Microsoft Goes To The Mall With Kinect Features For Wall-Sized Displays

Maybe touch will never be a particularly good match for Microsoft's Windows. Its Kinect sensor, however ' yes, the one mostly used as an attachment for its Xbox 360 game system ' might be another story.

Today, Microsoft announced two new gestures for Kinect for Windows, the PC-specific version of its Kinect interface. Within the new Windows for Kinect 1.7 SDK are two new gestures: the "push" or "click" gesture, and a closed-fist gesture for scrolling and panning a screen. Both could help power interactive wall-sized displays at your doctors' office ' or the mall.

Not An Actual Product ' Yet

Right now, Kinect for Windows is more of a research tool than an actual product. The sensor itself costs $228.99 at Amazon, is designed for closer sensing, and comes with a warning that it must be used as either a development tool or with software that has been designed for it - which, really, none has. But all that's changing.

"We actually think that this will be the biggest advancement [in Kinect for Windows] since the original introduction," said Bob Heddle, who leads the Kinect for Windows team in the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) Group at Microsoft. Microsoft calls the new gestures Kinect Interactions.

If the closed-fist gesture sounds familiar, that's because Microsoft demonstrated it at its recent TechFest, where Microsoft's vision for the future was embodied in wall-sized displays. In that environment, touch doesn't work as well as simply interpreting gestures via Kinect, which can "read" a user's gestures and translate them into a familiar user interface.

Windows On Walls

Microsoft sees those wall-sized displays, powered by Kinect for Windows, in three areas: interactive displays in public spaces, health care, and education and training. Some of Microsoft's vision is already a reality: at Bloomingdale's in New York, FaceCake and Microsoft installed "virtual dressing rooms" last year, where shoppers could use Kinect to "try on" a virtual scarf or dress, layered on top of their video "reflection". And there are virtual exercises of a sort, too, with "Just Dance" and similar Kinect-powered games grading players on how well they copy dance moves. 

The next step, Heddle said, was to make those activities more purposeful. Instead of dancing, for example, Kinect could be used as a rehab tool, working with a virtual physical trainer to ensure that users were putting in the required work. Microsoft also hopes to make Kinect an interface for "dirty hands" environments, such as using a PC when it might be covered with grease, for example. (Samsung's Galaxy S4 also allows users to swipe left and right, plus preview content, by simply moving their hand near the screen.)

"But to do that, we need a selection mechanism," Heddle said. "The value is that we can see you, understand the way you're looking, and draw the clothing on you... But to do that, you need to allow the user to choose the clothing, and now there's a 2D UI component."

How It Works

If you think about it, operating a PC-like environment doesn't have to be much different than, say, playing the giant electronic keyboard at FAO Schwarz, as Tom Hanks and a friend did in Big.

To gain control of the display, users raise their hand, identifying themselves to the screen. That hand appears as a wavy circle, a cursor that can be moved across the screen by moving your arm. Users "click" by pushing in toward the screen. (There is apparently no double-click in the Kinect interface.) What the new SDK adds is the closed-fist "scroll" gesture, which essentially works a swipe. Close your fist and move your hand down, and the window moves down. Chop your closed hand down rapidly, and the windows scrolls rapidly, like a flicked page on a smartphone.

According to Heddle, the new Kinect interface presents a familiar, Windows-like environment for interacting with large-screen content. Small-screen content, too. Last year, Microsoft Research quietly unveiled the Kinected Browser ' a set of browser elements that let developers write what are essentially Kinect-aware Web apps. A future with Kinect-equipped PCs won't necessarily need dedicated software or apps.

Kinect Fusion

Microsoft also announced Kinect Fusion, essentially the opposite of a 3D printer. With Fusion, the Kinect sensor functions as a wand, which a user can move around a statue or other object, transforming it into a virtual object using voxels, or pixels that exist in a 3D space. While there's a limit to the number of voxels that can be stored, the detail of the 3D object can be improved by merely moving the Kinect sensor slowly around, allowing it to take more "pictures" of the object, Heddle said.

Essentially, Kinect Fusion would allow users to "scan" their own physical objects, then manipulate them and print them out. It's a different take on the same problem that Autodesk attempted to solve in 2011 with a process that could create 3D models from two-dimensional photos.

In a mall kiosk, a retailer could use Kinect to simply "scan in" a new piece of merchandise, Heddle said.

The Future Of User Interfaces Is... Microsoft?

It's all part of the what Microsoft sees as its future: natural user interfaces, driven by speech and touch and gestures. Touch might not work naturally on the PC, but it adds a degree of public performance to any retailer. Think about a wall-sized display projected onto the wall of a Microsoft store, or Williams-Sonoma, or JC Penney. Who wouldn't stop to watch someone waving at a giant LCD screen, and seeing it react?

There are still problems to solve. By raising one's hand, Kinect knows that a user is trying to use it. But that user has to relinquish control for another user to have a turn. In reality, the first user will probably walk away when they're done; however, other users might want a turn in the meantime, causing a fight for control. And even though Kinect for Windows was designed for Windows 8, it still can't control it, Heddle said.

Nevertheless, Kinect for Windows allows brands to engage with users, and users to engage with brands. A UI that some see as a hassle on the desktop becomes fun in the mall ' and the only content to engage with is the brand that paid for it. You might call that a selling point.

Images: Microsoft, Amazon (Just Dance)

Dropbox Buys Mailbox - Promises To Help It Grow

Things have been going great for Mailbox, the sleek iOS email app that advertises its ability to "put email in its place." Developed by Palo Alto-based startup Orchestra Inc., Mailbox has grown immensely since its February launch - its now delivering more than 60 million emails a day and has taken more than 1.3 million reservations in a unique system that staggers users' access - and builds anticipation. And on Friday, Dropbox bought the company for an undisclosed amount. 

Mailbox attempts to reduce the impending email overload down to nothing. It lifts the inbox above Gmail's 'All Mail' folder and turns it into a productivity center where incoming items lie in wait to be organized. A swipe to the right archives or deletes the message, while  a swipe to the left sets up a time-based reminder or adds the folder to a custom list. That way, everything can be addressed immediately (or at least in one session) and put where it needs to be. Through archiving, conversations deemed finished are still accessible via search. The "archive, search and never delete" email mindset is increasingly popular -Mailbox gives you a clean starting point. 

Mailbox Lives!

"To be clear, Mailbox is not going away," stressed the app team in a blog post this morning. "The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen."

Though the acquisition sum is unavailable, it should be noted that Orchestra raised $5.3 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures in 2011. According to The Wall Street Journal, all 13 employees of Orchestra will join Dropbox. Currently Mailbox works only for iOS and Gmail accounts, but the team is looking to expand that in all directions. 

Dropbox, currently valued at $4 billion by investors, plans to use Mailbox to expand the reach of its services, which already cater to 100 million users, directly into the email optimization sector. But unlike Google's acquisition of email app Sparrow last summer that ended up killing the the app as it acqui-hired the team, Dropbox seems actually interested in the product as well as the team.  'We felt we could help Mailbox reach a much different audience much faster,' Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told the Journal. Houston emphasized that Mailbox wil stay a stand alone app, but Dropbox will also work to integrate it features, such as email attachments. 

Is It Worth The Wait? Absolutely

The beauty of Mailbox, which I've let run rampant on my multiple email accounts this morning, is the idea of "Inbox zero" - a repository for only the things that must be addressed immediately, with an end goal of wiping it to nothing every time you open it. By clearing out that pile of mail - too often used as a To Do list - either to a folder governed by time-based priority reminders or to one's All Mail folder through archiving and labeling, users can optimize their email organization and breathe a much-needed sigh of relief.

At least that's how theory goes. And after my morning tests, I'm starting to believe it could actually work. Mailbox could be one of the very few email optimizers to deliver on the promise of actually making your life easier.

Upending email long been a Holy Grail for both productivity and user interface gurus. Email philosophy has fluctuated constantly since the messaging platform became the mainstream Web-based communication method decades ago. But Mailbox, in only a matter of minutes, begins to fundamentally change how you view your inbox. For me, it immediately started to change my haphazard navigation through all the junk towards a semblance of organization.

Works For Me

I found Mailbox a refreshing upgrade from relying on Gmail's Label feature and my own rather arbitrary system of what needed to stay in front of my eyes at all times. Personally, I spend too much time throwing things in folders and applying labels, cutting my Inbox down but never quite achieving a regimented system where I truly felt in control and capable of easily finding anything at any time. With Mailbox, the difficult decisions are made for you. You just hand yourself over and stop trying so hard. 

It may be premature to consider Mailbox the best thing that ever happened to email, but I did manage to clear my inbox of hundreds of messages in just a few hours. After waiting for nearly three weeks to get access to the app, I was thrilled to achieve my "first zero." 

Though it matters less than core functionality and purpose, the app's design is also exemplary. A clean and simple look matched with an easy-to-use interface make Mailbox a pleasure to use, and its multi-purpose swiping conjures up the aesthetic experience of using the well-received Mac app Clear, which lets you set up prioritized lists and then swipe them away when completed. 

Reviewers seem to agree on Mailbox's promise, as do the long list of potential users still waiting to gain access. 

 

Samsung, Meet Icarus: Galaxy S4 Features Aim High, Risk Melting Waxy Disappointment

You remember Icarus, right? Greek boy with wax wings takes errant flight path, meets watery death. A classic metaphor for reach exceeding your grasp.

Samsung: Meet Icarus

Samsung threw so much at us during the keynote launch of its flagship Galaxy S4 that it's difficult to unpack all of it. 

Samsung is big on naming things. Every new function or feature in the Galaxy S4 comes with a snazzy title and, undoubtedly, a huge marketing campaign for convincing us how remarkable it is. Unfortunately, the Galaxy S4 is not exactly reinventing the smartphone. 

Samsung may need to brace itself for some blowback, given its over-the-top approach. There's something to be said for understatement, as Apple so frequently demonstrates and as Google has done with its Nexus series. Samsung wants to be everything to everybody. It's a fool's errand. Keep trying and ultimately you become the fool.

Home screen for the Galaxy S4

So what are some of these mind-blowing features that you're going to hear so very much about? Let's take a closer look.

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 First Impressions: Beautiful But Bloated)

Dual Camera: A feature that allows you to use both the front and back cameras of the Galaxy S4 at the same time. Also allows for Dual Video Call where you can show people what you are looking at during a video call with the front facing camera.

• Takeaway: OK Samsung, you got me here. This is a cool and innovative use of the dual-camera concept... that was introduced a couple of years ago with FaceTime on the iPhone. This basically taking FaceTime and stretching it to the extreme. 

Drama Shot, Sound & Shot And Story Album: Samsung is stretching out its camera functions. Drama shot allows you to see all the action in a photo in one continuous loop while Sound & Shoot allows you to capture the sound and voice happening during the photograph. Story Album organizes your photos by metadata ' time, geo-tag, people etc. specific to that event. 

• Takeaway: None of this is really groundbreaking, as companies like HTC, Apple, BlackBerry and Nokia all have very similar features. Sound & Shoot is creative but, ultimately, probably not terribly useful.

Group Play & Share Music: Allows users to share music, photos, documents and games with people around them (at least those also toting Samsung devices) without a data connection. Share Music allows users to play the same song on multiple phones, basically creating multiple mobile speakers.

• Takeaway: Group Play and Share Music are basically extensions of previous Samsung features that allowed users to share photos with other Samsung users. Samsung has turned this to other types of media and music.

S Translator: Instant translation using voice or text for apps like email, text message and ChatOn (a feature in Dual Video Call that allows you to share your screen).

• Takeaway: Google already has a fairly robust translator in Android. Samsung's own translator will only be a great feature if it cooperates with Google's apps like Gmail, Talk and Voice. If not, it's just another redundant Samsung app.

Smart Pause & Smart Scroll: Pause enables the users to control the screen by where they look. For instance, if you're watching a video, the phone will pause it if you look away. Smart Scroll allows you to scroll up and down emails or a browser without touching the screen.

• Takeaway: We didn't get a lot of hands on time with the Galaxy S4, so it is hard to say if this is cool or annoying. It will definitely be a different type of experience. Hopefully Samsung gives users the option to toggle it on and off.

Air Gesture & Air View: Gesture allows a user to interact with the screen without actually touching the screen. Just hover your finger over the screen and swipe between apps or pages. View lets you preview an app, email or page by hovering your finger over it.

• Takeaway: If you have ever played with the Galaxy Note II and its S Pen, you are well aware of the Air features. Functional and useful at times but perhaps superfluous features.

WatchOn: Allows you to control your various home utilities (TV, DVD player) by turning your Galaxy S4 into a remote.

• Takeaway: So, Samsung basically just put infrared into the Galaxy S4 and turned it into a remote. Just like a universal TV remote. Hey, why the hell not.

Tired Yet?

The primary problem with Samsung's last two flagship smartphones is that it was very easy to get lost in all of the various features that Samsung threw at us. Add in Android apps that do basically the same thing and your phone can start getting confusing very quickly. 

The same principal applies to the Galaxy S4 as to the Galaxy S3 when we reviewed it last year: more is not always better. Sometimes more is just more. Taken individually, each of these functions is fine and good. Some are more impressive than others, but none (outside of Smart Scroll, perhaps) are really groundbreaking. 

More is what Samsung does, and generally speaking, it does more very well. If that's the type of experience you're looking for in a smartphone, you'll probably love the Samsung Galaxy S4. If you want something simpler but still powerful, the HTC One or an iPhone 5 may be the way to go. 

Here You Go: All The Samsung Galaxy S4's Features In One Handy Video

Samsung stuffed a lot of features into its latest Galaxy S4. Enough to pack a Broadway play, apparently. With all the new apps, functions, gestures, camera controls and kittenkaboodles, it's plenty difficult just to figure out what's actually new and exciting about the Galaxy S4. 

There's a good chance that you're never going to use half of these apps. Others may make you throw your smartphone through a window -- say, for instance, if because every time you look away from your phone, the video you were watching stops playing. What is Dual Video Calling anyway? What, exactly, is the deal with all these different camera features?

(See also: Samsung, Meet Icarus: Galaxy S4 Features Aim High, Risk Melting Waxy Disappointment)

Product pages filled with specs and flashy names (WatchON! ChatOn! Smart Scroll! Drama Shot!) for features don't really tell the whole story. Sometimes you just need to see things in action.

Samsung did us a favor and made this four-minute favor overviewing everything new in the Galaxy S4. Check it out below.

What's the most useful new feature of the Galaxy S4? What's the most innane? Let us know in the comments. 

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 First Impressions: Beautiful But Bloated [Gallery])

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 Revealed: Spectacular Specs & Impressive Features)

How Change.org Puts More Power Into The Hands Of People

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

Major victories like these have drawn more than 30 million people to endorse petitions at Change.org, a figure that's growing at a blistering pace of 2 million each month. Jennifer Dulski, who left Google this past month to become the organization's President and COO, tells me that her biggest priority is making sure Change.org has a fast, stable platform and to make it easier for people to create and sign petitions.

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. 'Every package is custom built for each sponsor,' Dulski says, adding that 'we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.'

The future for sponsored Chang.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is 'going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we're able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.'

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. 'We have staff in 18 countries,' notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I'm ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

One Hadoop Distribution To Rule Them All?

The Hadoop market is getting interesting. Last year it was a death match between startups vying to own the heart of the project. Today it's a veritable smorgasbord of big-brand vendors getting involved to ensure they claim a big piece of the Big Data pie. Unlike American youth athletics, not everyone will get to take home a trophy.

Hadoop plays a key role in the burgeoning Big Data market, and represents a $13 billion market by 2017, according to Markets and Markets. (IDC pegs the market much, much lower at $812.8 million in 2016, but its numbers don't seem credible to me as they don't even seem to include Cloudera's sales.) Given that Big Data is hot, and Hadoop's data processing engine sits at its core, there's going to be a lot of money trading hands for Hadoop-related products and services.

Not everyone is going to collect.

SiliconAngle's John Furrier has challenged me on this, arguing that Hadoop is "not a winner take all market." While I, too, can see multiple winners in Hadoop, just as there have been in Linux (e.g., Red Hat dominates license/services revenue, but IBM, HP, and others make arguably more with related hardware, complementary software products, and professional services), markets don't tend toward entropy. They trend toward consolidation.

Today, the Hadoop ecosystem increasingly represents entropy:

• Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR remain the early favorites, but with very different approaches. Hortonworks positions itself as the 100% open source player; Cloudera somewhat does the same, but adds in complementary, proprietary bits, mostly around managing Hadoop, to add value to Hadoop (and its top line revenue); and MapR provides a hybrid open source/proprietary Hadoop distribution that swaps out HDFS for its proprietary NFS storage layer.
• EMC Greenplum has been involved with Hadoop for several years, and is set to release a new distribution of Hadoop called Pivotal HD. I've labeled Pivotal HD proprietary, but EMC's Hadoop team has taken issue with this characterization, arguing that PivotalHD is 100% open source, with complementary functionality (like HAWQ) available as add-ons. Point well taken, and I apologize for my misunderstanding. I was wrong, perhaps not surprisingly getting confused by Pivotal HD's product page, which says little about open source. But what seems clear is that customers won't be confused by EMC's value proposition: Hadoop with an advanced SQL query engine to make it easier and more powerful to use.
• Intel just got into the game with its own Hadoop distribution. Basically, you can think of it as Hadoop on (Intel Xeon' processor, Intel SSD, and Intel 10GbE networking.hardware) steroids.
• For those who don't want to run Hadoop within the datacenter, Amazon offers Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). As of April 2012, EMR was powering over 1 million Hadoop clusters. Presumably this number is much bigger today.
• Many, many others including IBM BigInsights, a range of startups, and more.

Will all of these companies make serious bank on Hadoop? No. Will some of them? Sure.

Ultimately, the winners in Hadoop will be those that invest most heavily in its success, as they will be perceived as the companies best positioned to help would-be customers succeed with Hadoop's complexities. But how they invest is up for discussion. Code to Apache Hadoop? Value-adding extensions?

Success isn't about open source purity, as Gartner's Merv Adrian posits: it's about making customers successful. As we saw with Linux, where Red Hat is both the top contributor to the Linux kernel and the company that harvests the most revenue from distributing Linux, contributing code is a great way to signal to the market that you're a leader and capable of getting code fixes to support customers. Code matters.

But code contributions are not the only way to demonstrate leadership and attract customers. Ultimately, companies that make it easier to get value from Hadoop will win big. There may be more than one such company. Indeed, there almost certainly will be. 

But there won't be 20 of them. Or even 10. Enterprise IT is simply not going to be able to manage a polyglot Hadoop distribution ecosystem. That's not the way markets work. No one wants to be "long tail" vendor, and customers don't want to buy from them, either, as Hugh MacLeod humorously points out on Gaping Void:

Source: GapingVoidArt. Used with permission.

The Hadoop market over the next year is going to be hugely interesting. And bloody.

Image courtesy of Ehab Othman / Shutterstock.

SXSW Wrap Up: Launches, Panels, Buzz & Snark [Infographic]

The SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas, is famously sprawling, crowded, hectic and intense. Not surprisingly, that can make it hard to sum up the impact of the entire event in any meaningful way.

But the folks at Mutual Mobile did their best to try in this infographic highlighting attendee tweets covering the best product launches, them most popular panels, the buzziest conversation topics and the snarkiest commentary.

I just wish they'd found a way to leave in the barbecue!

 

 

 

 

Top image of keynote speaker Jennifer Pahlka courtesy SXSW/Mindy Best.

 

Comcast's Awesome Watchathon Reminds You It's Still the Boss

On Wednesday, Comcast gave its subscribers a new reason they shouldn't cut the cord: The "Watchathon."

Beginning March 25, any Comcast subscriber with a cable subscription and access to video-on-demand viewing can dial up over 1,000 episodes from over 100 shows, including hits like Game of Thrones or Dexter. Yes, that's right: every show from every season from major pay TV services like HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax will available for free for a full week, whether or not you have premium-channel subscriptions. The Watchathon extends to basic-cable hits like Downton Abbey and The Walking Dead.

In other words, every so often, even Comcast can act just like everyone wishes they would all the time.

Normally, Comcast holds an iron grip around the pockets of most subscribers. Want ESPN, ABC, NBC, USA, and Bravo? Of course you do. But Comcast forces 150 more channels of utter dreck down your throats, and makes you pay over $100 a month for the privilege. In a Harris branding study released this month, Comcast finished 51st out of the 60 companies surveyed, with a corporate reputation that Harris said was "poor".

But work the peasants too hard, and a revolution will brew. To forestall that day, Comcast customers are eating cake, at least for now. (Here's a full list of shows included in the Watchathon. Note that it doesn't offer a free, one-week subscription to HBO, Starz or Showtime, just a pass to their proprietary shows.)

Comcast Is A Streaming Service, Too

When consumers talk about streaming services, the conversation starts with Netflix, then maybe Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime. If these services were baseball teams, Netflix might be the Oakland Athletics, always looking for an underutilized asset it can exploit ' in its case, the massive, inexpensive, and still popular back catalog of television shows. 

If that's true, Comcast is the New York Yankees: absolutely dominating the markets it serves, and buying up whatever it wants. And by owning a majority stake in NBC Universal, Comcast is a program creator as well as an aggregator like Netflix.

Furthermore, over five million U.S. homes are now "zero TV" homes, Nielsen reported this week, a figure that's doubled in the last six years. These cord-cutters are just five percent of the total U.S. TV viewing audience, but it's a growing trend. And cord-cutters, by definition, aren't choosing Comcast.

But until now, Comcast and Netflix have been polar opposites. Comcast provides everything that pay or free TV provides, hundreds of channels worth, but with no real depth. After a month or so, TV episodes drop into that nebulous twilight zone where they're only available for purchase from Amazon, Hulu, or Vudu before they're eventually packaged into boxed Blu-ray sets. A few years later, Netflix scoops them up into its ever-expanding back catalog.

The same holds true, quality-wise. For all of the low-budget "B" movies that some criticize Netflix for buying up, they're just the equivalent of the "16 and Pregnant" reality ilk that MTV and its brethren commission. And while Netflix would like to buy up as many recent movies as it can, Comcast tries to offer "Catch Up" options for viewers to watch older episodes of shows that are currently airing.

Throwing Its Weight Around

The difference, however, is one of budget. Comcast's quarterly revenues usually top $16 billion; Netflix recorded $945 million last quarter. But Netflix's revenue is steadily rising, giving the company more money to invest in either original programming, which competes directly with NBC, or buying up more movies and TV shows. Either way, Comcast loses. Watchathon is just Comcast beating its chest and roaring its displeasure -- quite possibly to no avail at all.

Judge for yourself. Here's what a source close to the company told me: "While there's value to Netflix's library of legacy shows, no one has an active content catalog like Comcast, and that's the stuff we're parading with Watchathon."

There's one important component to the promotion, however, that's not immediately apparent: many of the shows that Comcast is promoting, including the premium ones, are ongoing. Sure, you'll get to watch seven seasons of Dexter, if that's what you want. But when Season 8 rolls around this June, you'll have to sign up for Showtime to see how it ends. (The first sample is always free.)

Still, for years customers have clamored for an a la carte option, a way to pick individual channels without bundled stations they didn't want. For years, cable and satellite companies have ignored them. For a week, we get what we want. It's not clear how much money Comcast spent to try and buy our happiness, but who cares? After all, we paid for it.

Image via Flickr/scriptingnews 

 

IBM Wants Your CEO To Embrace The Future ' And It Will Do All The Hard Work

Executives with a capital "C" in their title generally don't have a clue on how to adjust to the social, mobile, and cloud-based business world. Now IBM wants to help these Luddite execs adapt -- by plunking them down into a new lab where it will show them what the IT tools at their disposal can actually accomplish.

IBM's new Customer Experience Lab aims to deploy 100 hand-picked specialists ' industry titans from the world of machine learning, analytics, and a slew of other "Big Data" fields ' as a consulting consortium aimed at aiding C-suite executives.

"Take for example a CMO whose life has changed quite a bit as a result of social and mobile in the last couple years," explains Clay Williams, senior manager of "front-office innovation" at IBM. "The goal here is to bring the headlights that IBM research has to shine and show them further down the road' so that IBM can help them chart the path forward."

In other words, IBM wants to provide some tools, and some advice, to help top executives learn how not to screw things up in a landscape they have no hope of understanding on their own. After all, a CFO may be well-versed in the complexities of financial-based business models, but isn't going to have the slightest idea of how to employ data mining and machine learning to better understand a single customers needs.

IBM knows that, and it insists it isn't looking to educate these individuals. "It's not so much teaching, but delivering these new technologies," Williams says. "It's built around us working in partnership."

"Big Data" Tools

With more than $6 billion going into research and development each year, IBM is one of the very few global companies capable of offering up an expensive, need-based Big Data consulting service.

But what exactly will it look like? Well, the new IBM lab aims to give business leaders the opportunity to work alongside those 100 experts in order to jointly create new business strategies based on what the companies' own data tell them.

For interested companies, IBM will pinpoint a C-level candidate exec and help craft new business strategies for him or her. Or, if you prefer the original IBMspeak: "From nomination to partnering to understanding the client problem and finding the right research team, then what we do is look at proof of concept model," Williams says. "We see if they are appealing, rapidly prototype some of those ideas and then go to a full solution process."

IBM outlines three generic sorts of breakthroughs it has identified for potential clients to leverage:

• Customer insight: Applying advanced capabilities such as machine learning and visual analytics to predict differences in individual customer behavior across multiple channels. 
• Customer engagement: Using deep customer engagement to drive insight and continuously deliver value by personalizing engagement, versus transactional experiences.
• Employee engagement: Embedding semantic, collaborative, and multimedia technologies to foster employee engagement and insight ' in person and online.

Mobile Banking? Great, But What's Next?

Williams offers an example from banking, both because that's an area where Big Data technologies can be particularly helpful, and because it's the sector in which two of the IBM lab's first clients ' British mutual institution Nationwide Building Society and Mexican superbank Banorte ' happen to operate.

"If you think about phase 1 of enabling [mobile] devices for banking, it was largely about parity with web-based banking," he says ' for instance, offering the ability to transfer funds or pay bills via mobile apps. Williams says IBM aims to go beyond that. If a bank wants to develop a plan for individual, social network-based experiences down the line, IBM can bring in a machine learning expert to parse how customers are interacting with businesses across various channels and develop algorithms for predicting behavior. "Now they're are asking the deeper question: 'What's going to happen next?'"

And that's the question IBM's customer-experience lab wants its would-be clients to be asking. It's supposedly the key with which international-scale business can craft strategies that fit the needs of individual customers -- though exactly how you get there from here still remains a bit fuzzy. One thing is for sure: IBM is convinced that it depends on crunching mounds of data. Oh, and on paying those consulting fees.

Image courtesy of Tomasz Bidermann / Shutterstock.com.

The Hackers Are Winning

After almost two decades online, I have never been more paranoid about my security, identity and theft.

Since the start of 2013, the following has happened:

• My Twitter password was compromised.
• So was the password on my Evernote account.
• My Yahoo email (which I hardly use anymore) was hacked and sent spam to everybody in my contacts.
• <And, the kicker of them all, my debit card was compromised while I was traveling in Manhattan.

That's just my personal journey for the first two and a half months of the year. I am not alone. Millions of Internet users have been affected by security breaches so far in 2013. Even the big companies of the Internet have seen breaches. Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have all admitted to being penetrated in one form or another. High profile Twitter accounts have been hacked, like those of Burger King and Jeep.

It's time to admit it. The hackers are winning. 

Are They, Really?

Assaying blame for hacks is a difficult endeavor. On one hand, people say we need to rebuild the Internet to make it more secure by default. Their theory is that the Web is, by its very nature, a hodge-podge mix of vulnerable nodes and standards that is aging and easy to exploit. This is largely true. Hackers hoard zero-day vulnerabilities like squirrels preparing for winter, and a motivated hacker can basically bust through anything.

On the other, many security experts argue that security starts with the individual. If you get hacked, you are basically at fault for violating basic security protocols -- for instance, by failing to change your passwords or by clicking on suspicious links. 

'There's no simple answer to this question,' Catalin Cosoi of antivirus company BitDefender wrote in an email to ReadWrite. He continued:

Hackers, scammers and malware writers have two main advantages: they have access to a lot of money (either by sponsorship or classic fraud) and they don't have to obey any software practice (their 'software' doesn't have to be properly tested, it can have bugs, doesn't have to work on any operating system and it really doesn't matter if it crashes a few machines). However, no one wants to complicate their lives more than needed or pay more that it actually makes, so if the hack gets very complicated, they will simply move to someone else.

Reactive Measures & The Myth Of The Impenetrable Fortress

Antivirus companies like Bitdefender are, by their own admission, highly reactive. They wait for a new virus to show itself on the Internet and then create a way to inoculate against it. This reactive approach has been going on for almost 20 years and it is increasingly becoming an untenable model.

'It works the same way human medicine responds to illness: once you identified the stream or the behavior, you can create vaccine for it,' Cosoi said. 'But we can't find a cure for an illness that doesn't currently exist '- at least not without significant costs. What we can do, though, is find ways to boost the immune system to make it less prone to future infections. In the security industry, we call this raising the cost of the attack.'

Spammers and malicious hackers have the stereotype of being inherently lazy. Like any stereotype, this is both true and false.

When it comes to getting people's money, most spammers prefer the path of least resistance. This leads to the quantity-over-quality approaches such as hacking Yahoo email accounts and spamming every contact from the user's address book. The easy route is to just get one person on the hook and then spread the virus through them, multiplying the scale of the attack with each successful infection.

When Cosoi talks about 'raising the cost of the attack,' he means that if it was harder to perform these types of attacks, they would slow to a trickle. The fact that they are so easy for spammers means they will continue. 

On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to keep a motivated hacker from getting something he or she really wants. These types of black hats are fewer and further in between but are infinitely more dangerous than your average spam-net. They usually don't target average users. Instead, they target the enterprise behind the user, which can lead to widespread breaches that affect everybody. 

As security researcher Graham Cluley at Sophos put it to me via email:

Regular Joe User isn't being targeted, and don't have to follow any different rules than the ones they should have been following for some years now to deal with the approximately 100,000 new unique samples of malware we see each day.

Is It Your Fault?

Some in the security industry think that breaches (both enterprise and individual) are inherently preventable. Just be smart and you'll be fine, right?

'The sky is not falling,' said Cluley. 'Burger King, Jeep and others who have had their Twitter accounts hacked have probably fallen victim because of human weakness. Chances are that they followed poor password practices, like using the same password in multiple places or choosing a password that was easy to crack.'

I can half believe that sentiment. It's very easy to imagine some intern manning the Burger King Twitter account might have a poor password or has been clicking on linkbait spam. That doesn't negate the fact that Twitter itself was hacked, exposing the passwords of some of its more popular and influential users.

I'm highly aware of suspicious links and attempts to spearphish me (a tactic where a specialized message with a poisoned link is sent to an individual as opposed to spammed to the masses). I don't click on links that might be malware.

Caution Only Gets You So Far

And yet, my caution hasn't protected me. For instance, I was not spammed or phished on Yahoo. I hardly use the account and only became aware of the hack when my Yahoo email started spamming my Google email (oh, the irony). This hack was on the Yahoo side, not the fault of an individual. Same goes for my password compromises on Evernote and Twitter. 

Unless I'm completely missing something, these breaches were not my fault. I was a victim caught in a larger game of cat-and-mouse between the hackers, security companies and susceptible enterprises. 

'There are no shortage of attackers with the necessary skill, motivation and financial resources to break into a given enterprise and steal data,' said Michael Sutton VP of security research at Zscaler, a company that focuses on detecting breaches. 'When companies such as Twitter, Apple and Facebook, with sophisticated security teams and more than adequate means to attract the very best talent cannot stop every attack, we must accept that the goal of building an impenetrable fortress is unachievable.'

Security Starts With The Individual (Who Can Still Be A Victim)

Researchers like Cluley have long advocated that security starts and ends with the individual.

'The takeaway from all these security stories is that each of us has a part to play in the fight against the bad guys -- whether it's on our home computers (ensuring they don't get hijacked into a botnet) or in the workplace,' Cluley said. 'Report suspicious activity, think before clicking on unsolicited attachments or links, keep your OS, your PDF reader, your anti-virus up-to-date with the latest security patches.'

The argument is a sound one and similar to how entities like the World Health Organization have gone about fighting outbreaks of epidemic disease: educate people to take care of themselves. Sometimes though, it doesn't matter how much you know or how assiduously you take care of yourself -- you are going to get sick (or hacked) and there is nothing you can do about it.

So, are the hackers winning? When people still do everything right and still become victims, you tell me.

Peter Thiel On Not Selling Facebook - And Much, Much More

As it turns out, the man who wants to build a sovereign ocean community off the coast of California is really down to earth.

Tuesday at South by Southwest (SXSW), serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and noted libertarian Peter Thiel took the stage to talk about' well, I wasn't really sure. But when the guy who co-founded PayPal, got in on the ground floor of Facebook, offers kids $100,000 to skip college and wants to build a crazy offshore island society talks, I listen. And I'm glad I did. 

Thiel's presentation defined a unique insider's view on the tech industry.

Why Facebook Said "No" To Yahoo's $1 Billion In 2006

It seems unimaginable now, but back in 2006, Yahoo almost bought Facebook. In a meeting to discuss the possibility, Thiel describes how when he, Mark Zuckerberg and board member James Breyer entered the negotiation room, the young(er) Zuckerberg declared that the meeting wouldn't take more than 10 minutes. When Yahoo put a $1 billion offer on the table, Zuckerberg barely humored the idea of selling.

"Full disclosure, I think that both Breyer and myself thought that we should take the money and run," Thiel recalls. "I was a little bit worried about it. The one partial rationalization I was able to come up with for not taking the money was that I looked at the history - two other companies were offered a billion dollars [by Yahoo] and had been turned down: It was eBay and Google."

"The argument that Zuckerberg finally came down on was that there were all these new things that we were going to build at Facebook. [Yahoo] had no definite idea about the future - they did not properly value things that did not yet exist. They were therefore undervaluing the business." Back then, the founder of Facebook said that he had no idea what he'd do with the money, Thiel recounts how Zuckerberg shrugged and said he'd probably just start another social networking site.

"The companies that are not profitable are actually companies that have a lot of ideas of what to do with money, " Thiel said. "The most successful businesses are the ones that don't sell."

The American Dream Is Dissolving

"We're still maybe in an Indian Summer of indeterminate optimism. In an indeterminate world, all you focus on are processes." According to Thiel, Steve Jobs's calculated multiyear plan after the 2007 crash is the perfect foil to an indeterminate business model - and a explanation for the success Apple still enjoys.

Thiel claims that startup culture and the investment world are locked into a "hermitically sealed loop" - but the era of suspended disbelief, of the strange safety of a bright-yet-amorphous future, can't last. "Indeterminate optimism is unstable" says Thiel. "I want people to at least be aware that this is the [prevailing] religion." It's a bubble world. It goes without saying that no one wants to talk about bubbles.

The Anti-Tony Stark?

I assumed a man so glutted with cash that he'd dedicate $1.25 million toward seasteading was just another flashy, lucky, walking embodiment of the Gatsbian dream. But Thiel is a cerebral entrepreneur steeped in Continental philosophy and urban planning practicalities - not the VC lexicon of buzzwords and bullshit. With an even meter to his speech and an uncanny way of flitting from history to philosophy, he may have just called the most gracefully executed bullshit on the tech industry' ever.

His talk itself proved to me that no, success isn't just about luck - not all of the time, anyway. Plucking historical examples from The Reber Plan to one of No Country For Old Men's creepiest scenes (the one when sociopath Javier Bardem decides if he'll kill a small-town Texan with a coin toss) to pop-finance read A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Thiel is a fascinating foil to the Tony Starks - and the Elon Musks - of the entrepreneurial world.

And yet his dreams are as big as Musk's - and maybe crazy enough to work, just the same.

The Customer Is Always Right ' Even When The Data Says They're Wrong

Guest author David Ewart heads up Marketing and Revenue for IT upstart Loggly.

The epic media battle between New York Times reporter John Broder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk began with a negative consumer review, escalated with a strong-armed public rebuttal by a powerful executive and ended with a bunch of shared log files disputing the veracity of Broder's driving experience. So what's the big deal? Was this just another he-said-he-said that ended with data coming to the rescue?

Oh no. It's bigger than that, much bigger.

(See also Would You Buy A Tesla Model S?)

On first blush, the story spoke of the growing importance of data in corporate America. Log files, typically the chatter of IT managers behind the firewall, had suddenly entered the corner office and the public spotlight. It was a powerful tipping point for those of us who deal with data every day, and spoke volumes to the growing potential of log files to help companies solve problems and identify trends. But what's the real issue' and why is it such a big deal?

Elon Musk, with all his innovative thinking has become a poster-child for the face of market disruption. Yet he forgot the age-old mantra: 'The customer is always right.' By publishing 'the truth' of the logs for the world to see, he may have succeeding in counteracting the claims of the reviewer, but he disrupted his own sales pipeline.

Being Right - At A High Cost

(See also Tesla And The Fallacy Of Data-Driven Decisions.)

On Bloomberg TV, Musk admitted: "We did actually get a lot of cancellations as a result of The New York Times article. It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial.' The stock, trading at $39 before the review was published is trading at $34 today. Elon lost customer confidence, trust and their cash.

While data is valuable, releasing it with the sole purpose of roasting the consumer - in this case, a test driver who should have succeeded regardless of any possible hidden agenda - isn't wise. Musk missed the point: The value of vehicle log files is not to fight battles in the press, but a tool to vastly improve the product and deliver a better experience for the next customer.

Imagine the backlash if Weight Watchers CEO David Kirchhoff read a customer's Facebook post saying that she followed the plan and still gained weight, by publicly posting the user's caloric intake and exercise log, indicating that she did not stick to the plan? The CEO might win that battle, but he would certainly lose the war.

Big Data And The Customer Experience

So, how can Tesla recover from this PR and fiscal train-wreck? Put those log files to work to improve the customer experience. The right way to create a win-win result for Tesla would be for Musk to acknowledge that as the car breaks new ground, Tesla will incorporate customer feedback and data to make a smart product even smarter and easier to use.

He could acknowledge that the car could still improve: That it should have understood that the trip and route chosen (programmed by the user), combined with the dropping temperatures (weather app) and known charging locations (geo-location data) would not end in a successful commute.

He could speak of the product roadmap and enhancements that will collect and interpret this data to alert the driver by dashboard, text, email or other method of impending failure. He could talk about how the Model S can actually get smarter with a software update. Perhaps the car could automatically initiate a battery warmer in cold weather, alert Tesla service crews of the situation ' anything but allow the failure.

It's not about proving that you're right and the customer screwed up, but by planning for success of everyone, including the outliers.

Musk missed a remarkable opportunity. He forgot that the customer is always right, and that a bad experience is the perfect time to help existing and future customers have a better experience. Somehow, that critical human message got lost in the data.

Image courtesy of Frontpage / Shutterstock.

Jaron Lanier Got Everything Wrong

Jaron Lanier helped create virtual reality, all the way down to "VR' headsets and handgear. Smithsonian Magazine called him an 1980s "Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star." Lanier was regularly featured in Wired Magazine, particularly during its early, glory days. Nearly 30 years before the introduction of Google Glass, Lanier saw deep into a future where individuals could access virtual worlds. Lanier's sizable vision, however, appears to have resulted in few actual usable products - nor much in the way of human advancement.

In 1985, Jaron Zepel Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left their jobs at Atari and founded VPL Research. VPL was the first company to sell VR goggles and accessories. (The company filed for bankruptcy in 1990.) Lanier was later a 'visiting scholar' at Silicon Graphics, served as an advisor to Linden Lab - makers of "shared creative spaces" and the much-hyped Second Life virtual world - and has also worked as 'scholar-at-large' on Microsoft's Kinect controller. With the possible exception of the Kinect device - which actually has been linked to virtual reality efforts - it's difficult to view any of Lanier's efforts as a success.  

Big Thinker

In 2010, Lanier was named to the Time 100. He was listed under the 'Thinkers' category, along with Steve Jobs. Time described Lanier this way:

In the 1980s, Lanier's pioneering work on virtual reality reshaped our concept of how sensory interfaces enable human-computer interaction. As a musician, he has fused Eastern and Western traditions with artistry and technology. His ability to synthesize these forces ' so often held in opposition ' is the hallmark of his mind and the guiding philosophy of his book, in which he celebrates the potential of the Internet but also laments the way its misuse can suppress the individual voice.

Comparing anyone's accomplishments with Steve Jobs may be unfair, but unlike the late Apple co-founder, Lanier's pioneering work hasn't amounted to that much. Moreover, Lanier's strident warnings of giant mainframes run by a few to control the many missed so many critical trends that it now sounds like 1980s science-fiction. 

Giant computer brains aside, the 52-year-old Lanier has often come close to the truth - yet was never able to fully capitalize on his insights. His efforts in the 1990s promoting "telepresence' and "tele-immersion," for example, no doubt spurred innovation in the field. But the real work of bringing such technologies from vision to product has been left to others. Many of whom, Lanier has found time to criticize. 

Writing for Wired in December 2000, Lanier lambasted Ray Kurzweil, so-called father of 'the singularity,' and others for their 'cybernetic totalism." Lanier expressed grave doubts that humans should or could be replaced by computers within a few decades - though in large part because of his belief that software grows increasingly more bloated and complex over time. Lanier did not foresee the rise of small stripped down apps and the mobile operatings systems on which they run. 

Lanier's oft-expressed view that our machines could make us less human seems to have utterly discounted the truly empowering aspects of the merger of man and computer - the ability today for children to learn on their own using an iPad, for example.

The Bad Collective

Lanier appears to have repeatedly discounted the power of the collective Web to enhance individual power and connectivity. 

In his 2006 essay, 'Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism' Lanier came close to foreseeing the global rise of Twitter and Facebook. Instead of being awed at how this new level of connectivity might improve humanity, however, Lanier railed against those who 'start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say... and making ourselves into idiots.' Lanier sounded an alarm that not only fell on deaf ears, but suggests that the "collective" - basically, masses of people - are what we should fear most. From his essay: 

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallcy of the infallible collective.

Lanier continued, revealing his perception of the so-called wisdom of the crowd:

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Perhaps Lanier believes we have always been stupid. In his 2006 essay, 'Beware the Online Collective,' Lanier stated:

I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.

The man who once sought to alter our very reality, create new worlds and prevent an anonymous cabal from controlling the masses, seems to possess a deep distrust of most people. Perhaps Virtual Reality was Lanier's escape from this world?

What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.

It's a valid concern, but Twitter-enhanced protests during the 'Arab Spring," for example, reveal that an 'online mass' can be a force for liberation, not just a 'mean mob.' Nonetheless, in his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier returned to the theme of anonymous groups manipulating the masses.

Much to Criticize

Lanier has claimed that real-time, social sharing platforms, which he groups under the term "Web 2.0," has glorified the collective. He has labeled Facebook and Google as "spy agencies." Lanier has criticized aspects of open software. He suggests that collective-generated content, such as might be found today on Wikipedia or Quora, for example, 'removes the scent of people,' whatever that means.  

Over and over again, Lanier has not only missed the rapid growth of the future just as it was about to strike, he also badly misunderstood the disruptive power, creative ability and even wisdom it confers to the very people he reputedly sought to protect from its rise.

The Lawnmower Man As Prophecy?

Here's the perfect example. Lanier's home page lists his books, musical works and upcoming speaking engagements and includes such "Celebrity Fluff" as:

The 1992 movie Lawnmower Man was in part based on him and his early laboratory- he was played by Piers Brosnan (sic).

In The Lawnmower Man, an exceedingly not-bright man is befriended by the brilliant, handsome scientist (Lanier?). By integrating the dolt with virtual reality tools and linking him with a singularly giant computer, the subject gains incredible mental powers. But very quickly, he - and everything - goes terribly wrong.

Lanier foresaw the rise of computing power, even if he whiffed on its actual execution, with a deep-seated fear that, well, ignorant rubes would use it to muck everything up. Perhaps what held Lanier back was his deep-seated fear of what would happen if and when the power of the technologies he worked on reached the masses.

Lanier can be lauded for his concerns that giant computer companies may harm people, or that we may lose our humanity by merging man and machine. Too often, however, Lanier seems to be repelled by the thought of these grand technologies flowing to the very people he claims to care about.

While technology, computing and the 'mob' mind have moved forward so quickly, Lanier appears to be standing still, seemingly content to speak at TED, SXSW and other events. Lanier's VR dreams were a shockingly intriguing experiment in the 1980s. Some 30 years later, however, while virtual reality remains mostly vapor, the world has changed in dramatic ways Lanier never saw coming.

Note: ReadWrite reached out to Mr. Lanier via the email provided on his personal website. He did not respond. 

Top image of Jaron Lanier courtesy of Flicker/vanz. 

How Solar Power Can Succeed

Last year, the South Pacific Island of Tokelau, a tropical atoll governed by New Zealand, became the first completely solar powered territory on Earth. Having invested $7.2 million on the project, the island of 1500 souls is now redirecting money it would have spent on oil to education, irrigation, and health care.

Could Tokelau's experience be a harbinger for the rest of the world? Maybe, maybe not. It is worth remembering, after all, that most of the island's inhabitants are subsistence farmers, and that thousands of their countrymen have emigrated to New Zealand and Samoa. An advanced economy it is not.

But let's take a moment to dream big and to consider just what it might take for solar to catch on in the same way across the industrialized world as well.

Sunny Scenarios

1. Swanson's Law. This rule, a play on Moore's law, posits that the cost of the photovoltaic solar cells used to generate solar power will fall by about 20% each time global manufacturing capacity doubles. Spin that forward a few generations and you have the prospect of solar power plants that are reasonably cheap to build... and nearly free to operate.
2. Better electricity storage and transmission. The sun doesn't always shine, of course. But new types of industrial-scale battery storage -- whether using liquid-electrolyte "flow" cells or something else -- could make it possible to save energy produced while the sun beams down for, well, a rainy day. And then transmit it to where it can do the most good.
3. New photovoltaic technologies. Forget Solyndra. Yes, its failure was a cause celebre for a while, but quite a lot has been going on outside that spotlight. In December, for instance, San Jose, Calif.-based Solar Junction hit a world record 44% solar conversion efficiency with a new type of photovoltaic cell. Many other startups continue to win federal funding for promising photovoltaic manufacturing processes that will keep Swanson's Law in business.
4. Climate change and high fossil-fuel prices. Should global temperatures continue to rise, or should oil prices remain high due to "peak oil" -- or both -- that would go a long way toward creating the economic incentives necessary to push solar technologies into mainstream energy production.

The U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world won't make the jump to solar overnight, especially given their continuing addiction to oil. Give these trends enough time to play out, though, and we may look back at Tokelau as a framework for solar.

Photo via Shutterstock

The Indestructible Smartphone: Why It Could Be Closer Than You Think

A smartphone is probably the most advanced piece of technology most people own. We take these devices with us everywhere, we use them all the time. Odds are high we will drop them - onto the floor, into water or even onto hard pavement. 

Even if you got the phone for free with a contract, this tiny slip-up could cost you hundreds of dollars to replace or repair the device. 

(See also My Week With Android, Or Why I'm Buying An iPhone 5.)

Meet The Indestructible Smartphone

It doesn't have to be that way. Several companies are already working on building much more rugged smartphones.

At this year's CES trade show in Las Vegas, for example, Sony demonstrated its "waterproof" Xperia Z. According to Sony, the Xperia Z can survive in up to 3 feet of water for up to 30 minutes.

Sprint, meanwhile, has just introduced the Kyocera Torque, which it calls the "splashproof, drop-proof smartphone that can handle all of the elements of your rugged world." According to Sprint, its drop tests were from a maximum height of 5 feet, 9 inches. Kyocera is even using Bear Grylls, of Man vs Wild fame, to promote the ruggedness of the device. The company claims the Torque meets IP67 ratings for dust and water immersion and Military Standard 810G for dust, shock, vibration, temperature extremes, low pressure, solar radiation, salt fog, humidity and immersion in 1 meter of water for 30 minutes. Phew!

The problem, of course, is that kind of protection often makes the devices too bulky, too heavy and too costly - and many of these ruggedized smartphones may not include the latest hardware. They may also be not terribly attractive.

The Torque, for example, weights 5.9 ounces - compared to the iPhone 5's 3.9 ounces - and is wrapped inside a thick, greyish rubber casing. In its review of the Torque - despite being impressed with its ability to withstand "pretty brutal treatment" - AllThingsD was disappointed in the device's speed and camera:

The Torque's five-megapixel, rear-facing camera was disappointing. It was slow to fire up. I took more than a dozen photos in various settings ' natural light, indoor light and darker scenes with and without flash ' and all of the photos came out a little grainy.  

Meet Graphene: Tougher Technology On The Way

Soon, however, thanks to the "wonder material" graphene, light, attractive, smash-proof and waterproof smartphones could become commonplace. 

According to the BBC, graphene could enable:

Mobile phones that fold, razor-thin handsets powered by flexible batteries or see-through solar panels built directly into a colourful screen.  

The BBC notes that single-atom-thick sheets of graphene: 

Conduct electricity better than copper, has strength greater than steel and also shows extraordinary elasticity. So great is its potential that in 2010 its discoverers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel prize for Physics.

Graphene is durable, see-through and available - it comes from highly abundant graphite. The problem is both cost and graphene's current inability to practically control microelectronics as robustly as silicon can. This has not stopped Samsung, Nokia and IBM from investing heavily in the material. 

How To Protect Your Existing Phone

Until graphene and other materials, such as nanobites, can succeed in the market, smartphone owners will have choose between bulk and vulnerability. Bumpers and protective cases certainly help make phones more rugged, for example, but add size and weight. And they typically don't help protect against water damage.

For that, there's a new service called Liquipel, which made a, er, splash, at last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Liquipel offers after-market waterproofing for smartphones and tablets. 

As the company notes:

Liquipel applies a very thin layer of a water repelling substance on all the surfaces of the object, by exposing them to a gas in a special chamber. Because the substance is gaseous, it can trickle into every corner of the device, thus ensuring total protection. The best thing about it is the fact that all ports, like USB or audio, remain accessible and functional.

While customers must currently mail in their device to the treatment, the company says it is rolling out "LiquiPod" machines at various retail locations.

Smartphone Airbags?

Surprisingly, one of the more outrageous methods to protect smartphones was developed by Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos. In 2012, Bezos and Amazon VP Greg Heart were awarded a patent for a "smartphone airbag system."

As Geek.com wrote at the time:

If someone accidentally drops his or her phone, the always-on accelerometer will detect that it's falling too quickly and will deploy the miniature airbags to cushion a potential impact with the ground or floor. Other possibilities suggest puffing out streams of gas to slow down the fall, or using springs instead of airbags.

Right.

The Insurance Option

Finally, instead of protecting the phone itself, another option is to protect against financial losses from a ruined phone. Extended warranties such as Apple Care are popular, if costly, for example. Other options include insurance plans from mobile carriers. These typically cost around $10 per month and - unfortunately - carry a steep deductible. But since replacing a brand new smartphone without a contract can cost $600 or more, these options may make sense for some consumers. And you don't have to wait for a technology breakthrough.

 

Lead image courtesy of Sony Mobile. Image of iPhone dunked in water from Liquipel.  Image of smartphone airbag patent via the USPTO. 

10 Things Google Could Have Bought With The $12.5 Billion It Spent on Motorola Mobility [Gallery]

Last week, Google's Motorola Mobility division axed 1,200 jobs - about 10% of its workforce. These latest cuts were in addition to the 4,000 job reductions Motorola announced last August. In a statement released to the press, Motorola glumly stated:

These cuts are a continuation of the reductions we announced last summer. It's obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition.

It was not supposed to be this way. 

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 for $12.5 billion, a move widely viewed as a way to bolster Google's Android ecosystem and defend the company against patent lawsuits from Apple, Microsoft and others. When the acquisition was finalized, Google CEO Larry Page was ebullient:

I'm excited to announce today that our Motorola Mobility deal has closed. Motorola is a great American tech company that has driven the mobile revolution, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation, including the creation of the first cell phone. We all remember Motorola's StarTAC, which at the time seemed tiny and showed the real potential of these devices. And as a company who made a big, early bet on Android, Motorola has become an incredibly valuable partner to Google.

The reality has play out far differently.

Job cuts notwithstanding, Motorola has failed to capitalize on the growth of the Android ecosystem. As ReadWrite reported last week, Samsung dominates Android even in the United States. For the quarter ending January 2013, Motorola's share of the U.S. smartphone market declined 1.4 points and sits at a meager 8.6% of the market. Globally, Motorola doesn't even crack the top 10 smartphone vendors.  

Which begs the question: What would have been a better use of Google's $12.5 billion? It turns out, a lot!

World's Largest Venture Capital Investment

 

With $12.5 billion in seed funding, Google could have doubled what Silicon Valley VCs invest in a year. 

Blackberry

 

Google could have purchased the iconic, secure and enterprise-friendly Blackberry for about $6 billion. To mitigate the crushing blow to Canadian pride for losing their once-mighty Blackberry, Google could have used the remaining $6.5 billion to make a run at acquiring the entire National Hockey League. 

Twitter

 

The increasingly popular micro-blogging and "second screen" platform, Twitter, has 200 million active users - and is valued at $10 billion.

You Get a Prius! You Get a Prius!

Forget futuristic driverless cars. Google could have jumpstarted the "sharing economy" and helped the environment. The 2013 plug-in version Toyota Prius retails for about $30,000. Instead of buying Motorola Mobility, Google could have brought home nearly 400,000 Priuses - and had plenty left over to acquire car-sharing service, Zipcar (recently purchased by Avis for a bargain $491 million). 

Fashionable Eyewear

Why did Google want to make Motorola smartphones when it should be constructing Google Glass headsets? Perhaps because no one save a few geeks will wear Google Glasses in public if they don't feel great and look fashionable. For a mere $6 billion, Google could have acquired Fossil, Inc. Fossil designs, makes and distributes not only eyewear but a range of fashion accessories - perfect for the coming wearable computer revolution. 

Lululemon

Google co-founder Sergey Brin - who thinks that smartphones are "emasculating" - has revealed a fondness for fashionably trendy, form-fitting Lululemon yoga gear. Brin could have bought the entire company for just North of $10 billion. 

 

 

Television

Google's efforts to crack open Hollywood - and gain a foothold in the television market - have so far floundered. For just $10 billion, Netflix could have belonged to the search giant.

Moon Shots

Larry Page wants Google to work on "moon shots" - those breakthrough innovations that promise to radically alter work and business. For $12.5 billion, Google could have fully funded NASA for a year.

All The News That Fits

Fairly or not, Google has been pilloried for destroying the newspaper industry. Indeed, France sought payment from Google for linking to (and aggregating) stories from their nation's newspapers. In response, Google established a '60 million Digital Publishing Innovation Fund. Yawn. With $12.5 billion, Google could have purchased The New York Times and still have $11 billion left to create global digital publishing innovation fund.

Bing!

 

At Microsoft's current valuation of $233 billion, Google could have bought its only legitimate search competition - Bing. Trefis estimates that Bing contributes 3% to Microsoft's valuation, about $7 billion at today's prices. That would leave Larry Page with enough left over to buy Microsoft's Xbox and Windows Phone businesses - and Skype, too!  

There is still the chance, of course, that Motorola will turn itself around. The company is rumored to be building an "X Phone" to challenge iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S line. Perhaps all those Motorola patents could turn into a goldmine - or prevent someone from successfully suing Google or Android for billions. To date, however, the Motorola acquisition appears to be a costly diversion to Google's high-margin and highly profitable search business. Not to mention a sea of failed opportunities to spend its money more profitably. 

 

Top image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Google slide image and Google-modified Prius image from Google. Google Glass image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Image of Sergey Brin from Flickr. "Forgotten Television" image from Fotopedia.  Moon image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Picture of newspaper from Fotopedia. Picture of Steve Ballmer via Microsoft. 

 

FoundationDB's NoSQL Breakthrough Challenges Relational Database Dominance

NoSQL databases are well-known for their speed and scalability - useful traits when dealing with the size and complexity of big data and hyper-fast transaction requirements. But one thing they have lacked has been strong data consistency: the ability to ensure that an update to data in one part of the database is immediately propagated to all other parts of the database.

A startup database vendor launched this week is making claims that its database, FoundationDB, finally delivers on the promise of true data consistency for a NoSQL database, without a huge loss of speed or flexibility.

Understanding why this is such a big deal in the Big Data (or any) sector requires a little background on how NoSQL, or non-relational, databases work.

Solving The ACID Test

When talking about relational databases, like PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle and the like, there's one acronym that keeps coming up: ACID. ACID stands for Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable - core aspects that must apply to all data within a relational database. Data is broken down to atomic values (name, address_1, city...) while remaining consistent across the database, isolated from other transactions until the current transaction is finished, and durable in the sense that the data should never be lost.

The infrastructure of a relational database is well-suited to meet the ACID criteria for data: Data is held in tables connected by relational algebra, and transactions are performed in a way that is consistent with ACID principles.

But for non-relational databases, such as Bigtable, MongoDB or Dynamo, ACID has always been sacrificed for other qualities, like speed and scalability.

This tends to freak out some companies, stopping them from moving to NoSQL because they can't give up ACID. Especially the "C," because not having data consistency is a particularly terrifying prospect for companies dealing with financial transactions.

Yet non-relational databases are being used by firms like Amazon and Google every day, with great success. Amazon, in particular, needs to track millions of sales transaction on any given day - how does it get away with inconsistent data?

The short answer is, it has to. The trade-off would be a relational database that could never keep up with the speed and scaling necessary to make a company like Amazon work as it does now. Recall that non-relational databases are structured to sacrifice some aspect of ACID to gain something in return. In the case of Amazon, its non-relational DynamoDB database is willing to apply an "eventually consistent" approach to the data in order to gain speed and uptime for the system when a database server somewhere goes down.

Bringing Back Consistency

It's not that having ACID compliance on a NoSQL database is impossible, explained David Rosenthal, one of FoundationDB's co-founders. It's just that most people think that applying ACID to NoSQL systems would come at a huge cost.

That's certainly what Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, thought in a 2008 paper that described the company's Dynamo database and it's relationship to consistency. 

Data inconsistency in large-scale reliable distributed systems has to be tolerated for two reasons: improving read and write performance under highly concurrent conditions; and handling partition cases where a majority model would render part of the system unavailable even though the nodes are up and running.

Translation: Requiring ACID on non-relational databases would make that database too slow and inflexible.

For the longest time, everyone using NoSQL systems was resigned to this eventual, or "weak," consistency model. After all, they had money to make and data to analyze. Who cares if consistency was not at the top of the priority list?

It turns out, quite a few people, including the founders of FoundationDB, Rosenthal, Nick Lavezzo and Dave Scherer.

Inside FoundationDB

After a successful start up with Visual Sciences, a technology that's now part of Adobe as the Adobe Insight product, the trio turned to developing another successful project, and hit on the lack of ACID-capable non-relational databases as a goal.

"We weren't satisfied with any of the data guarantees on non-relational systems," Rosenthal explained, even as they understood that the needs of many potential clients would preclude relational systems like MySQL or Oracle because of performance limitations.

Non-relational systems seemed to wear their weak consistency model like a badge of honor, but in the secret origin story of FoundationDB, the team saw weak consistency as a bug, not a feature. "Not having transactional integrity is not a good thing," Rosenthal emphasized.

They're not the only ones. Google's up-and-coming Spanner database, a second-generation distributed database that could ultimately replace the search engine company's Bigtable systems, is being built on the premise that transactional integrity has to be a part of that database, too.

Side Effects Include...

Establishing consistency in transactions within a NoSQL database is worthy news in itself, but the implications extend beyond that core news.

FoundationDB uses a key-value-like storage engine core that's surrounded by layers of whatever data model that's needed, which will in turn enable developers to much more easily code their apps to reach into the FoundationDB. These layers, according to the founders, can't be used on other key-value systems, because without consistent transactions, it would not work.

Also, since data is going to be consistent, applications won't have to be built to "wait" for data to catch up within a given transaction - thus making apps less complex and easier to build.

The best news of all concerns the so-called performance penalty that many in the NoSQL world said will be incurred if ACID was applied to non-relational database systems. According to FoundationDB, performance is hampered by only 10%, which seems a very small price to pay for consistent transactions.

The FoundationDB database, which was launched into public beta on Monday, is available for download now.

Image courtesy of FoundationDB.

Music Companies Won't Play Ball With Apple - Gee, I Wonder Why?

Apple wants to roll out a streaming music service like Pandora, reports The New York Times, but can't get it done because the music companies are dragging their heels.

Funny old world, isn't it? Apple used iTunes to basically take over the music business, setting prices and dictating terms. And Apple ran roughshod over those record companies, which are still smarting from the rough treatment.

Now they're getting their revenge. The longer they drag things out, the more Apple suffers as new rivals grow stronger. The suits in Los Angeles must be loving this.

According to the Times: "Apple had once hoped to introduce the radio service around the Grammy Awards in February. But it has been delayed, chiefly by slow progress in licensing negotiations with record companies and with one key publisher, Sony/ATV, which also controls the EMI publishing catalog."

Another issue, according to the New York Post, is that Apple is low-balling the deal, trying to get streaming rights at a rate well below what others pay. Apple is offering 6 cents for every 100 songs streamed. Others pay 12-to-35 cents per 100 songs streamed.

Adding to the resentment, I'm sure, is that Apple is sitting on $140 billion in cash, some billions of which were gained by screwing record companies the last time around.

Once Bitten...

I suspect the same thing is what's holding up Apple's push into TV, as movie and TV guys saw what Apple did to the music business and would like very much to avoid that happening to them, thank you very much.

Last fall I had an interesting conversation with an influential player in the TV and movie production business, who explained the fear and loathing with which Apple is viewed in Hollywood.

Part of the problem, he told me, is that the video guys all saw what happened to the music guys after they got in bed with Apple. But also, "Steve Jobs came down here and did meetings in Hollywood, talking to people who've been in this business for 25 years, and he told these guys, `You're all a bunch of idiots. You're dinosaurs.' The response from the Hollywood guys was, `Go f@ck yourself.'" 

As far as Hollywood is concerned, "Apple is scary. Steve Jobs was scary. There's a fear of empowering Apple. No one here has a vested interest in helping to build that up. It's a scary time, and do you really want an 800-pound gorilla controlling your pricing?"

An Analog Model

The larger problem with iTunes is that it's really, essentially, an analog business model. Apple didn't really do anything revolutionary. It just "paved the cowpath," meaning it took the same business model that people had used in the analog world and created a digital knock-off. Just like you used to buy vinyl records, and then CDs, now you went online and bought an album or a song, and now you "owned" them and added them to your "collection" which you had to manage on a computer. 

You can argue that Apple did something a little bit revolutionary by letting customers buy a single song rather than an entire album. Fair enough.

But iTunes is still a model in which you buy music. The whole thing is about replicating the experience that Steve Jobs had as a kid buying vinyl records, even down to getting the album art. 

As many others have pointed out, once you start using Spotify (in my case) or any of the other new music-streaming services, you don't really want to go back to iTunes. And you don't need to.

Apple has a problem. It bullied those content guys in Los Angeles, and now those guys are getting their revenge.

Image courtesy of Reuters.

12 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Online Security

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week, I got the chance to sit down with Stephen Cobb, a distinguished security researcher for the IT security company ESET. We talked about a lot of things, including Android security issues and how walled gardens have their uses.

(See also In The Security World, Android Is The New Windows.)

It was a great conversation, touching on a wide variety of fascinating aspects of online and mobile security, and I wanted to share as many of them as possible.

This list seemed like the best way to do that. And while not every one of the dirty-dozen points presented here may surprise you, I can pretty much guarantee that few people will already know - or agree with - everything on the list:

1. Big Data is not new to the anti-virus industry. Turns out the anti-virus companies have been doing traffic analysis, incident sharing and code sharing for decades, Cobb claims. They just didn't call it Big Data until the term become fashionable.

2. Anti-virus companies have been practicing co-opetition since the 1980s, when they realized there was no percentage in one company being able to stop one virus while you needed another company to stop a different virus. They quietly began sharing virus signatures and other information, Cobb says.

3. All the major Web browsers share information on malware sites and other threats. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and the others all share which URLs to flag, for example. That's why when NBC.com was hacked recently and started spewing malware, everybody was able to block it almost immediately.

4. One of the hardest parts of securing Big Data is knowing where the data is actually stored. In the old days, when data was collected and stored, it didn't really move much. Now, in the cloud, Cobbs says we don't really know where data is stored. Malware creators are intent on exploiting that, but what form that will take remains to be seen.

5. One reason more high-value targets haven't been hacked is that there is still so much low-hanging fruit for the bad guys to go after. According to Cobb, so far, there hasn't been much need to try and crack the hardest targets.

6. Most attacks take the form of malware or hacking. Of the hacking attacks, Cobb says, 80% go after passwords that are either non-existent, guessed or stolen.

7. Anti-virus hasn't been about matching virus signatures for years. Some people say the anti-virus model doesn't work because so much new malware is coming out all the time that anti-virus solutions can't possibly keep up. But Cobb protests that most anti-virus software is continually detecting previously unseen malware.

8. People who know what they're doing on the Internet might be able to get by with no anti-virus software. But Cobb says people are fooling themselves when they claim: "I don't run anti-virus software and I've never been hacked." "Are you really OK telling everyone you know - your mom, for instance - not to run anti-virus software?" he asks.

9. There's still an incredible amount of spam out there. You don't see it, but it's still there. It's using a a huge amount of datacenter power to block it, but it's built into the network security appliance and you don't have to deal with it.

10. The overall trend is for increasing levels of security to be compressed into the core, to become part of a standard install. That's happened to anti-spam, to firewalls and it's happening to anti-virus, too.

11. It's a lot harder to write 64-bit malware than it is to write 32-bit malware. And that could help lower the number of attacks on 64-bit systems.

12. In many ways, hacking behavior seems to have gotten better over the years - at least in the United States, Cobb says. But we are now increasingly exposed to other, more dangerous places. The globalization of the Net has caught up with us even as the value of hacking has one way up. Today, hackers aren't just messing with us, Cobb notes, they're stealing from us. And that's a big new incentive.

10 Compelling Ways People Plan To Use Google Glass

Google Glass is coming. Sure, the early adopters will be viewed as weirdos and the idea of a tiny head-mounted camera raises all kinds of creepy privacy questions, but Glass is cool. 

Google's first iteration may or may not be a slam dunk, but wearable computing is unquestionably the next big thing, and heads-up displays are going to be a part of our future, once everybody gets over the dorky stigma. 

To get the ideas flowing (and promote its upcoming product launch), Google asked its users to propose use cases for Glass and hashtag them #ifihadglass. The campaign, which wrapped up last week, yielded some snarky ' and, of course, some truly dumb ' responses, but there are plenty of smart suggestions, each of which lets us envision the type of techno-utopian sci-fi future Sergey Brin dreams about every night.  

Yes, it will be awkward the first time one of your friends shows up to the bar wearing a computer on their face. That's not what Glass is for, at least not initially. In general, people seem to be most excited about what Glass will mean for education, medicine, communicating, gaming and getting around. 

1. Enhancing Surgery With Augmented Reality

A number of the #ifihadglass contest respondents talked about how the technology could be use by surgeons as virtual assistants in the operating room. Timothy Lee, a surgical resident at New York University, proposes using Glass to record operations for teaching purposes, enable remote assistance via livestream and show the surgeon vitals, CT scan and other pertinent medical information. 

By tapping into real-time data, reference material and input from live surgeons across the globe, devices like Glass could reduce the number of errors made during surgery. Here's hoping the voice recognition is spot on.

2. Revolutionizing Higher Education 

A great deal of the excitement about Glass is coming from people working in higher education, as well as from students. Ben Foster, a professor at DePaul University, is one of many academics that are eager to augment the teaching experience with Google Glass, pulling up pertinent data without turning his back to students, for example. 

For students, Google Glass could be transformative. Some are even talking about how Glass could potentially aid those with learning disabilities.  Recording lectures, live streaming them for remote access, audio-note taking and supplementing lectures with related data are just the beginning.  Of course, exactly how Glass is used (and how useful it is) will vary depending on the curriculum.

3. Enhancing Less Formal, More Hands-On Learning

While universities and colleges will be among Glass's earliest adopters, the advantages are not limited to formal education. Just like people post tutorial videos to YouTube, a camera-equipped camera you wear on your face opens up new possibilities for teaching people things from a hands-on, first person perspective. Fixing things, cooking meals, learning to play the guitar. Anything you use your hands for can be taught (and augmented with relevant details) via a Hangout or YouTube video.  

4. Augmented Reality Gaming

This is one of the use cases people seem most excited about. And for good reason: Wearable computing and augmented reality open up new doors when it comes to gaming, which is already huge on smartphones and tablets. With technology like Glass, game developers can overlay gameplay over the real world, and plenty of them are already thinking about how to take their Android games to this new, exciting (or creepy) level. 

5. Overcoming Disabilities

Okay, so Google Glass won't cure blindness, but the technology can be quite valuable to those with certain visual, auditory and physical handicaps. At the University of New Brunswick Libraries, Jeff Carter wants to use Glass to make things more accessible to the visually impaired via real-time optical character recognition and text-to-speech translation. 

Navigating the stacks would be a lot easier (for everybody, really) with digital signage overlaying the physical world. Indeed, for the visually impaired, navigating just about anywhere could be made much easier thanks to Glass's augmented reality maps and voice control. 

At Shriner's Hospital For Children in Portland, the assistive technology team is already brainstorming ways that Glass could be used to "unlock their learning potential and access their world."

6. Stargazing 

No, I don't mean surreptitiously snapping photos of Nikki Minaj at the grocery store (although I'm sure they'll be plenty of that sort of thing). Amateur astronomers will be able to look at the sky with a whole new layer of digital insight using tiny, face-mounted computers.  

Mobile astronomy apps have been popular on smartphone users for years, and for good reason. It's pretty neat to hold your phone up to the sky and see information about planets, constellations, galaxies and the like. Now imagine that experience without the smartphone, overlaid directly over what you're seeing. 

7. Healthier Living 

There are all kinds of ideas being thrown around about how Glass could help people better manage their health. First, there's the somewhat obvious example of porting already-popular fitness tracking apps like RunKeeper over to Glass for a more seamless experience. Many of things runners and fitness buffs use their smartphones for now could be simplified by Glass. If nothing else, displaying real-time stats about your run in front of you as you go could be a serious motivator. Also, the bone conduction audio makes headphones unnecessary and reduces the odds of you getting hit by a truck. 

If Santa Clara University student Alexander Vincent Molloy has his way, you'll also be able to return health-related information about foods while you're cooking or even shopping. Using Google Goggles-style image recognition and search, a Glass app could do exactly that, helping the health-conscious make smarter decisions without fiddling with their phones as much. 

8. Reconnecting With History 

One of the most delightfully nerdy Glass use cases being talked about is augmented reality historical tours and museum exhibits. Again, just imagine some of the work that's been done with smartphone apps and remove the phone from the equation (or at least the act of taking it out and holding it up). 

Armed with Glass-supported Android apps, walking through the historical Old City District of Philadelphia or the history-rich parks of Massachusetts could be like taking one of those audio-guided tours on digital steroids. Even if an app is not built specifically to overlay data and imagery on top of historical buildings, the ability to do a quick, relevant voice search without pulling out your phone will make learning about history  more immersive than ever. 

9. Augmented Reality Art 

Like historical tours, the experience of viewing art could be enhanced using augmented reality. Some will undoubtedly balk at the idea of wearing a face computer to the MoMA. Why not just enjoy the art and leave gadgets out of it? Because there's way more information in the world about a given painting, sculpture or design than could ever fit into an exhibit. 

It doesn't have to bound by museum walls, either. European design agency Nuelandherzer says it would use Glass to create an augmented reality experience for viewing and learning about urban street art around the world.

10. Real-Time Language Translation 

Previously the pipe dream of optimistic futurists, real-time language translation is a reality today (even if its accuracy could use a little more polish). Using technology Google already owns (OCR and Google Translate), Glass could translate foreign signs and menus. Even more compelling is the device's theoretical ability to translate spoken language into real-time subtitles, effectively eliminating any language barrier between two Glass-wearing individuals. Lots of people are thinking about how learning and using sign language could change too. Pretty powerful stuff.