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Health researchers have known for some time that eating fish regularly provides health benefits to help protect against cardiovascular disease, stroke and overall mortality. The primary long-chain fats, DHA and EPA have been shown to improve innate immune response by…

Every year, more than 100 billion plastic bottles are dumped into landfills, where they can take hundreds or even thousands of years to begin breaking down. In many cases, these plastic bottles never fully break down because traditional plastic materials are inedible…

I remember when I was growing up in the 1940s my parents got into a new thing for them called smoking. By the 50s and 60s the whole country was obsessed. Even the physicians did ads touting the safety of smoking. But there were activists and protesters that said smoking…

Camu camu, also called camocamo and cacari, is a small tree that grows alongside rivers in the central and western Amazon basin in South America. It bears purple, cherry-sized berries which, due to their extreme acidity, are typically sweetened into jams, jellies, and…

Chicago, during the days it was ruled by Mayor John M. Daley and his Democratic political machine, was considered a hotbed of cronyism and corruption unequaled anywhere in the country (except, perhaps, in the nation’s capital, where such “qualities” are practically a…

As amazing as it sounds, professional marketing firms do have limits to how far they’ll go to get their advertisements in front of your face. The Telegraph reports that Angus Wood, an executive from digital marketing firm iProspect, has expressed concern that Facebook’s (FB) new Home software that takes over Android smartphone home screens will produce “invasive, tedious” ads that will repel consumers from using the service. In particular, Wood explained that “the closer you come to the consumer, the softer you need to tread, and the bar for content quality will be higher than ever,” so it seems that Facebook may need to restrict its Facebook Home ads only to those that are the most relevant and least annoying to its users.

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Reviews

Todoist: To Do List, Task List [Productivity]

Apps

Facebook Home Not Launching With Ads, Will Eventually Come To Cover Feed

Carriers

HTC First to be an EE exclusive in the UK

Google Glass

Watch the complete ‘Building New Experiences with Glass’ presentation from SXSW

Phones

HTC One Developer Edition pre-orders now open

HTC M4 Very Similar To HTC First, May Not Ship With Facebook Home

HTC to include “Live Experience Tour” in 11 cities for HTC One marketing campaign

Tablets

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 now on sale in the U.K.

Updates

Austrian Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus beginning to receive Android 4.1.2 update

Galaxy Axiom on US Cellular receiving OTA Jelly Bean update

Miscellaneous

Latest comScore report shows Android market share continues to shrink in the U.S.

Samsung Electronics Grows Profit By 53%, Fifth Record-Breaking Quarter In A Row

 

 

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for April 5, 2013

Whether or not Google (GOOG) is actually happy that Facebook (FB) has just launched software intended to take over Android home screens is certainly up for debate. But the company is doing its best to put on a happy face following the announcement, and it tells VentureBeat that Facebook Home “demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular.” That said, Google couldn’t resist nudging its own services into the conversation by saying that Home is “a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play — the heart of the Android ecosystem — along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search, and Google Maps.” In other words, Google is sending a gentle reminder to potential Facebook Home fans that their phones will still have plenty of Google services for them to use even if they choose to clog up their home screens with status updates.

When Facebook launched its Home on Android on Thursday, Om raised some questions about how Facebook’s new products would be collecting user data, and whether users should have concerns about their privacy.  Late on Friday afternoon, Facebook responded to now widespread questions about privacy and Home, saying basically that the company won’t be collecting data any differently than it already does with its Android app.

“Home doesn’t change anything related to your privacy settings on Facebook, and your privacy controls work the same with Home as they do everywhere else on Facebook,” the company wrote in the blog post.

But Om questioned on Thursday whether that’s really the case, since the HTC First phone with Facebook Home deeply integrated will have far more capabilities than a simple Android app, with the accelerometer in the phone having the ability to track how fast you’re moving, or the phone’s sensors detecting the location of your home based on the times of day you’re not checking in:

“The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down,  because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.”

However, Facebook reminded users that adopting Home is totally optional, as I noted in my story about the potential impact of the release, and that users who try it can de-activate it any time. Facebook explained that Home will track the apps you have in your Home launcher on Android, and will track when you open those apps, although not the actions you take inside them. For instance, it will see that you open a maps app, but not the directions you enter. And not surprisngly, the company reminded users that they can read about how Facebook uses data at its Data Policies center.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and five other technology companies have been accused of illegally agreeing to not poach each other’s employees. A class action lawsuit was filed last year after five software engineers claimed the companies, which also included Intel (INTC), Adobe (ADBE), Pixar, Intuit (INTU) and Lucasfilm, conspired to reduce employee pay by eliminating competition for skilled labor. District Judge Lucy Koh previously rejected the companies’ bid to dismiss the claims brought against them, however the judge seems to have changed her mind. Koh said on Friday that the five software engineers who brought the case against the companies have not yet shown enough evidence against the defendants to allow for a class action lawsuit, Reuters reported. The case will no longer go to trial unless the plaintiffs can gather new evidence, although they will still be able to sue individually.

Properly exploiting big data in health care could mean up to $450 billion in savings health care organizations and consumers according to a recent report from consulting firm McKinsey. But don’t get too excited yet – that data-optimized future isn’t just going to fall in our laps.

An abundance of newly available information — from research and development data aggregated by pharmaceutical companies to digitized patient records to recently-released health information from the federal government and other public sources — combined with new technology has the potential to transform health. But, according to the report, to really “jujitsu” that data (as the country’s CTO Todd Park likes to say), the industry may need to shift its thinking and scale some obstacles first.

“Stakeholders will only benefit from big data if they take a more holistic, patient-centered approach to value, one that focuses equally on health-care spending and treatment outcomes,” McKinsey’s report said.

To do that, the analysis laid out a few guidelines, including:

• encouraging patients to take more active steps to improve their health
• developing an integrated approach to care in which all caregivers have access to the same information
• selecting health care providers based on skill sets, not job titles (for example, having nurses perform tasks traditionally doctor-required duties)
• looking for ways to improve value while improving care quality (for example through systems that tie provider reimbursement to patient outcomes)
• identifying new and innovative approaches to treatment and care delivery

With those approaches, McKinsey estimates that the use of big data could save health care stakeholders $300 to $450 billion in health care costs, or 12 to 17 percent of the $2.6 trillion baseline in U.S. health-related spending.

Already, big companies and emerging startups are leading the way in the smart use of data. At GigaOM’s recent Structure: Data conference, Aetna’s head of innovation Michael Palmer talked about how the company is using data to prevent diabetes and heart attacks. Startup Asthmapolis (which this week raised $5 million) is using GPS data collected via sensors attached to inhalers to help individuals, physicians and public health officials uncover asthma-related patterns.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• A near-term outlook for big data
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

SAP and Kendall Square have a lot in common. They are both legacy tech powers that want to attract — and keep — shiny new data startups.

That’s the back story to Friday’s SAP Startup Forum held at the  hack/reduce facility in Cambridge, Mass.’s Kendall Square neighborhood. There SAP talked up HANA, the company’s analytics database as a development platform data (or big data) applications to more than a dozen startups including Hadapt, Entagen, Diffeo, Objective Logistics, InsightSquared, Luminoso, Sqrrl, and Veracode. Those startups, in turn, were able to tout their business plans and  demonstrate their products to an audience of reporters, VCs and others.

“We’re pitching to the startups and they’re pitching to us,” Scott Jones, SAP’s senior director for startup training and enablement told about 100 attendees. HANA, which debuted three years ago, has given SAP traction in an audience beyond its usual big-company ERP customer base and SAP fully intends to press that advantage.  SAP Ventures, the company’s VC arm, is increasingly active in finding and funding data startups. And it would very much like them to build their technology atop HANA.

The SAP execs repeatedly talked up HANA ONE, which runs on Amazon Web Services, as if to say “this isn’t the traditional, big iron, expensive SAP” of another era. It costs $3.49 per hour to run HANA ONE on an AWS EC2 8-core cluster.

As for the startups, many were clearly intrigued by HANA’s capabilities although none of those I talked to had actually run it. The consensus was this type of event and the promised perks — Jones offered free “no strings attached”  licenses and training — are what cash-strapped startups need. Indeed that may be only way for a large commercial software vendor  like SAP to hook small companies born-and-bred in a world dominated by free or nearly-free open-source software and rentable AWS infrastructure.

Plea to local startups: Stay put

A gaggle of area VCs were also on hand to sweet talk entrepreneurs into staying local rather than decamping to Silicon Valley after graduating from Harvard or MIT — as has been a standard practices. Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica Systems  who has helped nurture a big data startup community in and around Boston was on hand to talk up that effort.

And, Dr. Sam Madden, of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) was there to help out. “Boston is an awesome place for startups — there’s a spectacular pool of outstanding, hungry young talent [here].” It helps that the  VCs that used to live way out  on the 128 corridor have relocated in closer into the hub. In the past two years, Kendall Square has seen a huge building boom with growing presence from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others. It’s a hip area to work for young techies — many of whom dont own cars and like how mass transit and bike-friendly the area is.

Still, not every attendee was buying either pitch completely. Cyrille Vincey, CEO and founder of qunb, a data analytics and visualization startup that does use HANA, extolled its features and performance, but had one suggestion: “HANA is simple and fast. It feels like open source. Why don’t you open source it?”

And Timothy Jones, CEO and founder of Buzzient said his company, which has been based both Cambridge and Boston but is now virtual, may relocate to the San Francisco area. “We can get office space cheaper there than in Kendall Square,” he noted.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams re-launched the Obvious Corporation in June 2011, bringing back the umbrella organization from which they’ve launched startups like Blogger and Twitter. On Friday, Williams explained in an update how Obvious is currently structured and operating, as well as what’s up with Medium, the group’s most prominent current venture.

Medium is the publishing platform that came out of Obvious. It has been recently growing and hiring staff, and it will now operate as an independent business from Obvious. Williams wrote that he is spending about 98 percent of his time working on Medium, which is adding an editorial-minded staff and encouraging a wide variety of writers to publish posts on the site.

Meanwhile, Biz Stone will be working on his recently-announced mobile platform called Jelly, and Jason Goldman, who was profiled exenstively by Buzzfeed recently, will be working on Branch, another publishing platform.

Williams wrote how they’re currently viewing Obvious in the blog post Friday:

“Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered.

Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.”

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In the early ‘80s, before MTV turned its attention to reality TV, David Bowie, Madonna and the Pretenders lit up small screens, using a new medium to showcase their songs: the music video. Recently, we’ve seen a resurgence of this art form as cinematographers, musicians and artists join together to supersize their visual creativity. But now, instead of gathering around the TV, we watch on YouTube.

To celebrate this young art form, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, presents Spectacle: The Music Video, said to be the first-ever museum exhibition all about the evolution of the music video. The exhibit includes more than 300 videos, as well as artifacts and interactive displays, grouped by genre — and videos are further classified by subdivisions like choreography and controversy.

This exhibition was curated by Jonathan Wells — who’s our go-to curator for interstitial videos at TED — and partner Meg Wells of the global art cooperative Flux.

Like so many others, Jonathan and Meg cite A-Ha’s “Take on Me” as a pivotal moment in their love for music videos. As Jonathan tells Fast Company, “It was just this magical moment of someone diving into a comic book that really stuck with people. That’s an example of how a video can introduce and break an artist. We have the original illustrations that were done for the video.”

TED’s own Shanna Carpenter wrote this from the exhibit opening: “It’s an incredible collection — taking you on a sensory journey that starts in teenage nostalgia and progresses to obscure experiments in moral sensibilities, interactive digital experiences and yarn-bombing,” she said. “And, all of it in a crazily chic contemporary museum in Astoria.”

Find Spectacle: The Music Video at the Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, New York, April 3-June 16, 2013.

Can’t make it to Astoria? Watch a TEDx Talk about the making of one of the featured videos: “This Too Shall Pass” by OK Go »

That’s the prediction Aapo Markkanen, ABI senior analyst, makes today. It’s the right call, as Larry Page starts his third year returning as Google CEO. Page resumed duties on April 4, 2011, and the company’s direction took a hard turn. Business is more aggressive, altruistic goals less and so-called openness a waning thing. As I asserted a year ago, “Google has lost control of Android“. That Page and Company would try to wrestle back control is no surprise.

Facebook Home is good reason. The user interface debuting April 12 takes over the more app-centric Android homescreen, putting the social network first before anything else, including Google+. Facebook’s OEM program could put Home on many more devices. HTC already is on board with the First smartphone. Then there is Samsung, which during fourth quarter accounted for 42.5 percent of all Android handset sales, according to Gartner. TouchWiz, which gets a big update with forthcoming Galaxy S4, is the user experience — not that determined by stock Android. These are but two examples of many.

The OEM Problem

Amazon Android for Kindle tablets is another example. But the most disturbing, perhaps, comes out of China, now the world’s largest smartphone market, according to IDC. Markkanen observes that Chinese phone maker Yandex “appears to be keen to use Android UI tweaks — combined with an app storefront — for the benefit of its own vertical integration. The firm’s ‘Shell’ is available as a downloadable overlay, and it’s also available to potential OEM and carrier partners. If Yandex is successful it could quickly weaken Google’s foothold in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and even Turkey”.

Facebook Home and Yandex Shell are distributed to end users via Play store, something Google could easily block. But OEM distribution is another matter, which, like Samsung TouchWiz, would require intervention from Open Handset Alliance. The more OEMs that preinstall alternative homescreen UIs and the more successful sales, the more control Google loses of Android.

Changes are already afoot. “With hindsight, Google’s decision to not certify Acer’s Aliyun devices as Android was one of the most significant strategic developments in the OS space in 2012″, Markkanen asserts. “Google made it clear that it’s ready to play hardball if it concludes that an OHA member (in this case Acer) is about to cross a line, and did so in a deliberately vague manner, leaving a lot of scope for further, case-by-case interventions”.

Remember, Android is fundamentally Google’s gateway to mobile — the hub around which the company’s cloud services are consumed. China balks at the situation. In a paper posted one month ago, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology condemns: “Our country’s mobile operating system research and development is too dependent on Android…While the Android system is open source, the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google”. I can’t speak to the first part, but the latter absolutely is true.

How strange that Apple apologized to Chinese customers this week, but not Google.

Close the Door!

It’s not a question of if Google exerts more control over Android but when. Nexus devices released in 2012 are carrots. But sticks surely will come. Google’s corporate character is changing under Page. There is more accountability, less tolerance for frivolous projects, more focus on business and revenue goals, broader cross-integration of products and services, increased market aggressiveness, and tighter control of projects. The latter is about resetting priorities benefiting Google first, which in part means stepping back from some of the perceived openness that defined the company for a decade.

Simply stated: Google acts more like a monopoly by the day, and I’m struck by similarities seen about Microsoft in the last decade.

I’ve never been quite satisfied with the reasons — lack of them, really — for Andy Rubin stepping down as Android chief. The operating system was his baby after all, and in context of all the other changes taking place under Page’s leadership, I have long suspected a rift between the men regarding the operating system’s future. There is speculation far and wide that Google plans to bring together Android and Chrome OS. I disagree.

The philosophical winds are changing direction. Openness allowed Android to spread far and wide — 750 million cumulative devices, according to Google — but it’s a knife that cuts both ways. Mixing metaphors, Google finds that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Markkanen expects “muscle flexing” that will be “gradual” but the timeframe depends “on how successfully Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba and others manage to exploit Android for their own purposes. Either way, a slightly closed Android ecosystem could be reality by the end of 2015. If Google finds that its lunch is being eaten it will have no problems acting even faster than that, despite of all the openness rhetoric we’ve got used to”.

I see Rubin’s exit as the canary in the coalmine. Google has too much invested in Android to let openness get in the way of broader business objectives.