Live Streaming: TimesTalks With Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

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.

Your Brain on Computers: Readers Respond

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.”

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?”

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.”

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.”

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. ”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.”

As for those who opt not to use brain-reading technology,  they might instead choose to wear tin-foil hats.

Jack Dorsey Talks Square and Wearable Devices

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?”

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.

Q.

How has the Starbucks partnership been going? Have you seen an increase in users?

A.

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.

Q.

Have you looked into Google Glass?

A.

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.

Jack Dorsey Talks Square and Wearable Devices

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?”

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.

Q.

How has the Starbucks partnership been going? Have you seen an increase in users?

A.

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.

Q.

Have you looked into Google Glass?

A.

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.

Amazon’s Boom in Cloud Partners

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Smartphones Finally Surpass the Feature Phone

The smartphone has finally surpassed the traditional feature phone, also known as the dumb phone, in sales worldwide. Samsung Electronics is leading the pack.

DealBook: Alibaba Buys Stake in Sina Weibo, a Chinese Answer to Twitter

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.

In Silicon Valley’s Kitchen

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease

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).”

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.”

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 BBC in 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.”

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.”

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.)

Mr. Mizrahi works freelance trying to link social media to entertainment â€" and, in that way, his experience creating an online phenomenon could actually fit on his résumé. But he acts, he says, “out of love,” simply to register his dislike of a practice that is not limited to The Huffington Post.

“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.”

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.”

Of course, Huffington Post also promoted that article on Twitter: “@HuffPoSpoilers ruins every tease-filled tweet from @HuffingtonPost for you.”

That message left Mr. Mizrahi at a bit of a loss. All he could append was, “can’t ruin this one.”

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.