Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama traveled around the country to celebrate the third anniversary of Let’s Move!, her initiative to ensure that all our children grow up healthy and reach their full potential.
On Monday, March 4th at 11:10 a.m. ET, the celebration continues as the First Lady joins her first ever Google+ Hangout.
Mrs. Obama will participate in a completely virtual conversation from the Blue Room of the White House, speaking with families from around the country. The hangout will be moderated by Kelly Ripa, co-host of LIVE with Kelly and Michael, and we hope you’ll join, too!
It’s a well known fact that the 2013 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG is one serious performer. However when the boys at Benz decided to chop the top and create the SLS AMG GT Roadster, some enthusiasts thought that the car would lose some of its performance magic. InsideLine.com has come through with some favorable track test numbers that we hope will put all those who were skeptical at ease. Check it out after the jump.
The computer security industry is far from an easy place to build a successful startup. Security has traditionally been controlled by a small group of established firms that maintain a vice-like grip on the major IT sales channels. And understandably, big ticket customers like the military and large enterprise can be hard to sell into for startups. The technology in fields such as encryption and intrusion detection is complex and arcane, and often requires expensive certifications.
But even in the face of such challenges security remains a hot field and offers opportunities for startups. So-called endpoint security for consumers was a $4.9 billion market in 2012, according to IDC, and enterprise security software and hardware is roughly $31.4 billion worldwide. In the past two years there have been over $12 billion in security acquisitions, with many of the notable exits in 2011 and 2012 having hit north of $800 million.
It’s also a disruptive field. Security is constantly evolving to confront the mercurial world of hackers and cybercriminals. With the proliferation of professional financial cybercrime and high-profile state-sponsored hacking, modern adversaries for information security are incredibly sophisticated. The rise of this generation of hackers creates a demand for new and better security technologies, and two fields in particular are currently big areas of interest for Sand Hill VCs.
Cloud and next-gen infrastructure security
Cloud and infrastructure security refers to the hardware and software associated with protecting modern IT infrastructures. As more businesses move workloads to the cloud, critical financial and personal data becomes exposed to the public internet. Securing data in flight to the cloud and at rest off-site is mission critical.
VCs will be heavily investing in hardware and software in this field because it shares complementary demand with the success for cloud computing; as companies demand the flexibility and cost-savings of the cloud, they will also require next-generation security built to secure the infrastructure of public and hybrid-cloud environments.
This is a hard area for startups to play. Proving compliance with draconian and mercurial regulations like PCI-DSS or the Common Criteria is a difficult and frequently expensive endeavor. As a result of high barriers to entry, systems incumbents such as NetApp and Oracle have an advantage.
But several new startups in this space have navigated these issues through the engagement of established veterans and a focused but superior feature set. These include encryption-focused Ciphercloud and the back-end infrastructure-focused CloudPassage. (Note: I have no financial or professional relationship with these or any of the other companies mentioned in this article.) Both Ciphercloud and Cloudpassage augment the security of an existing IT infrastructure and uniquely target bringing compliance-grade security to hybrid cloud environments. Compliance is a serious and expensive issue for the enterprise, and these industry veteran-led startups are attractive to VCs because they provide an economic but well-monetized alternative to purely consulting-based solutions.
Intrusion detection and prevention systems
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) refer to software and hardware solutions that detect and halt attacks or attackers as they attempt to compromise a system in real time. The rocket science-esque fields of IDS and IPS aren’t new, but with the advent of this generation of sophisticated attackers and widespread interest in big data analysis, IDS and IPS are quickly becoming a hot topic for VCs.
A great example of IDS/IPS success can be seen in Silvertail Systems. Acquired late last year by EMC, Silvertail used complex algorithms to detect attacks from the outside and even internal attacks launched by compromised accounts. VCs liked that Silvertail’s tech was managed by a team of industry veterans and that from the beginning they closed deals with large enterprises.
Late-stage starlet FireEye seems poised for success by employing the same formula. Their late 2012 hire of ex-McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt and success in traditional security verticals like US DoD, US federal, and large financial have well prepared the company for their imminent IPO.
SF-based CloudFlare can also be considered an IDS/IPS company. CloudFlare intercepts and sifts traffic to a site through an analysis engine to improve performance and protect websites from modern attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). CloudFlare protects a significant measure of the internet and remains on the watch list for nearly every VC on Sand Hill.
CloudFlare’s frictionless sales model is also an interesting point for VCs. Bucking the traditional IT model of inside/outside sales teams, infrastructure companies like CloudFlare and New Relic allow customers to directly purchase through their sites. This decreases sales cycle time and increases margins – both key diligence metrics for VCs. In a busy space like IPS/IDS (or IT in general), employing positive differences like a unique sales architecture help startups to distinguish themselves in the eyes of investors.
Finding an edge
As a security startup you can do a few things to improve your chances of closing your round. Make sure your team is led by veterans who know how to build and sell into your verticals (or actively recruit them). Also, align your company with sectors that have complementary demand with big tech trends.
And, as in any industry, attack big problems that people are willing to pay lots of money to solve.
Andrew “Andy” Manoske is an Associate at GGV Capital, a Sand Hill and Shanghai-based venture capital firm. Prior to GGV, he was a product manager at NetApp and managed the design of security features across the company’s entire product line. Follow him on Twitter @a2d2.
Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.
Building a new tech company from the ground up is incredibly hard. Here are some tips from founders and co-founders who have already scaled that mountain that might help ease the journey for others..
David Mytton, CEO of Server Density (and friends.)
1: Haste makes waste. It’s natural to be in a hurry to get product out the door, but take a breath first and really gauge where you are. Slow down when it comes to key decisions, said Dan Belcher, co-founder of Boston-based Stackdriver, a startup focused on monitoring and managing cloud workloads. “Doing things too early is as dangerous as — or even worse than — doing them too late. Think hard about when you start to invest in sales and marketing and when you start forecasting, you need to implement roles and controls.”
Yesware founder and CEO Mathew Bellows
Matthew Bellows, co-founder of Yesware, an email provider for salespeople, agreed. “Don’t sell your product too soon. [That’s a] hard lesson for a salesperson like me to learn but our board was very clear that I shouldn’t start selling the product before the product was getting tons of in-bound interest.”
2: Do everything. This is easy because you’ll have to, but embrace this opportunity to get outside your comfort zone. ”Founders should do every role first before hiring someone to take it over. This helps me understand who I’m hiring, what they should be good at, what they should be doing and how to measure their success,” said David Mytton, founder of Server Density, a London-based provider of server monitoring services
Karl Wirth, co-founder of Apptegic, which helps companies tailor content shown to website users based on who they are and their activities, agrees. “For the first year and a half, I was our only salesperson.” This meant he learned how to cold calling prospects, find buyers. And to assess that person’s problem then work overtime to close the deal.”I knew sales would be important — I didn’t expect it to also shape and refine us so profoundly,” he said.
GrabCAD founder Hardi Weybaum.
Hardi Meybaum, co-founder and CEO of GrabCAD, an online marketplace for mechanical engineers, is all over this notion. “You are engineer, then product manager, then sales manager, then you’re raising money, then you hire smarter people than yourself to run product, engineering, sales, and marketing and then you need to lead by trust and great communication,” Meybaum said.
Apptegic founder Karl Wirth.
3: People are your biggest asset. Hire carefully. Mytton feels founders need to hold off on any new hires until things start hurting. “Hiring ahead of demand is the fastest way to burn through money,” he said. But, conversely, founders always need to look for new talent — perhaps for hiring down the road. “You should always be interviewing and always be hiring regardless of your headcount plan,” says Stackdriver co-founder Izzy Azeri. “It’s so hard to find good people and the founder is always the best recruiter.”
4: It’s all about the user, stupid. Ok, that’s harsh. But any startup or older company that loses its focus on the customer and solving a customer problem is toast.
“If you are genuinely helping people work more effectively, you will get pulled into companies,” said Yesware’s Bellows. “The days of selling to the IT department and the office of CIO are coming to an end. Frankly, the days of sales-and-markeing-driven companies are coming to an end.” So, talk to your users and perhaps more importantly, listen to your users.
Cloze co-founders Dan Foody (left) and Alex Cote.
5: Be prepared to fail. Expect it; it’s part of the gig. Dan Foody, co-founder of Cloze, the maker of an iOS app that consolidates a user’s mail and social media messages, said anyone in that line of work should heed Path CEO Dave Morin’s adage that the first version of any mobile app will fail.
Morin’s right, says Foody. ”The real reason is that Apple restricts developers to at most 100 beta test devices for any app. In today’s world that’s not nearly a large enough audience to refine an app (especially a consumer-focused one),” he said.
“You need hundreds to thousands of beta testers. How can you avoid this pitfall? Build a web app first so you can learn the hard lessons up front with a wide audience without being restricted by platform and store limitations.”
That’s a good micro example, but generally speaking, failure is how we learn. So founders: be prepared to fail. It can be a badge of honor, especially if you learn from the experience.
CloudFlare’s web security service went down for about an hour starting at 2:47 PDT Sunday morning, taking its customers down with it. The service was back up at 3:49 PDT, according to a post-mortem. CloudFlare attributed the outage to a system-wide failure of its Juniper edge routers that started after the company tried to prevent a DDoS attack on one of its customers.
Affected sites include Wikileaks, 4chan and others according to this Techcrunch report.
One reason CloudFlare opts for Juniper is the latter’s support for the Flowspec protocol which enables customers to propagate router rules across a large number of routers fast, according to the company post. This comes in handy because CloudFlare is always updating rules to combat ever-changing attacks and to re-route traffic as needed to optimize performance.
This morning CloudFlare detected a DDoS attack on one of its customers and its attack profiler ascertained the offending packets were between 99,971 and 99,985 bytes.
That attack profile was sent out to Flowspec to stop the spread of attacks. From the post mortem:
“Flowspec accepted the rule and relayed it to our edge network. What should have happened is that no packet should have matched that rule because no packet was actually that large. What happened instead is that the routers encountered the rule and then proceeded to consume all their RAM until they crashed.”
Service was restored after about an hour, although CloudFlare said it continues to examine the issue and has contacted Juniper to see if there is a known bug involved or the problem is unique to CloudFlare’s implementation.
Cedexis’ Radar view of CloudFlare outage.
Given that the number of DDoS attacks is on the rise, web sites had better gird themselves and hope their security vendors are taking proactive steps to keep ahead of the problem.
We understand, you’re busy. So you may not have had the chance to check out our podcasts this week. That’s why we’ve gathered them together in one handy place for you to spend your Sunday listening and learning about all the technology trends you need to know about.
In our weekly news wrap up we talked about Yahoo’s work from home ban, as well as our Internet of things meetup in San Francisco and the no news out of Mobile World Congress.
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.
Analyst Ucilia Wang takes a look at the LED industry, which is slowly making inroads into the commercial markets. LED is moving away from being a mere novelty or purely functional form of illumination and gaining popularity for residential and retail use. Wang provides a technical overview of LED design and engineering, potential additional use cases and applications for the technology, and which startups and major companies to watch as LEDs continue to gain a foothold in the mainstream.
Last summer, we published analyst Jody Ranck’s analysis of wearable devices, and it’s back at the top of our most popular research content. While Google Glass is often cited as the seminal wearable example, Ranck also looks at many of the devices available to consumers today. At present, it’s a market largely dominated by the quantified-self movement, anchored by fitness products such as the Nike Fuelband and the Fitbit (see disclosure). Although the mobile and health sectors will see the biggest impact over the next 5 years, Ranck looks at current and emerging wearable technologies that will resonate across the enterprise, disability technology, fashion, gaming/entertainment, and augmented reality sectors.
Analyst Stowe Boyd takes a theiry-based approach as he weighs in on Yahoo’s crackdown on WFH culture. Drawing on Edgar Schein’s principles of organizational structure, Boyd looks at what impact Meyers’ latest policy will have upon Yahoo’s corporate culture. While the mandate emphasizes the importance of in-person collaboration and communication, Boyd worries that Yahoo is sacrificing innovation in favor of corporate micromanagement.
Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
When it comes to off-road rallies and events there is no doubt that Europe has the U.S. beat hands down. That doesn’t mean however that U.S. teams can’t participate. The following video covers Team Magpul as they tackle the infamous Breslau Rallye off-road race that starts in Germany and ends in Poland. This is a race that no matter how well prepared you are, can and will bite you in the ass at the worst possible moment.
This week, our contributors to the Industry Perspectives channel shared thoughts on cloud-ready apps, data warehouse strategy, brokering IT services internally and today’s outlook on the vendor scene. 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:
Unleash Your Applications with Cloud-aware Application Delivery – The evolution of cloud architectures and their ability to deliver a greater level of efficiency and flexibility has been a hot topic recently. So why put your apps in the cloud? Kavitha Mariappan of Riverbed outlines the benefits of putting your apps in the cloud.
Creating An Effective Data Warehouse Strategy – Contrary to what some companies may still believe, effective data warehouse solutions do not have to be costly. Nor do they have to be complex or limited to a single size and scope, writes Alan McMahon of Dell.
Brokering IT Services Internally: Building the Order ProcessTypically, when the busy internal consumer seeks access to an IT resource, he or she is faced with a daunting obstacle course of approvals. Dick Benton of Glasshouse covers how the advent of cloud has changed the order and provisioning process.
A Great Time to be in the Data Center Industry – A decade or so ago, however, data center specialists were scarce. Today, there’s many companies available, writes Tom Roberts of AFCOM. Select a build and/or design partner that matches your company’s culture and style.
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.
Copied from @egyptologynews. Apologies that this is such a long post. I’ve been up to my ears in work and haven’t had time to do much. But this covers the period between 25th Feb and 2nd March, in no particular order as usual.
Piracy is a problem that needs to be dealt with. I don’t think anybody is going to refute that. Where people are divided is how we actually deal with this problem. After years of reputation destroying legal battles against dead people and little girls, copyright owners think they have an answer.
On Monday, the Copyright Alert System, or “Six Strikes”, went into affect across the five biggest ISPs in the U.S. The system hopes to catch those pirating content over P2P networks, and send them a notice detailing their infringement. The hope is that those who are caught will start using legal alternatives.
Do you think the Copyright Alert System will work? Will people truly stop pirating content after receiving an alert?Let us know in the comments.
To better understand the CAS, we have to look at what the Center for Copyright Information is doing with it. First, there are three tiers to the CAS that consumers should be aware of with each tier having two levels within it. The three tiers are as follows – educational alerts, acknowledgement alerts and mitigation measures.
The first two warnings – “educational alerts” – tell consumers they’ve been caught. The email will then direct them to legitimate sources of content with the hopes that the early warnings are enough to scare people into buying content.
The next two warnings step it up a notch with what’s called “acknowledgement alerts.” The first two alerts were simply emails, but these next two will actually hijack your browser. You will be hit with a message telling you that you’ve been caught yet again, and must acknowledge that you’ve been caught before you can start browsing.
The next two tiers, and presumably every alert afterwards, will be “mitigation measures.” In essence, the ISPs will begin throttling your bandwidth or blocking Web sites you frequently visit. The ISPs will not be able to cut off your Internet connection under the plan.
For a visual explanation, here’s the CCI’s soothing jazz version:
The actual specifics of these tiers will be different across the five ISPs participating in the CAS. We don’t know what every alert will look like, but Ars Technica did manage to get a hold of what Comcast’s alerts would look like.
As you would expect, the CAS hasn’t exactly garnered many fans. New Jersey Gubernatorial candidate Carl Bergmanson recently spoke out against it by saying ISPs have no right to monitor what you download:
“The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility. The electric company has no say over what you power with their service, the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download”.
The EFF has also come out swinging against CAS. The group says the system presents a number of troubling statements that don’t just hurt Internet users but the Internet for itself. For instance, the group points out that the CCI Web site tells people to lock down their Wi-Fi connections so others don’t pirate on your connection. The EFF sees this as an attack on the open Wi-Fi movement and it would be especially troublesome for those who do share their Internet connections with others, like small businesses.
Small businesses are where we run into the biggest problems. The CCI says that rights holders won’t target open Wi-Fi networks run by businesses. Your local Starbucks or Panera Bread are safe as they run off of a business network. The problem comes in the form of small businesses like a local coffee shop or bakery that runs free Wi-Fi off of a residential network. These businesses will be held liable for the actions of its consumers.
The CCI argues that it won’t hurt small businesses running residential networks because the CAS will never terminate an Internet connection. That’s entirely true, and it’s good that copyright owners didn’t go as far to request that ISPs terminate connections. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the fifth warning and afterwards will either block popular Web sites or throttle connections. For a small business that has multiple customers all on the same network, that’s just as good as shutting off the connection. People who want to use the Internet at these places will find it too much of a pain and take their business elsewhere.
Do you think the CAS will hurt small businesses? Or do you think the EFF and other groups are just exaggerating?Let us know in the comments.
This all brings us to the question of whether or not the CAS will even stop piracy. That’s obviously the goal, but it doesn’t look like an attainable one at the moment. In fact, the CAS is its own biggest enemy in the war on piracy.
The alerts obtained from Comcast all have one troubling thing in common. They don’t list any of the alternative, legal sources for content. The main point of the program is to educate consumers on legal alternatives, and it can’t even do that. Consumers receiving the alert with no prior knowledge of the system will most likely see it as a scam email and won’t act upon it. Later tiers require consumers to watch an educational video on copyright, but it doesn’t say whether these videos will present legal alternatives.
Fortunately, legal alternatives are doing a good enough job stopping piracy themselves. A recent report from the NPD found that legal alternatives like Spotify were driving music piracy down. It proves once again that easy access at a fair price can beat out piracy any day. Heck, the proliferation of streaming services even gave the music industry its first raise in revenue since 1999.
So why do copyright owners think the CAS will work? Do they really expect piracy rates to magically drop once the alerts start flying out? Past examples would suggest that no such thing would happen. In fact, previous efforts on the part of copyright owners to curtail piracy have had the opposite effect. Just look at the shutdown of Megaupload or the blocking of The Pirate Bay in the UK. Both cases actually saw an increase in piracy.
At this point, it’s still too early to tell how much the CAS will actually accomplish. At best, copyright owners will be able to proclaim that piracy rates are down as more people either use VPNs or move off of P2P and onto Usenet or Mega. At worst, consumers revolt and ISPs drop it after seeing that it’s costing them customers. Either way, piracy isn’t going anywhere.
Do you think piracy will ever stop being a problem? Or is it just a fact of life in the Internet age?Let us know in the comments.
The latest email update from Barry Kemp and Anna Stevens, with a few of the photographs attached to the email:
We are not far from the halfway point in the first, two-month part of the spring season, and making good progress with the three main tasks set for this period.
The first is the continued re-examination of the front part of the Great Aten Temple. We are continuing to remove the large Pendelbury dump that lies over the mud-brick pylon and also obscures the view of the temple from the road. A long stretch of the pylon is now revealed, including more of its mud-brick threshold and access ramps. The dump has produced its crop of sculpture fragments, including a fine piece of indurated limestone (resembling marble) carved with hieroglyphs and made to be inlaid into another kind of stone.
Further into the temple area and along its axis, the work began with the clearance of another stretch of Pendlebury’s trench along the axis. Two sets of gypsum-lined basins surrounding an offering space, first exposed in 1932, have survived remarkably well. They had been remade several times over. One of them had been partly filled in by Pendlebury with unwanted fragments of sculpture which have now been added to our extensive collection. At the higher level of the later temple floor, a simpler basin, also lined with gypsum, has also survived. Although very close to the modern ground level, the mud floor behind it, that Pendlebury did not excavate, has also survived well, and contains at least one more set of gypsum-lined troughs surrounding a rectangular area that has not been revealed before.
The front part of the temple, therefore, was the site of activities that involved the pouring of water on a sufficiently regular basis to necessitate periodic renewal of the gypsum linings. It was also a practice that was retained when the temple was rebuilt and its ground level was raised.
Further still along the axis, into the temple front, lie two conspicuous rectangles of gypsum concrete that seem to have been massive foundations for sets of huge columns that stood in front of the stone pylon. The top of one of these rectangles has now been cleaned. The gypsum surface onto which limestone blocks had been laid, leaving their impressions behind, is in better condition than expected and is in the course of being re-planned. The curious insets around the edges, especially on the east where they would have fronted the pylon, turn out to have originally been filled with limestone blocks, presumably to create extra-strong foundations to support unusually heavy weights. Large sculptures come to mind.
The concrete podium was built as a series of compartments, the lower parts filled with a calcareous gravel. A closer study will add further to our knowledge of Amarna building techniques.
Pendlebury’s plan shows it surrounded by gypsum foundations at the foot of a trench. The foundations bore the impressions of stone blocks, that belong to a surrounding retaining wall for the concrete and might not have risen to ground level. Stretches of this feature also remain although long parts were probably destroyed even when Pendlebury excavated the trenches. Banked against the outside of these walls is a complex stratigraphy that relates to the building of the later-phase temple. This is in the process of being elucidated. A hieratic jar label of regnal year 12 found in debris beneath the level of the temple’s final floor is a useful pointer to when, in Akhenaten’s reign, the major enlargement of the temple took place.
At the same time that the re-excavation is taking place, the small team of builders from El-Till is busy setting out the outlines of the stone building, the gypsum foundations of which were uncovered last year. There are two main components to this. The first is the marking of the positions of around twenty columns. Our method is to create flat circular pads, 10 cm high, from white cement, standing on square foundations of small, local stone blocks. When the scheme is finished and a layer of sand is spread over the interior of the building, all that will be visible is a few centimetres of their height. The other component is the laying of a single course of stones along the lines of the original walls. To do this we have taken delivery of blocks made in the limestone quarries of Tura, just outside Cairo. They include corner blocks carved with prominent circular mouldings. In length and width the blocks copy the dimensions of the talatat-blocks from which the original walls were built. But we have increased the depth (from 23 to 26 cm) to be the same as the width, partly to increase the choice of surface that we can display and partly to compensate for the sand and dust that will quickly blow in and around the building. When finished, the interior will be filled with sand to within a short distance of the top, hinting at the higher floor level that the building original possessed.
The inspection of the interior of the column at the Small Aten Temple, that was mentioned in the last bulletin as scheduled to take place, showed that, in the nearly twenty years that have passed since it was put up, the internal ironwork that holds it together has seen very little deterioration. This is a tribute to the skill with which Simon Bradley designed and built it. Nevertheless, to make sure it has a long life, two of our workmen cleaned the surfaces and gave them two coats of red oxide paint. That done, Simon and a local carpenter worked together to create a thick, robust wooden cap that is now securely bolted over the top of the column.
The outside of the column has generally weathered in quite a pleasing way.
The one part that shows deterioration is a wide panel with a flat surface let into the side that, on the original, showed Akhenaten and Nefertiti worshipping the Aten. Simon had originally given this a different finish to the rest of the column, providing it with a coat of smooth plaster. This has been cracking and falling off over the last few years. Simon’s current task is to remedy this.
We have until the end of March to complete the season’s work at the temples. Then the second major part of the programme for 2013 will commence. This is a return to the South Tombs Cemetery for a further excavation.
It remains, once again, to thank our supporters, who make the work at Amarna possible.
As March opens, college basketball fans are enjoying the final days of the regular season with teams jockeying for position in post-season tournaments. Next up will be conference tournaments and then the annual event known as “March Madness” – the NCAA Tournament. To help basketball fans keep up with all the action, ESPN has updated their Bracket Bound app for the 2013 season.
The app includes some features that users may find useful now, like the ability to setup favorite teams and games to keep track of the action. Other typical sports app features include access to news, conference standings, game results, and video clips of analysis and news. ESPN indicates the app will provide quick access to their WatchESPN app to watch live or recorded events as well as access to Twitter discussions the user may find interesting.
As far as the 75th NCAA Tournament goes, users can access the latest projections of who will make the field and where. ESPN indicates users will be able to access the ESPN Tournament Challenge using the app, including the ability to complete up to ten brackets. That function is not present in the app for now, but should be available via an update once brackets are announced.
You can check out some screenshots below. If you are interested in getting ESPN Bracket Bound 2013, use one of the download links below.
If you’re a Verizon Galaxy Nexus owner, then it looks like you’ve got some sort of update on the way… which we were already aware of and expecting. Reports are coming in that the nation’s wireless carrier is currently testing a mysterious JDQ39 build of Android 4.2.2 which seems to feature some new radios, but unfortunately seems to feature an old bootloader and old kernel version.
PWhy Verizon isn’t updating the kernel and bootloader beats us— but maybe it’s just part of its extensive testing before rolling out to the masses. Nevertheless we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes and ears open to what Verizon has up in its sleeves for you G-Nex users out there.
What would the internet be without hackers hacking things? Not a day goes by where some hacker somewhere is attempting to access secure or private information. Well it looks like the Evernote Operation’s and Security team discovered they they were at the receiving end of suspicious computer activities. Although personal content nor payment information looks to be affected the investigation does show that Evernote user information (usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords) were obtained. While this is worrisome in itself, files containing said user information is encrypted. However rather than rely on just that the Evernote team is playing it safe and requiring that you head on over to evernote.com to reset your password. In the process they also would like to remind everyone the importance of keeping your password secure:
“There are also several important steps that you can take to ensure that your data on any site, including Evernote, is secure:
Avoid using simple passwords based on dictionary words
Never use the same password on multiple sites or services
Never click on ‘reset password’ requests in emails — instead go directly to the service.”
So if you’re a Evernote user then head on over to their web site to change your password. Hit the source link below to read the full post. It’s great to see a company be proactive about their security. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go reset my password right now.
Back when I was a kid Toy Story was my favorite movie. Mostly because it appealed to something I then often thought about; my toys coming to life when no one was around. To this day it’s proved a timeless classic with millions of toys, two sequels and multiple videogames. Just the other day even, Disney/PIXAR released Toy Story: Smash It! into the Play Store for your gaming pleasure. They’re not stopping there as they bring an interactive live wallpaper into the mix. Toy Story: Andy’s Room promises to visually brighten your day while also entertaining you with activities involving your favorite Toy Story characters. As if being entertaining weren’t enough Disney/Pixar also brings the following with this wallpaper:
• Encounter popular Toy Story characters: Unlock and interact with 5 characters from Toy Story including Woody, Buzz, Rex, Hamm, and the Aliens!
• Collect points to unlock new characters with fun mini games: Catch falling army men, and hit the bullseye on the dart board to earn valuable points!
• Hang out in Andy’s room from day till night: Play from sunrise to sunset, and watch the room change throughout the day according to your local time!
• Customize your own cork board: Write fun messages and reminders on the cork board in Andy’s Room!
If you’re looking for a Toy Story nostalgia fix hit the break for a link to the Play Store download. Enjoy!
Google is said to be close to launching its Play Store Gift Cards in the UK very soon. We believe this to be the case since Google updated their Gift cards & Google Play balance help files to now include the UK. Gift cards will reportedly be available for purchase in £10, £25, and £50 increments.
UK readers may recall a similar tease when “redeem pages” popped up in the UK’s online and device-based stores in Q4 of 2012. Again, we can only deduct that a UK launch is imminent, but we have made the same assumptions in the past with negative results. So what makes this different? This time around though, it seems as though Play Store Gift Cards could be a reality in the UK…soon.
In 2011, IBM achieved a quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology when its Watson computer program trounced human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-day Jeopardy! tourney, taking home the million-dollar prize by outscoring the second place competitor by a three-to-one margin.
Since then, Watson has shown its computing prowess in the world of medicine and in other business settings. However, as was recently announced, IBM decided Watson could use a college education and so will join here us at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With its help, we hope to further advance artificial intelligence in a number of key areas.
The Watson program is already a breakthrough technology in AI. For many years it had been largely assumed that for a computer to go beyond search and really be able to perform complex human language tasks it needed to do one of two things: either it would “understand” the texts using some kind of deep “knowledge representation,” or it would have a complex statistical model based on millions of texts.
Watson used very little of either of these. Rather, it uses a lot of memory and clever ways of pulling texts from that memory. Thus, Watson demonstrated what some in AI had conjectured, but to date been unable to prove: that intelligence is tied to an ability to appropriately find relevant information in a very large memory. (Watson also used a lot of specialized techniques designed for the peculiarities of the Jeopardy! game, such as producing questions from answers, but from a purely academic viewpoint that’s less important.)
Right now, to take Watson into a new domain — for example, to be able to answer questions about health and medicine — Watson works by reading texts. First, it needs a lot of information to go into its memory, which is generally provided by giving it a million or more documents to process from any particular area or discipline. Second, it needs to have information about the specialized terms used – for example, to be told that the word “attack” in “heart attack” is a noun and not a verb. Technical terms, such as, say, “myocardial infarction” also need to be identified. Finally, to hone its ability in the new area it needs a combination of questions and answers to train from.
But on the Web, we can find much more than text. Watson will be more powerful if it can also take advantage of other resources. One of our first goals is to explore how Watson can be used in the big data context. As an example, in the research group I run, we have collected information about more than one million datasets that have been released by governments around the world. We’re going to see what it takes to get Watson to answer questions such as “What datasets are available that talk about crop failures in the Horn of Africa?” Or, at a more local level, “What government agency can help me find a job in New York?”
We’re also looking at how Watson can use other kinds of information; ideas our students have suggested include:
Technical domains such as chemistry and nuclear engineering, where specialized diagrams and formulas are needed.
“Commonsense” domains, such as what is happening around our college, where Watson would need to interact with Twitter, Facebook, and other kinds of social media.
“Artificial worlds,” such as role-playing games, where Watson would need to differentiate between objects that are real and others that are imaginary.
On a more theoretical level, we want to understand what Watson can teach us about artificial intelligence in general. We will explore how the memory-based techniques of Watson can be “embedded” into more complex reasoning systems. As humans, our memories are used as a component of much more complex cognition than is needed for playing Jeopardy (a tough task in its own right, or course.) Memory helps us to decide which of various approaches may be best when faced with a problem, by providing analogies between the current situation and ones we’ve seen in the past. We also are able to pull up separate memories in different contexts, based on situational need.
By exploring how Watson’s memory functions as part of a more complex problem solver, we may learn more about how our own minds work. To this end, my colleague Selmer Bringsjord, head of the Cognitive Science Department, and his students, will explore how adding a reasoning component to Watson’s memory-based question-answering could let it do more powerful things. Can Watson be made to solve word problems it has never seen before? Can we enable it to justify the answers it gives? Could it be made into a conversationalist rather than just a question-answerer?
As we understand Watson better, our students will also be exploring how to deepen its capabilities by programming new components. They will learn how this new generation of “cognitive computing,” as IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research John E. Kelly has called it, really works. They will come to understand the architectures, software, and hardware that power the approach, and they will program new modules to give Watson new abilities.
And finally, of course, there’s the blue sky nature of what Watson may allow. Given such a potent new tool, we suspect this list of projects still just scratch the surface of what our students will come up with. As one said, he is “eager to teach Watson to daydream.”
James Hendler is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and head of the computer science department. Follow him on Twitter @jahendler.
Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.
It seems like only yesterday Samsung released its flagship handset, the Galaxy S III, to a grateful public. The specs were impressive at the time, and the price was affordable compared to existing and emerging competitors.
Samsung is not one to let its success go to its head. Their impressive marketing budget, coupled with their zest for innovation has helped them climb to the top in a predominantly mobile marketplace. Their latest handset, the Galaxy S IV won’t be an exception to the rule!
The Galaxy S IV (SCH-i959), said to release to China Telecom, boasts some impressive benchmark results to say the least. Specs listed were:
1.8Ghz Quad-core Exynos processor
1920 x 1080 FHD display
CDMA/GSM
Android Jelly Bean 4.2.1
Overall score as reported by AnTuTu Benchmark was an impressive 26,250! Compared with the test results of 14,544 from the HTC DROID DNA, you can see how impressive this score really is.
On Thursday at TED2013, Chinese artist Liu Bolin talked about his remarkable photographic installations, in which he paints himself (and sometimes other people) with perfect camouflage to disappear into a busy background. His talk closed with a photo of Liu in the theater at Long Beach, disappearing himself into the stage with paint and pattern over the course of an evening. Watch the timelapse above to understand his process, which involves a lot of people saying “A little to the left… a little to the left …” I caught up with him to discuss.
Tell me about your process.
For the talk, I stood up on stage with my outfit pre-painted, and then one of my assistants worked with the camera and stood back to instruct the other painter on what to do, where to paint, what colors to use, until from the camera I appear invisible.
What inspires you to make a painting?
That’s a perplexing question for me. When I was preparing for the talk initially I thought I would prepare a talk about art, but then I realized it’s really difficult to talk about pure art in China, because it’s always tied to survival. My life in China has always been adding a lot of things to my physical body and mental, emotional state. For example, in my piece “Supermarket,” it has an actual weight on my body.
What makes an ideal shot?
Two things: position of camera and focus. Focus is the most important. For the piece I did for TED, the stage is very colorful and red, so I needed reds and pinks.
You mentioned in your talk that it’s not just an artist’s work but what they stand for. Can you talk more about that?
There’s a difference between Chinese artwork and foreign artwork. As a Chinese artist, I ask a lot of questions about society in my work. When I am abroad, though — for example when I went to the Louvre — because I’m usually overwhelmed by my artwork, I have to make art as a souvenir. The TED piece is more of the latter, a form of memory or a souvenir. This year I have a new plan. I think the TED stage will be the highlight of my new series, Happy New City. In the future I will create new kinds of art. My talk was as a summary to conclude what I’ve done before.
What kind of art do you enjoy?
First of all, that art has to move me. The creator of that art doesn’t have to be a famous person. The artwork I’m most interested in right now are those that take the subject from real life, such as mobile phones, because most people won’t think of those things as art objects. But through the work of this artist, people realize those objects can be art. This kind of art moves me.
