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Friday, September 3 2010 Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 Friday, September 3 2010 Data Week: Becoming a data scientist Friday, September 3 2010 FCC.gov poised for an overdue overhaul Friday, September 3 2010 Coulson affair escalates media war Thursday, September 2 2010 Four short links: 2 Sep 2010 Thursday, September 2 2010 Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places Thursday, September 2 2010 TOC's Wednesday devices, gadgets and ereaders update Thursday, September 2 2010 Data Week: Becoming a data scientist Thursday, September 2 2010 Monitor: Putting your money where your mouse is Thursday, September 2 2010 |
Concern on India system of paid newsFriday, September 3. 2010
Regulator urged to clamp down on the media practice of providing advertising and news coverage to publicly listed companies, which could be used to influence share prices
Posted by FT.com - Media and Internet
Original Article URL: FT.com - Media and Internet Author: at 20:01Defined tags for this entry: media
Four short links: 3 Sep 2010Friday, September 3. 2010
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 20:00FCC.gov poised for an overdue overhaulFriday, September 3. 2010
According to FCC officials, that's going to change, and soon. There was already some insight offered into redesigning the FCC website back in January on the agency blog, informed at least in part by discussions with Sunlight Labs on redesigning the government. Yesterday, I interviewed FCC managing director ?Steven VanRoekel at FCC headquarters about what rebooting FCC.gov? will mean for the agency, businesses and the American people. "The new site will embrace open government principles around communication and participation," said VanRoekel. "Consider OpenInternet.gov, where over 30,000 ideas were generated, or Broadband.gov. Comments there go into the official record and are uploaded to the Library of Congress. You will see that in a much more pervasive way in the new FCC.gov." Our short video interview is below. An extended interview follows. Redesigning FCC websites for public commentIn January, the FCC launched Reboot.gov and asked for public input on improving citizen
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 08:00Defined tags for this entry: blog, google, internet, media, mobile device, search engines, telecom, television, video, world wide web
Data Week: Becoming a data scientistFriday, September 3. 2010Note: Data Week is a new series that collects notable stories and developments from the data world. Data visualization and artArtist and scientist Stephen von Worley announced the launch of a new blog, Data Pointed, showcasing his data visualization research. "One part magazine and two parts blog", the site tells the story of von Worley's own data visualizations, and surveys choice picks from others. The lead story covers the results of the XKCD color name survey, illustrating the entertaining differences in the way different genders refer to colors. Across the top, witness the nuanced verbal repertoire of feminine color differentiation. While us men are busy grunting, guzzling beer, and shoving our hands down our pants, women get specific by mixing fruits, animals, spices, flowers, and other such familiarities with finely-honed modifiers like neon and dusty. The result? A vast panoply of warm-fuzzy color names that seemingly trounces anything our Y-chromosomes have to offer. The visualization shows colors organized horizontally by hue, and vertically by gender preference. Immediately obvious is the contrast in nuance between female, at the top, and male. Click the graphic below to reach the full article and interactive visualization. Becoming a data scientistThe community Q&A site Quora is rich with information about data science, analytics and computing. An especially illuminating answer was given this week to the question How do I become a data scientist — how does someone with a computer science background get the math and statistics knowledge required for data science? Providing an extensive reply, Alex Kamil gives eight points from his perspective as an undergraduate student. Many of these reference statistics and math, and Kamil provides an excellent list of papers, websites and technologies to tinker with. Several of Kamil's suggested starting points struck me as common themes among those who define themselves as data scientists:
There are many more starting points referenced in the full answer. The field of data science is a place where book learning meets code and produces results. In the words of Kurt Lewin: "There's nothing so practical as a good theory."
CouchDB clusters and particlesCloudant, providers of hosted CouchDB infrastructure, have released their clustering technology, BigCouch, as open source . CouchDB is a document-oriented "NoSQL" database, noted for its replication features. Use it as part of your application and you can count on database replication "for free." As part of offering cloud-based CouchDB services, Cloudant has developed software to create clusters of CouchDB instances, distributed among many servers. In Cloudant's words, "Instead of one big honking CouchDB, the result is an elastic data store which is fully CouchDB API-compliant." The most direct comparison to existing technologies is with Amazon's Dynamo, according to the announcement:
You can download BigCouch from its Github Project Page, and collaborate on the #cloudant IRC channel on Freenode. Elsewhere this week, ReadWriteEnterprise reports that scientists working at CERN are using CouchDB to support their work on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) on the famous Large Hadron Collider. Chief among the attractions of CouchDB to the scientists is the ability to manage petabytes of data, the built-in replication features, and an easy compatibility with Oracle. Simon Metson of the Data Management and Workflow Management group at the CMS project reports that CouchDB has a shallow learning curve, but is harder for those with deep SQL backgrounds: "The more you know Oracle, the harder it is to pick up." Strata: The Business of Data
At O'Reilly, we believe that the future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their data successfully. There's a change in both the skills of data analysts and the technology they use that's sweeping through industry and science. Our aim with Strata is to be the defining event for that change: for practitioners, businesses and data vendors. The call for participation is open until Sept. 28. We're looking for proposals from practitioners, business leaders, analysts, designers, and developers covering the spectrum of data business and practice. Suggested topics include:
Send us newsEmail us news, tips and interesting tidbits at dataweek@oreilly.com.
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 08:00Defined tags for this entry: blog, elearning, media, mergers & acquisitions, privacy protection, social network, world wide web
Coulson affair escalates media warThursday, September 2. 2010
Rumours persist that the full extent of the telephone hacking by News of the World journalists remains unknown
Posted by FT.com - Media and Internet
Original Article URL: FT.com - Media and Internet Author: at 22:37Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and placesThursday, September 2. 2010Three significant trends in the local sector -- deals, check-ins, and place pages -- are on a bender and headed for an exciting convergence. When they meet we will see one of three things: a train wreck of incompatibility, an awkward confluence, or a very powerful alignment. I'm hoping for the latter, a sort of local syzygy, because a well-conceived orchestration of these trends will benefit the consumer and it has real potential to take us entirely out of the Yellow Pages era and into exciting, unexplored territory. This is a two-part post: here I look in more detail at check-ins, deals, and place products (including, briefly, the adventurously named Facebook Places) with an eye to what might follow. In a following post I will discuss how we may more actively ease their convergence with linked data and some basic adherence to extant standards, specifically how these efforts will affect the local consumer. Place pages and check-insThe check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience but it works, and this is what is most important about any product. However successful it is now, the check-in will remain an interim solution for identifying long-term customer/business affinities and physical point of presence. So what's next? I've written about check-ins previously: since then, Facebook has thrown its hat into the ring with their own place/check-in product, offering little feature distinction outside the problematic ability to check-in your friends on their behalf . Thanks to Facebook, the "Ferris Bueller Problem" -- in which a friend checks you into (say) the Von Steuben Day Parade when you are officially at home, ill -- may soon find its way into mainstream parlance. Expect a rise in just-for-larks in absentia check-ins to the local "gentlemen's club" and similar places of sophomoric amusement. More interestingly, casual requests for a similar product from LinkedIn, and the introduction of a third-party check-in offering for Twitter demonstrate that geo and social products are becoming more integrated in the mind of the consumer, and corporate product strategies: Greg Sterling remarked on this trend recently in yp.com's new eat, play, live marketing campaign which attempts to transform the brand from its staid origins into "a lifestyle guide that also happens to feature contractors and plumbers." He is spot-on: some lines of business will not fit within the check-in model, but they nonetheless must be accommodated in any successful business-to-consumer product. I have no desire to see another check-in clone arrive anytime soon. Jeff Holden, the founder of Whrrl, recently noted that the check-in will shortly be a commodity, and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley believes it already is. If you are an entrepreneur or developer thinking of building a new check-in service, please don't. Instead, consider some of the more exciting challenges that provide real consumer benefit:
Advances along these tracks should obviate the check-in as we know it today. This is a good thing -- check-ins are something to get over, an intermediate solution to tolerate until we have something that works better. Foursquare certainly knows this. The excitement -- for Foursquare's business and users -- lies wholly in their ability to deliver utility, novelty, and serendipity beyond the check-in. Get it here: the dealGroupon's $134 million series C funding in April and its estimated $1.34 billion valuation woke investors and entrepreneurs to the monetary value of group buying, and local deals more generally. There are now hundreds of variants and multiple aggregators, while "Groupon clone scripts" can be purchased (caveat emptor) from any number of freelance developer sites. Groupon and its ilk tend to get bundled under the "group buying" or less-apt "social couponing" monikers, but -- in regards to Groupon certainly -- there's little that's actively social about the products. The less charitable may argue that Groupon's success is due as much to the severity of discounts on offer. However, Groupon and others have raised awareness that advertising is no longer the only solution. Specifically, SMBs are slowly gaining access to tools to engage their customers on mutually favorable terms. Examples:
Part 1 wrapLocal is huge and only getting bigger. As a litmus, Borrell's recent ad forecast notes that "local online advertising should grow by almost 18% [...] to $16.1 billion, in 2011." Money follows money: we can expect further me-too products around deals, check-ins, and place products, but there is huge scope for investment into products that contribute genuine value to the consumer experience and enhance SMBs' ability to connect to their customers. Much of this will take place at the data and platform levels. In my next post I'll take a look at how linked data might help cross-platform integration, and join deals, check-ins and place pages to the benefit of the consumer.
Related:
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 20:00Defined tags for this entry: blog, business strategy, corporate finance, digital book, internet, investment, media, mobile device, privacy protection, social network, telecom, world wide web
Data Week: Becoming a data scientistThursday, September 2. 2010Note: Data Week is a new series that collects notable stories and developments from the data world. Data visualization and artArtist and scientist Stephen von Worley announced the launch of a new blog, Data Pointed, showcasing his data visualization research. "One part magazine and two parts blog", the site tells the story of von Worley's own data visualizations, and surveys choice picks from others. The lead story covers the results of the XKCD color name survey, illustrating the entertaining differences in the way different genders refer to colors. Across the top, witness the nuanced verbal repertoire of feminine color differentiation. While us men are busy grunting, guzzling beer, and shoving our hands down our pants, women get specific by mixing fruits, animals, spices, flowers, and other such familiarities with finely-honed modifiers like neon and dusty. The result? A vast panoply of warm-fuzzy color names that seemingly trounces anything our Y-chromosomes have to offer. The visualization shows colors organized horizontally by hue, and vertically by gender preference. Immediately obvious is the contrast in nuance between female, at the top, and male. Click the graphic below to reach the full article and interactive visualization. Becoming a data scientistThe community Q&A site Quora is rich with information about data science, analytics and computing. An especially illuminating answer was given this week to the question How do I become a data scientist — how does someone with a computer science background get the math and statistics knowledge required for data science? Providing an extensive reply, Alex Kamil gives eight points from his perspective as an undergraduate student. Many of these reference statistics and math, and Kamil provides an excellent list of papers, websites and technologies to tinker with. Several of Kamil's suggested starting points struck me as common themes among those who define themselves as data scientists:
There are many more starting points referenced in the full answer. The field of data science is a place where book learning meets code and produces results. In the words of Kurt Lewin: "There's nothing so practical as a good theory."
CouchDB clusters and particlesCloudant, providers of hosted CouchDB infrastructure, have released their clustering technology, BigCouch, as open source . CouchDB is a document-oriented "NoSQL" database, noted for its replication features. Use it as part of your application and you can count on database replication "for free." As part of offering cloud-based CouchDB services, Cloudant has developed software to create clusters of CouchDB instances, distributed among many servers. In Cloudant's words, "Instead of one big honking CouchDB, the result is an elastic data store which is fully CouchDB API-compliant." The most direct comparison to existing technologies is with Amazon's Dynamo, according to the announcement:
You can download BigCouch from its Github Project Page, and collaborate on the #cloudant IRC channel on Freenode. Elsewhere this week, ReadWriteEnterprise reports that scientists working at CERN are using CouchDB to support their work on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) on the famous Large Hadron Collider. Chief among the attractions of CloudDB to the scientists is the ability to manage petabytes of data, the built-in replication features, and an easy compatibility with Oracle. Simon Metson of the Data Management and Workflow Management group at the CMS project reports that CouchDB has a shallow learning curve, but is harder for those with deep SQL backgrounds: "The more you know Oracle, the harder it is to pick up." Strata: The Business of Data
At O'Reilly, we believe that the future belongs to those who understand how to collect and use their data successfully. There's a change in both the skills of data analysts and the technology they use that's sweeping through industry and science. Our aim with Strata is to be the defining event for that change: for practitioners, businesses and data vendors. The call for participation is open until Sept. 28. We're looking for proposals from practitioners, business leaders, analysts, designers, and developers covering the spectrum of data business and practice. Suggested topics include:
Send us newsEmail us news, tips and interesting tidbits at dataweek@oreilly.com.
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 20:00Defined tags for this entry: blog, elearning, media, mergers & acquisitions, privacy protection, social network, world wide web
Four short links: 2 Sep 2010Thursday, September 2. 2010
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 20:00TOC's Wednesday devices, gadgets and ereaders updateThursday, September 2. 2010With the IFA Consumer Electronics Unlimited techno-smorgasbord set to open this Friday, there's a lot of buzz going around about upcoming announcements and unveilings. Much of the pre-show buzz is centered around Android-based competition for the Apple iPad. The IFA traditionally offers an early indication of what gadgets will sell well through Christmas. With order volume stemming from last year's show reaching nearly $3.8 billion, it's no wonder so much attention is focused on the show . Toshiba's SmartPad
ViewSonic ViewPad 7
Archos Android Internet tablets
Sharper Image Literati
Resembling the Amazon Kindle, the Kobo-powered color ereader will launch at $160. Featuring a QWERTY keyboard below a 7-inch screen, the ereader lacks a web browser and application functionality, clearly putting it in the standalone ereader category. Expected to arrive in October, the Literati will be available from a number of retailers, including Best Buy, Bed, Bath & Beyond, JC Penney, Kohl's and Macy's. Acer LumiRead
The LumiRead will come with access to the Barnes & Nobles ebook store as well as Libri.de, Germany's leading Internet book retailer. While no prices have been announced, rumors suggest the LumiRead will start shipping in October for around $316. SigmaTek eReaders
From the start, these ereaders may be playing catch-up because the devices are not equipped with connectivity to any application or ebook store. Some may see this as an advantage because it means the ereaders will be open to grab EPUB, PDF and TXT files from anywhere. In stores in October, the 5-inch model will cost approximately $127 and the 7-inch approximately $153. Other announcements from the world of ereadersFollowing a similar deal with retailer Target, Staples will start selling Amazon's Kindle in its stores this autumn. While expanding the number of channels for selling Kindle devices is key, according to Chris Brogan, Amazon's willingness to port their Kindle application to other ereader platforms may become their most important channel. According to an SEC filing by electronics manufacturer LG, they could be mass-producing 9.7-inch color and 9-inch flexible e-paper displays by the end of the year. According to an analyst at Forrester, the availability of flexible screens could greatly improve the durability of ereaders. While flexible ereaders from Skiff and Plastic Logic have failed in the past due to heavy pricing competition, a mass-produced display from LG could level the pricing playing field and bring about new ereader innovations. Finally, as part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of ereaders, the university debuted their first class taught entirely using the Apple iPad. The iPad will replace the textbook previously used in assistant professor Corey Angst's project management course. Members of the study are evaluating the iPad with the broader goal of designing an epublishing ecosystem
Posted by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies
Original Article URL: O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies Author: at 20:00Defined tags for this entry: corporate finance, digital book, google, internet, investment, media, mobile device, search engines, social network, telecom, television, video, world wide web
Online television: Hogging the remoteThursday, September 2. 2010Old-media firms are firmly in control of internet video LIKE stallholders in a busy market, technology companies hawked their online-video services this week. In Berlin, Sony announced it would begin selling films over the internet to Europeans. In San Francisco, Apple unveiled a smaller, cheaper Apple TV, a set-top box designed to play videos. It also said some television shows would be available a la carte for 99 cents. YouTube, a video-streaming website owned by Google, is trying to cut deals with studios that would allow it to rent newly released films. Amazon too is reportedly trying to build a subscription service. But while technology companies are making all the noise, old-media firms are quietly steering the market. The main reason for all the activity is the abrupt appearance in shops of televisions that can plug into the internet, either through cables or wirelessly. NPD, a research firm, reckons that 12% of all the flat-screen televisions sold in America in the first seven months of this year were “connected”. That share is likely to soar. Technology firms spy an opportunity to bypass old-fashioned distributors and bring online video directly to the living room. ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46Defined tags for this entry: google, internet, media, search engines, television, video, world wide web
Mobile internet in emerging markets: The next billion geeksThursday, September 2. 2010How the mobile internet will transform the BRICI countries BUYING a mobile phone was the wisest $20 Ranvir Singh ever spent. Mr Singh, a farmer in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, used to make appointments in person, in advance, to deliver fresh buffalo milk to his 40-odd neighbours. Now his customers just call when they want some. Mr Singh’s income has risen by 25%, to 7,000 rupees ($149) a month. And he hears rumours of an even more bountiful technology. He has heard that “something on mobile phones” can tell him the current market price of his wheat. Mr Singh does not know that that “something” is the internet, because, like most Indians, he has never seen or used it. But the phone in his calloused hand hints at how hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets—perhaps even billions—will one day log on. Only 81m Indians (7% of the population) regularly use the internet. But brutal price wars mean that 507m own mobile phones. Calls cost as little as $0.006 per minute. Indian operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications sign up 20m new subscribers a month. ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46The internet: The web's new wallsThursday, September 2. 2010How the threats to the internet’s openness can be averted WHEN George W. Bush referred to “rumours on the, uh, internets” during the 2004 presidential campaign, he was derided for his cluelessness—and “internets” became a shorthand for a lack of understanding of the online world. But what looked like ignorance then looks like prescience now. As divergent forces tug at the internet, it is in danger of losing its universality and splintering into separate digital domains. The internet is as much a trade pact as an invention. A network of networks, it has grown at an astonishing rate over the past 15 years because the bigger it got, the more it made sense for other networks to connect to it. Its open standards made such interconnections cheap and easy, dissolving boundaries between existing academic, corporate and consumer networks (remember CompuServe and AOL?). Just as a free-trade agreement between countries increases the size of the market and boosts gains from trade, so the internet led to greater gains from the exchange of data and allowed innovation to flourish. But now the internet is so large and so widely used that countries, companies and network operators want to wall bits of it off, or make parts of it work in a different way, to promote their own political or commercial interests (see article). ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46Defined tags for this entry: internet
Technology and protest: A town crier in the global villageThursday, September 2. 2010A cross-border fraternity that strives to be seen, heard and heeded NEARLY four years ago, a web-based political movement set itself the modest task of “closing the gap between the world we have and world most people everywhere want”. Calling their group Avaaz, which means “voice” in several languages, the founders aimed to reproduce globally some of the success which their progenitors—like America’s Moveon.org, and Australia’s Getup!—had enjoyed in national political arenas. By its own lights, the movement, using 14 languages and engaged in a mind-boggling list of causes, has had some spectacular successes. Within the next few months, membership will top 6m. The number of individual actions taken (from bombarding a politician with a well-aimed message, or funding a poster campaign, to helping provide satellite phones to Burmese monks) is estimated at over 23m. Among the recent developments Avaaz claims to have influenced are a new anti-corruption law in Brazil; a move by Britain to create a marine-conservation zone in the Indian Ocean; and the spiking of a proposal to allow more hunting of whales. ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46Defined tags for this entry: telecom
E-communication and society: A cyber-house dividedThursday, September 2. 2010Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace, the social network, as “like ghetto or whatever”. At the time, Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went, just as they tired of shoes. But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than whimsy might be at work. “Ghetto” in American speech suggests poor, unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race. ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolutionThursday, September 2. 2010The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote. ...
Posted by The Economist - The internet
Original Article URL: The Economist - The internet Author: at 12:46Defined tags for this entry: internet, world wide web
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