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Only T-Mobile can save iPhone now. Apple’s U.S. market share, as measured by smartphone operating system, retreated in February, according to data Kantar Worldpanel ComTech released today. With the iPhone 5 initial release sales glow gone, and a rapidly saturating market for a product feature set now three models old, share isn’t sustainable. Meanwhile, Android gains — as does Windows Phone.

iPhone share, based on sales, fell to 43.5 percent for the three months ended in February. That’s down from 45.9 percent in January and from 47 percent a year earlier. By comparison Android is up — to 51.2 percent from 49.4 percent sequentially and 45.4 percent annually. By the same reckoning, Windows Phone rose to 4.1 percent from 3.2 percent and 2.7 percent share.

But there is more than cooling iPhone 5 sales at work here. “Last month we saw that Android’s increases were thanks to a large increase in Samsung sales within Sprint”, Mary-Ann Parlato, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech analyst, says. “This month, while the increases for Samsung are less pronounced, we’re still seeing an increase in uptake of the brand, which is now impacting on Sprint’s overall share in smartphone sales”.

Read that paragraph again. iPhone was supposed to save Sprint, as T-Mobile USA also hopes. With Samsung sales lift, Sprint’s U.S. smartphone sale share rose to 15 percent from 12.9 percent year over year. T-Mobile nicked up, to 9.8 percent from 9.1 percent. By comparison, AT&T smartphone sales share fell 3.7 points to 26.7 percent and Verizon by 1.1 points to 35 percent.

For AT&T, which is most dependent on iPhone, share dipped to 67.9 percent from 68.4 percent, while Android dramatically jumped — from 20.8 percent to 26.5 percent.

Sales data for all the carriers suggests some ebbing loyalty among existing iPhone users. Meanwhile, Samsung loyalty increases, however, largely at the expense of other Android phone makers rather than Apple.

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 per ent had previously owned a Samsung featurephone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG featurephone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry”, Parlato says. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists”.

The data foreshadows much ahead. T-Mobile begins selling iPhone for the first time on April 12, which presumably will unleash unprecedented demand among existing customers. Meanwhile, new, compelling data plans offer iPhone users another carrier option. I just moved three lines to T-Mobile from AT&T for a monthly bill of $120 — unlimited text, talk and web. I downgraded the remaining two AT&T lines. For 550 minutes calling, unlimited texting and 3GB data for one line and 300MB data for the other, cost is pennies less than T-Mobile. The point: iPhone could get some sales lift during April and May.

Then there is Galaxy S4, which goes on sale later this month. AT&T starts taking preorders in 15 days. For the three months ended in February, Galaxy S III accounted for 52 percent of Samsung sales, followed by 21 percent for its predecessor and 5 percent for Galaxy Note II. The breakdown hints what to expect from the S4 but not whether there will perceptible increase in overall Samsung smartphone sales.

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AT&T has announced that the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 will be available on their 4G LTE network beginning on April 5th, 2013. Customers can choose plans for the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 starting as low as $10 per month on AT&T’s Mobile Share plan. According to AT&T, “with Mobile Share, new and existing customers can share a single bucket of data across smartphones, tablets, and other compatible devices.”

AT&T is also offering a limited time promotion deal for those who purchase a $399 32GB Kindle Fire HD 8.9 with a two-year data plan by taking $150 off the total purchase, bringing the tablet to $249. Are you picking up the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 on AT&T’s 4G Network? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: AT&T

Come comment on this article: Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD 8.9 coming to AT&T’s 4G network on April 5th

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Netflix posted a few job offers that hint at further international expansion in late March, including one for “experienced linguists with the ability to translate and customize marketing, UI and content materials for the target market.” The job posting goes on to say:

“We are looking for highly motivated individuals with the right mix of technical, organizational and communication skills to provide localization for the Netflix experience in the following languages: Turkish, Dutch, Hindi, French, and Korean.”

The company is also looking for an engineer to be the internationalization and localization evangelist at the company, further highlighting how important international markets are for Netflix.

Netflix has occasionally looked to hire employees to help with its internationalization efforts in the past, and job postings frequently contain countries that the company may not consider at all, just to make things less transparent for competitors. For example, in late 2011, a job offer listed “Turkish, Dutch, Russian, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Danish, Korean, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish” as languages of interest.

Needless to say, Netflix hasn’t launched in Russia just yet. However, nine months after that job posting, the company announced plans to open shop in Northern Europe – including Finland and Denmark.

It’s very likely that South Korea, India and European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium are at least under consideration as potential targets for further international expansion. Turkey seems less likely, but it’s certainly possible – the country has a thriving TV and movie industry, and it has seen an economic boom even as other parts of Europe have struggled.

Netflix is currently operating in over 40 countries, including the U.K. and Ireland, the Nordics, Latin America and Canada. It might take some time until we find out where Netflix will go next: executives said earlier this year that the company won’t embark on any further international expansions until late 2013 or early 2014. However, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells also made it clear that they definitely want to expand further, writing in their letter to shareholders:

“Our launch in the Nordics was very successful, confirming our belief in the large international opportunity for our service.”

Map courtesy of Flickr user kcp4911.

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President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, daughters Sasha and Malia, and Marian Robinson listen to Jessica Sanchez sing the National Anthem on the South Portico at the 2013 White House Easter Egg Roll, April 1, 2013.

(Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

The First Family today welcomed more than 30,000 guests to the South Lawn for the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll. This year's theme, "Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You" was inspired by Let's Move!, and the day's fun included numerous opportunities for the young guests to get moving, from the traditional Egg Roll to the Eggtivity Zone, an obstacle course where players and coaches from professional sports teams taught kids how to play sports and showed them easy, fun ways to stay active and fit.

After being introduced to the crowd from the Blue Room Balcony by "Kid President" Robbie Novak, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia and Sasha headed over to cheer on some of the youngest visitors as they raced down the Lawn in the Egg Roll. The President and Bo then made their way to the Storytime Stage where he gave a dramatic reading of "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom", calling it "one of my favorite books." Next up for the President was a drop by at the White House basketball court, where he joined some of the Washington Wizards in throwing the ball around with kids.

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The USGS is expanding the involvement of volunteers to enhance data collection about structures for The National Map.

This program, known as The National Map Corps, focuses on encouraging citizens to collect data relating to structures by both adding new features and/or correcting existing data within The National Map database. These structures can include schools, hospitals, post offices, police stations and other important public places.

Collaborative pilot projects in Colorado were recently used to test the concept of crowd-sourcing. While the project is on-going, early indications point to positive results and show the success of using TNMC volunteers to enhance data sets.

Over a trial period of ten months, 143 volunteers collected, improved, or deleted data on more than 6,400 structures in Colorado. The volunteers’ actions were accurate and exceeded USGS quality standards. In the Colorado pilot project the volunteer-collected data showed an improvement of approximately 25 percent in both location and attribute accuracy for existing data points. Completeness, or the extent to which all appropriate features were identified and recorded, was nearly perfect.

The significant results of the Colorado pilot have led to a phased, nation-wide expansion of the crowd-sourcing /volunteer project. The states in the first expansion of TNMC are: Arkansas, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, West Virginia

After an evaluation of the quality and procedures of the first group of states, the second set will be made available. Ultimately, by the end of 2013, the third batch of states will complete the expansion of the program.

“The response by volunteers in Colorado exceeded our expectations both in terms of the number of volunteers and the quality of the data they collected”, said Kari Craun, the Director of the USGS National Geospatial Technical Operations Center. “The Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) community represents a fantastic, untapped resource to assist USGS in maintaining data that are part of The National Map.”

While some familiarity with the area that a volunteer chooses is helpful, one doesn’t have to live near a particular place to contribute. The tools on TNMC website, along with ancillary information available on the Internet, are generally sufficient to edit a distant area.

There have been several instances of crowd-sourced geographic information making significant contributions to research and databases in government, private sector, and non-profit organizations. The goal of the TNMC is to provide data for the nation’s primary federal mapping agency in its effort to provide accurate and authoritative spatial data via the web-based National Map.

The citizen geographers/cartographers who participate in this program will make a significant addition to the USGS’s ability to provide accurate information to the public. Data collected by volunteers become part of TNM Structures dataset which is available to users free of charge.

Without a network of volunteers, the desired information would not be collected this year and the existing data would not be updated. TNMC volunteers perform important work that otherwise will not be accomplished in the foreseeable future.

Becoming a volunteer for TNMC is easy; go to http://nationalmap.gov/TheNationalMapCorps/index.html to learn more and to sign up as a volunteer. If you have access to the Internet and are willing to dedicate some time to editing map data, we hope you will consider participating!

This year, more than ever before it seems, businesses got into the spirit of April Fools’ Day. Twitter, for example, announced a policy change that tweeters would henceforth have to pay if they wanted to use vowels. Sony pretended it had launched a new product line, Animalia, consisting of electronics especially designed for pets. Google tried to trick the world into thinking it now offered olfactory search.

What’s behind all this tomfoolery? Let’s start with the main reason that companies are playing these jokes: It’s because they can. Large-scale gags on the order of BBC News’ revelation that spaghetti grows on trees used to be the sole province of major broadcasters. Now that every business has a web presence that allows it to publish daily, it’s easy to post creative content for April 1 only to take it down by April 2.

Amidst all the fun, some killjoys have started raising the question: Just because you can prank the public, does that mean you should? As many have hinted or outright said: Shouldn’t you be, um, working?

But the better question is this: Why wouldn’t you do an April Fools’ Day stunt?

If you think about it, even a joke that’s just okay is going to get more positive attention for your brand than almost anything else you could do today, or this month. Let’s stipulate that the humor behind your prank is the self-effacing kind that plays on your own quirks rather than the cruel, “kick me” kind that makes sport of your victim’s gullibility. In that case, you are striking exactly the tone that social media applauds brands for in other instances. Indeed, your April Fools’ gag will see plenty of extra amplification, as media from ABC News to Huffington Post to Time aggregate examples in their April Fools’ Day coverage.

I’ll push the point even further: A good April Fools joke — again, assuming it involves a light dose of self-mockery — can even pay benefits internally. Just as having your caricature drawn by a street artist is a good way to open your eyes to your most pronounced features, a parody is a great way to get past managers’ defenses and show in stark relief what the brand really stands for in customers’ minds.

Several years ago I had the idea to actually put this notion to the test. Thanks to my friend (and long-time HBR author) Tom Davenport, I had an “in” to the inner sanctum of the Harvard Lampoon. Tom’s son Hayes was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and one of the Lampoon’s officers. Since the Lampoon is known for its magazine parodies, I asked him: Why don’t you ever make fun of HBR? I even thought we might induce them to choose us for their next spoof by doing three things: sharing fonts and templates to make it easy to mimic the graphic design; lending lists to help them direct-market to the people who would be most likely to buy; and giving them access to archives and editors so they’d get an up-close look at our worst excesses.

Sadly, the idea died in committee here. Harvard wasn’t ready to turn quite so crimson. But it made so much sense that Hayes turned around and pitched the concept to National Geographic, and they went for it.

If you’re looking for any more argument that there’s a positive ROI on April foolery, think of this. Workplaces have always been ground zero for April Fools’ Day pranks among colleagues. The time and energy, in other words, are already being spent. Unleashing the humor on the public is a way to capitalize on it. So if you didn’t do it this year, resolve to go for the jocular in 2014, and let your customers in on the joke.

If you’re doing any sort of social-media application, you might want to take note of what Facebook just built. The company has created a benchmarking tool called LinkBench that measures the performance of databases tasked with serving graph-structured data, which, presumably, is the lifeblood of every startup around that’s concerned with who’s connected to whom.

Although, of all LinkBench’s features — and you can read all about them in a Facebook Engineer wall post from Monday morning — probably the biggest is that it’s open source and built to be extensible. One of the biggest problems with benchmarks overall is that they rarely align with actual production workloads inside the companies that are supposed to care about them. In this case, for example, a benchmark for measuring the performance of Facebook’s massive MySQL+memcached+Flashcache database architecture against its massive social graph and transaction activity would be all but worthless unless someone was just planning to rebuild Facebook.

I’ve written in the past that perhaps crowdsourced benchmarks are the wave of the future: essentially a compiled set of statistics and best practices as more companies test different database (or Hadoop) technologies on different hardware setups against different workloads and publish the results. Everything will of course vary by the exact details within any given environment, but it would be a good way to get a sense of how a particular stack might, or perhaps should, fare.

But an open source benchmark tuned for a specific use case — social graphs — by probably the world’s foremost expert on that use case is interesting, too. Anyone else trying to serve data from their own social graphs can benefit from some of LinkBench’s more-prominent features, such as its ability to generate “large synthetic social graphs,” while tuning it to the specifics of their own infrastructure. After all, it might be that your app has different requirement around reading versus writing data, and it’s very possible you’re not using MySQL, either.

Or maybe you are using MySQL and want to see how a newer database technology might handle your graph workload. That, by the way, is one of the reasons Facebook built LinkBench, according to this post.

At any rate, the social web is all about graphs, and database performance really matters for anyone trying to build a service that stays online and provides a pleasant user experience. Say what you want about Facebook, but its services perform, so the bar is set high for anyone trying to dethrone it or at least to build something than can attract an equally large and devout following.

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Menlo Ventures says it added Karl Mehta as a venture partner. Mehta will focus on sourcing investments and will advise portfolio companies in financial services, mobile payments, e-commerce and gaming. He was the founder and CEO of Menlo-backed PlaySpan, which sold to Visa. The Obama Administration named him as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2012.

Here is a link to the Menlo blog announcing the hire.

The post Menlo Adds Karl Mehta As A Venture Partner appeared first on peHUB.

The tradition of fake news coming out of the tech world every April Fools’ Day can be a bit tiresome.  After you’ve been through a few cycles of stories about phony new products and fake M&A activity, the humor wears a bit thin.

But sometimes April Fools’ jokes can get interesting — like when a gag starts to look more like a prophesy about our changing industry or a foreshadowing of a future product or service. Here are three April Fools’ jokes from this year that we think may, unwittingly, have more than just a hint of truth to them.

A broadband connection in every alley

Google is famous for pulling out all of the stops each April 1^st, and this year is no exception.  There’s Gmail Blue and a new levity algorithm. One of its biggest pranks, Google Nose, actually has some grounding in real technology, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out earlier today.

But the one that really caught my eye this year was Google’s video advertisement of its fake new broadband service fiber-to-the-pole in Kansas City, where Google is building high-bandwidth optical connections to homes and businesses.

“We thought a lot about what we do to enable this kind of ubiquitous connectivity throughout our fiberhoods, and we realized that the answers were all around us: utility poles,” the on-screen spokesman says. “I mean, we’re already invested in building a fiber network using these utility poles so we thought: why not make them even more useful.”

To be honest, the humor falls a little flat: Google pictures people gathered around poles plugging their laptops into Ethernet ports. But the idea of Google providing ubiquitous broadband in its fiber cities is probably far from a joke. Google of late has pursued a wide range of initiatives related to building better mobile and wireless broadband networks: it’s experimenting with high-capacity, long-range Wi-Fi gateways, it’s testing new small cell mobile network architectures and it’s been an active proponent of using TV white spaces spectrum for broadband.

I don’t know for certain what Google plans to do with those technologies, but all of them could easily ride on the back of its pole-mounted fiber infrastructure.

Your kid’s first 3D printer

Millions of future artists and draftsmen began their careers on Etch A Sketches. Maybe the next generation of sculptors and industrial designers will get their starts on 3D printers. ThinkGeek is advertising the world’s “most economical and fun entry-level 3D printer on the market” for just $49.99. Its media? What else: Play-Doh.

Many of you are already thinking this would be an incredibly handy gadget to own (and not just for your kids)– and it might not be too long before something like it appears on store shelves.

Once the purview of sophisticated engineering shops, 3D printers are becoming much more accessible to the everyday creative classes. Companies like Shapeways are providing 3D printing services for artisans. Today my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote about a 3D printing kiosk at Virginia Tech University available free of charge to any student – just insert an SD card with your 3D design code and out pops your object.

Of course, there are still plenty of technological and economic obstacles in the way of a $50 3D printer. But keep in mind Play-Doh is a much more forgiving material than steel or ceramics (and you don’t need a laser to bond layers of Play-Doh together). Our toddlers might have trouble figuring out the ins-and-outs of Autodesk’s computer-aided design software, but if the market for home-brew 3D printing develops you can bet more novice-friendly software will follow.

The selective vision of Guardian Goggles

Leave it to the U.K.’s liberal mainstay The Guardian to add some wry political humor to the April Fools’ mix. Its gag is a sendoff on Google Glass: Guardian Goggles, a set of spectacles that filters everything through the Guardian’s prism.

“And then there are those times your willpower falters,” goes the Guardian’s promo video as a reader reaches for a discarded copy of competing – and right-leaning – paper The Daily Mail. “It happens to the best of us. But Guardian Goggles can help keep you on track. Our proprietary anti-bigotry technology automatically protects you from harmful opinions before they even reach your eyes.”

Here are my colleague Mathew Ingram’s thoughts:

“The Guardian’s Goggles are obviously designed to lampoon Google’s version, and play on the newspaper’s reputation for leaning to the left. But Augmented Reality devices could be programmed to exclude or blur out content that a user didn’t want to see, such as that involving offensive words or imagery.

We already filter what information we expose ourselves to by selecting the type of media we consume – whether it’s The Guardian or Fox News. Technology helps us refine those filters further. Augmented reality could actually insert those filters directly into our lines of sight.

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RSS reader Feedly has been on a roll ever since Google announced it was shutting down Google Reader, and the alternative reader has rolled out a new mobile app. In this new version, users will benefit from a new search and discovery engine, visual tweaks for easier reading, and better sharing. The new search engine taps into over 50 million feeds and Feedly claims “No other news reader comes even close to offering this breadth of choice.” Using smart topic completion, it automatically updates your search with feeds that are relevant to what you’re looking for.

A section called “Must Reads” has been added which is where all the content you’ve tagged as must read appears. From the feed selection panel, you can now pull to refresh and instantly update all your feeds  A new title only view has also been added which makes it far easier to scan through headlines, and sharing has been made even better with the introduction of one-click sharing to Google+. You can still easily share via Twitter, Facebook, or email, and Feedly has had support for tools such as Pocket and Buffer. As well as the major update, Feedly reports it has added over three million new users since news broke that Google Reader will shut down in July.

Source: Feedly Blog

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Come comment on this article: Feedly Rolls Out New Mobile App, Adds Over 3 Million New Users

A federal appeals court has ruled that Aereo’s TV-anywhere service doesn’t violate copyright law, opening the door for the startup to expand a service that lets consumers watch television on their mobile device for as low as $1 a day. The decision amounts to a major victory for cord cutters and could hasten the end of a pay TV model that forces consumers to buy expensive bundles of channels they don’t want to watch.

Here’s a plain English explanation of the decision, in which the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Aereo’s technology is legal, and why it’s so significant for the TV industry. (Note that Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia will be speaking at paidContent Live).

Aereo’s legal loophole

Aereo captures over-the-air TV signals by means of tiny antennas and streams them to subscribers who watch and record shows on their mobile devices or computer browsers. Aereo’s antennas are not just a marvel of technology (see photos here) — they’re also the key to a legal strategy that helps the company avoid copyright infringement.

To get a better idea of both Aereo’s technology and its legal strategy, it’s helpful to consider how it works for consumers. According to the Second Circuit, “Aereo functions much like a television with a remote Digital Video Recorder (“DVR”) and Slingbox” — allowing subscribers to use internet technology to capture live broadcasts on stations like CBS or Fox and and watch them later.

Aereo argues that its “one antenna for one subscriber” operation means it’s just like a personal recording tool.  The country’s broadcasters disagreed and sued Aereo, arguing that it’s illegally retransmitting their signals to the public.

Aereo won the first round last year when a US District Court in New York refused to grant the broadcasters  a preliminary injunction, saying that Aereo’s service was on all-fours with a previous Second Circuit ruling that found Cablevision’s remote DVR’s to be legal because they involved one copy of a show being transmitted to one subscriber.

On appeal, the broadcasters repeated their argument that Aereo’s mini-antenna system was built specifically to get around copyright law and that Aereo was different than the situation in Cablevision because Aereo offers live TV without a license.

The Second Circuit, however, ruled on Monday in a two-to-one decision that each Aereo subscriber controls the TV stream they receive — including the ability to pause, rewind or record any given show. This means that Aereo is not transmitting to the public and that the service is consistent with the Cablevision decision. The court added that it didn’t matter if Aereo didn’t have a license to show the original programming or that it had created the mini-antenna service specifically to take advantage of the copyright loophole.

The decision was not unanimous, however. In a lengthy dissent, Judge Denny Chin blasted Aereo’s service as a “sham” and “a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.”

A major blow for the TV industry

The TV business has long been based on selling customers large bundles of channels at ever-increasing prices. Unlike the music industry, which has been thoroughly disintermediated by services like iTunes, the television incumbents have so far been able to resist the forces of digital disruption.

The arrival of Aereo thus represented a major threat to the TV business because it offered consumers a way to get broadcast channels where and when they wanted. And unlike other would-be disruptors, Aereo arrived well-funded and prepared to fight: it has top-notch lawyers and has already received at least $58 million in backing from media mogul Barry Diller and others.

Aereo alarms the TV industry not only because it encourages subscribers to watch shows where and when they want to, but also because it refuses to pay “retransmission” fees that cable and satellite companies give broadcast networks to retransmit over-the-air shows. At the same time, Aereo is promising to upend the cable industry by training users to come and go as they please — without expensive set-top boxes or installation fees or contracts. Instead, Aereo users can simply $1 a day or $8 a month.

For now, the broadcasters still have the upper hand in one way in that they own many popular cable channels such as ESPN that they can withhold from Aereo. This may help them in the short term but it does not address the bigger problem of changing TV-watching behavior of the sort that Aereo is ushering in. And in the meantime, Aereo has added one speciality channel (Bloomberg TV) and is likely to add others soon.

In the long run, Aereo’s CEO, Chet Kanojia, has vowed to break the current system which he has described as “an abusive system set up in an artificial way” and instead offer “rational bundles.”

Is the genie out of the bottle?

The significance of Aereo’s win at the Second Circuit is not just that can it continue operating. It’s also a big symbolic boost from the country’s most influential appeals court.

This symbolic support is likely to draw in more investment money and to facilitate Aereo’s expansion. Right now, the service is only available in New York City with plans to open soon in 22 more cities — Aereo is likely to treat the court ruling as a greenlight to open shop in the new cities sooner than later. At the same time, the new legal legitimacy is likely to speed Aereo’s existing partnership discussions with distributors like AT&T and Dish Networks.

Things aren’t all smooth sailing for Aereo, of course. The ruling only addresses a preliminary injunction, and the broadcasters will almost certainly appeal to a full panel of the Second Circuit and to the Supreme Court. At the same time, a California court has already ruled that a service offered by a would-be Aereo competitor amounts to copyright infringement — meaning that Aereo has no hope of coast-to-coast distribution for the foreseeable future. (The California case is at an earlier stage and could still be overturned; if not, it could set up a circuit split to be resolved by the Supreme Court).

But while it’s legal status remains uncertain, Aereo now has time on its side. Any future court decisions are likely to occur a year or more from now, providing the company with ample time to further ramp up its service. As it does so, consumers will become more familiar with Aereo and other over-the-top TV options — meaning it will be harder than ever for the traditional TV industry to persuade consumers to stick with an expensive bundle-of-channels model.

AEREO Decision

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The footage in this video — which shows a man, a woman and a teenager walking down paths, around curves, up stairs and across streets — may not at first viewing seem remarkable. But the people in this video are blind — and walking without a cane or guide dog. Instead, they are being guided by their shoes.

These shoes, which TED Senior Fellow Anthony Vipin Das introduced us to at TED2013, use haptic feedback and GPS technology to guide the blind. Each pair contains electronic circuitry, sensors and small actuators that give the wearer feedback on their movement as they walk, vibrating to tell them when to turn or lift their feet. (See Katherine Kuchenbecker’s great TED-Ed lesson to the field of haptic technology, which debuted on TED.com just last week.) They use a voice-programmed app that reads local GPS maps and plan routes. They have sensors that note obstacles and tell the wearer to stop. The shoes can also read gestures from the walker — for example, two taps means “take me home.”

These shoes are called Le Chal, which means “take me there” in Hindi. And as Vipin Das shared in this Q&A with the TED Blog, they are being tested in their first clinical study at LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India. Expected to be available this year, the shoes can be pre-ordered at Ducere Technology’s website.

“It’s very encouraging to see the kind of response we’ve had from wearers,” Vipin Das tells the TED Blog. “They were so moved because it was probably the very first time that they had the sense of independence to move confidently — that the shoe was talking to them, telling them where to go and what to do.”

American Capital said Monday that it closed on the sale of a $414 million of collateralized loan obligation bonds. Deutsche Bank arranged the transaction. American Capital Leveraged Finance Management, a subsidiary of American Capital Asset Management, is externally managing the CLO.

PRESS RELEASE

American Capital, Ltd. (Nasdaq: ACAS) (“American Capital”) announced today that an affiliate, ACAS CLO 2013-1, Ltd. (the “CLO”), has closed on the sale of $414 million of collateralized loan obligation bonds. The transaction was arranged by Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. The CLO is externally managed by American Capital Leveraged Finance Management, LLC, a subsidiary of American Capital Asset Management, LLC, a wholly-owned portfolio company of American Capital, for an annual management fee of 50 basis points of total assets.
The CLO has primarily invested the proceeds of the bonds in broadly syndicated senior secured loans purchased in the primary and secondary markets.
“We are pleased that we materially improved pricing on the financing of our latest CLO versus the CLO that we raised last September,” said Mark Pelletier , American Capital Managing Director, CDO and CLO Group. “We now manage three CLOs and have investments in the equity of 25 CLOs.”
“With this new CLO, American Capital Asset Management continues to expand its funds under management and now manages six private funds and two public REITs,” said Malon Wilkus , American Capital Chairman and CEO.
The bonds sold by the CLO included AAA(sf) through B(sf) rated tranches, and a non‑rated equity tranche of subordinated notes. American Capital Leveraged Finance Management purchased $25.3 million of the non‑rated equity tranche of subordinated notes, with third party investors purchasing the remaining $11 million. The retention of an equity investment by American Capital Leveraged Finance Management is intended to make ACAS CLO 2013-1 compliant with risk retention rules applicable to credit institutions regulated in the European Economic Area.
Capital Structure

Tranche
% of Total Capital
Principal Amount ($)
Moody’s
S&P
Spread
Class A
59.50%
246,500,000
Aaa
AAA
L+1.18%
Class B-1
7.97%
33,000,000
N/A
AA
L+1.90%
Class B-2
4.83%
20,000,000
N/A
AA
L+3.36%
Class C
6.52%
27,000,000
N/A
A
L+2.75%
Class D
5.31%
22,000,000
N/A
BBB
L+3.60%
Class E
4.47%
18,500,000
N/A
BB
L+4.90%
Class F
2.66%
11,000,000
N/A
B
L+6.10%
Subordinated Notes
8.76%
36,300,000
N/A
N/A
N/A

100%
$414,300,00

 
ABOUT AMERICAN CAPITAL
American Capital is a publicly traded private equity firm and global asset manager. American Capital, both directly and through its asset management business, originates, underwrites and manages investments in middle market private equity, leveraged finance, real estate and structured products. American Capital manages $18.6 billion of assets, including assets on its balance sheet and fee earning assets under management by affiliated managers, with $117 billion of total assets under management (including levered assets). American Capital, through a wholly-owned portfolio company, manages publicly traded American Capital Agency Corp. (Nasdaq: AGNC) with approximately a $13 billion market capitalization and American Capital Mortgage Investment Corp. (Nasdaq: MTGE) with approximately a $1.5 billion market capitalization. From its eight offices in the U.S. and Europe, American Capital and its affiliate, European Capital, will consider investment opportunities from $10 million to $750 million. For further information, please refer to www.AmericanCapital.com.

The post American Capital Closes $414 Mln Managed CLO appeared first on peHUB.

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Last week, news came out that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is working on a new startup called Jelly. Today, Stone opened up about it a bit.

In a post at JellyHQ.com, Stone writes:

People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.

Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful.

News of Jelly emerged unexpectedly early so I’ll wait a bit to share more about the team. In the meantime, I’ll say this. Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free. But, it won’t be ready for a while.

Personally, Jelly will command my full attention aside from some advisory roles elsewhere. The company is self-funded for now. Our offices are based in San Francisco. We are hiring, but Jelly is in no rush to be a big company any time soon.

According to Kara Swisher, a source referred to Jelly as a “native mobile” effort, and Stone has already hired four or five employees.

Presumably this is independent from Obvious, which Stone also co-founded, and is working on things like Medium, Lift and Branch.

Last night, zombie fans got a taste of a world where the infected run wild and the remnants of humanity fight over what’s left.

During the season three finale of The Walking Dead, Sony showed off the very first TV spot for Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. It was an excellent chance for Sony to show off the world of The Last of Us to viewers who were already tuning in for post-apocalyptic drama.

The Last of Us will launch exclusively on the PS3 on June 14.