increased pension funding liabilities.
United Technologies Corp (UTX.N) saw its liability increase by $5.2 billion after its acquisition of Goodrich Corp, for instance, while the pension obligation at Kraft Foods Group Inc (KRFT.O) increased $7.2 billion as a result of its spinoff of Mondelez International Inc (MDLZ.O).
Walker said plans will either have to invest in riskier, long-duration credit, hope that interest rates rise and/or increase their contributions.
The issue of pension funding will grow in importance to both corporations and investors alike as the oldest members of the baby boom generation retire and draw down assets.
“The huge cohort of upcoming plan beneficiaries are going to put a strain on defined benefit plans,” Walker said. “There’s no question that we are going to see a need to stabilize funding sooner rather than later.”
Approximately 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65 each day until 2029, according to estimates from the Pew Research Center. The generation is the last to be widely covered by defined benefit pension plans that guarantee workers a set monthly benefit regardless of market conditions. Most of these plans are closed to new employees, who instead save for retirement in so-called defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s.
The pending deficits of some companies amount to billions of dollars. At $19.7 billion, Boeing Co. (BA.N) had the largest shortfall among the 308 companies studied. General Electric (GE.N), Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N), and AT&T (T.N) also had shortfalls of more than $10 billion in fiscal 2012. Pension funding could be a risk that affects the future net earnings of these and other companies, Walker said.
Overall, the plans included in the study had a median rate of return of 11.8 percent in 2012, the fourth consecutive year of gains. Plans invested a median of 49.6 percent of assets in equities, 36.4 percent of assets in fixed income, and the rest in a mix of cash, real estate, and private equity or hedge funds.
Benefit payments rose to $76.5 billion from $72.5 billion the year before.
(Reporting by David Randall; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
Philadelphia is 101 miles from Manhattan, and the current travel time between the two cities is about 1 hour and 50 minutes. Suppose that Amtrak could achieve the speed of China’s bullet trains and move at 175 miles per hour. The one way commute time would decline to 35 minutes. Common sense suggests that home prices in Philadelphia would soar from their current median of $140,000 as businesses and households would come to view the city as a new Manhattan suburb, and the demand to live and work there would sharply increase. Philadelphia would benefit from the population increase and all the amenities that private enterprise would build to support it.
That is exactly what happened in China as a consequence of the country’s enormous investment in bullet trains, as work that I did with Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University shows. But the question is what level of public investment do the United States and other governments want to make to relieve congestion in mega cities and spur growth in second and third tier cities, especially at a time when many are questioning the role of government and pushing for fiscal austerity.
Here’s China’s story. Between 2006 and 2010, the Chinese central government spent billions of dollars on new bullet trains that connect second and third tier cities with the mega cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou — but of course bullet trains don’t connect every smaller city to a mega city. So my coauthor and I looked at the differences that bullet train connections wrought on “connected” cities by comparing them to similar cities that the bullet train had bypassed. Using data for 262 cities, we documented large home price increases for newly connected cities. Based on the ridership data for two major bullet train lines, we calculated that the average city house price growth per billion passenger-kilometers is 4.2%. Effect 1: a capital gain windfall for land owners in second and third tier cities
High rents in the mega city also nudged the subset of households and firms with the lowest willingness to pay to locate there to consider relocating to the secondary cities. But these decentralized households can easily travel to the major cities for unique shopping and restaurant options. Effect 2: dispersed population
What other changes can these lower tier cities expect? In our past work examining the consequences of new subways built in Beijing, we have documented that the private sector responds to major public transit investments through two different investment strategies. First, real estate developers respond by building new housing towers in close proximity to the new public transit stops. Second, commercial real estate demand is stimulated as upscale restaurants and shopping agglomerates close to these transit stations. The extent of this effect will depend on whether the area is zoned for residential or commercial activities, and also the density limits defined in zoning codes. Effect 3: private investment in amenities to support the growing populations of the lower tier cities
The bullet train simultaneously alleviates some of the congestion costs associated with urban growth in the mega cities and triggers the growth of the nearby second and third tier cities. In this sense, the bullet train creates the possibility that the nearby lower tier cities become a “safety valve” for the mega city and this alleviates concern about such cities growing “too big.” In the case of China, such investments strengthen center cities as the bullet train connects to downtown subway stations in the big cities. In this sense, this investment is a low carbon strategy that lessens the need for both in-city and cross-city car trips. Effect 4: lower carbons emissions
There’s even more to the story for companies. The bullet train has the potential to play a similar role as the Internet [PDF], attracting back-office activity and helping firms fragment so that they keep their deal makers in the expensive commercial real estate in the center cities while sending their routine activities to cheaper land at the periphery. The rapid transport will allow for a more efficient allocation of business activity across space, helping firms to control costs. It’s a “win-win” as the scarce mega city’s land is efficiently used and the secondary cities experience local growth. Effect 5: more efficient use of space for private enterprise
In the United States, Amtrak seems unlikely to accelerate any time soon, so Philadelphia, Providence, and other cities on the Northeast Corridor will not enjoy the full benefits of their geographic proximity to Boston and New York City. In the west, though, California is going ahead with its High Speed Rail. And while our work quantifies some of the spatial consequences of investing in high speed rail, we cannot claim to have conducted a cost/benefit analysis of such irreversible investments. Our work suggests that cities with bullet train stations will offer new investment opportunities for cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield.
But bullet trains cost billions, and California is expecting the federal government to provide much of this money. Critics will note that it is easy (and quite tempting) to spend “other people’s money.” In this new age of fiscal austerity, public finance arrangements for major urban infrastructure projects will become an important topic for debate.
When Panasonic Automotive and Aupeo said in January that they were starting a “strategic collaboration” around in-car infotainment services, it now seems they were just being coy. As it turns out, Panasonic has bought the Berlin-based Pandora competitor outright.
The deal closed in late March, Aupeo CEO Holger Weiss – who will continue to head up his 20-person team – told me. It’s big news for the connected car industry, but also for Berlin, a city whose startup scene has been eagerly awaiting the validation of a major exit for the last couple of years. Frustratingly, though, the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
According to Weiss, the deal will see both parties extend their reach:
“They’re buying technology, customer relationships and an experienced and gifted team. We’re already in Mercedes, BMW and all those other guys, and have been focusing strongly in the last 12-18 months on the connected car.
“Panasonic understands strategically that the internet-enabling of cars will [change] the use of the internet in the car fundamentally. You have the possibility of taking your smartphone and connecting it with the car, but the level of integration and according technology that are required to provide stable streaming while driving at 180mph is something a regular consumer-focused service cannot do.”
The deal is reminiscent of Harman’s 2010 purchase of Aha Radio, whose in-car Aha platform is found these days in vehicles from Subaru, Honda and Acura. Aupeo, meanwhile, has partnerships with Mercedes, BMW, Mini and Pioneer for its platform, which covers news and weather, radio, podcasts and audiobooks, and also uses text-to-speech technology. As for Panasonic, that company is already involved in Chrysler’s Uconnect platform — as is Harman, albeit as developer of a hands-free communication system — and Chevrolet’s MyLink.
The January announcement said Panasonic and Aupeo would “create customized cloud-based solutions, optimized for the automotive market”, and it now looks like a lot of that work will happen in Berlin.
According to Weiss, Aupeo will remain in Berlin as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Panasonic Automotive Systems Company of America, and will keep its name (and consumer apps and services). Berlin will become the “development hub” for Panasonic’s connected services strategy, he added.
Google’s Paul Dunne (left) and John Bruton TD, Ireland’s Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, inspect the air cooling system at the new Google data center in Dublin. (Photo: Google)
DUBLIN, Ireland – In the rainy western suburbs of Dublin, the cloud draws near the earth, filling the halls of data centers for the world’s largest cloud computing services. This city has emerged as a primary hub for server farms supporting the growth of cloud services across Europe, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon build powerful facilities with halls packed with servers and storage.
Dublin is unique amongst major European data center hubs in that its appeal is based on climate, rather than connectivity. While the thriving data center communities in London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are built atop network intersections in key business cities, Dublin has become one of the world’s favored locations for free cooling – the use of fresh air to cool servers. It is a prime example of how free cooling is giving rise to clusters of energy-efficient facilities in cool climates.
The free cooling revolution was unleashed by a simple realization – servers are much sturdier than were previously imaged. After many years of housing servers in digital meat lockers, research by Intel and Google (among others) demonstrated that IT gear can function in warmer environments with only a fractional increase in hardware failures.
This has led to a shift in thinking about how to design and build data centers, which has allowed the industry’s largest players to slash millions of dollars from their electricity bills by using fresh air to cool their armadas of servers, rather than power-intensive air conditioners and chillers.
In Europe, Dublin has been the chief beneficiary of this trend, boasting an ideal climate in which the temperature virtually never exceeds the upper ranges for using fresh air to cool the data center. The growing interest in free cooling has helped Dublin build upon its status as a technology destination for major U.S. technology companies. Both Microsoft and Google have more than 2,500 workers in development hubs and office operations in Dublin. In recent weeks both Facebook and Yahoo have announced plans to add hundreds of employees at new offices in Dublin.
In late 2008, Amazon announced that it had expanded its cloud computing services to Dublin, adding a European region for its EC2 compute service. By 2010, Amazon’s Dublin cloud hub was experiencing robust growth, and has continued to acquire land in the Dublin area for future expansion of its cloud operations.
In 2009, Microsoft opened its Dublin data center, investing $500 million in the 550,000 square foot facility, which effectively functions as a large air handler, moving fresh air through the facility to cool servers. In 2012 Microsoft added a second phase, investing another $150 million to add of 13 megawatts of power capacity.
In 2012, Google opened a €75 million data center in Dublin’s Profile Park. Like the Microsoft facility, the Google data center is optimized to use fresh air to cool tens of thousands of servers.
These technology titans have boosted the existing data center ecosystem in Dublin, home to at least 13 data centers for providers such as Digital Realty Trust, Interxion, TelecityGroup and SunGard.
The expansion of the data center sector has been welcome news for the Irish economy, which hs been hit hard by the economic downturn that began in the fall of 2008.
“Our technological infrastructure is rapidly improving and cloud computing is one area where our climate gives us advantages,” said Minister Richard Bruton, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. “The Government will build on announcements like this with more ambitious policies to take advantage of this potential and contribute to our recovery.”
The designers at startup Misfit Wearables had a goal to make their wearable health gadget so beautiful that customers might keep it on even if it was completely broken. The company’s quarter-sized Shine gizmo — made from aerospace-grade aluminum, lined with a halo of LEDs, and fitted with a variety of accessories for the wrist, neck, and body — is supposed to reach its first 5,000 crowd-funder customers in early June, whereby we’ll see if the pint-sized device is as beloved by its customers as it is by its creators.
But the story of year and half-old, venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).
Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation more mainstream wearables, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd-funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”
Next-gen wearables
Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit, is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop of smart phone.
But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.
Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu tells me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.
While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes it gadget in Japan and South Korea.
Think differently
For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and are trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.
The first aspect of their design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal –a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.
There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless wouldn’t penetrate out of the metal casing without that.
“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughs Vu.
Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.
Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months, before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” says Vu.
The decision to make it not chargeable also delivered usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.
A third counter-intuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet-clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu says that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.
For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made of all-metal but trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.
These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu says before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.
Glanceable UI
Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.
But the move was also a decision to increasingly move in the direction of what Vu calls a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.
The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pairs it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.
If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordan explained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.
Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine, houses the rest of the functionality.
Glanceable UI is about creating a second-worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.
Getting to market
Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.
Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.
Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.
The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.
While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.
I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this Summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.
Google (GOOG) and WhatsApp have reportedly been locked in negotiations about an acquisition for more than a month — and WhatsApp is pushing for nearly $1 billion valuation, Digital Trends recently reported. This sounds like a huge number, but even though WhatsApp has not released its user base estimate, it is widely assumed to be more than 300 million. This past New Year’s Eve, WhatsApp processed more than 11 billion outbound messages. The company has started counting outbound and inbound messages separately due to the popularity of its group chat feature that has been one of the cornerstones of its franchise. WhatsApp has become a massively popular service on all continents, but it is particularly big in Europe and Latin America where its market penetration among smartphone users tops 80% in countries including Brazil, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Germany.
Tampa Media Group, which is backed by Revolution Capital Group, has acquired Clearwater Gazette—a Florida-based weekly newspaper serving the Clearwater, Dunedin, Largo, Belleair, Belleair Beach, Belleair Bluffs, Belleair Shore and Indian Rocks Beach communities. Terms were not released.
PRESS RELEASE
Revolution Capital Group is pleased to announce its portfolio company, Tampa Media Group, has acquired Clearwater Gazette—a weekly newspaper serving the Clearwater, Dunedin, Largo, Belleair, Belleair Beach, Belleair Bluffs, Belleair Shore and Indian Rocks Beach communities. This add-on follows the launch in January of The St. Petersburg Tribune, a new daily newspaper serving St. Petersburg, Florida. Clearwater Gazette marks Revolution’s fifth acquisition since inception.
“For six decades, Clearwater Gazette has been an influential and important voice in the community, and we’re impressed with the quality of the publication put together by the owners, Chuck and Sandy Pollick,” says Gary Alcock, Managing Director of Revolution Capital Group.
The purchase of Clearwater Gazette and its integration into Tampa Media Group illustrates the acquisition growth strategy employed by Revolution as it seeks to unlock the full potential of its portfolio companies.
“The content and viewpoints of Clearwater Gazette mesh well with our existing portfolio of media properties in the region. In addition to that, it’s also an exceptionally well-run business,” says Jim Towers, a Senior Associate with Revolution.
Under Chuck and Sandy Pollick’s ownership, Clearwater Gazette has remained committed to providing superior local news while helping to promote local businesses in Pinellas County.
“Tampa Media Group’s mission is to connect and strengthen communities. Therefore, we are very pleased to add Clearwater Gazette to our Tribune family of products. It joins the over 117 year old Tampa Tribune and the leading website in Tampa Bay, TBO.com. Clearwater Gazette is a perfect complement to our St. Petersburg Tribune as well. We look forward to better serving our new and existing readers with expanded coverage while working to strengthen the business community of Clearwater,” says Bill Barker, Publisher of The Tampa Tribune.
Revolution Capital Group formed Tampa Media Group in October 2012 to purchase The Tampa Tribune from Media General. The firm continues to seek acquisition opportunities within the newspaper industry.
About The Tampa Tribune
The Tampa Tribune has been Tampa’s hometown newspaper for more than a century. TBO.com, the newspaper’s associated web site, was one of the first local media internet sites when it launched in 1994. In 1975, the newspaper moved into a new facility on Parker Street, where the operations reside today. The Tampa Times, an evening newspaper, merged into The Tampa Tribune in 1982.
About Clearwater Gazette
Founded in 1950, Clearwater Gazette started as a small island newspaper, and now serves Clearwater, Dunedin, Largo, Belleair, Belleair Beach, Belleair Bluffs, Belleair Shore and Indian Rocks Beach communities. The newspaper’s mission is to provide quality local news while helping to promote local businesses in Pinellas County. See their website for more details www.clearwatergazette.com.
About Revolution Capital Group
Revolution Capital Group was formed by a group of private equity, M&A and operational executives. The partners have worked on over $15 billion in transactions with corporations such as AT&T, BASF, Bayer, General Electric, Hays PLC, IBM, Lucent, Motorola, Universal Group and Williams Communications.
Vitamin and health food online retailer Vitacost has launched a tablet app that’s designed to encourage shoppers to put more than just the core items on their shopping list into their digital basket. Introducing a little serendipity into the buying process makes a lot of sense when you’re selling 40,000+ different products but what’s interesting is that Vitacost sees tablets as the place to do this.
Vitacost already has a smartphone app but says its tablet “experience”, which is designed for the iPad but built in HTML5 so is not a native app, is “entirely different” to the smartphone app — with a focus on allowing shoppers to discover new items, rather than just making it quick and easy to shop by category.
“The tablet size and form-factor encourages browsing,” says Vitacost CMO David Zucker. ”Information-rich, large catalog retailers work really well in a browsing format on a tablet, which is difficult to achieve on a smartphone.”
“The iPad experience is not an app but an actual website in HTML 5 to exploit the tablet and its functionality. Our phone app is optimized for that size screen while the new iPad experience is designed for the mid-size screen and the iPad functionality,” he adds.
It’s still early days in the retail gold rush to mine riches out of tablets. As slate ownership ramps up — with almost 200 million tablets predicted to ship globally this year (Gartner‘s figure), powered by YoY growth of nearly 70% — the swelling addressable market for selling stuff via slates is putting the dollar signs in retailers’ eyes. Especially as tablet owners are already showing signs that they are in the mood for casual browsing – so may be more likely to make an impulse buy.
Designing tablet-centric ecommerce that encourages a more casual kind of shopping, to help shoppers discover products they didn’t know they were looking for, seems like a natural next step in digital retail strategy. Certainly for ecommerce companies that have a large number of SKUs to sell.
“The tablet is the ideal ‘couch commerce’ browsing environment,” says Zucker. ”Their large screen, high resolution and good sound make rich browsing experiences possible… We see the growth in tablet usage as a ‘third screen’ and interaction with commerce and brands is increasing. Tablet usage has grown 10x faster than smartphone usage comparing the first two years after introduction [and] is expected to grow at 50% compounded annual rate through 2015 – this is where the puck is going.”
So what exactly does Vitacost’s tablet “experience” do to get more shoppers encountering stuff they didn’t already know about? Firstly, the shopping experience is built around gestures to make it easier to browse and choose items, with swipes to quickly flick through scores of items on virtual shelves. Products that the shopper wants to buy are then dragged off the virtual shelf to the bottom of the screen where they are added to the basket.
Another feature, called ‘browsing bubbles’, displays related info next to the products (such as ingredients and dietary info) but also bubbles up similar products to get users to widen the spectrum of their search.
Add to that, a proprietary ‘sprinkler algorithm’ introduces an element of pure serendipity by pushing random categories and items into the mix too, so that shoppers end up encountering a much broader collection of products than if they have been shopping via the traditional ecommerce staple of drop-down category menus.
The effect Vitacost was aiming for was to digitally recreate a bricks and mortar style shopping experience where the act of shopping naturally involves discovery, says Zucker. “Consumers using our new digital platform are offered an endless array of product suggestions through the browsing bubbles, increasing awareness of the vast selection of products and brands that Vitacost carries,” he adds in a statement.
The company gets 1.5 million unique views to its ecommerce website per month but does not yet publicly disclose traffic to mobile devices. Zucker tells TechCrunch that “mobile/tablet revenue is a non-trivial portion of our total revenue” but said, first and foremost, the decision to develop the tablet shopping platform was driven by “the desire to remove friction in the buying process for our 40,000+ SKUs”.
“We chose the iPad to exploit the functionality that this device has, such as dragging, swiping and other functionality that enables more gesture-based shopping. Second, we needed a user experience that better enabled a consumer to discover the products we have; since a typical consumer will enter a brick and mortar grocery shopping experience and emerge with items they did not initially intend to buy,” he says.
“This ‘discover’ process is difficult to build in a website and we believe we have made significant strides with our new experience to develop a sense of discovery using our shopping bubbles and sprinkle algorithm. Finally, we wanted something that people actually liked to use and found fun to interact with. I don’t think anyone would say that web shopping is in itself a fun experience, although theVitacost iPad experience is.”
Here’s a screengrab of the less fun/more utilitarian shopping experience offered on Vitacost’s website:
There were a number of announcements of new data center projects last week. Here’s a review of some of the announcements:
Windstream Opens Virginia Data Center – Windstream Hosted Solutions held a special event last week to celebrate the grand opening of its enterprise-class data center in McLean, Va. The 65,000-square-foot facility was designed to meet the growing demand for cloud-based and dedicated managed services.
Hospital to Convert Grocery Store into Data Center – A Pennsylvania hospital has received a state grant to help pay for the ongoing project to convert a former grocery store into a state-of-the-art data center that will house new electronic record-management systems. The new facility will house 27,000 square feet of data center space upon opening.
123.Net to Open Remodeled West Michigan Data Center– 123.Net, a Michigan based telecommunications company, today announced that it will be celebrating the opening of its newly remodeled Grand Rapids data center. The facility, located at 400 76th Street in Byron Center, Michigan, has approximately 3500 square feet of data center space and more than 150 cabinets.
Conlink Plans New Data Center in Grand Rapids– Comlink Inc., an East Lansing-based company that specializes in data hosting and “cloud” services, is entering the Grand Rapids market with a 9,000 square-foot data center. The facility at 3950 Sparks Drive SE, will employ 20 initially, the company said.>
San Francisco startup AppMesh is emerging from stealth mode with iPad and iPhone apps that bring together and optimize salespeople’s inboxes, calendars and ongoing deal data sets. With the apps, getting lost in email and manually updating the sales process are things of the past, the company vows.
Co-founders Leo Tenenblat and Tom Tobin both worked in product management on analytics at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce.com, where they saw the value of pushing out clear information to salespeople’s mobile devices.
With AppMesh, updates sync quickly between the iPad app and iPhone app. And if an app goes offline, it will sync and replicate to the Amazon Web Services public cloud once it goes back online. Users can export Salesforce data to the apps, although importing back to Salesforce is not currently possible. Android versions are planned. The apps automatically take note of salespeople’s emails and phone calls to potential clients. It also arranges email in different ways — by the size of the deal, by the time the deal opportunity closes and so on. The apps are free for teams of up to five people, and prices are determined on a case-by-case basis for larger user groups.
The AppMesh application for iPad lets salespeople track meetings, sales opportunities and emails.
The product is similar in some respects to Tylr Mobile, a startup that’s still in stealth mode. Meanwhile, some startups, such as Crushpath and Selligy, offer mobile apps for tracking sales relationships, and others, such as Yesware, deal in optimizing salespeople’s email boxes but not with mobile apps. There are also startups that aim to make the best of email but don’t draw from sales apps, such as Taskbox and Mailbox, which Dropbox acquired.
On top of that, it’s possible Salesforce itself could roll out more sophisticated features. After all, Salesforce plans several announcements around mobile offerings this year. Then again, Salesforce could move to acquire AppMesh or Tylr Mobile. The deal would make sense, because the products are intended to solve a real problem for salespeople.
Android users will get the chance to try out the official public release of Facebook Home later this week, but if anyone is really impatient a beta version has leaked and is available to try now (via Verge). MoDaCo has published the beta (which is actually made up of three separate APKs covering the Facebook app itself, a new Messenger app and the Home/launcher app.
Another benefit of the pre-release version of Home, besides getting to try it out early, is that it works on a wide variety of devices beyond the five specified by Facebook as being compatible in the event it held last week to officially announce Facebook Home. The only requirement seems to be that the device has a maximum resolution of 1280×768, and that a user is able to completely uninstall their existing Facebook app. The Nexus 4 is therefore a viable candidate.
Functionality is somewhat limited, however. Chat heads doesn’t work as of yet, for instance. But Cover feed appears to function as intended, and all the settings appear to be there. The settings reveal that in choosing where your Home content comes from, you can both enable and disable updates from Pages and status updates from users in your network. You can also enable or disable the notification/status bar at the top of the screen for a more edge-to-edge Facebook experience.
The leak shows that there doesn’t really appear to be any huge technical barrier to putting Facebook Home on a wide variety of handsets, which is good news for users who don’t own one of the five devices initially set to receive it. If you’re interested, you can head over to MoDaCo to download the APKs and try this our yourself, but as with any side-loaded software, remember you do so at your own risk. Friday might just be a little too far off for some curious folks, however.
To install the Facebook Home beta, first make sure you’ve uninstalled both Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Then navigate to your device’s security settings and then tick the box that allows you to install apps from unknown sources. Then download the APK files above to your computer. Plug in your Android device and make sure that it has USB mode enable, or download Android File Transfer if you’re on a Mac. Drag and drop the three APK files to your device, preferably in the “Downloads” folder.
On your Android device, if you don’t already have one, download and install a free file manager application from Google Play. The free and aptly named “File Manager” does the job. Within that app, navigate to where you copied the Facebook Home APK files from your computer, and tap on each to install them.
Once they’re installed, sign in to Facebook with your credentials, and then activate Facebook Home. It’ll take a few seconds to load, but should quickly go from a gray screen to photos from your FB feed and a home circle with your face at the bottom. You can choose to have pressing the home button on your device activate FB Home by default, or your default launcher, and you can change these settings at any time in Android Settings.
Cisco, Juniper,, Big Switch Networks, Nuage Networks, VMware and several other network hardware and software vendors are jumping into the open-source code-development pool with the establishment on Monday of the OpenDaylight Project inside the Linux Foundation.
Rumored in recent months, the project begins more than two years after the establishment of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which counts customers such as Facebook and Google as board members and has nurtured the OpenFlow protocol. OpenDaylight organizers describe the vendor-led consortium as a nice complement to the ONF that will support OpenFlow, but it’s hard to predict how nicely the organizations will really dovetail with one another.
OpenDaylight is taking proposals for code from engineers working inside and outside the sponsoring companies. The software line will include an open controller, plugins, applications, a virtual overlay and interfaces to bring all those elements together, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Those elements will sit on top of OpenFlow, as well as vendor-specific interfaces and other standard protocols, which work on top of virtual and physical switches.
Elements of the OpenDaylight Project
Different sponsors are proposing different parts of the total OpenDaylight product line. All contributions must be approved by a steering committee. The first OpenDaylight code is slated to ship in the third quarter of this year.
OpenDaylight says it intends to play nice with the ONF. But it’s unclear if that will actually happen. There are competing visions, for example, for the northbound API. The ONF believes there should not be a standard, while OpenDaylight will be shipping standard northbound APIs. Meanwhile, there are lots of SDN startups not sponsoring OpenDaylight, so it’s hard to tell what those companies will do.
OpenDaylight’s stated goal — widening the adoption of and sparking more innovation around software-defined networking — is noble. Vendors’ acknowledgment that the network indeed must become as dynamic and programmable as compute and storage is right on point. Whether OpenDaylight will cripple SDN startups’ efforts to help companies swap out expensive brand-name gear for cheaper commodity equipment is an open question. To be sure, though, the establishment of OpenDaylight is a turning point, and the SDN hype ensures that lots of people will be eager to see what actually comes to pass.
From June, almost all Londoners should be able to get free Wi-Fi access in London Underground stations, after O2 became the latest major carrier to sign up as a wholesale customer of Virgin Media.
Virgin Media has been providing internet access in Tube stations since the Olympics in mid-2012. The service was initially free for all, but after the Games Virgin started charging on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for those who aren’t customers of Virgin Mobile or the company’s fixed-line services. EE and Vodafone – respectively, the UK’s first and third-largest mobile carriers — signed up as wholesale partners in November, ensuring that their customers would also get free access.
O2, the second-largest mobile operator, has now done the same, with its customers getting access from June. According to Virgin, those three carriers account for 89 percent of London’s population, leaving only overseas tourists and subscribers of other carriers – notably the smallest of the big four, Three – having to pay up for access.
“Having O2 on board is excellent news for the thousands of people that use the Tube every day,” London Underground strategy chief Gareth Powell said in a statement. “Most customers will now be able to access live travel information or use social media to plan their social life while on the move.”
London Underground also used the announcement to reveal 12 more stations that will be Wei-Fi-enabled, including Baker Street, Bank, Earl’s Court and Sloane Square. The total number of stations bearing connectivity is now 120 (the Tube network has 270 stations, although many aren’t in central London, as the Wi-Fi-enabled ones tend to be).
I’ve asked Three whether it’s talking to Virgin about getting its customers into the scheme, and will add the response in when I get it.
The British site analytics firm Qubit has released version 2 of its platform, which aims to give ecommerce proprietors a simpler unified interface for seeing and acting upon what visitors to their sites do.
Qubit was started a few years ago by a group of ex-Googlers, who are now taking on their former employer’s Analytics product as well as other rivals such as Chartbeat, Adobe Omniture and Mixpanel. Qubit draws in more than 100 data points for each site visit, which it combines with factors such as geography to create a behavior model – first-time visitors tend to do this, second-time visitors tend to do that, and so on.
The new version of the platform gives marketers a more fully integrated workflow, as Qubit CEO Graham Cooke explained to me:
“We can do an analysis, understand who the users are and look at the journeys they’ve taken. So, for example, [certain users] always have these issues when putting things in their basket; they don’t know if they spend another £10 [$15.30] they will get free delivery. So you can choose that segment from the analytics platform and choose to target that segment with a message, which [we] put straight into the website without needing to rewrite the website. You just need a single line of code on the site.”
Cooke said Qubit had invested heavily in in-memory processing to deal with the resulting tens of billions of data points, as technologies such as Hadoop and MapR “mean it takes five minutes to get the result back”. (It should be noted that rivals such as Chartbeat and Mixpanel are also working with in-memory technologies.)
“We have a mix of open-source technologies that we put together with our own query language, built around our own in-memory clusters to do that,” Cooke said. “Hadoop is part of our framework but not part of this solution. This is about making big data friendly and being able to build a hypothesis and write that change into your site targeting a specific user group.”
Qubit already has an impressive roster of customers, including the BBC, the Financial Times, Expedia and British retail chains such as Staples and Topshop. According to Cooke, the company’s technology leads to around a 25 percent uplift in revenue.
Internet Explorer users are valuable
To mark the launch of Qubit v2, the company has also released some in-house research about the relative “value” of users of different browsers – one of the many variables that the platform takes into account. The research took in data from around 100 million sessions across 90 different retail sites between December and January.
Interestingly, the research shows Internet Explorer (IE) customers to be the most “valuable” customers because they are the easiest to tempt into a sale, with a 3.14 percent conversion rate and an average basket total of £76.87. Safari users have a much higher average basket total of £108.44, but are harder to sell to, with a conversion rate of 1.64 percent.
Firefox users actually have the highest average basket total, at £110.99, and have a 2.18 percent conversion rate, while Chrome users average £90.36 percent for basket total and are only slightly easier to sell to than Safari users, with a 1.84 percent conversion rate. In terms of average customer value, then – balancing basket value with conversion rate – the results in descending order look like this: IE (£2.42), Firefox (£2.41), Safari (£1.78) and Chrome (£1.66).
Although plenty of people support Windows 8 and the Modern UI, a lot of readers feel that yes, Microsoft should seriously consider making changes to its divisive OS and accept that the “one size fits all” model isn’t working.
Nvic sums it up for many:
At this point, I’d say giving in and putting in a classic UI option would be their best first move. I’m one of thousands who refuses to use the OS due to it requiring third party modification to be usable on a PC. Their second option if they don’t want to do that: Stop selling to PC users and offer 7 again.
If anything, forcing PC users isn’t making them get used to the new UI, it’s making them less productive and causing them to develop a hatred for the product. Making those users happy would be the smart first move. With them quieted, they can then focus on the tablet market this product was really meant for.
WP7Mango agrees and thinks Microsoft should give buyers a clear choice:
There is absolutely no need to change course IMHO. Microsoft already has a perfectly good operating system for traditional desktops — Windows 7.
I’d go with your second option — stop selling Windows 8 on non-touch-screen devices and supply Windows 7 instead. Those who want to upgrade their PCs to Windows 8 can still do so — it’s then ultimately their choice. Once Windows 8 is updated so that it is easier to use without a touch-screen, then default to shipping with Windows 8 (or whatever updated version it’s called).
But for touch-screen device, Windows 8 is absolutely the best option, and especially if it’s on high-end hybrid touch-screen devices equipped with a Wacom stylus.
Cecile comments:
It was a mistake to offer W8pro on regular computers. I added to my W7 and I regret it. W8 on a machine that is designed for touch is great, but piggy back to get the new interface was a BIG mistake. Some hands on advertising in person in stores would have been better. Microsoft never seems to LEARN a hard lesson.
Froderik makes an interesting suggestion:
MS should forget the failed one size fits all strategy and release platform specific Win9 beta editions for Desktop / Tablet / Server!
Thom Frost thinks that might be going a little too far, observing:
Well the underlying OS could be the same just a UI change is all that would be needed. What MS did wrong is force the same UI on everyone.
It’s a statement that Antony Clark fully agrees with:
Brilliant comment. The OS could indeed be the same with UI choice. Forcing the UI as they did is nothing more than an Apple-ish move. Force what you think is best on the consumer to sell new product because you feel you know best for all. It’s why I don’t buy Apple, and why I’m starting to not like MS either.
That the debate over Windows 8 remains so lively and passionate clearly shows that Microsoft continues to have a problem on its hands with the new OS. There’s no question that Windows 8 works much better on touch screen devices than on the PC, and many customers are refusing to upgrade from Windows 7 purely because of the Modern UI.
Maybe Microsoft needs to accept making a concession to the legions of non-touch consumers is necessary to drive Windows 8 adoption. There’s no shame in listening to your customers and admitting that Windows 8, as a concept, is ahead of its time. By making a slight course correction to the PC version (rather than a full U-turn), Microsoft could yet still change public opinion and give its troubled OS a second shot at glory.
If you’ve a penchant for typos or having to type the same repetitive phrases day in, day out, you’ll be eternally grateful for Word’s AutoCorrect and AutoText functions. The sad thing is, of course, that once you exit Office they’re inaccessible, which must be frustrating as you read back that horribly misspelled message in your email client or psyche yourself up to enter your address for the umpteenth time into your text editor.
The good news is that you can gain this functionality across all your apps and tools in Windows with one small, perfectly formed freeware program. Step forward, WordExpander 1.5.15.
WordExpander comes from Bartel Media, the makers of PhraseExpress. PhraseExpress has all of the functionality of WordExpander, and then some, but crucially it’s only free for personal use and is quite zealous about enforcing that rule. Thankfully there are no such restrictions with WordExpander, which might explain why it’s hidden away.
That’s a shame, because WordExpander is one useful program. Once set up, you’ll be able to watch it correct your typos from whichever application – text editor, web browser or instant messaging client — you happen to be using. You’ll also be able to get autocomplete suggestions for repetitive phrases appear as you type — just press [Shift] to accept the suggestion and the text is inserted for you.
There is a certain amount of configuration involved before you get started. Click the program’s Taskbar icon to begin and you’ll be whisked to a very well designed configuration screen sporting the ribbon interface you’ve come to love (or hate). WordExpander supports two types of libraries: AutoCorrect, where the correct spelling is paired with the typo, and Phrases, where you provide a description, shortcut key and then enter the phrase you wish to use.
Nothing is set up by default, so start by shortcutting your way to adding AutoCorrect functionality. From the Libraries tab, click AutoCorrect Library to create a new library, then click the Download Libraries button. From the website that appears, right-click the English AutoCorrections link and choose to save it — a text file — to your Downloads folder. Now, with your AutoCorrect library selected in WordExpander, click Import Library, and select the downloaded English_Autocorrections.txt file. It’s a shame this isn’t already configured for you, but it does give you the opportunity to start familiarising yourself with the program.
To start building your Phrases library, switch to the Phrases tab, click New Phrase and enter a suitable description (for reference), a shortcut key that triggers it and then type – or import – the text phrase you want to use.
It’s all very straightforward — take a trip to File tab and select Options should you want WordExpander to automatically start with Windows or tweak the Phrase Detection settings (don’t like using [Shift] to confirm a phrase? Change the key or switch EasyComplete off entirely).
Ultimately, it all adds up to an essential download if you’ve been looking to extend AutoCorrect and AutoText to any application — with no strings attached. WordExpander 1.5.15 is a freeware download for PCs running Windows XP or later.
April Madness, anyone? Okay, we might have to work on our sports metaphors, but for golf fans, things are only just getting started with the 2013 Masters Tournament. It’s the first of the four annual major golf championships, and it’s going to unfold this week at the prestigious Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.
Unfortunately, much of the action will happen while most of us are at the office. Luckily, key events will once again be live streamed online: CBSSports.com and Masters.com will stream more than 90 hours live from the competition, with action unfolding on a total of four live channels.
A fortnight ago I asked a simple question — 
If you’ve a penchant for typos or having to type the same repetitive phrases day in, day out, you’ll be eternally grateful for Word’s AutoCorrect and AutoText functions. The sad thing is, of course, that once you exit Office they’re inaccessible, which must be frustrating as you read back that horribly misspelled message in your email client or psyche yourself up to enter your address for the umpteenth time into your text editor.
