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98 articles, 2016-03-03 00:02 1 HTC reportedly pre-sold 15,000 Vive VR headsets in less than 10 minutes HTC's Vive virtual reality system was made available to pre-order for the first time a few (2.00/3) days back. Many have balked at the price – $799, a full $200 more than the Oculus Rift – although those with hands-on experience… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 2 How to tame your robot A student has put the power of interacting with robots into our hands — literally. 2016-03-02 23:58 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 3 Delivering the Internet of the future, at the speed of light and open-sourced New research has found, for the first time, a scientific solution that enables future Internet infrastructure to become completely open and programmable while carrying Internet traffic at the speed of light. 2016-03-02 23:10 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 4 'Performance cloning' techniques to boost computer chip memory systems design Computer engineering researchers have developed software using two new techniques to help computer chip designers improve memory systems. The techniques rely on 'performance cloning,' which can assess the behavior of software without compromising privileged data or proprietary computer code. 2016-03-02 23:10 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 5 The science of retweets What's the best time to tweet, to ensure maximum audience engagement? Researchers have demonstrated that an algorithm that takes into account the past activity of each of your followers -- and makes predictions about future tweeting -- can lead to more 'retweets' than other commonly used methods, such as posting... 2016-03-02 23:10 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 6 Lie-detecting software uses real court case data By studying videos from high-stakes court cases, researchers are building unique lie- detecting software based on real-world data. 2016-03-02 23:10 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 7 GIMPS project discovers largest known prime number The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the new largest known prime number, having 22,338,618 digits, on a university computer volunteered by Curtis Cooper for the project. The global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet... 2016-03-02 23:10 7KB www.sciencedaily.com 8 New tech automatically 'tunes' powered prosthetics while walking When amputees receive powered prosthetic legs, the power of the prosthetic limbs needs to be tuned by a prosthetics expert so that a patient can move normally -- but the prosthetic often needs repeated re-tuning. Biomedical engineering researchers have developed software that allows powered prosthetics to tune themselves automatically, making... 2016-03-02 23:10 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 9 Expert passport officers better at detecting fraud using face recognition technology Face-matching experts at the Australian Passport Office are 20 percent more accurate than average people at detecting fraud using automatic face recognition software, new research shows. The study is the first to test how well people perform on this difficult but common operational task carried out by passport officers. Recruiting... 2016-03-02 23:10 3KB www.sciencedaily.com

10 Mathematical 'Gingko trees' reveal mutations in single cells that characterize diseases: Online app could help clinicians choose the best treatments by comparing genetic fingerprints of individual cells A new interactive analysis program called Gingko has been released that reduces the uncertainty of single-cell analysis and provides a simple way to visualize patterns in copy number mutations across populations of cells. Detailed knowledge of CNVs can point to specific treatment regimens. 2016-03-02 23:10 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 11 Warning labels should be introduced to prevent digital addiction, research suggests Labels and messages could encourage responsible use of digital devices and raise awareness of potential side effects, suggest authors of a new report. 2016-03-02 23:09 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 12 New methods for more energy-efficient internet services Billions of people use the internet, which requires huge data centres and results in an enormous energy consumption. Researchers have now developed techniques and algorithms to manage and schedule the resources in these large data centers at a lower cost, greater efficiently, more reliability and with a lower environmental impact. 2016-03-02 23:09 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 13 Gaming technology may improve X-ray precision: Feasibility study shows potential for reducing radiation exposure With the aim of producing high-quality X-rays with minimal radiation exposure, particularly in children, researchers have developed a new approach to imaging patients based on the Xbox gaming system. Using proprietary software developed for the Microsoft Kinect system, researchers have adapted hands-free technology used for the popular Xbox system to... 2016-03-02 23:09 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 14 New research method identifies stealth attacks on complicated computer systems Computer scientists are unveiling a novel approach to discovering stealth attacks on computers. The scientists' secret formula in finding a stealth attack is in their algorithms. With specific matrix-based pattern recognition, they were able to analyze the execution path of a software program and discover correlations among events. 2016-03-02 23:07 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 15 Pupils learn poorly when using most computer programs “Most digital learning tools used in schools are unsatisfactory and only test the knowledge the pupils already have”, says Björn Sjödén, who has reviewed a large number of computer programs in his doctoral thesis “What Makes Good Educational Software?” 2016-03-01 00:00:00 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 16 Making a difference with open source science equipment Science can be expensive. But making customized scientific equipment doesn't have to be. Researchers at Michigan Technological University have compiled economic data on the effectiveness of open source hardware in the laboratory -- and the process looks promising. 2016-03-02 23:07 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 17 The future of gaming: Create your own character in just four minutes Want to see the future of gaming? Look in the mirror. 2016-03-02 23:07 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 18 3-D mapping of entire buildings with mobile devices Computer scientists have developed a piece of software that makes it very easy to create 3-D models of entire buildings. Running on a new type of tablet computer, the program generates 3-D maps in real time. 2016-03-02 23:07 5KB www.sciencedaily.com

19 Pushing boundaries in software analytics Researchers have developed an automated 'debugging' approach called Adaptive Multimodal Bug Localisation (AML). AML gleans debugging hints from both bug reports and test cases, and it performs a statistical analysis to pinpoint program elements that are likely to contain bugs. 2016-03-01 00:00:00 7KB www.sciencedaily.com 20 Open-source GPU could push computing power to the next level A synthesizable graphics processor unit (GPU) architectural model has been developed for general-purpose and graphics-specific workloads. This marks the first time a team has taken an open-source GPU design and run a series of experiments on it to see how different hardware and software configurations would affect the circuit's... 2016-03-02 23:07 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 21 Closing a malware security loophole An add-on for antivirus software that can scan across a computer network and trap malicious activity missed by the system firewall is being developed by an international team. The research raises the issue that the developers of both operating systems and antivirus software must work more closely together to reduce... 2016-03-02 23:07 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 22 Building efficiency software now available A set of automated calibration techniques for tuning residential and commercial building energy efficiency software models to match measured data is now available as an open source code. The Autotune code is available on GitHub. 2016-03-02 23:07 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 23 New advanced computing systems under investigation Scientists are studying how to improve the development of advanced computing systems to create faster software under the auspices of RePhrase, a new research project from the European Union Horizon 2020 program. These new techniques will make it possible to improve applications such as industrial manufacturing processes and railway traffic... 2016-03-02 23:07 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 24 Engineer models heart valves, wind turbines for better designs, performance Computer modeling technologies are being developed to help engineers design better machines. The models are being applied to wind turbines, artificial hearts and gas turbines. 2016-03-02 23:06 4KB www.sciencedaily.com 25 New software provides overview of big data of genome sequencing Since researchers first succeeded in mapping the human genome back in 2003, the technological development has moved at warp speed, and the process which at that time took several years and billions of dollars can now be performed in a few days. Researchers have developed a new type of software,... 2016-03-02 23:06 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 26 WebAssembly may go live in browsers this year The portable code format promises to bring native speed to Web apps 2016-03-02 22:22 4KB www.infoworld.com 27 Powerful tool predicts wave behavior at all depths of sea A new harbor or windmill park at sea will continuously undergo the forces of breaking water waves. Those waves have, on their way from the deepest ocean to more shallow coastal waters, undergone lots of changes. Researchers developed mathematical models for very fast calculation of the wave behavior, for each... 2016-03-02 21:31 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 28 Patrick Debois Bringing DevOps to Mobile Delivery Patrick Debois, founder of DevOps Days conferences, together with AWS's Trent Peterson and Etsy's Nassim Kammah, are organizing Mobile Delivery Days, a new conference for discussing the entire mobile delivery tool chain, from building and testing to publishing automation, production support (logging, instrumentation, monitoring) and (A/B) testing. 2016-03-02 22:49 3KB www.infoq.com 29 Phil Haack Replies to Concerns on. NET OSS Some members and contributors expressed concerns toward the current state of open source in. NET, as covered last week. To get a deeper perspective on the situation, InfoQ reached out with Phil Haack, former program manager at Microsoft and currently engineering manager at GitHub. Phil is also the track host... 2016-03-02 22:49 6KB www.infoq.com 30 Apple, FBI Testify before Congress Apple and the FBI have appeared before the House Committee on the Judiciary Hearings to argue over the legalities of whether Apple should be compelled to create an insecure version of iOS to allow the FBI to break into a suspect's phone. InfoQ has been watching the live video stream... 2016-03-02 22:49 8KB www.infoq.com 31 Apache Wicket 7.2.0 Released The Apache Wicket PMC has released Apache Wicket 7.2.0. This release is a minor release, but does contain new features. To learn more about this release and the state of Apache Wicket, InfoQ interviewed Apache Wicket PMC member Martijn Dashorst. 2016-03-02 22:49 6KB www.infoq.com 32 From Android N to Self-Driving Cars: What to Expect at Google I/O Expect Google to make myriad product and technology announcements at its 2106 Google I/O developer conference, which it says will kick off May 18. 2016-03-02 22:47 1KB www.eweek.com 33 A Glimpse at the Future of Containers in the Enterprise As interest in containers continues to grow, industry experts gathered at the Container Summit to discuss the technology and its future. 2016-03-02 22:47 1KB www.eweek.com 34 Meet the Bugatti Chiron, the 1,500 HP successor to the Veyron For years, the Bugatti Veyron has sat atop the production supercar mountain as a vehicle that most can only dream of owning. The Veyron's staying power, both as a high-end production car and an icon in modern pop culture, is… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 35 Despite a year-on-year decline, GPU shipments started to improve in Q4 2015 A new report from Jon Peddie Research shows that despite year-on-year total GPU shipments declining an average of 14 percent in Q4 2015, the quarter did bring some good news: a 2.4 percent increase from Q3. 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 36 Google's self-driving car at fault in minor accident involving public transit bus Google's self-driving vehicles have logged millions of hours on public roadways. Inevitably, they've also been involved in a handful of traffic accidents. Up to this point, however, Google says its autonomous vehicles have never been at fault in any of… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 37 Xbox One update expands Party Chat room size, improves Xbox 360 backward compatibility and more Sony recently announced that Remote Play and a host of other new features will soon be heading to the PlayStation 4 via firmware update (the beta is already live if you want to give that a shot). Not to be… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 38 YouTube creates team to oversee copyright takedown errors It should come as little surprise that copyright violations on YouTube are a dime a dozen. YouTube has for some time employed an automated takedown system designed to detect and remove clips that it believes are violating copyrights. 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 39 Harmonix launches crowdfunding campaign to create a PC version of Rock Band 4 In what can only be described as a fairly surprising move, developer Harmonix has announced that it will be bringing Rock Band 4 to the PC – but only if the company raises enough money via a crowdfunding campaign. 2016-03-02 22:48 3KB www.techspot.com 40 iOS 9.3 will give employers a lot more control over your work-issued devices The vast majority of companies place restrictions on their computers to stop employees downloading certain files or changing PC settings. It protects network security; without it, workers could compromise an entire system - a scenario that is thought to be… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 41 The 9.7-inch iPad Pro looks set to feature a 12MP camera, 4K video, and an improved display It was reported yesterday that Apple is rumored to have yet again moved its product launch event date. Originally set for March 15, the company changed this to March 22 before settling on March 21. The fact that March 22… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 42 This convenience store is operated entirely via your smartphone, no cashier needed It's a foregone conclusion that robots will continue to replace humans in the job field but did you ever expect your employment could be replaced by a smartphone? That's exactly what's taking place at Sweden's first unstaffed convenience store as… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 43 IoT is a mixing pot of technologies that's finally coming into focus Much of the press from last week’s Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona focused on the mobile device announcements—the traditional stars of that show—but there was an underlying theme that was actually a much bigger and more important story: … 2016-03-02 22:48 5KB www.techspot.com 44 VESA announces DisplayPort 1.4 standard with support for 8K displays The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has finalized and published the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The latest version, announced roughly 18 months after its predecessor, includes a number of noteworthy features and specifications that may lead some to skip DisplayPort 1.3 entirely. 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 45 Amazon and Brita join forces for a $45 smart water pitcher that automatically orders new filters There are an ever-increasing number of household items being made ‘smart,’ from toothbrushes to fridges like Samsung’s $5000 Family Hub that has enough built-in tech to rival a smartphone. Now, a new product has gone on sale that’s a lot… 2016-03-02 22:48 2KB www.techspot.com 46 MSI GS40 Phantom 6QE Gaming Laptop Review The GS40 Phantom is loaded up with a 14" 1080p display, a Core i7-6700HQ CPU, GeForce GTX 970M graphics, 16 GB of RAM, and a combination of a 128 GB SSD with a 1 TB disk drive. It also packs the latest connectivity, including a USB Type-C port sporting Thunderbolt... 2016-03-02 22:48 4KB www.techspot.com 47 Here's how you can make (or buy) your very own Centriphone Earlier this month we shared an iPhone video experiment dubbed Centriphone in which Swiss freeskier Nicolas Vuignier created an impressive bullet time effect of himself hitting the slopes using only an iPhone 6. With more than 3.6 million views already,… 2016-03-02 22:50 1KB www.techspot.com 48 Saving Green: Computer Program Saves Nurseries Water, Plants and Money A web-based irrigation system saved 21 percent in water use without reducing growth of container-grown landscape plants, a new study shows. 2016-03-02 19:24 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 49 New laptop program can identify drug resistance from bacterial genomes: Rapid analysis can gives medics drug resistance information in three minutes once genetic sequencing complete A new software runs on a standard laptop or tablet without the need for any specialist expertise, explains an investigator describing a program that can analyze the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under 3 minutes, once a bacterial sample has been cultured and its DNA sequenced. 2016-03-02 20:28 6KB www.sciencedaily.com 50 New interactive tool to explore the brain PyramidalExplorer, a free distributed software toolkit, has been developed to allow researchers to study the organization of the pyramidal neuron in depth. 2016-03-02 20:28 2KB www.sciencedaily.com 51 Living in the '90s? So are underwater wireless networks: Engineers are speeding them up to improve tsunami detection, walkie-talkies for scuba divers, and search-and-rescue work Engineers are developing hardware and software tools to help underwater telecommunication catch up to its over-the-air counterpart. 2016-03-02 20:27 3KB www.sciencedaily.com 52 Video: The father and son VCs behind the new LocalGlobe seed fund Robin and Saul Klein are the 'father and son' VCs behind the new LocalGlobe seed fund (website, twitter, Medium). Just recently they led a £1.1 million.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 53 Microsoft will soon offer a HoloLens emulator for developers Want to develop for Microsoft's HoloLens mixed-reality platform but don't want to pay $3,000 for the developer kit? Until now, it looked like you were out of.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 54 GoTenna, the startup that lets you text without cell signal, raises $7.5M and launches with REI GoTenna, the device for people who want to stay connected when they don't have cell signal, has found a natural launch partner — outdoor equipment retailer.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com

55 No More Voicemail is an app that kills voicemail so callers have to text you instead Voicemail is so last century. The idea of phoning someone then leaving a rambling message when they don't pick up seems decidedly antiquated in the age of.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 56 Cisco to acquire Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million as buying spree continues Cisco continued its buying spree today as it announced its intention to acquire Israeli chip designer Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million. Cisco sees.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 57 YouTube invests in female creators YouTube announced this morning two programs aimed at funding and highlighting women's voices across its video network. One sees the company forging a.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 58 Lola, the all-cotton tampon subscription service, soaks up $3 million in seed funding Lola, the first tampon subscription service to use 100 percent cotton tampons, is today announcing the close of a $3 million seed round of funding. The round.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 59 Are site reliability engineers the next data scientists? It’s no secret that "data scientist" is one of the hottest job titles going. DJ Patil famously proclaimed data scientist “The Sexiest Job of the 21st.. 2016-03-02 20:16 7KB techcrunch.com 60 Facebook faces German antitrust privacy probe Facebook's data harvesting practices are facing yet another probe in Europe. This time the German federal competition authority is initiating proceedings --.. 2016-03-02 20:16 5KB techcrunch.com 61 Augment raises over $3 million in series A funding from Salesforce Ventures Augment, a Paris-based Augmented Reality (AR) startup announced this morning that they raised more than $3 million from Salesforce Ventures to further expand.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 62 Jobbatical, the marketplace for tech gigs abroad, scores $2M led by USV and LocalGlobe Jobbatical, the Estonia-headquartered job matching site for tech gigs abroad, has raised a $2 million funding round led by Union Square Ventures, and Saul.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 63 Mozilla tests the waters for Firefox OS IoT apps, including a Samantha-style virtual assistant Back in December, Mozilla called it a day with its failed Firefox OS for mobile business, and said it would pivot the technology into a new Internet of.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 64 Delivery Hero to exit China amid “anything but sane” competition Berlin-based Delivery Hero has built up a large network of online food ordering and delivery operations globally that was valued at over $3 billion as of.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com

65 MedyMatch raises $2M to bring AI to medical imaging MedyMatch Technology bills itself as an artificial intelligence healthcare startup. It's applying AI in the form of "deep vision and advanced cognitive.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 66 Africa’s Commercial Drones Take Off Startups Rocketmine and Aeroshutter are flying and booking revenue 2016-03-02 20:16 7KB techcrunch.com 67 What Lending Club’s falling share price means for the P2P lending sector Lending Club, the largest P2P lending platform in the U. S., has seen its share price drop by more than 50 percent since December 10; the price per share on.. 2016-03-02 20:16 7KB techcrunch.com 68 Chase down those ZZZ’s with new Sleepfulness app If you've ever looked at meditation and thought "that stuff just sends me to sleep," you may just be onto something. Mindfulness Everywhere recently released.. 2016-03-02 20:16 1KB techcrunch.com 69 HBO will launch streaming services in Brazil and Argentina this year HBO announced today it would be expanding its streaming footprint with the launch of standalone streaming services in Brazil and Argentina, which are set to.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 70 SugarCRM acquires Contastic for natural language-based predictive sales tools Following its acquisition of Stitch last year, SugarCRM -- a CRM and open source competitor to Salesforce -- has picked up another startup to enhance.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 71 Aerial imagery service TerrAvion adds data services There has been a lot of hype around using drones to in precision agriculture, but for the time being, using regular planes outfitted with specialized cameras.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 72 Plane is a new ‘social icebreaker’ app from the founder of Cupple Plane is a new social app from Tim Allison, who previously founded Cupple, the relationship app acquired by YC alumni Pair (which since re-branded to Couple.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 73 Slack voice calling arrives on desktop Slack was being cheeky when yesterday it said voice chat would start testing "very, very soon". Today the new "Calls" feature starting rolling out on Slack.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 74 Google experiments with a way to pay without taking out your phone Google is rolling out a pilot program today that introduces a new way to pay cashiers — and it involves leaving your phone in your pocket. It's called.. 2016-03-02 20:16 5KB techcrunch.com 75 Dot & Bo to help startups with office design Home furnishings site Dot & Bo is expanding into workplace design, with the launch of Dot & Bo for Business. The e-commerce startup will be offering a.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com

76 WhatsApp adds support for document sharing, but only PDFs at launch WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging service that recently hit 1 billion users worldwide, is today rolling out a much-anticipated feature to its apps.. 2016-03-02 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 77 Talking innovation in a data-enabled economy with Secretary Penny Pritzker The open data that is being released by the Federal Government and particularly by the Department of Commerce is a key asset that is enabling both.. 2016-03-02 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 78 Apply now for TechCrunch Include office hours with Emergence Capital Another chance to participate in TechCrunch Include Office Hours is here. On March 18th, Santi Subotovsky and Alison Wagonfeld of Emergence Capital will join.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 79 Hands-on with the $949 mind-bending Meta 2 augmented reality headset Right now this industry is full of products that are cumbersome and ugly enough that you'd probably swipe left on Beyoncé wearing a pair, but this past week.. 2016-03-02 20:16 8KB techcrunch.com 80 Politically themed social network Roust launches iOS app Launched last July as “a social network for connecting with others to discuss polarizing topics such as politics, religion and social issues,” Roust.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 81 Spotify Expands Curation Services With The Launch Of Fresh Finds On the heels of the success of its Discover Weekly feature, Spotify is adding another curated service so that users can find new music. Called Fresh.. 2016-03-02 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 82 The 'free ride' of BBC iPlayer viewing is over as license fee loophole is to be closed Watch TV in the UK -- be it through an aerial, cable, or satellite -- and you have to pay for a TV license. The official line is that you need a TV license Watch TV in the UK — be it through an aerial, cable, or satellite — and... 2016-03-02 20:10 1KB betanews.com 83 Users enrolled in the Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview will finally be able to get firmware After promising to deliver firmware updates to Insiders since January, Microsoft will finally be delivering tomorrow. The firm also announced a new firmware update for certain Lumia 950 models. 2016-03-02 19:52 1KB www.neowin.net 84 It's time to get serious about Internet of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) is the newest technology mega-trend, according to Goldman Sachs, and it’s easy to see why. Cisco’s IoT study suggests that the number of connected devices is expected to grow to 50 billion by 2020, leading to a global economic impact of $10 trillion. The Internet... 2016-03-02 19:46 10KB betanews.com 85 Researchers discover major security breach in 3D printing technology Researchers from UCI have discovered a major hole in the security of the 3D printing process, which could allow hackers to reverse-engineer the printer's source code and engage in corporate espionage. 2016-03-02 19:36 2KB www.neowin.net

86 Adblockers 'pose a threat to the survival' of news and music websites Is adblocking good or evil? It's a discussion that has been rumbling on for some time, and it shows no signs of going away any time soon. The reasons for blocking ads are plentiful - - privacy, speed, annoyance -- but there's no getting away from the fact that ads mean... 2016-03-02 19:23 2KB betanews.com 87 Cortana will soon be able to tell you on your PC when your phone has a low battery A screenshot has revealed that Microsoft is planning to expand Cortana's cross-device notifications support, including text messages, low-battery warnings, and even app notifications from your phone. 2016-03-02 19:20 1KB www.neowin.net 88 Unified communication tools boost productivity and satisfaction for remote workers Cloud unified communications specialist Outsourcery says that the full potential of remote working can only be achieved if strong UC tools are in place. Skype for Business, Slack or Trello, just to name a few, are proven to boost productivity and the possibility of working from virtually anywhere, anytime, has... 2016-03-02 19:19 2KB betanews.com 89 Pro: Comey doesn't want to make enemies with Apple Discussing FBI Director James Comey's testimony on Capitol Hill about Apple with Comey's Austin Berglas, Senior Managing Director & head of U. S. Cyber Investigations and Incident Response, K2 Intelligence. 2016-03-02 19:07 763Bytes video.cnbc.com 90 Microsoft implies Windows Phone 8.1 users will receive Windows 10 Mobile build 10586.122 [UPDATE] After releasing Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview build 10586.122 today, Microsoft implied that this will be the build that users upgrading from Windows Phone 8.1 will receive. 2016-03-02 19:04 1KB www.neowin.net 91 The business processes behind services management We take a look at the essential steps an organisation must take to multi-source or bring in- house IT services 2016-03-02 16:47 1KB www.computerweekly.com 92 The $35, 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 is here: now 50 percent faster and with built-in Wi-Fi There’s some good news for fans of the Raspberry Pi: as the tiny, single-board computer celebrates its fourth anniversary, a new version of the device has just gone on sale today. Available for just $35 – the same price as… 2016-03-02 16:47 3KB www.techspot.com 93 Samsung launches first monitors with FreeSync over HDMI Samsung has today unveiled the first monitors that support AMD's FreeSync variable refresh technology over HDMI, instead of through DisplayPort. While the experience should be mostly the same, delivering FreeSync over HDMI allows consumers to use more common (and often… 2016-03-02 16:47 2KB www.techspot.com 94 $3000 HoloLens Developer Edition is available for pre-order today, ships March 30 The virtual reality battle between the Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive is almost here, but while all the talk seems to revolve around these two headsets, it’s easy to forget about Microsoft’s augmented reality offering - The Hololens. Rumors regarding… 2016-03-02 16:47 3KB www.techspot.com 95 McDonald's Sweden's Happy Meal box transforms into VR headset Forget the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift: McDonald's Sweden will soon have everything you need for an excellent virtual reality experience. The company is launching a new version of the Happy Meal box that can transform into a virtual reality… 2016-03-02 16:47 2KB www.techspot.com

98 articles, 2016-03-03 00:02

1 HTC reportedly pre-sold 15,000 Vive VR headsets in less than 10 minutes (2.00/3) HTC's Vive virtual reality system was made available to pre-order for the first time a few days back. Many have balked at the price – $799, a full $200 more than the Oculus Rift – although those with hands-on experience claim it's worth every penny. It's far too early to know if the device will be enough to slow HTC's downward spiral but early sales figures seem encouraging. Shen Ye, an employee in HTC's virtual reality division, recently revealed on Twitter that the company sold more than 15,000 Vive units in less than 10 minutes. That equates to roughly $12 million in pre-orders for a very niche product that also requires buyers have a high-end computer capable of powering it. Without any sales data from competing products like the Oculus Rift, however, it's difficult to peg just how good (or bad) the figures really are. Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey did say shortly after the Rift went up for pre-order that sales were going much better than he could have possibly expected but who knows what that means. What's more, the first 10 minutes of a pre-order simply isn't enough time to gauge true demand. Was HTC able to sustain that level of sales over the next 10 minutes / 30 minutes / hour or did sales fall off sharply once the diehards got their orders in? Right now, only HTC knows the answer to that question. It's also worth pointing out that the admission from Ye is not an "official" announcement from HTC but rather, the "opinion" of a single employee. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

2 How to tame your robot Now programming robots is not just for those with years of coding knowledge, it's for anyone who wants to experience what it's like to simply wave at a robot and have it wave back. Gannon designed Quipt, open-source software that turns a human's motions into instructions a robot can understand. She designed it while in residence at Autodesk Pier 9 in San Francisco. When she left for her residency, she had been working with industrial robots at Carnegie Mellon University for a few years. She was close to making a big change. "I wanted to invent better ways to talk with machines who can make things. Industrial robots are some of the most adaptable and useful to do that," she said. But they are also some of the most dangerous. The U. S. Department of Labor has a special website devoted to "Industrial Robots and Robot System Safety. " These robots are big, and they have to be programmed by people with years of training. That programming takes place "basically with a joystick," according to Gannon. Programmers move the robot to a place, record a point and iteratively build up a motion path for the robots to remember. "Then the robot will repeat that task 24/7. That is their world," Gannon said. But not anymore. Quipt replaces the joystick technique. Its software stitches together the robot with a motion capture system, which are cameras that look into a space and let the robot see where it is. "I gave this robot -- this big, powerful dumb robot -- eyes into the environment," Gannon said. When the robot looks with its motion-capture eyes, it sees tracking markers on a person's hand or clothes. Now it can track a person while remaining a certain distance away, it can mirror a movement, or it can be told to avoid markers. Which means that potentially these robots are a lot safer -- and a lot smarter. Gannon imagines a world where they aren't just welding parts on an assembly line. "I think what's really exciting is taking these machines off of control settings and taking them into live environments, like classrooms or construction sites," Gannon said. Gannon collaborated with visiting artist Addie Wagenknecht and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry to develop a robot that could rock a baby's cradle according to the sound of the baby's cry. This software is a cousin to another of Gannon's projects that makes technology more hands-on -- last year Gannon released Tactum, which takes the software guesswork out of 3-D printing. In fact, Tactum projects an image directly on your body, and with your own hands you can manipulate the image to make it fit or look exactly how you like. Together with a projector, which produces the image on your skin, and a sensor, which can detect your skin and how you're touching it, the software updates the 3-D model that you're creating. When you're ready to print, you just simply close your hand and your design goes to the 3-D printer. Gannon was drawn to CMU's College of Fine Arts when the School of Architecture added new fabrication equipment. "I felt like I had the keys to the candy shop," she said. "My research is really playing in the field of computer science and robotics, but the questions I'm able to ask those specific domains is conditioned by my architectural background. It's really a spatial answer, how to control or interact with a robot. That, in my mind, is an architectural answer to this problem," she said. Golan Levin, director of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, is one of Gannon's doctoral thesis advisors. He thinks her work could change how people design architecture, clothing and furniture, as well as influence industrial design and the arts. "Madeline is remarkable for the way in which she brings together an acutely sensitive design intuition with a muscular ability to develop high-performance software," Levin said. "The kind of work she is doing could not be achieved by a collaboration between a designer and engineer; it takes a single person with a unified understanding of both. " Stephen Lee, head of CMU's School of Architecture, has a philosophy that students learn best when they learn by making. He has attended Gannon's presentations and hired her to teach undergraduate architecture courses. "I think project-based learning and the maker culture are revolutionizing both the academy [K-12 & university] and practice [more slowly]. She is front and center in these new ways of learning and doing," Lee said. 2016-03-02 23:58

3 Delivering the Internet of the future, at the speed of light and open-sourced The research by High Performance Networks (HPN) group in the University of Bristol's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering is published in the world's first scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. The current internet infrastructure is not able to support independent development and innovation at physical and network layer functionalities, protocols, and services, while at the same time supporting the increasing bandwidth demands of changing and diverse applications. The research addresses this problem with a new high performance network infrastructure that is open and programmable and uses light to carry internet traffic. It introduces new concepts of open source optical internet enabled by optical white box and software defined network technologies Dr Reza Nejabati, Reader in Optical Networks in the HPN group, said: "Hardware and software technologies reported in this paper can potentially revolutionised optical network infrastructure the same way that Google Android and Apple iOS did for mobile phones. These technologies will hide complexity of optical networks and open them up for traditional programmers and application developers to create new type of internet applications taking advantages of speed of light. " Dimitra Simeonidou, Professor of High Performance Networks and who leads the HPN group, added: "New internet technologies frequently emerge, but most of them rarely result in new and revolutionary internet applications. The technologies suggested could pave the way for the creation of new internet services and applications not previously possible or disruptive. The technologies could also potentially change the balance of power from vendors and operators that are monopolising the current internet infrastructure to wider users and service providers. " 2016-03-02 23:10

4 'Performance cloning' techniques to boost computer chip memory systems design Computer chip manufacturers try to design their chips to provide the best possible performance. But to find the most effective designs, manufacturers need to know what sort of software their clients will be using. "For example, programs that model protein folding use a lot of computing power, but very little data -- so manufacturers know to design chips with lots of central processing units (CPUs), but significantly less memory storage than would be found on other chips," says Yan Solihin, an associate professor of computer engineering at NC State and an author of two papers describing the new techniques. However, many large customers -- from major corporations to Wall Street firms -- don't want to share their code with outsiders. And that makes it tough for chip manufacturers to develop the best possible chip designs. One way to address this problem is through performance cloning. The concept behind performance cloning is that a chip manufacturer would give profiler software to a client. The client would use the profiler to assess its proprietary software, and the profiler would then generate a statistical report on the proprietary software's performance. That report could be given to the chip manufacturer without compromising the client's data or code. The profiler report would then be fed into generator software, which can develop a synthetic program that mimics the performance characteristics of the client's software. This synthetic program would then serve as the basis for designing chips that will better meet the client's needs. Previous work at Ghent University and the University of Texas at Austin has used performance cloning to address issues related to CPU design -- but those initiatives did not focus on memory systems, which are an important element of overall chip design. Researchers have now developed software using two new techniques to help optimize memory systems. The first technique, called MEMST (Memory EMulation using Stochastic Traces), assesses memory in a synthetic program by focusing on the amount of memory a program uses, the location of the data being retrieved and the pattern of retrieval. For example, MEMST looks at how often a program retrieves data from the same location in a short period of time, and at how likely a program is to retrieve data from a location that is near other data that's been retrieved recently. Both of these variables affect how quickly the program can retrieve data. The second technique, called MeToo, focuses on memory timing behavior -- how often the program retrieves data and whether the program has periods in which it makes many memory requests in a short time. Memory timing behavior can have a significant impact on how a system's memory system is designed. For example, if you think of memory requests as cars, you don't want to have a traffic jam -- so you may want to be sure there are enough lanes for the traffic. These traffic lanes equate to memory bandwidth; the broader the bandwidth, the more lanes there are. "Both MEMST and MeToo are useful for chip designers, particularly for designers who work on memory components, such as DRAM, memory controllers and memory buses," Solihin says. The new techniques expand on previous work done by Solihin that used performance cloning to look at cache memory. "Our next step is to take MEMST and MeToo, as well as our work on cache memory, and develop an integrated program that we can commercialize," says Solihin, author of the forthcoming Fundamentals of Parallel Multicore Architecture, which addresses memory hierarchy design. The paper on MEMST, "MEMST: Cloning Memory Behavior using Stochastic Traces," will be presented at the International Symposium on Memory Systems, being held Oct. 5-8 in Washington, D. C. The paper was co-authored by Solihin and Ganesh Balakrishnan of Advanced Micro Devices, a former NC State Ph. D. student. The paper on MeToo, "MeToo: Stochastic Modeling of Memory Traffic Timing Behavior," will be presented at the International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation, being held Oct. 18-21 in San Francisco, Calif. Lead author of the paper is Yipeng Wang, a Ph. D. student at NC State. Co-authors are Balakrishnan and Solihin. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number CNS-0834664. 2016-03-02 23:10

5 The science of retweets The internet is full of advice about when to tweet to gain maximum exposure, but the new study subjects marketing folk wisdom to scientific scrutiny. William Rand, director of the Center for Complexity in Business in UMD's Robert H. Smith School of Business, with co-authors from the departments of scientific computation and physics, examined the retweeting patterns of 15,000 Twitter followers during two different five week intervals, in 2011 and 2012, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Retweets are especially valuable to marketers because they help to spread a brand's message beyond core followers. Most marketers are well aware there's a pattern to Twitter traffic. In the early morning, nothing much happens. Then people get into work and retweet intensely, as they do their morning surfing. The number of retweets drops as the day progresses, with a slight uptick at 5 p.m. Then it picks up again later "when people get back to their computers after dinner, or are out at a bar or restaurant using their phones," as Rand puts it. Monday through Friday follow roughly that pattern, but Saturday and Sunday show markedly different behavior, with much smaller morning spikes and less decline during the day. A "seasonal" model of posting -- the folk-wisdom model -- would suggest posting whenever there are peaks in that recurring weekly pattern. (Which peaks you choose would depend how many tweets you expect to send.) The authors compared that model to two others: The first added to the seasonal model a component that looked for unusual surges and declines (caused by, say, big news events) and adjusted posting patterns correspondingly. They built the final model from scratch: It took into account the individual tweeting behavior of each follower and predicted his or her likelihood of tweeting in the next 10 minutes. The authors first had to write software that collected the tweets. For each five-week period studied, the authors used the first four weeks to build a model and the final week for testing it, by tweeting and watching what happened. All three models were reasonably effective, but the algorithm that the authors wrote, which took each individual's behavior into account, was the most successful at generating retweets. The paper serves as a demonstration that applying analytic methods to Twitter data can improve a brand's ability to spread its message. The authors made the open-source software developed for the study available online. 2016-03-02 23:10

6 Lie-detecting software uses real court case data Their prototype considers both the speaker's words and gestures, and unlike a polygraph, it doesn't need to touch the subject in order to work. In experiments, it was up to 75 percent accurate in identifying who was being deceptive (as defined by trial outcomes), compared with humans' scores of just above 50 percent. With the software, the researchers say they've identified several tells. Lying individuals moved their hands more. They tried to sound more certain. And, somewhat counterintuitively, they looked their questioners in the eye a bit more often than those presumed to be telling the truth, among other behaviors. The system might one day be a helpful tool for security agents, juries and even mental health professionals, the researchers say. To develop the software, the team used machine-learning techniques to train it on a set of 120 video clips from media coverage of actual trials. They got some of their clips from the website of The Innocence Project, a national organization that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted. The "real world" aspect of the work is one of the main ways it's different. "In laboratory experiments, it's difficult to create a setting that motivates people to truly lie. The stakes are not high enough," said Rada Mihalcea, professor of computer science and engineering who leads the project with Mihai Burzo, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UM-Flint. "We can offer a reward if people can lie well--pay them to convince another person that something false is true. But in the real world there is true motivation to deceive. " The videos include testimony from both defendants and witnesses. In half of the clips, the subject is deemed to be lying. To determine who was telling the truth, the researchers compared their testimony with trial verdicts. To conduct the study, the team transcribed the audio, including vocal fill such as "um, ah, and uh. " They then analyzed how often subjects used various words or categories of words. They also counted the gestures in the videos using a standard coding scheme for interpersonal interactions that scores nine different motions of the head, eyes, brow, mouth and hands. The researchers fed the data into their system and let it sort the videos. When it used input from both the speaker's words and gestures, it was 75 percent accurate in identifying who was lying. That's much better than humans, who did just better than a coin-flip. "People are poor lie detectors," Mihalcea said. "This isn't the kind of task we're naturally good at. There are clues that humans give naturally when they are being deceptive, but we're not paying close enough attention to pick them up. We're not counting how many times a person says 'I' or looks up. We're focusing on a higher level of communication. " In the clips of people lying, the researchers found common behaviors: This effort is one piece of a larger project. "We are integrating physiological parameters such as heart rate, respiration rate and body temperature fluctuations, all gathered with non-invasive thermal imaging," Burzo said. The researchers are also exploring the role of cultural influence. "Deception detection is a very difficult problem," Burzo said. "We are getting at it from several different angles. " For this work, the researchers themselves classified the gestures, rather than having the computer do it. They're in the process of training the computer to do that. The research team also includes research fellows Veronica Perez-Rosas and Mohamed Abouelenien. A paper on the findings titled "Deception Detection using Real-life Trial Data" was presented at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction and is published in the 2015 conference proceedings. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, John Templeton Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 2016-03-02 23:10

7 GIMPS project discovers largest known prime number The new prime number, also known as M74207281, is calculated by multiplying together 74,207,281 twos then subtracting one. It is almost 5 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 49th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered all 15 of the largest known Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes with a cash award offered to anyone lucky enough to compute a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the largest known primes and is an excellent history of Mersenne primes. The primality proof took 31 days of non-stop computing on a PC with an Intel I7-4790 CPU. To prove there were no errors in the prime discovery process, the new prime was independently verified using both different software and hardware. Andreas Hoglund and David Stanfill each verified the prime using the CUDALucas software running on NVidia Titan Black GPUs in 2.3 days. David Stanfill verified it using ClLucas on an AMD Fury X GPU in 3.5 days. Serge Batalov also verified it using Ernst Mayer's MLucas software on two Intel Xeon 18-core Amazon EC2 servers in 3.5 days. Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. This is the fourth record GIMPS project prime for Dr. Cooper and his university. The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award. Their first record prime was discovered in 2005, eclipsed by their second record in 2006. Dr. Cooper lost the record in 2008, reclaimed it in 2013, and improves that record with this new prime. Dr. Cooper and the University of Central Missouri is the largest contributor of CPU time to the GIMPS project. Dr. Cooper's computer reported the prime in GIMPS on September 17, 2015 but it remained unnoticed until routine maintenance data-mined it. The official discovery date is the day a human took note of the result. This is in keeping with tradition as M4253 is considered never to have been the largest known prime number because Hurwitz in 1961 read his computer printout backwards and saw M4423 was prime seconds before seeing that M4253 was also prime. GIMPS Prime95 client software was developed by founder George Woltman. Scott Kurowski wrote the PrimeNet system software that coordinates GIMPS' computers. Aaron Blosser is now the system administrator, upgrading and maintaining PrimeNet as needed. Volunteers have a chance to earn research discovery awards of $3,000 or $50,000 if their computer discovers a new Mersenne prime. GIMPS' next major goal is to win the $150,000 award administered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation offered for finding a 100 million digit prime number. Credit for GIMPS' prime discoveries goes not only to Dr. Cooper for running the Prime95 software on his university's computers, Woltman, Kurowski, and Blosser for authoring the software and running the project, but also the thousands of GIMPS volunteers that sifted through millions of non-prime candidates. Therefore, official credit for this discovery shall go to "C. Cooper, G. Woltman, S. Kurowski, A. Blosser, et al. " About Mersenne.org 's Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was formed in January 1996 by George Woltman to discover new world record size Mersenne primes. In 1997 Scott Kurowski enabled GIMPS to automatically harness the power of hundreds of thousands of ordinary computers to search for these "needles in a haystack. " Most GIMPS members join the search for the thrill of possibly discovering a record-setting, rare, and historic new Mersenne prime. The search for more Mersenne primes is already under way. There may be smaller, as yet undiscovered Mersenne primes, and there almost certainly are larger Mersenne primes waiting to be found. Anyone with a reasonably powerful PC can join GIMPS and become a big prime hunter, and possibly earn a cash research discovery award. All the necessary software can be downloaded for free at www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm. GIMPS is organized as Mersenne Research, Inc., a 501(c)(3) science research charity. Additional information may be found at www.mersenneforum.org and www.mersenne.org ; donations are welcome. More Information on Mersenne Primes Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians. An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only divisors are one and itself. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form 2 P -1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127 corresponding to P = 2, 3, 5, and 7 respectively. There are only 49 known Mersenne primes. Mersenne primes have been central to number theory since they were first discussed by Euclid about 350 BC. The man whose name they now bear, the French monk Marin Mersenne (1588- 1648), made a famous conjecture on which values of P would yield a prime. It took 300 years and several important discoveries in mathematics to settle his conjecture. Previous GIMPS Mersenne prime discoveries were made by members in various countries: Euclid proved that every Mersenne prime generates a perfect number. A perfect number is one whose proper divisors add up to the number itself. The smallest perfect number is 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 and the second perfect number is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. Euler (1707-1783) proved that all even perfect numbers come from Mersenne primes. The newly discovered perfect number is 2 74,207,280 x (2 74,207,281 -1). This number is over 44 million digits long! It is still unknown if any odd perfect numbers exist. There is a unique history to the arithmetic algorithms underlying the GIMPS project. The programs that found the recent big Mersenne finds are based on a special algorithm. In the early 1990's, the late Richard Crandall, Apple Distinguished Scientist, discovered ways to double the speed of what are called convolutions -- essentially big multiplication operations. The method is applicable not only to prime searching but other aspects of computation. During that work he also patented the Fast Elliptic Encryption system, now owned by Apple Computer, which uses Mersenne primes to quickly encrypt and decrypt messages. George Woltman implemented Crandall's algorithm in assembly language, thereby producing a prime-search program of unprecedented efficiency, and that work led to the successful GIMPS project. School teachers from elementary through high-school grades have used GIMPS to get their students excited about mathematics. Students who run the free software are contributing to mathematical research. David Stanfill's verification computation for this discovery was donated by Squirrels ( airsquirrels.com ) which services K-12 education and other customers. 2016-03-02 23:10

8 New tech automatically 'tunes' powered prosthetics while walking "When a patient gets a powered prosthetic, it needs to be customized to account for each individual patient's physical condition, because people are different in size and strength. And that tuning is done by a prosthetist," says Helen Huang, lead author of a paper on the work and an associate professor in the biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC- Chapel Hill. "In addition, people are dynamic -- a patient's physical condition may change as he or she becomes accustomed to a prosthetic leg, for example, or they may gain weight. These changes mean the prosthetic needs to be re-tuned, and working with a prosthetist takes time and money. " To address this problem, the researchers developed an algorithm that can be incorporated into the software of any powered prosthesis to automatically tune the amount of power a prosthetic limb needs in order for a patient to walk comfortably. The algorithm would not only make it easier for patients to walk while reducing prosthetist-related costs, but would also allow a prosthesis to adjust to changing conditions. "For example, the algorithm could provide more power to a prosthesis when a patient carries a heavy suitcase through an airport," Huang says. The system works by taking into account the angle of the prosthetic knee while walking. Powered prosthetic legs are programmed so that the angle of the prosthetic joints -- the knee or ankle -- while walking mimics the normal movement of the joints when an able-bodied person is walking. During the conventional prosthetic tuning process, a prosthetist adjusts the powered prosthesis's system so that it exerts the power necessary to recreate those normal joint motions while walking. But changes in a person's weight, or gait, can affect the prosthesis's ability to achieve that "natural" joint angle. The automatic-tuning algorithm takes a similar approach, tracking the angle of the prosthetic joint while walking. But it is able to adjust the amount of power the prosthesis receives in real time, in order to maintain the proper angle. "In testing, we found that the computer -- using the algorithm -- performed better than prosthetists at achieving the proper joint angle," Huang says. "So we know our approach works. But we're still working to make it better. "Prosthetists rely on years of experience to not only adjust the joint angle, but to adjust a prosthesis to help patients maintain a comfortable posture while walking," Huang adds. "We're not yet able to replicate the prosthetist's success in achieving those comfortable 'trunk motions,' but it's something we're working on. " Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gjAczfCWJI&feature=youtu.be 2016-03-02 23:10

9 Expert passport officers better at detecting fraud using face recognition technology The UNSW-led study is the first to test how well people perform on this difficult but common operational task carried out by passport officers. "Our research shows that accuracy can be significantly improved by recruiting staff who are naturally good at face recognition -- the so-called "super-recognisers" -- and then giving them in- depth training in the use of the software," says study lead author and UNSW psychologist Dr David White. The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE . Automatic face recognition software is increasingly being used for police work or when people apply for identity documents such as passports, immigration visas or driver licences. These commercial systems search large databases of known offenders or existing passport or licence-holders and generate a list of the top eight or so "candidate faces" that closely match the suspect or person applying for a document. A match could help reveal, for example, if someone is fraudulently applying for a second passport under a different name. "The accuracy of automatic face recognition software has improved markedly in recent years. But, despite its name, the system is not fully automatic," says Dr White. "Human skills are also very important. Once a list of candidates has been generated by the software, a police officer or passport officer must decide whether any of these images are of the target person. Our study is the first to test how well people can match the identity of faces selected by facial recognition software. " The researchers tested 42 untrained students and 24 non-expert passport officers who make face-matching decisions in their daily work using the software, but who have only had a small amount of training. They also tested seven specialist facial examiners -- highly trained and experienced staff who regularly work on cases of suspected passport fraud. Real Australian passport application images were used in the experiment as well as a face recognition system used to screen passport applications for identity fraud. The students and non-experts passport officers made errors 50 per cent of the time when determining whether a face was on the list of candidates or not. "Their performance was very poor, and our results show that mere practice does not improve this. It shows the software sets them a very difficult face-matching task," says Dr White. "But it is encouraging that specialist facial examiners performed far better than the untrained students and the non-specialist passport officers. They outperformed other groups by 20 percentage points. " As a result of Dr White's research, the Australian Passport Office has recently begun to recruit staff who are naturally good at face recognition. The study authors include UNSW's James Dunn and Associate Professor Richard Kemp, and Alexandra Schmid of the University of Sydney. 2016-03-02 23:10

10 Mathematical 'Gingko trees' reveal mutations in single cells that characterize diseases: Online app could help clinicians choose the best treatments by comparing genetic fingerprints of individual cells The problem is that current techniques for acquiring this knowledge are difficult and produce unreliable results. Today, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) publish a new interactive analysis program called Gingko that reduces the uncertainty of single-cell analysis and provides a simple way to visualize patterns in copy number mutations across populations of cells. The open-source software, which is freely available online, will improve scientists' ability to study this important type of genetic anomaly and could help clinicians better target medications based on cells' specific mutation profiles. The software is described online today in Nature Methods. Mutations come in many forms. For example, in the most common type of mutation, variations may exist among individual people--or cells--at a single position in a DNA sequence. Another common mutation is a copy number variation (CNV), in which large chunks of DNA are either deleted from or added to the genome. When there are too many or too few copies of a given gene or genes, due to CNVs, disease can occur. Such mutations have been linked not only with cancer but a host of other illnesses, including autism and schizophrenia. Researchers can learn a lot by analyzing CNVs in bulk samples--from a tumor biopsy, for example--but they can learn more by investigating CNVs in individual cells. "You may think that every cell in a tumor would be the same, but that's actually not the case," says CSHL Associate Professor Michael Schatz. "We're realizing that there can be a lot of changes inside even a single tumor," says Schatz. "If you're going to treat cancer, you need to diagnose exactly what subclass of cancer you have. " Simultaneously employing different drugs to target different cancer subclasses could prevent remission, scientists have proposed. One powerful single-cell analytic technique for exploring CNV is whole genome sequencing. The challenge is that, before sequencing can be done, the cell's DNA has to be amplified many times over. This process is rife with errors, with some arbitrary chunks of DNA being amplified more than others. In addition, because many labs use their own software to examine CNVs, there is little consistency in how researchers analyze their results. To address these two challenges, Schatz and his colleagues created Gingko. The interactive, web-based program automatically processes sequence data, maps the sequences to a reference genome, and creates CNV profiles for every cell that can then be viewed with a user- friendly graphical interface. In addition, Gingko constructs phylogenetic trees based on the profiles, allowing cells with similar copy number mutations to be grouped together. Importantly, Gingko, which Schatz and his colleagues validated by reproducing the findings of five major single-cell studies, also analyzes patterns in the sequence reads in order to recognize, and greatly reduce, amplification errors. Schatz and his team named their software after the gingko tree, which has many well- documented therapeutic benefits. "We like to think our Gingko 'trees' will provide benefits as well," says Schatz, referring to the graphical way that CNV changes are represented by analysts. Right now, CNV is not a commonly used diagnostic measurement in the clinic. "We're looking into the best way of collecting samples, analyzing them, and informing clinicians about the results," says Schatz. He adds that CSHL has collaborations with many hospitals, notably Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the North Shore-LIJ Health System, to bring single-cell analysis to the clinic. For Schatz, Gingko represents a culmination of CSHL's efforts over the past decade-- spearheaded by CSHL Professor Michael Wigler--to pioneer techniques for studying single cells. "Cold Spring Harbor has established itself as the world leader in single-cell analysis," says Schatz. "We've invented many of the technologies and techniques important to the field and now we've taken all this knowledge and bundled it up so that researchers around the world can take advantage of our expertise. " 2016-03-02 23:10

11 Warning labels should be introduced to prevent digital addiction, research suggests The researchers believe labels and messages are required to help people adjust their usage of digital devices and raise awareness of potential side effects and addictive behaviours. A study by software experts and psychologists from BU found that more than 80 per cent of participants believed digital warning labels were a good idea, and would encourage users to adapt their use of digital devices and social networking sites. Dr Raian Ali, a Senior Lecturer in Computing at BU, said: "Research has shown that excessive and obsessive usage and preoccupation about technology are associated with undesirable behaviours such as reduced creativity, depression and disconnection from reality. "The immersive use of technology and presence in the cyber space can easily lead a person to become unconscious of the time spent, the side-effects of being overly online, and the potential risks of taking actions in a hasty style due to a sort of irresistible impulse. "Thus, warning messages and labels are a social responsibility, ethical and professional practice for technology developers, at least to raise awareness so that people can make an informed decision on whether and how to use technology. " Signs of digital addition can include withdrawal symptoms, tolerance to a continuous increase of usage, relapse when trying to reduce or adjust the usage style, and mood modification when online. Labels could be used as powerful precautionary mechanisms to avoid entering highly-addictive usage -- raising awareness of time spent online and possible alternative activities. They could also be a mechanism to help recover from digital addiction or regulate usage -- enabling people to set up an online limit and reminding them whether and how they are adhering to it. "In contrast to traditional labels found on tobacco and alcohol, digital labels can be designed to be intelligent and interactive," Dr Ali said. "While tobacco and alcohol cannot tell their 'users' to stop, software fortunately can. "But the development of intelligent software able to understand users and personalize the labels so that they fit their context, preferences and values to ensure their effectiveness are all challenges we still have to address. " The BU research, conducted in partnership with Streetscene Addiction Recover Ltd, found that people were more likely to take notice of motivational messages, rather than those focusing on potential negative impacts of spending too much time on a device. Possible solutions could include altering the digital interface -- such as the screen changing from green to red or a buzzing to indicate excessive usage -- or personalised messages and graphics related to a person's interests and usage. Dr Ali added: "We would like to see a policy change in the production of digital media so that it helps people to make informed decisions about their usage with regard to digital addiction. "We would also like to see more public awareness of the potential side effects of the obsessive usage of technology, or at least encourage people to make a self-assessment exercise around it. " 2016-03-02 23:09

12 New methods for more energy-efficient internet services Korean pop-video, Gangnam Style, available on YouTube has had 2.5 billion viewers, which results in a power consumption of more than 400 GWh. If, in worst case, the electricity to serve such a demand is generated by diesel, it would mean that more than 250,000 tons of CO2 would be produced, which is equivalent to over 100,000 cars per year. These examples are not uncommon. Millions of people are using different services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, every day. This increase in internet usage and the information generated by nearly one billion people entails large data centres with row after row of servers, requiring huge amount of space, electricity and cooling. The dissertation introduces methods and techniques to efficiently use the servers in the data centres, so that load can be served with fewer resources. What technology can be used? "It could be optimised scheduling systems packing several software components into a few servers in a way that makes full use of processors, memory, bandwidth, network capacity and other resources. In this way, energy efficiency can be improved reducing the negative environmental impact, and at the same time reducing operational costs," says Mina Sedaghat. The research leading to Sedaghat's dissertation has been conducted in collaboration with multiple people at Google Inc., Departments of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Umeå University, and the Department of Communication Network at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. 2016-03-02 23:09

13 Gaming technology may improve X-ray precision: Feasibility study shows potential for reducing radiation exposure Using proprietary software developed for the Microsoft Kinect system, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have adapted hands-free technology used for the popular Xbox system to aid radiographers when taking X-rays. The software coupled with the Kinect system can measure thickness of body parts and check for motion, positioning and the X-ray field of view immediately before imaging, said Steven Don, MD, associate professor of radiology at the university's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. Real-time monitoring alerts technologists to factors that could compromise image quality. For example, "movement during an X-ray requires retakes, thereby increasing radiation exposure," Don said. A feasibility study will be presented Dec. 2, at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting in Chicago. "The goal is to produce high-quality X-ray images at a low radiation dose without repeating images," Don said. "It sounds surprising to say that the Xbox gaming system could help us to improve medical imaging, but our study suggests that this is possible. " The technology could benefit all patients but particularly children because of their sensitivity to radiation and greater variation in body sizes, which can range from premature infants to adult- sized teenagers. Setting appropriate X-ray techniques to minimize radiation exposure depends on the thickness of the body part being imaged. High-quality X-rays are critical in determining diagnoses and treatment plans. Traditionally steel calipers have been used to measure body-part thickness for X-rays. However, calipers are a "time-consuming, intrusive and often scary to kids, especially those who are sick or injured," said Don, a pediatric radiologist who treats patients at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "To achieve the best image quality while minimizing radiation exposure, X-ray technique needs to be based on body-part thickness," Don said. The gaming software has an infrared sensor to measure body-part thickness automatically without patient contact. "Additionally, we use the optical camera to confirm the patient is properly positioned," he explained. Originally developed as a motion sensor and voice and facial recognition device for the Xbox gaming system, Microsoft Kinect software allows individuals to play games hands-free, or without a standard controller. Scientists, computer specialists and other inventors have since adapted the Xbox technology for nongaming applications. Don and his colleagues, for example, combined the Microsoft Kinect 1.0 technology with proprietary software to improve X-ray imaging. With help from Washington University's Office of Technology Management, the team applied for a patent last year. Don developed the technology with William Clayton, a former computer programmer at the School of Medicine, and Robert MacDougall, a clinical medical physicist at Boston Children's Hospital. This year, Don and his colleagues have received funding from Washington University and The Society for Pediatric Radiology. They will use these resources to continue research with the updated Microsoft Kinect 2.0 and seek feedback from radiological technologists to improve the software. While further research and development are needed, the eventual goal is to apply the technology to new X-ray machines as well as retrofitting older equipment. "Patients, technologists and radiologists want the best quality X-rays at the lowest dose possible without repeating images," Don said. "This technology is a tool to help achieve that goal. " 2016-03-02 23:09

14 New research method identifies stealth attacks on complicated computer systems Imagine millions of lines of instructions. Then try and picture how one extremely tiny anomaly could be found in almost real-time and prevent a cyber security attack. Called a "program anomaly detection approach," a trio of Virginia Tech computer scientists has tested their innovation against many real-world attacks. One type of attack is when an adversary is able to remotely access a computer, bypassing authentication such as a login screen. A second example of attack is called heap feng shui where attackers hijack the control of a browser by manipulating its memory layout. Another example of attack is called directory harvesting where spammers interact with vulnerable mail servers to steal valid email addresses. The prototype developed by the Virginia Tech scientists proved to be effective and reliable at these types of attacks with a false positive rate as low as 0.01 percent. Their findings are reported in an invited presentation at the 22nd Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Denver, CO, Oct 12- 16, 2015. "Our work, in collaboration with Naren Ramakrishnan,is titled, "Unearthing Stealthy Program Attacks Buried in Extremely Long Execution Paths," said Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. Xiaokui Shu, a computer science doctoral student of Anqing, China, advised by Yao, was the first author. "Stealthy attacks buried in long execution paths of a software program cannot be revealed by examining fragments of the path," Yao, who holds the title of the L-3 Communications Cyber Faculty Fellow of Computer Science, said. Yao explained, "Modern exploits have manipulation tactics that hide them from existing detection tools. An example is an attacker who overwrites one of the variables before the actual authentication procedure. As a result, the attacker bypasses critical security control and logs in without authentication. " Over time, these stealthy attacks on computer systems have just become more and more sophisticated. The Virginia Tech computer scientists' secret formula in finding a stealth attack is in their algorithms. With specific matrix-based pattern recognition, the three were able to analyze the execution path of a software program and discover correlations among events. "The idea is to profile the program's behavior, determine how often some events are supposed to occur, and with which other events, and use this information to detect anomalous activity," Ramakrishnan said. "Because the approach works by analyzing the behavior of computer code, it can be used to study a variety of different attacks," Yao added. Their anomaly detection algorithms were able to detect erratic program behaviors with very low false alarms even when there are complex and diverse execution patterns. Yao and Ramakrishnan have lengthy portfolios in the study of malicious software and data mining. In 2014, Yao received a U. S. Army Research Office Young Investigator award to detect anomalies that are caused by system compromises and malicious insiders. This award allowed her to design big data algorithms that focused on discovering logical relations among human activities. In 2010 she won a National Science Foundation CAREER award to develop software that differentiated human-user computer interaction from that of malware, commonly known as malicious software. 2016-03-02 23:07

15 Pupils learn poorly when using most computer programs "In a pilot study, we examined the top 100 apps within math and Swedish, and barely half of them could be considered digital learning tools according to our standards, only 17% of which provided some sort of informative feedback. Some were so bad that we, as researchers, would never even consider to test them in class," says Björn Sjödén. One example is the computer program to teach parts of speech, where illiterate 5 year olds do better than those who can read. A 5 year old who quickly guesses multiple times performs better than someone who tries to read and spell correctly. "Probably more than 90% of the learning tools available online are simply test tools. They provide no explanatory information in addition to the correct answer. The pupils often compete against time, but not towards greater understanding," says cognitive scientist Björn Sjödén. Björn Sjödén has a background in the computer games industry and is part of the interdisciplinary research group ETG (Educational Technology Group) at the universities of Lund and Linköping in Sweden. In his doctoral thesis, Björn Sjödén defines 'digital learning tools' as "subject-specific, interactive computer programs that provide feedback to achieve a specific learning objective. " In the last 15 years, Sweden has invested heavily in iPads and laptops for pupils, and, compared to other European countries, we are far ahead in terms of IT technology in schools. But the latest report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) showed that the students who use the internet the most, both in and outside of school, also perform the worst on the PISA tests (standardized testing). "However, digital learning tools can provide great educational benefits, as long as they do not become books on a screen, but use their digital advantages. This involves providing good feedback, showing that there are different ways of thinking to reach a goal, and presenting consequences that that cannot be demonstrated in a book," says Björn Sjödén. For example, when calculating how long it will take you to get to the train station, a miscalculation of 13 minutes will result in the train leaving 13 minutes before you get there, or you having to wait x number of minutes. In chemistry, it is possible to show what happens if you combine different substances -- it may begin to bubble or explode. Björn Sjödén has had two groups of pupils play a math game for eight weeks. Both groups were to help a computer character -- a digital pupil -- throughout the game. Then one group was to take a digital math test where the same character was featured. The other group took the same math test without their digital friend. "The pupils that were helping their digital friend were more engaged. They wanted to solve more and harder math problems to help their digital character. Especially low-performing pupils became more motivated. This knowledge should be utilised in digital learning tools," says Björn Sjödén. The research group ETG collaborates with Stanford University and others, to develop and study three digital learning tools -- two in math and one in history. The software is non-commercially developed, and will be free. "However, researchers cannot be the only ones leading the way in the development of digital learning tools. If none of the large, well-established companies will, I hope that one of the new enterprises will succeed. The developer who makes the first real digital learning tool will have control of that entire market," says Björn Sjödén. 2016-03-01 00:00:00

16 Making a difference with open source science equipment The new study, published in Science and Public Policy , was led by Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering as well as electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech. Pearce says that distributed digital manufacturing of open source hardware will make science both cheaper and more accessible. Open Source Defining open source as "free" is too simple. While it does mean free access to papers, downloads and data, open source focuses primarily on sharing knowledge in order to refine and apply that knowledge. Free, or even inexpensive, is currently hard to come by in research. "In science, we all have this problem where we pay so much for scientific equipment that it overwhelms our budgets," Pearce says, explaining that a lot of equipment is simple -- mechanically speaking -- and can even be manufactured with a do-it-yourself 3-D printer like the RepRap. Pearce proposes that instead of spending millions of dollars every year replacing quickly obsolescent equipment, that money could be redirected to developing open source tools that are "upgradeable and transformable -- they will be continuously updated" using digital manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing. The benefits could be huge: research would cost less, the equipment would improve each year, grant competition would be less inflamed and educational tools would provide better inspiration and instruction. Outside the lab, open source tools could help spur innovation and diversity in the science manufacturing market. While these big impacts would take time to grow, Pearce and his Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology lab did quantify the impact of open source syringe pumps. Making an Accessible Syringe Pump Syringe pumps are ubiquitous and an iconic scientific tool. Their prices range from several hundred bucks to a couple of thousand dollars, and depending on how they're used, the designs vary. Pearce and his group created 3-D printable models -- completely customizable -- for $97 for a single pump and $154 for a double pump, using open source CAD software and off-the-shelf motor parts. They posted the designs and codes on Youmagine and Thingiverse; within ten months, they had 1,035 downloads. And each download counterbalances the cost of purchasing a syringe pump. "We know at the very least that our design is more cost-effective than low end syringe pumps," Pearce says. "You look at our syringe pump, and it's way better than the low end ones -- it matches performance of high end syringe pumps that anyone can build themselves. " To calculate a return on investment, the team examined the download substitution value. Basically, they took the price of a syringe pump and the cost of manufacturing their own tool design -- the difference between them represents a savings. Then they multiplied that savings by the number of people who downloaded the design and made the tool. Pearce and his team estimate the return on investment for this case study is between 460 percent and 12,000 percent. Not Just Cheap Inexpensive and convenient, however, does not mean low quality. "It's one thing to have a cheap device, and another to have a tool you can trust to do scientific research," Pearce says. A key point of Pearce's research is that calibrating open source devices and ensuring quality is invaluable. The problem is that there is currently no way to track that validation. "That's where the initial funding comes in," Pearce says, adding that the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other major funders could make a big difference in improving open source validation. "They can also build a centralized database to house that information -- including the code -- and make the hardware more accessible. " Until those databases exist, Pearce plans to keep improving open source tools, one syringe pump and download at a time. 2016-03-02 23:07

17 The future of gaming: Create your own character in just four minutes Video games are increasingly allowing players to custom design their own characters -- often with the intention of inserting themselves into the game. Until now, players relied on predesigned faces and body types provided by a game's creators. Researchers at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies are making character design more personal. They've released a set of free tools to allow players to upload their own face and body into a game. It takes just four minutes to scan and upload a digital avatar of yourself, and the kit supports a range of game engines, including Unity and Unreal. The digital toolkit includes three components, relying on Microsoft Kinect to scan the player with a high degree of photorealistic detail. The three components include scanning software; automatic rigging software to convert 3-D models into a game- or simulation-ready character; and simulation software, called SmartBody, which allows you to animate and control the 3-D character. SmartBody provides a variety of ready-made animations: Players can watch themselves running, interacting with in-game objects, lip-synching to prerecorded speech and even performing nonverbal behavior such as gestures. More complex facial expressions are on the way. "We're giving everyone the ability to scan and animate themselves for free," said Ari Shapiro, one of the leads on the project who heads the Character Animation and Simulation research group, along with Evan Suma and Andrew Feng. He said the team is interested in putting the software in the public domain to see what creative uses people come up with for it. "We're trying to foster innovation," Shapiro said. "While tools to create games and capture 3-D exist, the toolchain to bring the entire process together typically requires expert artistic intervention and a complicated set of processes. We are providing tools and software that, without any expertise, allow you to create and animate a 3-D version of yourself in four minutes. "The community can now develop interesting applications with it. The applications could extend beyond games and into social media, communication, training and more. " Complex avatars In-game avatars have been growing increasingly complex. Games like the popular Fallout 4 allow players to choose from preselected faces, gender and skin tones. Character-creation videos on YouTube range from celebrities to Halloween mask grotesques. Why bother customizing a character to this kind of degree? Shapiro said there are all sorts of social motivations that drive gameplay. Having a personalized character communicates identity to the other players around you. It also may affect how people experience the game for themselves. Shapiro and his colleagues have been researching whether people make different decisions or have different emotional reactions when playing a game with a personalized avatar. They're interested in learning if people are more invested in a simulation when the player character looks exactly like them. If something bad happens to the player character, does make them more invested in the game? Shapiro sees a range of uses for personalized avatars. The U. S. Army Research Lab, which funds this research, is especially interested in training simulations. Virtual avatars could play a large role in the future of communications tools. He noted that the Oculus Rift has Oculus Social, an app where players can interact with each other in a virtual space. At this stage, their avatars are generic. But how would people's behavior change if they could insert their own likeness into a virtual room? "I can see a revolution in social interaction using your own 3-D avatar as a means of communication," Shapiro said. "Face-to-face interactions have the potential for more complex and nuanced kinds of communication. A 3-D avatar of yourself could provide some of that complexity in virtual scenarios. " 2016-03-02 23:07

18 3-D mapping of entire buildings with mobile devices He developed the software running on the device in cooperation with his colleagues from the group led by Marc Pollefeys, Professor of Informatics. Development was carried out as part of Google's Project Tango, in which the internet company is collaborating with 40 universities and companies. ETH Zurich is one of them. Pixel comparison The ETH scientists' method works by purely optical means. It is based on comparing multiple images, which are taken on the tablet by a camera with a fisheye lens, and uses the principle of triangulation in a manner similar to that applied in geodetic surveying. Or, to put it simply: the software analyses two images of a building's façade that were taken from different positions. For each piece of image information, each pixel in an image, it searches for the corresponding element in the other. From these two points and from the camera's known position and viewing angle, the software can determine how far each picture element is from the device and can use this information to generate a 3D model of the object. Long gone are the days when the models were restricted to the outlines of buildings and basic features such as window openings and doorways. Instead, they now even show architectural details such as the arrangement of bricks in a stone façade. The new software offers some key advantages over existing methods. One advantage is that it can be used in sunlight. "Other systems work using a measuring grid of infra-red light," explains Torsten Sattler, another postdoc in Pollefeys' group who is also participating in the project. In the infra-red method, the device projects a grid of infra-red light onto an object; this grid is invisible to the human eye. An infra-red camera captures the projected image of the grid and uses this to generate a three-dimensional map of the object. "This technique works well indoors," says Sattler. But he goes on to say that it is poorly suited to outdoor shots in sunlight. This is because sunlight also contains infra-red components, which severely interfere with the measurements. "Outdoors, our method has clear advantages. Conversely, infra-red technology is better suited to indoor use in rooms whose structures are less pronounced, such as rooms with uniform, empty walls. " The ETH scientists programmed the software for the latest version of the Project Tango mobile device. "These tablets are still in the development phase and are not yet intended for end users, but they have been available for purchase by interested software developers for a few months now, also in Switzerland. The first apps for them have already been developed; however, at the present moment the device is out of stock," says ETH doctoral student Schöps. A fisheye lens and rigorous quality control Pollefeys' working group already developed a 3D scanner for smartphones two years ago. This was intended for smaller objects. The current project allows even whole buildings to be mapped for the first time, thanks to the fisheye lens and the device's high processing power. "In future, this could probably even be used to survey entire districts," says Sattler. As the researchers have found, the mapping of large objects is plagued by calculation errors in respect of the 3D coordinates. "It isn't that easy to differentiate between correct and incorrect information," explains Sattler. "We solved the problem by programming the software to scrupulously delete all dubious values. " Real-time feedback is essential to ensuring that the 3D model does not become a patchwork. Thanks to a preview mode the user always knows for which building areas they have collected enough information and which still require scanning. Augmented reality This real-time feedback is possible because, thanks to its high processing power, all of the calculations are performed directly on the tablet. This also paves the way for applications in augmented reality, says Sattler. One example is a city tour in which a tourist carries a tablet as they move around a city in real life. If they view a building 'through' their tablet, additional information about the building can be displayed instantly on the screen. Other potential applications include the modelling of buildings, the 3D mapping of archaeological excavations, and virtual-reality computer games. Furthermore, the technology could be integrated into cars to allow them to automatically detect the edge of the road, for example, or the dimensions of a parking space. Accordingly, the current project has also utilised findings from the EU's V-Charge project for the development of self-parking cars, in which Marc Pollefeys' group was also involved. The software now developed at ETH forms part of Google's Project Tango. "Our software is now part of Google's software database. Of course, we hope that Google will make our technology available to end users and include it as standard in the next version of the Tango tablet," says Sattler. "Obviously, our dream is that some day every mobile device will include this function, allowing the development of apps that utilise it. " A large computer manufacturer recently announced its intention to put a smartphone with the Google Tango technology platform on the market this coming summer. The report can be found online at: https://www.cvg.ethz.ch/research/3d-modeling-on-the- go/schoeps3dv2015.pdf 2016-03-02 23:07

19 Pushing boundaries in software analytics Software analytics is a relatively new field of research, having developed more formally near the start of the 21st century. It involves analysing the large amount of data produced during the software lifecycle, including source code, bug reports, and user feedback. By analysing this data, software developers are able to improve software development and performance. David Lo, Assistant Professor at the Singapore Management University School of Information Systems (SIS), has published many research papers on the topic in the past six years. "My work is motivated by the high cost involved in developing and maintaining software systems and the importance of delivering systems of high quality," says Professor Lo. "New innovations are needed to design tools and techniques that can help keep software development and maintenance costs low, while keeping the quality of software systems high. " The surge of software data that has recently become publicly available online provides excellent opportunities to create customised solutions that can be used to automate software engineering tasks, he explains. "Being able to create new solutions to tackle concrete problems excites me the most," he says. Even though software engineering has been a part of information systems for some time, it still faces a wide range of problems that require solutions. The field has been developing rapidly in recent years with the introduction of new platforms, processes and programming tools to create software products. This not only creates new challenges but also new opportunities, Professor Lo explains. "Being able to understand and work with those challenges and design solutions to address them, not alone but with students and colleagues from academia and industry across the globe, makes my job an interesting and satisfying one," he says. In 2014, Professor Lo published a study he conducted with two other SMU colleagues in which they developed an algorithm to create a search engine for source code (commands that are assembled into a software programme). Many code search techniques had been proposed previously, but they depended on searching through text only. However, source code is not mere text, it contains elements that depend on one another in order for the software programme to perform an execution process. Professor Lo and his colleagues developed a technique called AutoQuery, which allowed programmers to search through codes using dependency queries made out of small snippets of code. The technique took into consideration the code structure rather than simply looking at its text. Better ways to debug Software programmes often contain defects or bugs that need to be detected and repaired. This manual "debugging" usually requires much valuable time and resources. To help developers debug more efficiently, automated debugging solutions have been proposed. One family of solutions goes through information available in bug reports. Another goes through information collected by running a set of test cases. Professor Lo notes that until now, there has been a "missing link" that prevents these threads of work from being combined together. Together with colleagues from SMU, Professor Lo has developed an automated debugging approach called Adaptive Multimodal Bug Localisation (AML). AML gleans debugging hints from both bug reports and test cases, and it performs a statistical analysis to pinpoint programme elements that are likely to contain bugs. Moreover, AML adapts itself for different kinds of bugs. "AML can reduce the manual process of finding where a bug resides in a big programme," he explains. "While most past studies only demonstrate the applicability of similar solutions for small programmes and artificial bugs, our approach can automate the debugging process for many real bugs that impact large programmes," he explains. Professor Lo and his colleagues presented the AML at the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in Italy. Currently, they plan to contact several industry partners to take AML one step closer to being integrated as a software development tool. Taking a multidisciplinary approach Professor Lo is enthusiastic about multidisciplinary work with his SMU colleagues. "Besides colleagues who specialise in similar research areas, I collaborate with many other colleagues across the five research areas at the School of Information Systems," he says. "I have benefitted from their diverse expertise to solve challenges that I otherwise could not have solved alone, and to spot opportunities that I otherwise would not have noticed. These collaborations have resulted in many pieces of work that have been published in various international conferences and journals. " Professor Lo is also hoping to be involved in future collaborations with colleagues from other schools at SMU. "I strongly believe a multidisciplinary approach will result in holistic research works that expand frontiers of research in new and interesting directions," he says. For example, he is currently looking at ways to optimise cooperative workflows in software organisations and in open source teams. A project of this kind would require expertise from diverse fields such as organisational behaviour, psychology and group behaviour, empirical analysis, applied statistics, and game theory. Professor Lo also plans to study the problem- solving and mental task processes that software developers undergo. This project would benefit from the expertise of his colleagues from the School of Social Sciences in psychology, he says. Aside from his research projects, Professor Lo enjoys teaching a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate software engineering courses at SMU. He supervises undergraduate projects that require teams of students to develop software solutions for real clients, and also works closely with SMU PhD candidates to bring his research ideas to fruition. "SMU provides a lot of support for faculty members to do research, for instance, travel grants to present papers at conferences; visiting professors; and hardware support are some of the things that SMU provides to facilitate research activities. "Also, the Office of Research has provided much support for research grant submissions, and the SMU library has provided much support in securing greater visibility for my work. " One of Professor Lo's research ambitions is to develop an Internet-scale software analytics solution. With Internet-scale software analytics, massive amounts of passive software data buried in myriads of diversified online repositories can be analysed to transform manual, painstaking and error-prone software engineering tasks to automated activities that can be performed efficiently with high quality. This is done by harvesting the wisdom of the masses, accumulated through years of development efforts by thousands of developers that are hidden in these passive, distributed and diversified data sources. "I strongly believe this will be ground- breaking because no existing software analysis technique has come close to making sense of software engineering data at this scale and diversity in a holistic way," says Professor Lo. 2016-03-01 00:00:00

20 Open-source GPU could push computing power to the next level Binghamton University computer science assistant professor Timothy Miller, Aaron Carpenter and graduate student Philip Dexterm, along with co-author Jeff Bush, have developed Nyami, a synthesizable graphics processor unit (GPU) architectural model for general-purpose and graphics-specific workloads. This marks the first time a team has taken an open-source GPU design and run a series of experiments on it to see how different hardware and software configurations would affect the circuit's performance. According to Miller, the results will help other scientists make their own GPUs and push computing power to the next level. "As a researcher, it's important to have tools for realistically evaluating new ideas that may improve performance, energy efficiency, or other challenges in processor architecture," Miller said. "While simulators may take shortcuts, an actual synthesizable open source processor can't cut any corners, so we can say that any experimental results we get are especially reliable. " GPUs have existed for about 40 years and are typically found on commercial video or graphics cards inside of a computer or gaming console. The specialized circuits have computing power designed to make images appear smoother and more vibrant on a screen. There has recently been a movement to see if the chip can be applied to non-graphical computations such as algorithms processing large chunks of data. "We weren't necessarily looking for novelty in the results, so much as we wanted to create a new tool and then show how it could be used," said Carpenter. "I hope people experiment more effectively on GPUs, as both hobbyists and researchers, creating a more efficient design for future GPUs. " The open-source GPU that the Binghamton team used for their research was the first of its kind. Although thousands of GPUs are produced each year commercially, this is the first that can be modified by enthusiasts and researchers to get a sense of how changes may affect mainstream chips. Bush, the director of software engineering at Roku, was the lead author on the paper. "It was bad for the open-source community that GPU manufacturers had all decided to keep their chip specifications secret. That prevented open source developers from writing software that could utilize that hardware," Miller said. Miller began working on similar projects in 2004, while Bush started working on Nyami in 2010. "This makes it easier for other researchers to conduct experiments of their own, because they don't have to reinvent the wheel. With contributions from the 'open hardware' community, we can incorporate more creative ideas and produce an increasingly better tool. " The ramifications of the findings could make processors easier for researchers to work with and explore different design tradeoffs. Dexter, Miller, Carpenter and Bush have paved a new road that could lead to discoveries affecting everything from space travel to heart surgery. "I've got a list of paper research ideas we can explore using Nyuzi [the chip has since been renamed], focusing on various performance bottlenecks. The idea is to look for things that make Nyuzi inefficient compared to other GPUs and address those as research problems. We can also use Nyuzi as a platform for conducting research that isn't GPU-specific, like energy efficiency and reliability," Miller said. The paper, "Nyami: A Synthesizable GPU Architectural Model for General-Purpose and Graphics-Specific Workloads" appeared in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software. It can be accessed at: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/nyami- ispass2015.pdf 2016-03-02 23:07

21 Closing a malware security loophole The battle between malware authors and security researchers has changed dramatically in the last few years. The purpose behind malware was often for the sake of a prank, to expose vulnerabilities or for the sake of spite. Today, malware is more about stealing sensitive data and exploiting information for fraud, identity theft and other criminal intent. In addition, much malware is aimed at breaking systems through denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in the name of espionage, whether industrial or political or for "hacktivism," whereby activists prevent legitimate users from accessing a site they see as the enemy to their cause. Computer security systems that attempt to thwart the spread of malicious software, malware, often fall down at one of two points of failure. The first being the failure of the network to spot malicious data packets entering the system. The second is that once the network is breached, the antivirus software, which is the last line of network defense fails to identify the software intruder as malicious. Now, researchers in Jordan and the USA have devised an antivirus add- on that allows the AV software to scan the network data as well as applications and so trap malicious activity that the firewall and other defenses that work at the network have missed. The system devised by computer scientists Mohammed Al-Saleh of Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid and Bilal Shebaro of St. Edward's University, Austin, Texas, side-steps the problem of additional computing overheads placed on a network attempting to detect the spread of malware that may well be encrypted and avoids the issue of antivirus software becoming out-of-date the instant new malware is written and uploaded and the inevitable vulnerability that occurs during the AV scanning process. The team's tests demonstrate that their prototype security system add-on can detect the spread of malware to a computer and block it before it is able to do anything malicious or make a copy of itself to send to other machines on the network. The system adds little computing overhead. "Together with the existing network-based anti-malware software, our solution will offer client machines better protection that has no significant overhead on the protected system," the team reports. 2016-03-02 23:07

22 Building efficiency software now available ORNL principal investigator Joshua New, in collaboration with a team of researchers, developed the automated calibration software, which reduces the amount of time and expertise needed to optimize building parameters for cost and energy savings. By cheaply producing calibrated building energy models, Autotune allows "no-touch" audits, optimal retrofits and other simulation-informed applications to be cost-effectively realized for buildings traditionally too small (below 50,000 ft 2 ) to be serviced by industry. "The methodology uses multi-parameter optimization techniques, in combination with big data mining-informed artificial intelligence agents, to automatically modify software inputs so simulation output matches measured data," New, a researcher in ORNL's Building Technologies Research and Integration Center, said. "Instead of having a human change the knobs, so to speak, the Autotune methodology does that for you," BTRIC researcher Jibonananda Sanyal said. To develop their software, the team used DOE supercomputing and computational resources -- including ORNL's Titan supercomputer and the National Institute for Computational Sciences' Nautilus system -- to perform millions of EnergyPlus simulations for a range of standard building types with generated data totaling hundreds of terabytes. Titan resides in the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. By mining this data and trying many different calibration algorithms, the researchers were able to identify techniques and evolutionary computations that can quickly evolve a building to match measured data. On Titan, the team has been able to run annual energy simulations for more than half a million buildings and write 45 terabytes of simulation output to disk in less than one hour using over a third of Titan's nearly 300,000 CPU cores in parallel. The code made available contains: (1) a backend that performs the evolutionary calibration, (2) a web service that allows scripting for calibrating large numbers of buildings and (3) a front end website which allows users to interact with the software. 2016-03-02 23:07

23 New advanced computing systems under investigation The goal of the RePhrase project is to work on improving the development of software for parallel heterogeneous architectures. "Parallel heterogeneous architectures are those that are used in machines that combine different computing devices, such as the familiar multi-core processors and graphics cards used to make computations," explained the main researcher from the UC3M team, José Daniel García, from the ARCOS research group (Arquitectura de Computadores, Comunicaciones y Sistemas -- Computer Architecture, Communications and Systems) in the university Computer Science and Engineering Department. The participation of UC3M in this new project is focused on solving specific problems when creating applications in parallel computers, paying special attention to the use of the C++ programming language, which has been identified by the participants as an excellent alternative for this kind of devices. According to Professor García, the next generations of computers will have an ever greater number of processors with diverging features, which gives rise to the need for new software development methods. "The goal is to achieve faster applications which at the same time consume less energy," he said. Biomedical Applications The results from this research might have applications in different fields, such as in the improvement of industrial manufacturing processes, the monitoring of railway traffic or the optimization of applications for diagnosing mental illnesses. In this last case, UC3M collaborates closely with another research team from the Center for Research on Mental Health (initialled CIBERSAM in Spanish) at Gregorio Marañón Hospital, applying the techniques developed to improve methods of diagnosis based on magnetic resonance. "The application we are working on consists of the computer processing of brain images captured through magnetic resonance," explained one of the members of the project, Professor Francisco Javier García Blas, from the UC3M Computer Science and Engineering Department. Currently, these systems take hours to run the computer analysis of the images and the goal of these researchers is to reduce this time to minutes. That is, to "obtain faster diagnoses in the case of illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression," he said. Interview with the researchers: https://youtu.be/8yrRhD6lrJw 2016-03-02 23:07

24 Engineer models heart valves, wind turbines for better designs, performance And then Ming-Chen Hsu, an Iowa State University assistant professor of mechanical engineering, searched his computer for another video and clicked play. This time the tip of a wind turbine blade appeared on his monitor, constantly moving, flexing and vibrating as the blade rotated around the rotor hub. Red indicated air moving at a relative speed of 52 meters per second over the top of the blade; blue and green marked the slower air around the blade. These are computer models featuring technologies called computational mechanics, fluid- structure interaction and isogeometric analysis. They show the flow fields and stresses that mechanical systems have to withstand. And they're part of a toolkit Hsu and his research group are developing to improve the design, engineering and operation of all kinds of machines. "If we are able to use computers to model and simulate these engineering designs, we can save a lot of time and money," Hsu said. "We don't have to build and test every prototype anymore. " Hsu said it would be impractical, for example, for the wind energy industry to build and test full- scale prototypes of each and every idea for improving the performance of wind turbines. Instead, the wind energy industry can opt for computational models. Hsu said they're based on complex mathematical equations. They're full of data. And studies show they're accurate. Using the models, "We can predict the real physics of the problems we are looking at," he said. And so those videos showing blood flowing through an artificial heart valve or the vibrations of a wind turbine blade are a lot more than colorful graphics. To engineers, they can be as good as full-scale prototypes for studying durability and performance. Hsu has a background in computational mechanics and started modeling wind turbines during his doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego. He started modeling heart valves as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. He's been at Iowa State since the fall of 2013 and has built a research group that currently includes doctoral students Austin Herrema, Chenglong Wang, Michael Wu and Fei Xu plus undergraduate student Carolyn Darling. The group is now working on two wind turbine studies and an engine project: • They're modeling the performance of the "Hexcrete" concrete wind turbine towers being developed by Sri Sritharan, Iowa State's Wilson Engineering Professor in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering. The goal is to use prefabricated concrete to build taller wind turbine towers that can access the steadier winds at 120 meters and higher. The project is primarily supported by the U. S. Department of Energy. • They're also developing software to help engineers design wind turbine blades. The software will bridge a wide gap between blade design tools and performance simulations. The project is supported by a National Science Foundation grant that established Iowa State's graduate program in wind energy science, engineering and policy. • And Hsu's research group is modeling the performance of the rotors inside gas turbines. The models will help engineers design the next generation of turbine engines. The project is supported by a grant from the U. S. Army Research Office. Hsu, who teaches courses in fluid mechanics, said the modeling can be applied to all sorts of questions about a machine. In wind turbines, for example, the models can provide answers about material stress and fatigue, rotor aerodynamics, blade design, the wake behind turbines and power efficiency. "Ten to 15 years ago, computational fluid-structure interaction was new to everyone," Hsu said. "But with the success of this field, more and more methods are being picked up by industry. Our computational methods are improving engineering designs. " 2016-03-02 23:06

25 New software provides overview of big data of genome sequencing ChIP sequencing -- an insight into the workflow of human cells The EaSeq software has been developed for analysis of so called ChIP sequencing. DNA sequencing is used for mapping the sequence of the base pairs, which our DNA consists of, and ChIP sequencing is a derived method in which the sequences are used to determine the presence of different cell components in the genome at a given time. Roughly speaking, ChIP sequencing can be compared to a microscope, which enables us to observe the presence of different cell components in the entire genome at a given time. The method is still quite young and holds the potential to be applied within many more scientific fields, which can benefit from understanding how healthy and pathological cells control and uses genes, says Associate Professor Mads Lerdrup Better analytical tools means a broader range of applications While ChIP sequencing has made it possible to produce enormous amounts of data very fast, the analysis of these data has -- until now -- been a tedious process. Most of the analytical software being used requires knowledge of computer programming and researchers have therefore been dependent on specialists in order to decode and analyze their data. EaSeq offers a far more visual and intuitive alternative, which makes it possible for biomedical researchers to study and test hypotheses using their own data. This means that instead of waiting for weeks for others to carry out an analysis, researchers will be able to perform the analyses themselves in a matter of hours. Today, DNA sequencing is gaining ground within the clinical area where it is e.g. being used for diagnosis and targeting of treatment within the cancer area. The developers of EaSeq see similar perspectives for ChIP sequencing in the clinical work, and in that context strong analytical tools will be pivotal. "The DNA sequence itself tells us very little about how cells actual decodes the DNA, and to understand this we need to map out which cell components are present in different parts of the genome at a specific time. It is our hope that we by increasing feasibility can enable researchers to faster uncover such knowledge and apply it clinically," says Associate professor Mads Lerdrup. 2016-03-02 23:06

26 WebAssembly may go live in browsers this year The WebAssembly project to improve the Web's performance now has experimental implementations in place for major browsers. Developers also are advancing the design of the binary format that serves as the technology's linchpin. In fact, WebAssembly could be ready this year on several browsers. First detailed last June , WebAssembly features a portable code format to run safely in browsers at native speeds. "It's designed to be efficient for browsers to download, decode, and compile, and it runs fast by taking advantage of common, widely available hardware capabilities," said Luke Wagner, a programmer at Mozilla. He has served as a co-chairman in the World Wide Web Consortium community group overseeing WebAssembly. Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple all have participated in the development process. "There are experimental WebAssembly implementations for Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome," said Wagner. "In the coming months, we expect to see enough progress and convergence to release demos of large, realistic applications that will run on the prerelease channels of multiple browsers. " "A user can compile a program of a high-level language to WebAssembly and run it in a browser," said B. Abhijith Chatra, a senior software engineer at Microsoft and a co-chairman of the community group. "As a first step, in the minimal viable product, the goal is to ensure that a C/C++ program can be compiled to WebAssembly and run within the browser. " While awaiting native browser support, WebAssembly developers are building tools to translate it to the asm.js subset of JavaScript , making it possible to use WebAssembly even in browsers that do not yet support it, Wagner said. WebAssembly will feature a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. It would access browser functionality through the same Web APIs accessible from JavaScript. The project's developers envision using WebAssembly for porting large applications to the Web and for implementing performance-sensitive kernels of Web frameworks or computationally intensive tasks like computer vision or media processing. They also want it to enable other programming languages to compile efficiently to the Web. JavaScript developer and author Eric Elliott sees WebAssembly helping with development of video, audio, and games for the Web. "That kind of thing is clearly pretty hard to do with JavaScript right now mostly because of the payloads involved," he noted. A lot of source code is required -- payloads on the order of 20MB for a small game can be required, but WebAssembly has the potential to eliminate this problem, Elliott said. Currently, JavaScript requires downloads of compressed text that have to be uncompressed inside the browser, then parsed into an abstract syntax tree (AST), which helps the computer understand the text and what it means semantically, Elliott said. "WebAssembly bypasses all that because it actually is a binary AST format by default," he said. "It gets compiled to binary AST from languages like C or C++.... It's really going to help the performance of the Web. " Developers are already compiling to JavaScript with other languages and using asm.js as the bridge, Elliott noted. Despite those efforts, WebAssembly remains very much a work in progress. Developers need to experiment with browser implementations and provide feedback before the specification is finished, Wagner said. Also, the community group has to finish the spec and deal with a "steadily shrinking" set of questions, he said. In addition, the conformance test suite must be expanded to cover the entire specification. More about Apple AST Google Microsoft Mozilla World Wide Web Consortium 2016-03-02 22:22 Paul Krill

27 Powerful tool predicts wave behavior at all depths of sea The waves we see at a surface, at full sea or at the coast, consist of numerous other waves at a range of depths. From the deepest ocean waves with a long wave move at high speed, while the waves we see at the surface are short waves moving slower and differ from the deep sea waves in shape and altitude. Joint action It is complicated to capture all these changes in mathematical models, therefore often some kind of approximation is chosen. This holds, for example, for dispersion: the relationship between wave length and wave speed. Kurnia does not use an approximation but the exact relationship. He doesn't choose a numerical approach, that uses strongly simplified equations for a series of times. Instead, he wrote an accurate description of the combined action of the wave at different depths, using the kinetic energy. Fast calculation Thanks to this, the model is applicable for any water depth. Furthermore, Kurnia is capable of introducing abrupt changes: a quay, a sloping coastline, a ship. Despite the added complexity, the models can be calculated very fast -- minutes instead of days -- by using the so-called Fast Fourier Transform, decomposing any mathematical description in several sinus waves. Kurnia's model calculations have already been compared with the many experiment in 'wave tanks' of the Technical University of Delft, MARIN in The Netherlands and the Indonesion Hydrodynamic Laboratory. The models are also very useful to make precalculations of the desired wave in the thank, thus reducing the expensive experimenting hours. Via LabMath Indonesia, Kurnia's software is available named HAWASSI: Hamiltonian Wave-Ship-Structure Interaction. Ruddy Kurnia (Bandung, 1987) did his PhD research in de Applied Analysis group (faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science EEMCS). His supervisor is Professor Brenny van Groesen. The research had financial support of the Dutch Technology Foundation STW. Kurnia continues working on the models, partly as a postdoc researcher in Twente, partly in his home country Indonesia 2016-03-02 21:31

28 Patrick Debois Bringing DevOps to Mobile Delivery Patrick Debois , founder of DevOps Days conferences , together with AWS's Trent Peterson and Etsy's Nassim Kammah , are organizing Mobile Delivery Days , a new conference for discussing the entire mobile delivery tool chain , from building and testing to publishing automation, production support (logging, instrumentation, monitoring) and (A/B) testing. InfoQ asked Debois why they felt the need for a new conference on this topic: Mobile conferences are usually very developer centric: they focus on the specific programming languages. The operational conferences tend to focus on the “web” side of things and leave out specific native apps. According to Debois's message on the devops-toolchain mailing list , current challenges to a continuous delivery approach for mobile include nearly disjoint sets of tools for web and mobile delivery , unclear APIs making it hard to automate the build and publishing stages, slow test execution and a divide between developers and operations in the mobile space, with a lack of concern for app operability after app store approval. In a recent talk Debois explained his DevOps mental model and how selecting a toolchain for mobile could help promote the different areas of collaboration between Dev and Ops, from extending delivery to production via continuous delivery, to increasing awareness of operational concerns in Dev as well as awareness of business concerns in Ops. In the same message he mentioned part of the approach on his last project: We went on integrating logging and metrics in the mobile app, having it correlate with our backend logs. While doing this we tried to close the feedback gap between dev & ops by making logs, metric & settings available. Then we added feature flags to enable/disable features at runtime but also remotely increasing debug levels and memory errors. Mobile Delivery Days follows the mixed talks and open space model popularized in the last years by DevOps Days conferences. Debois highlighted the conversational nature of the conference in a message to the citcon mailing list : "In true openspace style, you don't have to have all the answers. Let's just try to share & learn". Debois further told InfoQ what his experience with DevOps Days brings to Mobile Delivery Days: From the devopsdays events we know that there is a lot of value in talking amongst peers. The principle of the openspaces don’t require you to be the expert. [We wish to replicate] the non- commercial aspect and an atmosphere where everyone comes equal to the table, no matter what your company is. The conference will take place in San Francisco on March 21st and 22nd. Debois expects an ecletic audience: We try to focus on engineers passionate around the subject. We see that many have QA/testing background or an operational background. Some people from the business side are attending too to find ways to deliver apps faster. When asked if there are plans to follow the DevOps Days model of distributed, locally organized conferences, Debois replied: We’ll tackle that when we get there. But we do expect to have an EU version if this one is successful. 2016-03-02 22:49

29 Phil Haack Replies to Concerns on. NET OSS Some members and contributors expressed concerns toward the current state of open source in. NET , as covered last week. To get a deeper perspective on the situation, InfoQ reached out with Phil Haack, former program manager at Microsoft and currently engineering manager at GitHub. Phil is also the track host of “Incredible Power of an Open-Sourced. NET” at QCon. Phil begins by describing the current transformation of. NET OSS: I think a lot of the frustration with the. NET OSS community is the fact that compared to other OSS communities, it’s relatively young. Although it’s improved a lot and is continuing to improve, there’s a lot of inertia to overcome. For a company the size of Microsoft, its rate of change is actually impressive. But the impact of that change will always lag behind. After all, a lot of people are still angry about IE 6 and its demolishing of web standards, and that came out 15 years ago! Traditionally, Microsoft had to have its own product in every space. In part, its customers demanded it. The old adage “ Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM ” equally applies to Microsoft. However, it’s changed in recent years as it began to realize that OSS is the future. For example, they investigated the possibility of building their own DVCS, but came to their senses and simply adopted Git wholeheartedly. Likewise, they had their own distributed cache but then switched to Redis. They also contribute to OpenSSH. In this regard, Microsoft has started to not only adopt OSS, but contribute to it. They’ve also converted a lot of their code to open source as evidenced by the fact that MSBuild, ASP. NET Core,. NET Core, etc. etc. are all open source and on GitHub. But it’s going to take time for the impact of this sea change to really pan out. Now is the time for a truly innovative. NET project to have a chance to succeed because if it becomes a standard and is something Microsoft doesn’t already have, but needs, Microsoft becomes a potential sponsor. Open source project sponsorship is one of the main concerns brought up by several. NET contributors. They claim that while some enterprises use open source projects extensively, they do not contribute back. Phil responds : The problem about saying enterprises do not contribute back to projects is how do you measure it? Nobody can put forth any data that suggests this is true or not. My hunch is that this is a problem in every OSS community. Just look at all the security vulnerabilities in openssl and how under-funded that project is and it’s used EVERYWHERE. We need more research on this. I’d bet there’s an average ratio of number of users that use an OSS project to the number of companies that contribute to that project. For example, suppose for every 1 million users of an OSS library, one company sponsors. Given the small size of. NET communities, that would mean very few. NET OSS projects get corporate sponsors. This is a challenge that I think is universal in open source, not just in. NET and is something I’d like to improve. I think we need to help companies see the benefit to their bottom line in contributing back to the software they use. Not only does a rising tide lift all boats in this case, but it’s a great way to build up solid engineers as contributing to these projects is often more challenging than their day to day work. It’s also a morale booster and can provide great PR. As an open source community, we need to do better in teaching companies the benefits and how to effectively contribute back. While Microsoft now embraces technologies it did not create, opening the way for outside projects, it still has a key role to play in. NET open source. Phil explains the link between the business strategy of Microsoft and. NET OSS: I think it’s important to look at the long play of Microsoft. Their Windows and Office businesses are going strong. However, as more and more people embrace open source, web, and mobile, the power of these businesses to sustain Microsoft long into the future will diminish. Their ability to make money selling applications, libraries, and frameworks will follow the same path. I think Microsoft’s business of the future is Azure and its associated services, which suffer less from the commodifying effects of OSS. From their perspective, who cares what you built it with, as long as it runs on Azure! This is why we see OSS being embraced right from the top (Satya Nadella) on down. It’s not a PR stunt. Nobody would bet that much money, time, and infrastructure on PR. It will take some time for this sea change to reach the shores of the average. NET OSS project, but it will. For example, C# repositories on GitHub outpace the average and are one of the fastest growing languages on GitHub. We’ve seen a pick-up in new users who use Windows as their primary operating system.. NET open source is certainly not stagnant on GitHub; it’s growing rapidly. One of the projects I help maintain is Octokit. Net, a client library to the GitHub API. It’s a relatively small and obscure project, but we’ve had a lot of active contributors lately. It’s really picked up. Phil concludes: So yeah,. NET open source isn’t as big, strong, or as healthy as some of the other communities. But it’s closer than most people think and actively growing. I think the big effort going into the future is to educate companies about contributing back, but that’s not solely a. NET problem but a larger OSS problem. 2016-03-02 22:49

30 Apple, FBI Testify before Congress In a hearing today with the House Committee on the Judiciary Hearings , called The Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans' Security and Privacy , FBI director James Comey started off the hearings by describing the problems inherent with encrypted communications and saying that "going dark" is a grave, growing and extremely complex problem. We are seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence resides on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop — evidence that may be the difference between an offender being convicted or acquitted. If we cannot access this evidence, it will have ongoing, significant impacts on our ability to identify, stop, and prosecute these offenders. We would like to emphasize that the Going Dark problem is, at base, one of technological choices and capability. We are not asking to expand the Government’s surveillance authority, but rather we are asking to ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to us to keep America safe. However, Apple presented the problem as a constitutional issue, with the first and fifth amendments coming into play; by being compelled to create code (and where code is synonymous with speech) the government is attempting to compel Apple to say something that it disbelieves, as well as compelling Apple to work for the government without recourse. Bruce Sewell, representing Apple, suggested that: The FBI is asking Apple to weaken the security of our products. Hackers and cyber criminals could use this to wreak havoc on our privacy and personal safety. It would set a dangerous precedent for government intrusion on the privacy and safety of its citizens. Furthermore, in evidence presented by the FBI and acknowledged by Apple, there are hundreds of phones waiting in the queue to be decrypted: As we have told them — and as we have told the American public — building that software tool would not affect just one iPhone. It would weaken the security for all of them. In fact, just last week Director Comey agreed that the FBI would likely use this precedent in other cases involving other phones. District Attorney Vance has also said he would absolutely plan to use this on over 175 phones. We can all agree this is not about access to just one iPhone. Susan Landau, professor of cybersecurity policy at of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who also attended the hearing, emphasised the fact that it's not a question of submitting to security but rather of enforcing it: Despite appearances, this is not a simple story of national security versus privacy. It is, in fact, a security versus security story although there are, of course, aspects of privacy embedded in it as well. Stealing your login credentials provides criminals and nation states the most effective way into your system—and a smartphone provides one of the best ways of securing ourselves. That’s why Apple’s approach to securing phone data is so crucial. But law enforcement continues to see electronic surveillance in twentieth century terms, and it is using twentieth-century investigative thinking in a twenty-first century world. Instead of celebrating steps industry takes to provide security to data and communications, the FBI fights it. In cross examination by members of the committee, the director of the FBI admitted that they had made a mistake when they reset the iCloud password for the account, preventing cooperation and allowing Apple to provide automatically backed up resources. However, he also said that they would not be doing their job unless they tried out all possibilities in order to gain access to the phone. Many of the questions were positive and were looking to understand the problem; however, a few of the Congress members kept returning to the criminal angles and murders where Apple would not be able to assist in breaking into suspects' (or victims') phones. Several expressed the view that they would sacrifice personal security in the benefit of wider public security, seemingly without understanding the irony that weakening security for one weakens security for all. Later on, Dr Landau pointed out that whether or not Apple could get into the phone, if an encrypted app (such as Telegraph) was used, there would be no way of finding out what the communications were in any case. They pointed out that these applications and encryption routines were already widely available as open-source projects or existing applications, regardless of the outcome of this particular case. Indeed, she highlighted that this was part of a discussion with the NSA over a decade ago when stronger encryption was being used by foreign competitors and other aggressors while weaker security was mandated across the American public. Dr Landau stated she believed that the FBI were still in the past, believing that they could legislate away encryption. When asked whether or not the backdoor could be limited to a single phone, Sewell stated that there was no technical limitation that would prevent it being used in additional phones; and that even if a key could be tied to a specific phone, the large queue of other phones which were in the hands of other law enforcement agencies would require an automated delivery mechanism and ability for individuals to be able to request a backdoored operating system. This would lead to human failures in the long term, or simple mistakes, which could be used trivially as a security vulnerability to break into actors' phones. Potentially the same backdoor could be subverted by foreign agencies or criminals once created. Even if the software were just used for this one phone, as the FBI originally requested, they asked for the software to be shipped through the mail on a hard drive to the FBI offices, which clearly presents a highly vulnerable single point of failure. Apple also clarified that they have a 24x7, 365 day a year, security hotline on which they offer law enforcement advice and support in these cases. In the specific San Bernadino case, Apple received a call at 2:47am, had responded by 2:48am, and provided data as requested by search warrants within 24 hours, as well as despatching support engineers to advise the FBI how to get into the phone. Had the FBI not reset the password it is very likely that the information would already be in the FBI's hands. Apple has continued to provide information that they are able to under the existing infrastructure. Members of the congress have five days to ask any additional information from the participants. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Investigative Powers Bill will be read and rushed through on Wednesday which would give the UK government the ability to immediately request the backdoor software from Apple. In addition, external agents and other countries would be in the queue in order to gain access to this information as well. Ironically, the ACM Turing Award for 2015 was awarded on the 1st March 2016 to Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, the same day that this hearing was attended. These two created what is now known as Diffie-Hellman public key cryptography, which is widely used in commerce today: “Public-key cryptography is fundamental for our industry,” said Andrei Broder, Google Distinguished Scientist. “The ability to protect private data rests on protocols for confirming an owner's identity and for ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of communications. These widely used protocols were made possible through the ideas and methods pioneered by Diffie and Hellman.” As Bruce Sewell noted, "The world is watching this case". 2016-03-02 22:49

31 Apache Wicket 7.2.0 Released The Apache Wicket PMC has released Apache Wicket 7.2.0. This release is a minor release, but does contain new features. To learn more about this release and the state of Apache Wicket, InfoQ interviewed Apache Wicket PMC member Martijn Dashorst. InfoQ: First of all, congrats on the release! In the New and noteworthy section of your release notes, you mention two notable features: 1) the ability to read resources from file systems using Java’s NIO API and 2) loading images from external servers. Can you explain to InfoQ readers why these are important? Dashorst: The first feature makes it easy to directly stream media content from the file system to the browser. For example when you have a video file stored in a zip archive, you can stream this directly using the Java NIO API's: The Java code: URI uri = URI.create("jar:file:///videosFolder/videos.zip!/folderInZip/Video.mp4"); Path path = FileSystemResourceReference.getPath(uri); FileSystemResourceReference ref = new FileSystemResourceReference("video", path); Video video = new Video("video", ref); add(video); The HTML markup: The Video component will create the appropriate media tags in the HTML document and the FileSystemResourceReference will allow the direct streaming of the video content when the browser asks for it. Wicket is for example used by the Apache OpenMeetings project so this feature will come in handy for them. The ExternalImage component is more of a repurposing of an existing component and bringing it up to speed with current web-best-practises. The ExternalImage supports cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and the srcSet attribute when it is provided with a list of external URLs. This allows applications to use responsive multi-resolution images. InfoQ: It looks like Wicket’s mailing list traffic is way down (averaging 6 messages per day according to http://wicket.markmail.org ). Do you feel this is caused by a rise in JavaScript MVC frameworks? Dashorst: I think that there are many contributing factors for mailing list traffic going down. As you can see with several other frameworks shutting down -- a couple of weeks ago JBoss announced the end of life for RichFaces -- the server-side web framework landscape has lost much of its appeal. As I noted in the State of Apache Wicket just over a year ago, Wicket is one of the few survivors of the server-side web framework of the mid-2000's: barely 15 have survived, where I note that 'survive' means made a release in the last year. Of course having books, and having a user guide online available removes the need for some questions, the advent of Stack Overflow for asking and answering questions another. Wicket has been around for a long time and lots of applications rely on it to work. Therefore we adopted semantic versioning since 6.0 and strive to keep major API changes to a minimum. This slows down the evolution of our framework, and hence commit traffic. That said, the server-side frameworks are done, complete. There's not much to add to those frameworks to improve them an order of magnitude, and I doubt our current users would like us to completely rewrite Wicket even if it would provide a new compelling API for new developers. Does this spell gloom and doom for the future of Wicket? No, I am confident that we'll be supporting and developing Wicket for the foreseeable future! We constantly add new developers to the core team to keep the project moving forward. Our downloads have been stable at 70,000 per month for the last couple of years, and there are still projects being started with Wicket. InfoQ: What features do you plan to add to Wicket in the future? Dashorst: Good support for Java 8: lambda's seem like a natural fit for our event handling and bindings between components and your domain objects. However we want to make sure we keep the memory requirements low. This is something we plan for Wicket 8, but there's not a set timeline. We'll keep an eye on Java EE technologies and keep integrating with those, for example CDI and the bean validation framework. We're also looking at parts of Wicket that can be improved to get even higher performance. We recently replaced a core functionality of Wicket where adding components to a page had 3 levels of O(N^2) complexity, and replaced it with an algorithm that's roughly O(1). This was a holdover from the old days where we optimized for memory consumption rather than CPU cycles. Then there's my personal wishlist for the Wicket core. Wicket uses server-side state for much of its AJAX processing, and I want to make stateless AJAX happen. I want to revisit the Wicket examples project and integrate it with the user guide, so the user guide can import living code. InfoQ: What do you think of the Spring Boot starter for Apache Wicket ? Dashorst: It is great! A lot of work went into creating that project, but I have yet to play with it. It is a nice departure of the quick start project we provide from our website, and looks like nice place to start for getting up and running with a new project based on Wicket. I think this is a great example of the liveliness of our community. There are lots of open source integrations with Wicket, for example our Wicket Stuff project consists of almost 100 projects. The Wicket Bootstrap project is keeping up with the newest Bootstrap and Wicket releases. Another contributor works on JQuery UI and Kendo UI integration with Wicket. So while interest in server-side frameworks is waning, the rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated. InfoQ: Anything else you’d like to add? Dashorst: If you have read this far, and never played with Wicket, or your experience is from a long time ago, try it! Starting with Wicket was never this easy. You can use the aforementioned Spring Boot integration, or our Maven Quick Start. If you want to find out more about who is using Wicket you can look at our Built with Apache Wicket tumblr site , or follow our Twitter account, @apache_wicket , that publishes anything that happens in our community, and finds all the Wicket built websites. 2016-03-02 22:49

32 From Android N to Self-Driving Cars: What to Expect at Google I/O Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O, kicks off on May 18, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Jan. 12. The event will be held in Google's neck of the woods in Mountain View, Calif., and will once again play host to some of the company's most important updates for the year. Attendees of the developer conference can expect to sit in on developer breakout sessions, learn tips and tricks about the new platforms Google has developed, and more. But for the vast majority of people following Google I/O, it won't be the developer events that they are eagerly looking forward to, but rather what Pichai and his team will unveil during the keynote session. During the keynote, Google will talk about what it believes the future looks like, examine how the company fits into the marketplace, and showcase some new products and services. Just what can we expect to come out of the conference? This eWEEK slide show looks at some of the rumors swirling around Google I/O and provides insight into what the company may be thinking heading into its big day. 2016-03-02 22:47 Don Reisinger

33 A Glimpse at the Future of Containers in the Enterprise With containers gaining increasing popularity in enterprise environments across a variety of industries to automate the deployment of applications, Joyent and others in the container ecosystem got together to give a state-of-the-state event at the Container Summit conference Feb. 10 in New York City. Although the cloud native world is adopting container technologies, such as Docker, only 8 percent of enterprises are using them in production, said Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Yet curiosity about containers is soaring. Bartoletti said questions from clients about containers and when and how to deploy them have increased by a factor of 10 in the last two years. Indeed, many of the speakers at the Container Summit said they were introduced to container technology in a previous job and moved it to their current role. Others simply adopted it as the proper thing to do. This eWEEK slide show looks at some of the scenes from the Container Summit and what industry experts had to say about the technology. 2016-03-02 22:47 Darryl K.

34 Meet the Bugatti Chiron, the 1,500 HP successor to the Veyron For years, the Bugatti Veyron has sat atop the production supercar mountain as a vehicle that most can only dream of owning. The Veyron's staying power, both as a high-end production car and an icon in modern pop culture, is quite impressive considering it launched more than a decade ago. Father Time is constant and despite multiple variations, the Veyron's time in the spotlight is nearly up. That's just fine with Bugatti as its successor somehow manages to up the ante in virtually every key category. The Bugatti Chiron is the pinnacle of performance, luxury and exclusivity. It's powered by a redesigned version of the Veyron's 8-liter W16 engine that's mated to four sequentially- configured turbos. The combination is good for a staggering 1,500 horsepower and 1,180 lb-ft of torque that propel the car from 0-60 mph in less than 2.5 seconds en route to a governed top speed of 261 mph. I've taken a ride in a twin turbo Dodge Viper putting down over 1,000 horsepower, an experience I can only describe as absolutely terrifying. I can only imagine how scary / awesome something with 1,500 ponies on tap would be. Inside, you'll find leather-everything and even a storage compartment large enough to hold a decent-sized piece of luggage. The driver is in perfect view of three high-resolution displays and has total control over an audio system that Bugatti says could be considered "the world's fastest concert hall. " With a one-carat diamond membrane in each of the system's four tweeters, it's as over-the-top as you'd expect from the Veyron's successor. Bugatti is only planning to produce 500 Chiron, a third of which have already been spoken for. Even if you could afford the $2.62 million price tag, this level of exclusivity means most people will never even come across one in person. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

35 35 Despite a year-on-year decline, GPU shipments started to improve in Q4 2015 A new report from Jon Peddie Research shows that despite year-on-year total GPU shipments declining an average of 14 percent in Q4 2015, the quarter did bring some good news: a 2.4 percent increase from Q3. The year-on-year average decrease included a 9 percent drop in desktop graphic processors and a 17 percent decline in notebooks. The site says that the fourth quarter increase is a sign that the GPU market is rebounding and outperforming the PC market, which is now stabilizing. Overall PC sales may have suffered a 10.27 percent decline last year, but they increased by just over 2 percent quarter-to-quarter. In the breakdown of individual GPU makers, AMD saw its unit shipments increase 5.16 percent quarter-to-quarter, while Nvidia’s jumped up by 8.41 percent. Intel lagged behind the two big GPU companies; its shipments increased a mere 0.73 percent. Discreet graphics cards are now found in 31.28 percent of all PCs - an encouraging rise of 1.34 percent from the previous quarter. But while discreet GPU shipments increased 6.57 percent from the last quarter, they were down 7.01 percent year-on-year. Even though both Nvidia and AMD didn’t release any new GPUs in the second half of 2015, the companies' products continued to perform well near the end of the year. It was reported last month that Nvidia beat fourth quarter earning forecasts and posted record revenue for Q4 and 2016. This was partly due to consumers purchasing new hardware in response to the large number of GPU-intensive titles, such as The Witcher 3, Call Of Duty: Black Ops III, and Star Wars: Battlefront being released in 2015. Ultimately, the report paints a fairly positive picture. While year-on-year shipments of PCs and GPUs may have decreased, both markets have stabilized and are now starting to improve. The fourth quarter was particularly good for GPUs, especially considering the lack of new products. 2016-03-02 22:48 Rob Thubron

36 Google's self-driving car at fault in minor accident involving public transit bus Google's self-driving vehicles have logged millions of hours on public roadways. Inevitably, they've also been involved in a handful of traffic accidents. Up to this point, however, Google says its autonomous vehicles have never been at fault in any of them. That claim no longer appears to be case. T he Verge points to a report from the California DMV first spotted by Mark Harris that describes a recent incident involving one of Google's self- driving vehicles and a city bus. In it, Google describes an out-of-the-ordinary scenario in which one of its Lexus-model autonomous vehicles was attempting to merge back into traffic at a slow speed when it made contact with the side of a public transit bus. Google said its autonomous vehicle, which was in self-driving mode at the time, was traveling around 2 mph and the bus was going about 15 mph at the time of impact. The vehicle's safety driver saw the bus approaching from the rear but believed it would stop or slow to let the Google car continue. What makes the scenario unique is the fact that the right-hand lane on this particular street is wide enough to allow two lines of traffic. It's not uncommon for a vehicle attempting to turn off the road to hold up traffic and when that happens, drivers make full use of the wide lane and go around them. In a report on the matter, Google says its vehicle did just that but encountered some sandbags blocking its path near a storm drain. As such, it needed to merge back into "traffic" to go around it which is when the accident happened. Fortunately, there were no injuries reported at the scene. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

37 Xbox One update expands Party Chat room size, improves Xbox 360 backward compatibility and more Sony recently announced that Remote Play and a host of other new features will soon be heading to the PlayStation 4 via firmware update (the beta is already live if you want to give that a shot). Not to be forgotten, Microsoft has also revealed details regarding its next update for the Xbox One which will deliver its own nifty features. Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, Microsoft's director of programming for Xbox Live, shared the news in a recent blog post . Late last year, Microsoft rolled out backward compatibility support for the Xbox One which allows for the playback of select Xbox 360 titles on the latest console. In the new update, Microsoft is making it easier to find and purchase backward compatible games by offering and storing them much the same way as new digital games are handled. The update will also allow Party Chat to be used simultaneously with the Twitch app, permitting Party Chat participants to be included in the live broadcast if they so choose. What's more, Party Chats are also being expanded to allow for up to 16 people at any given time. Elsewhere, gamers will now be able to track their Achievements easier through a dedicated section in the Xbox One guide, watch videos in the Activity Feed, customize game DVR recording length, follow web links and YouTube videos from Game Hubs, compare avatars and much more. Members of Microsoft's Xbox One Preview program can get the update as of writing while everyone else will have to wait patiently as the staggered rollout unfolds over the coming weeks. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

38 YouTube creates team to oversee copyright takedown errors It should come as little surprise that copyright violations on YouTube are a dime a dozen. YouTube has for some time employed an automated takedown system designed to detect and remove clips that it believes are violating copyrights. The problem, however, is that YouTube's Content ID system doesn't always get it right and takes down clips that shouldn't have been removed. It's a minor annoyance to the average YouTube user but for professional content creators that invest loads of time into their videos for the purpose of generating revenue, having a clip erroneously removed is a direct hit to their bottom line. And as Billboard correctly points out, the current process to get a video reinstated takes time – further diminishing potential earnings. Fortunately, it would appear as though the Google-owned video sharing site is finally getting its act together. In a recent post from YouTube's Policy Team, an employee named Spencer said the feedback that its community has raised in comments and videos is having an impact. Specifically, it has caused them to look closely at their policies and helped them identify areas in which they can improve. As such, YouTube has created a human team dedicated to minimizing mistakes and improving the quality of the team's actions. Furthermore, Spencer said they'll be rolling out some initiatives in the coming months that will help strengthen communication between content creators and YouTube support. The team will also strive to increase its transparency into the status of monetization claims. It's good to see YouTube finally addressing the issues although some will no doubt view the initiative as being too little, too late. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

39 Harmonix launches crowdfunding campaign to create a PC version of Rock Band 4 In what can only be described as a fairly surprising move, developer Harmonix has announced that it will be bringing Rock Band 4 to the PC – but only if the company raises enough money via a crowdfunding campaign. The studio is aiming to reach $1.5 million within the next 35 days using the Fig platform, the same crowdsourcing site that Double Fine turned to for Psychonauts 2. Harmonix says that bringing the franchise to the PC for the first time will cost $2 million, but the developer is willing to contribute the extra $500,000. This past October, we released Rock Band 4 for the consoles—the first new Rock Band release in 5 years. This was a massive undertaking for us as an indie studio, but we somehow pulled it off. But since the very first Rock Band release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 back in November 2007, there is something we keep getting requests for, something we’ve never had in the series’ eight year history... a version of Rock Band for PC! We’ve been planning, scheduling, scoping and preparing this PC version since the day after we launched on console back in October, and we’re now ready to launch this Fig campaign to ask for your help to make this happen. Harmonix says it will be teaming up with Sheffield, UK-based studio Sumo Digital to port the game across to the PC. The company has worked on titles such as LittleBigPlanet 3, Forza Horizon 2, and Disney Infinity 3.0. The PC version of the rhythm game will have all the content and features found in the console versions, and will include the same regular monthly updates that the consoles receive, as well as all those that were released prior to its launch. Additionally, the PC version will bring a feature from Rock Band 3 that allows players to create, and even sell, their own music tracks. Using the Steam Workshop, users can submit files to Harmonix who will then put the tracks into the in-game store. A cut of the revenue will go to the creators when (or if) the songs sell. Harmonix says that the PC game will be compatible with most existing Rock Band instrument controllers, “with some exceptions and caveats,” but it is continuing to work on adding support. The company noted that wired USB instruments, including ION drums, should work without a problem. Any DLC purchased on either of the console versions won’t carry over to the PC, but that’s understandable. Should the campaign meet its funding target, the PC version of Rock Band 4 will launch this fall. With 34 days still left, 717 backers have pledged $175,550. 2016-03-02 22:48 Rob Thubron

40 iOS 9.3 will give employers a lot more control over your work-issued devices The vast majority of companies place restrictions on their computers to stop employees downloading certain files or changing PC settings. It protects network security; without it, workers could compromise an entire system - a scenario that is thought to be the cause of the recent Hollywood hospital ransomware attack. This same level of administrator control doesn't extend to company-issued smartphones, but it looks as if Apple’s upcoming iOS 9.3 update may change things . A section in Apple’s developer documentation shows that, among other things, those with mobile device management access will be able to edit the homescreen layout of company iPhones, meaning admins get to decide where the apps are positioned. The company could, for example, put work apps in a prime position for employees to access, with no way for workers to arrange apps the way they prefer. Additionally, employers will be able to hide certain apps, including pre-installed Apple ones and those related to the device’s systems, presumably so users won’t compromise the security of the phone. IT admins will also be able to block specific apps being downloaded from the app store, so no more Candy Crush or Clash of Clans. Finally, the new update will let companies change notification settings on their iOS devices, meaning they can control the method and frequency in which users receive them. Constant, invasive notifications will no doubt make it difficult for staff members to claim that they “never saw the message.” One thing iOS 9.3 brings that benefits employees is a prominent message on the lock screen that warns: “This iPhone is managed by your organization.” Going into the device’s About screen will expand on this, explaining that the iPhone’s supervisor can monitor its internet traffic and locate the device. While this is all good news for businesses looking to improve worker productivity, many employees may not be too happy to find they can’t even personalize the layout of their work- issued device, even if it is their employer’s property. Image credit: Vitabello / Shutterstock 2016-03-02 22:48 Rob Thubron

41 The 9.7-inch iPad Pro looks set to feature a 12MP camera, 4K video, and an improved display It was reported yesterday that Apple is rumored to have yet again moved its product launch event date. Originally set for March 15, the company changed this to March 22 before settling on March 21. The fact that March 22 is when Apple will face the US government in court was probably a big factor when it came to moving the dates. One of the products that we’ll almost certainly see at the event is Apple’s new 9.7-inch iPad. It was previously thought that the upcoming device would fall into the Air range and be called the iPad Air 3, but it now seems almost certain that it will be a new iPad Pro. While this 9.7-inch iPad Pro may be smaller than the 12.9-inch version , it’s rumored to surpass the larger device in several ways, especially when it comes to the camera. According to 9to5Mac ’s sources, recent internal prototypes of this smaller iPad Pro feature a 12-megapixel camera and a sensor similar to the iPhone 6s. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro, for comparison, has an 8-megapixel rear camera. The upcoming device is also rumored to be the first iPad to feature a rear LED flash. Additionally, like the iPhone 6s, the 9.7-inch Pro will be able to record 4K video - a jump from its predecessor's 1080p recording ability. The rest of the iPad’s specs are said to be similar, if not identical, to the 12.9-inch version; this includes the A9X processor, Apple Pencil support, quad speakers, and a Smart Connector. A smart keyboard cover for the device is also said to be on its way. Along with the new iPad, Apple looks set to unveil the 4-inch iPhone SE and an update to the Apple Watch on March 21, so the tablet could end up being the most popular product to come from the event. 2016-03-02 22:48 Rob Thubron

42 This convenience store is operated entirely via your smartphone, no cashier needed It's a foregone conclusion that robots will continue to replace humans in the job field but did you ever expect your employment could be replaced by a smartphone? That's exactly what's taking place at Sweden's first unstaffed convenience store as customers can drop in, buy their goods and be on their way without any human involvement. The store is the brainchild of Robert Ilijason who said he came up with the idea one night after trying to find a supermarket that was open so he could buy baby food for his screaming toddler. As the Associated Press details , the 39-year-old IT professional now operates a 24-hour shop with no cashier. Customers just need to download the store's app to get started. The app will grant them the ability to unlock the store's otherwise locked door. Once inside, customers can select from an assortment of basic goods including bread, milk, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products you'd expect to find in a small convenience store. The shop measures just 480 square feet so there's not really a lot of room for non- essential incidentals. Customers are billed for their purchases via monthly invoice. Tobacco products and medicines aren't offered due to the risk of theft and alcohol is banned from being sold in convenience stores in the country. For everything else, a series of security cameras keep a close eye on shoppers to deter shoplifters. Ilijason said the app will send him a text message if the front door remains open for more than eight seconds or if someone tries to break in. Would you be interested in shopping at a store of this nature? Would the convenience of not having to wait in line trump the fact that only certain products are sold and there's nobody on hand to offer assistance? Let us know what you think in the comments section below. Image courtesy Jan Olsen, AP Photo 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

43 IoT is a mixing pot of technologies that's finally coming into focus Much of the press from last week’s Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona focused on the mobile device announcements—the traditional stars of that show—but there was an underlying theme that was actually a much bigger and more important story: the palpable evolution of the Internet of Things (IOT). From telecom companies like AT&T and T- Mobile, to network equipment makers like Cisco and Huawei, to component makers like Qualcomm and Intel, everybody was focused on the IOT opportunity. After a decade-long run highlighting the voice and data improvements their networks could provide, the major telcos, for example, were clearly looking beyond smartphones to applications like connected cars, factory automation, and smart cities. Similarly, hardware companies were as eager to talk about how their technologies are deployed in industrial applications as they were to show off their slick, consumer devices. Just prior to the show, there was even a major breakthrough on the IOT connectivity and standards front, as the OIC group, led by Intel, announced that they were being joined by Qualcomm and other members of the AllJoyn group and that they were forming a new organization called the Open Connectivity Forum (OCF). Mind-numbing acronym shuffles aside, this is actually a very important development that removes a critical barrier and should lead to faster advancements in connectivity across a wide range of devices, both at home and in businesses. Of course, it’s still the early stages for IOT, so there was a lot more blustering in Barcelona about a few small examples than widespread real-world deployments, but the change in the air was clear. One of the things that’s fascinating about IOT is that it brings together so many key technology trends into a unified whole. From 5G networks to sensor-based edge devices to multifaceted computing demands to big data-driven analytics software, it’s the biggest mixing pot of technologies that we’ve seen in some time. Put another way, there’s something that nearly every technology-related company can find in the IOT world, and still a lot waiting to be determined. From 5G networks to sensor-based edge devices to multifaceted computing demands to big data-driven analytics software, IOT is the biggest mixing pot of technologies that we’ve seen in some time. In fact, this is part of both the beauty and frustration of IOT—it’s too big and too all- encompassing to be controlled by one entity or even sub-segment of the overall tech industry. At the same time, it’s too big to be moved forward in any kind of consistent, rational way. Instead, it appears to be moving along in fits and starts in multiple different directions simultaneously, not unlike a beach ball being buffeted wildly across a sandy beach when a storm front moves in. One of the many challenges is that each company trying to drive developments in IOT has an agenda or angle and many of these angles are far from complementary. Even the end goal for customers is quite varied—is it driving down costs, improving processes, or generating revenue? Despite these questions, it’s clear that there are some intriguing new options coming into play and the promise of many more to come. Just today, for example, United Health Insurance announced a new wearable device—developed in partnership with Qualcomm Digital Life— which medium-sized businesses (100-300 employees) can offer to their employees to reduce their health insurance premiums. Essentially, by following an activity schedule that’s tracked by the wearable, you can earn money towards your premiums—much like Progressive Insurance offers for automotive customers who put an OBD2 dongle in their car to monitor how safely they drive. At the other end of the spectrum, you have innovative startups like Terbine, who just debuted their online marketplace for sensor-driven data. The idea is that companies looking to generate revenue from their IOT deployments can share their data into Terbine’s database. Companies wanting to leverage data from various sources can purchase that data and mash together various combinations to get the data set they need, or make comparisons across best-of-class standards to see how they compare. It’s a complex but fascinating idea that shows the kinds of innovations going on in IOT business models. Moving forward, I expect we’ll see a great deal more interesting combinations of existing technologies put together in creative ways to drive new applications in IOT. To be clear, there are still enormous technical, logistical, political and business-related challenges to overcome. Nevertheless, the once foggy picture of where IOT is going and what it really means is finally starting to come into focus. Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech. This article was originally published on Tech.pinions . 2016-03-02 22:48 @bobodtech

44 44 VESA announces DisplayPort 1.4 standard with support for 8K displays The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has finalized and published the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The latest version, announced roughly 18 months after its predecessor, includes a number of noteworthy features and specifications that may lead some to skip DisplayPort 1.3 entirely. DisplayPort 1.4 retains the same High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3) physical interface as its predecessor but utilizes Display Stream Compression (DSC) technology. DSC version 1.2 enables up to a 3:1 compression ratio that's said to be visually lossless (at least, according to VESA member testing). As such, DisplayPort 1.4 can drive 60Hz 8K displays and 4K displays at up to 120Hz – both with HDR "deep color. " The new standard also supports 32 audio channels, 1,536kHz sample rate and inclusion of "all known" audio formats. VESA further notes that the 1.4 standard features forward error correction and HDR meta transport in addition to the aforementioned expanded audio support. Best yet, the latest standard will work over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C connections. Given precedent, it'll likely be quite some time before devices actually implement the new standard. DisplayPort 1.3 was announced in September of 2014 but as multiple publications note, there still aren't any products on the market that utilize it. Ideally, manufacturers could skip DisplayPort 1.3 entirely and jump to the latest standard but that's little more than wishful thinking. 2016-03-02 22:48 Shawn Knight

45 Amazon and Brita join forces for a $45 smart water pitcher that automatically orders new filters There are an ever-increasing number of household items being made ‘smart,’ from toothbrushes to fridges like Samsung’s $5000 Family Hub that has enough built-in tech to rival a smartphone. Now, a new product has gone on sale that’s a lot cheaper, and probably more useful, than many connected devices: a smart water pitcher. The $45 Brita Infinity is the result of a collaboration between Brita and Amazon. The pitcher tracks the amount of water that passes through its filter and, once it nears the end of its life, will automatically order a new one using Amazon’s Dash Replenishment service. Once a user puts a new filter into the pitcher, they simply need to press the start button for the Infinity to begin its monitoring. When it counts around 40 gallons of water – said to be the equivalent of two month’s use – it will order more of the $6 filters. You need to register your contact and billing information online with Dash Replenishment to receive the replacements. Amazon already uses the service for customers to automatically order printer toners, laundry supplies, dog food, and even blood glucose testing supplies. "People buy Brita pitchers because they want cleaner, great-tasting water from any tap, but the challenge is remembering to have that replacement filter on-hand, just when you need it," Brita General Manager Ed Huber said in a statement. "We saw an opportunity to work with Amazon to make keeping up-to-date on filter changes effortless for Brita users. By integrating Wi-Fi connectivity into this pitcher so it can connect with Amazon Dash Replenishment, we've created an elegant, simple solution to eliminate that moment when you realize you didn't re-order your filter. " More companies are expected to introduce connected features to their products, so consumers won’t need to remember to stock up on certain goods when they’re doing a shopping run. These include August, Oster, Petnet, Sealed Air, and Whirlpool. While some may say that automating parts of our lives in this way isn’t necessarily a good thing, you can expect more household items to become ‘connected’ as time goes on. I’m certainly hoping that the canceled automatic toilet roll replenisher that was on Kickstarter a couple of years ago gets resurrected. 2016-03-02 22:48 Rob Thubron

46 MSI GS40 Phantom 6QE Gaming Laptop Review I wasn’t particularly impressed by the last 14-inch gaming laptop I reviewed. The performance from the Gigabyte P34W v5 was decent, but it was let down by a collection of issues, including a bland design, poor thermal performance, and a subpar keyboard and trackpad. So I reached out to MSI to see if their latest 14-inch gaming machine, the GS40 Phantom 6QE , is a truly better option. The hardware inside the GS40 Phantom is well-rounded but won't pull any surprises either. It’s loaded up with a 14-inch 1080p display, an Intel Skylake Core i7-6700HQ CPU, a GeForce GTX 970M discrete graphics card, 16 GB of RAM, and a combination of a 128 GB SSD with a 1 TB hard drive. It also packs the latest connectivity, including a USB Type-C port sporting Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 gen 2. The Phantom isn’t a flagship gaming laptop, but it does include a handy list of other features, such as Killer DoubleShot Pro networking, a SteelSeries keyboard, and a brushed aluminium chassis. All of this is available for a decent price of $1,599, with no configuration options available. The aspect to the GS40 Phantom that I was most impressed with is the design. Having used gaming laptops from Alienware and Gigabyte previously, among others, the understated design to MSI’s 14-inch laptop is appreciated. Yes, there are still some elements of ‘gamer’ style to this laptop, including various contours on the laptop’s lid and around the keyboard, but it’s far less than you’d get from some other over-the-top designs. Despite the understated design, MSI has succeeded in giving this reasonably expensive laptop a premium look and feel. Both the laptop’s lid and the keyboard surround are made from brushed black aluminium, which is visually appealing and a slight fingerprint magnet. There are some areas of plastic, although it’s limited enough to not detract from the otherwise great metal chassis. MSI has also done a fantastic job of not making this laptop just a black slab of materials. The majority of this laptop is black metal or plastic, but there are some slight red highlights found around the design that give it a bit of much needed interest. The shiny red rim around the trackpad is particularly nice, as is the surprisingly subtle red backlighting to the keyboard that’s barely visible in natural light. The design of the GS40 Phantom 6QE isn’t perfect though. MSI has made no attempt to make this laptop exceptionally thin or light: at 22.8mm thick and 1.6 kg heavy, it’s pretty average for this size and class of device. That’s not to say the 6QE is bad in this respect – it’s around the same weight as a 13-inch MacBook Pro – but it’s not as compact or portable as some top-end gaming laptops of a similar size. There are quite substantial bezels around the 14-inch display as well. Measuring in at 16mm or higher on all sides, MSI could have comfortably fit a larger display in this chassis. Luckily the display is matte-finished, rather than glossy, which significantly reduces reflections and cuts down on accidental fingerprints. The GS40 Phantom comes with a typical selection of ports for a gaming laptop. On the left side you’ll find Ethernet, a proprietary power connector for the 150W power brick, a USB 3.0 port, an SD card slot, and two 3.5mm audio jacks for headphones and a microphone. On the right is a HDMI 1.4 port, a USB 3.0 port, and a single USB Type-C port that provides Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 gen 2. Like with the Gigabyte P34W v5 and the new Dell XPS 13 , the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 is great for a number of reasons. It provides 40 Gbps of bandwidth, which is enough for multiple 4K 60 Hz displays or multiple extremely fast external drives. It also supports USB 3.1 gen 2 for 10 Gbps connections and power delivery through an established protocol, and the reversible USB Type-C port is the future of USB connections. On the back of the GS40 you’ll find two large vents, each with fans for the CPU and GPU respectively. The GPU also gets a second vent along the right-hand side, as its higher TDP requires extra cooling. The back panel features a mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connector as well, which is in a convenient location for those who might be docking the GS40 into an external display. 2016-03-02 22:48 Tim Schiesser

47 Here's how you can make (or buy) your very own Centriphone (here's the original clip in case you missed it) If you're interested in giving the rig a shot, Vuignier will gladly accept your pre-order for either the original Centriphone for iPhone 6 / 6s or a Centripro which accommodates a GoPro 3, 3+ or 4. Each is priced at roughly $39 and includes the handle and strings needed to swing it overhead. Vuignier says shipping for both models will begin in April. Vuignier has also made the project open source for the DIY type, offering up the original files so you can print your own rig should you happen to have a 3D printer. 2016-03-02 22:50 (here's the

48 Saving Green: Computer Program Saves Nurseries Water, Plants and Money While UF/IFAS scientists say a Virginia nursery is the only one utilizing the system so far, they hope similar businesses take advantage of the software, so they can reap its benefits in saved water and money. For now, scientists are interested in the irrigation needs of container-grown plants such as anise, gardenias, azaleas, junipers, roses and more. UF/IFAS researchers worked with other UF scientists, the Virginia nursery and an automation technology company to develop the system, called the Container Irrigation Management program (CIRRIG). The weather-based system automatically provides daily irrigation run times for sprinkler-irrigated plants. For the study, conducted at a nursery in Dunnellon, researchers integrated CIRRIG with a programmable logic controller (PLC) to automatically irrigate sweet viburnum in 10-inch diameter containers. The 24-week experiment showed water savings. "The Virginia nursery that helped us develop and test CIRRIG has been using it to successfully control more than 200 irrigation valves," said Jeff Million, a research associate in the UF/IFAS Department of Environmental Horticulture. "We are at the beginning stages of getting this technology out into the field. We have been getting a lot of interest, but only time will tell if the technology will be adopted by other nurseries including those in Florida. " Scientists liken the PLC to a "switchboard" that can be programmed to accept output from CIRRIG through the Internet and then activate irrigation valves in the field. The PLC software used by CIRRIG is currently limited to a laptop or desktop, but it could eventually run on a mobile device, Million said. "Our objective was to test out the 'daily-adjustment' technology in a nursery in Florida," he said. In general, the nurseries can save money from reduced pumping costs and increase revenue from growing plants they previously couldn't grow well, Million said. They can also reduce fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide use. Such businesses must pay to install the PLC-irrigation system and manage the CIRRIG program, but the Virginia nursery covered the cost of the irrigation system upgrade in the first year of the new system, Million said. "Every nursery will be different but that is what the Virginia nursery observed," he said. Million worked on the study with UF/IFAS Department of Environmental Horticulture Professor Tom Yeager. The study is published in the journal HortTechnology and was supported by the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association. 2016-03-02 19:24

49 New laptop program can identify drug resistance from bacterial genomes: Rapid analysis can gives medics drug resistance information in three minutes once genetic sequencing complete The Mykrobe Predictor software, developed by Dr Zamin Iqbal and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, runs on a standard laptop or tablet without the need for any specialist expertise. The program can analyse the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under 3 minutes, once a bacterial sample has been cultured and its DNA sequenced. A study on more than 4,500 retrospective patient samples, published in Nature Communications , shows that Mykrobe Predictor accurately detects antibiotic resistance in two life-threatening bacterial infections: Staphylococcus aureus (one form of which causes MRSA) and tuberculosis (TB). The software is now being evaluated in hospitals in Oxford, Brighton and Leeds in a project led by Professor Derrick Crook, which in collaboration with parallel programmes at UCL and Cambridge University aims to develop whole genome sequencing as a routine tool for the diagnosis and control of infections within the NHS. The programme is funded by the Department of Health and the Wellcome Trust through the joint Health Innovation Challenge Fund. Drug-resistant infections pose a major threat to global health and could in future mean that serious and life-threatening infections become impossible to treat. The problem develops through natural selection. Like other species, bacteria are constantly evolving through subtle changes in their DNA. Some of these changes make them resistant to certain drugs, meaning they are more likely to survive and pass on their resistant traits to other bacteria. One of the best ways to prevent the spread of resistant bacteria is to make sure that patients with an infection are treated quickly with the right type of antibiotic. But to find out which particular strain of bacteria is causing a patient's infection and which drugs it is resistant to, doctors must carry out drug susceptibility testing, where different antibiotics are applied to the bacteria in a petri dish to see whether they kill it. This process can take days, or even months for slow-growing infections like TB. Scientists believe they could obtain the same information much faster by looking directly at the DNA sequence of the bacterium for mutations that are known to cause resistance. However, the interpretation of genetic information often requires a large amount of computing power and the expertise of specialist bioinformaticians. Mykrobe Predictor streamlines this process by automating genome analysis, cross-checking the bacterium's DNA sequence with previous strains to look for resistance-causing mutations and presenting information about the bug in an easy-to-understand format. In this study, the software was able to detect resistance to the five first-line antibiotics in over 99% of Staphylococcus aureus cases, matching the performance of traditional drug sensitivity testing. For TB, where the genetic basis for drug resistance is less well understood, Mykrobe Predictor still matched the performance of current DNA tests (which look at snippets of DNA, but not the whole sequence), detecting 82.6% of resistant infections around 5-16 weeks faster than traditional drug susceptibility testing. However unlike standard 'snippet-based' DNA tests, Mykrobe Predictor can be rapidly updated with a simple software upgrade that allows researchers to detect new resistance mutations as they evolve. A further advantage of Mykrobe is that it can identify infections where a patient's body contains a mixture of both drug-resistant and drug-susceptible bacteria. In this study, the ability to distinguish between these bacterial 'sub-populations' gave Mykrobe an advantage over conventional testing in detecting resistance to second-line TB drugs. This is important for diagnosing infections such as 'extensively drug-resistant TB' (XDR-TB), which is resistant to at least four of the core TB drugs and is considered a global threat to public health by the World Health Organisation. Dr Zamin Iqbal, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, senior author of the paper, said: "One of the barriers to making whole genome sequencing a routine part of NHS care is the need for powerful computers and expertise to interpret the masses of complex data. Our software manages data quickly and presents the results to doctors and nurses in ways that are easy to understand, so they can instinctively use them to make better treatment decisions. " Co-author Professor Derrick Crook, a Consultant Microbiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital and Director of the National Infection Service, Public Health England, said: "Genome sequencing has the potential to transform the way we diagnose and treat bacterial infections in NHS hospitals, but one of the main challenges is developing the right tools to enable us to unlock this information quickly and affordably. Our ultimate goal is to be able to provide complete information on a pathogen within 24 hours of culture, linking this information to a national surveillance database to enable more timely and better targeted patient treatment. " Dr Stephen Caddick, Director of Innovations at the Wellcome Trust, added: "Drug-resistant infections pose a major threat to global public health. Antibiotics that were once lifesavers are in danger of becoming worthless, and within our lifetime we could see minor infections returning as a major public health concern. We urgently need new diagnostic strategies that allow us to better target antibiotic use, and thereby safeguard the effectiveness of our existing antibiotics, and any new drugs that are developed in future. " 2016-03-02 20:28

50 New interactive tool to explore the brain A team of researchers from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and CSIC has developed PyramidalExplorer, a software tool that is able to extract data from the micro-organization of the most abundant and traditional neurons of the cerebral cortex, the pyramidal cells. The application has been developed within the Cajal Blue Brain and Human Brain Project projects, its usage will allow us to explore new hypotheses to understand the human brain and seek solutions to fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's, epilepsy and Parkinson's. This study has combined functional models of pyramidal neurons with data of its architecture in order to interactively identify zones within the neurons that present singular characteristics. Specifically, from three-dimensional images obtained through a high resolution confocal microscopy, an expert can assess the organization of dendritic spines (main targets of excitatory connections in the brain) of this type of neurons by combining morphological information with practical information. This study was applied to a human being, specifically to a pyramidal neuron with 9,000 dendritic spines, although this tool can load data of any species. These results will allow researchers to establish new hypotheses about the functioning and the organization of neural connections. For example, by using this tool, researchers were able to immediately observe that the volume and the area of the apical dendrites were different from the regions corresponding to apical and basal dendritic trees. Besides, the usage of this tool allows us to see the role played by diverse spines groups and their morphological characteristics in subcellular electrogenesis. Today, there are not other software tools of similar characteristics to the developed tool in this study, such as its particular nature of data process and its programmed functionality. The main features of PyramidalExplorer go from three-dimensional navigation on digitized neurons to data filtering operations and content-based information retrieval. This tool has been developed with the programming language C ++ using free softwares such as Qt, that was used to develop the graphical interface, and Open Scene Graph for three-dimensional data visualization. This study was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy and this application can be freely downloaded on the website PyramidalExplorer: http://gmrv.es/pyramidalexplorer/ 2016-03-02 20:28

51 51 Living in the '90s? So are underwater wireless networks: Engineers are speeding them up to improve tsunami detection, walkie-talkies for scuba divers, and search-and- rescue work The flashback is due to the speed of today's underwater communication networks, which is comparable to the sluggish dial-up modems from America Online's heyday. The shortcoming hampers search-and-rescue operations, tsunami detection and other work. But that is changing due in part to University at Buffalo engineers who are developing hardware and software tools to help underwater telecommunication catch up to its over-the-air counterpart. Their work, including ongoing collaborations with Northeastern University, is described in a study -- Software-Defined Underwater Acoustic Networks: Toward a High-Rate Real-Time Reconfigurable Modem -- published in November in IEEE Communications Magazine . "The remarkable innovation and growth we've witnessed in land-based wireless communications has not yet occurred in underwater sensing networks, but we're starting to change that," says Dimitris Pados, PhD, Clifford C. Furnas Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at UB, a co-author of the study. The amount of data that can be reliably transmitted underwater is much lower compared to land- based wireless networks. This is because land-based networks rely on radio waves, which work well in the air, but not so much underwater. As a result, sound waves (such as the noises dolphins and whales make) are the best alternative for underwater communication. The trouble is that sound waves encounter such obstacles as path loss, delay and Doppler which limit their ability to transmit. Underwater communication is also hindered by the architecture of these systems, which lack standardization, are often proprietary and not energy-efficient. Pados and a team of researchers at UB are developing hardware and software -everything from modems that work underwater to open-architecture protocols -- to address these issues. Of particular interest is merging a relatively new communication platform, software-defined radio, with underwater acoustic modems. Traditional radios, such as an AM/FM transmitter, operate in a limited bandwidth (in this case, AM and FM). The only way to pick up additional signals, such as sound waves, is to take the radio apart and rewire it. Software-defined radio makes this step unnecessary. Instead, the radio is capable via computer of shifting between different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is, in other words, a "smart" radio. Applying software-defined radio to acoustic modems could vastly improve underwater data transmission rates. For example, in experiments last fall in Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, New York, graduate students from UB proved that software-defined acoustic modems could boost data transmission rates by 10 times what today's commercial underwater modems are capable of. The potential applications for such technology includes: 2016-03-02 20:27

52 52 Video: The father and son VCs behind the new LocalGlobe seed fund Robin and Saul Klein are the ‘father and son’ VCs behind the new LocalGlobe seed fund ( website , twitter , Medium ). Just recently they led a £1.1 million investment in online mortgage advisor Trussle. It’s likely to be among the first of many. Saul has been actively involved founding and investing in over 100 tech companies in London since at least 1994, Robin for, well, a little longer. We decided to meet up with them and get an idea of how the fund will operate, what it’s like working with family, and where LocalGlobe plans to sit in the London and European investor ecosystem. Saul admits he is more “conceptual”, says Robin, while Robin says he is more analytical. And they are both bullish about the Internet economy and startups, despite the global volatility in the market right now, and the potential downturn of some so-called “unicorns.” In particular, Saul Klein is a passionate about London as a centre for investing across Europe. He says London is “so firmly on the map for startups and scale-ups.” These include the fact that UK GDP is top 5% globally and growing; Internet as a percentage of national GDP is at the top of the G20; London speaks 300 languages; the UK is the largest market other than the US and China for all major tech companies because of the UK consumer’s higher propensity to be mass-market early adopters of technology; Meanwhile, London has inherent and deep institutional strengths across both public and private sectors. But let’s face it, a London-based VC would say that wouldn’t they. Still, it’s hard to argue with the empirical facts on the ground, with over £30bn of new value from the likes of ASOS, Betfair, JustEat, King, MoneySupermarket, Paysafe, Sophos, Rightmove, Markit, Mimecast, Worldpay and Zoopla. Emerging stars include Deliveroo, Farfetch, Funding Circle, Shazam, Transferwise, Worldremit plus Skyscanner and FanDuel, admittedly in Scotland. They are joined by Citymapper, Datasift, Huddle, Improbable, Lyst, Moo, OneFineStay, Secret Escapes, Songkick and Swiftkey. As Saul says, the fact that US tech firms have so much money on their balance sheets right now, that to acquire European tech startups is potentially a great opportunity. How do they think they will compete in the market against many new seed funds? They aren’t worried about the competition “given the supply [of great startups] is so great” says Robin. Plus they plan to take a co-operative approach to investing with other funds in Europe. It’s fair to say that this long-time double-act is going to be around for some time longer in Europe. 2016-03-02 20:16 Mike Butcher

53 Microsoft will soon offer a HoloLens emulator for developers Want to develop for Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality platform but don’t want to pay $3,000 for the developer kit? Until now, it looked like you were out of luck, but as Microsoft announced today , you will soon be able to use a HoloLens emulator to write your applications even if you don’t own the actual hardware. The emulator, as well as all of Microsoft’s other developer tools for HoloLens, will become available before March 30, the shipping date for the first batch of HoloLenses. Using the emulator, developers will be able to test their apps in simulated rooms and walk around it using keyboard commands, a mouse and an Xbox controller. By default, the emulator will come with spatial maps for two different bedrooms, a living room and a great room layout. Developers will also be able to use a HoloLens to scan their own rooms and then use them in the emulator. The emulator will run in its own Hyper-V virtual machine and as far as the apps are concerned, they won’t know whether they are running in an emulator or on the real hardware. The standard tool chest for building “holographic apps” hasn’t changed since Microsoft first walked us through the process of building a basic app. You’ll need Visual Studio and a working knowledge of Unity. To help developers prepare for the release of HoloLens, Microsoft also today announced a video tutorial and other documentation as well. 2016-03-02 20:16 Frederic Lardinois

54 GoTenna, the startup that lets you text without cell signal, raises $7.5M and launches with REI GoTenna , the device for people who want to stay connected when they don’t have cell signal, has found a natural launch partner — outdoor equipment retailer REI. Daniela Perdomo, goTenna’s CEO and co- founder, told me that REI has signed on to be the startup’s exclusive retail launch partner. For the next three months, the only place you’ll be able to buy goTenna, aside from the goTenna website, will in REI stores nationwide (where they’re getting prominent placement, as you can see in the New York store photo above) and the REI website. GoTenna has created a lightweight device (1.8 ounces) that uses Bluetooth technology to pair with your smartphone and then generates long-range radiowaves to connect with other goTenna devices. That means you can send text messages and share your location (via pre-downloaded maps) even when you don’t have a cell connection. It’s not just for use in the great outdoors, but that’s probably the most obvious use case, so REI seems like a natural partner. In a press release, REI category merchandising manager Egan Whitley described goTenna as “an innovative solution for groups and friends who still want to stay in touch via text during their outdoor adventures.” The startup is also announcing that it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Walden Venture Capital, with participation from MentorTech Ventures, BBG Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Wareness.io, Cellular One founder Kenneth Horowitz and Howard Finkelstein. (BBG, which stands for “built by girls”, is a subsidiary of Verizon, which also owns TechCrunch.) Perdomo said the funding will allow her to expand the 13-person goTenna team (well, 13 plus interns). For one thing, she said she’s been “almost a one-person marketing operation,” so she’ll be expanding that part of the company. At the same time, goTenna will also continue to invest in product development, particularly improving the existing hardware through updates to the software and firmware. “It’s not about using it every day,” she added, but rather making sure it’s useful “when it’s your only choice,” like when a group of friends goes into the woods and they need to stay connected. Perdomo also said customers are discovering new uses: “People might buy it for skiing and then realize, ‘Oh, I can use it for traveling abroad.’ Or they might buy it for hiking and then keep it for emergencies.” GoTenna currently costs $199 for a pair of devices. Looking ahead, Perdomo said this is just the first goTenna device, and will ultimately serve as “the basis for a whole stack of technologies that we are developing — firmware, networking protocols, software, hardware addresses — that addresses the need for totally resilient, bottoms up communication infrastructure.” Update: The post has been updated to correct the description of how goTenna works. 2016-03-02 20:16 Anthony Ha

55 No More Voicemail is an app that kills voicemail so callers have to text you instead Voicemail is so last century. The idea of phoning someone then leaving a rambling message when they don’t pick up seems decidedly antiquated in the age of instant connectivity, where friends, family, colleagues and others can be easily reached with a text. Voicemail is so over, in fact, that large corporations like JP Morgan and Coca-Cola have ditched the service entirely. If only consumers had the same option. Well, thanks to a new app simply called No More Voicemail, they now do. Available for both iOS and Android devices, No More Voicemail is a clever solution to the voicemail problem. Today, if you want to actually deactivate voicemail, you would have to contact your carrier and explain that you don’t want the service. That’s a hassle in and of itself. And if you ever want to turn voicemail back on for any reason, you’d have to call the carrier again to re-enable it. No More Voicemail offers a different solution. The app isn’t actually disabling voicemail per the carrier – it only seems like it is. Instead, No More Voicemail uses the conditional call forwarding feature on your phone to send your unanswered calls to a virtual number that will just ring and ring. This is the same concept that’s used today in other legit third-party voicemail apps like YouMail or Google Voice, expect it ditches the idea of offering a hosted voicemail system. Calls won’t be shuffled off to No More Voicemail’s third-party system until you reject or ignore the call. That means you’re able to pick up calls normally when you have time to talk. But if you choose to not take a call, the callers will just hear the phone ring forever, the company claims. Eventually, callers should get tired of waiting for voicemail to pick up and will hang up. (Then hopefully text you instead!) The process of setting up No More Voicemail is straightforward. You’re provided an activation code to copy and paste into your phone’s dialer, which you then call to make the necessary changes. In practice, I found that this process failed the first time I tried it, then succeeded on the second go-round. When testing this further, I declined an incoming call, but found that the phone didn’t ring indefinitely as promised, but rather rang a bit then automatically disconnected the call. Sadly, that’s far from perfect. But even if it’s a little buggy, it did prevent my voicemail from picking up and taking the call on my behalf. And I’m hopeful these kinks will get worked out over time. (I’m using an iPhone 6s running a beta build of iOS on T-Mobile, so it’s possible that I’m not the best test subject, I should point out. Your mileage may vary!) Disabling No More Voicemail uses a similar process as activating the service. This worked as advertised in tests. The app is the latest creation from TelTech Systems, a company that has released a number of telecommunications apps over the years. It’s probably best known for TrapCall, a service released in 2009 that unmasked Caller ID on blocked incoming calls, or its earlier SpoofCard Caller ID spoofing service. “We think voicemail is a thing of the past and that it just makes life a little easier to never have to worry about checking and returning voicemails,” explains TelTech partner on Special Projects, Nate Kapitanski. “If it’s important, people will text you or message you on one of the various messaging apps,” he says. No More Voicemail is supported on all the major carriers at launch, including AT&T, Verizon, T- Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular. The app is a free download on the iTunes App Store and Google Play. 2016-03-02 20:16 Sarah Perez

56 Cisco to acquire Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million as buying spree continues Cisco continued its buying spree today as it announced its intention to acquire Israeli chip designer Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million. Cisco sees this acquisition as a way to bolster its hardware catalog with highly advanced chip technology. “By combining Leaba’s semiconductor expertise with the Cisco engineering team, we will accelerate our plans for Cisco’s next generation product portfolio and bring new capabilities to the market faster,” Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investing team wrote in a blog post announcing the purchase. When the deal closes, the Leaba team will report to Core Hardware Group, led by Cisco senior vice president, Ravi Cherukuri, according to the blog post. The company actually doesn’t even have a shipping product yet, R Ray Wang, founder at Constellation Research told TechCrunch. “They haven’t even finished their prototype. This is an acqui-hire for next generation semi-conductor [technology]. Think networking at the chip level,” he said. This is not the first time the Leaba founding team has launched and sold a cutting edge chip production company, according to report in Globes , an Israeli business publication. The founding team, which consists of CEO Eyal Dagan and CTO Ofer Eini sold Dune Networks to Broadcom for $178 million in 2009. Today’s news comes just the day after the company announced it was buying CliQr , a cloud hybrid services management platform for $260 million and just about a month after it bought Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion . Cisco is walking a fine transformational line here. On one hand, the purchase pattern suggests that the company is trying to pivot from its networking hardware roots to a business centered around services as the CliQr and Jasper Technologies would suggest. Much like IBM, Cisco is looking to the future and trying to use its cash hoard to make strategic purchases to help speed up that transition. At the same time, it’s not quite ready to give up completely on its hardware roots and purchasing a leading-edge semiconductor company suggests that it is still looking to a future where it can continue to lead in the networking hardware space. 2016-03-02 20:16 Ron Miller

57 YouTube invests in female creators YouTube announced this morning two programs aimed at funding and highlighting women’s voices across its video network. One sees the company forging a year-long partnership with U. N. to appoint top female creators as the first Change Ambassadors for the organization’s Sustainable Development Action campaign, where they will advocate for gender equality. The second is an investment in over 50 videos funded through YouTube’s new, global YouTube Spaces program, which put women both in front of and behind the camera. With the U. N. campaign, YouTube announced video creators Ingrid Nilsen , Jackie Aina , Yuya , Taty Ferreira , Hayla Ghazal , Louise Pentland , and Chika Yoshida as Change Ambassadors. As program participants, they will work with the U. N. to serve as role models and “inspire and activate” their fan communities by releasing videos that promote gender equality. Meanwhile, a half dozen female creators from around the world, including Anna Akana (U. S.), Alexys Fleming (U. S.), Julia Veiga Faria (Brazil), Em Ford (U. K.), Nilam Farooq (Germany) and Kuma Miki (Japan), recently worked as Creative Directors across YouTube’s global Spaces – the company’s dedicated production facilities set up around the world. The women mentored others in YouTube Spaces in L. A., London, Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, and Berlin, in an effort to get more female-driven videos produced. The videos were shot on specially designed sets built as part of this program, the company says. The videos emerging from these efforts will include those on topics like women in the workforce, tributes honoring historical female leaders, as well as other original scripted content. Topics may also include health, science, engineering, music and comedy, notes YouTube. Some of the videos created as a part of this inaugural program include those from several big names on YouTube, like Michelle Phan, GloZell, Ali Brustofski, Flavia Calina, Olhos de Nuvens, Ochikeron, mirellativegal and others. The videos will be released beginning today on the YouTube Spaces channel , as well as the creators’ own channels, the company says – just ahead of International Women’s Day arriving on March 8. 2016-03-02 20:16 Sarah Perez

58 Lola, the all-cotton tampon subscription service, soaks up $3 million in seed funding Lola , the first tampon subscription service to use 100 percent cotton tampons, is today announcing the close of a $3 million seed round of funding. The round was led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures with participation from Brand Foundry, BBG Ventures, BoxGroup, VaynerRSE, 14W, Seth Berkowitz, the founders of Warby Parker, Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru and Jonathan Neman, among others. Lola launched back in July after receiving $1.2 million in angel funding. The premise was simple. Replacing chemical-filled tampons from big manufacturers like Playtex and Tampax, Lola created an all organic cotton tampon that would be delivered on-demand in the perfect quantity and composition for its users. Ladies could choose how many super tampons, regular tampons, etc. they needed for a cycle and schedule a set delivery date each month so they never have to run to the grocery store in an emergency. “Contrary to popular belief, cotton isn’t the primary ingredient in most tampons,” said cofounder Alexandra Friedman in an interview this summer. “Tampons are typically made from a blend of the artificial fibers, rayon and polyester, and could also include chemicals and dyes.” But these chemicals often aren’t listed as ingredients on the box, and since we’re usually given our first tampon at a young age from someone we trust, it would be easy to stick with the same brand a mom or a friend gave you as a child. Unfortunately, these chemicals are quite dangerous, especially when exposed to a lady’s private bits. Lola’s tampons, complete with a plastic applicator, are made with 100 percent cotton to avoid any of these nasty chemicals. The company plans to use the funding to double its team, specifically in operations and customer service. The new cash should also help Lola in an increasingly competitive market — startups like Cora and Le Parcel have come onto the scene with a similar subscription-based offering. “To us, the introduction of new feminine care startups to market further validates the importance of not only all-natural options but also knowing what’s in your products and having all the information to make conscious decisions,” said cofounder Jordana Kier. “We don’t want to just make a splash with controversial period talk; we want to drive this cultural shift.” The Lola wouldn’t be too specific when asked about new product verticals, but did say that they want to be “a brand that provides feminine health and hygiene products for women throughout their lives.” With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine Lola developing feminine hygiene pads or even products that help women transition through menopause. You can learn more about Lola here . 2016-03-02 20:16 Jordan Crook

59 Are site reliability engineers the next data scientists? It’s no secret that “data scientist” is one of the hottest job titles going. DJ Patil famously proclaimed data scientist “ The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century ” before moving on to join the White House as the first chief data scientist of the U. S. Once a rarefied in-house role at a few leading Internet companies such as LinkedIn and PayPal, data science has since grown into a global phenomenon, impacting organizations of all sizes across many industries. More recently, a buzzy new job title has emerged from the same group of companies: that of site reliability engineer, or SRE. Will SREs follow the same path of rapid growth that data scientists did before them? Before we dive into that question, let’s consider the context that has led to the creation of site reliability engineering. Over the last 15 years, the largest Internet properties have quietly led a revolution in IT technology. The reason is simple: Traditional corporate data center techniques simply would not efficiently scale up to the level that is required to run a global service like Google or Facebook. Instead, these companies have had to innovate at all layers of the technology stack, from hardware to networking to applications. In many cases, the resulting building blocks have been released as open source software packages, or have inspired third parties to create their own versions. Now, organizations ranging from startups to the largest Fortune 500 enterprises are adopting these technologies for their own purposes. Examples of this phenomenon are numerous. To pick just a few: A unifying theme of these technologies is higher efficiency and lower cost at larger scale. But source code won’t solve these challenges in isolation. It must be complemented by new management techniques, methodologies and tools. In other words, the big picture needs to consider people and process as much as it does software. For inspiration on the people and process front, we can similarly look to the web-scale Internet companies. Many of the early innovators have rallied around the concept of site reliability engineering. Ben Treynor, who joined Google as a site reliability tsar in 2003, has described SRE as “what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.” Over the last decade, the team that Treynor started at Google has grown from a handful of production engineers to more than 1,000 SREs. Moreover, the SRE concept has been embraced by other major Internet companies, including Dropbox , Airbnb , Netflix and many more. Job listings site Indeed now lists hundreds of SRE positions. The SRE community now even has its own conference, dubbed SREcon. Andrew Widdowson, an SRE at Google, relates the discipline to competitive auto sports: “Our work is like being a part of the world’s most intense pit crew. We change the tires of a race car as it’s going 100mph.” As any competitive racing fan knows, a faster engine and chassis doesn’t mean much without a world-class pit crew, equipped with the right tools, techniques and strategies to keep it in the lead. In Formula 1 racing, the days of winning races based on gut instinct are waning. Today’s winning teams are differentiated by real-time streaming data analytics as much as they are by pistons and tires. It’s all well and good to be inspired by the large Internet companies, but how do we integrate the SRE discipline into existing enterprise IT teams? Just like companies like Cloudera packaged the early “tribal knowledge” around data engineering and turned it into turnkey products accessible to a mass IT audience, a new batch of companies is packaging the principles of SRE for the masses. Recently introduced Rocana Ops is an example. [Disclosure: I am an investor in Rocana Ops.] Rocana Ops gives administrators visibility into the inner workings of their data centers and applications. Just as a Bloomberg terminal enables brokers to monitor and investigate activity across markets, Rocana Ops uses big data techniques, combined with data visualization, to guide IT operators to the root cause of any issue in their complex IT infrastructure. Companies using Rocana Ops to power their IT operations gain the capabilities of the site reliability engineer discipline, without the steep learning curve. Consider the example of a contemporary multi-channel e-commerce application. A typical modern system might be comprised of core business logic implemented in Scala, linked to a legacy off-the-shelf Java order management system, backed by multiple transactional databases (say, both MongoDB and Oracle), fronted by a Node.js API tier. Some pieces of this puzzle may be deployed in an on-premise data center, while other components live on a public cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. There will be dependencies on third-party services (perhaps Stripe for payments), and a mix of web endpoints and native mobile apps for Android and iOS interacting with the core system through an API gateway. Now, consider a typical business-critical problem that could crop up: request timeouts are driving shopping cart abandonment by mobile app users. How long would it take to notice the problem to begin with? Once the problem is identified, given such a complex web of interacting technologies, where would one even start to look for the underlying root cause? Is it a network issue, a database performance problem or an application error introduced in the most recent release? With an SRE-inspired approach, system logs and telemetry are continuously collected, in real time, from all components of the system, and stored in a central data store. Machine-learning algorithms identify anomalous events (such as the rash of timeouts from mobile devices that represent a statistical outlier compared to historical patterns) and surface them to the attention of IT staff. A rich web interface incorporating data visualizations guides the admin to the most relevant log events, highlighting other contemporaneous behavior changes observed across all elements of the IT infrastructure, wherever they reside. Armed with the ability to quickly narrow in on the relevant data, the underlying problem can be identified. The new stack is infiltrating IT infrastructure already, driven at a grass-roots level by progressive developers and IT operators. Given that, it’s important for IT teams to respond proactively and holistically to the change that is afoot. Here are a few recommendations on how to approach this: How long will it be until we have a Chief Site Reliability Engineer of the United States? Given the challenges of rolling out healthcare.gov in recent years, this may be a case of “the sooner, the better.” Regardless, while we await that milestone, it’s not too soon to consider the implications of the SRE discipline in your own organization. 2016-03-02 20:16 Donald Fischer

60 Facebook faces German antitrust privacy probe Facebook’s data harvesting practices are facing yet another probe in Europe. This time the German federal competition authority (the Bundeskartellamt ) is initiating proceedings — rather than it being a European Member State’s national data protection watchdog. So rather than privacy regulations being the jumping off point for this latest probe of Facebook’s business practices, the company is being investigated ostensibly on antitrust grounds. But its data harvesting practices are being linked with German competition law on account of Facebook’s dominant market position in the country. News of the investigation was reported earlier by Fortune . The specific accusation is that Facebook is using unlawful terms and conditions related to its collection and use of user data, and given the T&Cs are a condition for access to its service the suspicion is that could constitute an abuse of a dominant market position. “It is difficult for users to understand and assess the scope of the agreement accepted by them. There is considerable doubt as to the admissibility of this procedure, in particular under applicable national data protection law. If there is a connection between such an infringement and market dominance, this could also constitute an abusive practice under competition law,” writes the German competition authority. “Dominant companies are subject to special obligations. These include the use of adequate terms of service as far as these are relevant to the market. For advertising-financed internet services such as Facebook, user data are hugely important. For this reason it is essential to also examine under the aspect of abuse of market power whether the consumers are sufficiently informed about the type and extent of data collected,” adds Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt, in a statement on the action. The social network giant has faced plenty of privacy-related investigations and orders from European DPAs in recent times — including receiving a formal order from the French DPA last month to stop tracking non-users via cookies and social plug-ins; and back in summer 2015 court action from the Belgian DPA over a similar tracking issue. In the latter case Facebook later agreed to change how its site operates in the country. The Bundeskartellamt’s move is interesting as it seeks to link similar data-protection related privacy concerns with antitrust law — which carries higher potential fines for companies found to be abusing their market position, and involves better resourced departments carrying out investigations than the over-worked, under resourced DPAs. The German competition authority’s action is also targeting Facebook Inc., USA, the Irish subsidiary of the company and Facebook Germany GmbH, Hamburg. In fighting privacy related actions initiated by European DPAs Facebook has typically tried to use a jurisdiction-based argument to its advantage, claiming individual member states do not have jurisdiction over its regional business, and arguing instead that it is only bound by the Irish DPA, as its European HQ is situation in Ireland. Using a competition law route to press privacy concerns against Facebook may be one way for European countries to workaround that argument. The Bundeskartellamt’s action also follows comments made by the European Commission’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, at the start of this year in which she suggested dominant tech platforms that harvest vast amounts of personal data might in future be considered in breach of the overarching EU’s competition rules — based on their data holdings. So this is not the first time European competition authorities are linking systematic data- collection with antitrust concerns. “If a few companies control the data you need to cut costs, then you give them the power to drive others out of the market,” Vestager told the DLD conference back in January. “If a company’s use of data is so bad for competition that it outweighs the benefits, we may have to step in to restore a level playing field,” adding that her department would “continue to look carefully at this issue”. The Bundeskartellamt notes it is conducting its Facebook antitrust probe “in close contact with the competent data protection officers, consumer protection associations as well as the European Commission and the competition authorities of the other EU Member States”. At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment. 2016-03-02 20:16 Natasha Lomas

61 Augment raises over $3 million in series A funding from Salesforce Ventures Augment , a Paris-based Augmented Reality (AR) startup announced this morning that they raised more than $3 million from Salesforce Ventures to further expand company operations and also specific integrations with Salesforce software. This brings the total investment amount raised since launch to $4.7 million. Augment’s AR software, which is built on PTC’s Vuforia platform , has both B2B and consumer implementations, however the B2B model seems the most interesting and the one with the most runway. Their B2B offering specializes in helping vendors visualize product placement for the merchants with whom they work. For example, a brand rep can help a merchant visualize—prior to ordering —which product end cap to choose and what it will look like when integrated into the store location. Based on the funding, it should come as no surprise that Augment is also, as their press release states: Augment’s AR technology itself is not necessarily something we haven’t seen before. In many ways, it reminds me of AR demos I’ve seen as far back as 2011. It is simple and mostly (but not exclusively) uses target markers to orient. Markers are flat images that are used to identify where the augmented content should go when you view a space with your device or smart glasses. However, it is the simple and practical nature of Augment’s platform that makes it interesting to me. What’s important here is that Augment has figured out a practical business model for Augmented Reality as this imaging technology begins its slow climb out of what Gartner calls the Trough Of Disillusionment in their Hype Cycle model for determining technology relevance. For the record, I’m not quite as pessimistic as Gartner is about AR’s climb to productivity. It’s nice to see the technology actually demonstrating value as a business tool instead of only behaving as a marketing enhancement like we’ve seen here and here . Additionally, I think it’s smart that Augment’s strategy is focused on building their own platform to ease repeated AR visualization efforts rather than causing sales reps and/or vendors to require single “one off” projects each time they need to realize their AR needs. Augment counts brands such as Coca Cola Germany and L’Oreal among its 200 clients. 2016-03-02 20:16 Jay Donovan

62 Jobbatical, the marketplace for tech gigs abroad, scores $2M led by USV and LocalGlobe Jobbatical , the Estonia-headquartered job matching site for tech gigs abroad, has raised a $2 million funding round led by Union Square Ventures, and Saul Klein and Robin Klein’s LocalGlobe. Previous investor Smartcap also participated. Launched in late 2014, the startup is on a mission to build a global marketplace for what it calls “career adventures”. It does this by matching the “skill set and travel aspirations” of tech and startup professionals with companies worldwide who are in search of talent. The site currently lists jobs outside of the typical tech hubs and in so-called emerging tech cities, such as a backend developer in Hong Kong, a UX researcher in Penang, and a digital marketing manager in Vienna. To that end, when Karoli Hindricks, co-founder of Jobbatical, first hit on the idea of creating a marketplace for tech and other talent to find a job sabbatical abroad, she wasn’t sure how big the opportunity would be. The site initially pitched ‘short-term jobs with life-changing experiences’ and in turn promised to help employers hire from a pool of skilled people looking to temporarily work in a different country. That much remains, she told me during a call. However it turns out that Jobbatical is not only resonating with workers who want to take a ‘career break’ or combine work with the experience of living abroad, but is tapping into the changing nature of work itself that is seeing people change jobs (and even careers) more frequently than ever and work is increasingly ephemeral. A site like Jobbatical also exposes the “lie” implicitly told by both employer and employee: that is that a job is for life, when of course it isn’t, and even if it was, an employee probably has no intention of sticking around indefinitely anyway. Instead, Hindricks says, when both parties are up front about the potentially short or fixed term nature of a hire, the outcome is often more productive and a better experience for both parties. That’s a sentiment echoed by LocalGlobe’s Saul Klein in a statement: “The world of work is changing fast, and Karoli’s vision of millions of people one day soon taking 7-to-10 ‘Jobbaticals’ over 10 years, instead of working a single job over the same period, is one we wholeheartedly share,” he says. Meanwhile, in typical job matching fashion, Jobbatical generates revenue by taking a small commission on each successful hire, and plans to launch additional supporting services to help new employees relocate. The company claims to have built a talent pool of 30,000 plus people, which presumably equates to registrations. However, more substantive, in its first year the startup says more than 1,200 companies across more than 40 countries have used the platform, resulting in over 7,000 job applicants and over 300 successful matches. “We actually change people’s lives,” adds Hindricks. 2016-03-02 20:16 Steve

63 Mozilla tests the waters for Firefox OS IoT apps, including a Samantha-style virtual assistant Back in December, Mozilla called it a day with its failed Firefox OS for mobile business, and said it would pivot the technology into a new Internet of Things strategy. Amid a good dose of skepticism that a platform (and organization) that failed in one area can succeed in another that is arguably even more complex, Mozilla has laid out the first projects in its IoT shortlist. Get ready for a intelligent “personal user agent”, a smart home initiative, a crowdsourced network based on sensors and a voice interface for IoT devices. Mozilla also says it is now looking for community members to help develop and test in each of the areas: Project Link is described by Mozilla as an “our personal user agent that understands your preferences for how you want to interact with the world of devices in your home, and automate your connected world for you.” Originally this project was called FoxLink, and it looks like the idea here is for Link to learn from your preferences to be able to control connected devices without you getting involved, although it’s also controlled by you. The kind of intelligence Mozilla seems to be going for here reminds me more than a little of the personal assistant Samantha as envisioned in the film Her. Mozilla says that this project is still at a very early stage. The aim of Project Sensor Web , meanwhile, is to create a network of sensors that can supply crowdsourced data that would be accessible by everyone, rather than proprietary. I’d argue that this is the open web riposte to services like IBM’s Watson, which is bringing together a mountain of public and private data but under a proprietary umbrella. Given IBM’s acquisition of the Weather Company, it’s maybe more than a coincidence that the first pilot project for Sensor Web will be a crowdsourced PM2.5 air pollution sensor network. Here’s how Mozilla visualizes Sensor Web will work: Project Smart Home is Mozilla’s “middle ground” answer to Apple Homekit and DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Essentially it’s a platform that Mozilla proposes to offer to hardware and software makers to run their connected home devices. For what it’s worth, it seems to have a potentially more commercial mandate than the Sensor Web project, if a little hesitation, too: “People want affordable, easy-to-use smart home technology, but some of life’s everyday problems can’t be solved using “in a box” systems. People could solve these problems through DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi, but these solutions are far too complicated for most people,” Mozilla writes. “There is a clear market gap… but we don’t know if consumers really want or need something to fill this gap.” Mozilla says the next phases of Project Smart Home will be to research more about what’s missing in today’s smart home, including the limitations of existing solutions. The fourth and final project is called Vaani , and if Link is the intelligence of Samanta, Vaani wants to be its voice. Essentially this is an Echo-list voice interface that developers can add to their apps or to a piece of hardware so that users can interact more naturally. The first efforts here, Mozilla says, will be around interactions at home. “What’s the temperature in my house?” or “Please turn off the lights upstairs”, with each linking respectively to a smart thermostat or lighting system, seem to be the kinds of commands/queries that would get included. Again, I know that there are a lot of skeptics out there about the potential for Firefox OS given its track record so far. Many also believe that Mozilla should be focussing more developers for its clearly strongest area, which is its web browser. I agree that it definitely should, but am also happy to see the group trying to see what mileage may be left in Firefox OS before giving it up for good. IoT is still nascent and taking an open web approach to developing it, in constrast to a lot of proprietary work going on elsewhere, is not a bad thing. 2016-03-02 20:16 Ingrid Lunden

64 Delivery Hero to exit China amid “anything but sane” competition Berlin-based Delivery Hero has built up a large network of online food ordering and delivery operations globally that was valued at over $3 billion as of its last fundraise, but it has now decided to call it quits in one of the biggest markets in the world. TechCrunch has learned, and now confirmed, that Delivery Hero is getting out of China after facing aggressive competition from local startups, which include the likes of Ele.me and Baidu Waimai. Delivery Hero plans to divest Waimai Chaoren (“Takeout Superman”), over the next couple of months. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, as the saying goes. We first got wind of the news from an anonymous tip, and Delivery Hero’s co-founder and CEO Niklas Östberg has confirmed the details. Östberg says rivals intent on scaling are offering cut- price and even free services, and Delivery Hero doesn’t have the appetite to invest the sums it would need to meet the challenge: Delivery Hero is not disclosing details about potential buyers, or whether it will simply shut down the operation completely. “We are evaluating all options,” Östberg said. Our original tipster claimed that 1,000 jobs will be affected. Östberg says the number of employees is well below 1,000. The larger figure may be based on contractors who ran deliveries for Waimai Chaoren. But the food business is not unlike the race among transportation startups. Both require significant cash injections as mere table stakes. This is not only to use on running, investing and improving existing operations, but to subsidise marketing and business development in a category where — both for users and the contractors the startups need to make their businesses work — there may be little in the way of brand loyalty. And raise they do. Baidu Waimai is supposedly collecting $500 million to invest in its logistics. Ele.me is reportedly raising $1.25 billion led by Alibaba , having already raised more than $1 billion in the past. Notably, Ele.me’s other investors include Uber’s big rival in China, Didi Kuaidi, which confirmed in November 2015 that it has put money into the startup in a strategic deal that will see Ele.me use Didi’s network of vehicles to help deliver food. And Yummy77 has picked up investment from Amazon. Meanwhile, Meituan-Dianping, which also offers Groupon-style daily deals, announced a massive $3.3 billion round at an $18 billion valuation in January . In that context, Delivery Hero’s vertical food-only business in China appears almost quaint in size, so you can see why the company is now looking for a buyer for the operations — and why now might be a useful time to try to sell it. In many of these cases, the food businesses are aligning with the larger logistics plays. Uber, the big name in transportation services, has raised billions of dollars in venture capital to date — including hundreds of millions specifically for Uber China — but it has yet to enter the food race in that market. However, it has been building out UberEats in the U. S. and counts Baidu (backer of Baidu Waimai) as an investor. On top of all this, Delivery Hero itself may be firming up its business for bigger battles. When it raised $110 million in 2015, the company was considering this the last round ahead of an IPO, so this could be part of the company’s bid to improve its books and balance sheet ahead of a potential listing. A shift from markets that are expensive to operate in could also mean more attention on new services: Delivery Hero has also been quietly working on a new B2B logistics platform called Valk Fleet. 2016-03-02 20:16 Ingrid Lunden

65 MedyMatch raises $2M to bring AI to medical imaging MedyMatch Technology bills itself as an artificial intelligence healthcare startup. It’s applying AI in the form of “deep vision and advanced cognitive analytics” to the analysis of medical imaging scans to help radiologists or emergency department physicians recognise hard to spot abnormalities and in turn make better decisions. To further develop and market its tech, the Tel Aviv and Boston-based company has raised a $2 million seed round from several private and institutional investors. These include Genesis Capital Advisors, and Exigent Alternative Capital. As it stands today, MedyMatch is applying its tech to the area of stroke diagnosis, ensuring that stroke victims are given the correct treatment. That’s because, I’m told, there are generally two major types of stroke, each requiring very different treatment. When that treatment is applied incorrectly, not only can it be life threatening but also the difference between returning to a relatively normal life or needing further and costly care indefinitely. One type of stroke is where someone’s blood vessel bursts in the brain and that person begins to bleed, while the other type is a clot in a blood vessel, where the blood stops flowing to that part of the brain. In the case of a blood clot, the doctor would prescribe a clot busting drug which would open up the blood vessels to get the blood flowing again. However, if the stoke has resulted from a burst vessel and the doctor accidentally prescribes the clot busting drug, it will increase the flow of the bleed, causing severe damage. That, of course, is where MedyMatch comes in. “With such a small window to make the right call on a stroke patient, doctors misdiagnose them approximately 30 per cent of the time,” Michael Rosenberg, MedyMatch’s CFO and co-founder, tells me. “MedyMatch compares billions of data points in images to give the physician in the emergency room an augmented set of eyes on the medical imaging they are looking at and can easily help the doctor pinpoint the location of the bleed and how bad it is. It is essentially a second look and a second opinion to support or refute the doctor’s initial diagnosis.” In other words, AI is being used to give radiologists or physicians a second — and potentially better — pair of eyes. Though not on the scale of a stroke, I was once called back by a hospital when it was determined that I had in fact fractured my leg after initially being told I hadn’t. In that case, the second pair of eyes was provided by a technician but could easily be a computer via deep vision AI. Fun fact: Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO of gig search engine and recommendation platform Songkick , who has a background in machine learning, worked on something similar for his Masters. “I worked on a system that could help process breast cancer biopsy scans faster – the idea was that a machine could pair with a pathologist and help to do some of the more mechanical aspects of diagnosis, thus saving the human time in processing the more edge cases,” he told me after Google acquired London-based AI startup DeepMind in early 2014. Meanwhile, also impressive, MedyMatch recently appointed Gene Saragnese as Chairman and CEO. Prior to joining the startup, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Phillips Imaging Systems, the multi-billion dollar medical imaging division of Phillips Healthcare. Before that Saragnese headed up the CT, Molecular imaging and image processing divisions within GE Healthcare, and prior to that he was the overall GE Healthcare Chief Technology Officer and the General Manager of GE’s MRI business. Not a bad hire by anybody’s standards. 2016-03-02 20:16 Steve

66 Africa’s Commercial Drones Take Off Some of Africa’s first commercial drone startups are generating clients and income. South Africa’s Rocketmine and Ghana’s Aeroshutter are completing services such as 3D volumetric image processing, aerial advertising, and music video production for multinational mining companies, global telecoms firms, and African pop stars. This precedes the anticipated debut of commercial drone delivery in Africa, which could be one to two years off. Based in Johannesburg, Rocketmine provides “aerial data solutions” in mining, agriculture, water and forestry, and civil engineering. It expects to book just over $1 million in revenue in 2016, according to CEO Chris Clark, and received South Africa’s first Commercial Operating License in 2015 under the country’s new Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems ( RPAS ) regulations. A self-declared “tech geek,” Clark saw the potential for aerial data services working for digital media company Public Display Technologies (PDT). He noticed one of his mining clients struggling with human data collection and attempting to operate their own broken drone. “I listened to the problems and started thinking about how to plug those holes with technology,” Clark told TechCrunch. “We quickly realized the potential for safe, affordable, and prompt aerial data collection…and turned it into a scalable business.” Clark formed Rocketmine in 2013, as a startup spinoff of PDT. The company’s initial capital was “self-funded and bootstrapped,” but he noted Rocketmine will announce a major investor in 2016. Rocketmine now has 7 pilots, operates a fleet of 15 eBee drones, and conducts business in South Africa, Nigeria, and Mozambique. “We’ll fly in Africa wherever the requests come from,” said Clark. Big clients include mining giants Anglo American and BHP Billiton. One of Rocketmine’s customer solutions is quantifying mine stockpile volumes using aerial volumetric 3D mapping. “Previously employees would walk over these 40 meter piles with GPS devices, which was dangerous and less accurate. Now what used to take half a day takes half an hour and we get volume calculations down to 0.025 percent accuracy in variation to standard GPS-supplied data,” explained Clark. Rocketmine runs itself more as a startup airline than a drone company. All of its operators have manned aviation pilot licenses and the venture has structured a training program that resembles a commercial airline cadet program. “We even give them wings and bars on their shoulders when they graduate to keep the airline feel,” said Clark. This approach aligns with South Africa’s recent commercial drone legislation, which regulates and licenses the sector under the Civil Aviation Authority —the country’s FAA equivalent. While Clark sees South Africa’s advanced commercial drone regulation as structured to ensure safety, he believes, “Africa’s drone environment overall is still less institutionalized than the U. S. and offer’s a lot of space for entrepreneurs to experiment.” Ghanaian startup Aeroshutter is testing a number of new commercial drone services, alongside those it already provides. Founded by 30 year old Kwamena Hazel, the company offers aerial photography, commercial property surveillance, and ads. A graduate of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Hazel described his penchant for tech gadgets and entrepreneurship. He got into drones as a hobby while working as a bank IT specialist and soon saw commercial applications. “If you are an entrepreneur you look for shortfalls and opportunities. I started to see them in photography and technical topography,” he told TechCrunch. “I realized getting a higher perspective in Ghana could serve a niche and drone services could actually be a business with many applications.” Hazel found the American blog Droneabove.com and sought advice from its founder Justin Edwards. “He sent me books on how to start the business and perform aerial photography and that helped us launch the company and our first customers.” Aeroshutter now has 6 staff operating a fleet of DGI drones with SD card camera’s running Pix4D and Dronedeploy mapping software. It charges from $5K- $15K per project, according to Hazel, and has done work in Ghana for Best Western, TEDx, Vodaphone, and Numont Mining. In 2015, Aeroshutter shot footage for local artist Stonebwoy’s music video that went on to win at Ghana’s 4Syte Music Video Awards. On the regulatory front, Aeroshutter is a registered company in Ghana, but is operating in what remains a largely unregulated space. “We are waiting on forthcoming policies from Ghana’s Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA),” said Hazel. In the meantime, he and Aeroshutter counterparts formed an industry association, DronePilotsGH, and have offered GCAA input on commercial guidelines. “We hope they make the right choices, don’t overly restrict us or put burdensome fees on us.” Aeroshutter funds itself by operating revenue, but is in dialogue with investors. Hazel said the company looks to move into more sophisticated commercial activities in agriculture, construction, and mining and build out initiatives in drone advertising (Aero Ads) and drone racing (Aero Arcade). Drone delivery could be in the company’s cards, but Hazel believes the firm needs more investment. “We are watching what Amazon may come up with. With funding it could happen for us, but drone delivery is a bit more complicated.” Rocketmine CEO Chris Clark also sees opportunities and constraints for commercial drone delivery in Africa. “There’s more need and a more open physical environment here for highways in the sky for 1000s of unmanned aircraft. But for now we are more focused on photographic data capture, delivery, and analysis. That’s the low hanging fruit,” he said. “To do commercial delivery, I don’t think the technology or price points are there yet. To deliver a 1 kilo payload you’d probably need a 6-7 kilogram drone…at a transaction cost of around R250K [$16K]. And we’re still dealing with drone battery life of about a half an hour. That doesn’t allow us to really close the loop on last-mile delivery just yet”” While commercial drone couriers in Africa may be years off, initiatives are currently underway to make it happen. Swiss led enterprise Flying Donkey is working on unmanned, robotic, flying vehicles to deliver heavy cargo across Africa. They’ve started research in Kenya and are projected to test in 2017. Another endeavor, Afrotech, is directing the Red Line project to launch open source cargo drones and drone routes across the continent. Red Line expects to open its first drone port in Rwanda in 2018, project director Jonathan Ledgard told TechCrunch via email. Moving forward, Rocketmine CEO Chris Clark sees a prominent role for unmanned aircraft in the continent’s tech sector. “If there’s any kind of technology that’s going to make a massive big impact in Africa it’s going to be drones,” he said. “This really speaks to the lack of infrastructure and a more experimental approach to drones in Africa. As the technology and entrepreneurs adapt, the possibilities to deliver goods and services to rural areas and come up with leapfrog social and commercial applications are infinite.” 2016-03-02 20:16 Jake Bright

67 What Lending Club’s falling share price means for the P2P lending sector Lending Club , the largest P2P lending platform in the U. S., has seen its share price drop by more than 50 percent since December 10; the price per share on the NASDAQ Stock Market dropped from $14 to less than $7 (current price per share will vary). So what is the reason for such a precipitous decline in the share price of the world’s leading P2P lender, and what does it tell us about the P2P lending industry? The table below shows the company’s financial condition in Q3 2014 (the data available at IPO), and Q3 2015. Because Lending Club reports for Q4 of the preceding year only in February of the subsequent year, only Q3 2014 data were made available to the investors at the date of IPO, so we compared Q3 2014 indices with Q3 2015 indices. As the table above shows, the company’s business volume has doubled over the past year, and its net income has become positive. This is what makes the fintech sector so attractive: Because financial transactions can be conducted completely online, lenders’ net income margin can reach and exceed 30 percent. In my view, the share price fall has many causes that exist far from the company’s performance indices. Let’s explore the most important of these causes. The discovery that Ezubao , one of the largest P2P platforms in China, was in fact a classic Ponzi scheme, with approximately 95 percent of loan applications on the platform being false, has had a significant impact. The actions of the Ezubao management who have been arrested did material damage not only to the platform’s investors (according to the Chinese and American media reports, investors’ losses reached $7.6 billion), but also to the sector in general: In response to the news that Ezubao was a financial pyramid, Lending Club share prices fell 8 percent. Yirendai , a subsidiary of CreditEase and the first public P2P platform in China, suffered a 29 percent fall in share price because of the news. However, for companies like Lending Club, Prosper or Funding Circle , the risk of fraud is much lower thanks to a much more sophisticated regulatory environment. Where the SEC and FCA are closely monitoring the activities of P2P lenders, this was not true in Ezubao’s case. Furthermore, in the U. S., the maximum granted loan amount is $35,000 (compared to unlimited on the Ezubao platform), and the likes of Lending Club must maintain up-to-date data on the returns of loans granted through the platform. It is possible that when Santander recently announced it was selling around a billion loans purchased through Lending Club, it had a knock-on effect on share price. In reality, the situation in Santander has little to do with the P2P market: The bank had a very large consumer lending portfolio, and the bank incurred substantial losses from them, but these losses were not associated with the loans purchased through Lending Club. When news broke that JP Morgan had purchased Lending Club loans from Santander, and the transaction was carried out with a premium to par value of the loans, it confirmed that Santander lost no money from Lending Club loans. It appears that Lending Club loans are OK, but the bad taste still lingers, and Lending Club shares were impaired, despite the fact that nothing bad has happened. Quite the contrary: Lending Club’s credit quality turned out to be better than expected when issuing loans, because the loans issued at par were paid above par. Companies’ share price slump often attracts legal companies in the hope of making money from “investor rights protection.” Once Lending Club’s share price fell significantly below the IPO price, several legal companies immediately declared an investigation on the accuracy of Lending Club’s communications with its investors. A request from the California Department of Business Oversight regarding a number of platforms, such as Lending Club, Prosper, SoFi, CircleBack Lending, Affirm, Avant, OnDeck Capital, CAN Capital, Kabbage, Funding Circle, Bond Street, PayPal, Square and Fundbox, also serves for these legal companies as an indirect invitation to start an investigation. The reason for the request has not been disclosed, and no action has been taken by the regulator. In my opinion, such investigations against Lending Club (when even the subject of an investigation is not clear), will carry no long-term threat to the company business, and, in the end, lead nowhere (except for, perhaps, a boost to lawyers’ income). Nevertheless, the news, again, had a significant negative impact on Lending Club share price. In a recent two-month span, Lending Club raised its loan rates twice: Once caused by a rise in the U. S. Federal Reserve System rate, and once more in order to assess loan risks more precisely. The total raise for December and January made up 0.57 percent on the average among the loan grades (see more detailed in the table below). Analysis of the rise, by Lending Club advisors (largely misunderstood because there was no proper legend to the graph they provided), said defaults on a segment of Lending Club loans had actually accounted for 8 percent and not 4 percent, as expected. The fact that the purpose of the graph was to show that some of the loans have higher defaults compared to others, while in general Lending Club loans perform on track, was not properly addressed. That caused another 7 percent drop in Lending Club share price, although there is nothing to be afraid of as the loans actually perform as they should. Lending Club issued a clarification about that, but the bad taste lingered. During the last couple of months we’ve seen more and more posts that risks to the economy are growing and the P2P sector will be mostly affected. Even the former chairman of FSA, Adair Turner, warned in an interview about the risks of P2P lending during periods of economic instability. Though listening to ex bosses of FSA might be useful in some occasions, I prefer sticking to facts. Risk profile of P2P loans originated by Lending Club and Prosper are very much similar to risk profile of credit card loans. And as experience tells us (rather than assumptions), investing in P2P loans is profitable even in a recession. Overall, most fears about the company and the P2P sector are actually farfetched, and in the course of time, and with growing understanding of the sector by an increasing number of investors, these fears will be allayed. In my opinion, we can expect another year of considerable growth of business volumes and capitalization for such companies as Lending Club, Prosper and other P2P platforms. However, recent events have just led to a perfect storm, impacting the share price of one of the P2P sector’s leading stars. 2016-03-02 20:16 Mike Lobanov

68 Chase down those ZZZ’s with new Sleepfulness app If you’ve ever looked at meditation and thought “that stuff just sends me to sleep,” you may just be onto something. Mindfulness Everywhere , better known for its successful mindfulness and meditation app buddhify , recently released Sleepfulness. The new app helps you pull the plug on yet another long and horrific day, and dispatches you off to slumberland. “A good night’s sleep means you have a gentler, brighter, and more focused day,” says Rohan Gunatillake, the executive producer of the app. “Sleepfulness brings the tried and tested techniques of mindfulness to this important aspect of our lives.” The app itself is free, and comes with 10 tracks. If you want more, you’ll have to cough up some cash to access a wider toolkit of torpidity. Additional content packs cost $2.99 each, and include a choice of a “relieving stress” pack, a “softening anxiety” pack and a “working with pain” pack. Stress, anxiety and pain? Sounds like it’s the perfect companion if you’re in the process of building a startup. In addition to helping you sleep, the app is designed to help explore mindfulness, and it builds up analytics to help discover why Mr. Sandman keeps skipping your apartment in the evenings. The apps are available now for both Android and iOS . 2016-03-02 20:16 Haje Jan

69 HBO will launch streaming services in Brazil and Argentina this year HBO announced today it would be expanding its streaming footprint with the launch of standalone streaming services in Brazil and Argentina, which are set to go by year’s end. These join the recently announced standalone service arriving in Spain , also before year’s end, as well as the network’s streaming services that are live now in nine countries worldwide (U. S., Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Colombia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore). News of the South American expansion was unveiled today at Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media and Telecom Conference, where CEO Richard Plepler detailed the network’s various efforts with its over-the-top services, and responded to questions about the performance of HBO NOW in the U. S. The company, as you may recall, was criticized earlier this year for having grown HBO NOW to “only” 800,000 subscribers. Plepler again reiterated that HBO is investing in content that will appeal to the streaming demographic, including programs from Jon Stewart and Bill Simmons. He also pointed to the network’s deal with Vice, which will provide a nightly newscast to HBO NOW viewers. When these shows launch later this year, HBO will increase its marketing push for HBO NOW, the CEO said. “When that comes on this summer and into the year we will start marketing accordingly, using a lot of that content to attack what we think is a real opportunity in the digital space,” said Plepler, as reported by Variety. “We have not turbo-charged the direct marketing as much as we will in the coming months.” Plepler also confirmed that HBO will remain under the Time Warner umbrella instead of being spun out, and announced that HBO and Summit Entertainment extended their exclusive output agreement through the end of 2022. He emphasized the importance of this agreement and of theatricals to HBO, adding that Summit films like “Divergent” and “John Wick” were top performers on the streaming service. The company also has licensing deals with Universal, Fox and Warner Bros. And though, like Netflix, HBO heavily invests in original programming, movies are still a big draw for HBO subscribers. The announcement of HBO’s streaming service expansions comes shortly after rival Netflix’s game-changing move to make its service available across the globe. The company had announced at CES in January that it was going live in 130 new countries worldwide, including India. That immediately made Netflix more of threat to newcomers like HBO NOW, whose pricier service is still largely dependent on top titles like “Game of Thrones” to attract an audience. However, HBO has been working to revamp its image a bit in recent weeks, as it expands its catalog to better compete with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and others. In addition to soon bringing in more millennial-friendly programming options and those aimed at cord cutters, it also targeted a more mainstream audience by launching a new children’s section this year. This section now includes Sesame Street and other titles from Sesame Workshop, and was introduced alongside features for parents like a “Kids Lock” setting and other parental controls. 2016-03-02 20:16 Sarah Perez

70 SugarCRM acquires Contastic for natural language-based predictive sales tools Following its acquisition of Stitch last year , SugarCRM — a CRM and open source competitor to Salesforce — has picked up another startup to enhance the arsenal of intelligent sales tools that it provides to its customers. The company has acquired Contastic, a startup based out of Mountain View that built a platform based around natural language processing technology to analyse communications between sales people and their contacts, and help them keep up those relationships. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Contastic had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors that included IDG-Accel and Lightspeed. Contastic’s site looks like it went offline back in January , which Contastic now tells us was due to the acquisition. SugarCRM says that the deal will include intellectual property rights and other assets but no customers. According to the archive of Contastic’s site linked here , previous customers had included employees at Oracle, Accenture and Tesla. As part of the deal, Contastic’s founder and CEO Cy Khormaee will join SugarCRM as its director of product management for predictive analytics. “Contastic’s team is thrilled to join Sugar to expose their NLP technology to a much wider customer base in the coming months,” the company said in a statement. Contastic had built a platform that draws on data sources like email, LinkedIn and Salesforce essentially to create a composite picture both of the target contact, and a sales person’s existing relationship with that person, then also providing extra content — suggestions of relevant news stories — to help start up conversations with those people. It sounds like SugarCRM’s interest in Contastic is specifically around the content suggestion aspect of its platform. In an interview, Larry Augustin, SugarCRM’s CEO, said his company will be using the technology to “process and understand emails and other interactions between individuals, suggesting relevant content.” Some of this technology is likely to make its way into future releases of SugarCRM’s primary platform and Augustin says the company is still thinking about how it will further monetize the assets. (Indeed, Stitch, the startup SugarCRM acquired last year, was also a tool to help sales people proactively follow and close deals.) Contastic competed with and sat alongside a number of other tools on the market that are also in the general category of predictive sales like Clari, 6sense, InsideSales and more. This — combined with the fact that a lot of CRM is consolidating around specific platform players like SugarCRM, Salesforce and Oracle; and that there is something of a funding squeeze for some startups — will mean that we are likely to see more M&A activity, says Augustin. “There is a lot of interesting tech that we are working on around helping people be a lot more connected and establish business relationships, but a lot of those feel like they are features that need to hook into a broader system,” he said. “We have a very broad platform that extends the whole cuxtomer lifecycle, and whether you are talking about a Contastic or Stitch it’s hard to monetise them separately. We are going to remain acquisitive. Let’s see what others in the space plan to do.” What this will also help SugarCRM do is strengthen its own product while it too waits for its next “liquidity event.” The company’s most recent round of new funding was a $40 million Series F i 2013 — made at the time as the company was anticipating an IPO. Times, for sure, have changed, but Augustin says SugarCRM is in a strong position. “We have been cash flow positive since 2014. We don’t need to raise money and we have a strong balance sheet,” he said. “I’ve always said that our goal is to be a large public company. We have the scale and continue to think of that as a goal but the markets are not attractive right now and we don’t need to do it. We’ll do it when it works for us as a business.” This is SugarCRM’s fourth acquisition — after buying iExtensions back in 2011, Stitch and an (until now) unreported acquisition of process management and workflow technology from ProcessMaker (but not ProcessMaker itself). 2016-03-02 20:16 Ingrid Lunden

71 Aerial imagery service TerrAvion adds data services There has been a lot of hype around using drones to in precision agriculture, but for the time being, using regular planes outfitted with specialized cameras is still a more cost-effective way to cover wide swaths of land. YC-backed TerrAvion made an early bet on using planes for aerial imaging for precision agriculture, and after a few growing seasons, it’s now expanding its service by also adding a layer of quantitative analysis on top of its images. TerrAvion currently covers a number of major growing regions, including areas in California, Oregon, Washington State, and the Great Plains. As the company’s CEO and co-founder Robert Morris tells me, it has now also set its sights on the wine-growing regions of Spain. Morris argues that TerrAvion alone currently covers 100x more acreage than the whole drone industry while offering a very similar resolution at a comparable (or better) cost point. Traditionally, TerrAvion has provided growers with lots of imagery, but now it’s adding a statistical layer on top of that based on its own image analysis. “We now process a bunch of statistics that most growers want,” Morris said and noted that it would usually take an in-house geographic information systems specialist to process this data, but for now, TerrAvion is offering this new service, which it calls Digest, for free. “Basically, Digest takes what TerrAvion does best–giving growers a comprehensive up-to-date picture of what’s happening on their farm, allowing them to take immediate action — and brings this into the quantitative realm,” Morris told me. “Visual control revolutionized indoor manufacturing. Now TerrAvion is not only making that possible in agriculture, but we’re also putting a quantitative layer on top of that visual control. Farmers can then take this data and reuse it across any other service. “Growers are very sophisticated as tech integrators,” Morris said. “Because of this, they are much more sensitive to things like being able to reuse data and having the choice to change IT providers.” 2016-03-02 20:16 Frederic Lardinois

72 Plane is a new ‘social icebreaker’ app from the founder of Cupple Plane is a new social app from Tim Allison, who previously founded Cupple, the relationship app acquired by YC alumni Pair (which since re- branded to Couple and was sold to Life360). Born out of Allison’s own frustrations, after he moved countries, Plane is pitching itself as a ‘social icebraker’, and lets anybody post a short location-based message — called a ‘Signal’ — to be read by other users in the same city. You can reply publicly to a Signal, which disappears after 24 hours, and optionally swap ‘social cards’ and exchange private messages. In other words, Plane mixes features from Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook, and also crosses over with something like Yik Yak, the location-based social app popular on university campuses. Allison tells me the idea was initially conceived to serve the needs of expats, but since being soft launched in Copenhagen two months ago is already resonating with a wider group of users. “We’ve found that the ‘expat’ group is increasingly hard to define,” he tells me. “People live, work and love all over the world and operate in all sorts of ways.” Plane is built on the premise that when travelling to a new city it’s hard to break the ice, unless you already have an established network. Instead you’re largely left with the option of signing up to a bunch of dating apps or joining a noisy Facebook or Meetup group. “I worked for 12 months commuting in and out of Switzerland every week and working on a large international campus,” explains Allison. “Whilst actually living in the city during the week it was really difficult to break the ice with new people and actually find out what was going on. I don’t want to use dating apps, most expat forums are quite old-fashioned and for a lot of people, ‘meetups’ can be quite daunting.” To that end, Plane focuses on the city you are in and lets you share Signals to a community of users around you. The intention was to do away with selfies or other profile photos — the app is almost exclusively text-based — and because public messages expire Allison says there is less pressure to compose the perfect Signal. “We’ve found users express themselves with a certain freedom and creativity you might not find on a more visual and permanent based network,” he adds. Of course, like any social app, Plane will need to scale quickly to benefit from much-needed network effects. Right now, a day after fully launching, the London stream is fairly barren. That said, the startup has already raised an undisclosed round of angel funding. I understand that Plane’s backers include Hampus Jakobsson, who previously founded The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the mobile User Interface company that BlackBerry acquired in 2010. 2016-03-02 20:16 Steve

73 Slack voice calling arrives on desktop Slack was being cheeky when yesterday it said voice chat would start testing “very, very soon”. Today the new “Calls” feature starting rolling out on Slack for desktop and on the Chrome browser. It lets you start a private Slack Call or launch a conference call in a channel that anyone can join with a click. And in keeping with Slack’s lighthearted style, once you’re chatting, you can send visual emoji reactions that appear overlaid on your profile picture to others on the call. Slack confirms to me that the feature is currently rolled out to less than 50% of users. Team admins can check if it’s available to them and turn it on here. Slack already offered integrations with voice calling apps like Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and Bluejeans, but those required a separate installation and were quite clunky by comparison. Slack Calls just need to be enabled by your team’s admin, are super easy to use, and blend naturally into the Slack experience. Slack says that video chat is also in the works, which it first announced last year after acquiring Screenhero. But now it’s on the official roadmap, though the company plans to get voice chat rolled out on all devices first. First, you’ll have to download the latest version of Slack for desktop and make sure your team’s admin has enabled Calls in the Team Settings. You’ll then see a phone icon at the top of your one-on-one threads and channels. Tap the phone icon and a Slack Call pings your private message partner with a pop-up window beckoning them to answer. Once you’re in a call, you can change your microphone settings (unlike Skype which makes you set that before a call) or add more people to the call. Slack didn’t bring all its emoji along, but the Smiley-face button reveals a few you can tap to silently let Call partners know how you feel. The emoji pop up on top of your profile picture in the corner. It’s like a visual nod over the phone. They say something you agree with, and you hit the heart or smile so they know without interrupting them. On channels, hitting the Call button prompts you name the call and then wait for others to join. Your channel partners will see a button to join in the text thread so anyone available can quickly jump on. And just for giggles, tapping the main avatar in your call causes it to pulse satisfyingly. When I spoke to Slack’s VP Of Product April Underwood yesterday, she told me the use case for Slack Calls was that “If I’m DMing someone in Slack and we want to switch to have a quick voice conversation, it addresses that problem.” Now she’s issued this statement, saying Apparently voice calling was one of the most heavily requested options from Slack’s 2.3 million daily active users and 570,000 paid subscribers. Yesterday’s customer conference and the release of hotly anticipated features could help boost Slack’s momentum as it reportedly looks to raise at least another $150 million. By becoming more of a full-service communication suite rather than just a text chat tool, Slack might be able to convince more companies to pay for it — especially because businesses might already be spending money to have voice chat. Slack Calls could threaten Skype and Google Hangouts, which increasingly feel inconvenient. 2016-03-02 20:16 Josh Constine

74 Google experiments with a way to pay without taking out your phone Google is rolling out a pilot program today that introduces a new way to pay cashiers — and it involves leaving your phone in your pocket. It’s called Hands Free , and it’s a way to basically connect your phone with a point of sales system using the sensors on your phone. The end result is that a point of sale device is already aware of your phone’s presence, and when you want to pay for something, you can do so through Hands Free. The service is launching in a pilot in the Southern San Francisco Bay Area today. “When you think about a user, in a bunch of situations, the experience is quite crummy right now, it’s quite clunky,” Google senior director of product management Pali Bhat said. “You don’t want your phone in the way, your wallet in the way, you don’t want your cash in the way. These are inconveniences that happen multiple times a day.” Users basically walk up to a cashier, which can detect that the phone is in the area and gives the point of sale system the ability to charge the user’s card that’s tied to Hands Free. The user tells the cashier that they will “pay with Google,” and give their initials to the cashier, who then inputs that and the transaction is closed. Cashiers also have a way to detect what the person looks like and whether it’s the same person in the photo tied to a Google profile. The goal here is to reduce friction in the payments process. That was the main attempt of tools like Android and Apple Pay: being able to pay for products with just your phone and not having to take out your wallet and pay with a credit card. This is all beneficial to companies like Google and Apple, because it helps bring payments closer to the phone, and increases the chance that they’ll pay for things with Apple or Google with a credit card saved on that phone. And if it’s easier to pay for things on a phone, it’s easier to pay for apps and services like Google Play and the App Store. All this, if it works, will help Android Pay continue to catch on. Google says that it’s seeing around 1.5 million new registrations each month in the United States, with 2 million locations that accept Android tap and pay. This tool will work with Android devices that go all the way back to Jellybean, Bhat said. But if this tool sounds familiar, it should: Square took a crack at creating a payments product that enabled users to pay cashiers without taking out their phone. That worked with some geofencing technology, while Google’s works a bit different, Bhat said, but the principle is more or less the same — opening and closing a tab without taking your phone out of your pocket. The goal was to make paying for things more of an experience as much as a convenience, but that application didn’t really catch on from Square. In this case, Google can throw its weight behind the tool and it can get preloaded within Android devices, but the challenge is still there for even Google. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple follows Google into this space, given the huge similarities between Android and Apple Pay. This is something that Square took a shot at, and maybe that implies that there is at least some demand for a tool like this as long as it’s done properly. Bhat says the technology — whether that’s fraud detection or location data from Google Maps — is what gives Google an edge over potential competitors (like, inevitably, Apple). “We believe we have some very unique assets and technologies that we’re bringing to the table,” Bhat said. “One of the things is this combination of technologies we’re using to ensure that a user’s near the store, the other piece that’s as important is all the things we’re doing on the security side. Those are pieces of technology that we feel are very critical and defensible.” The challenge for Google with this tool will be two-fold: getting point of sales services on board, and getting users to adopt it. The former tends to follow the latter, but Google has a suite of APIs that point of sale makers can tap into. The question will be whether the product has hit a big enough scale to justify having point of sale makers integrate this service into their devices — working not only with smaller point-of-sale services like Clover but larger ones like Ingenico. “For us, it’s less about competition with other companies, in fact we believe that the more that mobile payments is adopted by users, it’s good for everyone,” Bhat said. “The way we think about this is that our goal is to make mobile payments awesome for users and not worry about anything, as long as we focus on the user and build great solutions, that’s what follows.” The company is insisting it’s a pilot program — hence only being available in the Southern San Francisco Bay Area — in order to collect user feedback. The service is available in a few stores and pilot locations for McDonald’s and Papa John’s. “Our goal is not really scaling this, our goal is to see how users are reacting and how merchants are experiencing this,” Bhat said. “Once we’ve made all the fine-tuning that potentially we get from the feedback from merchants and consumers, we then are going to start scaling it. Until then our goal is not to have millions and millions of users adopt.” 2016-03-02 20:16 Matthew Lynley

75 Dot & Bo to help startups with office design Facebook LinkedIn Dot & Bo Expands To Office Design Home furnishings site Dot & Bo is expanding into workplace design, with the launch of Dot & Bo for Business. The e-commerce startup will be offering a free styling service to other startups and businesses who are looking to find the right vibe for their offices. In an industry where nap pods and slides are commonplace, a comfortable work atmosphere has been considered a critical component for hiring at tech startups and corporations, and San Francisco-based Dot & Bo is looking to capitalize on this market opportunity. “We’re launching a new service specifically targeted toward small business as well as larger enterprise clients that are looking for help and design advice,” founder and CEO Anthony Soohoo tells TechCrunch. The Dot & Bo team tested out the service with local coffee chain Philz Coffee and decided to expand the program. Dot & Bo says it plans to work with interior designers and furniture dealers to create fashionable work environments at affordable pricing. Companies will be able to lean on Dot & Bo stylists for design advice and the team will aim to make the decorating process more efficient. “It’s a pretty daunting task, said Claire Lee, head of trade and business sales at Dot & Bo. “We help them the whole way through and it makes their lives a lot easier.” Dot & Bo is not the first startup to enter the office furnishings space. Launched last year, New York-based Kontor also aims to be a resource for business style. Founded in 2013, Dot & Bo is backed by Trinity Ventures and Oak Investment Partners. 2016-03-02 20:16 Katie Roof

76 WhatsApp adds support for document sharing, but only PDFs at launch WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging service that recently hit 1 billion users worldwide , is today rolling out a much-anticipated feature to its apps on iOS and Android devices: document sharing. Though the company hasn’t yet made an official announcement, a number of WhatsApp users have seen the feature pop up alongside other sharing options, like photo or video sharing, contact sharing, or location sharing, for example. The feature works similarly on both iOS and Android devices. In a chat on Android, you tap the attachment icon then press the new “Document” icon that appears. (To make room for the option on the pop-up window, WhatsApp compressed “Photo” and “Video” sharing options into one “Camera” option instead.) On iOS, you tap the arrow icon in the chat then pick “Share Document” from the menu that appears. At launch, users are able to select documents from cloud storage services including Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and others, but the feature is unfortunately limited to only PDF files at this time. In some cases, WhatsApp won’t even display the other file types that are present on the cloud storage service you pick, so as to limit user confusion. However, the app did let me pick an Office document saved on Google Drive, but then failed to share it, instead offering an error message about the unsupported file type. If the recipient hasn’t upgraded to the latest version of WhatsApp, document sharing won’t work either, we found in tests. (The app will tell you that the contact has to “update WhatsApp to receive documents.”) When shared, WhatsApp displays a file preview of the PDF, notating also the number of pages, file size and type. The fact that it has dedicated a field in the message window to display file type is a good hint that other file formats will be supported in the future. Even with the limited functionality available at present, document sharing could help to boost business use of WhatsApp’s messenger app, given how prevalent PDFs are in the professional world. That fits in with WhatsApp’s larger agenda, revealed earlier this year, which sees the company increasing its focus on its business customers. CEO Jan Koum said in January that WhatsApp would begin testing more commercial services, including those that would allow consumers to communicate with businesses. Document sharing makes sense in this larger context of business-friendly features. Of course, the feature will have direct consumer benefits as well for things like sharing flyers, e- tickets, scans, and other PDFs of a more personal nature. And because WhatsApp has been invested in end-to-end encryption on its network, the documents shared on its service will be protected. The feature is arriving now on both iOS and Android, though not yet Windows Phone. 2016-03-02 20:16 Sarah Perez

77 Talking innovation in a data-enabled economy with Secretary Penny Pritzker Since his first day in office it has been a key priority for President Obama and his Administration to deliver an open and transparent government to better serve the people. And the leadership at the US Department of Commerce has been working hard to lay the foundation for that transparency in a way that will enable a strong digital economy to endure well past this Administration and benefit American competitiveness for generations to come — with the help of government data. Indeed, the open data that is being released by the Federal Government and particularly by the Department of Commerce is a key asset that is enabling both transparency and business opportunities across industries. During her visit to Silicon Valley last week US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker wanted the tech community to know that the Department of Commerce is its partner in driving innovations, growing the American economy and opportunities for American workers, made possible by the value of open data. Known as “America’s Data Agency”, the US Department of Commerce is one of the largest publishers of open data from across its twelve bureaus. The breadth and depth of data that Commerce provides is vast ranging from weather forecasts to economic data that are important for key business decisions such as where to locate, where to manufacture a product and where to sell that product. The value of this data can translate to tens of billion dollars for the American economy on an annual basis. Indeed, according to the Open Data 500 Study, the first comprehensive study of its kind, there are in excess of 500 companies that use open government data to fuel innovative businesses in agriculture, finance, energy, education, healthcare, and many other sectors of the economy. The efforts of Secretary Pritzker and her team go well beyond releasing data, though. The Secretary stressed that there must also be collaboration and partnership between the public and private sectors, standardization and timely accessibility of the data in order to drive maximum value to the business community. She further highlighted that the government is here to serve its key customer, the public, and that the technology community should view the Commerce Department as its partner. “I want there to be a recognition in the tech community that the Department of Commerce is your partner when it comes to data and the digital economy,” the Secretary said. And, indeed, the private sector has embraced working with the Commerce Department. “We have created the Commerce Data Advisory Council which consists of a group of professionals that act like a public company’s board of trustees to help identify the priorities for our department including high level Technology executives such as Intel’s Chief Information Officer, Paypal’s Head of Data Strategy, and IBM’s Chief Information Strategist,” said Secretary Pritzker. The startup community isn’t ignorant of the benefits of working with the Commerce Department, either. Startups that met with Secretary Pritzker during her visit included Omnity which uses data from the USPTO, BrightBtyes which looks at Census data, Symbiotic Technology and Ecology (STAE), AutoGrid which leverages data releated by NOAA and Arborlight, also relying on data from NOAA. There is a transformation of the Federal Government underway which goes beyond the modernization of systems being used across the government. It also involves a shift in how government leaders such as Secretary Pritzker, a former CEO herself, are seeking to incorporate private sector best practices and business models. To learn more about how Secretary Pritzker and her team are engaging with the private sector to drive innovation and opportunities to benefit not just the Department of Commerce but commerce overall, listen to the entire interview, Talking Innovation through Open Data with Secretary Penny Pritzker . 2016-03-02 20:16 Shelly Kapoor

78 Apply now for TechCrunch Include office hours with Emergence Capital Another chance to participate in TechCrunch Include Office Hours is here. On March 18th, Santi Subotovsky and Alison Wagonfeld of Emergence Capital will join TechCrunch editors to provide advice and feedback to startups. Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level. Office hours are part of that effort. Once monthly, TechCrunch works with its VC partners to ensure that founders of all backgrounds have an opportunity to build connections with top investors. To be considered for a meeting in the Emergence Capital session fill out a short application , by Wednesday, March 9 at 6 p.m. PT. Underrepresented groups eligible for office hours include but are not limited to black, Latino, Native American, LGBT and female founders. Office hours will be held at TechCrunch’s offices in San Francisco unless otherwise specified. Introducing our co-hosts. Santi Subotovsky is General Partner at Emergence Capital. Prior to joining Emergence, he was founder of e-learning company AXG Tecnonexo. He currently serves on the boards of several companies, including Civitas Learning, CrunchBase, High Alpha, Tophat and Zoom. Additionally, he is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that finds and selects the best founders of high potential growth companies from Latin America and helps them scale their businesses globally. Alison Wagonfeld , Operating Partner at Emergence Capital, joined the company in March 2013. At Emergence Capital she uses her knowledge and experience to help companies on marketing, strategy, talent/recruiting, and resource development. She works closely with companies like Textio and Insightly and was named one of the “Most Influential Women in the Bay Area” in 2014 and 2015. Prior to joining Emergence, Alison served as the executive director of the Harvard Business School California Research Center and Co-Founded QuickenLoans where she served as Marketing Director. We are looking forward to having Emergence Capital join us for Include Office Hours this March. If your startup focuses on enterprise solutions, Emergence Capital may be who you want to connect with. Apply today! 2016-03-02 20:16 Samantha

79 79 Hands-on with the $949 mind-bending Meta 2 augmented reality headset As modern virtual reality welcomes its consumer moment with the impending releases of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, off in the distant far-less- sexy enterprise space exists a class of augmented devices that will eventually replace our smartphones. Right now this industry is full of products that are cumbersome and ugly enough that you’d probably swipe left on Beyoncé wearing a pair, but this past week I had the chance to play with one that was, okay, still pretty unfashionable, but also really amazing. Meta CEO Meron Gribetz unveiled the Meta 2 augmented reality headset at TEDx 2016 last month, showing off — among other things — the headset’s incredibly large, near 90-degree, field-of-view. Following the event, the team from Meta invited me and the TC video crew down to their offices in Redwood City to take a look at their “natural machine.” The company had grown quite a bit since TechCrunch’s last demo with them in 2014. The former Y-Combinator company has hired aggressively and gathered funding, including a $23 million Series A last year. After considerable hype (and a ceremonial red velvet cloth unveiling) I had the chance to try it on. Check out the video above for footage from the demo and my point-of-view. There were definitely moments of brilliance. I really could nerd out about the Meta 2’s (2560×1440) display for days. Field-of-view (FoV) matters a hell of a lot more on augmented reality devices than it does on VR headsets. With virtual reality, the more squashed the FoV, the more constrained your viewpoint is, but everything that isn’t the screen is just blackness and thus not all that distracting. In AR, low FoV means that it looks like there’s a little translucent window into the virtual world that you have to fit floating 3D content into. It sucks. The original Meta (also tethered) had a FoV between 25 and 35 degrees which is quite small but comparable to other existing AR experiences, though still a bit less than HoloLens’s speculated FoV. The near 90-degree field-of-view on the new Meta 2 is more expansive than anything I’ve seen to date and was sizable enough that everything I was viewing felt like it had visual context and wasn’t just butting into my regularly scheduled line of sight. For comparison’s sake, the Gear VR mobile headset offers 98-degree field-of-view. The tethered nature of the Meta 2 is undoubtedly what makes a FoV of this size possible. Microsoft could likely physically do the same on the HoloLens but it’s all about tradeoffs at this point, and Microsoft chose to give developers all-in-one mobility where Meta chose to anticipate advances in technology and give developers a wired experience that it believes in can untether and shrink before Meta goes on to become a consumer product. “Generation over generation you’re going to see a dramatic miniaturization,” Ryan Pamplin, Meta’s VP of Sales and Partnerships, told me. “Today it’s about getting it in the hands of all of the developers who have been waiting for this.” Meta CEO Meron Gribetz also believes these devices will shrink down significantly, but once that happens, he believes consumer focuses will shift away from hardware. “… in about 5 years, these are all going to look like strips of glass on our eyes that project holograms.” Gribetz said onstage at TEDx 2016 last month. “And just like we don’t care so much about which phone we buy in terms of the hardware; we buy it for the operating system, as a neuroscientist, I always dreamt of building the IOS of the mind, if you will.” I’m not as sold on the actual interface elements for the Meta 2 as I am on the hardware. While the navigation was simple to learn, I question whether the “natural machine” is approaching input realistically. Being surrounded by the tech-obsessed posse that I was, I had little appreciation for the fact that I did indeed look like a total idiot while I was navigating the Meta 2 demo. But to be honest, I was just having too much fun to care. Worrying about appearances can feel shallow when you’re grasping at the future through a product as mind-bogglingly cool as Meta 2, but when you consider the theoretical potential of augmented reality devices as smartphone replacements you need to be more critical. Even if the Meta 2 had the form factor of a pair of Wayfarers, I still wouldn’t be caught dead reaching my arms out and grabbing shit out of the sky in public. I will grab shit out of the sky for days in virtual reality where I’m locked into my obliviousness and in a space like my living room, but I can only crunch so much tech in the wide open. That being said, the hand-tracking controls were a bit more brutish than I would hope, especially dim in comparison to my recent experiences with Leap Motion’s latest Orion update. Grabbing virtual items with Meta 2 required me to thrust my open hand into a virtual object and close my fingers to make a fist in order to select and move the objects. This was certainly simple enough for moving larger, otherwise stationary objects like a digital computer monitor, but the occasionally jittery demo left me somewhat skeptical that I would be able to tap a hyperlink with ease from a virtual web browser though it is apparently easy to utilize a physical keyboard and mouse in conjunction with the device. Much of these differences in quality come from the fact that while Leap Motion is making dynamic digital skeletons of your hands, Meta is using a variety of sensors and a high-def camera to actively map not only your hands but the environment they are manipulating. I have no doubts that these technologies will only continue to improve, but at the moment they were a bit of a let down compared to the mind-bending display. If/when augmented reality catches on with consumers, I also have significant doubts that hand- tracking will play a major role in how we interact with reality. Among other things, it’s just too conspicuous. Hands and fingers may be the more precise input option in theory, but the discreetness offered by eye-tracking will likely make it the go-to input method for augmented reality consumer devices moving forward (keep in mind that right now Meta 2 is first-and-foremost a developer kit for an enterprise-focused solution). Input will work itself out as augmented reality companies adapt to consumer, ahem, input, but a major key right now is getting the tech to a point where consumers give a shit. The Meta 2 will help make that happen, but it’s on developers to dream up the use cases that prove the platform. Even as companies like Meta and Microsoft prepare the releases of their dev kits, a strange beast looms on the horizon of augmented reality (i.e. somewhere in Miami). Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $1.4 billion from investors like Google and Alibaba, is building a light field display which will beam holographic images directly onto your eyeballs. Light field displays, which Pamplin called “exciting,” have the potential to dramatically shrink the size of today’s existing AR headsets. The mainstream dominance of augmented reality seems flexibly inevitable. While virtual reality is grabbing early headlines with consumer devices headed to market, keep in mind that companies have been building expensive enterprise-focused VR headsets for decades to get to this point. The Meta 2 is an early step towards an augmented future I’m sure we’re at least a decade from, but innovative developers ready to hop on the platform when it launches later this year can likely get us a head start. Pre-orders of the $949 Meta 2 developer kit go live today and the company says devices will ship in Q3 of 2016. 2016-03-02 20:16 Lucas Matney

80 Politically themed social network Roust launches iOS app Launched last July as “a social network for connecting with others to discuss polarizing topics such as politics, religion and social issues,” Roust releases their first iOS app today to give members of their network another way to connect and discuss topics. Given the crazy political year we are having in the USA, the timing couldn’t be better for something like this. I applaud Roust’s efforts to keep political bombasts out of my Facebook feed by trying to redirect them to a rant-tastic network made just for them. The first thing that comes to mind when considering this app is obviously the Sean Parker- backed network called Brigade that launched just a little ahead of Roust. At first glance Roust appears to be sort of a poor man’s Brigade…a little less fancy, a little less glitzy. It also doesn’t have the same voting or recruiting motifs as Brigade. There is noticeably less activity. But there’s also something sort of authentic and conversational about Roust. The stripped down design is more casual and less about voting and choosing sides. You can simply post up something you feel strongly about and people can converse in the safety of knowing they can answer without restraint. It doesn’t have to be a political conversation either and Roust monitors to keep trolling at bay. It sort of reminds me of message boards from back in the day. Plus, these guys are bootstrapped and not backed by a bazillionaire like Sean Parker so it’s understandable that their creation might not be quite as slick at this point. It seems like they made this to satisfy what they feel are unmet needs of the sphere of social media. I think they have a decent idea to bring conversations to a place where you, as founder Mark LaFay has already been quoted, “know what you are getting into.” It will be interesting to see if this can go somewhere. 2016-03-02 20:16 Jay Donovan

81 Spotify Expands Curation Services With The Launch Of Fresh Finds On the heels of the success of its Discover Weekly feature, Spotify is adding another curated service so that users can find new music. Called Fresh Finds , the new weekly Wednesday feature, available through to all Spotify users in its “Browse” tool, will uncover new artists for listeners. These new “discoveries” from Spotify are culled from scouring blogs and music sites online and combining that with the hundreds of thousands of its users’ listening hours that the company has tracked. Basically, the service is using information from the music gurus around the web and on its own service to determine what may be the hits of tomorrow. The Fresh Finds featured musicians will come in a general category — for all genres — and five sub-genres ranging from electronic to experimental music. “Spotify has always focused on artists and listeners, and with Fresh Finds we’re specifically looking at new creators, digging deeper to understand how undiscovered artists can attract a huge fan base,” says Dr. Brian Whitman, Principal Scientist at Spotify, in a blog post. “By analyzing the listening behavior of our top tastemaker users, we’re able to predict new breakout artists and filter their hits-to-be into playlists with the most promising new music out there.” It’s another way the company is looking to juice its growth by making the hundreds of thousands of musicians — and their catalogs — that are on the site more accessible to a more casual listener than the company’s core audience of power users and music aficionados. Since Spotify acquired Echo Nest , the two companies have been pooling their collective brain power on ways to bring more music to the masses. And the company is certainly drinking its own Kool Aid. Five of the musicians that are going to be at the Spotify showcase at its 2016 SXSW Spotify House in Austin were discovered through Fresh Finds. 2016-03-02 20:16 Jonathan Shieber

82 The 'free ride' of BBC iPlayer viewing is over as license fee loophole is to be closed Watch TV in the UK -- be it through an aerial, cable, or satellite -- and you have to pay for a TV license. The official line is that you need a TV license "if you watch or record programmes as they're being shown on TV or live on an online TV service" and this has long-meant that anyone time-shifting their viewing by watching shows on BBC iPlayer have been able to do so for free. This is set to change. Having waxed lyrical about the threat of adblockers to the web , UK culture secretary John Whittingdale turned his attention to the BBC's streaming services. He plans to close a loophole that has permitted people without a TV license to watch non-live shows on iPlayer without paying a fee and -- more importantly -- without breaking the law. He says that this is 'wrong' and wants to bring the 'free ride' to an end. Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention, Whittingdale said that the laws governing the license fee did not take into account technological advances. The plan is to extend the TV license requirement to include those who use iPlayer as a catch-up service. Following talks with the BBC, the culture secretary wants to bring about the changes as soon as possible. He said: While the plan would certainly help to bring in additional revenue for a beleaguered BBC, it is not clear how iPlayer users would be checked to ensure ownership of a valid TV license. Photo credit: Antonio-BanderAS / Shutterstock 2016-03-02 20:10 By Mark

83 83 Users enrolled in the Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview will finally be able to get firmware Back in January, Microsoft revealed that it was planning on making it easier for those enrolled in the Windows 10 Mobile Insider Program to receive firmware updates. At the time, the workaround was to switch to the Production ring (turn off Insider builds), install the firmware update, and switch back to whichever ring the user was on. As of tomorrow, users will be able to grab those firmware updates without switching rings, which was the plan from the start. This begins on March 3 at 10 AM PST. The firm also announced a new firmware update for select Lumia 950 models. You can find the list right here. Spoiler: the AT&T model still isn't on it. Insiders that want the firmware update can switch to the Production ring to get it, or they can wait until tomorrow and update their device directly. Source: Microsoft Community 2016-03-02 19:52 Richard Woods

84 It's time to get serious about Internet of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) is the newest technology mega- trend, according to Goldman Sachs, and it’s easy to see why. Cisco’s IoT study suggests that the number of connected devices is expected to grow to 50 billion by 2020, leading to a global economic impact of $10 trillion. Connected devices are set to change the very fabric of the world we live and work in. However, the buzz around gadgets such as connected fridges and smart kettles being developed by consumer goods manufacturers have been a distraction from the IoT’s true potential. Indeed, research from Embarcadero Technologies revealed that just 16% of those developing IoT solutions are targeting consumers. The real focus should be on connecting consumer gadgets, such as smartphones and wearables with capital-intensive physical infrastructure or assets, such as plants, hospitals, electric grids, field vehicles and pipelines. Until a large part of these assets are connected to handheld devices, real benefits of IoT such as improved uptime, efficiency and asset utilization, cannot be achieved. While many technologies depend on consumer needs and their rate of adoption, IoT will largely be governed by business use cases that will create virtuous adoption cycles across an ecosystem. For example, in the medical profession, connecting wearable devices with doctors and hospitals could be used to remotely monitor patients’ vital signs, while sensors can help clinicians figure out whether elderly or vulnerable patients have taken their pills on time. This would enable doctors to monitor their patients remotely, reducing the need for hospital and GP surgery visits whilst improving care and decreasing the costs of delivering it significantly. Time to realize the true benefits of IoT Today we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg when thinking about the vast potential of the IoT. The real innovation is set to take place behind the scenes in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The real business imperatives arising from adoption of IoT will be operational efficiency and incremental revenue generation opportunities. Connected devices and network sensors will reinvent and optimize the efficiency of business processes and global supply chains in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy management, transportation, agriculture, and countless others. The IIoT will give these organizations a greater ability to control the machines, factories and infrastructure that form their physical operating environments. As more devices and sensors begin to come online, there will also be a significant acceleration in the volume, variety and velocity of data being created. Combining insights gleaned from the analysis of this ‘big data’ with the greater level of control the IIoT enables will allow businesses to automate processes and reduce equipment downtime with predictive maintenance. This will help them to improve product quality, increase throughput and realize potentially enormous cost-savings. For example, in order to help optimize the use of equipment, one of Intel’s manufacturing facilities participated in an early pilot program which utilized IoT and big data, and resulted in millions of dollars in forecasted cost savings. However, this is just one early example; the IIoT is still in its infancy and there are a number of key challenges that must be overcome before businesses can begin to realize its true and full potential. Getting the IoT out of the house First and foremost, there are the obvious concerns over security and privacy. There is barely a day that goes by without a high-profile data breach or large-scale cyberattack in the headlines. As more endpoints are connected to the internet, the organizational attack surface will be increased dramatically, exposing them to an even greater risk from these cybercriminals. As such, current cybersecurity measures will soon become inadequate. Organizations embracing the IIoT must look to develop new security frameworks that span the entire cyber physical stack, from device-level authentication to application-level security. The other major barrier to overcome is the interoperability between existing IT infrastructure and systems, which has the potential to ramp up the costs and complexity of IIoT deployments significantly. The industrial internet will rely on an interconnected digital ecosystem that enables machines and core physical infrastructure components to communicate and share data seamlessly. As such, it isn’t enough to simply layer IoT technologies on top of the existing infrastructure; those looking to embrace the IIoT successfully must lay the groundwork by digitalizing their operating environments. This is no small task, and so it is vital to ensure that you are able to walk before you try to run. Legal and political structures will need to collaborate with global enterprises and respond rapidly and perhaps with measured force to such situations. Organizations big or small will need to drive the technology test-beds and have to keep room within their IoT budgets to allow for rapid prototyping, use-case testing and data evaluation so that they can quickly turn the ship in case the business case falters. Drawing a roadmap for the IoT Once these initial barriers and any early teething troubles of the IIoT have been overcome, we’re likely to see a dramatic shift in the business world. In addition to the huge operational efficiencies set to be introduced, three key trends will begin to emerge: Industry borders will be redrawn The connection of ecosystems that currently operate in isolation will redefine the boundaries that exist between industries. Successful IoT implementation will require new levels of partnerships, mergers and acquisitions that we may not consider as a “strategic fit” today. Technology leaders such as Microsoft, Apple and Google may find themselves partnering with companies that manufacture toothbrushes, hairdryers, meters and fire alarms to name a few. The acquisition of Nest by Google is a case in point where an individual use-case product required support by a larger ecosystem. The prevalence of data sharing will enable software platforms to draw insights and identify parallel lines between businesses that never realized they were connected. For example, agricultural supply chains will see significant efficiency gains when sensors deployed in a farmer’s field to monitor the soil conditions can forecast crop yields more accurately. This insight will enable the rest of the supply chain to become more efficient, as manufacturers can automatically adjust the throughput of packaging to ensure shortfall or surplus is limited, whilst logistics firms can plan vehicle routes in advance to ensure the most effective utilization of their fleets. Emergence of the 'outcome economy' As we become increasingly able to directly control and even automate the physical world through technology, we’ll have a stronger grip on the results of business processes and activities than ever before. This will place an ever-growing emphasis on end products and the outcomes of business activities, meaning that traditional models of services and fees will no longer be as important as they once were. 80% of the IoT revenue will be derived from services. It’s the end result that will begin to command a fee; which will force businesses to re-assess the ways in which they work. In many cases, this will mean building new business models and software platforms that will help create, distribute and monetize the outcome-based services at an unprecedented speed and scale. Humans and machines will become colleagues It may sound like an idea from a sci-fi movie, but as the capability of machines continues to evolve and become more complex, they will increasingly act as collaborative partners for humans. As we grow increasingly used to the helping hand machines can lend, working practices will evolve to include them, leading to a huge upturn in productivity. This will enable people to enjoy more engaging working practices, as mundane and routine tasks are transitioned to machine counterparts. Of course, there is a long road ahead before these visions become a reality. The opportunity is huge and the canvas is vast. The key to winning lies in picking the right partners and driving change internally. The big winners will be the owners and partners of new platforms and business models, who can harness the network effect inherent in these models to create new kinds of value and revenue streams. The introduction of smarter ways of working through a seamlessly connected ecosystem is set to yield considerable economic benefits over the coming years. It’s time to put the adolescent dreams of the IoT behind us and set it to work in the industrial internet. Photo credit: Odua Images / Shutterstock Sukamal Banerjee is the Global Head of Engineering Services (ERS) business line at HCL Technologies focused on Hi-Tech & Communications Markets. This involves defining market strategy, P&L responsibility and leading business development teams to drive new business growth. In addition, he leads HCL ERS’ global strategy and investments around emerging technology transformations along with Product Management and Service Line Unit development for world-wide markets. He also has additional responsibility as Business Unit Head for “IoT WoRKS” - HCL Technologies’ Internet of Things (IoT) business unit. This includes the charter for extending HCL’s thought leadership in IoT, creating market space, positioning and managing overall BU growth strategy, P&L and customer satisfaction across all vertical markets globally. He is a frequent speaker in several industry and technology forums with focus on Communications, Digital Businesses and IoT. He has also authored various articles around emerging technology trends such as IoT, 3D printing amongst others, which can be referred here. 2016-03-02 19:46 By Sukamal

85 Researchers discover major security breach in 3D printing technology Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have discovered what may amount to a major security breach in the 3D printing process: the source code of any 3D printer can be easily recorded and reverse engineered, allowing hackers to reverse-engineer 3D-printed objects and potentially engage in corporate espionage. The team behind the research, led by Professor Mohammad Al Faruque of UCI's Advanced Integrated Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, said they managed to successfully reverse-engineer the G-code of a 3D printer using only audio of the printer nozzle recorded on a smartphone. Recording the sound of the printer allowed Al Faruque and his team to analyze and interpret the acoustic signals of the 3D printer in a meaningful way. The team at UCI managed to duplicate a 3D printed key with up to 90 percent accuracy using their sound recording method. A 10 percent margin of error could still render total failure in complex 3D-printed objects, but Al Faruque - who plans to present his team's research at the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems in Vienna in April - says the potential for corporate or national espionage using reverse-engineering could be very high. “President Obama has spoken about returning manufacturing to the United States, and I think 3- D printing will play a major role because of the creation of highly intellectual objects, in many cases in our homes,” Al Faruque said, and suggested engineers consider "jamming" the acoustic signals made by the 3D printer with a white noise device or similar tool. 2016-03-02 19:36 Jett Goldsmith

87 Cortana will soon be able to tell you on your PC when your phone has a low battery Since first appearing with Windows Phone 8.1 way back in April 2014, Cortana has picked up a vast range of new abilities. While major additions like new language support , deal alerts , and integration with third-party apps are always welcome, even the smallest improvements can make a big difference to the overall user experience. As revealed today by @tfwboredom (better known as 'Core' on Twitter), Microsoft is planning to add new cross-device notifications to its digital assistant. Currently, Cortana can notify you on your Windows 10 PC if you miss a call on your handset, which you can find in the assistant's settings under 'Missed call notifications'. As the screenshot here shows, Microsoft is apparently planning to expand this functionality further. Under the revised title of 'Send phone notifications', the description notes that Cortana will also be able to deliver notifications to other devices telling you that your phone has a low battery, along with text messages, and even app notifications from your handset. Of course, we'll have to wait and see just how useful those notifications prove to be in real-world usage, but there will no doubt be many users who welcome these new additions to Cortana's skill set. Source: @tfwboredom via MSPowerUser 2016-03-02 19:20 Andy Weir

88 Unified communication tools boost productivity and satisfaction for remote workers Cloud unified communications specialist Outsourcery says that the full potential of remote working can only be achieved if strong UC tools are in place. Skype for Business, Slack or Trello, just to name a few, are proven to boost productivity and the possibility of working from virtually anywhere, anytime, has great effects on employee satisfaction. There have been numerous studies about the benefits of remote working, and all of them came to the same conclusion -- this is something all of us should be implementing. One of those studies was recently published by Lancaster University’s Work Foundation, which suggests that by 2017, more than half of all UK businesses will have employed flexible working at some parts of their organization. Jon Seddon, Head of Product at Outsourcery, commented: "As this survey found, businesses who enable their employees to work from multiple locations experience great benefits to their efficiency, employee satisfaction and industry reputation as positive places to work. With the rise of millennials in the workplace, remote working and flexible hours are becoming more commonplace and suitable systems need to be implemented in order to ensure the benefits are realized". One of the main concerns executives have, regarding remote working, is the lack of supervision. Some of them believe people would work less, if they’re not being monitored. Seddon believes otherwise. "The effective collaboration and teamwork between employees working remotely is one that an integrated UC tool can greatly benefit. With voice and video calls, instant messaging and conferencing all enabled in a UC solution, workers are contactable regardless of their location, ensuring the business still runs efficiently. The ease of contact that a UC solution brings can also address the concerns of some managers who would prefer their people to be in the office. Team collaboration can be maximized with easy conference call set up across video, voice and mobile devices with powerful screen and document sharing built in". Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: olly / Shutterstock 2016-03-02 19:19 By Sead

89 Pro: Comey doesn't want to make enemies with Apple Discussing FBI Director James Comey's testimony on Capitol Hill about Apple with Comey's Austin Berglas, Senior Managing Director & head of U. S. Cyber Investigations and Incident Response, K2 Intelligence. 2016-03-02 19:07 Getty Images

90 Microsoft implies Windows Phone 8.1 users will receive Windows 10 Mobile build 10586.122 [UPDATE] Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile build 10586.122 today. Along with a list of fixes , they dropped some big hints that this will likely be the build that non-Insiders receive upon upgrading to Windows 10 Mobile from Windows Phone 8.1. Last week, we reported that the "official" Windows 10 Mobile update will not be bundled with device specific firmware. Because of this, users can upgrade through the Release Preview ring and get the exact same update as they would if they waited for the "official" update. Of course, nothing is finalized until that update actually rolls out to Windows Phone 8.1 users. We've seen issues before where Microsoft identified an important bug and had to hold off on releasing a new build in order to fix it. As it stands right now, though, it seems clear that the firm's plans are to roll out build 10586.122 to non-Insiders. UPDATE: Brandon LeBlanc, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft for the Insider Program Team, has commented that they made no such implication and that this is "a bit of a stretch". He didn't give any indication of when the rollout might begin, given that it was due back in December. Source: Windows Blog 2016-03-02 19:04 Richard Woods

91 The business processes behind services management Where and how are corporate IT services best located: in-house or outsourced? Enterprises are constantly re-evaluating their IT sourcing using outcome-focused commercial models. In-sourcing allows an organisation to maintain in-house technical teams or large, single- source suppliers. It can also be more adaptable by exploiting competitive market behaviour, which can cut costs and capitalise on innovation. But Gartner published a study of IT sourcing capabilities in 2014, which found only 11% of respondents mastered their approach to sourcing. The remaining 89% needed to improve competencies and significantly raise their maturity levels to manage multi-sourcing successfully. 2016-03-02 16:47 Bernt Ostergaard

92 The $35, 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 is here: now 50 percent faster and with built-in Wi-Fi There’s some good news for fans of the Raspberry Pi: as the tiny, single-board computer celebrates its fourth anniversary, a new version of the device has just gone on sale today. Available for just $35 – the same price as its predecessor - the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is said to carry out most tasks about 50 - 60 percent faster than the Pi 2, and it comes with some impressive new hardware. The Pi 3 marks the second major upgrade to the board in just over a year and is the first to feature built-in wireless capabilities. In previous versions of the Pi, USB adapters were required if you wanted Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, but the Pi 3 supports Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only). Another upgrade from the Pi 2 comes in the form of a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, running at 1.2GHz. The Pi 3’s processor is a pretty big jump from the previous version’s 32-bit 900Hmz Cortex-A7. "Our primary goal in moving to A53 from A7 was to get a better 32-bit core," the board’s co- creator, Eben Upton, told Engadget. "A53 running in 32-bit mode outperforms A7 at the same clock speed by 20-30 percent. " The Pi 3 keeps the same dimensions as its predecessor and retains the HDMI port, Ethernet, MicroSD, and four USB ports. It uses a 400MHz Broadcom VideoCore IV 3D graphics processor, rather than the Pi 2’s 250MHz version. 1080p video support goes up to 60fps from 30fps, and H.265 support is also introduced, but this is limited to 1080p at 30fps. In addition to the improved components, the Pi 3 comes with better power management and will launch alongside an official 2.5A power supply, “which will enable users to power their Pi and ‘add-on’ boards all from one power source” Upton pointed out that while the Pi 3 supported 64-bit operating systems, the device will ship with a 32-bit version of the Noobs OS. “We're going to wait until someone can demonstrate a concrete benefit to going to 64-bit before we make that our standard,” he said. The Pi 3’s hardware upgrades make it “more credible as a PC replacement,” according to Upton. The Pi foundation is putting a strong focus on the IoT with its new device, announcing at a launch event that it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure compatibility between the Pi 3 and Windows 10 IoT. “A few hundred thousand” Raspberry Pi 3 boards are going on sale today. Here are the full specs: 2016-03-02 16:47 Rob Thubron

93 Samsung launches first monitors with FreeSync over HDMI Samsung has today unveiled the first monitors that support AMD's FreeSync variable refresh technology over HDMI, instead of through DisplayPort. While the experience should be mostly the same, delivering FreeSync over HDMI allows consumers to use more common (and often cheaper) cables and connectors. The three monitors Samsung has unveiled all pack 1080p displays, and all support FreeSync over HDMI, although unfortunately the refresh rate is capped at just 60 Hz. All three monitors also use VA LCD panels, with brightness and contrast ratings of 250 nits and 3000:1 respectively. For those that prefer flat displays, these new monitors might not be for you, as Samsung has implemented a 1800R (1800mm radius) curve in all three. This is a pretty strong curve as far as curved displays are concerned, with many other monitors opting for less tight 2700R or 3000R curves. The three curved monitors on offer with FreeSync over HDMI are split between two lines: CF591, as a single 27-inch monitor; and CF390, where there's 23.5- and 27-inch models available. The main differences between these monitors are in features, with the CF591 covering 117% of the sRGB color space, and offering dual HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and built-in 5W speakers. The CF390 series doesn't offer any of these features, instead packing just HDMI and VGA. Samsung's new monitors will be hitting the market in March for those in the United States, Europe and Asia, with other markets to follow in April. Pricing has yet to be announced. 2016-03-02 16:47 Tim Schiesser

94 94 $3000 HoloLens Developer Edition is available for pre-order today, ships March 30 The virtual reality battle between the Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive is almost here, but while all the talk seems to revolve around these two headsets, it’s easy to forget about Microsoft’s augmented reality offering - The Hololens. Rumors regarding the device may have dried up recently, but news from the weekend states that the $3000 Development Edition of the headset will be available for pre-order today for an expected launch date of March 30. The information came from an article in Fortune which was published before the embargo and subsequently pulled. It was later reposted in its entirety on Reddit by a user named ‘Shooob.’ Microsoft will be providing tutorial videos, documentation, and information to help companies develop Windows 10 apps for headset. Part of the help Microsoft is offering developers will apparently come in the form of three playable Hololens games - Fragments, Young Conker, and RoboRaid - all created by the Redmond-based company. The games, which demonstrate some of the Hololens’ capabilities, sound quite interesting. Fragments, for example, puts players “in the middle of an augmented reality crime drama that unfolds in their living room, allowing them to investigate clues and solve crimes by interacting with characters that sit on their couch and talk directly to them.” Young Conker brings the titular squirrel from developer Rare's series of games – the most ( in)famous being Conker’s Bad Fur Day – into the real world. The game supposedly changes depending on the environment the player is standing in, giving each person a unique experience. RoboRaid, meanwhile, is a first-person shooter that “has invading aliens literally ripping through the walls of the room you’re in,” and uses spatial sound as a gameplay feature. The Hololens Development Edition will also include several non-gaming programs, including HoloStudio, an app that lets developers create 3D resources and teaches them various commands; an enhanced version of Skype that allows people who are running the app on any Windows device to interact with the holographic world; and HoloTour, which can create 360- degree panoramic displays of locations like Rome and Machu Pichu to make users feel like they are there. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Kudo Tsunoda has high hopes for the Hololens version of Skype. “This type of communication has enormous potential in both the consumer and business world,” he said. “It will allow developers to communicate with each other using the holographic medium to share development methods and seek the advice of others. With Skype, you can see the holograms the other person is seeing and you can use holograms to illustrate helpful techniques or development approaches. It is our hope that the holographic development community will be just that—a community.” We’ll no doubt learn a lot more about the Hololens at the Microsoft’s Build conference which starts on March 30. 2016-03-02 16:47 Rob Thubron

95 95 McDonald's Sweden's Happy Meal box transforms into VR headset Forget the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift: McDonald's Sweden will soon have everything you need for an excellent virtual reality experience. The company is launching a new version of the Happy Meal box that can transform into a virtual reality headset , which they're calling "Happy Goggles", complete with an in-house VR skiing game. Happy Goggles will only be available in a handful of stores in a trial run: 14 restaurants are participating, and will sell 3,500 convertible Happy Meal boxes on the weekends of March 5 and March 12. To get the headset you'll have to fork out around US$4.10, which is the typical price of a Happy Meal in Sweden. Similar to Google Cardboard, McDonald's VR headset requires you to insert a smartphone into the completed cardboard creation, which is (understandably) not included. However the construction process appears to be pretty simple, and it includes a pair of lenses. Happy Goggles have been created to tie in with Sportlov, a school holiday that allows children to go skiing in the country's numerous winter sports destinations. The game that accompanies the headset is called "Slope Stars", and will work without a VR headset for those that don't have access to one, or with an alternate set such as Cardboard. If the headset becomes a hit, there's a chance McDonald's will roll it out to a wider audience, potentially to other countries. Considering Google Cardboard and its alternatives typically cost more than a standard Happy Meal, it could be a great way to bring simple VR experiences to the masses. 2016-03-02 16:47 Tim Schiesser

96 Hack the Pentagon! The Pentagon is to run its own big bounty program, inviting white-hat hackers to test the security of its systems. It is not intended to be a free-for-all, and would-be hackers will be vetted before being given the go-ahead -- although of course there is nothing to stop anyone from trying to breach the defenses if they feel so inclined The 'Hack the Pentagon' initiative was launched today by Defense Secretary Ash Carter. He said "I am confident that this innovative initiative will strengthen our digital defenses and ultimately enhance our national security". It is to be a carefully managed program which will only be open to US citizens, and networks relating to particularly sensitive material and weapons will be off-limits. While full details are yet to be released, the Pentagon is considering offering financial rewards. The program is being run by the Defense Digital Service (DDS) which launched back in November to draw on the capabilities of the technology industry. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is to head an advisory board at the Pentagon with the aim of bringing innovation and 'best practice' ideas from Silicon Valley to the US Military. Inviting hackers -- even those that have been vetted -- to attack government systems is certain to ring a few alarm bells, but it is only public-facing systems that will be part of the program. Speaking to Reuters , a Pentagon official said: "The goal is not to comprise any aspect of our critical systems, but to still challenge our cybersecurity in a new and innovative way". The Pentagon says that the program will launch in April, and it is expecting thousands of applicants to express interest in participating. Photo credit: Frontpage / Shutterstock 2016-03-02 18:25 By Mark

97 Google glitch translates 'Russian Federation' into 'Mordor'; it has a ring to it As a fan of Cossack dancing, Eastern Bloc architecture, vodka and pervasive government oppression, Sneak loves Russia. And while he accepts that Siberia is a vast and mostly empty land mass, capable of killing the unwary in numerous ways, he would not liken it to Mordor, the dark, ash-covered, orc-infested land in the south-east of Tolkien's Middle Earth. But, according to multiple reports, the all-seeing, all-knowing Sauron Google believes that Russia is in fact Mordor. Or more accurately a bug in the Google Translate tool translated the Ukrainian word for 'Russian Federation' into 'Mordor'. Not content with effectively calling Russia a nation of twisted, down-trodden creatures ruled by a brutal dictator, Google Translate went one step further by translating 'Russians' into 'okkupanty' meaning ‘occupiers' in Sneak's second language, that being English. C++ is his mother tongue. Then to pour a granary of salt into the virtual wound, Google translated the surname of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov into the Russian for 'sad little horse', according to The Telegraph. Sneak thinks that's rather cute in a slightly Eeyore way. Yes he knows Eeyore is a fictional donkey. Please don't write in. Now, that noise you're hearing is Sneak's irony alarm going off at full pelt, given that Ukraine is not exactly having the best time with Russia and pro-Russian rebels at the moment, particularly as in 2014 Russia annexed the Crimea region from Ukraine, simply because it could. Google has apologised for the error and blamed the automated aspect of Translate, but Sneak is not convinced that it was a bug and, to indulge the conspiracy theorist in him, believes that a disgruntled pro-Ukraine programmer decided to tweak Google Translate to offer this slight at Russian users. Back in his early years as an IT chap at Northern Rock, Sneak ended up dating a lovely Russian systems analyst called Natasha. She had a mononym. Next thing he knew she disappeared one evening after a heady mix of vodka and Kerplunk! and disappeared with Sneak's server room key card. Then the banking crisis happened, Northern Rock went under and Sneak took indefinite sick leave. The moral of the story is that annoying the Russians might not be wise, otherwise the road to Google's Mountain View HQ could end up being blocked by Soviet-era tanks with president Putin straddling a turret, topless and declaring "You shall not pass" to befuddled Google engineers. Or perhaps they will take it in good humour. After all as the video below explains: Russians love to boogie. 07 Jan 2016 2016-03-02 16:45

98 WinRT PDF found to be a possible vulnerability in Edge for Windows 10 With the introduction of Windows 10, Microsoft said goodbye to Internet Explorer, the aging Netscape killer, and hello to Edge. While the company has been increasingly vigilant about security and the nightmares of IE 6 have slowly faded away, with a new browser comes with the potential for new problems. Security researcher Mark Yason of IBM thinks he may have found a potential path to attack. Yason plans to demonstrate the flaw at the upcoming RSA USA 2016 conference. The vector for attack stems from EdgeHTML which utilizes WinRT PDF for these file types, something that saves customers from using a third-party program such as those from Adobe, Nitro and FoxIt. Windows Runtime (WinRT) has been around since the introduction of Windows 8.1. It aimed to aid developers with the incorporation of PDF files into their apps. Yason points out that "WinRT libraries such as WinRT PDF have well-documented APIs that applications can use. In the case of WinRT PDF, the Windows. Data. Pdf namespace provides the necessary classes that would allow applications to render PDFs into image files. Interestingly, in addition to using the documented WinRT PDF APIs, EdgeHTML uses additional, nondocumented WinRT PDF APIs that enable features such as PDF text searching and selection". Thanks to Windows 10, the WinRT PDF has become prominent due to its full integration with the Edge browser. However, it also allows for direct accessibility by hackers to instigate drive-by attacks. This is enabled by default in Edge and there is no opt-out as of now. Yason concludes "WinRT PDF opens up an additional attack surface that can be leveraged to attack the Edge browser. But for now, exploiting WinRT PDF via Edge is expensive because of the combined exploit mitigations in place. Interest in WinRT PDF and the development of new exploitation techniques will determine when an Edge drive-by exploit leveraging a WinRT PDF vulnerability will be seen in the wild". Photo credit: tanuha2001 / Shutterstock 2016-03-02 18:20 By Alan

Total 98 articles. Created at 2016-03-03 00:02