While trying to get a sense of this year’s LeWeb conference, the annual technology culture get-together in Paris, one thing was most striking to me: humans are out of this loop. For the most part, speakers focused on topics like machine-to-machine communication, artificial intelligence, or the now ubiquitous big data.

But while that realization seemed jarring at first, it’s also becoming increasingly clear how these tech-heavy topics will help humans — especially as we approach a world where practically everything is connected. (The so-called “Internet of Things.”)

Let’s take a look at the five most interesting topics at LeWeb:

1) PixPlit’s social photo creation app

As expected, plenty of Instagram-wannabe apps were trying to cut through the noise. But I thought PixPlit, an Tel Aviv, Israel-based app that lets you co-create photos with others, was the standout. It’s like a social jigsaw puzzle that offers you a new way to tell a story.

Simply take a picture with the PixPlit app, decide on the jigsaw canvas design, called the “collage”, apply your filters, and publish. Then the story takes flight — whoever wants to be part of the creation process can add their own piece. In the end, one picture (or part of it) becomes an element in a much bigger artistic creation, with friends or complete strangers.

The PixPlit co-creation process is interesting, but the real value is the way it lets you communicate via tastes and aesthetic notions with others.

2) Jib.li, say hello to “crowdshipping”

Another startup that boosts a new approach to communication is France-based Jib.li, which is like the Craigslist of your shopping abroad. Let’s say you live in Kentucky and your favorite cookies come from Paris. Jib.li makes it easier to source them by connecting travelers to people who need things shipped over to them urgently. The founders call this “crowdshipping.”

Joining the network is free of charge if you’re a traveler — simply state your itinerary and travel dates, as well as available volume in your suitcase. The person who’s asking you to bring an item has to agree to your terms, for example, whether it’s going to be a free or paid transaction, or one in exchange for a return service (or just a drink).

The openness of the exchange is a particularly interesting aspect of Jib.li: transacting takes place directly between the two parties, and the reward is paid upon delivery of the goods. The company may face a few legal hurdles with the current regulations for flight safety — you’re not supposed to carry something given to you by a stranger, especially if you don’t know the actual contents.

3) The man behind the Mars Curiosity Rover speaks out

Muse, NASA Mars Curiosity Rover chief software engineer Benjamin Cichy has his own vision about how social media fits into in the Internet of Things when it comes to space discovery. [Check out our in-depth interview with Cichy.]

For him, Curiosity Rover is the is “the further outpost of a connected device, and on the surface of another planet,” transmitting data to help humans understand their galactic surroundings better. He pointed out how the Internet of Things also includes social media, which has allowed global, real-time distribution of information. The whole world now has immediate access to NASA photos that were only visible to a happy few handful of space scientists before.

The irony, Cichy said, is that nowadays, scientists often end up seeing the images after the general public does, due to the viral nature of the information being broadcasted everywhere simultaneously.

4) Interaxon’s thought-controlled computing

Another mindblowing technology and approach to artificial intelligence comes from Interaxon. On-stage at LeWeb, Interaxon CEO Ariel Garten presented the Muse, which looks like a hair band, but has the ability to register your brainwaves and translate them into concrete signals as you type an email, for example.

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

5) Mobiquithings powers the “Internet of things”

The most striking startup at LeWeb wasn’t on stage, and its technology far from sexy (despite being being oh-so-powerful). Mobiquithings stayed under the radar. — a real tour de force given the power of their simple yet far-reaching technology.

The company uses SIM cards as data transmitters that can connect devices across carrier networks. Since it’s relying on existing infrastructure, the SIM cards can easily give almost any device an always-on Internet connection. For example, it could be placed on your water heater to alert you, or a repairman, as soon as it has a problem.

Mobiquithings notes “by 2020, there will be 50 billion things connected in the world.” That surely represents a massive pool of opportunities for this French startup.

Top photo: Jean Baptiste-Bellet for LeWeb; Cichy photo: LeWeb; Garten photo: Ciara Byrne; SIM photo: Luciano Belviso/Flickr;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VB: What do you hope to find out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by contributor Liva Judic; Photo: NASA

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The above video is another extraterrestrial first: Curiosity’s very first collection of Martian regolith via its robotic arm’s scooper, as seen from the rover’s mast camera.

“Here’s the scoop: I like my regolith shaken!” the rover’s social media team tweeted of the clip, which shows the scoop full of Mars’ topmost layer and vibrating to sort the material.

Regolith is a layer of dust, broken rock, and soil loosely covering solid rock. We get a bit of it here on Earth, and it’s also present on our own moon, some asteroids, and other planets, including Mars.

Currently, researchers are trying to find out whether or not Mars’ regolith is being shaped by groundwater sapping and whether carbon dioxide hydrates exist on the planet. The hypothesis is that water and CO2 are frozen and hidden in the regolith in large quantities, especially around the planet’s equator and at high altitudes.

This particular sample, however, will be used for cleaning bits of Curiosity’s sample-handling mechanism, with the sandy collection being vibrated inside each interior chamber and then discarded.

“The rover’s ability to put scooped and sieved samples of soil into onboard laboratory instruments is an important part of the mission,” NASA stated on the news.

“Those instruments — Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) — will play crucial roles in evaluating whether the study area has ever had a favorable environment for microbial life. Still to be used for the first time is the rover’s capability to take powdered samples from rocks, using a percussive drill, for delivery to those same instruments.”

Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin’ to say, but nothin’ comes out when they move their lips — just a bunch of gibberish. VentureBeat readers act like they forgot about Mars.

But seriously, we haven’t forgotten about Mars and everyone’s favorite lil’ rover buddy up there, Curiosity.

In this video, Internet hero Bobby “Starry Mohawk” Ferdowsi leads us through an update on the rover’s progress (with Morse code for “JPL” shaved into the side of his meme-spawning head, no less).

This week, Curiosity’s Martian road trip began, complete with road tunes from Will.i.am, analysis of Mars’ atmosphere, and lasers being used on the planet’s surface for, you know, science. Lasers will come into play more as Curiosity rolls toward one of its targets, Glenelg, an intersection of three types of terrain near the rover’s landing site.

“The rover’s Chemistry and Camera [ChemCam] instrument shot its laser at rocks exposed by thrusters on the rover’s sky crane at the scour mark called Goulburn,” we read on the ChemCam site today.

“They show differences in brightness at the impact spot as well as a slight change in shadows. The inset shows an area about 1 square-inch [2.5 centimeters per side]. The target is about 19 feet [5.8 meters] away from the rover.”

Here are some before/after pics of the ChemCam laser’s work:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How’s this for a remote operation? NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory team had to send a software update to the Curiosity Rover on Mars, more than 160 million miles away.

The software had to be updated because Curiosity needed different software to drive around on Mars than it did to land on the planet’s surface. The computer hardware in the Curiosity Rover is powered by a pair of computers built by BAE Systems. These RAD750 computers use a 10-year-old IBM PowerPC microprocessor running at 132 megahertz. It has just 120 megabytes of random access memory, making it a great computer if you’re living in 1995. But it’s built to withstand wild temperature swings, radiation, and physical shaking.

The drawback is that the computer on the robot vehicle doesn’t have enough memory for both the landing and surface missions. So NASA had to swap out the software over four days of communication through the void of space. It took so long because every interaction takes 14 minutes to send the signal to the rover and 14 minutes to get a response back. I guess you could call that the longest-distance mobile computing that we’ve seen yet.