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As Nate Silver discussed earlier today at SXSW in Austin on Sunday, the polarization of cable news and politics means that if you’re a serious Rachel Maddow fan, there’s only a tiny chance that you also vote Republican, and the same is true of Sean Hannity listeners and chances they’ll go for Democrats.

But as we change where we get our news and turn to places like Twitter for information and verification of facts, it’s important to ask how that polarization will translate to social media – if it will at all. Several journalists discussing the future of news dissemination (something we’ll also be discussing at paidContent Live in April) tied these issues to those of crowdsourced news, particularly in the Middle East, when the tensions between accuracy and access are most apparent.

NBC correspondant Ayman Mohyeldin made an interesting argument about verification, arguing that people should be free to select the accounts they want to follow and personally decide whether to trust that information or not, just as they tune into particular cable shows in the United States and apply their own sense of skepticism to Maddow and Hannity.

“You ultimately choose which channels to watch,” he said. “There’s no reason that should be different in who you follow.”

The argument puts a good deal of trust in the user’s judgement and takes some pressure off journalists or random people on Twitter to present accurate information, but it’s an idea that fellow panelist Andy Carvin has popularized to much controversy recently. The idea came under fire during the spread of misinformation on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, and certainly has its detractors:

The end user is responsible for deciding who they trust, @AymanM says. True, but most don’t have the expertise to decide. #nextnews #sxsw—
Eric Carvin (@EricCarvin) March 10, 2013

But it’s a good reminder that even if we think of cable news as being particularly polarizing right now, news consumption and opinions on Twitter might not be all that different.

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Nate Silver, writer for the New York Times and America’s favorite nerd, took the stage in Austin at SXSW on Sunday to talk about his favorite topic: data. Needless to say, Silver’s had a few wins this year in that department.

He recently published a book called The Signal and the Noise that looks at the role data plays in our daily lives and the way we can use it to better understand the world around us. But speaking at a breakneck speed in front of a large audience in Austin on Sunday, Silver addressed some fairly random topics and questions:

1. Why the competition matters

“I’ve tried to work in fields like politics and baseball where the competition is not very good.” Silver said the lesson is important for startups, too: if you’re doing the same service that 98 percent of your competitors provide, there’s less room for growth.

2. On moving

“There were too many cool people moving to Brooklyn, so I had to move back to Manhattan.”

3. Who would play Nate Silver if they make a FiveThirtyEight movie

“I really hope they don’t make a movie about me. But I would think Brad Pitt. In terms of appearances.”

4. How he got his start

“Initially when I was a ten-year old I really wanted to build my fantasy baseball league. And I kept drafting … really crappy players and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t win. So with me it’s often been about competition, about wanting to win my NCAA tournament pool or my fantasy league.”

5. On fame

“Ironically I think I’m getting way too much credit now,” Silver says. “We’re very results-oriented as a society.” Silver said he’ll become uncomfortable if FiveThirtyEight ever discourages people from voting as the predictions improve, something he’s discussed before.

6. On the best way to pick a March Madness bracket:

“Travel distance matters a lot to performance.” Silver said that FiveThirtyEight does March Madness bracket predictions, but noted that people filling out their own should remember the correlation between travel distance and performance.

7. On one of the hardest things to predict:

“We had a formula that tries to predict the numbers and it’s only about 70 percent right,” Silver said of the Oscars. “That’s a field where you don’t have very good data available.”

8. Why he’s misunderstood by critics

“I think sometimes people mistake what I do as someone who’s saying everything we do is predicable…. Whereas really I’m more of a skeptic of prediction,” he said. “What I’m actually doing is taking polls and averaging them and the fact that it’s so surprising says a lot about where we have to go in terms of science and math.”

9. The strangest model he’s ever been pitched on

“I got pitched one time by a guy who works for a cricket team in India and thinks there can be like a Moneyball revolution in Indian cricket. I wasn’t too psyched about that.”

10. One piece of data he uses to make decisions in everyday life

“Don’t fly out of JFK in New York in the evening in the summer. If you fly out in the morning, and I’m not a morning person, but you probably have a much better chance of not having delays cascade across the system.”

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When it comes to building out the broadband infrastructure, the data networks and the processing for the internet of things, we’re going to have to make some changes. That’s the message I got from conversations with a variety of people and from panels at South by Southwest in Austin this weekend.

It’s the network, stupid

When considering washing machines that tweet, inventory-tracking sensors that send a few pieces of data or home health monitoring systems that are tracking someone’s heartbeat, most people assume the data is so small that the network can handle it. But today’s networks are designed to fulfill very different scenarios.

However, Joe Weinman, the SVP of cloud services and strategy at Telx, noted that the old broadcast model employed by cellular networks (and even to an extent wireline networks) focuses on sending a piece of content down to many. In some cases it’s one piece of content down to one person, but with the internet of things the devices at the edge are sending many different chunks of data up to the core.

That could require new ways of designing networks with a focus on uploads. There’s another element as well that wasn’t discussed too much at the panel, and that was the issue of quality of service and latency. In the heart monitoring example, that’s data that should have priority over other network traffic because it needs real-time monitoring. However, if it’s just gathering information for diagnostic purposes, then it’s fine if that traffic takes a back seat to other bits.

Processing may find a new home

The network is probably the most important (and is definitely the most expensive) element of the internet of things infrastructure, but another ongoing debate is about where the information collected by the thousands (millions?) of sensors we’ll connect will be turned into action or aggregated to form meaningful insight. Namely, will the processing happen in the cloud, or will it happen locally?

Wael Diab, senior technical director at Broadcom’s infrastructure and networking group, noted that the pendulum has swung back and forth between centralized and distributed processing since the mainframe. But what’s worth noting about the internet of things is that there will need to be both — and where the processing takes place will be dynamic depending on several factors.

For example, if the promise of a truly universal internet of things ever occurs (as opposed to siloed areas of connectivity in the medical space, the home, the car etc) then devices might send certain types of data to a local hub in a medical or automotive setting because it’s more secure or cheaper, but take advantage of the cloud and wireline broadband in the home or work setting.

What’s almost universal among people I’ve discussed this with is that the technology to make the internet of things possible has been around for a while. The big change is now that people are able to mediate the lack of standards and interoperability in the underlying technologies using the web via a smartphone.

But that won’t be enough to truly created a connected world with services that span different devices — the promised internet of things.

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Ed. note: This post was originally published on the Let's Move! website. You can see that post here.

Tomorrow at 11:05ET, I'll answer some questions about @letsmove & how we can improve the health of our kids. Join with #AskFLOTUS ­mo

— FLOTUS (@FLOTUS) March 10, 2013

To celebrate the third anniversary of Let’s Move!, First Lady Michelle Obama traveled around the country to highlight healthy changes being made in schools, towns and businesses across America.

Tomorrow, we're continuing the celebration on Twitter to discuss the First Lady's initiative to ensure that all our children grow up healthy and reach their full potential.

read more

Here’s how things used to work, New York Times media columnist David Carr said in a keynote at SXSW Sunday: People would leave college, get a job, get married, reproduce, go to IKEA and “start to worry what the school system was about.” So they’d subscribe to a newspaper.

Nowadays, things are different: People “may practice the art of reproduction, but they don’t do a great deal of it … they might not get a job. And they might not buy a house and they might not go to IKEA and they might not need to know what’s going on in the school system … the other thing they might not do: Get a paper.”

Carr recalled being at SXSW two years ago when the New York Times debuted its paywall. “I remember some of the things people said,” he said. “The theologists of free — the spiritual belief in the power of free. [These people believe that] you keep things free, and eventually somebody will clack two coconuts together and you’ll get rich.

“We were told that people would never give us money, that we priced it way too expensively … the fact that it was leaky was viewed as silly, the fact that you could do a workaround was viewed as silly. We did that on purpose. If you like it so much that you’re willing to do a hack around a URL just to get a peek under our dress … eventually you’re going to give us some money.”

Carr, who described his job as “writing about people who write about people who do things,” said that metrics inspire “neurosis” in him. “Any time you write about newspapers, it’s click death,” he said. “I decided that, to do my job, I can’t always pay attention to metrics … I don’t want to do an Andrew Sullivan. He’s a brave and wonderful guy and he is totally kicking ass, but I don’t want to be out there all by myself with a tip jar.

“I’d rather be holding hands with Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd … I can remember when we first looked at a paywall in 2005, Times Select. They were going to put only the business columnists and the op-ed columnists behind the paywall. I’d been a business columnist for, like, two months and I was like, Jesus Christ, don’t put me back there. … This time I’m holding hands with the entire wingspan of the New York Times, we’re all holding hands together jumping across the line, and it’s going pretty well.”

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When Anita Sarkeesian began raising money via Kickstarter last year for a project analyzing gender in video games, she received support from almost 7,000 backers — raising over $150,000.

She also got death threats.

In starting the Tropes vs. Women In Video Games project, Sarkeesian, founder of the Feminist Frequency video blog, committed the crime of looking to produce and research a series of YouTube videos questioning why the roles female characters play in mainstream gaming are problematic at best and insulting at worst.

Everything would have been fine, if 4Chan hadn’t found out about it, and declared troll war upon her. The New York Times summarized the abuse she received as a result of the campaign:

Angry fumers tried to hack her Twitter and Google accounts; they e-mailed her drawings of her being raped by video game characters; one even created a Flash game where you clicked the mouse and bruises and welts appeared on her face.

Sarkeesian ended up giving a TEDxWomen talk about the experience of being targeted by a cybermob, and specifically how (transforming the language of games to a new purpose), the men harrassing her saw themselves as heroic victims taking on a great injustice, ”and they cast me in the role of the villain.”

This campaign of abuse did give the project greater exposure, including coverage on outlets like Kotaku, Boing Boing, ThinkProgress and (as mentioned above) the New York Times. But the price of this publicity was incredibly high.

After a delay caused in part by Sarkeesian’s decision to expand the project beyond its original scope (given that she initially only intended to raise $6,000 to fund the research and production of Tropes vs. Women), the first episode launched this week.

At nearly 24 minutes (making it part of the growing trend in lengthier YouTube content), “Damsels in Distress: Part 1″ examines the frequency with which female characters in video games get kidnapped — the foundation upon which classic games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are based.

In perhaps a wise move to avoid a repeat of what happened with the original Kickstarter pitch, YouTube ratings and comments on Episode 1 are disabled; to understand why, just look at this Gameranx compilation of what’s being said across various blogs about it.

However, so far the first episode has racked up over 500,000 views in just a few days, and while trolls were always unavoidable, it’s also inspiring reasoned debate over the episode and Sarkeesian’s approach to the subject.  And that’s the version of the conversation that should be had — because that’s the version which could lead to real change for the video game industry.

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After I shelled out something like $200 for a Kinect bundle that I ended up shoving in a closet, the team at 4tiitoo may have finally given me a reason to dig the thing out. The Munich-based company recently kicked off a Kickstarter campaign to let Kinect owners control their PCs with little more than some subtle glances, thanks to a $50 add-on they’re calling the eyeCharm.

But first, a bit of back story — 4tiitoo is the company behind NUIA, a software suite that makes it possible for PCs to interpret eye movements and staring as valid inputs. 4tiitoo has shown off a slew of applications that have been modified to accept this new kind of input, from eye-tracking versions of games like Angry Birds and perennial geek favorite Minecraft to utilities like VLC Media Player.

So far, though, those eye-friendly apps have mostly been demoed with pricey hardware courtesy of the Swedish camera buffs at Tobii. They’re not exactly meant for consumer use, so crafting a reasonably inexpensive add-on for a popular console accessory is a rather savvy move.

Speaking of the add-on, the eyeCharm itself is actually rather modest — it’s essentially a large plastic clip that sticks onto the Kinect to provide “the necessary optics and special infrared illumination” to properly track people’s eyes. Once the included setup software has been run, users can attempt to navigate Windows 7 or 8 (Windows 8 and some of its touch-tailored UI elements seems to be easier to deal with), or fire up some of the included NUIA-enabled apps that backers get as part of the deal.

More importantly, all but the cheapest backers get access to the NUIA SDK, so they can (hopefully) get cracking on the next generation of eye-tracking PC apps. 4tiitoo is looking to collect a total of $100,000 in funding and is currently hovering just under $10,000 in contributions after two days.

I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft’s original vision of full-body gaming is one that hasn’t yet been fully realized, but the Kinect has emerged as an intriguing tool for developers and entrepreneurs alike — startups like Personify and Disrupt Battlefield alum Kinobi were quick to embrace the technology, and Microsoft has sought to nurture those Kinect-centric ventures. If some particularly sticky rumors hold true, the next Xbox will be so reliant on the Kinect concept that an upgraded Kinect will come with each console, so 4tiitoo’s vision for reshaping how the masses interact with computers could become a reality sooner rather than later.

As brands consider their digital marketing strategies, one thing they have to think about is the way they use language online. Proclaiming that “if technology is a pimp, our language is its favorite bitch,” panelists at SXSW on Sunday offered a few communication tips for brands online.

Don’t wait for style guides to catch up

According to Merriam-Webster, “email” should have a hyphen. But that doesn’t mean you should follow the rule. “Even if people don’t quite understand the rule, they’re still going to make a judgment,” said Gail Marie, content editor at ad agency McKinney.

“I don’t think at a digital agency we should be hyphenating ‘email,’ no matter what the dictionary says,” Kristina Eastham, communications manager at digital ad agency Digitaria, said. Similarly, she suggested that using “Web site” instead of “website” can be a marker of uncoolness.

The new sign you’ve made it: You invented a word

“Historically, brands have gained marketing fame by bastardizing English,” Eastham said, mentioning examples like Apple’s “Think different,” the “Got Milk?” campaign and “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Now, she said, the biggest sign of success is “if you can work a word into the English language based on your brand or technology” — Googling, friending, liking. “When somebody says ‘Instagram that,’ everybody knows what it means.”

Sean Carton, who teaches about digital communication at the University of Baltimore, noted that Facebook has actually changed the definition of the word “friend.” “Ninety-nine percent of the people you’ve friended are not your friends in the traditional sense,” he said. “They’re just not your enemies.”

Some tech concepts still lack words. “I don’t know what to say when someone writes me an email to introduce me to someone I haven’t met,” Eastham said. “I hate saying, ‘Nice to ‘meet’ you.’ I think it sounds so tacky.”

Carton expressed the desire for a shorter way to say “WWW.” He’s heard someone try “triple dubs,” but perhaps not surprisingly, that hasn’t caught on.

A mistake not to delete…. his first name is Cory. RT @acarvin: Corey Booker on making mistakes on Twitter: never delete your tweets. #sxsw—
Richard Robbins (@rich1) March 10, 2013

What’s next: Text becomes visual

With the rise of visual forms of expression like Tumblr, Instagram, animated GIFs and Vine, brands have to learn to write short and differently (just when you thought you mastered 140 characters…) Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider said he’s seeing more and more emojis in reader comments on Twitter, and if Google Glass takes off we’ll see text overlaid on real life experiences.

Images sources: Mlkshk, someecards

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Samsung owned the Oscars, by running a series of long commercials about a software company using Galaxy S3s and Note IIs to create game Unicorn Apocalypse. The TV spots were compelling marketing. You simply must watch the 90-second spot featuring filmmaker Tim Burton looking to make zombie unicorn movie “Horn of Darkness”.

Unicorn Apocalypse went live on Google Play today (South Korean time). The “game is the winner of Samsung’s contest to create the game discussed in the Samsung TV commercials”, the company explains. “As the world crumbles and burns, a lone unicorn wreaks havoc on the last of humanity”. Reviewers wreak havoc on the game, with 80 one stars out of 142, as I post. Hey, but they are polarized. Another 37 give Unicorn Apocalypse five stars.

Cody Mills is in the one-star club: “After about a minute of gameplay, you fall off the edge and there’s just fire. You still collect points, but the unicorn isn’t on the screen”. Nick Cruz: “Awesome. From commercial to Game!! Samsung is the best!!” He gives five stars.

Ivy Hawk makes the point I would otherwise: “If you’re going to make a series of commercials and then release the game they advertise, you have to know significant quality is expected. This game is nothing more than another poor ripoff of Robot Unicorn Attack”.

Michael Welch, who gives five stars, is more forgiving: “Have a sense of humor people. Games based on TV shows and movies are universally bad. Did you really expect a game based on a TV commercial to be perfect? Yes it has bugs but it is mildly entertaining and at least has novelty value. Ironic how many of the complainers here are using HTC, LG, and Motorola phones. Maybe that’s your problem. You need a Samsung!”

And you? What do you think? I’ll give Unicorn Apocalypse a go later. Right now, my wife asks I get off the computer and go outside. What? There’s life out there?

If you like technology, brisket and huge crowds of harried people, there’s no better place to be this weekend than SXSW. We’ve got five of our writers on the ground dodging raindrops and wacky startups in Austin, Texas, and here’s what they’ve found. (Check out this post for an idea of what we expected going into the legendary event.)

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To connect devices to the internet, developers shouldn’t have to keep reinventing wheel. That’s the message from Hugo Fiennes, the CEO and co-founder of Electric Imp. Electric Imp is a startup building a card that brings all the connectivity needed to connect a device to the internet. It also has a cloud backend that lets people build apps that will take advantage of that connected device.

At the GigaOM internet of things meetup last week, Fiennes showed off a candy dispenser that was connected to the web. When someone tweeted @electricimp or #electricimp it would dispense candy in an amount that related to the number of Twitter followers the person tweeting had. As you can see in the video below, it was a feature that Fiennes quickly had to turn off.

But outside of novelty devices, Fiennes’ argument was that so far the internet of things hasn’t taken off — not because it wasn’t cheap enough, but because people building products weren’t focused on enchanting the user (and connectivity was hard). Check it out.

If you liked this talk, check out the others on defining the internet of things, the future of our devices, how to design apps for the internet of things and security. Or come to our next internet of things meetup in Boulder, Colo., next week.

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The problem with GT cars here in the U.S. is that for some reason, they’re never really as good as we want them to be. They all have high-style and big power, but they’re a compromise between a true sports car and a full-on open road car. Carlos Lago recently got his hands on the new 2013 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT to see just how good this newly revamped super-Benz really is. Check it out after the jump.

Source: MotorTrend.com

Many would be shocked to know that researchers analyze and gather insights from only 1 percent of the world’s data. That 1 percent of analyzed data has been the only driver of innovation and insights in what we now know as “big data.” The other 99 percent of the 1 quintillion bytes of data that is collected every day (according to a recent study from IDC) remains untouched.

We all know that big data has so much promise. For a very large number of problems today, the effective use of data is a bottleneck. The drug discovery problem is more about data than chemistry. The discovery of new energy sources is more about data than geology. It’s the same for tracking terrorists, detecting fraud, and more.

Today, we recognize that these, and many other critical global issues, are all data problems. This fact alone has given rise to a huge investment into big data, created the hottest job title around –data scientist — and propelled the valuations of private data analytics providers into the billions. However, imagine the endless possibilities when the world is operating on the insights gathered from 100 percent of its data.

Realizations

Where do you start when you have a data set as large as the human genome, for example, or President Obama’s recent call to map the human brain? To achieve the breakthroughs we need to address the world’s most perplexing problems, we need to fundamentally change the way we gain knowledge from data. Here’s what we need to start thinking about:

• Starting with queries is a dead end: Queries are not inherently bad. In fact, they are essential once you know what question to ask. That’s the key: the flaw is starting with queries in the hope that they will uncover a needle in the massive digital haystack. (Spoiler alert: they won’t.)
• Data has a cost: Storing data is no longer expensive, in most cases. Even querying large amounts of data is becoming more cost effective with tools like Hadoop and Amazon’s Redshift. This is just the hard cost side of the equation, though.
• Insights are value: The only reason why we bear the cost is because we believe that data has insights that unlock value. Ultimately, the undiscovered insights that organizations miss have a much higher cost in terms of being able to solve big problems quickly, accelerate innovation and drive growth. The cost of data collection can be high, but the cost of ineffectual analysis is even higher. The tools for getting at insights don’t exist today. Today, we rely on very smart human beings to come up hypotheses and use our tools to validate — or invalidate — those hypotheses. This is a flawed strategy since it relies on (arguably smart) guesswork.
• You have the right data today: There’s often a belief that, “If we only had more data, we could get the answer we’re looking for.” Far too much time and money is wasted collecting new data when more can be done with the data already at hand. For example, Ayasdi recently published a study in Nature Scientific Reports that shows important new insights from a 12-year-old breast cancer study that had been thoroughly analyzed for over a decade.

Big bata” is the beginning, not the end

I’m very concerned that the growing hype around the term big data has set us all up for disappointment. Query-based analysis is fine for a certain class of problems, but it will never be able to deliver on the expectations the market has for big data.

We are on the cusp of critical breakthroughs in cancer research, energy exploration, drug discovery, financial fraud detection and more. It would be a crime if the passion, interest and dollars invested to solve critical global problems like these were sidetracked by a “big data bubble.”

We can and should expect more from data analysis, and we need to recognize the capabilities that the next generation of solutions must be able to deliver:

• Empower domain experts: The world cannot produce data scientists fast enough to scale to the size of the problem set. Let’s stop developing tools just for them. Instead, we need to develop tools for the business users: biologists, geologists, security analysts and the like. They understand the context of the business problem better than anyone, but might not be up to date with the latest in technology or mathematics.
• Accelerate discovery: We need to get to critical insights faster. The promise of big data is to “operate at the speed of thought.” It turns out that the speed of thought is not that fast. If we depend on this approach, then we will never get to the critical insights quickly enough because we’ll never be able to ask all of the questions of all of the data.
• Marriage of man and machine: To get to those insights faster, we need to invest in machine intelligence. We need machines to do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to finding the clusters, connections and relationships between data points that gives business users a much better starting point to begin discovering insights. In fact, algorithmic discovery approaches can solve these problems by looking for rare, but statistically significant signals in large datasets that humans would never be able to find. For example, in a recent study, previously unreported drug side effects were found by algorithmically searching through web search engine logs.
• Analyze data in all its forms: It’s understood that researchers need to analyze both structured and unstructured data. We need to recognize the diversity and depth of unstructured data: text in all languages, voice, video and facial recognition.

When it comes to the evolution of big data, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. It stands to reason that if we continue to analyze 1 percent of data, then we’ll only tap into 1 percent of it’s potential. If we’re able to analyze the other 99 percent, then think about all of the ways that we can change the world. We can accelerate economic growth, cure cancer and other diseases, reduce the risk of terrorist attacks, and many other big ticket challenges that we’re faced with.

That’s something that we can all rally around.

Gurjeet Singht is the co-founder and CEO of Ayasdi, an insight discovery platform built on topological data analysis technology. He will be speaking at Structure: Data, March 20-21 in New York.

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Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Sergey Lavrentev.

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Serious Sam 3: BFE is probably the only worthy remnant of a golden era of gaming, showing people all over the world how things were done and why today’s games are heading on the wrong path.

Somewhere along the line games ceased to be just pure entertainment, and tried to become much more.

The change was gradual and everyone thou… (read more)

What happens if you can’t believe your own dashboard?  Whether it’s for your car, your plane or your computing cloud, it’s not a good thing if the console that’s supposed to tell you what’s really going on just isn’t doing so.

That’s why the recent Heroku-Rap Genius dustup is important. To recap:  About two years ago Rap Genius, which runs its Ruby-based application on Heroku’s platform as a service, started noticing performance issues. As traffic grew, it dutifully added more Heroku resources, aka “dynos,” in Heroku parlance. But performance still lagged. Rap Genius dealt with lots of customer complaints although its Heroku log files and related New Relic dashboard said nothing was amiss.

Customer mandate: transparency and trust

It turns out that Heroku, the PaaS company acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010,  had tinkered with the routing underpinnings of its site in such a way that jobs were not getting deployed optimally. This move from “intelligent load distribution” to “random load distribution” plus the fact that this change was not documented — let alone publicized —  to customers, was the issue.

In a February 13 Rap Genius blog post detailing the issue, the company said:

“A Rails dyno isn’t what it used to be. In mid-2010, Heroku quietly redesigned its routing system, and the change — nowhere documented, nowhere instrumented — radically degraded throughput on the platform. Dollar for dollar a dyno became worth a fraction of its former self.”

That blog post generated a ton of “up-votes” on Hacker News  and  probably promoted an apology from Heroku, which TechCrunch covered.

Rap Genius co-founder Tom Lehman described what happened in a recent phone interview. “We had been running 90 dynos at $20,000 a month which we thought was sufficient based on the incorrect data we were getting but it turned out that 90 dynos was woefully insufficient. So we upgraded to 300 dynos at $40,000 per month and performance is still bad. We can’t pay $40,000 a month for this.”

On February 16, Heroku issued a more detailed apology  and outlined a plan of action including:

• Improving our documentation so that it accurately reflects how our service works across both Bamboo and Cedar stacks
• Removing incorrect and confusing metrics reported by Heroku or partner services like New Relic
• Adding metrics that let customers determine queuing impact on application response times
• Providing additional tools that developers can use to augment our latency and queuing metrics
• Working to better support concurrent-request Rails apps on Cedar

When asked for comment, Heroku referred back to its blog post.

Lehman said his company is in a tight spot. It can’t sustain payments of $40,000 per month. “Unless something changes we have to move.”

the likely destination? Amazon Web Services, a transition he would not take lightly because Heroku does much that AWS cannot. On the other hand,  many of Rap Genius’ third-party providers are already on AWS.  ”I still have love for Heroku. Without it we couldn’t get to where we are today but they have not been 100 percent upfront with customers.”

In his view, this should not be the end of the story. “We feel Heroku (and therefore Salesforce.com) overcharged and misled a bunch of small (and big!) start-ups and if they indeed did something wrong they should be held accountable.”

The bigger picture

I’ve asked Lehman if he is party to the class action suit and will update when he responds, but lets get back to the broader issue. Update: Lehman said he is not part of the lawsuit.

Companies already get the heebie jeebies over the perception that moving to the cloud involves a “loss of control” over its IT. Imagine the impact if they think they can’t trust or believe in the metrics they’re given by their providers.

This is about way more than Heroku and Rap Genius. It’s about customer trust and the lack of that is a real danger to cloud adoption.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user 3Art

This story was updated at 8:42 a.m. PST to reflect Lehman’s position on the class action suit.

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Because I’m a journalist and somewhat of a nerd, which means I do things like read Romenesko and Poynter for fun every day, I’ve wanted to come to SXSW in Austin for years. I don’t remember when I first started feeling the pangs of missing-out-on-coolness-emanating-from-Texas in March, but I definitely muted the Twitter hashtag for at least the past two years and was deeply jealous of anyone I knew who went. When my journalism professors complained about having to go and moderate a panel last year, I thought they were the height of annoying. How could you possibly complain about hanging out with super hip people in a super hip city with tacos?

One of the most in-demand services in Austin? Phone charging.

But now, less than 24 hours into my first SXSW experience, I’m sitting on the floor of the Austin Hilton charging all my dead iDevices, telling someone that, no, they can’t take my picture for a Tumblr of people charging things and wondering if naps on the plush carpeting are acceptable. My hair is looking sort of frizzy from the humidity and I’ve been offered more free drinks in place of food than I thought possible. (Please let me know if you see vegetables anywhere. To the lady who told me that “Bloody Marys are the same as breakfast,” no, that’s just not true.)

I’m texting people and complaining about various aspects of SXSW. And thank goodness, they’re reminding me to shut up.

Despite the warnings that SXSW isn’t what it used to be, and despite the frizzy hair and excess drinks, I’ve still had a blast in the 24 hours I’ve been here. I’ve found plenty of geeks, heard live music three different times, seen people I’ve only read about speak in person, and have bookmarked the idols I still want to meet.

So if someone tries to tell you it’s not as cool as it used to be or that it’s just over-hyped marketing next year, you should ignore them. And do SXSW your own way. (Even if part of the conference is moving to Las Vegas next year.)

Here’s what I’ve learned in my 24 hours here so far:

1. Planes from San Francisco to Austin on the Friday before the conference should be re-labeled SXSW shuttles. They should be properly labeled as such, at least for other passengers who don’t enjoy the sight of startup sweatshirts, discussions of the Soundcloud party, or questions like, “Hey bro, is that a Pebble watch?”
2. When someone asks if your name is “on the list,” you should always say yes. Similarly, if they ask if you’re with “event PR,” you should say yes, because it’s possible they said “NPR” and you just misheard them and it will be an awesome party. Similarly, when you hear “Facebook jazz party” it could actually be “basement jazz party.” These are all good calls.
3. Pedi-cabs are apparently normal in Austin, and the drivers wear absurd costumes to stand out. I don’t know who thinks it’s a good idea to ride one. But people do. And they look like fools.
4. Introduce yourself to everyone. Say hello. People are fascinating. I took a Sidecar ride (which was free) and my driver told me about his job tutoring inmates in an Austin prison. I took an Uber car (also free) and my driver had worked at a mortician’s office. A completely random person and I bonded over trying to sneak into a line for free sandwiches before getting kicked out of said line. Seriously, this is like extrovert central; embrace it.
5. You’ll feel like you’re always missing out on something cooler happening somewhere else. I think that’s an inherent part of the experience. But I’ve decided I’m just going to roll with it, and enjoy whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it. My best time so far was sitting in the basement (not Facebook) jazz bar drinking gin and tonics with basically complete strangers. And there wasn’t a tacky Interactive badge in sight.

Think I’m an idiot for missing out on some crucial Austin tip or experience? I’m here till March 12 — tweet at me at @elizakern and let me know.

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TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: What does the future look like?

It’s the question none of us is sure how to answer: What will the world look like in 20 years? And in a hundred years, will our lives be recognizable? Is the future going to be so bright we gotta wear shades, or will we descend into dystopia? In this selection of talks, hear 11 visions for the future — on everything from cars to the Internet to the human species.

Watch this playlist, which includes talks by Juan Enriquez, Nicholas Negroponte and Danny Hillis.»

Here’s an easy way to end the weekend a bit smarter than when it started: Catch up with recent GigaOM Podcasts! From Facebook’s news feed to people fleeing iPhone to connected devices potentially conspiring against you to the LED industry, good listens are just a click away.

Facebook’s feedin’, Lean In‘s meanin’, and everyone’s Hadoop-in’

Download the weekly news wrap up

Call-in show: Why the “I’m leaving iPhone” trend?

Download the mobile call-in show

IoT: When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

Download the Internet of Things podcast

Why we need the LED industry

Download the GigaOM Research podcast

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