NEW NET Weekly List for 12 Mar 2013

Below is the mostly final list of technology news and issues for the Tuesday, 12 March 2013, NEW NET (NorthEast Wisconsin Network for Entrepreneurism and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 PM weekly gathering at Sergio's Restaurant, 2639 South Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.

The ‘net

1.        If you could get it, which .search, .app, .blog or .cloud URL would you take?  http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/09/if-it-gets-them-google-may-open-search-app-blog-and-cloud-gtlds-to-the-public/  “If Google is awarded the right to manage the domain registrations for .search, .app, .blog and .cloud, there is now a good chance that it won’t just use them for its own services and will open them up for non-Google properties, too. Last year, when ICANN opened up the first phase of the registration process for new generic top-level domain names, Google accounted for about 100 of the over 1,900 applications ICANN received. Among those were some that referenced Google brands and products like .google, .chrome, .android and .gmail, but Google and many of the other applicants also applied for the right to manage top-level domains with very generic terms like .blog, .show, .earth, .book and .car…”  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57573504-93/book-publishers-blast-amazons-plan-to-control-domain-names/  “Amazon's effort to control dozens of new generic top-level Internet domain names is drawing fire from a pair of publishing industry groups. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers oppose the Internet retail giant's plan to control so-called generic top-level domains (gTLD) that end in suffixes .book, .author, and .read, arguing that such influence would be anti-competitive…”

2.       A Better way to Name a Company and Choose URL  http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/03/05/test-company-domain-name-with-mturk-survey-data/  “……”

3.       Amazing wireless whitespace technology bringing free WiFi to SXSW  http://boingboing.net/2013/03/09/amazing-wireless-whitespace-te.html  “……”

4.       Amazon Pulls Digital Edition of SimCity as EA Struggles to Fix Servers  http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/03/07/amazon-pulls-digital-edition-of-simcity-as-ea-struggles-to-fix-servers/  “……”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

5.        Microsoft’s Patent Lawsuit Against Google Could Shut Down Google Maps In Germany  http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/microsofts-patent-lawsuit-against-google-could-shut-down-google-maps-in-germany/  “Microsoft and Google are currently involved in a patent lawsuit in Germany that could, according to FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller and a number of German reports, lead to an outright ban of Google Maps in the country…If Microsoft wins the injunction it is asking for, Google could have to shut down its mapping service in Germany, both on the web and on mobile phones (or at least on all of its own Motorola phones). In the worst of all cases, it could even be ordered to stop distributing Chrome in Germany unless it blocks access to Google Maps from the browser…”

6.       Google services should not require real names: Vint Cerf  http://news.yahoo.com/google-services-not-require-real-names-vint-cerf-120515311--sector.html  “……”

7.        Technology Turns to Tracking People Offline  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/technology-turns-to-tracking-people-offline/  “……”

8.       Why haven’t biometrics replaced passwords  http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/can-biometrics-secure-our-digital-lives/  “……”

9.       Harvard Search of E-mail Stuns Its Faculty Members  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/us/harvard-e-mail-search-stuns-faculty-members.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  “……”

10.     Speed cameras are a scam, Ohio judge rules  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57573478-71/speed-cameras-are-a-scam-ohio-judge-rules/  “……”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

11.      Tablets Surpass Smartphones in Global Web Pageviews  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57573182-94/tablets-surpass-smartphones-in-driving-global-web-traffic/  “…for the first time ever worldwide tablet traffic has surpassed smartphone traffic. Tablets now drive 8 percent of all Internet traffic, while smartphones generate 7 percent. "We've been keeping a close eye on how quickly tablets have taken off," manager and primary analyst working on Adobe Digital Index Tyler White wrote in a blog post today. "Smartphones remain much more common, but the tablet form factor makes it ideal for browsing. Whether it be leisurely surfing the Web, engaging with video, or shopping online, on average internet users view 70 percent more pages per visit when browsing with a tablet compared to a smartphone…”

12.     Android 4.x Now Ahead Of Android 2.3 Gingerbread  http://www.mobilemag.com/2013/03/06/android-jelly-bean-gingerbread/  “……”

13.     A Shrinking Garmin Navigates the Smartphone Storm  http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511786/a-shrinking-garmin-navigates-the-smartphone-storm/  “……”

14.     Japanese wireless company Willcom reveals tiniest phone ever  http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/willcom-reveals-tiniest-phone-ever/  “……”

Apps

15.     Thermodo is a tiny thermometer for your smartphone  http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/thermodo-thermometer-smartphone/  “Blasting through a Kickstarter funding goal of $35,000 in the first seven hours after the project went live, the Thermodo by Robocat is a miniature electrical thermometer that plugs into the headphone jack on a smartphone or tablet. Also designed to plug into a key ring for storage, the passive temperature sensor can measure the external or interior temperature of the surrounding environment. According to the details on the Kickstarter page, an audio signal is first sent through the sensor. At this point, the sensor attenuates the signal amplitude and a built-in microphone picks up the attenuation in order to calculate the temperature using software installed on the mobile device. Conceptually, the Robocat team is selling the ability to know the exact temperature in your local area rather than relying on data that’s general to a much wider area…”

16.     Google Takes a Field Trip to iOS  http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/google-field-trip-ios/  “……”

17.     Photoshop Touch Built Specifically for Smartphones  “……”

SkyNet

18.     Google's 4 Biggest Technical Challenges For Search  http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/03/10/googles-4-biggest-technical-challenges-according-to-search-guru-amit-singhal-sxsw/  “…Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search and Google Fellow, was asked in a talk at South By Southwest what Google’s biggest challenges are to solving its mission. Those four technical challenges are: the knowledge graph, speech recognition, natural language understanding and (understanding) conversation, he said. These four areas are technical problems that, despite Google’s improvements, are still “not solved,” Singha said. The knowledge graph is about “understanding the world as you and I do”–in other words, the connections between things and ideas and how they relate to each other, which underlies Google’s core search focus. Speech recognition is translating the human voice into text, which is key to things like searching by voice. Natural language is understanding the nuances of language, which allows the conversion of voice transcription into meaningful information. Conversation is related to natural language.…”

19.     How to Activate Google Docs Offline on Your Chromebook  http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-activate-google-docs-offline-on-your-chromebook  “……”

20.    Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None  http://allthingsd.com/20130305/why-google-thinks-two-music-subscription-services-are-better-than-none/  “……”  http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/08/technology/streaming-music-apple-google/  “……”

21.     Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace  http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2013/03/scoot-and-doodle/  “……”

22.    Google Debuts ‘Talking Shoe’ Concept At SXSWi  http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/09/google-shoes/  “……”

23.    How to Use Google Docs to Help Power Your Reporting  http://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/item/how-to-use-google-docs-to-help-power-your-reporting  “……”

24.    Google Glass: the scientists behind Google's augmented reality glasses  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9918794/Google-Glass-the-scientists-behind-Googles-augmented-reality-glasses.html  “……”

General Technology

25.    Small gestures, big impact: hands-on with Leap Motion  http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/9/4082902/leap-motion-controller-hands-on-sxsw  “The last time we checked out the Leap Motion Controller (then known as "The Leap") we referred to it as "a Kinect on steroids." Since then, Leap has attracted an impressive amount of developer support and has announced a full retail launch on May 13th for $79.99 through major channels like Best Buy. We just had a chance to use the final hardware and some of the early third-party apps and games, and frankly, we're still very impressed — but it's still in its infancy. The first thing to note on the hardware: this is one of the first consumer devices to use micro USB 3.0. The cord looks proprietary to most people at first blush — especially with Leap's logo on the plug — but it's just early adoption. Co-founder and CTO David Holz assures us, though, that a micro USB 2.0 should work just fine but that the 3.0 will be required later down the line as software is made to harness more of the data Leap is capturing. Overall, the device is tiny. A small silver box about half the width of an Altoids tin with three red LEDs faintly glowing on the black, glass top…”

26.    Kinect palm gesture controls coming  http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/03/05/microsoft-techfest-2013-kinect-hand-gestures-machine-learning/1965931/  “……”

27.    Collision Course: SDN And Server Virtualization  http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/virtualization/collision-course-sdn-and-server-virtuali/240149860  “……”

Leisure & Entertainment

28.    The First Unofficial ‘Steam Box’ Will Launch This Holiday Season Starting At $1,000  http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122605-Xi3-Opens-Piston-Steambox-Pre-Orders-Starts-at-1-000  “Xi3 unveiled the "Piston" earlier in the year, describing it as "a computer game system that's optimized to support Steam and its Big Picture mode interface for high-definition televisions." At the time, no price point was mentioned. We now know how much the first "Steam Box" will cost, as the Piston is now available for pre-order from Xi3's website, with the cheapest model coming in at $1,000 USD. The Piston will come in three different configurations. The cheapest, standard model comes with a 128GB SSD internal hard drive, the middle model comes with a 256GB SSD internal hard drive, and the third, most expensive model comes with a 512GB SSD internal hard drive…”

29.    Oculus Rift: is virtual reality the 'Holy Grail' of gaming?  http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/9/4081912/oculus-rift-at-sxsw-is-virtual-reality-the-holy-grail-of-gaming  “……”

30.    Back Lord British’s Kickstarter, Get This $5,000 Game  http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/03/akalabeth/  “……”

Economy and Technology

31.     SXSW: MakerBot's Bre Pettis on the Next Industrial Revolution  http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/226044  “To kick off the 20th year of SXSW Interactive, Bre Pettis, the co-founder of MakerBot (one of the leading companies in desktop 3-D printing), was selected to give the opening remarks. To call Pettis’s success the past few years as “extraordinary” would be an understatement, second only to calling 3-D printing’s potential “revolutionary.” The word “revolution” is one that Pettis himself is comfortable with, describing 3-D printing (and specifically MakerBot) as the “next industrial revolution.”…That’s a long way from four short years ago, when MakerBot was a brand-new startup comprised of Pettis, Adam Mayer and Zach Smith, who simply wanted to make a 3-D printer because they “really wanted one”. When Pettis came to 2009’s SXSW with the very first MakerBot prototype, he went into random bars and printed out thimble-size shot glasses to the delight of patrons. Today, Pettis believes MakerBot can fundamentally disrupt global manufacturing…Is 3-D printing a niche technology, or is it on par with the cultural magnitude of the television or the personal computer? …”

32.    Google swinging axe, cutting its Motorola workforce by 10 percent  http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/google-swinging-axe-cutting-its-motorola-workforce-by-10-percent/  “……”

Design / DEMO

33.    Hello World: Where Design Meets Life  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/10/hello-world-alice-rawsthorn-review  “Design, as Alice Rawsthorn points out, can mean a great many things. You can have designs on someone, as in making them an object of intrigue. You can design a corporate strategy, a gene, software, a lifestyle, a skyscraper, a menu, a razor. A designer can be a flouncy stylist of clothes or interiors, or someone in a laboratory coat, or, if you are a creationist, God…So writing about design, if it is not to be impossibly broad, has to narrow the field somehow. Rawsthorn describes design as conceiving and implementing change in a particular way. The examples of "designer" that she mentions include such unorthodox examples as the 18th-century pirates who devised the skull-and-crossbones as a form of corporate identity, but are weighted towards more widely recognised examples such as the industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames, and Saul Bass, creator of memorable title sequences for Hitchcock and James Bond films…”

34.    Designer is Living With Less  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all  “……”

DHMN Technology

35.    What Steve Mann learned from 35 years of wearing computerized eyewear  http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/steve-mann-my-augmediated-life  “Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house. As I went to speak with the driver, he threw the car into reverse and sped off, striking me and running over my right foot as I fell to the ground. When his car hit me, I was wearing a computerized-vision system I had invented to give me a better view of the world. The impact and fall injured my leg and also broke my wearable computing system, which normally overwrites its memory buffers and doesn’t permanently record images. But as a result of the damage, it retained pictures of the car’s license plate and driver, who was later identified and arrested thanks to this record of the incident…I’ve built dozens of these systems, which improve my vision in multiple ways. Some versions can even take in other spectral bands. If the equipment includes a camera that is sensitive to long-wavelength infrared, for example, I can detect subtle heat signatures, allowing me to see which seats in a lecture hall had just been vacated, or which cars in a parking lot most recently had their engines switched off. Other versions enhance text, making it easy to read signs that would otherwise be too far away to discern or that are printed in languages I don’t know. Believe me, after you’ve used such eyewear for a while, you don’t want to give up all it offers…”

36.    When wearable computing meets the Pilates shirt  http://www.cnet.com/8301-14013_1-57572726-284/when-wearable-computing-meets-the-pilates-shirt/  “……”

37.    MakerBot unveils new 3-D scanner at SXSW  http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/08/tech/innovation/makerbot-pettis-sxsw/  “……”

38.    Man has 75% of skull replaced with 3-D printed implant  http://www.wired.com/design/2013/03/3-d-printed-skull-implants/  “……”  http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-skull-3dprinted-implant-75-20130308,0,7338719.story  “……”

39.    3D Printers Help Build Robohand for 5-Year-Old  http://mashable.com/2013/02/13/robohand/  “……”

40.    Self-Organizing Organizations  http://www.infoq.com/articles/self-organizing-organizations  “……”

Open Source

41.     Serious people are saying Ubuntu is better than Windows 8 on tablets  http://www.zdnet.com/mark-shuttleworth-serious-people-are-saying-ubuntu-is-better-than-windows-8-on-tablets-7000011959/  “…Ubuntu OS on the desktop is becoming an increasingly recognisable brand and has a long heritage in the open source community, but rather than confine itself to the one platform, Canonical set out on the path to use the same core kernel and deliver the same platform across smartphones, tablets, the desktop and TVs…We've got a lot of work to do but we've got some great partners kicking in and the team is really motivated. We have a chance to profoundly change the historical balance of Linux as a follower of PCs. This is better than Windows 8 as an experience, that's not a crazy thing to say…”

42.    The Rise of the Rolling Release  http://ostatic.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-rolling-release  “……”

Civilian Aerospace

43.    Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Testing Technology To Make Rockets Reusable  http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/09/elon-musk-spacex-reusable-rockets/  “Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting closer to having technology which could dramatically lower the cost of space travel. In a keynote speech at SXSW Interactive, Musk demonstrated tech that could be used to make rockets reusable. During the interview, Musk showed off a couple of videos demonstrating how the technology works. The first video was a simulation, which showed theoretically how the different rockets used to launch shuttles into space could return to earth and land. That is in contrast to previous rocket technology, which typically breaks off and is not reused…”

44.    SpaceX Grasshopper Makes Highest Hop Yet  http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/asd_03_12_2013_p03-01-557797.xml  “……”

*****