AllThingsD » MIT http://allthingsd.com Sat, 18 May 2013 13:09:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpg All Things Digital http://allthingsd.com/ 144 22 Box to Acquire Web Document Company Crocodoc http://allthingsd.com/20130509/box-to-acquire-web-document-company-crocodoc/ http://allthingsd.com/20130509/box-to-acquire-web-document-company-crocodoc/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 19:32:16 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=320016 Aaron Levie Box OneCloudBox, the fast-growing IPO-bound enterprise cloud file-sharing and collaboration service has agreed to acquire Crocodoc, a Web-based document sharing and embedding service.

CEO Aaron Levie just announced the deal in a corporate blog post. Crocodoc is a seven-person team hailing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its technology has powered the document sharing and embedding capabilities of Yammer, LinkedIn and SAP.

The company had raised a small amount of capital from Y Combinator and Dave McClure, among others. Box isn’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal, though Levie just told me in a phone conversation that “everyone concerned is happy with the deal.”

Crocodoc, Levie said, has gone deeper into the experience of rendering documents on the Web and on mobile devices using HTML5 than other companies that are involved in presenting and sharing documents, like, say, Scribd and DocStoc.

If you think of Scribd as sort of a YouTube for documents, then Crocodoc, Levie says, is comparable to Brightcove. Where YouTube presents video in a consumer friendly way, Brightcove powers video experiences for other companies. “They’re going out and powering the experience of presenting documents. We do this now when it comes to collaboration and content, but we don’t do it yet for documents.”

Crocodoc CEO Ryan Damico will become Box’s director of platform, and the rest of the Crocodoc team will be joining Box. Eventually the Crocodoc brand will fade away inside Box, Levie said.

The deal is Box’s second acquisition. In 2009 it acquired Incredo, a company focused on document and media viewing. Levie said that as Box continues to expand, it will occasionally make opportunistic acquisitions of small companies.

It can probably afford to do more deals. Box has raised a combined total of $312 million. Its most recent round was $150 million, led by private equity firm General Atlantic. It also has strategic investments from Salesforce.com and SAP. Levie has said publicly that Box is eyeing an IPO sometime in 2014.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130509/box-to-acquire-web-document-company-crocodoc/feed/ 0 You Lookin' at Me? Reflections on Google Glass. http://allthingsd.com/20130412/you-lookin-at-me-reflections-on-google-glass/ http://allthingsd.com/20130412/you-lookin-at-me-reflections-on-google-glass/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:55:59 +0000 Jan Chipchase http://allthingsd.com/?p=311441 frog640

There is but one remedy for the Glass wearer — a bucket of ice water in the face whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares

With the public beta launch of Google Glass, there has been a lot of discussion on why it will or won’t fail. The ultimate benchmark for success is high: After someone has tried Glass, can they imagine life without it?

It’s the wrong question.

Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy. Our traditional bogeyman for privacy was Big Brother and its physical manifestation — closed-circuit TV — but the reality today is closer to what I call Little Sister, and she is socially active, curious, sufficiently tech-savvy, growing up in the land of “free,” getting on with life and creating a digital exhaust that is there for the taking. The sustained conversation around Glass will be sufficient to lead to a societal shift in how we think about the ownership of data, and to extrapolate a bit, the kind of cities we want to live in. For me, the argument that Glass is somehow inherently nefarious misses a more interesting point: It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that already exist and are widely deployed today, whose lack of physical, obvious presence has limited a mainstream critical discourse.

As a product that is both on-your-face and in-your-face, Glass is set to become a lightning rod for a wider discussion around what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and private spaces. The Glass debate has already started, but these are early days; each new iteration of hardware and functionality will trigger fresh convulsions. In the short term, Glass will trigger anger, name-calling, ridicule and the occasional bucket of thrown water (whether it’s ice water, I don’t know). In the medium term, as societal interaction with the product broadens, signs will appear in public spaces guiding mis/use1 and lawsuits will fly, while over the longer term, legislation will create boundaries that reflect some form of im/balance between individual, corporate and societal wants, needs and concerns.

So Shoot Me

Of all of the companies and organisations that could bring Glass to market, I’m pleased that Google is the one making a significant investment: A company with a recent record of genuine innovation that stretches/defines social and behavioral norms2 with a strong revenue stream and deep enough pockets to have a fighting chance of medium to long-term success. It also helps that the project is considered of strategic importance, and has key executive sponsorship. Less obvious, but no less relevant in this equation, is that the company has a lot to lose, is no longer the media darling, has fucked up enough times in public to know it can do so again (and again), has been humbled by more nimble competitors, has experienced talent drain and understands the impact of this on its culture and its bottom line. Of course, Google can financially afford to fail again: Experimentation and failure is a critical part of its DNA, but while privacy-snafu fines are low, the internal and external cultural costs of Glass failing are high.

All technology challenges the status quo, and if a technology is noticed by consumers/users/constituents at all, it presents for some an opportunity and for others a threat. The perceived and actual threat from Glass comes not from crimes against taste. (Many have commented on the perceived inelegance of the design.) Google’s design team appears to have done a sterling job, if you assume that particular design direction and constraints. Our sense of what is tasteful succeeds or fails as part of a far broader narrative, which they, too, are exploring. Yes, you can find a hundred and one designs of “wearable computing” from the past decade that look similar, but very few are packing the same experience into the same form factor. However, as a connected, sensing object, it is capable of recording and transmitting photos, video and sound directly through content analysis or indirectly through proximate connected devices, other data such as location, temperature, trajectory and so on. In other words, in a worst/best case scenario it could record and measure “everything,” and associate that data to a person. How will this play out?

I want you to try a little experiment. Find somewhere where you can sit and observe people interact with one another. Pick somewhere just out of the throng — the edge of a cafe looking in, a park bench, a doorway close to a market. It’s easier if you choose somewhere you don’t know so well, you’ll have less to unlearn.

Give yourself 30 minutes to view and reflect upon the scene in front of you: Who visits that space, and why; the differences in ritual greetings, and indeed whether or not a person is greeted; how people project who they are; things that signify status and social hierarchy; where objects are placed; the level of interaction with those objects when not in use. What can you see being documented online or off? What can you imagine being documented? Pay particular attention to things that fit your definition of “technology” and reflect upon the things in front of you that once fit this definition but no longer do (my list of were-once-technologies includes the pencil, the wristwatch and the smartphone).

If you’re close enough to other people, you’ll overhear conversations plus bits of conversations that the speakers will allow you to hear, raised, projected, sotto voce and in whispers, combined with body language all serving to emphasize what is said, and the intent of what is communicated. How much of that conversation is directed at the “listener” and how much of it is directed at others in proximity, including you? This rich social choreography is playing out hundreds of billions of times a day across our planet, and is as subtle and delicate as anything appearing in a BBC2 nature documentary.

Of course, people and systems are already capturing (and channeling) content and data in this space in the form of photos, video, background noise on phone or video calls, who is connected to what, and what they are doing. It is likely that Google, Microsoft and Nokia’s Navteq (to name but three) have already systematically mapped this space and are serving up street views online. The difference with Glass is that it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether it can support sustained recording for long periods or not; what matters is that the form factor supports this, that it could at some point, and that we all know Google is in the business of selling ads against insight drawn from large volume of data. Continuous, indiscriminate recording in this space is the dragnet fishing of data collection — it’s a destructive technology, a conversation- and privacy-killer.3

Back to our experiment. Take in the scene in front of you. Who owns this space, both legally and figuratively? Who has the rights to do what? By what authority? Who enforces that authority? How do these rights differ for regulars or a first-time visitor? What are the ways people signal the beginning or the end of an activity? And how does that signalling make something more or less acceptable? The obvious clue to activities people have deemed socially unacceptable are often found on hand-scribbled “do not” signs, as in “staff will refuse to serve customers who are on their mobile phone,” or “do not ask for credit.” The more sustained the infringement, the more official-looking the sign.

Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity.4 Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven.

Social Interaction

A number of years ago, while I was working at Nokia, I was asked to explore use cases using an appearance model (a non-working prototype) of a form factor similar to Glass, but clunkier and definitely less refined.5 In the first phase of this make-it-up-as-you-go-along-and-see-what-works study, we hired students in Tokyo to act out various scenarios, including content browsing, viewing and game-play using gestures and voice commands, in a range of contexts: At home, on a commuter train, on a long-distance train, in a hotel lobby, in a park, a cafe, and while walking along. The research team then noted interaction issues with the glasses, carefully observing social reactions from people in proximity before finally interviewing the actors/actresses for their own experience.6

Fans of Milgram’s New York subway experiment will be happy to note that our actors and actresses felt extremely self-conscious about wearing nonstandard glasses, and awkward about acting out the scenarios, particularly in contexts where there were others in close proximity. A number of the things we learned from this study surprised us:

  • Most of what we “see” at any time is out of focus in the periphery where as long as the things going on in peripheral vision don’t trigger a threat response will probably pass the glance test. It will be interesting to see whether Glass is perceived as a threatening object and thus may force others in proximity of a wearer to maintain a hyperawareness of the wearer and their own actions — whereas today they are currently able to relax. This would be, in effect, like a blanket tax on the collective attention of society.7
  • Spoken interaction is awkward for almost everyone in confined spaces on systems with less than 100 percent accuracy. An interface built around short responses to contextually understood events will be the dominant form of interaction.
  • Gesture interaction is just as awkward in close spaces, and in many instances will restrict regular use and/or in a vocabulary of “quiet gestures.” To get a sense of how this plays out, the next time you are on the subway and have people sitting on either side, raise your hands in front of your face or look down and move your hands in your field of vision. Even simple gestures require upper-arm/shoulder movements, which, when you are sitting shoulder to shoulder, impact fellow passengers. A Glass wearer who wants to maintain the social cohesion in that context (and not all will be that self-aware or considerate) can mitigate this by pausing interactions for the moment when they are appropriate, or more likely by avoiding interactions in that context.
  • In contexts where social interaction is required — sitting with friends around a table in a cafe, say — Glass will create a situation where people are not sure whether they or the contents of the display are engaging the wearer.
  • In-ear or close-to-ear (inductive) audio changes the wearer’s enjoyment of food and drink — a problem for an otherwise prime use case: Watching movies at home, where snacks and beverages might naturally be consumed.
  • Humans tend to fall asleep in contexts where they are seated, safe, and there is minimal physical movement — providing opportunities to design for disengagement.
  • Humans have a vested interest in tracking changing emotional states of the people around them. This will introduce “Are you lookin’ at me?” moments where others in proximity assume that a smile, tear or frown is triggered by their own presence, and will spur people to send inappropriate content to their Glass-wearing peers, with a weary inevitability that will include this but is far less likely to include this (or is it the other way around?). In some contexts, these moments will lead to confrontation. Read the footnote in this article in the Atlantic, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and imagine introducing erratic behavior into the equation. Amplify to billions of social interactions a day.

What starts out as a fairly broad set of use cases rapidly starts to narrow.

Tooling Up

I’ve got a confession to make. Frog, the design and innovation consultancy where I work, has recorded thousands of conversations around the world, videotaped many more, tailed people around town and nosed around people’s homes — opening cupboards and drawers, asking personal questions where there were none. All with their permission, and all in the name of research. There are a few things we’ve learned that relate to the broader discussion of what is collected by whom, how and why, and how it is used; you’ll see why these are relevant in a moment.

Any idiot can collect data. The real issue is how to collect data in such a way that meets both moral and legal obligations and still delivers some form of value.

  • Ownership. People are naturally suspicious of what they don’t know. The simple act of giving them control over the process or the objects/technologies we carry defuses initial suspicion. A few simple field-research techniques can rapidly build trust. These include handing someone you’ve just met on the street a $5,000 camera and then ignoring them to concentrate on a conversation with their friends. This shows we trust them. And then they trust us.
  • Clear On/Off States. Most people have (at least initial) concerns about being recorded. There are numerous effective ways that we in Frog’s design research team emphasize the transition between on and off: From how a camera or other recording device is held when not in use. It is useful to think of a camera as a gun: Understand the impact that bringing it out can have on any given context; only take it out if you’re prepared to use it and be careful where you point it.
  • Reciprocity. Today it is easy to maintain a persistent connection between the researcher and the participant — often in the form of a social media account or email address. You’ve asked something of them, and they have the right and now have a channel through which to ask something of you.
  • Full circle: We give participants the opportunity to review, delete or own any of the data collected on them by the research team. This is normally carried out at the end of the session, after any reward is handed over (so they are not pressured into letting us keep data) and before any data consent form is signed (so they better understand the implications of what they are signing). A team that knows the data will be reviewed by the participant changes what they collect in the first place; it becomes self-policing. More than any training, this simple principle helps keep teams honest and operating within social norms.

    • A few simple steps lower the more obviously anti-social aspects of Glass. The evolution of body language that helps communicate Glass’s current state, e.g. pushed above the head to show that it is not in use; a literacy around the spoken commands that communicate the current task that the user is engaged in “take panorama” or “grindr lookup”; and showing whether the camera and other recording mechanisms are in use or disabled.

    Glass has four design principles for developers that focus on the Glass wearer’s user experience: “design for Glass,” “don’t get in the way,” “keep it timely,” and “avoid the unexpected.”8 As challenging as it is to find a compelling use-case (beyond porn), these principles are aimed at the wrong people — Glass wearers, rather than those in proximity.

    Two complementary principles will go some way toward accommodating the concerns of people in proximity and lower social barriers to adoption:

  • Proximate Transparency: Allow anyone in proximity to access the same feed that the wearer is recording or seeing and view it through a device of their choosing. Make it easy to identify the Glasses themselves and to trace them back to the wearer. This simple act can help demystify the technology, create a broader sense of ownership of its inclusion in any given space. The reality is that very few people would be interested in jacking in and the act of having an open stream will change the behavior of what is watched. For many this won’t be enough of a step; it is after all an opt-out measure for people who have the technological know how and literacy to — forcing people in proximity to do something for dubious gain.
  • Remote Control: allow identifiable people in proximity to control Glass’s recording functionality and have access to the output of what was recorded. Allowing others to demonstrably benefit from the utility of Glass will make it part of the social landscape.

Pedestal or a Pauper’s Grave?

One could argue that the form taken by Glass offers up a lazy futurist’s vision of what might be — take the trajectory of one product (displays becoming smaller/cheaper/more efficient over time) and integrate it with another (eyeglasses), sprinkle in connectivity and real-time access to content and big-data-analytics. Our expectations of what it could be are raised in part because this join-the-dots vision of the future fits neatly into Western un/popular young-male culture, from “The Terminator” through to Halo. Glass has a certain inevitability about it, like the weight of expectation on of child born to a great composer or, if you will, to a middle-aged suicide. As any visitor to Yodobashi camera over the past decade will tell you, the hardware technologies that make Glass hardly feel novel (and for recent competitors, see Sony, Golden-i, or this Telepathy device prototype) but neither do they need to be, because this is all about how they are brought together into a holistic experience.

There are of course alternative visions of this connected future that are far more discrete, taking connected, sensing things and embedding them in the world around us to inform, guide, direct, cajole, tax, enrich us and the things around us. It’s an area worthy of an essay in its own right, but for now, here are a few pointers to people, places and things that have helped inform my sense of this space: Dan Hill at City of Sound; the MIT Senseable City Lab; Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art; Tisch ITP; BERG, Nicholas Nova and Julian Bleecker at the Near Future Laboratory help stretch our understanding of what could be; Curious Rituals in conjuction with students at the Arts Center College of Design in particular is a lovely piece of work; living for more than a decade in Tokyo, Shanghai and frequent trips to the cities that define this century’s urban experience — the Seoul/Nairobi/Mumbai/Rio/Chongqings of this world; products like Nike+, FitBit, Moves (to take one narrow category) through to less well known but arguably more impactful services that for me are at the very center of the internet of things — services like Kilimo Salama and Sarvajal;9 through to business units/activities in large corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Disney, and Ericsson with more of a how to make money/make a difference at scale.10

That Moment in Time

I started this essay by paraphrasing a quote — here is the original in full: “There is but one remedy for the amateur photographer. Put a brick through his camera whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares.” It could be written about Glass today, but is in fact taken from an 1885 edition of “Amateur Photographer”11 magazine, seven years after the introduction of dry plates, a technology that supported more surreptitious photography. (The essay by Bill Jay is worth reading in full.)

The same essay contains another quote from “Amateur Photographer,” twenty five years later, when cameras were becoming smaller, less noticeable: “Our moral character dwindles as our instruments get smaller.” In due course, the technologies to deliver Glass’s emerging functionality will truly disappear from view — this is a window of opportunity for discussion, debate and a reflection.

I’m thankful to Google for putting so much effort into Glass at this moment in time.

That passion? Channel it.

That anger? Channel it.

Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog, a design and innovation consultancy. He has not tried Google Glass, and has no idea whether he has been recorded through one. His first book, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” available from HarperCollins on April 16, explores issues around technology adoption, use and abuse.

1 This sign did the rounds but is closer to advertising for a pleasantly seedy bar than a warning sign. The suspicion can be real, but the true test comes from reactions to a wider deployment.
2 Eric Schmidt’s quote, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” is an interesting reflection of company culture. It’s refreshing to have a CEO that is this frank about the business they are in and the way they operate, and it’s an interesting assumption that the best way to institutionalize an understanding of creepy is to measure it and place it on a line.
3 If you want to extrapolate the argument around wholesale recording through Glass, it’s actually highly inefficient, particularly once much of that space and context is known. There are other, emerging technologies with far more processing power and unlimited power supply that are in a better position to continuously record.
4 There are many examples of what we say and do being recorded: From the obvious conversations in an interrogation room through to corporations tracking employee emails and IM chats, all the way to state agencies. When conducting research in Iran and making a call to the U.S., I assume it is being recorded by both Iranian and U.S. agencies. The only question is who else is listening and what is their motivation, today and at some point in the future.
5 I’ve not done a full write up of the research, but it was shared publicly a few years back.
6 After the Tokyo study, my then colleague Raphael Grignani ran a comparable study in New York City, with broadly analogous findings.
7 The physical toll of having to maintain a state of hyper-awareness is touched on here and here, and while these are extreme examples it is an interesting topic to further explore.
8 As Bruce Sterling pointed out, take each of those design principles and flip them to understand the actual experience.
9 We are running a study around water consumption and Sarvajal and will be sharing more on the project in due course.
10 Full disclosure: This list includes both personal and Frog clients.
11 “The Amateur Photographer,” 18 September 1885, p. 871.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130412/you-lookin-at-me-reflections-on-google-glass/feed/ 0 Stanford to Work With EdX Open-Source Learning Platform http://allthingsd.com/20130402/stanford-to-work-with-edx-open-source-learning-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/stanford-to-work-with-edx-open-source-learning-platform/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:01:07 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=308720 Stanford University has helped spawn much online learning activity (see our D10 interview with its president), but the school itself is now throwing its weight behind the open-source, not-for-profit EdX platform, which was founded last year by Harvard and MIT.

StanfordThis is more complicated than you might think it would be. Stanford actually isn’t joining the 12-school EdX consortium, but rather integrating into the EdX platform when it is open-sourced on June 1.

Former Stanford professors are behind Udacity and Coursera, two venture-funded for-profit MOOC (massive open online course) providers that are partnering with professors and universities to teach classes as well, including ones from Stanford.

Stanford is expected to incorporate EdX tools into its online classes this fall, which run on a separate Stanford-built open-source MOOC platform called Class2Go.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/stanford-to-work-with-edx-open-source-learning-platform/feed/ 0 Obama Gives a Shout-Out to MEET, the Israeli-Palestinian Youth Tech Project http://allthingsd.com/20130322/obama-gives-a-shout-out-to-meet-the-israeli-palestinian-youth-tech-project/ http://allthingsd.com/20130322/obama-gives-a-shout-out-to-meet-the-israeli-palestinian-youth-tech-project/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:26:38 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=306006 When we heard about a project that pairs Israeli and Palestinian teens to learn about tech and business, we were immediately intrigued.

meet_teens1

After learning more, we made MEET (Middle East Empowerment Through Technology) one of the original Global Voices at the D: Dive Into Mobile event scheduled for last fall.

Well, MEET has reached the attention of President Obama, who referenced the program Thursday while in Israel encouraging greater cooperation.

“That is the kind of relationship that Israel should have — and could have — with every country in the world. Already, we see how that innovation could reshape this region,” Obama said. “One program here in Jerusalem brings together young Israelis and Palestinians to learn vital skills in technology and business.”

Responded Noa Epstein, the co-CEO of MEET, in an email to AllThingsD, “We are proud and honored to have MEET’s work recognized by President Obama and are strengthened by his commitment to creating a better future for Palestinians and Israelis through empowering and connecting young change makers from both sides through the common language of innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.”

MEET pairs Israeli and Palestinian high school students together over several summers and during the school year to learn about technology and ultimately create their own endeavor.

The group’s big appearance on the D stage got washed out by Hurricane Sandy, but the MEET folks (who like us were stuck in Manhattan) sat down for an interview.

And, by the way, if you are looking for more inspiration, President Obama, we’ll have a new crop of Global Voices at our rescheduled Dive Into Mobile event April 15-16 in New York.

Here’s the video of Obama mentioning MEET.

And here’s our interview with the organizers and two MEET participants from last fall.


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130322/obama-gives-a-shout-out-to-meet-the-israeli-palestinian-youth-tech-project/feed/ 0 From TED, the Future of Robots: 4D Printing, Personalization and Adaptation http://allthingsd.com/20130226/from-ted-the-future-of-robots-4d-printing-personalization-and-adaptation/ http://allthingsd.com/20130226/from-ted-the-future-of-robots-4d-printing-personalization-and-adaptation/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:01:11 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=298701 What’s next for robots? They’re becoming smarter, more personalized, more adaptive. But at the same time they’re becoming more complex and capable, they’re also becoming more basic. One MIT scientist, for instance, is trying to program physical materials to assemble themselves.

4D printer Skylar Tibbits

Ryan Lash/TED2013 4D printer Skylar Tibbits

The TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., today presented three very different approaches to robotics: A safe industrial robot called Baxter, a cheap personal robot called Romo, and a research initiative into programmable materials such as self-folding proteins.

4D Printing

Let’s start with that last one. Skylar Tibbits, a lecturer in MIT’s architecture department and founder of its new Self-Assembly lab, describes what he’s doing as 4D printing. If the fourth dimension is time, Tibbits’s projects are designed to respond to energy and change over time. At TED, he showed off a collaboration with Stratasys and Autodesk to create strands made of multiple types of materials that when dipped in water fold themselves into pre-designed shapes.

Here’s what it looks like:

4D Printing: MIT Self-Folding Strand from Skylar Tibbits on Vimeo.

You can think of it as an extension of those tiny plastic capsules you bought as a kid at the dollar store that melt and expand in water and turn into tiny sponge creatures. (And if you never bought them, this analogy was totally ineffective.)

Tibbits describes this as a fundamental shift to create things that are adaptable and have their own smarts. “It’s like robotics without wires or motors,” he said.

Keller Rinaudo and Romo

James Duncan Davidson/TED2013 Keller Rinaudo and Romo

Romo

Romotive CEO Keller Rinaudo showed off the Romo, a product of not one but two successful campaigns on Kickstarter. The $150 device is an iPhone dock on wheels that uses Wi-Fi and computer vision to react to human movement and other input.

Romotive’s goal, said Rinaudo, is to get robots into everybody’s hands. That is: “To make a robot affordable, and it has to be something people actually want to take home,” he said.

To that end, he wants people to be able to program their own robots to do what they need. “We think if you’re going to have a robot in your home, that robot should be a manifestation of your imagination,” Rinaudo said. “The most compelling cases in personal robotics are personal.”

Baxter the robot

James Duncan Davidson/TED2013 Baxter the robot

Baxter

Last but not least, Rod Brooks, founder of Roomba-maker iRobot and now CTO of Rethink Robotics, gave a demo of Baxter, a robot designed to work alongside humans in factories.

In the first day of the TED conference, Baxter had already been cited multiple times as a leading indicator of the potential for machine learning to augment the human experience.

Launched last year and priced at $22,000, Baxter can be trained to do assembly-line tasks without programming. It has animated “eyes” that show where its attention is moving so humans aren’t surprised by its actions. And it knows to stop when it runs into an object — say, if a human steps in front of what it’s working on.

Rather than displacing human workers, Brooks said, Baxter helps show what humans and robots can do together. “Lots of jobs need doing,” he said. “I am scared we won’t have enough robots.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130226/from-ted-the-future-of-robots-4d-printing-personalization-and-adaptation/feed/ 0 Amid Activist Outcry, U.S. Attorney Defends Prosecution of Aaron Swartz http://allthingsd.com/20130116/amid-activist-outcry-u-s-attorney-defends-prosecution-of-aaron-swartz/ http://allthingsd.com/20130116/amid-activist-outcry-u-s-attorney-defends-prosecution-of-aaron-swartz/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 05:43:01 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=286337
carmen_ortiz

Photo: U.S. Attorney's office, Massachusetts

Nearly five days since news first broke of the well-known Web activist’s death, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts issued a public statement on Wednesday evening, defending the office’s actions in pursuing charges of computer and wire fraud against Aaron Swartz.

“I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life,” the statement, written by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, read.

“I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably,” Ortiz wrote.

The statement comes after days of widespread Internet outcry over the 26-year-old activist’s death, ruled a suicide last Saturday. At the time of his death, Swartz was being prosecuted by the Department of Justice for allegedly downloading nearly 5 million academic journal articles from the Web site JSTOR in 2010, using a laptop hooked in to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus network.

After Swartz handed over a number of hard drives, JSTOR decided not to pursue charges. But many have placed the blame on Attorney Ortiz and assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann, both of whom continued to prosecute Swartz for his alleged crimes.

Swartz’s attorney, Elliott Peters, has accused Heymann in particular of overzealous pursuit of Swartz, in a recent interview with the Huffington Post.

Assistant Attorney Heymann was looking for “some juicy-looking computer crime cases and Aaron’s case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill,” Peters told HuffPo. Peters said that Heymann believed Swartz’s prosecution “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.” Peters also claims that if the case had gone to trial and Swartz was convicted, he could face the maximum penalty: Upward of 35 years in Federal prison and fines of $1 million.

Ortiz’s statement, however, seems to downplay the extent to which her office went after Swartz. “At no time did this office ever seek — or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek — maximum penalties under the law,” Ortiz’ statement read.

Mr. Peters has not yet responded to multiple requests for comment.

MIT has also come under fire, taking flak for continuing to cooperate with Attorneys Ortiz and Heymann. The school released a statement on Sunday, expressing sympathy to Swartz’s friends and family and announcing its intent to conduct an internal investigation as to the school’s part in the ordeal.

“It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote.

But activists, academics such as Lawrence Lessig and Swartz’s family aren’t letting MIT and the U.S. Attorney’s office off the hook so easily. Swartz’s family released a statement on Saturday, placing much of the blame squarely on both MIT and Attorneys Ortiz and Heymann.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” the statement read. “Decisions made by officials in the U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

In the wake of many cries for computer crime reform in the days that followed, some U.S. lawmakers have spoken out in favor of amending existing legislation. On Tuesday evening, Representative Zoe Lofgren posted a draft of a bill she planned to propose on Reddit, where supporters of computer crime reform could give Lofgren feedback before she presented the bill to congress.

Read Ortiz’s statement embedded in full below:

January 16, 2013
STATEMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CARMEN M. ORTIZ
REGARDING THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ

As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life.

I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct — while a violation of the law — did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct — a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek — maximum penalties under the law.

As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly and responsibly as possible. We strive to do our best to fulfill this mission every day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130116/amid-activist-outcry-u-s-attorney-defends-prosecution-of-aaron-swartz/feed/ 6 DOJ Drops Charges Against Late Activist Aaron Swartz http://allthingsd.com/20130114/doj-drops-charges-against-late-activist-aaron-swartz/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/doj-drops-charges-against-late-activist-aaron-swartz/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:57:58 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=285250 In a filing on Monday, the Department of Justice dropped the charges against Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide on Friday. As first reported by The Hill, dropping charges against a deceased defendant is standard practice. In a statement on Saturday, Swartz’s family blamed prosecutorial zealotry, in part, for Swartz’s death.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/doj-drops-charges-against-late-activist-aaron-swartz/feed/ 1 In Wake of Activist's Death, Anonymous Hacks MIT Website http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-wake-of-activists-death-anonymous-hacks-mit-website/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-wake-of-activists-death-anonymous-hacks-mit-website/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:30:23 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=285081 anonymous_at_scientology_in_los_angelesAnonymous, the guerrilla outfit of loosely affiliated hackers around the world, attacked MIT’s website on Sunday evening, in apparent retaliation for the school’s role in Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s death.

The group used a denial-of-service brute-force attack (commonly known as DDoS-ing) to bring down the site for a period of time, while posting a message to the school’s site shortly thereafter.

“Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice Aaron died fighting for,” the group wrote in the message.

The attack comes just two days after news of Swartz’s death was first made public. Swartz was being prosecuted for his alleged theft of nearly five million JSTOR academic articles in 2010, accessed on the MIT campus network.

Swartz faced charges of computer fraud, wire fraud and other allegations from the U.S. Attorney’s office, which, if he were convicted, could have put the young activist in prison for upward of 30 years and slapped him with $1 million in fines.

While JSTOR eventually did not pursue any legal action against Swartz after he handed over a number of hard drives, the U.S. Attorney’s office continued to prosecute Swartz. His trial was set to begin this April.

On Friday evening, Swartz was found hanged to death in his Brooklyn apartment, by his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. He was 26.

“… The situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.”

The attack came only hours after MIT released a statement on Swartz’s death, announcing that the school would launch an internal investigation on the events that led up to Swartz’s passing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/in-wake-of-activists-death-anonymous-hacks-mit-website/feed/ 3 MIT Responds to Death of Activist Aaron Swartz, Begins Internal Investigation http://allthingsd.com/20130113/mit-responds-to-death-of-activist-aaron-swartz-begins-internal-investigation/ http://allthingsd.com/20130113/mit-responds-to-death-of-activist-aaron-swartz-begins-internal-investigation/#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:58:53 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=284933
tumblr_mgjgbnGz3Q1s3npego1_1280

Photo Credit: Jacob Appelbaum

Two days after Internet activist Aaron Swartz took his own life, the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has issued a public response and will launch an internal investigation looking into the university’s role in the ordeal which first began in 2010.

“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” wrote president L. Rafael Reif in a statement emailed to members of the press on Sunday. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

The university has come under widespread criticism in the wake of Swartz’s death. Swartz was first indicted on charges of computer fraud in 2011, after allegedly downloading approximately 5 million academic papers and files from the online service JSTOR, using MIT’s on-campus network.

While JSTOR eventually dropped the charges against Swartz after he handed over his hard drives, the U.S. attorney’s office continued prosecuting Swartz.

MIT is considered to have tacitly supported the decision byU.S. attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann to continue pursuing Swartz’s criminal prosecution, which left him facing penalties of upwards of 30 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

Swartz’s family issued a statement on Saturday, placing some of the blame for Swartz’s death on both MIT and the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” the statement read. “Decisions made by officials in the U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

The university will conduct a self-audit of its role in the events of the past two years, according to president Reif.

“I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present,” he wrote. “I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.”

Abelson is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and one of the founding members of both the Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.

The U.S. Attorney’s office has not responded to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130113/mit-responds-to-death-of-activist-aaron-swartz-begins-internal-investigation/feed/ 27 Family of Hacktivist Aaron Swartz Accuses MIT, U.S. Attorney of Contributing to His Suicide http://allthingsd.com/20130112/family-of-hacktivist-aaron-swartz-condemns-mit-states-attorney-for-contributing-to-his-suicide/ http://allthingsd.com/20130112/family-of-hacktivist-aaron-swartz-condemns-mit-states-attorney-for-contributing-to-his-suicide/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2013 23:42:42 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=284847
Aaron Swartz in 2008, with former Red Hat CEO Bob Young in the background (CreativeCommons)

Aaron Swartz in 2008, with former Red Hat CEO Bob Young in the background (CreativeCommons)

Update 7:49 PT: Added comment from JSTOR.

The family and friends of Aaron Swartz — the famed Internet hacktivist who took his own life on Friday at the age of 26 — released a public statement on Saturday, placing some of the blame for Swartz’s suicide on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” the statement read. “Decisions made by officials in the U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Swartz, long regarded as one of the major proponents of a free and open Internet to further the spread of information, was indicted in July of 2011 on federal charges of illegally accessing documents on JSTOR, the online digital library that hosts academic journal articles, books and primary sources. His alleged crime involved downloading nearly 5 million articles off the service from MIT’s on-campus network.

He faced upwards of 30 years in prison, along with $1 million in fines.

After Swartz turned over his hard drives, JSTOR decided not to pursue any legal action against him.

“The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge,” JSTOR wrote on Saturday in a statement to the public hosted on its Web site. “At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011.”

But U.S. Attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann, backed by Federal government, continued to pursue the prosecution of Swartz, with the tacit support of MIT behind them.

Said Ortiz in 2011: “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Earlier on Saturday, acclaimed academic and friend to Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, suggested that Ortiz’s steadfast pursuit of Swartz was outlandish and unnecessary, and part — though not the direct cause — of what brought Swartz to the grim solution he chose.

“From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way,” Lessig wrote on his personal blog. “… [A]nyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.”

Neither the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts nor MIT immediately responded to emailed requests for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130112/family-of-hacktivist-aaron-swartz-condemns-mit-states-attorney-for-contributing-to-his-suicide/feed/ 168 Teaching Business, Technology and Maybe a Little Mideast Peace in the Process (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20121101/teaching-business-technology-and-maybe-a-little-mideast-peace-in-the-process-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20121101/teaching-business-technology-and-maybe-a-little-mideast-peace-in-the-process-video/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:31:54 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=265157 Teenagers Amin Manna and Yuval Yogev live just a few kilometers from one another and yet were a world apart.

Or at least they were until they signed up for Meet (Middle East Education Through Technology), a program that teaches technology and business skills to Israeli and Palestinian youth.

After three years, they have not only learned technology skills and built a mobile app, but also gained an understanding for each other’s culture. The two are friends, but still don’t always agree on politics. At least, though, they now have a face to go with the “other side.”

Meet is a project that brings together an equal number of high school students of Jewish and Palestinian background (and an equal number of boys and girls) for a three-year program, pairing them with volunteer mentors from MIT.

Participants spend each day together over the summer learning business and technology skills and continue to meet once a week during the school year. Finally, the youth work together on a technology project.

Yogev and Manna, both now 17 and high school seniors, joined forces on Count Me In, an Android-based meet-up application that helps create impromptu events ranging from a casual dinner to a large-scale peace protest.

The pair traveled from Israel to New York to be part of the Global Voices segment of D: Dive Into Mobile. Hurricane Sandy may have washed out the conference for now, but the youths are eager to tell their story.

In a video interview with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried, you can hear from both teens as well as the CEO and founder of the project.


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121101/teaching-business-technology-and-maybe-a-little-mideast-peace-in-the-process-video/feed/ 0 Zero Gravity for All at Google Zeitgeist Partner Conference http://allthingsd.com/20121015/zero-gravity-for-all-at-google-zeitgeist-partner-conference/ http://allthingsd.com/20121015/zero-gravity-for-all-at-google-zeitgeist-partner-conference/#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:30:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=259964 Google’s big annual Americas partner event takes place this week at a fancy resort in Arizona. We at AllThingsD didn’t get the invite, though Google PR tells us to expect videos from the talks to be posted after the fact here, and also warned not to expect any product news whatsoever.

Photo credit: Zero Gravity

An attendee did send us the speaker list, so we know a bit more about what we’re missing: The lineup includes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, producer J.J. Abrams, American Express CEO Ken Chenault and MIT biomechatronics researcher Hugh Herr. This year’s theme is “The World Around Us,” which sounds grand and vague and kinda self-centered despite itself.

Plus, Google goes way beyond the normal conference perks of t-shirts and pens and fancy dinners. Attendees were each invited to participate in a zero-gravity flight that mimics the weightlessness of space. “As an extension to our theme, we will be providing an opportunity for you to experience what it feels like to be outside of our world,” Google told them.

By the way, the normal price for these flights? $5,000 per head.

But they don’t come without their downsides, as LeWeb CEO Loic Le Meur charmingly noted:

Still, Google missed perhaps the most perfect product tie-in ever when it didn’t supply skydiver Felix Baumgartner with Google Glass to livestream from his own head his record-breaking trip from space onto (nearby!) New Mexico on Sunday. Sergey Brin, you have been seriously one-upped.

In more serious Google news, the company reports third-quarter earnings on Thursday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121015/zero-gravity-for-all-at-google-zeitgeist-partner-conference/feed/ 0 Jeff Ma Talks About TenXer Raising $3 Million More to Help You Judge Yourself (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20120828/jeff-ma-talks-about-tenxer-raising-3-million-more-to-help-you-judge-yourself-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120828/jeff-ma-talks-about-tenxer-raising-3-million-more-to-help-you-judge-yourself-video/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:00:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=245687

On-the-job personal productivity start-up tenXer has raised $3 million in a Series B round, which it said it will use to accelerate growth outside its software industry market.

The San Francisco company, which was founded by longtime entrepreneur Jeff Ma, makes tools to allow a user or perhaps a company, track performance and progress using a number of different metrics. The presumable goal is to use social and gaming elements, along with this activity data, to help you do your job 10 times better.

Get it with the tenXer name now?

The new funding is led by True Ventures, and its partner, Puneet Agarwal, will join tenXer’s board of directors.

Radar Partners and Khosla Ventures, as well as angel investors, participated in the new round, for what the company describes as a “human capital management platform.”

Currently aimed at tracking the work of software engineers, tenXer integrates current tools such as GitHub, Pivotal Tracker and Jira.

Here’s a video interview with Ma — who gained fame for his gambling prowess as part of the MIT blackjack team, and also was one of the co-founders of Citizen Sports, which was bought by Yahoo in 2010 — about the new round, and also about where tenXer is headed next:


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120828/jeff-ma-talks-about-tenxer-raising-3-million-more-to-help-you-judge-yourself-video/feed/ 0 A Look Back at the Second Week of the Apple-Samsung Trial http://allthingsd.com/20120811/a-look-back-at-the-second-week-of-the-apple-samsung-trial/ http://allthingsd.com/20120811/a-look-back-at-the-second-week-of-the-apple-samsung-trial/#comments Sat, 11 Aug 2012 20:35:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=240377 Calling the Apple versus Samsung patent lawsuit the most closely watched case of its kind in recent memory isn’t exactly going out on a limb, and that’s because the disclosures of details previously held close to the vest by both parties have been so numerous and, well, so interesting.

The trial’s first week was widely described as something of a slapfest, during which lawyers for both sides aimed to sting the other by forcing one painful bit of previously secret information after another into the record of evidence.

Though the second week had its snoozy moments, the fascinating disclosures kept on coming, and ended with nothing less than a bombshell. Here are the week’s highlights:

Apple Offered Samsung a License on Its Patent Portfolio

“Shocked” as it was by the iPhone-like look of the first Galaxy phones, Apple considered its relationship with Samsung — a key supplier of chips and other components — important, and was willing to make a deal. In October of 2010, it offered Samsung a license on its patents for $30 per phone and $40 per tablet. It also offered a 20 percent discount, if Samsung was willing to cross-license its portfolio back to Apple. By Apple’s reckoning, such a deal would have brought in $250 million in 2010. It’s now seeking 10 times that much in damages from Samsung. It was on this surprising little bombshell that the week’s proceedings ended.


Samsung’s U.S. Tablet Revenue Was Less Than 5 Percent of Apple’s

As often as they’re held up as competitive devices, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab barely moves the sales needle when compared to Apple’s iPad, at least in the U.S., according to Samsung documents that were admitted into evidence. As AllThingsD’s Ina Fried put it, Samsung sold fewer tablets during the entire seven quarters in question than Apple did in its worst quarter. Samsung recorded U.S. tablet sales worth $644 million, or less than 5 percent of the nearly $15 billion Apple generated during the same period.


Samsung Competes Better With Apple in the Phone Business, but Is Still Way Behind

The Korean electronics giant wasn’t the only one forced to pry open its books for inspection. Apple disclosed, for the first time, a U.S. breakdown of its unit sales of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches from 2007 through the first half of this year. The result: Apple sold 85 million iPhones in the U.S., worth $50 billion in sales; 34 million iPads, worth $19 billion; and 46 million iPod touches, worth $10 billion and change. For its part, Samsung disclosed that in the two years ended June 2012, it sold 21.25 million phones, generating $7.5 billion in revenue. Its best-performing individual model was the Galaxy Prevail, which sold 2.25 million phones.


Samsung Said in an Internal 2010 Report That Its Galaxy Would Be Better if It Were Just More Like the iPhone
Lawyers for Apple introduced into the record a 132-page internal Samsung report that examined, feature-by-feature, how its Galaxy S I stacked up against the iPhone. The verdict of Samsung’s product designers, who wrote it, was simple, and from the standpoint of Apple’s lawyers, pretty damning: Make it more like the iPhone. Samsung called the report a routine “competitive analysis.”


Samsung Customers Might Pay Extra $100 for Apple-like Features

If it followed the advice of its own product experts and made its phones more like the iPhone, Samsung’s customers might have to pay as much as $100 more per phone. That was the conclusion of John Hauser, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who conducted a detailed study of the three disputed Apple utility patents. His study found that customers said they were willing to spend up to an additional $100 on a smartphone or $90 for a tablet that incorporated all three features created by the patents. Under cross-examination by Samsung lawyers, Hauser explained that in the study, customers were asked how much they might be willing to spend on a set of features, but were never asked to weigh those costs versus other expenses they might have. This would, Samsung laywers argued, create a “reality check” on Hauser’s findings.

Patent Lawsuits, No Matter Who the Litigants Are, Can Be Boring

For all their vaunted importance, patent law is, as legal subgenres go, a pretty dry subject. Sooner or later, you wind up talking about the kind of in-the-weeds details about which only practitioners of the art give a fig. On Friday, lawyers for Apple called one expert after another to testify about patents governing features as varied as the “bounce back patent,” and others referred to only by the last three digits of their patent numbers. One of the patents, testified an expert using a technical term, is intended to help save users a lot of “fiddling around.” Snoozing yet?

Apple is expected to wrap up its case next week.

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

RELATED POSTS:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120811/a-look-back-at-the-second-week-of-the-apple-samsung-trial/feed/ 0 MIT Emotion-Sensing Start-Up Affectiva Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Horizon Ventures http://allthingsd.com/20120807/mit-emotion-sensing-start-up-affectiva-backed-by-kleiner-perkins-and-horizon-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120807/mit-emotion-sensing-start-up-affectiva-backed-by-kleiner-perkins-and-horizon-ventures/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:30:27 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=238561 Affectiva, a start-up that develops products that detect people’s emotional states, has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins.

The company spun out of MIT and develops products such as a Webcam-based facial-coding tool and a wristband biometric sensor. The big idea here is that by measuring things like tiny movements in a person’s facial muscles, it’s possible to detect how they actually feel about something, rather than asking them to try to describe it.

Affectiva might have big-time backers now, but its technology was originally developed by MIT professor Rosalind W. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby to help children with autism understand facial expressions. Now it is primarily used for market research by brands with partners like WPP Millward Brown (WPP is also a backer) and the IPG Media Lab.

The company is broadening its application to any sort of video content — for instance, measuring audience reaction to movie trailers and TV shows — and adding mobile and social support.

CEO Dave Berman said Affectiva has also set up a charitable trust with a big chunk of company stock for the benefit of people who have difficulty regulating their emotions, and that autism spectrum research continues through MIT.

As Affectiva has gathered more data, it has become more adept at detecting subtle expressions, like a smirk, and can now mine data to understand the contrasts in emotion between people of different genders and countries, among other things.

“We have the largest repository of facial responses ever collected in the world,” contended el Kaliouby.

Affectiva customers can see a moment-to-moment score of each participant’s emotion while experiencing their content. (You can try how “Affdex” works by watching Super Bowl ads with your Webcam turned on in a demo on Affectiva’s Web site.)

El Kaliouby said Affectiva tries to be highly conscious about user privacy, and may actually retain less data over time. “We’re less ‘big brother’ than helping people,” she said.

Currently based in Waltham, Mass., Affectiva is also planning to open a San Francisco Bay Area office with the new funding. It had previously raised $7.7 million from WPP, Myrian Capital and the Peder Wallenberg Charitable Trust, and won grants from the National Science Foundation.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120807/mit-emotion-sensing-start-up-affectiva-backed-by-kleiner-perkins-and-horizon-ventures/feed/ 0 Berkeley Aligns With Harvard and MIT's edX Online Learning Initiative http://allthingsd.com/20120724/berkeley-aligns-with-harvard-and-mits-edx-online-learning-initiative/ http://allthingsd.com/20120724/berkeley-aligns-with-harvard-and-mits-edx-online-learning-initiative/#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:35:08 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=233237 University of California, Berkeley said today it would join edX, the nonprofit online learning joint venture between Harvard and MIT, with two computer science courses to be offered this fall. What’s interesting is that Berkeley professors are already teaching three computer science courses on another online learning platform, the for-profit Coursera.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120724/berkeley-aligns-with-harvard-and-mits-edx-online-learning-initiative/feed/ 0 For Olympic Games, Tweets Will Turn the London Eye Into a Giant Mood Ring http://allthingsd.com/20120723/for-olympic-games-tweets-will-turn-the-london-eye-into-a-giant-mood-ring/ http://allthingsd.com/20120723/for-olympic-games-tweets-will-turn-the-london-eye-into-a-giant-mood-ring/#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2012 23:40:23 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=232919 It’s hard to accurately portray the predominant emotion surrounding any major event. Those of us in the working press rely upon certain devices, using quotes from an individual to capture an overall mood, pegging sentiment to an exceptional quote or a well-timed photograph.

This is exactly the aim of Energy of the Nation, a joint venture between the United Kingdom’s EDF Energy Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focused on capturing the emotion of those in the U.K. who are bearing witness to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. But instead of publishing words and photos to newsprint, EDF is doing it a bit differently: The group will use audience tweets as its stock-in-trade.

The EDF will analyze tweets centered around the Games throughout the course of the Olympics, and will use those tweets to power a spectacular light show at 9 pm and 10 pm every evening.

The focal point? The London Eye, the tallest Ferris wheel in all of Europe, and a renowned U.K. tourist destination that sits right off the river Thames. Tweets lighting up the Eye are based on the feelings extrapolated from the millions of Twitter messages flowing through the stream.

Professor Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton and a band of MIT grads will use access from the raw Twitter firehose, scanning them to see if they’ve originated within the U.K. If so, the team then scans each tweet to see if it contains any specific words or hashtags — Olympics, #energy2012 and others related to the Games — to see if they’re relevant to the overall sentiment measurement.

After making it through those filters, tweets are met with a sentiment algorithm which attempts to measure the type of sentiment caught within the tweet. Adjectives that describe feelings are, of course, taken into account, but also punctuation and even emoticons will measure nonverbal forms of sentiment. The tweets are then scored, and the positive and negative emotions are tallied up over the course of each day.

Those results are distilled, creating the basis for the 24-minute light show displayed on the London Eye twice each evening. And if you aren’t there to watch the show yourself, there is, of course, an app to track the flow of positive and negative tweets around the U.K.

Will real-world data visualizations render the emotion of the Games better than our usual methods? Perhaps, and perhaps not. One thing is certain, though: If the crowds don’t go for it, they can certainly let it be known over Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120723/for-olympic-games-tweets-will-turn-the-london-eye-into-a-giant-mood-ring/feed/ 1 LittleBits Secures $3.65M in Funding, Plans Product Expansion http://allthingsd.com/20120718/littlebits-secures-3-65m-in-funding-plans-product-expansion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120718/littlebits-secures-3-65m-in-funding-plans-product-expansion/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:32 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=231215 LittleBits, which creates small hardware parts akin to electrically-charged Legos, has secured funding that will help the fledgling start-up meet demand and make new products.

The New York-based module-making company has raised $3.65 million in a Series A round led by True Ventures, with Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Lerer Ventures also contributing to the funding. LittleBits had previously received seed funding from Joi Ito, Nicholas Negroponte and Joann Wilson.

So what are littleBits, exactly? They’re magnetized, modular hardware parts that snap together to build things. Currently there are more than 50 available, categorized by power, input, output and wire. Bits include dimmers, buzzers, wires, buttons, LEDs and motion triggers. (For some interesting examples of what people dream up with littleBits, check out the company’s Web site. A littleBits coffeemaker, anyone?)

The littleBits are sold as both individual parts and as kits. The company’s flagship product, the 10-piece starter kit, sells for $89. There’s also a teaser kit, with just three bits, for $29.

Founder, engineer and MIT Media Lab alumna Ayah Bdeir says littleBits’s biggest customers to date have been parents and kids, and there’s a strong customer base in teachers and educators, as well.

“In the beginning, we expected it to be tinkerers and hobbyists,” Bdeir said in an interview, “and surprisingly, they make up a small portion of our user base.”

In the three weeks following last September’s launch, littleBits sold more than 3,000 kits. In February of this year, the company won the Popular Science “Best of Toy Fair” award, beating out bigger toy companies like the Lego Group and Mattel Inc. Since then, Bdeir says, demand has increased.

In addition to securing funding, littleBits has also established a partnership with global supply chain management company PCH International, which will take over production of littleBits in August of this year.

New products coming down the pipeline include at least 10 new modules, some built with new tech, like solar panel modules. The company also plans to offer a greater variety of kits, Bdeir said, at different price points and ranging in complexity, “to appeal to both the kindergartner and the architect.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120718/littlebits-secures-3-65m-in-funding-plans-product-expansion/feed/ 0 Accel, Breyer Capital and Polaris Join Harvard-Area's Experiment Fund http://allthingsd.com/20120626/accel-breyer-capital-and-polaris-join-harvard-area-experiment-fund/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/accel-breyer-capital-and-polaris-join-harvard-area-experiment-fund/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:56:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=224432

Accel Partners, Breyer Capital and Polaris Venture Partners became the newest partners in the seed-stage venture fund aimed at entrepreneurs in the Boston area.

The Experiment Fund, which already includes New Enterprise Associates, is “anchored” and was launched at Harvard University, although the famed school is not one of its funders.

New advisers were also added to the Experiment Fund, including former Harvard Law School professor and former director of the Berkman Center John Palfrey, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Hugo Liu, as well as an ex-officio post created for the current president of Harvard Student Agencies.

The fund, which AllThingsD wrote about previously, was created earlier this year by the dean of the Harvard School of Engineering.

The early-stage incubator planned then to award funding to four to six start-ups, in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000, focused on the Cambridge, Mass., area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as MIT.

The point has been to foster innovation around the Boston area, rather than watch those start-ups head west to seek funding. In other words, to keep the next Facebook — which was born there — from moving away to Silicon Valley.

In other words: Stay east, next young Mark Zuckerberg!

The new partners are contributing more funds, although they declined to specify the amount. Breyer Capital is the personal investment company of Accel’s Jim Breyer.

As part of adding the new partners, Breyer and Polaris’ Alan Crane will become “experts-in-residence” at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Breyer and Crane, by the way, both got their MBAs from Harvard.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120626/accel-breyer-capital-and-polaris-join-harvard-area-experiment-fund/feed/ 0 Harvard and MIT Launch $60M Nonprofit Online EdX Platform http://allthingsd.com/20120502/harvard-and-mit-launch-60m-non-profit-online-edx-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20120502/harvard-and-mit-launch-60m-non-profit-online-edx-platform/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:14 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=202401

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today are launching a nonprofit, open-sourced joint online learning venture called EdX, with the first courses to start in the fall of this year.

Basically, Harvard is jumping in as an equal partner to a previously announced project called MITx, with each school contributing faculty leaders and putting up $30 million in funding.

EdX (which was pronounced both “ed-ex” and “ee-dee-ex” at a press conference this morning) will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free; in the future, other schools will be invited to join.

The two Boston-area schools are essentially leapfrogging Stanford University, where a set of online classes last year gave rise to the creation of two for-profit companies led by the Stanford professors who taught the classes — Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng’s Coursera. Stanford is still figuring out its own approach to online learning.

EdX will bring MIT and Harvard courses to students around the world, with no admissions requirements, free classes, and “a modest fee” for credentials earned by students, according to plans posted today.

The open source platform will include “self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories.”

The first courses have not been chosen yet, and many other details have yet to be figured out.

“Online education is not an enemy of residential education, but rather a profoundly liberating and expanding ally,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield at a press conference this morning.

EdX is also an opportunity to push forward education research, said the project’s leaders.

EdX President Anant Agarwal

EdX is inspired in part by Sal Khan’s Khan Academy, and will include videos made in his style, said Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Agarwal will be the first president of EdX.

Of other online learning initiatives, including those that are for profit, Agarwal said, “Of course, all of us are looking at each other. At the end of the day, I think the more online educators there are, I think the better off the whole world is.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120502/harvard-and-mit-launch-60m-non-profit-online-edx-platform/feed/ 0 Put Down the Phone and Learn to Be Alone (And to Listen), Says Sherry Turkle at TED http://allthingsd.com/20120301/put-down-the-phone-and-learn-to-be-alone-and-to-listen-says-sherry-turkle-at-ted/ http://allthingsd.com/20120301/put-down-the-phone-and-learn-to-be-alone-and-to-listen-says-sherry-turkle-at-ted/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:19:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=179824 We constantly text and social network so we don’t have to feel lonely, but while peering into our phones we’re ignoring the people and the world around us. That’s a serious problem, one that should be addressed by technologists, regulators and norms, according to psychologist Sherry Turkle.

James Duncan Davidson

Speaking at the TED conference today, Turkle said she wants people to make a personal commitment to live with each other and teach themselves to be okay with solitude.

Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she has done her own research on these topics and published a book about them last year called “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” (here she is talking about the book with Stephen Colbert). Her talk clearly resonated at TED, where attendees in the main auditorium aren’t allowed to use their phones or computers, a rare occasion for the many technologists here.

But I don’t think there’s any doubt that after their enthusiastic standing ovation, those twitchy techies were back on their smartphones as soon as the session ended.

What’s so bad about the “I share, therefore I am” mentality, where people live their lives thinking of the pictures they will take and the status messages they will post?

It’s that we’re hiding from each other and real relationships, Turkle said. “We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch. Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and demanding. And we clean them up with technology.”

All this time spent communicating digitally gives us “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” Turkle said. “If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely.”

Turkle asked people to create spaces in their offices and homes that are designated for conversation. She told them to work on solitude and to listen to each other.

RELATED POSTS:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120301/put-down-the-phone-and-learn-to-be-alone-and-to-listen-says-sherry-turkle-at-ted/feed/ 0 Now Is the (Larry) Summers of Our Silicon Valley VC: Economic Guru Joins Andreessen Horowitz as "Special Advisor" http://allthingsd.com/20110629/now-is-the-larry-summers-of-our-silicon-valley-vc-economic-guru-joins-andreessen-horowitz-as-special-advisor/ http://allthingsd.com/20110629/now-is-the-larry-summers-of-our-silicon-valley-vc-economic-guru-joins-andreessen-horowitz-as-special-advisor/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:00:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=92874

In an unusual appointment for the longtime public servant, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Silicon Valley venture powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz as a part-time “Special Advisor.”

Summers got to know the firm with an assist from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was a student of his when he was a professor at Harvard University.

Summers was later president of Harvard, as well as director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration until late last year.

“I am doing this because I feel technology in general and information technology in particular is now having a real pervasive macroeconomic impact in our time,” said Summers in a phone interview this afternoon from his home in Boston. “Long after people have lost their memory of the dramatic financial crisis in recent years, they will remember what technology has done to transform our economy in these same years.”

Summers said he increasingly wanted to become closer to this important trend and thought he could contribute to the innovation in Silicon Valley by helping its portfolio companies better understand the global economy.

He was introduced to Andreessen Horowitz at first by Sandberg, who was also Summers’ chief of staff while at the Treasury Department, and was attracted to its investment philosophy.

“They have distinctive elements of strategy that seemed to be a good fit, such as their emphasis on market disruption,” said Summers. “They also have an audacity of the vision and were really supporting transformation.”

Summers said he would serve as an advisor to Andreessen Horowitz companies, focusing on global opportunities they should take advantage of.

He will not become a VC, though. “My life to date has been as a professor and public servant, so I am not in a position to be a major investor,” said Summers.

That said, Marc Andreessen quickly noted in the interview that “if Larry brings in a company, we are going to take a serious look at it.”

While he was not a partner, Andreessen said Summers’ compensation would be linked to the long-term performance of the firm.

Summers will travel between Massachusetts and the West coast, but will also continue to work on outside projects.

What he will not be doing is giving any long-winded economic lessons to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

“I am not sure there is the attention span for some of my lectures out there,” he joked.

Here is Andreessen’s blog post about the Summers appointment:

Meet Larry Summers, Our New Special Advisor

By Marc Andreessen

Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor.

A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date:

* Admitted to MIT at age 16, originally to study physics — clearly our kind of nerd.

* Became tenured professor of economics at Harvard at age 28, where he first started mentoring a young undergraduate named Sheryl Sandberg, who ultimately became his chief of staff at the US Treasury.

* Received John Bates Clark Medal for his research at age 38, one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics (the other is the Nobel).

* On the staff of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-1983. (For those of you too young to remember, Reagan was a noted Republican.)

* Undersecretary for International Affairs and then Deputy Treasury Secretary for President Clinton between 1993 and 1999. Intimately involved in resolving major macroeconomic crises in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Became US Treasury Secretary in 1999.

* President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006.

* Until late 2010, served as President Obama’s director of the White House National Economic Council.

* And, most importantly, a pivotal character in the recent movie “The Social Network”.

Larry will be an advisor to our firm and our entrepreneurs on several topics:

First, as technology continues its relentless colonization of broad swaths of the global economy, Larry will help us understand the scope and nature of the opportunities in front of us and our industry.

Second, many of our companies are seeking to restructure and revolutionize various markets — such as telecommunications, advertising, entertainment, education, health care, and financial services — and Larry will help us and our entrepreneurs analyze and understand the economics and dynamics of those markets.

Third, Larry’s deep insight into global economics and geopolitics will be highly useful to our companies that intend to expand globally — which is to say, all of them.

According to the New York Times, “Years ago, Henry Kissinger suggested that Mr. Summers be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas.” We can’t arrange that, but we are excited to have him on our team, both to do that and to contribute lots of new ideas to us and to our companies.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110629/now-is-the-larry-summers-of-our-silicon-valley-vc-economic-guru-joins-andreessen-horowitz-as-special-advisor/feed/ 0 Want to Transfer Data to Your Phone? Just Point and Shoot. http://allthingsd.com/20110616/want-to-transfer-data-to-your-phone-just-point-and-shoot/ http://allthingsd.com/20110616/want-to-transfer-data-to-your-phone-just-point-and-shoot/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:30:25 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=87508 Researchers at Google and MIT think they have come up with a novel way to transfer applications and data to a cellphone without a cable or wireless network. Their transfer mechanism of choice? The camera.

The project, called “Deep Shot,” shows how one might zap a page on a map, complete with links, just by taking a picture of it. But instead of getting just a picture of the screen, the phone is also getting the code needed to go to that place on the map. It works by taking advantage of widely used Web technology known as a uniform resource identifier, or URI. Programs use URIs to email links or embed code and Deep Shot transmits that URI to the cellphone camera. The project requires a small bit of code on both the phone and the computer.

The benefit, though, is not constantly having to email links when one wants to download a map or other information to a mobile device.

MIT graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang developed Deep Shot last summer, while an intern at Google, which owns the rights to the technology. Chang and Google’s Yang Li presented the technology in May at a computer-human interaction conference.

In theory, the software technique could be used to send data among different programs as well, but that would require Google to open up the technology and it is not yet clear what its plans are, MIT said.

Deep Shot is the latest in a series of efforts that recognize the cellphone camera as not just a means of taking pictures, but rather a sophisticated input mechanism capable of scanning bar codes and recognizing objects.

For some folks, Deep Shot may stir memories of a technology Timex built into a line of watches in the mid-90s — DataLink, a wireless, optical data transfer developed in partenership with Microsoft. Users would build a contact database on the computer, and then point the wristwatch’s imaging sensor at the screen while the data was transferred through a series of bar code-like flashing lines.

Here’s a look at Deep Shot in action.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110616/want-to-transfer-data-to-your-phone-just-point-and-shoot/feed/ 0 An Exit in Egypt http://allthingsd.com/20110321/an-exit-in-egypt/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/an-exit-in-egypt/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:15:24 +0000 Christopher M. Schroeder http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37934 These days the word “exit” in connection with Egypt often conjures the departure of a politician or business executive caught on the wrong side of historic, popular forces. Indicative, however, of a growing new narrative in successful entrepreneurship in the country, Intel announced last week its acquisition of Cairo-based SySDSoft, a leading 4G wireless software developer.

The move marks Intel’s vote of confidence in the post-Mubarak Egypt, in the earliest days of establishing a new political, cultural and economic identity. In addition, as one of the worlds leading global technology players, Intel has embraced the growing quality of innovation and engineering talent in their first acquisition in the Arab world. Dr. Christian Mucke, Vice President of Intel Mobile Communications, notes that “Egypt has a young, growing talent pool across multiple specializations, including the field of engineering, and we remain committed to Egypt as a strategic market.”

SySDSoft’s CEO and founder Dr. Khaled Ismail is a classic start-up story. Having received his PhD from MIT and the highest recognition from leading engineering institutions, Ismail founded his company out of passion and necessity. When the U.S. company for whom he built the Cairo operations failed to survive the bubble burst of 2001, he saw significant market and talent opportunity in region. Starting with two employees, he reflects on those early days, “It was not very difficult as I was blessed with a great team. My main challenge was always to find new customers abroad, who were willing to trust an Egyptian company to deliver top-notch technical work for them.” Find them he did, and as his operations grew to nearly 100 engineers, SySDSoft quickly moved from offering engineering design services to developing its own IP in the 4G telecom world. SySDSoft was named the first Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurial Company in the Middle East in 2007.

Ismail has been active in fostering and mentoring young Egyptian entrepreneurs in technology and telecom. Between his success at SySDSoft, sitting on the board of Orascom–the largest telecom operator in the Middle East–and actively advising government and business leaders in how best to incubate new tech ideas, he is optimistic for the new generation following in his footsteps. “What will change,” he hopes, “is that young entrepreneurs may have more guts now to take the risk and hope for a good upside in case they are successful. After Jan 25, 2011, in fact, I am much more optimistic, since the overall environment is very crucial, and we hope that the change that has happened will entice a lot of young Egyptians to have a dream, take the risk, but have the patience to not simply chase quick profit.”

SySDSoft had received two offers to sell in recent years, but now, with the exponential growth in mobile services and pressure on time to market, the time was ripe to harvest opportunities in consolidation. Ismail notes, “During the past six months, there have been so many acquisitions in the domain or wireless technologies more broadly. We witnessed most of our small- to medium-size customers being acquired by big companies during that phase, which indicated that big consolidations are happening.” When Intel bought one of the leading wireless companies last August, Infineon Wireless, it also acquired one of SySDSoft’s most important customers. Ismail concluded, “We had an excellent working relationship with them. Also, Intel is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world that would allow our product, which we believe is best of its class in the world, to reach the hands of hundreds of millions very soon. Our IP is a part of their road map, and as our business is not capital intensive, we represent far less risk than other industries.”

Mucke agrees: “SySDSoft designs software IP solutions and RF/analog circuits embedded in mobile platforms and enhances Intel Mobile Communications’ existing multi-communications portfolio, specifically accelerating its 4G LTE efforts.”

Ismail will remain with Intel as the head of Intel Mobile Communication Egypt. “I have currently no other plans but to make it one of the most successful teams with Intel worldwide, and to win the 4G chipset battle such that an Egyptian product will be in the hands of more than a billion users within five years from now.”

Intel is sizing up the best approaches in Egypt and the region overall. “Intel remains committed to the Egyptian market and the region has a young, growing talent pool,” Mucke explains. “We are currently in the process of evaluating the market and the financial impact to Intel as a result of the Egypt revolution, and are working with the ecosystem on identifying how Intel can help rebuild and restructure the Egyptian PC market.”

Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington, DC-based angel investor in U.S. companies and CEO of the leading collection of condition-specific, social health web sites at healthcentral.com. He recently returned from Cairo, Damascus and Dubai, examining the region’s start-up community, and was a delegate in the State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program as a judge for Egypt’s new venture business plan competition. He can be followed at @cmschroed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/an-exit-in-egypt/feed/ 0 Bubbli, Push Pop Press and Bluefin a Hit at TED http://allthingsd.com/20110303/bubbli-push-pop-press-and-bluefin-delight-at-ted/ http://allthingsd.com/20110303/bubbli-push-pop-press-and-bluefin-delight-at-ted/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:00:38 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3938 Some of the biggest hits so far at this year’s annual TED–the well-known conference now taking place in Long Beach–have come from tech start-up founders’ talks and show-stealing demos.

Here are three companies you’ll likely be hearing about again:

In recent weeks multiple people have told me about Bubbli, saying it’s a see-it-to-believe-it experience. At TED on Wednesday, the company gave the first public demo of its augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos.

Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a picture with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that “bubble” by holding their own phones in front of them. When their phone is moved up or down or left or right, they see what you would have seen in that same direction.

At least, that’s how I think it works. The Bubbli demo was a bit raw, in part due to connectivity issues.

Bubbli co-founder Ben Newhouse gained recognition for building the Yelp Monocle feature, which was the iPhone’s first augmented reality app. It uses the phone’s built-in compass to overlay Yelp restaurant ratings onto a camera view of the surrounding area.

Bubbli, which is funded by August Capital, describes its goal as to “build the matrix by defining a new medium to express the physical world around us.”

Meanwhile,

Bluefin Labs co-founder Deb Roy used his full-length speaking slot to describe the process of surveilling his house with video cameras to capture the process of his son learning to speak. In order to analyze more than 90,000 hours of video, his MIT team created machine learning systems that helped trace the evolution of his son’s learning moment by moment.

Roy has now taken a leave of absence from MIT to extend these machine-learning techniques to social media discussions of television programs. His company, Bluefin Labs, raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

In a previous conversation with NetworkEffect, Roy told me that Bluefin now analyzes 30 television channels 24/7 and computes their intersection with Twitter Firehose data, Facebook updates and blog posts in real time. Bluefin’s customers are big brand advertisers, agencies and media companies, who want to better understand how ads and programs resonate with online audiences.

TED attendee and financial commentator Paul Kedrosky was effusive about Roy’s talk on Twitter, calling it the best ever.

“Epic, moving and wondrous. Generated biggest standing O in ages,” Kedrosky tweeted.

And on Tuesday,

Push Pop Press showed off a reimagined digital version of former Vice President Al Gore’s book “Our Choice” built for the iPad and iPhone with interactive infographics, videos and voice overs. For instance, one demonstration of wind energy generation can be manipulated (as pictured) by a user blowing on the device’s screen. That was a big crowd pleaser.

TEDsters (you’ll notice they’re an effusive bunch) called the demo “mind-blowing” and “amazing.”

I’ve written before about how Push Pop Press is highly anticipated given its founders’ background. Mike Matas, who showed off the app on stage at TED, was formerly a design prodigy at Apple.

Caveat: I am not at the conference myself, but have a press pass for the live stream. TED continues through Friday, and session videos will be posted online in the coming weeks.

Photo credits, via TED:

Terrence McArdle + Ben Newhouse, Inventors, in Session 5: Worlds Imagined, on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Deb Roy, Cognitive scientist, in Session 4: Deep Mystery, on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Mike Matas in Session 3: Mindblowing, on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

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