It’s hard to imagine Apple’s App store — 50 million users, 400,000 apps, 10 billion downloads — being threatened with extinction. (…) But we know that empires crumble: what’s interesting is how.
Right now pundits are focused on the threat of Android. (…) Android’s not the issue, however.
The real threat are web apps. The kind that will download to your device the moment you open then, allowing you offline access, whether they’re news, games, email or some other utility. If you don’t believe they’ll work — and eliminate dependencies on plugins outside of open web standards, like flash — go download a free copy of Angry Birds for Google Chrome and try disconnecting from your local network. (…)
Or try opening Nytimes.com/chrome in Firefox, any webkit-based browser or, of course, Google Chrome, and you’ll see what the future holds.
Apple has entered the final stages of negotiations with the major record labels and music publishers for a service that will allow people to upload and store their music on the Web and listen to it on smartphones, tablets or computers — so-called cloud-based music.
Amazon and Google introduced similar services weeks earlier. Apple’s service, though, is expected to be easier to use, and to find a ready market in the 200 million people who have iTunes accounts. (…)
“I don’t think it is something they will have to give away for free, at least initially,” said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. Mr. Munster said the service could be bundled with MobileMe.
Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. (…)
More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.
One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they’ve taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don’t share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn’t speak their language.”
For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel… the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on.
And with that drive into modernity MIT has played no small part in building western, and particularly US, global dominance. Its explosive innovations have helped to secure America’s military and cultural supremacy, and with it the country’s status as the world’s sole superpower.
{ Apple overtook Nokia last quarter to become the world’s No. 1 vender of mobile phones — smart or otherwise — in terms of revenue. In terms of sales, it still has a lot of room for growth. | Fortune }
Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (…)
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
{ Footprints, available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling. | TechCrunch | full story }
Excuse me for raining on the Facebook parade, but the $450 million investment by Goldman Sachs and $50 million from Russia’s Digital Sky Technology didn’t move me the way it seemed to move others. This despite the suggested $50 billion valuation, as big and beautiful a number as the stock market has seen in some time.
I am certainly not moved in the same way it appears to have moved Goldman’s own clients: the Wall Street firm has pledged to line up another $1.5 billion in sales to its high net worth investors, who are said to be champing at the bit to get a piece of the action, which starts with a $2 million minimum. Not that I have $2 million lying around, but I wouldn’t buy this stock if I did.
Reason #1: Someone who knows a lot more than I do is selling. While the identities of the specific sellers remain unknown, the current consensus seems to be that most will be from venture capital investors like Accel Partners, Peter Thiel, and Greylock Partners. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will kick in $50 million or so himself, just for some fooling around money. (…) The way the social network is talked about these days, it’s the best investment opportunity in town. So why would anyone want to forsake it? And don’t give me that crap about VCs being “early stage” and wanting to cash out of a “mature” investment. These people are as money hungry as any other institutional investor, and would let it ride unless….they saw something that suggested that the era of stupendous growth was over. Facebook reached 500 million users in July. There’s been no update since, even though the company had meticulously documented every new 50 million users to that point. Might the curve have crested? And let’s not even talk about the fact that they don’t really make much money per user — a few dollars a year at most. (Its estimated $2 billion in 2010 revenues would amount to $4 per user at that base.)
Reason #2: Goldman Sachs. I’ve got nothing against Goldman Sachs. Hell, I worked there. But when Reuters’ Felix Salmon says that the Goldman investment “ratifies” a $50 billion valuation, he’s only half right. That is, someone, somewhere—perhaps the Russians at DST Global—might just believe this imaginary number. (It’s hard to see why, though: DST got in at a $10 billion valuation in May 2009. Facebook’s user base has more than doubled since then. So its valuation should…quintuple?) But concluding that Goldman Sachs believes in a $50 billion valuation is poor reasoning. (…)
Reason #5: Warren Buffett cautions those looking at outsize valuations to consider one’s purchase of company stock in a different way than price of an individual share, whatever it may be. He suggests one look at the total market valuation – in this case, a sketchy $50 billion – and to consider: Would you buy the whole company for that price, if you had the money? The market value of Goldman Sachs is just $88 billion. I’d take more than half that company over the whole of Facebook any day of the week.
…SCVNGR, a $100-million company that makes location-based apps to rival Foursquare and Groupon. (…)
Priebatsch is 22 years old. He’s also worth millions. And not just because he’s had a “Projects” folder on a hard drive since he was 8, made tens of thousands of dollars every month on a startup when he was 16, and dropped out of college after freshman year. He’s the man in charge because he sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics, maybe, and slightly slower.”
The story of SCVNGR begins with the story of Priebatsch and that game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. His aunt gave it to him when he was a kid, and its premise was simple: Build an ancient civilization strong enough to take over the world. Priebatsch, the son of a biotech entrepreneur and Morgan Stanley VP, was forbidden from watching TV, but could play on the computer. Spending hours with the game, he quickly became addicted not to conquering the world but conquering the game. “The fact that the game was designed by someone always made me think that someone had built it with their own biases,” he says, “I would essentially mine the game into a series of algorithms and know exactly what to do at any given time.”
Priebatsch, like an undergrad reading Marx for the first time, started to look at everything through this new worldview. “I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases. After years of playing games, Priebatsch felt ready to actually build one.
“I’ve never felt threatened by Facebook. (…) Facebook has the most to lose because it has a history of altering its privacy policies and not doing the most to protect the privacy of its users,” said Priebatsch. “Facebook will be like Google, Microsoft and IBM before them – they’ve been dominant for maybe a year and I’d give them maybe four more years.”
related { 18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd different markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here? | Reuters | full story }
The widely publicized hack of Sony’s computer networks is worse than previously thought, also affecting 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment network accounts. (…)
Add this to the 77 million accounts that may have been compromised last week, and Sony is responsible for one of the largest recorded data breaches.
Remember, after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, those stories about wallets filled with money being found and turned-in to the authorities, still stuffed with cash? That’s one positive aspect of Japanese culture, but does it also make them too trusting? (…)
“For whatever reason (low crime rate, maybe?),” my reader says, “the Japanese cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that unencrypted cardholder data sitting on servers in unsecured areas and being transmitted across public networks is a bit of a risk. Every other country in Asia has grasped this easy concept, but not Japan. (…)
I can’t imagine such exposed servers having not been repeatedly explored by bad guys over the past two years. That information isn’t just vulnerable, it is gone.
If there’s one topic likely to generate spit-flecked ire, it is the controversy over the potential health threat posed by cell phone signals.
That debate is likely to flare following the publication today of some new ideas on this topic from Bill Bruno, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The big question is whether signals from cell phones or cell phone towers can damage biological tissue.
On the one hand, there is a substantial body of evidence in which cell phone signals have supposedly influenced human health and behavior. The list of symptoms includes depression, sleep loss, changes in brain metabolism, headaches and so on.
On the other hand, there is a substantial body of epidemiological evidence that finds no connection between adverse health effects and cell phone exposure.
What’s more, physicists point out that the radiation emitted by cell phones cannot damage biological tissue because microwave photons do not have enough energy to break chemical bonds.
The absence of a mechanism that can do damage means that microwave photons must be safe, they say.
That’s been a powerful argument. Until now.
Today, Bruno points out that there is another way in which photons could damage biological tissue, which has not yet been accounted for.
He argues that the traditional argument only applies when the number of photons is less than one in a volume of space equivalent to a cubic wavelength.
When the density of photons is higher than this, other effects can come into play because photons can interfere constructively.
Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, of course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.
Recent history suggests Sony’s likely gift to users as an apology for losing their personal data will be some period of free credit monitoring and a free month of PSN service.
The mathematical foundations of electronics predict the existence of four fundamental electronic devices. The resistor, capacitor and inductor are well known. The fourth device, the memristor, was only discovered in 2008 and even now remains an exotic piece of kit.
Memristors are electrical elements whose resistance depends on the current that has passed through it in the past, a phenomenon that physicists call a hysteresis. This makes these devices behave like resistors with memory, hence their name.
Memristors have generated considerable interest because they are simple and cheap to make, operate quickly and at low power and have the potential to store information even when the power is switched off.
So it’s no surprise that great things are expected of them and that various plans are afoot to build them into future generations of microchips. (…)
Today, Alexander Stotland and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California-San Diego, reveal a comprehensive analysis of the effects of noise on memristors. Their conclusion is both surprising and reassuring. Not only should memristors be immune to most types of noise, their memory ought to be enhanced by it.
For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.
Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint “influencers,” the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer’s social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.
Human minds evolved to constantly scan for novelty, lest we miss any sign of food, danger or, on a good day, mating opportunities.
But the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts, tweets, status updates and video links to piano playing cats.
There’s growing concern among scientists that indulging in these ceaseless disruptions isn’t good for our brains, in much the way that excessive sugar or fat - other things we evolved to crave when they were in shorter supply - isn’t good for our bodies.
And some believe it’s time to consider a technology diet.
A team at UCSF published a study last week that found further evidence that multitasking impedes short-term memory, especially among older adults. Researchers there previously found that distractions of the sort that smart phones and social networks present can hinder long-term memory and mental performance.
JamesMTitus was manufactured by cyber-security specialists in New Zealand participating in a two-week social-engineering experiment organized by the Web Ecology Project. Based in Boston, the group had conducted demographic analyses of Chatroulette and studies of Twitter networks during the recent Middle East protests. It was now interested in a question of particular concern to social-media experts and marketers: Is it possible not only to infiltrate social networks, but also to influence them on a large scale?
The group invited three teams to program “social bots”—fake identities—that could mimic human conversation on Twitter, and then picked 500 real users on the social network, the core of whom shared a fondness for cats. The Kiwis armed JamesMTitus with a database of generic responses (“Oh, that’s very interesting, tell me more about that”) and designed it to systematically test parts of the network for what tweets generated the most responses, and then to talk to the most responsive people.
After the first week, the teams were allowed to tweak their bot’s code and to launch secondary identities designed to sabotage their competitors’ bots.
Tech bubbles happen, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. This one—driven by social networking—could leave us empty-handed
As a 23-year-old math genius one year out of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook when the company was still in its infancy. This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher—one of Facebook’s first 100 employees—the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others. The company also wanted to track differences in behavior between high-school-age kids and older, drunker college students. “I was there to answer these high-level questions, and they really didn’t have any tools to do that yet,” he says.
Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team to build a new class of analytical technology. His crew gathered huge volumes of data, pored over it, and learned much about people’s relationships, tendencies, and desires. Facebook has since turned these insights into precision advertising, the foundation of its business. (…)
After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” (…)
Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup. He’s 28 now and speaks with the classic Silicon Valley blend of preternatural self-assurance and save-the-worldism. (…) He’s not really a programmer or an engineer; he’s mostly just really, really good at math. (…)
On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They’re the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That’s when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology.
Classic user identification requires the remote user sending a username and a password to the system to which they want to be authenticated. The system looks up the username in its locally stored database and if the password submitted matches the stored password, then access is granted. This method for identification works under the assumption there exist no malicious users and that their local terminals cannot be infected by malware. (…)
Nikolaos Bardis of the University of Military Education, in Vari, Greece and colleagues there and at the Polytechnic Institute of Kiev, in Ukraine, have developed an innovative approach to logins, which implements the advanced concept of zero knowledge identification.
Zero knowledge user identification solves these issues by using passwords that change for every session and are not known to the system beforehand. The system can only check their validity.
