Spikes Builds A Secure Browser For The Enterprise

The vast majority of malware on corporate networks arrives through the browser. Branden Spikes, the CEO of Spikes, believes that by virtualizing the browser and having it run separate from the desktop, his company can prevent the vast majority of these attacks. The WebKit-based browser runs in a virtualized environment either on-premise or in the cloud and mostly resembles Google’s Chrome (though with the URL bar on top of the tabs).

Spikes, who was previously the CIO of SpaceX and PayPal, told me that in his view, users are ready for this kind of tool. They are already familiar with the concept of remote applications. Right now, however, using browsers on remote desktops typically isn’t a great experience, especially if you’re using a highly interactive site.

As the Spikes team told me, the company puts a strong emphasis on ensuring that the browser feels just like a native app on the desktop. To do this, Spikes uses PNG for encoding text and just switches to H.264 for video. The team says this keeps the latency as low as possible and allows users to play YouTube videos or even browser-based games without any noticeable lag.

To use Spikes, users simply sign in with their accounts (after they’ve downloaded the software) and the browser will start on their desktop. All of their bookmarks and other personalizations, of course, persist between sessions. The team also added a few new features to the browser that aren’t readily available in other solutions, including a new tab content menu and the ability to open multiple tabs at launch (something most browsers can do, too, but don’t emphasize). Spikes tells me that the team will also happily customize the browser for new companies that want to switch to this service.

An OS X client is already in the works and after that, the team plans to launch a mobile app, as well. ”You can’t secure the network with just Windows machines,” he told me.

For now, Spikes is squarely focused on the enterprise market, but in the long run, the company also plans to move into the consumer space.

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India’s Meru Cabs Launches Smartphone Apps With Emergency Distress Button

In its smartphone debut, Meru Cabs is targeting a more diverse group of users than just taxi customers: it’s hoping to save people caught in a dangerous situation — a necessary feature in a country where victims are often ignored by the authorities and passers-by.

The new iOS and Android apps, soft-launched earlier this week, feature an In Case of Emergency (ICE) button which messages your location and a distress signal to one or two pre-nominated friends. They will also be notified via an emergency buzzer if they have the Meru app installed. Once you press the button, which sits prominently in the banner, you have ten seconds to cancel the request.

Public security and safety, especially for women, is a serious problem in India. The callous nature of the Indian authorities and some citizens was exposed last December when the victims of a gang rape in Delhi were left, bleeding on the side of a highway while neither passers-by nor police officials rushed to help.

In fact, the genesis of the ICE button was a SMS service the fleet operator launched on International Women’s Day last year, according to CTO Nilesh Sangoi. He said after passengers registered the mobile numbers of their friends, they would be notified of their whereabouts at two points in the journey, fifteen minutes in and once they reached their destination.

They extended this popular functionality in the app.

“We have about two million active consumers, but it makes sense to give them something that’s valuable day-in, day-out, not just when they’re catching a cab,” Sangoi said. “By providing security, it has a better chance of becoming a utility app.”

The feature is a unique point of differentiation in the increasingly crowded mobile and online taxi bookings marketplace — including Ola Cabs, which last year reportedly raised over $6 million from Tiger Global, BookMyCab, Sharedcab.com, TaxiForSure.com, and Cubito – which aim to solve the common problem of taxis turning up on time, and as promised.

Meru processes about 20,000 bookings a day, 40 percent via mobile/online and 60 percent via the call centre, and unlike other operators it owns all the 5,500 taxis in its fleet. Sangoi is hoping the new apps will boost the number of bookings and driver satisfaction.

The company will use the influx of data to further optimise its taxi delivery supply chain, powered by an Oracle ERP and Siebel CRM system. It has already developed an algorithm which has helped secure 500 additional bookings a day; is if a customer tries to book when no cabs are available, instead of rejecting the order, the system will schedule a cab that is dropping off another customer nearby.

“We have a reliability rate of 99.7 percent, and we are constantly working to improve this,” he said.

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Have A Space Burial As Elysium Sends Your Ashes Into Orbit

Because Carl Sagan once r

eminded us that we are all made of star stuff, there might be a few people who wish to go quietly into the night by sending their ashes into space.

A San Franciso-based company called Elysium Space pledges to send the cremated remains of clients out into space for $2,000. They are contracting with several commercial space flight companies and plan to send their first satellite into orbit next year from Cape Canaveral in Florida. (As a sidenote, this company has nothing to do with that sci-fi movie starring Matt Damon that’s coming out today under the same name.)

“These are the kind of people who think space is a unique and beautiful place,” said CEO Thomas Civeit, a former software engineer at Nasa Ames who helped maintain the Hubble Telescope. He pointed to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has professed a wish to die on Mars.

With the average funeral costing roughly $6,000, according to the National Funeral Director’s Association, Elysium’s costs are actually not a bad deal either.

For now, Elysium is aiming to send the remains of 100 or so clients on a single satellite out into the earth’s orbit next year.

Clients get a kit with a custom ash capsule that they can scoop their loved ones’ remains into. (You can hire a funeral professional to do it for you.)

They ship the capsule back to Elysium, and the company places it into the spacecraft with a message of the client’s choice engraved onto the spacecraft’s metal plates.

The satellite may circle the earth for months or years before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up.

“The satellite re-enters the earth atmosphere as a burning star,” he said.

But eventually, Civeit would like to offer people the ability to scatter their ashes on the moon or send them out into deep space.

“Some want their ashes launched into the sun,” he said.

Elysium also has an app paired with the service that can help families track their loved ones in the skies. It’s only on Android for now, but Civeit plans to launch an iOS version soon.

Civeit says he’s in the process of raising funding. Elysium isn’t the only company offering space funerals. Celestis launched more than five years ago, but they charge about $5,000 for a comparable service that sends a person’s remains out into orbit. Celestis also has cheaper packages at about $1,000 that send a person’s remains out on a spaceflight that ultimately returns to Earth, and then packages that cost more than $12,000 that will send a person’s ashes into deep space.

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Armstrong Confirms “Hundreds” Of Layoffs At Patch, 400 Sites Shuttered Or Partnered Off, And A New CEO

We reported yesterday that AOL’s hyper-local news service would lose hundreds of employees today, and now we have confirmation from a well-placed Patcher privy to the call that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong did indeed confirm to employees that hundreds would be laid off, with notifications of who will be let go coming throughout the coming week. (Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch).

In a call Armstrong held with the Patch team today, he explained that “AOL is going to be running the show” at the restructured Patch along with new CEO Bud Rosenthal. Rosenthal replaces outgoing CEO Steve Kalin, who was reported to be getting the boot earlier this week.

400 Patch sites will be closed or partnered with outside sites over the coming week as part of the changes being made at Patch to try and turn things around, Armstrong explained on the call, but also reassured the Patch staff that the company is behind the initiative and told them not to “worry about what [they] read in the press,” calling it “bullshit.” Nonetheless, he encouraged any Patch non-believers still remaining at the company to get out now, emphasizing that there’s no room for equivocation in turning the effort around.

In a somewhat dramatic twist, Armstrong reportedly fired an employee who took his photo (behavior he presumably didn’t approve of), while on the call with 1,000 people listening in. Our tipster said the public nature of the termination struck them as “shameful and disgusting” behavior.

Our source isn’t very convinced by the bluster around the new direction put forth by Armstrong. They suggest that this new strategy is really a “correction of a bad idea” that involved scaling far too fast without proper thought and planning, and notes that original Patch sites are still among the most successful. Focusing on those regions that actually do drive good revenue and traffic is probably the only way to save Patch at this point, however, so big cuts are probably unavoidable.

Armstrong put on a brave face and discussed tough choices on the call, but our source notes that the AOL CEO was also there throughout the network’s decline, and had approved the very same people that he “buried on the call today.” Overall, the source says there’s not much reason to be confident in Patch’s leadership anymore.

The stakes at Patch are high because AOL has promised it will see positive revenue by the end of the year, which is a tall order given its most recent earnings results. These cuts and shifts in strategy are drastic measures, but that’s exactly what’s required if Armstrong wants to make good on a promise of Patch profitability by year’s end. Ultimately, our source says the lesson to learn is that “news works,” and that a strategy that refocuses on those editors who cover their towns well and leaving them intact is probably Patch’s best chance at still existing in some form a year from now.

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BlackBerry Reportedly Considering Going Private, Following Dell In A Bid To Refocus With Less Scrutiny

Canada’s smartphone industry pioneer BlackBerry is giving a lot more thought to taking the company private, according to a new report from Reuters. The strategy has been tabled before, but CEO Thorsten Heins and the BlackBerry Board of Directors are increasingly mulling the possibility of paying off shareholders and structuring a private equity deal to give them a chance to avoid continued public scrutiny.

The message from BlackBerry’s communications department has been pretty consistent regarding its recent quarterly performance, as well as issues like layoffs and executive departures – the company is still in turnaround mode, and needs to make more changes to get the organization ship-shape before it can return to growth. But that’s not a refrain that investors enjoy hearing – especially not when the track’s on repeat.

Going private would dramatically narrow the field of those the company has to be accountable to, and give it a chance to do some of the hard work it needs to do behind closed doors, without so many cooks in the kitchen. It’s a similar strategy to what Dell is currently attempting to do, with Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners slugging it out with public stockholders to take the PC company private.

Michael Dell says he wants to make his company “more founder led than it was in its first few decades,” arguing that this will benefit customers as it transfers risks to he and Silver Lake, while pursuing a more aggressive restructuring strategy designed to put Dell in a position to profit from a changing PC market.

BlackBerry’s Heins hasn’t expressed any similar desires so far, and in fact seemed reluctant to consider the option, preferring instead to make a big bet on BlackBerry 10 and its attendant BB10-powered handsets. So far, that hasn’t prompted quite the resurgence in consumer interest. That could have helped the company warm to the idea of a private equity deal, but also may have made it less likely that BlackBerry can find an interested partner.

The news of late has not be great for BlackBerry, with executive departures and budget cuts leading to layoffs in key areas. Yesterday, it did secure approval from the U.S. Department of Defense to supply that agency with BlackBerry 10 devices, but that’s not a huge win: it will result in 30,000 devices being used by the DOD by the end of the year, but really it would’ve been more surprising if BlackBerry’s latest was rejected for use. In other words, all options are probably on the table, given the state of affairs, and going private might be among the most palatable of those.

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Obama Announces Website For NSA Transparency, 3 More Reforms

President Obama announced a series of new reforms to increase public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and telephone surveillance program. The press conference (live at whitehouse.gov/live) is still on-going. Here are the 4 reforms he’s proposed. All are quite vague:

1). “Pursue appropriate reforms” around section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the NSA to conduct surveillance.

2). Create a public advocate to argue in front of the secret court that grants the NSA authority to target suspects (both foreign and domestic). This advocate would argue for more privacy.

3). Create a website detailing what the NSA does–and does not–collect on Americans and foreigners.

4). Create an independent agency that reviews cybersecurity processes and produces timely reports. One is supposed to be out by the end of the year.

This is a developing story. We’ll have analysis soon.

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Tablet Tribulations: Asus Dumps Windows RT While NVIDIA Hopes For The Best

Asus may have a hand in producing Google’s refreshed Nexus 10 Android tablet, but recent remarks from the company’s chief executive reveal that the Taiwanese company is turning up its nose at the prospect of making another Windows RT-powered tablet entirely.

“It’s not only our opinion,” CEO Jerry Shen remarked to the Wall Street Journal. “The industry sentiment is also that Windows RT has not been successful.”

And how many RT tablet models did Asus need to make before it came to this conclusion? Just one: the VivoTab RT (three models if you include its cellular variants).

Now Asus may not be the most prominent of Microsoft’s RT hardware partners, but in an age where a surprising number of people are buying tablets in lieu of more traditional PCs the snub is a prominent one. The company would apparently rather continue making full-blown Windows 8 tablets and notebooks rather than dump resources into a new RT tablet and hoping people into buying them. And can you blame them? Even Microsoft’s Surface — arguably the Windows RT flagship, mind you — is a dog. Who could forget that Microsoft had to write down a whopping $900 million of Surface RT inventory because people just didn’t buy them.

Shen is absolutely right though: Asus is certainly not alone in panning RT as a platform worth building on. HP and Toshiba both had RT devices in development but axed them prior they ever hit the market. HTC reportedly canned a 12-inch Windows RT tablet, despite the fact it’s arguably too invested in Android. Even Nokia, Microsoft’s Windows Phone darling, is said to have dumped Windows RT in favor of full-on Windows 8 for its first (and oft-rumored) tablet in years.

Naturally, not every company has been so quick to distance itself from Windows RT’s controversial embrace. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed to CNET yesterday that the chipmaker is working closely with Microsoft on a second generation Surface RT tablet, and hopes that the devices will be a “big success”. Of course, that very same day Huang also indirectly pointed to the original Surface as one of the reasons the company’s quarterly Tegra sales revenue is expected to be so wimpy — to hear him say it, NVIDIA doesn’t “expect as much returns on that investment as we originally hoped”. Bummer.

Despite loud claims to the contrary, Microsoft isn’t going to let Windows RT go down without a fight. The problem is that even Microsoft seems unsure of which direction to take here — larger tablets like the Surface RT and its cousins haven’t managed to resonate with consumers. What about working with OEMs to create some smaller, cheaper RT tablets that could theoretically compete with devices like the iPad mini? It’s an intriguing thought… until you remember Microsoft relaxed its own standards to let device manufacturers load up full versions of Windows 8 on a generation of new, smaller tablets. Where is RT supposed to fit in now? That’s the $64,000 question, and plenty of OEMs don’t even want to try answering it anymore.

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DOJ defends Apple e-book price fixing injunction, says publishers had it easy

The US Department of Justice isn't buying publishers' arguments that proposed injunctions against Apple for alleged e-book price fixing are excessive and contradictory. DOJ attorney Lawrence Buterman claims in a response letter that the penalties against Apple are necessarily harsher, since it didn't settle the accusations like its reported co-conspirators. The group objection even justifies Apple's punishment, Buterman claims; it suggests that publishers are just waiting until the end of a two-year ban on agency pricing to raise prices once again. The five-year restriction imposed on Apple could keep prices down for longer, the lawyer says.

Apple, meanwhile, isn't done with its objections. In addition to an earlier request for a stay on proceedings pending an appeal, it now contends that the court excluded or ignored testimony while giving Amazon and Google witnesses too much credibility. The company will present more of its opinion at a conference today with both the DOJ and the presiding judge, but we're not expecting a quick resolution -- neither side is budging at this stage.

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Motorola Moto X review

phone that wouldn’t have existed if Google had not paid $12.5 billion for Motorola over a year and a half ago, and one that lets Google introduce its vision of a mass-market Android smartphone without taking center stage. In a world filled with everything from major smartphone manufacturers to non-name white-box vendors producing Android devices, why and how does this new flagship phone from Motorola shine through? It all boils down to something very Googley — data.

Google uses data like no other company, and with the Moto X it took an average of what screen size is acceptable to most consumers, the most comfortable shape of the phone based on data from focus groups, and features that exist just to try to fix statistical problems. One example is how, on average, we check our phone for the current time more than 50 times a day.

The most impressive thing to me about the Moto X though, is how un-Googley it feels. It’s a phone that actually has character, purpose and meaning, even though it was created in a test tube. It doesn’t feature the most mind-blowing hardware and it’s not the fastest Android phone in the world, but it doesn’t need to be.

It just needs to be the first iPhone of the Android world, and here is why it delivers on that.

The Moto X is made out of a combination of glossy plastic and soft touch plastic, letting the phone feel premium and look great without sacrificing weight or comfort. The display is bonded to the plastic front frame using a new manufacturing process that practically eliminates the border around the screen. It makes you feel as if you’re just holding the display in your hand when you use it, and everything else just melts away.

Speaking of the display, it’s a 4.7-inch panel that features a 720p HD resolution, and is the best looking display ever to come out of Motorola. While it looks overly saturated and bright because it’s an AMOLED screen, the screen does look sharp and clear, with a 316 ppi that makes text look beautiful.

Diving deeper, the phone itself is powered by a system on a chip Motorola is calling the Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System — basically there’s the phone’s processor, a Qualcomm dual-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4, a quad-core graphics processor, a natural language processor that powers Touchless Control, and a contextual computing processor that powers Active Display and other always-listening gestures like quick photo capture that we will get into later.

The X ships with Android 4.2.2, 16GB of storage, 2GB of RAM, a 2,200 mAh battery, NFC, Miracast wireless display and Bluetooth 4.0.

There are three microphones on the Moto X to help with Touchless Control, but also to provide great noise cancellation with Motorola’s Crystal Talk feature, and they all work together exceptionally well. Talking on the phone sounds impeccably good in a wide variety of different environments, to both me and the people who I spoke to. Finally, a phone that works great as a phone.

Switching to the speakerphone, which is loud — super loud — and also clear, there is a reason why. Motorola says that the Moto X measures the temperature and movement of the speaker membrane to enable more than 5 times the sound power of other speakerphones while ensuring the speaker doesn’t blow out.

The X also features something Motorola has been doing for a bit, and that’s a water-repellant coating that extends to the electrical boards inside the phone, giving you some leeway if you accidentally drop your phone into water or splash it with a drink. Wi-Fi 802.11ac, the latest Wi-Fi technology, is built-in for absolutely insane WI-Fi performance, and so is more 802.11n performance with a second amplifier.

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Moving on to the battery, this is easily the best performing Android device I have ever used in this regard, not counting something like the Motorola Maxx. It lasts for days on standby, even with Active Display running, and it easily powers through one whole day of non-stop usage. It’s downright impressive.

One of the main features of the Moto X that isn’t available on any other phone in the world is something Motorola calls Touchless Control. It’s something Edward Snowden warned us about — there’s someone listening to everything you say on your phone, except in this case it’s actually your phone and not the government.

After quickly learning your voice, all you have to do is say “OK Google Now” followed by an action, and even if your phone has the display off or if you are not directly in front of it, the Moto X will wake up and respond to what you say. It’s incredibly useful in situations where you can’t access or look at your phone, like driving for instance. Just say “OK Google Now navigate to 1 Broadway Avenue,” and off you go.

You can ask a lot of different types of questions and if the phone isn’t able to deliver, it will serve up a Google search result as a back-up which obviously works quite well. Touchless Control can call contacts, check the weather, get navigation directions, serve up sports scores or information on people, give you the time, and set reminders.

Unfortunately almost everything you can ask your phone to do is one way, unlike Apple’s Siri, however. There’s no way to get unread messages read to you, send emails, make calendar appointments, text friends, book restaurant reservations at restaurants, tweet, or post to Facebook.

In my testing, Touchless Control worked great, often reacting to what I said even from across the room without a hitch. The one hiccup is that since I have a passcode on my phone, I can’t actually get anything back from the X until I enter my passcode and unlock it, except to make outbound calls.

One way around this, which is absolutely brilliant, is the ability to trust specific devices. Since your car’s built-in Bluetooth is paired to your phone, and since your phone is in the car, there’s a reasonably good chance you are in the car with your phone connected to Bluetooth. By allowing trusted devices, you don’t need to enter your passcode to unlock your phone as long as you are connected to that device. This way, when you’re in the car you can completely control the Moto X without ever having to unlock it or touch it.

Have you ever pulled your phone out from your pocket or taken it out of your purse to check the time, or to see if you have any missed notifications? No? Please leave now then. According to Motorola’s research, we do this an average of about 60 times a day and each time you need to wake up your phone — or even worse, if there are unread notifications you need to unlock your phone and then go into the app to check the message.

Active Display lets you see your notifications on the lock screen, but also allows you to jump directly into the most important one, for instance, a text message. You can read a preview of the text message by sliding your finger up on the lock screen, and you can go directly into that text message conversation if you’d like to reply, with just one more tap.

Another feature of Active Display is the… active display. Even when your phone is locked, the screen will still show the time and any notification icons in a pulsing animation every few minutes. Motorola is able to do this because of the type of screen that’s used in the Moto X, and it only uses a fraction of energy compared to if this was done on other phones.

Android’s camera app has never been the best designed or most useful to me, but with the enhancements Motorola added on top of it, it’s surprisingly good. One problem Motorola sought to solve was the fact that it takes too long to get your phone out of your pocket or bag, unlock it, get into the camera app and take the picture.

Using a gesture where you turn the phone front to back twice, the camera app will automatically launch. On top of this is a new full-screen capture button so you can tap anywhere on the screen to take the photo instead of having to find the on-screen shutter button. One drawback of this feature is that the phone will then determine where to focus instead of focusing where you tap, like on other smartphones. This is probably not the worst thing for most people, but I quickly changed it to allow me to tap to focus.

There are other automatic features that should help the average smartphone user like an automatic HDR mode and automatic flash. Motorola told me that practically no one goes into their camera settings, which I agree with, so it’s great that the camera app is set perfectly for the majority of people who are going to buy the phone.

Two more enhancements to the normal Android camera app are a nice slide-in settings wheel so you can, if you wish, quickly access different camera modes and settings by swiping in from the edge of the phone, and also the ability to quickly see the last pictures you took by swiping to the left.

As far as actual photo quality, there’s a 10-megapixel camera that features something Motorola calls Clear Pixel technology that captures up to 75% more light to provide less blurry photos during the day and night. In my tests, I didn’t find the camera to be quite as amazing as Motorola made it out to be, and overall not as good as my iPhone 5. It’s not a bad camera by any means and it’s nice to see companies like Motorola and HTC pushing camera technology forward on Android smartphones. You can also capture 1080p HD video on the Moto X as well as high-quality slow motion video in 720p resolution. The front-facing camera is a 2-megapixel sensor that allows 1080p video capture of god-knows-whatstagram.

The most amazing thing to come out of Motorola in the last couple years has probably been Smart Actions. This app allowed you to customize your phone to do quite a number of different actions based on many types of situations. For instance, you could set it to automatically switch Bluetooth on when you leave your house and turn it off when you get home, or start to dim your display more drastically when your battery is below 50% to save energy and extend your battery life. Smart Actions could even turn your phone to vibrate-only mode whenever you walked into the office.

Awesome, right? Well it’s not available on the Moto X.

While Smart Actions isn’t on here, there are three unique features Motorola offers that are fantastic. Since Android is a mess and there is no centralized way to back up your device or restore it to another (don’t start with me, I’m not in the mood nor do I care about how you can but you can’t if the phone is stock Android but your next one isn’t but some of your apps restore but your app data doesn’t but it’s open), Motorola Migrate is a nice tool to help solve that. All you need to do is install the Migrate app on your existing Android smartphone and tap on the Migrate app on your Moto X. You then scan a code using the camera and all of your data starts transferring over, including photos, videos, contacts, call history, text messages and more.

Motorola Connect is another feature that is most likely life-changing for many people, and it offers the ability to see your incoming, outgoing, missed calls, and text messages on your computer. You can even respond to text messages from your computer from anywhere you are, no matter where your phone is. This is big, and yes there are solutions for this already including Google Voice, but an integrated feature in a phone right out of the box is great for the average consumer. To use Motorola Connect, you just download a Google Chrome extension on Mac or PC and you’re off — it works extremely well.

The last of the bunch is Motorola Assist, and while it has some of the spice of Smart Actions, it lacks all of the heat. More focused on daily tasks, Motorola Assist can preemptively start listening to certain phrases when the phone senses you are driving to help you keep yours eyes on the road. The phone can then read incoming messages to you and quickly reply with a preset response, or tell you who is calling and also allow you to start and stop music playback. If you’re in a meeting, the phone can silence your ringer during a calendar appointment automatically, and also instantly reply to incoming callers letting them know you’re busy. The last part of Assist is a nighttime mode or do not disturb setting that silences your phone’s ringer for a preset length of time.

Motorola’s final piece of the Moto X puzzle is a service called Moto Maker. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt explained how the company has completely overhauled its supply chain and opened a U.S. factory to produce Moto X in Texas. It’s the first modern smartphone to be assembled in the U.S. but one reason the company is doing this is because of the new customization options Motorola is offering.

Buyers are able to customize the phone in tens of thousands of ways, including black or white front covers, 18 different back covers, seven accent colors for the phone’s buttons and hardware around the camera, custom messaging on the back of the phone, unique wallpapers, and even a custom welcome message when you power your phone on. Despite all these customizations, Motorola will deliver your phone in under four days. The company also offers color-matched accessories from SOL Republic like headphones, wireless speakers, and cases from other manufacturers.

Something I was surprised Motorola didn’t mention in its messaging is the fact that the Motorola RAZR was practically the phone that started the entire color craze, launching a black model after the aluminum one in the U.S. and then, obviously, in a bunch of colors soon after. But now that I think about it, yeah, let’s not talk about the RAZR

The Motorola Moto X is not the fastest phone in the world. It’s also not the most cutting-edge, it doesn’t feature the biggest display, and it isn’t the thinnest Android phone. However, there is absolutely no doubt that the Moto X is the most amazing Android phone I have ever used, and I think most people will agree.

Motorola’s new hero phone offers up the most seamless and integrated Android experience on the market, and it does this without changing the core Android experience practically at all. It is a mainstream, consumer-focused, $199.99 mass-market phone. One that can appeal to young kids, teenagers, professionals, men, women, and everyone else. There are truly great, well thought out features, that together make this phone a bona fide smash, and it really is Android’s iPhone.

It’s great to see Motorola back..

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Samsung to buy German OLED company Novaled

OLED is heating up as Samsung plans to spend $350 million acquiring German OLED company Novaled.


Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung, in conjunction with its affiliates, plans to acquire German company Novaled, which makes organic light emitting diode or OLED technology. OLEDs are used in next-gen displays for cell phones and televisions, and the tech is both more energy efficient and also delivers vivid colors and images.

Samsung and its affiliates are paying around $350 million plus a potential $40 million payment based on performance for Novaled. Novaled’s investors include eCAPITAL, TechnoStart, Omnes Capital, TechFund Europe, Innovation Capital, as well as Samsung Ventures, which invested in 2011.

Samsung has been shipping phones with its Super AMOLED Plus screen technology since early 2011. As GigaOM’s Kevin Tofel noted, the screen tech is better seen than described and the display colors are extremely vivid when compared to any other screens.

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Good news for Boston startups — new incubator space on tap for Watertown

Home Depot? Check. Registry of Motor Vehicles? Check. Restaurants? Check. Startup incubator? Coming soon to the Arsenal Mall.
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It may not be Silicon Valley or San Francisco’s South of Market, but Boston has a vibrant startup scene. And it would be even more vibrant if startups could find affordable office space anywhere nearby. Cambridge’s Kendall Square — home of local outposts for Google, VMware, Microsoft, and IBM outposts – is prohibitively expensive and the Boston Seaport “innovation district” is getting there.

But relief may be on the way. Boylston Properties and the Wilder Companies have bought Watertown’s Arsenal Mall and Harvard Vanguard building for $70.5 million – and reportedly will convert a good chunk of that 225,000-square-foot property to incubator space. The deal has been in the works for awhile. Athenahealth already purchased the corporate center next door for $168.5 million. Together that’s a good chunk of land right next to the Charles River and within easy bus reach of Watertown Square and Harvard Square. Plans also call for a former Saab dealership to be converted into a hotel.

In July, when he discussed his pitch in The Boston Globe, Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said the plan was to transform the parcel from ”a black hole into a cool place to live and play.”

I might dispute the black hole bit, but Boston dearly needs more affordable space for startups and Bush told the paper that the ultimate goal was to extend the area’s innovation zone with lower rents and startup-friendly amenities from restaurants to boutiques.

Watertown abuts Cambridge, Boston, Newton and Waltham. The mall itself had its time in the national spotlight during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers when its parking lot was used as a staging area for law enforcement.

The need for affordable or even near-affordable space is critical for local startups — many of which spin out of research work at area colleges. The dearth of affordable space was a top topic at a recent GigaOM meet-up in Boston. And, at a Kendall Square geared to show off the area’s attractions for local startups, one CEOs told me he planned to move his company back to San Francisco because it’s cheaper there. Gulp.

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With web commenting, praise begets more praise, MIT study found

It turns out for all the democratization of the web, a mob mentality of sorts still exists. An MIT study shows that early positive recommendations for articles lead to more likes and upvotes.
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The internet practically runs on the recommendations of others. Whether it’s finding the right rug for your living room, the best Chinese restaurant in town or the smartest take on a news article, users are naturally more likely to seek out things that other people like.

But what if the best wasn’t really the best, just the result of some clever manipulation?

MIT professor Sinan Aral and his team of researchers created an experiment to test how much a single positive or negative review swayed an entire group of commenters — a follow-up to his 2011 study on the impact of crowdsourced movie reviews on others’ opinions. What the team found indicated that we’re all a little more like lemmings than we care to admit.

The experiment used a news aggregate site “similar to Reddit” (the team won’t give out the name of the network used) that tracked responses to upvotes or downvotes. Over the course of five months, and with 100,000 posts, the researchers gave every post an immediate and randomized upvote or downvote as the first comment — with a “no vote” as a control.

The results showed that those single “seed” votes have the potential to influence what comes after them. Articles that received the upvote were 32% more likely to receive positive ratings, and saw a 25% increase in upvotes on average compared to the control.

Downvotes didn’t trigger the same sheep-like response: In fact, ratings with a downvote were actually likely to receive a corresponding upvote.

Thing about that the next time someome leaves a gushy review of a book or movie or pair of pants.

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How to pick the best MOOCs: 6 tips from a Coursera junkie

Feynman Liang has finished more than 36 online classes, putting the 21-year-old in the upper ranks of MOOC veterans. Here are his tips for picking classes.
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Feynman Liang will make you feel like a slacker.

The 21-year-old is pursuing a dual-degree program in engineering and biophysics from Dartmouth and Amherst, but in the last year or so, he’s also completed 36 massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Coursera, Udacity and edX. Right now, he said, he’s taking 10 courses simultaneously — while he completes a summer internship at Google.

When his friends go out for Thursday night parties, he said he often stays back to complete Coursera assignments due the next day. And, once, he spent 80 hours on a single assignment. But he said the MOOCs have helped him pass out of lower-level classes in college and even prepped him for his Google interviews.

“I get to gain a nontrivial understanding of a field,” he said. “And it translates into me doing a lot better in college.”

In the past year, MOOCs have attracted all kinds of interest from people inside and outside education. And the major MOOC startups have teamed up with dozens of top-notch schools around the world for classes in a range of disciplines. But, despite the buzz, attrition rates are very high — some estimates say as many as 90 percent of online students never finish the classes they sign up for.

Most of us aren’t likely to go on a Coursera bender or take 10 online classes at a time. But more of us could probably afford to give up an hour or two of Breaking Bad now and then for a little bit of learning. Here are Liang’s tips for picking the best classes.
1. It’s not just about the certificates

If you’re the kind of person who likes to rack up accomplishments, you might be tempted to stick to the online classes that award official-looking certificates at the end. When he started taking Coursera classes, Liang said that’s what he did. (Not all classes offer them and they’re not worth institutional credit, but they were a way to show his parents that he wasn’t wasting his time.) But then he realized he was going about it all wrong. “You really don’t need a certificate or official recognition for what you take away from the class to be useful to you,” he said. Liang said he took a class on algorithms and data structures with a top Princeton professor that did not offer certificates of any kind. But when he walked into his technical interviews for summer internships, he said he realized that “being in that class gave me the answers to the questions in the interview.”
2. Don’t judge a course by its videos

Some online courses offer highly produced videos with graphics and animations and artfully shot sequences, while others just stick a professor in front of a camera. But don’t dismiss a whole course just because the videos don’t seem up to par. An electrical engineering course he took on Coursera didn’t have great videos, but Liang said it was on of the best classes he’s taken online. So, what’s a better way to evaluate a class early on? Test out a class for a couple of weeks to get a sense of the professor’s personality and commitment level. Assignments and quizzes that just ask you to recall material covered in the video might indicate that the professor is doing the online thing because of a university initiative, not a real personal interest, while more thought-provoking questions and problem sets could show that the teacher is really invested, Liang said.
3. Be prepared to gripe about peer grading

If there’s one part of the Coursera experience Liang isn’t crazy about it’s the peer review process. To enable students in a class of 30,000 to get feedback on papers and assignments that don’t lend themselves to automatic computer grading, many Coursera classes rely on peer grading. Students get trained to use a grading rubric and then they’re asked to evaluate a set number of their peers’ work. The problem, as Liang and others see it, is that there’s huge variability in the feedback. Some students may be Ph.Ds in the topic of the course, while others may be high-school students or non-native English speakers with limited vocabularies. There is an upside, however: you get a chance to interact with people from all kinds of backgrounds.
4. Don’t play it safe when you pick classesIn a competitive college environment, where every final grade ends up a transcript, the nearly straight-A Liang said he’s been reluctant to branch out beyond the courses he knows he’ll do well in. On Coursera, however, he’s been free to delve into social psychology, behavioral economics, climate science and other topics – without worrying about the outcome. Indulge your curiosity. You can learn anything from the history of humankind to the history of rock, from the comfort of your own home. And, if you want, you can ask dumb questions or test out half-baked theories without anyone knowing who you are.
5. Don’t assume there’s consistency between classes

As Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng has said, his startup isn’t a university — it’s “a humble hosting platform.” That means the professors and schools behind each course design the curriculum, create the content and set the class requirements. Coursera obviously sets the framework and provides support, but its classes run the gamut in terms of quality. Once you’ve registered for a class, pay attention to its assignment policies. Some classes may not ask you to submit anything until the very end, while others will fail you if you miss more than 30 percent of one week. Also, a lot of professors are trying out classes for the first time, so be prepared to feel a bit like a guinea pig as policies shift as the professors learn what works.
6. If you take just one class, make it this one

Obviously, potential Courserians have a huge range of interests and motivations, and there’s not going to be one course that’s the best for everyone. But Liang said that of the more than 50 classes he’s tried, the one he’d most recommend to a MOOC newcomer is: “A beginner’s guide to irrational behavior.” Taught by a Duke professor of behavioral economics and psychology, the class gets into all kinds of interesting lessons about human nature. “It’s one of the more accessible and rock-your-world classes,” he said.

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Motorola is reportedly working on a new Nexus in time for the holidays

Hot on the heels of the Moto X, Motorola might be work on Google’s next Nexus smartphone in time for a Q4 launch.
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9to5Google spotted a rather interesting post Taylor Wimberly made to Google Plus on Thursday. You might remember that Wimberly, formerly of Android and Me, was chock full of leaks for the Moto X, most of which turned out to be true. Now he’s reporting that Motorola is already at work on Google’s next Nexus smartphone, which should be ready in time for a holiday launch.

Google has previously used a number of manufacturers for its Nexus line, from HTC and Samsung to, most recently, LG. Early rumors pegged LG to remain on board for the next Nexus, but Motorola seems like a much more likely fit. Google owns Motorola, after all.

If the rumors are true, it’ll be interesting to see how this phone compares to Motorola’s current line. Will it come in different sizes like the new Droid lineup for Verizon? Or will it feature a customizable design like the Moto X? Perhaps it’ll be something else entirely. Let the rumor mill continue to churn.

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Bored by Google Glass? Hands on with Atheer augmented reality glasses

CEO Soulaiman Itani said the company plans to lay the digital world over the physical world. If it succeeds, the platform will be much more promising than Google Glass.

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Google Glass is polished, I’ll give it that. From its flat design UI to the industrial-feeling Google office where I first tried it on, it’s an experience that feels beautiful and reliable.

It’s also boring. It’s a screen that floats in front of your eye. It can text, translate and take video, which is great, but there are no surprises.

The sunglasses-like augmented reality platform that Mountain View-based startup Atheer Labs announced in May doesn’t share the same polish as Google Glass. At least not yet, as it is not expected to launch to consumers until the end of this year. But it is wilder in its scope: Instead of putting information on a screen at the edge of your vision, Atheer lays it over reality in 3D. It’s an effort at true augmented reality, unlike Google Glass

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Atheer is still working on the first-generation design for its glasses, which are expected to be finalized late this year or early next year. They will resemble sunglasses. Atheer does not think of itself as a hardware company, so they are interested in companies developing new gadgets that can make use of their software. Photo by Signe Brewster

The “glasses” I tried on weren’t glasses at all, but a headset mounted on a tripod. I peered through and saw a menu — four squares, not unlike icons on an iPhone. Atheer said this is a temporary UI that will change by the end of the year. I moved my hand up and it entered my vision in front of the menu. The menu is meant to appear somewhat in front of you, so you have to reach forward to touch it.

I struggled a bit to find the right depth, but eventually was able to tap on an icon, much like I would tap on a physical object. The program that opened filled the screen with bubbles. I jabbed at each one and watched as they popped.

Other programs featured fish swimming by or a cube you could twirl with your fingers. One featured a physical newspaper that I could turn my head to scan across and read. The images were 3D or animated.

It’s still in the development stage, so it felt a bit primitive compared to a virtual reality platform like the zSpace. Co-founder and CEO Soulaiman Itani said the company is currently working with developers and will be ready to show off more real-life applications in a few months. He described some appealing future applications, such as going shopping and being able to reach out and tap a physical object to get a price check. You could also leave virtual notes hanging on the doors of restaurants for friends to find or have a virtual pet dragon that flies above you as you go about your day.

“The whole world around us is going to be smarter,” Itani said. “There will be intelligence in every object around you. The thing that is missing is a software platform that allows people to interact naturally and get information from those sensors. If you have controllers in your shades that allow you to turn them on and off, you still have to go find the switch. It should be pointing toward it and telling it to go up. We are building this software that will enable all of this generation of devices.”

Itani said his vision is an always-on device that pushes the wearer information as they need it. But the hardware isn’t there yet. Battery constraints mean that wearable electronics like Atheer’s glasses die too fast if they are always on. Five years from now, that could change. Itani also said hardware is best left to larger companies, so Atheer is focusing on the software, which could eventually be used by a whole range of products

For now, Atheer wants to get its glasses to people who need augmented reality, such as surgeons and industrial designers. Itani said he doesn’t see the average consumer wearing them on their commute just yet, but they could be a replacement for a tablet at home.

The name Atheer means ‘ether,’” Itani said. “The goal is to take the digital world, the virtual world that is very much a part of our lives these days, to free it from behind the screens and put it in the ether.”.

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Snooping on your kids: Sometimes surveillance defeats the purpose

I spent close to a decade using a variety of surveillance tools to spy on, stalk and otherwise monitor my three daughters’ online behavior as teenagers. Am I proud of that? No. But I learned a lot

This post is the third of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Here are parts one and two. Look for part four on Monday.

In the first two installments of this series, I talked about how I started eavesdropping on our two younger daughters’ behavior online — out of a somewhat misplaced desire to protect them from a variety of imagined dangers — and how I learned something about them along the way, despite misgivings about my surveillance activities.

Our youngest daughter proved to be even more of a revelation in some ways, both because of the way the social web has evolved since I started my family spying program about a decade ago, and because of how her reaction to my monitoring made me rethink what I was doing.

In many ways, the evolution of our daughters’ use of the web has been a kind of microcosm of the broader changes in the internet over the past decade: When I started paying close attention to what our oldest was doing online as a teenager (she is 24 now), it was primarily instant messaging — which now seems like an ancient relic of the web, thanks to the rise of texting and apps like SnapChat or Instagram — as well as some websites where you could play rudimentary games or do puzzles. So a simple keystroke-logging program allowed me to eavesdrop quite easily on most of her activity

The rise of Facebook and the social web

By the time I started monitoring our second-oldest daughter and her online behavior as a teenager (she is now 19), she spent some time on websites with games or jokes, but she also started to spend a lot more of her time with sites and services that were more like prototypical social networks: virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel, where the engagement with other users was far more important than the actual surroundings or the simplistic games that were played — and sites, like Gaia Online, that offered the ability to write interactive fiction with others who were passionate about the same topics.

In much the same way, we’ve seen the internet evolve from being just a series of static websites through the dawn of what used to be called “Web 2.0″ or the interactive web, to the rise of full-fledged — and globe-spanning — social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Interestingly, all three of our daughters have used Facebook (which started to become popular just as our oldest reached teenager-hood), but their usage waned substantially as they grew older — and it is also a much smaller focus for our youngest daughter than it was for our other two at the same age.

In some ways, they seem to see Facebook as almost a necessary evil, like email is to an older generation, rather than something they want to spend a lot of time on for their own purposes. My colleague Eliza Kern has written about this phenomenon, which I think is fairly widespread with younger users.

Facebook gives way to Tumblr and Twitter

If our middle daughter started the trend in our family of being more interested in sites with a social element rather than just games or other activities, our youngest continued it — beginning with sites like Club Penguin as a child, and then moving on to Facebook and others as she became a teenager. What was interesting about her use of the web, however (as opposed to the usual teenager behavior like texting) was how quickly it started to center around Tumblr and Twitter, and how that more or less stymied my attempts to monitor her online activity the same way I had with her older sisters.

While keystroke-logging software worked with a one-on-one IM conversation, it was of no real use for texting (I didn’t really investigate whether there were similar tools for phones, because that seemed a little too draconian even for me) and it didn’t help much with trying to keep an eye on what she and her older sister were doing on Tumblr or Twitter either. All I got was a mess of text without any kind of reference point for who or what they were talking to or about, which didn’t help much.

And so I did what I’m sure plenty of other parents have done in a similar situation: I more or less gave up on the automated snooping and turned to stalking, by friending them on Facebook and following them on Tumblr and Twitter. The difficulty there, of course, is that following someone is a very difficult thing to keep hidden from the person you are following — it becomes obvious as soon as you do it, unless you create a secret account under a pseudonym just for the purpose, which seemed like a lot of effort to go to.

I decide to stop stalking my kids

My daughter’s response to this was fairly predictable: She hated the idea that I was somehow looking over her shoulder while she interacted with her friends and other fans of the TV shows she talked about on Tumblr and Twitter, and I’m sure she felt much like I did when my parents would sit in the dining room and watch my friends and me trying to have a party in the living room — like a giant wet blanket had been dropped on her online life, smothering any chance of spontaneity. When I asked her to change her online name because it seemed a little offensive, she rolled her eyes and complied, but I could tell I had crossed a line.

Both her response and that of her older sister — who also spent most of her time on Tumblr, live-blogging Teen Wolf and Doctor Who and other favorite shows with an online community of fans — somehow made me feel worse than I had felt before, when I was just anonymously snooping on my daughter’s IM conversations. The idea that even my virtual presence on Tumblr or Twitter might prevent them from being able to express themselves or interact with their friends (some of whom they have never met) in an authentic way made me feel like I was robbing them of one of the most powerful features of the social web.

I had become increasingly concerned over the years about the broader invasion of privacy that my monitoring represented, and had also come to the conclusion that all of my surveillance was achieving very little — since it didn’t actually help me understand what they were going through or where potential trouble spots might lie.

But it was the interference with their development as fully functioning social human beings (whatever that means in an online context) that really gave me pause, and finally made me step back from all of my monitoring.

Now I am back to crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, like most parents have done since the beginning of time.

Monday: One of my daughers talks about what it was like to have a snooping parent

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Google Maps app now displays ads in your search results

Ads in the Google Maps app are relevant to what you searched for, but can send you farther out of the way than the actual nearest result.

The next time you’re using the Google Maps app to search for some late night tacos, your first result might be an ad for a nearby taqueria with a buy-one-get-one-free carne asada special.

Beginning on Thursday, Google started to incorporate ads into its search results on the Google Maps app for Android and iOS. Powered by AdWords, the promoted businesses will appear at the top of your results, but are only being served if they are relevant to your actual search.

Ads appear at the bottom of your screen, just like a typical search result, but are clearly marked with a tiny “Ad” label. They work exactly the same as any other listing – swipe up for the address, phone number and more information about the location.

These aren’t the first ads to come to Google Maps. Google has already offered businesses the ability to promote themselves by highlighting results on the map itself. While this new ad system doesn’t seem terribly invasive, it could mean that your first search result will be an ad for a nearby coffee shop, rather than the actual nearest coffee shop.

I searched around in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, but haven’t been able to find any ads.

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