Techno-News Blog

by Alexis C. Madrigal, the Atlantic

Instagram is changing its terms of use in January. Included in the new legalese is one section that has some power users, including The New York Times‘ Nick Bilton, feeling queasy:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

Note the key parenthetical — “(along with any associated metadata)” — which you could read as “location data.” In essence, if you go to the Palms in Las Vegas and snap a pic… Facebook Instagram may use that photograph in an advertisement for the Palms that reaches your friends.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/12/why-you-should-want-to-pay-for-software-instagram-edition/266367/

by GREGORY FERENSTEIN, Tech Crunch

In response to the most popular ePetition in White House history, President Obama personally recorded a YouTube video to address his plan of action on gun control. WeThePeople was originally set up to open the process of requesting answers from the President, a process that is otherwise exclusive to the White House press corps and select media. A petition requires 25,000 to get a response; gun control petitions met that difficult bar within hours of the Newtown shooting. There were also 31 other gun control petitions that the President responds to in the video.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/obama-responds-to-white-house-gun-control-epetitions/

by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies

Here are the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 – the results of the 6th Annual Learning Tools Survey – as voted for by 582 learning professionals worldwide. A learning tool is a tool to create or deliver learning content/solutions for others, or a tool for your own personal or professional learning. Below is a summary of the Top 100 Tools 2012 and where the Top 100 Tools are mainly being used – ie for Personal/Professional learning/productivity, in Education and/or in the Enterprise (for training, performance support and/or team collaboration). (Please note that the absence of a checkmark in a column does not mean that the tool is not, cannot or should not be used for that purpose!)

http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/

By Kevin Kwang, ZDNet

Social networking giant is testing the viability of charging users a fee for allowing them to send e-mail messages to other users that are not in their online social circle.

http://www.zdnet.com/facebook-trials-paid-e-mail-service-7000009105/?s_cid=e539

By Zack Whittaker, ZDNet

What will be the next big thing? As cellular carriers merge and become stronger, mobile makers may not survive. Will big data analytics take off, and will 3D printing arrive with a bevy of legal and ethical issues? Here’s a look ahead at 2013 and what we can expect.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnets-tech-predictions-for-2013-7000009130/?s_cid=e539

by Harvard Gazette

EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), announced its spring course and module offerings today. With an emphasis on the humanities and the social sciences, topics include the concept of the hero in classical Greek civilization and literature, the riddle of world poverty, and global environmental change. Harvard will offer four new courses during the spring season and several “beta” learning modules. Although students will be able to register for the HarvardX and edX courses immediately, the start and completion dates of each will vary.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/12/edx-springs-into-action/

by Don Reisinger, technology review

Nokia is one of those companies that matters too much to the worldwide mobile market to die off. When the financial collapse ravaged the world and sent most countries into a recession, there was a discussion on which banks were “too big to fail.” It was a discussion that centered on the idea that if a particular company were allowed to fail, it could send the entire economy into a tailspin. Looking at the technology industry, Apple or Microsoft might fit that bill. But Nokia might do so in its own way. A Nokia closure wouldn’t necessarily rattle the economy, but it’s entirely possible that if the company shuttered its doors, it would send shockwaves through the industry. In a recent study, research firm IHS iSuppli revealed that for the first time in 14 years, Nokia is no longer the world’s top handset maker. Samsung, with 29 percent market share worldwide, has been able to nab the top spot from Nokia, which was only able to must 24 percent ownership. Last year, Nokia shipped 30 percent of the world’s mobile handsets.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/509066/is-nokia-too-big-to-fail/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

On a rainy day last week, the scene at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, California, looked rather incongruous: several dozen developers sat in an auditorium, many of them taking notes on Apple laptops, while another programmer, also using a Mac, stood behind a podium flanked with Microsoft’s blocky logo. This wasn’t a secret meeting of Microsoft rebels; it was Microsoft’s attempt to lure developers who have been building apps for Apple’s incredibly popular iOS platform, which runs on the iPad and iPhone, over to its Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508581/in-a-strange-reversal-of-fortunes-microsoft-woos-apple-developers/

by Michael Orcutt, Technology Review

The tablet market has taken off, and it appears to mark the beginning of the end of dedicated e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle. IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, expects around 15 million e-book readers to be shipped this year, down nearly 40 percent from last year. “I’ve never really seen anything quite like this. In the world of consumer electronics, things appear and disappear quite rapidly, but never really as meteoric as the e-reader market is,” says Jordan Selburn, the author of the IHS iSuppli report. Last year it seemed that the market might be big enough for both dedicated e-readers and tablets, which cost more but offer e-books, among many other features. E-reader sales rose in 2011 even as tablet sales jumped sevenfold. But now it appears the versatility of tablets is winning out. “People want to do other things on their devices besides read books,” says Selburn.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508711/amazon-is-undermining-the-e-reader-market-it-created/

by Dave Talbot, Technology Review

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the ITU, declared in a statement: “History will show that this conference has achieved something extremely important. It has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global communications. There is not one single world view but several, and these views need to be accommodated and engaged.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508886/the-un-isnt-regulating-the-internet-but-governments-still-exert-control/

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Ray Kurzweil, notable for developing some early speech and text recognition software, and more recently for his views about the singularity and defeating aging, has joined Google. Kurzweil’s press release says he’ll be working on “new projects involving machine learning and language processing.” Google has recently made major improvements to its speech recognition using new techniques based on models inspired by biological neurons (see “Google Puts its Virtual Brain Technology to Work”), an approach Kurzweil has written about. A Google spokesperson just sent me this statement from the company’s director of research Peter Norvig, a well-known computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508896/what-google-sees-in-new-hire-futurist-ray-kurzweil/

By Sasha Issenberg, Technology Review

The significance of Dan Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had emerged from a cadre of analysts who thought of voters as individuals and worked to aggregate projections about their opinions and behavior until they revealed a composite picture of everyone. His techniques marked the fulfillment of a new way of thinking, a decade in the making, in which voters were no longer trapped in old political geographies or tethered to traditional demographic categories, such as age or gender, depending on which attributes pollsters asked about or how consumer marketers classified them for commercial purposes. Instead, the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms. Now it was up to a candidate who wanted to lead those people to build a campaign that would interact with them the same way.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508836/how-obama-used-big-data-to-rally-voters-part-1/

by the BBC

The man known as the “father” of the iPod has invested his energy in a home appliance: a thermostat. Tony Fadell caused surprise when he quit Apple in 2008 after heading its music player division. Fortune magazine once tipped him as a successor to former chief executive, Steve Jobs. In a rare interview he talked to the BBC’s Leo Kelion about his time working on the iPod, his relationship with Scott Forstall at Apple, and his new Nest project.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20529417#

by Rori Cellan-Jones, BBC

Chinese telecoms company Huawei bills itself as the future face of Chinese industry: a hi-tech superpower employing tens of thousands of engineers rather than just poorly paid factory workers. Chief Engineer Gabor Schreck gave the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones a tour of its manufacturing facility in Songshan Lake, Shenzhen, where 10,000 people produce electronic equipment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20599569#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

by the BBC

Some of Britain’s leading scientists have called on the government to grant a posthumous pardon to Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after acknowledging a sexual relationship with a man. Professor Stephen Hawking, Astronomer Royal Lord Rees and the Royal Society’s Sir Paul Nurse are among 11 signatories to a letter in the Daily Telegraph. They urge David Cameron to “formally forgive this British hero”. The scientists said: “We write in support of a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the modern era. “He led the team of Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, which most historians agree shortened the Second World War.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20722581#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

By Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Many companies lack visibility not only to what data is in the cloud but also to who can access that data, according to a Loudhouse/SailPoint survey. Many IT organizations are not fully aware of which cloud applications are in use across the enterprise, making it difficult for enterprises to monitor and control user access to mission-critical applications and data, according to a survey of 400 IT and business at British and American companies with at least 5,000 employees. The report, conducted by research firm Loudhouse on behalf of identity management solutions provider SailPoint, found enterprises are running one-third of their mission-critical applications in the cloud today and expect to have half of all critical applications running in the cloud by 2015. While business users have gained more autonomy to deploy cloud applications without IT involvement, they do not feel responsible for managing access control. The survey found 70 percent of business leaders believe that IT is ultimately responsible for managing user access to cloud applications.

http://www.eweek.com/cloud/cloud-based-apps-byod-pose-security-threat-to-businesses/

By Nathan Eddy, eWeek

A survey by Varonis found that 40 percent of respondents spend 30 minutes or more every day managing their email. Surging numbers of emails cause workers to spend countless hours sorting, filing, flagging and tagging instead of focusing on action items, according to a survey of nearly 100 organizations by data governance software provider Varonis. The study, which questioned employees about their digital habits and vices, found that nearly a quarter receive between 100 and 1,000 emails. One in 10 workers now faces more than 10,000 emails in their inbox. The problem has grown so bad that 43 percent of those surveyed said they routinely abandon their inboxes altogether in favor of a virtual coffee break.

http://www.eweek.com/it-management/email-deluge-swamping-worker-efficiency-varonis/

By Michelle Maisto, eWeek

Verizon, Criterion and partners will soon test the feasibility of using one very secure user-name and password combo for the whole of the Internet. Verizon, Criterion Systems, and other online identity and technology companies are teaming up to test whether consumers might trust a single, highly secure user-password combination for all of their online accounts. A White House-launched initiative called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace has awarded Verizon and its partners a federal grant with which to run pilot tests over the next two years to determine the feasibility of using “trust elevation” tactics to establish online credentials.

http://www.eweek.com/security/verizon-to-test-support-for-one-password-for-whole-internet/

by Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Google’s achievment isn’t the end of the road, so to speak, for Apple Maps or other newcomers (such as Nokia’s Here Maps). We now have better mapping options than we did before Apple’s mapping app came out, including several free ones that give decent turn-by-turn directions. While Apple’s Maps isn’t great, it’s going to get better, and it could eventually prove tough competition to Google. The fact that Google now has some major competition in an area that it pretty much owned previously is likely to make the company innovate more quickly and invest more seriously in making its own product better. In the end, neither Apple nor Google will win these “map wars”-consumers will.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508786/you-are-the-real-winner-of-the-mobile-maps-wars/

By Tom Simonite,Technology Review

Despite some of the more scathing reviews of Windows 8, ordinary users are getting along with it just fine, according to Julie Larson-Green, the Microsoft executive who leads Windows product development. Data collected automatically from some Windows users, she says, show they are adjusting to some of the new operating system’s controversial features without problems. “So far we’re seeing very encouraging things,” Larson-Green says of the large volume of data that Microsoft receives every day from people using Windows 8 who have chosen to join the company’s “customer experience improvement program.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508546/microsoft-has-been-watching-and-it-says-youre-getting-used-to-windows-8/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Several startups and experts say one of the biggest problems with e-mail is that we’re trying to use it in ways that were never intended—as an organizer, for example, or to facilitate collaboration on group projects. For that reason, many of them have introduced innovations that treat the in-box more as a to-do list than a list of messages. That’s the idea behind Mailbox, an e-mail app for smartphones built by Orchestra, the group behind a to-do app of the same name. Gentry Underwood, CEO of the Palo Alto–based company, knows the unofficial methods some of us already use: marking read e-mails as unread so we’ll remember to respond to them, or sending ourselves e-mails as reminders. He says Mailbox is trying to reimagine the in-box as a workflow tool that’s more useful than these little tricks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508471/startups-aim-to-bring-e-mail-back-to-the-future/