Comment Google compte offrir l'accès à Internet aux 2/3 de l'Humanité qui en sont dépourvus ?

Project Loon : http://www.google.com/loon/how/

Google Is Making A Land Grab For The Internet Of Things

Before this past December, when Google acquired seven robotics companies back-to-back, the company’s ambitions in the “Internet of Things” space looked as detailed as a freshly started jigsaw puzzle.

But with its last three acquisitions — Boston Dynamics, Nest and DeepMind — it seems like Google is rapidly collecting the individual pieces to put together a “real life Internet,” a network of AI-driven robots and objects that could improve transportation, manufacturing and even day-to-day consumer life.

Google’s “real life Internet,” a business that reaches far beyond web search and online advertising, may look like a General Electric on the Internet of Things side, and an IBM on the software side — where artificial intelligence is at the core of products likeWatson.

At least that’s what it looks like right now, as the search giant is gobbling up almost every company that could fit into the puzzle, combining hardware, software, analytics, robotics and artificial intelligence into, well, something.

Google X, the company’s skunkworks unit that’s been developing driverless cars among several other sci-fi-esque projects, now seems to be leading Google’s hefty meatspace ambitions.

One obvious extrapolation from all these acquisitions is that Google will be in the business of data for a long time. Covering computers, tablets and now phones with Android and building applications like Maps to harvest information about its hundreds of millions of users, Google is now looking far beyond traditional computing devices. Acquiring Nest, which builds smart home devices, was one swift lunge in that direction.

How many more of these diversity acquisitions will we see before 2014 closes out?

Since last Christmas, Google has dropped well over $4 billion on buying seven roboticscompanies and Big Dog maker Boston Dynamics, enlisting Android guru Andy Rubin to figure out what do with them.  Internet of Things darling Nest, and AI company DeepMind will operate outside of the robotics division, according to Liz Gannes.

Google is betting its future on the fact that one day our cars, refrigerators, mobile phones, computers and home devices will communicate with each other, generating insights that can be converted into data. And that these newer channels will result in a massive advertising opportunity.

But what can Google accomplish that IBM and GE cannot?

IBM has invested $1 billion in its AI-driven Watson project, which is expected to bring $10 billion in revenue over the next few years. Facebook too, has set up an artificial intelligence team to understand emotions, and according to The Information and a tipster, was even in the race to acquire DeepMind (our tipster held the Facebook bid at $450 million).

And good old GE is putting all its might behind building software platforms that bridge the physical world of industrial machines with the Internet — a strategy and aim similar to Google’s but for the machine world.

So far, IBM has depended heavily (perhaps doggedly) on Watson for making its artificial intelligence push work. Since its launch around three years ago, IBM has been pushing aggressively to turn its “Jeopardy”-winning computer into a business where healthcare and telecom companies pay to use Watson in real life. But as a WSJ piece earlier this month pointed out, IBM has been struggling to make it work.

On the enterprise side, both IBM and GE are still far away from making any big impact in terms of revenues, despite having the experience of working with Fortune 500 companies for decades.

Watson’s biggest challenge today is solving real-life problems and living up to the “intelligence” part of the artificial intelligence equation.

When asked by the New York Times what he wanted to build at Google, Andy Rubin brought up the example of a windshield wiper that turned itself on when it rains. 

As humble as that sounds, Google ostensibly has a head start in terms of AI-practicality, with Google Now making strides in the proactive computing field. It also has a tremendous advantage in its treasure chest of user data, allowing it to predict and analyze patterns in behavior and needs more robustly than any competitor.

With one of the largest server architectures on the Internet, Google has the big computing power necessary for AI processing at its fingertips. It also has ancillary Google X efforts like Project Loon that could blanket areas in connectivity needed to power robotics.

A “real life Internet” may be closer than we think.

‘Her’ image via IMDB, Warner Bros. 

Source : Techcrunch

Google serait en train de construire un Datacenter flottant à San Francisco

Discrètement, selon les informations que rapporte Cnet, Google serait en train de construire un centre de serveurs flottant sur Treasure Island dans la baie de San Francisco. Le datacenter serait situé sur le Pont 1 (voir photo ci-dessous extraite de Google Maps), une barge flottante rattachée à l’île. Le hangar 3 situé juste à côté (Bldg 3 sur l’image) appartiendrait à Google (même si aucun document ne le montre) puisque le message du répondeur remercie d’avoir appelé… Google.

Voyez les photos récentes de Cnet :






La sécurité est maximale aux abords du Hangar 3 comme en témoigne les deux personnes ci-dessous, dont l’une avec des énormes jumelles :

Bâtir un centre de données refroidi par de l’eau de mer a un gros avantage : cela ne coûte pas cher et c’est écologique (comme celui situé en Finlande). En plus, Google possède depuis 2009 un brevet pour ce type de datacenter en mer. Autre avantage de taille à prévoir pour la firme de Mountain View : tout ce qui flotte normalement n’est pas soumis aux règles gouvernementales et donc à l’impôt…

Source : Vincent Abry

The 5 Most Important Algorithms In Tech

Algorithms, simple functions that hover between mathematical problems and computer programs, are everywhere.
Whether dealing with lost packets when using Wi-Fi, or getting your credit-card details securely to an online store, most consumer technology couldn't work without some ingenious solutions to common problems.
And when Google decides to change its search algorithm - as it did with Hummingbird last week, it can make or break whole companies.
Here are just five which you couldn't live without.

Pagerank – how Google calculates search results

The broad strokes of how Google's search algorithm works have been public for over fifteen years, though the exact way it organises search results remains the company's most closely guarded secret.
PageRank is the system at the heart of it all, and the key invention behind Google's rapid dominance of internet search. Ten years ago, when competitors relied on human-maintained indexes of webpages, it allowed the company to assess the value of websites automatically - a massive advantage as the web grew exponentially.

The algorithm works by looking at every link to and from every page on the internet. A link to a page is, in effect, a vote for that page's validity, because it means that someone thought that whatever was on that page was worth sharing. So the more inbound links a page has, the higher its PageRank is.
But then it adds a second measure: links from pages which have a high PageRank themselves confer a higher PageRank. So being linked to by Stanford, the Google creators' alma mater, is significantly more valuable than being linked to by Stanford's, the map shop.

On top of PageRank are myriad tweaks and adjustments to improve the results further. Some of those, such as the decision to punish 'link farms', vast networks of sites which link to each other in an effort to boost their PageRank , are directly connected to the core algorithm.
Others, like the company's attempts to leverage what it knows about users based on their previous searches to deliver personalised results, were bolted on later.

But as the demands we make of search have got ever more intensive, the company has been forced to adapt. The most recent update to the algorithm, Hummingbird is "a new engine built on both existing and new parts", according to Danny Sullivan of the search blog Search Engine Land.
Hummingbird was built to deal with the fact that increasing familiarity with search, as well as the rise of voice control, mean that we now ask Google actual questions, rather than just typing in relevant words.

In the future, new problems will require further tweaks, but the position of PageRank at the heart of it all seems secure.

Public key cryptography - keeping credit card data secure

Public key cryptography is the name for a broad collection of algorithms which lie at the heart of nearly every form of security online. Using what is perhaps best described as 'magic maths', public key cryptography lets people encode data with a key which cannot then decode it.
If Alice has a piece of information which she needs to get to Bob without anyone else seeing it – maybe a credit card number which she's using to buy a computer with, or perhaps evidence of state wrongdoing which she's leaking to a national newspaper – she has to encrypt it.

Way back in history, the only way to do this would be to use a shared secret: a cipher which both Alice and Bob know, but no-one else does. That's how encryption all the way up to the second world war worked.
But the obvious problem is that Alice and Bob can't use open channels to agree on their cipher. That's fine if they can meet in person to swap codes, but less effective if Alice is a consumer and Bob a multinational corporation.

Public key cryptography means that Bob can tell the world his public key, and let them know that anything encoded with that will be readable by him and only him. Alice sees the public key, locks up her credit card data using it, and then sends that packet on the way.
Only Bob, using a second, private, key can decrypt the data and read the number.

Unfortunately, doing all of this every time is pretty hard on a computer's processor, so another step, where both Alice and Bob use their keys together to generate a shared secret, is frequently added in most practical uses of public key encryption. That shared secret can then be used in old-fashioned symmetrical ciphers. But it all comes back to the public and private keys.

Correcting errors

CDs are temperamental beasts. When they were introduced, they were hailed as being a resilient replacement for vinyl and cassettes, but as anyone who has tried to play a carelessly preserved album found in their car's glovebox can attest to, that's only half true.

Still, it could a lot worse. When you're storing data using microscopic pits on a sheet of metal covered with a thin layer of plastic, it's quite a feat to read every single pit correctly, a feat only compounded by later generations of optical media, which shrink the pits still further.

Error correction lies at the heart of that reliability, thanks to the use of a cunning algorithm which lets CDs be readable even with quite a lot of damage to the data stored on them.
In hugely simplified form, imagine the data on a CD as a grid of 1s and 0s. Like this:

101
010
000

If there's an error reading the CD, one of those 0s may turn into a 1. Without error correction, there's no way to tell if that's happened, and no way to fix it.
The simplest way to correct errors is to add another load of data. Each row and column is counted up, and if there's an even number of 1s, another 1 is added on the end. If there isn't, a 0 is added instead:

1011
0100
0001
000

Now, if one of the 0s is misread, the player can check with the error correction codes, and tell that there's been a mistake – and even, assuming there's not too much damage, what the real value should be.

Suppose the bottom right 0 is read as a 1: by reading the error correction code for that row, the player can tell that there's one too many 1s. It can then cross-check with the error correction codes for each column, and spot that there are also too many 1s in one column as well.
Now the player knows where the error is, and can carry on with those sweet tunes.

Error correction isn't just used by disc drives, though. Nearly every electronic device which gets data from one place to another will have some error correction on it, from WiFi to DSL. Even ISBN numbers on the back of books have error correction: the final digit serves the role.

Protecting passwords

Sometimes, it's really important to check that the file you have been given is exactly the one you expected. Maybe you are worried it's been tampered with, or just want to check that a large download finished without corruption. One way to do that is to look at its hash.

There isn't really one algorithm which can be used to make 'hashes' of data: any process which can take information and spit out something which fulfils a few criteria will do.

A good cryptographic hash function will give the same output every time it's given the same input; the hash will change if the message changes; it would be nearly impossible to work backwards from the hash to the message; and it would be nearly impossible for two messages to have the same hashes.
But there's a much more important use for hashing data than just checking files: password protection.
As is painfully obvious these days, not many organisations can guarantee they won't lose your data. That's particularly problematic if it's your password they've lost, because — well, you don't have a different password for every service, do you?

These days, companies shouldn't be keeping passwords in plaintext at all. Instead, when a user types in their password for the first time, the site should hash the password, and only keep that.
Every time they come back to log in, it can take another hash, and compare it to the one on file. If they match, the password's correct. But now, if the site's hacked, the only thing which gets lost is a table full of hashes which can't be reverse engineered into passwords, so everyone is happy.

(Technically, site owners should be salting their hashes - an oh-so-cute term which means adding a little bit of extra data into the password hash to prevent it being reverse engineered.)

Perlin noise: generating landscapes in games

Games are just big bags of algorithms. There's art, music, writing, direction, design and playtesting too, but a lot of algorithms.

Take procedurally generated terrain, the favoured way of filling in the vast expanses of games like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. It's not enough just to generate random noise, and apply it to a landscape, because if you do, you end up with something which is too random: all noise, no pattern. Instead, you want terrain which demonstrates the same fractal nature as the real world, with mountains, hills, boulders and pebbles all having effects on different scales.

That's what Perlin noise can do. It's a simple enough algorithm: generate some random noise at a load of different frequencies, smooth it out, and then add them together. But when you do, you go from this:

To this:
Or consider trying to get enemies to take an intelligent route through a map. The obvious way to do it is easy enough: consider every possible route, then take the shortest one from A to B. But that's so computationally intensive that it's unusable in most situations.

Instead algorithms like the A* search can be used.

How it works is tricky to explain (essentially, it finds a path by always taking the step where the number of steps already taken plus the number of steps in a straight line to the destination is lowest), but it is entrancing in action.

• In August 2011, a rogue algorithm lost its owners $440m on the stock market before it was eventually shut down.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

Source : Business Insider

Google étend la logique de la performance publicitaire au regard

Grâce à des capteurs intégrés à ses lunettes intelligentes, Google envisage un nouveau mode de facturation au regard pour les annonceurs.

Afin de financer son moteur de recherche, Google a toujours utilisé des indicateurs de facturation pour ses annonceurs reposant sur la performance. Ainsi le coût par clic (CPC) ou le coût par achat (CPA) permettait jusqu'à présent de mesurer l'audience publicitaire sur Internet. Grâce à un nouveau brevet de "Gaze tracking system" développé pour ses lunettes intelligentes, Google peut désormais mesurer la performance au regard, voire aux émotions. Cette invention permettrait de mesurer en permanence l'exposition à la publicité(physique et digitale) et une tarification au regard.

L'optimisation des tarifications publicitaires grâce au regard

Le brevet déposé propose un système intégré de capteurs et de lunettes mesurant l'attention du regard, relié en permanence à un serveur. Grâce à ce système de caméras embarquées, Google mesure quels supports publicitaires sont visionnés et pendant combien de temps. Ces images et coordonnées sont directement transférées au service de tarification qui facture directement les annonceurs concernés. Les lunettes enregistrent donc toute consultation visuelle de contenu publicitaire, en ligne ou physique (journaux, affiches, magazines etc.) Pour l'instant Google n'envisage pas d'exposer de la publicité directement sur l'interface Glass et a d'ailleurs interdit aux développeurs d'applications de vendre de l'espace publicitaire. Mais d'autres services, notamment Google Now, moteur de recherche d'applications intelligent, seront ouverts aux contenus publicitaires.

Vers la mesure des émotions?

Le “Pay per Gaze” - littéralement “coût par regard” - n'est qu'une première étape du développement de la mesure de la performance dans le marché de la publicité. Avec cette application Google peut en outre mesurer le niveau de dilatation de la pupille et ainsi détecter l'émotion suscitée chez l'utilisateur. Cette fonction pourrait permettre aux annonceurs de comprendre les réactions des consommateurs au contenu publicitaire et travailler davantage sur les émotions pour inciter à l'achat. D'autres accessoires de wearable technology, notamment le bandeau intelligent Muse permettent déjà de mesurer les émotions d'un utilisateur et de les intégrer dans les moyens de communication digitaux.

Source : L'Atelier

Google Bought Waze For $1.1B, Giving A Social Data Boost To Its Mapping Business

After months of speculation, the fate of Waze, the social-mapping-location-data startup, is finally decided: Google is buying the company, giving the search giant a social boost to its already-strong mapping and mobile businesses. Speculation has had the sale at $1 billion to $1.3 billion, and so far there is no price on the deal, but a source tells TechCrunch that it was done for $1.1 billion.



Update: Waze has also published a blog post on the acquisition. In it, CEO Noam Bardin writes that CEO Larry Page, Google GEO VP Brian McClendon and the Google Maps teams “We are excited about the prospect of working with the Google Maps team to enhance our search capabilities and to join them in their ongoing efforts to build the best map of the world.” He also notes that “nothing practical will change,” with the company, now pushing 50 million users, “will maintain our community, brand, service and organization.”

He also raises the subject of why Waze decided to sell. Bardin says that it was motivated by the fact that an IPO appeared the route that would take the company more into being focused on returns and less on growing as a product for users. “Choosing the path of an IPO often shifts attention to bankers, lawyers and the happiness of Wall Street, and we decided we’d rather spend our time with you, the Waze community.” Of course, the burden of getting a return on the investment now become’s Google’s, but as you can see below there are a number of reasons why it would buy Waze, anyway. [original post continues below]

Update 2: Israeli tech blog GeekTime also confirms our $1.1 billion figure, “of which $1.03B will be transferred in cash directly to the company and its stockholders. An additional $100M will be awarded to employees based on performance.”
This is a doubly strategic move for Google. The purchase comes in the wake of what appeared to be failed negotiations between the Israel-based startup two big rivals of the search giant: Facebook, which was eyeing up the company but apparently faltered at the due dilligence phase; and Apple (neither company ever publicly confirmed interest in acquiring Waze).
The news comes after a particularly heated few days in which reports of Google’s interest in Waze reached new heights, after first surfacing two weeks ago. In the wildfire that is internet publishing, many even went so far as to report it as a done deal, making things even more confusing.
Waze had raised some $67 million in funding from Blue Run Ventures, Magma, Vertex, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Horizon Ventures. And it looks like the majority of the payout in the sale will go to these VCs. Globes, the Israeli business newspaper that first reported the latest interest from Google, estimated that payouts to co-founders — Ehud Shabtai, Amir and Gili Shinar, Uri Levine, Arie Gillon — and its CEO Noam Bardin, will be under $200 million in total.
There are at least a couple of places where you can see Google making use of Waze data.

Social. Under CEO Larry Page, Google has been especially bullish on where it positions itself on social, which it has been hinging on Google+ as a kind of web across all of its other properties to show you, the user, what those you know are doing, and also to let your connections see what you are looking at online. Taking a page from Facebook’s book, the thinking goes that this helps with discovery and engagement.
Waze, as a crowdsourced location platform, would give Google an additional, very mobile-based angle on this concept, letting users not just share places (i.e. sites) visited on the web, but actual places visited physically. As Bardim noted at the AllThingsD conference in April, “What search is for the web, maps are for mobile.” By this, he means that most of the searches you do on mobile have to do with location, and Waze is one of the few companies out there that is bringing that kind of search together with actual map data and a social layer. (The NYT ran an interesting piece yesterday with one mapping company describing how maps on mobile specifically become a “canvas” for all other apps.)

Competition. Waze could be a two-pronged fork for Google: On one hand, it gives the search giant nice, healthy wedge into the mass of consumers who are already using the app on iOS devices. But it also, if reports are to be believed, also gives Google a way of roadblocking how companies like Facebook could use Waze’s assets. As the startup likes to point out, it’s not a mapping company, but a big data player. Facebook, making its own big push on mobile, would have been a natural home for a socially-focused company like Waze, which also happens to be one of the few home-grown mapping databases around. This will mean that Facebook will need to have to continue to use third-party data for its own location-based searches and information, or less look to acquire elsewhere.
(Now could be a good time to wonder whether Nokia might consider offloading Navteq, its loss-making but strategic mapping asset, to shore up its financial position…)

It’s interesting, in any case, that Google and Waze have now kissed and made up. It was only in April that Bardin jabbed at Google when talking about who the big players in mapping were and how Waze stacks up against them: Waze used to benchmark itself with Google, he noted at the AllThingsD conference, but after the search giant cut off access to its API, Waze started to benchmark to Navteq.
When the Facebook acquisition reports surfaced, we’d heard that one of the sticking points was that Waze wanted to keep its R&D in Israel, while Facebook was leaning to a Menlo Park relocation. Since then, others have told us that this was just smoke a mirrors and that there were other reasons the deal fell through (Mountain View’s most famous resident being one possible factor). Google, unlike Facebook, has a decent presence in the country, including a new hub for startups started in December 2012, Campus Tel Aviv.

Google today made it clear that it would keep Waze’s operations going in Israel — for now, at least. “The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now,” Brian McClendon, Google’s VP of Geo, noted in the blog post announcing the deal. “We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”
In any case, it makes sense that Waze might want to keep its Israel-based operations intact. Just about all of the company’s 110-or-so employees are there, with only around 10 in a very modest office in Palo Alto, just down the street from another big-data startup, Palantir. That small proportion, however, is mighty: regular workers there include CEO Noam Bardin and Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platform and partnerships.

The U.S. is currently Waze’s largest single market — in April, Bardin noted that 12 million of its (at the time) 44 million users are based there — and this is where the company is putting its growth efforts for now, too. In February of this year, Waze expanded its U.S. operations, and its monetization ambitions, by opening an office on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising world in New York City, and we’ve seen that members of the team have been visiting New York recently. There is still a lot of development to be done on the advertising front — and given Google’s pole position in online and mobile advertising, that would give Waze another obvious fit with its new owner.
Ironically, the news comes as Google continues to fight other kinds of fires on the mapping front. In the U.S. it is trying to get a ruling overturned that it violated federal wiretap laws with its StreetView services.

In Europe, Google recently offered up a settlement in a search antitrust suit, originally brought by travel and mapping companies, that claimed Google, the biggest search engine in Europe by a longshot, was giving its own mapping and travel results more preference in search results over those of its competitors, making business untenable for smaller players. In that ongoing case, the EU competition regulator Joachin Almunia said at the end of May that Google still needed to make more concessions.

Source : Techcrunch

Google Considering 'Wireless Balloons' to Deliver Internet to Countries

Google's news about its ambitious plans to build wireless networks in "emerging markets" like Africa and Asia isn't nearly as interesting as how the company might ultimately end up deploying Wi-Fi to these areas – not via conventional cable-stringing but, rather, by balloons.
While Google appears to be planning a fleet of CPUs and Android phones to connect its wireless networks together – over airwaves commonly used for television broadcasts, reports the Wall Street Journal – the company is also allegedly planning a few more esoteric methods for getting wireless access up and running in previously underserved areas.
Among these methods are satellite Internet and the aforementioned "balloons" plan, which would use "high-altitude platforms" to blast a wireless signal across an area spanning hundreds of square miles.
In other words, these aren't just conventional Wi-Fi routers strapped to weather balloons. They would also use frequencies different than those used for television broadcasts – an area that the company would need to get a governmental blessing from in order to fully deploy, given the regulations involved.

As for why Google is planning to invest such a great deal of hardware and engineering think into underdeveloped areas, the Wall Street Journal postulates that Google is simply interested in connecting more users into the Googlesphere of apps and devices. Doing so, in turn, helps add to Google's considerable success in Web advertising. With more than half the globe not even connected to the Web, even gaining a small sliver in this ignored population would give Google a healthy new base to draw from – a critical note, given that the company pulls most of its annual revenue from its advertising.

The move would also allow Google to get to this new population first before other carriers descend en masse. With numerous cable companies and wireless carriers in the U.S. and Europe crying foul that Google benefits from running "over the top" apps and services their networks with little benefit to the carriers themselves, Google's first-to-market wireless service in these underdeveloped areas would allow the company to get out ahead of its "competition" and circumvent their ability to prevent Google from effectively serving new audiences.

Google's ambitions are comparable to its launch of "Free Zone" in fall of 2012. This service allows users in the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Africa to use Google services and click through to search results without incurring any data charges on their phones. If users continue to surf the Web beyond the results of their searches, however, data costs apply.

Source: www.pcmag.com

Google Wallet makes payments possible through Gmail

Google is integrating Gmail with Google Wallet so that users can send payments as a mail attachment, even if the recipient doesn’t have a Gmail address.
To send money through Gmail, the user composing the email has to hover over the attachment paperclip, click the dollar sign ($) icon to attach money to the message, enter the amount, and send the mail, Travis Green, Google Wallet product manager, said in a blog post on Wednesday. The recipient will receive an email confirmation that the money was sent immediately after.
The service is free if the user’s bank account is linked to Google Wallet or a Google Wallet balance is used to make the payment. Payments can also be made with linked credit and debit cards for a flat fee of 2.9 percent per transaction, for a minimum of 30 cents.
Users will have to be signed in or get a Google Wallet account to send or receive money through Gmail. Although not required to have a Gmail address, the recipient will also be prompted to sign in or sign up for Google Wallet to accept the money. Sending money with Gmail and Google Wallet is only available in the U.S.
The Internet giant is rolling out the feature in the coming months in the country to users over 18 years.
Receiving money is always free regardless of the funding source the sender chooses, Google said. After the money is received, it can be deposited into a bank account or used anywhere Wallet is accepted.
Sending money through Gmail is currently only available on desktop. Another way to send money is by clicking a Send Money button in Google Wallet online at wallet.google.com on desktop or mobile, Google said.
Google has also launched its Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API to facilitate selling of physical goods and services on native Android apps with a two-click checkout option. The application programming interface is designed for merchants and developers who already have a payment processor and are looking to simplify the checkout experience for their customers, Google said in a blog post.

Source : PCWorld.com

Google, Nike, Jawbone and the fight to win wearable computing

Jawbone's Up wrist monitor

(Credit: Jawbone)

When wireless headset company Jawbone announced plans Tuesday to buy wearable sensor maker BodyMedia for what a source said was more than $100 million, it may well have marked a turning point for wearable computing.

The technology, which includes everything from Google Glass eyewear to heart-rate monitors to sensors that slip into running shoes, has come of age. It's moving past the niche gizmos that only appeal to geeks and gearheads.

As a real business materializes around the technology, a battle is brewing among companies that want to put themselves at the heart of it, and profit from its growth.

It's the age-old story of tech -- companies want to control the application standards on which developers build. In the 1990s, Microsoft won the platform war against IBM and became the powerhouse of the PC era. Google's Android mobile operating system is racing ahead of Apple's iOS in the platform battle for mobile dominance.

There's a reason winning the platform wars is so key. Developers have limited resources and often find themselves too stretched to create applications for more than one or two platforms. So often, they focus on the biggest. That, in turn, helps boost the platform, which then is in a stronger position to win over more developers. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

Wearable computing may never become the massive global business that PCs and mobile devices are now. But it's already caught the attention of Google, which is pushing its Google Glass. It's unclear what products might emerge using the technology. But Google's heft alone is enough to lure developers to its technology. And last month, giant Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as Google's own Google Ventures, formed an investment syndicate to seed startups creating Google's Glass products.

A handful of other companies are staking their own claim as well to a wearable technology platforming, focusing on the health and fitness market that's become the biggest piece of the business.

"There is a little bit of a platform war going on," said Robin Thurston, chief executive and co-founder of MapMyFitness, a health and fitness service where athletes can log their runs and bike rides.

It's not a full-on combat just yet. MapMyFitness is developing its own platform to which some 400 devices connect, uploading various health and fitness data. But the company is also one of 10 app makers partnering with Jawbone on its Up platform, announced Tuesday, that also hopes to be attract developers.

Right now, much of the data collected from wrist monitors such as Jawbone's Up, as well as heart-rate monitors, sleep-pattern sensing devices, bicycling cyclometers and more exist in digital silos. It's not easy to look at the different collections of data at the same time to determine, for example, if a series of poor running performances might have been related to several nights of fitful sleep.

"At the end of the day, you want to see how one pattern links to another pattern," said Travis Bogard, Jawbone's vice president of product management and strategy.

Wearable tech gets in the game (pictures)

Scroll LeftScroll Right

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

That's the point of Jawbone's platform. The company also inked deals with MapMyFitness rival Runkeeper, and with Withings, which makes digital scales that send weight data wireless to PCs, among others.

"We wanted to create showcases to get developers interested," Bogard said.

And then there's Nike. The shoe and apparel giant has been pushing into consumer electronics since the 2006 introduction of its Nike+ technology, which began with a sensor that runners could slip into their shoes to track performance. It's Nike+ FuelBand, unveiled a little more than a year ago, competes with Up, monitoring the steps and calories burned by users.

Nike+ FuelBand

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

In December, the company made its own bid for developers, launching a program to offer money and mentoring to companies interested in creating health and fitness apps on top of Nike+. In March,the company awarded 10 startups $20,000 each to work from Portland, Ore., for three months to build those apps.

"We want to work with partners that have the same vision we have for health and fitness," said Nike spokesman Joseph Teegardin.

The platform battle is still young. And many of the companies vying for their spot in the center of the emerging market work with one another. But the competition suggests that wearable computing is moving from being merely a novelty, niche business.

"This is the beginning of an entirely new ecosystem of applications that will exist on top of your wearables," Jennifer Darmour, a user experience designer for the Seattle design firm Artefact and author of the Electricfoxy blog. "And that is a pretty solid indication that wearable tech is here to stay."

Source : http://news.cnet.com/, Jay Greene  May 2, 2013

Google reveals Shawnee, Kansas is in line to get its Fiber Internet service

Google on Thursday announced that Shawnee, Kansas will receive the company’s Fiber Internet service. Shawnee is located just south-west of Kansas City, meaning the technology will be easier to extend than previous Fiber city announcements, but Google currently claims it doesn’t have an estimate for when the service will be available.

The company says it has “a lot of planning and engineering work to do” before bringing Fiber to Shawnee. Nevertheless, Google insists the city deserves Fiber access as it expects that widespread connectivity will complement the “great work” the City is already doing:

We’ve also been impressed by Shawnee’s vision to keep their citizens informed and involved using the Internet. Recently, the Citymodernized their website, so that locals can easily access city info—from crime maps to fiscal reports to streamed audio of city council meetings.

Although Shawnee is a city in its own right, it also happens to be a suburb of Kansas City. In this regard, it is similar to Olathe, Kansas – which also approved to receive Google Fiber, back in March.

Earlier today, there was speculation that Shawnee was getting Google Fiber after city officials announced a special council meeting to consider an agreement regarding the service. Once they voted to bring it to the city, Google and the city announced the news together.

“The ultra-high speed Google fiber network will enhance the quality of life for people in Shawnee by providing faster access to essential digital resources,” Shawnee’s Mayor Jeff Meyers said in a statement. “This will grow and strengthen Shawnee’s competitive advantage in the years to come.”

Google first announced Fiber was coming to Kansas City in July 2012. The company was quiet regarding other locations for months, but as of late there have been a slew of announcements.

In April, Austin, Texas was named as the second city, quickly followed byProvo, Utah less than two weeks later.

Given the plans for Olathe and Shawnee, Internet citizens who live in cities near Austin and Provo should talk to their city officials. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google is eager to expand Fiber, both to large US cities as well as smaller ones that are suburbs to existing Fiber cities.

Source : The Next Web, Emil Protalinski, 3/5/13

The Data Made Me Do It

Would you trade your personal data for a peek into the future? Andreas Weigend did.

The former chief scientist of Amazon.com, now directing Stanford University’s Social Data Lab, told me a story about awakening at dawn to catch a flight from Shanghai. That’s when an app he’d begun using, Google Now, told him his flight was delayed.

The software scours a person’s Gmail and calendar, as well as databases like maps and flight schedules. It had spotted the glitch in his travel plans and sent the warning that he shouldn’t rush. When Weigend finally boarded, everyone else on the plane had been waiting for hours for a spare part to arrive.

For Weigend, a fast-talking consultant and lecturer on consumer behavior, such episodes demonstrate “the power of a society based on 10 times as much data.” If the last century was marked by the ability to observe the interactions of physical matter—think of technologies like x-ray and radar—this century, he says, is going to be defined by the ability to observe people through the data they share.

So-called anticipatory systems such as Google Now represent one example of what could result. We’re already seeing the transformations that big data is causing in advertising and other situations where millions of people’s activity can be measured at a time. Now data science is looking at how it can help individuals. Timely updates on a United Airways flight may be among the tamer applications. Think instead of statistical models that tell you what job to take, or alert you even before you feel ill that you may have the flu.

Driving this trend is a swelling amount of personal data available to computers. The amount of digital data being created globally is doubling every two years, and the majority of it is generated by consumers, in the form of movie downloads, VOIP calls, e-mails, cell-phone location readings, and so on, according to the consultancy IDC. Yet only about 0.5 percent of that data is ever analyzed.

“There is so much more data out there that you can afford to tailor it to the individual,” says Patrick Wolfe, a statistician who studies social networks at University College, London. “Statistically, strength comes from pooling people together, but then the icing on the cake is when you individualize the findings.”

For the data refineries of Silicon Valley, like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the merger of big data and personal data has been a goal for some time. It creates tools advertisers can use, and it makes products that are particularly “sticky,” too. After all, what’s more interesting than yourself? Facebook suggests who your friends might be. Google Now gets better the more data you give it.

Exposing more personal data seems inevitable. With the huge jump in sales of smartphones packed with accelerometers, cameras, and GPS, “people have become instrumented to collect and transmit personal data,” says Weigend. And that may just be the start. Already a fringe community of technophiles, known as the quantified-self movement, have been equipping their bodies with sensors, pedometers, even implanted glucose monitors. One we will feature in this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report is Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the search engine Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram has for years engaged in a massive self-tracking project, cataloguing e-mails, keystrokes, even his physical movements. Wolfram is interested in predictive apps, but also in the insights that large data sets can have on personal behavior, something he calls “personal analytics.” Wolfram’s idea is that just as his search engine tries to organize all facts about the world, “what you have to do in personal analytics is try to accumulate the knowledge of a person’s life.”

The holdup, says Wolfram, is that some of the most useful data isn’t being captured, at least not in a way that’s easily accessible. Part of the problem is technical, a lack of integration. But much data is warehoused by private companies like Facebook, Apple, and Fitbit, maker of a popular pedometer. Now, as the value of personal data becomes more apparent, fights are brewing. California legislators this year introduced a “Right to Know” bill that would require companies to reveal to individuals the “personal information” they store—in other words, a digital copy of every location trace and sighting of their IP address.

The bill is a part of a social movement that is demanding privacy and accountability, but also a different economic arrangement between the people who supply the data and those who apply it. People want more of the direct benefits of big data, and this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report tracks the technology, apps, and business ideas with which industry is responding.

Source :  MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado on May 3, 2013

BII REPORT: How Banking Is Going Mobile

Over the years, retail banks have innovated to make personal banking more convenient and consumer-friendly.
They've built sprawling branch networks, introduced credit cards, and developed automatic teller machines.


In its latest evolution, banking is going mobile. With smartphones and tablets increasingly at the center of financial decisions — especially those of younger consumers — banks have to get their mobile strategies right. If they don't, they risk losing business to more mobile-savvy competitors, as well as tech companies like PayPal, that are developing their own payment and personal finance solutions.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence,  we examine mobile banking's growth spurt, analyze consumer adoption behavior and barriers, detail the competition to develop the best mobile banking tools, take a look at some banking app pioneers and cutting-edge features, detail how mobile banking could be bottom-up, expanding bank and credit access worldwide, and touch on how this race affects the closely-related business in mobile payments.

Here's a brief overview of the current state of mobile banking: 

• The app race and platforms: In the highly competitive retail banking sector, any service or feature that helps a bank differentiate can lead to a greater market share, larger deposit base, and an edge on the competition. That's why banks have begun to invest heavily to integrate the latest and greatest features into their smartphone apps and mobile sites. We look at a few banking app pioneers, and explore the newest cutting-edge features. We also take a peek at the technologies that power mobile banking on the back-end, and the dealmaking that has surrounded these platforms in recent months.
• Bottom-up: Unlike past consumer finance technologies first adopted by the wealthy in developed countries (e.g., credit cards), mobile banking has caught on in poorer countries, and could expand bank and credit access worldwide. In emerging markets, many lack basic financial infrastructure and limited access to credit is a huge economic bottleneck. But even in the United States, where credit and financial markets are highly evolved, an estimated one-fifth of the adult population have limited access to banks.
• A mobile-first bank?: If the legacy banks don't succeed in redefining their services for the mobile age, they risk losing out to upstarts like Simple with innovative mobile-first banking formulas.
• Adoption barriers: Globally, the mobile banking user base is expected to grow at 18 percent annually to over 1 billion users by 2017. It's estimated that 590 million consumers will use mobile banking by year-end 2013. But, on the consumer side, there is still some resistance to mobile banking, reflected in relatively low adoption rates. We look at the five main barriers currently limiting adoption. 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-banking-is-going-mobile-2013-5#ixzz2SJjbDWUF
Source : Business Insider, May 3, 2013,