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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Taboo on Speaking Ill of the Dead Widely Ignored Online After Thatcher’s Death

Video of hundreds celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher in London on Monday.

Even in ancient Sparta, apparently, people had to be advised to resist the urge to speak ill of the dead. According to Diogenes Laertius, among the precepts held dear by Chilon of Sparta was, “of the dead, nothing but good” should be spoken.

Like some of Chilon’s other rules for how not to live â€" “Do not laugh at another’s misfortune,” “Let not your tongue outrun your thought,” and even “Gesticulation in speaking should be avoided as a mark of insanity” â€" the taboo on gloating over the death of one’s enemies seems to be losing hold in the era of social networks, where millions of half-formed impressions and knee-jerk reactions circulate around the globe within minutes of any major news event.

So, as The Independent reported from London this week, it was little surprise that about one third of the first 25,000 comments posted online following the death of Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who inspired an intensity of feeling in both her supporters and opponents rarely seen outside authoritarian states, were negative, according to the media monitoring firm Synthesio.

Among those stepping forward to bury Mrs. Thatcher not to praise her, were political opponents like George Galloway and Glenda Jackson, the filmmaker Ken Loach, the Irish Republican Gerry Adams, the editors of Glasgow’s Evening Times, the singers Billy Bragg, Morrissey and Antonio Lulic, the Elvis Costello fan behind the Web site Isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk, the 233,0 fans of that site on Facebook, and even Australia’s foreign minister.

Then on Wednesday came news of the apparent success of a Facebook campaign to send the song “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead” soaring up the British singles chart this week to celebrate the death of the country’s first female prime minister.

The song, from the soundtrack to “The Wizard of Oz,” entered the weekly chart at number 10, barely a day after Mrs. Thatcher’s death was first reported, just a few thousand sales short of the third spot. If the song is still in the Top 40 by Sunday, the BBC will be forced to decide whether to play it during the weekly broadcast of “The Official Chart Show” on the broadcaster’s main radio channel. The corporation, which has been deeply respectful of the former leader’s death, said in a statement on Wednesday that the chart show “is a historical and factual account of what the British public has been buying and we will make a decision about playing it when the final chart positions are clear.”

This was all in keeping with what one observer of social media predicted in a comic chart produced three months ago, as Mrs. Thatcher neared death.

As BBC News reported, a scan of social networks also revealed “lots of people who got angry at the people who were happy at the news.

“Show some respect,” tweeted one. “Celebrating someone’s death is a bit sick,” said another. “Today someone’s mum died,” was a third.

Not all of Mrs. Thatcher’s political enemies focused on hatred as she passed away. Several members of Parliament, like David Lammy of the opposition Labour Party, tried to strike a more respectful tone in their comments.

Among those who reacted to the outpouring of hate online and on the streets was Martin McGuinness, a former commander in the Irish Republican Army, who recoiled in horror after hundreds gathered in Belfast and Derry, honking horns and waving flags as if Ireland had won the World Cup.

Video said to show celebration in Belfast on Monday night, after the death of Margaret Thatcher.

Writing on Twitter, a former leader of the militant group that came close to assassinating Mrs. Thatcher and her whole cabinet in 1984 but later made peace, urged his followers to refrain from celebration.

Late Wednesday, Mr. McGuinness’s perspective was echoed by his colleague Mr. Adams, in an interview with Rodney Edwards of The Impartial Reporter, a Northern Irish weekly published in County Fermanagh, where. in 1981, Irish nationalist voters elected the I.R.A. prisoner Bobby Sands to represent them in the British Parliament just before his death from a hunger strike.

Speaking to Mr. Edwards, who made an advance copy of the interview available to The Lede, Mr. Adams said he stood by his initial comments criticizing Mrs. Thatcher for letting I.R.A. prisoners die from hunger strikes that year rather than granting them the status of political prisoners, but called it “demeaning to celebrate anyone’s death.”

“It isn’t up to me to forgive her for what she did to the prisoners; that’s up to them and their families.” he said. “I can forgive her, because I think we have to be about forgiveness. I can forgive her for anything that was done to me under her rule and I don’t have any problem with that â€" I actually believe in forgiveness. I just know as an individual; hatred or failure to forgive is most corrosive to the person involved as opposed to the perpetrator who mightn’t even be conscious of what you are thinking about him or her.”

He added: “We Irish are very forgiving people, we don’t speak ill of the dead.”



Video: Gunman Takes Firefighters Hostage in Georgia

A heavily armed man took five firefighters hostage after luring them to a suburban Atlanta home with a fake 911 call for medical attention Wednesday afternoon, officials said at the scene in Suwanee, Ga. One of the firefighters was released unharmed about an hour after being taken captive.

Live video from the site of the hostage-taking, via WXIA-TV news in Atlanta.

According to Capt. Thomas Rutledge, a fire department spokesman for Gwinnett County, Ga., members of the police department’s SWAT team were attempting to negotiate with the man, who had barricaded himself in the house in a subdivision in Suwanee.

“This is a very fluid situation,” Captain Rutledge said. “We don’t want to do anything to cause this to take a negative turn.”

Captain Rutledge said that the firefighters had no idea they were being set up when they received the call. He did not specify the nature of the medical call. He said the firefighters had not been injured.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the house, a large single-family home on a leafy block, is across the street from Collins Hill High School. It is about 35 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta.

On Dec. 24, four firefighters were shot and two were killed when they responded to a call in Webster, N.Y., by a gunman who then shot and killed himself.



A Venture Capital Partnership for Google Glass Apps

Three prominent venture capital funds want software developers to know they are on the hunt for apps and software for Google Glass, the company’s Internet-connected glasses.

On Wednesday, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz announced the Glass Collective, an investment partnership. The three firms said they had agreed to share every pitch from start-ups related to Glass, so each firm would have the chance to invest.

It is an efficient way for software and hardware developers to get their ideas in front of three prominent venture capital firms and to jump-start developers’ creativity in thinking about ways to use the new hardware, said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures. The fund, which operates separately from Google, invests up to $250,000 in this type of early-stage start-up.

It is also a way for the firms to make sure the deal flow of the best ideas comes to them first. They are trying not to miss out on wearable computing, which many analysts say could be the next big wave of tech investing.

Though the firms are not starting a separate fund for Glass apps, Glass Collective is an idea similar to Kleiner Perkins’s iFund, a $100 million fund that the venture capital firm opened in 2008 to seek iPhone app developers.

John Doerr, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, said Google glasses could be the next major platform for apps, similar to other platforms like browsers, mobile phones and Facebook.

“Though it’s early days, there’s the potential here to build a platform,” said Mr. Doerr, who is also on Google’s board. “I think it’s exactly the right time to kick-start an effort to support entrepreneurs.”

Just as other mobile platforms competed with the iPhone, other wearable computing platforms are expected to compete with Glass, like Internet-connected watches or bracelets. The investors said, though, that they are focused narrowly on the glasses.

“This is about Glass, this is not about wrist or foot or ring,” Mr. Doerr said.

He said he is interested, for instance, in health care apps, like online fitness trainers who could coach people as they were exercising. Mr. Maris said he imagined ways that people could benefit from accessing the Internet hands-free, like people with physical disabilities being able to send text messages or scientists being able to look up information while working in the lab.

Mr. Doerr said he had been wearing the glasses and uses them especially for taking pictures and looking up words while playing Scattergories with his family, though it is questionable whether that follows the game’s rules.

Mr. Doerr’s Scattergories strategy raises an often-asked question about Google’s glasses. What will it mean when people can do things without others knowing they are doing them â€" like surreptitiously looking up words while playing a game, reading e-mail at the dinner table or recording a video of a conversation

“Using the device, if someone is reading e-mail or taking a picture, you know it, and you can be more present in a conversation because you haven’t put a phone in your face,” Mr. Doerr said. “And if you want to be focused on the person across the table, focus on them. Ignore those droids.”



Facebook Refines Ad Targeting

Bought granola at the supermarket lately Expect to see an ad soon on your Facebook page for something that fits your granola-buying profile.

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out a long-anticipated and potentially lucrative way to show highly targeted advertisements to its users. What consumers have bought in the past, online and offline, is the best predictor of what they are likely to buy again, marketers say. Facebook has partnered with four data companies that track, to varying degrees, online and offline purchase behavior: Acxiom, Blue Kai, Epsilon, and Datalogix.

Optimal, a San Francisco-based company that helps brands target their advertisements on Facebook, said the new product would allow companies to more precisely aim messages at the right customers at the right time. A barbecue sauce maker, for instance, could target customers who buy meat every week.

Facebook has been under intense pressure to grow advertising revenue, its chief money maker. The new product allows more fine-tuned targeting. In a blog post, the company said: “To date, advertisers have been able to show ads to people based on their expressed interests on Facebook. Now with partner categories, they can also show ads to people on Facebook based on the products and brands they buy across both desktop and mobile.”

Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester, called it “a smart step” but not enough to significantly improve targeted advertising on Facebook.

“Since they lack the expertise to turn their own data into truly useful ad targeting, it makes sense to bring in third parties who have stronger experience bringing meaning to data,” he said, adding: “The real marketing value in social media isn’t in trying to market to people on social sites; it’s in using data from social sites to power better marketing everywhere else.”



Facebook Refines Ad Targeting

Bought granola at the supermarket lately Expect to see an ad soon on your Facebook page for something that fits your granola-buying profile.

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out a long-anticipated and potentially lucrative way to show highly targeted advertisements to its users. What consumers have bought in the past, online and offline, is the best predictor of what they are likely to buy again, marketers say. Facebook has partnered with four data companies that track, to varying degrees, online and offline purchase behavior: Acxiom, Blue Kai, Epsilon, and Datalogix.

Optimal, a San Francisco-based company that helps brands target their advertisements on Facebook, said the new product would allow companies to more precisely aim messages at the right customers at the right time. A barbecue sauce maker, for instance, could target customers who buy meat every week.

Facebook has been under intense pressure to grow advertising revenue, its chief money maker. The new product allows more fine-tuned targeting. In a blog post, the company said: “To date, advertisers have been able to show ads to people based on their expressed interests on Facebook. Now with partner categories, they can also show ads to people on Facebook based on the products and brands they buy across both desktop and mobile.”

Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester, called it “a smart step” but not enough to significantly improve targeted advertising on Facebook.

“Since they lack the expertise to turn their own data into truly useful ad targeting, it makes sense to bring in third parties who have stronger experience bringing meaning to data,” he said, adding: “The real marketing value in social media isn’t in trying to market to people on social sites; it’s in using data from social sites to power better marketing everywhere else.”



Facebook Refines Ad Targeting

Bought granola at the supermarket lately Expect to see an ad soon on your Facebook page for something that fits your granola-buying profile.

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out a long-anticipated and potentially lucrative way to show highly targeted advertisements to its users. What consumers have bought in the past, online and offline, is the best predictor of what they are likely to buy again, marketers say. Facebook has partnered with four data companies that track, to varying degrees, online and offline purchase behavior: Acxiom, Blue Kai, Epsilon, and Datalogix.

Optimal, a San Francisco-based company that helps brands target their advertisements on Facebook, said the new product would allow companies to more precisely aim messages at the right customers at the right time. A barbecue sauce maker, for instance, could target customers who buy meat every week.

Facebook has been under intense pressure to grow advertising revenue, its chief money maker. The new product allows more fine-tuned targeting. In a blog post, the company said: “To date, advertisers have been able to show ads to people based on their expressed interests on Facebook. Now with partner categories, they can also show ads to people on Facebook based on the products and brands they buy across both desktop and mobile.”

Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester, called it “a smart step” but not enough to significantly improve targeted advertising on Facebook.

“Since they lack the expertise to turn their own data into truly useful ad targeting, it makes sense to bring in third parties who have stronger experience bringing meaning to data,” he said, adding: “The real marketing value in social media isn’t in trying to market to people on social sites; it’s in using data from social sites to power better marketing everywhere else.”



Turning Street View Images Into Time-Lapse Films

Hyperlapse videos are a variation of traditional time lapse filmmaking in which the camera travels while also panning, rotating and tilting. The effect can be striking or dizzying. But under normal circumstances, coordinating all that action and turning it into a film is exceedingly complex and time consuming.

A Toronto design studio, Teehan & Lax, has developed an online, no-cost system that creates hyperlapse films using images from Google Street View.
Jon Lax, the studio’s co-founder and president, said that the project didn’t initially did not involve Street View. A video designer at the company, Jonas Naimark, was working on software that would simplify making hyperlapse videos with a conventional camera. Google’s Street View provided him with a vast, global set of images to create a demonstration film.

After further simplifying the process and consulting with Google, the company made its software available as an open-source download, mainly for developers and other sophisticated users, while posting a simplified online version that did not require any technical knowledge on the part of users.

“Our intention in releasing the source code is to allow people to make things with this,” Mr. Lax said. Exactly what, he acknowledged, is unclear.

Mr. Lax’s partner, Geoff Teehan, is a motor-racing fan who has used the software to take virtual drives around famous circuits in Europe. Mr. Lax said that organizers of running, triathlon and cycling races might offer hyperlapse previews of their routes and suggested that tourism agencies could post virtual road trips online.

There is other software available for gathering Street View images into time-lapse films. But it generally does not allow users to alter the apparent vantage point and usually requires the use of separate video editing software.

Mr. Lax said he also hoped that creative uses for the images can be found. In 2011, Tom Jenkins, a British filmmaker, combined time-lapse sequences made from Google Street View and stop-motion photography in a short film about an office desk toy traveling across the United States in a toy car.



A Vocabulary Site Shows How to Tailor Online Education

The recent excitement about online learning has mostly been focused on the power of technology to distribute and democratize education. At the forefront has been the rise of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which have been magnets for attention and investment.

But the other potential of computing in education is less about reach than depth. That is, the ability to tailor learning experiences to the skills, strengths and weaknesses of individual students. The goal has been pursued for decades, but it is within reach now because of the increasing ease in handling large amounts of data and steadily improving tools from the field of artificial intelligence like machine learning.

An intriguing example, some educators say, is Vocabulary.com. The vocabulary-building Web site went up in 2011, open to the public. It has received enthusiastic reviews and awards, attracting users who have answered questions 60 million times. That user information goes into improving the system and adding to the site’s continually growing collection of more than 100,000 vocabulary questions. This works much as Google uses the billions of search queries by users and tracks their responses to refine its search engine.

Having grown and matured, a version of Vocabulary.com was introduced to the education market last month, with online dashboards and graphic tools for teachers to track the progress of individual students in real time.

Educators who are familiar with Vocabulary.com are impressed by the technology. It is a sign, they say, that real progress is finally being made in computer-assisted education â€" at least in the domain of learning words and their meaning.

“Vocabulary.com is a good example of what is becoming possible and the direction we should be heading,” said Lee Ann Tysseling, an associate professor of education at Boise State University. “We’re seeing the blooming of good academic ways to use computers. It builds on good academic theory and not just what’s easy to program.”

For years, educators say, computer-aided learning amounted to the equivalent of digital flash cards and other rote drills. By contrast, Vocabulary.com has a variety of sentences, typically several for a given word. So if a person misses a definition, the same word may come up in a different sentence, several questions later.

The goal is to nudge each student ahead, according to his or her level of knowledge, delivering questions that are challenging, not too hard or too easy.

“The crux of this is the adaptive technology, a system that works with the student and grows with the student,” said Sandra Schamroth Abrams, an assistant professor in the school of education at St. John’s University.

Vocabulary.com is built by a New York start-up, Thinkmap. Vocabulary.com is its second word-data product, following Visual Thesaurus, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus, which presents words, definitions and related words in animated graphics. The Canadian province of Alberta, for example, has licensed Visual Thesaurus for 600,000 students.

Michael Freedman, co-founder and chief executive of Thinkmap, declined to disclose the pricing for Vocabulary.com in the education market. He said the per-student cost would be “a fraction” of the cost of vocabulary textbooks and workbooks that schools buy. The main market, he said, is middle school and high school students.

Thinkmap’s executive producer for Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com is Ben Zimmer, a linguist, lexicographer and author, who wrote the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine after William Safire. Of Vocabulary.com, Mr. Zimmer said, “The technology makes it possible to create a dynamic learning environment that is personalized to the individual.”

On its Web site, Vocabulary.com declares, “Our magical technology models your brain.” It is intrusive, in a way, a kind of real-time educational surveillance. My colleague David Streitfeld wrote this week about teachers’ ability to monitor the use and study habits of college students using digital textbooks. A dean at Texas A&M said, “It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent.”

These digital forays into education may hold a larger lesson in the debate about privacy and online monitoring of behavior. If the user sees a benefit, it’s called personalization. If not, it’s surveillance, a word with a very different connotation.



A Vocabulary Site Shows How to Tailor Online Education

The recent excitement about online learning has mostly been focused on the power of technology to distribute and democratize education. At the forefront has been the rise of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which have been magnets for attention and investment.

But the other potential of computing in education is less about reach than depth. That is, the ability to tailor learning experiences to the skills, strengths and weaknesses of individual students. The goal has been pursued for decades, but it is within reach now because of the increasing ease in handling large amounts of data and steadily improving tools from the field of artificial intelligence like machine learning.

An intriguing example, some educators say, is Vocabulary.com. The vocabulary-building Web site went up in 2011, open to the public. It has received enthusiastic reviews and awards, attracting users who have answered questions 60 million times. That user information goes into improving the system and adding to the site’s continually growing collection of more than 100,000 vocabulary questions. This works much as Google uses the billions of search queries by users and tracks their responses to refine its search engine.

Having grown and matured, a version of Vocabulary.com was introduced to the education market last month, with online dashboards and graphic tools for teachers to track the progress of individual students in real time.

Educators who are familiar with Vocabulary.com are impressed by the technology. It is a sign, they say, that real progress is finally being made in computer-assisted education â€" at least in the domain of learning words and their meaning.

“Vocabulary.com is a good example of what is becoming possible and the direction we should be heading,” said Lee Ann Tysseling, an associate professor of education at Boise State University. “We’re seeing the blooming of good academic ways to use computers. It builds on good academic theory and not just what’s easy to program.”

For years, educators say, computer-aided learning amounted to the equivalent of digital flash cards and other rote drills. By contrast, Vocabulary.com has a variety of sentences, typically several for a given word. So if a person misses a definition, the same word may come up in a different sentence, several questions later.

The goal is to nudge each student ahead, according to his or her level of knowledge, delivering questions that are challenging, not too hard or too easy.

“The crux of this is the adaptive technology, a system that works with the student and grows with the student,” said Sandra Schamroth Abrams, an assistant professor in the school of education at St. John’s University.

Vocabulary.com is built by a New York start-up, Thinkmap. Vocabulary.com is its second word-data product, following Visual Thesaurus, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus, which presents words, definitions and related words in animated graphics. The Canadian province of Alberta, for example, has licensed Visual Thesaurus for 600,000 students.

Michael Freedman, co-founder and chief executive of Thinkmap, declined to disclose the pricing for Vocabulary.com in the education market. He said the per-student cost would be “a fraction” of the cost of vocabulary textbooks and workbooks that schools buy. The main market, he said, is middle school and high school students.

Thinkmap’s executive producer for Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com is Ben Zimmer, a linguist, lexicographer and author, who wrote the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine after William Safire. Of Vocabulary.com, Mr. Zimmer said, “The technology makes it possible to create a dynamic learning environment that is personalized to the individual.”

On its Web site, Vocabulary.com declares, “Our magical technology models your brain.” It is intrusive, in a way, a kind of real-time educational surveillance. My colleague David Streitfeld wrote this week about teachers’ ability to monitor the use and study habits of college students using digital textbooks. A dean at Texas A&M said, “It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent.”

These digital forays into education may hold a larger lesson in the debate about privacy and online monitoring of behavior. If the user sees a benefit, it’s called personalization. If not, it’s surveillance, a word with a very different connotation.



A Vocabulary Site Shows How to Tailor Online Education

The recent excitement about online learning has mostly been focused on the power of technology to distribute and democratize education. At the forefront has been the rise of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which have been magnets for attention and investment.

But the other potential of computing in education is less about reach than depth. That is, the ability to tailor learning experiences to the skills, strengths and weaknesses of individual students. The goal has been pursued for decades, but it is within reach now because of the increasing ease in handling large amounts of data and steadily improving tools from the field of artificial intelligence like machine learning.

An intriguing example, some educators say, is Vocabulary.com. The vocabulary-building Web site went up in 2011, open to the public. It has received enthusiastic reviews and awards, attracting users who have answered questions 60 million times. That user information goes into improving the system and adding to the site’s continually growing collection of more than 100,000 vocabulary questions. This works much as Google uses the billions of search queries by users and tracks their responses to refine its search engine.

Having grown and matured, a version of Vocabulary.com was introduced to the education market last month, with online dashboards and graphic tools for teachers to track the progress of individual students in real time.

Educators who are familiar with Vocabulary.com are impressed by the technology. It is a sign, they say, that real progress is finally being made in computer-assisted education â€" at least in the domain of learning words and their meaning.

“Vocabulary.com is a good example of what is becoming possible and the direction we should be heading,” said Lee Ann Tysseling, an associate professor of education at Boise State University. “We’re seeing the blooming of good academic ways to use computers. It builds on good academic theory and not just what’s easy to program.”

For years, educators say, computer-aided learning amounted to the equivalent of digital flash cards and other rote drills. By contrast, Vocabulary.com has a variety of sentences, typically several for a given word. So if a person misses a definition, the same word may come up in a different sentence, several questions later.

The goal is to nudge each student ahead, according to his or her level of knowledge, delivering questions that are challenging, not too hard or too easy.

“The crux of this is the adaptive technology, a system that works with the student and grows with the student,” said Sandra Schamroth Abrams, an assistant professor in the school of education at St. John’s University.

Vocabulary.com is built by a New York start-up, Thinkmap. Vocabulary.com is its second word-data product, following Visual Thesaurus, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus, which presents words, definitions and related words in animated graphics. The Canadian province of Alberta, for example, has licensed Visual Thesaurus for 600,000 students.

Michael Freedman, co-founder and chief executive of Thinkmap, declined to disclose the pricing for Vocabulary.com in the education market. He said the per-student cost would be “a fraction” of the cost of vocabulary textbooks and workbooks that schools buy. The main market, he said, is middle school and high school students.

Thinkmap’s executive producer for Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com is Ben Zimmer, a linguist, lexicographer and author, who wrote the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine after William Safire. Of Vocabulary.com, Mr. Zimmer said, “The technology makes it possible to create a dynamic learning environment that is personalized to the individual.”

On its Web site, Vocabulary.com declares, “Our magical technology models your brain.” It is intrusive, in a way, a kind of real-time educational surveillance. My colleague David Streitfeld wrote this week about teachers’ ability to monitor the use and study habits of college students using digital textbooks. A dean at Texas A&M said, “It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent.”

These digital forays into education may hold a larger lesson in the debate about privacy and online monitoring of behavior. If the user sees a benefit, it’s called personalization. If not, it’s surveillance, a word with a very different connotation.



G.E. Turns to the Crowd for Help in Creating Consumer Products

General Electric has been making a serious push in recent years into the so-called Internet of Things, where all kinds of devices connect to the Internet, creating a constant stream of data about how they’re working. Now it is hoping to crowd-source consumer uses for technologies it has developed for things like power plant turbines and medical imaging equipment.

On Wednesday, G.E. announced a partnership with Quirky, a New York-based start-up that is a kind of social network for inventors, helping turn vague ideas into marketable items, manufacturing them, and distributing them through stores like Best Buy and Target. G.E. is licensing hundreds of its patents to the company’s community and working directly to help identify particularly promising consumer uses of these patents. The number of patents that G.E. is making available is expected to grow into the thousands in the coming months.

The deal provides for G.E. to share in the revenue from resulting products. The company will thus have a chance to profit further from its intellectual property â€" say, for special coatings to protect industrial equipment from water damage, or cooling techniques for LED lighting systems â€" without having to figure out itself how such things might appeal to consumers.

“There are a host of consumer applications that we haven’t had they ability to focus on,” said Beth Comstock, G.E. chief marketing officer. “That just isn’t our core business.”

The inventors who work with Quirky, meanwhile, will have access to a deep library of technologies developed by G.E. for other uses. Ben Kaufman, Quirky’s founder, sees the partnership as a way to leverage patents in a positive way.

“We’re making it really easy for owners of intellectual property, like G.E., to explore new uses,” he said. “For them, it’s extra revenue with little risk, and for us it’s a whole new avenue of different types of invention.”

Mr. Kaufman started Quirky in 2009 after selling his previous company, Mophie, known for a smartphone case that serves as an extra battery. Quirky’s founding premise was to make it easier to be an inventor by providing a novel twist on product development. Anyone can pitch an idea for a product to Quirky. The company’s other users then weigh in on which ideas they like best and help design the physical makeup and branding of the product. Quirky’s staff has the final say.

The company gets over a thousand ideas a week, about two or three of which actually end up with manufactured products, mostly produced in factories in Asia. Once a week Quirky live-streams product development sessions, so that people watching online can offer feedback.

When a product hits the shelves, Quirky splits the profits with the people who helped create them. Previous offerings have included a new kind of power strip and a rubber band with a hook attached to it. The person who comes up with an idea gets a share of the revenue it brings in, while someone who developed the tagline for a product or proposed changes to its design gets a smaller cut.

The company, with a staff of 130, has raised over $90 million in venture capital and expects to bring in at least $50 million in revenue this year. It is not yet profitable.

By providing its patents, G.E. will essentially become a member of Quirky’s community, receiving a portion of the revenue from products that make it to store shelves. The companies declined to discuss how big that cut would be.

“This is not an academic exercise,” said Mark M. Little, G.E.’s senior vice president for global research. “We’re looking to make money out of this, Quirky will make money out of this, and hopefully the inventors will, too.”

The two companies will also work together to select three Internet-connected household devices that they will sell this holiday season. (Quirky and G.E. have already cooperated to create a jug with a sensor that will tell people when the milk inside has soured.)

Mr. Kaufman said the idea to pursue Internet-connected devices came from an afternoon at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, when he became convinced that none of the most established technology companies had been able to dominate this area in the way that, say, Apple and Samsung have overtaken the smartphone market. But while he says he believes that typical garage-based inventors have a chance in this market, he also knows that they will benefit greatly by creating such products with G.E.’s vote of confidence behind them.

“You don’t want to buy a smoke detector from a little start-up that is great at Internet hardware,” he said. “You want to buy it from G.E.”



Live Updates on the Gun Debate

A bipartisan compromise on background checks is expected to be announced Wednesday. Newtown families urge Republican Senators to debate and vote instead of filibuster. While the focus is on pending legislation in the Senate, lawmakers in states around the country are strengthening and weakening their gun laws.

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Daily Report: Aereo’s Inroads Bring Sharp Reaction From Networks

Aereo is a service that scoops up the free signals of local television stations and streams them to the phones and computers of paying subscribers. Because Aereo cuts off the stations from the retransmission fees that they have grown to depend on, they are determined to shut down the service â€" even, the station owners say, if they have to go cable-only, Brian Stelter reports in Wednesday’s New York Times.

The networks aren’t just concerned about Aereo, which has a tiny following, but about copycats. “It’s Aereo today, but it could be something else tomorrow,” said Robin Flynn, a senior analyst at SNL Kagan.

For several decades companies that were lucky enough to own licenses for local TV stations thrived on advertising revenue alone, and because there was relatively little competition they enjoyed huge audiences and profit margins to match.

As cable and then the Internet introduced new competitors, station owners began to rely on a second revenue source, the so-called retransmission fees that come from the cable and satellite operators that pick up their signals and repackage them for subscribers. Now that they’ve had a taste of these fees, the stations aren’t willing â€" or able, they say â€" to go back to the old model of advertising alone.

SNL Kagan estimates that station owners took in $2.36 billion in retransmission fees from subscribers last year. (Some of that money is pocketed by owners, while a portion is paid to the network that the station is affiliated with, like Fox or CBS. Each of the networks also owns some stations outright.) The research firm projects the fee revenues to hit $6 billion by 2018. The trend lines for broadcasters are similar to those in the newspaper and music businesses â€" subscribers are paying a bigger and bigger piece of the overall cost of content creation.

That’s why the stations are doing battle with Aereo, because it doesn’t pay any fees, the same way antenna users do not. News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, the CBS Corporation and Univision, all of which own stations in New York, sued Aereo shortly after the service was announced last year, accusing it of copyright infringement. But the media giants failed to win a preliminary injunction against the service last summer, and their appeals were rejected last week in a 2-to-1 decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Aereo’s success in court could embolden cable and satellite providers to do their own end-runs around retransmission fees. So now the station owners are plotting their next moves.



World’s Tech Companies Look to Brussels to Resolve Antitrust Complaints

World’s Tech Companies Look to Brussels to Resolve Antitrust Complaints

BRUSSELS â€" When the European competition commissioner needs to communicate with the chairman of Google, he doesn’t have to send an emissary or even pick up the phone.

Joaquín Almunia sometimes sends Eric E. Schmidt a text.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Almunia has the power to block mergers or fine companies billions of dollars. But where he differs is in how comfortable he is in communicating with executives across the table â€" or the ocean â€" to negotiate settlements that avoid long battles.

“I have an open phone line, or e-mail line, or SMS line at any moment,” Mr. Almunia said in an interview Monday.

Mr. Almunia, 64, served as the European Union’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs before being appointed four years ago as the bloc’s competition commissioner. The post is likely to be his last job in Brussels and he does not foresee a return to politics in Spain, where he led the Socialists to defeat in 2000 before resigning as party leader.

But the formal complaint that recently hit his desk, focusing on how Google runs its mobile software business, is the latest sign that Mr. Almunia remains the go-to figure for antitrust enforcement in the world’s technology sector.

That complaint, filed by a coalition of companies including Microsoft and Nokia, accuses Google of using the Android mobile operating system to promote its own products and services in a majority of smartphones sold to consumers.

Mr. Almunia still must decide whether to take up the new complaint, which landed just as he appeared to be reaching the final stages of settlement talks with Google over the way it conducts its search and advertising business. But the case is growing in importance, given the rise of mobile computing.

In recent years, the European Commission has become a defender of fair play in computing and communications, even as regulatory bodies with far more experience â€" notably those in the United States â€" have grown squeamish about using antitrust law to pry concessions from some of the world’s most dynamic companies. Unlike his American counterparts, Mr. Almunia can decide punishments without judicial approval.

He has made a point of avoiding public showdowns with chief executives, or seemingly endless litigation. Indeed, he has made negotiation, rather than confrontation, a hallmark of his term in office to avoid dust-ups with giants like Microsoft and Intel, which were the subject of bitter, decade-long investigations. The change of approach has been most noticeable in the inquiry into Google’s search and advertising business.

Less than three years after formally opening the case, Mr. Almunia said this week that he would test proposals submitted by Google aimed at making it easier for people to distinguish when the company was proposing its own services â€" the strongest sign yet that the investigation into Google’s search business would end in a settlement and without a fine or a finding of guilt.

Even as his officials burrowed into the inner workings of Google’s hugely successful search and advertising businesses, Mr. Almunia met and spoke with Mr. Schmidt and called other senior representatives, like David C. Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, to update them.

His willingness to meet with executives to forge relationships and to gain knowledge about the sector also extends to figures like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. At a meeting with Ms. Sandberg in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the two discussed “the relationship between the search activity and the social network’s activity, but they were general conversations,” Mr. Almunia said.

Not everyone is happy with how European antitrust enforcement is evolving.

Mr. Almunia’s approach has frustrated companies like Foundem, a British online comparison-shopping site, which brought one of the original complaints about the way Google runs its search and advertising businesses.

Last month, Foundem, along with companies including TripAdvisor and the powerful Federation of German Newspaper Publishers, asked Mr. Almunia to force Google to “hold all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms.” The complainants suggested that Google would make such concessions only if it faced formal charges, called a statement of objections.

A few days earlier, Fleur Pellerin, the French minister for digital affairs, told a French Senate committee hearing that Google “apparently systematically favors” Web sites it controls. “I hope that the European Commission will not compromise,” she said.

Mr. Almunia batted away the suggestion that he was not standing up to Google, particularly after the United States Federal Trade Commission decided in January to end a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine with a finding that it had not broken antitrust laws.

“I don’t feel that I am losing my nerve,” he said. Instead he suggested that some of the complainants had unrealistic expectations.

“It’s obvious that not everybody has the same merits,” he said. “Antitrust decisions cannot eliminate these merits and put everyone in the same position.”

One reason complainants tend to knock on the door in Brussels first is that European competition law is based on a tradition of protecting smaller businesses to ensure choice and defend against abuses. American enforcers, at least in recent decades, have tended to avoid intervention without strong evidence that consumers were harmed.

That is something of a sore point for the Europeans like Mr. Almunia, who are at pains to insist they share the same goals as the Americans when it comes to consumer welfare.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 10, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: World’s Tech Companies Look to Brussels to Resolve Antitrust Complaints.

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