Krital

A San Francisco-based startup called Zephyr Health has raised $15 million in a venture capital funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Jafco Ventures. Zephyr analyzes data in order to help pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers better target their research efforts and the doctors with whom they should share their work.

“When we say big data at Zephyr, what we really mean is the variety of data,” founder and CEO William King said. The company’s platform collects and analyzes data from more than 2,500 public sources, as well as customers’ proprietary data, in order to provide the right information.

The underlying premise of Zephyr is to help its customers make the most of their R&D efforts, which are going up in cost while producing fewer successes overall. King said one pharmaceutical executive recently compared the industry is becoming a lot like forestry, which was thrived for many years until it didn’t. “All of a sudden, one day there are no trees,” the exec told King.

King doesn’t think Zephyr can help drug or device makers have more big wins, per se, but it can help them increase the payback on their research spending overall. The first step might be helping them discover new areas to target for research or clinical trials, while the next would be helping them make sure they present their findings or products to doctors and researchers who can best help spread the word. If there are tens of thousands of cardiologists in the United States, for example, there might be a handful who are particularly influential in certain areas.

The Zephyr Health pipeline.

The final piece of the Zephyr puzzle is simplicity, King said. The company uses advanced visualizations and prepackaged applications software to target businesspeople rather than statisticians or scientists. The visualization aspect is designed to be ”intuitive” and “applied,” he said — meaning anybody can pick it up and know how to use it, and it’s designed specifically to solve problems in the life sciences field.

Entrepreneurs and investors are racing to create the killer application for a health care industry in the midst of a serious overhaul. The timing couldn’t be better: More data and bigger, faster, cheaper ways of storing, processing and analyzing it means technologists can unleash their creative spirit like never before. Already this year, we’ve covered five startups — including, Zephyr and, earlier on Wednesday, Lumiata — that have raised nearly $29 million in venture capital combined.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Feng Yu.

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• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• What you missed in cloud in the third quarter of 2013
• Cloud computing and trickle-down analytics

Mikko Hypponen, a respected Finnish researcher who is a regular guest at computer security conferences, says he will not appear at RSA’s February conference because the firm took money from America’s National Security Agency to weaken its cryptographic standards.

“[Y]our company accepted a random number generator from the National Security Agency, and set it as the default option in one of the your products, in exchange of $10 million,” wrote Hypponen in an open letter published this week. “[The] random number generator was found to be flawed on purpose, in effect creating a back door.”

Hypponen’s decision represents a wave of anger at RSA which, as my colleague David Meyer noted, has yet to directly address why it took the $10 million from the NSA, a decision that some have characterized as a betrayal of its customers.

RSA produces a fob used at many companies that displays random numbers that are required to securely log-in to a network; the alleged “backdoor” would make it easier for outsiders to learn the number sequence and invade the network.

In his letter, Hypponen stated that it was ironic that the talk he was scheduled to give at the RSA conference was on government use of malware. He also wrote that he did not expect other speakers to follow his boycott, noting that most of them are Americans and that the NSA’s efforts to compromise security standards aren’t aimed at them.

Hypponen’s announcement was retweeted hundreds of times of Twitter, and received messages of support on sites for computer insiders like Slashdot.

My open letter to the Chairman EMC and to the Executive Chairman of RSA: http://t.co/Q8Wlk373K4 #RSAC

— Mikko Hypponen ‹␊␍› (@mikko) December 23, 2013

But, as Ars Technica notes, RSA’s recent stock price suggests investors do not seem to care about NSA news.

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• Who to watch in the growing European cloud market
• Cloud and data second-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets

Is this the backlash? A handful of companies are requiring cloud service providers to promise — in writing — that they won’t store any client data in the United States, according to Bloomberg.

The report says that a British grocery chain and a Canadian pharma company have responded to the ongoing US surveillance scandal by adding language to existing contracts that mandate suppliers to segment their data and keep it out of America.

The report of the revised contracts comes as the cloud computing industry continues to digest news that America’s National Security Agency is tapping underwater cables and infiltrating the servers of storage providers as part of a sweeping counter-terrorism program.

In August, shortly after news of the surveillance was leaked by Edward Snowden, a Forrester analyst reported that it could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry up to $180 billion as a result of foreign firms bolting American providers.

The $180 billion figure (which appears plucked from the air) was cited as a worst case scenario and so far there has been no systemic exodus from American cloud companies. But the fear and anger in Europe and elsewhere over America’s surveillance activities are very real; a recent PWC report said that 15 percent of German companies are looking for cloud providers that promise not to cooperate with U.S. or U.K. intelligence services.

So does the Bloomberg report portend the start of a trend? It’s too soon to say. The report, which also claimed a Canadian agency had asked for the “no data in USA” clause, was based on a single source (an Indiana security firm known as Rook Consulting) and did not name any of the companies involved.

And, while such reports are eye-catching, they also provide a public relations opportunity for cloud providers outside of the US.. to drum up business. In the meantime, it’s unclear if European cloud providers have the capacity to take over existing large-scale data storage contracts, and to what degree companies’ existing cloud contracts dissuade them from switching services.

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• How to resolve cloud migration challenges in physical and virtual applications

The smartbulb throne isn't exactly the most exciting one to occupy, but Philips Hue has its fair share of challengers, such as the freshly released Bluetooth-controlled Lumen. Similar to Hue, you can tweak not only the bulb's color, but also its intensity. In addition, several modes come baked into the light source, including one that programs the Lumen to flash whenever a call comes in, and another that syncs its effects with music. Unlike Philips' fancy bulbs, though, the device doesn't need a WiFi hub to work -- it connects directly to an iOS or Android device loaded with its companion app. What's more, its creators claim the product consumes only one-sixth of the energy a 40W bulb does despite emitting comparable light. If a Bluetooth-connected bulb intrigues you -- even though the idea itself isn't new -- you can now snatch the Lumen online or from various retailers for $70.

Filed under: Misc

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Via: Slashgear

Source: Lumen

We love when we find new ways to bring our toys together. The Automatic Link does just that: it connects your iPhone to your car's computer, using Bluetooth Low Energy as a bridge to the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) interface that's been standard in most cars since 1996. Coupled with a free app, you can log various stats from your road trips, including how aggressively you drove and how much gasoline your car consumed. Basically, it's sort of like a quantified-self tracker, but for your vehicle. So, does this $100 driver's assistant deliver? Let's see.%Gallery-slideshow121856%

Filed under: Peripherals, Transportation

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You'll have to plug in a typical Arduino-compatible board at some point in its life, whether it's to add code or just to supply power. Not Punch Through Design's upcoming Cortado, however. The tiny device centers on a custom Bluetooth 4.0 LE module that both enables wireless programming (including through mobile apps) and helps the board last for more than a year on a replaceable watch battery. In fact, the Cortado will already be powered up when you get it -- you can start coding before you've opened the shipping box. It should also be relatively flexible for its size with a built-in accelerometer and the ability to serve as an Apple iBeacon transmitter. Punch Through is crowdfunding the board with hopes of shipping its first units in May. If you're interested, you can pledge $18 to pre-order a Cortado; there's also a helpful promo video after the break.

Filed under: Peripherals

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Via: Make

Source: Punch Through Design

Why outcome-based segmentation should be the cornerstone of developer outreach strategies. VisionMobile’s Data and Operations Manager, Christina Voskoglou, explains why everyone running a developer program should focus on outcome-based segmentation and not technologies, demographics and platforms.

00 Shooting the duck

Two statisticians were hunting for ducks by a creek. Spotting one taking off behind a bush both hunters fired simultaneously: The first man’s shot fell 1 meter too low while his friend’s shot flew 1 meter too high. Thrilled, they dropped their rifles and started congratulating each other, hopping about, happily chanting: “We got it on average, we got it on average!”. The duck, even happier than the statisticians, had of course in the meanwhile flown away to safety.

This is a lesson on how working with averages is a sure-fire strategy to miss your targets. There is no average person. And there’s no average developer.

01 “Are you talkin’ to me?”

There are mobile platform companies like Microsoft and Apple. There are ad networks like AdMob and Inneractive. There are back-end tools companies like Parse and StackMob. There are cross platform tools like Appcelerator and PhoneGap. All of them are serving developers. All of them are competing for developer attention with marketing dollars. Most of them are talking to the Average Developer.

Consumer segmentation has been a popular strategy since airlines figured out how to sell an airplane seat in 100 different ways to 100 different people. Segmenting a population to better understand it has long since been proven to be doing a better job at getting those campaign response rates up than simply addressing the whole population with an ‘on-average’ interesting message. Now companies from Amazon to ZTE are figuring out how to grab developer attention through segmentation.

The bigger and more heterogeneous a population is, the more effective segment-based outreach campaigns are. And one could hardly wish for a faster-growing and more diverse population than mobile developers across geographies and platforms. Question is, how do you segment developers effectively to make sure you’re talking to the right people with the right message?

The classic approach practiced by platform vendors is to segment based on demographics, skills or technology considerations such as platforms – e.g. Android vs. iOS developers. Trouble is, technology used is a choice that may have been made by different developers for different reasons. For example, a developer may have chosen Android to take advantage of its wide customer base, while others because of its lower cost of development vs. iOS. Simply grouping together people who made the same choice doesn’t necessarily result in a homogeneous group that behaves in a coherent way – choices made by Android developers who care more about reach will differ to choices made by Android developers who want to learn at low cost. If we fail to understand the drivers behind these choices we won’t be able to understand how and why choices change over time, for example why developers would switch from native to HTML5 or switch their main platform from Android to Windows Phone. Nor will we be able to see how to convince developers to switch from an existing choice to a new one – e.g. from a tool they use today to a new one offered – or why and how developers decide to commit resources and take risks in the app economy.

Effective developer segmentation can only be based on what drives developers, what they’re trying to achieve in the app economy. In our Developer Segmentation report we adopted an outcome-based approach to segmentation, backed by hard data from a survey of 6,000+ app developers. The research resulted in eight distinct behavioural segments: The Hobbyists, the Explorers, the Hunters, the Guns for Hire, the Product Extenders, the Digital Content Managers, the Gold Seekers and the Enterprise IT. By focusing on the motivations that drive developers to adopt a new technology our model provides actionable insights on which developer groups to approach and how.

03 A success story

Let’s consider a common scenario of an outreach program pivoted around supporting developers to succeed in the app economy. So, how do developers succeed in the app economy – how do they perceive success? You can simply assume that most people care about revenues – for example Microsoft and Nokia’s AppCampus program is pivoted on rewarding developers with money for a limited app exclusivity.

However, our research proves that revenue-based success is only half the truth: We found that just above 50% of all developers give success a definition that involves direct revenues. This implies that if you addressed all developers out there with a revenues-oriented message, about half your marketing budget would be predictably wasted.

What if you segmented developers based on the platforms they use – Android vs. iOS vs. Windows Phone et-al? The next chart presents the popularity of four success metrics (out of the six explored in our research in total) within each platform – Android, BlackBerry 10, HTML5 mobile, Windows Phone and iOS. We have normalised the results over the developers’ desired outcomes in the app economy to remove bias and isolate the effect that platform choice alone has on success definitions.

Differences between platform-defined segments are obviously very small to be actionable. For example, there is no great difference in what platform segments think about reach as a success metric – around 60% of all segments alike say reach is important. Platform-defined segments obviously fail to define distinct clusters of developers that perceive success in different ways. If you’ve used platform-based segmentation to understand your developers, you’ve been wasting your money.

Segmenting developers based on app categories leads to similarly un-actionable results. For example take four category-based developer segments – those developing games, apps, games and apps and enterprise apps. How do developers differ based on their success metrics? Do game developers vs. app developers measure success in different ways?
Again, technology-based segmentation fails to understand differences among developers with respect to success perceptions: All four app-category segments give approximately the same weight to knowledge gained (47%), while exactly the same percentage within each segment (6%) doesn’t care about success at all. ‘Games only’ developers seem to differentiate themselves from the other three segments with respect to reach and slightly with respect to direct revenues, however the resulting differences are not intuitive: Why would game developers care less about reach and more about revenues than other segments?

04 What are you trying to achieve?

In our Developer Segmentation research we segment developers in terms of what developers are trying to achieve. This is based on the Jobs-To-Be-Done segmentation methodology popularised by Harvard professor Clay Christensen. The results are not just refreshingly clear. They are refreshingly actionable.

Consider the success metrics distribution for five of our eight outcome-based segments as shown in the graph below. First, notice how direct revenues are important to only 27% of Hobbyists as compared to 81% of Hunters. Hobbyists more than anyone else state that they don’t care about success (23%), while Explorers define it mostly in terms of knowledge gained (72%). Product Extenders, who aim in promoting a non-mobile product, care most about reach (70%).

It is evident that outcome-based segmentation results in distinct behavioural groups. Success metrics is obviously not the only instance where segment dissimilarity occurs. In our Developer Segmentation report we explore how outcome-based segments differ in their motivations (personal, commercial, community), in the choices they make (including platforms and tools), in the way they think (challenges, platform selection reasons), in markets they target (devices, audiences, app categories) and in the ways they make money (revenue models, monthly revenues made). We also profile them in detail (including their geographical distribution, their experience and role) and discuss what share of the app economy each segment holds.

05 Mind the sub

It may be that you are interested in understanding a subpopulation of developers – you may be addressing only developers of a particular region, or developers that use a particular platform. In such cases, you will get more accurate profiles if you segment only the subpopulation of particular interest – e.g. Asian or Android developers – rather than the whole developer population.

Consider for example Hunters in Russia vs. those in the US. As Hunters will always be hunters, both groups are mainly after revenues. However, Russian Hunters care more than their North American colleagues about the knowledge they gain, and also a slightly higher percentage states to be indifferent to success. These differences point to a less ‘mature’ market and therefore a less ‘mature’ set of hunters in Russia: Most probably a higher percentage of Hunters there than in the US are at their early stages, currently more focused on building know-how rather than reaching customers – something you wouldn’t have picked about Russian developers if you had just used the ‘global’ profile of Hunters.

If you care to understand developers, you need to understand what motivates them, what they consider success and what they’re trying to achieve. Our Developer Segmentation research has done just that.

What other stories have you seen where developers are poorly understood or mis-marketed?

- Christina (@ChristinaVoskog)

The post The Language of Talking to Developers: The Importance of Outcome-Based Segmentation appeared first on VisionMobile.

Few stand out items from the JVM Language Summit 2013:

• Data parallel programming and Java
• An API For Distributed Computing
• AMD’s Prototype HSAIL-enabled JDK8 for the OpenJDK Sumatra Project
• Scala War Stories
• R in Java

Hello everyone,

today I moved my videos to Vimeo, since my Youtube videos were no longer available after I “deleted” my Google Plus account.

I was somehow nagged all the time when I logged into Gmail and popups came up asking me to open a G+ account. The buttons were Yes, Yes maybe, and a confusing button which might say no. So I reactivated the G+ shit again and had to delete it again

Now I will only read Gmail without the web interface provided by google, and since I removed as much as possible at google my blog related videos are available at Vimeo now: https://vimeo.com/user898748

The videos are embedded in the blog already so there shouldn’t be an issue while watching them.

Cheers,

Michael.

Hello everyone,

this weekend I received a SODAQ beta board for some testing with the BLEBee and just grabbed some parts from my electronic boxes to create a “Plant Moisture Sensor”.

The part list for this little project is:

• 1 SODAQ Moja Board
• 1 BLEBee (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/blebee-v100-p-1632.html)
• 1 Groove Moisture Sensor (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/grove-moisture-sensor-p-955.html)
• 1 Groove Cable (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/grove-universal-4-pin-20cm-unbuckled-cable-5-pcs-pack-p-749.html)
• 1 Lipo Battery
• 1 Mini USB Cable

The parts are shown in the picture below:

I wrote a very little sketch to read the data from the grove moisture sensor and print it out over Serial. Connect the SODAQ board to the PC/MAC and program it using the settings:

• Board: Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (3.3V 8MHz) w/ ATmega328
• Serial: The port where the board is attached to

and program the following sketch to it:

/*
 * BLE SODAQ Moja Moisture Sensor Demo for Arduino 1.0.5
 * v1.0.0 2013-11-17
 * 
 * Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dr. Michael Kroll
 *
 * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any 
 * person obtaining a copy of this software and associated 
 * documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the 
 * Software without restriction, including without limitation 
 * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, 
 * sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to 
 * permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, 
 * subject to the following conditions:
 *
 * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall 
 * be included in all copies or substantial portions of the 
 * Software.
 *
 * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY 
 * KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
 * WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR 
 * PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS 
 * OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR 
 * OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT 
 * OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH 
 * THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
 *
 * http://www.mkroll.mobi
 * http://forum.mkroll.mobi
 */

int sensorPin = A0; // select the input pin sensor
int sensorValue = 0; // variable to store the sensor value

void setup() {
 // Set the BLEBee Baudrate here 
 Serial.begin(9600); 
 Serial.print("Setup... done.");
}

void loop() {
 // read the value from the sensor:
 sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin); 
 Serial.print("Grove - Moisture Sensor = "); 
 Serial.println(sensorValue);
 delay(2500);
}

After doing so, plug the parts together and turn the SODAQ on and illustrated in the picture below:

Now you can connect to the Moisture Sensor using an iPhone where BLExplr installed on to connect to it. Select the BLEBee:

Once connected navigate to the BLEBee service, select the RX characteristic and enable notifications and you will see the text that is sent from the moisture sensor:

Since the sensor is measuring the “Air” the data transferred is: “Grove – Moisture Sensor = 0″ once you put it into water, the value changed as shown in the picture below. I just put the sensor in a small plastic tray of water to show the difference in the reading.

The first picture shows the reading in air and the second in water:

Of course this is a very easy example on how to use the SODAQ Moja together with the BLEBee. I have chosen this example to show the simplicity of using both together (I don’t have any other Groove sensors around, to be honest ). Setting up the hardware, writing the sketch and even writing this blogpost including taking the photos took me around an hour. Take a look at the SODAQ Kickstarter pages in order to get more information about this nice board: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/386717175/sodaq-a-lego-like-plug-in-rapid-prototyping-board?ref=live

Have fun,

Michael.

Hello everyone,

a few weeks ago I found a 2.7 Inch e-Paper Display provided by Embedded Artists: http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/displays/lcd_27_epaper.php. It supports Arduino and is cheap EUR29 compared to other solutions in that size available in the web.

When I hook i up to an Arduino UNO R3 it looks like this, which is described in their document “Embedded Artists 2.7 inch E-paper Display & Arduino UNO”:

I don’t really like these kind of setups. Well they are good for prototyping, but to build a nice setup e.g. to run this together with me BLE-Shield it is not movable and more or less a little fragile. The idea I came across with is a small shield, of course.

There is not much on it, but using this little Shield the display can be attached easily and even with the smaller cable provided by embedded artists. The shape is that crippled, since it fits on top of the Yun as well, even though the Arduino Sketch does not yet work on the Yun or Leonardo.

Please let me know if you are interested in making a real product out of it and even attach something useful on the empty space. Maybe SPI flash or an SD-Card connector

Cheers,

Michael.

Amazon Web Services announced a new streaming data service called Kinesis on Thursday but one could argue its biggest impact is more business than technology. Google, Microsoft and any cloud provider that thinks it wants to compete with AWS needs to step up its game if it wants to stand a real chance at winning new developers.

New instance types, databases and security protocols are great, but they’re not necessarily huge points of differentiation between clouds. At least not for long. Hypothetically enabling entirely new types of applications because of services that let users capture, store and  transport streaming data to various data stores or processing engines (e.g., DynamoDB, Redshift, Elastic MapReduce and even Storm) is a pretty big point of differentiation.

Capture with Kinesis, send to EMR, Storm or wherever.

Forget streaming data — Microsoft just rolled out its batch Hadoop service; Google doesn’t technically have one for Compute Engine.

While announcing Kinesis onstage at AWS re:invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels quoted Netflix’s Adrian Cockroft (and I’ll paraphrase him) in noting that a company like Netflix is a log-generation application that happens to stream videos. The same could be said for just about any application dealing in mobile, video, media, social, sensors or whatever. If the companies running those applications want to do something with that data in real time, and they want to do it via a managed cloud service, Kinesis (to the best of my knowledge) is the only option around.

I wrote last week that Google has the technologies internally to build an incredibly compelling cloud platform should it choose to deliver them as services. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong fleshed out that idea in a blog post on Thursday. She wrote

“I expect Google is going to launch truly innovative capabilities that will turn into customer demands. It’s not that AWS is going to simply mount a competitive response — it will become a situation where customers ask for these capabilities, pushing AWS to respond.”

The live workload migration service that inspired her post does sound impressive and is something that AWS doesn’t offer. Microsoft, too, has promise in terms of having a technology portfolio capable of disruption if exposed as services.

Right now, though, it’s still AWS doing most of the innovating (I forget the exact number of major features Vogels said AWS has released so far this year, but it was north of 200), while we just talk about how disruptive the others could be. If they really do intend to attract new developers and keep them away from AWS, it seems like other cloud providers might want to pick up the pace.

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Simple.tv officially revealed more details on its new second-generation hardware on its new website Friday. The device, which is manufactured by SiliconDust and features two tuners, will go on sale for $250 in December – no surprises here for Gigaom readers, since we already reported most specs and pricing after a leak two weeks ago.

Perhaps more surprising is that Simple.tv will continue to sell its first-generation, single tuner hardware for $150. Service pricing also remains unchanged. A year of Simple.tv service costs $60, a lifetime subscription can be bought for $150. And there’s good news for new as well as existing Simple.tv users: The service’s iPad app will soon get an overhaul that will allow users to download show recordings for offline viewing — good for long plane rides and other situations without connectivity.

But Simple.tv isn’t the only one trying to reinvent the DVR for cord cutters. Canada-based Nuvyyo launched a Indiegogo campaign for a similar product dubbed Tablo Friday. Tablo is also a networked DVR that streams to mobile devices as well as Roku and Chromecast. Nuvyyo CEO Grant Hall told me during an interview this week that Tablo will be available with both a two-tuner and a four-tuner version, priced $200 and $250 respectively.

Hall said that Tablo was built from the ground up with tablet apps in mind, and that the device will enable both in-home and out-of-home streaming. “We really started with the tablet app,” he said. Nuvyyo will also charge Tablo users a service fee that has yet to be determined, but Hall said that he is aiming for half the price of a Netflix subscription, which would put it at $4 a month.

Nuvyyo wants to use Indiegogo to get feedback on the product, explained Hall, adding that some features aren’t set in stone. Right now, Tablo’s box comes with Wifi but no internal hard drive, instead prompting users to connect their own drive via USB. But Hall said that he’d also consider building a version with hard drive if consumers demand it. Tablo wants to beta test its device through December and then start making it commercially available in January.

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• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
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• Over the top in 2012: trends and technologies to watch

Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend.

Construction Simulator 2014 ($2.99 Universal) is a simulation game where you inherit your family’s construction company. Unfortunately you do not know much about the family business and need to get up to speed quickly in order to make enough money to expand.

You start out owning four basic vehicles: a deposit tipper for removing waste materials from construction sites, a small excavator for filling the tipper with waste material, a small flatbed truck for hauling and a forklift for loading. There are fourteen different vehicles in all and although that does not sound like a lot, you realize that the combination of different vehicles can accomplish quite a bit of work around town. Even though each vehicle operates a little differently, the on-screen controls are easy enough to get the hang of. Right from the start you learn that there are two basic modes to each type of equipment, driving and operating.

When driving, most of the traditional vehicles move forward and backward as well as right and left. These are your trucks, haulers and flatbeds. You can use the tilt controls if you like but I preferred to use the optional left and right sliders. Other vehicles like the forklift have the same type of control, but with the turning wheel is in the rear they maneuver quite differently and can rotate in place. Then there are the machines with two independently controlled tracks like the excavator. Learning how to drive each vehicle is an important skill to learn since you will also need to transport your equipment to each job site. If you do end up getting lost in town, each vehicle has a button to quickly return it directly to your business.

There are a series of tutorials to get you started. Each teach you the basics of operating the different types of machinery. The instructions are easy enough to understand. Fill a tipper with dirt from a site, haul a pallet of wood to a construction site, or even load a truck with the necessary materials for a job. Learning the controls of each machine in order to get various missions done around town takes more time to accomplish than one would think. While I am no expert at how each piece of heavy machinery works in real life, it does appear that the number of moving parts that you need to control accurately depict each type of equipment.

When traveling from job site to job site, there is a map with a sort of in-game GPS to help you learn your way around.  Outside of town there is a factory, gravel pit and sawmill. In town there is a builder’s merchant where you pick up the material necessary for various types of construction, a harbor by the sea and of course your business. Getting around town takes a little getting use to at first, as it would learning you way around any new town you visit. The camera can be positioned in first or third person perspective when driving, and can even be manually controlled to give you a 360 perspective when you are stopped in one place. The map that you can look at when you need to will indicate the various landmarks around town as well as your current position.

As you start to take on some of the easier missions you will earn money that you can set aside to purchase additional equipment. Each new mission will involve more and more machines in order to complete. The larger equipment will of course command the right job prices. You have a bank account and will keep earning money that you can in turn spend on additional equipment as you expand the business. You can bankroll your operations through in app purchases as well.

There promises to be a Mac/PC version of the game coming soon that will incorporate all of the same job mechanics. If you are the type of person that can’t help but enjoy watching heavy machinery in the real world, or loved playing with your Tonka trucks as a child, then this weekend you are in for a treat as you can own and operate your own assortment of construction vehicles in the virtual world.

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• What Google’s Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft

You’d be hard pressed to find a tech company who hasn’t jumped into the wearable tech space. Some make a big splash with game changers like Google Glass, or they come more quietly like Microsoft and Intel. But they are coming – even car manufacturer Nissan introduced a smartwatch. And why shouldn’t they? The potential is huge. ABI Research estimates the global market for wearables in health and fitness alone could reach 170 million devices by 2017.

But while the hardware players have been first on the scene, they are struggling. Building stuff at a price point people will buy is thought to be the easy part, and goal accomplished: fitness trackers like the Nike Fuelband and the FitBit (see disclosure) are flying off the shelves. But building stuff that works well has been tough – to note, I’m on my 4th Fuelband (this one, finally, seems to be lasting). And building stuff people will incorporate into their daily lives and use to improve their lives – that’s a whole other story.

Why the disconnect?

The majority of products to this point haven’t successfully married the hardware and the software in such a way that there is anything that actually makes life better, easier, smarter for the consumer. We have a lot of products that can add value, but there is a heavy onus on the user to continually plug in, check in, and get the most out of the experience. We’re feeding the big data machine, but we’re not solving any problems. That’s where the opportunity lies.

To move from “my thing” to mainstream, wearable tech device manufacturers need to get out of the hardware first mentality. Devices must have a user experience that hardly involves the user. Collected data has to feed a system that yields analysis, rewarding the user with information – dare I say, advice – that means they’ve done more than just counted their steps. The knowledge of the number of steps they’ve taken informs a decision on living an active life.

How do we get there?

Brands need to invest in the digital product just as much as the physical product from day one. Build something people will buy, and people will wear, but even more so something people will continue to use. Incorporating user motivation into the design of the product — which involves a heavy emphasis on the digital experience with smartphones — will create wearable technology that keeps customers coming back. You want to know how to retain and grow your user base? Build for the user. Digital partners and hardware suppliers should be at the table with product developers from day one.

There are some companies finding their way. FitBit actually leapt too far too fast when it ditched the user interface on its Flex device. It has since taken into account user feedback and evolved the Flex to include a watch and other visual controls with its newly announced Force – showing we can’t go too far too fast, and we must always take into account what the user wants. FitBit’s evolution of its fitness band showed that people want to interact with their devices right then and there, and not wait to sync.

Other companies, like MapMyFitness, know their users have multiple devices, and thus multiple data points to collect. So the company wisely opened up its APIs to bring together user data from multiple sources into its app, for the convenience of its user.

Beware the “mobile”

Remember how for years mobile meant the cell phone? And now mobile means so much more than that? Yep, same thing here. While the device is important, it’s just a jumping-off point. the form factor is what brings consumers in, but it’s just temporary. In wearables, it’s the knowledge – the ability to change for the better – that will make all the difference and keep users coming back for more.

As Stanford professor BJ Fogg believes, technology serves as a major platform for persuasion, but without an innate understanding of how human behavior works – including the motivation necessary for change – and utilizing that understanding in your product, it just won’t happen.

Today, we’re essentially wearing fancy pedometers. In the future, we’ll see an aggregation of body data from customized, perhaps even implanted, sensors which gather information much meatier than number of steps taken or calories burned. We’ll see devices, apps and data working together, and across platforms, to create entire systems.

We’ll see systems – hardware and software – built for groups, like co-workers, family members, friends, classmates. We might even see systems devised across species – examining questions like do people with dogs live happier lives, and what role does your pet play in your health picture.

It’s all coming. But to get there, we must beware of a fixation on the hardware and start ensuring software, and smart design with the user in mind, is at the table from day one.

Sam Gaddis is the CMO of Mutual Mobile.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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• Why design is key for future hardware innovation
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

In the last year I’ve gone from 12 connected devices in my home to about 50. As I’ve tried out different systems and ripped stuff on and off the walls I’ve spent about $3,000 worth of my own money and reviewed maybe $6,000 worth of equipment from hubs to sensors to connected toothbrushes (that last one wasn’t worth it). And in this last year my perspective has shifted with regard to the goals and questions we should be asking about connected devices.

The IEEE asked me to speak at a roundtable discussion held in Los Gatos (see picture above for the location!) on Thursday, so I trundled through the hills of California in my rental car clutching my MacBook and a hastily composed presentation, hoping that my ideas might offer some perspective for the group’s standards-setting agenda around the internet of things.

I thought it might be worth sharing my presentation below, with a bit of an explainer. Most of the stuff I talked about — the challenges of discoverability, creativity, programming, and “protocol drama” — I’ve covered here on the site and on the internet of things podcast. For example, when I talked about the challenge of accountability in what have essentially become federated services, I used the example of my malfunctioning Hue light and IFTTT recipe I discussed with Kevin Tofel on Tuesday’s podcast.

But in putting together the presentation I realized one key way my perspective has shifted in this last year. I had been thinking of the internet of things as an evolutionary process through which I’d eventually get a “smart home” that can could predict what I’m doing or need and then take care of it without involving me. The idea is that we move from being able to remotely turn on a light while sitting on the couch to the house recognizing that we’re hunkered down in front of the TV at 8:30pm and automatically dimming the lights. (The intermediate step is the computer asking our permission to dim the lights).

We will perhaps get there. I imagine my house combined with Google Now and can’t wait, but the real efforts and conversations this year aren’t about that; they are about the home as a platform. The key question so far is: Is the connected home going to be a vertically integrated Apple-like ecosystem or an open system where data flows freely between devices in the cloud?

My initial excitement about these technologies came from realizing the enormous potential we as users have to manipulate the physical components of our environment and tie that environment to the web-based services and algorithms available online. So I can place a water sensor by my daughter’s bathtub and link that to a radio or light plugged into a connected wall socket so when she starts splashing water outside the tub she gets immediate feedback that she needs to tone it down. That’s not a use case that is currently offered as part of the connected home packages.

But that level of creativity is what I’m looking for in connected homes, which is why the connected hubs such as SmartThings and Revolv are so interesting, or services like IFTTT have such appeal. However, even as they are rushing to the market, they are so far a bit daunting for the average consumer to use. That’s why ISPs and stores like Lowes or Staples are releasing products that aim to make connecting a home even easier, albeit with less freedom to customize today.

It’s also why hardware vendors like Nest or Smasung are trying to push products into the user’s home that aim to build up a network effect, where the more devices from that same vendor you buy, the better experience you have. But I don’t think consumers buy devices that way, and it also ignores the idea that the real value in the connected home are actually the services.

But when it comes to the smart home, this race to become a platform and control the customer as well as the flow of data generated and demanded by that customer is the defining drama of this particular moment. I expect this will shake out in the next year as more and more people purchase a connected product and start trying to do more than just turn on the lights from their couch, and more and more companies (including giants like Google or Microsoft) release their products for this arena.

Below are my slides. As a side note, I was also asked about the challenges of reporting on this area, but feel free to ignore those final items unless you’re just excited about how your journalism sausage is made. I’d love to continue this conversation.

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Next Wednesday, November 13, the European Investment Fund organises in Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens, an invite-only event that may be of interest for some of us to watch. The event, starting at 10.00am, will be streamed live via the following link.

Here is the full agenda:

10.00 Keynote Speeches by:

• Kostis Hatzidakis, Minister of Development & Competitiveness
• Michalis Chrisochoidis, Minister of Infrastructure, Transport & Networks

10.30 Overview of European Private Equity and ICT markets  – (a) Greece: Achievements, Vision and Objectives, (b) Sharing EIF experience in other countries

• Hubert Cottogni, Deputy Director & Head of Regional Business Development, EIF

11.00 Panel I : Greek ICT – A modern hub for entrepreneurship – (a) From ideas to commercialisation, (b) Applying international methods for the build-up of the Greek innovation ecosystem

Moderator: Julie Meyer, Chief Executive, MBE Ariadne Capital Ltd

Speakers:

• George Tziralis, Partner, JEREMIE Openfund II
• Loukas Pilitsis, Partner, PJ Catalyst Fund
• Lyuben Belov, Partner, LAUNCHub
• Antonis Fiorakis, Founder, Incrediblue
• Fanis Koutouvelis, CEO, INTALE

12.00 Panel II: Building global champions out of Greece – (a) ICT in Greece, current state and opportunities, (b) Greek ICT going global

Moderator: Julie Meyer, Chief Executive, MBE Ariadne Capital Ltd

Speakers:

• Thanasis Kalekos , Partner, Odyssey JEREMIE Partners
• Panagiotis Solomos, Partner, Elikonos JEREMIE Fund
• Maria Grapsa, Managing Director, Olive Media
• George Spanoudakis, CEO and co-founder, Pinnatta
• Marco Veremis, CEO and co-founder, UpStreamSystems

Hello everyone,

the BLEBee v1.0.0 is available for sale.

Please visit Seeedstudio’s Depot following this link http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/blebee-v100-p-1632.html to get one or more.

Thanks,

Michael.

When it comes to avenues of commerce, nothing beats the nation’s electric power grid.

That’s right. Those wires running down the street, or underground in your neighborhood, are responsible for more than $350 billion in sales each year. It’s secure, reliable and – judging by recent weather events – can be practically destroyed and rebuilt in short order.

But it’s operated mainly by proprietary hardware, telecommunications, and software platforms that make it more expensive to run than it should be.
So how do we make the grid simpler to operate, and less costly? Interoperability.

Just like your laptop can operate with devices from many manufacturers interchangeably, the electrical grid of the future needs to be able to exchange data with different devices from many manufacturers locally in the field.

Unfortunately, many utilities are “siloed” by proprietary technologies that backhaul data to a centralized hub such as a head end server. Without cross-industry collaboration and tactile evaluation of device interoperability in the field, support for the technology requirements to realize the potential benefits will never occur.

Duke Energy has initiated research projects to build and deploy low-cost controllers in the lab and in the field to better manage the electric grid. This requires building a field message bus to exchange data between assets.
This data exchange can only happen if these devices are connected either through wired or wireless technologies. Once connected, the data exchange is facilitated by non-proprietary protocols and open standards – always keeping data privacy and security at the forefront.

Obviously, non-proprietary protocols and open standards sound easy enough. But every company has its own “secret sauce” that must work only with all the other secret stuff they make. It’s one of the main challenges to the concept of the internet of things.

In this proof of concept, Duke Energy is using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT). The OASIS MQTT standardization process is making MQTT an open, simple and lightweight standard protocol for M2M telemetry data communication. Implementations of a field message bus and distributed intelligence applications for the electric grid have the potential to enable interoperability at a low cost and to achieve significant cost savings. These savings are attributed to improved operational performance, faster response times, and better management of distributed energy resources (DER) and utility-owned devices.

The key to unlocking these values is for utilities and vendors to implement a standards-based, interoperable field message bus that facilitates the translation and sharing of relevant local data between disparate assets. This will enable the development of distributed intelligence applications to enhance the performance of existing centrally managed systems.

In testing, Duke Energy has successfully connected meters, communication nodes, cellular modems, capacitor controls, battery management systems, solar inverters, transformers and a DMS system from multiple vendors. The data from these devices is now shared locally, via a field message bus, providing for more efficient decisions with lower latencies. Changes in equipment status are backhauled to higher-priority systems and models are then updated.

So, is interoperability a pipe dream? No. Duke Energy is out to prove that multiple vendors can work together over a field message bus with distributed applications – all while increasing security, reducing latencies, compressing data traffic and saving money. The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), an independent organization, oversees the path to interoperability–the ability to link smart grid hardware, software and systems from multiple suppliers throughout the modernized power grid.

SGIP helps utilities like Duke improve regulatory treatment for investment recovery, gives manufacturers enhanced commercial opportunities worldwide and keeps customers competitive, informed and well-connected. This “orchestration” enables energy modernization efforts globally.

Duke Energy is an active member of SGIP. Interoperable standards are key to the success of the electric grid, which ultimately paves the way for our economic well-being.

Jason Handley is Technology Development Manager at Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C.

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Hadoop is everywhere, especially this past week. Partnerships, products, clouds — it was nearly impossible to keep up with the news coming out of New York. It’s further evidence that Hadoop is cementing its role as the enterprise’s big data operating system. And, while I’ve been historically outspoken on Hadoop’s features and delivery platforms, what excites me most about the ecosystem is actually the release of Hadoop 2.2.0 (aka Hadoop 2).

This might be surprising, because Hadoop 2 is not a blow-your-socks-off release. It is not packed with revolutionary new features from a user perspective. Instead, its greatest innovation is a glorious refactoring of some internal plumbing. But that plumbing grants the community of Hadoop developers the pathways they need to address some of Hadoops greatest shortcomings in comparison to both the commercial and the internal Google tools that Hadoop was derived from.

Most notably, version 2.2.0 is the seed that may well revolutionize Hadoop’s offerings for greater scale, more processing models than MapReduce and truly multitenant operations.

Spinning a better Sweater via YARN

Hadoop 2 is all about YARN (a clean factorization of cluster resource management from the data processing models) going mainstream. While it may be a bit raw compared to commercial alternatives, YARN’s job is to manage the load across all the nodes in a Hadoop cluster, schedule application execution on the cluster, and move the processing close to the data. The main focus of YARN is on distributed resource management — something we’ve worked on intimately in scientific grid computing and in our own distributed database service at Cloudant.

YARN lays the foundation for people to build more things into Hadoop. It splits out distributed processing capabilities from the algorithms being applied to process data. MapReduce 2 is still the default, but new processing models are already available (see below), and developers of those algorithms won’t have to worry about things like job scheduling, fault tolerance and check-pointing strategies. Moreover, the need to “speak MapReduce” caused significant impedance mismatches as the community worked to layer additional functionality and interfaces on top of Hadoop. Those days are over.

Federation

The other major addition in Hadoop 2 is federation within the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). While the impact may not be immediately obvious, federation is a crucial step to allow HDFS to scale and to enable multitenant operations, both critical requirements in enterprise class data warehousing.

Federation in 2.2.0 works by allowing cluster nodes to participate in file storage for multiple namespaces (think directories, blocks, files, et cetera), and for namespaces to scale horizontally with additional “namenodes.” Not only does this allow Hadoop to scale beyond 4,000 nodes, but also it is the primitive to allow enterprises to share storage and processing nodes among a community of trusted users by “chopping up” the farm and sharing the resources at both at rest and at run time.

Impact

It’s not crazy to predict that federation and YARN are going to revolutionize Hadoop as we know it. In fact, it’s already happening. YARN has been available in technical preview for just over a year, but the community has already adapted to build SQL, stream processing, graph processing and more directly into Hadoop (via YARN ) instead of on top of Hadoop (via MapReduce). Perhaps one of the most significant early victories was Cloudera’s Impala, a Google Dremel clone for interactive queries over petabytes of data using SQL.

Combined with fledgling primitives for multi-tenant operations, Hadoop is rapidly solidifying as the platform for enterprise data warehousing. Perhaps most excitingly, the myriad new tools and interfaces enable the full analytics development cycle, from data integration (HDFS + “schema on read”) through ad hoc exploration (Hive, Impala, et cetera) to production workflows (incremental and/or batch).

Hadoop v2 sends a clear statement from the open source community that it recognizes the limitations of batch processing and MapReduce, and that the community is working to give developers new ways to do more. Much in the way that Google moved beyond MapReduce, the Hadoop ecosystem is following in its footsteps.

There are still plenty of rough edges, however. With the ability to build directly into Hadoop, developers lose the approachability of simplified processing interfaces like MapReduce. That means opportunity for high-level services (e.g., Continuuity’s Reactor) or analytic user interfaces (e.g., Tableau and Excel) to put the power of Hadoop into the hands of the masses via user interfaces. Federated HDFS is a big step, but there are still questions to answer about application containerization, security, heterogeneous runtimes, et cetera, for true multitenant operations.

Finally, with the rapid pace of cross-product integration with Hadoop, it will be very interesting to watch whether Hadoop, a truly open source community, can outpace its roots and innovate faster than its inspiration — Google.

Mike Miller is co-founder and chief scientist of NoSQL database startup Cloudant.

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although high level, this McKinsey video, “Putting big data and advanced analytics to work” is worth viewing.

Hello everyone,

the new BLExplr app v1.5.0 has a hidden easter egg

If you find it, please make a screenshot and send it over to me using the “E-Mail to the Author” function available in BLExplr and leave your full name as well. If the screenshot shows the easter egg, I will publish the finder on my blog and the finder will get a BLEBee for free

Happy hunting,

Michael.