Blog

Back in January we told you about an automation app that looked to redesign itself with the Holo look in mind. That app, Tasker, has graduated from its beta phase and is now available with the new theme in tow. The kicker however, is that it’s only available for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich or higher. Those of you running anything below that will see the same interface as before, but you’ll at least get various bug fixes. Here’s what’s new:

v4.0
* UI updated for holo look-and-feel with selectable light and dark themes
* 200 built-in icons each in holo light and dark
* internal cleanup of deprecated APIs
* several new states, events and actions
* many incremental improvements and bugfixes
v1.6
* various incremental improvements and bugfixes
More: http://tasker.dinglisch.net/changes.html

If you’re looking for a great automation app that automates almost everything, and one that looks great in the process, then you can’t do wrong with Tasker. Hit the break below to get your QR code and download link. We also included a gallery of the app’s nice, new look. Enjoy!

Play Store Link

Come comment on this article: Tasker’s New Holo Redesign Graduates to the Play Store, Brings It to Android 4.0+

I guess reviews just aren’t enough. Social matters more. Late today Amazon and Goodreads reached a merger agreement, in a deal expected to close second quarter. The companies did not publicly disclose terms.

Goodreads is a recommendation service with social sharing capabilities. Founded in 2007, the the company claims 16 million members and 23 million reviews, but the magic comes from the social aspect. If you ever wanted to snoop in a friend’s bookshelf, Goodreads lets you do something just like that — recognizing reading recommendations from people you know can be more influential than professional reviewers and other strangers.

“Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president of Kindle Content, says. “Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike”.

Together is the key word. Goodreads is a potentially good fit for Amazon, depending, of course, on execution and puts the retail giant ahead of major competitors. Google has a big social network, which could be leveraged for selling ebooks from the Play store — but an asset for now largely wasted. Apple and Barnes & Noble have got what? Nothing really.

“Books, and the stories and ideas captured inside them, are part of our social fabric”, Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler, asserts. “People love to talk about ideas and share their passion for the stories they read”.

Amazon’s reach is, ah, good for Goodreads, and Chandler acknowledges this. “I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to partner with Amazon and Kindle. We’re now going to be able to move faster in bringing the Goodreads experience to millions of readers around the world”.

We’ll see if he survives the transition, which often isn’t the case for CEOs of acquired companies. That said, Goodreads will remain in San Francisco rather than relocate to Seattle. So who knows about anyone’s future.

This has been a surprisingly busy few weeks for social recommendation acquisitions. On March 20, Yahoo announced plans to acquire Jybe, a startup specializing in personalized local entertainment recommendations — for books, restaurants, movies and such. Same day, Pinterest snatched up Livestar, another local recommendation startup.

Anonymous data is one of the staples of the big data movement, but there’s a dark side.

In theory, data from mobile phones lets us do things like map traffic patterns, while web-behavior data can be a boon to researchers and others trying to make sense of how people conduct their online lives. The thing is, it’s damn hard to keep that data anonymous. Perhaps all we can hope for is to keep potentially sensitive data out of the wrong hands.

The latest proof of how hard it is to anonymize data came earlier this week, when a group of MIT researchers published a paper based on their analysis of 1.5 million cell phone traces over 15 months inside a “small European country.” A press release highlighting the paper’s publication nicely sums up the findings, which are somewhat startling:

“Researchers … found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of them.

“In other words, to extract the complete location information for a single person from an ‘anonymized’ data set of more than a million people, all you would need to do is place him or her within a couple of hundred yards of a cellphone transmitter, sometime over the course of an hour, four times in one year. A few Twitter posts would probably provide all the information you needed, if they contained specific information about the person’s whereabouts.”

And assuming you’re concerned about protecting privacy, it gets worse:

“[T]he probability of identifying someone goes down if the resolution of the measurements decreases, but less than you might think. Reporting the time of each measurement as imprecisely as sometime within a 15-hour span, or location as imprecisely as somewhere amid 15 adjacent cell towers, would still enable the unique identification of half the people in the sample data set.”

All it takes to get started is a few pieces of data against which to compare the anonymized mobile data. “For re-identification purposes,” the authors write in the paper, titled Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility, “outside observations could come from any publicly available information, such as an individual’s home address, workplace address, or geo-localized tweets or pictures.”

We’ve been down this road before

This news might ring a bell to anyone who follows the world of web data. After releasing anonymous user data as part of its Netflix Prize competition in 2007, researchers were able to de-anonymize it using publicly available movie reviews from IMDB. In 2006, AOL released a bounty of supposedly anonymous search data for research purposes, but it was quickly mirrored onto public web sites and people began picking individual searchers out of the sea of anonymous identification numbers.

There are plenty of non-digital examples, too. The Unique in the Crowd authors point to one case where a medical database was analyzed against a voter list to discover a governor’s health records. In a 2007 post for Wired, security expert Bruce Schneier cited a couple of analyses of census data, including one using 1990 census data and proving that 87 percent of Americans could be identified using just their ZIP code, sex and date of birth.

And then there are those fitness-tracking devices. At out Structure: Data conference last week, Central Intelligence Agency CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt gave the audience — the whole world, really — a scare by noting that it’s possible to identify someone based solely on his gait. That kind of information might not get people lining up for web-connected pedometers and other fitness devices.

Any type of de-anonymization is only exacerbated in an era of social media. The University of Texas researchers who decoded the Netflix data were able to speculate on individuals’ political positions, sexual orientation and other characteristics, but we now give that information away for free on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, you name it. If you’re inclined to stalk someone, steal identities or engage in any other malicious undertaking, access to names, photos, interests, location, checkins and other information makes for a hearty personal-data stew, and it just takes one piece to get the rest.

A choice between privacy and a better world?

However, if we can get past the inherent privacy concerns, these types of anonymous, aggregate data sets can be incredibly valuable. Companies such as Google, Apple and INRIX are using smartphones and in-vehicle devices to map traffic patterns and how people move throughout cities in efforts to improve both commute times and urban planning. Social scientists accessing data from companies such as Google and Facebook could learn a lot about the intricacies of online behavior. And predictive analytics platforms such as Kaggle present an opportunity optimize everything from business processes to health care.

The holy grail of anonymous data lies in genomics and the hope that lots and lots of quality data will help researchers discover cures for diseases like cancer. Because of the relative uniqueness of each individual cancer case, researchers hope a massive pool of data on sequenced genomes will help them spot patterns and commonalities that no amount of traditional lab work will uncover.

Further complicating things is the fact that the companies delivering our favorite web services rely on our personal data to make money. Whether we like it or not, targeted advertising pays the bills for free services, and doing targeted advertising well requires a lot of personal data. One could argue that a major focus of the data science movement that has taken the world by storm is stitching together various pieces of anonymous data from across the web in order to create holistic images of consumers.

In fact, web companies have gotten so good at de-anonymizing data that the Federal Trade Commission has all but abandoned the term “personally identifiable information.” In a 2010 report on online privacy, the agency wrote that any guidelines it proposes will likely apply

“to those commercial entities that collect data that can be reasonably linked to a specific consumer, computer, or other device. This concept is supported by a wide cross-section of roundtable participants who stated that the traditional distinction between PII and non-PII continues to lose significance due to changes in technology and the ability to re-identify consumers from supposedly anonymous data.”

“Going forward,” the Unique in the Crowd authors conclude, “the importance of location data will only increase and knowing the bounds of individual’s privacy will be crucial in the design of both future policies and information technologies.” This rings equally true for every other type of personal data, especially given the relative ease with which they can be analyzed against each other to create a sum that greater than the whole of its parts.

One has to wonder, though, what types of policies and technologies will come about to keep data anonymous and available to the people who need it while still maintaining its utility. Privacy is important, but is it worth the opportunity costs of not trying to solve the types of problems that large, anonymous data sets are ideal for solving? If true anonymization is really that difficult, perhaps the best bet is just to double down on security and try to ensure that valuable data — anonymous or not — doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

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

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

One of Google’s (GOOG) defining traits is its willingness to engage in big experiments aimed at disrupting established markets — think of how Google Fiber is meant to shake up the broadband market or how self-driving cars have the potential to alter the transportation industry. On Thursday, Google announced yet another of its grand disruptive experiments, this time a same-day delivery shopping service intended to change the retail industry. Google Shopping Express, which is getting an initial trial run in San Francisco, is described as “a local delivery service that we hope will make it possible for you to get the items you order online the same day, and at a low cost.” Google says it’s recruited several big retailers for Shopping Express so far, including Target, Walgreens, Staples, American Eagle and Toys“R”Us, and has also attracted a number of smaller local businesses in the Bay Area.

Texas Instruments has developed seven new chips in total that cut battery recharging time in half. Part of a new BQ2419x line of chipsets, they utilize a “battery path impedance compensation system” and be can be used in more than just smartphones or tablets. Portable medical equipment, mobile hotspots, and battery packs are just some of the devices that could utilize these new chips. They’re 92 percent efficient at 2A output or 90 percent efficient at 4A of output and measuring just 4mm x 4mm, manufacturers can purchase in bulk for just $2.50 per chip. Back in February, Qualcomm announced Quick Charge 2.0 which is reported to help charge enabled devices up to 75% faster than its previous technology.

Source: TechWeekEurope

Come comment on this article: Texas Instruments Develops New Chips That Cut Battery Recharge Time In Half

Got a lot of media stored digitally? Want access from a range of devices, including your computer, mobile and smart TV? One of the best tools for the job is the wonderful, and open-source, XBMC 12.1. It’s capable of so much, acting as a media center, DLNA-compatible server an, from version 12, PVR for live TV on your computer.

Next to XBMC, just about every so-called smart media box out there pales under its radiance. If only you could build your own XBMC-based smart box, eh? Actually you can: all you need is a spare PC and the wonderful OpenELEC 3.0.0.

OpenELEC 3.0.0 is a complete Linux-based distribution based around XBMC. Boot up a PC running OpenELEC, and within seconds you’re at the familiar XBMC desktop, with all your media within arm’s reach. The concept isn’t new — there are plenty of Linux-based XBMC distros out there, including XBMC’s own XBMCbuntu, based around Ubuntu.

What makes OpenELEC stand apart from the competition is its size — or lack of it. By focussing solely on providing a platform for running XBMC and nothing more, OpenELEC weighs in at a maximum 125MB when installed. That’s megabytes, not gigabytes, which is why it’s optimized for smaller removable media like SD cards and USB thumb drives, leaving your hard drive free to store all that media on.

Installation is refreshingly simple — all you need is a PC that supports USB booting, and a spare USB thumb drive (256MB or greater) to place the installation files on. Then it’s a case of picking the right version to download — you’ll find customised builds for ION/ION2, Intel and Fusion GPU chipsets, the Raspberry Pi and two “generic” builds to cover just about any laptop or desktop out there.

The file you download will be in .tar.bz2 format. Extracting your installation files from here may be a bit fiddly — Windows users will need a third-party tool such as IZArc to do so. Once done, Windows users can simply double-click the create_livestick file and follow the prompts to create the USB boot drive; Mac and Linux users should follow the instructions at theOpenELEC wiki.

Now switch to your media center-to-be, insert the USB stick and boot from it to install OpenElec itself, again following the simple prompts. You can install to the internal hard drive or any removable drive – as we said earlier, picking a SD card or second USB thumb drive allows you to separate your media from OpenELEC itself.

Once the installation process is complete, you can boot OpenELEC proper. You’ll see it’s incredibly fast — another benefit of such a small footprint — and delivers you direct to the familiar XBMC desktop. The new version, OpenELEC 3.0.0, is actually the first official stable release, and based on the very latest version of XBMC: Frodo, v12.1. That means if it works in XBMC, it’ll work in OpenELEC too. Your media experience will never be the same again.

OpenELEC 3.0.0 is available as a free, open-source download for use on a secondary PC. The installer can be run on Windows, Mac and Linux to create the required USB thumb drive installer. XBMC 12.1is also available as a free, open-source download for running on a primary Windows, Mac or Linux computer.

Photo Credit: Baranova Alona/Shutterstock

The prospects of a new era of crowd-funded startups took another jump forward today as the Securities and Exchange Commission told FundersClub, a website that lists new companies seeking funding, that its business model doesn’t violate federal securities rules.

FundersClub, which promises “insider access to pre-vetted startups,” faced legal uncertainty because it lets investors make investments as low as $1,000 in exchange for equity, even though it’s not a registered broker. Instead, the company, which is itself a start-up that grew out of the Y-Combinator incubator, holds itself out as a venture-capital adviser that does not take transaction-based commissions but instead takes management fees from accredited investors.

To verify its legal status, FundersClub wrote the SEC to request formal validation of its business model. In a letter, reported by TechCrunch, the SEC stated that it would not pursue enforcement action against the company.

In a significant footnote in the SEC letter, the Commission notes that FundersClub’s model is consistent with the Jobs Act, a recent law intended to make it easier for start-ups to raise money without regulatory headaches:

The Staff notes that FundersClub’s and FC Management’s current activities appear to comply with Section 201 of the Jumpstart Our Businesses Act of2012 (“JOBS Act”) in part because they and each person associated with them receive no compensation (or the promise of future compensation) in connection with the purchase or sale of securities.

The Jobs Act, passed a year ago, is only partially in effect as the SEC is still devising rules to facilite “crowd funding” from hundreds of small investors. FundersClub participants must still meet the definition of an “institutional investor,” which means they have an annual income of over $200,000 or a net worth of $1 million.

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

• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Earlier today, the White House invited innovators from around the country to join a Google+ Hangout to discuss the Maker Movement, a growing community of young people and adults who are designing and building things on their own time.

White House innovation advisor Tom Kalil moderated the conversation with participants including: 11-year-old Super Awesome Sylvia, creator of the Super Awesome Maker Show; Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE Magazine and creator of Maker Faire; Tara Tiger Brown, co-founder and executive director at LA Makerspace; Saul Griffith, co-founder of Otherlab; and Venkatesh Prasad, Ford technical leader. And in a first for White House Hangouts, a robot joined too.

During the Hangout, participants discussed the elements of an "all hands on deck" effort to elevate Making and also share their ideas on how we can get more young people interested in STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math). Here's what you missed:

We'll continue to host hangouts with key members of the Administration on a range of issues. Follow the White House on Google+ for updates from the Administration and opportunities to participate in upcoming Hangouts.

 

Given the number of people with diabetes – 26 million in the U.S., with another third estimated to have prediabetes – it’s little wonder that more companies and startups are trying use technology to address the problem.

But a new report on computer-based support for people with diabetes finds that while digital tools can lead to some positive outcomes, the effects appear to be short-lived.

The report, published in the Cochrane Library, an independent evaluator of medical research, was based on a review of 16 trials involving nearly 3,600 people with type 2 diabetes. In each of the trials, the patients used computers or mobile phones as part of a diabetes intervention program that lasted between one and 12 months.

The interventions in the trials included online peer support and education, digitally delivered tailored advice, goal setting features and mobile-based glucose data transmissions.

The study found that the digitally supported programs led to small positive effects on blood sugar levels, with the mobile-based interventions leading to slightly more improvement, but that those effects started decreasing after six months. It also found that there didn’t appear to be significant improvements on depression, blood pressure, weight or quality of life.

“Our review shows that although popular, computer-based diabetes self-management interventions currently have limited evidence supporting their use,” lead researcher Kingshuk Pal, of the London-based University College London said in a statement. “There are also few studies looking at cost-effectiveness or long-term impact on patient health.”

Skeptics of broad studies like this one point out that because they look at a range of products of differing qualities, that can create more middle-of-the-road outcomes. Indeed, some of the more innovative digital diabetes programs, like Omada Health, Ginger.io, and Glooko, have shown some promise — for example, in a recent 230-person pilot of Omada’s diabetes prevention program, the average participant lost 13.7 pounds after 16 weeks.

But as more digital applications emerge to help patients fight and prevent diabetes and other conditions, it’s important to scrutinize their effectiveness. As this study emphasizes, real behavior change is incredibly complex, and the tools that ultimately work will be the ones that help patients figure out how their specific health changes can sustainably fit into the rest of their lives.

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

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services today released a new, easy-to-use interactive tool that gives anybody – researchers, physicians, public health professionals, policymakers, consumer advocates, tech innovators, and the public – the ability to find and examine data on multiple chronic conditions among Medicare beneficiaries. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Chronic Conditions Dashboard furthers the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) goals for health promotion and the prevention and management of multiple chronic conditions and is an integral part of the Administration’s Health Data Initiative that seeks to release more health-related data in more usable formats to the public in order to promote innovation and improvement in health and care.

The Dashboard includes data for 2011 and presents summarized information on the prevalence of chronic conditions, as well as aggregate Medicare costs and utilization measures for beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions at various geographic levels – national, state, and hospital referral region. Examples of what you can find in the Dashboard include:

read more

T-Mobile CEO John Legere may come to regret publicly slamming the “greedy hedge funds” opposed to his company’s merger with MetroPCS (PCS). The Wall Street Journal reports that the influential Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) is advising MetroPCS shareholders to vote down the proposed T-Mobile merger at their meeting on April 12th. ISS, which the Journal says “advises big shareholders how to vote in corporate elections,” claims that MetroPCS shareholders will not get fair value in the proposed merger and believes that MetroPCS still has the potential “to continue to thrive as a stand-alone company.” T-Mobile and MetroPCS received full regulatory approval from the United States government for their merger earlier this month and now must only gain approval of MetroPCS shareholders to make the deal official.

There have been a lot of conflicting and confusing – and several plain wrong – reports on whether the current version of the iPhone 5 will work on T-Mobile’s new LTE network. I’m sorry to say I even helped spread some of that misinformation by talking about those reports on GigaOM’s mobile call-in podcast on Wednesday. But I’ve since had a chance to talk Apple, and got the details about what exactly the iPhone 5 can do and what it can’t.

Bottom line: if you have a North American GSM version of the iPhone 5 — whether you bought it from AT&T or Apple or got it in from Canada – it can connect to T-Mobile’s new LTE network. It just has to be unlocked. So for AT&T customers looking to switch sides, that means you have to finish your contract, and ask your carrier to unlock the device.

The device will also work on T-Mobile’s 3G HSPA+ network (which T-Mobile calls 4G), just not in every city today. T-Mobile is in the process of a big network overhaul that will align all of its networks with the radios in the iPhone and most other AT&T devices. It’s completed the upgrade in about 50 cities covering 142 million people, but other cities are getting converted quickly.

The source of the confusion is over frequencies, which is why we’ve been seeing all of these references to the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band. T-Mobile runs two technologies in the AWS band, it’s LTE network and a portion of its HSPA+ network. The iPhone 5 will support LTE in the AWS band, but it won’t support HSPA+ over AWS. The iPhone 5, and all previous versions of the iPhone, will work on its new upgraded HSPA+ systems in the PCS band.

Apple will release a new version of the iPhone 5 next month that will make all of the band differences completely moot. The updated version will support HSPA+ on both AWS and PCS band. It will even be able to access T-Mobile’s dual-carrier 42 Mbps HSPA+ network, which current and older versions of the iPhone cannot.

All of this is probably still extremely confusing so I’ve broken it down into a Q&A, which hopefully will answer any lingering questions.

How do I know if my iPhone will work on T-Mobile’s networks?

For the iPhone 5, check your model number. It must be the A1428, sold by AT&T, the Canadian operators or Apple. Older iPhone models will also work on T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks. All of these devices must be unlocked, though, or they’ll be blocked.

How can I be sure I’ll have access to T-Mobile’s LTE and HSPA+ networks?

For LTE, it’s simple. T-Mobile launched LTE in seven markets this week: Baltimore, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. New York City is scheduled to come online this summer along with a bunch of other yet unnamed cities.

For HSPA+, it’s a bit more difficult to tell since T-Mobile doesn’t have any kind of map that tracks which markets have HSPA+ running on the PCS band. They make regular updates on their blog and to the media. PCMag has the most the recent list of T-Mo’s 49 iPhone-optimized cities.

As a general rule of thumb, though, if T-Mobile has LTE in your city, then HSPA+ will be in all the right places, too. And if you get a new version of the iPhone 5 next month, it will work on all of T-Mobile’s network.

When will I be able to bring my old iPhone over to T-Mobile? 

You can do it right now if you like. T-Mobile already has millions of iPhones on its network, running over its 2G and 3G services. In order to access LTE though, you’ll have to wait until Apple updates iOS, authorizing the iPhone 5 to use T-Mobile’s network. Apple hasn’t given a date for when this will happen, saying it will come as an over-the-air update.

Will I be able to access dual-carrier HSPA+?

On a current iPhone, the fastest 3G network you’ll have access to is its 21 Mbps single-carrier system, since all of T-Mo’s dual-carriers are in the AWS band. T-Mobile will eventually launch dual-carrier in the PCS band, but that will take some time. It has to close its acquisition of MetroPCS and convert a lot of old GSM networks to 3G first. If you’re set on accessing the dual-carrier network in the near future, then you’ll need to get one of new versions of the iPhone 5.

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

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

 

It looks like Google & LG may have pulled a fast one on the Android world by recently giving the Nexus 4 a couple of subtle design changes. As pointed out by our pals at MobiFlip, we can now see that the device features two notable uhhhh… “nipples” on the back of the device. Many of you are wondering what they are there for, right? Well it’s quite simple actually: since the Nexus had a flat back previously, the speaker was essentially muted, meaning owners could miss some important notifications. The nipples essentially act as a sort of stand which would help to elevate the phone just slightly in order for sound to pass through easily. Additionally, the ring found on the camera lens has been reduced to appear a bit smaller. Of course there’s no specific reasoning for this change, but the guess is that the camera lens reduction is probably aesthetics-related.

“New” lens on the left; “old” lens on the right

Now if we can get just one more feature added in, the Nexus 4 will be gold.

via: MobiFlip
source: Android Police

Come comment on this article: Did Google and LG quietly update the Nexus 4 design? It sure appears to be the case

While millions of cord cutters are eagerly awaiting their chance to subscribe to HBOGo, the CEO of the company that helps ensure that HBO’s over the top content looks good is skeptical about when that might happen. Darren Feher, the CEO of Conviva, thinks things will get worse for cord cutters before they get better.

Instead of watching Game of Thrones via an a la carte HBOGo subscription, they’ll face higher fees for content aggregators like Netflix and Hulu and will find more content inaccessible unless they have a pay TV subscription, he thinks. Even Hulu’s backers have toyed with making the site accessible only to those who have a pay TV subscription.

“The whole industry is doing a lot of experimentation in places and markets where they are trying to figure out what will work for the U.S. market,” said Feher, who prior to the top job at Conviva was the CTO of NBC-Universal responsible for activities such as streaming the Beijing Olympics. “But before that, in the next 12 months there will increasing pressure against cord cutters. The whole authentication thing, where you can’t watch content unless you have a cable sub, will be a mess for consumers.”

In short, while Nordic viewers get their HBOGo a la carte, those of us in the U.S. may have to wait, no matter how many webcomics and industry insiders demand it. Even vague suggestions from HBO executives are compromises that limit the experience to an app.

However, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel according to Feher. “Inevitability consumers will tell content creators what they want and the content guys will have to respond. There’s a whole upcoming generation of ‘cord nevers’ that the industry has to consider.”

For example he notes that while many in the industry expected online viewers of The Super Bowl to be lower that it was, given that it was a weekend, and people tend to have parties where they cluster around the big screen TV to watch it. Thus he, and others were surprised at how many online watchers there were and how many came from sites with an .edu address.

“No one brings a TV to college anymore, and so it’s logical to ask if they will ever want to watch outside of this way they’ve gotten used to,” said Feher. “But in the short term there will be a lot more pressure on aggregators like Netflix and Hulu, and the consumer will feel that in less content or higher prices.”

The challenge for the industry is complex, and is one where technology is pressuring business models designed for the old way of delivering television — multicast from one to many over a guaranteed and pay-TV-provider-controlled connection. The internet has made viewing content more of a one-to-one proposition and the rise in over the top services and multiple devices on which to watch the content has made the entire experience disjointed.

Conviva has stepped in to ensure video quality in this brave new world with software that parses a lot of data in the cloud and has software agents that make decisions about how to adapt the video in response to problems. If the internet is congested for example, it may route content via different route. If the video is buffering in your home because your Wi-Fi is wonky it may drop down to a lower bit rate.

But outside of technical solutions, Feher also thinks there’s a business model that will help content companies and broadcasters make money so they can avoid “trading analog dollars for digital pennies,” as NBC-Universal’s Jeff Zucker (and Feher’s former boss) has said. It may be a matter of charging people more money for HD streams or even more for 4K streams that require a whopping 25 Mbps connection. ISPs are trying to build this level of granularity into their billing systems and networks.

It might also be as simple as using the targeting abilities available in the digital world to better monetize a viewer by showing him or her more relevant advertising or charging different prices for a la carte content. Essentially he’s proposing that the data driven model we’re seeing drive success in other industries takes a stab at changing television. I hope the results are worth watching.

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

• Connected Consumer Wrap-up: Q1 2009
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

An interview with Bruce Feiler, New York Times columnist and author of The Secrets of Happy Families.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by April 4.

Say, you know that new pop-up compose message box Google introduced last autumn. You don’t? Well, get ready. Gmail is giving the ditty to everyone, whether or not wanted. That’s what it looks like, in photo right.

“The new compose will be rolling out to everyone over the next few days”, Phil Sharp, Gmail product manager, says. I’ve used the thing since October, in a sort of love-hate thing. On a laptop working in Chrome — even better, on Chromebook Pixel — the new compose box is great. On Surface Pro, using Internet Explorer 10 from Modern UI, the thing is unusable. The box flicks up and down from the bottom of the screen.

We’re all guinea pigs in the Google lab, and Sharp praises our rodent brains: “In addition to telling us what you love about the new compose experience (like how much easier it is to multitask!) you’ve also been sending us helpful suggestions for what features you’d like to see added. As a result of your input, we’re now ready to introduce the new compose experience as the default for everyone. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!”

I do appreciate the ability to compose a message and work in the inbox at the same time. It’s good to see Google catch up with email features I first used in the 1990s.

Amazon announced Thursday afternoon that it has acquired the popular book-related social networking site Goodreads for an undisclosed sum. I spoke with Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler and Amazon’s VP of Kindle content Russ Grandinetti on what’s next for Goodreads and its 16 million members.

Questions and answers have been edited slightly for clarity.

What does the acquisition mean for Goodreads’ reputation as a neutral hub for readers, authors and publishers?

Otis Chandler [OC]: “One of the extremely important things to us is for readers to share what they’re reading, no matter how they’re reading. We have no plans to change that. We want Goodreads to be a place for readers of all types to share their favorite books. You can expect to see customizations and better integrations for people who do use Kindle. For everyone else, Goodreads will remain largely as it is.”

Will Goodreads remain a standalone site, and is its entire team staying on? Is the site getting a redesign?

Grandinetti says Goodreads will be an independent subsidiary of Amazon, like Zappos or IMDB. The site will remain based in San Francisco. Chandler remains CEO, reporting to Grandinetti. Chandler said that Goodreads’ entire team is staying on (and that the company is hiring). To the question of a redesign, he said there is “nothing specific to mention in relation to the acquisition.”

Will Amazon have access to all of the Goodreads users’ data?

OC: “Goodreads is or will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, so on one level, yes. Are things going to happen in the background without customers understanding it? I think the answer to that is no….We’ll make it very easy for someone to say, ‘Yeah, I’d love it if you could import all of my Amazon or Kindle purchases into my Goodreads shelf.’ We’ll make it very easy for people to do, but they’ll be aware of what’s happening.”

Users already have the ability to export their data from Goodreads, and they’ll continue to be able to do so.

Will Amazon use Goodreads reviews on its own retail site, or will Amazon reader reviews migrate over to Goodreads? In general, how much content will cross between the sites?

OC: “We’re going to think about this in terms of what’s best for our members. Maybe if we find books that don’t have any Goodreads reviews we might consider that, but I don’t think there’s any specific plans to do that at this time.”

Russ Grandinetti [RG]: “Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit.”

Right now, Goodreads includes links to many retailers (like Barnes & Noble and Indiebound) on its book pages. Will that practice continue?

OC: ”It’s incredibly important to us that Goodreads remain a platform for all kinds of readers to use, whether they’re reading paper or on their Nook or Kindle or whatever. We always want Goodreads to be a place for people to share and talk about books…As for specific design of [the links], we’ll see, but we really think about it from the user perspective. If users really want those links [to other retailers], then those links will probably still be there.”

Will Goodreads now include a retail component — for instance, selling print or Kindle books from its site?

RG: “The design they have works incredibly well for users. You see that in the number of users who join that service.”

OC: “I think, short-term, the thing we’re most excited about is actually bringing the book into Goodreads and enabling people to just start reading right there from the Kindle Cloud Reader. We’ve never had a good book preview feature.”

Will Goodreads expand internationally?

RG: ”As you’ve seen in the last couple of years, one thing we’ve been working hard on at Kindle is [globalizing] the business…Goodreads has many users around the world. In terms of new languages and other countries, I think that’s an area of opportunity for both of us to work on.”

OC: ”Amazon has done a fabulous job of curating databases of international metadata.”

Speaking of metadata, Goodreads stopped sourcing its metadata from Amazon in early 2012, switching to Ingram’s metadata instead. What happens now?

OC: ”We’re going to determine what makes the most sense, but we’ll have access to Amazon’s metadata and certainly will probably be using it.”

Are the Kindle and Goodreads apps combining?

RG: ”Our goal would be…[for] the Kindle experience as it exists both on devices and apps, [to put] putting the connection [users] have on Goodreads as close to their fingertips as possible. When and how we do that, I’ll ask you to stay tuned.”

Will Goodreads retain its public API? Does Kobo get to keep its Goodreads review feed?

OC: “Yes [on the API],” and “we’re not going to shut [the Kobo feed] off.”

Why did Amazon buy Shelfari? Was that a failed acquisition?

RG: ”We’ve used [Shelfari] to generate quite a bit of incremental data about books. It’s powered features we’ve launched over time, such as book extras and X-Ray. But, of course, Goodreads has been much more of a social connection site and a larger social network. So when it comes to the graph we’ll use to connect people on Kindle, Goodreads will power that.”

Will Goodreads keep sharing data about its readers at conferences and so on?

OC: “Yeah, as far as I know, I think we’re still excited to share readers’ behavior…and create lots more 50 Shades of Grey infographics.”

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge

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

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

He may not have the same kind of public profile as the teenaged founder who sold his company to Yahoo for $30 million, or the founders of hot apps like SnapChat or Instagram, but Dave Winer has done a lot more for the world of online media and publishing than many people realize, including pioneering both blogging and podcasting, as well as the development of RSS. So it’s worth paying attention when he comes up with something new, even if it’s not immediately obvious how that service fits into our lives — because it probably will.

So when he announced earlier this week that he was launching a new company called Small Picture and had a new product called Little Outliner, I was interested, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. So I called Winer up and asked him to describe what Little Outliner is and what it is designed to do — and there is a clear thread that connects this new service to the other things he has championed: namely, the idea of having control over one’s content, and of being fully open.

A browser-based notepad, but also much more

In a nutshell, Little Outliner is a kind of notepad, and it runs in a browser window so no software has to be installed, and it allows a user to keep notes or text content of any kind — but also allows them to structure that content in a number of ways, so that it becomes a kind of brainstorming tool. Says Winer:

“It’s basically a note-taking tool that becomes a writing tool. So if you’re a reporter, as you’re putting together a story, you might talk to a few people and take notes while you’re doing that, and maybe you do a little research and gather some quotes and put that in your outline — but the structure is malleable, it’s fluid, things just flow into it and you don’t have to worry about where you put them because where they are is easily changed.”

This kind of thing comes naturally to Winer, because he said he has been using some form of outliner ever since he first became a programmer. “People think, ‘Oh he’s the guy who started RSS, podcasting or blogging,’ but that’s not really what I do,” Winer said. “What I really do is outlining. It was my entry into the tech industry — I wasn’t even a programmer until I realized computers could be used for these things, and it’s still what I do to this day.”

In addition to being used as an organizational tool while programming (which Winer says he does with his new partner, Small Picture co-founder Kyle Shank), one potential use for Little Outliner is as a blogging tool, the former Weblogs.com founder says. The product as it currently exists is just an entry-level thing, Winer said — with more features to be added later, as users discover new uses for it. And one of those features will likely be integration with blogging platforms like WordPress (please see the disclosure statement below).

“I have a really incredible blogging system, far in advance of what anybody else uses, I’m pretty sure of that, and this gives me a way to deliver that to people on the terms that they want it. They want it in the browser, so now it’s in the browser — and now it’s about hooking it up in very simple ways to things that can take advantage of it, like WordPress. I want to integrate — that’s my religion: interoperability.”

Open standards and interoperability

While Little Outliner may seem competitive with other tools such as Evernote or Google’s new Keep service, Winer said it differs from these in two specific ways — the first being that it incorporates structure into the notes or content being saved. The second is that Winer is dedicated to keeping it as open as possible, in part so that users don’t suffer the same fate they did when Google shut down Google Reader. That’s why the content is stored locally on a user’s computer (although web sharing is coming) and it is based on OPML, an open standard.

“For some people, Keep will probably be a wonderful tool to use. If it were my type of tool, the questions I would ask would be the obvious ones in light of the Google Reader thing — what does the future look like, how open is it — if things were open, if you could replace them and their data was accessible to other pieces of software, then it wouldn’t matter if they withdrew. But if you have to worry about them dropping the product and they don’t make the data accessible to other pieces of software, you really don’t have any upside.”

Whether Little Outliner becomes a must-use product for millions or not, Winer’s dedication to open standards — which has included promoting the idea of a distributed version of Twitter, rather than relying on a proprietary platform owned by a single company — means that those who prefer open and interoperable web tools will always have an alternative.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito

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

• The 2013 task management tools market
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout