NASA has thrown a $125,000 grant at a research project to bring 3D-printed pizza into our reality.

Check it out:

That’s a prototype printing chocolate. I know it sort of looks like a fraught-with-science version of a Willy Wonka movie prop, but that machine is actually synthesizing chocolate from cartridges containing sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein, etc.

The NASA-funded project comes from mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor of Systems & Materials Research Corporation. Coincidentally, Contractor was also a speaker at the recent Humans to Mars conference.

Naturally, this kind of food replication would be a great way to survive in space or on other planets, where plant-growing natural resources are scarce. But it’s also a great idea for feeding hungry people around the world when economics, famine, or war come between people and sustenance.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” the engineer told Quartz. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”

Here’s a diagram of how the contraption works, courtesy of Systems & Materials Research Corporation:

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

There’s been a lot of debate around what the right age to be an entrepreneur is, and if there’s really a correlation between age and running a successful business. Well, we have some new input for you on those questions: We met three extremely smart entrepreneurs – aged 13, 16, and 22 – on a youth panel at TiEcon 2013, and they’ve been up to some cool stuff.

Jordan Casey, 13

If you think Mark Zuckerberg was young when he started Facebook, wait till you meet Jordan Casey, a self-taught programmer and the 13-year-old founder and chief executive of Casey Games from Waterford, Ireland. He hands you his business card with a smirk on his face and tells you, “I run an independent mobile video game company called Casey Games.”

His inspiration was Club Penguin, a Flash multiplayer game. “I saw some of the users of the game were making websites about it, so I thought this could be a fun hobby, and so I went to the store and bought a book on programming,” said Casey, who started programming when he was all of nine. A year later he started working on programming projects and got himself into building games.

Casey founded his company when he was 12 and already has four mobile games and one web game on the market. His first game, Alien Ball vs. Humans, which released in February 2012, was No. 1 on the app store game charts in Ireland. Casey has built key partnerships with Adobe and Microsoft, who provide him with free software and support his initiative. He has one staff member, a designer, and he tells us, “My parents have to be the directors of the company because I’m too young.”

His parents are super proud of him, and they accompany him to conferences and events. “At first my parents didn’t understand what I was really doing. Instead of making games, they thought I was playing games,” said Casey. “Once they realized what I was doing, they became very supportive of me.”

Tanay Tandon, 16

Nick D’Aloisio made waves when he sold Summly, his news summarization app, to Yahoo for a whopping $30 million this past March. That put 16-year-old Tanay Tandon, founder and chief executive of Clipped, a content summarization app, in the spotlight.

Although Clipped provides an output similar to Summly, they use a different approach, Tandon told VentureBeat. “Summly has taken a keyword based approach to summarization, while Clipped is more grammatical,” he said. The Clipped algorithm “analyzes how humans might actually read content” based on “subject-predicate-object-pattern-like sentences” to draw summaries.

A sophomore at Cupertino High in Cupertino, Calif., Tandon founded Clipped in January 2013, and he’s already seeing some traction. To date, he’s had 130,000 downloads for his iOS and Android apps, with 10 million summaries provided. He was incubated at Teens in Tech and is now “in talks” with some investors.

He got started with programming on Android apps and wants to study “something computer science,” going forward. “People would drop out but I value education. I definitely want to go to college,” said Tandon, who wrote pattern recognition algorithms for his app from the ground up. When he catches time between school and his startup, Tandon like to play tennis.

Aron Beierschmitt, 22

Aron Beierschmitt founded his company, Foundation Games, in 2010 when he was 19. He employs 15 people and has offices in San Francisco, Philippines, and Sydney today. He has raised $850,000 in funding from angel investors, including the founders of Treyarch – the guys behind the popular Call of Duty series – and some other veterans from the gaming industry.

Interestingly, he stumbled upon his very first investor, Steve Vachani, on LinkedIn. “I took advantage of the early LinkedIn ability to send a lot of InMails without paying for them,” said Beierschmitt.

So far, Beierschmitt and his team have developed five iOS games and are working on three more. “Most of our titles have seen typically 500 to a million downloads” with no real marketing, Beierschmitt told VentureBeat. Lumi, the team’s second release, was featured as Apple’s app of the week; it retails for 99 cents and has seen over a million downloads.

“Born to develop, produce, and sale [sic] amazing products,” reads his LinkedIn profile. Beierschmitt, a firm believer in “putting out really really high quality” games, says, “I aspire to publish my own network.” He attended a startup accelerator program at YetiZen and recently earned a degree in political science from the University of Tennessee. He draws inspiration from his dad, loves to run and ski, and met his girlfriend at a physics lab.

Photo (left to right): Jordan Casey, Tanay Tandon, Aron Beierschmitt. Photo Credit: Chitra Rakesh/VentureBeat

Debbie Landa is CEO of Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar.

With the Under the Radar conference coming up this week, I’ve been speaking to a lot of startups about how they’re managing to get their messages out to business decision makers. The conference is all about how the consumerization of IT is changing how startups design and market their products. And most recently I spoke to Aubrey Sabala (pictured, VP of marketing for “smart data” company Sailthru, to find out how she’s experiencing this change, both as the marketing lead of a startup and as a buyer of technology from other startups. Sabala (pictured below) pulls from quite a bit of experience — she’s previously worked on innovative marketing programs for some of the largest brands in technology, including Google, Facebook, Digg, and AOL and helped lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing Team, serving as the executive producer for Facebook Live.

Here’s what she had to say.

Debbie Landa: We’ve heard from the likes of Gartner and others that CMOs are quickly outpacing CIOs in terms of technology spending. What types of technologies are you looking for today?

Aubrey Sabala: We’re very data driven here at Sailthru. We want to ensure that our marketing spend is going to the right place and that leads have been qualified. Software that can give us a very informed picture of how our marketing campaigns are converting, or who’s landing on our website — more than Google Analytics — is worth investing in. Our top priority is very accurately quantifying the success of the campaigns we’re working on. Of course, we also leverage Sailthru ourselves, which provides a lot of actionable insight.

Landa: How much of your overall budget is tied to technology purchases?

Aubrey Sabala, Sailthru

Sabala: Because we create a marketing solution, we fall on the lower end, maybe 10-15% — but we expect that to increase. My guess is that the average CMO would say about 30%.

Landa: Do you find yourself competing with your CIO for IT budget?

Sabala: To date, no. It’s more of a challenge at other companies, but we’re spared from some of that drama because many of our tools are built in-house. One thing is true regardless: You need to be able to justify technology purchases. In B2C companies, that’s harder because consumer marketers build out social channels, which is not tied to sales acquisition in a direct or measurable way.

Landa: If you could wave a magic wand and solve specific business problems with technology, what would those be? Where should tomorrow’s entrepreneurs be putting their energy?

Sabala: Today there are many different touchpoints, channels, and data sources that businesses need to connect in order to understand customers. Integrating them is really challenging, and getting insights from them to inform your marketing efforts is even more difficult. However, it’s worth it for organizations of every size and it’s the very challenge we’re solving with Smart Data. I’d also love turnkey customized landing pages that tie into Salesforce so that we could go out and market directly. I’d also love to optimize the sales funnel even further so that we can really identify the best qualified leads — at the right time — so that we can turn them into sales.

Landa: How long does the typical buying process take, from initial pitch to deployment, and what does your vetting process look like?

Sabala: We want to make sure we’re investing wisely, so we ask a lot of questions and always ask for customer testimonials, referrals, case studies, etc., all of which adds time to the process. We want to know if we have the infrastructure in place, that the value outweighs the cost, that it’s solving a real pain, and that we’re buying solutions that will still work in the long-term. We always ask to speak with vendors’ customers to ask the pivotal question: “When you approach the time to renew and you’re evaluating your budget, would you renew or look elsewhere?” All that said, we’re typically able to deploy technology in a month or so.

Landa: What are the biggest challenges associated with choosing new startups to work with?

Sabala: Vendors need to be able to show that they’re proven; that means more data points and more case studies— as a vendor, it’s a challenge we face as well. Vendors should strive not to pitch, but to build trust and credibility. Both vendors and customers should be asking the right questions, connecting the dots with other customers with similar challenges, and diving deeper.

Landa: Many businesses make major purchasing decisions by looking at analyst reports and benchmarks. How important are those reports — like Gartner magic quadrants, Forrester Waves, etc. — in your buying decision?

Sabala: I take them into consideration, but it really depends on the size of the company. Many worthwhile startups don’t make the cut because they’re not big enough. I look at it like hiring an employee: Everything that’s on paper gives you a starting point, but the real story is in the backchannel conversations. Don’t stop at the standard, traditional sources like analyst houses — be proactive with technology exploration! When you think about adopting a technology solution, you want to be able to scale and invest in the long haul. Think more about the problems you’ll have in a year or two and evaluate solutions that solve those problems.

Landa: Why do you attend events like Under the Radar?

Sabala: I think that if you’re not looking at the future of these technologies, you’re already two steps behind. It’s a forward-thinking challenge to participate with entrepreneurs that are innovating in various spaces. I always leave these types of events thinking, “Wow, we will have some very cool tools in our toolbox in the near future!” 

Meet Aubrey Sabala and hear how technology factors into her marketing strategies at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today using special discount code VentureBeatVIP.

For more insight from our Under the Radar series, see our previous stories:

• 12 enterprise mobility startups to watch
• Rackspace CMO to vendors: ‘Be smarter than me’
• How to get a top 10 website to pay attention to your startup
• How to capture Cisco’s attention: An exclusive interview with Biren Gandhi

Top photo of a nervous businessman from Shutterstock.

The brain is a fascinating thing. It morphs over time, forming new connections, assimilating new information, and forging new pathways.

According to this video we stumbled across, our brains are also evolving in a new way thanks to technology.

If you’ve ever spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it, you probably already assume, as the clip notes, that Google sort of acts as an external hard drive for your own gray matter.

But does that mean we’re getting dumber? Or just that we’re thinking smarter, not harder?

Want more tech-brain mashup science? Check out our posts on how brain waves could replace passwords, why the Obama administration is spending $100 million to map the human brain, and how this group of scientists captured a video of a thought being formed in the brain.

Source: AcademicEarth
Image credit: Liz Henry/Flickr

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

SAN FRANCISCO — The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities.

So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above).

Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law.

These exchanges bring a level of transparency and openness to the insurance market that hasn’t been easy to find until now, Sivak said. The new exchanges will be large, consumer-facing marketplaces, and the insurance industry hasn’t been exactly nimble about embracing the latest consumer tech trends — so there will be lots of opportunities for startups to bridge the gap.

They’ll increase competition, because people will be able to see and compare insurance plans more easily. Now, any qualified, licensed insurer will have access to a market of potential customers via the exchanges.

Also, he said, the act will bring 30 million to 50 million more people into the ranks of the insured, creating a new pool of customers to market to. And there will be lots of data.

“You have no idea what’s possible, and you have no idea what people are going to come up with, so that’s what I’m really looking forward to,” Sivak said.

Apart from the ACA, Sivak also said government has an important role to play in facilitating health care innovation.

Government can help spur technology in three ways, he said:

• Facilitation: ”Governments at all levels are interested in seeing citizens do great things.” At the federal, state, and local levels, he said, there’s a lot of interest in helping people create new ventures, improve existing health care systems, or create new systems.
• Convening: “We’re really, really good at getting people together,” Sivak said. So if a big problem needs tackling, governments are well-positioned to gather people to talk about it.
• Incentivizing: Governments can be very effective at spurring change through relatively small incentives or through mandates. For example, he said, the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) stagnated until it was mandated by the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

“Just think about that: A small government intervention has caused EMR adoption to go from under 15 percent to over 70 percent,” Sivak said.

What’s more, government sits on top of a lot of data. Sivak estimates that HHS has about 1,000 data sets, 400 of which have been catalogued on the agency’s HealthData.gov website. Some of the datasets aren’t free, though HHS is working to bring the costs down. So there’s a long way to go still.

Sivak, a former entrepreneur who cut his teeth in San Francisco during the dot-com days, says his attitude toward government’s role is a new perspective for him.

“The only time I interacted with government was when I needed to file my incorporation paperwork with the State of California,” he said of his experience in the 1990s — not atypical of many tech entrepreneurs.

But if he’s right, techies — at least those who want to do business in the health care field — would do well to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on in government.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

These days, users require intuitive, responsive, and interactive apps that scale to high volumes of data (and users!). While developers work overtime to keep up, they are often locked into programming models that result in lackluster apps.

Here are five ways developers can break the cycle of simply meeting user demand and get ahead of the game to create apps that users actually want to use.

Single-page applications

In traditional web applications, every click or interaction causes a page refresh. This is not an effective way for a user to move through an application.

The single-page architecture is shifting the paradigm and allowing developers to build more fluid and interactive applications. To validate user input, traditional web applications send the user input to the server, validate the input, then return results to the user. Single-page applications validate most content on the client, providing a vastly more interactive and responsive user experience.

Web browsers and mobile devices provide powerful environments that allow for rich user interaction. For example, single-page application can leverage the capabilities of a mobile device to deliver a rich user experience, utilizing the camera, accelerometer, and/or GPS to specific and contextual experiences.

Single-page applications can use powerful visual components to present information in the format selected by the user. For example, a user may want to see data in a chart or in a table; a single page application can switch between these representations without any interaction with the server.

The plethora of devices with varying sizes has catalyzed the concept of responsive design, where applications adjust how information is displayed and which content is displayed for the size and characteristics of the device. Single-page applications are far better suited for creating responsive applications because the client can make independent decisions based on the device capabilities.

Separating client and server

Most Java applications look terrible because the application architecture does not allow UI developers to collaborate effectively with server-side developers. By exposing services and creating a clear separation between the client-side and the back-end services, developers can create much richer applications.

A client application, written with HTML or HTML and Java Script, execute server-side functionality. Client developers, with skills in graphic design and user interaction, leverage the efforts of server developers, whose expertise are in scalability and reliability, which provides a powerful combination and results in superior applications. A clear separation between client and server, often using a REST interface and/or JSON payloads, allows both sets of developers to focus efforts in their areas of expertise.

Realtime push

Historically, web apps are updated only when the user refreshes or moves to a new page. While the user views the page, the data may have changed on the server, thus the user is often seeing outdated information. JVM-based apps can solve this issue using real-time push, which updates the data in real time. In the case of apps like Google Docs this means instant collaboration.

Rich user experiences are created with instant content updates. Instant messaging and text messaging are two solutions founded on push notification that have changed how we communicate. Map applications are much more useful when merged with realtime traffic data. Vital business applications require notification to key decision makers, whose business successes require timely information.

Data is being collected with growing frequency and volume, providing new opportunities to provide consolidated results that can impact our immediate decisions. For example, the Waze mobile maps application collects the current speed and location of other drivers and adjusts your route based on that information.

Scale predictably

Web applications must scale to meet demand. The “Oprah Effect,” where an application or website is brought to its knees by an onslaught of traffic after being mentioned by a prominent source, has crashed more than one web application. The solution must be implemented so the application can scale to meet increased user demand, increased data volume, or other increases in activity.

Most developers build their applications on top of low-level concurrency models like threads. In order to manage concurrency, they rely on locks, which block threads and are particularly difficult to compose, leading to incredibly difficult and unpredictable issues such as deadlocks and live locks.

Using high-level concurrency models like Akka’s Actors enables developers to build high volume systems that scale as needed. Developers can write applications that block threads only where they absolutely must, and instead rely on asynchronous execution to maximize the utilization of the physical resources on a single machine or many.

Create a stateless architecture

Since the advent of CORBA, the idea of being able to create clusters of servers that replicate state across them has been the holy grail of distributed architectures. JEE specified entity beans that would fulfill a similar role. For performance and complexity reasons, we have since given up on such architectures and instead focused on using external, denormalized stores to cache our data for multiple servers, but even that comes with the cost of eventual consistency and manual arbitration of colliding updates across nodes.

Have we have finally reached the point where it is okay to say that stateless sessions is the only way to go for high-performance, distributed architectures?

Stateless web applications have become really important for building fault-tolerant and scalable systems. This allows web requests to be transparently load-balanced across a number of servers. Without any state contained in those servers the web tier becomes elastic and can easily deal with failures. Additional servers can be added as demand increases.

Ultimately, the world is witnessing a fundamental phase shift in the way applications are built and designed. Keeping these new basics in mind will enable the creation and deployment of truly scalable and robust applications; furthermore, you’ll be able to leverage new open source tools to build these systems on the JVM.

Get ready for a new era of reactive applications, and happy hacking!

Derek Henninger is vice president, engineering, at Typesafe, a developer tools company focused on Scala, Java, Akka, and the Play Framework.

Image credit Shutterstock/leedsn

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

The mechanics of the innovation are simple and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view.

But thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh

As The Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent.

Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively.

This means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true:

1. If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”
2. Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past 10 years.”
3. And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”

There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: if the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission.

Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers.

“We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today.

Image credits: Twitter icons

SAN FRANCISCO — Don Jones is a vice president for Qualcomm Life who’s on a mission to make the future of health care a reality.

Qualcomm Life houses a healthcare investment fund, grooms master’s degree programs in wireless health, and sponsors the Tricorder X Prize, dubbed “health care in the palm of your hand” (and apparently a product Jones proposed himself.)

Jones is also leading the Scripps Clinical Efficacy Center for trials involving connected clinical solutions. As we’ve heard throughout HealthBeat 2013, entrepreneurs should understand clinical workflows to test the adoptability of their health technology solutions before attempting to make inroads into a system already fraught with problems.

Jones was joined onstage by Susan Dentzer, a former health correspondent for the PBS News Hour and senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The two compared the coming changes in health care technology to a shift as drastic from horse and buggy to cars.

But what exactly does the future hold? According to Jones and Dentzer, it’s health care on demand.

Jones said, “Once you have health care on demand, you don’t want to go back … you won’t accept anything less.”

Both payers and providers will have to compete to attract patients, thus shifting markets based on new value propositions facilitated by technology. In rapid-fire succession, Jones described a system that is “smarter, faster, cheaper, more convenient, and more transparent for the patient.”

And Qualcomm isn’t just talk. The company has partnered with Stanford University to offer these types of connected health care services to all of its employees, located in 100-plus locations operating on a 24/7 schedule.

Qualcomm Life is focused on making “immediate response” something embraced by both technology companies and the healthcare industry alike by dictating the terms for what a future health system should be.

Photo: Don Jones of Qualcomm Life and Susan Dentzer of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Streaming music service Pandora is launching a new radio station today that features songs from albums that aren’t available for sale yet.

The station, called Pandora Premieres, features a slew of unreleased music, interviews and other extra content from both established and emerging artists about a week before you can buy them via retail stores. You can listen to those songs as often as you’d like in any order, (so basically, its on-demand), and kicks off with music from John Fogerty and Laura Marling. The content itself receives a refresh once a week, in which case you’ll have to either buy the album to continue hearing those previously unreleased tracks or wait for them to get played on your custom smart radio stations.

The move marks an important step in Pandora’s attempt to become just as vital to the music industry as the traditional radio stations were decades earlier. I’m curious about whether Pandora is paying for its users to play these tracks, or if Pandora Premieres is primarily a promotional vehicle that music companies can pay for to help sell new albums. And given Pandora’s problems with generating enough revenue, I’m guessing they probably aren’t paying for on-demand licensing, which is far more expensive than the digital radio fees.

If Pandora is getting paid for what it plays on Pandora Premieres (at least in part) by the music industry, then it could prove to be an extremely smart move, too — and one that traditional radio has turned into a source of revenue. This is also something that Grooveshark is exploring with the launch of their new Grooveshark radio service that debuted last month.

Navigating to the new station reveals that Pandora is maximizing its advertising by pulling in a sole sponsor, as you can see from the screenshot above. Beyond that, Pandora’s Tim Westergren only had this to say about the new station in a company blog post:

“Pandora Premieres is also a new and unique vehicle for artists, both established and emerging, to reach and expand their audience. Seeing the impact of Pandora on the careers of working musicians continues to be one of the most gratifying parts of this experience.”

We’ve reached out to Pandora for clarification about its strategy for Pandora Premieres and will update this post with any new information we find out.

With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, we could focus on many things: hardware, flashy games, and entertainment options. But one aspect really gets me fired up: Developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Wired reports that the game developers and studios can tap Azure for all kinds of things. Microsoft isn’t going to force developers to use the cloud platform, but it will certainly push them to do so.

The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to the Internet to play games, but it does generally require an online connection. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost a game’s power, a web connection will be necessary to play that game.

Why Azure?

Microsoft has been building Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier.

Microsoft opened up Azure for pure cloud infrastructure use in June. It now competes with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Azure applications in gaming

Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power.

The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One is making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements would be synced and available wherever you are. You would also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches would be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session.

Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better.

Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud.

“It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.”

Screenshot via Microsoft

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — What do the most innovative doctors and nurses really think about the new wave of medical technology?

While investors and entrepreneurs are making noise about opportunities in the space, health care providers are often the silent, reluctant partner. But to continue to stay at the top of their field, providers are keeping tabs on innovation and new products.

So we invited clinicians from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University to HealthBeat to discuss the new technology they are piloting in their hospitals, and the gaps that entrepreneurs can fill.

“One of our big challenges is making ourselves accessible,” said Faye Karnavy Sahai, vice president of innovation at Kaiser Permanente (pictured above, right). But Kaiser has built its brand around innovation at the front lines of healthcare, and claims its 17,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses are exposed to new ideas across the spectrum.

“We also work independently with a lot of entrepreneurs and give them advice,” added Sumbul Desai (above, center), a doctor who works as the associate chief medical officer for strategy and innovation at Stanford.

To guide investment in the space, Stanford offers startup founders the opportunity to pilot their technology. A number of innovation fellowships are also available, and the hospital works closely with the accelerator program StartX Med.

“Every morning we’ll meet with folks in the entrepreneurial community — we love doing it and are super invested,” Desai said.

What are the biggest challenges for health entrepreneurs?

Desai said one of the biggest issues is that entrepreneurs don’t do their homework. There are unique regulatory, privacy and compliance issues involved with health care — HIPAA compliance is just the beginning. In addition, founders aren’t as aware as they should be about the competitive market.

The other challenge is integration. Desai stressed that new products need to work well with existing workflows. Kaiser is working on centralizing its electronic medical records (EMR) system, echoing a nationwide trend. To that end, Kaiser inked a deal with Epic Systems, the electronic health record company that health entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with.

“Epic is the cornerstone of how we look at our data,” said Karnavy Sahai.

Epic has been criticized for hampering innovation due to its closed system that shuts out third parties. But it has a dominant position in hospitals, and isn’t wise to ignore.

Another issue the speakers raised is that entrepreneurs can often get too fixated on the idea, and not consider the organization that they plan to fit into. It’s easier said than done. So for this reason, startup founders like ConsultingMD’s Owen Tripp are opting to team up with physicians.

And the biggest opportunities?

One of the hottest areas is patient care, but Desai warned that it’s “just one piece of the puzzle.”

Consumer technology is slowly making its way into hospitals. Kaiser is experimenting with putting real-time location data in sponges to prevent them from being left in patients’ bodies during surgery (and producing an ensuing publicity nightmare). In addition, nurses can check in using location proximity badges, making it far easier to track their movements.

Some of the less “sexy” areas include reimbursement and data analysis.

“Big data and analytics will be huge — expect to see predictive diagnostic capabilities,” said Desai. Much of this data will be mined from fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone’s Up, which are used by patients as part of a “quantified self” trend.

When asked about the one piece of technology that would be most beneficial, Desai urged innovators in the audience to think big. Physicians need ”an overall digital experience,” she explained, that will clearly list out patient visits, second opinions, virtual visits, and so on.

“Too often we see separate small companies and pockets of innovation right now,” she said.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

The mad scientists at Microsoft have finished building their next-gen creation and finally unveiled it to the world today. It’s a multimedia powerhouse that is ready to go head-to-head with Sony’s PlayStation 4. The Internet is buzzing with a confusing mess of details, so we decided to gather together everything we know about the Xbox One and post it below.

We cover everything in this post, but you can get expanded coverage on everything from our Xbox One hub page here.

The basics

The Xbox One is Microsoft’s all-in-one living-room device. In fact, Microsoft confirmed it called the new system “Xbox One” because it is supposed to be the one device people will need for their entertainment. That means video games are just one small piece of its capabilities.

Basic info:

• Price: Microsoft didn’t specify
• Release: “Later this year”
• No backward compatibility
• Requires Kinect
• Single-player games don’t require an always-online connection
• Used games will work but may require a fee
• Xbox Live is back
• Gamertags will transfer
• Friend-list limit raised to 1,000

Questions we still have:

• What happens to Xbox Live Arcade purchases?
• Do used games work?
• Is there a fee for used games?
• How much is that fee, and what does it get us?

We’re working to answer all of these questions, and we’ll post the answers here as we find them.

Technical capabilities

Microsoft’s Xbox uses an accelerated processing unit, or APU, from AMD that combines the CPU and GPU on a single chip for increased performance. This is nearly identical to what the PS4 is running.

Xbox technical specifications:

• 64-bit architecture
• 8GB of RAM
• USB 3.0
• 5 billion transistors
• Blu-ray disc drive
• 500 GB hard drive
• HDMI Out/In
• Ethernet and Wi-Fi

You can read our detailed breakdown of Xbox One’s capabilities in our story that goes under the hood here.

The controller

Over the last seven years, the Xbox 360 controller slowly became an industry standard for console shooters. That standard will continue with some minor tweaks and improvements.

Here are list of features for the new controller:

• Fundamentally the same as the Xbox 360 controller
• Deep groves on thumb sticks
• Impulse triggers
• Wi-Fi radio
• “Precision” direction pad
• Integrated battery compartment

This is a natural evolution of the last controller. It’s not as packed with features as Nintendo or Sony’s gamepads (both of those have touch inputs), but it should please anyone who is used to Microsoft’s design.

The new Kinect

Along with the Xbox One, Microsoft is also introducing a next-generation Kinect motion sensor. The new console will require this new device to operate. That means this 3D camera and microphone is almost certainly included with every console.

The new Kinect’s features:

• 1080p camera
• Wide-view lens
• Skype support
• Can sense rotation of wrist and shoulder
• Detects weight distribution
• Capability to read heart-beat rate

Kinect is also a central part of Microsoft’s media experience. Xbox One owners can command the Xbox to switch from games to a movie instantly with their voice. Hand gestures will also enable people to pinch and zoom multiple apps that are all running simultaneously on the Xbox One.

Xbox Live

Xbox Live will continue on Xbox One. Microsoft confirmed that your Xbox Live accounts will transfer to the new system. If you have Xbox Gold on Xbox 360, then you already have the service on Xbox One as well.

Likewise, player achievements and gamerscore will transfer to the new system.

The company also confirmed on Twitter that it is upping the friend limit from a measly 100 to 1,000.

The multimedia features

Microsoft spent much of its presentation focusing on how the Xbox One integrates with television and movies. The company obviously wants to own entertainment delivery in the living room.

With the Xbox One, TV viewers can use their voice to turn their systems on. From there, they can change the channel by saying “Watch SyFy,” and the Xbox One will tune to SyFy. It does this by connecting a cable or satellite box into the One through HDMI In.

These features also integrates with unique viewing experiences from the NFL and a new Halo television series exclusive to Xbox Live.

The Games: Call of Duty: Ghosts

Microsoft didn’t reveal a ton of new games. This event definitely positioned the Xbox One as something more than a gaming console. Despite that, we did get a look at a few new games.

Here are the confirmed titles for Xbox One:

• Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Forza Motorsport 5
• NBA Live 14
• Madden NFL 25
• FIFA 14
• EA Sports UFC
• Quantum Break
• Destiny

Microsoft and other publishers will show more games at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June. Except announcements from Ubisoft and more.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Bid to pitch your favorite venture capitalist.

The charity is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the world’s largest volunteer health agency dedicated to curing blood cancers, and 21 leading venture capitalists from some of the biggest-name investment firms in the country have donated lunch, dinner, or pitch meetings to hear your best ideas … after you’ve coughed up a bit of coin for charity.

Those VCs include all-stars like Tim Draper, who’s offering a not just a 15-minute pitch session but a full two-hour dinner for three at the “famous Tamarine Restaurant” in Palo Alto, Calif. Menlo Ventures is represented by Shervin Pishevar, and will be donating a “power lunch” somewhere on the also-famous Sand Hill Road.

Keith Rabois

Which means you’ll have the full time and attention of a powerful, experienced, and — most importantly — looking-to-invest venture capitalist for at least an hour, and up to two hours. Which might be hard to pass up for founders who are looking to make connections and close funding rounds.

Here’s the stellar lineup:

• Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder and managing director)
• Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures venture adviser)
• Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures)
• Brian Singerman (Founders Fund partner)
• Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates partner)
• Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant (AngelList cofounders)
• Brian O’Malley (Battery Ventures general partner)
• George Bischof (Meritech Capital managing director)
• David J. Blumberg (Blumberg Capital founder and managing director)
• Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes (First Round Capital founder and partner)
• Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner)
• Tod Francis (Shasta Ventures managing director)
• Ajay Chopra (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Ann Miura-Ko & Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate Fund cofounding partner and managing partner)
• Jon Soberg (Blumberg Capital managing director)
• Tim Chang (Mayfield Fund managing director)
• Gus Tai (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Geoff Lewis (Founders Fund principal)
• Ellen Pao (Reddit Strategic Partnerships)
• Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures principal James Cham)
• David Lee (SV Angel cofounder and managing director)

But it won’t be easy. If the Cook auction is any indicator, prices could get high. Dinner for three with Tim Draper carries an estimated value of $30,000, and it already has a bid at $3,000. Many of the others have estimated valuations of $5,000.

Ellen Pao.

A successful relationship with a big-name VC, of course, could be worth many times those numbers. But — and this might be the trouble with this particular auction — founders who are just starting out tend not to have huge sums of money to throw at speculative meetings.

Which means that already funding entrepreneurs who are looking to close a B, C, or D round might have a better shot. If they can convince their boards that this is a good investment.

But, lest we forget, it’s all for a good cause in the end, and it can probably be written off as a charitable donation.

“We are deeply grateful to the venture capitalists who have donated their time to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society,” Christina Resasco, the founder of MobilizeForTheCure, said in a statement. “Their generosity will provide crucial funding needed to advance blood cancer research and development for LLS and give hope to those suffering from the disease.”

The project is part of the Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series, which has raised about $200,000 since 2010. Last year’s winners included entrepreneurs from Australia, Poland, Russia, and the Philippines.

Image credit: Tim Draper: John Koetsier/VentureBeat

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft’s team of super-hardware geeks talked about what is inside the new Xbox One console.

Gamers may not care about the hardware so long as it runs games smoothly and doesn’t get in their way. But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive.

If you look at all of the tasks that the machine does, it’s clear there isn’t enough silicon in the box, said Nick Baker, a distinguished engineer of console architecture and one of the head silicon engineers at Microsoft. He was a key architect on the Xbox 360 chips as well as the Xbox One chips. But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing.

That means the hardware inside the box isn’t fixed. Over time, the hardware can get better as Microsoft upgrades the technology in the data centers. For now, Microsoft has more than 300,000 servers in its data centers to support Xbox One and the Xbox Live online entertainment service. The Microsoft supergeeks spoke on a panel at the Xbox Reveal in a session moderated by Xbox Live evangelist Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb.

That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox, from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV. That kind of processing exists alongside other things going on at the same time. You can, for instance, watch TV and then receive a Skype call without turning off the TV show. To do this type of thing, Microsoft had to design the box in a way that it could access memory and caches of data much faster than in past game consoles.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the loads onto,” said Boyd Multerer, the partner director of development and ISS Console Development Management (one of the software experts at Microsoft). “I think it’s an inflection point. So over time, your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

Todd Holmdahl, the corporate vice president of IEB hardware and another longtime Microsoft hardware executive, said the load can shift from one device to another. The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering. The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are those that the box — not the cloud — still needs to handle.

“This is a radically different way of thinking about a game console,” he said.

After the talk, Multerer told me that some tasks don’t need to run all the time. Artificial intelligence, for instance, doesn’t need to be calculated for every single frame of the game. Your enemy in a game will close in on you, but it only needs to know where you are every second, rather than every split second. So that task can be offloaded to the slower connection to the servers.

But anything that happens on the screen in an instant — if you pull the trigger on a gun and you see a muzzle flash on the screen — has to be calculated inside the box, Multerer said. Some rendering, like trees in the distance in a scene, can also be offloaded, so long as the software properly divides up the tasks, he said. That kind of thinking is very different for a game machine, but Multerer thinks many consumer products will be designed like this in the future.

The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in Internet speeds. It has multiple power states so it can reduce power consumption when necessary. The box has a couple of 802.11n radios to connect to the Internet wirelessly and with other devices in the room.

“You can use just enough power for the experience you are in and nothing more,” he said. “The best example of that is wake-on voice, where you say ‘Xbox On’ and it powers up immediately.”

Holmdahl said that Microsoft redesigned the Kinect system. The sensors are now smart enough to detect your facial expressions, which provides for smarter games that know how you are feeling as you play the game. Kinect has a variety of sensors it can rely on, like time-of-flight depth cameras and infrared, which is good at detecting low-light movements.

“You get better identification, better field of view, better audio, better recognition,” he said.

Baker said that the internal Microsoft chip team had to design five pieces of silicon to handle all of the tasks in the console and the Kinect subsystem, which now comes bundled with the box. The team had to test the chips thoroughly, running 10 trillion cycles of simulation in order to make sure everything worked right. The chips had to be designed to work with each other in a coherent way.

The GPU is multitasking so that it can run compute and cloud tasks at the same time that it renders graphics, Baker said. The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second.

Holmdahl said, “We started with a blank slate. We talked to the hardware, software people. One of the good things about Microsoft is you have those people under the same roof.”

Holmdahl said developers will be able to exploit these technologies as they learn more about things like instantaneous voice command integration into the game console.

The work started a few years ago.

“The development of these things takes a while,” Holmdahl said. “You develop some things that don’t work. We have converged on something that people will love.”

Multerer said the machine has 8GBs of RAM because it needed to have fast-switching between apps and support two things running at the same time, such as the Kinect entertainment controls and the games.

The new generation of graphics chips is based on supercomputing technologies and having the right data flow, with the focus on having the data in the right places at the right time. So there had to be caches of memory on the die, on the CPU, to feed that data to the processor, Multerer said.

Baker said that things like Hyper V, virtualization, and 64-bit processors really started in a data center. Getting them into a living room device wasn’t easy.

“This is really a first,” Baker said.

“And it’s hard to do,” Multerer said. “David Cutler came under our team a year and a half ago and he worked on the operating system himself.”

The machine’s software takes lessons from the services world. The team started with virtual machine technology and it stripped out general-purpose functions out. It boiled it down to the bare minimum so that the virtual machine — a middle software layer — can run extremely fast and won’t slow down games. This kind of software can be partitioned into different parts so it can handle different tasks simultaneously. One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off.

“When you can do two things at one time, it solves a lot of problems,” like figuring out when your friends are online and they are trying to get in touch with you, Multerer said.

There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said.

With Xbox Live, the number of servers supporting the system in the cloud is huge. Those servers can be swapped out. When the hardware becomes more powerful over time, developers can build bigger game worlds and put more action on the screen at once, Multerer said.

Dan Greenawalt, one of the game development experts at Microsoft and creative director at Turn 10 Studios (the folks behind the Forza Motorsport auto-racing franchise), said that Microsoft brought together teams from Microsoft Research and other teams.

“This is the next giant leap forward,” he said.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop.

Executives from Cedars-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management.

“We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy,” said Julie Vilardi, who’s a registered nurse as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.”

She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay: your medical prescriptions, the food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective. But because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due.

Darren Dworking, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said it had recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong.

“A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworking. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.”

Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and she believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworking, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications.

According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however.

Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com.

Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

With Microsoft’s introduction of the new entertainment watching experience through its new Xbox One console, one of the biggest winners will obviously be for those that love live sports.

The company announced a new partnership with the NFL that will see America’s most popular pro sports league bring original content to the Xbox. There was plenty of talk about being able to integrate sports scores, play-by-play views, socialization, and more into the TV screen as well as making fantasy football leagues more centralized to your experience. Specifically, we don’t know which games or sports shows will get the new Xbox One treatment, but I assume Microsoft and the NFL will reveal more in the weeks to come.

I got the sense that the NFL programming will seek to use all the available devices in interesting ways that either don’t overlap or take away from the central experience of the content.

The NFL programming isn’t the only nongame content that Microsoft revealed during today’s Xbox One event. The first was a new interactive Halo TV show produced by the legendary Steven Spielberg, who created roughly half the childhood favorite films for anyone born during the ’80s.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Updated at 11:06 a.m. with quotes from Change.org CEO Ben Rattray from VB’s HealthBeat conference.

Popular social petition service Change.org has raised $15 million in new funding — cash that will help it further build up the “world’s largest petition platform.”

Change.org provides an accessible way to enact social change and it makes it simple to create and sign petitions. The service has grown quite a bit in the last year, jumping from 6 million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today. More than half of Change.org’s users are outside the U.S.

“Petitions aren’t new,” Change.org CEO Ben Rattray said today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference in San Francisco, Calif. “What’s different now is that you take petitions, you make them easier than ever before and more social than ever before.”

So far, the site’s users have won “thousands of victories.” Major wins spurred by Change.org petitions include Bank of America dropping its $5 debit card fees, Seventeen magazine committing not to Photoshop models, and having felony charges against high-school student Kiera Wilmot dropped.

The new funding was led by Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. Rattray told VentureBeat that his biggest priority was finding a funding partner who deeply believed in the company’s mission.

“We’re trying to show that it’s possible to build a technology company focused on social impact, and we now have the resources to hire the tech talent needed to demonstrate that at scale,” Rattray said. “We’ve been approached a number of times by traditional, for-profit venture capital firms interested in investing in the company, but we are only open to investment from social investors who are prepared to support that mission. … So we specifically sought out the Omidyar Network because of its unique alignment with our empowerment mission and the ability to support our scale.”

Chris Bishko, an investment partner at Omidyar Network, will join Change.org’s board.

Rattray says it will continue to help petition creators get their word out, though it does not plan on bringing in folks with industry-specific knowledge to help with those petitions. Instead, it says the best way to get your story heard is to, well, tell your story.

“Actually focusing on the direct impact on an individual’s life is by far the most impactful,” said Rattray. “You can’t win with numbers in public advocacy. … You win with stories.”

Additional reporting included by Meghan Kelly.

Top photo via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat, Middle photo via Change.org

Microsoft announced the Xbox One and the first games it confirmed for the new system were four titles from EA Sports.

Electronic Arts sports division revealed FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and UFC are all in the works for the Xbox One. The publisher is using a new graphics engine, called Ignite, that EA claims will bring in a new sense of realism.

“Today marks the beginning of a broad strategic partnership between EA and Microsoft,” EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson said. “We share a common vision with Microsoft that games should be intelligent, dynamic, connected, rich with emotion, and — most importantly — fun.”

Wilson went on to promise that all four games will fundamentally change the way people play.

“Ignite was designed specifically to blur the line between real and virtual, ” he said. “Sports are just as much about your head as they are about your feet or hands. We built new technology that allows players to make decisions with four times more calculations per second.”

The increased graphics power of the Xbox One helps EA Sports show more of the playing field at any one time. This should give players more context during the game or match.

EA went on to show a sizzler reel of its four announced games. It didn’t have much gameplay, but the animation is smooth. We’ve included a gallery below:

For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

But not from Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), who used most of his question time to chat about his own tax code reform initiatives.

Portman, who has has some presidential aspirations in the past and clearly wants to massively re-write the tax code to make it easier to “repatriate” overseas income, also tossed a few softballs towards to Cook and his subordinates. And he illuminated an interesting correlation between Apple and Samsung.

“Apple and Samsung pay about the same global tax rates, correct?” Senator Portman asked. “But your investment options are a lot more limited.”

Source: John Koetsier

Tim Cook answers questions on Capitol Hill

Senator Portmans’ point, which Cook and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer agreed to, is that Samsung paid about $4 billion in corporate taxes on about $28 billion in global earnings — roughly equivalent to Apple’s global effective tax rate of about seven percent. And, that Samsung can bring home foreign income without being taxed.

“Our international tax code puts our workers at a disadvantage,” Portman continued. “No other country in the world has such high barriers to bringing international income home … and Canada just lowered to its rate to 15 percent.”

That 15 percent, of course, is much lower than the U.S. rate of 35 percent which has caused Apple to refrain from bringing about $100 billion in overseas income home to the the U.S.

Portman asked Tim Cook if Samsung was Apple’s biggest competitor, which Cook was careful to deflect into “it’s one of them,” and highlighted the fact that Apple is an American success story. Cook answered that Apple’s overseas income has powered Apple’s growth, and that Apple has created or supported 600,000 U.S. jobs.

“80 percent of the world’s purchasing power lies beyond our borders,” Portman said. “But we’re living with an international tax code that’s a relic of the 1960s.”

Almost all of the OECD countries, Portman added, have moved to a territorial tax system in which earnings are taxed in the countries in which they are realized — i.e., where sales are made. And they do not tax foreign income.

Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations and Electronic Medical Record (EMRs) systems are traditionally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At Healthbeat today, Verizon’s managing principal of Connected Health Care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network, but we have a $6 billion health care practice and a Chief Medical Officer ,” she said on stage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people and is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spiderman), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power telemedicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

This sponsored post is produced by Matt Quinn, CTO of TIBCO.

We’re well beyond any question about whether cloud computing is the future. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paved the way for the idea that organizations can operate some of their most important systems in an on-premise or off-premise cloud. Small, medium and even large businesses accept that cloud computing delivers flexibility, cost and scalability that business has never had before. Companies are gravitating to cloud because it brings very short time to value and doesn’t impact the current business model. Lower cost and less risk are very attractive propositions.

How big is this move? Forrester estimates that the average company has 9.3 different SaaS applications in use. Consulting firm Cap Gemini reports that 78% of new applications are deployed into the cloud. And that’s just the applications that are being tracked. In reality, workers today are practicing BYOS (Bring Your Own Service) as they experiment with SaaS in broad ways that IT and even business managers may not know about.

Cloud has its challenges

As cloud computing continues to mature and its use expands, it hasn’t been without challenges. The single most significant limitation has been the increasing pain of a lack of integration between cloud applications and the rest of the business. This is a pain that becomes more acute as the cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise system invariably becomes more complex. On top of the integration challenge, the mechanics of cloud expose organizations to increased risk of data integrity, process latency and security. Oftentimes, SaaS applications are being marketed to the business, which likely looks at risk in a different way than IT or compliance. This is a challenge itself as the organization faces risks that aren’t understood or moratoriums on SaaS use that aren’t followed.

A way to solve this problem is to stay within a single SaaS vendor “stack,” but that leaves an organization beholden to a single vendor – a risky position. But there’s a reality of the still-maturing cloud: SaaS applications are typically limited in capability, a necessary evil of the SaaS paradigm that creates economies of scale for users by requiring customers to use highly standardized interfaces and functionality. To build out the same level of capability that’s commonplace in the on-premise world, organizations need to blend custom functionality within their own walls with multiple, disparate cloud applications and storage options. The reality of Cloud is that nearly all enterprises will need to operate a hybrid model for years to come.

TIBCO Cloud Bus

With these challenges in mind, TIBCO today released TIBCO Cloud Bus. This is an entirely new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that uses ready-made templates and connectors to integrate cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise systems and applications, and includes integration with social networks. In keeping with the nature of the cloud, TIBCO Cloud Bus is a subscription service and pay-as-you-go without a large upfront investment or infrastructure.

The immediate benefit of this iPaaS platform comes from being able to rapidly connect SaaS applications without having to program, by using the latest graphical tools in a business-friendly user interface. Considering how critical time-to-value has become, this kind of ease of use is essential. Let’s face it, what matters enormously today may not be necessary tomorrow and likewise, business needs to constantly innovate through technology that changes, it seems, daily.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Xbox Live is going to the cloud.

At today’s Xbox Reveal event, corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten announced that the new Xbox Live service for the upcoming Xbox One console provide access to movies, games, and save files from “anywhere.” He also said that the system will feature a “dedicated DVR” to capture your gameplay and upload that to the cloud as well. However, these were not shown in action, as Whitten only spent a few minutes discussing the online service before moving on to the next part of Microsoft’s presentation.

For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Microsoft just blew the doors off of every integrated television experience with the reveal of its next generation Xbox One video game console.

The new Xbox will bring improved voice and gesture controls to watching TV. It also brings in live TV from the Xbox One (something you could do a bit clunkily on the Xbox 360 with Verizon FiOS and Xfinity TV from Comcast), Skype Internet calling, a new Trending feature that shows what’s popular among all Xbox Live community members and multitasking while watching programs.

Seriously, if the demonstration is any indication for how it’ll actually work, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.

Microsoft entertainment VP Yusuf Mehdi showed off how you’ll be able to turn on all the devices in your living room by speaking “Xbox On,” which pulls up your Xbox Live profile without the need to click through several sign-in screens or software updates. Apparently, the console will recognize your voice to do this, and it could possibly even distinguish between others that might use the console.

From there, Mehdi proceeded to change the channel by speaking. For example, you change from watching ESPN to Syfy by simply saying “Watch Syfy.” That’s right — no more “flipping” through the channels when you know exactly where you want to go. Mehdi didn’t make this clear, but I think this means those with a cable subscription (to Comcast at least, which was what they used in the demo) will no longer need to rent one of those crappy cable boxes that was probably made a decade ago.

As for the gesture controls, they seem to be utilized when switching between functions, like Live TV or another app. And speaking of other apps, the new controls make me think that multitasking on a television screen isn’t just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The demo showed off the ability to pull up sports stats during live games, chat rooms with friends, and pulling in a Skype voice call while you’re watching something.

For more coverage, check out our complete coverage and our liveblog and livestream.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

The Xbox One is real. Microsoft’s next-generation system also has a new controller that looks very familiar.

Xbox One comes with a dual-analog gamepad that has nearly an identical layout to the Xbox 360 joystick. That makes a lot of sense, since many consider that controller as the industry standard.

“The Xbox One controller is updated with over 40 design innovations,” Xbox Live vice president Marc Whitten said. “It features updated ergonomics and an integrated battery compartment that just fits better for gamers of all ages.”

Xbox One’s controller is actually slightly different in its shell and edges. It has sharper angles in its design, and the thumb-sticks have a deep groove. Finally, the direction pad is now a plus rather than the hated circular pad from the 360.

For more on the Xbox One, check out our complete coverage or our liveblog and livestream.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Microsoft unveiled its next-generation Xbox, the Xbox One, this morning at an even on its campus.

The company’s aim is to usher in the next-generation of entertainment, using games as the Trojan horse into broader control of the living room. More than eight years in the making, the new machine represents the company’s ambitions to become the most important gaming and entertainment company in the world.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Xbox One,” said Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s game business.

The system turns on in an instant with your voice commands.

It will be interesting to see the reception for it. The world has changed since Microsoft last introduced its Xbox 360 game console in 2005. Apple’s iPhone ushered in a new era of smartphones and tablets that are contenders for the leisure time of consumers. Microsoft has acknowledged this changing landscape and is making the new Xbox more connected than ever.

Nicknamed the Xbox 720, the new machine’s most direct competition will be the Sony PlayStation 4, which is expected to debut in November, as well as the Nintendo Wii U, a less-powerful system that is struggling to gain a foothold in the market. New game consoles typically sell millions at the outset, but Nintendo sold only 3.45 million units in its first five months.

Source: GamesBeat

The Xbox One’s revamped Kinect sensor.

Microsoft sold an estimated 77 million Xbox 360 game consoles during the current generation of hardware. Sony sold about the same, while Nintendo has sold 99 million Wiis. But Microsoft has dominated the charts of consoles sold and game sales for the past couple of years, and companies like Electronic Arts are betting heavily that it will be a leader in the next generation alongside Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Those results are far better than anyone ever expected from Microsoft, which was fundamentally a software company entering the hardware business back in 2001. With the original Xbox, Microsoft moved too slowly. It sold about 25 million units, beating Nintendo’s underpowered GameCube. But it was trounced by Sony’s PlayStation 2, which sold more than 150 million units in its lifetime.

Microsoft essentially moved from zero percent market share in 2000 to 12 percent market share in 2006 in the hardware business. And as the market currently stands, Microsoft has about 30 percent of the hardware unit market, compared to 30 percent for Sony and 40 percent for Nintendo. But in dollars, Microsoft’s share is higher than that, as Wii game sales slowed down dramatically in the last couple of years. Now the company plans to complete its conquest of video games in the coming generation.

The machine has an accelerated processing unit (APU) chip from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD, which also makes the APU for the PS4, is making a semi-custom chip for Microsoft, using eight processing cores, or computing brains, based on Jaguar micro-architecture designs. The chip will combine graphics and processing on the same sliver of silicon, and it represents a shift away from IBM’s three-core Power chips that were used in the  previous Xbox 360 game console.

Microsoft and Sony will likely distinguish itself based on the number of cores they will have in each chip. Sony has eight Jaguar cores in its chip, and it also has a special kind of graphics memory that will speed the transfer of data within the chip. Durango has an eight-core 64-bit APU running at 1.6GHz, with 8GBs of DDR3 main memory and a large hard disk. Microsoft’s machine has similar capabilities on the semiconductor level, but its games may not run as fast as Sony’s in part because Microsoft is expected to dedicate some of its performance to running Kinect 2.

Kinect 2 is expected to be a more accurate version of the Kinect motion-sensing system that Microsoft launched in 2010. That system enabled players to control their games with gestures, rather than controllers, using body movements. But it wasn’t particularly accurate, and you had to stand in a sweet spot about 10 feet away from the console. With more processing power dedicated to the motion-sensing tasks, Microsoft will be able to make Kinect 2 more accurate and cover a wider area. Kinect 2 is expected to ship as standard on the new box, with better accuracy, improved voice recognition, a better camera, and dedicated hardware processing. If the latter is true, it will make the box more expensive to make. But the tax on processing power may not be as great.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

SAN FRANCISCO — You might not guess it to look at your most recent medical bills, but doctors are nervous about their ability to make money.

CareCloud, which creates a fully-online management app for health care practices, surveyed over 5,000 doctors who say they are worried about their income in the next year.

“In the early 90s I saw healthcare for the first time and I was just blown away by how screwed up it was,” said chief executive Albert Santolo at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today.

Despite attempts to modernize today’s practices in how they keep data and report revenue, the health care industry seems to be just as screwed up as it was 20 years ago, according to the survey, which CareCloud calls the Practice Profitability Index.

“You think about it very differently than you would 15 years ago in the early days of the web,” said Santolo. But, he said, “when you look at these systems, they date that far back.”

CareCloud is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that doctors can use to manage their finances. It also has a social layer to communicate with patients, as well as its own form of electronic health records (EHR). Indeed, it seems these EHRs are on of the main issues that make doctors worry about their profitability.

Santolo explained that EHRs are currently slowing doctors down, and he admitted that even CareCloud is a part of that problem. He predicts that 20 to 25 percent of doctors will be back in the market for better solutions surrounding EHRs.

There’s a lot of opportunity there, of course, for businesses to take up the challenge. (For instance, Practice Fusion has made great headway offering a free EHR now used by 150,000 doctors.)

CareCloud isn’t ignoring the issue and says it will release a new user interface for its EHRs next month.

Other than coding and documenting changes, doctors are also concerned about declining reimbursements, rising costs, and Affordable Care Act requirements, according to the survey. Nearly 50 percent of doctors are worried about using all this new technology to handle the flood of new patients that the ACA will bring to them.

“Doctors still care very much about their future, economics of their business, and what healthcare reform is imposing on them,” said Santolo. “They feel ill-equipped to handle the influx of 30 million new patients.”

CareCloud image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

---

HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

---

Apparently the financial analysts and institutional buyers who have driven Apple stock down hundreds of billions of dollars over the last half year have not taken the value of the iconic company’s stock into account. According to the latest BrandZ ratings, Apple is once again the most valuable brand in the world, with a calculated value of over $185 billion.

Tech companies did well in general. Counting telecoms, technology companies made up 29 of the top 100 brands in the world.

Those multicolored letters in Google’s logo are not cheap, coming in at number two with a value of $113.7 billion. And though much older, another tech company with letters for a logo ranked number three: IBM’s brand was valued at $112.5 billion. The only other technology company in the top 10 was Microsoft, with an overall brand value of $69.8 billion.

“Despite a more competitive marketplace and other challengers nipping at its heels, Apple’s ability to maintain its no.1 position demonstrates the value that having a strong brand brings to business,” Nick Cooper, a director for the company behind the BrandZ rankings, Millward Brown Optimor, said in a statement. “People still love the brand regardless of its stock price.”

Apple should watch out, though. Its brand value grew just one percent, compared to mobile rival Samsung’s massive 51 percent growth to number 30 in the global rankings at $21 billion.

How did it grow so quickly?

“Samsung fueled its huge increase in brand value by balancing a remarkable period of innovation with growing market share – it spent $1.6 billion more on advertising in the last year,” Cooper said.

The top 100 brands in the world are now worth $2.6 trillion, according to Millward Brown Optimor. The ranking and awards, of course, were created by a brand research company, which might give it some incentive to be generous with the valuations.

The top 10 brands globally:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. IBM
4. McDonald’s
5. Coca-Cola
6. AT&T
7. Microsoft
8. Marlboro
9. Visa
10. China Mobile

See all the data in visual form in this infographic. Open the image in a new window to see more detail.

photo credit: albyantoniazzi via photopin cc

When Ceasers Palace announced earlier this month that it was banning Google Glass from its casino floor, few people were less surprised than Colin Jones.

A veteran card counter, Jones has been banned from dozens of casinos for using probability and his brain to play games like blackjack. And it was pretty obvious to him why casinos were freaking out about Glass: It could change everything.

“Casinos are paranoid about people finding any way to get an advantage over the house,” he said.

In case you haven’t been to a casino in a while, here’s the reality of how things work: They aren’t there to be your friend. Despite the rosy advertising, the nature of casinos means that when you win, the house loses. And the house doesn’t like to lose.

This is why casinos aren’t crazy about card counters, who use statistics to beat the house at its own game. For casinos, gambling is about chance, and using anything beyond it is just duplicity. “Casinos love to lump cheaters and card counters in the same sentence,” Jones said, not shy about expressing his distaste for the casino industry.

Jones often has to visit casinos in disguise to throw off dealers.

This is why it’s not particularly surprising that casinos are already taking such a stand against Glass, even though just about no one owns a Glass device yet. Devices like Glass could one day make it far, far easier to count cards, and Jones wants to make that reality possible by developing a card counting app for Glass.

Still, for all the hype about the device, Glass isn’t the first gadget casinos have banned over the years. The iPhone faced similar backlash from casinos after its introduction, and dedicated card counting devices like this hidden computer are even considered illegal in states like — go figure — Nevada. Also frowned upon are apps like Jones’ own BlackJack Trainer Pro, which teaches card counting techniques.

In short, the banning of Glass is nothing new. But what is new here is the just how much Glass will expand the card counter’s tool box — even outside of Las Vegas.

Imagine, for example, being able to see in first-person a player’s hand and advise them on the best possible move. This, of course, would be considered cheating if you did it in a casino, but it could be a very powerful training tool for people who want to remotely teach others how to count cards. (“Skype training is a logistical nightmare,” Jones said.)

More, consider an app that would let card counters know in real-time which casinos had the best games going, or which ones had dealers who were best avoided. It’s like a crowdsourced Yelp for card counters.

“The way I see it is we want to use every technology at our disposal to help counters train and help the card counting community work together. We want to stay at the forefront of that,” Jones said.

All of this sounds really interesting, but it’s clear that it’s going to be a while before any of it actually exists. Jones confesses that he hasn’t used Glass yet — though he is talking to developers about creating an app.

Also, the real potential for card counters and wearable computing won’t be realized until we’re using something like Google Contacts, Jones says. Right now Glass is just too conspicuous, and it’s going to be a long time until that’s not the case. Still, a card counter can dream, can’t he?

“Casinos have cameras on every player at every time. Imagine when players have the same advantage that casinos have,” Jones said.

Hey there, social media egomaniac! If a full-page headshot and links to all your self-promoting social media feeds isn’t enough for your About.me experience, are you in for a treat today!

This morning, About.me is going pro with premium features at the easy-to-forget-about-on-your-credit-card-statement price of $4 per month.

That $4 per month gets you access to the About.me Premium store, which includes shelf after glorious shelf of tools and tricks like domain mapping, About.me nav bar removal, Google Analytics, priority customer support, and coming soon, page promotion powered by recent acquisition Wefollow. Sadly, the About.me branding is still retained on every page, although on Premium pages, it’s reduced to a medium-sized logo box in the bottom left corner.

“About.me Premium is the natural progression of our main goal to provide you with the best starting point for your personal identity service on the web,” said a company rep, obviously speaking to the percentage of web users who think they’re too good for Facebook.

Here’s a sample of one of the new Premium-enhanced pages:

All sarcasm aside, About.me Premium has quite a few use cases beyond the kind of person who thinks of The Fountainhead as a personal roadmap for life. Jobseekers, small-business owners, authors, and just about anyone else who requires a simplified one-to-many web presence with a bit more polish will find Premium features both useful and totally worth the negligible-in-the-first-world four bucks.

Image credit: About.me founder Tony Conrad

And Cook took the offensive, unapologetically calling for tax code reform — and even dolloping out a big dose of Apple religion to the senators.

“To our knowledge Apple is the largest corporate taxpayer in America,” Cook said, saying that Apple’s U.S. tax rate was 30.5 percent. “We paid $6 billion in cash to the U.S. Treasury — that’s $16 million each day. And we expect to pay even more this year.”

Cook also said that Apple was a massive employer and supporter of the U.S. economy, saying that the company was building the world’s largest data center in North Carolina, new data centers in Oregon and Nevada, and a new corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

“Apple has real operations in real places with Apple employees,” Cook said. “We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar. We don’t only comply with the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law. We don’t stash money on some Caribbean island.”

Apple does have significant amounts of cash overseas, Cook acknowledged, but that is due to the fact that the tax code has “not kept up with the digital age,” which Cook said handicapped the U.S. corporation relative to its international competitors.

The Cook dosed the senators with a little Apple religion.

“Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex,” Cook said. “It is in this spirit that we recommend a dramatic simplification of the tax code.”

That simplification, he said, should include a lower tax rate and a reasonable tax on foreign earnings. That simplification, with the tax on foreign earnings, would increase Apple’s overall tax burden, Cook said, but is the right thing to do.

“We say this with eyes wide open, knowing that this would likely result in an increase in Apple’s U.S. income taxes,” Cook said. “It would keep America globally competitive.”

Image credit: C-Span