Crum often pauses in intense silences or starts sentences without finishing them while she grapples with the problem of how to describe a concept. Precision is important to her. While she clearly loves her work, Crum started off as a violinist, not a neuroscientist. At music school she took an elective course in neuroscience. “One of the papers was from Professor Eric Knudsen at Stanford who studied representations of what we hear and see and how we form a multi-sensory map of an object based on these two senses. When he reared owls with prism glasses on (so what they saw was inconsistent with what they heard), they developed a secondary map that integrated auditory and visual space.”

Crum has absolute pitch, which she describes as hearing sound as other people see color, but the names you give to those auditory colors depends on a learned pitch centre. In Western music, for example, the note A is assigned to the frequency 440 Hertz, whereas in early music — music from the medieval and Renaissance periods —  it’s 415 Hertz, a whole semi-tone lower. “I had a map of pitch that was at 440. Playing early music was driving me crazy for about six months. Every time I played a note, I saw it on the page and heard something different in my brain. One day I tuned up my early music violin at 415 and realized that I had absolute pitch at 415. I had developed an entirely new map of pitch. At that point, I decided that I had to understand my brain a little bit more.”

The science of sound

Sound poses a complex problem for the brain. If you hear a dog barking, your brain needs to figure out which sound frequencies are associated with the dog, integrate those sounds with what you see, and determine where the dog is. “It’s like monitoring just one square foot of the waves on a lake and figuring out how many boats are on that lake, how fast they are moving, and where they are located. That’s the problem our ears are having to solve.”

Our brain is constantly reweighting the information it receives from different senses. “The ability to locate something visually has less error, so we weight what we see more than what we hear, but in terms of when something happens, we weight our sonic information much more than our visual information. As you get to lower light levels, the model starts to changes and auditory information becomes more relevant.”

Different sounds constantly mask and obscure other sounds. Our brain uses context and expectation to make sense of it all. “When you listen to an old record, it’s got scratches everywhere, but you can still hear the music. The experience of the music and even the emotion is often just as strong. When there’s a big scratch on a record, to our brain something is still there. Information is missing, but we fill it in dynamically — in frequency, in time, and in spatial position.”

Sensory Superpowers

Dolby is constantly developing new sound and imaging technologies, and an understanding of how the brain perceives is vital to doing that effectively. “All of our products take advantage of perception in some way. Our codecs are a computational neural model which reduce information but maintain the perceptual experience by getting rid of information which I wouldn’t experience in real life.” One of the products in development is an imaging technology that can produce up to 20 thousand nits (a measure of light emitted per unit area as perceived by the human eye), as opposed to the 450-1000 nits emitted by a typical HDTV display. When Crum watched a video of fire on one of these new screens, something strange happened.

“I was watching a variety of content, all of which was producing the same amount of nits, but when the content was fire, I experienced my cheeks get warm,” Crum explains. “So I used thermal imaging cameras to track people’s faces, and there were changes when they saw flame. When we see flame in real life, our bodies are already preparing to expel heat based on the luminescence which is reaching our retina in conjunction with the fact that we know it’s fire. I ran the same test on HD displays, and you don’t see anything like this. This technology is truly creating a realistic experience by tricking the body.”

If we can create technology that can trick the body, all kinds of new sensory experiences become possible. “You don’t just want to create reality, you want to create something that’s even better. By using the synergistic effects of our senses on each other, we can amplify them so we have heightened experiences and potentially heightened emotional responses. Many species have superpowers, like bats and their ability to navigate. You can look at these species and how their brains have solved problems and use technology to create an experience that is not limited by the physical capabilities of our senses.”

Musical Brain Training

Crum is not only concerned with understanding and manipulating the way the brain perceives, but also with how we can use sensory input to alter the structure of the brain itself.

She teaches a class on Neuroplasticity and musical gaming at Stanford on how to create games that alter the organization of the brain in a targeted manner. “You have cells that have what is called a receptive field, the stimulus set which optimally produces a response from that cell out of some vast number of stimuli. With neuroplasticity, you might find different cells change the stimulus they respond to, or that they become more selective so you are developing more specificity.”

Crum’s students have developed all kinds of sound-based games to target different skills. One game trains people to detect phonetic differences that are usually lost in adulthood in order to allow them to become bilingual more quickly. Students have created games to increase accuracy in localizing sound and train digit span to improve memory.

One application of this kind of gaming is compensating for age-related sensory decline. “If I have hearing loss, I am relying too much on sonic information. I’ve had students re-weight how we integrate audio and visual information to allow people to hear better in noisy environments, to rely more on their visual cues when their auditory cues are compromised. In that case, they were training people to detect phonetic differences in lip reading and then progressing to different words.”

Our future may be full of devices that can create the impression of reality or even heighten it, manipulate our sensory experiences and emotions and even reshape our brains. This is less of a leap than it seems. “The brain’s job is not to get it right, it’s to be robust – the most impervious to error in action,” says Crum.”We are usually experiencing some kind of illusion.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mark Curtis starts by telling a story. The Egyptian king Thamus is visited by the God Theuth, who offers a gift to the people of Egypt, the gift of writing. To the God’s surprise, the king refuses the gift, saying that his people would lose the ability to remember if everything were written down. “For every step forward in technology,“ says Curtis, “you lose something and you gain something.”

Curtis is the co-founder of service design agency Fjord, which works with large companies like banks and mobile operators — the kind of companies we all love to hate but whose services we rely on every day.

Driven to distraction 

Curtis is also the author of “Distraction: Being human in the Digital age.” Distraction was published in 2005, but its concerns — how technology is changing our notion of space and time and making us prefer the distant to the close at hand — are even more relevant in the age of the smartphone.

“Technology distracts us from the here and now by opening up avenues of possibility to the rest of the world all the time. Those avenues are deeply distracting because what could be over there appears to be more exciting than what is in front of us right now,” explains Curtis. In the same way that it was 80 years after the invention of the automobile before countries started to make seatbelts compulsory, Curtis contends that we haven’t yet defined ways of counteracting the negative effects of technology.

“Technology has created a permanent fifth dimension in our lives – virtual space. Every time human beings have perceived a new dimension, it’s led to seismic changes in society. We moved from thinking in two dimensions in Medieval art to three dimensions in the Renaissance. In Dante, Heaven and Hell were in a direct line up and down. At the same time Copernicus and Galileo started to realize there was something called space, which completely undermined the whole notion of Heaven, because if space is infinite then where is Heaven? That fundamentally changed the way we see everything.”

Keep it simple, stupid 

That fifth dimension also creates a challenging design problem that Fjord is tackling by reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to absorb information. “One of my colleagues calls it ‘design for the glance’,” says Curtis. The device best designed for the glance is the wristwatch, and Curtis expects to see plenty of products for the wrist following the flawed but groundbreaking Nike+ Fuelband.

Curtis points to David Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he explains that the brain works in two ways. “System 1 is where I say to you ‘What’s 2+ 2?’ You know the answer immediately without having to think about it. System 2 is where I say ‘What’s 24 x 17?’ Your brain then goes into lockdown because of the cognitive effort.” Fjord is trying to design nudge services into the realm of system 1 rather than system 2.

Last year Fjord created a new mobile app for the Swedish mobile phone operator 3, which displays all the information about a customer’s bill and usage using simple data visualizations. “If I want to know my own data usage, my carrier says ‘You have used 320 MB out of 1,024 MB and it’s now Feb 25′. What do I do with that information? I immediately have to go into system 2 to figure it out.” 3 itself offered over 200 different subscription models. My3 displays a visual snapshot of usage and trends over the past six months as well as showing how the bill compares to that of a typical customer. Hundreds of thousands of customers now rely on the service.

Banks and payment companies are also starting to think simple. “Paypal and Square have been brilliant at simplifying, although largely for merchants rather than customers.” Fjord itself produced a new set of mobile applications for the Spanish bank BBVA that now have 1.2 million users. Recent usage statistics show that customers log in 21 times a month on the mobile apps versus three times a month on the web site.

Experience design is dead

The next frontier in service design is what Fjord calls living services, where the same service is delivered via a whole plethora of interfaces and becomes ever more atomized. “We are already seeing financial services clients saying how can we break up what they do into little chunks which other people can use in discrete ways. Spotify, for example, will deliver the service in my car, through my phone, through my PC, through my Sonos system at home mediated by Ford or Apple or Android or Sonos.”

This complexity means that designers can no longer entirely control the  user experience. “What designers can do is set the stage and assemble the props, and the customer will design the experience.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BARCELONA — 1.7 billion people got a new mobile phone handset last year. What happens to the old ones? Ten million of them have been reused and renewed by eRecyclingCorps. “If subsidies are the drugs of the mobile industry, then incentivized device recycling is the methadone,” says CEO Dave Edmondson from the Mobile World Congress. 

“Those 1.7 billion phones will retain one-third of their value 24 months into their future. That is 100 billion dollars worth of economic value that we are allowing customers to walk into the shop with, walk out with, and then put in a drawer.” Edmondson contends that only 1 percent of handsets worldwide and 1o percent in the U.S. are recycled or reused. 

ERecyclingCorps works with five out of the top seven U.S. mobile operators to offer consumers discounts on a new phone or payment plan when they trade in their old device. My slightly battered 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy SII, for example, is worth around $100. “Unincentivized recycling doesn’t work, ” says Edmondson. “Customers intuitively know that the device they just made a phone call on has some value, even if they don’t know how to monetize it.” The company’s oldest customer — Sprint =- has publicly stated that for every 10 new phones it sells, four are traded in. By 2017, Sprint’s CEO wants to increase that to nine out of 10.

When a customer walks into a shop using eRecycling’s system, they are asked a few simple question about their old phone: Does it power on? Does it have a good LCD? Is there anything broken? The answers are combined with the model type to calculate a trade-in price.

Old phones are shipped to a central facility where the data is erased and they are tested to see if they can be reused. If components are damaged, the device is given a new keyboard, screen, or camera. Finally an upgraded OS and operator-specific software is installed. Phones whose parts cannot be reused are broken down so the raw materials can be recycled. But the company estimates that 80 percent of incoming devices are reused as is or renewed.

There is no agreed definition for what constitutes a refurbished phone. ERecyclingCorps has teamed up with 20 other companies to define precise standards for what it calls a renewed phone. Every time the user moves the slider up and down on a sliding phone, for example, you get wear and tear on the ribbon cable. As long as it works, most refurbishers will not replace it but to qualify as a renewed phone the ribbon must be upgraded since it is a potential point of failure.

So where do the renewed phones end up? Surprisingly, 50 percent of them as resold within the U.S. as insurance replacements, for prepaid programs or used by operators to acquire new customers at a lower subsidy cost. Feature phones often go to sub-Saharan Africa while smartphones are more likely to end up in the hands of an Indian or Chinese urbanite who could never afford a new iPhone. 

Although eRecyclingCorps is a relatively new company (it was founded in 2009), its management team could not be more different from the typical starry-eyed young startup founder. It’s populated by battle-hardened mobile industry veterans, most of whom have held senior posts at mobile operators and device manufacturers, which is not to say that they are not idealists.

“The mobile industry has grown from nothing to a trillion dollar business in 30 years by focusing on the front, ” argues Edmondson.”What’s the next network upgrade? What’s the new application? Nobody looks at the backend, which is creating the largest environmental mess in the history of the world. How many companies at Mobile World Congress are talking about that?”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Siebrand Dijkstra wants anyone to be able to make an app. He’s the CEO of AppMachine, which just launched at Mobile World Congress. The Netherlands-based company lets users build a richly featured native application for Android or iPhone from simple building blocks he compares to lego bricks. 

Several superstar Dutch DJs and the Amsterdam Dance Event mobile app, a complex application that would previously have cost upwards of €50,000 ($66,000) to build, have already created apps with AppMachine.

AppMachine’s 20 app bricks cover everything from Facebook integration to discographies for DJs. You can add products and floor plans, send emails, and like Facebook pages from within the app itself. The crawler feature scans an existing web site and extracts relevant information like photos, RSS feeds, iTunes playlists, or Twitter accounts to be added as content to your brand new app.

Plenty of other “build your own app” products exist, including another Dutch company, LayarGloss, but Dijkstra emphasizes that AppMachine apps are truly native and not a melange of HTML and native code. An app simulator is provided for testing.

AppMachine provides extensive analytics features for tracking downloads, locations of users, and time spent in an app. The final app can be multilingual, adapting automatically to the language of the phone on which it is used.

Target customers are DIY app builders and design agencies. A more flexible version will be available later for developers who will be able to drag in XML and XSL files or even a web service and have AppMachine’s content management system automatically convert it into tables. 

You can build an app for free but pay a one-time fee when you publish via AppMachine on one or more app stores. The fee varies between €399 and €1,499 ($525 and $1,975) depending on the version used (“Gorgeous” for DIY app makers, “Designer” for designers, and the more flexible developer version). It’s currently in closed beta but will be opened up to new accounts in two weeks or so.

 AppMachine is based in Heerenveen in the Netherlands, was established in 2011, has 24 employees and is privately funded. 

Nokia launched four new phones today at Mobile World Congress, among them the Nokia Lumia 520. The 520 features a rounded back to fit in the palm, a 4-inch supersensitive screen, 8GB of storage, and a 5 megapixel camera.  The device will cost a mere 139 EUR ($184) without a contract.

At the slightly higher price point of 249 EUR ($331), the Nokia Lumia 720 delivers a HD-quality 6.7 megapixel camera with a flash designed to take clear pictures in low lighting conditions on your nights out. The 4.3-inch LCD display comes with a filter to reduce glare during outdoor use.

At the other end of the scale, Nokia also announced its cheapest device ever aimed at emerging markets. The bare bones Nokia 105 will cost a mere 15 EUR, has no camera, and sports a tiny 1.5-inch screen, but the upside of the pared-down feature set is that can run without a charge for up to 35 days (12.5 hours talk time). For the millions people who have no access to grid power, charging is a major consideration. It also sports its own flashlight and FM radio, essential tools in places like sub-Saharan Africa.

“Google is focusing on full automation of the driving experience, making the vehicle drive itself without human interaction, ” says Sterling Anderson, the cofounder of Gimlet Systems. “Gimlet is an intelligent combination of both human and vehicle, an invisible copilot that is adaptive to the driver’s needs.” The system can either run in the background and come to life to avoid collisions or drive autonomously if the driver is incapacitated or wants to zone out. In testing with real human drivers, Gimlet reduced collisions by between 78 percent and 100 percent. 

A copilot wouldn’t just make drivers safer but also reduce fuel costs and congestion. Many safety features, which make vehicles larger or heavier, could be removed if cars were no longer in danger of crashing. Collision-proof vehicles can also be packed more tightly into roadways, avoiding the need to build more roads.

How does it work? Any intelligent vehicle control system is designed to preemptively avoid hazards in the environment so it needs to know where those hazards are, or will be, in the near future. A laser-based range finding unit (lidar), which looks like a spinning tin can on the top of the vehicle, works with cameras, radar, and some infra-red sensing to construct a map of the environment.

Using this map, Gimlet monitors and predicts the vehicle’s motion and determines how safe it is. If there is any adjustment to be made, the system’s logic-based algorithms determines the adjustment behind the scenes by sending commands to the accelerator or steering or braking system to avoid an accident.

Gimlet’s makers want to improve the driver’s performance even when he is not using the copilot. “We want to preserve the driver’s intuition about how the vehicle will respond. For that reason we provide a number of different feedback mechanisms. One is haptic, applying a feedback torque to the driver’s steering wheel.” This avoids the situation where the driver doesn’t even know he is making a mistake because the copilot corrects the vehicle’s motion without giving feedback. 

Test drivers grew quite fond of their copilots. 20 drivers performed 1,200 trials, driving a utility vehicle remotely using a video feed and the copilot. “We surveyed the drivers at the end of each day of testing. When they began the tests most drivers didn’t trust the system,”Anderson explained. “By the end of testing they were reporting that they felt more in control of the vehicle with the copilot’s help, than they did without it.” 

Its military applications look promising. “The number one cause of non-combat fatalities in the U.S. Military is vehicle crashes,” says Anderson. “It’s a serious cause of death even in combat, when soldiers are under duress.” If soldiers could drive supply convoys or perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions remotely, they would avoid risks like IEDs, saving many lives. 

Charles Grinnell helped build the world’s largest particle collider at CERN (The European Center for Nuclear Research). Now he’s taken up gardening, or rather, his robots have.

Grinnell’s company, Harvest Automation, makes pint-sized robot farmers who move ornamental plants around nurseries and turn manual laborers, who often don’t even speak English, into robot supervisors.They are the first autonomous robots available for horticulture.

Ornamental agriculture is a highly labor-intensive $17 billion business in the U.S. alone, and it has a severe shortage of workers. “It’s very demanding physical labor out in the elements,” says Grinnell. “In the U.S. not many people want to do this kind of work.”

Harvest Automation’s robots are completely automated. Their supervisor defines parameters like the size of the plant being moved (to distinguish them from people or other objects), the width of the field, the spacing between the plants, and the new configuration required for the fauna.

The little robots use 20 different sensors, including a laser-ranging system to detect plants and obstacles. But the real smarts are in the software. The robots use a technique from MIT called behavior-based programming to keep track of many different things simultaneously, such as the ever-changing environment and the task at hand, while requiring only local information. It doesn’t have a GPS; the uploading of maps or access to other systems is not required. A bot’s battery lasts four to five hours.

Agriculture is a demanding environment for an autonomous robot. Many sensors are optical, but they couldn’t cope with the full range of lighting conditions in the fields, from darkness to full sunlight. “The robots operate in a very unpredictable environment,” Grinnell explains. “The terrain is unpredictable. The environment is constantly changing as the work is going on. People are working in the area. Plants are being moved around.”

The robots share their working environment with human workers, so safety was a critical concern. The typical approach to automation in agriculture is to replace 10 or 100 workers with a giant, intimidating machine. Harvest Automation’s robots are small, do the work of one person (or fewer), and move relatively slowly. “Even if these machines completely malfunctioned, they might bruise someone’s ankle but not critically injure them. Compared to the other equipment workers are using out on these farms, we are orders of magnitude more safe.”

So, how do existing workers react to their robot colleagues? ”These are tasks that the workers don’t enjoy doing. The robot does all the repetitive and physically challenging parts of the job. People do the more interesting things which are much harder for a robot to do. The workers turn into robot supervisors and they love it!” insists Grinnell.

Next on the agenda in Harvest Automation’s green robolution are tasks like watering, spraying, and trimming plants. Nurseries often overuse water, fertilizers, and herbicides because they don’t have enough labor to treat every individual plant. This also causes environmental damage. “When they apply herbicides, they broadcast the chemicals over the entire area. Most of it misses the plants and goes into the ground.”

A new watering robot will go on the market by 2014.

Harvest automation started shipping robots in September, and only a few dozen are out in the field, but Grinnell expects to sell thousands of robots in the near future. A single robot costs around $30,000 but can move 200 3-gallon pots an hour, about the same as a human worker. For other tasks, the robot may only replace a fraction of a single worker but they don’t need coffee breaks or stop to have lunch.

DIY Infographics: Infogr.am

This Estonian team must be running out of space to display all the awards it has won lately, although it missed out on a gong at the Europas. Its interactive, online infographics and charts are simple enough for a tech journalist to use and great fun for those who like messing around with data. No graphic design experience required.

Better scientific research: Mendeley

U.K. startup Mendeley won several awards at the Europas. Scientific researchers have to deal with a vast and rapidly updated sea of research. Mendeley’s mission is to make scientific research more efficient by automatically extracting bibliographic data from academic literature and making it available via search and an API. Millions of academic papers in all kinds of fields have already been indexed, and 260 apps are generating more than 100 million calls to the Mendeley API per month. Scientific publications company Elsevier is rumored to be in talks to buy Mendeley for $100 million.

3D body scans from a photo: Poikos 

Poikos creates 3D body scans from photos taken on a laptop or similar camera. Using a database of full 3D scans of real people, it combines the best matches with the photo to form an extremely accurate model without requiring any additional hardware. The first use cases for the Poikos FlixFit system are accurate sizing for online clothing shopping (over 40 percent of returns are due to bad fit) and tracking fitness. In the longer term, the technology could be used in hospitals to accurately tailor drug dosages to a particular person.

Phone-charging furniture: Powerkiss

Making use of the skills of battery experts formerly employed by Nokia, this Finnish startup has revived wireless resonance induction charging technology by building it into furniture. Plug a “ring” receiver into your phone, place it on a table (or even beside a light) equipped with a “heart” transmitter, and watch it give your device the kiss of life. Powerkiss‘s technology is in use in several airports and cafes in Europe.

What people really read: Scoopinion

Scoopinion wants to save journalism by focusing on quality rather than clicks. There are plenty of tools that recommend content based on what you and others bookmark, rate, or click on, but how many people have actually read the content closely? This Finnish startup creates heatmaps of articles to track paragraph by paragraph just how much attention you really paid to that author’s words. The tool then makes recommendations based on the true reading behavior of the community. The company claims readers spend four times longer on articles recommended by Scoopinion than those from other sources.

Instant shopping gratification: Shutl

U.K. startup Shutl aims to shake up one of the most static parts of the e-commerce sector —  delivery — by linking local couriers to retailers for high-speed delivery. The Shutl Now service guarantees delivery within 90 minutes. Shutl gathers quotes from delivery couriers (who don’t normally deal directly with consumers or with big retailers) for a particular delivery and combines them with rating data to select the best quote based on price and quality. Shutl raised $3.2 million last year and will launch soon in the U.S.

Over 100 people are already walking around Europe and Israel in a ReWalk Personal and, pending FDA approval, the suit will be available for personal use in the U.S. in the second half of 2013. ReWalk Rehabilitation is already helping patients in 16 rehabilitation centers across the United States.

Israeli electrical engineer Dr. Amit Goffer designed the ReWalk suit. He became a quadriplegic following an accident in 1997. Goffer devoted 10 years to developing a device that would help a paraplegic to walk again. Such devices, like metal frames with springs, have been around for at least 50 years but required an enormous effort from the user. “It was extremely tiring for an individual to take 10 or 15 steps. A key element of the ReWalk design was that the energy requirements of the user should be no different from that of someone who was not injured,” says Argo Medical Technologies CEO Larry Jasinski.

Goffer developed a robotic exoskeleton that attaches to a person’s legs and waist and can bear the weight of both the user and the device itself. Shifts in the user’s center of gravity control the suit, somewhat like riding a Segway. The suit’s motion sensor can detect a very small movement of say 4 degrees and send a signal to the bionic legs to begin to move. A backpack carries the suit’s battery and software. The ReWalk is used with crutches purely for balance. The suit’s software includes safety features that detect if the user is about to fall.

ReWalk Rehabilitation 2.0 can be more easily adapted to users of different heights and weights and has a beginner-gait mode with improved software to support new users as they learn to take their first steps. Patients need training to learn how to use the suit (an average of 15 sessions), but some have been able to walk unaided in the third session.

The ReWalk doesn’t just allow users to walk again but may have a remarkable effect on their overall health. “How many of us are told by doctors to get off the couch? The health challenges for someone with a spinal chord injury are immense,” says Jasinski.

Purely because they spend their time in a wheelchair, paraplegics experience depleted bone density, rising body fat, diabetes, declining cardiovascular fitness, severe bowel problems, and pain. Argo Medical technologies is involved in two clinical studies on the effect of the ReWalk suit on patient’s general health. “We are evaluating what you do to the overall metabolism of a person when you let them walk again. Our patients are almost universally showing reduced body fat, increased lean tissue and improved cardiovascular function.”

The ReWalk is currently available in Europe and costs €52,500. The price Stateside is expected to be around $65,000. The price tag may be steep, but Jasinski told me that the overall cost of care for ReWalk users drops considerably. “We believe that the health impact will more than pay for the cost of this device.”

The company is developing a product for quadriplegics (patients who also cannot use their arms) that is similar to the current suit but will have crutches integrated into the system and is looking at many other medical applications where people cannot walk because of a stroke, Multiple Sclerosis or Cerebral Palsy. Users are, however, still waiting for a dance mode.

Treemetrics provides a 3D laser scanning system to accurately measure the height, straightness, taper, and volume of the trees in a section of forest. The European Space agency will combine the latest satellite data with Treemetrics’ ground-based forest information.

2D satellite images provide a bird’s eye view of huge areas of forest. Treemetrics uses this data to spot missing trees, which may indicate disease or illegal logging, and to determine where ground scanners should be most urgently deployed. Making the whole process cheaper and more efficient means that owners of smaller forests can starting using the technology.

There are sound reasons for better tree tracking. “Timber demand is set to double over the next 30 years. People need wood for shelter and heat,” said Treemetrics CEO Enda Keane. “Forests are also a vital ecosystem in which 90 percent of the world’s mammals live.”

Currently, forest measurement is done manually by a forester who uses calipers to measure the radius of a sample of trees. But with Treemetrics’ technology, a 3D laser scanner emits laser pulses that bounce back from objects in the area, gathering millions of data points over a 30 meter radius of forest. Those data points are then used to construct a 3D model of the trees. Better measurement means that fewer trees can be cut while maximizing value.

Treemetrics claims that its system can reduce measurement costs by 75 percent.

If there is one thing foresters hate doing, it’s cutting trees. Keane should know, since he worked as a forester himself for 10 years. He says that 20 percent of the value of forests worldwide (or approximately 10 billion Euros) is lost annually due to inaccurate knowledge of the quantity or quality of the timber available before trees are harvested.

Keane first encountered 3D graphics via satellite images, which foresters use to get different views of the forest. Having started the company in 2005 with Garret Mullooly, he collaborated with research teams at several European universities with expertise on image processing, forest recovery, and optimization to develop the software for the Treemetrics scanner.

The system is now used in forests in Ireland, Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US. Treemetrics’ business model is software as a service, where users are charged per hectare of forest. Keane says the company has no direct competitors.

Treemetrics is based in Cork, Ireland, has 15 employees and has received 1.4 million EUR ($1.87 million) in private and government funding.

City waste water networks are often outdated, decaying, and maintained by skeleton maintenance crews. The EPA estimates that U.S. investments in wastewater will need to increase by over $150 billion over the next two decades to maintain current services. Many water companies have pipes one hundred feet underground that have never been inspected.

Redzone’s first sewer robot, Responder, was built to inspect the largest pipes in the toughest conditions. Navigation in pipes is relatively easy, but they may be littered with debris and have various levels of sewage flow, making locomotion difficult.”It was a quest to send a robot where no robot had gone before,” says Redzone’s CEO Mike Lach. “Waste water is a perfect application for robotics: dirty, dull, and dangerous.”

Smaller pipes can be inspected manually using a remote control vehicle with a camera attached, but this is inefficient, time-consuming, and impossible for many pipes. Redzone’s robots can be dropped into one manhole and find their way to the next one for collection. They carry cameras, laser, lidar (light detection and ranging), sonar (for detection below the flow line), and hydrogen sulfide gas sensors. Hydrogen sulfide can corrode pipes. A combination of data from all of the sensors is used to build a model of the pipe’s interior and identify, for example, which pipes have the most corrosion.

“Money is tight. You are dealing with public funds,” Lach explains. “How do you get the data you need to make decisions? And even if you can get that data, is it good enough? Do you replace pipes? Refurbish them?” These are the kinds of questions Redzone’s analytics platform can answer.

In many cities, the first task is simply to map the wastewater system and its state of repair using the robot inspectors. For larger pipes, the cost of inspection is similar to existing methods, but the data acquired is much more rich. Inspection of smaller pipes is cheaper and quicker than the alternatives. An assessment that might otherwise take 15 years can be completed in one.

Fast, fearless, and happy to do the dirty work. What more could you want from a robot?

The U.K., Germany and Ireland respectively received the most nominations, cementing London and Berlin’s reputations as the twin poles of the European startup scene. The Europas organisers hail from Ireland and the U.K. so this might also explain a slant towards those nations. U.K. companies received 65 nominations as opposed to 26 for German companies and 13 for Ireland.  However, the Nordic countries, France and Spain also did well on total nominations.

Things get more interesting when you look at the nominations per capita. Small European countries like Ireland, Finland and Sweden leave Germany and the U.K. trailing based on this measure, while all the Scandinavian countries perform well. Tiny Latvia (population 2.2 million) received 4 nominations but they were all for the same company, DIY infographics tool Infogr.am.

The entrepreneurial performance of Spain, France and even Germany starts to looks less than impressive when adjusted for population. Even Greece does better than the former two countries.

So what does this tell us about the state of entrepreneurship in Europe? This is obviously not definitive data since it is based on nominations for one set of startup awards, but the results do indicate that investors and media should look beyond the obvious centres of London and Berlin. Interesting things are happening on the fringes of Europe in the scrappy smaller members of the European family.

The data: If you leave out the people’s choice awards, regional awards, the award for startups outside Europe and non-startup awards like best investor, 164 nominations remain. Several startups received multiple nominations and these all counted towards the country totals. Pinpointing the country of a startup was not always straightforward. Gidsy‘s founders, for example, are Dutch but they started the company in Berlin. Several European startups nominated are now based in the U.S. I mostly used the base of the company, if it was within Europe, or the home country of the founders as the startup’s country. Mail me if you would like a copy of the raw data.

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The courses offering certificates are the following, but this list is expected to expand rapidly:

“Three locations have been found which have skylights on the order of 100 meters across,” says Astrobotic Technology Inc.’s President John Thornton.”It’s a good parallel to where humans settled on earth. They chose caves because they provided shelter and protection.”

Astrobotic’s mission is to provide cost-effective landers and roving robots for planetary missions.”The Moon is a first step in human beings learning to live off beyond the Earth,” Thornton continues. “It’s very important to the future of mankind to expand beyond our home planet: to satisfy our innate curiosity, for exploration and potentially for survival should we damage this Earth beyond repair.”

To survive on another planet, we would need a reliable water supply, food, basic manufacturing facilities like 3D printers to make spare parts or new machines, and robots for exploration and transport. In October 2015, Astrobotic will send a lander and rover to the Moon to search for the most basic of those requirements: water.

Water is an almost magical chemical whose components can be used to make everything from air for breathing to rocket fuel. Procuring water and making fuel locally could dramatically cut the cost of planetary exploration, since currently all resources are carried from Earth at a cost of million of dollars per kilo.

Astrobotic’s Polaris Rover

Astrobotic’s robot rover Polaris will hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX. After landing, it will prospect for polar ice and determine how to harvest it. The rover has three vertical solar panels to generate 250W of power, stereo cameras and laser to generate 3-D video and models of the surface and for navigation. Polaris can drive and avoid obstacles autonomously. 

The polar mission is also an attempt to win Google’s Lunar X prize, a $20 million reward for the first privately-funded robot to land on the surface of the Moon, drive 500 meters and send video and images back to Earth. There are bonus prizes for other robotic feats like driving 5 km or surviving 14 frigid lunar nights (at liquid nitrogen temperatures) intact. While most X-prize entries are small-scale, Astrobotic will bring 100kg of payload to the Moon and the company sees it as just a first step in lunar colonization and commercialization.NASA cancelled its manned lunar space program last year so future manned lunar exploration is now the domain of private industry. 

The first lunar industry may be mining. “The Moon could be a potentially huge source of a lot of exotic materials,” Thornton explained. “It has platinum. It has Helium-3, a third generation, nuclear fusion fuel which creates no radiation as a byproduct. It comes from solar wind and doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.”

To mine, you need permanent settlements suitable for human beings. That’s where the caves come in. Robots could prepare landing sites, find new caves, map the cave network, construct infrastructure for returning to those caves and finally create habitats for humans. “Most of the technology is there,” said Thornton. “There are some issues we are focusing on like precision landing with an accuracy of 10s of meters. That’s important when you want to return to same place. There will be a new type of robot to descend down into the cave the first time and then set up the infrastructure to access it regularly.”

Astrobotic’s first customers are, however, the space agencies themselves. The company is developing robotic equipment for NASA and will haul payload from space agencies and scientific institutions to the Moon. Later, space agencies may even buy tickets for their astronauts. Thornton claims that the role of the commercial sector is to take established space technology and put it into an affordable form, while government agencies should continue to push the boundaries.

It’s not all about the money though, even for commercial space companies. “One of the most important things about space exploration is exciting a new generation about space,” Thorton muses. “It’s been 40 years since Apollo landed on the surface of the Moon. How many young people were inspired at that time to become scientists or engineers or the next astronaut? We have lost a bit of that. If we can revive interest in the Moon it’s a first step towards reinvigorating the next generation and that’s important to the future of all of us.”

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The ReWalk suit was designed by Israeli electrical engineer Dr Remit Gopher, who became a quadriplegic following an accident in 1997. Gopher devoted 10 years to developing a device which would allow a paraplegic to walk again. Such devices, like metal frames with springs, have been around for at least 50 years but required an enormous effort from the user. 

“It was extremely tiring for an individual to take 10 or 15 steps. A key element of the ReWalk design was that the energy requirements of the user should be no different from that of someone who was not injured,” says Argo Medical Technologies (the company which makes the ReWalk) CEO Larry Jasinski.

Gopher developed a robotic exoskeleton which attaches to the user’s legs and waist and can bear the weight of both the user and the device itself. The suit is controlled via shifts in the user’s center of gravity, somewhat like riding a Segway. The suit’s motion sensor can detect a very small movement of say 4 degrees and send a signal to the bionic legs to begin to move. A backpack carries the suit’s battery and software.

Patients need training to learn how to use the suit (an average of 15 sessions) but some have been able to walk unaided in the third session. The ReWalk is used with crutches purely for balance. The suit’s software includes safety features which detect if the user is about to fall.  

The ReWalk doesn’t just allow users to walk again but may have a remarkable effect on their overall health. “How many of us are told by doctors to get off the couch? The health challenges for someone with a spinal chord injury are immense,” says Jasinski.

Purely because they spend their time in a wheelchair, paraplegics experience depleted bone density, rising body fat, diabetes, declining cardiovascular fitness, severe bowel problems and pain. Argo Medical technologies is involved in two clinical studies on the effect of the ReWalk suit on patient’s general health. “We are evaluating what you do to the overall metabolism of a person when you let them walk again. Our patients are almost universally showing reduced body fat, increased lean tissue and improved cardiovascular function.” 

The ReWalk is currently available in Europe and costs 52,500 EUR. “We believe that we will have patients walking around the streets of the US in the second half of 2013 (pending FDA approval),” says Jasinski. The price stateside is expected to be around $65,000. ReWalks are already in use in 22 rehabilitation centres across the U.S.

The pricetag may be steep but Jasinski told me that the overall cost of care for ReWalk users drops considerably. “We believe that the health impact will more than pay for the cost of this device.” Around 100 Europeans currently have a ReWalk for personal use. 

The company is developing a product for quadriplegics (patients who also cannot use their arms) which is similar to the current suit but will have crutches integrated into the system and is looking at many other medical applications where people cannot walk because of a stroke, Multiple Sclerosis or Cerebral Palsy. Users like John (featured in the video above) are, however, still waiting for the “dance mode”. 

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Is it a friend’s birthday? 24me will retrieve the data directly from Facebook and offer you the option to post on her Facebook wall or buy her a gift card directly from the app. Is your electricity bill due today? The app will automatically add this task to your to-do list and link to your service provider so you can pay with one click.

24me was founded by Liat Mordechay Hertanu and her husband Gilad. “We found ourselves wasting our precious time on managing daily life routines,” she says. “There are great to-do list apps, but those are only digital replacements for a pen and a paper. 24me is a personal assistant in the form of a to-do list.”

In addition to the entries that appear automatically on the task list, you can add items manually or using voice recognition. The application uses some simple text recognition to create action buttons for each task in your list. Enter ”Call Ciara,” and 24me integrates with the Ciara’s contact number and inserts a call button next to the action. Once you click on it, 24me calls that person.

If the task is physical, e.g. “Pick up the laundry,” 24me adds a button linking to TaskRabbit, where you can pay a physical personal assistant to collect it for you. Finally, you can share tasks if you need to; for example, you can compile a shopping list with a family member.

24me integrates with a number of service providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast and banks such as Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo. After linking to these services, tasks will be added when you have a bill to pay or your bank balance drops below a certain amount.

The app is currently free and the business model will probably involve charging services providers some kind if fee at a later stage. But for now the founders are concentrating to getting as many users as possible.

24me is available for iPhone. An Android version is in the works. The app currently only supports service providers in the U.S.

RobotAppStore is the first robot app marketplace. The store supplies apps for consumer robots like iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, InnvoLab’s pet dinasour Pleo or Sony’s Aibo robot dog. The infographic below shows the full range of robots and the types of apps supported.The apps range from a new personality for your Aibo to songs for Pleo to perform. Many of the apps are free but developers receive 70 percent of earnings. The site also provides a knowledge base and programming manuals covering core robots programming topics and access to experts in particular robot models.

Software may be the next frontier for robotics. Traditionally, robots used proprietary operating systems and software but efforts like Willow Garage’s open source ROS (Robot Operating System) are helping to build an infrastructure of libraries for robot capabilities like navigation or vision recognition. The app store is somewhat different since, like mobile apps for the iPhone or Android, the applications need to be developed for a particular model. Extending the functions of robots via apps is a similar approach to that being taken to the Internet of Things by startups like SmartThings.

Grishin Robotics is the brainchild of Dimitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian email and social media portal worth around $7 billion. His Mail.ru co-founder Yuri Milner runs headline-grabbing investment firm DST, whose investments include Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon.

The RobotAppStore is Grishin Robotic’s second investment after Double Robotics, whose slinky telepresence robots seem designed to glide soundlessly around a chic interior. Grishin Robotics will make investments of between several hundred thousand dollars and several million from its $25 million fund. Funding is one of the biggest problems for robot startups. Hardware requires a bigger upfront investment than software, and Venture Capital is still reluctant to make bets on risky hardware projects.

When I interviewed Grishin a few months ago he talked about how he wanted to bring Internet startup culture to the robot world. “Roboticists spend years and years on research. Then years on a prototype. They need to do quicker iterations and get feedback from users. Without user feedback, you can’t create a good product.” Adding apps seems a logical step in that direction.

Of course no driving app is required for a cat to hitch a ride on your Roomba.

The first part of the system is a hub that forms the bridge between the Internet and home devices supporting low-power, wireless protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave. SmartThings adds a set of reference devices to that: a motion sensor, a contact sensor that can be attached to doors and windows, and a low-resolution cloud-controlled camera. You can also use standards-based devices from other manufacturers. Finally, there’s the SmartTag, a keyfob that indicates your presence and also acts as an environment sensor. All kinds of apps will run on top of the basic platform.

“We come at the Internet of Things from the perspective of a bunch of cloud software guys,” says Hagins. “Our tendency was to divorce the intelligence from the devices.” He argues that countering that tendency gives consumers more choice and makes life far easier for developers. “The Internet of things has been held hostage by firmware developers,” he continues. “That’s not a common skill set. A web developer should be able to jump into an IDE, write a smart app that integrates and works with these physical devices, and push a button to deploy.”

The idea of the “smart home” has been around since the 1950s but never became mainstream. The smartphone supplied one of the missing pieces. “We are now carrying the perfect console for the Internet of Things, the smartphone, and 50 percent of consumers in the US and in Europe have one.”

SmartThings polled Kickstarter supporters on what applications they wanted most. DIY home security came out at the top of the list. The definition of security here was broad. It was not just about protecting your home from external threats but also internal threats like a pipe bursting and ruining your wood floors.

Control of entryways was another requirement. “When I use this device as the console for so much of my life, it controls my finances, my communications, my social engagements, restaurant reservations, my music system, my TV. It’s controlling so much and yet I can’t control my front door? We haven’t reinvented the front door in 1,000 years,” Hagins explains.

The next most popular request was care of people and pets. Do you know when your kids get home? Can you tell if the dog’s gotten out of the yard? That your elderly mother has taken her medicine? 

SmartThings’ 6,000 Kickstarter backers will receive the hub and a set of devices in January. The business model hasn’t yet been decided. It may depend on the distribution channels the company chooses. Partners like retailers should be able to add their own value on top of the platform by creating custom application. The company also recently announced a $100,000 contest for software developers and device makers.

SmartThings was founded in 2012, is based in Washington DC, and has a staff of 25.

Bot&Dolly bought three second-hand industrial robots back in 2008. “I had been wondering for years why people weren’t using them to move cameras around,” says Linnell. He ran a small advertising and video production company in San Francisco and had spent his career doing motion graphics and animation. “The first robot found its way into a Louis Vuitton TV commercial a week later.”

Some time later, Linnell got a call from a major Hollywood studio who were shooting a new movie. “It has a lot of impossible shots which you would not be able to do with traditional wire work and is massively ambitious technically,” explains Linnell. It took a year and a half to write a new control system for the robots which could be used on the set.

Bot & Dolly Reel from Bot & Dolly on Vimeo.

Robots were used in film-making as far back as Star Wars but they were always custom-built and required proprietary software and a highly-specialised operator. In the 1980s the computer conquered Hollywood and movies went digital. Bot&Dolly’s founders felt that everything that could be done on a computer had already been done and that it was time to get film-makers back into the real world. So they took Autodesk’s Maya animation software (the industry standard) and wrote tools to allow non-roboticists like animators to run robots.

“Animators were flying cameras around in the virtual world doing Avatar or whatever but they never had the power to be film-makers,” says Linnell. “Now the same animators can move a camera around, or an actor or a prop. Anyone from Pixar can pick up the tool that they use every day, hit an export button and animate a robot.” Bot&Dolly’s software system controls some standard robots like Scout and Iris which weigh from 6 up to 500 kilograms but users can also control their own robots by adding a new model to the software.

Robots can achieve a level of precision, speed and coordination of movement which cannot be matched by humans. “If you want to move a coffee cup six inches across a table at two meters per second and have it stop on a dime, we want to give you a tool to do that without hiring a developer.” Lights, props, explosions, special effects and even the positions of the actors, can be synchronised to the millisecond and coordinated with sound and playback.

Industrial robots don’t usually work in such close proximity with people so safety was a critical issue, especially when those people are expensive movie stars. The system contains checks and safeguards to ensure the robots are on the programmed flight path and uses laser tripwires, pressure mats and other technology to keep track of the humans. High-risk shots are rehearsed at various speeds, building up to real-time.

Bot&Dolly’s robots have also developed showbiz careers of their own. They have appeared in advertisments for Google and star in a Las Vegas show where they act and play music with the Blue Man group. “People are pretty fascinated by large robots,” muses Linnell. “When they move in a highly coordinated way where all the axes are moving at the same time, the movement is incredibly organic and snake-like. It’s a bit disconcerting and amazing even to myself having watched these things for years now. In a theatrical production, we are trying to give them a sense of character, purposely making them sad or proud or scared. You can convey emotion quite easily.”

George Clooney had better watch out. The next generation of stars may be built, not born.

“You can listen more carefully to what’s going on inside the brain, understand the relationship between brain activity and emotions and gain more control over your emotional state,” Garten explains.

An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain by detecting it via contacts on the scalp. As a medical instrument it has long been used to diagnose conditions like epilepsy and dementia as well as determining whether a patient in a coma is brain dead. Brain electrical activity is cyclic in nature, hence the name brainwave. Waves within particular ranges of frequencies, like “alpha” or “beta” waves, have various types of biological significance.

“Beta waves are associated with focus and alpha waves when you are relaxed and calm or quiet the mind,” says Garten. Beta waves are emitted when people are alert, agitated, tense or afraid and have frequencies ranging from 13 to 60 pulses per second in the Hertz scale. When relaxed, the frequency slows down to 7-13 pulses per second, so called “alpha waves”. We spend most of our time in beta mode, but the alpha rhythm is ideal for learning and performing complex tasks. Decreasing the brain rhythm using techniques like meditation and mindfulness also produces significant increases in the levels of beta-endorphins and dopamine.

“This is still first stage technology so what we can detect is still quite limited but the very fact that we can detect it is pretty damn exciting, ” enthuses Garten. “The predominant thing we can detect is alpha waves and beta waves.” The Muse headband measures full brainwave spectrum data from four points on the scalp: the temples and behind the ears. The integrated Brain Health system suggests and runs you through a series of mindfulness-based exercises such as deep breathing suitable for your current brainwave state. “

“Meditators can have a higher resting alpha state. When you are meditating there are a number of brain changes which go on and over time those become persistent so people are able to maintain this calm state of mind. “

At the LeWeb conference in Paris, Garten demonstrated the headband by adding contextual information based on brain activity to an email. “When someone is focussed the characters are small and tight and as they dream or relax or start to laugh the letters have florishes. When you are adding emphasis to something, you are smiling or using a lot of facial movement (which Muse can detect), we make the text bigger.”

Interaxon is certainly not the only player in this space. Neurosky makes an EEG chipset for integration into other devices as well as producing EEG devices which cost around $200. Emotiv has produced a more sophisticated 16-sensor headset which can detect some emotions and thought patterns but it’s a rather more steep $750. Both applications seem to emphasise applications where you directly control things with your brain such as a computer interface.

“We can do really basic controls – one dimension – based on alpha waves and beta waves. When you focus on something it will happen. If there’s a glowing ball in your game and you focus on it (to go into a beta state), it can get bigger, ” says Garten. However, Muse’s objective seems more inner exploration than external control.  As the Buddha said “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you.”

Muse can be pre-ordered on crowd-sourcing site IndieGogo where the project has already raised $253,293.

Mars may once have looked like Earth. It has seasons, polar ice-caps and once supported shallow seas and flowing streams. So did it also once support life? The Mars Curiosity Rover’s chief software engineer Benjamin Cichy just gave a rollercoaster of a talk at LeWeb in Paris on the huge software effort and nail-biting suspense involved in getting the rover to Mars.

NASA has been sending spacecraft to Mars since the 1960s. The first 12 missions failed disastrously. Overall, one-third of all missions to Mars have failed. The Curiosity Rover is the biggest and most complex that NASA has even built, the size of a small car, and it was landed using a completely novel set of technologies.

It took five million lines of code to teach the Rover how to land. A heatshield made from an entirely new material protected the spacecraft during entry. The biggest parachute ever built was used to slow its descent towards the surface down to a mere 300 km per hour. At this breakneck speed the cord was cut and a jetpack attached to the top of the Rover fired up to slow it down to 2.5 km per hour and lower it down towards the surface. Finally the attachment to the jet pack had to be cut before it ran out of fuel and crashed down on top of the rover.

Even worse, there was no way to test if all of this would work together until the landing itself. NASA called it “The 7 minutes of terror.”

The Curiosity Rover’s two-year prime mission is to investigate whether conditions in Mars may have been favorable for microbial life. It is equipped with a 2 meter robot arm, cameras, spectrometer, telescope, chemistry and minerology equipment. It even has a laser which can be pointed as a rock to determine its composition. 

When the Rover has nothing new to report it sends back a packet to Earth. As software engineers do, Cichy inserted his own name and those of the other NASA developers into the 1000 characters available. He also added a quote from Carl Sagan: “We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still.”

We met with Benjamin Cichy for a chat after his presentation for some forward thinking perspective.

VentureBeat: What’s the next step, the closest in time, and the big picture?

Benjamin Cichy: We’re just getting the Rover to be able to explore Mars. It’s been on the surface of mars for four months now. We have a two-year mission, we’re just getting started. What we’re trying to do is to drive across the surface of this crater and get to the base of this mountain that we landed on. We’re going to go read the history book of that mountain —  each layer on that mountain is a chapter in the book of Mars.  We’re going to learn about Mars by reading it from the oldest layer at the bottom, to the most recent layers at the top. That’s what’s next for this mission.

VB: What do you hope to find out?

BC: Whether or not Mars ever could have been a place to have life. Was there a life once on Mars before? Everywhere that we look for life, we know we need to look for three things. An energy source, water an the organic molecules that can bring life — are there building blocks of life on Mars?

VB: Which would be the next planet that you would want to explore, that to you as a scientist think could hold the key to other potential forms of life? 

BC: There’s a lot of other exciting bodies in the solar system and they’re not all planets, they’re moons. Moons of Saturn and moons of Jupiter. One in particular, Europa, is very interesting — in terms of  maybe it’s an environment that could harbor life now; maybe there is a liquid ocean there on Europa. Maybe there’s something interesting to find out on these moons of other planets. What I’d really like to see is some missions to go off explore those other bodies in the solar system and really just look for how pervasive these environments are that could have once supported life.

VB: This is LeWeb and the theme is the “Internet of Things”. How does Mars Curiosity Rover relate to that? 

BC: This really is the first mission that we’ve had since the internet has literally exploded into a hyper connected web: social media, connected devices…. the Curiosity Rover in a way now is the further outpost of a connected device, and on the surface of another planet. What it does is that as Curiosity sends out these images, they are sent all over the world, broadcasted through social media and they get traction elsewhere in the world in a way that they never did before. Images are retweeted thousands of times and often times even before the scientists are able to take a look at them, the general public sees the images. That’s immediate access to the exploration process, participation in the exploration. This is really the first time.

VB: When do you think we’ll be able to have shuttle trips going back and forth between Mars or other planets and the blue planet — Earth? 

BJ: When I talk to people about space, it’s universal: the people want to take that journey of exploration. We won’t be able to do it now, we are taking the baby steps towards understanding what it takes to land on these other bodies, what it takes to get humans up there.

VB: What is the role of private-public partnership in your field? 

BC: When you look at what we need to do to gain low-cost access to space, if we want to go somewhere like Mars, colonize Mars, extend our human presence throughout the solar system, we’re going to need to get much lower cost access to space. One of the great things that we’ve seen through our collaboration with the private industry and the commercial space program is that lower cost access to the space station is achieved through such public-private partnerships. We really need to extend that model, in order to really  gain access to space — low cost access to space is what we will enable us to carry out the rest of our exploration.”

VB: What about communication with and identification of other forms of life? 

BC: Ultimately, we want to find a common language, about exploration, find a common ground. We want to tell them we’re intelligent beings as well.

Benjamin Cichy is on Twitter but says he tweets less than Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity), but you may still want to follow him:  @BenCichy

Interview by contributor Liva Judic; Photo: NASA

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The audio-sharing network SoundCloud, which allows users to share not just music but any audio recording — from company earnings calls to cat impersonations — has just launched a new version, “Next SoundCloud,” at LeWeb in Paris.

“Sound will be bigger than video online,” said CEO Alexander Ljung.

VentureBeat once described SoundCloud as “the biggest music startup you have never heard of.” Since then the company landed a reported $50 million in funding and expanded to touch 180 million users (via web, mobile, and partner widgets) a month, an impressive eight percent of the entire online population. One of SoundCloud’s latest users is the White House, which releases Barack Obama’s key speeches and other content via the site.

The Berlin-based company has long wanted to make sound the sixth sense of the social graph. Flipboard, for example, is using SoundCloud to add audio to its content. SoundCloud’s founders are convinced that sound has the potential to be bigger than video, since we listen to it while doing other things, and it’s much easier to create than video. Ljung talked about how he receives sound recordings (rather than the more traditional photos) of his cousin’s new baby.

Human beings derive richer layers of meaning from a voice than from a written sentence. The background sounds when you call someone give you an instant impression of their situation. “If you want to stop being scared when watching a horror movie, you mute the sound. Sound is the emotional carrier,” Ljung said.

Next SoundCloud adds new discovery features like algorithmic recommendations (“Related Sounds”), curation, and reposts. Reposts are similar to Twitter’s RT feature and are a way to amplify the voice of creators. When you join Soundcloud via Facebook, the service will automatically detect what music and sound creators you like so that you can follow them on SoundCloud as well.

At the core of the service is the Soundcloud waveform; a visual representation that allows listeners to add comments at any point in the recording. It was initially developed by Ljung and co-founder Eric Wahlforss as a way to share a piece of music with someone privately and get feedback.

Wahlforss was an artist creating music, while Ljung was a sound designer for TV and films. “We had both been tech geeks all our lives and were really into the whole social web movement around the time of Flickr. But there was no Flickr for music. There was nothing built for artists,” Llung told me. SoundCloud started off as a set of tools for professional and semi-professional music creators. It’s now the standard way for many DJs and music makers to send and receive music. The Berklee College of Music, one of the premier music schools in the world, runs its online courses entirely from SoundCloud.

The startup world may be obsessed with pivots, but SoundCloud has grown from a tiny Berlin startup to a large company without fundamentally changing its mission. “We want to unmute the web,” Ljung told me in an early interview. “We think the web is very silent at the moment.”

SoundCloud was founded in late 2008 and has raised roughly $66 million in funding. It has 160 employees.

Robots are on their way into your workplace, but you may not be there to complain about it.

“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots. Such robots are already used for tasks which require highly skilled labour and physical presence but where it’s either too dangerous or extremely expensive to use human beings. Aerial and ground-based robots were used in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, to help assess system and structural integrity and evaluate demolition plans. 

According to Beane, the next wave of robotic workers will be in retail, security and remote supervision of manufacturing operations. Telepresence robots like those made by DoubleRobotics (and their human operators) will help you to find the right TV in a retail store or allow an operations supervisor in Chicago to do quality control on an assembly line in Shanghai. 

But robots are just one small slice of our automated future. Google’s driverless car depends on the company’s massive sensing, mapping and data sorting network. Technologies like Big Data, the Internet of Things, Speech Recognition and Machine Learning will make robots smarter but that’s the least of their applications. “Robots will not be a discrete element of the change in the economy, but rather the physically extensible part of this ever-expanding bubble of underlying technology.”

“The next frontier for automation is non-routine work,” explains Beane. “Some of the biggest changes in work could be at the high end. These jobs can be automated without a physical avatar.” So while taxi drivers and farm workers can be replaced by robots operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a human operator, it’s still expensive to manufacture that hardware. “Most automation will be intangible. It’s progressing very rapidly and is much less expensive than physical production. Once you have got good AI, it’s replicable at almost zero cost.” That, gentle reader, means you. Replacing lawyers or software developers or technology journalists with AI could result in the ultimate scalable business. 

These developments raise some rather uncomfortable questions for non-extensible human beings. “Who am I if this robot can do my job?” says Beane. He points to surgeons as an example of highly skilled workers who already work with robots and will face this dilemma. “This is one of the most narcissistic, ego-driven working cultures you can imagine and many of us owe our lives to that culture. Being decisive in the face of imminent death or disability takes an almost inhuman amount of confidence and skill,” he elaborates.

A surgeon’s whole identity is based on incredibly high status, skill and autonomy relative to other professions. “Yet when they use a Da Vinci surgical robot, if they stray outside the surgical field, the robot can be programmed to resist. They get force feedback on the manipulators. Even the best surgeon in the world can be told by the robot, multiple times during an operation ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’”

So is all automation bad for humans? Beane has studied hospitals using Aethon’s Tug robots, which move supplies around the building. No jobs were lost. In hospital pharmacies Tugs were used to deliver drugs. “Pharmacy technicians spend two to four years in schooling and certification but they were spending eighty percent of their time ferrying drugs around. Now the technicians are doing the things they were trained to do and have much higher job satisfaction.”

In general though, if automation significantly reduces the amount of work there is to go around, this could lead to fundamental structural problems in the economy such as higher concentration of wealth, greater inequality, fewer high-paying jobs and lower consumer spending. “We may automate ourselves into a recession,” concludes Beane. 

Grishin is the CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian email and social media portal worth around $7 billion. His Mail.ru co-founder Yuri Milner runs headline-grabbing investment firm DST, whose investments include Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon and who offers $150,000 to every new startup from incubator Y Combinator.

Robotics is still a niche field, dominated by academic research and expensive humanoid showpieces. According to Grishin, that’s about to change. “Robots will become mass-market products. Where we are with robotics now is where personal computers were in the early 1980s.” 

Robots sense, move, consume energy, and often need some basic intelligence. They are complex creatures consisting of sensors, motors, control software, manipulators like robot arms, and a power supply. Due to the cost, hardware innovation has traditionally taken place in large companies. Venture capital is still reluctant to make bets on risky hardware projects. So for robotics startups, the biggest problem is often cash and not technology. However, the cost of components is dropping, and open-source robotics software like Willow Garage’s ROS is making robots more cost-effective. That’s where Grishin comes in.

Grishin Robotics will make investments of between several hundred thousand dollars and several million from its $25 million fund. Grishin’s first investment is Double Robotics, whose slinky telepresence robots seem tailor-made to glide soundlessly around a chic interior. It’s exactly the type of product Grishin is looking for. “It’s very important to bring design into the culture of robotics. Focus on simple problems. If you build a product which costs several thousand dollars, you are done. You have to make it cheaply enough to make it accessible to a mass market,” he said. Hardware startups do have one big advantage over software; people still pay for physical products.

Grishin also wants to bring Internet startup culture to the robot world. “Roboticists spend years and years on research. Then years on a prototype. They need to do quicker iterations and get feedback from users. Without user feedback, you can’t create a good product.”

Robots have toiled for years in manufacturing, medical applications, and the military. Beyond a few outliers like iRobot’s Roomba, few have stepped out of those silos and into our daily lives. To become consumer products they need to operate in the messy world of human beings and not the sterile and structured environment of the factory floor. Our relationship with technology is also a social one, especially once that technology starts to look life-like. MIT’s adorable cardboard robot is an excellent illustration of the future social life of robots.

Education and entertainment are the first sectors Grishin Robotics is targeting, but the fund is open to proposals from all areas of robotics, and from all geographies. Grishin is particularly passionate about robots in education. “Robotics require electronics, programming, hardware. So if students learn robotics, they are learning most of the important skills they need for the future job market.” 

Whether they will be recycling waste, harvesting crops, helping the wheelchair-bound to walk, or watching over the elderly, the robots are coming.

“A year ago, online education was something people would look askance at, as a not completely respectable form of education,” says Daphne Koller, Stanford professor and co-founder of online education site Coursera.”Now it’s something which every institution is figuring out how to use and how quickly.”

Antioch will offer local support and facilitation from an instructor wrapped around Coursera MOOCs.”Students get Antioch credits for an Antioch course,” Koller explains “but the Antioch course makes extensive use of these pre-existing, high-quality, on-line materials. It’s like teaching a course from a very rich text-book”

Coursera has come along way since its launch a mere nine months ago. The site has educated 1.75 million students (I am one of them. I took co-founder Andrew Ng’s 3-month Machine Learning course) and offers 200 courses from 33 top universities. It’s not all IT and business either, although the Introduction to Finance course is the site’s most popular with 130,000 enrolements. The Modern World: Global History since 1760 had 70,000 takers and “Modern & Contemporary American Poetry“, which Koller says is a hard sell even within universities, boasted 33,000 students. One third of students come from the U.S followed by India, Brazil, Russia, Canada and the UK.

Coursera addresses some of the biggest problem in education: the lack of capacity in many areas of the world, the soaring cost of university education in Western countries and the drop-out rate in the U.S, which can have serious financial consequences for students. “If you don’t complete your degree your return on investment is negative, ” Koller states. “It’s important to give people the opportunity to made headway in a low-cost, low-risk way.” In fast-growing economies like India and Brazil where tradition institutions simply cannot scale to meet the demand for graduates, education may take on completely new forms. “Some of those countries will leapfrog brick and mortar institutions in the way that those countries have leapfrogged landlines and moved directly into cellular,” says Koller.

The teaching revolution won’t just happen abroad. Online education will also change how students are educated on-campus in the U.S. “In 10 years or sooner we will look back at the days when we shoveled 300 students into an auditorium to lecture at for 3 hours a week as ‘Wow! I can’t believe we actually did it that way.’ ”

Koller told me that teaching online and offline are completely different paradigms with different strengths. Trying to replicate face-to-face teaching online was never going to work. Online courses have flexible timetables and operate on a different scale. Scale can actually be an advantage online since students form diverse and cooperative communities which help each other to learn. From this point of view “Larger classes are, in fact, better than smaller ones,” Koller explains. 

The Antioch announcement is also the first stage in building Coursera’s business model. Institutions will be able to license Coursera’s materials and integrate them into their own offerings. Other revenue-generating features likely to be offered are charges for course completion certificates and employer referrals, where employers pay for introductions to graduates of relevant Coursera courses. This could be a good investment. The top three data scientists on Big data competition site Kaggle, for example, are all graduates of Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera.

Revenue would also allow Coursera to pay the universities, and by extension, the instructors who create the online course materials. Could Coursera create global professorial “rock stars” in the way that the gramophone allowed musicians to reach a global audience?

While Coursera needs to be self-sustaining and has already raised $16 million in funding, Koller still sees it as primarily a social enterprise whose objective is educating the world. “In 3 years I would like to offer most of the curriculum in most disciplines, from the best universities, to everyone around the world for free. Wouldn’t that be really cool?”

F.ounders took place in Ireland last weekend, and it was quite a scene. Oscar-winning film director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) led one of the pub crawl groups. U2′s The Edge took time out from the music studio to give a talk. The guy sitting beside you on the bus would turn out to have sold Adsense to Google or started Geek Squad. While Kila played, half of Silicon Valley took to the dance floor with their own rather creative interpretation of Irish dancing. Later they tried to play Ireland’s national sport – hurling – without bothering to learn the rules. After several late nights, the founders were talking about sleep as greedily as new mothers.

So how did F.ounder’s organizers (a self-described failed entrepreneur, freelance journalist, and unemployed asset manager), with no background in technology, convince some of the world’s top entrepreneurs to come to an unknown event at the far edge of Europe?

Paddy Cosgrave

“Paddy could sell sand to the Sahara,” was the explanation offered by one wag. The Paddy in question is Paddy Cosgrave, the mop-headed, bespeckled twentysomething  who first came up with the grand vision for F.ounders. “I started a company called MyCandidate that wasn’t much of a success,” Cosgrave says. “If anything, it was a failure.” (The company was, in fact, acquired.)

Cosgrave then started the Dublin Web Summit in 2009. That event hit 4,000 attendees this year, making it the biggest tech conference in Europe. “The first web summit was very small — 150 people — and it was terrible,” he recalls. “The audio-visuals didn’t work. The Wi-Fi didn’t work. The catering was from Domino’s pizza. It cost money. It didn’t run on time. MyCandidate hadn’t worked very well, and the Web Summit hadn’t worked very well. I was a bit depressed and deflated.”

It was at this low ebb that Cosgrave started to think about doing an event for company founders.  “Guys like [Skype founder] Nicholas Zennstrom know what it is like to be up against the wall with three guys, a backpack containing all his possessions, no money, and a crappy apartment in London, ” he says. “That’s the reality for every entrepreneur at some point in their career. So I wondered if you could create an event for founders. There was no company because I never saw it as a business. It was all personally financed.”

Flipboard’s Mike and Marci McCue enjoy pints

Zennstrom was, in fact, the first person to accept an invitation to the inaugural F.ounders. “As for Silicon valley,” Cosgrave said, “I could pretend it was because I was incredibly charming, but in reality, I wrote to so many people that in the end the two most curious guys on the West coast got back to me: Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Chad Hurley of YouTube.” Both Dorsey and Hurley come from Irish backgrounds. Dorsey’s family name was originally Darcy, but an over-enthusiastic emigration officer changed it. With those three tech superstars were on board, persuading others became much easier. 

Cosgrave then recruited flatmate and former asset manager David Kelly and journalist Daire Hickey as his own cofounders. “I was a freelance journalist, ” says Hickey. “I was chasing property developers around the place for the Mail on Sunday. Paddy called me one day around six weeks before the first F.ounders and said, ‘I’ve managed to convince the founders of YouTube, Skype, and Twitter to come to Dublin. Can you help me with publicity and the program?’”

Hickey agreed and then rapidly realized how chaotic the whole project actually was. “Paddy wanted people speaking on gaming and PHP and mobile, and I was meant to run all of this and I had no idea about any of these things,” Hickey says. “But I did convince a lot of media to come to Dublin. There was one point where I turned to Paddy and said we are going to fuck up on a major scale in front of the world’s media and they will all be there going, ‘What the fuck happened? How did we get here? This is the worst event ever!’ We would be embarrassed forever more.” 

Founders try out hurling

But somehow the first F.ounders came together and immediately garnered rave reviews. The design of the conference program was also somewhat unconventional. “I’d never really been to a corporate conference. I went to music festivals, ” explains Cosgrave. “I thought that people really connected with each other and did business deals over a pint or a coffee.”

This led to minimal conference sessions and lots of socializing. This year the formal program included many small group discussions on subjects from robotics to work-life balance, hosted by the founders themselves. It seems to work. Matt Mickiewiecz, cofounder of 99Designs, told me that he met his new business partner at F.ounders 2011. It is rumoured that Uber’s $32 million funding deal went down at the event last year. 

But F.ounders is less about doing immediate business than about human beings — who happen to create companies — building relationships and having fun together. Most tech conferences have an asymmetry between the speakers, investors, journalists, and everyone else. Founders constantly have to perform. In Dublin, they can relax a bit in the company of their peers. As one founder told me, “No offense, but I would really prefer if you [as a journalist] weren’t here.”

F.ounder’s dinner at Christchurch cathedral

The format encourages serendipity. Anna Scally bumped into Moshi Monsters maker Michael Acton Smith, who gave her a rare “Mr. Moshi” card for her 6-year-old-daughter Eva. The astonished Eva wrapped the card in cling-film to protect it before bringing it to school the next day. Engineyard‘s Eamon Leonard bought a Sunbeam Rapier on the street at 2 a.m. because it was the car his dad sold when he was born to help fund his new family. Everplaces CEO Tine Thygesen found herself chatting to Pinterest founder Paul Sciarra during the pub crawl. When she finally asked for his business card, he looked at her and said, “But can’t we just hang out?” At F.ounders, they probably can. 

“It’s been a fun and difficult project,” said Eva Ho, a Factual vice president and a self-confessed health nut. “Nutritional data and ingredients are really difficult to normalize. After tackling CPG products, which we think will power a load of really wonderful couponing and commerce applications, we are moving on to things like electronics.” 

When it comes to data, both Ho and founder Gil Elbaz know their stuff. Their last company, Applied Semantics, provided the basic technology for Google’s AdSense, which earns Google close to $10 billion a year.

The new ingredients list allows developers to exclude products containing high fructose corn syrup or find those with green tea, which rather surprisingly includes everything from shampoo to dog treats. Developers can also query calories, level of saturated fat, cholesterol, sugars, sodium, and eight other parameters. If you want to avoid a mid-morning sugar slump, check out the sugar content of popular breakfast cereal brands as shown on the chart below. Factual has also added EAN-13 data, a 13-digit code used to identify retail products worldwide, in addition to UPC, the US standard.

Factual currently provides clean and structured data sets on places (Facebook was the company’s first customer), restaurants, healthcare providers, hotels, and consumer products. The company recently added real-time updates, which allow anyone to contribute data to a particular data set and have it validated by Factual’s machine learning algorithms.

“You can say, ‘This product is not kosher.’ We will then make our best guess on how that new piece of data effects the model,” says Ho. “The update gets pushed out into the production-ready data set in less than 10 seconds.”

Factual spent three years developing its automated processed for structuring and cleaning up data sets. The data comes from partners (with which Factual has many “data swap” deals), users, and the web.

“We look at millions of web pages and extract facts using machine learning and other techniques, ” Ho explains. “These signals are not always obvious. From a Foursquare check-in you can deduce hours of operation. We are not just scraping opening hours from a website.” Each new input is assessed based on the source. Trusted sources get higher weight. The raw data is turned into facts by mapping to a known semantic data type like a phone number or a zip code. This new fact is matched against the existing database to eliminate duplication and stored if it is supported by multiple, trusted sources. 

Factual’s data sets are currently most commonly used in local search, applications with geographical components, and e-health. Within large companies, they are used for CRM, credit scoring, supply chain analysis, and customer targeting. “What’s really fun is seeing a large financial services company using it both on the enterprise side for analytics as well as building, say a restaurant application,” says Ho.”So we are powering their digital initiatives as well as internal operational efficiencies. That’s been a little surprising for us.” 

So what’s the next big trend in the data business? “Companies will realize that by pooling their information, they will create a new data platform on which lots of new applications can sit,” says Ho. “In the past, the CPG manufacturers only had to worry about their data being published in Amazon and drugstore.com.

“Now there are thousands of mobile apps out there and their data is completely mis-represented. The pictures are wrong, the descriptions are wrong. If you want your data to be accurate, go to one central hub which holds it and cleans it.” 

Factual wants to be the Switzerland of data: tidy, neutral, and very likely rich. It may just get there. 

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“I love doing hand stands and other inverted postures,” Sevenoaks says. “It makes me feel like a kid again.” 

Sevenoaks is the instigator of Nerd Yoga, a weekly yoga class in the Volkskrantgebouw, which houses 300 startups and creative businesses in the hip district of East Amsterdam. He’s also the cofounder of mobile shopping startup Spaaza. “We try to focus on the upper body and back in Nerd Yoga,” explains Sevenoaks. “People who sit in front of computers all day tend to have really bad posture.”

I dropped into a Nerd Yoga class several months ago and encountered a typically unbendy group of coders struggling through a demanding session. Most were beginners. A week ago, the group’s physical prowess had dramatically improved with half of the class time devoted to difficult inverted postures like headstand and handstand.

Teacher Sinead Daly told me that the group was very ambitious and consequently has progressed faster than her other classes.

“Once they got into it, they really got into it,” she says. Sevenoaks points to the popularity of Reddit fitness (207,000 members) as a testament to geeks’ interest in health and fitness. “It’s primarily geeks, and they are completely obsessed, as nerds often get.”

So how did yoga mats become quietly de rigeur for developers in the Dutch capital?  At first glance yoga and technology seem like uneasy bedfellows. Yoga’s spiritual image appears at odds with the highly scientific mindset of the software developer, a mainly male group not noted for its athleticism.

James Bryan Graves runs the wildly popular Hackers and Founders Amsterdam and has been attending Nerd Yoga classes for six months. “The startup team I worked with in the U.S. was very much the stereotypical, overweight, frumpy dudes. After a successful release, we would have a pizza party, and that’s how we celebrated our success. We would reward our developers with crappy food,” Graves muses. ”One guy had back surgery because his back had gotten so weak from doing development for 10 years that he literally couldn’t walk one day. Every time I go to yoga, I think about this particular individual and how I don’t want to end up like that.” 

Nerd Yoga emphasizes the physical aspects of yoga, although Sevenoaks and Graves both acknowledge that they feel calmer and experience improved clarity of thought in their work after a class. Other startup yogis approach their practice in a different way. 

Eleanor “Nell” Watson is the CEO of Poikos, which makes a 3D body measurement system. But in typical techie style, she was somewhat disconnected from her own body. “I’m a perceiver rather than a senser. I don’t see through my own two eyes but through my mind’s eye.”

Poikos participated in Startup Bootcamp Amsterdam‘s accelerator program this year. One of the startup mentors offered to teach a free weekly yoga session. [Full disclosure: That startup mentor was me].

“Yoga wasn’t something that I had really considered before,” she says. “I imagined getting into very strange positions, like an Indian version of Twister, but I found it very quiet, very peaceful, an idyll I could retreat to once a week to get away from the madness of the startup world.”

Watson also noticed that yoga, and in particular breathing exercises (pranayama), helped her to focus on one thing at a time rather than flicking through a relentlessly expanding to do list.

“I would be interested in seeing studies conducted on the physical and psychological well-being of anyone trying to start up a company. It’s a hell of a stress on the body,” Watson says. “It’s easy to lose your grip on stuff, physically and mentally. Yoga is a powerful way of re-centering oneself and putting oneself back in the body and also in the current situation that you are in and not in the situation that you are worrying about.” 

Oscar Kneppers echoes this sentiment. He runs rival startup accelerator Rockstart. “Detachment is the main benefit of yoga for everyone, but especially when you are in a startup accelerator where the pressure is high and time is running out.”

Kneppers is a hardcore yogi. He gets up before 4am, has a cold shower and completes a demanding 2.5 hour Kundalini yoga practice. He no longer drinks alcohol or eats meat. Rockstart hosted yoga classes and startups in the program often began the day with wheatgrass shots but, ironically, this was not Knepper’s idea. “I was just being who I am and talking about yoga the way I do, and Don [his cofounder] said, ‘Why don’t we do this in Rockstart?’”

“Yoga helps you to carry more weight if you need to and get rid of the pain more easily afterwards,” Kneppers explains. “Ten years ago, running my first company, I would get completed immersed and have to drink myself out of it. Now I can fully engage and fully commit, but the moment I turn around and walk away, it’s out of my head. In most cases this is the founder’s first startup, and it’s not going to be their last. Yoga helps you to look at what you are doing from a distance, to have the intention to go in a specific direction without attaching yourself to the end result.”

When I asked Amsterdam’s startup yogis about the barriers to getting other techies involved in yoga they explained that yoga’s image was “hippy-dippy,” “too spiritual,” “not physical enough,” and, perhaps mostly damningly, “for grandmothers and mothers-to-be.”

Then there’s the early rising. “The best time to do yoga is early in the morning,” says Kneppers. ”If you have been coding until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., you don’t want to get up at 6 a.m. You may have to give up things that you have programmed yourself to think that you need, like working long hours.” 

I’m a former software developer, and when I teach techies, the physical impact of sitting behind a keyboard all day is all too obvious: tight shoulders, rigid hips, back problems, and disordered breathing. Even more ominous for knowledge workers are the mental effects of these physical problems. The ancient yogis did not, in fact, believe in a separation between the mind and the body. They saw the mind as simply the most subtle aspect of the body and vice versa. So everything that happened in the body was considered to affect the mind. Science has started to confirm this whether it’s evidence that exercise makes you smarter or that Alzheimer’s is the ultimate food scare.

Larry Wall famously listed the three great virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris. If there’s one thing engineers love, it’s efficiency, and yoga can be a highly efficient way of conditioning body and mind. It can help you to cope with stress, think more clearly and generally become more light-hearted.

“Kundalini yoga is not engineered for people sitting in a grotto and contemplating,” Kneppers concludes. “It’s engineered for people in this world.” 

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The top buzzwords were ”Big Data” (133 mentions), ”Augmented Reality” (106 mentions), ”OpenGraph” (88 mentions) and ”Social Discovery” (72 mentions). So if you are a Big Data developer who’s a dab hand at AR interfaces, you are golden.

In terms of job areas, 33 percent of vacancies are for developers followed by 25 percent marketeers. Product managers trail in at 13 percent implying that marketing your startup product is more important than designing it well.

Other findings were, unsurprisingly, that the average startup job salary is much lower than a banking IT salary, £36,344 as opposed to £51,158. In compensation, 27 percent of startups currently hiring in the UK are offering equity to new starters but given new data on how 3 out of 4 VC-backed startups fail, you might want to ask your potential new employer to show you the money.

Despite the apparent tech boom in the UK as elsewhere, 1 in 10 Computer Science graduates remain unemployed. They might want to look further afield to the Republic of Ireland. In spite of the country being in the IMF program, my sources there tell me that there’s more or less full employment in the tech sector. Go west young man.