and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
Since 2009 Google has been working with controversial startup D-Wave Systems which claims to make the first commercial quantum computer.
And last year Google purchased one of D-Wave s machines. But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
Martinis has taken a joint position with Google and UCSB that will allow him to continue his own research at the university.
Martinis s work on D-Wave s machine led him into talks with Google and to his new position.
However Google has given not up on D-Wave. In an online statement the leader of Google s quantum research said that the two companies will continue to work together
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
Over the last few decades we ve grown beyond the industrial economy to the IT economy and the Internet economy each
Social networks let billions of people collaborate in a variety of ways. Meanwhile business networks have enabled new types of frictionless commerce.
The numbers of people-to-people connections##business networks social networks##they ve all been growing over the past 10 years says Dinesh Sharma SAP s vice president of marketing for the Internet of things.
Google Waze an app allowing drivers to share local real-time traffic and road information; and Uber a mobile app that connects people seeking taxicabs or ridesharing services.
A business looking to purchase say a particular machine part can now turn to the ultimate consumer marketplace##ebay.
Now technology can easily extend a search via a consumer network like ebay. That dramatically increases the number of choices available
and the Internet##millennials are natural networkers. They re completely at home in highly connected collaborative spaces like those underlying the Networked Economy.
Anyone paying attention knows that his or her Web searches, Facebook feeds, and other online activity isn always safee it from the prying eyes of the NSA
or those of the companies providing a social networking service. While a substantial chunk of the populace finds all this tracking creepy and invasive,
Some startups hope to exploit this by buying access to your Web browsing and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month.
what websites they are visiting, what queries they are feeding into Google, and how often they check Twitter.
The program participants are asked also to answer questions about their behavior. Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix.
The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars. Advertisers want better targeting
If it turns out that consumer review sites are a prominent part of the process, for instance,
partnering with the sites, and buying ads there. Ultimately, Luth found that by the time a customer actually visits a car manufacturer website,
theye most likely ready to buy a car. hat a big deal, says the company senior executive for marketing,
and Web browsing behavior to be tracked and sold to marketers. This kind of tracking will only get more sophisticated.
#U s. Warrants for Overseas Data Trample Foreign Privacy Laws U s. Internet companies and indeed all multinationals with a presence in the United states appear to be trapped between the data access requirements of U s. law enforcement agencies
For example in June the German government cancelled a contract with Verizon for Internet services. Many more companies have a commercial incentive to contest these cross-border requests for data.
The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
The privacy expectations of the Internet users whose data may be accessed have received little attention. The best way to resolve this conflict would be to make changes to U s. legislation that balance the interests of companies and law enforcement while taking the privacy expectations of individuals into account.
The ground signal can also be measured by fastening an alligator clip at the far end of an Ethernet, VGA,
But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
Yet while efforts like Google Project Tango are adding depth cameras into mobile gadgets, new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
Google famous neural network capable of recognizing cat and human faces required 1, 000 computers with 16 processors apiece (see elf-Taught Software.
The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don currently reach.
and reflect the signal from a nearby Wi-fi router. Software installed on the phone allows it to read that signal by observing the changing strength of the signal it detects from that same router as the battery-free device soaks some of it up.
The battery-free Wi-fi devices can harvest enough energy to receive and decode Wi-fi signals in the conventional way.
Google, and perhaps Apple are mobilizing to sell
#Can Technology Fix Medicine? After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age.
as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013 rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group.
And that an idea that could influence everything from drugs policy to social network studies to the marketing of beef burgers r
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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
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
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.
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,
which youl be able to order on Amazon com or add to your Amazon wish list. But beyond perhaps changing how we shop,
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.
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 don think the Internet is valuable to them, said Parikh. Making apps more economical with data is one thing that could help such people,
and a Web infrastructure to establish a peer-to-peer trust network in which Brescian youth address the social issue of drunk driving themselves,
#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.
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
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
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.
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.
and cars to the Internet, unleashing new streams of data about our everyday lives, one mobile ad company scents a new opportunity.
when more and more data on people actions in the real world is becoming available as wearable devices, Internet-connected home automation equipment,
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.
The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
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.
This feature allows phones to connect to one another directly using Bluetooth or Wi-fi as an alternative to the Internet.
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.
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?.
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.
We need to create small Internets that can function on their own and then connect them to the big Internet t
#Yeast 2. 0 Designer changes in the first artificial yeast chromosome could help advance synthetic biology.
the researchers also flanked many genes on the chromosome with tiny bits of DNA that act as landing sites for a protein that can be used to create on-demand mutations.
the researchers have shown that inducing mutation in yeast using the designer sites led to some cells that grow more slowly,
Internet connections with speeds similar to those on the fastest smartphonesnd even a few early dashboard-based apps, engineered to be dumbed as-down as possible.
and high-fidelity audio could stream from Internet radio services. But the first dashboard apps will be limited, spare versions of familiar ones like the Weather Channel, Pandora, and Priceline.
or fully autonomous cars (see ata Show Google Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I. Henry Tirri,
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