Company’s App Can Now Be Used to Hail Yellow Cabs in City
After a series of court hearings and false starts, New York City’s yellow-taxi riders can now, for the first time, legally hail a cab with a smartphone app.
On Tuesday night, a company called Uber, which entered the yellow taxi-hailing market last year before being rebuffed by the city, said that its service was available, one week after a lawsuit challenging the use of such apps was dismissed. The city announced on Friday that Uber’s was so far the first and only app to be approved.
“The launch of Uber’s service is great news for New Yorkers and visitors to our city who want to quickly and conveniently get a taxi,†Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement. “Adding safe and regulated e-hail service is the latest in our administration’s efforts to use innovative technology to improve taxi service.â€
In December, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission approved a pilot program of apps for yellow cabs, prompting a lawsuit from livery and black-car operators who argued that the program would violate the city’s longstanding ban on prearranged rides in yellow taxis. The plaintiffs initially succeeded in delaying the program, securing a temporary restraining order on the plan, but a State Supreme Court justice dismissed the suit last week.
Now a rival company, Hailo, appears to have drawn the city’s ire. The commission issued a terse industry notice this week warning drivers that they would be subject to summonses if they used a recently released test version of Hailo’s product.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 1, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Company’s App Can Now Be Used to Hail Cabs in City.
A video report from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli settler news organization, on the funeral of Evyatar Borovsky, who was killed Tuesday near his home in the West Bank by a Palestinian attacker.
As my colleagues Isabel Kershner and Fares Akram report, the tension of daily life in the occupied West Bank exploded into deadly violence on Tuesday, when a knife-wielding Palestinian man attacked and killed an Israeli settler at a bus stop. The attacker, identified as Salam Zaghal, a 24-year-old who recently spent three years in jail for throwing stones, then seized the dead man’s pistol and engaged in a shoot-out with police officers.
On social networks and in statements to the news media, representatives Israel’s military and the leadership of the settler community were in no doubt about the nature of the attack, describing the killing as the murder of an Israeli civilian by a Palestinian terrorist.
This morning: #Palestinian #terrorist murdered Evyatar Borovsky, an #Israeli father of five http://t.co/L1IeVznUtZ
Some supporters of the national-religious settlement project, like the editors of The Jewish Press in Brooklyn, even blamed the officers who responded to the attack for not just killing the attacker on the spot. “It is not clear,†The Press reported, “why they shot the terrorist in the leg, and not the head.â€
From Palestinians and Israelis who oppose the occupation, though, condemnations of the killing were mixed with calls to pay attention to the broader context â€" in which an Arab community of 2.5 million, living under military rule for 46 years, is forced to accommodate itself to an influx of hundreds of thousands of Israeli migrants to expanding Jewish-only settlements, defended by armed soldiers, officers and civilian guards.
In a statement offering “condolences to the family of the murder victim,†the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights said it was “horrified by the nationalistic murder,†but also suggested that Palestinians are engaged in “a morally justified campaign against a discriminatory military regime.†The rabbis quickly added, however, that even a just cause “does not justify harm to civilians, and we harshly condemn any attack such as this.â€
Condolences to the family of the murder victim today at Tapuah Junction | Rabbis for Human Rights http://t.co/qOzaA2JpFz
According to Yousef Munayyer, the director of The Palestine Center in Washington, his group has documented more than 1,200 incidents of violence by settlers in the 18 months since the last killing of an Israeli civilian in the occupied territory.
#Israel settler killed by a Palestinian today in the WB for first time since Sept ’11 during which 1200+ settler violence incidents occurred
In a post for the Israeli news blog +972, Mairav Zonszein, argued that the 18 months since the last fatal attack on an Israeli in the West Bank had created “an illusion of calm and stability†in a status quo that is unsustainable. Ms. Zonszein, an Israeli-American blogger who works with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish group that supports rural Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, wrote:
During this “calm†period, most Israelis continue going about their lives. They aren’t affected by the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a daily basis. But days like today, when the phrase “terror attack†is back in the news, Israelis suddenly remember that we are in a violent conflict. The government, of course, does a good job of reminding us we are the victims.
But on all those days when there is no violence against Israelis in the news, on all those days when Israelis can go about their business, the situation is actually not at all stable or calm. It’s definitely not calm for the Palestinian population, specifically in the West Bank where life under occupation is anything but free of violence.
By way of explanation, Ms. Zonszein cited remarks published last year by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, on the constant pressure of life in the West Bank, between outbreaks of deadly violence, in which he asked the rhetorical question: “What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e. when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?†His answer was:
What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians in the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.
“To avoid any kind of misunderstanding,†Mr. Žižek added, “taking all this into account in no way implies any ‘understanding’ for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.â€
In the days before the deadly attack, Ms. Zonszein’s fellow-activists at Ta’ayush were working to draw attention to how very tense daily life in the occupied West Bank can be when Israeli soldiers try to keep Palestinian farmers away from land near Israeli settlements.
Over the weekend, Ta’ayush released a brief video clip showing an Israeli soldier shouting with rage at Israeli activists who had accompanied Palestinian shepherds from a West Bank village as they tried to graze their sheep on land near Othni’el, an Israeli settlement.
Video recorded by an Israeli activist in the West Bank this month showed an Israeli soldier screaming at Palestinian shepherds and their Israeli supporters.
According to Ms. Zonszein’s translation, when a Ta’ayush activist named Guy interrupted the soldier as he was shouting at a shepherd, the reservist turned to Guy’s camera and screamed “Get out of here you Israel haters!†After threatening to hit the activist, he added: “You are worse than the Arabs!†The officer then shouted at a female Israeli activist: “Shut up, Israel hater who goes to bed with Arabs!â€
After the video was featured on the Web site of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli military called the officer’s conduct unbecoming, but suggested that the confrontation had been provoked by the “left-wing activists†who recorded it.
Activists from Ta’ayush have also documented an apparent effort by Israeli officers in the West Bank to prevent footage of what ordinary aspects of the occupation look like from being recorded. In another video clip, released with a blog post on Saturday, soldiers can be seen repeatedly blocking the lens of Ta’ayush activists as they attempted to film the shepherds being forced away from land near the settlement.
Video of Israeli officers using their own phones and cameras to block the lenses of Israeli activists attempting to record their work in the West Bank.
Asked about this footage, in which officers can be seen using their own phones and cameras to block the lenses of the activists, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Capt. Eytan Buchman, told The Lede: “a Palestinian shepherd, accompanied by Israeli activists, tried to illegally graze a field adjacent to the town of Othni’el in a blatant attempt to create a provocation. Security forces arrived in order to distance the shepherd and activists without the use of force.â€
Guy, Ta’ayushIsraeli soldiers blocked the cameras of Israeli activists who were recording their activities in the occupied West Bank this month.
Amiel Vardi, a Hebrew University classics professor and one of the founders of Ta’ayush, was with the shepherds in South Mount Hebron when the video was recorded. He told The Lede in an e-mail, “the soldiers gave no reason,†for blocking their cameras. “On the contrary, they insisted that they do not restrict our filming â€" only filming us too, as is their right. So much for what they said. As for what they actually did, I suppose they know that they have no legal authority to drive the shepherds away from these lands, and are not to keen to be filmed doing it.â€
As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, Mr. Vardi “was shot in 2006 by a settler when he and friends tried to help Palestinian farmers reach their vineyards during the grape harvest.â€
According to the Ta’ayush activists, the effort to prevent them from recording scenes of routine confrontations in the occupied West Bank is a concerted one. Last month, they posted a video compilation of officers blocking their cameras during several visits to the area, and at the start of this month, they were even detained for several hours by police officers investigating a complaint filed by settlers who accused the activists of “disturbing public order†by filming construction at a settlement.
When it comes to comments on the Internet, there are often two distinct buckets. One, a sludge of vitriol and anger toward the author of a post or story. The second, too many comments to navigate where the good input from readers is often lost in Bucket No. 1.
A number of start-ups have been trying to solve this problem for some time, including Branch, which entices people to start a longer, more in-depth conversation about a specific topic and invite others to join the discussion.
Now Disqus, a comments platform for bloggers, is trying to help people find unique conversations using a data visualization, Disqus Gravity.
In a post on the company’s Web site, the new feature is described as a “live feed of trending discussions happening across the galaxy of sites that use Disqus.†There are 700 million people who engage with the service a month.
The data visualization looks like a bunch of marbles floating around on a shiny floor, with round circles shimmering about, each belonging to a genre of commentary: sports, news, celebrity gossip. The larger the circle, the more people involved in a conversation about the topic. Comments that have seen the most interaction by readers are highlighted, and stand out from the rest of the chatter.
That is, providing people want to read the comments in the first place.
On Tuesday, Jawbone, which makes wireless headsets and music accessories, announced that it acquired BodyMedia, a company that sells wearable sensors, for about $110 million.
Jawbone declined to comment on how much it paid for the acquisition, but a source close to the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record confirmed the price.
“It’s a significant deal because it’s a significant opportunity,†said Hosain Rahman, the chief executive of Jawbone. “We looked at the market and what we thought about what we can do on our own or together with BodyMedia, and we found a deal acceptable to our shareholders.â€
BodyMedia has been making and selling activity tracking armbands that can monitor exercise and sleep behaviors since 1999. Mr. Rahman said he was most interested in the company’s expertise, and its robust trove of data about how people use and interact with their body monitors and sensors. His plan is to continue to run and sell BodyMedia products and incorporate Jawbone’s line of wearable products into BodyMedia’s software services that let people view and monitor their activity.
In addition, Mr. Rahman said he was interested in BodyMedia’s portfolio of patents, which he thinks will help future-proof the company as more companies get into developing and marketing their own wearable designs.
“When you are a creator or inventor, you have to make sure you are protected and make sure your innovation is solid and protected,†he said.
Currently, Jawbone sells the Up, a wearable fitness bracelet, but the device has had some stumbles in the market, making its debut to some unfavorable reviews and critical reactions to the app that is meant to be used with the wristband.
But Mr. Rahman says the Up has been the company’s fastest-selling product, although he declined to share specifics on sales, further bolstering the company’s bet in the new hardware category.
“We now have the definitive intellectual property for the next phases of wearable tech,†he said.
On Tuesday, Jawbone, which makes wireless headsets and music accessories, announced that it acquired BodyMedia, a company that sells wearable sensors, for about $110 million.
Jawbone declined to comment on how much it paid for the acquisition, but a source close to the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record confirmed the price.
“It’s a significant deal because it’s a significant opportunity,†said Hosain Rahman, the chief executive of Jawbone. “We looked at the market and what we thought about what we can do on our own or together with BodyMedia, and we found a deal acceptable to our shareholders.â€
BodyMedia has been making and selling activity tracking armbands that can monitor exercise and sleep behaviors since 1999. Mr. Rahman said he was most interested in the company’s expertise, and its robust trove of data about how people use and interact with their body monitors and sensors. His plan is to continue to run and sell BodyMedia products and incorporate Jawbone’s line of wearable products into BodyMedia’s software services that let people view and monitor their activity.
In addition, Mr. Rahman said he was interested in BodyMedia’s portfolio of patents, which he thinks will help future-proof the company as more companies get into developing and marketing their own wearable designs.
“When you are a creator or inventor, you have to make sure you are protected and make sure your innovation is solid and protected,†he said.
Currently, Jawbone sells the Up, a wearable fitness bracelet, but the device has had some stumbles in the market, making its debut to some unfavorable reviews and critical reactions to the app that is meant to be used with the wristband.
But Mr. Rahman says the Up has been the company’s fastest-selling product, although he declined to share specifics on sales, further bolstering the company’s bet in the new hardware category.
“We now have the definitive intellectual property for the next phases of wearable tech,†he said.
On Tuesday, Jawbone, which makes wireless headsets and music accessories, announced that it acquired BodyMedia, a company that sells wearable sensors, for about $110 million.
Jawbone declined to comment on how much it paid for the acquisition, but a source close to the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record confirmed the price.
“It’s a significant deal because it’s a significant opportunity,†said Hosain Rahman, the chief executive of Jawbone. “We looked at the market and what we thought about what we can do on our own or together with BodyMedia, and we found a deal acceptable to our shareholders.â€
BodyMedia has been making and selling activity tracking armbands that can monitor exercise and sleep behaviors since 1999. Mr. Rahman said he was most interested in the company’s expertise, and its robust trove of data about how people use and interact with their body monitors and sensors. His plan is to continue to run and sell BodyMedia products and incorporate Jawbone’s line of wearable products into BodyMedia’s software services that let people view and monitor their activity.
In addition, Mr. Rahman said he was interested in BodyMedia’s portfolio of patents, which he thinks will help future-proof the company as more companies get into developing and marketing their own wearable designs.
“When you are a creator or inventor, you have to make sure you are protected and make sure your innovation is solid and protected,†he said.
Currently, Jawbone sells the Up, a wearable fitness bracelet, but the device has had some stumbles in the market, making its debut to some unfavorable reviews and critical reactions to the app that is meant to be used with the wristband.
But Mr. Rahman says the Up has been the company’s fastest-selling product, although he declined to share specifics on sales, further bolstering the company’s bet in the new hardware category.
“We now have the definitive intellectual property for the next phases of wearable tech,†he said.
Tonight at 7, Bits will be live streaming a conversation with Eric A. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, about how the Internet is reshaping people, places and things. Click on the image above to watch the event, which is being moderated by David Carr.
My Disruptions column this weekend looked at a nascent technology through which you can control computers, smartphones and robotic arms with your mind.
Although some people are clearly excited by this nearing technology, where they can change channels on their television just by thinking about it, other readers were mortified by the idea of a gadget reading their brain waves.
“Yeah, well, currents flow two ways. You turn your lights on with your brain; the lights turn your brain off,†wrote Tom from San Diego in a comment on the column. “Me? Leave me disconnected.â€
Another, Tony from Pennsylvania, seemed downright scared. “I actually find this a little on the scary side,†he wrote. “If technology can be controlled by thought, who’s to say our thoughts can’t be read the government?â€
It seems these readers aren’t alone.
On the frequently asked questions area of Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband that can engage with computers and mobile devices, there is one particular question that stood out. “Can a brainwave sensor read my mind?†the question asks. Trying to put the reader at ease, Muse answers: “Absolutely not. It cannot read thoughts. A brainwave sensor is a non-invasive device.â€
James Temple, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in a column over the weekend that some researchers fear that the rise of brain-reading gadgets will bring with it a new genre of hacker who could try to steal people’s thoughts.
Mr. Temple cited research published last year where scientists tried to siphon A.T.M. codes from students’ minds by flashing bank logos, A.T.M. machines and debit cards, all while monitoring the student’s thoughts using brain-scanning technologies.
“Some of these tests worked better than others,†but over all the researchers’ ability to predict the right A.T.M. code “improved by anywhere from 15 to 40 percent, compared with random guesses.â€
Scary stuff indeed. One of the comments on my column predicted how this all might play out.
“What a difference a generation or two makes. When I was a young man, the notion of having a computer chip implanted in your head was cause for alarm,†wrote Holmes from Middletown, Conn. â€Now I can easily see young people doing so in order to access their beloved devices, in fact, lining up in order to be the first among their peers.â€
As for those who opt not to use brain-reading technology, they might instead choose to wear tin-foil hats.
Many technology enthusiasts have had their eye on Glass, Google’s monocle that looks like something out of Star Trek. But the Internet-connected eyewear doesn’t really pique the interest of Jack Dorsey, chief executive of the mobile payment system Square and a co-founder of Twitter.
“Glasses are very compelling, and I think it’s an amazing technology,†Mr. Dorsey said, “but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?â€
Mr. Dorsey said he fancied devices that wrap around the wrist, like smartwatches or exercise bands, because they felt more natural. The conversation might hint that Square is considering a payment app for a smartwatch, perhaps the watch from Apple that has long been rumored to be in the works.
Mr. Dorsey shared his thoughts last Friday while at a grilled cheese shop in New York to talk about a new feature in Square’s cash-register software for iPads. The new feature allows restaurant owners to speed up the process of placing customized food orders with Square’s cash-register app for iPads, called Register.
With the new software, a restaurant can more easily customize orders. For example, if a customer chooses a grilled cheese sandwich, but wants it with gluten-free bread and extra peppers, the merchant can hit the grilled cheese sandwich button and then individually select the type of bread and extra peppers. In the past, a merchant would have needed to create a separate button in advance for each variation of each sandwich offered â€" for example, one for a regular grilled cheese sandwich, one for a grilled cheese with wheat bread and one with gluten-free bread and extra peppers.
Mr. Dorsey answered several of our questions about Square and its future. A transcript of the interview follows, edited for length and clarity.
Q.
What’s the message behind the news about the customized food orders?
A.
People have known Square for accepting credit cards. This is a big push we’re making into smaller businesses and brick and mortar, specifically around restaurants. There’s this huge movement around quick-service restaurants all over the country, especially in places like New York, where you order at a counter. Food trucks are often an offshoot of this. These places are doing really creative crafty things and doing them very well.
Q.
When it comes to speeding up food orders for businesses, some of your competitors are enabling the ability for customers to order ahead and pay with an app, then skip the line and grab the food. Are you looking into that capability, too?
A.
That’s definitely something we hear about it and it’s something we’d naturally want to do.
Q.
Last year Square introduced the ability for customers to pay with their face through Square Wallet, its payment app. Are people using that feature a lot, or is it just tech nerds?
A.
We do have early adopters. I don’t want to disparage tech nerds because they’re the ones that spread things like Twitter and Facebook. I think we’ve been happy with the residence of Wallet, but we haven’t been thrilled. A lot of that is due to people understanding how to use it. We have a lot more work to do to surface it.
For those who use it, they love it. For the merchants who receive it, they love it. They get to know their customers as they walk in, what they like, what they might order, and it increases their revenue.
We definitely saw a surge in Wallet. We definitely saw a surge in Register, actually. It really validates the high end. They’re using the same tool that these guys are using, they’re using the same infrastructure. It really levels the playing field for them to compete with each other. It really validates that this is something businesses can trust â€"this huge company is using it, and I can also build my business on it.
I don’t think glasses are the answer. I think it might be a 10-year answer, but not in the next five years. Maybe if they’re in sunglasses or what not.
I think the movement you see around Fitbit, Up and FuelBand, that seems to be the next step in wearable. So something on the wrist that feels natural, almost feels a bit like jewelry.
Glasses are very compelling and I think it’s an amazing technology, but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?
Q.
Sounds like you have a lot more faith in the rumored iWatch.
A.
(Laughs.) I don’t know, I think there’s a lot going on. The Pebble watch I think is pretty compelling as well.
Many technology enthusiasts have had their eye on Glass, Google’s monocle that looks like something out of Star Trek. But the Internet-connected eyewear doesn’t really pique the interest of Jack Dorsey, chief executive of the mobile payment system Square and a co-founder of Twitter.
“Glasses are very compelling, and I think it’s an amazing technology,†Mr. Dorsey said, “but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?â€
Mr. Dorsey said he fancied devices that wrap around the wrist, like smartwatches or exercise bands, because they felt more natural. The conversation might hint that Square is considering a payment app for a smartwatch, perhaps the watch from Apple that has long been rumored to be in the works.
Mr. Dorsey shared his thoughts last Friday while at a grilled cheese shop in New York to talk about a new feature in Square’s cash-register software for iPads. The new feature allows restaurant owners to speed up the process of placing customized food orders with Square’s cash-register app for iPads, called Register.
With the new software, a restaurant can more easily customize orders. For example, if a customer chooses a grilled cheese sandwich, but wants it with gluten-free bread and extra peppers, the merchant can hit the grilled cheese sandwich button and then individually select the type of bread and extra peppers. In the past, a merchant would have needed to create a separate button in advance for each variation of each sandwich offered â€" for example, one for a regular grilled cheese sandwich, one for a grilled cheese with wheat bread and one with gluten-free bread and extra peppers.
Mr. Dorsey answered several of our questions about Square and its future. A transcript of the interview follows, edited for length and clarity.
Q.
What’s the message behind the news about the customized food orders?
A.
People have known Square for accepting credit cards. This is a big push we’re making into smaller businesses and brick and mortar, specifically around restaurants. There’s this huge movement around quick-service restaurants all over the country, especially in places like New York, where you order at a counter. Food trucks are often an offshoot of this. These places are doing really creative crafty things and doing them very well.
Q.
When it comes to speeding up food orders for businesses, some of your competitors are enabling the ability for customers to order ahead and pay with an app, then skip the line and grab the food. Are you looking into that capability, too?
A.
That’s definitely something we hear about it and it’s something we’d naturally want to do.
Q.
Last year Square introduced the ability for customers to pay with their face through Square Wallet, its payment app. Are people using that feature a lot, or is it just tech nerds?
A.
We do have early adopters. I don’t want to disparage tech nerds because they’re the ones that spread things like Twitter and Facebook. I think we’ve been happy with the residence of Wallet, but we haven’t been thrilled. A lot of that is due to people understanding how to use it. We have a lot more work to do to surface it.
For those who use it, they love it. For the merchants who receive it, they love it. They get to know their customers as they walk in, what they like, what they might order, and it increases their revenue.
We definitely saw a surge in Wallet. We definitely saw a surge in Register, actually. It really validates the high end. They’re using the same tool that these guys are using, they’re using the same infrastructure. It really levels the playing field for them to compete with each other. It really validates that this is something businesses can trust â€"this huge company is using it, and I can also build my business on it.
I don’t think glasses are the answer. I think it might be a 10-year answer, but not in the next five years. Maybe if they’re in sunglasses or what not.
I think the movement you see around Fitbit, Up and FuelBand, that seems to be the next step in wearable. So something on the wrist that feels natural, almost feels a bit like jewelry.
Glasses are very compelling and I think it’s an amazing technology, but I just can’t imagine my mom wearing them right now. What is the value of Glass?
Q.
Sounds like you have a lot more faith in the rumored iWatch.
A.
(Laughs.) I don’t know, I think there’s a lot going on. The Pebble watch I think is pretty compelling as well.
You can tell when a technology is really taking hold. In addition to picking up customers, it generates other businesses that require their own care and feeding. And some of those businesses can illustrate how much more business is out there.
On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services is having a meeting for developers and customers in San Francisco. It is the fourth of 12 such meetings Amazon is holding worldwide; the first was in New York on April 18 and the last will be in São Paulo, Brazil, on July 30. In between, Amazon will be in Delhi and Berlin, among other cities.
These gatherings will include lots of cheerleading and information from Amazon Web Services directed toward prospective customers and will also have meetings for companies that work closely with Web services on things like databases, security, and application development. About 650 companies are partners with Amazon Web Services, and there are another 723 consulting partners that attract customers looking to tie the unit into their business.
Amazon Web Services is growing fast. It has over 1,600 job openings on its Web site and accounted for the vast majority of the $798 million in “other†revenue Amazon reported in the quarter that ended March 31. Still, it wants those other companies to be really active on its behalf so it can remain the leader in so-called “public clouds,†or cloud computing services for rent.
A look at one of the partners, Eucalyptus Systems, illustrates the kind of scale the Amazon service operates on. Eucalyptus provides cloud software that is used primarily for testing big Amazon service projects. That is, even before some companies go on Amazon Web Services, they build mini-Web services clouds.
One customer of Eucalyptus, App Dynamics, tests new software for Netflix, the largest customer of the Amazon service. “Even before their software is on A.W.S., we are categorizing and analyzing over a billion transactions,†said Thomas Morse, director of information technology and operations at App Dynamics. “Netflix inflicts a unique kind of pain on a system, with tens of thousands of computing nodes supporting millions of actions a minute.â€
Eucalyptus, which began life as an open-source project for people to build their own clouds, moved into supporting Amazon Web Services once Amazon captured such a large share of the market. “They’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers now,†said Marten Mickos, chief executive of Eucalyptus. Because almost all of these customers are companies, he said, “it is used by millions of people. It gives them meaning for a number of years.â€
Last week the data storage giant EMC and its affiliate VMware, which are worried about the Amazon service, announced creation of Pivotal, a company that includes its own Amazon-type cloud. This summer, Google is likely to announce an expansion of its own Amazon Web Services-type unit, called Google Compute Engine.
Both Pivotal and Google are working hard on partner networks of their own. Elsewhere, a wealth of consortia with the word “open†in their names are looking for their own openings. Many of these companies are heavily backed by older incumbent companies.
Mr. Mikos, who sold MySQL, a relational database management system, to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008, sees the completion as a three-way competition. “There are the old guys, like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Cisco, who are trying to get into new stuff,†he says. “There are the server virtualization companies, like VMware and Citrix, who say the cloud is just more virtualization of your existing equipment. Then there are the pure plays, like A.W.S. and Google.â€
On Monday, Eucalyptus introduced a new version of its product that allows customers to test even bigger projects before they move to the Amazon service. In the future, Mr. Mickos said, the company would look to make its product compatible with Google’s service as well.
“It is the most interesting strategic thing we can do,†he said. “Amazon is the standard now, Google will compete. There is an old world that won’t cross over.â€
The smartphone has finally surpassed the traditional feature phone, also known as the dumb phone, in sales worldwide. Samsung Electronics is leading the pack.
The Internet giant Alibaba was once known as China’s answer to eBay. Now it is forging closer ties to the country’s counterpart to Twitter.
Alibaba agreed on Monday to buy an 18 percent stake in the Sina Corporation’s Weibo, the most popular of China’s microblogging services, for $586 million. It has the right to raise its stake to 30 percent in the future.
Alibaba and Sina also agreed to cooperate in improving ways to marry social networking with e-commerce, as microblogging services like Sina’s continue to grow in popularity. Sina Weibo said last year that it had over 46 million users, an increase of 82 percent from the period a year earlier.
That remains a fraction of Twitter’s user base, however. And a recent study of about 30,000 Sina Weibo users found that about 57 percent of the sampled accounts had no measurable activity or posts.
Alibaba continues to grow, most recently being valued by analysts at more than $55 billion. It has reshuffled its management ranks ahead of a hotly anticipated initial public offering that could come as soon as this year.
The growth of social networking and its close ties to the continuing boom in mobile Internet usage have prompted a natural response: how to make money from the phenomenon. Sina and Alibaba expect their efforts to yield about $380 million in advertising and commercial revenue for the Weibo service over the next three years.
“We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile Internet a core part of Alibaba’s strategy,†Jack Ma, Alibaba’s chairman, said in a statement.
Venture Capitalists Are Making Bigger Bets on Food Start-Ups
Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
Unreal, a candy company based in Boston, says it uses 25 percent less sugar than other candy on the market.
What if the next big thing in tech does not arrive on your smartphone or in the cloud? What if it lands on your plate?
Nick Taranto, one of the founders of Plated, which sells ready-to-make dinner kits, at its Brooklyn warehouse.
That idea is enticing a wide group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley into making big bets on food.
In some cases, the goal is to connect restaurants with food purveyors, or to create on-demand delivery services from local farms, or ready-to-cook dinner kits. In others, the goal is to invent new foods, like creating cheese, meat and egg substitutes from plants. Since this is Silicon Valley money, though, the ultimate goal is often nothing short of grand: transforming the food industry.
“Part of the reason you’re seeing all these V.C.’s get interested in this is the food industry is not only is it massive, but like the energy industry, it is terribly broken in terms of its impact on the environment, health, animals,†said Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Hampton Creek Foods, a start-up making egg alternatives.
Some investors say food-related start-ups fit into their sustainability portfolios, alongside solar energy or electric cars, because they aim to reduce the toll on the environment of producing animal products. For others, they fit alongside health investments like fitness devices and heart rate monitoring apps. Still others are eager to tackle a real-world problem, instead of building virtual farming games or figuring out ways to get people to click on ads.
“There are pretty significant environmental consequences and health issues associated with sodium or high-fructose corn syrup or eating too much red meat,†said Samir Kaul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, which has invested in a half-dozen food start-ups. “I wouldn’t bet my money that Cargill or ConAgra are going to innovate here. I think it’s going to take start-ups to do that.â€
In the last year, venture capital firms in the valley have funneled about $350 million into food projects, and investment deals in the sector were 37 percent higher than the previous year, according to a recent report by CB Insights, a venture capital database. In 2008, that figure was less than $50 million.
That money is just a slice of the $30 billion that venture capitalists invest annually, but it is enough to help finance an array of food start-ups.
The venture capital firms helping to finance these businesses are some of the valley’s most prominent names, in addition to Khosla: SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and the Obvious Collection. Celebrities from Hollywood (Matt Damon), pro football (Tom Brady) and the tech world more broadly (Bill Gates) have also joined in.
“Consumers are interested in sophisticated experiences that are beautifully delivered, which we’ve seen happen on the Web and with products like the iPhone,†said Tony Conrad, a partner at True Ventures, which was an early investor in the coffee company Blue Bottle. “Now, we’re seeing that happen with food and beverage.â€
Still, some tech analysts and venture capitalists are skeptical that these companies, with their factories and perishable products, can reach the scale and market valuations of big Internet companies.
“I don’t see a multimillion-dollar business coming out of any of these companies,†said Susan Etlinger, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, a firm that advises companies on how to use technology. “The majority of Americans will not likely be able to participate, they’re simply too expensive for them.â€
Venture capitalists have strayed from pure technology to food before. Restaurant chains like Starbucks, P. F. Chang’s, Jamba Juice and, more recently, the Melt, were backed by venture capital. Recipe apps and restaurant review sites like Yelp have long been popular.
But this newest wave of start-ups is seeking to use technology to change the way people buy food, and in some cases to invent entirely new foods. Investors are also eager to profit from the movement toward eating fewer animal products and more organic food. They face a contradiction, though, because that movement also shuns processed food and is decidedly low-tech.
“It’s not Franken-food,†Mr. Kaul of Khosla Ventures said. “We’re careful not to make it sound like some science experiment, but there is technology there.â€
Hampton Creek Foods, based in San Francisco, uses about a dozen plants, including peas, sorghum and a type of bean, with properties similar to eggs, to make an egg substitute.
Mr. Tetrick, its founder, started the company after working on alleviating poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. He hired a protein chemist, a food scientist, a sales executive from Heinz and a contestant from the television show “Top Chef.†Two large food companies are using the egg substitutes in cookies and mayonnaise, and he said he planned to sell them to consumers next month.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Silicon Valley’s Kitchen.
Much like a friend who can’t let you get to the punch line of a joke without getting there first, the Twitter feed @HuffPoSpoilers takes away the fun of the teasing headlines that The Huffington Post sends out about its articles.
On Thursday, for example, when The Huffington Post posted on Twitter, “City council may consider making rifle ownership mandatory,†the HuffPoSpoilers Twitter feed included that original tease and appended the following: “City = Craig, CO (pop. 9,000).â€
Or on April 4, when it posted, “ ‘Mad Men’ star hints at season six surprises,†HuffPoSpoilers wanted it known that the star was not Jon Hamm or Elisabeth Moss but Ben Feldman, who plays the copywriter Mike Ginsberg.
And then there is that deflating feeling produced when a post promising “3 foods that will give you amazingly smooth skin,†is explained simply with “Avocado, honey and sugar.â€
Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, may not be great for capturing the nuances of complicated social changes but it seems ideally suited to a particular form of snarky journalistic criticism that grows brick by brick, post by post. HuffPoSpoilers uses example after example to expose the habit of sending out overpromising headlines.
Similarly, the Twitter feed @NYTOnIt has sent out more than 400 posts, prompted when a trend article from The New York Times seems too obvious or too generic â€" for example, distilling an article about a study of Internet use among older people as, “GUYS, older folks don’t use the Internet as regularly as younger folks, and The Times is ON IT.†Other targets include articles about the arrival of fall, the use of staplers, and how night stands are becoming more crowded.
(In November, The Times enlisted Twitter to have the account more clearly identified as a parody of The Times, not part of The Times, which led to its briefly being taken down.)
Another style of journalistic criticism is more of a group effort â€" like the now nearly four-year-old hashtag #slatepitches. This acts as a clearinghouse for over-the-top “story ideas†that would seemingly fit the counterintuitive spin that Slate magazine favors, along the lines of, say, why Kobe Bryant’s injury would be good for the Lakers in the N.B.A. playoffs. (These days, however, Slate and its contributors appear to be using the hashtag to promote themselves, showing that perhaps the worst thing is to be ignored on Twitter.)
A more esoteric example of such Twitter mockery was the flurry of posts with the hashtag #BBCobituaries, which allowed fans of the cult movie “Withnail and I†to object to how one of its stars, Richard Griffiths, was identified by the BBCin an obituary. Mr. Griffiths was identified in the headline only for his work in the Harry Potter movie franchise, rather than for his turn as Uncle Monty in “Withnail.â€
The creator of HuffPoSpoilers, Alex Mizrahi, says his Twitter feed came as a spur-of-the-moment reaction to reading the post “Guess who is the highest-paid celebrity†in August. Rather than guess, Mr. Mizrahi, 30, from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, looked up the answer â€" Oprah Winfrey, $165 million in 2011 â€" and added it to the Huffington Post message. He quickly got 10 followers and remembers being excited.
“It kills me that there is a 40- or 50-character tweet where they could easily put in more information but choose not to, such as the person involved or the country,†he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I understand they want people to read,†he added, but he said it was hard not to feel toyed with when a headline is sent out like this one on Thursday: “1 dead 20 injured as chef mistakes pesticide for sauce.â€
You think, he said, “Oh my God, that might be New York,†when, as HuffPoSpoilers revealed, this happened in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China.
On Wednesday, for a reason he can’t really explain, the Twitter feed suddenly got enough attention to cascade, with more than 11,000 followers as of Sunday â€" Mr. Mizrahi says he knew it was a big deal when he stumbled on HuffPoSpoilers in the feeds of people he follows. (He does not identify himself as the creator of the Twitter handle, but it was not hard to discover who it was.)
“The Huffington Post wouldn’t have three million followers if people didn’t like the content and like the articles and like what they are producing,†he said, “but people like me get annoyed by their cryptic tweets that don’t tell you anything, or just obvious click bait.â€
Thus far, Huffington Post has not changed its tactics on Twitter, but it did give some publicity to those who would mock it. The very brief article about HuffPoSpoilers on Thursday says, “We don’t know who’s behind this account but it made us laugh, so we’re sharing it with you too.â€
Of course, Huffington Post also promoted that article on Twitter: “@HuffPoSpoilers ruins every tease-filled tweet from @HuffingtonPost for you.â€
That message left Mr. Mizrahi at a bit of a loss. All he could append was, “can’t ruin this one.â€
A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease.
The high-tech patents wars are fed by the value of patents as weapons for extracting rich sums from companies and competitors.
But courts are blunting the patent weapon, at least for the kinds of patents deemed vital for communications and data-handling in devices like smartphones, tablets and online game consoles. That trend took another step with an opinion issued last Thursday by a judge for the United States District Court in Seattle.
In his 207-page ruling, Judge James L. Robart took on the issue of pricing for so-called standard-essential patents. These are patents that their corporate owners have pledged to license to others on terms that are “reasonable and nondiscriminatory,†often known as RAND. All well and good, but what is reasonable to the owner might seem like extortion to the licensee, depending on the price. That kind of standoff becomes more likely if the two companies negotiating are rivals in the marketplace.
With clear prose and some clever math, Judge Robart concluded that when a company has made a RAND commitment to an industry standards organization, the price should be low. That is especially important, he said, for the intellectual property in complex digital devices that are bundles of many hardware and software technologies.
The ruling, according to Arti K. Rai, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, “fits into a long line of recent cases in which courts are squarely rejecting attempts by patentees to claim high reasonable royalty figures when the patent in question is a just a small piece of the product.â€
The case in federal court in Seattle is a breach-of-contract dispute between Microsoft and Motorola, whose mobile phone unit, Motorola Mobility, Google bought in 2011 for $12.5 billion. Google picked up 17,000 patents in the deal, which closed last year.
In essence, Microsoft argued that Motorola bargained in bad faith by initially offering outlandish terms to license its patents on a wireless communication standard, 802.11, and another standard for video compression, H264.
Microsoft contends that Motorola’s first offer, if applied to a wide range of Microsoft products, might result in royalty payments of more than $4 billion a year. Motorola has replied in court that opening offers are nearly always negotiated down substantially, and that Motorola was mainly seeking a license deal on Microsoft’s Xbox video console rather than Microsoft’s wider product portfolio.
Still, Judge Robart determined that a reasonable rate for licensing the Motorola patents would be just under $1.8 million a year. That is not far from what Microsoft was offering as reasonable, about $1.2 million a year.
In his ruling, the judge set out some basic principles. An important one, he said, is that “a RAND royalty should be set at a level consistent with the S.S.O.s’ (standard setting organizations) goal of promoting widespread adoption of their standards.â€
Later, Judge Robart explained the problem with relatively high royalties on standard-essential patents. He noted that at least 92 companies and organizations hold patents involved in the 802.11 standard for wireless communication. If they all sought the same terms as Motorola, he wrote, “the aggregate royalty to implement the 802.11 standard, which is only one feature of the Xbox product, would exceed the total product price.â€
Judge Robart’s ruling covers only one part of one patent case â€" a price for reasonable licensing terms on Motorola’s patents. And the case is continuing. But his opinion, said Jorge L. Contreras, an associate professor of law at American University, detailed “some overarching principles that apply in cases like this. He emphasized that there was a social good that should be taken into account, and what is good for the whole market, not just for the two parties involved in the litigation.â€
The ruling, Mr. Contreras added, “makes the big picture a lot clearer.â€
Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. Taking a picture might be accomplished with a single wink.
But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might be interacting with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In the next couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Further into the future, our robot assistant will appear by our side with a glass of fresh lemonade simply because it knows we’re thirsty.
Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.
The technology, often called brain computer interfaces, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.
Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen with their mind.
NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight brain movements and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets â€" all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling â€" like happy, or excited â€" rather than searching by keywords. Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with an app that “exercises the brain†by forcing people to concentrate on aspects of a screen, almst like taking your mind to the gym.
Car manufacturers are exploring technologies packed into the back of the seat that detect when people fall asleep while driving and rattle the steering wheel to awaken them.
But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. “The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,†explained John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.†In other words, to gain access to the brain, for now you still need a chip in your head.
Last year, a project called BrainGate pioneered by Dr. Donoghue, enabled two people with full paralysis to use a robotic arm with a computer responding to their brain activity. One woman, who had not used her arms in 15 years, could grasp a bottle of coffee, serve herself a drink and then return the bottle to a table. All done by imagining the robotic arm’s movements.
But that chip inside the head could soon vanish as scientists say we are poised to gain a much greater understanding of the brain, and, in turn, technologies that empower brain computer interfaces. An initiative by the Obama administration this year called the Brain Activity Map project, a decade-long research project, aims to build a comprehensive map of the brain.
Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, is working on the project and although she said it would take a decade to completely map the brain, companies would be able to build new kinds of brain computer interface products within two years.
“The Brain Activity Map will give hardware companies a lot of new tools that will change how we use smartphones and tablets,†Dr. Chun said. “It will revolutionize everything from robotic implants and neural prosthetics, to remote controls, which could be history in the foreseeable future when you can change your television channel by thinking about it.â€
There are some fears to be addressed. On the Muse Web site, an F.A.Q. is devoted to convincing customers that the device cannot siphon thoughts from people’s minds.
These brain-reading technologies have been the stuff of science fiction for decades.
In the 1982 movie “Firefox,†Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot on a mission to the Soviet Union to steal a prototype fighter jet that can be controlled by a brain neurolink. But Mr. Eastwood has to think in Russian for the plane to work, and he almost dies when he cannot get the missiles to fire while in the middle of a dogfight. (Don’t worry, he survives.)
Although we won’t be flying planes with our minds anytime soon, surfing the Web on our smartphones might be closer.
Dr. Donoghue of Brown said one of the current techniques used to read people’s brains is called P300, in which a computer can determine which letter of the alphabet someone is thinking about based on the area of the brain that is activated when he sees a screen full of letters. But even when advances in brain-reading technologies speed up, there will be new challenges, as scientists will have to determine if the person wants to search the Web for something in particular, or if she is just thinking about a random topic.
“Just because I’m thinking about a steak medium-rare at a restaurant doesn’t mean I actually want that for dinner,†Dr. Donoghue said. “Just like Google glasses, which will have to know if you’re blinking because there is something in your eye or if you actually want to take a picture,†brain computer interfaces will need to know if you’re just thinking about that steak or really want to order it.
Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. Taking a picture might be accomplished with a single wink.
But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might be interacting with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In the next couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Further into the future, our robot assistant will appear by our side with a glass of fresh lemonade simply because it knows we’re thirsty.
Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.
The technology, often called brain computer interfaces, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.
Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen with their mind.
NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight brain movements and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets â€" all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling â€" like happy, or excited â€" rather than searching by keywords. Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with an app that “exercises the brain†by forcing people to concentrate on aspects of a screen, almst like taking your mind to the gym.
Car manufacturers are exploring technologies packed into the back of the seat that detect when people fall asleep while driving and rattle the steering wheel to awaken them.
But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. “The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,†explained John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.†In other words, to gain access to the brain, for now you still need a chip in your head.
Last year, a project called BrainGate pioneered by Dr. Donoghue, enabled two people with full paralysis to use a robotic arm with a computer responding to their brain activity. One woman, who had not used her arms in 15 years, could grasp a bottle of coffee, serve herself a drink and then return the bottle to a table. All done by imagining the robotic arm’s movements.
But that chip inside the head could soon vanish as scientists say we are poised to gain a much greater understanding of the brain, and, in turn, technologies that empower brain computer interfaces. An initiative by the Obama administration this year called the Brain Activity Map project, a decade-long research project, aims to build a comprehensive map of the brain.
Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, is working on the project and although she said it would take a decade to completely map the brain, companies would be able to build new kinds of brain computer interface products within two years.
“The Brain Activity Map will give hardware companies a lot of new tools that will change how we use smartphones and tablets,†Dr. Chun said. “It will revolutionize everything from robotic implants and neural prosthetics, to remote controls, which could be history in the foreseeable future when you can change your television channel by thinking about it.â€
There are some fears to be addressed. On the Muse Web site, an F.A.Q. is devoted to convincing customers that the device cannot siphon thoughts from people’s minds.
These brain-reading technologies have been the stuff of science fiction for decades.
In the 1982 movie “Firefox,†Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot on a mission to the Soviet Union to steal a prototype fighter jet that can be controlled by a brain neurolink. But Mr. Eastwood has to think in Russian for the plane to work, and he almost dies when he cannot get the missiles to fire while in the middle of a dogfight. (Don’t worry, he survives.)
Although we won’t be flying planes with our minds anytime soon, surfing the Web on our smartphones might be closer.
Dr. Donoghue of Brown said one of the current techniques used to read people’s brains is called P300, in which a computer can determine which letter of the alphabet someone is thinking about based on the area of the brain that is activated when he sees a screen full of letters. But even when advances in brain-reading technologies speed up, there will be new challenges, as scientists will have to determine if the person wants to search the Web for something in particular, or if she is just thinking about a random topic.
“Just because I’m thinking about a steak medium-rare at a restaurant doesn’t mean I actually want that for dinner,†Dr. Donoghue said. “Just like Google glasses, which will have to know if you’re blinking because there is something in your eye or if you actually want to take a picture,†brain computer interfaces will need to know if you’re just thinking about that steak or really want to order it.
Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. Taking a picture might be accomplished with a single wink.
But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might be interacting with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In the next couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Further into the future, our robot assistant will appear by our side with a glass of fresh lemonade simply because it knows we’re thirsty.
Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.
The technology, often called brain computer interfaces, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.
Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen with their mind.
NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight brain movements and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets â€" all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling â€" like happy, or excited â€" rather than searching by keywords. Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with an app that “exercises the brain†by forcing people to concentrate on aspects of a screen, almst like taking your mind to the gym.
Car manufacturers are exploring technologies packed into the back of the seat that detect when people fall asleep while driving and rattle the steering wheel to awaken them.
But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. “The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,†explained John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.†In other words, to gain access to the brain, for now you still need a chip in your head.
Last year, a project called BrainGate pioneered by Dr. Donoghue, enabled two people with full paralysis to use a robotic arm with a computer responding to their brain activity. One woman, who had not used her arms in 15 years, could grasp a bottle of coffee, serve herself a drink and then return the bottle to a table. All done by imagining the robotic arm’s movements.
But that chip inside the head could soon vanish as scientists say we are poised to gain a much greater understanding of the brain, and, in turn, technologies that empower brain computer interfaces. An initiative by the Obama administration this year called the Brain Activity Map project, a decade-long research project, aims to build a comprehensive map of the brain.
Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, is working on the project and although she said it would take a decade to completely map the brain, companies would be able to build new kinds of brain computer interface products within two years.
“The Brain Activity Map will give hardware companies a lot of new tools that will change how we use smartphones and tablets,†Dr. Chun said. “It will revolutionize everything from robotic implants and neural prosthetics, to remote controls, which could be history in the foreseeable future when you can change your television channel by thinking about it.â€
There are some fears to be addressed. On the Muse Web site, an F.A.Q. is devoted to convincing customers that the device cannot siphon thoughts from people’s minds.
These brain-reading technologies have been the stuff of science fiction for decades.
In the 1982 movie “Firefox,†Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot on a mission to the Soviet Union to steal a prototype fighter jet that can be controlled by a brain neurolink. But Mr. Eastwood has to think in Russian for the plane to work, and he almost dies when he cannot get the missiles to fire while in the middle of a dogfight. (Don’t worry, he survives.)
Although we won’t be flying planes with our minds anytime soon, surfing the Web on our smartphones might be closer.
Dr. Donoghue of Brown said one of the current techniques used to read people’s brains is called P300, in which a computer can determine which letter of the alphabet someone is thinking about based on the area of the brain that is activated when he sees a screen full of letters. But even when advances in brain-reading technologies speed up, there will be new challenges, as scientists will have to determine if the person wants to search the Web for something in particular, or if she is just thinking about a random topic.
“Just because I’m thinking about a steak medium-rare at a restaurant doesn’t mean I actually want that for dinner,†Dr. Donoghue said. “Just like Google glasses, which will have to know if you’re blinking because there is something in your eye or if you actually want to take a picture,†brain computer interfaces will need to know if you’re just thinking about that steak or really want to order it.
Facebook shares may have been on a roller coaster ride in the year since they made their debut on Wall Street, but they haven’t been too shabby for its top executives. Mark Zuckerberg exercised stock options worth $2.3 billion, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Friday â€" and sold about half, to cover his tax bill.
Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, retained her spot as the company’s best-paid executive for two consecutive years. She received total compensation of about $26 million in 2012, down slightly from nearly $31 million the year before.
Mike Schroepfer, the engineering chief of the company, had almost $21 million in compensation, while Mr. Zuckerberg claimed a far more modest package of just under $2 million last year.
The proxy statement reported that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent $1.2 million on chartered aircraft for his personal travel.
Ms. Sandberg had vested stocks worth over $820 million, while David A. Ebersman, who as chief financial officer led the company’s public offering in May, had vested options worth just over $100 million.
Facebook came out of the box in May at $38 a share, and its value sank sharply over the next several months. It closed on Friday at $26.85.
The company also announced that Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, an early investor who personally made more than $100 million from his sale of Facebook stock, was leaving the board. He was one of the most prescient venture capitalists to back Facebook and had served as a director since 2005. He was recently elected a fellow of the Harvard Corporation, a governing board of the university.
The terms people search for on Google have been used to forecast how many Americans have the flu, travel plans and the price for which cars sell. Now a scientific study shows that Google search can be used to predict the stock market.
Using Google Trends, a service that shows the popularity of search terms, researchers from Warwick Business School in England and Boston University’s department of physics found that the type of terms people search Google for on a given week can predict whether the Dow Jones industrial average will rise or fall the following week.
The study, titled “Quantifying Trading Behavior in Financial Markets Using Google Trends,†was published Thursday in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
The researchers tracked 98 search terms from Google Trends between 2004 and 2011. These included investment-related words, like debt, stocks, portfolio, unemployment and markets, and non-investment terms, including lifestyle, arts, happy, war, conflict and politics.
One of the leading search terms used to predict the markets was the word “debt†â€" an increase in such searches heralded a sell-off of stocks. A decrease in searches found the market rose slightly the following week.
But the results do not take into account volatile markets where a big sell-off can force investors to abandon ship sooner than they anticipated.
And sometimes Google Trends can give scientists inaccurate information when the proper context is not applied. For example, earlier this year Google Flu Trends said it believed that nearly 11 percent of the United States population had influenza. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the coughing and sniffling peak at 6 percent of the population. It turns out Google didn’t anticipate how outside influences, like media coverage of the flu and the rise in discussions on social media, would affect its data and statistics.
In 2010, researchers at Indiana University-Bloomington performed a similar study and found that people’s emotions on Twitter could help predict the stock market.
Living Social told employees Friday that it had been breached, and that data for 50 million users might have been accessed.
In a memo to employees, the company, based in Washington, said online criminals had accessed usernames, e-mail addresses and dates of births for some users and encrypted passwords for some 50 million people. The company’s databases that store user and merchant credit card and banking information were not compromised in the attack, it said.
“We recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,†the company told employees. “We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.â€
Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for Living Social, confirmed that the attack might have compromised 50 million of its users, and said the company was resetting passwords and would be alerting customers by e-mail. Mr. Weinstein said it would get in touch with customers in all of the countries LivingSocial operates with the exception of Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Phillippines, where its systems were not compromised.
The attack on Living Social is just the latest in a string of attacks on consumer Internet companies in recent months. Twitter, Facebook and Apple all stepped forward in February to say they had all been the victims of a what they described as a “sophisticated attack.†Evernote, the online notetaking app, said last month that it had reset passwords for 50 million users after it was compromised by hackers.
Living Social did say it “hashed†passwords â€" which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm â€" and “salted†them, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auctionlike black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.
Do you notice anything peculiar about the explosion that destroys this Honda Civic?
Watch this very brief video clip of a Honda Civic hatchback being destroyed by an explosion from within. Does something seem odd about the blast? (No, the answer is not that the skin of the passenger-side door almost destroyed my camera.)
In a moment, we’ll provide a clue, and then the real answer.
First, the background. Last week the staff and students in the United States military’s Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course participated in a bomb-disposal drill at Northwest Florida Regional Airport, on the Florida Panhandle. An account of the drill, held just days after the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, appeared in The New York Times on Friday.
Michael Spooneybarger for The New York TimesA soldier inspected a car after a detonation.
That drill brought together military and civilian law enforcement and safety organizations - an explicit acknowledgment that in the fight to thwart makeshift bombs, the public is best served when knowledge, skills and equipment are pooled. And it is a irrefutable, if sad, fact that there is no pool of experience like the military’s veterans of explosive ordnance disposal teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries where improvised bombs became the primary causes of wounds to service members, and where the bombs have been used extensively against civilians.
Almost all of the Advanced Improvised Explosive Device Disposal course, which is part of the United States Navy’s school for explosive ordnance disposal technicians, takes place in classrooms and training ranges on Eglin Air Force Base. The video at the top of this post was filmed at one of those ranges last week.
Look at the video again. Here’s the clue: Do you notice what is missing? Watch closely, because once you notice what is not present, the game is given away.
What is missing is the flame. Clearly there is a sizable blast originating somewhere near the back seat. But there is no flash and no fire. The car is blown open by pressure.
So what is happening? This explosion was a demonstration of what bomb-disposal technicians call a disrupter charge - an explosive encased within another substance. The purpose of such charges is to instantly separate the components of a bomb without causing the bomb’s main charge to explode.
There are many forms of disrupter charges, including off-the-shelf products like the BootBanger, an explosive paired to narrow drums of water, which can be placed under the trunk of a parked car, and will project the water and force upward when the charge is detonated.
One of the ideas behind such charges is that they can minimize property damage around a suspected car bomb. A comparatively small disrupter charge will destroy the suspected vehicle, but its effects on the surrounding area will be far less than if a car bomb were to explode.
In the case of the video above, the explosion was caused by a recently fielded form of disrupter charge known as a VMODS, the military’s acronym for Vehicle Modular Overpressure Disrupter System. A photograph of one of the modules is below.
C.J. Chivers/The New York TimesA Vehicle Modular Overpressure Disrupter System.
The VMODS does not rely on water. It is a multidirectional charge of plastic explosive encased in a squat plastic cylinder of ABC fire-extinguisher powder. The modules can be fitted together, so that a disposal team can select the size of the blast they seek, depending on the size and composition of the area or the vehicle the technicians hope to disrupt. In this case, three modules were fitted together, for a total of a little less than two pounds of net explosive weight.
For the purposes of this demonstration, the charge was emplaced by a Marine technician, Gunnery Sergeant Pierre Anthony. But the VMODS was designed to be carried and emplaced by a Talon robot, which can shatter a car window with its robotic arm, then drop the charge into place. The VMODS is then detonated remotely, by an operator at a safe distance back.
Back to the quiz. On Thursday, I posted this video on my personal blog, and asked readers if they could spot what was peculiar about the explosion. In-house, one editor guessed it right - Greg Winter of the Foreign desk. And outside The Times, Matt Egleston, a reader, tweeted the correct answer, too. “No flame/fire?†he wrote.
That’s exactly right, and by design - an explosive tool that can provide a safer and lighter touch when faced with one of the most treacherous problems presented by terrorism and unconventional war.
Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times 
