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Real Augmented Reality Google Goggles In Prototype Stage?

jos — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:28:56 +0000

There have been whispers in the past of augmented reality goggles or glasses, but generally we have been able to dismiss them as exaggerations or concepts. The technology, while it isn’t unrealistic, simply isn’t quite there yet. Apparently that hasn’t stopped Google: a new report is appearing corroborating earlier ones that they are working on a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’d piggyback on your phone’s connection and overlay information like directions, news, and so on. Whether you think it’s a good idea or not, this kind of thing is going to come eventually, so it’s natural that Google would want to start girding itself for the approaching augmented glasses wars of 20XX. The 9 to 5 Google report says they look something like a pair of athletic glasses, with a forward-facing camera and flash. The augmented reality bit is actually not a transparent display over one or both eyes, but a single opaque display on the side of one eyepiece (which eyepiece, and which side, were not specified). You operate it with voice or by moving your head around to navigate or select menu options. Yes, not exactly the future we were expecting. I guarantee these things don’t look cool, either. But like I said, the technology isn’t there yet: cameras and processors aren’t small or fast enough, batteries can’t provide enough power, displays aren’t built for them, and computer vision isn’t good enough. Some of these things Google can work on, some they can’t. But the best way to have a product ready when the tech is there is to try to build one when the tech isn’t. The glasses are apparently nowhere near done, unsurprisingly, and Google isn’t sure how to make anything out of them. A pilot program could be in the works, or it could continue to be an underground project, metamorphosing again and again until the market is ready. As it is, these things would be weird, expensive, and not particularly useful. In a couple years, though, who knows?

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Real Augmented Reality Google Goggles In Prototype Stage?

Pedestrian Map App, Lumatic, Raises $800K From Joi Ito And 500 Startups

A D M I N — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:10:45 +0000

All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago. He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels. Lumatic has an Android app which works right now only in San Francisco. When it gives you directions, it chooses routes which are optimal for walking, cycling or public transport. As you walk through the streets, the app displays a street-view with photos and arrows pointing in the right direction. The app is built on top of Open Street Map , but the user experience is centered heavily on using photography, landmarks, and visual cues to help people navigate cities. Fighting Google Maps in this category is going to be a tough slog, but if the app can gain a following there plenty of money in local commerce and advertising to make it a worthwhile pursuit.

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Pedestrian Map App, Lumatic, Raises $800K From Joi Ito And 500 Startups

Facebook Could Jumpstart HTML5 Platform With App Bookmarks On News Feed

admin2 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:22:52 +0000

Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar. Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases. The Facebook mobile app platform launched in October to help the social network start monetizing mobile through in-app payments on which it collects a 30% tax. Apps run through an internal web browser within its iOS and Android apps, allowing it to circumvent Apple and Google’s tax. However, the platform hasn’t gained serious traction with developers or users, and that’s a serious risk the company noted in its S-1 filing to go pulbic. Some developers don’t want to re-fork production to support HTML5 in addition to iOS and the various Android versions, at least not until Facebook’s platform is a proven money maker. HTML5 also needs time to mature before it can handle the most advanced native apps. With limited choice, and no ads to promote third-party apps within Facebook’s own mobile apps and HTML5 site, users aren’t installing them in the first place. Since bookmarks for the HTML5 apps are only found at the bottom of the Facebook mobile site’s nav menu, and have to be located through the search bar in the Facebook iOS and and Android apps, users aren’t reengaging with HTML5 apps either. But Facebook has been pulling its punches. It has hundreds of millions of daily active mobile users who first see the news feed where these bookmarks are being tested. Facebook says similarly styled bookmarks on the web interface’s games canvas page have been proven to drive traffic. The small percentage of m.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone users in the test could click bookmark and after some confusing lag an internal browser would launch Words With Friends, The Washington Post Social Reader, CityVille Express, Warimals, or another game or app. The test may have run on the Facebook for Android app as well. Facebook is likely testing to see if users click these bookmarks, and if their presence decreases news feed engagement or session length. If Facebook can get more eyeballs on third-party app bookmarks without degrading the user experience, it may have found a way to leverage its natural assets to begin the steep uphill battle against Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

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Facebook Could Jumpstart HTML5 Platform With App Bookmarks On News Feed

The Future of Peer Review

kram412 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:51 +0000

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — an online community that revolves around researchers and their work. Instant distribution Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago. Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Some of the strong platforms are Academia.edu , arXiv , Mendeley , ResearchGate and SSRN . What about peer review? One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research? Content discovery on the web Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web. The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are: Search engines (Google, Bing) Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc) Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively: Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website. Social Review : Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow. One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”: Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper. The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is: expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research. slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more. of questionable quality : the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it. unchanging : the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes a lot of work for the reviewers : it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work. More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms: Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed Social platforms : Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter. As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process. But has the research been done to a high standard? People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not. The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally. Discovery and credit systems are powered by the same metrics Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question. The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system. One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process. Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit. Academic credit from social platforms In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include: numbers of followers you have the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed. These metrics show how much interest there is in your papers, and how widely they are read right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact. One drawback of citation counts as a metric of academic credit is that they are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper. This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit. The advantage of the kinds of metrics that social platforms like Academia.edu, Mendeley, and SSRN provide is that they are real time, and they fill this credit gap. Academics are increasingly including these real time metrics in their applications for jobs and for grants. The competition for jobs, and grants is intense, and having more data that speaks to the impact of your work helps. Funding bodies are also eager to see more data about the impact of research, as it helps them make better decisions. Instant Distribution and Peer Review The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation. The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by new peer review mechanisms, Crowd Review and Social Review, which are faster, cheaper, and more personalized. The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.

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The Future of Peer Review

How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google

ACMAir — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:21:54 +0000

Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion. Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. In 2008, Facebook’s fifth year of existence, its revenues were only $272 million, and it lost $56 million. If you chart Facebook’s revenues for the past five years and compare them to Google’s for the five-year period preceding its IPO (see below), a truer picture emerges of each company’s size at similar points in time. You need to compare Facebook as a 5-year-old to Google as a 5-year-old. Matching both companies year-for-year, its is clear that Google grew faster and was always substantially bigger no matter what year you look at. Year 8 for Google was 2006, when its revenues were $10.6 billion and its profits were $3.5 billion. As an 8-year-old, Google’s profits were almost as large as Facebook’s revenues as an 8-year-old. (Google was incorporated in September, 1998, so I am using 1999 as Year 1 for the purposes of this analysis. Facebook started in January, 2004, which I am as it’s first full year). But which company grew faster? It turns out that the 5-year compound annual growth rate for each one’s revenues during these comparable periods (2002-2006 for Google, and 2007-2011 for Facebook) was almost exactly the same: 89 percent a year (Facebook grew a smidgeon faster at 89.22 percent a year versus 88.96 percent for Google, but Google started with almost twice the revenue and thus ended up much larger five years later). Facebook’s growth is astounding, but it is important to keep it in perspective. In many ways, it is still trying to catch up to Google’s past.

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How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google

Facebook – Run from the Bulls?

blogger — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:28:58 +0000

Editor’s note : Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Much ink has been spilled these past few days on the Facebook IPO filing . Much of it analyses the details revealed in the S1 initial document . Some of it has focused on revenue and growth ; some of it on control and corporate governance , some on valuation and how reasonable or not it is likely to be, and a little on whether or not the IPO represents the end of Facebook’s growth cycle . So, should you be a bull, and buy? Or should you run as fast as you can away from the bulls? For guidance turn to the risk factors part of the filing. For me, the most interesting part of the document is that part focused on Facebook’s mobile strategy and associated risks, and what that tells us to be alert to in the future. Now, to be clear, Facebook and its employees have done the most wonderful job of riding the transformation of the Internet from a place where anonymous individuals surfed the web, consumed information and media and accessed services to discover relevant things into an Internet where named individuals publish information to each other and discover things from friends. Facebook dominates the modern Internet. Its APIs extend its reach outside of its garden into almost every website on the planet – this one included. It is awesome to behold and it generates significant revenues already, and even more significant profits. Hats off to all involved. This success shouldn’t blind us to the relative size of company we are talking about. Last week Apple reported profits of over $13 billion for a quarter, Google’s revenues were lower than that number, and Facebook’s revenues are lower than Google’s profits. Facebook is huge by startup standards, but not by Internet standards. There is much more in its future. But this article isn’t about that. It is about the context within which the human Facebook IPO is happening. The Facebook S1 is clear on that context. In the risk factors of its filing it states: Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results. We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook. Although the substantial majority of our mobile users also access and engage with Facebook on personal computers where we display advertising, our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices. We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected. Facebook initial S1 filing, 1 Feb 2012, page 13 The reason this risk factor jumps out of the page – for me – is that this trend to growing mobile use is inevitable. What is more, it will be both rapid and enormous. How do we know this? Well, human beings are flocking to mobile platforms in droves. This is happening to such an extent that Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker went on the record almost 1 year ago to say that we are now in the 5 th major technology cycle of the past half century (mainframe; mini-computer; desktop; internet and now mobile) and that mobile traffic will “grow 26 times over the next 5 years”. The presentation linked above is 56 slides long and is well worth a read. So the risk that “our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices,” is not a risk. It is a certainty. When Google reported its financial results for the quarter 2 weeks ago it failed to meet a key metric – Cost Per Click advertising rates. This too was driven by the growth in the relative proportion of traffic derived from mobile. In mobile, ad clicks are fewer and ad rates are lower. Google’s present – and Facebook’s future – involves the painful fact that the very success of mobile platforms in helping human beings be productive, on the go, has a negative impact on the desktop-based advertising programs of the past 10 years. Mobile growth impacts web advertising revenues, except of course for Apple who make money from hardware and software and so benefits from these trends. The reason is simple. We do less ad-centric activities on mobile than we did on the web. And we are less likely to click away on an ad when we are focused on a specific goal on a largely single window device. The challenge faced by any content based mobile platform will be to try and figure out a revenue strategy that can monetize mobile use as mobile minutes cannibalize desktop minutes in the months and years ahead. There are many efforts to figure this out. From virtual goods in the context of games ( Zynga and others); to subscriptions for high quality content ( Wall Street Journal , The Economist ); to advertising and sponsorships in content (see Fotopedia’s “ Japan ” app); and Payment systems ( Square ). None of these are the solution – although all are valid and scalable. The billions spent on the web each year by advertisers will have to find a way to be effectively spent in the place consumers increasing will be – on smartphones. The mobile platform needs an innovation that fits it as closely as Google’s Adsense and Adwords were a fit for the desktop era. One thing we know for sure. Revolutions in computing are harsh on those who fail to adapt to what is new. Photo credit: Camilo Rueda López

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Facebook – Run from the Bulls?

Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success

Budowniczy425 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:04:03 +0000

Editor’s note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo . Follow him @ashkan . Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young Mark Zuckerberg in his early 20s as CEO, Facebook investor Peter Thiel said: “Well, we’ll wait until he’s over 25 to file”. Wise move, considering that Mark’s title on his business cards read “I’m CEO, bitch”. This week Facebook filed its S-1 to go public. Mark is 27. How Mark managed to launch a social networking site after Friendster had crashed during MySpace’s zenith has been widely chronicled . What’s been less discussed is how Mark mastered the six requirements to succeed, namely Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing. Ambition “The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe”, Russian Proverb The foundation and building block of any successful person is Ambition, or the desire for personal achievement. People are driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame. If you believe everything in The Social Network , Mark launched Facebook to level the playing field at Harvard and to succeed at getting girls. Success is relative, subjective and fluid ; over time Mark’s definition of success grew to match his brainchild’s imprint. Wearing your ambition on your sleeve will get you cut off at the knees, but ambition is required to succeed; the challenge is channeling it properly and managing your emotions around it. When the Winklevoss twins first hired Mark to build their social networking site, Mark never revealed his ambitions to build his own site. It was only later – far too late for the Winklevoss – that Mark revealed his true ambition. Vision A design glitch allowed MySpace users to customize their profiles. But that mixed blessing created a cacophonous environment which made users welcome Facebook’s clean interface. Facebook wasn’t visionary in any revolutionary sense of the word. Where Facebook deserves credit was that Mark et al. recognized the need for a real directory of people, not merely users. Before Facebook it was nearly impossible to actually find people, you could “google” them but finding the person you wanted within one search wasn’t a given. We now take it for granted, but that extension of people search and connecting them was certainly evolutionary , and it’s worth noting that most successes are not radically new but extensions and improvements of existing paradigms. The critics may note that Mark sometimes lacked charisma. In this context, charisma is a subset of vision: it allows you to convince others to buy into your vision, but charisma in and of itself is not a requirement to succeed, it’s an accelerant or amplifier. In Mark’s case, he has had the good fortune to let Facebook’s massive growth rates do the talking for him. Execution “Stay Focused, Keep Shipping” , Mark Zuckerberg When you look back to Facebook’s functionality when it launched, it was bare bones. Facebook has added features while scaling users, literally changing jet engines at 30,000 feet without missing a beat. It’s easy to laugh at missteps like Beacon or the privacy dossier and fail to appreciate the velocity at which Facebook has evolved and grown. Determination To quote President Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” Back in 1995, Steve Jobs added: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”. Determination, drive, tenacity or persistence is the most important variable, demonstrated by Mark through his: relentless coding early on to launch Facebook to catch the Winklevoss brothers off guard; adding colleges; attacking MySpace; defending against the subsequent lawsuit from the twins; repeated encroaching into people’s privacy (which remains one of Mark’s Achilles heels). But, to his credit, he has repeatedly not cared or believed in himself enough to charge ahead no matter what. Mark is a constant reminder that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission . So those were the first four traits: largely innate, can be learned, and things you can control. But without the next two, you won’t succeed. Luck “A great fortune depends on luck, a small one on diligence”, Chinese Proverb In sports and in business, luck can be your best friend or your undoing. Let’s face it: Mark’s had a horseshoe up his butt. Luck made him run into Sean Parker, who introduced him to Peter Thiel, without whom as an ally and first outside investor it’s unlikely he would have remained CEO to this day. But you create your own luck, or when lady luck smiles down on you, you seize the opportunity. Timing Google wasn’t the first search engine, YouTube wasn’t the first video sharing site and Facebook certainly wasn’t the first social network. Geocities, Tripod, Friendster, Tribe Networks, MySpace are just some that come to mind. Mark’s managed the clock all along: slowing down the Winklevoss brothers; launching Facebook on Harvard first to then expand to other colleges; relocating to California; refusing Viacom and Yahoo!’s offers; closing his deal with Microsoft. While the comparisons to Google’s IPO are understandable , Google ushered a new Internet Bull run whereas Facebook’s is coming at the tail end of Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Demand Media and Pandora’s – none of which have fared particularly well . However, much like Google’s IPO made it the Internet stock bellwether, Facebook will become the de facto stock pick of individual and institutional investors, pushing demand to justify the lofty price-to-earnings and price-to-sales multiples. There you have it: success = ambition + vision + execution + persistence + luck + timing; with the first four being things you can control and the last two being externalities that you cannot. While I’ve praised and criticized him and Facebook, as a fellow entrepreneur, Mark is someone all builders look up to and admire despite his obvious mistakes – reminding me of the Michael Jordan quote: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

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Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success

Google Adjusts Political Posture With Sponsorship Of Conservative Conference

Achilles — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:09:02 +0000

In interesting but ultimately not very shocking news, Google has signed on as a major sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference , which is more or less what it sounds like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a little odd seeing Google, which is becoming increasingly political, listed next to such organizations as the Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the NRA. But this isn’t the moment Google comes out as a closet Republican. It’s actually quite in keeping with Google’s position of aggressive neutrality. Google says that it’s there because it’s a great place to promote their election-tracking site, push Google+ as a platform for sharing and collaborating, and because the conference is fairly young and tech-savvy. Hard to accuse them of pandering, or of partisan pandering anyway. And that’s sort of the point. Google will no doubt be sponsoring similar events on the left side of the political spectrum as well (they say as much, but haven’t announced anything specific). The message is: hey, we just provide a service. No agenda here. Not that Google is totally apolitical, but their fierce opposition to SOPA was more like a mother bear defending its cubs than a deliberate political decision. On the other hand, they did go out of their way to take an official stance against Proposition 8 . By and large, though, they have avoided taking a stance on hot-button issues. Can Google actually remain neutral? SOPA was the product of bipartisan ignorance and greed, not just left or right, but what if the next bill threatening a Google territory were to be led by one party or the other? Or what if Google refuses to support, say, a communications embargo with a terrorist-harboring country, or such like? The dance they’re doing will become increasingly difficult if they insist on putting their neutrality on a pedestal for much longer. On the other hand, this may be overthinking it. Why can’t a company spend a little cash to have a ring in the political circus, and not choose sides overtly? No reason. But, as has been observed in other contexts, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

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Google Adjusts Political Posture With Sponsorship Of Conservative Conference

Fear Not: Google Will Still Support The Verizon Galaxy Nexus

bestcbstore — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:29:23 +0000

Earlier this afternoon Droid-Life noticed something strange: the Android developer devices page had been modified to remove the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, leading the site to question whether Google may have removed support for the device because of its spat with Verizon over Google Wallet. Which would stand to infuriate a lot of new Galaxy Nexus users (including myself), who are looking forward to receiving device updates directly from Google and not having to wait for Verizon to get around to pushing their own releases. Thankfully, we’ve confirmed this isn’t the case: Google says it will indeed be updating the Verizon Galaxy Nexus in the future. Turns out Droid Life made a bit of a logical leap, as the page stated that No CDMA Devices were supported any more, and other devices including the Sprint Nexus S 4G had been removed as well. In response to the post, Google has written a clarification to the Android Contributors group, in which it explains that CDMA devices are being removed from the Android Open Source Project site because they need carrier-signed .apk files (which users can’t generate). Here’s the post: Hello! This is a quick clarification about support for CDMA devices. For various technical reasons, recent CDMA Android devices implement core telephony functionality in .apk files provided in binary form by the carriers. To function correctly, these .apk files must be signed by the so-called “platform” key. However, when an individual creates a custom build from the AOSP source code, they don’t use the same signing key as these CDMA flies were signed with. The result is that these files don’t work properly, and pure AOSP builds running on these devices can’t place calls, access mobile data, and so on. Because we aim to make sure that we are as clear as possible about the degree of support that devices have, we updated the docs over at source.android.com to reflect this reality. We will still make available as many as possible of the closed-source binaries for these devices, and Nexus devices will continue to have unlockable bootloaders. And, of course, GSM/HSPA+ devices are still supported, as are any other devices we’re able to support. We’ve simply updated the documentation to be clearer about the current extent of CDMA support. We are of course always working to improve support, and we’ll keep everyone updated as we make improvements. Thanks as always for your interest in AOSP! – Dan

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Fear Not: Google Will Still Support The Verizon Galaxy Nexus

The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

vertical8 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:20:31 +0000

Thirty spokes meet at a nave; Because of the hole we may use the wheel. Clay is moulded into a vessel; Because of the hollow we may use the cup. Walls are built around a hearth; Because of the doors we may use the house. Thus tools come from what exists, But use from what does not. – Tao De Ching There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract. Reading the recent back and forth between Stephen Fry – an Apple apologist – and Mike Daisey – an Apple user/abuser – I’m reminded of that carousel. The gist is this: Mike Daisey woke up the NPR-listening world with his long piece of Foxconn for This American Life . It was a great piece – dramatic, educational, and eye-opening – but it’s definitely nothing we haven’t seen before. Some could say that it was The Jungle of Chinese manufacturing, a tell-all with just enough outrage to make us rethink a great horror. But the problem is this: Daisey is an actor and knows how to bring out the story, just as John Steinbeck was a writer and knew how to populate the Dust Bowl with Christ figures. That doesn’t make the story less effective – it makes it more so – but it does make the story less true. The problem is the endless circle of blame and apology. Daisey is correct in many of his assumptions, but offers a way forward that is currently unenforceable. But if you argue against Daisey’s points, you’re an apologist. But, as Paul Krugman writes : Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. We keep going over the same ground here. The argument can be delineated like this: Foxconn is an evil sweatshop. Apple is a huge Foxconn customer. They should change things. Two of those things are true, a third is false. To be clear, I’m with the crowd that says that Apple is, at best, ignorant of Foxconn’s problems and at worst ignoring them. I agree things must change and Apple is in a great position to do it. But I don’t agree with the first point. I’ve seen sweat shops and Foxconn is a factory. If many of the major brands (I recall that Ford was a customer at one factory I visited) knew that their promotional USB keys were made in a building that looked like a gulag, they’d be skewered. Here’s hoping they are, one day. However, Daisey’s Foxconn story – written outside of the factory – and my own research , written inside the factory – don’t jibe. His discoveries that people get sick or are injured in factories are naive and I suspect his sample size of employees who approached him is far smaller than we realize. To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity. Nor am I saying that Daisey’s interviewees are malingerers with an axe to grind. I’m sure their lives are ruined or much harder thanks to Foxconn. The value of Daisey’s efforts is his ability to give these people a voice in an environment that would normally quash that voice. He’s doing what artists must do – reflecting a time and place through his own lens. My own opinion is simple: Apple needs to do more for the people in its manufacturing chain. I will not pretend that Apple can simply wave a magic wand and make every Foxconn employee rich and happy, but it has the cash and the wherewithal to further disrupt the Chinese supply chain and improve the lot of Foxconn’s employees. But I also agree with what one Gawker commenter said : “I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.” Apple on the aggregate couldn’t care less about our existence nor does it deserve our undying respect and admiration. On an personal level there are plenty of folks inside Apple working and worrying about worker’s rights in China, but as an entity we are talking supply chains and price management. Apple makes excellent tools for our digital age, that’s it. To defend or excoriate the company is like screaming into the wind. However, through their constant rejiggering and improvements, they have essentially created a Western, ISO-compliant factory environment in a corporate culture that used to force underperforming employees to stand outside wearing a sign that said “I am a bad worker.” What Daisey did is made us think. Did he do it the right way, using the right tools? Absolutely not. Will he improve the lot of the workers he interviewed? I doubt it. But will his efforts – and the efforts of many who came before him – help bring the Chinese worker out of penury? Sure, eventually. I opened this piece talking about a carousel in Cape Cod, a delightfully bourgeois setting for a piece on poverty wage labor practices. I get to go to Cape Cod and put my kids on a carousel because my job involves dicking around on the Internet all day (I suspect Daisey’s does too). My one wish is that every Foxconn employee, at some point in their lives, will be able to sit down to an unhurried meal, chat with family, and maybe ride a carousel. I think it’s in Foxconn’s best interests to ensure that that happens – and soon – and I think that we’re nearly there. Things will get better, I’m sure of it, and I also feel that they already have.

More here:
The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?