the batteries can deliver enough current for low-power wireless communications sensors, distinguishing them from other types of thin batteries.
as well as AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, to further develop its proprietary chemistry and finance the batteriescommercial launch.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
and Schneider Electric but it faces blistering competition from EMC Syncplicity and Citrix Sharefile as well as Microsoft Onedrive Google Drive and a host of others.
That pressure has spurred Microsoft Google and now Amazon to evolve from providing generic file storage to specialized services aimed at large organizations that have real problems
It has sparked also a price war that so far has seen Google drop prices and Microsoft boost per-customer storage allotments.
Given that Amazon web services has become the go-to source of computing power for new-breed online businesses the company may well threaten Google Microsoft
The most effective method to protect data against cyber-spying is to process confidential information on dedicated computers that are connected not to the Internet.
Some U s.-based defense contractors are openly advertising positions for people with Top Secret/SCI clearance to create offensive exploits targeting iphones, ipads, and Android devices.
Government surveillance The two most important inventions of our time, the Internet and the mobile phone, changed the world
monitors people known to be innocent and builds dossiers on everyone based on their Internet activity.
Because the U s. is home to the most ubiquitous Internet services, search engines, webmail sites, browsers,
#How to Clean the Gas and Oil industries Most Contaminated water In a nondescript site in Midland, Texas, an inexpensive new process is cleaning up some of the most contaminated water aroundhe extremely salty stuff that comes up with oil at wells. By the end
But in recent months a number of practical virtual reality devices have begun to emerge such as the Oculus Rift and Google cardboard.
Ice can take whole wind farms offline and wreak havoc on the grid in places such as Colorado,
#Facebook s Emotional Manipulation Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users With emotion-triggering effort, Facebook pushes beyond data-driven studies on voting, sharing,
Facebook controversial study exploring whether it could manipulate people moods by tweaking their news feeds to favor negative
but it is far from the social network first effort to control user behavior. With huge amounts of data flooding in from more than a billion users, the company has a unique position to study their every move
and to perform experiments by measuring how behavior changes under different conditions (see hat Facebook Knows.
This helps Facebook persuade users to spend more time on the site. But in the past three years it has also been probing everything from voting to the effect of encouraging people to make organ donations.
Other academics perform research on Facebook without collaborating with the companyither by simply observing users
but also because the affected users were asked not for permission to participate (agreeing to Facebook terms
Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users to see if it could manipulate their emotions by varying the selection of posts in their news feeds.
Past Facebook studies have shown that relatively minor restructuring of its pages and prompts can have significant social effects.
when Facebook posted reminders to vote, that action prompted 340,000 more people to vote than otherwise would have (see ow Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls.
And in 2012 Facebook showed it might have the power to get people to donate their organs.
The company put a clickable box on Timeline pages to let people indicate that they were registered donorshe campaign was associated with a huge boost to donor enrollments.
though, extensive media coverage of Facebook effort complicated the analysis of whether Facebook effort directly caused the increased enrollments.)
In some ways, Facebook published research is just part of a vast ongoing effort at Web-based manipulation. hat far more concerning is the lack of transparency about Facebook practices overall,
says Zeynep Tufeki, an assistant professor at the University of North carolina, Chapel hill, and a former fellow at the Center for Information technology Policy at Princeton university. concerned about these practicesesting and manipulating the user experience every day.
What else does Facebook do every day? We have no idea. Mining personal data is a billion-dollar business (see he Data Made
Facebook data use policy is far more vague, saying that it might use your data for nternal operations,
not only on the Web but in daily life, he says. hat is what advertising in general
On Monday Facebook said it had nothing to add beyond the apology its researcher, Adam Kramer, posted on the matter e
#Google Makes Its Search engine a Remote control for Some Mobile Apps Getting stuff done using a smartphone often involves swiping through a jumble of icons looking for just the right app then navigating within it to find what you want.
Google aims to change that by creating search results that take you somewhere specific within an app or trigger a function like playing music by a specific artist.
If successful the move could change the way people interact with smartphones and tablets. So far aimed only at devices running Google s mobile operating system Android the new system also expands the company s vision for mobile voice-operated functionality that competes with Apple s Siri and Microsoft
s Cortana. It could help extend Google s lucrative search ads business in an increasingly mobile app-defined world.
Google began experimenting with search results that point inside apps late last year together with a few partner companies such as Pinterest Tumblr and IMBD.
On Thursday at the Google I/O conference for software developers in San francisco the company announced that its search engine will now index any
and all apps that allow it to do so. Lawrence Chang a product manager at Google said the change would make mobile devices easier to use
and likened it to the arrival of Google search on the Web. It makes a seamless experience he said.
For the first time we re treating apps you ve installed on your device on the same level as websites.
Chang showed how Google s mobile search app can list results from the Web and from inside apps running on the same device.
Searching for a phrase related to a recent news story returned a direct link to an article inside the Huffington Post app.
Now if you search for the name of a musical artist Google s search app responds by offering icons for the music apps installed on a device
Supported apps include Spotify Youtube and Tunein. I have instant access to my music apps whenever
I search for music artists on Google said Jason Douglas a product manager for Google search.
and that it was powered by Google s database of facts and relationships known as Knowledge Graph (see How a Database of the World s Knowledge Shapes Google s Future).
We will be expanding over time he said. Chang said the company was interested in eventually rolling out the new features to devices based on Apple s ios operating system
but Google users are on all different platforms and that s really important to us.
The key to searching inside apps is modified a version of the Googlebot software that constantly trawls the Web.
Google is not the only company encouraging use of deep links. Facebook for example has launched a program called App Links designed to help spread the practice on both Android
and ios devices and a well-funded startup recently announced its own plans for a search engine focused on searching inside apps (see A Search engine for the App Era
#Aereo Ruling Means Uncertainty for Cloud Streaming Services In the U s. Supreme court smackdown of Internet TV upstart Aereo today, some legal watchers see a threat to other cloud storage and content-streaming models,
capture free over-the-air TV broadcasts on tiny antennas in data centersne antenna per customernd send that content over the Internet to individual subscribers,
is skeptical of worries that copyright holders could say a storage service like Google, Dropbox,
my phone would be unlocked without a PIN code, or I could log into my PC
Given the boom in fitness monitors and other wearable gadgets tethered wirelessly to smartphones, the technology could also allow confirmation that data streaming from the device is coming from the right person,
#With Fire Phone, Amazon Could Popularize Visual Search Amazon is evidently on a quest to make it as fast as possible to buy whatever you want,
and the smartphone that the online retailer unveiled yesterday is its newest tool for making that happen.
however, it may also be creating a powerful new mobile search engine that could evolve into a simpler way to find all sorts of information on the fly.
During yesterday event in Seattle, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Fire Phone black handset that runs a modified version of Google android system and looks pretty similar
The phone, which will be available on July 25, is initially available only through AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract.
A few features do set the Fire apart, most notably a scanning technology called Firefly, which lets you not only shoot pictures of QR codes
what the phone camera sees with information from its database of products. And, interestingly, it allowing developers to use Firefly in their own apps.
The high-end smartphone market is crowded already, but given the rise of mobile e-commerce, it a plunge worth taking (see hy Amazon Needs Its Own Phone.
It also clear that Amazon intends for Firefly to help it sell more stuff: 70 million of the more than 100 million things Firefly can currently recognize are products like books and video games,
which youl be able to order on Amazon com or add to your Amazon wish list. But beyond perhaps changing how we shop,
says Ramneek Bhasin, general manager of mobile and vice president of product for shopping search engine Thefind. Bhasin is interested in using Firefly to expand the Thefind search capabilities.
In museums it could pull up Wikipedia articles when focused on a piece of art (Amazon says that it will add image-recognition for artwork to Firefly later in the year).
when their products appear on social networks, thinks that having a physical button to access Firefly on the Fire Phone will help popularize visual search simply by making it easier to access.
To use anything similar, users currently have to load a third-party app. don really know quite yet what the long-term use case is going to be here,
but I think we now assume everyone phone can recognize a song you hear on the radio
While a smartphone may be able to recognize somewhat flat items like books, it still very difficult to discern objects like a purse or a stuffed animal.
Facebook Puts Its Apps on a Data Diet as Part of a Global Internet Campaign As Facebook eyes the six billion or so people in the world who don use its services,
Not with moneyrofits are growing healthilyut with the data demands that Facebook use places on mobile networks.
Software engineers are currently working to make Facebook apps leaner in order to make them more practical for people who have scarce bandwidth
and pay high data rates, said Jay Parikh, head of infrastructure at Facebook, at MIT Technology Review Digital Summit event in San francisco today.
The data diet campaign began after a group of Facebook product managers traveled to several African countries last year. ur apps were crashing all the time
That effort has seen already the data use of Facebook main Android app drop by 50 percent.
That trend continues across all of Facebook apps, said Parikh. The move to be thriftier with usersdata is a part of the Internet. org project launched by Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year.
Its stated aim is to bring affordable Internet access to everyone on the planet an effort that could incidentally supply Facebook with many new customers (see acebook Two Faces.
Parikh described Internet. org as he next phase of the company. The highest profile parts of the project so far have been Zuckerberg spending on companies
and technology that could see wireless broadband delivered by drones or satellite (see acebook Drones Will Battle Google Balloons to Spread Internet Accessand ow Google Could Disrupt Global Internet access by Satellite.
Parikh said that slashing app data use fits into an equally important arm of the project focused on people that can access Internet infrastructure
but choose not to. here are three or four billion folks out there that walk around in a 2g
or 3g area but may not have devices or economic standing, or don think the Internet is valuable to them,
said Parikh. Making apps more economical with data is one thing that could help such people,
#Designing Connections From the beginning, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab has focused on using digital technology to maintain human interaction and human connections at the community level.
a system designed for the city by the Mobile Experience Lab, combines wearable technology, mobile phones, and a Web infrastructure to establish a peer-to-peer trust network in which Brescian youth address the social issue of drunk driving themselves,
but aided by government institutions. The UNICEF country office in Brazil trains young people to gather stories
and data about their communities using a smartphone application based on the Mobile Experience Lab Open Locast technology.
In Paris, the Mobile Experience Lab worked with the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens to create a bus stop designed not just to help people use the bus system itself
The Connected Sustainable Home, a Mobile Experience Lab project in Trentino, Italy, is a non-technocentric smart home.
First Emotion-Reading Apps for Kids with Autism The first mobile apps that use emotion-reading software to help kids with autism are nearing release,
the operating system used in iphones and ipads. And now the first apps are said coming el Kaliouby. utistic kids have trouble reading
#A Simple Plan to Impede the NSA Is Taking hold A year after revelations first emerged from former National security agency contractor Edward Snowden about mass Internet surveillance,
Google said 65 percent of the messages sent by Gmail users are encrypted when delivered, meaning the recipient provider also supports the encryption needed to establish a secure connection for transmission of the message.
Google says, but that up from 27 percent on December 11, 2013. And the numbers could get even better as more providers offer encryption by default to their customers.
less than 1 percent of traffic to and from Gmail from Comcast and Verizon is encrypted currently,
on Tuesday Google released draft source code of a tool, called End-to-end, that would secure a message from the moment it leaves one browser to the moment it arrives at anothereaning even e-mail providers couldn read them as they travel between two people,
Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity college in Dublin and a member of the Internet Engineering Task force, the group of engineers who maintain
and upgrade the Internet protocols, says the Google data shows progress. ore e-mail is being encrypted between mail servers,
he says. ne would hope that a general, and good, trend. Embarrassed by Snowden revelations,
Last month, Facebook reported that about 58 percent of the notification e-mails it sent out were encrypted from its systems to recipientse-mail providers i
#How Google Could Disrupt Global Internet Delivery by Satellite Google has shaken up the market for fast Internet service in parts of the United states by offering
Its reported entry into the satellite Internet business could do the same globally by providing increased competition and better service than existing satellite technologies.
This week the Wall street journal reported that Google will spend more than $1 billion to launch a fleet of 180 satellites.
which Google helped fund in 2010. Neither company would comment on the plan Tuesday. While satellite launches can be expensive the strategy could give Google a foothold in a growing business.
The effect of competition could be powerful. Google s entry into municipal fiber markets has tended to drive down prices
and improve service offerings from existing ISPS according to some analyses (see Google Fiber s Ripple Effect
and When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?).Similarly if Google could beam Internet connectivity to countries that have only a single ISP often one controlled by a government
and very high prices for Internet connectivity that could be a game changer for a huge swath of the globe says Rob Faris research director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
O3b s name refers to the other three billion a reference to people worldwide who lack Internet access.
The company has four satellites in orbit and plans to launch another four next month.
Its existing business is providing Internet connectivity to mobile carriers base stations. It isn t clear
what model Google and O3b might pursue. But O3b s satellites already offer a superior and cheaper way to deliver high-speed Internet than conventional satellite services.
Satellite Internet is provided traditionally by geostationary satellites that stay over a given point On earth. These satellites orbit at 35000 kilometers often adding a 600 millisecond delay to the radio signals going back and forth.
Such a delay is considered generally excessive for business use. O3b satellites orbit at a relatively low altitude of about 8000 kilometers and the company says this means a more-tolerable 150-millisecond delay coverage to latitudes up to 45 degrees north
or south of the equator a swath of territory inhabited by 70 percent of the world s population.
Google declined an interview request about its satellite project. But like its other infrastructure efforts the satellite plan could boost its earnings simply by bringing its services to new users.
That incentive also helps explain Google's Project Loon a far-out effort aimed at dispatching high-altitude balloons to provide broadband service from the stratosphere.
Both Google and Facebook have been acquiring companies and experts to explore using drones for that purpose e
However, the kind of motion sensors used by virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift could provide enough information.
and sounds in games on smartphone headsets or devices like Google glass could make them easier to interact with,
Peloton system consists of radar sensors, a wireless communications system, and computers connected to each truck central computer.
The U s. Department of transportation has indicated that it plans to mandate such communications systems in new vehicles in the hopes of improving road safety (see he Internet of Cars Is Approaching a Crossroads.
#Wireless Power from Across The room A startup called Energous aims to let you charge your gadgets without plugging them in. o you want us to charge your phone?
a company that is developing technology called Wattup that will allow you to charge smartphones, tablets,
or top off your phone while buying a coffee or playing Candy Crush in an airport.
Holmes plugs my iphone into a white device shaped like a smartphone atop a little stand.
Another iphone sits on the table wearing a bulky Energous case. Across the table, a briefcase-sized wireless energy transmitter sits on another tripod
and the other iphone in the case. He taps the app to tell the transmitter to find the devices and start the power-up process.
My phone, which is 53 percent full, buzzes to indicate it is charging. Recharging works more than 10 feet from where the power is emitted
Yet many of the wireless charging products that have come to market have relied on special charging mats that juice up devices at a short distance,
and theye still not that popular with consumers. here not very many people that want to take their phone
The most common wireless-charging technology currently available is magnetic induction, which uses coils to transfer power over small distances via a magnetic field.
Energous charging method uses a transmitter with lots of small antennas to send radio waves to a receiver connected to the gadget being charged.
The transmitter uses Bluetooth to scan for nearby gadgets that are authorized to receive a charge.
the transmitter directs radio waves toward the receiver, which collects them and converts their energy to DC power so it can charge the phone.
The transmitter and receivers Energous brings to my office can send power to two devices that require less than 10 watts of power at a distance of up to 15 feet;
The company expects the first products using its technologyuch as smartphone cases that can deliver wireless power to the deviceso be shown off by partner companies at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las vegas next January
Rizzone predicts a phone case would cost about $75 to $125, which is within the range of
But buried within a March announcement of iphone and ipad apps for Microsoft office was word of a new app that could put the company at the forefront of productivity software again.
what youe working on to curate a selection of articles to read, Web pages to visit, videos to view,
your Oslo board might present a blog post written by the meeting leader, an article on the topic of discussion,
Oslo looks like a corporate manager answer to Google Now, which runs in the background on Android devices,
The Google parallel isn incidental. Microsoft is struggling to compete not only with Google search, Google docs, Google Drive,
and Android but with Google ability to leverage big data. With Oslo, the company is trying to take advantage of the information that its customers have poured into various products,
in areas including search (Bing), e-mail (Outlook), social media (Yammer), document creation (Office), and content distribution (Sharepoint).
Between these products, Microsoft arguably has access to more proprietary information than any other service provider On earth.
The Office Graph has a handle on internal documents that are invisible to Google, and it potentially knows where,
when, how, and by whom theye used. Oslo is an attempt to pull together these disparate threads into a feed of information that can help individual people get work done.
Where his predecessor Steve Ballmer clutched the fading Windows operating system like a frayed security blankethe ios version of Office appeared four years after the iphone debutadella has acknowledged the company need to move on,
and cars to the Internet, unleashing new streams of data about our everyday lives, one mobile ad company scents a new opportunity.
San francisco-based Kiip plans to sell a new kind of ad targeted according to people actions at home
your phone says, ere a Red Bull.?Sprague believes that kind of promotion will be received well by consumers
when more and more data on people actions in the real world is becoming available as wearable devices, Internet-connected home automation equipment,
and streams vehicle data to a smartphone app to help users track their driving, their fuel economy,
and their vehicle maintenance status. Kiip will use data from that device to target promotions inside the Mojio phone app.
and interact with nearby smartphones. hen I at a physical retail store and can determine that a person who has my app
said study senior author Stephen Badylak, a regenerative medicine researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, at a teleconference on Tuesday.
whose research suggests that earthquakes could cause carbon dioxide gas to leak out of underground storage sites,
Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a hingto its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this weeting.
visit Dweet. io with your computer or mobile phone, click ry it now, and youl see raw data from your device itself:
The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
rdinates to cellular networks (see he Internet of things, Unplugged and Untethered and easily be turned into a weet streamof location or other data.
#Shape-Shifting Touch screen Buttons Head to Market As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet,
Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywherehey power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon musk, CEO of Tesla motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United states three years from
and a site is selected. And they typically scale up gradually. Why announce plans to build such an enormous factory specially
#The Latest Chat App for iphone Needs No Internet connection Mobile app stores are stuffed with messaging apps from Whatsapp to Tango and their many imitators.
But Firechat released last week for the iphone stands out. It s the only one that can be used without cellphone reception.
Firechat makes use of a feature Apple introduced in the latest version of its ios mobile software ios7 called multipeer connectivity.
This feature allows phones to connect to one another directly using Bluetooth or Wi-fi as an alternative to the Internet.
Micha Benoliel CEO and cofounder of startup Open Garden which made Firechat says the app shows how smartphones can be set free from cellular networks.
He hopes to enable many more Internet-optional apps with the upcoming release of software tools that will help developers build Firechat-style apps for iphone or for Android Mac and Windows devices.
so that data can hop between two iphones out of range of one another via intermediary devices.
or community-controlled communications networks (see Build Your Own Internet with Mobile Mesh Networking). Apps built to exploit such device-to-device schemes can offer security
and privacy benefits over those that rely on the Internet. For example messages sent using Firechat to nearby devices don t pass through any systems operated by either Open Garden
This method of communication is immune to firewalls like the ones installed in China and North korea says Mattt Thompson a software engineer who writes the ios and Mac development blog NSHIPSTER.
Recent revelations about large-scale surveillance of online services and the constant litany of data breaches make this a good time for apps that don t rely on central servers he says.
Open Garden s main product is an app that allows Android devices to share their Internet connections (see Could You Spare Some Internet access?.
However Benoliel says that won t be coming to the iphone anytime soon because the feature that Firechat relies on cannot be used to share data connectivity.
Peer-to-peer mobile communications and mesh networks could prove especially important in countries with minimal communications infrastructure.
You can see Google spending billions on fiber and balloons but this is not going to solve the problem of ubiquitous mobile connectivity Benoliel says.
He argues that the spread of cheap Android phones across the world will make mesh networking feasible.
We need to create small Internets that can function on their own and then connect them to the big Internet t
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