Eideard

It’s no secret that the rise of smartphones, tablets and social networking has fostered an entirely new market for app developers, but a freshly released study has now attempted to quantify this impact, in terms of real jobs.

According to TechNet, a bipartisan network of tech execs, the so-called “App Economy” has created an estimated 466,000 jobs since 2007, when the iPhone was first unveiled.

The report specifies that this estimate includes all jobs at Facebook-focused companies like Zynga, as well as dev gigs at Amazon, AT&T and Electronic Arts, in addition to the obvious heavyweights, Apple and Google.

As far as geography goes, California leads the way as the most app-friendly state, though New York City tops the list of metropolitan areas. It’s not an entirely bi-coastal affair, though, with some two-thirds of all app-related jobs located outside of California and New York.

TechNet acknowledges that the App Economy “is only four years old and extremely fluid,” so it’s likely that these numbers will fluctuate in the years to come, though the organization says these numbers underscore a fundamental principle: “Innovation creates jobs, and in this case, lots of them.”

You can read the full report at technet.org.

And don’t get your shorts bunched figuring the numbers are going to diminish or decline. When it comes to the predominance of the mobile web – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

After threatening web companies for more than a decade, Michael Doyle and his patent-holding company Eolas Technologies…may be finished.

An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access to the interactive web were invalid. That means the three upcoming trials that were scheduled to rule on infringement and damages, for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have been canceled. The eight defendant companies who resisted the lawsuits won’t pay anything to Eolas or its partner, the University of California, for using the web.

Eolas maintained its patents entitled the company to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video. The chief issue in the case was whether the first computer program that allowed access to an “interactive web” was created by the little-known Chicago biologist Doyle, who runs Eolas out of Chicago. Or was it one of the web pioneers put on the stand by the defendant companies — such as Pei-Yuan Wei and his Viola browser, or Dave Raggett and his “embed” tag?

The Eolas patents were denounced for years before this week’s landmark trial, but managed to survive repeated re-exams at the United States Patent and Trade Office.

However, Thursday’s verdict is likely a setback Eolas can’t overcome. It may well be appealed, but that will be a long process, and in the meantime Eolas won’t be able to go after new targets…

Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman for JCPenney – the only primarily bricks-and-mortar retailer who continued fighting the patent, added: “JCPenney is very pleased about the jury’s decision and thank all of them for their service. We also want to thank the true inventors who traveled from all over the world to testify in this matter and tell the real story about who invented the technology…”

As for the many companies that settled with Eolas, they might be regretting that pragmatic decision in light of the verdict.

Those companies include: Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, JP Morgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises International, Rent-A-Center, Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle while this litigation was underway), and Texas Instruments.

I truly resent the context built over over time from the policy pushed by insurance companies and lawyers that says — settle with these schmucks even though their case sucks. It will cost less over time.

The cost to integrity is never worth it.

Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies…

Although such companies try to keep their users’ information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply…

But the vast amount of personal information that companies like Google collect to run their businesses has become simply too valuable for police and governments to ignore, delegates to the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi said.

“When the possibility exists for information to be obtained that wasn’t possible before, it’s entirely understandable that law enforcement is interested,” Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Reuters in an interview. “Then the issue would be, what’s the right policy? And that, of course, engenders a lot of debate,” said Cerf…

Demands from governments for Internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.

“Every decent-sized U.S. telecom and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters…

Soghoian estimates that U.S. Internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year…

“Now, one police officer from the comfort of their desk can track 20, 30, 50 people all through Web interfaces provided by mobile companies and cloud computing companies,” he said.

I realize some of my regular readers are already paranoid about what companies like Google and Facebook are doing with the information they gather about users. Anonymized or not.

Now, it’s becoming more and more clear that the cost to governments of tracking your every movement and thought – is a bargain at any price.

Click on map for larger view

How do you combine an obsession with Zombie movies and data analysis of Google Maps?

Simple, you produce the map, above. It was created by Oxford University’s Internet Institute – and the guys behind the fantastic dataviz site, Floating sheep: Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton, Matthew Zook and Monica Stephens.

Using a keyword search for “zombies”, it visualizes the absolute concentrations of references within the Google Maps database.

The map reveals two important spatial patterns. First, much of the world lacks any content mentioning “zombies” whatsoever. Second, and related, the highest concentrations of zombies in the Geoweb are located in the Anglophone world, especially in large cities…

Graham, whose favourite Zombie movie is the original Romero Dawn of the Dead (“the classic of the genre”) says of the map:

The results either provide a rough proxy for the amount of English-language content indexed over our planet, or offer an early warning into the geographies of the impending zombie apocalypse.

Actually zombie movies bore the hell out of me. I much prefer to be scared by extraterrestrial aliens.

Rick Santorum is the 8th dillweed from the right
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Former U.S. Sen. and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has a well-known Google problem.

For the uninitiated, if you Google Santorum’s name, the first result you’ll probably get is not his personal website but a fake definition of “santorum,” a sexual byproduct that’s a bit too graphic to talk about in detail here.

We’ll get into how that all happened in a second, but here’s what’s new: On Tuesday, the socially conservative politician lashed out at Google, saying the company could get rid of the sexual references to his name on the search results if it wanted to — and perhaps would do so if he were a Democrat…

Santorum contacted Google and asked the company about the issue, Politico said.

In an e-mail to CNN, a Google spokeswoman said, “Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly. Once the webmaster takes the page down from the Web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

She added: “We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines…”

The lewd “santorum” definition popped up after the former senator compared homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press…

That angered gay rights supporters, including gay podcast host and sex columnist Dan Savage, who launched a campaign for his listeners to redefine Santorum’s name. Savage created a website to promote the winning definition and enough bloggers linked to it that the spoof site eventually eclipsed Santorum’s campaign website in search rankings.

Danny Sullivan, who writes at the blog SearchEngineLand, notes that Google has a history of being hands-off when it comes to these controversies, regardless of the politics or sensitivities involved:

“Google is loathe to touch its results in any way, shape or form. That’s because if it does intervene in any way, there’s some interest group that will immediately claim a bias…

Just an example that reactionaries are as likely as anyone else to put in a claim for political correctness.

Yes, there are qualities of bigotry that I personally think should be shunted into the garbage can of discourse – but, I’m not in charge of anything in the public eye except this blog. Santorum is getting exactly what bigots like him deserve. A joking finger up his self-image.

If you were to come up with a list of places you’re unlikely to stumble across Google’s Street View trike snapping 360 degree panoramics, the banks of the Amazon would surely be pretty close to the top. Yet that’s precisely where the search behemoth’s imaging team is currently focusing its attention. Starting off with a 50 km stretch of the Rio Negro River, the team plans to document life in some our world’s most remote and richly biodiverse regions – visiting local communities, going inside village buildings and floating up and down the waterways to offer virtual visitors a unique insight into the wonders of the Amazon.

Often described as the lungs of the planet, the lush Amazon rainforest has been disappearing at a frighteningly rapid rate at the hands of mankind. Now thanks to Google, much of this immensely important region of the world is about to be saved – albeit digitally. Accepting an invite from the locals, Google’s Brazil and U.S. Street View teams have joined members of the Google Earth Outreach program to share their image collection expertise with non-profit conservation organization Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS).

While in the area, the now-familiar Street View will be seen trundling down the narrow dirt paths that join villages and will capture images of the river, surrounding forests and adjacent river communities. Building interiors will also host an image capture tripod to give us all a sense of what it’s like to live and work in such communities. The teams will also mount the vehicle on a boat and record all-around views of the great river as it floats gently downstream, which will then be stitched together to produce 360 degree panoramas.

On completion of the project, Google will leave behind some technical equipment to allow FAS members to continue their work, and give them the means to share their way of life with the rest of the world.

Rock on!

This surely ain’t the Ivy League

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.

The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announced.

The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a “statement of accomplishment.”

For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.

The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world’s best-known artificial intelligence experts. In 2005 Dr. Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. More recently he has led a secret Google project to develop autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100,000 miles on California public roads.

Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google’s director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence…

The two scientists said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organization to provide video tutorials to students around the world on a variety of subjects via YouTube.

“The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” said Dr. Thrun…

Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who helped develop an earlier generation of educational offerings that began in 2002, said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving.

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

Bravo! I set this article aside a few days ago to post at the blog. I got an email from one of our regulars – Ursarodinia – who just signed up for the course and they’re now up over 83,000.

UPDATE: Over 129,000 signed up, now – and more info at their website.

Search giant Google has teamed up with the Bletchley Park Trust to kick start a fundraising effort to rebuild the records center known as Block C. A Google-supported garden party was held within the grounds of the famous WW2 decoding center last week to start off the restoration fund, which aims to transform the now derelict building into a visitor and learning center.

It’s not the first time Google has joined forces with the Trust to preserve a piece of history. Last year, Google contributed $100,000 towards an effort to save a collection of scientific material and papers relating to the wartime codebreaking work of Enigma genius Alan Turing, which had been put up for auction. In spite of public donations to the tune of $37,432 also being raised, things looked decidedly hopeless until the National Heritage Memorial Fund stepped in and secured the winning bid. The papers are now safely housed in a special display at Bletchley Park.

Now Google is helping to transform a dilapidated building last used in 1984 into a new visitor and learning center for Bletchley Park and the UK’s National Museum of Computing, which is housed in H block on the site and is home to Colossus – the world’s first electronic programmable computer…

It’s estimated that the efforts of the Park’s 10,000 plus personnel shortened the war by at least two years and saved more than 20 million lives.

Bravo!

The eGenius entry from Germany

Whether you view Google as a benevolent Internet overlord or the new ‘Evil Empire’, there’s no arguing that the search giant at least devotes some of its squazillions towards environmentally beneficial causes. Earlier this year the company invested US$168 million in what will be the world’s largest solar power tower plant and now it has partnered with NASA to sponsor the Green Flight Challenge that offers a prize purse of $1.65 million for the design of quiet, practical and energy-efficient aircraft.

Announced at AirVenture 2009 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the Green Flight Challenge…will be held at the CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Foundation Flight Test Center…in Santa Rosa, California…with 13 teams from across the U.S. entering to compete for what is the largest ever prize for civilian aviation.

Competing aircraft must be able to maintain an average speed of at least 100 mph with a fuel efficiency of 200 passenger MPG on two 200 mile flight – or one gallon per passenger. The aircraft must also keep the noise down to under 78 dBA at full power on takeoff and clear a 50 foot obstacle in under 2,000 feet on takeoff.

While most of the prototype aircraft competing, such as the e-Genius, will be propelled by batteries and electric motors, some are bio-fuel or hybrid aircraft. The electric aircraft will have their batteries charged using clean geo-thermal based electricity from The Geysers geo-thermal fields in the Mayacama Mountains North of Santa Rosa.

The winner of the main competition will be awarded $1.3 million, with four next placed runners up receiving $80,000, $60,000, $40,000 and $20,000 respectively. A Bio-fuel prize of $150,000 will also be awarded but with only one bio-fuel aircraft in the running, it comes down to a question of whether it can achieve at least 80 mph and at least 160 passenger MPG. If not, the $150,000 will be split and added to the other prizes.

Living smack dab next door to a municipal airport and surrounded by pilots [I'm the only one in the family who's never piloted an aircraft] this is of immediate local interest. Like so many similar competitions from DARPA, etc., I’m pleased to see one of the pillars of contemporary geekdom playing a leading role on sponsoring the competition. And I look forward to the results.

In Google’s ongoing quest to become more social, the search giant has released a new feature called Google News badges that tracks what users read and allows them to share their badges with Google contacts to see what interests they have in common.

The badges bring a bit of social gaming into news reading…

“The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate,” said Natasha Mohanty, an engineer working on Google News, in a company blog post. “We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you…”

“Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends,” she said. “Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are.”

While the badges show off what topics a person is interested in, they don’t offer information on what specific articles a user reads — that’s always left private, Mohanty said.

In a very Google+ Sparks-like addition, users will also be able to tailor news feeds directly in Google News relating to their reading interests and the badges can help users figure out just what it is they read a lot about, she said…

The badges are in their first iteration as of now, and more social features could be coming soon, she said. If a user reads a few articles on the same topic every day, it should take about a week to earn their first badge, Google said.

“Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level,” Mohanty said.

Whatever that might mean?