Raindance Technologies has closed a $20 million fifth round of funding with strategic investment from Myriad Genetics, the biotech company at the center of this month’s debate about we should be able to patent human genes.

Myriad’s involvement in the landmark federal case has not put a road block in its expansion plans. The company has signed a multiyear commercial agreement with Lexington, Mass.-based Raindance. The terms of the investment dictate that Raindance will provide technology to improve Myriad’s hereditary cancer test and speed up its process for large-volume genetic testing.

Raindance’s best-known genetics research product, dubbed “Thunderstorm,” helps its customers target 20,000 regions of the genome using any of the commercially available gene-sequencing technologies.

In recent years, the cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen, reaching a low of $1,000 in 2012 due to a microchip and machines designed by genomics company Life Technologies Corp. Raindance is one of the companies that seeks to capitalize on these developments, and it’s providing research tools for the growing crop of genetics labs.

“Imagine all diagnostics some day being reduced to a simple blood test,” said CEO Roopam Banerjee, who believes Raindance products are a “step in that direction.” The company’s overarching mission is to develop more reliable methods for researchers and physicians to detect disease and predisposition risk.

In a phone interview, Banerjee said he took on additional funding as the company is at an “inflection point.” He explained, ”We – along with our customers — have generated some compelling data to track complex human disease noninvasively.”

Raindance claims its customers will process 50,000 samples in 2013 and 100,000 samples in 2014 alone. According to Banerjee, the company doubled its sales in the previous year and anticipates explosive growth in the wake of the funding.

Existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Quaker BioVentures, Alloy Ventures, Acadia Woods, and Sectoral Asset Management also participated in the funding round.

Top image via Raindance 

---

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.

---

Microryza is a crowdfunding platform to follow and fund scientific research projects. On stage at Y Combiantor’s Demo Day, founder Cindy Wu said that funding for research projects is short-sighted and only available to PhDs and professors. Microryza opens up the financing opportunities to people outside of these communities, and users are choosing this channel instead of applying for grants.

On the site, researchers set up a profile with their proposed project and raise money  to carry out the research. Backers projects can track the lab’s progress as experiments unfold and have the opportunity to interact directly with the researchers.

“This solution helps close the gap for potential and promising, but unfunded projects,” Bill Gates said about Microryza.

The types of projects are narrowed down into categories- education, biology, engineering, computer science, medicine, ecology and palentology. If you have a specific topic that interests you, like breast cancer research or biofuel, you can zero in on those opportunities. However, browsing yields some interesting findings, including a look at how lemurs can ensure their own survival, whether machine learning can ace tough tests, and searching for a cure for Alzheimers.

The caliber of researchers is high. A majority of the project owners are working on or have advanced degrees, and many already work with scientific or academic organizations, and just need an extra push to achieve their goals. Profiles include videos, biographical information about the scientists, and  answer the questions “What are the goals of this project?”, “Why is this research important?”, and “How will the funds be used?”

Wu said the site is doubling each week in terms of transactions, projects, and users. Her ultimate goal? To turn anyone with a credit card into a patron of science.

---

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.

---

Google acquired research startup DNNresearch today, after recently awarding the team of three $600,000 for their work in neural networks and language and image processing.

DNNresearch was born at the University of Toronto’s department of computer science. It was founded by Professor Geoffrey Hinton and his two graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. The company does research on “deep neural networks,” or our language processing centers. Srizhevsky and Sutskever recently created a system “that dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition,” according to the University of Toronto, making the company an interesting purchase for Google’s search product.

Image and voice queries will likely become more common in the mobile age, as TechVibes points out, and thus improving Google’s processing abilities will make its search even stronger.

Google confirmed the buy to VentureBeat in an email, though it did not provide any more on what the company’s talent will be used for.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed other than the fact that Hinton will be able to split his time between research projects at the university and those at Google. Krizhevsky and Sutskever will move and focus full-time on Google.

The University of Toronto is otherwise excited to deepen its relationship with Google, likely because the company has already shown its willingness to give money when it’s deserved.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for Geoff, and a great opportunity for the department,” said University of Toronto computer science chair Sven Dickinson in a statement. “In recent years, we have been expanding our industrial relations, and this acquisition represents a wonderful opportunity to strengthen our existing ties with Google, one of the world’s most innovative IT companies.”

Neural connections image via Shutterstock

---

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.

---

Duke researchers have electronically linked the brains of a pair of rats using the world’s first “brain-to-brain” interface. With one rat stationed in Durham, N.C., and the other in Natal, Brazil, the rodents could share tactile and motor information and work together to solve simple puzzles.

This brings the concept of Internet connectivity to a new level.

“These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication linkage between brains, and that the decor brain is working as a pattern-recognition device,” said professor Miguel Nicolelis in a paper in Scientific Reports. “So basically, we are creating what I call an organic computer. […] We are creating a single central nervous system made up of two rat brains.”

Dubbed “brain-net,” the experiment shows that it was possible to create a “workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.” The research team tested the hypothesis by training pairs of rats to solve problems, like pressing a lever in response to a light to obtain water.

One of the rats was the “encoder” animal and the other was the “decoder,” and their brains were connected using electrodes. The encoder rat received the visual cue to press the lever, and this brain activity was “translated into a pattern of electrical stimulation” that was delivered into the brain of the decoder rat. That rat had no visual cues of its own but was still able to press the correct lever and get a drink.

The brain-to-brain interface goes two-ways. The encoder rat did not receive the reward if the decoder rat made the wrong choice, which led to “behavioral collaboration.”

“We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net,” Nicolelis said. “In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.” Such a connection might even mean that one animal would incorporate the other’s sense of “self.”

Nicolelis’ laboratory can record brain signals from almost 2,000 brain cells at once, which is apparently an unprecedented number. He is a professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and psychology and neuroscience at Duke. Read more at www.nicolelislab.net and check out this video:

---

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.

---

Asadi is the founder and CEO of Bina, a healthcare startup working to make ‘personalized medicine’ a reality. Bina applies big data analytics to genomics, making it possible to sequence the human genome in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.

Today, Bina launched its commercial product. The platform provides physicians, clinicians, and researchers with a detailed picture of a patient’s health. From there, they can make data-driven diagnoses and prescribe individualized courses of treatment.

“Medicine today is very experimental,” said founder and CEO Narges Bani Asadi in an interview with VentureBeat. “Before, there was a bottle neck to crunch the massive amount of genomic data. At Bina, we have created the fastest, most highly accurate, cost-efficient processing solution available in the market today. The next step is to incorporate this genomic data into medical use. Data-driven, information-based medicine is much more targeted. Personalizing therapies for different diseases means a longer and healthier quality of life for all humans.”

There are thousands of genetic disorders. In 2013, over 580,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer. One in 20 babies born in the U.S. is admitted into the neonatal intensive care unit, and 20 percent of infant deaths result from congenital or chromosomal defects. Technology can be used to curb these terrifying trends. Bina’s role is to bridge the gap between DNA sequencing technology and the diagnosticians and clinicians who can apply it to their practice.

“The study of genomics has largely been a research activity done in medical schools and universities,” said Mark Sutherland, Bina’s senior vice president of business development. “They could only look at a few samples at a time because it was too expensive or complicated to do it at scale. There is a tidal wave of data that has not been manageable or in a format physicians can understand. Now we are seeing an inflection point. Sequencing is a powerful way of looking across a broad spectrum to provide insight into the cause of certain diseases and conduct risk assessments, early detection, or predict the possibility of recurrence. It can also be used to find applicable therapies and customize treatments.”

Asadi said her team had to achieve innovations in every step of genetic processing in order to create a scaleable, marketable, effective solution. Bina’s platform includes a hardware box to collect DNA, advanced software to process the data, and applications to turn the data into actionable form. Whereas before a full genetic analysis took weeks or months and could cost thousands of dollars, Bina turns it around within hours for around $200 a sample.

The technology emerged out of Asadi’s PhD work at Stanford. She collaborated with professors from around the world to apply high performance computing and computer architecture to gain a new understanding of human health and disease. Bina was founded in 2011 by three professors from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. It is backed by venture funding, and pilot customers include the Stanford Genetics Department and Palo Alto Veteran Affairs Hospital.

Startups don’t often set out to cure cancer or prevent infant mortality. However, as technology continues to evolve and along with it, the healthcare industry, a medical system where diagnoses and treatments are based on hard data, where each and every individual is treated  as such, could be on the horizon.

Read a VentureBeat guest post by Dr. Asadi: The personalized medicine revolution is almost here.

[To learn more about the most transformative IT trends hitting health care, including big data, consider coming to HealthBeat, our event for health care executives and decision-makers, on May 20-21 in San Francisco.]

Photo credit: Shutterstock

---

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.

---

Stanford professor Shai Bernstein tracked almost 2,000 technology companies that went public. After the IPO, companies became more “incremental,” less ambitious … and lost their top inventors and innovators. Mediocre performers, however, stayed behind.

The result? Companies turned to acquisitions to bring in new technologies and get fresh talent.

Bernstein tracked the companies between 1985 and 2003, recording how many patents each earned both before and after the IPO. He paired the hard analysis with an estimate of how important each patent was by checking how often it was cited in other patent applications. And then he went one step deeper by looking at companies that almost went public — planned to go public but changed their mind — and compared them to the companies that actually did conclude their IPOs.

While companies that stayed private continued innovating at the same pace, the ones that went public saw the average value of their patents decline by about 40 percent over the next five years.

In an sense, it’s obvious: The key leaders of a company benefit most from an IPO, cash out, and go elsewhere to pursue another dream. And those who fit well into the ungreased cogs of a startup don’t mesh with the bureaucracy of a public company with public responsibilities. In fact, inventors were 18 percent more likely to leave than other employees after an IPO.

But something odd happens to the ones that stay, too. Inventors that stay seem to become less innovative, as the quality and value of their patents dropped almost 50 percent after the IPO.

The lesson might seem to be: Don’t go public.

But that’s not exactly the case. In situations where the CEO and chairman of the board are the same person, innovation stayed relatively high. Bernstein attributes this to how a small leadership group with closely held authority is more able to stand firm against the quarter-by-quarter pressures from the market.

photo credit: Tony Fischer Photography via photopin cc

---

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.

---

In a less violent and more productive demonstration of clipboard capabilities, online web clipping service Clipboard has struck an investment deal with Scientia, an enterprise software company that provides tools to institutions of higher education.

On Clipboard, users clip items from around the web and organize them on “boards.” Rather than importing a link or an image, users select the specific zone they want to keep, which makes it easier to save things like a tweet, forum thread, or product description.

The platform is comparable to that of Pinterest, Evernote, and Springpad. Uses include personal collections, containing recipes and clothing items, and work-related purposes. The boards can private or shared, and you can use them to collaborate on projects. You can annotate and tag them, and they can sync across desktop and mobile devices.

This strategic investment with Scientia is in an effort to move Clipboard’s offering into a new vertical and make it a solution geared towards researching private and professional content.

“Since we can ‘clip’ anything on the web, this will be extremely beneficial in the education space, for instance professors pulling together coursework materials, students researching a paper and study groups brainstorming project ideas,” said CEO Gary Flake in an email. “Scientia helps more than 400 top universities and more than 10 million students outside of the US organize academic life and we are confident this new partnership will help us add value to the research, collaboration and creation of ideas in education.”

Scientia’s software is used by major universities around the world. Its suite of applications include planning, timetable and exam scheduling, progress tracking, and workload organizational tools. A statement issued by Clipboard said this funding “marks the beginning of a joint product development effort by Clipboard and Scientia that will focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in online collaboration and extending it into the education market.”

Clipboard received $1.5 million from top tier investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and SV Angel, among others. It launched to the public on May 31 and now claims to have more than 100,000 registered users who have saved more than 1.7 million clips. The terms of this deal are undisclosed, although it makes Scientia the largest individual investor.

It seems the days of physical documentation are slowly ebbing away. Notebooks, bulletin boards, to-do lists, photo albums, and filing cabinets will soon be relics of a time gone by. Soon, they will be function primarily as vintage home decor (or weaponry) as digital versions gain traction with the mainstream population.

A simple Swingline stapler from the office supply chain Staples could cost you either $15.79 or $14.29, depending on where you live.  And the same is true for other products from Staples, as well as at Home Depot’s online store and other retailers, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal.

Such pricing differences are common in brick and mortar retail stores, but it’s a new development on the web, where physical location has traditionally mattered less (except when calculating taxes, and in some cases shipment costs). Inspired by academic research in online price discrimination from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Telefonica Research, the WSJ built a custom solution to test out precisely what influenced prices at online retailers.

In addition to a customer’s general location, Staples offered discounted prices to customers within 20 miles of rival stores like OfficeMax and Office Depot, the WSJ found — which ended up being the single biggest factor in price differences. As a consequence of that, Staples ended up offering higher prices to less wealthy customers in rural and urban areas, where there aren’t many stores.

Rosetta Stone, which offers language learning software, also offered significant discounts to customers based on their location. The company admitted to the WSJ that it tests different bundles and prices in different areas, and it also personalizes deals based on how people reach the site.

As we move towards a more personalized web experience for ads and shopping recommendations, it’s inevitable that we’ll see even more creative pricing from online stores. For the most part, they’ll come in the form of deals and discounts. But the WSJ’s research is a good reminder that, in certain cases, you may end up spending more than other online shoppers.

Thanks to NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have been able to track wind and radiation patterns on Mars in an attempt to discover whether conditions there were ever favorable to life.

Initial readings found that levels of radiation are about the same as those astronauts typically experience in the low-Earth orbit. “Absolutely, astronauts can live in this environment,” Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said during a news conference Thursday.

Hassler explained that Mars’ natural environment acts as a shield for the radiation on the surface. This supports the notion that astronauts can set foot and even function on the Red Planet for a short stretches of time.

Curiosity’s fancy instrument, the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), monitors high-energy radiation in the environment; this could also be a factor in determining whether Mars has the potential to host lifeforms.

Researchers believe that Mars lost its global magnetic field long ago due to solar wind bombardment. RAD reported that as the remaining Martian atmosphere thickens and thins daily, radiation levels rise and fall by 3 percent to 5 percent.

As was first reported in a NASA blog post, researchers stationed in a car-sized mobile lab are specifically tracking events with a least one characteristic of a whirlwind. They are also linking the rhythmic changes in radiation to daily atmospheric changes, which will lead to a better understanding the native environment.

The overarching goal of the mission is to use assess whether areas inside Gale Crater, an area of Mars where Curiosity landed, once offered a habitable environment for microbes.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bridging clouds used to be the domain of rainbows and magic carpets. Now with the proliferation of cloud applications, technology companies are taking on this lofty task. A group of 14 European partners have banded together with €8.4 million to launch a major research initiative called PaaSage.

The goal is to develop an open and integrated platform to support the lifecycle management of cloud applications. Cloud computing has changed the IT industry by making software development more efficient, but according to this consortium, the available platforms and APIs are insufficient.

Paasage’s approach will be to provide an Integrated Development Environment that gives developers a greater ability to build applications. The objectives are:

• 1. To contribute to the design and standardisation of an open, powerful, and expressive modelling language for Cloud-independent modelling of enterprise systems with the desired preferences and constraints, focusing on architectural styles and characteristics of the Cloud computing paradigm.
• 2. To provide an intelligent Integrated Development Environment (IDE) supporting the modelling language and supporting the developer in the task of optimising the application.
• 3. To provide mappers and engines that allow a modelled Cloud application to be deployed and executed in a distributed environment across multiple heterogeneous Cloud providers. The execution will thereby observe the specified execution characteristics and adjust itself accordingly at run-time.
• 4. To define metadata relevant for Cloud services, and provide mechanisms to acquire the metadata and performance indicators from running applications and to reuse the historical metadata available on the services in the application design and deployment.

“PaaSage will provide the relevant means to significantly improve programmability, usability and performance of Clouds beyond current state of the art approaches,” said scientific coordinator Keith G Jeffery.

The intended impact is to support developer throughout the full application lifecycle by reducing cost, avoiding lock-ins with one provider, allowing transparent use of heterogeneous infrastructures, increasing the knowledge of best practices, simplifying management of services and infrastructures, and enabling integrations and deployment.

The project  is supported by the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics. Of the €8.4m, €6.3 comes from the European Union. Flexiant, a company which provides cloud orchestration software, has joined the initiative along with these organizations. Read the press release. 

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepared for a lot of variables when it sent Curiosity, the car sized rover, to Mars, but it didn’t prepare for it to become a tween-aged girl on Myspace.

Just kidding. The Mars Curiosity rover took a “selfie,” or a picture you take of yourself from a flattering angle. Curiosity was actually taking its own portrait for researchers down on Earth to use as an example of how the rover looked at the beginning of its mission. It will periodically send these images, which researchers at JPL will use to see if Curiosity’s wheels are clogged with dirt, or if it has any other kind of damage.

Right now the rover seems to be in pretty good shape, though these images are only thumbnails stitched together to give us the full view of Curiosity. It will later send a high-definition version of the selfie that the researchers can use for examination.

Curiosity previously took high-def images of a shiny material found in the martian soil. This particular shiny piece was actually just plastic, but Curiosity’s cameras later helped researchers determine that there were separate, native shiny-particles in the regolith, or Mars dirt. Curiosity took up a few more scoops to do some research and found that Mars’ soil is similar to the volcanic soil in Hawaii.

You can see the scoop marks on the left side of the image.

hat tip Gizmodo; Curiosity image via JPL

This is a guest post by professor, Reynol Junco

We’re in the middle of an Educational Technology (“ed-tech”) startup boom.

Research by GSV Advisors shows a sharp increase in investments in education companies almost doubling between 2007 and 2011 to $930 million. Data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that investment in ed-tech companies has almost tripled between 2002 and 2011.

It’s no surprise that the number of ed-tech startup companies has grown exponentially and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

The market is flooded with these startups and clearly, there is a great deal of interest from venture capital firms.

Many ed-tech startups typically build their product because one of the founders had a particular issue in college that they think can be addressed with a new technology or by building an education version of an existing technology.

For instance, a founder might think “I used to forget to bring my chemistry book to class so why don’t I develop a cool app that automatically texts students right before a class where they need a book?” (Please note that I did not base this example on a real startup; however, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a product existed). Other ed-tech startups have an idea they think should result in improved student outcomes and they run with it.

I hate to break it to you…

This may come as a surprise to ed-tech companies, but you’re not going to invent the next big thing by shooting in the dark. Without knowing the research on how students learn and develop as well as the literature on how technology affects student outcomes, the chances of your startup magically creating student success are almost nonexistent.

Indeed, it’s not the technology that generates learning, but the ways in which the technology are used.

Ed-tech startups rarely, if ever, talk with educators about designing their product. You’d be surprised at the number of emails I get asking me to comment on a product after it has been conceptualized, built, and tested. I have dubbed these messages “tell us how cool our product is” emails.

Startups in other fields don’t behave this way. Imagine a genomics startup that didn’t talk to medical researchers and/or didn’t base their products on research in the biotech field. Such a company would never exist, let alone be funded by a venture capital firm.

Yet, in this new boom investors are more than happy to fund an ed-tech startup whose employees have never bothered to read a single piece of educational research. My fellow academic rebel Audrey Watters famously commented about a $2.5 million investment in Codecademy, “Wow, bullshit badging and shitty pedagogy wins the day in ed-tech investing.”

Educators and researchers who know about how students learn know that there is nothing special about Codecademy. The flashing lights and pretty buttons fool the venture capital firms and foundations that invest in these kinds of startups. Since funders also know next to nothing about how students learn, of course these ideas sound amazing.

Where’s the data?

Lastly, there is the issue of adoption of new technologies by educational institutions. Higher education faculty and administrators are already distrustful of startups because there is inherent skepticism about for-profit ventures. Ed-Tech companies have no data showing that their product does what they say it does. Indeed, in their Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology report the U.S.’s Council of Economic Advisers politely wrote, “It is difficult for producers of these technologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products.”

It’s actually not that difficult to demonstrate effectiveness, it’s just that startups have been unwilling and/or do not have the expertise to do so. Having evidence is crucial in convincing educators to adopt a new technology — don’t tell them that your new technology is effective in improving student learning, show them.

Here are some suggestions for getting it right:

1.  Collaborate with an academic when developing your product. You don’t have to have an educator or a researcher directing what you do, but at least get some input so that you know you are building a product that might have some utility.
2. Assess your outcomes. In business-speak this usually means “provide financial figures to show you are being successful;” however, what you must provide to educators are data that show that using your product does what you say it does. Did you develop an app that’s supposed to increase student lecture attendance? Then design a study with your academic collaborator to evaluate differences in attendance rates between app users and nonusers. Remember, data are the lingua franca of academic circles.
3. Refine your technology based on assessment data. This goes beyond bug fixes and UI design. In collaboration with your academic collaborator, you’ll likely discover ways to make your product more robust in doing what you want it to do. Recently, my colleagues and I published a paper showing that using Twitter to continue discussions outside of class was positively related to student engagement and learning; however, using Twitter as a back channel for in-class discussions was not. If your outcome studies don’t yield a positive effect, at least you’ll have some great data with which to refine your product.
4. Publish what you find. No matter what you believe about the current academic publishing process, the academic culture values results presented through peer-reviewed academic publications more than blog posts, presentations, and “white papers” (a phrase I absolutely despise, but that’s a topic for another day). Not only will you have clout in academic circles when you publish data, your academic collaborator will have an additional benefit of working with you (another publication) that will help them in their tenure and promotion process.
5. Learn about the culture of academia and help academia learn about the culture of startups. This will help you understand institutional resistance to new technologies in education as well as help you understand how to best approach your new academic partners.

Reynol Junco is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He researches the impact of social technologies on college students. Follow Rey on Twitter and read about his research on his blog.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and they do not reflect in any way those of the institutions to which he is affiliated.

[Top image credit: wavebreakmedia ltd/Shutterstock]

I guess those 3 percent are Silicon Valley tech blog writers.

ChangeWave Research just surveyed 4,300 consumers, and it turns out that they don’t care about Apple Maps versus Google Maps. In fact, one in three people surveyed said they’re likely to buy the iPhone 5, with 20 percent saying “very likely” and 13 percent saying “somewhat likely.”

“Despite the media attention surrounding both the Apple Maps issue and the Apple Lightning port issue, neither has had an impact on the massive numbers of buyers queuing up to buy the iPhone 5,” Paul Carton, a ChangeWave VP, said in a statement, adding that “both issues hardly rank as bumps in the road.”

Apple replacing Google maps with its own not-quite-as-solid version has dominated a lot of the media about the iPhone 5 launch, of course, with concerns about its lack of data and its sometimes-hilarious 3D flyover fails, causing Apple CEO Tim Cook to publicly apologize. But Consumer Reports gave Apple Maps a fairly positive review, and the app is, apparently, good enough to give Taiwan’s military a few hot flashes.

ChangeWave compared the current Maps issue with the iPhone4′s “Antennae-gate,” and Maps is not even in the same league. While 36 percent of consumers experienced an issue with iPhone 4 reception, only 10 percent have experience any sort of problem with the iOS 6′s new maps.

Additionally, when the research company asked consumers what was stopping them from buying an iPhone 5, Maps blocked precisely 0 percent of purchases. The biggest reason? People were satisfied with their current phone and saw no need.

photo credit: the past tends to disappear via photopin cc

Microsoft already made controller-less motion interaction popular with Kinect, so why not try to revolutionize other kinds of sensor and interaction technology?

A new video from Microsoft Research details a project called Digits, a hand sensor that projects your motions accurately on a screen. Ideally, Digits will be able to provide interaction for gaming, augmented reality, apps on mobile devices, and more.

The main components of Digits are an infrared camera, infrared laser-line generator, diffuse illumination, and an inertial measurement unit. While it’s not quite as cool as Google Glass, Digits is still a fascinating way advanced technology could change how we interact with digital and real-world objects.

Check out the video above for more.

Robert Arauz didn’t intend to become an entrepreneur. He’s actually a scientist by profession and training. Starting a company is just the best way he’s found to solve some of the scientific and medical communities’ biggest problems.

His company, Innovation Choice, seeks to remove some of the blockades between information and the people who need it to solve big, global issues.

“We are solving a communications problem in the way scientists and researchers are able to share and obtain relevant medical information,” Arauz told VentureBeat in an email chat. Innovation Choice aims to be a professional network where scientists, educators, researchers, and students can quickly get accurate information from subject experts, all with a focus on respecting intellectual property and individual privacy.

“Today, these people have very limited options in terms of resources at their disposal that they can access in order to tackle the most important questions of our time.

“They aren’t looking for restaurant recommendations; they are seeking how to cure Alzheimer’s.”

Arauz knows the needs of these professionals well. As a research scientist himself, he said getting access to critical and specific information was usually “very expensive, ineffective, and very time consuming.” Innovation Choice, he said, is set up to be the exact opposite.

“We connect scientists from around the world so that they can collaborate and target technical questions in their field. … Using the medical journals to find information is only accessible to a select few and not very good at giving you exact answers; it just provides specific details about particular data. I want the discovery of the next penicillin to take months, not 10 years.”

Members of the site must be verified professionals in the field, which distinguishes the site from many of its competitors.

“I was a bit surprised by the emphasis on credentials,” said Andrew Rosenthal of Massive Health. “A lot of good stuff is bubbling up from people that don’t have formal credentials, and this company has made a very conscious decision to screen for them.”

Currently, Innovation Choice is in early, formative stages. Arauz expects to launch a beta version of the service in January 2013 and is currently trying to raise money for the startup.

Beyond basic startup goals such as product development, feature roll-out, and new user acquisition, Arauz says he’s also trying to “expand to work within the network of most universities (in their life sciences departments)” in his company’s next steps. He’s already partnered with UC Berkeley Extension and University of the Pacific.

“We are creating a product that can ultimately accelerate medical research,” Arauz concluded. “Our vision can yield discoveries that can positively affect millions of lives and make our world a better place to live.”

Innovation Choice is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Sergej Khakimullin, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry smartphone, has donated $100 million to a new center pursuing radically small computing innovations.

The Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre will open tomorrow, Bloomberg reports, and it’s where Lazaridis will double-down on his efforts to promote technological improvements in quantum computing and nanotechnology.

The massive donation in nascent technology isn’t anything new for Lazaridis: In 2000, he founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and has donated around $150 million to it so far. He’s also donated more than $100 million to the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

Lazaridis and his RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie both stepped down from their roles in January, after facing criticism for not innovating RIM’s hardware and software to compete with the iPhone and BlackBerry. But things aren’t shaping up much better for new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who in June announced that next-gen BlackBerry 10 devices won’t appear until 2013.

Why the fascination with tiny computing? Both nanotechnology and quantum computing have far-reaching applications in fields like biotechnology, allowing us to develop treatments that work at the cellular level. Lazaridis also tells Bloomberg that this research could lead to tiny energy sources and self-repairing elements for nuclear plants. Most importantly, the move towards nanotech and quantum computing will allow us to leap beyond the limitations of Moore’s Law, the notion that number of transistors on integrated circuits double every two years.

“We can’t offer [people working at the center] ocean, beaches, or mountains, but we can try and offer them the best environment, the best collaborators, the best equipment that would be conducive to them making the breakthroughs of their lifetime,” Lazaridis told Bloomberg. “One of the best ways to describe this is, we’re trying to break the known laws of physics.”

Photo via textlad/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yesterday, Google Research pulled the shroud off Spanner, Google’s “scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database,” claiming to have created “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally consistent distributed transactions.”

The only problem?

TransLattice has been deploying a globally available, geographically distributed multinode database for almost two years.

I wrote about TransLattice almost two months ago when the company finally went public. The company’s core product is “TED,” TransLattice Elastic Database, and it enables a live, functional, operational database with multiple nodes all over the world, without simply syncing, replicating, or cloning.

Spanner, which appears to be in use at Google, maintains global consistency with the assistance of atomic clocks and GPS. The database automatically places data closest to where it’s frequently needed, replicates elsewhere for redundancy and backup, and can scale impressively: up to “millions of machines across hundreds of datacenters and trillions of database rows.”

That sounds like greater scalability than TransLattice, which two months ago was running on up to 12 nodes and was working on capability for 20 or more nodes.

But TransLattice believes it was first, saying that Google’s system, while interesting, is much more a key-value store than a true relational database, which while enabling huge scale, would not work for enterprise applications.

In other words: It’s built for exactly what Google does every day.

In addition, however, TransLattice co-founder and chief technical officer Mike Lyle called Google’s claim to be first into question.

“Most dubious is Spanner’s claim to be the first system with these properties. TransLattice has been delivering to customers true SQL conformance and geographically distributed relational databases with all of the ACID guarantees for nearly two years.”

I talked to a Google representative about Spanner and TransLattice, and while she did not have a specific quote, she said that Spanner is a Google Research project, not a specific product.

Any specific claims in the paper are not claims Google per se is making, and while Spanner is deployed right now, she could not comment on how long it has been operational.

Reading through the Google Research paper (OK, skimming it) it appears that Spanner has been built for a different use-case than TED. And both, to be completely frank, are incredible achievements.

No matter which one happened to be first.

photo credit: IronRodArt – Royce Bair (NightScapes on Thursdays) via photo pin cc

---

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.

---

Academia.edu, a website that has crowdsourced 1.5 million academic papers, has given university professors the capability to track who’s actually reading their academic papers and research.

In its initial incarnation, Academia.edu was designed as a social network for researchers to connect with each other; it was described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “Facebook for nerds.” The San Francisco-based startup has been around since 2008, and it boasts 1.7 million members. After pulling in $4.5 million in funding last year, the site has focused its energies on building analytics around its catalog of freely available research papers.

Founder Richard Price (pictured left) claims that this is a step forward in enabling academics to measure their social and professional influence. The metrics available include a map highlighting the countries that are driving traffic, and which search engines and specific keywords are generating hits for users’ profiles and research.

Price, a young British entrepreneur (check out his profile here), moved to the Bay Area and started the site after achieving a Ph.D in philosophy at Oxford University in 2007.

My bet is that this will likely be part of the site’s long-term monetization strategy, as the analytics are valuable and could be offered as part of a premium service.

The real value proposition for professors is that they can set up profiles with more information than a university profile page typically contains, including links to research papers or personal blogs. One early adopter, Richard Kahn, a professor in the education department at Antioch University in L.A., said that he joined the site because it helped him seem like a “legitimate and influential player in my fields of expertise.”

However, one of the challenges the site will need to overcome is that university professors have typically been slow to embrace social networking sites. For those that are connected, they are overwhelmed with choices such as LinkedIn to Facebook, and it’s a hassle to keep all their online profiles updated with fresh content. The startup will also need to compete with a growing number of sites that are bringing scholars online, like Mendeley.com, ResearchGate.net, and Zotero.org.

Academia.edu and its competitors haven risen with the open access movement. Ed-tech startups like Coursera (read more about the site’s growth here) Udacity, and Course Hero all claim to be democratizing education by bringing academic courses to anyone with an internet connection.

Researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) in Singapore have created a printer capable of spitting out images with 100,000 dots-per-inch resolution (dpi) – a big improvement over the 10,000 dpi in current inkjet printers.

To do this, the researchers had to go small. Within each colored pixel are four nanoscale nodes, each topped with silver and gold nanodisks. To create color, the researchers simply altered the size of and spacing between each node, an effect called “structural color.”

The result, as the image above shows, is a somewhat grainy full-color image that measures just 50 micrometers across.

More interesting, because the nodes can’t get any closer to each other without blurring the overall image, the researchers say they’ve obtained the highest possible resolution for images.

But there’s a problem: As Northwestern University professor Teri Odom told Nature, even those with perfect vision can’t see images smaller than 20-30 micrometers. So the new technology won’t have too many consumer uses.

But the A*Star team has a better application. In addition to cryptography, the technology can be used to create nanoscale watermarks and read-only high-capacity DVDs. That may not be very sexy, but if the researchers play their cards right, it could end up being very lucrative.

Thirty percent of online shoppers research a product on Amazon before they purchase it, another sign of Amazon’s incredible dominance in e-commerce, according to new research from Forrester.

“Ever since Amazon.com opened for business in July 1995, its impact on retail and the broader eBusiness world has waxed and waned,” Forrester analysts Sucharita Mulpuru and Brian K. Walker wrote. “But Amazon has indisputably become a force that cannot be ignored.”

The new study, titled “Why Amazon Matters Now More Than Ever,” outlines Amazon’s strengths and weaknesses ahead of the company’s earnings report today. Analysts surveyed by FactSet expect Amazon to post $12.9 billion in revenue for its fiscal second quarter, compared to revenues of $9.9 billion a year ago.

Forrester’s study said that while 30 percent of online buyers use Amazon to research first, Google attracted 13 percent. “Amazon is the first stop on the shopping journey for more and more shoppers; in recent years, it appears to have taken market share from search engines like Google, the dominant incumbent in shopping research,” the report said.

The report estimates that Amazon’s U.S. revenue accounted for 9 percent of total U.S. e-commerce revenue in 2001, but as of 2011 that number is now 19 percent. If that trend is still active today, Amazon may command more than 20 percent of U.S. e-commerce.

While much of this is good news for Amazon, it will need to innovate in other areas if it wants to keep growing.

“While it’s anyone’s guess, Forrester believes that further innovation will drive Amazon’s future,” Mulpuru and Walker wrote. “Logical next steps include opening physical stores and distribution centers that enable same-day delivery, and expanding website features for merchant services and product verticals.”

Jeff Bezos photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

In yet another science-is-awesome moment, a group of Harvard University researchers has engineered an artificial jellyfish from silicone and cells from a rat’s heart.

Harvard bioengineers constructed a freely swimming jellyfish from “chemically dissociated rat tissue and silicone polymer,” as documented by the journal Nature Biotechnology. This research lab mostly focuses its time on creating models of human heart tissues that could be used to regenerate organs. It created the artificial jellyfish to help the team better understand “muscular pumps” by reverse engineering one.

Instead of calling the creature a jellyfish, the Harvard scientists instead refer to it as a “medusoid.” The medusoids were designed using various computer programs so the lifeform would mimic jellyfish behavior, including how it swims, how it feeds, and how it interacts with animal fluids. The team writes:

The constructs, termed ‘medusoids’, were designed with computer simulations and experiments to match key determinants of jellyfish propulsion and feeding performance by quantitatively mimicking structural design, stroke kinematics, and animal-fluid interactions. The combination of the engineering design algorithm with quantitative benchmarks of physiological performance suggests that our strategy is broadly applicable to reverse engineering of muscular organs or simple life forms that pump to survive.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish,” Kit Parker, a Harvard biophysicist who led the research told Nature. “Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat.”

Check out the video below of the artificial jellyfish swimming:

Star Trek science, meet the real world.

A group of researchers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute has possibly figured out a way to take the fictional tractor beam and make it real.

Light’s ability to push objects has been known for some time, but what has evaded researchers so far is a way to create backwards force from a forward-moving beam.

The A*Star team has figured out how to do just that. The key to the discovery is the Bessel beam, a laser with particular distribution of light intensity. Instead of scattering backwards, the light of a Bessel beam can, with small enough particles, actually scatter forward, pulling the particles back towards the observer. So, while the beam of light is moving forward, the particles are moving backwards. Hello, tractor beam.

That’s the theory, anyway. The team says the idea could be used to manipulate smaller objects like biological cells, which don’t need all that much energy to be moved.

Higher level applications like cars or people, on the other hand, are seen as more or less impossible: One, moving something on that scale would would require far too much energy, and two, the ensuing Besssel beam would likely be powerful enough to damage — or, in the case humans, kill — whatever it was moving.

In short, a Bessel beam vacation would not be a fun trip.

I have a secret. In college, sometimes students pay each other to do their homework. I know! The research takes a lot of time, and in the end often you still don’t have all the information you need. Researching tool Qualtrics helps students and enterprises alike find not just some data, but all the data relevant to their project.

“In 2002 I couldn’t convince anyone to do research online,” said Qualtrics chief executive Ryan Smith in an interview with VentureBeat. “So we started in academia for five years and we dominated it.”

Just like in college, others are willing to pay you to do that data analysis for them. The company received $70 million in its first round of funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital today. Since its founding year, 2002, Qualtrics has grown to be profitable and have over 4,000 customers including big enterprise clients, as well as over 600 academic institutions. The company was founded when a couple of students realized they needed a better way to get their research done. Smith stressed that his product is for the intern all the way to the professional researcher. For much of Qualtrics’ life, the company had only one product: the ability to fill out a survey of your knowledge needs and get back an answer.

“Part of the problem I see is that people believe they’ve got the right data,” said Smith.

This product, which is the company’s main bread and butter, allows customers to “survey” anyone on the Internet, asking for any kind of data that isn’t restricted by a certain database’s parameters. Instead of coming back with a long list of data that needs to be made sense of, the program will provide you charts or graphs, information you can immediately absorb and use. The company just released two new products, one called “Site Intercept” that allows you to see when and how someone is using your site to push them content or ask them for information about a product. The second, called Qualtrics 360, provides analytics.

“People talk about big data right now and tend to get focused on the data center,” said Accel Partners partner Ryan Sweeney in an interview with VentureBeat. “We at Accel believe there’s as much of a data issue occurring outside the enterprise as well.”

Sweeney explained that this was the biggest round Accel and Sequoia had jointly participated in, but it wasn’t an easy road to get there. Smith and his co-founders simply weren’t interested in taking on venture capital. The company had been bootstrapped since its early days and become independently successful.

“We’ve been kind of scouted for quite some time by venture firms and it’s been a process,” said Smith. “We really were interested in making sure that one and one equals five and we really saw they bought into the vision that we have.”

Smith also appreciated that the venture firms were excited about having the company in Utah, outside of the big silicon city. Qualtrics will use the funding to hire on 250 employees, build out the Site Intercept and 360 products, as well as push forward with international expansion.

Ryan Smith photo via Justin Hackworth, screenshot via Qualtrics

Microsoft is making a major expansion to its Research arm with the opening of a New York City lab.

With the move, Microsoft aims to tap into the fledging tech ecosystem of the city, one that is home to both a growing start-up scene and an established academic community. The lab will join Microsoft Research’s twelve global locations, which span seven countries.

The news comes the acquisition of fourteen former Yahoo! researchers who will head up the new operation. Three of the higher profile hires include Duncan Watts, David Pennock, John Langford, all of whom are leaders in their respective fields.

Pennock, who specializes in algorithmic economics, will act as assistant managing director for the new lab alongside Microsoft researcher Jennifer Chayes, who will continue to direct Microsoft Research New England (pictured above).

In their new jobs at Microsoft Research, the team will focus on, broadly, taking data sources from the Web and applying them social sciences, and, potentially, actual Microsoft products. The Manhattan location should not be overlooked: The new lab gives Microsoft a viable connection to the academic institutions of NYC, not to mention the growing tech and startup ecosystems.

This is something the researchers stress as vital.

“My ambition for the New York City lab is that it will become a leading center, if not the leading center, for computational and experimental social science,” Watts said in a press release. “Leveraging the intellectual capital of the New York City academic community, the tremendous data assets of Microsoft and Microsoft’s partners, and the rapidly growing local tech scene.”

As much as cable companies don’t want to admit that their users are getting rid of traditional TV and using services like Netflix and Hulu to fill their watching needs, new research shows North Americans dropping cable at a fast clip.

A new report titled, “The Battle for the American Couch Potato: Online and Traditional TV, and Movie Distribution” from Toronto-based Convergence Consulting says 2.65 million Americans cut the cord between 2008 and 2011, with more than a million leaving cable in 2011. By the end of 2012, that number is forecasted to reach 3.58 million cord-cutters.

Between 2000 and 2009, cable companies in North America added an average of about 2 million subscribers a year, but lately, growth has been slowing sharply. Subscriber growth for cable considerably slowed from 2010 to 2011, with 112,00 subscribers added in 2011 from 272,000 added in 2012. But on a mixed note, the report forecasts 185,000 additions will happen in 2012, some of which could be people returning to cable after trying the cord-cutting lifestyle. (It should also be noted that Leichtman Research Group has counter research that says major U.S. cable companies added 380,000 subscriptions in 2011.)

Although the stagnation of cable subscribers might seem like good news for Netflix and other video-streaming services, the report also had bad news for them. The research suggests the audience for free full-episode sites like regular Hulu “has started to plateau.” It also suggests paid services such as Netflix are screwed because of the high cost of programming. The only way Netflix can overcome new cost barriers will be to “achieve sufficient subscriber/revenue growth.”

As a cord cutter myself, I identify greatly with this data. I miss my cable subscription and access to live entertainment and sports events. I’ve adjusted to using free and paid streaming services, but I’ve seen the quality of Netflix’s content decline over time, especially with its loss of Starz as a partner. Thankfully, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings might be looking at alternatives to find a coexistence between the cable and streaming. I for one, would welcome such a truce.

Cord cutting photo: GoodLIfe_Studio/Shutterstock

Editor’s note: If you’d subscribed to my email newsletter, you could have been reading this column yesterday!

In Microsoft’s vision of the future, Kinect sensors are everywhere: In your living room, your kitchen, at school, and even in the supermarket, above the fruit display.

And why not? The $150 motion-sensing device provides a cheap way to add gesture and voice controls to any application. Plus it’s got a camera and two 3D depth sensors that give computers a tool to map out spaces in three dimensions, recognize people by their faces, identify real-world objects, and create 3D models of those objects.

I spent a day at Microsoft’s Redmond campus this week attending TechForum, a small gathering of about a dozen journalists hosted by Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie. Part strategy briefing, part new-product showcase, part science fair, TechForum was a chance for us writers to see an array of recent and upcoming technologies that Microsoft’s been working on, both in its commercial products as well as in its pure research labs.

Kinect sensors weren’t the day’s primary theme, but it was fascinating to see how many contexts in which the flat, three-eyed black bar kept popping up.

• Kinect sensors are built into the gestural controls in the futuristic demonstration home on Microsoft’s campus. In the living room and entertainment room, large-screen TVs use Xbox-like gestural and voice-command interfaces to let you select music and videos as well as control your home environment.

• Whole Foods, together with development house Chaotic Minds, showed off a robotic shopping cart that uses a Kinect sensor (mounted above the cart’s handlebars) to sense where you are so it can roll along the aisles following you. The Kinect could also be used to identify items you place in the cart, although for the demo we saw, the system used RFID instead.

• Nissan is planning a Kinect-powered interactive app to show off its new 2013 Pathfinder at the upcoming New York Auto Show, and maybe in dealer showrooms after that. Development company Identity Mind is building the app, which lets you view the Pathfinder from different angles by moving your body; a Kinect sensor identifies where your body is and adjusts the view accordingly.
  

  Aaron Greenburg from Interactive Entertainment Business demos the Kinect for Windows SDK.

• Interactive television shows for children are in the works, including a new Sesame Street series and a show called National Geographic Wild. These shows will use Kinect sensors to let children answer quizzes and play games by moving their bodies.

• Engineers in Stevie Bathiche’s group Applied Sciences Group have used a Kinect sensor to create a 3D display connected to a stereo camera that moves left and right as you move your head left and right, so the perspective shifts just as it does in the real world.
  

  A stereo camera that moves to match the motion of your head, as tracked by a Kinect sensor (not shown).

• Other Microsoft researchers have built a demo called “Behind the Screen” that uses Kinect sensors and transparent LCD displays to give you a sort of window for looking at 3D objects that you can manipulate with your hands. You put your hands behind the transparent screen, and a Kinect sensor pointed down at your hands detects where they are and what you’re doing with them. The system projects 3D objects onto the screen, superimposed on your view of your hands, so it looks like you’re interacting with the digital objects. Another Kinect sensor pointed at you adjusts the view to the position of your head, so the perspective always appears correct.
  

  Microsoft Research intern Jinha Lee from MIT Media Lab demonstrates the Behind-the-Screen Interaction.

• Andy Wilson’s research group has created a sort of magic mirror called the “Holoflector,” which puts a half-silvered mirror three feet in front of a large LCD screen. If you stand three feet in front of the mirror, a Kinect sensor picks up your body position and can use that to display images on the screen behind the mirror. Because the screen is exactly as far from the mirror as you are, its images look like they’re coexisting with you in the three-dimensional world. That lets the system create some interesting interactive effects, such as turning you into a pixelated mannequin, displaying a floating “hologram” above your outstretched palm, or raining little bouncy balls all over you.
  

  Microsoft Research's Andy Wilson and Craig Mundie demonstrate the Holoflector project.

• Finally, Microsoft created a demonstration grocery display for TechForum that uses a Kinect hidden above your head, pointed down at a rack of fancy fruit. There’s also an LCD screen behind a half-silvered mirror that sits above the fruit rack. When you pick up a piece of fruit and hold it in front of the mirror, the Kinect recognizes what you’re holding. The display then wakes up and superimposes images on the reflection, showing you (for instance) what the fruit is, where it comes from, and what kinds of recipes use it. Naturally, you can use gestures to navigate through the interface, swiping left and right to see different information cards.

Microsoft is not alone in embracing the Kinect as a platform for interface innovation. Almost as soon as the Xbox accessory launched, hackers and programmers quickly started seeing what they could do with the device — build robotics platforms with 3D vision, for instance. Microsoft not only didn’t mind the hacking, it encouraged it. To facilitate the experimentation, Microsoft last month released Kinect for Windows, a development kit that’s expressly made for experimentation. Students can buy it for $150 and if you want to incorporate it into a commercial product, it costs $250.

Microsoft now says that more than 300 companies are working on products that will use the Kinect, including the Whole Foods and Nissan projects I mentioned above.

Last year, Mundie said, about 90 percent of the Kinect projects by outside developers were based on the gestural interface. This year, an increasing proportion are using its equally-impressive voice interface.

Even without delving into hard-core coding, Microsoft sees a way that Kinect can be useful for more than just playing games. The company showed a video of the Lakeside Center for Autism, a Seattle-area organization, which uses Kinect games to help autistic children learn to interact with the world and with each other. Apparently, the gestural interface is much more direct and intuitive for these children than traditional computer interfaces, and draws them out of their “shells” more effectively than traditional forms of teaching and human training. (Autism researchers have discovered similar advantages to using Apple iPads, whose touchscreen interface also seems appealing and engaging to children who otherwise have difficulty communicating.)

It’s not hard to see why the Kinect, which provides cheap 3D sensors that just two years ago would have cost thousands of dollars, is such an appealing platform for Microsoft’s innovators. The company is smart to make it so accessible to outside developers, and so cheap. For that reason, you can expect to see (and be using) a Kinect in the next year, regardless of whether you own one.

Are you building Kinect applications? Let me know about your projects, and send me links to short videos. I’ll include the best examples in a future story.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Researchers are working on an on/off switch for the next generation of credit cards. No, not to stop you from spending money you shouldn’t, but to help protect you from theft and fraud.

Credit cards are moving away from magnetic strips to more modern, no-contact technology. Now, with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips or near-field communication (NFC) cards, you can just wave your credit card in front of a reader to quickly pay for a cup of joe.

However, this ease could open up the doors for a new type of criminal. In theory, shady characters with portable scanners can read the information off your RFID card by getting close enough to you that your card is in their reader’s electromagnetic field. This type of theft hasn’t taken off yet, due to clunky technology and minimal monetary gain (most RFID and NFC cards have low spending caps), but an on/off trick could be a smart preventative step.

Researchers at the Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are working on a simple new technology that would require customers to place their finger on the card to turn it “on” when they pay. When you place your finger on a specific spot on the card, say a logo or icon, it would complete a circuit and enable readers to charge the card. If the circuit isn’t complete, the card’s NFC or RFID technology would be disabled.

“Our new design integrates an antenna and other electrical circuitry that can be interrupted by a simple switch, like turning off the lights in the home or office,” explains professor Marlin Mickle in a statement. “The RFID or NFC credit card is disabled if left in a pocket or lying on a surface and unreadable by thieves using portable scanners.”

The extra step would take very little time for the customer, and researchers think the technology would be fairly easy and inexpensive for credit card companies to adopt. They recently filed a patent application for the on/off card technology.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New and bored smartphone owners alike went on a download spree last week, with a record-breaking 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps downloaded between Dec. 25th and 31st.

The staggering number of apps downloaded, courtesy of analytics firm Flurry, goes hand-in-hand with the report that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day. Naturally, many new owners of these smartphones downloaded all kinds of games and apps to make their smartphone experience more useful and entertaining, with 242 million apps downloaded on Christmas.

With those two reports together, the week from Dec 25th through the 31st set new records for number of smartphone activations and total number of apps downloaded. Flurry specifically estimates 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated. The company believes 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, which is a 60 percent increase from the first full week of December.

Most apps were downloaded in the United States, with 509 million downloads, or 42.3%. In second place was China with 99 million app downloads. Rounding out the top three was the United Kingdom with 81 million app downloads. Flurry appropriately notes that Christmas is widely celebrated in the U.S. and U.K., but not in China. But with the 1-billion-strong Chinese population hungrily buying smartphones, it appears they didn’t need a holiday to download a lot of apps.

Looking ahead to 2012, Flurry estimates that surpassing 1 billion app downloads per week will become a regular occurrence. The company rightly points out that iOS and Android adoption is “still by all measures relatively nascent” and with more phones sold around the world, many more apps will be consumed.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Companies love to use the term “cloud” when hyping their internet-based services. But what do technology executives really think about the cloud?

With our exclusive conference on cloud computing, CloudBeat 2011, starting today, we decided to ask.

VentureBeat commissioned an exclusive survey of technology executives at companies of at least 250 employees. The results show that, yes, the push to cloud services is gaining momentum: It’s already playing a significant role in IT executives’ decisions about what technologies to deploy, and many large companies are already embracing cloud services to a significant degree.

The main reasons for embracing the cloud are cost reduction, cost control and agility of deployment.

However, companies are holding back on hosting their most critical business applications in the cloud. Concerns over security, regulatory compliance and the difficulty of integrating complex apps into a new, internet-based infrastructure are the big concerns. There’s also some reluctance to commit business applications to a cloud provider that might suffer from occasional outages or that could be affected if legal actions target another one of the provider’s clients.

What cloud providers need to do to win over the next wave of customers seems clear: Ensure the security and reliability of services, facilitate integration and migration of existing apps, and provide assurances that customers will be able to move their apps and data elsewhere if need be.

We created a simple questionnaire with free-form answers to three key questions: Why are you using (or considering) cloud services, in what cases aren’t you considering using it, and what needs to change in the next year to speed adoption of cloud services.

We used Maven, a network of qualified domain experts that are available for “micro-consulting” (basically answering questions like these) in exchange for fees. Maven directed our questionnaire to a set of IT executives working at companies of 250 employees or more.

Of the 25 respondents, 64% were chief information officers, vice presidents or a similar executive title, while the remainder were senior managers or IT directors. 40 percent were at companies of 250-1,000 employees, and 28 percent were at companies with more than 10,000 employees. All have had decision-making responsibilities for choosing cloud-based technologies within the past 6 months.

Here are the specific questions we asked, along with a sampling of answers to each.

Why cloud?

Please describe in 3-4 sentences your organization’s primary motivation for evaluating and/or using the cloud.

Many respondents cited cost as the primary factor, with rapid implementation or simplification showing up in many other responses. Variability of cost, flexibility of deployment and “agility” were other reasons for considering cloud services.

Some pointed to specific accounting reasons: The desire to avoid capital expenditures (CapEx) and move costs to operating expenses (OpEx) or, perhaps, bury them in employee expense reports — a trick I’ve used at previous jobs to get needed services that IT wouldn’t approve.

Specific responses included:

“Cost reduction and simplification of support and maintenance.”

“Managing IT services infrastructure and owning it is not core to our business — in addition we cannot ever hope to stay up to date with technology without funding which would have to be taken from elsewhere in our business.”

“Major shift from CapEx to expense budget.”

“A tablet approach allows the use of a pdf annotation application and eliminates paper for this and board report documents as examples. Cloud storage, such as DropBox or Box can be used to upload the weekly files to the tablet. … [Bring Your Own Device] is another driver — the cloud delivery methods can eliminate the need to manage a user’s device directly and instead deliver PIM, email and other data to a secure canister on the device.”

Why not cloud?

Please name a process, workflow, application, or data set that your organization has deliberately decided NOT to move to the cloud. Please explain why you made this decision.

Keeping control of mission-critical business processes, ensuring security and maintaining lower costs on certain services were the main reasons cited for not using the cloud. For example, one respondent noted that large files were simply cheaper to store on local file servers at this point. Similarly, one company kept its own Exchange servers, noting that with a really large installation (over 1,500 seats) it was cheaper to maintain in-house.

Applications that have been carefully woven into a company’s business processes, integrated with a host of other software, is also difficult to move to the cloud.

In some cases, security concerns are particularly pressing, such as with medical records governed by HIPAA.

Specific responses included:

“We would like to cut costs and simplify the support and maintenance efforts involved in storing [large] files. But, to date, it is much more economical to maintain that storage in-house.”

“Core policy administration systems: these are largely back office systems, they are large-scale legacy systems with a great deal of intellectual capital as well as containing our customers’ and agents’ personally identifiable information (PII), so any kind of security breach, or outage, would pose a significant business risk.”

“Clinical applications. Not quite sure of the HIPAA complications of storing Patient Data in a public cloud.”

“The bank’s core applications are considered too sensitive to move to a cloud model. Cloud vendor security cannot be reliably assessed or guaranteed, a big concern for heavily regulated industries. Application availability cannot be reasonably assured as well and there are several cases that can be pointed to in this area. A vendor’s environment being seized by the FBI has also affected some companies using these services. Having an internal cloud delivery model that leverages two internal datacenters is what we have implemented to address this concern.”

What’s next?

Please describe at least three key pain points (e.g. governance, spend management, multiple languages/frameworks, open standards, interop, etc.) that you believe will be solved in the next year to make cloud adoption easier. Why do you choose these items?

Management of the environment in the cloud was a concern of several respondents. How do you maintain your software, enforce service-level agreements, and make sure you’re not completely locked into any one vendor?

The answers here also hearkened back to the concerns over regulatory compliance with, say, banking regulations or HIPAA. Trusting data to a cloud provider is a whole different ballgame when that trust puts you at risk of very severe regulatory penalties.

Specific responses included:

“Comfort with the term cloud and education to understand that it’s not an either/or decision, the cloud can be private, hybrid or public depending on needs.”

“Support for multiple Hypervisors, especially HyperV, because customers are demanding it and most cloud providers are mature enough with their first VMWare support…but recognize they need to support others in the event of hybrid cloud setups.”

“Bandwidth, spend management, and open standards are current pain points that I expect to be resolved in the next year.”

“Data residency: complexity/variability of global compliance rules makes it hard to adopt cloud for certain types of data.”

“Mobile access: HTML5 based access via mobile devices makes usage more ubiquitous.”

“Ability to manage the dynamic environment that results from cloud adoption, the ability to manage SLA’s, performance, availability and reliability across multi-vendor cloud solutions, ability to maintain portability so one can still have strength negotiating contract renewals.”

For the entire survey results, check out the embedded PDF below.

With Steve Jobs stepping down from the CEO job at Apple, it’s easy to overlook the computer industry’s other big invention factory: Microsoft.

While it’s not often regarded as a font of innovation, Microsoft actually devotes substantial resources — to the tune of $8 billion annually — to research and development. The company was the third-most prolific recipient of patents in 2010 (after IBM and Samsung), with 3,094 patents granted, putting it far ahead of Apple’s 563, which ranked it 46th on the list.

And the company’s research facility in Redmond is a Mecca for computer scientists. The company employs 850 Ph.D.s around the world in its research efforts, and many are located in the Redmond campus’s Building 99.

I visited the facility earlier this year, before leaving Wired to come work at VentureBeat, and after some delays my story appeared recently: How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck.

Wired photographer Jim Merithew and I started out somewhat skeptical of the idea of spending a day at the home of Windows 7, Outlook and Clippy the Office Assistant. But then we were ushered into a world filled with mad scientists, intent on re-imagining the way that people interact with computers.

Some of these visions were more impractical than others. I’m not convinced, for instance, that we’ll ever need wrist cuffs that “read” our finger positions based on the electrical signals emitted by our forearm muscles.

Microsoft senior researcher Andy Wilson shows off a new interface.

On the other hand, some of the inventions we saw that day could take us far closer to the day when you can walk up to a video wall and peer through it at people on the other side of the world, just as naturally as you’d look through a window into the next room. In this vision, the scene changes for each viewer, so as you move your head side to side, you see slightly different views, while the person standing next to you sees their own perspective, just like in real life.

So while Microsoft makes most of its money from Windows and Office, it is definitely pushing the limits of innovation. Some of these mad-science inventions even make their way into products.  You can see a direct line from these R&D projects to truly inventive products like the Kinect. The real question, then, is why Microsoft isn’t making better use of all those patents.

It’s an open question. But if the scientists in Building 99 are even partially successful, Microsoft will continue to play a significant role in inventing the interfaces of tomorrow.

Photos by Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Related articles

• How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck (wired.com)
• How Microsoft designed Kinect to withstand gamers and lightning strikes (venturebeat.com)