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
and they maxed out their data plan in 40 minutes, said Parikh. e now have a whole team of people focused on reducing data consumption.
There continual effort to drive data use down. 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,
he said. Another is changing how mobile carriers meter and charge for data use. ee working with carriers to rethink how they price
and offer data plans, said Parikh t
#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.
The lab goal is truly to design technology around people, not the other way around from smart personal devices to smart cities.
Let look at some examples. The city of Brescia, in northern Italy, was facing a dramatic increase in the number of automobile accidents involving young drunk drivers.
The city wanted to be perceived not just as an enforcer of laws, but as a component of a social circle that could help young drivers achieve better outcomes.
Ride. Link 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.
Sitting alone at a computer seemingly connected to an entire world but lacking any physical contact with others in a real physical space,
or Skype them. The problem is real, and as our devices grow more and more capable, we had better do something about reversing this trend.
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,
Affectiva grew out of emotion-detecting research at MIT Media Lab. The company software, called Affdex, analyzes images of faces to detect features such as smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, and smirks.
whether ads are effective (see tartup Gets Computers to Read Faces, Seeks Purpose Beyond Ads.
last year, the company released the software to app writers for ios, the operating system used in iphones and ipads.
And now the first apps are said coming el Kaliouby. utistic kids have trouble reading and understanding social and emotional cues,
The advertising work helped make the software more accurate by rainingit she added. After three years analyzing faces seen on webcams,
Affectiva database now holds more than a billion facial expressions
#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,
more e-mail providers are adopting encryption, a simple change that could make it harder for spy agencies to vacuum up huge numbers of communications in transit.
In an analysis released this week, 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,
if it gains access to an e-mail provider servers. Even here, though, the tide may be turning:
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
#Microsoft s 3-D Audio Gives Virtual Objects a Voice Just as a new generation of virtual reality goggles for video games are about to hit the market,
researchers at Microsoft have come up with what could be the perfect accompaniment way for ordinary headphones to create a realistic illusion of sound coming from specific locations in space.
In combination with a virtual reality device like the Oculus Rift, the new system could be used to make objects
or characters in a virtual world sound as well as look like they are at a specific point in space,
Microsoft researchers refer to the technology as 3-D audio. In a demonstration of the technology at Microsoft Silicon valley lab,
I put on a pair of wireless headphones that made nearby objects suddenly burst into life. A voice appeared to emanate from a cardboard model of a portable radio.
Software built a 3-D model of my head and shoulders and then used that model to calculate a personalized filter that made it possible to fool my auditory senses.
or software, says Ivan Tashev, the researcher at Microsoft Redmond labs working on the project with colleague David Johnston. ou can use this for virtual reality and augmented reality,
he says. To work properly, Tashev system also needs data on the position of the headphones as a person moves his head
provided by motion sensors and a watching camera. However, the kind of motion sensors used by virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift could provide enough information.
Tashev system is a new twist on an old idea. It has long been known that the unique shape
but that isn practical outside a lab. Video game developers create spatial audio effects using average HRTFS,
his software generates an approximation of that subject HRTF that seems good enough to produce unusually accurate spatial audio. ssentially we can predict how you will hear from the way you look,
The software that does that was created by capturing accurate HRTFS for 250 people and then comparing them with 3-D scans of their heads.
Mark Billinghurst, a professor and leader of the Human Interface Lab at the University of Canterbury, New zealand, says that the approach developed by Microsoft could have a broad impact
and sounds in games on smartphone headsets or devices like Google glass could make them easier to interact with,
Billinghurst says. hat could help with how immersed you feel in a game or virtual environment or even with wearable devices
#Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds.
He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U s. military,
including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
The new line of research has been dubbed ffective brain-computer interfacesby some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings,
#10-4, Good Computer: Automated System Lets Trucks Convoy as One A recent demonstration involving two trucks tethered by computer control shows how automation
and vehicle-to-vehicle communication are creeping onto the roads. A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno,
the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead.
The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable,
Peloton system consists of radar sensors, a wireless communications system, and computers connected to each truck central computer.
Video screens in both cabs show the drivers views of blind spots around the two vehicles.
Joshua Switkes, CEO of Peloton Tech, says the fuel savings are 4. 5 percent for the front truck and 10 percent for the rear truck.
The prospect of two trucks driving so close together under computer control may raise concerns among other drivers,
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,
and other small gadgets from across a room without wires. Energous hopes other companies will license this technology and build it into all kinds of products and places,
so you can easily power your ipad while sitting on the couch browsing Instagram, or top off your phone while buying a coffee or playing Candy Crush in an airport.
It will face competition however, from a startup called Witricity that uses a different method,
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
Holmes picks up an ipad running a Wattup app that shows the two devices that are enabled for chargingine,
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
if we didn have so many wires and gadgets to plug in. 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
and go leave it somewhere while it charges, Energous CEO Stephen Rizzone argues. f theye going to leave it somewhere while it charges,
The most common wireless-charging technology currently available is magnetic induction, which uses coils to transfer power over small distances via a magnetic field.
Its patents are at the heart of a new standard called Rezence that is supported by companies including Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
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;
it will be able to charge more gadgets at a time. 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
and go on sale later in the year. Rizzone predicts a phone case would cost about $75 to $125,
which is within the range of what you pay today for a case that provides extended battery life,
Energous wants companies to build the charging technology right into gadgets, and the company is having its first transmitter and receiver chips manufactured.
about 20 percent of the power siphoned from a wall outlet is delivered to gadgets. If the end result is wasting energy,
The technology is called a haptic stylus gadget connected to mechanical apparatus that gives force-feedback sensations to let artists eelwhat theye doing as they sculpt a 3-D image on the screen
Haptic styluses and similar hardware have been used for years for niche applications and for high-end 3-D design and medical trainingor example,
technologies that add physical sensations a common feature in products like computer mouses that vibrate and game joysticks that shake,
and even touch screens that vibrate, making you feel like there a sharp edge on a flat surface.
and printing for a variety of applications (see hat Yoda Taught Me About 3-D Printingand he Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers. 3d Systems,
for example, makes many 3-D printers and recently launched a sub-$1, 000 home model called Cube and a $400 handheld scanner that can, in a couple of minutes, generate a realistic 3-D drawing of a human head that as good as the ones produced by existing stationary systems
or a facial feature that you really can get just using a regular mouse. As a practical matter, it will also offer museum restoration artists
#Microsoft Readies a Virtual Assistant for the Corporate World Microsoft reputation for innovation has suffered in recent years despite the company undeniable prowess in research and engineering.
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.
It called Microsoft Oslo, and it acts like a kind of virtual assistant. It draws on online content and a company internal data to offer important information, context,
and contacts when they are needed, before you even think to ask. Oslo which is currently available only in a limited-release test,
will be included in Office 365, Microsoft subscription-based productivity software for PCS and mobile devices, in the second half of 2014.
Oslo examines what youe working on to curate a selection of articles to read, Web pages to visit, videos to view,
and podcasts to hear, all presented on a Pinterest-like page of clickable tiles. For instance, if youe about to attend a meeting,
your Oslo board might present a blog post written by the meeting leader, an article on the topic of discussion,
general manager of the Microsoft office suite. y work is no longer about who sent me e-mail most recently;
a database developed by the former employees of Fast Search & Transfer in Oslo, Norway,
which Microsoft acquired in 2009. The Office Graph gathers information from the spectrum of Microsoft enterprise products (purportedly taking care to distinguish between public and private information)
and uses machine-learning algorithms to identify useful patterns. Oslo looks like a corporate manager answer to Google Now,
which runs in the background on Android devices, waiting for the moment to pop up with timely information about traffic patterns
or sports scores (see oogle Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead. It also has similarities to Microsoft recently unveiled mobile assistant
Cortana (see icrosoft Wants You to Educate Its Virtual Assistant. 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.
Moreover, applying similar technology to Microsoft products aimed at, say, customer relationship management could give the company an advantage over competitors like Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.
Oslo is a big test for how the company focus might change under its new CEO
Satya Nadella, who spent the last three years running Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group. 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,
emphasizing a strategy he calls obile first, cloud first. And although Oslo was in the works before he took the helm,
the technology puts the mobile cloud front and centerhe kind of thing Microsoft will need to do if it going to move back into the forefront of digital life g
#Startups Experiment with Ads That Know how You Drive As businesses race to connect our homes
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 cars with integrated data connections head to market. Those new data streams could form the basis for many new services and products,
but they also bring new privacy concerns. Ads tailored to driving behavior will be possible thanks to a partnership with fellow startup Mojio.
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.
Sprague says that getting access to data from a car engine and safety systems could unlock some unprecedented approaches to ad targeting.
Similarly, Sprague says that gaining access to data from connected home gadgets, such as thermostats or home automation systems, could also allow for creative new ads.
Kiip hasn announced yet any partnerships that that might provide that data, though. Kiip currently sells ads to brands including General mills and American Apparel.
and some other companies make it clear that a person is getting a direct benefit in return for sharing data,
and interact with nearby smartphones. hen I at a physical retail store and can determine that a person who has my app
However, Kiip and other companies moving in that direction must try to find a way of offering advertisers new ways to reach people without leaving those people feeling that they no longer control their own data. he user that going to interact with your brand really needs to know what they are giving up,
because Geico looked at my data, I want to be the one in control. The way I drive my car is personal information. l
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,
and a cartoonish face shown on a touch-screen display, is very easy and safe to work with.
New sensors and software allow these machines to predict collisions and avoid them as humans go about their work.
#An Easy Interface for the Internet of things With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves,
But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New york city company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.
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:
its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation;
another click stops this sharing. Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform.
and Openremote (see ree Software Ties the Internet of things Together, with different business models and levels of complexity.
Big companies like General electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms. Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because t the easiest to use, says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford motor.
Prasad showed how Freeboard could quickly unlock the value of vehicle-generated data. He been experimenting with Freeboard using a car data interface called Open XC.
Prasad took data on the on-off state of windshield wipers to come up with a prototype of a warning alert that could someday be dispatched to a car a few kilometers back to warn the driver of wet roads. set it up
and did it in a matter of a few minutesnd I don code for a living,
a bicycle or other object could get wired with the help of an emerging class of cheap gadgets that report GPS co?
rdinates to cellular networks (see he Internet of things, Unplugged and Untethered and easily be turned into a weet streamof location or other data.
Semmelhack showed off one application a Freeboard dashboard of a whiskey still in Washington built by of one of his developersfathers.
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