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With MetroPCS scheduled to vote on a merger with T-Mobile only a couple weeks away, the deal appears to have moved closer to obtaining FCC approval. An attorney for the Communication Workers of America Union claims the deal will be approved “at the bureau level instead of the commission level.” The union is watching the proceedings closely as they have concerns about the merger and this apparent move by the FCC to usher approval on through does not sit well with the union. Debbie Goldman, a director with the CWA refers to the possible FCC decision as “outrageous” and “unprecedented.” Despite the CWA’s concerns, others see this latest development as positive news. David Kuat, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus & Co., believes the lack of commission level action reveals the deal to be “basically non-controversial” and that “no one thinks this is going to be blocked.”

source: TmoNews

Come comment on this article: T-Mobile/MetroPCS FCC approval may be near as vote date approaches for MetroPCS

Congress has been the piñata in every poll lately, but recently presented bipartisan legislation — the Start-up Innovation Credit Act of 2013 (SICA) introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) — is proof that Capitol Hill has its share of good ideas. In brief, SICA allows start-ups to take advantage of the R&D tax credit for the first time.

Our current tax code, and especially the R&D tax credit (the biggest tax credit in the code), is not geared to benefiting start-ups. As a tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, I (Dean) listened to many speeches from members on both sides of the aisle in praise of the R&D tax credit, because it would help grow and support those two entrepreneurs in a garage with the new idea. But the current R&D tax credit does nothing for those two gals in a garage.

Why? Because a start-up is rarely paying federal income tax. The R&D tax credit under current law can only be used as a credit against income tax paid — not as a credit against other taxes a business pays. In practice, a start-up is in its early stages is not making a profit and is therefore not paying income tax — making it ineligible to use the R&D tax credit under current law.

SICA fixes that problem by allowing the business to count not just income taxes paid, but also other business taxes (e.g., payroll), towards the R&D tax credit. Even a start-up making no profits has employees and payroll to meet — now under SICA they can use those taxes to realize a benefit from the R&D tax credit.

Start-ups, and the U.S. economy, could use the extra boost. The current R&D tax credit supports exactly the kind of productive innovation our economy needs — not just a credit for basic science (lab coats and test tubes) but also for applied science (making a product better, manufacturing it greener, etc.). Supporting small incremental steps — the reality of innovation and technological change — are what the R&D tax credit is about. And let’s not forget the argument that better-performing start-ups create jobs. For example, an August 2010 paper from the National Bureau for Economic Research, “Who creates jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young,” clearly came to the conclusion that the answer is young — that start-ups and young businesses are the keys to creating jobs.

The legislation will be especially crucial in an environment where the number of new businesses has dropped considerably. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson captures it well: “We have gone from being an expansive, risk-taking society to a skittish, risk-averse one.” Putting dollars in the pockets of entrepreneurs (by letting them, in effect keep more of those dollars) will be a significant help in changing this climate.

While SICA is a new idea in Washington, several states have in place refundable state R&D tax credits — notably Minnesota, New York, and Louisiana. I have seen first-hand working with businesses in these states that these refundable credits have made a difference in continuing to create jobs, expanding a business, or even making the decision to start a business. The margins are so small and the belts so tight that even a tax credit of 30-50k can keep a business afloat.

Best of all, the bang for SICA’s buck can’t be beat. For a drop in the bucket compared to the overall R&D tax credit (approximately $9-10 billion a year), SICA will cost approximately $160 million dollars. It won’t be the federal government deciding the winner and losers either, but the market and investors — with the R&D tax credit providing support to those start-ups and new businesses receiving investments. Just as important, SICA can help immediately — with the benefits being recognized in the monthly payroll charges — as opposed to waiting for months if not years for grants to be made, committees to meet, and the grind of Washington.

It is perhaps because of this combination of supporting innovation and entrepreneurs, market-driven benefits, and limited costs that SICA has attracted strong support out of the gate from both Republicans and Democrats. Along with Senator Coons (who has been a house-a-fire on helping entrepreneurs), SICA has already garnered cosponsors on the other side of the aisle including respected Senators Blount (R-MO), Enzi (R-WY), Moran (R-KS) and Rubio (R-FL) and important Democratic Senators like Schumer (D-NY) and Stabenow (D-MI). As Washington continues to search for ways to create jobs and encourage innovation, SICA is a smart idea ready on the shelf.

The Twitterverse has been aflame with a lot of noise about Sheryl Sandberg, Anne Marie Slaughter, and Marissa Mayer. But a lot of this talk is knee-jerk criticism that misses the big picture: our nation’s failure to address the issue of integrating work and the rest of life has finally emerged as a critical economic, social, political, and personal issue affecting not only women, but all of us, and it’s capturing deservedly serious attention and accelerating experimentation with new models in our brave new world. For the first time in the 25 years since I’ve been studying the intersection of work and life, it’s now front-page news and everyone has an opinion — because for the first time everyone feels that they have a stake and a voice. It’s no longer only a women’s issue.

When Slaughter’s Atlantic piece — chronicling the difficulty maintaining a high-powered career while still being able to nurture her teenage sons — became the most read article in that journal’s history, the field of work/life, long in the shadows, catapulted to center stage. Then the Yahoo! controversies: first everyone had an opinion about Marissa Mayer as a pregnant CEO, then everyone had another opinion about her revocation of work-from-home policies. Now the brouhaha about whether or not Sandberg can or should speak for all women has turned the heat up further.

The key word there being heat; not light.

Each is speaking out, on the basis of her experience, about why and how change must come. As a life-long policy scholar, naturally Slaughter emphasizes policy. And as an employee and an employer, Sandberg naturally draws on her own experience. Ideas and action on both the individual and policy levels are essential, and they both recognize this. And yet each is pitted against the other, in a non-existent “feud.” Now pundits are treating Mayer’s decision about the remote-work policy at one struggling company as if it were an all-encompassing value judgment on flexibility policies.

Let’s not lose the forest for the trees. The discussions inspired by Slaughter, Sandberg, and Mayer are good news for those of us who care deeply about creating a more just society where men and women can participate in the spheres of work and home as they choose. As my 20-year study of Wharton students shows, and as others are finding as well, women are no longer alone in this fight, although it’s undeniable that they still bear the greatest burden. Men of the new generation have a different take on how work and life must cohere than do my grey-bearded peers. Young men do not merely accept that their spouses may work, they expect it. And they expect to have lives beyond work that include caring for their children and pursuing other passions. They want flexibility as much or more than women do. When asked to describe their dream jobs at the start of my class recently, one man said, “Stay-at-home Dad.”

And so we find Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, talking about the art of “conscious leadership” in his recent Wisdom 2.0 talk. This leader of one of our hottest companies is espousing the importance of taking the time to listen, ask questions, and coach rather than prescribe; of being mindful in order to make course corrections and experiment; of harmony among the spheres of life while eschewing the folly of balance; and of managing compassionately, not as a perk, but as a way of increasing economic opportunity and productivity. It’s increasingly OK for men to think like this and to talk like this.

As women (and some men) have worked for decades to help women enter and advance in the workforce, as women’s presence in the workforce has grown so that a new generation of children have been raised by working parents, and as the changing division of labor at home strains both men and women, we have entered a whole new world. The revolution is here.

But our policies have not kept pace with these changing realities. We must catch up to other developed nations. Though there’s been some movement since Jeff Greenhaus and I wrote Work and Family — Allies or Enemies? in 2000, we still need more flexible work arrangements, better-quality childcare, and, most importantly, leaders who recognize and respect the whole person. But what is heartening to me about this moment is how many have joined in the debate. And the conversation happening now will undoubtedly affect the choices that all of us — both men and women, at all levels of society — are making every day, by increasing the range of available possibilities for our companies, our families, our communities, and our selves.

In the earlier days of Android, music management was no easy task. Since there was (and is) no universal iTunes-like apparatus, as there is for the iPhone, users had to essentially connect their devices to computers as USB mass storage and copy over the files. With a clear need for some kind of management system, many developers flocked to the space. Of all the ones I tried, I found doubleTwist’s media syncing app the best.

Not long after I discovered doubleTwist, it added a streaming music feature, though it was no real competitor to existing services on the market. It was just a nice little perk for double Twist users. Now, though, doubleTwist is coming at the streaming market with its own product.

Magic Radio is more like Pandora than Spotify, in that it streams music without much user control. While it contains pre-programmed stations, it adds a twist that you won’t get from Pandora and other streaming services: your own songs. The app uses these as a base for streaming.

You don’t need to do anything to make it work. Magic Radio scans your music library and plays songs that you already have. That might seem like a glorified shuffle feature, but it does organize them based on a number of attributes, similar to Pandora. The neat catch is that Magic Radio adds in music it thinks you’ll like, based on what you own. That way you get music you know you’ll like, in addition to music you might find that you love.

The beauty of this setup is that it works for all different kinds of streaming music listeners. Those who subscribe to streaming music services for discovery will get that feature with Magic Radio. With 13 million songs at its disposal, you’re bound to hear plenty of new stuff. It works even better for those who use streaming services for a thought-free way to listen to music. By using your own music as a base, you know you’re getting something you like.

At $3.99 per month, Magic Radio is priced more attractively than Spotify. Of course, with Spotify you control what you listen to, and can listen offline. Magic Radio is more like Pandora, though it’s priced at a dollar more per month (Pandora One is $36 per year to Magic Radio’s $48). Priced in line with Pandora, I think Magic Radio would see a few more converts. But as it stands, it’s tough to see anyone making the jump.

Magic Radio comes with the doubleTwist app, which you can download for free at Google Play. It does come with a free seven-day trial, so you can give it a whirl to see how it stacks up.

Via Phone Scoop.

The post doubleTwist Adds Its Own Twist To Streaming Music appeared first on MobileMoo.

According to a number of reports from insiders close to the company — including some who have talked to Om and some who have talked to All Things Digital — LinkedIn is considering an acquisition of Pulse, the news-reading app, for as much as $100 million. At first glance it might seem like an odd pairing: why would a site that is focused on corporate networking want to buy a content-recommendation app? But as the world of content continues to evolve, such a combination actually makes a lot of sense.

Pulse is one of a number of news-recommendation apps that try to apply algorithms and other filters to suggest content to users — a group that includes Zite (which was acquired by CNN in 2011) as well as News360, Flipboard and Prismatic. Pulse was one of the first to make a big splash, in part because Apple founder Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage during the launch of the original iPad, and also because the New York Times accused the company of copyright infringement for aggregating its content.

Since its launch, Pulse has grown to the point where it has about 20 million users, but it’s still seen by many as a runner-up to Flipboard in the news-recommendation market , so an acquisition in the $100-million range would likely make sense for the company and its backers.

LinkedIn is becoming a media network

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the purchase of a service that aggregates and recommends content from a wide variety of news sources would be an interesting extension of its recent moves to bulk up the media side of its business. When the company first launched its LinkedIn Today service — which aggregated news based on which links were shared within a user’s network of contacts — it seemed to some (including me) like a side project designed to primarily to drive traffic to the site, which was mostly being used as a place to store a resume or connect with potential employers.

Since then, however, the company has made a number of other efforts on the content side that are more ambitious — directed by former Fortune magazine staffer Dan Roth — such as the launch of the Influencers program, in which the site gets prominent personalities such as Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman to blog about topics of interest to its users. In many ways, this is analogous to what alternative blogging platforms like Medium and Svbtle have been doing (and WordPress seems to be interested in doing as well).

So what could LinkedIn do with something like Pulse? Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has one idea, based on a video that Dan Roth made for a Fortune app that had LinkedIn integration — so that users could see who they were connected to at a specific company that was mentioned in the news. But while this might be useful to some, it seems a lot less interesting than using it as a kind of extension of LinkedIn Today: in other words, a way of recommending content that would target users based on their interests.

It’s all about the “interest graph”

As we’ve tried to explain a number of times, this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks. It’s the reason why Facebook is constantly tweaking its news feed, and why Twitter is pouring resources into improving recommendation filters like its Discover tab and other features — and why Google is trying so hard to get people to share and “plus one” more content through its Google+ network.

If there’s one overwhelming reality of the digital age, it’s that we are all to some extent drowning in content from an ever-growing range of sources, and we all spend an increasing amount of time trying to filter out the noise and find the signal. LinkedIn has a large and growing graph of the social-network connections between people based on their work — a graph some believe could make the company an acquisition for someone like Bloomberg — and that could potentially be very valuable for users.

So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.

And if such a deal does end up happening, of course, a LinkedIn purchase of Pulse would be just another example of a non-media company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) establishing a powerful foothold in an area of the business that has traditionally belonged to newspapers and magazines.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Arvind Grover

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The Zurich-based online recruitment firm Silp has signed a strategic partnership with x28, another Swiss recruitment technology firm that counts the likes of Adecco among its clients. It’s a partial exit of sorts, as x28 has bought an undisclosed number of shares from Silp’s founders, and will fund the company for the next couple of years and put its executives on Silp’s board.

Silp has an unusual approach to the so-called “social recruitment” business. Plenty of startups are trying to exploit Facebook and other social media to help people find jobs, but Silp’s take is passive. People sign up using their Facebook account, saying that they might be interested in changing jobs at some point, and Silp gets to work extracting useful data from their Facebook profiles and combining it with other information from linked services such as Twitter, GitHub and About.me. Recruiters will then come to Silp with a list of requirements for prospective job candidates.

Meanwhile, x28 deals in spidering and extraction, with a strong focus on ontology and semantics. According to Silp co-founder Dominik Grolimund, the two companies have complementary technologies — to give a very basic example, Silp might be really good at finding “software engineers”, but x28′s technology would help it know to also look for “programmers” and “developers”:

“There’s synergy with their technology because [x28 is] good at crawling and extracting information in a structured way — making meaning out of the text is what they’re good at. They’re also really good at… adding semantics to the matching process.”

Silp claims to have had a million people sign up within its first three weeks (the service launched last August). As those signing up also put their Facebook contacts into the system, that means the company has 150 million profiles in its database.

According to Grolimund, after that epic first run of sign-ups Silp removed invite features in order to halt growth while the company worked on developing its service for employers – a service that will now have x28′s technology built into it, and that will be co-marketed by the two firms. “We’ll resume growth again once we release the employer product,” he said.

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By Stephen Eisenhammer

Rivers of gold? Maybe not, but there can be money to be made in Chinese water systems.

With the world’s largest population rapidly moving from the countryside to the city, Chinese water supplies are becoming horribly polluted and the companies wading in to clean and purify them are set to benefit.

Investors are taking an interest in water cleaning companies which are supported by the Chinese government as the country attempts to avoid a dawning crisis.

China is under increasing domestic pressure to clean up its water supplies and is promising to invest 4 trillion yuan ($650 billion) on rural water projects between 2011 and 2020.

Fen Sung, senior investment manager at the asset management fund Premier, said cleaner water would be high on the agenda for the new Chinese leadership:

I hold China Everbright, who are a superb company in China who specialise in water treatment and waste to energy. Recent results and company announcements continue to show strong demand in the sector.

I have recently added a new holding called Sound Global, who are dual-listed in Singapore and Hong Kong. They specialise in the water treatment sector and are trading at an attractive valuation.

China Everbright has risen 40 percent in the last 12 months. Sound Global, meanwhile, has a price to earnings multiple of nine compared to 16 among its peers, according to Thomson Reuters data, and has traded largely flat so far this year. Sung says:

Pollution control will be on the agenda for the new Chinese government and I am confident that both companies can achieve good earnings growth for the coming years.

 

This terrifying first-person look at a climbing mishap is your nope, nope, and triple nope of the day. Amazingly, the climber is moving at the end of this 100-ft.+ fall.

For a second day, small aftershocks continue to rumble beneath Southern California.

The aftershocks are the result of a 4.7 magnitude earthquake that occurred Monday. The Earthquake was centered under Riverside County, but could be felt in both Los Angeles and San Diego. Though the shaking could be felt for miles around, its relatively low intensity caused little damage.

Today, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that aftershocks from the quake are continuing, with “dozens” recorded by the USGS this morning. This is after over 150 aftershocks were recorded in the immediate aftermath of the quake on Monday. The aftershocks were weak enough that they shouldn’t have even been noticed.

The most recent large earthquake in Southern California occurred in 2010, when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Baja California. Though this week’s quake did little damage, the incident stoked the fears of people who live in Southern California, who are well aware that they live in the most earthquake-prone area in the U.S. Many of them took to Twitter to voice their fears using their special brand of detached humor:

Back in September, Vimeo launched their new Creator Services suite, which they billed as a set of “simple, powerful tools to help creators make more money for doing what they do best.” The first part of that was the “tip jar,” which allowed video creators to set up donations on their video pages. At the time, Vimeo teased that paid videos were on the horizon.

A couple of months later in November, Vimeo took a baby step toward that with a pay-to-view service complete with six movies released to their Vimeo Movies site.

Today, Vimeo is launching the full video on demand service that will let video makers sell their work on the site. It’s pay-to-view, put squarely in the hands of the creators.

“We’re creators ourselves, and we know how hard it can be to get your work out there and connect with an audience. Since we founded Vimeo in 2004, we’ve been dreaming of a world where more and more creators can support themselves with their work alone. Today we’re proud to be taking a big step in that direction, and there are many more exciting steps to come,” says Vimeo.

Vimeo On Demand features customizable viewing options that let creators decide exactly how much to charge for their video, the viewing period (how long it can be viewed after purchase), and even where it can be viewed (regional limiting). Creators can also customize their Vimeo On Demand pages and sell the films on their own sites, using Vimeo’s framework.

And the split is a flat 90/10. Creators keep 90% of the revenue generated by the views of their videos. Which, to a lot of artists, is a more than fair split.

To get started with Vimeo’s new pay-to-view service, you must be a Vimeo PRO member.

Google showed off a few sample apps for its augmented reality Google Glass at the SXSW festival this week, and the apps were pretty obvious ones, including being able to view select headlines from the New York Times, checking out your Path photos and being able to read your emails. And while I know most of the early apps built are going to be like this — services help people manage their digital communication — I really want an app that helps people see the world differently and potentially help with important global issues like climate change.

That’s why I really want a concerned and passionate developer to build a carbon emissions viewer for Google Glass. The concept could be pretty simple. The app would take objects — from cars to buildings to cell phones — that use electricity or oil and overlay them with data or imagery about how much carbon, or greenhouse gases, they are emitting.

Depending on how the developer wanted to visualize the data, the app could show an infographic, graphics that look like smoke clouds, or just a couple of basic data points. Most of this type of data is out there and being collected by energy software companies, government institutions, nonprofits utilities and others.

Companies that collect such data have long tried to figure out creative ways to make data about carbon emissions interesting, provocative, compelling and cool. Grist’s David Roberts blogged about the rare non-sucky infographic on climate change this week. The Victorian Government created this video campaign to illustrate carbon emissions as black balloons a few years ago.

If there was a super compelling visual rendering of greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps that would help more people galvanize around carbon emissions reducing projects and technologies, like lower emissions cars, and energy efficient buildings. These types of projects and technologies are pretty boring, and unless there’s some way that they can be made more compelling, they’ll continued to be under investigated and under funded.

Another inherent problem with climate change and carbon emissions is that emissions can’t be seen by the human eye, so they are easy for people to dismiss. Pollutants that produce smog, or smoke, or make water dirty, are far easier to get people to rally behind, because there’s constant visual proof. There’s proof for carbon emissions, of course too, but you need instruments like Picarro’s emissions detecting sensors.

There’s already some websites and smart phone apps that are trying to make a similar idea to this carbon emissions viewer. There’s CO2GO, a mobile app that calculates in real-time the carbon emissions of a user while you’re on the go. And there’s 3D visualizations like the carbon emissions globe. But placing this data over the eye, so that it becomes ingrained in daily life, could be even more powerful.

O.K., so such a carbon emissions app wouldn’t be something you’d want to use or wear all the time. Or very often. It’d be more like an educational tool or a art project. But I think it would be important.

So calling all developers. There’s some data sourcing and UI work you’d need to figure out, but anyone up for a carbon emissions viewer Google Glass app?

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We’ve talked about Google Now integration coming to Chrome and thanks to a reference in the latest Chromium release, integration on Windows and Chrome OS is coming. Developer François Beaufort discovered the reference and posted about it on his Google+ profile. Found in chrome://flags of Chromium, users can now enable Google Now if they know the relevant server. Also, François shared the photo above of a Google Now extension that is currently inactive. With the cat now out of the bag, it’s only a matter of time before Google announces when Chrome OS and Windows users can expect to see Google Now in Chrome.

Via: The Verge
Source: Chromium Code Reviews

Come comment on this article: Google Now Making Its Way To Windows And Chrome OS, Dev Browser Shows

It’s no secret that Zynga is in trouble. The former giant of social gaming is now on the defensive as it lays off employees and closes studios around the world. It has to find a hit, preferably in mobile, to get back into the game. Before any of that happens, though, the social games maker might find itself with a new owner.

It’s being reported that Yahoo is currently in talks to buy Zynga, and the rumors have done nothing but good for the company. Zynga’s shares were up by 10 percent on Monday at the news of a potential buyout. The company’s share price has since receded four percent. As for Yahoo, buying Zynga would help the company on its way to refocusing its efforts on mobile.

That being said, some analysts are rightly skeptical of any such purchase. Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter says that a Zynga buyout probably won’t happen as he doesn’t “believe that [CEO] Mark Pincus wants to sell at this time.” He also says that Yahoo wouldn’t be interested in buying Zynga as “its strategy is to partner with varied content providers.”

That last statement is rather interesting in this particular context. Yahoo may not be buying Zynga, but it makes sense for the two to collaborate on a future project together. Yahoo has the audience for Zynga’s games, and Zynga could use another outlet to gain more players outside of Facebook and its own Zynga.com games portal.

Of course, all of this comes down to Zynga playing its cards right. 2012 was marked by a number of bad business decisions, but the social games maker seems to know what it’s doing this year. A partnership with Yahoo or any other major Internet brand could be incredibly lucrative for Zynga.

[Wall Street Journal via GamesIndustry International]

If you own an Xperia TL on AT&T, you’ll definitely want to keep an eye out for updates on your device in the next few days. AT&T has announced they’ll begin rolling out the Android 4.1 update to the TL, which includes all of our favorite Jelly Bean features like expanded notifications and Google Now. You’ll also get some new camera features, including a better auto mode and HDR, as well as AT&T’s DriveMode app, which auto replies to texts if the phone detects you’re driving over 25 mph.

Keep checking for the upgrade, and let us know in the comments if you’ve received the update.

source: AT&T

Come comment on this article: AT&T to begin rolling out Jelly Bean OTA update for Xperia TL

Spiral Genetics, a Seattle-based startup that helps researchers and others quickly analyze DNA sequence data, has raised $3 million in its first institutional round of funding.

The Series A round was led by venture firm DFJ and brings the startup’s total amount raised to $3.7 million. With the new funding, Adina Mangubat, Spiral Genetics co-founder and CEO, said her eight-person team plans to expand product development, as well as sales and marketing.

Mangubat said that when she and one of her co-founders, Becky Drees, first looked at the field of genomics, their plan was to launch a consumer-focused genetic testing service like 23andme. But as that company started launching its services, they decided to switch tacks.

“We were looking at the industry and we wanted to do something really impactful that involved genomics and computing,” she said. When they realized the speed and volume with which raw sequence data was being generated, she said, they spotted an opportunity in offering high-performance bioinformatics tools for analyzing it.

Companies like DNANexus also offer sequence analysis, and others might conduct the analysis in-house, but Mangubat said they envisioned a service that could shrink the turnaround time for researchers and others in industry deluged by data. Last month, Redwood City, Calif.-based Bina Technologies announced the commercial launch of its own genomic analysis platform and similarly touts a faster-than-ever service.

Mangubat and Drees teamed up with their third co-founder Jeremy Bruestle and started building a computing platform specifically intended to solve this kind of big data problem. Now, the company says, it can analyze a whole human genome in 3 hours, which is about 40 times faster than what it might take others.

Spiral Genetics’ customers run the gamut from academic researchers to corporations, Mangubat said. For example, while some clients may use their bioinformatics tool to tackle childhood cancer, others in agrigenomics could use it to sequence different strains of corn.

Along with the new funding, Spiral Genetics announced a new partnership with Omicia, an Emeryville, Calif.-based provider of clinical genome sequence interpretation tools.

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People see your language as a reflection of your competence. Make lots of mistakes in your e-mails, reports, and other documents, and you’ll come across as uneducated and uninformed. Others will hesitate to trust your recommendation to launch a resource-intensive project, for example, or to buy goods or services. They’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Consider pronouns. Certain errors will predictably get you in trouble: “Just keep this matter between you and I,” for instance, and “Tom and her will run the meeting.”

Write instead: “Just keep this matter between you and me.” And: “She and Tom will run the meeting.”

The rule, very simply, is that I, we, he, she, and they are subjects of clauses — as in “Leslie and I were delighted to work with you.” Me, us, him, her, and them are objects of either verbs or prepositions: “You might want to consult with Leslie and me.” In the compound phrasings, try leaving out Leslie and — and you’ll know the correct form immediately.

Here are two other common problems to watch out for:

1. Subject-verb disagreement. A verb must agree in person and number with its subject.

I am aware of that.
You are aware of that.
Pat is aware of that.
We are all aware of that.

But syntax can make things tricky.

There is poses a problem because There appears to be the subject. It’s not. It’s what grammarians call an expletive — a word that stands in for the subject in an inverted sentence. The true subject follows the verb. So don’t write, “There is always risk and liability considerations.” Use are — your subject is considerations.

2. Double negatives. A double negative is easy to recognize in spoken dialect (“We didn’t have no choice”), but the problem can be more subtle in writing. Watch for the word not plus another word with a negative sense. Don’t write, “We couldn’t scarcely manage to keep up with the demand.” Write instead, “We could scarcely manage to keep up with the demand.”

How can you brush up on your grammar?
Read first-rate nonfiction — this helps you cultivate an appreciation of the skills you’re trying to acquire. Ask knowledgeable colleagues to proof your material and explain their corrections. And consult guides on grammar and usage to distinguish between the real rules and the artificial ones that plague so much writing.

For example, were you told in school never to begin a sentence with a conjunction? So was I. But look at all the Ands and Buts that begin sentences in high-quality prose. They’re everywhere. As sentence-starters, these words keep readers going smoothly with the train of thought. They’re short, sharp, and fleet. They don’t break any real rules — and they never have.

Grammatically, there’s nothing wrong with using Additionally and However as sentence-starters. But stylistically, they’re inferior. Multisyllabic connectors don’t join as cleanly and as tightly as monosyllables do.

It’s also perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. The “rule” that you shouldn’t is a misbegotten notion based on Latin syntax and expounded by a few (a very few) 19th-century writers. Grammarians have long since dismissed it as ill-founded and unnecessary. Often a sentence with a terminal preposition sounds far more natural than the same sentence forced into avoiding one. Consider: What will the new product be used for? versus For what purpose will the new product be used?

Do you worry that your readers will think a sentence-starting conjunction or a sentence-ending preposition is wrong? They won’t even notice it. Good style gets readers focused on your clear, concise message. Bad style draws attention to itself.

This is the fourth post in Bryan A. Garner’s blog series on business writing. The series draws on advice in Garner’s new HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.

Post 1: Don’t Anesthetize Your Colleagues with Bad Writing

Post 2: A Well-Crafted Letter Still Gets the Job Done

Post 3: Write E-Mails That People Won’t Ignore

It’s taken a while but it seems that Android tablets are finally giving the iPad some real competition. The latest tablet shipment forecast from IDC projects that Android will take a 48.8% share of the tablet market in 2013, a significant jump from the 41.5% share of the market the platform held in IDC’s previous projection. The rise of Android in the tablet realm comes at the expense of Apple (AAPL), which IDC projects will hold a 46% share of the tablet market in 2013, a decline of five percentage points from the 51% market share it held in 2012.

Continue reading…

Is it possible that you are unwittingly outing yourself – as gay, as a conservative, as Muslim, or as a pot smoker – by simply liking stuff on Facebook?

Sure, you could easily do this by liking the “Gay Men’s Alliance for Rolling Joints #420″ page (I don’t think this really exists, just an example). But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people being able to accurately predict your lifestyle choices and personality traits by simply analyzing the combination of things you like on Facebook.

And by doing that, bring to light things that you may have purposefully tried to keep hidden.

Have you ever had a problem or been put in an awkward situation because of something you liked on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

You may not think that liking a page like “that’s going in my status when I get home” would allow people to infer that you’re a teetotaler, or that liking the Weight Watchers page tips off that you’re in a relationship, but new research suggests that your likes (even the ones you may find innocuous) are much more telling than you may think.

Baby, you like that?

The study comes to us from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal (PNAS). Researchers looked at over 58,000 Facebook users and found that they were able to accurately predict “a range of highly sensitive personal attributes,” including things like ethnicity, religious affiliations, sexual orientation, intelligence, drug use, political views, and more, by simply analyzing the subject’s likes on the site.

For instance, using Facebook likes, the researchers were able to correctly categorize white vs. black 95% of the time and male vs. female 93% of the time. They were correct in their predictions about a users’ sexual orientation over 80% of the time, and could distinguish between Christianity vs. Islam in 82% of the circumstances.

And as you may expect, the researchers were more accurate with their predictions when they had more likes to work with.

“[E]ven knowing a single random Like for a given user can result in nonnegligible prediction accuracy. Knowing further likes increases the accuracy but with diminishing returns from each additional piece of information.”

So simply knowing one thing that you like on Facebook could help someone determine a fact about you, like your age, gender, or sexual orientation. And the more likes that are available, the more likely someone is going to be able to predict many of your attributes (up to a certain point).

Succinctly put, “individual traits and attributes can be predicted to a high degree of accuracy based on records of users’ likes.”

What’s interesting is how the researchers made their inferences. “Few users were associated with Likes explicitly revealing their attributes,” according to the study. That means that the likes that tipped off the analysts weren’t blatant declarations of personality and lifestyle traits. For example, less the 5% of users that the analysts predicted to be gay liked specifically gay groups like “Being Gay” or “I love being gay.” The analyst’s predictions were based on much more subtle indicators such as liking pages for “Britney Spears” or “Desperate Housewives.”

In other words, your likes betray you, good ladies and sirs.

The researchers outline their nghtmare scenario as such:

On the other hand, the predictability of individual attributes from digital records of behavior may have considerable negative implications, because it can easily be applied to large numbers of people without obtaining their individual consent and without them noticing. Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one’s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation, or political views that an individual may not have intended to share.

One can imagine situations in which such predictions, even if incorrect, could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life. Importantly, given the ever-increasing amount of digital traces people leave behind, it becomes difficult for individuals to control which of their attributes are being revealed. For example, merely avoiding explicitly homosexual content may be insufficient to prevent others from discovering one’s sexual orientation

Of course, it’s important to note that this is in no way exclusive to Facebook likes.

“Similarity between Facebook Likes and other widespread kinds of digital records, such as browsing histories, search queries, or purchase histories suggests that the potential to reveal users’ attributes is unlikely to be limited to likes,” they say.

But likes are unique in that, most of the time, the information in much more available to the public than a browsing history, for example. Facebook has over a billion monthly active users, and a good number of them like hundreds and even thousands of individual items of content on the site. It’s interesting (and probably unnerving to many people) that analysts were able to determine many personality traits with such accuracy simply by combing through a users’ liking habits.

An outing on Facebook

Likes aren’t the only kind of Facebook action that can “out” someone, exposing information that they wanted to keep private to the wrong people.

Last October, we talked about a privacy flaw inside Facebook’s Groups that led to two gay college students being outed to their families.

As the story goes, the two University of Texas students were added to a Facebook group called “Queer Chorus” by the group’s creator. As you’re probably aware, Facebook allows friends to add other friends to groups that they create.

When the two students were added, Facebook generated a story about the event, which was published on their parents’ news feeds. Although both students had customized privacy settings that disallowed their parents from seeing certain posts, this story that they had been added to the “Queer Chorus” group somehow made it to their parents eyes.

How?

Simple. There are three types of groups that users can create on Facebook: Open, Closed, and Secret. And Facebook allows for friends to see that you’ve been added to Open and Closed groups.

“Similar to being tagged in a photo, you can only be added to a group by one of your friends. When a friend adds you to a group, a story in the group (and in news feed for Open or Closed groups) will indicate that your friend has added you to a group,” says Facebook.

“When a friend adds you to a group, you’ll get a notification right away, [and] you can leave a group anytime. To do so, just go to the group page and click “Leave Group” in the right-hand column. Once you leave a group, you can’t be added by anyone else unless you explicitly request to be re-added.”

So, you can leave the group if you want. But there’s nothing to stop people from seeing that you were added to it (assuming it’s an open or closed group).

There’s also a bit of misinformation when it comes to the notifications users receive when they’re added to a group. The notifications can make it seem like the user was only invited, when in fact they can appear in friends’ news feeds as having been “added.”

Sounds a bit anecdotal, I know. But it’s just another example of how non-direct, contextual info derived from Facebook actions can be used to infer certain things about a user – often at a heavy price to that user.

Likes, and privacy by obscurity

As you probably know (although there’s a chance you haven’t received it yet), Facebook unveiled their new Graph Search product in January. With Graph Search Facebook is looking to index all of the data on their massive graph and make it easily searchable and cross-reference-able.

With the unveiling of any new product, especially one involving search, Facebook is going to come under fire from those concerned with privacy. Facebook has made a point to reassure users that Graph Search will in no way affect their privacy. And in a way, Facebook is being completely genuine here. Basically, if a random person could find the info before Graph Search, they’ll be able to find it with Graph Search. If they couldn’t find it before, Graph Search won’t just suddenly throw it out in the open.

Facebook is not changing any of the privacy details on any of your posts, photos, or likes. You can trust them on that.

But there is something to the privacy concerns revolving around Graph Search. First, Facebook removed the ability for users to opt out of being featured in search results. This happened back in December, well before Facebook announced Graph Search.

“Everyone used to have a setting called ‘Who can look up my timeline by name,’ which controlled if someone could be found when other people typed their name into the Facebook search bar. The setting was very limited in scope, and didn’t prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site,” said Facebook at the time.

Because of this “limited scope,” Facebook retired the setting. Now, everyone can be found with Facebook search. And since Graph Search is powered by “likes,” that means that Graph Search has made it easier for people to find information about you and your likes.

Here’s how I explained the concept of privacy by obscurity then:

It’s not that any of your information is any more public than it already was. Once again, Facebook isn’t lying about that. You’ll probably be found more often simply because Graph Search is a better search tool that makes it easier to find stuff.

Previously, Facebook users could rest on the principle of security through obscurity (or privacy by obscurity, for our purposes). That line of thinking goes something like this:

“Sure, I have some public information out there. But unless someone is specifically looking for it or for me, it’s kind of hard to find.”

And that line of thinking is true, for most circumstances. If I wanted to find you, I would have to be actively looking for you. There was no real, reliable way to simply stumble upon your Facebook profile (with consistency), and definitely no way to find you based on your likes, photos, and interests.

Now there is, of course. If I search “people from Hoboken that like Bon Jovi,” your name may pop up. I don’t know you, and I never would have organically searched for you. But Graph Search has led me to you, and your adorable puppy photos, and information on your penchant for fine wines and spirits. I basically know you now.

So, what can you do about it? Luckily for you, Facebook provides a way to prevent other users from determining things about you based on your likes. All you have to do edit the visibility of your likes. Just go to your settings, access you likes, and you’ll find that each like group has an option to make itself private. This process can be tedious, but if you want to stop people from knowing everything that you like and making inferences from it, this is pretty much the only way. Other than quitting Facebook.

Final Thoughts

Of course, the big issue of the study is that this information was inferred from likes, not just any information available on Facebook. Even if you choose to leave the “religion” or “interested in” sections of your About page blank, there’s a chance that those things could be discovered simply by looking at public info on your likes.

If you’re concerned about your likes giving you away, one simple but somewhat tedious solution involves changing the visibility of your likes – something that more people may be thinking about anyway thanks to Facebook’s new Graph Search. Another solution could be to simply be more careful with what you like. If you don’t want people to know/think that you’re a strict Christian, maybe you should stay away from liking pages that you think would tip it off.

But the bottom line is that likes are one of the vertebrae in the backbone of Facebook. Likes make the world go round. And it’s nearly impossible to have a real Facebook experience without liking things. You can fine tune your privacy all you want (and that’s strongly suggested), but in the end, this is Facebook’s bread and butter. Being surprised that Facebook likes could possibly be telling of your personality is like being surprised that someone could infer your team allegiance from your Green Bay Packers jersey and that giant block of cheese on your head.

Do you think about how people judge you based on what you like on Facebook? If so, do you care? Are you concerned about people discovering things through likes that you may have thought was hidden? Let us know in the comments.

Apple entered the small slate market with its iPad mini but less expensive Android tablets are poised to soon surpass iPad sales. So says IDC, which on Tuesday released a quarterly update to its Worldwide Tablet Tracker report. By the end of 2013, IDC says, Android tablets will take 48.8 percent of the market compared to 46 percent for Apple’s iPad. That, of course, doesn’t leave much room for Microsoft Windows tablets.

The two factors driving Android’s tablet rise are costs and size. Apple’s iPad starts at $329 for a 16 GB Wi-Fi model while tablets with similar hardware running Google’s Android software can be had for half that cost. It’s a valid argument to suggest that consumers may get a better experience with the more expensive iPad, but if $329 isn’t in a consumer’s budget when tablet shopping, a lower-priced Android may land in the shopping cart.

Apple was also a little late to the small slate market. Decent Android tablets sized at 7 inches were available as far back in 2010; a time when Apple publicly squashed the idea of a tablet in this size. We all know how the company changed its tune: After reading articles and reader comments on the merits of a 7-inch tablet, Apple executives realized there was indeed a market for these. And in late 2012, the iPad mini arrived, with its 7.85-inch screen.

IDC’s data suggests that one in two tablets shipping this quarter are 8 inches or less in size, confirming a recent report from Display Search. The research firm that studies display panel shipments — and the implications of those numbers — says the iPad mini will outsell larger iPads this year.  IDC Research Analyst Jitesh Ubrani echoes the usability of small slates that I noted in 2010: ”Vendors are moving quickly to compete in this space as consumers realize that these small devices are often more ideal than larger tablets for their daily consumption habits.”

Where does that leave Microsoft Windows tablets? IDC doesn’t hold out much hope for Windows RT, forecasting a dismal 2.7 percent of the tablet market by 2017. I agree with IDC here because tablets running the full version of Windows 8 with the same battery life as RT devices can be had for nearly the same price. There’s simply not a huge market for Windows RT without a drastic price drop in the devices.

Windows 7 and 8 tablets, however, should eke out some gains over Android and iOS tablets over the next five years, says IDC. These could account for 7.4 percent of the tablet market by 2017. If Microsoft continues to evolve the platform at the same time hardware improves, I think 10 percent (or more) of the market is actually possible by then.

Ultimately, Apple doesn’t care about its overall market share provided it continues to rake in massive profits. That’s a good strategy, but I’m curious to see how the sales mix of iPads and iPad mini devices affects Apple’s profit margin in tablets. Surely the ASP, or average selling price, will decline due to the lower-priced iPad mini. Can Apple make it up in volume?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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