And here’s something else to calm your nerves: Our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 4:

1.) White House: It’s Time to Legalize Cellphone Unlocking

2.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

3.) YouTube’s Show-Me-the-Money Problem

4.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

5.) What Could Apple Buy With Its $137 Billion? About 18 Homes Each for Every Yahoo to Not Work At, and More!

6.) Former Top Yahoo Ad Exec Sues Yahoo, Accusing It of Trying to “Cheat” Him Over Acquisition Compensation

7.) Heads Turn as Microsoft Shows Off 3-D Scanning Techniques

8.) Loose Lips: Yahoo M&A Head Told Employees Company Looking at Two “Significant” and a Half-Dozen Small Buys

9.) The Disappearing Interface

10.) Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

A blind beta tester of Le Chal navigates an open space via vibrating insoles.

Instead of all-purpose, full-focus devices, these new tools are migrating outward, on and around our bodies, to our fingers and heads and wrists and ears, and even feet. From there, they can be ready to help us the moment we need them, in a manner that’s less abstracted and hard to talk about without referencing science fiction.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s becoming more and more accessible and interesting. You might glue together a bunch of these ideas by thinking of them as the disappearance of the interface.

At the TED Conference this past week in Long Beach, Calif., a number of the talks and demos showed off ways for interfaces to melt away so both inputs and outputs can adapt and be more accessible.

For instance, an eye surgeon from India named Anthony Vipin Das has created vibrating insoles that help blind people navigate the world by gently buzzing their feet with directional cues.

The company manufacturing the shoe, Ducere Technologies, is based in Hyderabad, and the product, which will cost about $40 and is set to go on sale in India in about six months, is called Le Chal (“take me there” in Hindi).

So, for instance, 20 meters away from a left turn, a Le Chal wearer would feel a calibrated buzz in his left shoe. Then, 10 meters away, a longer duration. And at the turning location, a persistent buzz until the turn is successfully completed.

And all this without a cane or a companion, or any indication to others that the sense of direction is coming via haptic signals to his feet.

In the coming months, Le Chal expects to add obstacle detection and indoor navigation, Das said. The company is working on a sort of Morse code vibration language to communicate more complex directions and warnings.

Das noted that it’s not just blind people who could benefit from subtle navigation signals. “There are implications for sighted people, as well,” he said.

James Duncan Davidson/TED2013

Meanwhile, Google’s co-founder/resident mad scientist Sergey Brin took the TED stage to talk about Google Glass, using a strangely gendered choice of words to call smartphones “emasculating” because “you’re standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.”

The exciting Project Glass aims to make people whole again (I suppose) by enabling them to take hands-free photos and videos, so they can be more in the moment, and by displaying phone notifications. In some ways it’s similar to the new Pebble watch, but rides on the eyebrow instead of the wrist.

But it’s hard to imagine wearing these glasses not being completely strange — the “Segway for the face” metaphor goes a long way. Concerns about distraction and privacy are more than valid.

Still, these ideas do tickle your imagination. In another talk, Mary Lou Jepsen, who works with Brin at Google X, spoke on her personal exploration of high-resolution brain-scanning systems that would allow people to decode brain waves to see the live images playing in their own heads.

Jepsen said she thought in the near future it will be possible to do a sort of live brain simulcast. Imagine remembering your dreams when you wake up in the morning, or helping translate what’s going on in the brain of someone with an injury or disease. Studies have already shown that brain scans can find images — albeit very blurry images — that correspond to photos and videos we are watching or imagining.

“We’re going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media,” Jepsen said.

Think that sounds crazy? There are so many directions the disappearance of the interface can go. Another speaker, marine biologist Denise Herzing, presented on her efforts to improve dolphin-to-human communication through wearable computers that decipher dolphin sounds (including the ones humans can’t hear) and translate them for the wearer.

The system, called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), also helps divers generate dolphin calls so they can talk back to the dolphins while swimming.

But wearable smart devices are not that weird. Sensors in and around people’s bodies are already part of many geeks’ lives. Throughout the week, hundreds of TED attendees were contributing data about their activity levels via complimentary Jawbone Up wristbands. (But this is still pretty blunt. The biggest trend at TED: Less sleep per night as the week elapsed.)

And the disappearing interface trend is obviously not restricted to any one conference. Elsewhere last week, Leap Motion announced that its Windows-compatible motion-sensor device would start shipping in May. Leap wants to remove a layer of abstraction from computing with its extra-sensitive system where users manipulate virtual objects by literally waving their hands around in front of a screen.

In many ways, these ideas are already in the mainstream through gesture-driven gaming devices like the Wii and the Xbox Kinect — and now the ubiquitous high-quality touchscreen devices like the iPad, where we start to forget we’re sending signals to an impenetrable system and feel that we’re interacting with it directly.

Back in 2010, Microsoft’s Craig Mundie described these ideas as the “NUI” — that is, the natural user interface, instead of the more well-known “GUI,” or graphical user interface — that “embraces gestures, anticipatory computing, expressive response, contextual and environmental awareness, and 3-D or even immersive experiences.”

“You won’t necessarily sit down at a computer terminal,” Mundie said. “Computing will be all around you, and you’ll basically converse with that pervasive intelligence.”

Mundie was definitely on to something, and soon enough the rest of us may be, too.

But Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter has a different interpretation. He thinks texting, with its abbreviations and odd constructions and novel usage, is “a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.”

“A whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as batting around when they’re using their little devices,” he said in a talk at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., today.

The trick is realizing that there’s a difference between written language and spoken language, according to McWhorter.

“Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk,” he said.

It’s very natural to decry the decline of formal language — in fact, McWhorter found a citation as old as 63 A.D. of someone bemoaning the corruption of written Latin.

But textspeak, in fact, contains structural features of an emerging language.

For instance, the texting convention “LOL” doesn’t necessarily mean “laughing out loud” anymore. “Now it’s evolved into something much subtler,” McWhorter said. It’s become a marker of accommodation, used to fill gaps in a conversation. This is similar to “ne” in Japanese and “yo” among young black people in the U.S., McWhorter said. The technical term for it is “pragmatic particle.”

Another example is “slash,” which used in textspeak indicates changing the topic.

When young people can switch between the language of text and the language of the rest of their society, it’s actually a great thing, McWhorter said, because being bilingual is widely acknowledged to be good for your brain.

So, what’s the alternative? Coon and his team have developed an in-home augmented-reality shopping experience for glasses, set to launch in April as an iOS app for Glasses.com.

There have been all sorts of virtual fitting rooms over the years, but this is pretty nifty. Glasses.com set up a hallway exhibit at TED in Long Beach, Calif., to show how a beta version of the product will work in people’s homes.

This is a bit different from what I’d seen before, so, using myself as a dummy/model, let me walk you through what happens.

First, you download the app and hold your iPad out in front of you with the front-facing camera on.

You slowly turn your face to one side and then the other, while the camera captures some 300 to 450 frames. The app then isolates 15 key angles to build a manipulable 3-D representation of your head.

Then you take the iPad and hold up a screen with a QR code next to your face in front of a mirror. This determines the size of your face so the app can effectively scale the representation. Coon described it as a sort of inverted augmented reality. “We’re using the virtual to calculate the real thing for the first time,” he said.

Then comes a sort of personal fitting room, with pairs of various glasses superimposed on your own face, which you can swipe back and forth to see from different angles.

And then you’ll be able to pick and compare your favorites, ask friends to help you narrow them down and purchase glasses within the app. That seems far preferable, argued Coon, to “asking a stranger on commission for advice.”

Will people really download a full app just to make a single purchase? Coon admitted that he’s not sure. But, in his opinion, there’s a larger significance here.

“The real story here isn’t virtual try-on of glasses,” he said. “The Glasses.com application will be to augmented-reality shopping what ‘Toy Story’ was for computer-generated animated films.

“Prior to ‘Toy Story,’ CG was just used in a scene — it wasn’t 100 percent of a movie,” Coon said. “And it often wasn’t very good. ‘Toy Story’ was the first 100 percent CG animated film, the first to look good and the first to achieve commercial success.”

James Duncan Davidson/TED2013

So if he warns that the Internet itself is vulnerable, it’s probably worth listening up.

Where many people today worry about the security of computers, the security of the Internet is also at risk, Hillis said. And that’s a problem, because so many of our systems — from phones to payments — rely increasingly on the Internet.

Speaking at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., today, Hillis referenced an incident in 2010 when massive amounts of Web traffic were suddenly rerouted through China Telecom after a DNS root server was intercepted, something that was said to be an accident.

“We’re setting ourselves up for a disaster like in the financial system,” Hillis said, because the Internet is a “system basically built on trust, and expanded way beyond the limits.”

“The Internet is actually an emergent system. We don’t fully understand it, like the weather and like the economy,” said Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines and Applied Minds, whose work on the Google-acquired Metaweb helped start the company’s “Knowledge Graph.”

“It’s changing so quickly that even the experts have no idea what’s going on. It’s different now than it was an hour ago,” Hillis said at TED.

“We don’t know the consequences of what an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be. So what we need is a plan B.”

The good thing is, a sort of emergency phone tree for the Internet should be relatively easy to design, said Hillis. However, he didn’t offer any details on exactly how this solution might work.

Ryan Lash/TED2013

Myshkin Ingawale of Biosense Technologies has developed an iPhone app to make that process much more accessible. The aim of uChek is to make analyzing pee so simple that people around the world can do it at home to test and monitor their own health.

As Ingawale put it, the conclusion was inevitable: “Cellphones, everybody has them. And everybody pees. There has to be something interesting going on here.”

He quipped in a well-received talk at the TED conference on Monday, “The future might not be in your hand; it might well be down the toilet.”

The uChek app works with any urine-test dipstick, with the familiar set of colored boxes that change to indicate levels of things like ketones and pH in the pee.

To use the app, you dip the stick in the pee and put it down next to a washable color mat, then take a picture of the two at certain time intervals. The point of the mat is to provide a reference color palette that can be compared to the stick in any light. Then the app locally analyzes what it sees, and displays the levels and the trends.

After Ingawale demoed this process on stage with a cup of pee, nobody was quite sure whether to shake his hand.

Biosense Technologies employs 10 people in Mumbai, and raised $500,000 from Insitor Fund and GSF India, Ingawale told me in an interview offstage.

He said he expects to launch uChek on March 25. The app will likely cost $0.99, and the mat will cost $20. An Android version is the next priority.

UChek is actually Biosense’s second product, and this was Ingawale’s second TED talk. Last year, he debuted an anemia detector that doesn’t require a needle, called ToucHB. That device has been redesigned over the past year, and is now shipping in limited quantities in India, he said.

The big-ideas event — which is on the must-attend list for certain Silicon Valley elite — had spent the past five years in the perpetually up-and-coming Long Beach, Calif. The final event in that location will be held later this month (and we’ll be there for live coverage).

This particular case of up and moving to Canada doesn’t seem to have much to do with dodging drafts or protesting elections.

TED said it will move to what it called “the world’s most eco-friendly meeting venue,” the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The conference said it was also modestly scaling back its audience size, from 1,400 to 1,200. Its annual simulcast/companion event, TEDActive, will be moving to nearby Whistler.

The conference, which originated in Monterey, Calif., will be marking its 30th anniversary in 2014. TED said it would be inviting back 100 of its best speakers of all time, both to participate and to present again onstage.

In the past few years, TED has become a much broader phenomenon via community events and online videos of its talks. There have been more than 6,000 TEDx events, and one billion TED video views.

HBO, which normally plays up the value of its original productions like “Game of Thrones,” says that 84 percent of its conventional TV viewing* comes from movies.

The deal, which many observers had expected, was done well in advance of a 2016 expiration date. It’s relevant primarily because it means that the movies won’t end up on digital subscription services like Netflix or Amazon.

There had been industry chatter about Universal owner Comcast taking the movies in-house to create its own Netflix-like service, or to fold it into its existing Streampix offering, but that won’t happen, either.

The next big question for movie-distribution observers is the status of Sony’s deal with Starz. BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield, among others, thinks Netflix will end up with that one, too.

We’ll have HBO President and COO Eric Kessler onstage at D: Dive into Media next month.

*That is, the stuff that people watch when HBO airs it, as opposed to on-demand plays and views via its HBO Go service.

The occasion was the TEDx Silicon Alley conference held here in New York, and for various reasons, I was asked at the last minute to stand in as moderator.

Kurzweil’s talk, which took place before our “Fireside Chat” that was announced as a surprise final event of the day’s proceedings, amounted to his first public appearance in connection with the publication of his new book, “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” Naturally, it builds a bit on his previous book, “The Singularity Is Near,” in which he argues that in time — about the year 2030 or so — the exponential increase in computing power will lead humanity to enhance itself with machines. In the new book, he talks about the latest thinking in how the brain works and how it’s organized, and where its limitations are. Eventually, he argues, we’ll be enhancing our brains with computing power in some way as well.

Juan Enriquez is an investor and a founder of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard University’s Business School, and in 2008 he wrote a book called “Homo Evolutis,” in which he explored the nature of human evolution and the question of whether or not humanity is finished evolving. Short answer: Probably not. His talk yesterday had more to do with tying together tattoos, social media and the idea of immortality.

Anyway, my job yesterday was to sit between them for an hour and to mostly stay out of the way while at the same time gently steering a conversation between them and relaying questions from Twitter.

The video below is long because it includes first Enriquez’s talk and then Kurzweil’s and then our fireside chat. But if you’ve got an hour and change to spare, the conversation sure was interesting. It was one of those moments in life when one feels dumb compared to the people with whom you’re sharing a stage, and yet you know you’re walking away smarter. If that doesn’t make sense, just watch and you’ll understand what I mean.

(A few people have since asked me where I got the reference to “three deaths” that I referred to in my first question. It was in the second segment of this episode of Radiolab, the documentary program on Public Radio, and yes, I remembered it a little bit wrong.)

Together they’re going to try to figure out modern-day YouTube.

Buzzfeed has bought Ze Frank’s games/video start-up, which means it has “acqhired” Frank and two of his three employees. Frank’s job is to help Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti break into Google’s video giant.

“Facebook and Twitter have been huge for the growth of BuzzFeed so far and YouTube has been the missing piece,” Peretti says. “Ze will lead the YouTube charge for us.”

Frank is building and staffing a BuzzFeed studio in Los Angeles, but he’s already been generating some video for Peretti and company, by creating some clips based on BuzzFeed posts.

Here’s his breakout hit to date, which has generated more than 4 million views and is more popular than its source material.

But Frank says the stuff he’ll be doing as a full-time BuzzFeed employee won’t be limited to recreating the site’s posts. “That’s just one approach,” he says. His guiding principles: “The thing that has always struck me is that there has always been a bit of a hole at YouTube when it comes to authenticity, human emotion, fun and play.”

Frank has been monkeying around on the Web since 2001, but made his name with a video series he launched in 2006. Frank didn’t actually use YouTube to host the daily show, but the style and content — Frank, close-up, riffing straight into a camera, with some very fast cuts and a confessional style — is now a YouTube template.

Frank started a new show this year, backed by a Kickstarter campaign, and that’s going to continue.

In 2010, Frank started a games company that eventually raised $700,000 from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures, which is also backing BuzzFeed. He’s one of two acquisitions the company has made this week — it also picked up Facebook ad start-up Kingfish Labs, another Lerer Ventures project.

Here’s a TED talk Frank gave in 2010. Well worth 20 minutes if you have it.

Maya

Late last year, the Rare Genomics Institute raised $3,550 from 50 donors to sequence the genes of 4-year-old Maya Nieder, who has global developmental delays that were previously unexplained by genetic testing.

That money paid the way for researchers at Yale to identify a mutation in Maya’s genes that had never been documented before.

It’s likely the first crowdfunded gene discovery, said RGI founder Jimmy Lin, a physician-scientist who performed the first sequencing of a genetic disease as part of his PhD thesis. I met Lin earlier this year at the TED conference, where he is a 2012 fellow.

Was the process that led to the Maya discovery scalable, or a one-of-a-kind thing? “Our goal is to scale it so that genetic bases of all 7,000 rare diseases can be discovered,” Lin said this week.

Jimmy Lin

RGI is not an open platform for crowdfunded genetics research; it carefully screens kids and matches them with researchers.

Twenty approved projects are currently in the pipeline, 10 are on the site, and out of those, three have been successfully crowdfunded. (In some cases, families opt to pay out of pocket.)

Crowdfunded donations mostly come from friends and family of the child, with only about a quarter of funding coming from strangers, Lin said.

At this point, crowdfunding has become effective enough that the biggest bottleneck in RGI’s work is securing doctors’ time to see patients and analyze results, Lin added. But he said he would like to raise funding for RGI itself to hire a staff.

Dugan reigned over all sorts of fantastical creations at DARPA, including testing hypersonic vehicles. She was a huge hit at our D9 conference last year, and recently delighted the audience at TED with a presentation of an array of projects, including a remote-controlled flying hummingbird.

Dugan had an unusually entrepreneurial philosophy for someone in the government, for instance telling our own Walt Mossberg at D, “Failure isn’t the problem, it’s the fear of failure.”

A spokeswoman for Google said that Dugan would have a “senior position” at Google but wouldn’t confirm her role. A DARPA spokesperson told Wired that Dugan felt she couldn’t turn down a chance to join such an innovative company.

Here’s the official Google comment: “Regina is a technical pioneer who brought the future of technology to the military during her time at DARPA. She will be a real asset to Google and we are thrilled she is joining the team.”

Google has recently — mostly in secret — combined some of its moonshot projects into a division called Google X, which is run by co-founder Sergey Brin. It is working on things like wearable computing devices and autonomous cars. Seems like a natural fit for Dugan, though of course Google wouldn’t confirm it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120312/darpas-regina-dugan-will-join-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120312/amazing-video-learning-neuroscience-by-making-a-cockroach-dance/ http://allthingsd.com/20120312/amazing-video-learning-neuroscience-by-making-a-cockroach-dance/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:22:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=184576 Greg Gage is on a mission to get kids excited about neuroscience by helping them understand how the brain works — in ways that are extremely memorable. He sells $100 kits that teach how neurons work by putting electricity through cockroach limbs and living cockroaches.

One of the most amazing and unexpected experiences I had at the TED conference a couple weeks ago was getting to do one of Gage’s experiments myself. I tracked him down after reading that he was one of 25 invited TED fellows, and before I knew it, I was in a random hallway in the bowels of the convention center, wrestling a squirmy cockroach into my own experiment.

First, Gage had me anesthetize a cockroach by dousing it in a glass of ice water, then sever one of its legs (they grow back), plug in a couple of electrodes, and then listen and watch neurons through an app on his iPad.

There’s actually a really great video of this same experiment, taken from when Gage performed it for an audience of kids. TED just released it today, as part of its new education initiative.

In the video, Gage shows how the living neurons in the cockroach leg can be pulsed with bass from music, and then brings out a live beatboxer on stage to show the cockroach leg dancing to the beat. Read that last sentence again, or just watch the video. It’s pretty crazy.

What’s wackier than a dancing severed limb? A cyborg cockroach. The next product from Gage’s neuroscience education company, Backyard Brains, helps kids surgically attach to a cockroach’s back an electronic pack that can be remote controlled. Then, sending a stimulus to either the right or left antenna nerve prompts the cockroach to turn in that direction. More on that here.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120312/amazing-video-learning-neuroscience-by-making-a-cockroach-dance/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120302/when-autonomous-flying-robots-fail/ http://allthingsd.com/20120302/when-autonomous-flying-robots-fail/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:05:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=180075 A presentation of progressively fantastical feats performed by a cadre of flying robots — jumping through hoops, collaborating with each other and playing the James Bond theme — was a huge hit at the TED conference this week. Now, see what it looked like when the “quadrotors” crashed.

Yup, it’s a flying robot blooper reel:

Here’s the full talk from TED this week by University of Pennsylvania’s Vijay Kumar:

(Hat tip Farhad Manjoo.)

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120302/when-autonomous-flying-robots-fail/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120302/viral-video-ted-2023-according-to-prometheus/ http://allthingsd.com/20120302/viral-video-ted-2023-according-to-prometheus/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:44:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=179919 Here’s a clever spoof video that was prepared for the TED conference, ending today in Long Beach, Calif.

It’s for the upcoming movie by Ridley Scott, “Prometheus,” and pretends its main character (played by Guy Pearce) is a speaker at the event, which is a favorite of Silicon Valley players.

On a fake Web site depicting the corporation around which the film revolves, it notes of the appearance: “Considered a seminal moment in the career of our founder Peter Weyland, this 2023 TED Talk launched Weyland Corp into the international spotlight.”

Clever:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120302/viral-video-ted-2023-according-to-prometheus/feed/ 0 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.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120301/put-down-the-phone-and-learn-to-be-alone-and-to-listen-says-sherry-turkle-at-ted/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-ted-view-of-the-future-hypersonic-gliders-liquid-batteries-and-flying-robots/ http://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-ted-view-of-the-future-hypersonic-gliders-liquid-batteries-and-flying-robots/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:52:19 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=179338 This morning, the TED conference brought researchers out of the lab to show off their latest gadgets — if you can use the word “gadget” to describe a hypersonic Mach 20 glider, autonomous and collaborative flying robots and a long-lasting liquid battery.

Flying robots play keyboard

It was a good lineup; the TED audience barely had time to put its socks back on before they were knocked off yet again. Better yet, probably to the delight of the investors in the audience, many of the projects are in the process of being commercialized.

Here’s a glimpse what the future may hold:

Flying robots: Vijay Kumar and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania build robots — called “Quadrotors” — that can fly incredibly quickly and intelligently. While sensing their surroundings and movement, the robots can avoid obstacles, right themselves and carry and deposit things. Kumar showed a robot jumping through a flying hoop and drawing a 3-D map by navigating a physical space.

Even better, the robots can work together with decentralized control. They can take actions based on local information while being agnostic to who their neighbors are. Kumar said potential applications for the robots include first response work and construction.

Check out this video made for TED of the Quadrotors playing music (take that, OK Go!)

Professor Donald Sadoway diagrams his liquid metal batteries.

Liquid metal batteries: MIT professor Donald Sadoway is building liquid metal batteries to try to separate power supply from power demand. The goal is to help the electrical power grid do a better job of storing energy, including renewable energy. Sadoway dreamed up the idea of combining magnesium and antimony, a process he diagrammed at TED with chalk on a blackboard. Among other benefits, like cheap materials and long lifespans, liquid metal batteries are built to run hot, so they can handle temperature increases.

Sadoway’s research team — which is now also a company funded by Bill Gates — has created a pizza-shaped 16-inch cell battery with a capacity of 1 kilowatt hour, and it expects to manufacture a version four times as big in two years, Sadoway said.

Mach 20 flight: DARPA has conducted two tests of hypersonic vehicles, the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. Towed into space by rockets, both gliders crashed in the Pacific Ocean, but along the way they generated a great deal of data and more information than ever before about how to fly so fast, said DARPA Director Regina Dugan.

Mach 20 speed would mean traveling from New York to Long Beach, Calif. (where TED is held), in 11 minutes and 20 seconds, Dugan said. The flight would be quick, but it would also be incredibly hot.

A remote-controlled hummingbird flies onstage at TED.

Dugan, whose team conducts research for the U.S. military, was the surprise hit of our D9 conference last year. I imagine her TED video is going to do pretty well, too.

Dugan urged the TED audience to “be nice to nerds” (probably not that tall an order, given this constituency) and told them to ask themselves, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” (She sounded a lot like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who has made “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” a sort of mantra.)

In addition to Mach 20 flight videos, Dugan demonstrated a remote-controlled mechanical flying hummingbird, and showed pictures and videos of a nano-adhesive modeled on geckos, metals that are lighter than Styrofoam and a prosthetic hand controlled by a human mind. She might have the best bag of tricks in the business.

RELATED POSTS:

• Put Down the Phone and Learn to Be Alone (And to Listen), Says Sherry Turkle at TED
• A TED View of the Future: Hypersonic Gliders, Liquid Batteries and Flying Robots
• At TED, Susan Cain Tells Business Leaders: Honor Thy Introverts
• TED Tech Preview: Robots, Crowdsourcing and Bill Nye

Photos by James Duncan Davidson for TED.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120229/a-ted-view-of-the-future-hypersonic-gliders-liquid-batteries-and-flying-robots/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120228/at-ted-susan-cain-tells-business-leaders-honor-thy-introverts/ http://allthingsd.com/20120228/at-ted-susan-cain-tells-business-leaders-honor-thy-introverts/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:33:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=178993 Author Susan Cain pressed for better recognition and support for the world’s introverts in a well-received talk at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., today.

Introverts, who prefer less social stimulation, make up a third to a half of the world’s population, according to Cain. (Introversion is different from shyness, which is about fear of social judgment.)

Cain argued that workplaces and schools are organized around extroverts, with their tendency toward outspoken leaders and emphasis on group coordination.

“Western societies favor the ‘man of action’ over the ‘man of contemplation,’” Cain said. Over time, she noted, the topics of self-help books have changed from being about building character to teaching the skills of salespeople (winning friends and influencing people, etc.).

Meanwhile, Cain argued, introverts get better grades, are more knowledgeable and can be better leaders because they only step forward to lead out of deep conviction. In a group setting, she said, there is not necessarily a correlation between someone talking the most and having the best ideas.

Cain’s examples of great introverts included Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, Charles Darwin, Theodor Geisel and Steve Wozniak. She herself just published the book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” which she said took seven years of research, including a year of working on public speaking.

Cain’s talk hit exactly on the personal-story-turned-universal-lesson arc beloved by the TED audience, and her effort to transcend her own introversion received the main TED 2012 program’s first standing ovation.

Though Cain’s talk was highly personal, it had a message for the business leaders in the room. “Stop the madness for constant group work, just stop it,” Cain urged. She also told the audience to honor their introverted sides, and spend time in contemplation — and then share that back with the world. “I wish you the courage to speak softly,” she closed.

RELATED POSTS:

• Put Down the Phone and Learn to Be Alone (And to Listen), Says Sherry Turkle at TED
• A TED View of the Future: Hypersonic Gliders, Liquid Batteries and Flying Robots
• At TED, Susan Cain Tells Business Leaders: Honor Thy Introverts
• TED Tech Preview: Robots, Crowdsourcing and Bill Nye

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120228/at-ted-susan-cain-tells-business-leaders-honor-thy-introverts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120227/ted-tech-preview-robots-crowdsourcing-and-bill-nye/ http://allthingsd.com/20120227/ted-tech-preview-robots-crowdsourcing-and-bill-nye/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:00:54 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=178118 Please excuse the #humblebrag for a second, but little old me is somehow headed to the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., this week, and I’ll be reporting on it here for AllThingsD.

As will Kara Swisher, who’s been going to TED since the dawn of time — check out her February 2000 coverage of “The Billionaires’ Dinner” — though she assures me that the yearly dose of techno-optimism is enough to drive her to drink bottled water and drive an SUV.

Meanwhile, I expect to report back to you on some of the most interesting sessions before they are released online and shoot to viral video fame.

TED curates a potpourri of talks and performances on technology, entertainment and design (which is where its name comes from). In recent years, the conference has gotten larger and gained fame through the release of talks online, and the facilitation of independently organized “TEDx” events around the world.

This year’s TED theme is “Full Spectrum,” which is pretty vague, but it looks like there will be some trends around urban planning, robots and climate change.

At the risk of extracting one part from the greater whole, I delved into the program and pulled up some of the talks that look to be more techie, at least on the surface. Here they are:

Sarah Parcak is a “space archeologist” who uses satellite images to find archeological sites.

Peter Diamandis is chairman of the X Prize and Singularity University, and just wrote the book “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think.”

Henrik Scharfe studies people’s interactions with robots, with the help of one that looks just like him.

You may remember DARPA Director Regina Dugan as the surprise hit of our D9 conference last year.

Jack Choi is CEO of Anatomage, which makes 3-D anatomy-imaging software.

Donald Sadoway is an MIT professor who has made a battery using “liquid metal.”

Vijay Kumar is a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies multi-robot formations.

T. Boone Pickens is the oil baron who now supports alternative sources of energy.

Reid Hoffman is perhaps the TED speaker best-known to ATD readers, for his work founding and running LinkedIn, and now as an investor at Greylock Partners and co-author of “The Start-up of You.”

Former Microsoft marketer Lior Zoref is delivering “the first-ever crowdsourced TED talk.”

Jen Pahlka is founder of Code for America. She’ll also be keynoting SXSW in a couple weeks.

Frank Warren created the community confession blog PostSecret.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”

David Kelley founded IDEO and Stanford’s D School.

John Hodgman is a PC. His latest book is “That Is All.”

Jared Ficklin works at frog design and visualizes music.

Bill Nye is the Science Guy.

Cesar Kuriyama edits together one second of video from every day of his life.

Whew, that’s already a lot — and I’m sure there will be offstage demos and shenanigans to write about, too. Let me know what you want to hear about most.

RELATED POSTS:

• Put Down the Phone and Learn to Be Alone (And to Listen), Says Sherry Turkle at TED
• A TED View of the Future: Hypersonic Gliders, Liquid Batteries and Flying Robots
• At TED, Susan Cain Tells Business Leaders: Honor Thy Introverts
• TED Tech Preview: Robots, Crowdsourcing and Bill Nye

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120227/ted-tech-preview-robots-crowdsourcing-and-bill-nye/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120119/two-last-sopapipa-videos-one-silly-and-one-serious-both-terrific/ http://allthingsd.com/20120119/two-last-sopapipa-videos-one-silly-and-one-serious-both-terrific/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:55:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=165242

One thing that was particularly fantastic from the protests over the two bills in Congress that most of the Internet was protesting over yesterday, was the plethora of creative videos that were released.

Here are two that I liked a lot — a comic one from Jest, called “Wikipedia/SOPA Survival Kit”; and a very cogent argument against the legislation, from Clay Shirky on the TED Web site, titled “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120119/two-last-sopapipa-videos-one-silly-and-one-serious-both-terrific/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111201/huffpost-and-ted-will-ring-out-the-year-with-an-online-idea-thon/ http://allthingsd.com/20111201/huffpost-and-ted-will-ring-out-the-year-with-an-online-idea-thon/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:20:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=149034

Two of the more interesting online media properties are apparently joining up for a year-end online idea festival.

The AOL-owned Huffington Post, and TED, the massive conference organization and online site dedicated to its offerings, will jointly feature 18 of the best onstage speeches from TED’s excellent year-round global events.

The idea-thon will be called “Best of TED 2011: A Countdown of 18 Groundbreaking Ideas to Reshape the World in 2012.” A post on the Huffington Post site noted that it will feature the popular TEDTalks and combine them with “new blog posts written by the people who delivered them, examining how their ideas were impacted by being shared with a global audience.”

Out of a total of 300 possible choices, the number of speeches has been narrowed down to 18, because TEDTalks are limited to no more than 18 minutes. The talks range over a wide array of topic areas, including science, art, music, tech and more.

In an interview today, HuffPost majordomo Arianna Huffington said that the aim was to spur thinking around big problems the world faces.

“We are trying to be people to rethink everything in a super engaging way,” she said. “That is what TED is famous for and we wanted to shed a lot of light on it.”

Here’s today’s, with game developer Kevin Slavin on “How Algorithms Shape Our World”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111201/huffpost-and-ted-will-ring-out-the-year-with-an-online-idea-thon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110413/showyou-an-ipad-experience-for-shared-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20110413/showyou-an-ipad-experience-for-shared-videos/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:00:17 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5472 Watching videos your friends recommend on Facebook and Twitter can be awkward. You often lose your place on the page, or have to grab headphones, or want to come back to something when you have more time later. Or all of the above.

Showyou is a new iOS app with an imaginative interface built for social video consumption. It’s meant for spurts of time dedicated to watching videos.

The main Showyou view is a never-ending tiled video wall intended primarily for use on the iPad. Scroll horizontally or vertically and you’ll find videos shared by your friends (the organization seems somewhat random, but more recent videos are generally up and to the left, and popular older videos are down and to the right). Click on a video and it pops out from the wall and plays immediately.

Videos keep loading on one page as you move, giving the (somewhat overwhelming!) sensation that there are infinite options to watch. It might be disconcerting not to have a playlist function or a way to filter videos by any sort of topic, but Showyou does also offer a more traditional feed view that shows just the activity of other Showyou users you follow.

The app comes from San Francisco-based Remixation, a True Ventures-backed start-up which for the last four years has been working on a video curation tool called Vodpod. Vodpod still exists, but the Remixation team has in the last six months shifted almost entirely to work on Showyou, in part inspired by iPad consumption experiences like Flipboard.

At launch, Showyou only supports YouTube, Vimeo and TED videos (in part because they are available in HTML5 for display on iOS). There are also a smattering of social tools in the app, so you can click to share a video, “thank” your friends or comment on videos within Showyou. And Showyou is living-room-ready at launch–that is, if you have Apple TV 2.0 with Airplay.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110413/showyou-an-ipad-experience-for-shared-videos/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110304/a-white-knuckle-ride-in-google-driven-car-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110304/a-white-knuckle-ride-in-google-driven-car-video/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:45:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30414 What’s it like to be a passenger in one of Google’s self-driving cars?

Pretty cool! Also, kinda scary!

At least it is in this video Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan shot yesterday outside the TED conference, where the search giant was demoing the project for attendees. It was also implicitly trying to explain, again, why it is exactly that an Internet company is building self-driving cars. But whatever. Check out this video!

And now ask yourself: If push came to shove, and I needed to chase down a drug thug who’d hopped onto the NYC subway, who would I want driving my car–Google? Or Popeye Doyle?

Duh.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110304/a-white-knuckle-ride-in-google-driven-car-video/feed/ 0 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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