NEW NET Weekly List for 15 Nov 2011

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 15 November 2011, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering at Sergio's Restaurant, 2639 South Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.

The ‘net

1. Grove.io: Hosted, Searchable IRC Chat For Teams http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/11/groveio-hosted-searchable-irc.php “Grove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today…It supports all the great IRC client apps…but Grove takes care of the fiddly parts of setup and hosting. All that's left for teams to do is sign up and start using it. Starting today they can do so for free at Grove.io…Leah Culver…got into real-time chat in 2009…That insight led to the creation of Convore, which splits the difference between real-time chat and forums. It allows users to create topic-based forums, but replies are posted in real time. It works like chat if you're present, but it logs conversations like a forum…But IRC has advantages over proprietary tools. It's a stable, open protocol - "like email," Culver points out - which means users can use whatever client application they want, on any platform, most of which are open-source and free. Without having to build apps for every platform, Grove can concentrate on eliminating the fiddly parts of IRC, and what's left is an easy, real-time, logged chat service for teams built around a trusted protocol…”

2. Amazon Quietly Snaps Up Speech-Recognition Startup http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/i-see-your-siri-and-raise-you-a-yap-amazon-quietly-snaps-up-speech-recognition-startup/248165/ “Amazon quietly purchased a Charlotte voice-to-text startup called Yap…It is increasingly clear that the fastest, easiest, and safest way to interact with services on a mobile device is using your voice, and Yap makes this…possible…The acquisition is particularly interesting given the prominence of Apple's voice efforts and the depth of Google's. In the everyone-does-everything war between Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, this could be a small step for Amazon into voice control…”

3. Community Treehouse Wants To Teach You How To Code http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/07/web-design-and-development-community-treehouse-wants-to-teach-you-how-to-code-get-you-a-job/ “…developer education startup Treehouse is launching to the public this morning, using videos, quizzes and badges to take ostensibly anyone from n00b to 1337 in months. Unlike Codeacademy and Lynda, Treehouse offers a breadth of expert-curated web design, development and iOS development topics (HTML, CSS Foundations, Technology Foundations, Aesthetic Foundations, Introduction to Programming, and others) and is already profitable as it charges users from $29 to $49 dollars a month to use its programs…companies like Estée Lauder, Disney and Virgin have signed on to use the service for employee training and startups like LivingSocial, WordPress/Automattic and BankSimple are on board to recruit qualified Treehouse Members after they pull in the requisite badges. “We plan on getting millions of un-employed or ‘under-employed’ people out of low-paying and unsatisfying jobs and in to higher-paying and exciting design and development jobs,” says co-founder Ryan Carson…”

4. November 2011 Web Server Survey http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/11/07/november-2011-web-server-survey.html “In the November 2011 survey, we received responses from 525,998,433 sites…Apache showed a…rise of 15.9 million sites this time, allowing it to claw back some of the market share it lost last month…In terms of active sites, Microsoft was the only major web server vendor to show a loss. Conversely, nginx made the largest gain, rising by 0.86 million active sites and bringing it to within 0.66 percentage points of Microsoft's market share…”

5. Wrike's Project Management App on Google Apps Marketplace http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/11/09/prweb8950478.DTL “…Wrike announced it has launched a free version of its award-winning application on the Google Apps Marketplace…Wrike is the leading social project management and collaboration software that helps thousands of teams worldwide get things done by working together in real time…By adding Wrike to the Google Apps Marketplace, we're making fast, intuitive social project management available to everyone. Solopreneurs with tight budgets will love the free version with the most essential features…Wrike's integration with Gmail™, Google Docs™ and Google Calendar™, combined with Wrike's killer project management features, will give users an easy, yet powerful solution for project success," said Andrew Filev, CEO at Wrike…”

Gigabit Internet

6. Net veterans prep networks for data onslaught http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57323937-92/net-veterans-prep-networks-for-data-onslaught/ “…Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and David Cheriton, a computer science professor at Stanford University, founded Arista Networks to shore up the Internet's reliability…The pair, who were among the first investors in Google, have committed $100 million toward the effort. A coming explosion in transactions in an online world 100 times faster than today's will lead to a greater number of accidents, the story says, citing as a precedent a partial failure at Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure…that brought down some Internet operations…The common 1-gigabit-per-second connection for servers is quickly evolving into 10-gigabit connections…The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, which has 250 employees--167 of them engineers--is working on a data-routing switch that can repair problems without shutting down the network…”

7. You’ve got a gigabit network, so now what? http://gigaom.com/broadband/youve-got-a-gigabit-network-so-now-what/ “Two news headlines of note this week highlight the challenges of getting what you wish for, especially if what you wished for is a gigabit network. From Chattanooga, Tenn. we learn about a contest this weekend to build a startup in 48 hours using the city’s gigabit broadband network, while over in Kansas City…people are unsure how they want to use it…Most believe, as the theme for the recent GigaOm’s RoadMap conference states, “Connectivity Changes Everything,” but it is the particulars of that change that give mayors and stakeholders heartburn…In Chattanooga this weekend, several hundred people will use the city’s gigabit network for a 48-hour united effort to help 27 entrepreneurs transform ideas to investment-worthy businesses. A great idea by itself, 48Hour Launch is part of a bigger, more complex and well-planned economic development program involving a variety of citizens, businesses and organizations…” http://colab.is/what-we-do/events/48hour-launch/

8. UK’s Hyperoptic on how to get gigabit to the home http://gigaom.com/2011/11/10/uks-hyperoptic-on-how-to-get-gigabit-to-the-home/ “Britain’s broadband market used to be widely lauded for its combination of high speeds and low prices, something achieved through a mixture of strong competition and careful regulation. But as the gigabit revolution has taken hold elsewhere, the U.K. has been left trailing its counterparts in Europe…a cohort of companies — most of them new entrants like Gigaclear and CityFibre — is trying to turn that around. But how do you do it? “We’re focusing on London,” says Dana Pressman Tobak, the managing director of Hyperoptic…Our approach is to hit high density areas, start with multiple-occupancy dwellings and build up from there.”…British internet providers…have traditionally focused on making sure they can get broad geographic coverage and scale…For example, as Om reported last week, local rival CityFibre is looking for $800 million to build out a large scale fiber network so that it can hit 1 million subscribers as soon as possible. But Tobak says Hyperoptic is starting at the other end, with something that focuses on a small number of users and very specific areas like London’s East End — notorious for poor connectivity, despite being the heart of the English capital’s startup scene…We’re focused on ‘notspots’, including south of the river, Westminster, Holborn and Covent Garden. There are definitely pockets, and we’ll extend from those.” The focus on cost effectiveness means that customers lucky enough to live in a building served by Hyperoptic can get 1 gig download speeds for £50 a month ($80)…”

9. Seattle broadband network floated again, sort of http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2016766002_seattle_broadband_network_floa.html “Seven years after it began pursuing a city broadband network, Seattle's trying again. Sort of…The plan is to offer city infrastructure to lure phone or cable companies willing to build ultrafast broadband in one or two neighborhoods…It's unlikely to help many homes or businesses truly suffering from a lack of fast service, especially since the targeted neighborhoods already have pretty good broadband…As it did in 2006 and 2007, the city's offering access to 500 miles of fiber-optic lines the public spent at least $50 million to install. This time around, the city's hooked up with the University of Washington and an alliance of universities across the country that's trying to get companies to provide faster service to research schools and their surrounding communities. The alliance, called Gig U, wants to foster new research and development of applications using ultrafast connections. Success in these areas could prod telecommunications companies to provide more ultrafast broadband….But the city has started off on this road before and never went anywhere…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

10. Port 25 will be blocked for South Korea from December http://zombie-storage.com/?p=95 “So it turns out that what I thought was just a scam message is actually true: The South Korean government is attempting to fight spam by issuing a national decree to block port 25 and use 587 instead…A national block of port 25 will be instituted in December…If you have a server in South Korea you probably should change your app to use port 587 for outbound traffic and port 465 for SMTP over SSL. If you are outside South Korea be aware that all traffic sent over port 25 will probably be intercepted…Do these government agencies actually think blocking port 25 will reduce spam?...Botnets are a problem but using another port doesn’t fix that…they are also recommending people break port 587 by accepting both SMTPS and SMTP connections. Further they recommend 465 for SMTPS just to break the spec more. The Korean government has long had a system of deep packet inspection so the technical implementation of a nationwide firewall over a port isn’t new or unprecedented. The steps may prevent some spam but really, I doubt it will amount to anything substantial…”

11. Barnes & Noble Exposes Microsoft's "Trivial" Patents and Strategy Against Android http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011111122291296 “Barnes & Noble has done the world a tremendous favor, by pulling aside the curtain and revealing Microsoft's patent campaign tactics against Android…It reveals the assertion of "trivial" and "invalid" patents against Barnes & Noble and…details about an "oppressive" license agreement that would have controlled hardware and software design features that Microsoft presented, thus limiting to what degree Barnes & Noble could offer upgrades and improved features to its customers if it had signed it, features it says none of Microsoft's patents cover. Microsoft worked so hard to keep it all secret, and I think you'll see why…Exhibit D…is a long detailing of the incredibly insignificant patents Microsoft has the nerve to use against Android, claiming control of the entire operating system with what is pretty much a handful of stupid patents no one really needs or which are so trivial that the fees it claims become outrageous…The patents, we read, "cover only arbitrary, outmoded and non-essential design features" and yet Microsoft is demanding "prohibitively expensive licensing fees", in effect asserting "veto power" over Android's features…Barnes & Noble asserts that Microsoft is attempting "to use patents to drive open source software out of the market," saying…pay Microsoft exorbitant rates for patents, some trivial and others ridiculously invalid or clearly not infringed, or spend a fortune on litigation. A large company like Amazon might be able to pay, but Barnes & Noble can't afford to pay such rates, which in any case it believes are ridiculous, given the quality of the patents, or lack thereof…” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/expert-regulators-unlikely-to-stop-microsoft-patent-bullying.ars

12. ‘Biggest Cybercriminal Takedown in History’ http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-57321844-245/seven-accused-in-$14-million-click-hijacking-scam/ “The U.S. Department of Justice said today that it has uncovered a large, sophisticated Internet scam ring that netted $14 million by infecting millions of computers with malware designed to redirect their Web searches to sites that generated ad revenue. Six people have been arrested in Estonia and a Russian is being sought…They are accused of infecting about 4 million computers in more than 100 countries…with malware called DNSChanger. The malware altered the Domain Name Server settings on the computers so they could be automatically redirected to rogue DNS servers and then on to specific Web sites…Defendants also allegedly replaced legitimate ads on sites with ads that triggered payments to them. For instance, they are accused of replacing an American Express ad on the Wall Street Journal home page with an ad for "Fashion Girl LA,"…Computers became infected with DNSChanger when they visited certain Web sites or downloaded particular software to view videos online. In addition to altering the DNS server settings, the malware also prevented antivirus and operating systems from updating…The operation began in 2007 and ended in October with the completion of the two-year FBI investigation called "Operation Ghost Click," the FBI alleges…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

13. Nvidia launches its Tegra 3 mobile graphics processor http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/08/nvidia-launches-its-tegra-3-mobile-graphics-processor/ “…Nvidia is formally launching its Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor for smartphones and tablets…The chip is the new flagship for Nvidia’s drive to diversify beyond PC graphics into mobile devices…Asus…will use Tegra 3 in its upcoming Android-based Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. Formerly known under the code name Project Kal-El, the Tegra 3…has four cores…plus an additional “companion core” that is used to handle small tasks and dramatically lower the power consumption of the entire chip…Each ARM-based central processing unit (CPU) core on the Tegra 3 can automatically turn on or turn off as needed…allowing a mobile device with the chip to operate with a longer battery life…the four cores provide performance that is about three times better than last year’s Tegra 2 on graphics performance with 61 percent lower power consumption…”

14. Amazon's Kindle Fire Kills All Other Android Tablets http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396337,00.asp “The Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet eradicate most of the Android tablet market. There are now three tablet players (those two plus Apple), and everyone else is pretty much irrelevant. Companies like Acer, Archos, Coby, Pandigital, Viewsonic, and Velocity Micro should just give up now, unless they can refit their businesses to deliver what consumers really want. Samsung has a tiny bit of protection because it makes really nice hardware, but that's a thin margin of safety…”

15. ARM's new GPU chip design aims to boost mobile graphics http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15668347 “British computer chip designer ARM has unveiled its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices. The Mali-T658 offers up to ten times the performance of its predecessor. It paves the way for faster games and other more complex software on smartphones and tablet computers. ARM hopes to expand its share of a rapidly-growing market. Demand for its mobile GPU designs lags behind that for its central processing units (CPUs). The most high-profile use of its GPU to date is in Samsung's award winning Galaxy 2 handsets…A review in September by the influential website AnandTech rated the 400 MP the fastest GPU available in a smartphone…”

16. The PC-ification of Android Tablets http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/14/stumbling-towards-the-future-the-pc-ification-of-android-tablets/ “Did you hear that Lenovo is releasing a 10.1-inch tablet powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU?...Do we really have to be doing this? Is this what the struggling tablet market needs: a spec war? But what’s a tablet maker to do?...The OEMs are just working within Android’s confines, try desperately to wring more performance and marketing credibility out of the platform by throwing hardware at the problem. Right now it’s the iPad versus the world. Consumers can either opt for the $500 iPad or pick from countless identical Android tablets. It’s a microcosm of the PC notebook market, really: You can either pick from two Apple models or hundreds of Windows notebooks, all the same. Either the buyer trusts Apple and opts for a notebook that’s nearly void of available options, or, as most consumers do, they choose a Windows notebook that better fits their use case and/or budget. The iPad is a large iPod touch and to say it’s anything else is disingenuous. It’s a multimedia device with some content creation capabilities. But much like its smaller brother, Apple has managed to sell millions of the iPads without talking that much about specs…”

17. NTT Docomo Does Japanese/English Real-Time Translation On Mobile Phones http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/video-ntt-docomo-shows-japaneseenglish-real-time-translation-service-for-mobile-phones/ “Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has developed a real-time Japanese <-> English translation service for mobile phones, the first of its kind. The way it works is that you speak something into the device and wait to hear a voice interpretation of what you just said in another language. As you can see in the videos embedded below, the service…isn’t quite “real-time” but pretty close…The company also claims the success rate for speech recognition stands at about 90% in the case of Japanese and about 80% for English…That’s significantly more than the 15-20% back in May…NTT Docomo plans to offer the service to all of its 56 million subscribers in the second half of 2012…”

18. Lenovo to release a 10.1-inch Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with Tegra 3 by year's end http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/14/exclusive-lenovo-to-release-a-10-1-inch-ice-cream-sandwich-tabl/ “…Lenovo…will release a new 10.1-inch tablet by the end of the year, and unsurprisingly, Ice Cream Sandwich along with NVIDIA's Tegra 3 T33 are on the menu. Other features include 2GB of speedy 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, a standard USB host socket…a back-facing camera of unknown resolution…and, most interestingly, a fingerprint scanner that apparently doubles as an optical joystick…”

19. Could Apple have 3 top-selling smartphones in U.S. during holiday season? http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/223885/could-apple-have-3-top-selling-smartphones-us-during-holiday-season “…even the battery-drain problems an iOS 5 update last week apparently failed to fix probably won't dissuade many shoppers who really want the newest iPhone for themselves or as a gift. So it's reasonable to expect the iPhone 4S to be the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. during the fourth quarter…Apple might have a chance to sweep the top three spots in U.S. mobile handset sales in Q4. NPD reports that the two biggest-selling mobile handsets in the third quarter were the Apple iPhone 4 and runner-up iPhone 3GS…followed, in order, by two Android devices -- the HTC EVO 4G and Motorola Droid 3…Add in the Steve Jobs factor -- his recent death and the success of his biography arguably have added an aura to Apple and its products -- and it's likely AT&T will move a lot of iPhone 3GS devices through December…”

20. MacBook Air now 28% of Apple's notebook shipments http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/11/14/macbook_air_now_28_of_apples_notebook_shipments.html “Apple's MacBook Air models now make up 28 percent of the company's notebook shipments, up from just 8 percent in the first half of the year…The popularity of Apple's MacBook Air, which incorporates design elements and features of the iPad (such as instant wake and solid state storage) has sparked speculation that MacBook Pro models would similarly slim down…”

Apps

21. “Several Thousand” Apps Ready For Kindle Fire http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/several-thousand-apps-including-netflix-are-ready-for-kindle-fire/ “…Amazon has just announced that they…will have support for Netflix and Pandora, as well as “several thousand more apps” when the Kindle Fire ships…Usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter will run fine on Amazon’s tablet, as will games from big players like Zynga and EA. Amazon’s smaller Android Appstore runs parallel to Google’s, but Amazon claims that the apps they “carry” are tested for Kindle Fire compatibility. Amazon’s focus on apps is probably meant to highlight the small size of BN’s own app store, but there’s no question that Amazon is feeling some pressure from their long-time rivals. The Nook Tablet came out swinging just a few days ago, and it received more than a little attention thanks to the full suite of media services that would come preloaded on the device…”

22. Lookout Brings Smartphone Security And Tracking App To Australia, Canada And The UK http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/lookout-brings-smartphone-security-and-tracking-app-to-australia-canada-and-the-uk/ “Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphone platforms, is expanding internationally with native apps in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom…Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and most recently iOS devices help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone…it will act as a tracking application, data backup and a virus protector…Mobile threats don’t discriminate based on where you are. They tend to be global, affecting people around the world…Lookout’s Mobile Threat Network, a cloud-based network which constantly analyzes global threat data to identify and quickly block new threats with over-the-air app updates…In the first of half of 2011, the number of unique apps with malware went from 80 to 400 In fact, in the last four months mobile malware instances have more than doubled reaching nearly 1000 infected apps – and it’s likely…this malware…affected people worldwide…”

23. App Developers Anxious to Tap Amazon Gold Mine http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243807/app_developers_anxious_to_tap_amazon_gold_mine.html “A new survey from Appcelerator indicates that app developers are excited about the potential with Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet. The Android-ish tablet creates some issues as well, but it more than makes up for it with access to an audience of mobile device users that are accustomed to spending money…It seems like just about every mobile and desktop operating system has an app ecosystem, and users of all ages are anxious to find apps that fit virtually every conceivable need. The problem, though, is getting those users to actually pay for the apps so the developer can make a living…The number of Android tablets continues to grow, and it seems inevitable by virtue of sheer diversity and volume that Android will eventually surpass iOS in that arena as well…it makes sense that developers would want to focus on the largest market, but it isn't quite that simple. Developers want to focus on the market that is the most profitable, and Android users in general seem more reluctant to spend money on apps than users of other platforms. The Kindle Fire can change all of that…”

Open Source

24. A faster Web server: ripping out Apache for Nginx http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/a-faster-web-server-ripping-out-apache-for-nginx.ars? “…I grew to adult nerdhood doing tech support and later admin work in a Windows shop with a smattering of *nix, most of which was attended to by bearded elders locked away in cold, white rooms. It wasn't until I started managing enterprise storage gear that I came to appreciate the power of the bash shell, and my cobbled-together home network gradually changed from a Windows 2003 domain supporting some PCs to a mixture of GNU/Linux servers…I eventually decided to put my own website up on the Internets, and I used the Apache HTTP server to host it. Why? I had an Ubuntu server box sitting in front of me, and Apache was the Web server I'd heard about the most. If Apache was good enough for big sites, it should be good enough for my little static personal site. Right? But it wasn't quite right for me. Here's why—and what I learned when I spent a weekend ripping out my Apache install and replacing it with lightweight speed demon of a Web server called Nginx…”

25. 5 Resources for Getting Much More Out of VLC Media Player http://ostatic.com/blog/5-resources-for-getting-much-more-out-of-vlc-media-player “In case you don't already use it, VLC Media Player, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux, is one of the best open source applications of any kind. I find that it consistently plays video file formats that other players have problems with, and there is much more under the hood in this open source media player than many people realize. For example, you can use it to broadcast your own video content, you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats, and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it. VLC Media Player is so powerful, though, that it could use better documentation. In this post, you'll find our newly updated collection of good tutorial resources that can introduce you to some of the many useful VLC Media Player features that may not be immediately apparent…”

26. Global Village Construction Set – An Open-Source Platform for Sustainable Civilization http://news.thomasnet.com/green_clean/2011/11/14/global-village-construction-set-an-open-source-platform-for-sustainable-civilization/ “…the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) being developed by Open Source Ecology (OSE), a network of engineers, farmers, enthusiasts, and other supporters who are developing an open-source hardware platform for small-scale farming and manufacturing…50 basic Lego-like machines based on low-cost, easily-obtainable parts and interchangeable modules that provide all of the technologies needed “to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts,”…The closer I examine the GVCS, the less crazy and the more exciting it sounds. Open Source Ecology is seeking funding to move ahead with building all of its machines. If they succeed…they might just end up creating an innovative set of technologies that can be used to develop small-scale, decentralized communities oriented toward farming and industry…”

SkyNet

27. Google X, a Secret Product Lab, Revealed for First Time http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/at-google-x-a-top-secret-lab-dreaming-up-the-future.html “In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low…Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space. These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas…Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists…two people briefed on the project said one product would be released by the end of the year, although they would not say what it was. “They’re pretty far out in front right now,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at M.I.T.’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics…the lab reflects its ambition to be a place where ground-breaking research and development are happening, in the tradition of Xerox PARC…At Google…some of the outlandish projects may not be as much of a stretch as they first appear, even though they defy the bounds of the company’s main Web search business…Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, is deeply involved in the lab, said several people with knowledge of it, and came up with the list of ideas along with Larry Page, Google’s other founder, who worked on Google X before becoming chief executive…Robots figure prominently in many of the ideas…”

28. Google launches guide to using Google+ Pages http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57321504-93/google-launches-guide-to-using-google-pages/ “…Rolled out on Monday, Google+ Pages finally bring the social network to the business world, allowing companies of all sizes to post updates about themselves and their products or services…Businesses can also set up hangouts where they can chat directly with potential customers. To help companies get started, Google has created its online guide to show them how to create a page, promote it, and measure its effectiveness…Once the page is up and running, the first trick is to get some buzz going. So Google advises businesses to start sharing items of interest--updates on your products, the latest news on your company, photos, videos, and anything else that might draw some attention…the next step is to ramp up some conversations…Promotion is next on the to-do list…Finally, companies will want to track how well their page is doing to see if any tweaks are needed. Google advises them to use Google+ search to look for keywords about their product or service. Businesses can also use Google Analytics to measure the popularity of their page. Google is promising additional features to help companies determine the effectiveness of their pages…”

29. Removing your Wi-Fi network from Google's map http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57324766-281/removing-your-wi-fi-network-from-googles-map/ “If you're worried about the street address of your home Wi-Fi hotspot being public, Google has a solution…all you need to do is append "_nomap" to the name of the Wi-Fi network. So "theharrisons" becomes "theharrisons_nomap"…The privacy risks arise when a device's location can be tracked. CNET confirmed in July that Google's Street View cars recorded not just the locations of Wi-Fi access points, but also the addresses of some laptops, cell phones, and other devices…”

30. Google Quietly Rolls Out Google+ Badges http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396147,00.asp “Google said Wednesday that businesses and brands—and especially publishers—might benefit from the Google+ badge, an indicator of how many people are following a page. The badge was quietly rolled out as part of Google's launch of its Google+ Pages for businesses on Monday…”

31. Think Insights with Google is out of beta http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/think-insights-with-google-is-out-of.html “Quick pop quiz: Based on search history, consumer demand for pretzels peaks in what month of the year?...How much (in $) does search add to the world’s GDP?...In 2011, what percent of people dreamed and brainstormed about their next vacation?...These are just a few questions that can be answered* on the new Think Insights with Google, our information and resource hub for marketers. The site is fresh out of beta…If you only have a few minutes to spare, try playing with our new Real Time Insights Finder tool. With just a few clicks you can spot emerging trends and gain valuable consumer insights, all in real time. For example, the most popular video in common among males 25-34 in Italy and the U.S. is the Official Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game trailer…We hope you’ll use it as a one-stop shop for consumer trends, marketing insights and industry research…”

32. Google Earth spots huge, unidentified structures in Gobi desert http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8888909/China-Google-Earth-spots-huge-unidentified-structures-in-Gobi-desert.html “Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert, raising questions about what China might be building…In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space. Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre…another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long. All of the sites are on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang, some less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, the headquarters of China's space programme and the location of its launch pads…The purpose of the structures is unknown, but some experts suggested that they might be optical test ranges for Chinese missiles…”

General Technology

33. What the end of Flash means for Adobe http://www.splatf.com/2011/11/adobe-flash/ “Adobe announced…it would stop developing Flash plugins for mobile browsers, which ultimately signals the end of Flash…the reality is that the mobile browser is the future of the web. So anyone who is using Flash today for anything should start working on a plan to eventually stop using it…this isn’t a massive sales hit. Flash only drove about 7% of Adobe’s revenue in fiscal 2009…And it’s not like Flash authoring tool sales are going to terminate immediately. After all, people are still spending an alarming amount of money on DVD movies and AOL dialup!...Adobe’s position as the world’s top creative software maker — how it actually makes a lot of its money — is still strong…Piper Jaffray…asked Adobe users if the Apple/Flash issue would ever force them to use design tools other than Adobe’s. For the second survey in a row, every respondent (100%) indicated that they would continue to use Adobe tools despite the fact that Flash does not run on Apple devices…Now Adobe needs to put its head down and make the best HTML5 authoring tools in the world, better than anything it has ever done for Flash…This is an opportunity for Adobe to play a major role in the future of the web — desktop, mobile, and in areas we haven’t yet imagined — by making amazing software…Adobe is making some good moves, showing that it understands where the web is going…”

34. Why the world of scientific research needs to be disrupted http://gigaom.com/2011/10/31/why-the-world-of-scientific-research-needs-to-be-disrupted/ “Traditional media players…get criticized for being slow to change…but…there is another world that makes these industries look like…enthusiastic of early adopters: namely, academic research. Award-winning quantum physicist Michael Nielsen says that the closed and disconnected nature of most research is holding back scientific progress in important ways, and that we need to foster a new kind of “networked science” if we want to make new discoveries faster…this argument…was adapted from a book he published earlier this month called “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science.” The author…chose to put his quantum computing work on hold in order to write the book, because he felt so strongly about the need for more collaboration and what he calls “open science.”…The Polymath Project…started with a simple blog post by a mathematician at Cambridge University who wanted to see if he could get help with a problem. Within a matter of hours, comments had poured in from mathematicians, a high-school math teacher and others around the world, and within six weeks the problem had been solved. Unfortunately, as Nielsen points out, this kind of collaborative effort is rare…”

35. AMD introduces world’s first 16-core PC CPU http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/13/amd-introduces-worlds-first-16-core-pc-microprocessor/ “In a first for the PC industry, Advanced Micro Devices introduced a microprocessor today with 16 cores…on a single chip…AMD is the primary competitor to the world’s biggest chip maker, Intel. While AMD is a perennial underdog, it can sometimes push forward with innovations ahead of Intel…These new chips are aimed at giving enterprise servers better performance and power efficiency. The company is introducing the AMD Opteron 6200 family of processors, formerly code-named Interlagos. The chips give enterprises as much as 84 percent better performance, 73 percent better memory bandwidth, and better power efficiency with half the power per core. They save about two-thirds on floor space and two-thirds on platform costs…”

36. Intel Peaks on PC Performance With New Six-core Chip http://www.pcworld.com/article/243776/intel_peaks_on_pc_performance_with_new_sixcore_chip.html “Intel on Monday announced what it called its fastest chip to date for PCs, the six-core Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor, which is based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and designed for use in high-end desktops. The chip is targeted at enthusiasts such as gamers, who usually are early adopters of the latest technologies. More cores and faster clocks speed up PCs and are valued by gamers, who demand peak performance when playing graphics intensive games…The Core i7-3960X runs at a default clock speed of 3.3GHz, cranking up to 3.9GHz per core depending on performance required. The chip has 15MB of cache and four channels of memory…”

37. NVIDIA’s Maximus Technology: Quadro + Tesla, Launching Today http://www.anandtech.com/show/5094/nvidias-maximus-technology-quadro-tesla-launching-today “…NVIDIA’s Maximus Technology – Quadro + Tesla, Launching Today…Project Maximus, an interesting technology initiative to allow customers to combine Tesla and Quadro products together in a single workstation and to use their respective strengths…So what is Maximus Technology?...a new way to use NVIDIA’s existing Quadro and Tesla products together…new features in NVIDIAs drivers and new hooks exposed to application developers…to allow the transparent combination of NVIDIA’s Quadro and Tesla products…utilizing Quadro and Tesla cards together at the tasks they’re best suited at. This means using Quadro cards for graphical tasks while using Tesla for compute tasks where direct graphical rendering isn’t necessary…” http://www.vizworld.com/2011/11/nvidia-maximus-revolutionizes-workstation/ http://www.crazyengineers.com/nvidia-maximus-arrives-on-workstations-1270/

38. Interview with tech futurist Nick Bilton http://thesop.org/story/20111029/judyth-piazza-interviews-new-york-times-writerreporter-nick-bilton.html “Nick Bilton is the Lead Technology Writer/Reporter for The New York Times Bits Blog…Nick is currently working on a new book title I Live in the Future: & Here`s How It Works The book will explore the effects our bite sized culture is having on our brains…Nick…is the User Interface Specialist & Researcher for The New York Times Research & Development Lab working on a variety of research projects and exploring technologies that could become common place in the next 2-10 years. His work in the R&D Labs includes exploring and prototyping content and interaction on futuristic flexible digital displays, a vast array of mobile applications and devices,Times Reader 2.0 , Print-to-mobile SMS, Semacode integration, data visualization, content in the living room and context aware sensors…”

DHMN Technology

39. Tinkercad Raises $1 Million, Aims To Popularize 3D Printing http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/tinkercad-raises-1-million/ “Tinkercad, a startup that aims to introduce browser-based 3D printing CAD to the masses, has landed $1M in seed funding…The company’s mission is to ‘reach and teach’ a wide audience on the use of CAD software and creating ‘fun and meaningful’ things like jewelry, toys, car parts and whatnot, using 3D printers…one only needs a browser and a couple of minutes to use its browser-based software and have a 3D project ready for printing…Tinkercad is free, and encourages sharing designs under a creative commons license…I would also urge you to also visit GrabCAD…”

40. Honda's ASIMO robot sheds a few pounds, gets all autonomous on us http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/08/hondas-asimo-robot-sheds-a-few-pounds-gets-all-autonomous-on-u/ “…Honda's ASIMO humanoid has now taken that…leap into decidedly more dystopian territory. The revamped bot…was unveiled today in Japan, sporting a streamlined physique and scarily adept mind…Honda claims that its bot is now less "automated" than it is "autonomous" -- all thanks to new behavior control technology that allows it to move and make decisions on its own, independent of human operators. Its external recognition capability and set of onboard visual and auditory sensors enable it to rapidly process information about its environment, which the ASIMO then uses to plot its next move. Combining long- and short-term sensor data, the droid can predict human movements and automatically recognize voices or gestures…It can now run at a maximum speed of 9 kilometers per hour, jump up and down for as long as it wants, and even hop on one leg…”

41. BeagleBone: A hacker oriented version of the Beagleboard http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/BeagleBone-A-hacker-oriented-version-of-the-Beagleboard-1369760.html “The BeagleBone has been announced by the developers of the BeagleBoard as an open source hardware, low-cost, expandable, hardware-hacker oriented variant of the original BeagleBoard, which will cost $89. The BeagleBone sports a 720Mhz ARM Cortex A8 processor with 256MB of DDR2 RAM, using the TI AM335x. The board includes one USB 2.0 port, a 10/100 Ethernet port, microSD slot and a USB 2.0 flexible device port. There are also 2x 46-pin peripheral controllers on expansion headers enabling five serial ports and two I2C buses. The compact 8.6 cm by 5.3 cm (3.4 inches by 2.1 inches) board is shipped complete with a 2-GB MicroSD card loaded with the Ångström Linux distribution from OpenEmbedded, node.js and the Cloud9 IDE. This should allow a BeagleBone developer to connect to a web server, running the Cloud9 IDE, and directly work on JavaScript code for the Node.js runtime…”

42. 3D Printer Home Fabrication for the Fumble-Fingered http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/home-fabrication-for-the-fumblefingered “I've been building a 3-D printer from scratch for several years, but open-source hardware projects do not favor the leisurely. Between the time I first started ordering parts and when I was ready to assemble them, my controller circuits became antiques, and my ancient printed circuit boards are regarded by today's software with the same sense of befuddlement my son had when looking at a vinyl record. So when MakerBot Industries, one of the pioneers of prepackaged 3-D printer kits, announced that it was putting its iconic Cupcake CNC model on clearance sale, I decided that my customized version could wait while I built something that actually worked…The device can make small model cars and airplanes, tableware, gear trains, clocks, and anything else that can be modeled as a set of 2-D slices at roughly a half-millimeter resolution…And it goes together in maybe a week's worth of evenings, including soldering a handful of wires. Most of the work involves tightening nuts on the six or seven dozen 10-mm-long bolts that slide into ingenious slots in the laser-cut plywood sides to lock the whole thing together into a rigid framework. Assembly was easy, but troubleshooting was hard, especially for a hobbyist with one antiquated multimeter…Eventually, after I set the control program up to run as root, everything worked. It's amazing. It's addictive. A tiny thread of molten plastic squirts out of the nozzle and solidifies into a spoon or a coat hook or a toy dump truck or a small wrench. The pieces are surprisingly strong. I now have a mile-long list of items to fab, including a shoehorn holder, customized Lego bricks, and a small statue of our cat. Yes, there's software out there to transform a set of photographs taken from different angles into a 3-D representation…”

Leisure & Entertainment

43. Apple releases iTunes 10.5.1 with public launch of iTunes Match http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/11/14/apple_releases_itunes_10_5_1_with_public_launch_of_itunes_match.html “…The new version of iTunes is now available for download on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows…users can access the iTunes Match service, where they can subscribe and receive the ability to re-download songs on other devices like an iPhone or iPad…iTunes Match gives users the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud with songs that weren't purchased from iTunes. Built right into the iTunes software and the Music application on iOS devices, it lets users store their entire collection, including music that was imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. At a cost of $24.99 per year, iTunes will determine which songs in a user's collection are available on the iTunes Store…When a user's music library has been uploaded and matched to iCloud, it can be re-downloaded on other devices on the go…”

44. CastleVille Combines Rich Storylines, Fantasy, And Social Gaming In A Medieval World http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/zyngas-newest-title-castleville-combines-rich-storylines-fantasy-and-social-gaming-in-a-medieval-world/ “…the newest title in the “Ville” franchise, which includes FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille, is CastleVille. The newest title from the social gaming giant allows players to build mini-empires from castles, craft art and armour and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world…Bill Jackson explains that the studio took key elements of each ‘Ville’ title and brought the best into CastleVille…When first beginning the game, you’ll need to choose your character and build your look. Jackson says this is the most expansive character building features to date, with dozens of looks to choose from. Once immersed in CastleVille’s medieval world, peasants, princesses, pirates (and players) will choose their own path in the game by meeting new and different characters, completing quests and exploring mysterious areas…”

Economy and Technology

45. Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs http://trevorowens.tumblr.com/post/12432238865/why-founders-should-emulate-wozniak-not-jobs “…Jobs was not a great founder. The early success of Apple was more dependent on the brilliant engineering of Steve Wozniak and the industry insight of Mike Markkula. What Jobs is known for today: product vision, design aesthetic, and Reality Distortion Field, were more harmful than helpful. Jobs’s most important contribution was just general hustling…The Apple I & II were built by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was definitively one of the best computer engineers of his time…The Apple II was marketed and pushed beyond the hobbyist users by Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman and first investor. Mike was previously a senior marketing executive at Intel…Many brilliant engineers wanted to work at Apple because they idolized Wozniak, not Jobs because he wasn’t an engineer. But Wozniak had no desire to run any part of the company, he just wanted to be a mid-level engineer…Jobs…grabbed the best engineers from around the company and put them on the Macintosh team. Despite its breakthrough technology, the Macintosh was too slow and overpriced. It sold like crazy the first year…But sales dropped dramatically in the second year after people actually tried the product. The Macintosh only accounted for 10% of Apple Computer’s revenue, whereas the Apple II at this time accounted for 70%. After Jobs was kicked out of Apple Computer by the board, he founded NeXT Computers…Jobs poached some of Apple’s employees and released the NeXT Computer and the NeXTstation. Both products had limited adoption and Jobs spent excessively…In 1993 NeXT laid off 300 out of 540 employees and left the hardware business altogether to focus on software…Founders today will not have the opportunity to learn the lessons Jobs did…the skills that were most valuable in Apple’s early success: Wozniak’s engineering ability and Markkula’s industry knowledge…”

46. Square Founder Reveals Publishing Plans http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27336/ “…For a few years now, Dorsey has been working on Square, a company he founded that offers a dinky card reader that makes it possible for anyone to accept credit-card payments on a phone or tablet…today, he explained that Square is actually a publishing company, too, and that creating a new publishing medium is a big part of where his new company's profit potential lies. This new publishing medium is actually a reinvention of an old one that you scorn every day: the receipt…you can treat receipts as a publishing channel between the merchant and the payer…Square, to us, is about that communication channel…Payment is what we have to do to get to that interesting communication channel between merchant and payer…Square's publishing plans can be discerned in its Card Case app, which makes it possible to use your name and face to pay for goods in coffee shops and restaurants. The app enables you to open "tabs" with participating businesses…If you stroll in and say "a cappuccino for Jack, please," they simply check your face against a list of photos of nearby Card Case users and tap on it to set the payment in motion…the transaction triggers an electronic receipt that is sent back to you. That's where Dorsey spies gold…Square's Card Case could offer incredibly well-targeted ads, or even Groupon-style daily deals…I wouldn't complain if this approach could spare me from being pushed the deals for manicures and hair removal that I often receive…Dorsey acknowledged that advertising is often unpopular, but apparently thinks that Square's version can prove to be a lucrative exception…Dorsey seems to think that Square's insight into spending habits in the real world could translate the same "intent+ads=profit" formula onto the high street…”

47. Ditch those coupons: Square updates iOS and Android apps with loyalty features http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/15/square-ios-android-2-2-apps-loyalty/ “Mobile payments startup Square has updated its popular iOS and Android apps to include loyalty tracking and discounts for regular customers and further hardware support for brick-and-mortar stores…With this update, there’s no need for coupons, punch cards or third-party apps…the updated Card Case application…came out two weeks ago and makes it possible to pay Square retailers without touching your mobile device. Now, when Square retailers actively serve loyal Card-Case-using customers, they can automate the process of giving those customers a discount based on number of visits or the total amount spent…”

48. How Steve Case and His Company Are Driving the Sharing Economy http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/how-steve-case-and-his-company-are-driving-the-sharing-economy/247997/ “Three days after Steve Case, the founder of America Online, stepped down as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he took a longtime colleague out for pizza. Case wanted to get back to building companies. He wanted to open a new venture capital firm to attack old industries with the same dynamic, unwieldy Internet that AOL had harnessed…One year later, his firm, Revolution, had acquired a vacation-home sharing company that now owns $1 billion in mansions around the world. Three years later, it helped to create what you know as Zipcar, now the world's largest car-sharing company. The same year, it invested in a new company started by four former employees called LivingSocial, an online social commerce company with more than 45 million global members. A luxury-home network. A car-sharing company. An explosive deal site. Maybe you see three random ideas. Case and his team saw three bets that paid off thanks to a new Web economy that promotes power in numbers and access over ownership. The so-called sharing economy has taken off in the Great Recession…”

49. Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_bezos/all/1 “What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.”…Bezos runs through the features that will soon set the tech world ablaze—the $199 price tag, the easy-to-hold size, the seamless access to Amazon’s rich and growing collection of digital media…Yet the Fire is not just a rival gadget, but something essentially different. The iPad is the flagship of the post-PC era—in which the desktop is replaced by lean, portable, gesture-driven tablets. As people will learn when Amazon ships it today, November 14, the Fire is an emblem of a post-web world, in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center…While users of the iPad and the Fire will engage in many of the same activities—watching movies, reading books, playing Angry Birds—the philosophy behind the two tablets could not be more different. Apple is fundamentally a hardware company—91 percent of its revenue comes from sales of its coveted machines, compared to just 6 percent from iTunes…Amazon, on the other hand, is a content-focused company—almost half of its revenue comes from sales of media like books, music, TV shows, and movies—and the fire-sale-priced Fire is designed to be primarily a passport to the large amount of that content that’s available digitally. The gadget comes preloaded with customers’ Amazon account information, and anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year shipping service, will be able to access more than 12,000 (and counting) movies and TV shows on the Fire at no extra charge…Bezos doesn’t consider the Fire a mere device, preferring to call it a “media service.” While he takes pride in the Fire, he really sees it as an advanced mobile portal to Amazon’s cloud universe…”

Civilian Aerospace

50. Aerojet looks at ‘space tugs’ http://www.daytondailynews.com/business/aerojet-looks-at-space-tugs-1279977.html “Aerojet, a rocket engine contractor…wants to design and build solar-powered “space tugs” that could move satellites into orbit or help push spacecraft toward the Moon, Mars or other destinations. Aerojet wants to work with NASA’s Glenn Research Center at Cleveland and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to develop the technology for a prototype within the next three to five years, then build what would be reusable vehicles for long-term deployment in space…The company would consider building those vehicles in Ohio and developing relationships with local small-business suppliers…”

51. Mars Rover's Hovering Act Will Have NASA Scientists Biting Nails http://www.space.com/13582-nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-sky-crane-landing.html “Scientists are jittery but thrilled about the upcoming launch of NASA's Curiosity rover, the largest Mars rover yet. The $2.5 billion Curiosity…is set to lift off Nov. 25…At roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, Curiosity is about twice the size of previous Mars rovers. It's packed with 10 instruments designed to search for signs that the Red Planet was ever habitable…Another distinctive feature of the rover is its unique landing mechanism, designed to accommodate its hefty size. After an 8 1/2-month flight, the spacecraft carrying Curiosity will begin descending to Mars using parachutes. Then the descent stage of the spacecraft will take over, depending on thruster propulsion for control. When it gets close enough, the descent stage will hover and act as a "sky crane," lowering the rover gently to the ground on tethers…The tense moment is due to occur in August 2012…”

52. DARPA solicits air-launch proposals http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/darpa-solicits-air-launch-proposals-364537/ “…DARPA has released a broad area announcement (BAA) calling for information about launching small satellites from aircraft as a low-cost alternative to expensive vertical rocket launches. The programme, called airborne launch assist space access (ALASA), calls for a range of modified carrier aircraft and custom-built rockets…presentations accompanying the announcement request proposals for placing a 45.3kg (100lb) payload into orbit, using a 2,268kg (5,000lb) air-launched rocket. Such a vehicle would allow greater flexibility in payloads and launch conditions, and could lower launch costs significantly…A DARPA/NASA report from June, 2011, examining a variety of aircraft and launch configurations, concluded that modifying an off-the-shelf aircraft could result in costs as low as $3,000/lb, or around one-third the price of a large conventional rocket…The air-launch concept, which has been studied since the first satellites proposals, has become increasingly attractive as the necessary size and weight of satellites for a given mission have shrunk dramatically in recent decades…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

53. Parallel Coding with GPUs: Should You Wait? http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles-HPC-Parallel-Coding-with-GPUs-Should-You-Wait-110711.aspx “While the cost of high performance computing (HPC) has been reducing steadily over recent years, it may still put some people off. The advent of general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPU) has both accelerated the cost reduction and improved the energy efficiency of some HPC installations. The experiences of those who have written GPGPU algorithms, and who know HPC systems (some with GPGPU capability), may help you decide whether this technology is right for you. Most hardware vendors now have added GPGPU capabilities to their standard HPC hardware product range…This article examines the background to GPU usage, some of the options that currently exist and some issues that still need to be addressed…The considered answer is that there is no need to wait…start to experiment with GPUs now. Indeed, seeing as CPU and GPU technology appears to be converging, the sooner practitioners start parallelizing their code (in the fine-grained parallelism the new hardware will require), the better. It is important to start analyzing code now to identify hotspots and to plan how these hotspots could be implemented…The tools are effective, and the hardware is available at competitive prices and may already be incorporated in your HPC service…”

54. Nvidia Tesla GPUs to Fuel Russia's Newest Supercomputer http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-11-07/russian_academy_of_sciences_adds_gpus_to_hpc_servers.html “…the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS)…is updating its main supercomputing center with new NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. The Russian Academy of Sciences is…adding 128 Tesla M2090 GPUs installed in HP ProLiant SL390 G7 servers, to address the explosive growth in the number of scientific applications that use GPUs to drive research projects…More than 30 of these institutes currently utilize GPUs for research across a wide range of scientific fields, including hydro-dynamics, geological modeling, genomic analysis, gas dynamics, computational mathematics, molecular dynamics, image processing, computed tomography, electromagnetic…Tesla GPUs power…the most powerful Russian supercomputer, Lomonosov, at Moscow State University. In addition, seven of Russia's top 50 supercomputers are GPU-accelerated, which provide the same total computing capability as the remaining 43 supercomputers combined…This enabled me to analyze and monitor five times more dam break scenarios and flood regions," said Evstigneev Nikolay…GPUs provide significant performance acceleration for the algorithm used to create 3D re-constructions…which allows us detect tumor localization with a high degree of accuracy. GPU computing has been instrumental in the development of…new automated geophysical data interpretation systems for the oil and gas industry, promising to dramatically improve efficiencies in oil and gas exploration…”

55. Barcelona Supercomputing Center to Develop ARM-Based CPU/GPU Hybrid Supercomputer http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230570/Spain-Nvidia-plan-ARM-based-supercomputer “The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)…will develop a hybrid supercomputer based on Nvidia Corp.'s Tegra ARM CPUs and the firm's CUDA-supporting Tesla GPUs, with hopes of reaching exascale performance. BSC believes its prototype system will be the world's first ARM-based CPU/GPU supercomputing combination…it is aiming for a two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared to today's most efficient systems in the short term, with the ultimate goal of reaching exascale using 15 to 30 times less power than current supercomputer architectures. The lofty goal has been aptly dubbed the EU Mont-Blanc Project and is mainly being carried out as a proof of concept, to show what might be possible in future on more energy-efficient, embedded mobile technologies and jumpstart software development for the ARM architecture in the space…”

56. Nvidia proposes GPU programming standard http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230581/Nvidia-proposes-GPU-programming-standard “Nvidia Corp., Cray Inc., The Portland Group, Inc. and The Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms have unveiled ‘OpenACC’, a directives-based programming initiative the firms hope will become an industry standard for parallel computing. The approach aims to facilitate the acceleration of applications on both CPUs and GPUs, without modifying the underlying code, making it easier for scientists and researchers to efficiently use parallel programing on heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems. OpenACC allows parallel programmers to give simple hints –or “directives”-- to the compiler, which in turn identify which parts of the code to accelerate, without having to change the underlying code itself. The directives then allow the compiler to map the computation onto the accelerator…Nvidia believes OpenACC will most benefit the scientific community, especially chemistry, biology, physics, data analytics, intelligence and climate researchers who may not have enough funding or computational expertise to port their code over to GPU architectures. “We’re so confident about the approach, we’re launching an initiative called ‘2x in 4 weeks’,” said Nvidia’s Sumit Gupta, noting that developers using OpenACC had reported 2x to 10x increases in application performance in as little as two weeks when using existing directive-based compilers…”

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