Blog

Rosetta Stone, one of the biggest names in language learning, has picked up Seattle-based startup Livemocha.  In an announcement Tuesday, the 20-plus-year-old company said the $8.5 million acquisition is intended to help it move more quickly into the cloud.

Rosetta Stone, which charges between $350 and $500 for its language courses, is largely known for offering CD-ROM-based courses in its signature yellow boxes. More recently, it has moved online and to mobile. But as companies across all kinds of industries embrace the cloud and more people look for educational content on digital platforms, it makes sense that the company wants to update its products with new technology.

Livemocha, which has 16 million users globally, will remain in Seattle. But Rosetta Stone said its technology will form the foundation of the next wave of the company’s products. Launched in 2007, Livemocha offers free online lessons, as well as premium access to live classes and tutors.

The news comes as competition in the language learning space seems to be heating up. Last month, Berlin-based language learning service Babbel acquired PlaySay, a small Silicon Valley language-learning app, and raised $10 million for international expansion. Other emerging rivals include community-based language site Busuu and Duolingo, a free online service that helps people learn languages while also translating real-world content from the web.

While Rosetta Stone already has a strong presence in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, the company said Livemocha’s users in China, Russia and South America, as well as its several offices in the US, will complement its global footprint.

To date, Livemocha had raised $14 million from August Capital and Maveron.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

This is Joe Frazar, an automotive enthusiast that you should listen to. Joe’s automotive philosophy is simple – buy cars to drive, collect and enjoy, but never store. His current garage holds a combination of mild Ferrari’s like a 328 GTS and a Mondial, as well as a hot-rodded Porsche 914-6 that makes him giggle like a little kid. However when he’s not driving, Joe’s searching the classifieds for the next piece of automotive kit that may, or may not, find a place in his garage.

Source: Petrolicious.com

Amazon Web Services is by far the biggest and most experienced public cloud provider. Accepting that, the next question is: what cloud vendor can give AWS a run for its money? Increasingly the money is on Google  – at least in compute capacity where Google Compute Engine is becoming a force to be reckoned with even though it only launched (in beta of course) just last June.

Scalr is clearly a big fan, but even if you don’t buy its rather impressive report card , there are other reasons that Google Compute Engine should be considered the biggest potential rival to AWS.

Google knows from scale

Even Google bashers will concede that the company understands massive scale. It has the data center fire power; it has the software tools to harness that power; and it has a deep engineering bench that includes several key hires from — you guessed it — AWS. A quick LinkedIn search shows some of these hires, but omits many. One of those is Sunhil James, who worked on the AWS Virtual Private Cloud and Direct Connect and who now heads up networking services and technologies for the Google Cloud Platform.

Multi-cloud strategies demand a back-up cloud

As big and great as AWS is, most existing and potential business customers will not lock into a single cloud provider. They are still bruised from the current generation of vendor lock in. On the other hand, they can’t afford to support too many. “You can only make so many bets, and it’s clear that Google is in this public cloud game to stay,” said one vendor exec who would not be named because his company does business with Amazon.

Companies who made early bets on GCE are Cloudscaling, the OpenStack player which said last fall it will support both the AWS and GCE APIs, and RightScale, a pioneer in cloud management and monitoring that signed up as GCE’s first reseller in February.

Google is serious about GCE

Let’s face it: Google does have a bit of a credibility problem for launching, then deep-sixing services. (Hello, er, goodbye Google Reader.) But no one can seriously doubt that GCE is a priority.

“This is no skunkworks. This is not some little company they acquired. There’s a big team on the engineering side and if you look at the data center footprint, the fiber, the tech expertise, the internal platform and tools, they are serious about this,” said the vendor exec.

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver, a Boston startup, said the time is ripe for an AWS contender to surface. The industry, he said, appears to be waiting for someone — Google? Rackspace? Someone else? to challenge AWS.

“Clearly, Google’s strategy is to differentiate on performance (overall and consistency thereof,)” he said via email. “Our first test suggests that they are delivering on that promise … so far,” he noted. He also pointed out that GCE’s admin console UI needs work and that less than a year in, there are limited services and features compared to AWS. A new Stackdriver blog details its first impressions of GCE.

The big question is how performance will hold up when the service actually leaves beta and opens up to the real world. There are reportedly tens of thousands of users queued up and ready to jump in when that happens. “Sure it feels fast with my six instances in limited preview. How will it feel when I am sharing with the rest of the world? And what has Google done to limit the host, network and API contention that plague large AWS customers?” Belcher asked.

Lack of legacy baggage helps GCE

Microsoft Windows Azure is paying the price now for Microsoft’s huge installed base of Windows and .NET legacy applications. While it’s done a good job incorporating support for open-source technologies under the Azure umbrella, that support is not on par with Windows, at least when you ask developers outside the .NET world. “They are still waited down by their Windows and Office mentality,” said one vendor who weighed supporting Azure but decided against it. “There are aspects of Azure that are technically superior but then their APIs are attrocious,” he said.

On the other hand …

Skeptics will always wonder if Google’s heart is in anything other than internet search and advertising. And, Google, like AWS is not particularly known for working well with others in the partner community.

The other issue is that while Google Apps has gained traction in business accounts — largely because it’s so much cheaper than Microsoft Office —  one long-time Google watcher wonders if it will ever “get its enterprise act together.”  In his view, Google Enterprise Search appliance never got traction so Google has to prove its credibility outside internet search.

Going forward, Google will also have to offer a more comprehensive menu of services. And, most importantly, it will have to bring more enterprise workloads on board so all of those companies looking for an AWS backup (or alternative) can really put GCE through its paces.

We will be talking about public and private cloud adoption, gating factors to that adoption, and other hot-button topics at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco in June.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Forecasting the future cloud computing market

A U.S. District Court Judge has ruled that a lawsuit between Facebook and Timelines.com will in fact go to trial, after denying Facebook’s notion that the trademark-infringement lawsuit should be killed due to overly-generic trademarks.

Back in October of 2011, fresh off of unveiling the new Timeline profiles at the f8 conference, Facebook was sued by Timelines.com – a site that lets users create chronological historical records. The site, which launched in 2009, claimed that Facebook was infringing on their trademark with their new “Timeline” feature.

A few months later, Facebook countersued. They claimed that the term “timeline” is generic, citing the fact that a Google search of the term yields nearly 200 million results.

“Given the generic or at least merely descriptive nature of the term ‘timeline’ when used to identify chronologies of events and related information (or tools for their creation), as well as the prior and widespread use of the term by third parties, Counterdefendant does not own exclusive rights in the term ‘timelines’ as used in connection with timeline creation and collection services,” said Facebook.

Now, a Judge has ruled that the trial must go on, saying that Facebook has “failed to demonstrate, as a matter of law, that the marks are generic.”

He claims that Timelines.com has “millions of dollars invested in its business and more than a thousand active users,” and that it’s reasonable to believe that “timelines” has its own specific meaning to Timelines.com users.

A couple of months ago, Facebook updated investors on the situation, saying:

“We believe the claims made by the Timelines plaintiffs are without merit, and we intend to continue to defend ourselves vigorously. Although the outcome of litigation is inherently uncertain, we do not believe the possibility of loss…is probable.”

The trial is set to kick off April 22nd.

[Above image is Timelines.com’s Facebook Timeline]

What a difference a day makes. After being forced to issue a public apology for Apple’s Maps debacle late last year, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook on Monday issued an apology to Chinese consumers for what the state media deemed to be unfair local warranty policies that differed from Apple’s policies elsewhere. As reported by Reuters on Tuesday, Cook’s plea appears to have worked — the once critical government-run Chinese newspaper Global Times has issued a followup to earlier attacks stating that Apple is “worth respect compared with other American companies.” The Foreign Ministry also reportedly praised Apple for “conscientiously” responding to the media-driven outcry.

Continue reading…

Former NFL player and coach Jack Pardee has died at the age of 76.

According to the University of Houston, Pardee died on Monday, April 1, succumbing to gall bladder cancer. A Houston football scholarship has been founded in Pardee’s name, and will be awarded yearly to a Houston football walk-on.

“When my father was diagnosed back around Thanksgiving, we were able to have many great conversations about the past and the future,” said Ted Pardee, one of Jack’s five children and a radio commentator for Houston football. “One conversation was around what his lasting legacy would be. He truly loved the time spent at the University of Houston and wanted to find a way to help a deserving, hardworking, dedicated athlete who might not have the means to pay for their own college tuition. He could have offered his name to a lot of different charities or scholarship funds, but this was what my dad wanted to do. I hope you will join our family in support of this worthy fund.”

Jack Pardee began his football career at Texas A&M, where he was one of the famed ‘Junction Boys’. After college, Pardee went on to play linebacker with the Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. He then began a career coaching football for over 20 years. Pardee coached teams in the World Football League, U.S. Football League, Canadian Football League, and NFL, including the Houston Oilers. He also coached the University of Houston football team from 1987 to 1989.

“Today, we mourn the passing of a great man who dedicated his life to the game of football and was a true gentleman in every sense of the word,” said Mack Rhoades, vice president for intercollegiate athletics at the University of Houston. “It was not a coincidence that success followed Coach and his teams wherever he worked, and the University of Houston program was blessed to have him lead our football program during some of our most exciting times. I know I speak for all Houston fans and the entire department when I offer our sincere condolences to Phyllis, their children and grandchildren. He will truly be missed by all who had the pleasure to know him.”

Ever since Sundar Pichai took over the Android team, rumors started to swirl that Chrome and Android would merge since Sundar is also in charge of Google Chrome at Google. Shortly after, Eric Schmidt put a kibosh to that by saying they will remain separate, but to expect more overlap. As you know, Chrome is primarily in notebook computers, and the closest thing we have seen of Android on a notebook would be the ASUS Transformer series. The DigiTimes is reporting that Androidbooks, as in Android notebooks, are coming this fall.

It wasn’t mentioned in the report, but if the Androidbook were to have a detacheable display, I’m not sure what more it would offer over the Transformer line. Of course, it they were to be similar to the Chromebooks, where the display is permanently attached, it would be inferior. If there really is an Androidbook in the works, what makes the most sense is for it to not only have a detachable display, but it should also have both Chrome and Android with the ability to boot into either OS. I’m very interested to see what this rumor develops into.

source: DigiTimes

Come comment on this article: Androidbooks, as in Android notebooks, could show up by Q3

Mozilla, creators of the popular Firefox Web browser, turned 15-years-old on March 31. The non-profit looks to celebrate it in style as it looks back on what it, and the Web at large, has accomplished over the past 15 years.

Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, wrote a short post today explaining what spurred Mozilla to rethink the Web 15 years ago:

Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.

Baker emphasizes the importance of keeping the Web open multiple times, and says that Mozilla will play a central role in making sure the Web remains open for future generations:

In the coming era both the opportunities and threats to the Web are just as big as they were 15 years ago. As the role of data grows and device capabilities expand, the Internet will become an even more central part of our lives. The need for individuals to have some control over how this works and what we experience is fundamental. Mozilla can — and must — play a key role again. We have the vision, the products and the technology to do this. We know how to enable people to participate, both by contributing to our specific activities and coming up with their own ideas that advance the bigger cause of enriching the Web.

It’s an exciting time for Mozilla and the Web. Another two billion people will join the Internet community in the coming years. It’s critical that these people all have access to the openness and empowerment that the Web has brought to date. The browser is a necessary piece of making sure this happens; yet we need to do more.

Baker also mentions a couple of upcoming projects from Mozilla that he feels will help more people become intimate with the Web. The first is Firefox OS, Mozilla’s mobile operating system. The second, and personally more interesting project, is Webmaker. This particular project will help people who have no experience in coding move from Web consumers to Web creators.

Looking forward to the future isn’t the only thing Mozilla is doing on its 15th anniversary. The non-profit will also be sharing 15 facts about Mozilla throughout the day with the #Webstory hashtag. Mozilla encourages users to share their own stories about Mozilla, Firefox or just what the Web in general means to them with the same hashtag.

The Web has changed tremendously over the past 15 years, and Mozilla is no longer the only major alternative to Internet Explorer. In fact, the browser market is more diverse than ever before. Regardless, Mozilla and its Web freedom allies still have an important part to play as the Web continues to grow over the next 15 years and beyond.

If I was casting a film about Steve Jobs’s life, a comic actor probably wouldn’t be my first choice for the title role. But clearly I know nothing about such things. Because first we had Two and a Half Men’s Ashton Kutcher playing the Machiavellian Apple co-founder in Jobs, and now we have the boyish Justin Long as the titular iSteve in Funny or Die’s forthcoming full length feature film.

The teaser trailer for iSteve, which was released just now, doesn’t give much away, as it mostly consists of lines from the movie, but we do get a very brief look at Justin Long in the role at the very end.

Does Justin look like Steve Jobs to you? No, but then he didn’t look much like a Mac during his time playing one in the long running Mac Vs. PC ad campaign either.

The movie is described as a comedy, although there’s no sense of that in the trailer.

iSteve is due to debut on 15 April on Funny or Die. What do you think about it? Are you looking forward to it, or is it something to avoid? Comments below.

Many developers like to cobble together their own software-development-test-and-deployment platform(s) to take their code from inception to adoption.  Give them a Github account, a Jenkins server for continuous integration and their tool set of choice and they’re happy. But Cloudmunch, a Seattle-based startup is banking that many developers would be perfectly  happy to pay for a service that integrates and manages all of that for them so they can just — well just build software.

Cloudmunch portrays its offering as a “full stack continuous delivery” system that handles continuous integration, automated testing and continuous deployment. It supports both Github and Opscode Chef. Users can sign in with their Github ID to start what it now promises will be an integrated process to take their code from cradle to end user device.

This is part of the whole trend toward “democratizing” pieces of IT so that developers can develop what they want without having to wrestle with the set up and maintenance and updates of their tools.

“This illustrates the rather sexy notion of continuous development and delivery of code,” said Bryan Hale, VP of online services for Opscode.

Right now developers at smaller companies probably look at things like Werker which won GigaOM’s Launchpad Europe competition, Electric Cloud, CloudBees, CircleCI and Atlassian Bamboo to attack the continuous integration part of this problem. Larger companies might look at Nolio or legacy offerings from BMC and IBM for deployment and release automation.

Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu acknowledges all of that competition, but maintains that his platform puts all the pieces of the puzzle together.  And, he notes, for $25  per month for one code repo and five nodes, CloudMunch lets developers focus just on their code by providing a “complete continuous delivery platform hosted, managed and maintained.”

If it’s as easy as advertised, that could be a compelling story.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Continuous delivery and the world of devops
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• How devops can reduce cycle times

Reeder, a popular RSS reading app for iOS, relies on Google Reader for its backend. But the service will continue after Google Reader shutters on July 1, Reeder creator Silvio Rizzi said Monday. Reeder’s iPhone app is $2.99, and Rizzi is making the Mac and iPad apps free for now, down from $4.99.

The iPhone app is remaining paid because it already supports services other than Google Reader, Rizzi wrote: “I’m currently working on integrating Feedbin and adding support for standalone/local RSS (still experimental). You’ll get these features with the next update (3.1) which should be ready soon. That’s just the beginning, the plan is to add more services you can choose from in the next weeks and months.”

The Mac and iPad apps don’t support other RSS services yet, so they’ll be free until they get an update and “add all the features of the iPhone version, including all sharing and syncing services.”

I use Reeder to read RSS feeds on my iPad, and I recommend checking it out.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

Considering it was the most pirated show of 2012, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the new season premiere of Game of Thrones was downloaded quite a bit this weekend.

But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

I completely support the right of companies to stop paying people they don’t need any more, but the latest round of recent and planned layoffs from United Technologies is troubling me. Because UTC is doing great; its stock is at an all-time high, and sales have grown by more than 35% since 2005, to $57.7 billion.

This growth was accomplished, however, without expanding its workforce much at all, and now UT believes it can continue to grow as it wants to while actually shrinking its employee base. It’s planning to lay off 3000 workers this year, after shedding 4000 last year.

Now, is this really anything new? After all, output has been going up and employment simultaneously going down in manufacturing around the world for several years now, and UTC is a big manufacturer. But two things strike me as potentially novel here. First, the company does a lot more than just make things in factories. As its website says, “United Technologies… is a diversified company that provides a broad range of high-technology products and services to the global aerospace and building systems industries.” Servicing elevators, security systems, and so on, in other words, is a big part of what UTC does, and services have historically been very labor-intensive. That could be changing.

Second, it feels new to me that a successful company would shrink its workforce as it grows its sales, profits, and stock price. To make that concrete, imagine that in the ‘old world’ of manufacturing there are three companies, each with 1000 employees. Two of them are bloated and poorly run, and one is lean, mean, and highly technologically sophisticated. Over the course of five years, it puts the other two out of business while adding 500 employees to its workforce in order to cope with all the new demand. At the end of that time, total employment in the sector has shrunk from 3000 to 1500. This is not great news for the laid-off workers, but at least we could have some hope that they’d eventually be hired by the successful company as it continued to grow.

Now imagine the same scenario, except that the winner in this case is so lean and mean that it actually lays off 500 people as it’s growing and putting the others out of business. Total employment in this scenario drops from 3000 to 500.

Both scenarios fit the observed pattern of increased output and decreased employment. But in the second one, there’s no new place for any laid off worker to go, because even the successful company is never hiring. That feels like a different world to me; is it the one we’re heading into?

I don’t want to use this post to discuss the morality of UTC laying off people while the company is thriving and the nation’s workers are hurting. I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment. Because even for individual companies, economic growth has become so decoupled from employment growth that the former goes up while the latter goes down.

If that’s the world we’re heading into, then we had better start rethinking a lot of our assumptions, policies, and prescriptions. And fast.

Public clouds offer lots of flexibility, but not necessarily the sort of performance you need for handling big data. The Zurich-based provider CloudSigma has felt this pinch more than most, as it is a supplier to Europe’s performance-hungry science cloud, Helix Nebula, and now it says it has found the solution: going all-SSD. Well, that and rolling its own stack.

CloudSigma, which operates out of both Switzerland (Zurich) and the U.S. (Las Vegas), was one of a handful of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers that signed up last November for SolidFire’s all-SSD storage system. The result is now here: CloudSigma has ditched all its hard-disk drives and, as a result, it now feels confident enough to offer a service-level agreement (SLA) for performance, as well as uptime.

What’s more, despite the fact that solid-state storage costs about eight times as much as hard-disk, CloudSigma hasn’t changed its pricing – its SSD-based utility service costs $0.14 per GB per month, same as the HDD-based service did. Customers can also pick up the SSD storage service unbundled from CPU and RAM if they so choose.

HPC in the public cloud

According to CloudSigma COO Bernino Lind, the shift to SSD is a major help when it comes to handling high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as those of Helix Nebula users CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL):

“They want to go to opex instead of capex, but the problem is there is no-one really who does public infrastructure-as-a-service which works well enough for HPC. There is contention — variable performance on compute power and, even worse, really variable performance on IOPS [Input/Output Operations Per Second]. When you have a lot of I/O operations, then you get all over the spectrum from having a couple of hundred to having 1,000 and it just goes up and down. It means that, once you run a large big data setup, you get iowaits and your entire stack normally just stops and waits.”

Lind pointed out that, while aggregated spinning-disk setups will only allow up to 10,000 IOPS, one SSD will allow 100,000-1.5 million IOPS. That mitigates that particular contention problem. “There should be a law that public IaaS shouldn’t run on magnetic disks,” he said. “The customer buys something that works sometimes and doesn’t work other times – it shouldn’t be possible to sell something that has that as a quality.”

CloudSigma has also resolved another contention point around RAM, Lind claimed:

“A modern CPU can ask for a lot of data because it’s fast and efficient, so it is possible to saturate and make contention on your memory bus. That has been solved with NUMA topology, which is like a multiplexer to get access to memory banks. You get asynchronous access, which means you don’t have contention on accessing the RAM.

“However, public cloud service providers turn this off so the actual instance doesn’t have access to NUMA. We figured out a way to pass on the NUMA topology so, when you run really extensive compute jobs, you won’t hit a kind of contention when you want access to RAM. This is really important for big data workloads.”

In-house stack

Speaking of things that public cloud providers tend to turn off, CloudSigma’s stack – apart from the underlying KVM hypervisor, everything was written in-house – makes it possible to access all the instruction set goodies that are built into modern processors, such as the AES encryption instruction set.

Public clouds may run on a variety of physical hosts that encompass a range of CPU generations, only some of which will have certain instruction sets hard-coded onto the silicon. Providers will often turn off these instruction sets to make their platform homogeneous, but that means losing out on the performance benefits offered by hard-coding. According to Lind, CloudSigma’s stack allows a heterogeneous cloud based on allocation pools – say, one of older Intel chips and another of newer AMD 6380 chips – that customers can choose according to their performance needs.

What does all this mean in practice? Lind cited the example of augmented-reality gaming outfit Ogmento, which recently used CloudSigma’s all-SSD setup to power a mobile, location-based version of a popular title. “They [said] all their I/O-heavy stuff, databases and so on, saw a x8-x12 performance increase,” he noted. “Their entire stack saw a x2-x4 performance increase. That means they need to use less compute power in order to run their system.”

With the budgetary constraints faced by European scientists these days, it’s not hard to see how that same kind of effect could make a real difference in more serious applications too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Helix Nebula and the future of Europe’s cloud
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Cloud Computing Reaches the Final Frontier

Gammarus mucronatus, an amphipod grazer that can promote healthy eelgrass beds. Copyrighted photo courtesy of Matthew Whalen/UC Davis. (High resolution image)

LAFAYETTE – Tiny sea creatures no bigger than a thumbtack are being credited for playing a key role in helping provide healthy habitats for many kinds of seafood, according to a new study by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and U.S. Geological Survey.

The little crustacean “grazers,” some resembling tiny shrimp, are critical in protecting seagrasses from overgrowth by algae, helping keep these aquatic havens healthy for native and economically important species.  Crustaceans are tiny to very large shelled animals that include crab, shrimp, and lobster.  

The researchers found that these plant-eating animals feast on the nuisance algae that grow on seagrass, ultimately helping maintain the seagrass that provides nurseries for seafood.  The grazers also serve as food themselves for animals higher on the food chain.

Drifting seaweed, usually thought of as a nuisance, also plays a part in this process, providing an important habitat for the grazing animals that keep the seagrass clean.

“Inconspicuous creatures often play big roles in supporting productive ecosystems,” said Matt Whalen, the study’s lead author who conducted this work while at VIMS and is now at the University of California, Davis. “Think of how vital honeybees are for pollinating tree crops or what our soils would look like if we did not have earthworms. In seagrass systems, tiny grazers promote healthy seagrasses by ensuring algae is quickly consumed rather than overgrowing the seagrass. And by providing additional refuge from predators, fleshy seaweeds that drift in and out of seagrass beds can maintain larger grazer populations and enhance their positive impact on seagrass.”  

 USGS scientist Jim Grace, a study coauthor, emphasized that seagrass habitats are also quite beneficial to people.

“Not only do these areas serve as nurseries for commercially important fish and shellfish, such as blue crabs, red drum, and some Pacific rockfish, but they also help clean our water and buffer our coastal communities by providing shoreline protection from storms,” Grace said. “These tiny animals, by going about their daily business of grazing, are integral to keeping healthy seagrass beds healthy.”

Comparison of algae fouling on eelgrass with and without grazers. Copyrighted photo courtesy of Matthew Whalen/UC Davis. Copyrighted photo courtesy of Matthew Whalen/UC Davis. (High resolution image)

In fact, the authors wrote, if not for the algal munching of these grazers, algae could blanket the seagrasses, blocking out sunlight and preventing them from photosynthesizing, which would ultimately kill the seagrasses.  Seagrass declines in some areas are attributed partly to excessive nutrients in water bodies stimulating excessive algal growth on seagrasses. 

“Coastal managers have been concerned for years about excess fertilizer and sediment loads that hurt seagrasses,” said J. Emmett Duffy of Virginia Institute of Marine Science and coauthor of the study.  “Our results provide convincing field evidence that grazing by small animals can be just as important as good water quality in preventing nuisance algae blooms and keeping seagrass beds healthy.”

The USGS scientists involved in this study serve as members of a worldwide consortium of researchers examining the health of seagrasses. This research by Virginia Institute of Marine Science and USGS researchers is the first in a series of studies worldwide on seagrass ecosystems.

The study, “Temporal shifts in top-down versus bottom-up control of epiphytic algae in a seagrass ecosystem,” was published in the recent issue of Ecology, a journal by the Ecological Society of America.

Smartphones and mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. We use them for everything – from updating Facebook to checking our bank accounts. With over a million available apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play alone, the competition for user adoption is fierce.

If you’re a mobile app developer, you know you need to get your app in as many hands as possible. One in four mobile apps are abandoned after the first use. And more than 60 percent of apps in the Apple App Store haven’t been downloaded even once. The deciding factors in mobile app adoption come down to speed to market, app performance and a high-quality user experience.

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to see what’s causing performance issues. Crash reports can help, but by the time they reach you, the damage has already been done. So, what is a mobile developer to do?

Today New Relic is excited to announce the availability of New Relic for Mobile Apps. Now you can have real time, actionable insight into the performance of your native iOS and Android apps. With New Relic for Mobile Apps, you’ll be able to:

• Monitor the health and speed of every server and web API your app talks to
• Get detailed network and web server level analysis
• Have in-depth insight into real users, sessions and finger swipes as they happen

For more information and a free 30-day trial of New Relic for Mobile apps, visit here.

When we first heard about the Samsung Fonblet, it was rumored to have a 5.8-inch display. Then last week, a 6.3-inch version showed up in Samsung’s Global Download Center. Word is they aren’t going with the “Fonblet” name, and instead going with “Galaxy Mega.” It also appears that there will indeed be two devices. The smaller 5.8-inch version has a model number of GT-i9152, and the larger 6.3-inch version will be GT-i9200. Expect the 5.8-inch version to only be offered in white and to be available by the end of May. The 6.3-inch should be available by the middle of June and will be offered in both white and black.

source: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Samsung Fonblet now known as Galaxy Mega and will come in two sizes

As previously reported, Google began showing a doodle in honor of naturalist and illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian in parts of the world where it was already April 2nd. Now that the date has changed in the rest of the world, including here in the U.S., the doodle has made it to a larger audience, putting Google in the spotlight once again after its day of April Fools’ jokes.

The doodle celebrates Merian’s birthday, as she was born on April 2nd, 1647 in Frankfurt, Germany. She died on January 13, 1717 in Amsterdam.

Here’s what Google’s Knowledge Graph result looks like for Merian:

Merian published three collections of engravings of plants before turning her studies to insects. According to Wikipedia’s history of her, she kept her own live specimens, and illustrated the metamorphosis stage in various species. As the article points out, this was at a time when insects were largely thought of as “beasts of the devil”.

If you click over to Google’s Image results, you can peruse a plethora of Merian’s beautiful illustrations.

Revance Therapeutics Inc., a specialty biopharmaceutical company, has raised raised $33 million of its Series E growth financing, the company announced Tuesday. In addition, Revance announced the conversion of $71 million in convertible debt into the Series E preferred stock. Money will go toward clinical trials as well as other growth efforts. Revance’s investors include Essex Woodlands, NovaQuest Pharma Opportunities Fund, Delphi Ventures, Vivo Ventures, Technology Partners, Shepherd Ventures, Bio*One Capital and Pac-Link Ventures, and Palo Alto Fund.

PRESS RELEASE
Revance Therapeutics, Inc. (Revance), a privately held specialty biopharmaceutical company developing novel botulinum toxin products for use in aesthetic and therapeutic indications, today announced that it has raised $33 million of its Series E growth financing. In addition, Revance announced the conversion of $71 million in convertible debt into the Series E preferred stock. This closing of the financing included significant investment from new investors as well as participation from existing institutional investors.

The proceeds of the financing will be used to support US Phase 3 trials for the topical delivery of botulinum toxin type A to reduce the severity of crow’s feet wrinkles, as well as to support other neuromodulation clinical studies.

“We are pleased to welcome new shareholders to Revance as we continue our lead Phase 3 program, and are grateful for the ongoing support from our existing investors,” said Dan Browne, President and Chief Executive Officer of Revance. “We plan to utilize these funds to further expand our clinical trials that are underway and advance the development of our product candidates, RT001 and RT002.”

Revance’s investors include Essex Woodlands, NovaQuest Pharma Opportunities Fund, Delphi Ventures, Vivo Ventures, Technology Partners, Shepherd Ventures, Bio*One Capital and Pac-Link Ventures, Palo Alto Fund and other leading institutional investors.

About RT001 and RT002

RT001 Botulinum Toxin Type A Topical Gel is an investigational product currently in US Phase 3 trials for the topical delivery of botulinum toxin type A to reduce the severity of crow’s feet wrinkles by temporarily relaxing the orbicularis oculi muscle around the eyes. RT001 is also currently in Phase 2 trials for the topical treatment of hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating), and chronic migraine headache.

RT002 is an investigational, injectable neurotoxin that integrates Revance’s proprietary, purified botulinum toxin type A molecule with the patented TransMTS® peptide technology. RT002 is currently in Phase 1/2 trials.

About Revance Therapeutics, Inc.

Revance Therapeutics, Inc. (Revance) is a specialty biopharmaceutical company which develops botulinum toxin products for use in aesthetic and therapeutic indications. Revance has developed a platform technology, TransMTS®, that enables local, targeted delivery of botulinum toxin and other potent macromolecules across skin without patches, needles or other invasive procedures.

The post Revance Therapeutics Scores $33M in Series E Financing appeared first on peHUB.

When Apple introduced two-step authentication for Apple ID my first thought was “Finally, the fruit company takes security seriously”. But, as I’ve come to learn, that’s not entirely accurate for everyone as the new feature is only available for users living in Australia, Ireland, New Zeeland, United Kingdom and United States. What if you’re living in Canada or Germany? Well, tough luck, you can’t use it. But what can you do?

Wired’s Mat Honan is probably the best known Apple user to have fallen prey to Apple ID account hacks. Honan tells an alarming story, about habit and comfort (dare I say oversight) leading to having one’s virtual identity shred into pieces. But two-step authentication cannot be forcefully enabled, so what can you do while waiting for Apple to support your region and mobile operator? You can still take some precautions that will secure your Apple ID account.

First thing you should do is sign in to My Apple ID using your credentials (Apple ID and password). Then let’s tackle a couple of security steps one by one.

Use a Dedicated Email Address

This may seem like a no-brainer, but one of the most important steps that you can take to beef up the security of your Apple ID account is to use a dedicated email address. This can be achieved from the “Name, ID and Email Addresses” menu.

Preferably, the email address that links to your Apple ID account should have two-step authentication enabled (like Gmail currently allows) and must not be used to sign to in to Facebook, Twitter or other cloud services. You should also add an alternate and rescue email address, as a precautionary measure.

Change the Password

Even though security experts recommend changing the password for every account on a frequent basis, few users really do it. The reasons why may range from being lazy to not caring, but as some have come to learn the damage can be irreparable.

So head over to “Password and Security”, input the answers to the two security questions and change your password. Preferably you should use a complex one containing both capital and small letters, numbers and special characters, like “P4$$w0rd” instead of “Password” or “8374N3w$” instead of “BetaNews” (but please choose more difficult words or combinations to break).

Alternate Security Questions and Answers

Apple has a thing for security questions. The company wants users to add them when setting up a new account or for existing ones, and for good reason. Security questions are, at least in theory, a safety net against hackers. The only problem is that people tend to use obvious answers and not change or alternate the security questions over time.

Use “Password and Security” to add answers to security questions that only you would know how to respond to. And alternate the security questions and answers at least once a month. It may take a couple of minutes (maybe 15 minutes tops) but you will have a more secure Apple ID account afterwards.

Other Security Measures

Make sure all your contact information is accurate. This includes name, primary and shipping addresses and phone numbers (daytime, evening phone and mobile phone). You should also have it written somewhere else, hidden from prying eyes, in case of emergency (your Apple ID account got hacked for example) in case you can’t remember everything.

Also, use your Apple ID to only sign in to secure sites such as My Apple ID or to only authenticate yourself on Apple-branded devices such as iPad or iPhone. It’s best to compartmentalize rather than regret the mistake later on.

Photo Credit: The To/Shutterstock