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For Those Who Can’t Let Go Of The Past: The Techmeme Re-Underliner

Achilles — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:48:38 +0000

Remember the old Techmeme of a week ago, before the new design took effect? Sure, the new design is easy on the eyes. But is it better ? Personally, I’m already used to the new look, other than the sponsored posts stuck in your face in the new middle column (push those to the right, please, where ads belong). But some people just can’t let go of the past—people like Eric Marcoullier (founder of OneTrueFan, Gnip, and MyBlogLog). Marcoullier hates the new design so much that he created a Chrome extension to revert it back to its old look. The main feature he cannot live without is the underlined links. In the new design, the underlines are gone, making the site much cleaner with more room to breathe. But it also removes a key part of the information density which makes the site so useful, argues Marcoullier. Techmeme’s headlines and excerpts now makes it look more like a blog or other primary news source than a link aggregator. Partly that is because the links have been de-emphasized. Marcoullier thinks it is easier to parse the different sources when they are underlined than when they are separated only by a comma and spaces that make them look too similar to the excerpted text below the main headline. You can see a before and after below. Which one do you think is more scannable? I always found the underlines too cluttered. But seeing them here next to the new look, Marcoullier does have a point that the source names in the “More” section now tend to bleed into each other when the conversation gets too dense.

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For Those Who Can’t Let Go Of The Past: The Techmeme Re-Underliner

Japan’s NICT Creates Quantum Dots To Boost Optic Fiber Bandwidth By 7-10 Times, Shoot High-Res Pictures Of Molecules (Video)

vertical8 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:02:44 +0000

A team of researchers at the Photonic Network Research Institute of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have developed a new light source technology that might pave the way to some pretty spectacular applications in the future. The core piece of the technology are “high-quality” quantum dots , tiny nano particles, that boast higher stability and optical frequency than those created the conventional way. By using the so-called “Sandwiched sub-nano separator structure”, NICT says their quantum dots can be utilized in optical frequency bands that are about 70 Thz wide, which is about seven times wider than the 10Thz of conventional frequency bands currently offer. NICT also says that because this new wavelength band can permeate human skin, their technology could also be used in bio-imaging, for example to shoot high-resolution photos of new molecules in cells. NICT explains their light source technology: Usually when you fabricate quantum dots, you grow crystalline quantum dot particles, in nanometer size, on the semiconductor surface. But this time, we’ve formed a very thin layer, less than one nanometer thick, between the surface and the dots. By adding just this nanometer layer, we’ve be able to form high-quality quantum dots, without aggregation structures, at very high density. This video, shot by Diginfo TV in Tokyo, provides more insight (in English):

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Japan’s NICT Creates Quantum Dots To Boost Optic Fiber Bandwidth By 7-10 Times, Shoot High-Res Pictures Of Molecules (Video)

Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services

ACMAir — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:57:52 +0000

Google has more than 70 different privacy documents over its range of products, which overwhelming for any user to comb through (and that’s after Google pared down its policies in 2010). Today, the search giant is rolling out a new, comprehensive privacy policy which the company says will consolidate more than 60 of the separate privacy notices into one simple policy. The company says the changes will take effect on March 1, and will be starting to notify users today via email and a notice on its homepage. The main change, say Google, is that if you are signed into your Google account, Google will combine user info across its products to better serve account holders. As Google says: In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. This is exemplified, says Google, in its more personalized search product that debuted recently, and received major criticism . You’ll see Google+ posts and data in your search results, and allows for the seamless transfer of data in between other services, including Docs, Calender, Gmail and more, says Google. Google wants to make the entire web experience more personal, including advertising, location-based reminders, spelling suggestions of friends names and more. “People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out,” according to the blog post. The company also says it has rewritten its privacy policies so they’re easier to read and understand. And Google reiterates that it “remains committed to data liberation,” won’t sell personal information, or share it externally without permission and will continue to try to be transparent about the information collected from users.

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Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services

From Edu To Non-Profits, YouTube Aims To Walk The Path To Good

A D M I N — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:32:21 +0000

YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site’s massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends. Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube has done a lot of good so far. And it’s hoping to do a lot more. Hunter Walk , a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who has steered YouTube’s product side for years, recently decided that he wanted to spearhead YouTube’s social good efforts. Granted, the role he wanted didn’t exactly exist yet, but he managed to convince YouTube chief Salar Kamangar to let him create it. Walks’s new, self-appointed mission: Bake ‘good’ into any part of YouTube he can. He explains that plenty of YouTubers have worked on projects to support social good efforts in the past, but there’s never been any consolidated effort to do so. So these days he wanders the company’s halls, asking people if they’d be interested in launching an expedited support queue for non-profits, or a new white-list feature for schools. He says he rarely gets turned down — adding that YouTubers tend to view it as pro bono work, and they’re generally happy to help. Walk says that he views YouTube’s relationship with ‘good’ as supported by three main pillars: Causes & Non Profits; Education; and, finally, Activisim and Free Expression. YouTube’s special relationship with non-profits goes back to 2007, when the site began giving them free access to features typically reserved for premium content partners. These include videos that are longer than fifteen minutes in length and the ability to include a special Donate button that lets users contribute money. Non-profits also have the unique ability to include links to external sites using YouTube’s annotations feature (which they can use to drive people to a petition or ‘further information’ page, for example) — no other partners are allowed to use annotations to link off-site. And today, as one of the first fruits since Walk took on his new role, YouTube is launching a ‘Playbook’ of best practices that non-profits can use to effectively produce and distribute their YouTube videos (YouTube first launched a broader-ranging Playbook last July, and it plans to launch more vertical-specific guides in the future). Walk says that non-profits have more features coming soon as well, including the ability to live-stream video, which is currently in testing with a handful of partners. Walk’s second pillar — Education — is also fairly well established on the site. YouTube’s Edu Portal features thousands of videos from the likes of Harvard, Yale, and online schools like the incredible Khan Academy. This educational content has been watched a whopping 22 billion times on the site already. Walk says that up until now YouTube has been primarily focused on acquiring all of this content to build up its library. Now, it’s beginning to focus on the second, and equally-important step: curation. Teachers and scholarly institutions will increasingly be able to build out and share lists of their favorite videos, drawn from any of the site’s EDU channels. And YouTube is also focusing on making the site more school-friendly. Historically some students have had issues watching YouTube because their school’s firewall blocks the site (apparently it’s easy to waste time on YouTube). To help remedy this, YouTube is testing a ‘YouTube for Schools’ domain that will schools will be able to whitelist. This would enable students to watch videos as they please, but only content that appears as part of the Edu part of the site. With these additions and others, Walk says he’s hoping to make teachers’ livers easier, and to give people who don’t have classrooms the power to listen and learn about anything. Which brings us to Walk’s third pillar, which he dubs Activism and Free Expression. This pillar has more to do with how people are using YouTube, than it does with any particular improvement the site can make. Walk recalls an experience he had during a trip to Baghdad two years ago, when he asked a 17 year-old girl what she used YouTube for. “It allows me to understand what the world cares about”, she said. And the ability to watch a variety of camera-phone footage and news reports from various media outlets helped her arrive at her “version of the truth”. Walk also points to 2011′s Arab Spring, when social media services helped Egyptians spread news with each other — and around the world. Despite the fact that Egypt blocked the Internet for two weeks, Walk says that the number of video uploads in that region actually shot up 2x. Another interesting stat: the highest usage of YouTube per capita/Internet user is in Saudi Arabia. The reason? Walk says the less diverse the media sources available to a user through traditional routes like television and print, the more important it becomes to them to find other content. Which is why Walk says YouTube is committed to providing its entire corpus of content to all of its users. Walk didn’t have any upcoming features to discuss around this third pillar, but based on my conversation with him, it’s the one he’s most passionate about. He made it clear that, despite plenty of forthcoming hurdles around government censorship, YouTube is committed to hosting and freely distributing footage of the demonstrations, the speeches, the atrocities, and the joyous celebrations that will shape the world in the years ahead.

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From Edu To Non-Profits, YouTube Aims To Walk The Path To Good

Is This Activism?

ACMAir — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:07:58 +0000

Hundreds of websites (TechCrunch included) have gone dark or visibly changed their appearance as a protest against the Stop Online Privacy Act and its Senate doppelganger, the PROTECT IP Act. It’s a powerful statement and many are saying that it is already producing effects: Senators are changing positions, awareness is rising, and the opposition is becoming a dinner-table topic. But is this activism? I’m not asking whether it’s a good thing (it certainly is) or whether it is effective in guiding policy (it certainly might be), but whether it is right to call it activism . It’s not just a question of semantics; the distinction is material. Activism is like-minded individuals working to support or oppose a cause. What we are seeing today, in large companies and organizations acting together to sway an outcome, might better be termed collective bargaining. It just seems a bit strange that after months of outrage by individuals, what seems to cause notice is action by larger units: Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and the like. Although we as individuals may have contributed to their decisions, ultimately the choice was theirs. And while we are all thankful to these organizations for doing what they feel is appropriate to signal their disapproval, it’s significant that we individuals are largely without means of effectively banding together online. I wrote before that “people, not things, are the tools of revolution.” I know this to be true. But things, and means, are also important. Do we have the means to affect our country’s policies and decisions via the internet? One thing that this whole SOPA thing (and COICA before it, and others before that, and surely more to come) shows is the complete disconnect between the informed, online community and the legislative and governing bodies. The incredible increase in our capability to propagate and discuss issues and events has not been matched by a corresponding receptive capability on the part of our representatives and officials. This must change. The state of feedback between the governed and the governors is deplorable. Very little of the innovation driving internet companies is being applied to this problem, and as we have seen, it is a very serious problem. There is much to be said about the whole Washington ecosystem of lobbyists, career politicians, favors, vendettas, and all that. What is relevant to us right now, however, is not the vagaries of a representative democracy, but creating a reliable, official, and secure means for citizens to make their opinions felt by those in office. We may discuss and blog and comment and promote all we want and our senators might be none the wiser. We need something other than votes and campaign contributions that will make these people hear what their constituents are saying. The internet has very little that can be called activism. We can consider today, with its blackouts and wide visibility, a success. But it doesn’t seem to me that we can call it activism when so much of it has to do with powers outside our own making choices that just happen to coincide with ours. The internet is a powerful tool for communication and advocacy, but right now it is divorced from the decision-making process. The best we have is things like White House petitions and automatic email systems for contacting your senators. The level of engagement is wholly inadequate. As citizens we should expect more, and as evangelists of technology we should be making the tools to take the next step. [Hat tip to this article at GigaOm , which set me thinking)

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Is This Activism?

Turntable.fm’s Anti-SOPA Message Is Subtle, But Wonderfully Symbolic

vertical8 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:03:54 +0000

Regardless of where you stand on the SOPA battle, you’ve got to agree: seeing what seems to be the entire Internet come together to stand against something is incredible . Each company has a different approach, but their goal is the same: make sure everyone goes to sleep knowing what SOPA is. While I don’t want to turn today’s protests into a who-did-it-best battle (that’s not at all the point), I’ve got to highlight Turntable.fm’s approach. It’s about as simple as could be, but it just oozes with symbolism. If the goal is to raise awareness, the most effective form of peaceful protest is the one that spreads your message without inconveniencing those you’re trying to inform. Wikipedia’s approach , as a counter-example, brings a ton of attention to the issue — but it also pisses a lot of people off. It’s a hugely powerful move, but it taints the message for the huge chunk of people who just leave angry and confused. Now, take a look at the screenshot above. Notice the anti-SOPA/PIPA stickers on each DJ’s laptop lid? That’s Turntable’s approach. “Wait, what? That’s it?” Yep, that’s it. Here’s the thing: on any other day of the year, each DJ’s laptop generally represents which OS they’re using. On a Windows machine? It’ll have a Windows flag. Mac? It’ll have an Apple. Ubuntu? It’ll show Ubuntu’s… logo… thing. It actually becomes something of a point of contention, with OS flamewars breaking out on the regular and “Of COURSE a platform-X user would play this song” stereotyping abound. Today, everyone playing music on Turntable stands behind the same message: Stop SOPA/PIPA. It’s the very first thing you notice when you enter the room — and if you don’t already know what SOPA/PIPA are, curiosity will almost certainly make you turn to Google, where the information is quite literally front and center. There’s no inconvenience introduced, no damning of the user experience… and yet, it spreads the message just as well as anything else. Add in the headbobbing of the crowd and the inherent power of music, and it comes together into something not only powerful, but also positive . Good job, Turntable.

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Turntable.fm’s Anti-SOPA Message Is Subtle, But Wonderfully Symbolic

AllTrails Partners With National Geographic, Launches Redesigned, Co-branded Website

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:00:53 +0000

AllTrails , the AngelPad and 500 Startups-backed company working to build the most comprehensive database of hiking, biking and camping trails around the world, is announcing a major partnership today with National Geographic. As a part of the deal, the AllTrails website is relaunching this morning with a brand-new redesign built from the ground up, and is co-branded with National Geographic’s logo. According to CEO Russell Cook, National Geographic’s five-year old online property Topo.com , a website that worked with the company’s boxed software, was seeing around 300,000 registered users prior to today’s partnership. But National Geographic was never able to properly develop that resource, so it’s now shutting the site down. Going forward, all of Topo’s traffic will be redirected to AllTrails, and NatGeo will also provide AllTrails with access to its own mapping data. With AllTrails ‘ 200,000 users, the combination of the two sites will boost the company’s userbase considerably – up to half a million users. As a part of the partnership, National Geographic has also provided AllTrails with some development dollars, but nothing that can be disclosed. For those unfamiliar, AllTrails was founded about two years ago, with the focus on solving the problem of the incomplete and inaccurate data about spots for outdoors activities. This information is often found in analog format (e.g., guidebooks), but had not been properly digitized or organized on the web. To address the problem, AllTrails pulls in publicly available data and combines it with crowd-sourced efforts in order to build its database of outdoor trails and other activity spots. “The information is out there, it’s all over the place, and you can’t really trust it,” says Cook, of the publicly available data from government organizations in the U.S. like the Forest Service and the National Parks Service. “We go back through it with a team of editors, and a lot of our top users help as well. Any user can submit edits to new trails, then we have a team of editors that make sure it’s accurate before we publish it to the online database,” he explains. Sometimes this process even requires calling up the park in question to determine the data’s accuracy. After building its database for North America, AllTrails participated in the San Francisco-based incubator AngelPad’s first round of startups last year, in order to build its mobile applications. The company now has both iPhone and Android apps, and will offer a mobile website to those on other platforms. Unlike many other outdoor activity maps, AllTrails’ mobile apps intelligently cache content on your device, taking up minimal space, so you can access the maps even when you don’t have a signal. No extra effort is required on the user’s part, either – the app caches content based on your usage of the app, not on explicit commands to download data. The company is now investing its resources in Android development, with the focus on bring the Android app to feature parity with the iPhone app in a few months time. It’s also planning on international expansion efforts, beginning with the U.K., Australia, and South Africa later this summer. With the new deal between AllTrails and NatGeo in place, AllTrails will be able to launch a paid version of its product for the first time. This will include premium mapping content from National Geographic, GPS routes for trails (available online and on mobile) and discounts with retail partners. These features will roll out next month. The new website, however, is going live this morning at AllTrails.com . The expected launch time should be between 5 and 6 AM PST, but is not exact. (If AllTrails doesn’t look like the screenshots below, then you’re seeing the old version. Keep refreshing!)

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AllTrails Partners With National Geographic, Launches Redesigned, Co-branded Website

SocialRent Reduces Your Apartment Search Headaches

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:00:33 +0000

If you’ve ever tried to find an apartment with your friends, you’ve probably had a moment where you thought that there has to be something better than sites like Craigslist. A new startup called SocialRent aims to be that something better. The SocialRent team’s first product, a Facebook app , is only addressing one small part of the apartment search, but it seems like a solid start toward tackling a larger set of problems. For now, it’s all about helping a team of friends (probably college students) coordinate their needs, and then communicate those needs to real estate agents. The app is essentially a collaborative document — after users sign up, they can build a “crew” of Facebook friends, then each of those friends can enter and edit information about what neighborhoods they want to live in, what kinds of apartment they need (number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.), and how much they’re willing to pay. Once there’s a configuration that everyone’s happy with, SocialRent can send that information on to agents (which is how the company makes money). The app was built by a team of Boston University students over their winter break, but CEO James Zar said it’s not just a casual side project. Zar plans to graduate in May, and in the meantime, he makes it sound like SocialRent is more important to him than any classwork. The company has already incorporated, and it has recruited a real estate professional, Jamie Lebowitz, as its president and first investor. The real estate agents working with SocialRent are currently limited to the Boston area. However, Zar said that he’s working to bring other agents into the program quickly, and he noted that renters in other cities can still use the app to coordinate their needs — the information just won’t get forwarded to an agent. And further down the line, he wants to add features that allow renters to actually find roommates, and that do more to help those roommate crews select the best apartment. Oh, and if you sign up using the code “TECHCRUNCH”, you’ll get $25 off your first month’s rent, and Zar said SocialRent will donate another $25 toward fighting homelessness.

Accel Leads $10M Round In European Airbnb For Car Ride-Sharing, BlablaCar

bestcbstore — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:00:50 +0000

BlablaCar, a European carpooling marketplace that connects any driver who has empty seats with paying passengers, has raised $10 million from Accel Partners and existing investors ISAI and Cabiedes & Partners. This brings BlablaCar’s total funding to $12.5 million. On BlablaCar, drivers can register, publish their trips and contact other members who are making the same trip as you by sending them a message or calling them directly by telephone. If you’re a passenger, you can search the site and contact a driver who has published a trip that interests you. If you don’t find a trip that interests you, you can always publish your trip and have other members contact you. The service is free but drivers can charge a fixed price per passenger, which averages at around €20 per ride. Passengers choose to pay via BlablaCar’s online booking system or directly in the car. For now, BlablaCar is only available in the UK, in France (Covoiturage.fr) and Spain (Comuto.es). Part fo the funding will be used to fuel further expansion of its service across the rest of Europe. Currently, BlablaCar has 1.6 million users, with 400,000 drivers currently offering their empty seats to passengers. One billion miles have been collectively shared by the community for more than 8 million passengers transported. And the site is seeing 40 million page views per month, says CEO Frederic Mazzella. He adds that most of the trips on the site are long, weekend trips as opposed to commuter fares. As Mazzella explains, BlablaCar is spearheading collaborative travel, and providing major discounts for travelers, while also creating a revenue stream for drivers. In terms of safety precautions with the service, Mazzella says that every passenger and driver has to register with the site with a valid phone number and other information. Each user is rated on the site, which he says helps create credibility and accountability, and members with negative ratings are blacklisted. BlablaCar is similar in theory to U.S.-based startup Ridejoy and ZimRide, which also aims to be a carpooling marketplace.

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Accel Leads $10M Round In European Airbnb For Car Ride-Sharing, BlablaCar

A Google+ Tempest In A Teacup

ACMAir — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:28:38 +0000

There has been a great quantity of vitriol corroding the social web over the last few days, a reaction to Google’s decision to optionally integrate Google+ features into their search. The complaint, as I understand it, is that some searches bring up Google+ results before they bring up results the complainants feel are more relevant. Here’s the thing. Google certainly has an agenda here. But it’s not a destructive agenda, it’s merely Google-centric. Twitter made a Twitter-centric decision when they reduced their search profile last year, and Facebook has made Facebook-centric decisions almost exclusively since its creation. Google is a datavore. All it wants to do is collect data, organize it, and then deliver it to people, peppered with ads and the occasional sales commission. Viewed from this perspective, the new social search is simple — innocuous. The biggest crime Google has committed is giving it such a cumbrous name. “Search, plus Your World” (difficult to parse, more difficult to use in conversation) is about richer, deeper data related to your search terms, culled from your social contacts, than would normally appear in a search. And naturally, when it isn’t relevant, it isn’t applied: a social search for my name pulls my Google+ profile into the search box’s pole position, which I agree is a bit much — put it above, maybe? — but a search for “pasta puttanesca” gets me some recipes. So non-social searches, which compose a huge proportion of Google queries, are unaffected. That alone beggars the allegations — makes them seem whiny and out of proportion with the problem itself. Though there is, no doubt, a problem. A search that is ostensibly social-focused should be pulling information primarily from Facebook and Twitter, right? I agree. Yet it doesn’t. And people’s accusing fingers jumped up to point at Google, though the problem isn’t Google’s. The service is incomplete — that’s inarguable. But there is no malevolence to its incompleteness, and I’m not convinced that it’s Google’s responsibility to make it complete. (Except for co-opting non-letter operators. That’s ridiculous, Google.) Like I said, Google is a datavore. It eats data and it breathes services. When it has no data to eat, it is useless. What data does Google have from your friends on Facebook, the people you follow on Twitter? That data must be volunteered by the services which control it, and as Google pointed out saucily in response to recent criticism, those services are not very accommodating. The new search type is a deep search, providing rich data. What rich data does Facebook share? What deep search does Twitter permit? Google can’t produce something it doesn’t have, and what it does produce isn’t destructive to search — and if it were so, it can be turned off with a click. The suggestion that people won’t do this is at best poppycock, and at worst — flimflam. If Google had access to this information, it would present it to the user — based, as always, on a proprietary calculation of relevance. Are people really suggesting that Google is suppressing relevant results, results that make the service better, in order to feature Google+ more prominently? Google wants to provide socially-determined search. Facebook and Twitter want you to do that kind of social search within their sites. These objectives are fundamentally at odds. Google went live anyway with its incomplete product, something it has done a dozen times before, and the only data it has available to scrape is its own. It would like Facebook and Twitter to provide data for it to pass on. How much they provide is up to them. The objectives of these three big billy goats gruff, I said, are at odds, and it won’t do to say that Google should have access to Facebook data, or Twitter shouldn’t be providing recent tweets to display under someone’s handle in search. No one gets priority, because they’re all just companies trying to make a buck. The question is which one is going to eventually succumb to the will of the other. I don’t think it’ll be Google, who can make puppy dog eyes and say “it’s not our fault they don’t want to share with us.” And I don’t think Facebook even has the option – the logistics of putting their data out there are a nightmare, and the data would be frustratingly incomplete anyway. So Twitter, which unsurprisingly is complaining the loudest, will be the bough that bends. As for the passive promotion of Google+ elsewhere in search (in the people and places box, for instance), that’s not very different from everywhere else it appears. Are they obligated to put “follow on Twitter” and “subscribe on Facebook”? I suspect they are able to but decided those things would be out of place among search results that so plainly exclude information from those services. They might be waiting for Twitter to come with an olive branch. Should it be the other way around? That, I think, is a matter of opinion. There’s nothing controversial about competition. Google has started a new service that gives social data prominent placement. Ironically, the fact that people are complaining that it is not integrative enough (as opposed to Twitter and Facebook initiatives, which are often not integrative at all, and sometimes deliberately exclusive) testifies to Google’s adherence to their promise of even-handedness. I’d like to say that Google has offered a carrot and Twitter responded with a stick. But Google understand the power they have, and really, they’re using the carrot to beat on Twitter. Is that power a monopoly? The areas in which Google can be said to have a monopoly are vague and nebulous. This is certainly adjacent, but placing the issue correctly is one of great importance in the debate. I think it falls outside that area, which to me begs the question, but no doubt the discussion will continue, and Google’s actions will have repercussions further down the line.

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A Google+ Tempest In A Teacup