There’s something about a classic Ferrari that pushes all the right buttons. From their elegant styling and grace, to the intoxicating noise that comes from under the bonnet, old Ferrari’s are in a class all their own. Certain cars, like this history making 250 GT SWB, are the cars that little boys dreams are made of. Take a moment to enjoy it after the jump.
Source: Petrolicious.com
This week, our contributors to the Industry Perspectives channel shared thoughts on the data center “skills gap,” managing IT risk, methods to improve capacity planning, and a closer look at the differences between PCI compliance and HIPAA. This channel at DCK is growing and providing industry professionals with the opportunity to share their insight and expertise. For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of this week’s columns:
Mind the IT Skills Gap and the STEM Cliff! – However, the demographic “time bomb” is about more than the loss of programmers who know COBOL or of test engineers who know transaction processing. There’s also been a major shift in how companies organize their IT staffs, and their roles and skill sets, writes Bob Supnik of Unisys.
Understanding IT Risks – Most IT risk comes from failure of the enterprise to properly oversee or govern its projects, not from technical or low-level people issues. Hani Elbeyali of Dell writes on how to further your understanding of IT risks to lead to better management of potential issues.
Improving Capacity Planning Using Application Performance Management – Jason Meserve of CA Technologies writes about how to ensure an exceptional end-user experience for business-critical applications while reducing risk and without over-provisioning IT infrastructure.
HIPAA and PCI Compliance Are Not Interchangeable – When thinking about compliance, many companies assume PCI DSS is interchangeable with HIPAA or it is assumed that the gap between the two is small, writes Mike Klein of Online Tech. The real issue is that HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance protect different types of information, with different audit guidelines, safeguard requirements, and consequences for non-compliance or breaches.
Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.
This weekend, all eyes are on SXSW, as 60,000 registered attendees (not to mention the thousands who arrive just for the parties) descend into Austin for the ten-day interactive, film and music festival. Be sure to check out our SXSW coverage and wish our reporters luck and a solid Wi-Fi connection as they navigate hundreds of panel discussions and downtown Austin. Meanwhile, over on GigaOM Pro, our analysts are looking at the challenges of BYOD policies in the workplace, new trends in hiring contractors (both in the U.S. and overseas), and more.
Note: GigaOM Pro is a subscription-based research service offering in-depth, timely analysis of developing trends and technologies. Visit pro.gigaom.com to learn more about it.
Cloud: Three Things Amazon Web Services Should Do to Remain On Top
David Linthicum
Analyst David Linthicum takes a look at the latest Gartner report on public cloud computing adoption, which reveals that the IaaS market continues dominate the conversation (and the revenue streams) when it comes to public cloud. While AWS is clearly the biggest IaaS player — for now — Linthicum offers his own take on what Amazon can and should do in order to maintain its lead in the market.
Mobile: Planning a BYOD strategy on the move
Cormac Foster
Analyst Cormac Foster provides a practical guide for enterprises who want to implement a smart, dynamic BYOD strategy. Acknowledging that most companies already have an ad-hoc system in place, Foster provides guidance for establishing an oversight team, creating standards and metrics, and ensuring that you have buy-in from key departments across a given organization before embarking on a phased buildout.
Social: Taking the friction out of a fast-and-loose work economy
Stowe Boyd
Outsourcing is passe — instead, companies like oDesk are propagating a new trend called ”lift, not shift,” as analyst Stowe Boyd discovers when he sits down with Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, to chat about the 540,000+ companies which use the service to find and hire contractors. Boyd analyzes Swart’s description of how US companies create work both in the U.S. and overseas (as opposed to outsourcing labor for their entire company), and how oDesk is establishing itself as a global player in the freelance economy.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Will Merydith
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Many of you probably know about NASA’s latest venture onto Mars with the little spacecraft that could, Curiosity. Have you ever gotten a bit curious about exactly what that little gadget actually looked like? If you have, you’re in luck, as NASA has released an augmented reality app that will let you view a full 3D rendering of Curiosity or a few other models of spacecraft, with more models said to be added in the future.
The app is as simple as printing out a few markers, then aiming your device camera at those markers to see the 3D model. Best of all, it’s a free application. Hit the download links below to test out the app for yourself.
Come comment on this article: NASA releases augmented reality app for viewing 3D spacecraft models
Government agencies aren’t known for their efficiency, inspiring work spaces or willingness to experiment. (If you’ve ever lived in Washington, DC, you know they can be the exact opposite.)
But, last year, Bryan Sivak, the CTO and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, was tapped to bring more Silicon Valley spirit to the massive department. (Prior to working in government, he founded a company that was acquired by Oracle). And it looks like his touch is starting to move the agency further along a startup-inspired track.
At the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday, Sivak said he’s tried to promote a definition of innovation that gives people the “freedom to experiment.”
“I can teach you how to experiment. I can teach you how to develop a hypothesis. I can teach you how to define some tests that generate some metrics. I can teach you how to analyze those metrics to determine whether or not your test was successful and I can give you the freedom to execute some of these things,” he said. “This is something that’s critical for an entity like the federal government, which is very bureaucratic and structured and all the things we wish it wasn’t in a lot of cases.”
Sivak isn’t the first to bring lean startup theory to HHS. Sivak’s predecessor Todd Park, co-founder of health tech giants Athenahealth and Castlight and current CTO of the United States, drew on his tech chops to start opening up health data and transforming health care. But here a few of the more recent Silicon Valley-style programs at HHS.
Yammer-powered social networking
Getting 90,000 government employees to collaborate is obviously no easy task. But using Yammer, HHS employees across the department now have the opportunity to share ideas and reach out to people up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy through HHSConnect. Since launching a few months ago, 10,000 of the department’s employees have used the platform with many using it actively, said Sivak.
Open coworking spaces
Like many startup CEOs, Sivak said he believes in the “serendipitous collisions” that happen between coworkers who work in open spaces. But in government cubicles, he said, “the only thing you’re going to collide with is air.” To up the chances of serendipitous in-person collaboration, the department is creating “HHSLabs” – an open, modular, technologically-tricked out work space open to anyone in the agency. It’s also opening its doors to health startup CEOs and other private sector visitors to DC who want a temporary place to work.
Internal crowdfunding for resources
To support entrepreneurial-minded people at HHS who come up with interesting ideas but need people with other skills or resources to get their projects off the ground, Sivak said they’ve created an internal crowdfunding-like site where people can solicit support. Called “HHSFairtrade,” people can post descriptions of their ideas and others across the department can commit needed resources or support. Like Kickstarter, the project only activates once it receives all of the commitments it needs to launch.
Seed funding for internal innovators
If it’s a little bit of cash that internal innovators need to test their ideas, Sivak said they can turn to “HHSIgnite.” The program gives department employees small amounts of money to try out new approaches. If the project can show returns in three to six months, he said, it can become a stronger candidate for allocated funds.
Opening the door to outside entrepreneurs
More technologists like Park and Sivak are bringing a startup mindset to the public sector, but Sivak knows that many of the country’s most innovative thinkers don’t live inside the Beltway. To tap into their ideas, he said, the department created “HHS Entrepreneurs,”a new program based on the HHS Innovation Fellows program launched last year. One track invites HHS employees to apply to be “internal entrepreneurs” who will work on special team and get extra networking, mentoring and professional development opportunities. But the other track is open to entrepreneurs around the country who would come to HHS to work with internal entrepreneurs for 6 to 12 months on “high risk, high reward” problems, Sivak said.
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Dalton Caldwell knows that a lot of people are doubting his future with App.net. But Caldwell? He’s not stressing over picking the harder path.
Dalton Caldwell talks about his App.net project on March 9 in Austin at SXSW.
“It’s important to question assumptions about why things are the way they are,” the entrepreneur said Saturday in Austin at SXSW to the crowd in his typically passionate style.
And Caldwell knows the road less traveled. After previous ventures in both an ad-supported music startup and a photo-sharing site, he launched App.net, a paid developer platform (that was commonly but mistakenly referred to as the “paid Twitter”) last summer to much fanfare.
Caldwell has been working since then to make something out of his pledge to grow a network where people pay for — and own — their data. “I think that you are what you eat,” he said.
But just a few weeks ago, Caldwell surprised some people when he announced a free tier to App.net, which seemed at first antithetical to the idea behind the service. But Caldwell pointed to business models for Github or Dropbox and said a freemium tier can be highly profitable when done right.
“I don’t think people will use software because they think it’s good for them, or that it’s better,” he said. “But my approach is that we will make better software that people will want to use.”
Caldwell said immediately before launching the free tier App.net had 32,000 paid members, and now just a few weeks later, they’re at 51,000 total users, both paid and free, which he thinks has big implications for convincing developers to build for the platform.
While it was initially called a “paid Twitter” by a good number of people, Caldwell has repeatedly emphasized that App.net is actually a paid developer network that can serve as a platform for a lot of different apps (think Amazon web services or the plumbing and infrastructure people build their houses on.) Some developers have questioned whether they’d ever use those services if the average user membership to App.net itself is so low (just imagine the contrast with Twitter’s 200 million active users). But if a freemium tier can attract some more people, it could grow the audience and thus give credence to Caldwell’s idea that social networks should find a way to support developers and do right by the user.
“Like, if Vine users can’t find friends with Facebook, that sucks. It’s stupid. It’s only to protect business model interests,” he said, of Twitter’s decision to protect its social graph. But then again, Caldwell knows that the path for Twitter, which is ad-supported, is not easy.
Someone asked how Caldwell would have negotiated Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers this summer if he himself were a Twitter employee. Would he have done things differently?
“I’m not sure I could do anything different if I were in his shoes,” he said.
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Elon Musk — the CEO of Space-X and Tesla and Chairman of SolarCity — says he has a New Year’s resolution to have more fun. But in the meantime, there’s arguably not an entrepreneur alive today that thinks as big about solving global problems, has made as much money off of those solutions, and has such an appetite for risk, as Musk
During a wide-ranging interview with former Wired Editor Chris Anderson at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin on Saturday afternoon, Musk talked about hair-raising attempts to troubleshoot a spaceship, showed off a video of a test landing of a reusable rocket, discussed his one regret from the Tesla incident with the New York Times, and talked about how he once considered buying missiles from Russia.
On his one regret from the New York Times review incident:
Musk said that the only thing he regrets from the interaction with the New York Times over the publication’s negative review of Tesla’s Model S, was that he never posted his own rebuttal of the New York Times’ rebuttal. Musk says he wrote a response to the New York Times’ journalist, which noted that he thought that the writer had committed a “low-grade ethics violation” and sent it to the New York Times’ editor, but he never published it himself.
Musk said he wanted to make it clear that he thought the writer had not “acted in good faith.” He also said he still might publish the response.
On spaceship anxieties:
Last Sunday SpaceX’s spaceship Dragon was able to connect with the International Space Station and delivered cargo to the astronauts on board. But before that connection happened, the spaceship suffered from a problem which Musk gave details of during the interview.
Basically three of the spaceship’s four thrusters stopped working, leaving the spaceship essentially floating in space, and the team couldn’t figure out why. Eventually the team used a pressure system to jolt the Spaceship and give it “the equivalent of the heimlich maneuver,” said Musk. That finally worked and all three thrusters started working again. Musk called the experience “extremely nerve wracking,” and said “that was hard core. I never want to go through that again.”
On testing reusable and landing rockets
Musk showed off a video, which he says was shown to the world for the first time at SXSW, of SpaceX testing a rocket that can launch and land in the desert. The video showed, to the tune of the Johnny Cash song Ring of Fire, a 10-story high rocket launch and then shortly after land back in place still in the launch position. The rocket had a tiny Johnny Cash cowboy on the side.
Traditional rockets launch but don’t land. And Musk says that to make interplanetary travel financially feasible rockets need to be built to land successfully. All other vehicles are reusable and can start and stop without having to be replaced, said Musk, adding, imagine if you were watching Star Trek and the Enterprise was replaced every time.
On his biggest mistake:
In response to a question about what his biggest mistake in life has been, Musk said that he has routinely made the mistake that talent always trumps personality when it comes to people he works with. He said he’s put too much weight on it being just about the brain, when having a good heart is very important. It’s a mistake he said he has made many times.
On trying to buy intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russia:
Musk says that back in 2001 and 2002, when he was just starting to get into the idea of building tech for space travel, he traveled to Russia three times trying to figure out how he could buy Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles to aid his idea. He says when he got back from his third trip he started to realize that his original premise to use that technology, and work outside of the U.S., was wrong. “The U.S. is a nation of explorers,” says Musk.
Musk also says he originally wanted to launch a spaceship to Mars that could crash into the planet and germinate a kind of greenhouse, and that he wanted to do such a stunt to help NASA increase their budget to travel to Mars. He said he had looked onto the NASA website and saw no section for Mars travel, and at first he thought maybe it was hidden somewhere.
On what he is most concerned about:
Musk says he will be very disappointed if humanity doesn’t land on Mars in his lifetime. “That’s the thing I’m most concerned about.”
On managing to have a family at the same time as his crazy life:
Musk says he does email on his phone while he spends time with his five kids, and says that’s how he’s able to spend time with them and run two companies. In response to that, interviewer Anderson said that he wasn’t able to do such a thing as it’s negative for both the email and the kids.
Other fun stuff:
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Neo Innovation, a product design and web development company built on the ‘Lean Startup’ principles promoted by serial entrepreneur and author Eric Ries, is launching a new fund focused on investing in companies committed to the same philosophy.
On Saturday at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, the company is set to announce the creation of a $3-million fund that founder Ian McFarland said is just the first stage of what they plan to be a $30 million fund over the next seven years.
“We want to apply lean principles to building our fund,” said McFarland. “For the first year, we’re keeping it as a smaller experiment… We want to have a great track record this year and [then grow].”
The fund is aiming to do about ten investments, with none exceeding $500,000, and it plans to co-invest with others, McFarland said. He added that portfolio companies stand to benefit from Neo’s deep understanding of the lean startup philosophy, as well as its connection to a global community of lean developers and product managers. Ries himself is the company’s General Partner and Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is Chairman.
While the company has a particular familiarity with the social space because a few members formerly worked at Friendster, McFarland said it will look to invest in startups across different verticals. What matters is that the startup demonstrates an awareness and understanding of lean startup principles, he said.
A year ago at SXSW, the company, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Digital Garage (which is providing financial support for the new fund), launched as New Context. In November, it changed its name to Neo and announced a rebranding. At the time, McFarland told my colleague Eliza Kern, “We’re trying to establish the global brand in the lean startup space.”
As Eliza reported, in the past year, Neo has purchased several startups to build the company, including Cubox, a Ruby on Rails development team led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, who was the lead architect at Odeo, which later became Twitter; New York-based Proof Innovation Labs; Ruby on Rails software company EdgeCase; and Pivotal Lab’s Singapore branch.
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Google Glass has been banned at a local Seattle bar, The 5 Point Cafe, well ahead of its public launch. We already have a good idea of what Google Glass will be used for, and there is no question that everybody is concerned with privacy.
Owner Dave Meinert mentioned in his announcement, “People want to go there and be not known … and definitely don’t want to be secretly filmed or videotaped and immediately put on the Internet.” He also stated, “And ass kickings will be encouraged for violators.”
Bars are synonymous with social gatherings and individuals may be weary of having their picture taken during their “on-a-whim” excursions. On the other hand, security cameras are not banned from bars which are capable of taking the same embarrassing photos in a less discrete manner.
It will be interesting to see how many other businesses and public places follow suit. Glass is definitely intriguing, but Google has to get people to not only accept wearing them, but accept being in front of them everywhere all the time.
Source: The 5 Point Cafe Facebook
Via: PhoneArena
Come comment on this article: Google Glass already banned in Seattle Bar well before its launch
Microsoft rolled out its Windows 8 version of Bing Desktop in late 2012 and brought with it the cool wallpapers that are a part of the search engine’s home page. Now, the company has quietly updated the app with another major feature — Facebook integration. Without any announcement, version 1.2.113.0 launched, but has yet to find its way to all users.
The app is not all about the wallpaper, though that was my main reason for installing it upon original release. Bing Desktop also lets you conduct searches right from the desktop without opening any browser, as well allowing access to the top news stories, images, video and other popular content.
The new version adds Facebook integration via a new icon in the top of the window. Once clicked, you will need to log into your account, then allow the app to access your account information.
When everything is set then you can use the Facebook button in the Bing app to view your news feed as well as get messages and updates.
The update has not gone live to all users — I did not have it when I began this story, however, heading over to the Microsoft Download Center and installing the latest version will provide access. Otherwise, the update should slowly reach all users. A word of caution during installation — the app wants to make Internet Explorer your default web browser, Bing your search engine and MSN your home page. These options can all be unchecked.
Honestly, I can’t see myself using this feature very often — I originally installed the app to get the great daily images that Microsoft’s search page uses as its daily backgrounds. However, more functionality certainly does not hurt as long as it doesn’t bog down the system.
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Great news for Sony Xperia J owners out there! Like its brothers, the Xperia T/TL (LT30p, LT30at, LT30z) and Xperia V (LT25i), the Xperia J (ST26i) will finally see the much anticipated Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean OTA update rolling out to handsets.
This is amazing in itself since the Xperia J only has a single-core CPU and 512 MB of RAM. The kernel version is 3.4 and the firmware is 11.2.A.0.21.
Rumor has it that the Xperia TX (LT29i) will be seeing its update to 4.1.2 Jelly Bean goodness here in the next couple of weeks. So fear not Sony fans, the company is working hard to ensure their Xperia handsets stay up-to-date in an ever-changing mobile market, making it that much easier to live with signing that two year service commitment…mmm, okay, maybe just a little easier anyway.
Source: XPERIA Blog
Come comment on this article: Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean OTA Rolling Out to Xperia J (ST26i)
This week, Twitter’s OAauth keys leaked to Github. So what does that mean? Don’t panic. The consequences of a client application’s key being compromised are not as serious as user credentials being compromised. The risk associated with this breach is that a malicious application tricking you in participating in an OAuth handshake could access the Twitter API on your behalf. Attackers might come up with clever ways to exploit this leak.
In the meantime, avoid using Twitter through any application that you do not trust. If you seem to be redirected to Twitter after clicking a link or through any other means unexpectedly, don’t consent to an application accessing Twitter on your behalf even if this appears to be pointing to an application you trust.
OAuth distinguishes between confidential and public clients. Applications that you can publicly download on your own device (mobile or not) fall in the public category because they are subject to their embedded secret being reverse engineered as probably happened in this case. This incident is a good illustration of the fact that client secrets should not form the basis of a secure session in public clients like mobile applications because, well, those aren’t really secrets. Twitter may create new keys for their application and look for better ways to obfuscate them but it’s only a matter of time before these new secrets are also compromised.
This is the second time in three weeks that vulnerabilities are found on prominent social providers. February 19, Egor Homakov described how the Facebook OAuth authorization server could be tricked in facilitating a fishing attack. In both the Twitter and Facebook cases, the vulnerabilities were related to OAuth. It would be easy to point the finger at OAuth but the fact is that these vulnerabilities are the result of an incorrect use of OAuth: Facebook fails to validate redirection Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), while Twitter embeds shared secrets in public clients.
Although the validation of redirection URIs is a pretty basic precaution that any OAuth authorization server should implement, the correct way to use OAuth with native applications on a mobile platform is a much more complicated matter. As I discussed at Cloud Security Alliance and in our last tech talk, authentication involving redirection between applications on mobile device has its risks.
There are ways to completely secure this between applications of a same domain, but solving this across third-party mobile apps in a fool-proof way requires either something like a multi-factor authentication or the provisioning of client secrets post-application download, which is often not practical.
Either way, API and application providers would do well not relying on pseudo-secrets embedded in publicly available applications as the basis of any security. In the case of client applications issued by the same provider as the API they consume (e.g. the official Twitter app), the password grant type make a lot more sense to me and provides a better UX.
Photo Credit: The To/Shutterstock
Francois Lascelles is Layer 7’s Chief Architect. He guides the company’s solutions architecture team and aligns product evolution with field trends. Lascelles helps enterprise architects apply the latest standards and patterns. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. You can follow him on Twitter: @flascelles
My humble wish is this: That in the industry’s collective rush to monetize the blossoming Wi-Fi marketplace, we don’t hobble it before it hits its stride. Because let’s face it, we could botch it so, so easily.
Up until fairly recently, Wi-Fi was about in-home PC connectivity. But a few factors – the popularity of smartphones, the advent of tablets, overburdened cellular networks, among others – have come together to make Wi-Fi ubiquitous and its use in public settings commonplace.
And the trend is only strengthening; In-Stat says that 800 million smartphones alone will ship in 2013 (and a few billion Wi-Fi equipped devices), and Cisco’s 2013 Global Mobile VNI report found that mobile offload will increase from 33 percent (429 petabytes/month) of mobile data traffic in 2012 to 46 percent (9.6 exabytes/month) in 2017.
In our exuberance to monetize the Wi-Fi industry, here are the three big ways where network operators or owners of service provider Wi-Fi deployments can mess it up (Note: the author’s employer, Cisco, makes and sells a variety of Wi-Fi equipment, but the content of this article applies equally to competing products as well).
We have reached the point where we simply expect Wi-Fi to be readily available in airports, hotels and public places. And yet we all know the shock of discovering when the opposite is true. In most places, paying for Wi-Fi not only takes money out of consumers’ pockets, it’s also a hassle and a time suck. But keeping it free to consumers does not, in fact, destroy the business model. It creates others. The fact is people are enticed by free Wi-Fi.
Consider the tale of the cable MSO (I can’t name names yet) that added free Wi-Fi to its broadband package. The result: 15-18 percent churn reduction over 18 months. Now factor in what can happen with the addition of Wi-Fi network intelligence. Pairing free Wi-Fi with location-based analytics improves the business experience and opens up new revenue streams in crowded locations such as hotels and malls.
Say our friend Harry walks into IKEA. Call it a loyalty app, call it a mobile butler, call it a personal concierge – it gets awakened on his phone, by the intelligent network, and alerts him: “Want some free Wi-Fi, Harry, compliments of IKEA?” Harry agrees and is now on the IKEA Wi-Fi network, and chances are high that he’s looking for something IKEA can help him find or discover.
Now doing the opposite – making Wi-Fi difficult to use, with registration and pay schemes – drains time, battery power and more importantly enthusiasm. Anecdotally, a mobile operator recently mentioned to us that even a simple “terms and conditions” pop-up on their network causes a 50 percent drop-off rate, with users abandoning the activity they were planning on engaging in based on inconvenience. And to the contrary, at a recent professional football game, another operator offered an unadvertised version of Wi-Fi which then generated more than a terabyte of traffic – simply because it was free and easy-to-use.
Trying to knowingly or unknowingly capture private data about people, via their gadgets, always backfires in the long run. How happy and willing would you be to regularly frequent a Wi-Fi network if you knew you were going to be bombarded with myriad privacy-invading apps? Not so much.
The popularity of Groupon and other discount sites, however, confirms that if consumers crave anything it’s deals. The challenge then is offering them without compromising security and violating privacy. To effectively balance these factors, let your customers drive your Wi-Fi service. Recognizing the difference between user information and device information is essential to establishing trust with the customer. Rather than mining personal user data, Wi-Fi and location-based services can be used to improve the user experience through their intelligence and by allowing the user to opt in only with the info they want.
Our friend Harry is now on a Las Vegas vacation and could use a little assistance finding his way around the Bellagio resorts. Wi-Fi can help Harry find the ATM machines when GPS can’t reach him indoors or offer him discounted tickets for a late-night show. By enhancing Harry’s experience through network intelligence – offering him information he wants and, crucially, none that he doesn’t – loyalty is built and trust remains intact. The less intrusive the experience, the safer the end-user feels which is critical for encouraging network usage.
So now you’ve earned Harry’s trust, but that doesn’t mean Harry wants six different offers from you within the span of 10 minutes. That means not pushing your coupon pop-up to Harry until you see one of two things: 1) he appears to be idle, and/or 2) an opportunity to send something contextually relevant arises.
This creates instant value for loyalty and “mobile butler” apps. If you’re the CIO of an IKEA-sized venue, and you know that a quarter of a million people downloaded your loyalty app, you’re probably still ho-hum about the whole thing. Why? Because most people aren’t accustomed to opening the app of the store they’re entering.
However, what’s “intelligent” about intelligent Wi-Fi is that it can awaken the app, to trigger the “Hey Harry, free Wi-Fi” offer. Next, help him find what he’s looking for. Again, Harry’s mobile butler: “What are you looking for, Harry?” Uh, a drafting table. “Drafting tables are on aisle 10 and there is a special today – 20 percent off.” Result: One sold drafting table. User-pulled, not vendor-pushed.
Or, consider a mobile app / intelligent network launch we did with AT&T and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. When you enter, a green light flashes near the antenna icon on your phone. Selecting it returns nearby services – maps, restroom locations, guided tours and more. The café can detect slowdowns in the mid-afternoon, based on dwell times and crowding (flow control is another proven use for intelligent Wi-Fi.) It auto-generates a trigger that pushes an offer to museum-goers – “Free hot cocoa in the cafe!” – to attract appetites, and thus sales.
Jared Headley is director, service provider mobility, for Cisco.
Photo courtesy Richard Paul Kane/Shutterstock.com.
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WordPress is a content company, CEO Matt Mullenweg stressed in a panel Saturday at SXSW Interactive — and longform content is an area that the company is especially interested in. That could include native ads.
“All the stuff that’s done really well on mobile has been incredibly short form and easily scannable,” Mullenweg told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. “I think there’s a space … to sit down and read something longer than a couple of seconds. Rather than the coffee line experience, what’s the sitting-down-in-the-back experience? We’re going to keep experimenting.”
Mullenweg said that the average post on WordPress is 280 words long, and that’s remained “relatively constant” over the past few years. “Certain ideas need to be expressed and they just need more than 140 characters,” he said.
WordPress is taking steps to surface more of its users’ content. “We’ve been working a lot on wordpress.com to create an interesting reading experience,” he said. The site’s “Freshly Pressed” feed surfaces content from across users’ blogs. “You’ll see a lot more longform content and a lot more galleries [on the feed],” Mullenweg said, and traffic to that feed has grown by double digits in the past couple of months.
When Swisher noted that WordPress doesn’t link its users’ blogs together — suggesting what else to read if you liked a certain post, say — Mullenweg answered that “we’re really excited about starting to do that.”
And while Mullenweg criticized many forms of digital advertising — “print ads are still infinitely better” — he suggested that WordPress might look at offering more native advertising options. WordPress would consider a partnership with a company offering native ad units, he said, if it’s “something really compelling that doesn’t make readers block it…Native advertising is the most interesting thing I’ve seen. At the point where advertising becomes as good as the content that surrounds it, I will applaud it.”
Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.
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T-Mobile CZ was not shy during their Sony Xperia Z launch event in Prague recently. Swimsuit models were used to capture the true essence of the smartphone’s water resistant feature. Spectators stood in long lines, gawked, took pics and video of the models…oh, and the smartphone as well.
The scantly dressed models were made to use the smartphones while getting soaked in a specially built, strategically placed shower at the entrance to the T-Mobile mall store.
Of course, the ladies were not left out of the brilliant marketing strategy…they too had a half naked model to ogle at during the launch event. Well, at least they weren’t sexist about the whole thing, right?
Source: XPERIA Blog
Come comment on this article: T-Mobile CZ Uses Sex Appeal to Sell Sony Xperia Z
If we want to change the equation for women in the workplace, then we need to include men too. That’s the message Anne-Marie Slaughter had for the mostly-female crowd at SXSW on Saturday in Austin: Gender equality is up to men, too.
Slaughter made serious waves last summer — a “tsunami,” she actually called it — when she wrote for The Atlantic that “women still can’t have it all.” The article has generated 2 million pageviews so far, and made Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former director of policy under Hillary Clinton at the State Department, somewhat of a touchpoint in the discussion about women’s equality right now.
“The future of work and family, and male/female equality, it depends on you,” she told the few guys under age 30 in the audience.
Slaughter wasn’t saying that women should have to ask men for equal rights, but rather that we should view gender equality in terms of equal partnerships. Slaughter focused on the idea of the dual caregiver and breadwinner roles, and the understanding that men and women will need to juggle and balance those two roles between them to have an equal relationship, at times shifting who takes on more of each. And if men aren’t willing to engage in that juggle, Slaughter says, the balance won’t work.
“If guys are willing to get together with women and insist on the ability to be breadwinners and caregivers together, then I think we can really get there,” she said. The argument is far less controversial than her Atlantic headline, but probably one that’s more likely to resonate with people (especially for those with aging parents instead of small children, she points out.) Slaughter came across as funny, self-deprecating, and deeply passionate about women’s relationships with their families and careers while being interviewed by Jezebel editor Jessica Coen on Saturday.
Slaughter’s argument is familiar to the technology community right now, with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” set to release next week (a book Slaughter already weighed in on), and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer drawing attention (fairly or not) to her every move after becoming the first pregnant Fortune 500 CEO. A number of us here at GigaOM are reading Sandberg’s book, and will be talking about our impressions of the already controversial take next week.
In “Lean In,” Sandberg talks about the way our society is still uncomfortable with the idea of women out-earning their husbands, and said people would come up to her and ask if Dave Goldberg, her husband and SurveyMonkey CEO, was okay with her success. Sandberg said everyone needs to be more understanding of non-traditional gender roles and stay at home dads, a situation that Slaughter, who worked in D.C. while her husband was the primary caregiver, knew all too well. And Slaughter calls for that to change:
“I’ve also heard women say, ‘I want a guy who’s equal,’ but then they also say they want a guy who’s a dominant breadwinner. And that’s not going to work. We have to find a way to really value the guy who’s the equal partner, and say, ‘Sometimes we’re going to out-earn him.’”
Slaughter repeatedly came back to the need for workplace flexibility and careers that support women who also care about their kids and families. So naturally, the question of Mayer’s decision to end remote work at Yahoo came up. Slaughter said she’s torn: on one hand, she said the PR tactics of the announcement were terrible, and the dichotomy of Mayer’s personal nursery and ending home work for employees was a disaster. But she also sees why Mayer did it.
“That is her first job, right? She’s a CEO and has to turn that company around,” Slaughter said. “But I don’t think there’s any question that she believes in flexible work. I don’t think there’s anyone in Silicon Valley who doesn’t believe in flexible work. The optics were terrible, and the blunt force way she did it was terrible, but I’m going to reserve judgment.”
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Meet Google’s “talking shoe,” which aims to translate movement data in witty messages to users and their friends. The concept apparel, showcased at the search giant’s swanky SXSW Interactive headquarters, is part of a new arts project – ”Art, Copy, Code” – which aims to breathe a social, life-like experience into everyday objects. “If standing still was a sport, you’d be world champion,” the trash-talking shoe projects on a monitor hanging over a rainbow-colored obstacle course after it senses I’ve been standing still.
At a distance, users seem a tad pathetic trying to trigger positive feedback from the shoe. But when I strapped it on, I felt oddly compelled to impress my new automated coach. Combining coaching (even robotic coaching) made lifeless data unexpectedly motivational. Essentially, it’s Richards Simmons in a shoe.
In case critics think this is another one of Google’s flights of profitless creative fancy, Arts Copy Code is deliberately about improving advertising. “It’s explicitly aimed at how translating how Silicon Valley thinks about technology into how creative agencies think about advertising,” says project lead Aman Govil.
Brands such as Nike, who outfit professional athletes with health-tracking shoes and bracelets, could broadcast an athlete’s spring-training performance in realtime. Rival athletes’ apparel could trash talk one another automatically.
It’s still (very) early days for the arts project. The talking shoe (and shoe strap) concept was developed through a grant to electronics agency Yes Yes No. Google plans to open up the project to more everyday objects in the near future. One hypothetical use-case, imagines Govil, is an alarm block that sends snarky messages to co-workers if users have to hit the snooze on their alarm clock more than three times.
There’s been heightened attention to research that quantifies how much our friends affect our weight, success, and personal lives. University of San Diego political scientist and Connected author James Fowler found that having an obese friend can significantly increase people’s chances of also having their own set of marshmallowy love handles. And it’s no secret that a spirited friend can get us up at 5 a.m. for a morning run as much as they can tempt us into finishing their plate of fries.
Health startups have attempted to “gamify” good behavior by encouraging users to share personal goals with friends. Nike+ FuelBand, for instance, shares users’ exercise habits with their friends on the personal social network, Path.
This project attempts to remove the barrier presented by current products. The social aspect has always required one extra step of human effort. However fast a one-word message of encouragement could take to type about a friend’s morning run, the minor inconvenience is enough to seriously limit engagement. This new automated personality seems to have a place, especially when we’re all too busy to be personal.
Currently the project is just a concept. There’s no need to jump over to the Google Play store and find the buy link. But Google Glass was just a concept at one point, too.
Sometimes the internet of things is just there to mess with you. At the official opening night party for the SXSW Interactive Festival on Friday, design firm Frog Design created a party space where objects embedded with computing and wireless networks made party-goers think, laugh, and maybe even feel a little uncomfortable.
Frog, which has hosted the kick-off party for many years, called the series of interactive displays “The Other Singularity,” and Frog Principal Technologist Jared Ficklin said they were meant to show tech in “unexpected places.” Ficklin said Frog was expecting between 4,000 and 7,000 people to pass through the party and play with the displays.
Augmented Reality Porta Potty
After you enter the porta potty, a video display is projected onto the door and it can show whether you’re standing or sitting and how long you’ve been in the biffy. While the installation wasn’t working for part of the party, this is the one that I thought would make party-goers the most uncomfortable. No one wants to come out of a porta potty that’s displaying how you’ve been sitting on the toilet for 10 minutes.
Paintbrush LEDs
This 8-by-32-foot display was filled with different color individual LED lights. Viewers could use wand devices to wireless change the color of the individual LEDs, making the display kind of like a huge Lite Brite. Ficklin said someday when the LEDs and technology get cheaper and smaller, this type of display could be used for a wall in a home or office, and the occupant could change the colors of the wall using a remote.
Light books
The premise of this installation was: “someday light will be cheaper thank ink.” These machines projected light and images into books, and stylized it to look like light books. And I learned a new word, “skeoumorphic,” which means digital objects that have been stylized to look real.
The Gutenberg Bible-version
The Robotic Zen Gardener
Think of this one like the Roomba meets a Japanese zen gardener. The robot traverses the sand path and rakes it with its embedded metal rakes. Cool? Or pointless? We’ll let you meditate on that one.
The crowdsourced DJ
Frog Design worked with TouchTunes, a company that makes digital jukeboxes, to build an installation of dozens of screens that enabled party-goers to vote on and choose the music being played at the party. Frog and TouchTunes execs said they were interested to see if the early-adopter hipsters at SXSW would stick to Top 40 or being more creative and choosy with their tunes. For the short time I was there, Top 40 ruled the airwaves (and my multiple selections of Bob Seger’s Night Moves alas didn’t play).
Rattlesnake light bike
It’s not connected, but it was cool. A huge rattle snake moved by bicyclists and glowing with lights.
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Sometimes making an inexpensive car look like a million bucks takes nothing more than a good cameraman, a great editor and a bunch of love for the car. The Volkswagen MK1 Golf was never produced to be a performance car. It was a econo-box meant to replace the ever aging Beetle. However once enthusiasts realized it’s potential as a tuner car, well then, everything changed. Drop the car down a few inches, add a period correct set of wheels and some personal touches, and PRESTO! A budget built hot-rod that not only looks the business, but with the right parts, can be made into one helluva’ performer.
Source: Vimeo.com
New technologies have always produced unintended consequences. But user experience (UX) designers and engineers face a number of new ethical challenges today with the rise of technology and our interaction and dependence on it.
UX designers’ primary job is to improve usability and extend productivity. But they also have a responsibility to address the unintended consequences of new technologies, some of them with a clear ethical dimension. Following is a look at some of the principle ethical quandaries that UX designers will run up against and must deal with responsibly.
So much of the UX discipline’s early efforts were driven by the desire to improve human performance and productivity while reducing errors. Few questioned the value of these gains, achieved by optimizing system design, augmenting human ability, and automation, especially as it eliminated dangerous, repetitive, or tedious work – think of assembly line factory jobs that in past decades injured and maimed scores of people.
But some forms of automation come at the cost of diminishing the work’s intellectual and emotional value. Consider the levels of automation found in fast-food restaurants or warehouse fulfillment centers, where work is de-humanized, worker growth is diminished, and the value of rewarding work is stripped away. Undoubtedly these issues were at play with the spate of protests and suicides by distraught Foxconn workers in recent years.
The question for the UX professional who designs these work experiences then is: at what point must efficiency and optimization yield to human concerns?
Over the past two decades, there have been tremendous advances in the development of powerful support systems that augment human intelligence in demanding environments. For example, some aircraft systems, such as the Boeing Dreamliner and the F-35 Lighting II, have become so complicated that they challenge the human capacity to fly them without assistance from an “intelligent” assistant. The positive benefits of this technology can reduce error and improve safety.
At the same time, UX researchers must examine the possibiliy that automation can create a situation where skilled operators can be replaced be less-skilled operators. (On a mainstream level, that would include losing the ability to navigate without the aid of GPS, or more simply the ability to do math without using a calculator.)
In some cases, the gains from technology will outweigh the loss of skills. In others, the level of support and automation might warrant reconsideration. Whatever the outcome, it is critical that UX designers initiate this conversation, so that users of technology can make informed choices about their extent and consequences.
We’ve gotten pretty good at being able to subconsciously influence and alter behavior (by nudging, for one), which creates a vexing ethical conundrum for UX designers. The UX professional must understand that for every product created with the “best intention,” there will be another that deliberately nudges the user to ends not in the user’s best interest. Thus on the one hand, they recognize that human behavior often results in sub-optimum choices and actions. On the other hand, they recognize that they have the potential, through design, to affect that behavior in other ways – positive and negative.
So how do UX professionals define their ethical responsibilities as they subconsciously influence users’ decisions or actions? The case of producing negative outcomes is clear; less clear is who determines what is “positive.” The line between the two is often not well defined. Take for instance the medicare prescription drug plan finder tool on the medicare.gove site which navigates this dilemma well. It guides and supports the user in an unbiased fashion to the plan that best aligns with their health needs – a great improvement over early support efforts on the site.
With the best intentions, technologies have been developed to remotely monitor the activities of the elderly – what and how much they eat, where they’re located, even when they take their prescriptions. Similarly, products like vuezone or Car Connection allow parents to monitor every movement of their children – what they’re doing at home, how fast they are driving, where they are at 2 a.m.
The benefits of such technologies are real, for one allowing the elderly to live independently or for parents to be confident in the safety of their children . Yet such constant monitoring of the individual can also have the opposite effect, instead leaving one feeling the loss of highly valued privacy and dignity because of non-stop monitoring. With each new capability comes added consequences.
The convergence of technologies can tax our attention spans in a way that threatens the limits of human capabilities. One case is the increased integration of communication, navigation, and entertainment technologies in automotive design. We now have GPS screens, entertainment monitors, handsfree cellphone use, and advanced stereo systems with various control mechanisms.
While these technologies deliver unquestionable value and pleasure to the driver and passengers, they indisputably divide the operator’s attention, distracting him or her from the stated purpose of driving, leading to life- threatening situations (and that’s not even including texting while driving). The problem has become so severe that the Highway Safety Administration has created a website to address this issue.
So what responsibility do UX professionals have in these situations? The likelihood of distraction and its consequences should become an area of intense focus in the UX discipline’s research agenda.
At the end of the day, UX professionals must increasingly consider where their responsibilities lie – with the organization that reaps financial gains from the technology sold, or with the user who may possibly suffer negative or life- threatening consequences from these products.
Bill M. Gribbons is professor of information design and corporate communication and director of the graduate human factors program at Bentley University.
Photo courtesy Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com.
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