Lambda Labs is a startup company that released a beta facial recognition API for Google Glass last year. Co-founder of the company, Stephen Balaban, says that the next version of the API should be available to developers within a week. Since launching the beta, Balaban says the company sees over 5 million API calls per month and usage by over 1,000 developers. Not too bad for a startup making an API for a product that hasn’t even been released to the public yet.
The new API will allow developers to integrate facial recognition like finding friends in a crowd or making intelligent contacts in your device based on the faces it can recognize. It might sound a little privacy invasive, but it doesn’t do the recognition in real-time. Glass snaps a picture, uploads the picture to a server that handles the recognition, then sends the notification back to the device. Still, it’s a pretty creepy, but cool, thought. Hopefully we’ll hear more about it in the near future.
The new Samsung flagship camera from the NX series, the NX300 has been recently launched on the market and it brings a fresh new look to the lineup, along with some technical features that were never embedded into previous models.
Although Samsung NX210 was a big step forward in terms of specifications in comparison with its predec… (read more)
If you want to empower, engage, or motivate others, don’t just focus on increasing your positive behaviors. Pay attention to what you need to stop doing as well. Why? Because people remember the bad more than the good. To quote from a previous HBR article, How to Play to Your Strengths, “Multiple studies have shown that people pay keen attention to negative information. For example, when asked to recall important emotional events; people remember four negative memories to every positive one.” So, which behaviors do leaders most need to avoid? Drawing on thousands of 360 qualitative interviews, here are our top three:
Judgmental, non-verbal body language. No one, especially your successful colleagues, can tolerate perceived condescension. Research studies show that somewhere between 75 to 90 percent of our impact comes from our non-verbal communication, and tone is a key ingredient of this. Do you make comments to others in a way that sounds evaluative, harsh, or condescending? Often, this is not our intention but an in-the- moment reaction. Other non-verbal offenders include scowling, furrowed brows, quizzical looks (as if to say, ‘are you stupid?’), rigidity, and sarcasm. While seemingly small, each of these subtle darts creates a considerable amount of relationship damage.
Interrupting and interrogating. There’s been a lot of buzz recently around how to have “conversations that drive innovation” and how to “create safe environments for employees to bring their ideas forward.” It’s almost impossible for people to feel safe if the boss takes up most of the airtime, cuts people off, or interrogates half-baked ideas. Yes, employees have a responsibility to communicate with clarity, but if you expect every idea to be buttoned up, fully thought out, or structured before someone speaks, your colleagues will assume that you’re not willing to invest the time to be a thought partner.
Being inconsistent. Peers and staff often comment on how discouraging it is to see a colleague act in two very different ways — absolutely charming with the executive team and external clients while being disrespectful to those they work with every day. This inconsistency makes these behaviors even more memorable and egregious. Others have shared a different impact — the feeling of walking on eggshells at work, wondering who is going to show up: “smiling, charming, funny person” or “judgmental, intense, snapping person.” Over time, this drives passive aggressive responses from others in their attempt to avoid confrontation.
Ultimately, loyalty and followership are the two things we cannot demand or set as an expectation. What is perceived as fear-based motivation, belittlement, or power play can yield real short-term compliance from others. But negative behaviors ultimately diminish the legacy we leave. Consider what behaviors you might need to stop doing so that you can have a positive, lasting impact.
Relationships are a lot of work. You need to make sure you’re compatible, communicate well, and are on the same page for almost everything. Wait, you thought I meant personal relationships? Oh, sorry, I was talking about keeping multiple Macs in sync.
I was gifted a really nice 27-inch monitor a year ago. Connecting that to my 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro essentially turned my laptop into a desktop Mac. Not that unplugging it and bringing it with me is a hassle. It’s getting it to recognize the monitor when I plug it in. I end up having to use GFXCardStatus to force the graphics card into Discrete mode (even if it’s there already) to get it to properly detect the external monitor. I also dual-boot this Mac into Windows 8 to play some games, so that just generates some extra hassles when reconnecting the monitor.
At the same time, I did need a mobile platform. I’m getting a band together, and need a laptop to bring to rehearsals to record with. Plus, I wanted something light if I was leaving the house to write with. I also didn’t want to pay a lot for this muffler, err laptop.
Fortunately, I still had my 2009 13-inch MacBook Pro kicking around. This is the tale of how I manage both laptops. Because everyone has two laptops floating around, right?
The Mac App Store
The Mac App store has really eliminated my “OK, where did I put that serial number?” issues. While software packages like Microsoft Office aren’t there, I’m finding that around 90 percent of what I need is available in the Mac App Store. Pages ($19.99), Things ($49.99) and Evernote (Free) are key to my workflow, so being able to easily reinstall them from the Mac App Store (along with a 5-device license) is a blessing.
Office 365
Sometimes (OK, often), iWork isn’t enough, and I need the full might and power of the Microsoft Office Suite. To make my life a lot easier, I just use Office 365, which gives me access to the Office suite on both OS X and Windows 8. It also comes with 20 GB of SkyDrive space (more on that later).
Usually, I need Office when I’m on a fast roundtrip collaboration with a person who does not have iWork. While Pages does handle Word documents fairly well, I’m more comfortable keeping Word documents in Word. Also, I loathe Numbers and much prefer Excel. My issues with Numbers are lengthy, but it sums it up with that it kinda plays at being a spreadsheet, but doesn’t have nearly the power of Excel. So, it’s just easier to handle those tasks in Excel.
The cloud
Keeping the same programs on multiple devices is one thing. The important part is keeping the data in sync. For that, I rely on a handful of cloud services: iCloud, Dropbox and SkyDrive.
iCloud
iCloud has gotten kind of beaten up in the press lately, and to a certain degree, I admit the service has its good and bad points. So, I’ve separated out the pieces I have problems with (Documents in the Cloud) and instead focus on the parts that work for me (Bookmarks, iMessage, etc.).
The biggest issue I have with Documents in the Cloud is the walled-garden approach. Simply put, a file I start in Byword ($9.99) can’t easily be moved into Pages or Word, without cutting and pasting. I also don’t expect this to change, so I’ve looked for other solutions for document syncing. One problem I’ve run into is completely forgetting what program I even created a file in.
I also use Notes.app quite a bit. Its interface for capturing notes quickly is a little easier than Evernote’s. As an example, I was recently watching a band perform. This band is the same style of music I’m playing, and I took copious notes on their stage manner, song list and the like. I just felt more comfortable doing this in iCloud and Notes. Evernote for me still remains a place to store large bodies of notes with lots of text.
SkyDrive
My affair with SkyDrive started when I needed to edit Office documents on my Windows 8 partition. While Dropbox can handle this, I liked how it integrated natively into Windows 8. Also, it’s nice being able to edit Word documents in Skydrive’s web interface on a machine I might not have Office installed on. While I can use Google Docs for this (and for one spreadsheet, my band’s songlist, I do use Gdocs), I prefer the Office web apps. With my Office 365 subscription, SkyDrive also comes with 20 GB of storage. That also means I can use it to move my GarageBand songs between machines. One conscious decision I’ve made is to only have production-type files on Skydrive. This is where most of my working files reside.
Dropbox
Dropbox takes the place of flash drives for moving my files between computers. If I get a PDF in the mail I want to have on all computers, I put it in Dropbox. One exception to having work files on SkyDrive is most iOS text editors save to Dropbox, so I use that tool for any text files I’m working on. For the most part, these files are notes from meetings, or stories I’m working on that are in very rough draft and I don’t need to worry about niceties like formatting.
Final thoughts
A few months ago, I wrote about how I use Dropbox for some of the iCloud-type storage. Since then, I’ve started using SkyDrive quite a bit, and I like the separation between the digital junk drawer that’s my Dropbox folder, and the more organized, work environment in SkyDrive. While Dropbox would handle this well, the appeal to me is easy editing in a web interface via SkyDrive that I enjoy.
What is top of mind for corporate boards worldwide? In one of the most comprehensive global surveys of corporate directors to date, we found that they were very worried about developing and enacting strategic plans that will enable their organizations to succeed. And what did they say was their biggest concern? Not competitive threats. Not rising costs. Not innovation, risk management, technology, debt, or the regulatory environment. Corporate directors identified talent management as their single greatest strategic challenge.
In our survey, conducted in partnership with WomenCorporateDirectors and Heidrick & Struggles, we asked over 1,000 board members across the globe to rate their companies’ performance in each of nine dimensions of talent management: attracting top talent; hiring top talent; assessing talent; developing talent; rewarding talent; retaining talent; firing; aligning talent strategy with business strategy; and leveraging diversity in company’s workforce.
Because “good enough” is not good enough, we were interested to learn what percentage of directors “strongly agreed” their companies were doing an effective job on each of these practices–in other words, a great job. What we found is perhaps not what you might expect: overall, whether by region or industry, the vast majority of directors say their organizations are not doing talent management well. In fact, in two practices in particular — “firing” and “leveraging diversity” — many companies fail dismally.
When we broke down our findings by industry and region, we discovered some noteworthy differences. For instance, we found that directors in North America, Australia, and New Zealand gave their companies the highest scores on talent management, while directors in Eastern Europe and Russia gave their companies the lowest. We might expect the regions with the lowest overall averages to be those dominated by developing or emerging economies. This, however, does not seem to be the case: Western Europe did not fare much better than Eastern Europe.
Among the industrial sectors, materials (e.g., chemicals, metals and mining, paper and forest products), made out worst, scoring poorly on “firing” and “leveraging diversity,” and not much better on “assessing talent” and “developing talent.”
We know that organizations commit enormous resources and effort to talent management, so why aren’t they doing a better job? One hopeful sign is that boards are becoming more interested in talent management. They are realizing it can no longer solely be the charge of HR executives or even of the CEO and top management — and that they must integrate talent management with the long-term strategic goals of the organization if they are to have any hope of claiming competitive advantage.
But, while this new concern with talent represents progress, there are still many questions boards will have to address: What steps should they take to help their organizations build better talent management? What would this leadership look like over time? Should some specific talent management practices receive greater focus than others–that is, do they exert more influence on competency of an organization’s overall talent management process? What are the greatest predictors of success for a talent management practice?
Methodology
We talked to more than 1,000 board members in 59 countries. (U.S. boards made up 37% of the sample while 62% of boards represented were from outside of the U.S.) We analyzed the data along several dimensions including geography and industry. Specifically, we did a geographical breakout by eight major world regions: Asia; Africa; Australia and New Zealand; Eastern Europe & Russia; Latin America; the Middle East; North America; and Western Europe (due to low sample size or domination by one or few countries in a region we have excluded three regions, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, from our findings).
The industry breakout was done using eight major sectors (similar to those in the Global Industry Classification Standard system): Consumer Discretionary (e.g., consumer durables & apparel, retailing, education, media, hotels, restaurants & leisure); Consumer Staples (e.g., food, beverage & tobacco, household and personal products); Energy & Utilities (e.g., oil, gas & consumable fuels, electric, gas and water utilities); Financials (e.g., banking & financial services, insurance, real estate); Health Care (e.g., pharmaceuticals, biotechnology & life sciences, health care equipment and services); Industrials (e.g., aerospace & defense, construction & engineering, industrial conglomerates, professional services, textiles); IT & Telecommunications (e.g., computers & peripherals, electronic equipment & components, semiconductors, wireless telecommunication services); and Materials (e.g., chemicals, metals & mining, paper & forest products).
Last month, the EU finally released a public document discussing Google’s proposal to end a lengthy antitrust investigation. With the document, the Commission began seeking feedback on the commitments Google offered to address concerns. Unsurprisingly, the feedback has included demands from some that Google do more.
Here is the list of Google’s proposals, as shared in the EU’s announcement:
Google offers for a period of 5 years to:
(i) – label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
– clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
– display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users,
(ii) – offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
– offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
– provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,
(iii) no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and
(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.
A third party would be required to monitor Google’s implementation of its commitments.
It was clear from the beginning that competitors did not think these went far enough, though they did go further than Google’s actions settling a similar investigation in the U.S.
Reuters now reports that EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said the commission will press Google for further concessions, though the report does not get into specifics. It does say that Almunia said “Google would almost certainly be asked to improve its proposals.” Foo Yun Chee writes:
The EU competition authority initially gave complainants until May 26 to comment, but later extended the deadline to June 27 following pressure from the companies.
“After, we will analyse the responses we have received… almost 100 percent we will ask Google: you should improve your proposals,” Almunia told lawmakers during a Tuesday hearing at the European Parliament.
Meanwhile, reports have recently emerged that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been mulling opening up a new probe, this time into Google’s display advertising business.
Firewalls block basic attacks on your network and antivirus scanners filter known offenders, and no enterprise should operate without them. Still, focused attackers and zero-day exploits make short work of entrenched perimeter defenses, and every business should expect to be breached. To cope with these attacks, IT should build an additional layer of active analysis and mitigation.
Our panel will address these questions:
What are the limits of perimeter defenses?
What are the differences among passive and active defense strategies?
How can IT identify and mitigate zero-day and targeted attacks?
What are the financial implications of implementing active defenses?
What level of response to an attack is appropriate?
How should businesses share security data with trusted partners, consultants and the government?
Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Crowdstrike for “Countering targeted attacks with active defense strategies,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT.
The IMN’s Financing, Investing & Real Estate Development for Data Centers conference will kick off on Thursday this week, with a opening panel discussing how issues in the macroeconomy are impacting data centers.
The panel will be moderated by Tom Watts, Managing Member, Watts Capital, who will be joined by Philip Johnston, Territory Sales Manager, Extreme Networks; Eric Wells, Vice President, Data Center Services, Fidelty Investments; Rob Stevenson, Managing Director – Head of U.S. REIT Research, Macquarie; and James Breen, Senior Analyst, Internet Infrastructure Equity Research-Communications Services, William Blair.
The other sessions will cover popular topics including:
Mergers, Private Equity & IPOs
The President/CEO Panel: Colo Players
Scale vs. Scalability vs. Rightsizing
Connectivity-Creating & Tapping into New Revenue Streams
Evaluating & Standardizing Data Center Standards & Performance Metrics
Should you Own the Underlying Data Center Real Estate?
The event for data center owners, data center tenants, data center investors, and capital and service providers will held at the Conrad Hotel in New York City on May 30-31, 2013. For more information, visit the IMN website.
Obviously, estimating smartphone sales volumes is fiendishly difficult. BlackBerry beat the Wall Street consensus on BlackBerry 10 device shipments by 100% in the February quarter. Most hedge funds have long suspected that most “store check” research reports are crude hoodoo, particularly outside the United States. But now former London hedge fund analyst Michael Collins has published a very detailed piece on just how dreadful the quality of even top-tier Wall Street store checks can be. The target here is Brian Modoff, the telecom analyst at Deutsche Bank, and this is a particularly relevant smack-down because we are talking about a leading brokerage.
Viral trends webiste BuzzFeed today announced that it has partnered with CNN and YouTube to launch a new YouTube channel. According to BuzzFeed, a new channel will combine BuzzFeed’s entertainment content and CNN’s news to create new content that will be aimed squarely at engaging young people online.
“There has been a massive cultural shift in how people – particularly young people – consume news and entertainment and Ze and his team are tapping into the next generation of video production and consumption,” said Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed. “Over 70% of BuzzFeed’s traffic is social, almost half is mobile, and we are seeing these huge shifts earlier than others because the majority of our readers are 18-34. We are thrilled to partner with YouTube to bring a new generation of video content to a BuzzFeed audience that lives on social media and mobile phones,”
The new CNN BuzzFeed channel will use CNN archival footage to create mash-up videos. The two organizations will also be collaborating on “list posts,” which will be published on the CNN website.
“By pairing the journalistic strength and reach of the CNN brand with BuzzFeed’s unique editorial approach and young audience, our partnership will enable both organizations to engage new audiences,” said KC Estenson, SVP of CNN Digital. “It’s the perfect modern day media collaboration.”
The new CNN Buzzfeed YouTube channel has only one video so far, a narrated montage of CNN rescue footage:
After his very public divorce in 2010, Tiger Woods started to go out with Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn early this year. Vonn, who had just recently come out of her own divorce, decided to spend some quality time with Woods and his kids on a jet skiing trip this past weekend.
E! Online reports that Woods and Vonn were jet skiing with his kids over the weekend in Florida. It’s said that the jet ski trip shows that Vonn is starting to become more comfortable with Woods’ kids. It was only recently that Vonn wouldn’t be seen in public with the kids, but now she seems to have no problem with it.
Vonn had only just divorced her former husband, U.S. Ski Team member Thomas Vonn, in January of this year. It was revealed that she was dating Woods after she appeared at many of his golf tournaments. Now it appears that the two are spending more time together in public.
Of course, the big question now is whether or not Woods and Vonn are going to get married. Some would say it’s a little too soon for that as both are coming out of divorces. That being said, Woods making sure Vonn is comfortable with his kids could be a sign that he’s getting serious.
Rick Sherlund, Nomura Securities’ software analyst, clearly thinks something’s up with Microsoft. He is a long-time, respected Microsoft watcher — first at Goldman Sachs and now at Nomura — so when he puts out a research note saying something’s new, even if he’s a little coy about what that might be, it’s worth noting. Sherlund also boosted his price target for Microsoft to $38 from $32 per share, while retaining his neutral rating on the stock. Hmmm.
This is fascinating because Sherlund, in his past life as software analyst at Goldman Sachs was “the” go-to analyst on Microsoft and he definitely knows a where some bodies are buried.
Here are some veiled semi-, sort-of predictions Sherlund put down in a research note released very early Tuesday morning:
1: Restive shareholders gain power: Sherlund thinks that shareholders are gaining steam in their demand for a greater voice in where the company is headed. There “may be a more receptive group of frustrated shareholders to leverage in an effort to drive greater realization of shareholder value at Microsoft,” he wrote.
2: Microsoft could exit search. It could hand search off to Facebook or Yahoo in return for traffic acquisition costs (TAC), Sherlund wrote. Microsoft Bing has gained some ground on Google but remains a distant second. The latest Comscore numbers showed Bing with a record 17.1 percent of U.S. searches in April, up from 16.9 percent in March. Google share fell to 66.5 percent from 67.1 perent percent for the same period. Whether that gain is worth what Microsoft poured into its no-doubt-pricey BingitOn campaign, is subject for another debate, however.
3: It could pay off disgruntled investors. Microsoft could double the dividend to yield about 6 percent by providing tax on currnt foreign source income.”
One thing is clear: Microsoft shareholders are one unhappy bunch. Looking at the post bubble-burst 13 years, the stock price is basically flat — it’s peaked at around $37 and has bounced beweeen that an d$20 for much of that time.
That’s led to some very loud calls for CEO Steve Ballmer to head for the door — something Ballmer shows no intention of doing. Dow Jones Newswire’s Al Smith helpfully published Ballmer’s Epitaph earlier this month, citing Windows 8 as a “bet the farm” gamble that didn’t pay off. That a contention — that Windows 8 is a failure — has been repeated in several news outlets. And it’s a conclusion that Microsoft’s top corp comms guy couldn’t let pass. In a blog post, Frank Shaw responded that Windows 8, which has sold 100 million copies, is hardly a failure. And linked to two positive reviews.
But back to Sherlund. He senses something different in the air when it comes to Microsoft’s corporate governance:
“We think there is a shift in the wind upcoming for Microsoft,with shareholders likely demanding a greater say in the direction of the company and how it might be run to drive a better return to shareholders.”
Happy Tuesday! Enjoy a bonus binge this week: a playlist about design. “Design giants” contains 13 talks by iconic modern designers. Hear from Philippe Starck, who asks, “Why design?” … Stefan Sagmeister on how design helped him find happiness … Eames Demetrios on his grandparents’ legendary work … and today’s talk, Paola Antonelli, on how she shocked a few people in the art world by adding 14 video games to the design collection of MoMA.
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.
Anyone who already thinks Google Glass is “creepy” will certainly not be pleased to learn that Google’s digital headset may soon have the ability to recognize and identify individuals’ faces. The Telegraph reports that San Francisco-based company Lamda Labs has created a facial recognition application for Google Glass that will be available to Glass developers sometime over the next few days. The development of facial recognition features is particularly important with Glass because Google made a point of not including such technology in its first build of the device’s software, although it never forbade developers from creating their own facial recognition apps. The Telegraph says that initially the software “forces users take photographs, tag them with information on who is in them and then compare any subsequent photographs taken to those previously uploaded” while adding that future versions “may allow real-time recognition of faces.”
How could Notch and his team at Mojang possibly follow up the incredibly successful Minecraft? I’m not so sure myself, but Notch has a few ideas. One of those ideas is a trading card game called Scrolls and its open beta will soon be available.
Mojang announced on Monday that Scrolls will be available to purchase starting June 3. Like Minecraft before it, those who buy early get locked in at a lower price while getting all future updates for free. For gamers based in the U.S., buying into the open beta will cost $20.
If you want to know more about Scrolls, check out this mini-guide in preparation for the game’s open beta next week. You’re gonna need all the help you can get as you take on players all around the world in card fights.
Scrolls will be available on PC and Mac come June 3. There’s no mention of when it will exit open beta, or if it will be coming to other platforms at this time.
A 37-year-old Australian Man has admitted to setting a fire at a Quaker Hill nursing home that took the lives of 11 elderly patients and injured another 8.
Roger Dean had been working as a nurse at the nursing home for just two months.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the incident occurred on the morning of November 18th, 2011. Dean admitted to setting an empty bed ablaze. He then moved to the room of 80-year-old Dorothy Sterling and 85-year-old Dorothy Wu.
From the SMH:
Around 4.50am, Dean set an empty bed on fire in one wing, before moving to the room where Ms Wu and Ms Sterling were sleeping. When resident Helen Perry, 63, saw her friends’ room was on fire she told Dean, “We have to get them out”.
But Dean grabbed her arm and moved her on, saying, “People are on their way”.
They weren’t. As firefighters battled to contain the first blaze Dean had started, they had no idea the room of Ms Wu and Ms Sterling was also on fire. He didn’t tell them and by the time they reached the spot, the blaze had reached the roof. As the fires raged, Dean “actively assisted in moving residents and their beds, being careful to keep up the appearance of having nothing to do with the lighting of the two fires,” the documents said.
Dean had already stolen over 200 pills from the nursing home, and hours before the fire police visited the home to investigate the theft.
Now, in a New South Wales court, Dean has admitted his guilt. Previously, he had said that it was Satan that made him do what he did. The oldest victim of the fire was 97, and the youngest was 73.
The “Terminator” films have been mentioned more than a handful of times in discussions about Google Glass, and this is not going to do anything to make the comparison less relevant. Facial recognition is reportedly coming to Google Glass, potentially opening up the doors for anybody to have Terminator-like features.
Are you concerned about the future of privacy with regards to devices like Google Glass? Tell us what you think.
Google itself is not offering facial recognition with Google Glass. At least not yet. But that’s not stopping others from developing the technology for the device.
Matt Warman at The Telegraph, noting that Google’s terms do not forbid the use of the device for facial recognition, reports that San Francisco-based Lambbda Labs is set to launch its API to developers “in days”. He writes, “The first version of Lamda Labs software forces users take photographs, tag them with information on who is in them and then compare any subsequent photographs taken to those previously uploaded. Future versions, however, may allow real-time recognition of faces.”
Sarah Connor?
Come to think of it, this could prove even more precise than Terminator features, because even the Terminator got the wrong Sarah Connor to begin with.
Google has reportedly said that it will not implement its own facial recognition technology in Glass, until it has prviacy protections in place.
When using Google Glass, is it true that this product would be able to use Facial Recognition Technology to unveil personal information about whomever and even som inanimate objects that the user is viewing? Would a user be able to request such information? Can a non-user or human subject opt out of this collection of personal data? If so, How? If not, why not?
In Google’s privacy policy, it states that the company “may reject requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort…risk the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical.” Please provide examples of when Google would reject requests on Google Glass that would risk the privacy of others? Would Google place limits on the technology and what type of information it can reveal about another person? If so, please explain. If not, why not?
They gave Page until June 14h to respond to concerns (which were not limited to these specifically).
Beyond the obvious privacy implications, there are good things that could become of such capabilities. As Warman notes, people have suggested examples like apps for doormen to make admission to events easier or software for disabled people. Perhaps a blind person, for example, could use the device to capture a person’s face, and then be told whose face is in front of them via audio.
TechCrunch recently spoke with Lambda Labs co-founder Stephen Balaban. Sarah Perez reports:
Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,” “networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains
According to Warman, there are already 1,000 developers working with Lambda Labs’ software, generating five million attempts at recognition per month, and that’s without Glass. And that’s just one company’s software. Consider the possibility that many others could implement their own facial recognition capabilities with various features attached.
Facebook, for example has over a billion users, and it already has an app for Glass. Less than a year ago, the company bought facial recognition company Face.com. Here’s an interview we did with Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch before the acquisition.
Google, of course, has its own facial recognition capabilities, and it would be pretty surprising if it didn’t implement them at some point. In fact, the company acquired Viewdle, a facial recognition and augmented reality company, as recently as last fall.
More recently, at Google I/O earlier this month, Google revealed some new photo features for Google+, including the ability to automatically sort photos by landmark, human presence, aesthetics and other indicators. It’s getting better at recognizing what is in an image.
Of course many have expressed concerns about facial recognition technology regardless of whether or not Google Glass is involved. A Memorial Day report from the Associated Press suggests that “drones with facial recognition technology will end anonymity, everywhere.”
“Adding that capability to drones that can fly into spaces where planes cannot — machines that can track a person moving about and can stay aloft for days — means that people will give up privacy as well as the concept of anonymity,” writes Andrew Conte.
Conte has a whole series of reports on this stuff here.
“People are interested to harvest as much information they can from photos and videos… to connect with other people,” Hirsch said of his own Face.com in our interview. “It’s just another platform to connect with other people.”
To some, that’s what the technology, in general, has to offer users of a device like Google Glass. Others, however, are concerned that not everyone with access to the technology will have people’s best interests in mind.
It’s going to be quite interesting to see how Google handles these concerns. It’s been in trouble for privacy-related issus more than once in the past, and still has to answer to Congress. And this is really only one of the concerns they have (there were about ten in the letter).
Over the weekend, Officer Jason Ellis of the Bardstown, Kentucky police department was gunned down while driving home from work.
According to an Associated Press report, the 33-year-old Ellis was in his uniform and was driving his police cruiser on early Saturday morning. He had reportedly stopped to move debris out of the road when he was shot multiple times with a shotgun. Police have now stated that the incident was an ambush.
According to Bardstown Police, Ellis was a K-9 officer with the department. Police this weekend began accepting food donations, as well as cash donations to go towards a reward for the capture of Ellis’ killer. A makeshift police cruiser memorial has been set up in front of the Bardstown police station for mourners to leave flowers and baseballs. A candlelight vigil was held Monday night at the site.
Police are now investigating the incident, trying to determine whether Ellis was the intended target of the attack. They are asking for tips on the case, particularly whether anyone saw a parked car in the area or “people milling around.”
Bardstown is a small town of around 12,000 people in central Kentucky. It is most famous for the many Bourbon distilleries that are located near the town.
Circa, the mobile-only news service founded by Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, announced on Tuesday that it is hiring Thomson Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa to be the media startup’s editor-in-chief. Circa co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan said in an interview before the announcement that De Rosa will be building out the company’s editorial team, which will be based in New York rather than San Francisco, where the rest of the startup is headquartered.
De Rosa also said in a separate interview that he will be adding some new elements to Circa’s news repertoire — including a possible move into more traditional reporting. Galligan said that De Rosa was the company’s only choice for the editor-in-chief position, given what he has accomplished since he became the social-media editor at Thomson Reuters, and his status as a leading source of breaking news during events like the Boston bombings:
“I spoke with Anthony little over a year ago when we were getting Circa started, and gave him some ideas of where we were going, what our thoughts were about where we were going to take news. He was recommended to me by a bunch of people, because he’s always been on the forefront of thinking about this stuff and where news should move… we wanted somebody who could add editorial leadership but also push us forward.”
Reinventing the idea of a news story
As we described in a post last fall, Circa was founded by Galligan and Huh as an attempt to reinvent the news-consumption experience for a mobile device: it provides a summary of the top news stories in a number of categories — but unlike Summly, the news-summarizing app that was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year for an estimated $30 million, Circa’s story summaries are created from third-party news reports by an editorial team of human beings rather than by algorithms.
One of Circa’s unique features is that readers can “follow” or subscribe to a specific story and then get regular updates when there is a new development: instead of having to rewrite the entire story, the way many traditional news outlets do, Circa simply updates the existing entry and alerts users, who can then go directly to the new information. The feature is proving to be popular, Galligan said: during the Boston bombings, close to 30 percent of users subscribed to updates.
De Rosa, who has been social-media editor at Thomson Reuters since July 2011, said he was intrigued by Circa’s “follow” model, and also by other aspects of the service — in part because of a conversation he had with Huh at a media-industry event called NewsFoo before the company was even created. De Rosa said that he and the Cheezburger CEO (who was originally trained as a journalist) shared many of the same thoughts about the future of news.
“I was really interested in a lot of the principles behind it, and I think both of us share the ideals behind what Ben was trying to do — the concept of trying to transform the traditional article format, making articles more useful, thinking about presentation and timeliness, that was distilled into Circa shortly after that.”
Circa may move into traditional reporting
Circa came out of a broader news-reinvention project that Huh started called Moby Dick, which brought together a number of ideas about how news has to change for a digital and mobile age — including theories about how the traditional article format is no longer as useful a way of distributing information to news consumers, something journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and others have also written about (including Dave Cohn, the former Spot.us founder who was the founding editor at Circa and will now be De Rosa’s boss).
De Rosa said that in addition to helping build the editorial team — which currently stands at 11, some of whom are located in foreign countries so that Circa can have a 24-hour news flow — he wants to explore the idea of having Circa staffers do more of their own reporting, rather than just assembling stories based on reports from other news outlets. That extra reporting would likely involve calling primary sources to confirm information, he said.
“There’s no immediate desire to do original reporting, but that might be something I will push for — it doesn’t necessarily mean boots on the ground, but I definitely want to see the newsroom verifying information for themselves, so if we can contact primary sources and make sure that we feel comfortable about the information we’re putting out, I definitely want to ensure that our newsroom’s doing that.”
Both on Twitter and in comments to The Atlantic Wire, former Reuters.com editor Kenneth Li — who hired De Rosa — said that his departure was “heartbreaking” for the wire service. Former Thomson Reuters technology editor Peter Lauria (now at BuzzFeed) said something similar.
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