Techno-News Blog

By Antonio Regalado, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. Would you trade your personal data for a peek into the future? Andreas Weigend did. The former chief scientist of Amazon.com, now directing Stanford University’s Social Data Lab, told me a story about awakening at dawn to catch a flight from Shanghai. That’s when an app he’d begun using, Google Now, told him his flight was delayed. The software scours a person’s Gmail and calendar, as well as databases like maps and flight schedules. It had spotted the glitch in his travel plans and sent the warning that he shouldn’t rush. When Weigend finally boarded, everyone else on the plane had been waiting for hours for a spare part to arrive.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514346/the-data-made-me-do-it/

By Ben Waber, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. Can we use data about people to alter physical reality, even in real time, and improve their performance at work or in life? That is the question being asked by a developing field called augmented social reality. Here’s a simple example. A few years ago, with Sandy Pentland’s human dynamics research group at MIT’s Media Lab, I created what I termed an “augmented cubicle.” It had two desks separated by a wall of plexiglass with an actuator-controlled window blind in the middle. Depending on whether we wanted different people to be talking to each other, the blinds would change position at night every few days or weeks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514371/augmenting-social-reality-in-the-workplace/

By Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Despite the 190 million people that Google says use its social network every month, Google Plus has always struggled to escape Facebook’s shadow and seem like a hopping social destination. With the 41 new features the company announced would be rolling out this week, Google Plus is now morphing into something that makes greater use of what Google does best —anticipating the needs of its users, surfacing relevant news and information, and helping people managing the massive amounts of data. The new Google Plus will go as far as to auto-generate animated GIF files from several photos that people upload from their devices or desktops.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514836/googles-social-network-gets-smarter/

By Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Google is giving mobile app creators more ways to tap into people’s activities and locations without draining too much phone battery power. More and more apps look at a person’s location to offer services, advertising, and discounts that are relevant to what they’re doing, and also to help people track their own activities. Google itself is at the forefront of this trend—with its Google Now service, it uses sensor data and other inputs, like e-mail, to try to anticipate people’s needs before they have to open an app or a search box. The more services it provides to other Android developers, the more people may see similar in-the-moment features in third-party software.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514956/google-wants-to-help-apps-track-you/

By John Pavlus, Technology Review

Why should only computers, smartphones, and tablets be able to send a tweet? In the hopes of challenging this idea, Twitter recently developed a whimsical tweet-enabled cuckoo clock. It uses a toolkit that could help other designers and engineers test ways for new products to contribute to, and feed on, the social network’s chatter. Twitter created the clock, called #Flock, last month in partnership with London-based technology consultancy Berg; the clock responds to incoming tweets, @-messages, and retweets by animating small wooden puppets. The toolkit made by Berg is designed to make it easier for consumer-tech companies to prototype similar “connected products” and experiment with their novel user experiences.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514541/twitter-tests-a-toolkit-that-puts-the-internet-in-things/

By Susan Young, Technology Review

Elias Konstantopoulos gets spotty glimpses of the world each day for about four hours, or for however long he leaves his Argus II retina prosthesis turned on. The 74-year-old Maryland resident lost his sight from a progressive retinal disease over 30 years ago, but is able to perceive some things when he turns on the bionic vision system. “I can see if you are in front of me, and if you try to go away,” he says. “Or, if I look at a big tree with the system on I can maybe see some darkness and if it’s bright outside and I move my head to the left or right I can see different shadows that tell me there is something there.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514081/can-artificial-retinas-restore-natural-sight/

By David Talbot, Technology Review

Cell-phone data could be used for development, transportation planning, and public health. Around the world, some mobile carriers have been releasing anonymized records of cell-phone data to researchers. The data releases are not all the same, but can include records of which phones connected to which cell phone towers, providing a trace of caller movements; with whom the connection was made, providing a map of social networks; and what purchases were made, even through simple phones, providing a glimpse of economic activity. In many cases, such data is unavailable from any other source.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514646/glimpses-of-a-world-revealed-by-cell-phone-data/

By Duncan Geere, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. “We want to provide people with a perfect photographic memory,” says Martin Källström, CEO of Memoto. His startup is creating a tiny clip-on camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds, capturing whatever you are looking at, and then applies algorithms to the resulting mountain of images to find the most interesting ones. Just 36 by 36 by 9 millimeters, the inconspicuous plastic camera has a lot crammed inside. The most important component is a five-megapixel image sensor originally designed for mobile phones. An ARM 9 processor running Linux powers a program that wakes the device twice a minute; takes a picture and a reading from the GPS sensor, accelerometer, and magnetometer; and promptly puts the device back to sleep.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514361/logging-life-with-a-lapel-camera/

By Chip Rogers, Georgia Works

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are changing college education forever. The world’s most prestigious colleges and universities are now offering free online courses. Coursera.org and EdX.org feature more than 70 participating schools between them including Harvard, University of Michigan, MIT, and Georgia Tech. While most do not offer credits, students may take exams associated with the course subject matter to earn credit. Education-portal.com provides a comprehensive list of schools offering free online courses and offers links to the College Board’s College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) which allows students to test out of general education requirements at 2/3 of colleges and universities in the U.S.

http://www.gpb.org/blogs/georgia-works/2013/05/10/college-education-is-becoming-free-online

by PYMNTS

TechCrunch, the leading media property devoted to startups and tech, today expands into the online education space with the debut of CrunchU, developed in partnership with online learning marketplace Udemy. Inspired by the rise of self-directed, lifelong learning, CrunchU aims to help TechCrunch readers power up their skill-sets via renowned instructors through 30 TechCrunch-curated courses, including offerings from Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Jack Welch, and others. Course topics range from “Creating Responsive Web Design” and “Sales and Persuasion Skills for Startups” to “Android Apps in 1 Hour: No Coding Required” and “Raising Money for Startups.”

http://www.pymnts.com/news/businesswire-feed/2013/may/08/techcrunch-unveils-online-learning-destination-crunchu-in-partnership-with-udemy-20130508006271

by Christina Farr, VB/Entrepreneur

Coursera, the online course provider, is one of the fastest-growing startups that is transforming how we learn. Today, the company announced a partnership with a fellow ed-tech startup, Chegg, and is striking deals with the largest publishers. The goal is to make it easier for students of online courses to access relevant academic content on the web. Large publishing companies, including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering Coursera students versions of their digital textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s e-Reader. Students won’t be charged to access these materials while they’re enrolled on a course.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/08/coursera-partners-with-publishers-to-bring-digital-textbooks-to-the-masses/

by The News Tribune

The Internet keeps on disrupting higher education – sometimes even in a good way. The latest example is the Open Course Library just completed by Washington’s two-year colleges. The library (opencourselibrary.org) is an online trove of free courses and free or low-cost textbooks developed by local faculty members. The materials cover 81 of Washington’s most popular lower-division classes – principles of accounting, microbiology, symbolic logic, English composition, etc. The whole enterprise, begun in 2011, bypasses the traditional trappings of college. No big, expensive textbooks, no snoozing in the back of lecture halls, no classrooms.

http://blog.thenewstribune.com/opinion/2013/05/06/a-web-raid-on-traditional-higher-ed/

By Patrick Tucker, Technology Review

As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility. Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. In 1995, the European Union introduced privacy legislation that defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. The legislators were apparently thinking of things like documents with an identification number, and they wanted them protected just as if they carried your name. Today, that definition encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible/

By Don Clark, Wall Street Journal

Computer-based educational systems have long helped impart information to students and assess their understanding of it. The next step, one company in the field says, is using their behavior to make predictions. That’s the aim of technology being announced Tuesday by Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that specializes in cloud-based based learning systems it markets to colleges, schools and companies. Desire2Learn, launched in 1999, competes with companies like Blackboard and Instructure. It claims that 10 million learners at a range of institutions have made use of its technology, including some at big U.S. university systems.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/05/07/online-learning-system-aims-at-predicting-success-or-failure/

by SRI

Speaking at the Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco, Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D., co-director of SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning, highlighted how education researchers can best leverage the vast amount of data about online learning that is now available for their studies. In a shift from traditional research methods, Dr. Roschelle described how both researchers and developers can use large amounts of detailed data to evaluate student learning outcomes and enhance educational products. The presentation at the annual gathering for educational technology industry executives followed a well-attended workshop last year, which gathered extensive input from leaders on their needs for research, their frustrations with the slowness of traditional research methods, and their ideas on how to use newly available online learning data to improve products and students’ outcomes. The presentation highlighted the new synergies possible among learning scientists and the educational technology industry, in which learning scientists can play a key role in harvesting data for innovation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130506-904001.html

by Ina Fried, All Things D

Adobe announced a fairly big shake-up of its business Monday, saying that the latest version of core products such as Photoshop and Illustrator will be available only as part of a subscription service. The company said that it has new versions of the desktop apps, but said they will be available only as part of an update to its year-old Creative Cloud service. Adobe said that the service, which launched in April 2012, has more than 500,000 paid members and two million total members. “By focusing our energy — and our talented engineers — on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace,” Adobe Senior VP David Wadhwani said in a statement.

http://allthingsd.com/20130506/adobe-plans-big-shift-to-cloud-says-near-term-finances-wont-take-a-hit/

by RYAN LAWLER, TechCrunch

Over the last few years, Samsung has been working hard on building technology to improve the communication between its connected TVs and mobile devices, whether they be iOS or Android phones or tablets. Well, the company has acquired MOVL, a startup that should provide even more help in that category. MOVL is the maker of the Kontrol.tv API platform, which lets developers create apps to connect TVs via the cloud, as well as mobile phones on home networks. The platform was fully launched last fall, after a year-and-a-half that the MOVL team spent building the system.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/06/samsung-acquired-movl/

by Kevin C. Tofel, GigaOM

Does Intel still stand a chance in the highly-competitive mobile chip market? Yes, if the company’s new Silvermont chip lives up to its promise of 3x the performance of today’s Atom or 5x the power efficiency.

http://gigaom.com/2013/05/06/intel-debuts-silvermont-mobile-chips-with-powerful-battery-sipping-abilities/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Mobile network speeds in urban areas could dramatically increase if consumers connected small, public base stations to their home broadband. Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm and some U.S. wireless carriers are investigating an idea that would see small cellular base stations installed in homes to serve passing smartphone users. That approach is believed to be a more efficient way of meeting the rising demand for data and fixing patchy coverage than building more traditional cell-phone towers.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514531/qualcomm-proposes-a-cell-phone-network-by-the-people-for-the-people/

By David Talbot, Technology Review

Early next year, an emerging wireless technology known as LTE Broadcast will essentially make it possible for carriers to put a TV-like broadcast stream within LTE cellular signals. Putting data in broadcast mode reduces congestion but makes the most sense in situations where everyone is watching the same newscast, sports match, or other special piece of content at the same time. In such situations, using LTE Broadcast mode, a carriers’ transmitter needs to just send a signal out over one channel rather than separate ones for each mobile device. That’s how the traditional TV broadcast works: it doesn’t matter if 100 or a million people are watching, because the content is out there for the taking.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513311/broadcast-video-will-soon-be-packed-into-smartphone-signals/

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times

While Jennifer Clay was at home taking an online exam for her business law class, a proctor a few hundred miles away was watching her every move. Using a webcam mounted in Clay’s Los Angeles apartment, the monitor in Phoenix tracked how frequently her eyes shifted from the computer screen and listened for the telltale sounds of a possible helper in the room. Her computer browser was locked — remotely — to prevent Internet searches, and her typing pattern was analyzed to make sure she was who she said she was: Did she enter her password with the same rhythm as she had in the past? Or was she slowing down? In the battle against cheating, this is the cutting edge — and a key to bolstering integrity in the booming field of online education.

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/may/05/using-technology-to-fight-cheating-in-online/?partner=RSS