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When GigaOM asked its readers last June to read the tea leaves on Tesla’s future, 61 percent said that Tesla would be break even by this coming June and would be able to start making money by selling more mainstream cars. Tesla reported its Q4 numbers last week and our readers appear prescient. Founder Elon Musk told investors that the company would turn its first profit in the first quarter of 2013 after having been cash flow positive this past December.

Tesla is still a few years away from being able to sell EVs to the mass market but the company continues to plug away toward the goal. Wall Street did not like Tesla’s Q4 results, causing the share price to shed about 7 percent. The quarterly loss was worse than analysts had expected despite revenue coming in at $306 million, $7 million north of the $299 million consensus estimate.

Getting to gross margin

The earnings and revenue numbers highlight a core theme for 2013 and Tesla, which will revolve around getting to the 25 percent gross margin that Musk has promised, a milestone he reiterated on the investor conference call last Wednesday. For the fourth quarter, the gross margin was just 8 percent, owing to the high expense of ramping production and reaching economies of scale for a factory that’s geared to produce just 5,000 cars a quarter.

The small volume production of the Model S makes improving margins challenging. During Q4, Tesla flew in tires from a supplier in the Czech Republic in order to meet production goals. Air freight costs about ten times shipping freight for an automotive part, and Musk noted that the costs made him want “to punch myself in the face for that one.”

Musk told the anecdote about the Czech tires to highlight that he believes a lot of excesses like overtime and supplier costs can be dealt with over time to expand margins. When Tesla reaches certain volume levels on its orders for batteries, for example, Panasonic cuts back its pricing.

Surprises: Foreign demand and leasing

And just as Tesla has some work to meet expectations in terms of gross margin, there are also potential surprises in the company in terms of demand. The European and Asian markets open up later this year as Tesla’s head of retail George Blankenship said he’s looking forward to stores in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Additionally, the Model S cannot currently be leased, which likely is a barrier for some customers who aren’t sitting on the cash to buy the luxury car. I’d expect that to change by the end of the year, though Musk was clear that he wants compelling interest rates before rolling out a program, something I suspect could be challenging. No one really knows what a Model S will be worth in 4 to 5 years when a lease would be up. It’s such a new product for an luxury EV market about which future vehicle values are mostly a mystery.

So it gets hard for any financial institution that would underwrite a leasing program to take on risk by offering lower interest rates.  But we’ll see. I wouldn’t be shocked if Tesla is willing to offer a bit of a higher interest rate for leasing, knowing that in a recovering economy we’re going to start to see more widespread demand for luxury cars.

The Future

Finally, buried at the end of the conference call was a reference to the Model X, Tesla’s crossover SUV. Musk was reticent to give out numbers on early reservations for the all electric SUV, but he estimated that buying interest would be around 70 percent of that for the Model S. Delivering the Model X in 2014 is another incremental step for Tesla but it’s an important one and given how hard it was for the company to ramp production on the Model S, producing an SUV at good margins could be very difficult. Not to mention that significant R&D and selling expenses will be incurred to launch the Model X.

Tesla remains a production supply constrained company as it lacks the facilities to meet demand. The average wait time for a Model S is 5 months. And while Blankenship and Musk talked up potential future growth in Europe and Asia, it’s irrelevant in the short term because there are limits right now on how much Tesla can scale given that it can only output 20,000 cars a year. But all in all, these are good problems to have.

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Marissa Mayer is not shy about making changes to make sure Yahoo gets its groove back. I am in the “not buying it” camp because I don’t think it is easy for tech companies, especially ones like Yahoo that have been eaten from inside by a systematic rot. Still, she like the Greek god Sisyphus, she is trying to push the rock up the hill.

Her moves, including buying new talent, are one way to graft new cells into the old cancerous host. And recently she put a kibosh on the company’s work-from-home policies and expects people to come to office nearest to them. The move has come under a lot of criticism. Many who have never managed folks who work remotely have been quick to criticize Mayer’s decision. Our own Mathew Ingram too isn’t a fan of her decisions.

Now, I am a big, big fan of remote work. Remember, it has been something I have been talking about since 2004 and even started a blog dedicated to this cultural shift. GigaOM itself was a remote worker powered startup. So I totally understand the benefits and shortcomings of remote work.

Still, I can understand why she is making such a move. She is trying to revitalize the company culture and it means bringing back the folks into the Yahoo offices. I don’t know if that will be enough to save the company from its actual fate, but in her attempts for cultural overhaul, it is a gamble worth taking.

Also there is an upside of all this hand wringing — people are talking about Yahoo. When was the last time did you have people even talking about Yahoo other than the constant changes in the executive suite?

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With 3D printing on the verge of going mainstream, you can manufacture almost anything.

As of November 2010, you can add a 3D-printed car to that list, too.

The Urbee 2 is a two-wheeled hybrid assembled entirely from parts spat out of 3D printers, reports Wired. Just as Makerbot and Form 1 have changed the way we perceive manufacturing, Urbee is seeking to change the way we build cars.

Urbee is the brainchild of Jim Kor and his team at Kor Ecologic, a company solely dedicated to the future of 3D vehicle manufacturing. Their website expands upon their grand vision for the future of the automobile, a few points of which we’ve listed below.

“Use the least amount of energy possible for every kilometer travelled.
Cause as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation, and recycling of the car.
Use materials available as close as possible to where the car is built.”

Kor’s aim is to make the cars of the future light, energy-efficient and easy to manufacture.

The manufacturing process of the Urbee takes place entirely inside RedEye, a 3D-printing facility that was also used to produce the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle. Kor says one of the virtues of 3D printing is the added flexibility that’s impossible to produce with sheet metal. Instead of producing a multitude of parts that would be assembled later, the 3D printers can spit out a single, unibody part that makes manufacturing a heck of a lot easier. Kor simply uploads the models for each part into the printers, and 2,500 hours later (that’s something like 105 days), Kor has all the plastic parts he needs to assemble his car.

That’s right, the world’s first 3D-printed car is also a plastic car.

Kor has assurances that the Urbee will be perfectly safe to drive out on in the road. “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor tells Wired. “We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.” And the car isn’t entirely made of plastic. The engine and the base chassis, of course, will be made of steel.

Good luck, Urbee. You may look like an oversized computer mouse, but you’ve come a long way from the days when you looked like this.

Yesterday Microsoft, at long last, rolled out Internet Explorer version 10 for Windows 7 — a browser that had been available to Windows 8 users since launch back on October 26, 2012. Today the software giant followed up with language packs for that new software release.

Each language pack comes as a separate download and is, of course, completely free. There are countless ones available from Afrikaans to Marathi and all the way through to isiZulu.

Microsoft points out that “The Internet Explorer 10 Language Packs install language specific resource files, allowing users to view the user interface (UI) of Internet explorer 10 in a different supported language. To use these language packs, you must install the matching OS language pack on Windows before proceeding”.

The download file names may seem a bit cryptic, but if you are feeling confused then scroll to the bottom of the page and there you will find a list of the languages in alphabetical order, followed by the abbreviation. Use this as a key and you should have no problems.

Customers will need to be running service pack 1 of Windows 7, though these also are compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and higher. Installation is simple, but if you need help then there are instructions provided right on the download page. Microsoft supports just about everything possible — unless you choose to speak Latin. Even my Gaelic speaking ancestors would be happy! As for the retiring Pope, well…

Photo Credit: Igor Petrov/Shutterstock

Continue reading…

Editor’s Note: Muted in the noise from Mobile World Congress is an interesting drama between developer Presselite Studio and Facebook. Apparently, the social network, which bought Instagram in April 2012, is blocking Vintage Camera. The scuffle raises questions about Facebook clamping down on competing products, which, if true, should chill every developer. Apple favoring its stuff over partners’ products is old news. Is this really where Mark Zuckerberg and company want to go? Perhaps it’s all a misunderstanding. We asked Antoine Morcos, Presselite cofounder, to make his case. If screenshots can tell a story…

Facebook has decided to disable and block “Photo Sharing on Facebook” feature in Vintage Camera application available for iPhone and iPad. The reason for the app being denied of uploading photos, according to Facebook, is that it was receiving a “high amount of negative user feedback”, which is not true…

As you can see in the screenshots of Facebook developer admin, for a total of 1,000 to 3000 photos shared per day via Vintage Camera application, only 1 or 3 negative feedback are reported on Facebook, which we think is due to an inappropriate use of Vintage Camera application. This is less than 0.3-percent of negative feedbacks.

We don’t understand how Facebook could block the access to million users of Vintage Camera application who want to share their photos on Facebook, only because of a few negative feedback reports. It is not fair for 99-percent of Vintage Camera users who were enjoying this feature.

We made an appeal but Facebook has refused to approve it, here is Facebook answer: “We’ve checked out the circumstances of your app’s restriction, and we found that your app received strong negative feedback from users and their friends. Unfortunately, we will not be able to restore your app’s functionality”.

So Facebook seems to consider that 0.3 percent of negative feedback is strong? Currently, Facebook does not provide any acceptable level of negative feedback, so Facebook is free to decide for each case.

They do not give any details on why Vintage Camera has been restricted, and which part of Facebook policies our app is in violation. Facebook has not been able to provide us the clear reason of this restriction. Also, we want to understand how Facebook could restrict our application with only 0.3 percent negative feedback, if it’s not restricting access to all Vintage Camera users.

Vintage Camera is not violating any of Facebook Platform Principles.

The app has been downloaded over 8 million times since its release (both iPhone and iPad versions); 1.8 million photos have been shared on Facebook so far (since the release of the app on December 2011), according to Facebook Developer website.

As you all know, Facebook has acquired Instagram photo sharing application, and we hope this acquisition is not influencing this kind of restriction / access limitation for other photo applications.

Antoine Morcos is cofounder of Presselite Studio.

Google has quietly started to switch some aspects of its premium content offerings to its open source WebM video format. Google’s WebM product manager John Luther explained during a developer Hangout Wednesday that YouTube and Google Play video rentals are now using WebM as opposed to Flash on Samsung’s Chromebooks. “We will be rolling that out on more Chrome OS devices and other platforms soon,” he added.

Luther went on to explain that Google did a lot of work on the security layer that delivers the videos encrypted to an HTML5 player. “As far as I know, we are the first to ever do that,” he said.

He added that there is a lot of interest from other content services to use this type of technology for their offerings as well because it would allow them to deliver video to a variety of platforms that support HTML5, as opposed to customizing solutions for each and every platform. “A lot of content providers really want to do HTML5,” he said.

WebM was open sourced by Google in 2010, and the company has been working on integrating the format into both real-time video communication as well as video delivery for sites like YouTube. It was meant to become an open, royalty-free alternative to the predominant H.264 video codec, but the overwhelming majority of videos are arguably still delivered in H.264. Luther replied Wednesday by saying that H.264 had the same kind of adoption curve, adding: “I’m very bullish on VP8 for the next … many years.”

Nonetheless, Google is already working on a successor to WebM’s VP8 video codec, which is unsurprisingly called VP9. “VP9 is starting to come together, and we are seeing some pretty amazing results,” reported Luther. “We are seeing huge imporvements over VP8. It’s kind of a gigantic leap forward.”

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Aker Solutions has acquired Managed Pressure Operations International, which was backed by NGP Energy Technology Partners. Financial terms weren’t announced. MPO, of Houston, provides managed pressure drilling and continuous circulating systems. Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. provided financial advice to MPO.

PRESS RELEASE
Aker Solutions has acquired Managed Pressure Operations International, Ltd. (MPO), a company that has successfully developed the next generation of continuous circulation, riser gas handling and managed pressure drilling systems.

The acquisition places Aker Solutions at the forefront of technology development in the market for managed pressure drilling (MPD) which is seen as a key technology enabling better drilling performance and safety. MPO has also developed a new generation riser gas handling system to capture and safely handle gas in the riser.

The company currently employs 100 people in operating subsidiaries in Singapore, Dubai, Jakarta and Houston. These will join Aker Solutions’ more than 3 000 drilling technologies experts all over the world. MPO’s revenues are expected to continue to increase sharply in the coming years, from revenue of around US $30 million in 2012.

“MPO has proven technically-superior products and the ability to adapt and cater to a client’s specific needs. We are pleased to include their offerings in Aker Solutions’ portfolio of products, systems and services. The company has a solid reputation as both a product and a service provider, and already provides services to major drilling contractors and oil companies,” said Thor Arne Håverstad, head of Aker Solutions’ drilling technologies business.

Safe and efficient
MPO provides in-depth knowledge and technologies within the emerging MPD segment. The main rationale for using managed pressure drilling is to improve safety and efficiency, enable access to new fields with challenging drilling conditions, and enhance the life of mature fields. Aker Solutions aims to integrate the MPO MPD system in its rig design and will supply the equipment as part of complete drilling packages to offer clients state of the art solutions.

“Managed pressure drilling is a key safety technology for exploration drilling, high pressure high temperature prospect development, ultra deepwater of pre-salt carbonate reservoirs, as well as a drilling efficiency tool when used consistently like other game changing technologies like the top drive,” says Charles Orbell, who co-founded MPO in 2008.

MPO’s riser gas handling system will improve the safety and performance of current floating rig drilling technologies.

“Currently, deepwater exploration drilling is exposed to challenges related to the issue of small gas volumes with high pressure flowing into the riser and escalating through the riser to the surface, causing potentially dangerous ‘gas-kicks’. MPO has developed a riser gas handling system that includes a quick closing annular blow-out preventer connected to the top of the riser, which can capture and safely transfer this gas off the rig,” said Christian Leuchtenberg, co-founder and chief technology officer of MPO.

The transaction has been closed.

The post Aker Solutions Buys Managed Pressure Operations appeared first on peHUB.

The internet of things is an amorphous concept, much like the internet itself: People assume it’s a network of connected devices that will somehow let them do something or monitor something over the internet. But the folks trying to build the internet of things can’t be content with a mere concept; they need to refine it, so they can actually deliver on the awesome promise that the combination of connected devices, cloud computing and faster data analytics can offer.

Last night in San Francisco, five speakers at the GigaOM internet of things meetup hashed out a definition for the concept, called for better design associated with internet of things-based services and begged people to share their data. As for that definition, it wasn’t exactly definite; but all of the participants agreed that the connected device wasn’t the product, the service was.

Ideally, the internet of things should fade into the background; what matters is what it allows people to do.

How to design and develop for the IoT

Dave Merrill of Sifteo and Alsop Louie Partners at the meetup.

But fading into the background requires design decisions that are very different than app or web design as well as new theories of programming. This will result in a new class of physical devices that augment our smartphones — or what David Merril, the CEO of Sifteo (see disclosure), calls “the glass slab.”

“Our current programming tools are rigid and deterministic,” said Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the Innovation Services Group at PARC. He argued that developers are not prepared to program for a world where hundreds of connected devices will work in concert to deliver services. The industry can’t afford to fall back on the current pattern of binary decision making and still deliver a real-time experience, which means that programmers will start having to think about how to connect these tools using probabilistic logic: in which the computer, not a human, chooses the most likely outcome.

“We can’t afford command and control, and it fails when you move to hundreds or thousands of devices,” Kuniavsky said. “We need new tools that will help us shape the behavior of many devices asking for information simultaneously, working probabilistically rather than through increasing hardware.”

Roberto Tagliabue of Jawbone

The other design elements that people must take into consideration are that these are not devices made for the screen, but devices that need to be integrated into everyday life, according to Roberto Tagliabue, executive director and software designer at Jawbone. It’s also important to think about the difference between a service and an app that might hope to have the user’s full attention.

“Ask when and how we can be relevant to the user,” Tagliabue said. “It’s not about their full attention, but now, how we can improve their life.”

The future of physical objects

Design and programming considerations aside, the talk at the meetup later shifted to what happens as the smartphone replaces a variety of physical objects. Merrill didn’t think the “big glass slab” replaces physical devices, but instead that our devices will get more tactile and design connectivity in for specific uses.

“Making the tool fit us and making it fit the task is super important,” he said. “Our hands have a lot of different things we can do and most are different from touching a screen.”

Several people in attendance wondered about the direction for the current internet of things. Usman Haque of Cosm outlined the ways that big companies like Philips, IBM and Samsung are talking about the internet of things as a way to boost convenience, but also as a way for people to abdicate their thought process to the dictates of connected devices. He also found efforts to consider security and privacy in our coming connected world as a threat to innovation, noting if the founders of the internet started their tinkering with worries about securing the network, it would never have evolved the way it did.

He ended with a call to action for the people in the room, asking them to have fun and to build devices that were open, sharing the data they collected with an eye toward actually connecting things and giving others the opportunity to build on top of their original designs. In that way, the business model for the internet of things will mirror that of an app store, where the hardware platform provider and the developers share in the wealth.

The visions and advice shared last night paint a utopian vision for our connected future, one that I hope comes to pass. But first, let’s get the definition of the internet of things spread far and wide. It’s about the services, not about devices.

Disclosure: Sifteo is backed by True Ventures. True Ventures 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.

This story was corrected to reflect Mike Kuniavsky’s title at PARC. He is a principal not the head of Innovation Services Group at PARC.

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Across the United States, thousands of hazardous waste sites are contaminated with chemicals that prevent the underlying groundwater from meeting drinking water standards. These include Superfund sites and other facilities that handle and dispose of hazardous waste, active and inactive dry cleaners, and leaking underground storage tanks; many are at federal facilities such as military installations. While many sites have been closed over the past 30 years through cleanup programs run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. EPA, and other state and federal agencies, the remaining caseload is much more difficult to address because the nature of the contamination and subsurface conditions make it difficult to achieve drinking water standards in the affected groundwater.

Alternatives for Managing the Nation’s Complex Contaminated Groundwater Sites estimates that at least 126,000 sites across the U.S. still have contaminated groundwater, and their closure is expected to cost at least $110 billion to $127 billion. About 10 percent of these sites are considered “complex,” meaning restoration is unlikely to be achieved in the next 50 to 100 years due to technological limitations. At sites where contaminant concentrations have plateaued at levels above cleanup goals despite active efforts, the report recommends evaluating whether the sites should transition to long-term management, where risks would be monitored and harmful exposures prevented, but at reduced costs.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Environment and Environmental Studies | Earth Sciences

Imagine you’ve just returned from your annual physical, and it didn’t go well. Your doctor informed you that you’re overweight and are likely to have health problems if you don’t drastically change your diet and exercise routines. To make things worse, she set a hard deadline by scheduling a follow-up appointment with a specialist. You can avoid this follow-up, but only if you make some hard decisions and change your habits in meaningful ways. So why, when you have just days to go before the appointment, will you find yourself sitting on the couch, chip bag in hand?

Now, swap “you” with “the U.S. government” and you can begin to understand the psychology of the sequester.

A little background: Last year, amid quite a bit of negotiating, U.S. politicians could not come to an agreement regarding taxes and spending. Thus, they agreed to agree on a sensible budget by a certain deadline. As a result, Congress and the president must find some way to agree on meaningful fiscal changes before March 1, or the U.S. budget faces arbitrary and automatic cuts across the board.

The hope was that by setting up these arbitrary cuts — something that would seem unacceptable and would negatively impact a whole host of U.S. citizens — Congress would be motivated to come to some reasonable compromise in the allotted time. And yet here we are, with no solutions.

Now we’re all left asking: how did this happen?

Aside from the usual banter about a dysfunctional government, behavioral science research can help explain the reasons behind the current stalemate. We know from hundreds of research studies that goals do motivate people: specific, difficult goals make people strive harder to accomplish what they set out to do. One example, ironically, comes from government: In 1961, president John F. Kennedy gave a speech that set the goal of getting people to the moon and safely back within a decade. At the time, the U.S. had only launched an astronaut 115 miles above the earth. Going to the moon was a much more difficult goal: astronauts would travel 270,000 miles from home. Of course, you know the rest of the story: less than 10 years later, the U.S. landed on the moon.

We also know that people who set goals for themselves consistently perform better and more effectively on tasks (and particularly on onerous ones) than people who set no goals. These specific, difficult goals are intended to motivate us to do things that we do not like to do, like negotiating over budget issues with a counterpart who does not share our views. Or, in the case of your imaginary appointment, eating vegetables.

But research also suggests that goals are not always beneficial. When people violate their goals (eating that bag of chips), they experience further delays in task completion and tend to perform poorly. So if you only have five pounds to go, you’re more likely to try hard to lose it. But if you fail to accomplish your goal, or think that reaching it is nearly impossible, you’re more likely to experience negative emotions and resignation.

Making goals realistic also matters. In a 2004 study, participants were asked to complete a proofreading task within 30 days, and received payment upon task completion. In one condition, participants chose a difficult deadline for themselves. In another condition, they chose a realistic deadline for task completion. And in a third condition, they had no specific deadline. Over 83% of participants who identified a reasonable deadline completed the task in the allotted 30-day timeframe, while only about 62% of the participants in the other two conditions with no goal completed the task within the allotted time.

In the case of the U.S. fiscal cliff negotiations, let’s first make two important assumptions: that the parties at the table actually want to come to some agreement, and that coming to this agreement is incredibly difficult. With this in mind, it is likely that the March 1 deadline may have been demotivating rather than motivating. Knowing that avoiding the sequester is nearly inevitable, or is going to include a lot of work, may have led to resignation rather than high motivation. And such resignation led us to the current stalemate in negotiations.

It’s also important to consider the way time plays into solving problems. It was easy for the government to make plans to fix the budget crisis, but it’s unclear as to whether its goals were actually within reach. And because the commitment involves a large group of people, members of Congress may have felt that additional time afforded them the opportunity convince the other side to see the issues their way. This, of course, is a problematic assumption. In fact, research by my Harvard colleagues Mike Norton and Todd Rogers indicates that people have an overly optimistic view of the future when it comes to wants and preferences.

In one study, they asked respondents to indicate their political orientation and then answer the following question: “In twenty years (by 2031) how do you think the electorate in the United States will be different? Will it be more conservative than today, more moderate than today, or more liberal than today?” The results? Conservatives were more likely to believe that the future will be more conservative than the other two groups, moderates were more likely to believe that the future will be more moderate, and liberals were more likely to believe that the future will be more liberal.

Similarly, in my own research, I find that when we experience disagreements or conflict in negotiation and decide to meet at a later time to discuss further, we believe that the additional time will help the other party realize that our perspective is the right one. But the problem is that both parties share this belief, and thus the additional time turns out to be unhelpful to reaching a compromise or any other form of agreement.

When they agreed to the sequester deadline, both sides may have believed that the future would magically solve any disagreements. But such wishful thinking, as the budget debate is now showing, is often a good predictor of failure.

In that was totally out of context news…

David Petrarca, Game of Thrones, Big Love, and True Blood director, made headlines earlier for his apparently lax stance on piracy. Speaking at the Perth Writers Festival last weekend, Petrarca commented that piracy doesn’t matter to the overall success of the show and that shows like Game of Thrones survive on cultural buzz.

Apparently, Petrarca didn’t mean to imply that he supports piracy or that it helps generate buzz for TV shows and films.

“I am 100 per cent, completely and utterly against people illegally downloading anything…Nobody wins by illegally downloading content.” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

According to Petrarca, his comments were meant to imply that the piracy (and boy is there a lot of it) for shows like Game of Thrones was only a signifier of its popularity, not a cause of it.

HBO provided this statement on the matter to Wired:

Game of Thrones is sold worldwide, available legally on a large variety of viewing platforms and is one of HBO’s most popular series. With that kind of success comes a great amount of social media chatter, so can’t say we see an upside to illegal downloads.

Still, many feel as though HBO doesn’t quite do all they can to make their content available to all who want it.

“I think most people would be willing to pay for a show they love,” said Petrarca.

Yes. Agreed.

Earlier today, an image of what appeared to be a final Iron Man 3 poster being displayed outside a movie theater was posted to a tumblr blog.

The leak seems to have caught Marvel and Disney off guard, because an official link to the theatrical poster for Iron Man 3 has now been posted to the Iron Man Facebook page. The poster itself has been posted at Yahoo Movies.

The poster shows Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) in his new gold-and-red Iron Man armor, which appears to be burned off in places. Behind him can be seen other Iron Man suits, implying that Stark and Rhodey (played by Don Cheadle) will not be the only characters using such armor.

Other teaser posters and images for Iron Man 3 have been posted to the Iron Man Facebook page throughout February, including poster’s for Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, and Ben Kingsley’s villain, the Mandarin.

The movie is scheduled to be released internationally on April 25, and on May 3 in the U.S. Instead of being directed by Jon Favreau, who directed the first two Iron Man movies, Iron Man 3 will be directed by Shane Black, known for directing Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

(Image via Yahoo)

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

“The TED Salon in Seoul was lit up by this performer, by her extraordinary passion for her music,” says TED curator Chris Anderson by way of introduction. He’s referring to the Talent Search auditions held in 14 cities around the world that provided the conference with 33 speakers this year. And in particular, he’s talking about Ji-Hae Park, who now takes the TED stage to wow us with her violin-based virtuosity. “Classical music can rock you!” she announces proudly.

Between songs, Ji-Hae talks about her own struggle with depression — and how she began to play music in churches, nursing homes, anywhere but the concert hall. “It set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist,” she says — though she’s certainly become one of those too. As Chris says, her emotions come through in every note. “Do you feel like you’re all alone?,” she asks the audience. “I hope this piece will touch and heal your heart as it did for me.”

Once you dream, you have to do. The speakers in Session 6 have spent their careers giving form to ideas. They are makers, builders, artists and implementers — all with fascinating ideas about what it means to be a creative person.

In this session:

In his film “Mars et Avril,” Martin Villeneuve brings his sci-fi romance graphic novel to glorious life.

Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.

Dong Woo Jang turns an unusual stick of bamboo into an archer’s bow — an exploration of his cultural heritage and a metaphor for his perfect world.

Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer who believes that great design appeals to all five senses.

Barb Stuckey makes food for a living — and wants to help you taste things better.

Yu “Jordy” Fu‘s dream is to make this world a better place through art, design and architecture.

Jacky Myint designed the boundary-breaking news feature “Snow Fall” for NYTimes.com.

At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.

A paper on carbon nanotubes, a biology lecture on antibodies and a flash of insight led 15-year-old Jack Andraka to design a cheaper, more sensitive pancreatic cancer test.

As the world’s population expands toward 10 billion people within the next 50 years, urban citizens face an unprecedented opportunity to build more vibrant, just and inclusive urban centers. Because we know that cities are powered by people, and people enable change, TED responded to the rapidly changing urban landscape by granting the 2012 TED Prize to an idea: the City 2.0.

Last month, TED launched our redesigned City 2.0 website, a storytelling platform for city dwellers to share stories, videos and innovations related to urban transformation. Citizen-powered and story-driven, the City 2.0 site highlights what motivates people to take action and work together to shape the cities of our future.

The City 2.0 site also features remarkable stories from the 10 City 2.0 award winners, who are improving their cities by turning world-changing ideas into sustainable solutions and collaborative action. From Kampala to Melbourne, City 2.0 grantees are investing their energy, passion and resources towards making a difference in areas like education, safety, health, food and public space.

Watch these eight videos, released this week at TED2013 and TEDActive 2013, featuring remarkable City 2.0 award-winners from across the globe and learn how ordinary citizens are sparking extraordinary change:

Crowdsourcing the Quiet
As city populations expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for denizens to find places to retreat and relax in silence. Jason Sweeney and his team are working to “crowdsource the quiet” through their Stereopublic project, using web and smartphone-based technology to help people geo-locate quiet spaces in urban environments.

Designing Chicago
Designing Chicago leverages public participation and design to make citywide navigation better. The ultimate goal is that the app will take transit planning to the next level, incorporating functionality that people can use in a responsive, holistic way. Need to pick up a cup of coffee on the way to a meeting? Work that into your transit plan. Forgot the bus might be crowded because of the baseball game? The app will remind you of that, too. Need to plan elevator and escalator routes because you’re stuck with a big stroller? No problem.

Hollaback!
Emily May and Hollaback! are putting technology to work in the movement to end street harassment. Street harassment may be considered a social and cultural norm, but May is using crowd-source technology and social media to change the way we think about this insidious form of gender-based violence. Emily May wants you to Hollaback!

Lost in Lahore
A trio of impassioned mapmakers and technologists — Asim Fayaz, Omer Sheikh and Khurram Siddiqi — are going to use the $10,000 from their City 2.0 Award to become superheroes for people who are desperate and lost in Lahore. They are taking Allama Iqbal Town, one of the most densely populated localities in Lahore, and using it as a demonstration, of sorts. The signs they erect will follow international standards and have road names in Urdu and English. In addition to installing the new signage, they will also engage a team of paid experts and passionate volunteers to maintain the signs for a trial period of three months, documenting the time and effort required.

Mapping Sanitation
Faisal Chohan, a Senior TED Fellow and TEDxIslamabad organizer, will continue his mapping work with a related mission: Improving sanitation in order to prevent the spread of cholera, a bacterial infection in the small intestine, primarily caused by drinking water or eating food that has been contaminated by the feces of an infected person. The rapid dehydration and electrolyte imbalance that results from cholera can lead to death if left untreated.

Recycled Amusement
An artist and community organizer, Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire had an imaginative idea for how to engage and empower the children of his home country: play. Tusingwire became the first 2012 City 2.0 Award recipient at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, where he pitched his plan to turn thousands of plastic water bottles into an amusement park where kids growing up in the slums can play and learn.

Re-imagining the Commons
Recognizing the irreplaceable power of the local gathering space, Next American City, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit directed by Diana Lind, is living its mission by turning its headquarters into a vibrant local learning laboratory, art gallery and hot spot for boundary-crossing conversation.

WikiHouse, a House and Home for the 99%
Inspired by a desire to “create something that would allow the 99% to make cities for the 99%,” designers Alastair Parvin and Nick Ierodiaconou aimed to explore practical applications of their philosophical commitment to a more democratized design movement. They created a blueprint allowing everyday people to build their own homes using open-sourced designs and locally sourced materials. Since the project’s inception, five prototypes have been assembled.

Inspired by the City 2.0 award winners’ stories? Share your stories and inspirations on www.thecity2.org and download The Atlantic Cities and TED Books’ original ebook, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Last time we saw Steward Brand on the TED stage was in 2010, in his debate with Mark Z. Jacobson over whether the world needs nuclear energy. Brand, perhaps surprisingly, gave a passionate pro argument. But today he’s here for a very different — and potentially very controversial — purpose.

Extinction is not just death, but death for everyone you ever knew or anything remotely like anyone you knew. It’s permanent. … Or is it? Brand takes the stage today at TED to present ground-breaking research on bringing back extinct species.

In the past few centuries the Earth has lost dozens and dozens of species to extinction, including the Tasmanian tiger, the auroch and the passenger pigeon, which went from 5 billion to zero in just a few decades. But according to Brand, it’s possible to take tiny bits of old DNA from museum specimens and, using new technology, actually reassemble the entire genome — and maybe even reassemble the organism itself.

A team of people, including legendary geneticist George Church and newcomer Ben Novak, are working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, which was a keystone species that helped save the buffalo. Beth Shapiro has already sequenced the passenger pigeon, and Church believes it can be brought back with synthetic biology technology, which is accelerating at four times the rate of Moore’s Law. Since it’s now possible to make adjustments in DNA down to a single base pair, scientists can replace missing genes with alleles from a close relative. In this case, genes from the band-tailed pigeon could be used to engineer a passenger pigeon, the last of which, Martha, died in 1914.

The first de-extinction happened on the bucardo, a type of wild mountain goat. The last bucardo died out in 2000, but its ear was preserved, and in 2009 DNA from the ear was planted in a mother goat. The engineered bucardo died after 10 minutes due to a defect in its lungs.

Incredible things are possible to save the Earth’s species. Captive breeding in zoos and ecotourism are already helping; in 1981 there were 254 Central African mountain gorillas left, and today there are 880. Currently there are four non-breeding northern white rhinoceros left, and with cloning, says Brand, we can get them back.

But the critical question to ask is: Do we want extinct species back? Are we humans taking technology to its limits, and interfering unnecessarily in nature? Well, as Brand says, it’s our job to fix what we’ve already broken. In the past 10,000 years, we’ve made a huge hole in nature. It’s our fault that some of these crucial species have been completely wiped out, so we should dedicate our energy to bringing them back.

While talking on stage to Chris, Brand ends by saying firmly, “It may take generations but we will get the wooly mammoth back.” An amazing dream? Stay tuned and see — and watch the free livestream of TEDxDeExtinction on March 15.