NEW NET Weekly List for 11 Jun 2013

Below is the final list of technology news and issues for the Tuesday, 11 June 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 Weekly Top Ten, (pre-NEW NET, based on potential or immediate impact and/or general tech interestingness)

1.        Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower interview (# 18)

2.       More than half of US adults now own smartphones (# 23)

3.       Four Reasons Google Bought Waze (# 28)

4.       Pages With Bad Mobile SEO Won’t Rank As Well In Future (# 31)

5.        Apple Gives Sneak Peek at  the Pro Desktop (# 35)

6.       WiSee Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home (# 37)

7.        Chinese spacecraft blasts off with 3 astronauts (# 39)

8.       Sony Wins The Next-Gen Console War…In Just 22 Seconds (# 46)

9.       Apple's 500M user accounts key driver of growth (# 47)

10.     Bill Gates, VCs Invest $35M In ResearchGate To 'Open Source' Science (# 57)

The ‘net

11.      Yahoo gives search a redesign  http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/yahoo-search-redesign  “Yahoo has been…updating its various properties and snatching up new ones. Now its giving its Bing-powered search page a facelift….The color scheme remains the same and there's still a sidebar, though, the various search tabs have all been pushed to the left rail. The look is flatter, boxier and more modern with quite a bit of empty space…a new navigation bar…sits glued to the top providing shortcuts to the homepage, your mailbox, Flickr and other Yahoo-owned properties. The nav bar will also be rolling out to these other services soon, providing a Google-esque way to quickly hop around. Now Yahoo just needs to figure out how to serve up actually useful results…”

12.     Dangers of using smartphones and Evernote for a more quantified self  http://www.zdnet.com/using-smartphones-and-evernote-for-a-more-quantified-self-7000016579/  “…this whole NSA story…got me thinking about what the NSA would get if they decided to peek in on my life. I'm a middle-aged woman, happily married, and my biggest obsessions are knitting, crochet, and sewing. If the NSA had vacuumed up all my phone conversations…they would have repeatedly triggered the keyword searches for "beauty supplies," "diet," "bargain," "cute hats," and "God of War"…somewhere in the United States…there are terabytes, exabytes, and manipedibytes of data…most of those drives are probably filled with "Go Mets" and "did you see how big her butt has gotten?" rather than the secret mutterings of terrorists…I feel like we should do our best to…fight back against constant monitoring…The video below is a discussion between…Rafe Needleman…at Evernote and Adam Lin, president of the consumer medical devices company iHealth…there are an almost never-ending supply of fitness bands coming out that send data to your smartphone. Lin…focuses on cardiac care with devices like arm and wrist blood pressure monitors, a wireless pulse oximeter that will help you track your oxygen flow, a wireless scale, and the requisite fitness bands….iHealth links up to Evernote and dumps this information into your Evernote, if you want it to…the NSA…can…index millions of health measurements we're now taking and tracking on our smartphones…I don't think any of us should care…whether the NSA has data about whether we snuck some fries at McDonalds…But it is kind of scary to think that our insurance companies might be able to…deny us coverage because they know from our phone location data that every few weeks, somebody…hits the McDonalds on the way home from Weight Watchers…”

13.     Draft Lets You Collaborate Then Publish Anywhere  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/in-writing-platform-push-draft-lets-you-collaborate-to-publish-anywhere/  “Draft, a streamlined online word processor with version control, is getting deeper into the new professional publishing ecosystem…if you’re running a group blog using a standard setup from WordPress or Blogger and you want a more pristine, versioned environment, Draft now lets you publish from it to them…it has also added features to publish to Tumblr, Twitter and most recently LinkedIn and MailChimp…Kontny has also made it much easier to pull in content for a draft. He’s added audio and video transcription, a two-way sync tool with file storage services like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive, and a Chrome extension that lets you pull text into a new or existing draft…”

14.     Google's Not-So-Evil Plan To Lower Your Cable Bill  http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/06/11/googles-not-so-evil-plan-to-lower-your-cable-bill/  “…Why would Google care how much consumers pay for cable?...Since it’s in the business of selling internet services and internet-enabled mobile devices, it has an interest in encouraging consumers to use as much data as possible…While Google could theoretically solve that problem by rolling out Fiber nationwide, it would be an enormous undertaking, and an unnecessary one…All it has to do is introduce it to a few selected markets and then watch how the cable operators in those markets respond. If they drop their prices to compete with the ultrafast, ultracheap Fiber, they’ll have to do the same in other markets or else face uncomfortable questions from regulators about why they charge more in cities where they face less competition…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

15.     Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools  http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/ATC-B308  “This [video] session provides an overview of several Sysinternals tools, including Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns, focusing on the features useful for malware analysis and removal. These utilities enable deep inspection and control of processes, file system and registry activity, and autostart execution points. You will see demos for their malware-hunting capabilities through several real-world cases that used the tools to identify and clean malware…”

16.     Chinese Hacking Group Linked to NetTraveler Espionage Campaign  http://www.securityweek.com/chinese-hacking-group-linked-nettraveler-espionage-campaign  “Kaspersky Lab researchers…uncovered…another cyber-espionage campaign targeting…“high profile” businesses and government agencies around the world…Led by a group researchers have codenamed Red Star, the campaign is focused on stealing information related to aerospace, nanotechnology, nuclear power cells, lasers, drilling, manufacturing in extreme conditions, and radio wave weapons…Vast amounts of sensitive data have already been compromised from over 350 organizations in over 40 countries…The attack campaign, codenamed Operation NetTraveler, relied on spear phishing to trick targeted individuals into opening a booby-trapped Word document. Once opened, the malicious code established communication with the command-and-control servers to download additional malware and transferred stolen information…the campaign was focused on cyber-espionage, not sabotage…the malware infected both the private and public sectors, such as embassies, research centers, military contractors, oil and gas companies…”

17.     Welcome to Echelon 2.0  http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/06/welcome-to-echelon-20.html  “The NSA isn't spying on you. They don't have to. They just outsource it to businesses…20 years ago…a…theory…called "ECHELON"…claimed the NSA was monitoring the content of everyone's phone calls and emails…Echelon (probably) existed, but it's wasn't technically feasible to be as extensive as claimed…the NSA…can get a court order for most of the information from businesses, with help from the FBI and the FISA court. The court order demanded everyone's call records from Verizon. It demanded not just records of calls made to foreign countries, but those wholly within the United States as well…only your personal effects are protected by the Fourth Amendment. Once you give a thing to somebody else, that thing is no longer private. For that reason, your telephone records aren't private. Neither are your credit card receipts, banking records, hotel visits, automobile registrations, Internet logs…The government doesn't need Fourth Amendment "probable cause" to grab this information. A simple administrative subpoena is sufficient…Not only can they easily get the records, they are passing more and more laws requiring "data retention", forcing businesses to keep the records in the first place. Even without specific laws requiring data retention, the government can pressure businesses into it…It's getting harder and harder to buy anything without a credit card and identification…Right now in the United States, T-Mobile's prepaid plan doesn't require you to show identification…the cashier…pointed to the security cameras surrounding the store: apparently T-Mobile regularly gives police the camera feeds…The gadgets we buy no longer belong to us -- we just borrow them from the government. It's against the law to "unlock" your phone. By law, cars now include tracking systems, little "black boxes" that will tell investigators everything you did prior to a crash, and what your emissions look like. That a person's devices would spy on them for the government seemed like crazy science-fiction in Orwell's book 1984, but such things are now taken for granted in 2013…”

18.     Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower interview  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why  “…Why did you decide to become a whistleblower?...the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things…That is not something I am willing to support or live under."…We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism. Boston was a criminal act. It was not about surveillance but good, old-fashioned police work…the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America…We hack everyone everywhere…we are in almost every country in the world…The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."…When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up…there is a grassroots movement to take to the streets on July 4 in defence of the Fourth Amendment called Restore The Fourth Amendment and it grew out of Reddit…Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital's Dulles airport four…US intel officials saying…leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared…Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action…It is an authoritarian mindset in general."…"I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk…”

19.     Ron Paul: NSA leakers are ‘the real heroes’  http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/11/ron-paul-nsa-leakers-are-the-real-heroes/  “Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul has become one of the…defenders of Edward Snowden…praising the NSA leaker’s actions as heroic…the two-time Republican presidential candidate said…Snowden, and others willing to reveal secret government programs were needed to curtail government growth…“Individuals who are willing to take a risk and realize the danger of telling the people the truth, they are the real heroes.” Paul warned that the government that could be in violation of the 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizures…Paul also lambasted his own party for defending Obama in the wake of scrutiny over NSA surveillance, calling it “political foolishness” on the part of Republicans. “The American people are sick of all this prying,” said Paul. “It doesn’t even make political sense, doesn’t make good moral sense, doesn’t’ make good constitutional sense…”

20.    NSA PRISM and StopWatching.US  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/stopwatching-us-launch/  “It’s still not quite clear what PRISM really is, but what has become clear is that the NSA is doing its best to tap into as much online communications as it can…Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, the ACLU and numerous other organizations with both technical and political backgrounds have launched StopWatching.Us…to call on “citizens and organizations from around the world to demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored.” Given last week’s revelations that the NSA is likely tapping into a wide array of Internet communications, it’s no surprise that a number of Internet-based organizations are now banding together to protest the agency’s surveillance programs…”

21.     Cloaking technique makes data transmission invisible  http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/06/06/technology-purdue-temporal-cloaking.html  “Electronic communications could take place invisibly and securely with ordinary equipment, using a new "cloaking" technique developed by researchers at Purdue University…"It's a potentially higher level of security because it doesn't even look like you are communicating,"…The technique is a form of "temporal" cloaking which hides the movement of data over time, rather than the movement of physical objects through space that is hidden in "spatial" cloaking…two phase modulators were set up to make signals interfere with each other in such a way as to create "holes" in the data. Two others were used to cover up the fact that the data was altered…"Eavesdroppers won't realize the signal is cloaked because it looks like no signal is being sent…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

22.    FreedomPop launching freemium phone service through Sprint  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57587715-94/freedompop-goes-freebie-with-new-mobile-service/  “FreedomPop, provider of "freemium" services including free broadband and 4G, has announced a mobile service that gives users free voice, text and data usage without a contract. FreedomPop's new service will give users a guaranteed 500MB of 4G data for free, unlimited texts, and 200 voice minutes per month. Users registered on the network will also be given free unlimited calls to each other. The service will launch later this summer on several phones running…Android…”

23.    More than half of US adults now own smartphones  http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/more-half-us-adults-now-own-smartphones-6C10193220  “More than half — 56 percent — of American adults now have smartphones, up from 35 percent two years ago…for the first time worldwide, there are more smartphones being shipped than feature phones. Nine out of 10 Americans now have a cellphone of some kind…”

24.    iOS 7: Siri ditches Google for Bing  http://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-away-from-google-with-bing-integration-in-ios-7/  “During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple’s Eddy Cue briefly mentioned Bing integration in iOS 7. While demoing new features in Siri, Cue mentioned that Bing is used to power web searches…Apple has been distancing itself from Google for quite some time…Siri is already a Google search replacement in the sense that it uses services like Wolphram Alpha and Yelp to answer certain kinds of questions. In iOS 6, Siri uses your default search engine in Safari to show web results (Google, Yahoo, and Bing are options). Apple’s mention of Bing today in relation to iOS 7’s Siri indicates that Microsoft will be the default search provider no matter the engine you have set as your default. “Starting this fall with iOS 7, Bing will power Siri’s new integrated web search…”

Apps

25.    Top Smartphone Apps Companies Forbid Their Employees To Use  http://www.businessinsider.com/15-smartphone-apps-that-companies-ban-2013-6  “As more employees use mobile devices for work, IT departments are getting nervous. They are required, in some cases by law, to track and control the the data stored on these devices…mobile device management…vendor Fiberlink recently looked at the 2 million+ devices with its software to see which apps companies blocked most…Top 10 Blacklisted Apps: iOS Devices…Dropbox…SugarSync …Box…Facebook…Google Drive…Pandora…SkyDrive…Angry Birds…HOCCER…Netflix…Top 10 Blacklisted Apps: Android Devices…Dropbox…Facebook…Netflix…Google+…Angry Birds…Google Play Movies & TV…Google Play Books…Sugarsync…Google Play Music…Google+ Hangouts…”

26.    Microsoft, Purdue and Lafayettetech to host hackathon for smartphone apps  http://www.jconline.com/article/20130606/NEWS06/306060026/Microsoft-Purdue-Lafayettetech-host-hackathon-smartphone-apps  “…A free 24-hour “hackathon” at Purdue University this weekend will allow anyone with interest to learn how to build and launch applications. Microsoft App Camp — sponsored by Microsoft, Lafayettech, Purdue College of Technology and others — is open to developers, writers and designers, as well as with those with no experience in app development. “It seems like everybody I talk to is like, ‘I have an idea for an app,’ ” said Mikel Berger, Lafayettech president. “The goal is, as a group, that by the end of Saturday night we’ll have 150 apps created and submitted to the app store. It’s a pretty ambitious goal…”

27.    Apple’s Flashlight Is Why We Can’t Fund Nice Dumb Things  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/apples-flashlight-is-why-we-cant-fund-nice-dumb-things/  “Flashlight apps are a testament to the power and simplicity of modern technology…there are more than 1,000 in the App Store alone, many with 5-star ratings, because flashlight apps, which turn the flash of your iPhone camera into a literal flashlight, are awesome. Flashlight apps make you feel like your phone is more Swiss Army knife than Twitter receptacle…Apple essentially just mass-exterminated every flashlight app in the App Store. It will be adding its own Flashlight to iOS 7 Control Center, the feature accessible with a swipe and a tap. Versus apps that take so many clicks to open you might as well wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Apple routinely turns to the developer ecosystem for “inspiration” for its own products, thus killing said inspiration…”

SkyNet

28.    Four Reasons Google Bought Waze  http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/06/11/four-reasons-for-google-to-buy-waze/  “Google…has acquired Israeli mapping service, Waze, without disclosing what had been reported as its $1.3 billion price tag. But it is not exactly clear why…I think the answer could be a combination of four factors…1. Waze’s user engagement…Waze has created a culture of user engagement. Waze generates many of its maps by using GPS to track “the movements of its nearly 50 million users,”…They created this culture where you can really help others.” That culture…gives the top 500 map editors direct access to Waze employees…Google may be buying Waze to spread this culture of user engagement to its other services…2. Keep Waze from Facebook, Apple…if Google owned Waze, then competitors would not have access to its technology and users…3. Waze adds features that Google Maps lacks…Waze has options to report accidents, police presence, speed cameras and blocked roads, all things that Google does not have…4. Use Waze as an alternative to Google Maps…Although reports claim that Google will enable Waze’s CEO and most of its people to stay in Israel and operate independently for three years, it is possible that Google will keep it running thereafter…”

29.    Google Earth brings improved imaging to ocean viewing  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57588630-93/google-earth-brings-improved-imaging-to-ocean-viewing/  “Instead of blurred photos of the ocean floor, users can now see upgraded images with crisp details and topography. Google has started to bring a bit more clarity to underwater viewing in its Earth and Maps platforms…Not only is the resolution of the photos in Google Earth and Google Maps going to be far superior to imaging in the past but also more details about the seascape will be provided, such as ocean charts and depth…”

30.    Free Google Drive tools you should be using  http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040322/free-google-drive-tools-youre-not-using-but-should-be-.html  “…Google Drive becomes even more useful when you take advantage of third-party add-ons and services. These five totally free and easy-to-use tools will help you to encrypt your data, play your music, collaborate on slides, back up automatically, share files, and more…BoxCryptor…lets you encrypt files and folders, not just containers and volumes…using the AES-256 encryption standard…DriveTunes…can play all those music files stored on Google Drive…Google Slides…makes collaborating on presentations as simple as your collaborators will let it be…IFTTT…”

31.     Pages With Bad Mobile SEO Won’t Rank As Well In Future  http://searchengineland.com/google-search-ranking-changes-to-auto-correct-your-mobile-seo-mistakes-162826  “Google announced…they are rolling out search ranking changes to help recognize common mistakes webmasters make with their mobile configurations and auto-correct them in the search results…They followed by sharing two common mobile configuration mistakes…The first issue is called a “faulty” redirect, when a page listed in search may redirect all smartphone users to the same single mobile page, rather than to a mobile-optimized version…The second common mistake is that smartphone users, when trying to access a web page listed in search, get an error and nothing listed…For more on mobile SEO read our Google mobile SEO recommendations story…”

32.    How to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Maximize Your SEO Campaign  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2273660/How-to-Use-Google-Webmaster-Tools-to-Maximize-Your-SEO-Campaign  “Google provides a number of tools for your SEO arsenal. The most obvious is Google Analytics, which offers an in-depth analytics suite to help even the most basic user understand and improve traffic to their website…Google Webmaster Tools…helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more…”

33.    Google Art Project Gets A Redesign  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/google-art-project-gets-a-redesign-with-improved-navigation-and-search-tools/  “The Google Art Project got a major redesign today that includes a much improved and faster navigation and new search features. The improved search tools now make it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. Given that the Google Art Project continues to bring on new partners — virtually every major museum in the world has now partnered with Google to make its artworks available there — these new search features are a welcome addition. Art Project currently features more than 40,000 pieces of art from about 250 museums in more than 40 countries. Most of these feature high-resolution images…”

34.    Shortcut Keys for Google Search Tools  http://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/11/shorcut-keys-for-google-search-tools/  “The search tools that Google makes available on search results pages can be quite useful to filter results by time or other factors. While that is great, for instance to limit the results to posts made in the past week or day, it is also not really comfortable to use as you need to click three times before you can make any modifications to those filters. A click on search tools displays the any time and all results options underneath the main menu bar. You need to click on the selection here, and then again on the filter that you want to make use of. The Firefox extension Shortcut Keys for Google Search introduces keyboard shortcuts for all time-based options that Google lists under Search Tools. Instead of having to click through, you simply use the shortcut to activate the filter right away…”

General Technology

35.    Apple Gives Sneak Peek at  the Pro Desktop  http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/06/10Apple-Gives-Sneak-Peek-Into-the-Future-of-the-Pro-Desktop.html  “…the next generation…Mac Pro introduces a completely new pro desktop architecture…the new 9.9-inch tall Mac Pro packs an amazing amount of power…into a dramatic new design that’s one-eighth the volume, and…will be assembled here in the USA.” The…unified thermal core that allows the desktop to efficiently share its entire thermal capacity across all the processors…Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 core configurations deliver double the floating point performance. With two AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, the all-new Mac Pro is up to 2.5 times faster than the current Mac Pro and delivers up to an amazing 7 teraflops of compute power. The new Mac Pro also features PCIe-based flash storage that is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives and includes the latest four-channel ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866 MHz to deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth…the new Mac Pro lets you…edit full-resolution 4K video…With six Thunderbolt 2 ports that can deliver up to 20Gbps of bandwidth to each external device, Mac Pro is perfect for connecting to external storage, multiple PCI expansion chassis, audio and video breakout boxes, and the latest external displays, including 4K desktop displays. Each of the six Thunderbolt 2 ports supports up to six daisy-chained devices…”

36.    Behold the 9-day fresh strawberry  http://phys.org/news/2013-06-day-fresh-strawberry-approach-berry.html  “Strawberry lovers rejoice: the days of unpacking your luscious berries from the refrigerator only to find them sprouting…mold may be numbered. A research team from the…USDA…demonstrated that low irradiance ultra-violet (UV) light directed at strawberries over long exposure periods at…typical home refrigerator conditions…delays spoilage. The team used a novel device incorporating light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit UV at wavelengths found in sunlight…The results…are significant because previous attempts using traditional UV light sources for storage of produce resulted in severe drying…the UV-treated berries had their shelf life extended twofold—nine days mold-free—over darkened berries…These findings are expected to have a major impact on the appliance business to extend the shelf life and preserve nutritional value of fresh produce…”

37.    WiSee Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home  http://gigaom.com/2013/06/05/wisee-a-gesture-interface-that-uses-wi-fi-as-the-controller/  “…researchers at the University of Washington…unveiled their research using Wi-Fi to build out a gesture-based interface for connected devices in the home. They call it WiSee. The technology would be embedded in a Wi-Fi device, like a router or access point and would figure out the motions someone was making based on how those motions affected the Wi-Fi network…Wi-Fi is sending out a steady array of signals that bounce and bump into things into your home. If you could see the airwaves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band you’d see that every move results in a ripple effect, like a type of radar system. Normally those ripples are too small to be detected, but the WiSee researchers have discovered algorithms that help amply the Doppler effect created by a gesture disturbing a Wi-Fi network. It then can translate that difference into one of nine corresponding gestures with 94 percent accuracy rate…”

38.    Tiny Robotic Compound Eyes Unveiled  http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/tiny-robotic-compound-eyes-unveiled-130520.htm  “…if you want a panoramic view or the ability to track moving objects, compound eyes like a fly’s are the way to go. Not only can they see in all directions, but there’s actually less distortion — and insects can cram all that into a tiny space. That ability to see in all directions and pick up on motion easily would be really useful for robots, driverless cars, and 3D imaging…a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) built an artificial version…the group…designed three layers. One is a microscopic array of lenses, the next is a light-sensitive array that mimics the circuitry of an insect brain, and a flexible printed circuit board that provides structural support and handles signal processing. They put it in a tiny curved, thin package, so that they would get a field of view comparable to that of a fly. It’s curved so that the light-sensors an fit around the electronics. “…The device gives a near-panoramic, undistorted view…it can pick up motion at 150 frames per second, and work in anything from bright sunlight to moonlight, adapting to a new level of illumination in in a millisecond…”

39.    Chinese spacecraft blasts off with 3 astronauts  http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/06/11/china-space-launch-astronauts/2410915/  “China's latest manned spacecraft successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab…The Shenzhou 10 capsule carrying three astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 5:38 p.m…from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert…The spacecraft was launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket and will transport the crew to the Tiangong 1, which functions as an experimental prototype for a much larger Chinese space station to be launched in 2020. The craft will spend 12 days docked with the Tiangong…”

40.    Apple Rolls Out OS X Mavericks  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/apple-rolls-out-os-x-maverick-with-tabbed-finder-tags-and-improved-multiple-monitor-support/  “And just like that, OS X is off big cats and onto California locations. The next version of OS X brings a host of new features including tabs in Finder and vastly improved support for more displays. Finder Tabs allows you to merge multiple windows into one window a la Safari. You can copy files among tabs and swap from tab to tab to see multiple folders and files…Mavericks also supports menus and docks on multiple displays…The new OS X also includes new CPU management tools, which, according to Apple reduces CPU usage by up to 72%. Apple also retooled the memory processes and now claims…this improves processes like wakeup time by up to 1.5x times. Apple also rolled out a new version of Safari with Mavericks. The new version of Apple’s web browser is, well, as expected, faster and features better CPU management…”

41.     Cisco, iRobot Team Up on Ava 500 Telepresence Robot  http://www.eweek.com/networking/cisco-irobot-team-up-on-ava-500-collaboration-robot/  “…Cisco Systems is bringing its TelePresence video conferencing technology to iRobot's Ava 500 collaboration robot. Cisco and iRobot have signed a joint marketing agreement and are working together to bring Ava 500 to market…Ava 500 is being designed to enable someone in one part of the world to participate in meeting with people in another site, and to be able to move around—such as during a tour of a facility—even if they're not on-site…”

42.    AMD Unleashes First-Ever Commercially Available 5 GHz Processor  http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/news/article.asp?docKey=600-201306110800MRKTWIREUSPR_____1025359-1  “AMD today unveiled its most powerful member of the legendary AMD FX family of CPUs, the world's first commercially available 5 GHz CPU processor, the AMD FX-9590…The new 5 GHz FX-9590 and 4.7 GHz FX-9370 feature the "Piledriver" architecture, are unlocked for easy overclocking and pave the way for enthusiasts to enjoy higher CPU speeds and related performance gains. Additionally, these processors feature AMD Turbo Core 3.0 technology to dynamically optimize performance across CPU cores and enable maximum computing for the most intensive workloads. AMD was the first to break the 1 GHz barrier in May of 2000…”

43.    Nicaragua plans to one-up Panama with a massive canal of its own  http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/correction-nicaragua-canal-story-19368329  “Nicaragua is plowing ahead with a plan to dig a Chinese-funded rival to the Panama Canal across the midriff of the country, fast-tracking a proposal through the ruling party-controlled congress despite a lack of details about the $40 billion project. A China-based consortium says it will finance the project and turn over control of the infrastructure to Nicaragua in exchange for a majority of the earnings, which it would share with the Nicaraguan government…”

Leisure & Entertainment

44.    AMD rolls out Elite desktop APUs with Splashtop game streaming  http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/amd-rolls-out-elite-desktop-apus-with-splashtop-streaming/  “AMD…new, full-power A6, A8 and A10 Elite processors are more evolutionary bumps than overhauls…Along with a bump in Turbo Boosted frequencies to between 4.1GHz and 4.4GHz (3.5GHz to 4.1GHz normally), the updates ship with Radeon HD 8000 video and can handle speedier DDR3-2133 memory (on the A10). Wireless is just as important as it is with the firm's newest mobile processors: the desktop Elites improve streaming games to other devices using Splashtop, with relatively little lag when modern AMD processors are on both ends…AMD…did claim big gains over Ivy Bridge in both general-purpose computing and gaming. A 4.1GHz A10-6800K is up to 3.3 times faster in OpenCL than a 3.2GHz Core i5-3470…”

45.    Apple Unveils iTunes Radio, A Streaming Music Service  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/itunes-radio/  “Apple…iTunes Radio…has been long-rumored, but now…we can see what the Pandora-like streaming radio offering actually looks like. iTunes Radio is…a streaming music service that takes your tastes into account in order to play tracks that are likely to be in line with your tastes…the new service…can access the entire iTunes catalog, which, at this point, is well over 26 million tracks. Sony, Universal and Warner are all on board. The service will be free for U.S. users, and will use both text and audio ads to support the free streaming. iTunes Match subscribers won’t receive ads, making the subscription service a bit more compelling. Track skipping is supported…it looks a lot like Pandora…All Access for Google Play…will cost users $9.99 per month after June 30 and provides complete access to 18 million songs available on Play. This service competes more with Spotify and Rdio than with Pandora…Pandora, which has around 20 million tracks, offers its basic product for free, but also has a premium tier called Pandora One for $3.99 per month that drops ads, provides access to a desktop app and ups the number of skips a user is allowed per day…”

46.    Sony Wins The Next-Gen Console War…In Just 22 Seconds  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/sony-wins-the-next-gen-console-war-or-at-least-my-heart-in-just-22-seconds/  “While Microsoft busies itself trying to explain away a series of really bad decisions, Sony swoops in with a perfectly executed haymaker straight to the chin…When the competition is getting standing ovations at their press conference by simply not doing what you’re doing, it… might be time to reconsider your strategy…” [see accompanying video – ed.]

Entrepreneurism and Technology

47.    Apple's 500M user accounts key driver of growth  http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/04/apples-500m-user-accounts-second-only-to-facebook-viewed-as-key-driver-of-future-growth  “Apple's current account base of 500 million users is growing and spending at a tremendous rate, suggesting to one analyst that new services such as mobile payments or streaming radio could be key to the company's future growth. Apple's half-billion registered users with active credit cards one of the largest and fastest growing bases among technology companies…Apple is only second to Facebook in total number of user accounts as of 2012…In 2012 alone, Apple saw its account base grow an estimated 55 percent…Apple generates an average of $329 per user, which puts it in first place among technology companies, ahead of Amazon's $305 per account, and well ahead of eBay's third-place $125…” [this article illustrates a key Google deficiency and a clear advantage for Apple and Amazon; Google needs to develop a product that people will pay for, such as a unified interaction/communication hub which includes VoIP that collaborates with a consumer’s cellular service – ed.]

48.    Qwaya Wants To Help SMEs Get Down With Facebook Ads  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/qwaya/  “It’s often said that if you’re not on Facebook you don’t exist, so dominant in our social lives has the uber-social network become…businesses — big and small — may feel the same way. Hoping to cash in on the rise of Facebook advertising is…Qwaya, which offers a cloud-based tool for SMEs to create, publish and measure the effectiveness of Facebook ad campaigns…Qwaya offers a cloud-based tool for running Facebook ad campaigns, which it charges for at a “low fixed monthly cost” that, it claims, undercuts competing and more expensive offerings that target larger companies than the SMEs…”

49.    Are You Ready For The TechCrunch Seattle Meetup And Pitch-Off  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/are-you-ready-for-the-seattle-meetup-and-pitch-off-on-july-18/  “You may associate TechCrunch with the sunny climes of Northern California, but we’re…bringing our TC Meetups + Pitch-Off to the great, tech-centric city of Seattle. You can expect beer, great conversation, and a battle…to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under sixty seconds…We are charging a nominal fee of $5 which gets you a few beers and a lot of networking opportunities. TC editors will be on hand to talk about your pitches and we’ll have a great program of on-stage events…We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-Off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt…”

Design / DEMO

50.    Design School That Sold Me on Detroit's Future  http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/the-design-school-that-sold-me-on-detroits-future/276600/  “Last month I received my first-ever academic degree, an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit…when I visited, I was blown away by this surprisingly little known but inspiring incubator of art and design - the rare collegiate creative enclave that engages with, reflects, and embodies the city it's in…The college began in 1906 as the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts "to encourage good and beautiful work as applied to useful service." That notion of "useful service" soon expanded to include fine arts and what was called the "industrial arts" - the craft that would help power Detroit's auto industry…GM donated the 760,000 square foot building to CCS in 2008, when it was renamed the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education. It currently houses undergraduate and graduate design programs, as well as a unique art and design charter school for students from sixth to 12th grade (many of whom are inner-city), run by CCS and the Henry Ford Learning Institute…”

51.     Demand for Beautiful Design Grows in Quant-Crazy Silicon Valley  http://adage.com/article/digital/demand-design-grows-quant-crazy-silicon-valley/241966/  “A new class is gaining power in the left-brain territory of Silicon Valley: designers. You could witness their rise at Google's I/O developer conference last month, where the company introduced aesthetically pleasing versions of products such as Google Maps…But it's not just Google. Many technology titans previously satisfied with making products useful increasingly feel pressed to make them beautiful, too. They are responding by giving design and user experience a more prominent organizational role. Startups, meanwhile, are getting hungrier for designers…”

52.    5 Ways To Make Any Piece Of Tech Sexy  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672672/5-ways-to-make-any-piece-of-tech-sexy  “…Businesses’ ceaseless pursuit of ever-increasing performance and productivity creates a demand for greater utility from these instruments. As the costs of core technologies go down, manufacturers thus have an opportunity to serve a much broader base of users. But first they’ll have to take cues and technologies from consumer markets in order to deliver the value and experiences required to capture that broader market…a host of sophisticated testing technologies has made its way out of the lab and into the field: X-ray fluorescence, spectroscopy, thermal imaging, high-resolution CCDs, ultrasound, and many others have been shrunk, cost-reduced, and power-budgeted to the point where they don’t sit in big boxes on the lab bench anymore…seven years ago, you could hardly buy a thermal camera for less than $10,000. Today, DeWalt makes an $800 model for home inspectors…instrument manufacturers salivate over the possibilities of larger markets, they need to first realize that their formula for success must change. Here are five key ways to make it happen…1. DEFINE YOURSELF AROUND CUSTOMERS’ BUSINESS PROBLEMS, NOT ANALYTICAL PERFORMANCE…2. MAKE IT SIMPLE BUT ALLOW FOR COMPLEXITY…3. DON’T FORGET EMOTION…4. CONNECT, CONNECT, CONNECT…5: EXPLORE NEW BUSINESS MODELS…”

DHMN Technology

53.    Pet Drone Follows You Around Like A Shadow  http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/pet-drone-follows-you-around-like-a-shadow-130529.htm  “Quadrotor drones are…helping to save the elephants, rescue drowning victims and even deliver beer to concertgoers. While these important duties naturally suggest a certain level of independence, the drones aren’t entirely autonomous because they still require human pilots to control their maneuvers. Sameer Parekh, who recently launched an autonomous flying robot company called Falkor Systems, wants to change that. With his Pet AR.Drone prototype, Parekh has proposed a quadrotor drone that uses artificially intelligent algorithms and depth motion-tracking cameras to follow a person from a safe distance and/or film the encounter. One method for doing so would involve the drone tracking a specific graphic on a user’s t-shirt…“Everyone will have a pet robot just following them around or used as a little pet butler, taking a picture, tweeting pictures of you and your friends on your behalf…”

54.    Combine a Raspberry Pi with Google Calendar for a Smart Alarm Clock  http://lifehacker.com/combine-a-raspberry-pi-with-google-calendar-for-a-smart-512265472  “If you work the type of job where you get up at different time each day, setting and resetting an alarm clock is incredibly annoying. Blogger Devon Bray…combined a Raspberry P with Google Calendar to make it easier to set up…The Raspberry Pi is connected to a pair of computer speakers, and it plays a song anytime the appointment "wake" is in his Google Calendar…”

Open Source Hardware

55.     Knitic, an Open Hardware Knitting Machine  http://blog.makezine.com/2013/06/05/knitic-an-open-hardware-knitting-machine/  “…Knitic is an open source knitting machine, which controls a Brother electronic knitting machine via Arduino. The old ‘brain’ or control panel has been removed and replaced by Arduino, which allows us direct and immediate control over the needles. With it, one can knit as long a pattern as desired, as well as modify the pattern on the fly. Why are we developing Knitic? Because we feel the knitting machine, as the first domestic fabrication tool, has been totally overlooked in the age of digital fabrication…”

56.    Arduino-Based Mobile Robot You Control With Smartphone Swipes  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/06/the-rk-1-is-an-arduino-based-mobile-robot-you-control-with-smartphone-swipes/  “…roboticist Evangelos Georgiou wants to offer an open-source platform for helping Arduino hobbyists take their projects mobile, thanks to a remote controlled robot called the RK-1 that combines a programmable Arduino microcontroller with apps for iPhone or Android, tank tracks, DC motors and Wi-Fi connectivity. It’s a project that could really help out with home hobbyists, or with education workshops and classes to get people young and old more interested in robotics. The apps for the RK-1 will be free to download from the App Store and Google Play, according to Georgiou, and they use swipe touch gestures to manage changes in direction and forward/backward movement. It’s simple, and intuitive, but does look like it could be a very cool way for people to add an extra dimension to their product…”

Open Source

57.     Bill Gates, VCs Invest $35M In ResearchGate To 'Open Source' Science  http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/06/04/bill-gates-vcs-invest-35m-in-researchgate-to-open-source-science/  “Startup ResearchGate, a social network for scientists, has raised $35 million in Series C financing led by Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital for its goal of making scientific research more transparent…ResearchGate is a social network for scientists who can post information about their work, such as publications and skills on their profiles on the site. Scientists use the site to find collaborators for research, who may be hard to otherwise find, particularly in certain specific areas…Madisch wants scientists to publish raw data from their research on ResearchGate, including “positive results” that match their hypotheses as well as “negative results” that don’t. Scientists could also get feedback in real-time to their research, instead of waiting months or years for research to be published in top journals. It’s the type of mindset that open source programmers use, but is still nascent in other fields of science. “We want to change how scientists think about research…”

58.    LiveCode Community is open-source HyperCard for the 21st century  http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040331/review-livecode-community-is-open-source-hypercard-for-the-21st-century.html  “Many years ago, there was HyperCard, included free with the Macintosh in the late 1980s…it was one of the first tools that made it trivial to create GUI applications. Apple couldn't figure out how to properly market or position it, so it eventually died of apathy. RunRev has been publishing Revolution, now named LiveCode, as a spiritual successor to Hypercard, for a while, and LiveCode now shares one more important trait with Hypercard: It's now free. LiveCode Community Edition is the free, open-source, implementation of LiveCode. It has virtually all the features of the commercial edition, with one major exception: All apps created with it must be open-source. This means that it cannot be used to create apps for Apple's App Store…”

Civilian Aerospace

59.    DIY Rovers Compete to Explore the Martian Landscape  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/mars-rover-challenge/  “…15 teams of university scientists and engineers recently drove robotic rovers around a barren Martian-looking land west of the little town of Hanksville in Southern Utah. They had descended upon the Mars Desert Research Station to compete in the 7th annual University Rover Challenge put on by the Mars Society…teams from the United States, Canada, Poland, and India competed on several courses meant to test their rover’s designs and technology in a quest for bragging rights and a winner-takes-all $5,000 cash prize. The challenges included navigating through gates over varied terrain, dropping science packages at designated sites, and excavating material that could be analyzed for signs of life…”

60.    Mars trip food program on Mauna Loa gets $1.2M NASA grant  http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/20130605_Mars_habitat_program_on_Mauna_Loa_gets_12M_NASA_grant.html  “A space research program that uses a simulated Martian base on the slopes of Mauna Loa has received a $1.2 million grant from NASA. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program studies factors that contribute to the performance of astronauts on long space missions such as a manned trip to Mars…HI-SEAS site on the Big Island is unique among space analog locations, because it is easily accessible year-round, allowing for longer-duration isolated and confined environment studies…The Mars-like environment at 8,000 feet elevation on Mauna Loa offers the potential for high-fidelity space analog tasks, such as geological field work by human explorers or robots…The grant builds upon an ongoing HI-SEAS study, led by UH-Manoa and Cornell University, that is analyzing new types of food and food preparation to keep astronauts well-fed on long space missions.  More than 700 applicants vied for six spots in the HI-SEAS mission, which began in April and is expected to run until August. The researchers are living and working like astronauts, including suiting up in space gear whenever they venture outside the simulated Martian base…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

61.     China surpassing U.S. with 54.9 petaflop supercomputer  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9239710/China_surpassing_U.S._with_54.9_petaflop_supercomputer  “China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S…China's latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it. Today, the world's fastest supercomputer is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory…running at nearly 18 petaflops…China's latest large system is the successor to its Tianhe-1A supercomputer…China's latest supercomputer, called Tianhe-2 or Milkyway-2, has 32,000 multicore Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge chips, and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips, a co-processor based on Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture. Each Phi processor is capable of more than teraflop of speed, or one trillion floating point operations per second…”

62.    Brazilian Researcher Awarded Grant to Study GPUs and FPGAs  http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-06-07/brazilian_researcher_awarded_grant_to_study_gpus_and_fpgas.html  “HPC researcher Eduardo Marques has received a grant…to investigate the use of field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processor units (GPUs) to boost throughput in custom HPC machines…chip designers today are reaching the physical limits in how small the circuits can be shrunk and how fast chips can run before the heat becomes overwhelming. In response, general purpose and HPC server makers have turned to co-processors to deliver the added oomph that today's large business and scientific workloads demand. By programming GPUs and FPGAs to handle parallel tasks, server makers can continue to deliver increases in computing power without sacrificing energy efficiency or programmability. Today, some of the world's most powerful supercomputers use GPUs, such as those from NVIDIA. Marques' project, titled "Custom heterogeneous hardware acceleration for high-performance computing applications," will investigate an HPC architecture that uses GPUs and FGPAs as co-processors or traditional processors to deliver efficiencies in energy consumption and programmability…”

63.    Dust Storms Put GPU CPU Performance to the Test  http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-06-06/dust_storms_put_gpu_cpu_performance_to_the_test.html  “…Researchers from the Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing and the University of Denver are trying to better grasp how they can harness both CPUs and GPUs together to speed a sample geovisualization process using dust storms as the subject. By visualizing these storms, the team was able to develop a 3D/4D framework for geovisualization that includes everything from preprocessing, reprojection, interpolation and rendering. While the CPU was an important component of their initial project, especially in terms of preprocessing the data that couldn’t be held in the GPU’s on-board memory, GPUs presented a higher performance and more efficient solution than CPUs…”

Trends & Emerging Tech

64.    10 Ways the Internet is Changing the World  http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/10-ways-the-internet-is-changing-the-world.html/?a=viewall  “…KPCB…publishes an annual Internet Trends Report. The 2013 edition…offers some speculation about where we’re headed…1) The Internet revolution is still in full swing…Internet use in the United States grew by just 3 percent in 2012…because the U.S. Internet market is…mature, with a 78 percent population penetration rate and 244 million total users…this pales in comparison to China’s 564 million users, with a penetration rate of just 42 percent — and India will also soon pass the U.S. with 137 million users, a 26 percent growth rate, and a penetration of just 11 percent in 2012…2) Mobile Internet use is just getting underway…In May of 2012, just 10 percent of total traffic came from mobile devices, while in May 2013 the share was 15 percent. By 2014, the share is expected to be over 20 percent…3) Mobile Internet will spread with smartphone subscriber growth…Smartphone subscriptions are growing at a global rate of 31 percent per year, while Internet use is growing at a rate of 8 percent per year…4) …and increasingly through tablets…tablets are taking the world by storm…5) No one has quite cracked the mobile advertising code yet…Mobile platforms and advertisers are still struggling to fully monetize traffic on small-screen devices such as smartphones…6) …but Facebook is trying hard…In many ways, Facebook…has been a pioneer in the new age of Internet and mobile advertising…7) China is the next big experiment…8) … and the most important market…as China grows it is quickly becoming a highly-competitive market superpower…9) Sharing is caring…Engagement in massive online communities has fueled the growth of companies…who have made a business out of allowing people to help each other…10) What’s next?...Most observers seemed fixed on the idea of wearable technology…”

65.    Top 10 Future Tech Trends From 5 Top Venture Capitalists  http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/05/23/live-the-top-10-future-tech-trends-from-5-top-venture-capitalists/  “The only thing people in Silicon Valley like to do more than talk about the future of tech is to invent it. Tonight they settled for the second-best thing, in the form of the popular Top 10 Tech Trends dinner…the trends are supposed to be ones that aren’t obvious yet but will be explosive within five years–tough criteria. Honestly, some of these trends have been explored before, including at previous tech trends events. But often they take a decade to develop…1) EyePhones Replace iPhones: Eyewear computers will record our lives…2) The “Right Now” Economy…3)…Deus Ex Machina…4) The Individual Revolution…5) The U.S. Is The Supreme Cyber Security Force…6) Cyber Warfare Becomes A Good Thing…7) Certifications, Not Diplomas…8) Erasing The digital divide Ironically Accelerates The Rich-Poor Gap…9) Personalized Medicine…10) Wearable Computing Is The Watch, Not The Glass…”

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