Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Christopher Mims

Google Is Waging a Financial War of Attrition to Win the Cloud

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:59:10 -0400

Google is fighting a war on multiple fronts—against Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—and is outspending them all in the one area that will be critical to winning the future : the cloud.

Google’s April 17 earnings report revealed that the company spent $2.35 billion on infrastructure , which for Google means its data centers and all the IT gear that go in them.

Let’s put that in historical perspective. This chart from ex-Nokia analyst Horace Dediu is two years old, but it nicely illustrates the trend in infrastructure spending at the major consumer “cloud” companies before the recent frenzy.

Note that in the two years since Dediu assembled this data, Google has more than doubled its infrastructure spending, an increase of more than a billion dollars per quarter. Google is now on track to spend $10 billion a year building and outfitting data centers. To put that in perspective, that’s only $1 billion short of what Intel and Samsung will each spend to build and update the enormously expensive, ultra high tech factories, called chip fabs, where microprocessors are made.

How does Google’s spending on cloud infrastructure compare to its rivals? Amazon doesn’t break out what it spends solely on its cloud infrastructure, but the total value of “purchases of property and equipment, including internal-use software and website development” for all of Amazon was $1.08 billion in its most recent quarter, and Microsoft’s “additions to property and equipment” amounted to $1.73 billion .

Meanwhile, Apple spent $3.37 billion on infrastructure last quarter, but that number is meaningless in this context because, famously, most of that is for factories to build all those shiny iThings . We have no idea what portion of that goes to data centers, and in any event Apple is hardly a cloud-centric company.

But here’s the point: The cloud is at the center of Google’s strategy to push back against all its competitors.

Take Apple. Google just got out of the phone manufacturing business , so it can compete against Apple, through Android, without actually making any hardware. It has countless partners, like Samsung, to take on that unenviable task.

Now look at Microsoft. Google Apps is making inroads among small businesses.

And Amazon is a direct competitor to Google in the cloud-services market. While Amazon might have a tremendous head start , Google is apparently willing to outspend the company on every front.

What do all three of these battles have in common? In mobile, enterprise and services, Google is able to leverage its tremendous cloud infrastructure. Sure, it’s selling or giving away three different things—a mobile ecosystem, cloud-based software, or actual cloud services. But all three are enabled by the same cloud infrastructure.

Google is now spending more on the cloud than, well, anyone. And with the company getting serious about renting out portions of that cloud to others, in a so-called “public cloud,” it represents serious competition for Amazon, which as of 2013 had a public cloud five times larger than its next 14 competitors combined .

It will take a while for Google’s public cloud to gain steam, but it’s already having an impact. Snapchat runs on it, and, as Leo Leung of cloud services company Oxygen Cloud noted in a recent post :

Despite our heavy use of [Amazon Web Services], Google’s Cloud Platform (App Engine in particular), has changed the game for my company in terms of reducing development and deployment overhead. With Google’s infrastructure prices now more in line, our first choice has become [Google].

It’s apparent that Google is now, as much as anything, a company whose competitive advantage is infrastructure as much as the products into which that infrastructure is transformed. And Google is a company still deriving its revenue overwhelmingly from search and advertising—which means it can afford to wage a no-profit war of attrition for as long as it takes.

(Top image via Twin Design / Shutterstock.com )

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Amazon and Google Are Battling to Dominate the Cloud -- and Amazon May Already Have Won

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 11:17:09 -0400

In technology, it’s sometimes good to let a pioneer figure out the pitfalls of a new market. Apple’s iPod transformed music listening after countless lesser MP3 players failed to make a real dent.

Google is now trying to do something similar in cloud computing. The company last month announced price cuts that made its cloud services cheaper than Amazon’s, the leader in cloud services for businesses. At almost the same time, Google orchestrated a flurry of coverage of its cloud services .

But whereas music players were a fragmented industry when the iPod appeared, in cloud computing Google is playing catch-up with a single market leader, Amazon, that has a track record of destroying incumbents in every industry it gets into. What Google has in its favor, besides a sheer technical expertise, is that it already runs the biggest cloud-computing operation in the world—just that it puts most of it to a different use. The resulting battle is likely to be epic, and its outcome determines nothing less than who will control the internet .

The cloud is already massive and growing bigger

“The cloud” is a term so nebulous it hardly does justice to the specifics of Google’s and Amazon’s respective strategies. Generically, the cloud is just a vast mass of computers connected to the internet, on which people or companies can rent processing power or data storage as they need it. It’s used for everything from hosting websites to storing archives to running massive data-crunching operations.

Unless you work in technology or corporate logistics, you might not have known that Amazon was ahead of Google in the cloud business. Most consumers will have encountered the cloud in the form of services where Google is strong—email (Gmail), document storage (Google Drive), and the like. But Amazon Web Services has for years been the front-runner in the business of renting computer power to companies.

To understand the scale of the war brewing between them, it helps to understand that what Amazon and Google are really contesting is who gets to eat a bigger portion of the total corporate information-technology pie. All the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research—some six times Google and Amazon’s combined annual revenue last year. Not surprisingly, both companies have said at one point or another that this new revenue stream has the potential to be larger than all their current sources of income .

But wait, you say; that stuff isn’t all in the cloud. Most IT services are still provided much closer to where they are used, on PCs themselves or in “private clouds” run by companies and their contractors. (For example, IDC reports that only 13% of companies’ data is currently stored in the cloud.) But if the advocates of cloud computing are right, some day most of that spending will be on software that runs on remote computers controlled by internet giants.

When that time comes, all the world’s business IT needs will be delivered as a service, like electricity; you won’t much care where it was generated, as long as the supply is reliable. And Google and Amazon both want to be the utility company that provides it—minus the government regulation that usually attends utilities.

For once, Google is David to someone's Goliath

In response to Google’s price cuts last month, Amazon fought back with price cuts of its own, leaving the two companies’ services more or less at parity with each other in terms of cost, if not performance.

There’s a problem with Google’s cloud push, however: It arrives eight years too late. Way back in 2006, Amazon had the foresight to start renting out portions of its own, already substantial cloud—the data centers on which it was running Amazon.com—to startups that wanted to pay for servers by the hour, instead of renting them individually, as was typical at the time.

Because Amazon was so early, and so aggressive—it has lowered prices for its cloud services 42 times since first unveiling them, according to the company—it first defined and then swallowed whole the market for cloud computing and storage.

...and Amazon's Lead over Google is almost unfathomably big

In 2013, Gartner put

Amazon so far ahead of its competitors in terms of vision and execution that it literally stands on its own. Gartner

Today the cloud market has many players. Yet if Amazon’s entire public cloud were a single computer, it would have five times more capacity than those of its next biggest 14 competitors—including Google— combined . Every day, one-third of people who use the internet visit a site or use a service running on Amazon’s cloud. (Netflix runs on it almost entirely.) That’s one reason why, when a portion of Amazon’s cloud goes down, it can seem like the entire internet has failed.

Analysts have called Amazon the “ Walmart of the cloud ” for its rock-bottom prices and just-good-enough service. But there’s also a very human reason why Amazon has become so dominant. It’s the same reason Microsoft was able to win so many corporate contracts during the heyday of the Windows PC.

Amazon authored the lingua franca of the cloud...

For you to use a cloud service, your own computer has to swap information with the servers in the cloud. That means they need a common language, since computers all have different versions of operating systems and software. When the cloud started, there was no such common language. So Amazon created one of its own—in technical terms, an application programming interface, or API.

By now companies that rely heavily on cloud services are almost all customers of Amazon. (There are a handful of notable exceptions like the photo-sharing app Snapchat, which is on Google’s cloud .) That means they have created enormous libraries of code that are designed to talk to Amazon’s API. Efforts to create a universal cloud-computing language—the most prominent is called OpenStack— aren’t doing so well .

Which means Amazon has, by default, defined the language of the cloud .

"I claim that Amazon Web Services is the Windows of today,” says Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus , which helps companies build “private clouds” (i.e., servers and data centers they own and physically control) that can interface with Amazon’s public cloud . What he means is that Amazon’s cloud has become so dominant, and so popular with developers—who are only human and therefore generally loath to learn new technologies, even if they’re in some ways superior—that its position resembles that of Microsoft Windows at its zenith. “Amazon has the chance of controlling the public cloud just like Windows controlled the PC environment for a long time,” he adds.

Amazon’s cloud service now claims hundreds of thousands of customers, says Mickos, so at a minimum there are hundreds of thousands of developers adept at the company’s more than 38 different cloud services , which range from everyday computing and storage to systems for making sure that customer’s services stay up even when one of the regional data centers that comprise Amazon’s cloud (inevitably) goes down.

...it has big customers like Netflix locked in...

What’s it like to be one of the hundreds of thousands of customers for Amazon’s cloud? Like all relationships with technology, it has a touch of Stockholm Syndrome.

Ariel Tseitlin, head of cloud at Netflix, told Fast Company that as an early customer of Amazon Web Services, Netflix had to pay a “large pioneer tax” in order to make the service work for Netflix. That included a big push to write open-source code that stitches together bits of Amazon’s cloud in ways that are useful to Netflix and Amazon’s other customers.

As a result, said Tseitlin, “we don’t have a particularly strong desire to pay that pioneer tax again with another cloud provider."

In other words, Netflix would pay a high cost in switching to a competitor. Not just a financial cost; it would also just be a huge hassle, a company-sized version of the headache of switching from a PC to a Mac, or from an iPhone to an Android smartphone, or learning to drive on the opposite side of the road. Technology can move quickly, but when it does, the technology between our is ears slow to adapt.

…and even as Google plays catch-up, Amazon is pressing ahead

One reason Amazon’s cloud service grew so fast was its cheapness. For literally the price of a cup of coffee, developers could massively boost their processing power and storage for a day to deal with a short-term problem, meaning they never had to worry about budgeting bureaucracy. Google is now trying to undercut even those prices, but in the past few years the game has somewhat changed.

Offering cheap cloud will still help Google nab startups where developers have enough sway to decide which provider to use. (That’s one reason Google’s cloud got Snapchat, along with all its explosive growth .) But for bigger companies, a key consideration isn’t how a much a cloud service costs, but how easy it is to hire engineers who can write software in the language of that cloud service. In that area, Amazon is far ahead of all competitors. A search of jobs website Indeed.com puts listings for Amazon’s primary cloud technology, called EC2, far ahead of competing languages for communicating with the cloud

Amazon’s cloud services have so much momentum that the company could just rest on its laurels. Its revenue in cloud services was an estimated $3.4 billion in 2013 . But the company is continuing to roll out new services even as it keeps pace with Google in the price war. “I think Amazon is now trying to expand even faster while they have the freedom to expand,” says Mickos.

Google does have a long game: superior technology…

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Amazon’s advantage is that Google’s cloud API is in fact very similar to Amazon’s, says Mickos. It seems to have accepted that Amazon’s API is what engineers are comfortable with.

But similar doesn’t mean compatible. “Running services on both Amazon and Google and switching between them, the cost of it is high—you have to maintain a lot of ‘glue code’,” says Mickos—meaning custom-written software that allows workloads and data to flow between the two companies’ clouds. “That’s heavy and expensive and fraught with problems.” That means any given company is likely to use just one provider for all its cloud needs.

As long as Amazon is willing to match Google on price—which it has, so far—Google’s only alternative is to beat Amazon at the technology. The only reason that might be possible is that, even though Amazon’s external cloud business is much bigger than Google’s, Google still has the biggest total cloud infrastructure—the most servers and data centers. That’s because Google itself uses so much cloud computing power for Google Search, Gmail, and all the other services it provides. Given Google’s near-legendary ability to attract and retain talent , Amazon’s cloud team is now in a fight with the only engineers in the room who might be smarter than them—and have more resources.

…and enormous investments in infrastructure

Google has already laid extra fiber-optic cable all over the globe, to tie its data centers to each other and to customers with ultra-fast connections. But Amazon is doing the same —and both companies are customizing and optimizing every single part of their cloud infrastructure, from servers down to the electric substations that power them.

Right now, tests of Amazon’s and Google’s clouds show that by one measure at least—how fast data is transferred from one virtual computer to another inside the cloud—Google’s cloud is seven to nine times faster than Amazon’s. This is just one measure, however, and only makes a difference to certain customers. What will ultimately matter is the overall experience developers and corporations have when playing in each cloud.

Ironically, however, the end point of the technological arms race between Google and Amazon will, at least for some types of services, be clouds that customers don’t much think about, the same way we don’t often think about where our electricity comes from—it’s just there. Netflix’s Tseitlin told Fast Company that he longs for the day when the cloud is a commodity that can be taken for granted.

But we aren’t there yet. “It really isn’t a utility like we feel someday it is going to become,” he said.

But why compete if the cost of cloud computing is heading to $0?

The prospect of becoming a utility could be worrying for Google and Amazon, though. Consumers can already store gigabytes of information for free with services like Google Drive and Dropbox. It won’t be long before it costs nothing to store pretty much your whole life in the cloud. Businesses are another matter—they have many orders of magnitude more data—but all the same, as hardware gets cheaper and giants like Amazon and Google come up with ever more efficient ways to use it, merely renting out data storage and processing power will become a commodity business with cutthroat margins.

That means both companies are developing more sophisticated services that will also lock customers in to their cloud-storage systems. Amazon has Redshift , a “data warehouse service” which allows businesses to analyze gigantic quantities of data, and in turn creates more demand for the underlying cloud storage. Google has its services like Google App Engine , which makes it easier for developers to build entire applications with Google’s own libraries of code—which, of course, must then be run in Google’s cloud .

But even with add-ons like these, and even if, as Google and Amazon claim, cloud computing ends up being even bigger for them than their existing businesses, that’s no guarantee of how profitable it will be. Which means that the battle for the cloud is either the world’s biggest battle of egos—not unheard of in Silicon Valley—or it’s ultimately about something else, like control.

The future is Amazon, Google, Microsoft… and not much else

Whatever the endgame, it could take decades to reach. In the meantime, this is a fight that rewards scale . Size means efficiency, efficiency means lower prices, and smaller providers of cloud services are going to have a hard time competing.

And there’s a third big player: Microsoft. The company launched its own cloud service, Azure, in 2008. Though Azure is an also-ran for now, the company is so deeply entrenched in corporate IT culture that at least some companies are willing to wait for it to bring its cloud services to parity with Amazon’s. And like both its main rivals, Microsoft has the money to spend on the engineers and infrastructure required to make its cloud truly big.

"I do think the market [for cloud services] will support three big players,” says Mickos. “Google and Microsoft will build big businesses but can’t take the lead away from Amazon anytime soon."

That still leaves room for a gaggle of smaller companies providing other services, such as private clouds for companies that are nervous about keeping their data on someone else’s servers in an age of hacking and NSA surveillance. Companies that offer such services, like Rackspace and VMWare, as well as Mikos’s Eucalyptus, can offer these clients more control over their data—though there is evidence to suggest that private clouds are no more secure than the ones administered by Google and Amazon.

Either way, the upshot of all this competition is that computing has never been cheaper , and it will only become cheaper still. And as the internet penetrates every part of our lives, down to the everyday objects like toasters and cars that will someday soon be “smart” and connected, humanity is only going to need more cloud .

( Image via Gil C / Shutterstock.com )

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Even Barack Obama May Get Rid of His BlackBerry

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:50:46 -0400

The White House is testing alternatives to the long-time favorite smartphone of President Barack Obama, reports the Wall Street Journal . If Obama does switch to an Android-based phone, from BlackBerry, it would be a major blow for the ailing Waterloo, Ontario-based company.

Two models reportedly being tested by the White House are from Samsung and LG. Samsung has been working to make its phones uniquely attractive to business and government customers with its SAFE devices , which it claims are secure from intrusion.

One reason a presidential switch to a new phone could be particularly devastating for BlackBerry—and a boon to whichever handset maker follows—is the fact that Obama appears to be no less addicted to his smartphone than the majority of his constituents.

Here’s a brief tour down memory lane—thanks for the memories, iconic presidential BlackBerry.

While shopping at a bookstore in Arlington, Va., Obama refers to a list of books stored on his BlackBerry. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Obama checks an important presidential email while attending an NCAA basketball game. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Obama drops his BlackBerry on concrete in Tennessee. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Obama laughs at an email in June 2010. Perhaps it was from then chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

About the only time Obama is without his BlackBerry is during speeches. Here he is handing it to aide Reggie Love. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

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Twelve Reasons Robots Could Be the Next Trillion-dollar Business

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 12:58:55 -0400

Recently I sat down with Dmitry Grishin , the billionaire co-founder of mail.ru and head of the world’s largest venture capital fund devoted solely to robots, Grishin Robotics. As you might expect from someone who has put $25 million into robotics startups, he’s bullish on the potential of robots (as he defines them) to become an area in which fortunes will be made in just the next few years.

Here are Grishin’s arguments for why now is the time for the consumer robot industry to take off (followed by the reasons he might be wrong).

1. Building robots is cheaper than ever

We live in an era of self-driving cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, and ever more autonomous military drones. That’s because innovation comes relatively quickly and cheaply nowadays. “Let’s assume you wanted to build a robot 20 years ago,” Grishin says. “You would need to invest several million dollars to build one robot, and it might take three years.” Costs and timescales like that just don’t fly for modern VCs accustomed to putting their money in software, says Grishin.

2. Smartphones have made the guts of robots less expensive and more effective than ever

The biggest improvements in robotics have come from companies outside the field, says Grishin. “Right now because of smartphones, the price of components [useful for robots] is 1% what it was,” says Grishin. “Most of the components in smartphones are same ones you need in robots—sensors, cameras, batteries, processors. The biggest difference between now and 20 years ago is that the components have become cheap.”

3. And new building blocks keep engineers from having to start from scratch

Open source computers like the Raspberry Pi speed up development times. Raspberry Pi Foundation

So much of the basic infrastructure of an app or web service has already been built and is available for free or at a low cost—from hosting on Amazon to the collaborative software development at the Apache web server—that launching startups is now more about ideas than the technology itself . The same thing is happening in hardware, says Grishin, as basic components (like the open-source microprocessors Arduino and Raspberry Pi) and libraries of code (like the Robot Operating System ) begin to reach millions of hobbyists and professionals .

“It’s very important you have a lot of blocks to easily combine, and you don’t spend too much time to build any of them from scratch,” says Grishin.

4. Building prototypes of new hardware is easier than ever

3D printing has made it possible to iterate hardware designs quickly. Makerbot

“In the past, prototyping was really hard,” says Grishin. Hardware companies would build a prototype, show it off, then spend another year or two creating the next prototype. “But now, because of 3D printers and good 3D software, you can do prototyping much quicker,” says Grishin.

5. Hardware companies can now be as small as software companies

In software, it’s easy for a handful of engineers to build something with massive reach—just look at Instagram, which had but 16 employees when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. Thanks to better components and easier prototyping, Grishin is now seeing teams consisting of just a handful of engineers launching successful robotics startups, he says.

“I give speeches and say ‘guys, it’s possible to start hardware companies,’” says Grishin. “For most it’s not obvious—people still think that hardware is initially a multi-million-dollar investment. It’s changing, but still there’s this mindset that hardware has to be very big.”

6. Accelerators for hardware and robotics companies are finally taking off

Presently, there are hundreds if not thousands of incubators and accelerators designed to help launch software startups, but only a handful aimed at hardware startups. The first, HAXLR8R , launched in 2012. Since then, others have followed , including Highway1 in San Francisco and the R/GA Connected Devices Accelerator . Even big companies like Nike and Foxconn are launching hardware accelerators.

Two accelerators that focus specifically on robotics are AlphaLab Gear and Grishin’s own Bolt . Grishin says he doesn’t see other accelerators as competition—instead, he’d like to see more, so that several startups would compete to address a need with robotics, rather than just one or two.

7. A narrower focus makes it easier to find a market

“Robots” aimed at narrowly defined tasks, like keeping pets fed, are finding their niche. Petnet

The robots that we already rely on— automatic doors, cash machines , even the Roomba vacuum cleaner—are good at what they do precisely because the task they are designed for is relatively straightforward. This, says Grishin, is key to turning robots into a real business.

“What I’ve found is in the robotics niche, you have a lot of people who overcomplicate the situation,” says Grishin. “They start to build complicated universal robots. I think Japanese companies are heroes at this; they just build a mass of technology. But there’s no real way to use that in real life. I’m the opposite. I remember from the early internet that it’s important to take technology that already exists and focus on an area where you can solve real problems.”

8. Manufacturing in China is faster and less expensive than ever

It’s not just prototyping that’s become easier for hardware startups—it’s also possible to manufacture small runs of goods quickly and cheaply in China in a way that simply wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago, says Grishin.

9. Cloud computing means robots can learn from each other

The Roomba could be more effective if it learned from its peers. iRobot

Plenty of smart things have been said about how cloud computing can grant robots access to huge amounts of computing power . This is good for accomplishing difficult tasks like processing what a robot is “seeing” without having to put all that computing power into the robot itself. But Grishin has other notions about how cloud computing could make robots better. For example, robots can learn from each other’s mistakes.

“If a robot can learn something, you have a network effect,” says Grishin. “The more robots you have the on the field, the more they can teach each other.” For example, while iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner isn’t very smart on its own, Grishin argues that if all those little bots were sharing data to a centralized database, iRobot would be able to examine all the situations Roombas have collectively encountered. It could then use that data to re-program them to be more effective.

10. Many people are carrying a universal remote control for robots in their pocket already

It used to be that every gadget in our lives needed its own control panel and user interface. But as these devices become internet-connected, it makes more sense to simply control them through our smartphones—a system that most fitness monitors and other wearable technologies rely upon. Plus, it saves manufacturers from having to build this functionality into the device itself. This, says Grishin, saves “a big part of the cost” of robots.

11. The number of robot startups is exploding

Grishin says that since he started his robotics investment fund about a year and a half ago, he has received more than 600 applications from startups. Many told him that they had despaired of receiving funding, with so many VCs focusing on software rather than hardware.

12. Robots can now be cheap enough for people to actually buy them

Telepresence for the masses. Double Robotics

One of Grishin’s investments is in a company called Double Robotics , which sells a telepresence robot allowing workers to maintain a physical presence in an office. It costs $2,500, whereas competitors’ models go for up to $70,000 . Grishin believes that “about as much as a Macbook” is the maximum anyone will pay for a robot if it’s going to reach a mass audience. Because of all the factors listed above, that’s now possible.

But: Investors have been burned before, and physical barriers to success remain

Open source robot startup Willow Garage recently closed its doors. Willow Garage

“I definitely believe this will be next trillion-dollar market,” says Grishin. “But I don’t know when.” Many investors have been wrong before about robots—open-source robotics pioneer Willow Garage shut down in January , for example.

And the results don’t always come quickly enough to fulfill investor’s expectations. “People are usually right about what new technologies will become businesses, and the one thing they’re wrong about is the timing,” adds Grishin.

The simple fact is that hardware, which must contend with the unpredictable physical world, is much more of a challenge than software, which operates in the knowable environment of a computer.

Take, for example, the problem of energy and storage. The human body, and indeed pretty much every organism, is remarkably efficient about how it uses energy. Robots aren’t, especially when you start looking at things like their “weight to power ratio,” or the efficiency with which they turn stored electricity into movement.

“In memory, processors, and sensors you have Moore’s law,” says Grishin, referring to the trend first described by Intel founder Gordon Moore, in which silicon-based microprocessors double in processing power on average every 18 months. But batteries and motors aren’t on anything like the same trajectory for improvement.

Both batteries and motors are critical in another big industry , however—electric cars. So it’s possible that, just as cell phones have laid the groundwork for some aspects of the imminent robot takeover, innovation in electric cars could bring us even closer to the point where there are few jobs left for humans to do .

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We Already Live in the Age of Robots—We Just Don’t Call Them That

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:33:51 -0400

The head of the world’s biggest pool of venture capital devoted solely to robots is sitting on the edge of his seat, speaking so quickly I can hardly take notes, his boyish enthusiasm reaching a fever pitch. “People usually call something ‘robots’ when they don’t know what they are doing,” says Dimitry Grishin, billionaire co-founder of Mail.ru. “Once it does something useful, we call it a vacuum cleaner, a car, whatever. Look at the cash machine—there are a lot of devices around now that 50 years ago people would call robots.”

We’re sitting in a dim corner of the historic Driskill hotel in Austin, Texas, during the SXSW tech conference. You could hardly pick a less futuristic setting than this wood-paneled, leather-chair-infested lobby, but Grishin’s point is that even this environment demonstrates that the key to understanding how robots will change our lives is to recognize that they already have.

“Take the navigation system in a car,” he says. “Imagine telling people 50 years go there is going to be a person in your car who says ‘go left, go right.’ And yet we don’t call a navigation system a robot.”

We don’t call automatic sliding doors robots, either, and yet a gimmicky, humanoid robot that opened doors for us would certainly be called a robot, even if it had far less intelligence. But why is that?

The word “robot” comes from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”), in which beings almost indistinguishable from humans are created to relieve us of drudgery. By the end of the play, they’ve wiped out the human race. Thus was born the notion of robots as lethal Frankenstein-like copies of humans, an idea that has reverberated through science fiction ever since, fromThe Terminator to Battlestar Galactica.

How redefining “robots” unlocks their potential

Grishin’s conception of robots departs from the cultural detritus that has attached to the term, at least in the West. To him, robots are anything that affects the physical world. Drones are robots, but so are internet-connected lightbulbs. What is the effort to bring automation to our homes, businesses and cities but the attempt to turn these physical spaces into robots?

This thinking is reflected in Grishin’s investments. At $25 million, Grishin Roboticsis, as near as Grishin and this reporter can tell, the biggest VC fund in the world focused entirely on robots. But nothing Grishin has put money into resembles the humanoid robots of science fiction.

Instead, Grishin is financing startups like Petnet, a “smart feeder” that allows absent pet owners to dispense kibble for their pets remotely, from any laptop or mobile device. Petnet also produces data on how many calories a pet is consuming, and how that compares to animals of comparable size and breed. It knows whether a pet has eaten and can help an owner design a “customized feeding regimen.” Petnet’s dispenser is indisputably a robot, but would anyone call it that?

“In my view, ‘robots’ is where you start to apply internet technology to the real world,” says Grishin. “It’s [internet-connected] sensors and actuators,” he adds. Just as we no longer describe most companies that use the web to do business as “internet companies,” eventually, we won’t associate the word “robotics” with companies that are putting intelligence into everyday objects, says Grishin.

This view of robots—internet-connected, human-controlled, but with just enough intelligence to act on their own—is almost indistinguishable from the conventional definition of the next stage in the evolution of the internet, known as the “internet of things.” And that’s more or less the point—slowly but surely, as cost drops and their effectiveness increases, we’re filling our lives with robots like cash machines, smart cities and self-driving cars. Recognizing them as such allows us to understand where investment will flow next, without the fears and biases attached to the word “robot.”

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

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Here Comes the First “App Store” for Hardware

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:12:43 -0400

The most successful technologies are those aimed at what Steve Jobs called “things people want to do.” That is, they answer a human need that has remained constant throughout history, rather than cater a particular “market.”

I’m convinced that Mighty Cast ’s NEX band—or something like it—is one of these technologies, the sort that has the potential to grow well beyond its original purpose.

But first, what is the NEX band? According to marketing materials put out by the Montreal, Canada-based startup, it’s a wristband and “charm bracelet” into which users can snap “mods”—centimeter-size squares that perform specific functions, such as tracking your activity or blinking when your friends are nearby.

It’s clear from the design of the NEX band, and the company’s positioning of it as an add-on for video games, that it’s aimed at young people. Mighty Cast has already created mods that blink when a designated friend’s NEX band is in proximity, and the company is working on incorporating its bands into a location-based game.

“We do tons of focus grouping, and we have strong hunches about what the big applications will be,” says Adelman. One, they think, will send secret messages from one user to another. Another likely app will make social networks more physical, allowing mods to be swapped, traveling through networks of friends.

If all of these applications sound a bit childish, it’s important to remember that young people are exactly who the NEX band is aimed at. Young people fluidly adopt new apps and services—and rapidly spread them to one another—in a way that older users don’t. The hope is that these technologies then trickle up. And in the age of multi-billion-dollar valuations for technologies that few older than 25 have heard of, much less used (think Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.) that’s a distinct possibility.

Much of the potential of the NEX band is in its structure: By making the band modular—so that it’s possible to snap in up to five tiny pieces of hardware that give the band new capabilities, Mighty Cast has created a platform rather than a gadget. That is, the company set out to create a device that will have a software marketplace where outside developers can come up with new applications for it. (Smartphones like Android and iPhone are both platforms in the sense that they have app stores, and arguably most of the value of these platforms is in the pool of developers and apps that they’ve managed to attract.)

The world’s first hardware-based app store?

Other wearable-computing companies are also trying to build themselves up as platforms. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch has its own app store, and so does the Pebble smartwatch. But what makes the NEX band so different is the physical aspect: new capabilities are added or taken away depending on which “mods” are snapped into the band.

Once somone owns a NEX band, all it takes is a new mod—which will start at a retail price of $10—to give it the capabilities of some competitors’ wearables. So in theory, as Adam Adelman, CEO of Mighty Cast explained to me, “Instead of spending $150 on a Nike Fuel band, you can buy accelerometer mod, and poof, you have a fitness band.”

Mighty Cast has patented its “token and base” system, in which the band is the base and the mods are “tokens.” It has produced working prototypes and has promised it will announce three “very large” brands as partners by this summer.

Once these partnerships are announced, Adelman and his team will concentrate on rolling out something like Apple’s app store for mods and the software that goes with them. Developers who are comfortable making their own hardware can, like the initial partners in the launch of the NEX band, buy a license to interface with Mighty Cast’s hardware and software.

For developers who just want to concentrate on the software side, Mighty Cast is toying with the idea of manufacturing mods for them, says Adelman. Developers could upload an image of what they want their mod to look like, choose from a selection of internal hardware, like an accelerometer for tracking movement and a colored LED for conveying information to the user, and Mighty Cast would take care of the rest. (For example, Facebook could create a custom mod for the NEX band that is powered by a location sensor and blinks when your Facebook friends are near.)

How it works—and how Mighty Cast and developers will make money

Making the new functionalities cheap and simple to use is key to the concept of the NEX band, says Adelman. All of the expensive hardware for the system is in the polyurethane wristband itself: a powerful battery, a general-purpose microprocessor (made by ARM, the same company that dominates processors in smartphones), flash storage for software and data, and a Bluetooth LE radio for communicating with a smartphone. (Like many wearables, the NEX band is dependent on a smartphone for connectivity to the internet.)

Because almost all of the “brains” of the NEX band in the band, the mods that snap into the band can be extremely cheap and simple. The mod that would turn the NEX band into a fitness tracker, for example, would essentially just be an accelerometer designed to feed data into software on one’s smartphone. It could cost less than a dollar to manufacture, yet would retail for $10 and up, says Adelman.

“Our business is the classic razors-and-razor-blade model,” says Adelman. “We don’t need to make money on the bands, because all the margins are on the mods. And our margins on mods are almost as good as the margins on virtual goods.”

In other words, Adelman and his team have figured out a way to sell bits of hardware that are so cheap that they add little to the cost of selling the software behind them—a feature of software-only app stores, where there selling an additional unit of a good adds essentially nothing to the cost of developing the software in the first place. If it seems unlikely that such complicated sensors could be produced so cheaply, it helps to understand that all the important sensors in a smartphone are now created entirely with silicon, making them cheap to mass-produce and subjecting them to the same Moore’s law trend of falling prices as all other silicon chips.

The killer app for modular wearables has yet to be discovered—and that’s OK

Despite my excitement about this idea, I should say that there are many more reasons why Mighty Cast might fail than succeed. Hardware startups are notoriously difficult, given the contingencies of working with physical objects instead of mere code. And given that the band has yet to launch, it’s more than a little ambitious to imagine that the product might spawn a clearinghouse for developers making a new kind of hardware tchotchke. But it’s notable that the company is even thinking about bringing modularity back to hardware—an area in which “design anorexia” has led to smaller and smaller products that are less repairable or modifiable than ever .

Others are thinking about giving formerly virtual goods some kind of physical presence; for example, the Paris-based company Qleek , which has a system designed specifically for media. But I’m unaware of any other company in this sector specifically pursuing the app-store model by allowing developers to create physical objects to plug into a platform. That’s either because the idea doesn’t translate to the world of hardware—software-based app stores allow instantaneous wireless transactions anywhere, cutting out the need for shipping or retail—or because there has yet to be a pioneer to blaze the trail.

That’s what the NEX Band hopes to become. “What we’re really trying to do is build a platform—we’re almost agnostic to whatever application does take off,” says Adelman. And this is probably the right attitude when building something from nothing. After all, when the iPhone was first released, it didn’t even have an app store. Now, apps are a $10 billion a year business for Apple, and indivisible in many smartphone-users minds from the technology Apple built—the platform that gave rise to that burst of creativity.

Whether or not the NEX band takes off—a necessary prerequisite for the platform to attract outside developers—depends in part on whether Mighty Cast’s focus group testing has truly identified the ways in which the NEX band might become a “thing that people want to do.” But it’s not a stretch to imagine that the social mods proposed for the NEX band might draw in young people—and, eventually, adults.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

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The Internet of Trash Bins Is Here and It’s More Awesome Than It Sounds

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:04:23 -0500

In an unnamed city in Asia, AGT, a Swiss security firm , has teamed up with Cisco to install internet-connected sensors in trash bins. The idea is simple: the city knows when bins are full or empty, so it can plan more efficient routes for trash collectors and their trucks. Save enough on fuel and labor by eliminating wasted trips, and the sensors more than pay for themselves.

This is probably not how you pictured the urban panopticon that will some day transform every city on earth into a living organism brimming with sensors that track the location of every citizen, vehicle, parking spot, utility meter and countless other objects. And it might seem like a stretch to imagine that cities, which are full of aging infrastructure and constrained by tight budgets, will so quickly join the “internet of things.” But according to executives at AGT and Cisco, if providers can prove that connecting objects to the internet saves money—even the humble trash bin—it becomes a no-brainer.

The economic case for connecting everything in every city worldwide

Monitoring cities down to the level of individual homes and citizens could lead to increased efficiency. AGT

“[Information and communications technology] is the new essential infrastructure, alongside water, gas and electric—it’s about what it enables,” says Wim Elfrink, a vice president at Cisco.

AGT’s expertise is primarily in the software that processes data produced by everything from smart meters to surveillance cameras. Its recent tie-up with Cisco means that AGT has a dedicated hardware partner, so the two companies can sell complete solutions, from sensors and their physical connections to the internet to the cloud-based software that processes all the data they generate.

“Right now only one percent of what could be connected in cities is connected—things like smart meters, parking meters, water meters,” says Mati Kochavi, CEO of AGT. He claims that by giving city planners the ability to understand how cities work in as much real-time granularity as possible, AGT’s systems can generate new revenue in the form of smart parking systems, and increase overall energy efficiency of the parts of cities controlled directly by the government by 30%.

Cities like London are already festooned with security and traffic cameras. Rather than having humans watch them, AGT claims its software can use machine learning to automatically flag out of the ordinary events like a stopped vehicle on a roadway.

“Cities are pressed in terms of how many municipal workers they can deploy,” says Kochavi, who believes that, as in manufacturing, the replacement of humans with machines is one way for cost-conscious leaders to to wring economic efficiency from the systems they oversee.

Systems that lead to increased efficiency…

In a visit to AGT’s Manhattan offices, I saw systems that seemed to turn real-life cities into something like a Sim City control panel. Using AGT’s software, police and even citizens could use apps on smartphones and tablets to flag events at a given location. This data feeds into maps on which city workers can evaluate incidents—everything from potholes to riots—and decide how to react, such as deploying more police or other personnel to a given location.

The basic idea is that a variety of sensors, including security cameras, environmental sensors, and app-wielding citizens, can blanket a city and provide an unprecedented level of intelligence.

In the presentation I saw, all of this technology was pitched as a way to increase efficiency and make cities more livable. One system, for example, allowed grid operators to determine how much power was being generated by home rooftop solar installations, so that the grid could be balanced in a way that simply isn’t possible today, when utility companies may only have information about power usage at a local substation that powers dozens or hundreds of homes.

Are also, inevitably, about control

But there is another side to this kind of surveillance—security and control. In Singapore, AGT is deploying “ UrbanShield ,” a “state-of-the-art, event security and urban management system for real-time security management and post-incident investigation at mega-events.”

UrbanShield consists of a “mobile command and control” hub tied to a “sensors platform” that ties into existing sensors, as well as arrays of temporary sensors and cameras installed specifically to monitor an event. These ad-hoc sensors include “Urban Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Urban UAVs),” commonly known as drones, and “crowd-sourcing and analytics capabilities”—essentially monitoring signals from smartphones and other connected devices to determine where everyone is and what they might be up to.

There’s also an intelligence and analytics component to AGT’s security offering, “OpenMIND,” which monitors social media to take the temperature of the intentions of a crowd, and, the company claims, can identify influencers within a given social media network.

As a tool to control terrorism and crime, all of this sounds marvelously sophisticated. But as we are seeing in revolutions in Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela, there is always the matter of what a government chooses to do with these technologies—including those innocuous internet-connected trashcans—once citizens decided to act against the state that has deployed them.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

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Your Power Is About to Go Out—Here’s How to Make Your Cell Phone Last Until it Comes Back on

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 11:16:49 -0500

Grid-killing natural disasters are attacking the US east coast often enough that, as a semi-regular reader service, we republish our tips for how our US readers can make their cell phones last until the danger has passed. The new addition this time around? Next time, buy yourself a solar charger. But since it’s probably too late for an Amazon next day delivery of one of those, here’s how to make your phone last given the equipment you already have on hand.

1. Fully charge your laptop, and save that charge for your phone.

It’s easy to forget that our phones charge when they are plugged into our laptops via the USB port. This works even when your laptop is not connected to a power outlet. To get the most out of this trick, restart your laptop to kill all running applications and processes, dim the screen to nothing, and don’t use it for any other purpose. Just plug your phone in when the phone gets low on charge and allow it to parasitically drain your laptop’s (much larger) battery.

2. When the power goes out, turn off all the radios on your phone you’re not using: WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.

Your phone’s radios are the major drain on battery life. If you want to leave the phone connected to the cell network in case of emergency text messages or incoming calls, but you don’t need to browse the internet, turning off WiFi will preserve battery life, as will turning off the Bluetooth radio that the phone uses to communicate to headsets, keyboards and other accessories.

On an iPhone, these radios can be turned off simply by swiping up from your lock screen (in iOS7). Here are instructions for an Android device.

Put the phone in “Airplane mode” or turn it off entirely if you aren’t using it and aren’t anticipating incoming calls or texts.

3. Keep your phone plugged into a charger until the power goes out.

Update: Quartz developer about town Sam Williams points out that it’s also important that your phone charger be “plugged into a good surge protector in case of weird power spikes around time of outage.”

4. Turn off all “push” notifications on your phone.

News services and various apps send you “push” notifications that require your phone to power up just a bit in order to receive data from a remote location. Here’s how to switch them off in Android and on the iPhone. Turning all of these off will minimize the use of those battery-hogging radios. On an iPhone, you can also turn off “location services” which work in a similar way.

5. Restart your phone to kill all the apps that are running now.

This will assure that no unnecessary apps are running in the background, draining power by making the phone’s microprocessor do extra work.

6. Turn down the brightness on your screen.

Displays on phones are the other major battery hog. Turn down the display to the lowest level at which you can still read it.

7. Send text messages instead of making phone calls.

Text messages are tiny amounts of data, sent quickly, and do not tax your phone’s batteries the way a phone conversation does. Plus, texts are more likely to get through when the cell network is overwhelmed.

8. Borrow a cell phone car charger.

Sure, if you have a car, you should already own one of these items, but in a pinch, maybe your neighbor has one.

9. Do not use your phone.

This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget, in our fiddly, always-on age that you can step away from your mobile device except for periodic updates on the progress of the storm. Remember that if repair crews are overwhelmed, power could be out for days.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

(Image via Suwan Waenlor/Shutterstock.com)

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It’s Official: Apple Sells More Computers Than All Windows PCs Combined

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 11:16:31 -0500

Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops may still count for a fraction of the global market for PCs, but when you tally up all the computers (iPhones, iPads, etc.) on which people actually get things done, the number of computers sold by Apple exceeds the number of Windows-based PCs shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.

If you include Windows Phone, Microsoft is still ahead—but only just barely / Benedict Evans

Or as Andreessen Horowitz mobile analyst Benedict Evans put it :

This is a pretty good illustration of the scale of mobile: Apple limits itself only to the high end of the mobile market but still sells more units than the whole PC industry.

There are two ways of looking at this: One is to say, well, so what? What does it mean to compare these two very large numbers (mostly, how many iPhones Apple is selling) to the number of Windows PCs sold worldwide, when these are somewhat arbitrary device categories?

But the counter-argument is that the tasks we used to conduct on PCs are now being carried out on an ever-expanding variety of other devices, pretty much all of them mobile. And this trend will only accelerate: What share of the world’s “computers” will Apple ship when it unveils its (still rumored) iWatch?

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

(Image via nui7711 / Shutterstock.com )

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Bitcoin Company Offers Stock Denominated in Bitcoin

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 13:00:00 -0500

Startup Bitcoin Kinetics , which aims to create hardware that can allow vending machines to accept bitcoin, is offering 10 billion shares of common stock on the website Cryptostocks . This isn’t your typical IPO—Cryptostocks, where Bitcoin Kinetics will be “listed,” describes itself as both a crowd funding platform and a place to “buy shares… and earn dividends.” It’s not clear what the legal status of Cryptostocks is, since it’s not licensed or registered as an exchange. One commenter called Cryptostocks “another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges.” (We reached out to Cryptostocks for comment, and will update this when we hear back from them.)

So why should we care about an untested prototype produced by a company launching on an unregulated “exchange”? One reason is that the bitcoin ecosystem, while for the most part not so great at creating viable businesses, is awfully good at prototyping things that might someday exist once they’ve been produced by parties with enough resources to get them through the inevitable regulatory hurdles .

And no one could accuse bitcoin fans of not, um, thinking big. Here’s the future of Bitcoin Kinetics, as imagined by the company’s founder :

“Eventually Bitcoin Kinetics will become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization run completely by smart contracts, 3D printers & shipping centers, making it run on its own.’”

Got that? Corporations of the future are comprised of contracts executed in code and own factories full of 3D printers, from which robots ship goods. Profits are re-ingested by the software supervising the whole operation, and no one has a job anymore .

h/t Christoph Möller

( Image via Tomas Dalima / Shutterstock.com )

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Why the Only Thing Better Than Big Data Is Bigger Data

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:09:04 -0500

For many businesses, big data is superfluous . Except, a recently-published paper on the mathematics of big data reveals, when it isn’t. It turns out there is a kind of data that, like black holes or evil wizards of Middle Earth, only becomes more powerful the larger it grows. What’s more, suggest researchers Enric Junqué de Fortuny, David Martens and Foster Provost, even if you’re not gathering this kind of data at present, the new findings suggest you may lose out to a competitor who is.

To understand what’s going on—stay with us, it’s worth it—you have to know whether your data is dense or sparse. Most businesses are gathering data about their customers and clients such that a great deal is known about any one person. For example, you survey a handful of customers in depth, as in a customer survey comprised of dozens of questions. This is “dense” data, with lots of information on every person, object or event you’re cataloging.

But the most useful data, in part because it’s still hard to get your hands on or evaluate properly, is called “sparse” data. This is the kind of data the web’s giants, like Google and Facebook, gather all the time. It’s “sparse” because all you’re getting is a few data points from any one person, when you could be getting thousands or even millions. Take Netflix’s movie rating database, for example—if a person could rate all of the movies in Netflix’s database, Netflix would have perfect knowledge about that person’s tastes. But we can only watch and evaluate so many movies, so for most of the films in the database, Netflix knows zip about our tastes. Hence, sparse data.

Your Competitors Are Beating You With Massive Data

A different recent study of companies concentrated not on the mathematics of how companies use sparse data, but the economic benefit that accrues to the companies that do. After controlling for other factors that could account for increased performance, the researchers behind that study found companies using more big data were more productive than their peers, and those using less big data were less productive.

In paper-speak, here’s how that’s quantified:

“…using big data technologies is associated with significant additional productivity grown. Specifically, one standard deviation higher utilization of big data technologies is associated with 1%-3% higher productivity than the average firm; one standard deviation lower in terms of big data utilization is associated with 1%-3% lower productivity. This leads to potentially very large productivity differences between the firms at the extremes.”

Why More Data is Better

So now we have two papers about the impact of big data that is sparse. One shows that using more sparse data leads to an economic advantage. The other, which we’ll concentrate on for the rest of this piece, dives into the mathematics of big data, showing that with sparse data, there’s no such thing as enough.

To understand why firms gathering certain kinds of data seem to be benefiting from it, you have to understand the nature of the kind of data that they’re gathering. A classic example is the data gathered by energy companies. Sure, the world is filling up with smart thermostats and the like, but each model is reporting back to the utility company different kinds of data, at different rates, and it might even be measured in different ways. Now imagine you put all that data into a single spreadsheet—all day long you’ll be creating columns that can only be filled by data gathered by some smart thermostats and not others. For all the customers with a particular thermostat, the columns you created for the data generated only by other types of thermostats will be filled with “0″ values. Most of your spreadsheet, in fact, will be filled with zeroes. This is sparse data.

Now think about the entire world, and all the sensors in it. You’ve got security systems, temperature and humidity sensors, location data pouring in from cell phones, and an every wider array of gadgets connected to the Internet of Things . All of them are going to report back in their own way, and any given business might only have access to some subset of this data. It’s a mess. And yet there’s a tremendous amount of value even in this sparse data.

Here’s a chart showing this effect. All you really need to notice is that in every case, the more people who are represented in a database (x-axis) the more accurately a computer can make predictions about any subsequent individuals (y-axis).

For all of the datasets, adding more data (x-axis) leads to continued improvement of predictive power, which is why all the trend lines are up and to the right. (Blue lines and red dashed lines indicate relative performance of two different kinds of predictive models.) Predictive Modeling With Big Data: Is Bigger Really Better?

How Data-Poor Businesses Suffer

Here’s how the authors sum up their own work:

“These results are not only of interest to pundits preaching about the value of big data, but also have important implications for businesses and other institutions faced with competition. We have have shown that predictive modeling […] can be made substantially more accurate by increasing the data size to a massive scale. This provides one of the clearest illustrations […] that large data sets are indeed potentially even more valuable when it comes to [prediction].”

And, in case that isn’t clear enough:

“This implies that institutions with larger data assets—plus the ability to take advantage of them—potentially can obtain substantial competitive advantage over institutions without access to so much data, or without the ability to handle it.”

Let’s take the example of an energy company once more. An energy company that doesn’t have the chops to handle massive amounts of sparse data is, by its nature, not able to ingest and process the wide variety of potential data sources—from smart meters to weather—that could help that company predict demand, which is important to getting the best prices for energy (and keeping the grid intact). This research suggests that sparse data is the one kind for which there is no such thing as too much. The more you have, the more accurate your predictions can be. Indeed, in the case of predicting events that happen rarely, like freak accidents, you may not be able to predict them at all unless you have really massive data.

It would be easy to brush this off as a problem that is native only to “technology” companies—web companies, energy companies, companies bristling with internet-connected doodads. But here’s the problem: Increasingly, there is no longer such a thing as a “technology ” company. Everyone who makes things has inventory to track and supply chains to manage. The financial services industry, for example, is almost nothing but data. Every retailer has purchasing data pouring in. Even companies that are strictly in the service business are finding new ways to use big data to streamline the way they work. And this trend is only accelerating—retailers, in particular, are going to start adding things like centimeter-precision location data to the torrent of information they must process.

What this means is that companies that aren’t at the top of their industry in gathering and acting on the kind of big data where more is only better—i.e., sparse data—could, according to at least two distinct strains of research, lose out to competitors who are.

Coda, for Data Scientists

If your company already has a data scientist on staff, here’s the takeaway for those who are in the know: When you’re gathering sparse data, it’s not just having more data (more samples) that counts; the more kinds of information you’re gathering about each individual (more features) also leads to better results. And even though much of data science these days is about filtering out the features that seem to contribute less to your predictions, this latest research suggests that data scientists may want to rethink that standard way of practicing their craft.

( Image via ARTSILENSE / Shutterstock.com )

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Why Volcanoes Are the Energy Source of the Future

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:00:55 -0500

In Iceland, scientists have just completed a successful experiment in harnessing energy directly from a volcano.

But first, a little background: In early 2009, I wrote about an audacious project. Scientists in Iceland were going to attempt to drill into a reservoir of water so much hotter than anything tapped before that the water it contained was thought to exist in a fourth state of matter distinct from liquid, solid and steam. This super-heated water, which is in a state known as “supercritical,” that is beyond the point at which a substance can be either a liquid or a gas, exists only under conditions of extreme heat and pressure. Scientists can generate it in the lab, but no one knew if it existed in nature. Researchers believed that in Iceland’s water-logged subterranean depths, close to the fire-breathing hearts of its many volcanoes, they might find supercritical water.

It would be a world-changing discovery, because if you can get supercritical water to the earth’s surface and into a power plant, you can extract ten times as much energy from it as you can from typical steam or hot water. The government of Iceland, various engineering firms and foreign partners were so excited about the potential of supercritical water (also called supercritical steam, since in some ways it behaves like steam) that they envisioned pockmarking Iceland with advanced geothermal power plants with wells extending down into the country’s volcanoes like steel-clad straws, generating so much surplus energy that Iceland could lay power cables to Europe and help its friends on the Continent kick their fossil fuel habit.

But then disaster struck: In June of 2009 (pdf) scientists on what was known as the Iceland Deep Drilling Project struck magma—actual liquid rock—with their drill. That, I was told at the time, was the end of their quest to find a reservoir of supercritical water flowing in the bowels of a volcano. Hitting magma before the supercritical water meant no more drilling to a target depth of 4.5km (2.8 miles) below the earth’s surface—everyone assumed that the project was a failure.

Fast forward to the present day, and a surprising result has been just announced in the journal Geothermics: Rather than give up when their initial plan failed, the engineers decided to see whether the hole they drilled would form a reservoir of usable hot water on its own, as water from the surrounding, fractured rock flowed past the magma. Astonishingly, it worked. Two years later, the scientists were able to draw water from their well at 450°C (842°F), a world record.

While 450°C is not hot enough at atmospheric pressure to be supercritical, it still contains an enormous amount of usable energy. As a result, engineers estimated they could use the well to create a power plant capable of generating 36 megawattsof electricity. That’s 20 times less than what a typical coal-fired power plant can generate, but it’s often the case that a geothermal power plant will have more than one well. Plus, geothermal power doesn’t come with any fuel costs or appreciable carbon emissions.

So can the Icelandic Deep Drilling project ultimately be judged a success? While it didn’t achieve its stated and rather outlandish original goal, the engineers involved did manage a world first: tapping directly into a volcano and transforming the molten rock into a source of power. It’s been estimated that only a small fraction of Iceland’s geothermal resources have been tapped, and the potential to drill directly into volcanoes could mean that the country could become the renewable power plant for Europe, after all. Unlike wind and solar, geothermal power never switches off.

(Image via Pablo Hidalgo/Shutterstock.com)

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Why Google Just Sold Motorola to Lenovo for $3 Billion

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:55:54 -0500

Well this is unexpected. Google is selling Motorola, the iconic handset maker it bought for $12.5 billion in May of 2012, to Chinese PC maker Lenovo for $2.91 billion. Google CEO Larry Page has penned a short note about the sale, but he doesn’t get into details. Here’s why the deal makes sense.

Motorola was always an odd acquisition for Google; more than a year after the deal closed, analysts were still “scratching their heads” about what Google could have been thinking. It put Google in the awkward position of owning a company that competed with all of the other makers of Android smartphones. And while Google regularly protested that Motorola was just another partner, like all its other Android partners, it was a hard case to make given that Google installed one of its own,Dennis Woodside, as the CEO of Motorola. It was as if, at the height of the PC era in the mid 1990s, Microsoft had decided to undermine Dell and HP by buying Gateway and retooling it to selling Microsoft’s own PCs.

Aside from Motorola’s enormous trove of patents, which Google explicitly said at the time of acquisition were to be used to protect Android handset makers from being sued by Apple and Microsoft, the only reason for Google to buy Motorola was to transform it into a healthy counterweight to Samsung, which sells the overwhelming majority of Android smartphones. (Tellingly, Google is retaining the rights to Motorola’s patents, but will license them to Lenovo.)

And Google accomplished that. Motorola now makes one of the best, if not the best mid-range Android smartphone, the Moto X, along with its equally well-reviewed (and even cheaper) cousin the Moto G. But the Android phone hardware business resembles the PC business more every day. And margins in that business are brutal—after years of competition, they’re down to 2% to 3%.

What’s more, Google never ran Motorola with an eye toward profit. And given the recent fire-sale prices it’s been offering on the Moto X and G, ($70 discount on the former, half off on the latter) it’s clear that it’s always wanted to sell its Motorola-branded Android phones at the cheapest possible price, to get more people on Android, where they’ll use Google’s services, which is how Google actually makes money. Motorola has lost money for Google—hundreds of millions of dollars—every quarter it’s been on Google’s balance sheet.

From the consumer’s perspective, the way Google ran Motorola is the same model Google has used with its Google-branded tablets and other hardware, like the Nexus 7, which is built by its partner Asus and sells for less than half what the comparable retina iPad mini retails for. Google is like Amazon; the company is willing to break even on hardware in order to increase the market share of its money-making services.

It might seem like Google is taking a $10 billion bath on the sale of Motorola to Lenovo. But Motorola has already helped Google save what could amount tobillions of dollars on its taxes, which softens the blow. And there’s another way to look at this: Google has created a competitor to Samsung that is headed by an ex-Googler (for now) that will now go to a company, Lenovo, that has proved itself quite capable of succeeding in the low-margin hardware business. Lenovo is the #1 seller of PCs in the world by volume, and it’s also just taken on IBM’s low-end server business.

Yes, it costs Google billions of dollars to make the Android hardware ecosystem more diverse, but even if that wasn’t Google’s plan all along, it could in the end be worth the cost. Samsung, after all, is nervous enough about its dependence on Google that it’s trying to incubate its own smartphone operating system, called Tizen.

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How to Get the Hottest Job in Tech With Two Months’ Study and $2,000

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:09:18 -0500

Data science—the “science” of gathering and parsing the enormous flood of data pouring into America’s more technologically-adept firms—is so hot that even US president Barack Obama has declared it an educational priority. The Harvard Business Review called data science “the sexiest job of the 21st century” (paywall). Startups are producing so much data they’ve become “frantic” to find more data scientists, making salaries on the order of $300,000 a year not unreasonable.

But becoming a data scientist is no easy feat. You’ll need a grounding in statistics and the basics of computer science, or a willingness to learn both. As SAP noted, “Data scientists combine the analytical capabilities of a scientist or an engineer with the business acumen of the enterprise executive.”

Traditionally, you’d have to pay a place like UC Berkeley $60,000 to attend school full time for two years in order to get a Master’s degree in Data Science. But what mid-career switcher has that kind of time or money?

Enter Udacity, the online education startup. For about $2,000 and two months’ effort, students will soon be able to take a course in data science at Udacity taught by a Facebook engineer or an engineer from retail startup Yub. A “degree” from Udacity won’t have the cred of a sheepskin from Berkeley, but considering how quickly the field of data science is moving, students might be better off learning directly from teachers who are currently practicing data science, anyway. And for those who want to try out a site that’s still in progress, a startup called DataCamp is working on a beta of a self-teaching course for data science—current price, $0.

The recent crop of online courses in data science adds to a growing pile of online and in-person schools offering coding or startup education.

As an alternative to traditional degrees in data science, which are increasingly common, online courses are a quicker avenue to learning on the job. That’s a wise move considering how varied the field of data science has become—these days being a data scientist could involve anything from working in the fraud department of a bank to the analytics desks of a media company.

(Image via kentoh/Shutterstock.com)

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Someone’s Refrigerator Just Took Part in a Malicious Cyberattack

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:30:41 -0500

Between December 23 and January 6, more than 100,000 Internet-connected smart “things,” including media players, smart televisions and at least one refrigerator, were part of a network of computers used to send 750,000 spam emails. So says a study just released by enterprise security company Proofpoint. This is the first time anyone in the security industry has proved that devices that are part of the internet of things are being used just as PCs have been for decades—as part of “zombie” networks of computers used to do everything from sending spam to mining bitcoin.

It’s long been known that smart devices are among the most insecure computers on the Internet, but it appears that hackers are finally taking advantage of the fact that everything from our toasters to our lightbulbs will soon be internet connected—and ripe for compromising.

“Bot-nets are already a major security concern and the emergence of thingbots may make the situation much worse,” said Proofpoint security manager Dave Knight in a prepared statement.

In the same statement, security analyst Michael Osterman summed it up like this: “Internet-enabled devices represent an enormous threat because they are easy to penetrate, consumers have little incentive to make them more secure, the rapidly growing number of devices can send malicious content almost undetected, few vendors are taking steps to protect against this threat, and the existing security model simply won’t work to solve the problem.”

Naturally, Proofpoint would like to sell its customers a solution to this issue. It’s not clear yet that hacking smart devices has reached the point that consumers need to worry about it, and spam is a largely solved problem in email, but the fact that this kind of hacking is happening shows that the internet of things will have to be secured just like every other computer network—and someone will make a nice bit of money doing so.

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How You’ll Write Emails on the Tiny Screen of a Smartwatch

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 11:36:49 -0500

Imagine trying to compose an email on a keyboard just a tad bigger than a postage stamp. Nuance, whose technology powers speech-recognition systems like Apple’s Siri, thinks it has this problem licked—and it doesn’t involve voice recognition.

The key to typing emails on a tiny screen, says Peter Mahoney, chief marketing officer of Nuance, is the Swype keyboard, acquired by Nuance in in 2011 for $100 million.

Swype is an app for Android devices that modifies the keyboard so that it doesn’t require tapping; instead, you slide your finger over the keys to trace out a word. (Apple has so far blocked developers from tweaking its mobile keyboard, though the determined can get around this.) It has spawned a bunch of imitators, including Google itself, and Swype-like typing is now a standard feature on later versions of Android.

The Existential Threat to Bitcoin Its Boosters Said Was Impossible Is Now at Hand

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 11:39:36 -0500

A doomsday scenario that has long been dismissed by bitcoin’s biggest boosters is now a clear and present danger . At 3am ET Thursday morning, a single bitcoin mining collective known as Ghash.io reached 45% of the computing power of all global bitcoin miners, just six points short of the 51% that would be required to break bitcoin by arbitrarily re-writing the transaction history upon which it rests. The result could be, at minimum, “double spending” of existing bitcoins, which would render the currency effectively unusable.

To put this in context: Imagine that tomorrow, a single corporate entity gained the ability to clone all of its dollars, and then immediately went on an asset buying spree. To say that it would undermine trust in the US dollar would be an understatement . That’s what could happen to bitcoin.

Popular discussion boards devoted to bitcoin are freaking out about this possibility , and every post on the homepage of, for example, the portion of Reddit devoted to Bitcoin is currently devoted to the dangerous rise of Ghash.io:

Reddit’s bitcoin page, at 10.30am ET today. Reddit

The entreaties of bitcoin fans on Reddit is having some effect: Between 3am ET and the writing of this article at 10am ET, the power of Ghash.io has diminished by seven points, to 38% , probably because of people leaving the collective in response to the backlash. But how close it came illustrates the long-term problem.

Read the full story at Quartz.

( Image via antanacoins / Shutterstock.com )

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This Is the Year of the Electric Car

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:01:01 -0500

At the beginning of 2013, the stock price for US electric carmaker Tesla was $32. Now it’s sitting at around $150, after the company’s Model S sedan was named American automotive magazine Car and Driver’s car of the year. And really, that’s just the beginning; Tesla will be shipping 40,000 cars a year by the end of 2014, and it will roll out a cheaper Model X crossover vehicle.

Tesla’s success has helped burnish the image of electric cars, paving the way for just about every major manufacturer to roll out their own models. General Motors, Toyota, Ford, BMW, Fiat, Honda and Volkswagen will hit about every price point a buyer of a new, mid-range sedan might want. Even more affordable electric vehicles, from Chevrolet, Kia, Mitsubishi and the BMW-owned Smart, will spread the technology further; a $20,000 electric vehicle may seem worth it to the 42% of American drivers who could switch to electric cars without changing their driving habits.

This year will also hail impressive new technologies in electric cars, including a solar-powered vehicle from Ford that can absorb enough solar energy in a single day to travel 21 miles.

This story is Part 5 of a Quartz series.

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It's the Beginning of the End for Dumb Phones

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 14:50:26 -0500

For the first time ever, in 2013 smartphones outsold feature phones , and the dean of Silicon Valley tech investing, Marc Andreessen, says that within three years you simply won’t be able to buy a non-smartphone . But what proportion of phones in use right now are smartphones?

Less than half, is the answer, and it will be that way for at least 2-3 more years. In November 2013, Ericsson, the venerable Swedish maker of the infrastructure that supports cell phone networks, released a report suggesting we won’t exceed 3.5 billion smartphone subscriptions until 2016. The total number of mobile subscriptions, however, will exceed 7 billion by 2014 , according to the International Telecommunications Union.

Until 2016, it’s unlikely more people will access cellular networks with smartphones than with non-smartphones. (Image via Ericsson)

Meanwhile, the total number of mobile phone numbers will also be growing, and will exceed the number of people on earth thanks to countries like India, where many people have more than one phone to take advantage of price variations in different places.

Read the full story at Quartz.

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2014 Will Be the Year You Actually Want a Smart Watch

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 10:29:48 -0500

2014 will probably be the year of the smart watch. Apple is expected to unveil one, which might do better than the disappointments from Samsung and Sony. Google will come out with one too (paywall), reports the Wall Street Journal. It could be unlike any other on the market, with a unique two-mode display that is both reflective like e-paper and backlit like an LCD display. Google’s watch may function essentially as a one-inch (2.5 cm) square computer that could be used in a number of settings, not just on your wrist.

Meanwhile, in the health, fitness and life-tracking arena, popular wristbands like the Fitbit, Jawbone’s Up and the Nike Fuelband will be joined by an avalanche of competitors. One of the most interesting is the Basis fitness tracker, which adds so many sensors that it can track heart rate and caloric consumption as well as general activity.

At the same time, the makers of the pioneering Pebble smartwatch have demonstrated something interesting: It’s possible to turn a device widely dismissed as a dud at launch into one that more and more reviewers are finding genuinely useful merely by dint of software upgrades. One big improvement involves the notifications system built into Apple’s iOS 7. Using this system as a common language, any app on an iPhone can now push data—text or graphics—to the Pebble, as well as gather information from the Pebble’s sensors. The result is a plethora of new applications for Pebble, from remembering where you parked your Mercedes to alerting you minutes before it’s going to rain wherever you’re standing.

Read the full story at Quartz.

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2013 Was a Lost Year for Tech Innovation

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0500

All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled—and for reasons outlined below, Google Glass doesn’t count.If it’s in the nature of progress to move in leaps, there are necessarily lulls in between. Here are all the reasons 2013 was a great big dud for technology as a whole.

Mobile phones stagnated

2013 was the year smartphones became commodities, just like the PCs they supplanted. Even at the high end, Apple and Samsung’s newest flagship phones weren’t big leaps ahead from previous versions. The most that Apple could think to do with the new, faster processor in the iPhone 5S was animate 3D effects that make some users feel ill and a fingerprint sensor that solved a problem that wasn’t exactly pressing. Apple’s new iOS7 mobile operating system, which felt “more like a Microsoft release,” crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence.

Samsung’s update to history’s best-selling Android phone, the Galaxy S series, delivered on the technical specifications but continued the line’s “unpleasant, cheap design.” Packed with new features like touch-free gesture control, the phone also has an “easy mode” in recognition that many will want to switch them off, and suffers from an interface that stutters at odd moments despite its powerful electronics. Meanwhile, Google’s mysterious superphone turned out to be the Moto X, which is a nice Android phone but hardly revolutionary.

The one good thing about all this commodification is that smartphones are cheaper than ever—in 2014 they’ll cost as little as $20 in China—just like high-end televisions. Prices for good tablets have similarly collapsed.

Wearables were a letdown

The tone-deaf design of Google’s Glass headset—which to anyone but its user is a head-mounted video camera without the tiny light that all other video cameras have to tell you you’re being filmed—made the device such anathema that one pundit wondered whether he should be ashamed to wear it in public. Sergey Brin’spersonal campaign to make wearing Glass look normal couldn’t hide the fact that Glass is a technology in search of an application—unless that application isinvasions of privacy.

Smart watches were easily the biggest letdown of the year. Despite the fact that nearly every big electronics manufacturer is working on one, the battery and display constraints have stumped designers. Again and again, reviewers have declared existing models unfit for widespread adoption, with both Sony and Samsung unveiling devices that failed to make a compelling case for themselves.

Former giants continued their inglorious decline

Microsoft lost nearly a billion dollars on the Surface RT tablet, which was to be the device that pole-vaulted the company over Apple’s iPad and the dying PC industry. Insiders revealed Microsoft’s ruinous internal culture, fostered under a leader who probably never should have been CEO, leading those same insiders to conclude that the only solution is a breakup of the company.

The outlook wasn’t much better for Intel, not because the company hasn’tcontinued to innovate, but because people don’t need as many of its microprocessors, and the ones they do need are less profitable than ever.

BlackBerry, which investors once thought might be broken into smaller businesses with some latent value, proved to be a near-total loss. And while Hewlett-Packard has put the disastrous acquisitions and rapid-fire leadership changes of recent years behind it, the best that can be said so far is that it’s gracefully managing its own decline.

M&A replaced innovation

Microsoft bought Nokia‘s devices business, which would have been an astonishing turn of events a few years ago, but now felt like a lurch into an unsure future in which Microsoft remains an also-ran in mobile devices. Most big news about Apple was about the company’s tax-avoidance techniques and general failure to deliverany new products of note. (It still isn’t making phablets, though they’ve been hugely successful for other manufacturers.)

Google killed its much-vaunted 20% time—the policy of allowing engineers to spend a portion of their working time on their own projects—while insisting it hadn’t, leading to a furious (and public) debate among its employees about whether or not the company is still friendly to bottom-up innovation.

The arrogance of technology’s ruling class increased

Even as one entrepreneur declared that Silicon Valley should be a separate US state, economists made the case that much of what the internet has accomplished in the past 20 years is the impoverishment of the majority of Americans. While there isn’t much manufacturing left in rich countries to automate, it appears that robot baristas could threaten jobs in the service sector as well. Some in Silicon Valley even made explicit their goal of eliminating workers and their labor protections. And Uber’s CEO alienated customers by insisting that exorbitant “surge pricing” was nothing more than a way to ensure supply at busy times.

Meanwhile, American tech firms flocked to Ireland in order to avoid regulation, while companies like Uber and AirBnB made it apparent that their business model is dependent on avoiding regulations in the states.

Social media became profitable, if not compelling

We became more tired of social media than ever. Twitter filled up with machines. Facebook’s response—to mess with the algorithm that determines what’s in your feed, called Edgerank—made the site less appealing to many.

Facebook did crack the code on how to increase its revenue and boost its share price back to the levels of its 2012 IPO. Unfortunately, those methods includedobnoxious video ads. Twitter’s IPO, meanwhile, suggested that the company will have to follow in Facebook’s wake—more, and more intrusive, advertising—in order to justify its share price.

Media ravenous for stories bought into techno-hype

The value of bitcoin increased at least 10-fold in 2013, thanks to heavy investment—by the media, which helped talk it up. Managing “big data” became the growth plan of companies like IBM, despite the fact that most companies aren’t handling data that’s anywhere close to “big.”

Amazon scored a huge PR coup when its “surprise” announcement of a new drone program gave the company a boost in visibility worth millions, just ahead of thebiggest online shopping day of the year. Amazon competitor FedEx and just about everyone else who knows something about drones maligned the plans as a publicity stunt.

The NSA spying scandal put a chill on the biggest technological shifts of coming years

As more and more revelations emerged from the documents Edward Snowden lifted from the US National Security Agency, observers seemed numbed by the sheer scope and audacity of the agency’s domestic and foreign internet surveillance. The fallout for the tech industry has just begun: US companies must now prove, especially to foreign customers, that the move to cloud-based services, which necessitates sending all their data through the very same communication nodes to which the NSA has access, won’t put all of their secrets in the hands of US spymasters by default.

The effects are already being felt. Cisco blamed a poor quarter on deals in Russia and Brazil soured by fears about the NSA. Cisco also warned that this will affectmany other US firms, and that it threatens the future of the internet of things—fitting, since the implications of a world in which every gadget is a potential mole sure are scary.

And as is the case every year, tech pundits made countless dubious calls for whichthey will never be held to account.

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This Needs to Be Invented Before the Internet of Things Can Take Off

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:08:13 -0500

As Quartz has already reported, the Internet of Things is already here, and in the not too distant future it will replace the Web. Many enabling technologies have arrived which will make the Internet of things ubiquitous, and thanks to smartphones, the public is finally ready to accept that it will become impossible to escape from the Internet’s all-seeing eye.

But a critical piece of the Internet of things puzzle remains to be solved. What engineers lack is a universal glue to bind all the of the “things” in the Internet of things to each other and to the cloud.

To understand how important these standards will be, it helps to know a bit about the history of the Web. When the Internet was born, it was a mishmash of now mostly-forgotten protocols designed to accomplish different tasks—gopher for retrieving documents, FTP for sending and receiving files, and no standard for social networking other than email. Then the Web came along and unified those protocols, and made them accessible to non-geeks. All of this magic was possible because the Internet is built on open standards: transparent, agreed-upon ways that devices should communicate with one another and share data.

Read the full story at Quartz.

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How the 'Internet of Things' Will Replace the Web

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 11:34:29 -0500

We’ve already written about why 2014 is really, finally the year that the “Internet of things”—that effort to remotely control every object on earth—becomes visible in our everyday lives.

But most of us don’t recognize just how far the internet of things will go, from souped-up gadgets that track our every move to a world that predicts our actions and emotions. In this way, the Internet of things will become more central to society than the Internet as we know it today. The Web will survive, just as email survived the arrival of the Web. But its role will be reduced to that of a language for displaying content on screens, which are likely to be more ubiquitous but less necessary.

Click here for a closer look at the Internet of things that’s already here, and where it’s headed. This is the second in a series on the Internet of Things from Quartz.

(Image via skyme / Shutterstock.com)

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Most Americans Don’t Know What Bitcoin Is

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 10:21:17 -0500

Bloomberg surveyed a bunch of Americans and discovered that only 42% could correctly identify what bitcoin is. A small minority (12%) thought bitcoin was either an Xbox game or an iPhone app. (Scroll to the bottom of this Bloomberg page for an unintentionally hilarious pie chart depicting the results.)

However, 42% is remarkably high considering how many Americans have actually come into contact with bitcoin. No one knows how many people own any of the digital currency, but the number is probably less than 1 million, many of whom are outside the US. So a 42% recognition rate is a triumph of mindshare for what, as we’ve argued before, is a largely media-generated phenomenon. These are the same Americans of whom 94% can’t name a single Chinese brand, after all.

Read the full story at Quartz.

(Image via Flickr user antanacoins)

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Who Actually Uses Google+? Techs

Christopher Mims, Quartz — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 12:19:58 -0500

A new survey of Google+ users reveals that the earnest social media also-ran is inhabited by people who work in IT, people who are self-employed, and people who like to describe themselves as “decision makers.” In other words, if Facebook is for moms and Twitter is for journalists , Google+ is where the engineers hang out.

Nearly a third of people who self-identify as IT workers are using Google+GlobalWebIndex

This might help answer the fundamental question of who is using Google+. But given that the site remains little different from Facebook , it doesn’t quite answer why people are using it. Some have said that Google+ is less noisy than Facebook, and that the level of discourse is “higher” than on Facebook. But that could just be engineer-speak for “fewer baby and cat pictures.”

Full time parents and the divorced are among the least likely to use Google+.GlobalWebIndex

The list of who isn’t using Google+ lends some credence to this theory. Full-time parents and the divorced are among the least well represented on Google+, and at least one of those groups is going to be mostly moms.

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