Davemichels

Most people would say that a Roomba is a robot. But what about a Nest thermostat? Or an ATM or GPS?

People tend to think of robots in the image of C3PO or Rosie–humanoids that perform a range of tasks while peppering their humans’ lives with wit and humor. It’s easy to consider a Roomba as a robot because it moves and cleans autonomously. It’s not too hard to think of it as a pet.

But a Nest thermostat is not really any different. It manipulates the environment. And while a Roomba can’t learn, a Nest does; it tracks your patterns and incorporates them into when it heats or cools a room. It performs the same task as C3PO walking over to a thermostat and manually turning its dial.

The Roomba 800 series. Photo by Signe Brewster.

So what is a robot?

“Our cars and planes are robots and capable of a lot of autonomy,” Andra Keay, founder of Robot Launchpad and managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics, told me in an interview. “But we don’t see them that way. (They are) an environment; too large for us to look at as an item. Good robotics is invisible. It becomes an appliance. After vacuuming floor, mowing lawn, it’s done. It becomes invisible.”

Photo courtesy of Andra Keay

Keay moved to the United States in 2011 from Australia, where she studied robot behavior. She had heard that it was difficult for robotics startups to get funding and wondered how that could be true, given the transformative effect they are expected to have on the future.

That question led her to Silicon Valley, where she discovered money is indeed going to robots; they’re just not the robots you were looking for.

“It can happen in architecture classes, garages, aeronautic labs or car companies,” Keay said. “What we call a robot today is more sophisticated than what we called a robot in the ’80s. It has always been an identity issue.”

Photo courtesy of Dmitry Grishin

When a robot falls into a specific task, it has the tendency to fall into the background and no longer be called a robot, said venture capitalist Dmitry Grishin. Dishwashers and ATMs have simply become machines, as have smart thermostats and sprinklers.

“People always think about a humanoid robot, but I think it’s the wrong approach,” Grishin said. “People usually call something robot, but they don’t know what it’s doing. Once the robot starts to solve some particular task, they stop calling it a robot. They call it vacuum cleaner, they call it machine or car.”

The future of the robot

Grishin believes that niche robots will slowly converge into one product, just as calculators, compasses and communication have all been absorbed into our mobile devices.

Unbounded Robotics’ UBR-1 robot. Photo courtesy of Unbounded Robotics.

The technology isn’t quite there yet to provide that all-in-one robot, though companies like Unbounded Robotics, Keecker and Knightscope are taking cracks at what might be the first generation.

But it’s also a business move. Robots need a clear use to justify their cost, Grishin said. It’s better for them to do one task really well than to put out a generalist that does many things poorly.

“You need robots that solve the task and answer the question, ‘What is it doing?’” Grishin said.

So when will we actually call the robots we own “robots?” Keay said the key is a relationship.

“We will only call it a robot if we are engaging in a social relationship with it,” Keay said. “There is space for something to become the face of the invisible robotic functions surrounding us — like a robot butler.”

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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A political action committee created by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig to back candidates opposed to cronyism in campaign finance, reached its $5 million crowdfunding goal on the last day of its campaign. The successful fundraising means a group of wealthy donors, including Silicon Valley biggies,, who have yet to be announced, will kick in a matching contribution of another $5 million, bringing the PAC’s total war chest including an initial round of fundraising to $12 million.

The Mayday PAC, already backed by tech heavyweights such as venture capitalist Fred Wilson and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, aims to shine a light on the control that wealthy individuals and big-money interest groups have on political campaigns. More than 45,000 people contributed money to the PAC.

The next step is for the PAC to use the money to help elect Congresspeople who will carry the same message forward in their own campaigns, and hopefully Congress next. Yes, Mayday sought out contributions from wealthy folks to fight against the impact that wealthy folks have on campaigns for public office. “Yes. Embrace the irony,” read a message on Mayday PAC site.

“We’ve got lots of ideas about how to make this work,” Lessig wrote in a letter posted to Mayday’s site on Friday. “We’ll be testing them and improving them and building lots that’s new. But you’ve raised the money. It’s time to get down to work. So stay tuned.”

Other Mayday supporters include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Chris Anderson of TED.

Re/code

Sure, T-Mobile is the smallest of the four major U.S. wireless carriers, and yes, it was the last to roll out both a high-speed 4G LTE data network and the Apple iPhone. And, just this week, it got whacked by the federal government for allegedly allowing, and profiting from, fraudulent charges on its customers’ bills. (The company says the charges are “unfounded and without merit.”)

But the underdog certainly has spunk. It has ditched subsidies and offered free data for streaming music, among other things. It calls itself the “un-carrier.”

T-Mobile’s latest gambit: A free week-long “test drive” of an iPhone 5s running on its LTE network, which it claims is the fastest in the U.S. The idea is to convince people that the network is speedy and has strong coverage. The company is calling the program a “7 night stand,” and is running full-page newspaper ads that say: “Like 7 minutes in heaven. But for 7 sweet days.”

The carrier loans you the iPhone, which comes in special, T-Mobile speed-test packaging, instead of the usual box. It must be returned in good condition after a week. You order it online, and return it to a T-Mobile store. If it’s damaged, you will pay $100. If you don’t return it, you pay $700 plus taxes. Details are here.

I decided to take T-Mobile up on the offer, and toted the T-Mobile loaner along with my personal iPhone 5s, which runs on Verizon’s LTE network, the first to be widely deployed in the U.S., and quite widespread. This was a test-drive, not a scientific test. I didn’t compare other phone models or other carriers. And I only tried the T-Mobile phone in two cities that were already on my schedule: My home base of Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

I performed lots of functions on both iPhones, ranging from making voice calls to steaming video and music, surfing the Web, and texting and emailing. The T-Mobile variant did as well as the Verizon one on all these things.

But the acid test, for me, was to run the widely used speed-test app, Ookla’s Speedtest, on both phones in each location. I did 10 tests on each phone in the same place, at the same time. I focused on downstream speeds. Then I averaged them.

For the East Coast match, I was in my suburban D.C. home, whose address is rated by T-Mobile as having “very strong” LTE coverage, and which is also covered by Verizon’s LTE network.

For the West Coast face-off, I was at a major hotel right off San Francisco’s Market Street, a short walk from the city’s major financial and retail districts. T-Mobile says coverage there is “Excellent.” Verizon says the hotel is in an area fully covered by its LTE network.

The result: T-Mobile beat Verizon overall, in each location. T-Mobile averaged just over 10 megabits per second downstream, versus 6.8 Mbps for Verizon. In D.C., T-Mobile averaged 11.4 Mbps down, much faster than Verizon’s 7.6 Mbps. In San Francisco, T-Mobile averaged 8.7 Mbps down, versus just about 6 Mbps for Verizon.

These results are nothing to write home about, since LTE data speeds can often top 20 Mbps, and frequently measure in the teens.

Still, this was a reversal from another, more comprehensive, test I ran last year, in which Verizon topped T-Mobile (AT&T won that one, and Sprint was dead last.)

There are some caveats. Speeds on any network can vary by time of day, and even by slight changes in location. So your results may vary, even in the two cities where I tested. Also, Verizon’s network carries much more data traffic than T-Mobile’s, which can result in lower speeds

T-Mobile’s performance was much more uneven than Verizon’s. My T-Mobile results included multiple results under 1 Mbps, and multiple ones over 20 Mbps. The Verizon results clustered much more closely to the average, and were never slower than 2.5 Mbps.

Finally, Verizon beat T-Mobile on upload speeds, averaging about 5.1 Mbps versus 4.2 Mbps for T-Mobile.

Still, at least in my case, T-Mobile’s test-drive gamble worked for the carrier. I’m not switching, since I am grandfathered into a very favorable Verizon plan; I give great weight to the consistency of Verizon speeds, and have a Verizon family plan. But you might, if you’re not as satisfied with your current carrier.

There are 2, but actually… just one.

There’s a large number of voice codecs out there. Many of them used quite a bit. At the end of the day, WebRTC leaned towards using G.711 and Opus. Why is that?

G.711

Consider G.711 the fallback to crappy audio.

G.711 is naive and stupid. It does nothing well, eats up bandwidth and sensitive to network conditions. The only thing it has going for it is that it is supported everywhere.

Those using it today do so to connect to existing systems – mainly because transcoding from Opus to whatever they have on the other side requires more effort.

Opus

Opus is considered by some the best codec in existence today. It is brand new – it is newer than WebRTC itself. And it is heading towards non-WebRTC VoIP products as well.

What makes Opus interesting is its unique design.

From narrowband to fullband

The human ear hears only parts of the sounds around us. The hearing spectrum of humans is usually split into 4 broad categories:

• Narrowband – you can also refer to it as what you hear on a normal phone call today (i.e. nothing)
• Wideband – something that captures speech nicely, but doesn’t work that well for music. This is what is known as HD voice today when rolled out in some of the mobile phone carriers
• Super-wideband – that would be something that covers music as well as speech (and would definitely be good enough for my ears)
• Fullband – what audiophiles will be looking for

The higher the bands, the more bits you need to express them when you capture and send them – and the more demand there will be on your hardware components and CPU processing.

Different codecs are designed to work for different bands. Here’s a general rule of thumb for some of these codecs:

Opus is the only codec that fits everything from narrowband to fullband. Which brings us to the next characteristic of Opus.

2 for the price of one

Opus is actually 2 codecs, baked into 1:

1. SILK, the codec introduced by Skype. Its focus is low bitrate speech
2. CELT, a new codec, which focuses on music and high fidelity

My first thought when I learned that was that based on the specific call, Opus will choose one of these codecs, but apparently it is a lot smarter than I am – it uses both at the same time:

At any given moment, Opus can encode a single audio sample by breaking that sample up to two parts, encoding narrowband and wideband frequencies using SILK and the super-wideband and fullband using CELT.

This hybrid mode allows a lot of flexibility in Opus and also ensures in a way that there can be optimizations in implementations based on the use case and processor capabilities.

FEC and flow control

Opus has built in FEC and flow control mechanisms.

FEC stands for Forward Error Correction. When things go bad on a network, packets get lost. Opus has the ability to send additional packets serving as a kind of insurance – if packets get lost, then these packets can be used to regenerate the lost packets.

FEC adds robustness at the cost of bandwidth and improves media quality.

What is interesting here, is that FEC can done only the SILK codec only, making sure you hear voice well, but losing the higher bands of music. This saves up bandwidth and processing.

Flow control is what enables a codec to negotiate and indicate any commands and information it requires to change behavior during the call. Some codecs have external flow control mechanisms, where the control messages are sent over the signaling channel or the RTP that wraps around the codec.

Opus does all flow control by itself. This means the codec’s implementation is packaged nicely with little points of integration to other layers. It makes it easier to maintain.

Why is this important?

There are many codec implementations out there for voice and audio, and yet WebRTC decided to focus on a single one – Opus. Having more codecs means headaches to implementers in many levels:

• Footprint of the implementation grows
• Need to handle patents and royalties (most codecs have that problem)
• Deciding on a codec in a call becomes more complex

WebRTC leaned towards using a codec that can fit as many use cases as possible without sacrificing quality. What it did sacrifice is interoperability – you seend sever side transcoding for that.

For now, WebRTC’s selection of a voice codec means it can offer the best audio experience compared to other VoIP and communication systems.

I have no doubt that a newer and better voice codec will present itself. How will that be handled with WebRTC will be interesting to see.

The post Why is there only a Single Voice Codec in WebRTC? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Amsterdam is the most active city in the world, with its residents spending about 70% of their time moving doing walks, runs, or bicycle rides, according to data from fitness tracking app Human.

Human runs in the background of users' phones and automatically detects activities like walking, cycling, running, and motorized transport. Human aggregated data from users to create dozens of maps and charts that show how people across the globe get around.

Check out the ranking:

There's one caveat — the chart only counts the amount of time spent doing walks, runs, or bicycle rides, so some exercise might not be included in the data.

Washington, D.C. is the most active city in the U.S., followed by New York and San Francisco.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is at the bottom of the list. Residents of the West Coast city also spend more time in cars than people in any other city included in Human's data. Los Angeles is notorious for its traffic and lack of public transportation.

The high activity level in Amsterdam is largely thanks to cycling. Residents spend about 40% of their time moving by taking bicycle rides, which is far more than any other city.

Check out the other charts:

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Critics have spent the last few days castigating Facebook for a large-scale experiment conducted by researchers who wanted to learn the effects of tweaking the dosage of positive or negative comments on a user’s News Feed. Would people who are exposed to more negative comments than the average delivered to them by the Facebook algorithm be more or less prone to positivity themselves?

Many scorned Facebook’s actions as an unruly experiment on human subjects without their knowledge or informed consent. Kashmir Hill lamented what she called “a new level of experimentation, turning Facebook from a fishbowl into a petri dish.” Arthur Caplan wrote that the experiment “should send a shiver down the spine of any Facebook user or anyone thinking about becoming one,” and that it should never have been performed.

Others were more sanguine, pointing out that in considering the use of algorithms to tailor content — on Facebook and elsewhere — one was reminded of Captain Renault’s protest as he walked into a casino in “Casablanca”: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” They claimed that, far from being an exception to conventional business practice, manipulation of user experience on a digital platform is the market norm. On the Web, on mobile and increasingly in our homes and on wearable devices, data is analyzed to increase user engagement, satisfaction, traction, or shopping appetite.

Indeed, Facebook itself has engaged in experimentation with much more ambitious aspirations than merely gauging user sentiment. Last year, working with researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Facebook adjusted its profile settings so users could announce their status as an organ donor, or sign up if they weren’t already registered. Over a single day, the new feature prompted more than 13,000 individuals to sign up as organ donors — more than 21 times the daily average. Most observers would agree that increasing organ-donation rates is a laudable goal, but clearly, some kinds of social influence must be considered off-limits or subject to special disclosures.

Big-data analysis is already used in multiple contexts, to personalize the delivery of education in K-12 schools, reduce the time commuters spend on the road, contain greenhouse emissions, detect harmful drug interactions, encourage weight loss, and much more. Such data uses promise tremendous societal benefits, but at the same time creates new risks of surveillance, discrimination, and opaque algorithmic decision-making. In this environment, who is best placed to distinguish right from wrong, to warn before corporate practices cross the “creepy” line?

Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to decipher subtle social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or lawyers. Perhaps the most powerful example is the European court’s decision to appoint Google an arbitrator of thousands of individual contests between privacy rights and freedom of speech. Google reacted by setting up a panel of experts comprising senior officials as well as five external experts, including an Oxford philosopher, a civil-rights activist and a United Nations representative. It will have to deal with a steady barrage of requests from individuals who want to wipe their data record clean.

Google’s model will soon have to be replicated by companies tackling a broad swath of policy dilemmas. Should a fitness app “manipulate” users to coax them to eat less and exercise more? Is an airline overstepping the bounds of social etiquette by Googling passengers’ names to personalize their experience? Should an app developer offer a student a level-two math app after she completes level one?

These decisions echo the mandates of academic review boards (IRBs), which operate in research institutions under formulaic rules and follow strict protocols. It may be a challenge to deploy traditional IRBs in the corporate domain, which is restricted by concerns for confidentiality, patents and trade-secrecy law. But it would be unfortunate if the lesson that industry takes from this episode is to keep algorithmic decisions confidential, or prevent access to corporate data coffers by the academic-research community.

Going forward, companies will need to create new processes, deploying a toolbox of innovative solutions to engender trust and mitigate normative friction. Fortunately, many companies have already laid the groundwork for such delicate decision-making by appointing chief privacy officers. Others have budding internal ethical review programs.

But big-data analysis raises issues that transcend privacy and implicate broader policy concerns around discrimination, filter bubbles, access to data, and the ethics of scientific research. Accordingly, it requires active engagement by both internal and external stakeholders to increase transparency, accountability and trust.

As the companies that serve us play an increasingly intimate role in our lives, understanding how they shape their services to influence users has become a vexing policy issue. Data can be used for control and discrimination or utilized to support fairness and freedom. Establishing a process for ethical decision-making is key to ensuring that the benefits of data exceed their costs.

Jules Polonetsky serves as executive director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that seeks to advance responsible data practices. Founded five years ago, FPF is supported by more than 80 leading companies, as well as an advisory board comprised of the country’s leading academics and advocates. FPF’s current projects focus on online data use, smart grid, mobile data, big data, apps and social media. Reach him @JulesPolonetsky.

Omer Tene is vice president of research and education at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), where he administers the Westin Fellowship program and fosters ties between industry and academia. Before joining IAPP, he was vice dean of the College of Management School of Law, Rishon Le Zion, Israel. Tene is an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and a senior fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum. Reach him @omertene.

It looks like Google has been doing some end-of-spring cleaning these last two weeks.

On June 25 it announced that it was shutting down Quickoffice, which the company says it has fully integrated into its new Docs, Sheets, and Slideapps. Today also marks the beginning of the end for Orkut, the social networking service launched in 2004 from an employee's "20% time" project.

Google will officially kill Orkut, which was more popular abroad than in the U.S., by September 30. 

Instead of keeping Orkut kicking, Google will focus its efforts on YouTube, Blogger, and Google+. Current users can keep using the service until September, but no new people can sign-up. People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016).

"It's been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service," writes Google's engineering director Paulo Golgher. "We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond." 

SEE ALSO: Google Ventures Found The Secret To Productive Meetings In A First Grade Classroom

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When you think about Chromebooks for the education market, you likely think of Dell, Samsung and HP. CTL wants to change that branding perception with a new Chromebook of its own: On Monday the company announced the CTL Education Chromebook, with two unique design elements compared to what schools can already buy.

The $279 Chromebook is very similar on the inside to what other Chrome OS laptops offer: An fanless Intel Celeron quad-core chip clocked at 2.16 GHz, for example. It also uses the relatively standard 11.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 resolution, 16 GB of local flash storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, memory card reader and pair of USB ports. CTL does include 4 GB of memory, though; that’s something I’d like to see standard on other Chromebooks.

So what makes the device different? First is a unique handle that lets students carry the Chromebook like a small briefcase of sorts. And second is the one megapixel webcam: It faces front when doing video chats but can swivel back to take photos from the rear of the Chromebook as well. The notebook is a bit ruggedized as well, with a plastic bumper around the edges and a spill-resistant keyboard.

CTL said its Chromebook should last all day on a charge with run-time of around 8 hours; pretty ideal for usage in-school. Kids could charge the device at home and leave the AC adapter behind, making the Chrome OS laptop easy to tote, especially with the built-in handle.

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From classic keyboard devices to more mainstream smartphones like the Z10, we've seen a variety of phones from BlackBerry over the years.

But BlackBerry's upcoming device may be the strangest phone we've seen from the company yet.

CrackBerry, a blog that covers BlackBerry, recently published a lengthy post summing up its early impressions of the BlackBerry Passport, and we combed through it to extract some of the most important details. 

The BlackBerry Passport is aptly named — its sharp, angular shape and proportions resemble that of a book or document more than a phone.

The Passport is unusually wide and square, but judging by early photos it seems like it will offer plenty of screen space compared to standard-size phones on the market. 

The Passport looks large, but it's not meant to be compared with today's flagships like the iPhone 5s or Galaxy S5. It's not even really a true competitor to Samsung's Galaxy Note series in the phablet space. Rather, it seems more likely that BlackBerry is focused on its core audience — enterprise users.

We expect to learn more about the Passport when it launches in September, but here's what we know about the phone so far based on CrackBerry's early review. It's also important to keep in mind that CrackBerry reviewed a pre-production model, so we're likely to see some changes before the final version hits stores.

The Passport's screen is going to be a big deal.

The Passport's wide shape allows it to offer a larger, more square screen than your average smartphone. Technically, the screen is only 4.5 inches, which is smaller than most Android smartphones that venture into the 5-inch and higher territory. But since it's square rather than rectangular, it still looks like you're getting a lot of screen real estate.

The screen's resolution of 1440 x 1440 is also fairly high for a screen of that size. CrackBerry's early review said that the display "is of such an elegance, it even made the most diehard iPhone user smile." 

BlackBerry has improved its keyboard with the Passport.

BlackBerry is already known for its mobile keyboards, but the company has further refined that hardware aspect for its upcoming Passport. According to CrackBerry, the Passport's keyboard is "bigger, broader, softer, and wider" than the keyboard on previous BlackBerry phones.

One of the key improvements is the Passport's predictive keyboard, which is said to be touch sensitive in addition to providing legitimate keys. The keyboard feels like "the trackpad of a Macbook," according to CrackBerry, which makes the typing experience feel more natural and intuitive. 

The Passport's keyboard only includes letters, so symbols, characters, and numbers appear on screen as you type. Based on Crackberry's description, it sounds as if you can tap these characters to select them.

It's large and square, but also ergonomically shaped.

The Passport is a big phone, but that doesn't mean it feels awkward to use. CrackBerry writes that it should fit in your pants pocket without a problem, although it will probably occupy your entire pocket. Since the edges are slightly curved, it's easy to pick the Passport up from a flat surface like a table, which can prove difficult with some smaller thin phones.

However, you do need to use it with two hands to really utilize its full benefits. CrackBerry wrote that it was difficult to reach different corners of the screen while using one hand. 

Check out the video below from CrackBerry: 

SEE ALSO: Which Android Phone Should You Buy?

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Staples is expanding its commitment to the connected home (and office) with new products and partners and will place consumer displays and educational materials in more stores as of July 15. The Connect platform, which consists of a hub and related connected devices that range form window blinds to doorbells is expanding to 500 stores, up from the 32 that launched on Black Friday last year. Staples has about 1,500 stores worldwide.

The company is also supporting more radios with a newer and cheaper version of its hub. The new version will be made by D-Link and supports Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-wave and Lutron as well as Wi-Fi. It will retail for $79.99, while the older version that only supports Z-wave, Lutron and Wi-Fi will now retail for $49.99. The hub and Connect software created by Zonoff helps deal with the mess of existing radios already on the market and lets the consumer create recipes for her home.

Staples is also bringing in a bunch of new integration partners whose devices work with the hubs, including Jawbone, Polar and Samsung smart TVs. This brings the total number of devices supported by the Connect platform to almost 150. I’ve tested the Staples Connect platform and liked it — it’s easy to create programming rules and I really liked the Lutron gear. So far, the Connect platform is the only one Lutron has gotten behind, although the Revolv hub also has a Lutron radio inside.

The connected home is important for Staples, especially as it’s also seeking to help small business customers connect their offices. Peter Gerstberger, Director/DMM, new business development at Staples, says that the products are also beneficial for the stores’ margin profile because many of the connected devices sell at higher margins than typical electronic devices like tablets and computers.

Mike Harris, CEO, Zonoff; Peter Gerstberger, Senior Merchant, New Business Development, Staples; Mobilize 2013. (c) 2013 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Gerstberger said that the average Connect platform user plays with the app or hits the Staples web site at least eight times a day and on average connects six to seven devices within the first two months. The most commonly connected device is a security camera, but after that it varies. The key to getting customers to purchase the devices and then keep them is to tell them how to use the devices.

It’s not enough to show the hub, connected locks and a connected doorbell in the store. Gerstberger says Staples employees have to present the use case. For instance, you could ask a business owner if they ever miss package deliveries. When they say yes, the Staples employee explains that with a Doorbot, connected Yale locks and the hub, the business owner could see when the UPS man arrives and remotely open the door to get the package.

Staples is not alone in ramping up its connected home push. Also this month, GE-backed Quirky is launching a separate company called Wink that will provide connected home products. Those products will be heavily promoted via a partnership with Home Depot, which is expanding the number of connected products in its stores. This week Microsoft said it would offer Insteon products in its stores and Nest launched a developer program aimed at making Nest the hub of the smart home. Apple is working on a similar unification effort, with plans for a device certification program and software called HomeKit that should go live with iOS 8 this fall.

What we’re seeing is both the logical expansion of retailers’ product lines and big tech brands trying to carve out a niche in something that is expected to generate billions in the coming years. And apparently those products will sell at higher margins that tablets or computers, which could be why everyone is rushing to stake a claim.

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Google on Wednesday held a three-hour keynote presentation at I/O, its annual developers conference. 

If you missed it, this tweet from the Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern pretty much sums it all up:

So three hours summed up: Google wants to be everywhere.

— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) June 25, 2014

If you want a longer explanation, here goes. 

Google announced a new version of Android for mobile phones. It announced Android Wear, an operating system for smartwatches and other wearable devices. It announced Android TV, software to take over your TV. It announced Android Auto, which is supposed to take over your car. It announced Google Fit, a health and fitness platform. It announced changes to the Chrome OS, its desktop computing platform.

And while it wasn't talked about at all yesterday, Google also makes Google Glass, which is a computer that sits on your face.

All of that is in addition to Google's recent acquisitions want to take over your home. It bought Nest, which makes thermostats and smoke/CO detectors. And it bought Dropcam, which records everything in your home.

There's Skybox Imaging, which Google recently bought, that takes photos of the Earth with satellites. 

And there's also Google Fiber, which is Google's slowly-expanding hyperspeed internet and TV service. 

In short, Google has endless ambition to take over the world. Its keynote presentation was a three-hour reminder of that.

SEE ALSO: Here's How Google Plans To Change Android

Join the conversation about this story »

Oh yeah, this is the year the smart home goes mainstream.

This week Time has devoted a hunk of its magazine to profiling Tony Fadell, the founder of Nest, explaining SmartThings and showing off six “smart homes” that aren’t exactly smart. The profile of Fadell gets into his concept of the conscious home and won’t surprise anyone familiar with Nest, but it is a nice intro into a future with a home that adjusts to your needs.

The SmartThings profile shares what I think of as today’s version of the smart home, where the user puts connected devices into their home and develops modes and scenes that make their lives easier. SmartThings, as explained by CEO Alex Hawkinson, may represent the 1.0 version of the smart home while Fadell is after a longer-range vision that will depend on context and artificial intelligence to get the home to react appropriately around each individual. Fadell seems to realize this which could explain his emphasis on creating smarter individual appliances and “touchpoints” throughout the home.

Either way you look at it, the package loses a little ground when it profiles 6 smart homes, most of which have little in the way of electronics and are more about using space efficiently, promoting exercise or greener living. That being said, for an article my parents might read, both Hawkinson and Fadell provide good introductions into the two current points of view on how the smart home should evolve.

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Apple is reportedly working on new connected home products for consumers, according to 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman. 

Although Apple unveiled its HomeKit platform for developers at this year's WWDC, the company is now working on actual hardware products for everyday users.

Gurman's sources haven't specified exactly what types of devices Apple is working on, but they did reportedly say that the connected home space will be an important market for Apple moving forward.

These smart home devices would integrate deeply with Apple's existing products, such as its line of iPhones and iPads. 

Apple's smart home product probably won't compete with the Nest Learning Thermostat or the newly announced Honeywell Lyric. Rather, it will focus on something a little more mainstream that will get more widespread usage.

This could mean Apple is working on a smart speaker system or some type of controller for the devices in your home, Gurman's sources reportedly said. There's also no specific timeline for the product(s), so there's no telling when or if we'll see such devices hit the market. 

9to5Mac's report comes just after The Information reported similar news on Wednesday regarding Apple's plan to develop devices for the smart home. 

This also isn't the first time we've heard that Apple is interested in creating a gadget that can act as a universal controller for your home. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White predicted last year that Apple's long-rumored iWatch could be used as a multi-media controller for your home. 

It's not entirely surprising that Apple could be creating hardware geared toward the connected home. Now that Apple has baked support for smart home functionality into iOS 8, we would naturally expect some new products to go along with it. 

SEE ALSO: A Closer Look At All The Products Apple May Release In 2014

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Now this is cool: Google’s Chromecast team has found an interesting way to pair Chromecast streaming sticks with mobile devices that are not on the same Wi-Fi network. Pairing is done through inaudible, ultrasonic sounds, which should make sure that your neighbor won’t suddenly rickroll your TV screen.

Google first announced support for off-network casting at its Google I/O 2014 developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday, and Chromecast Engineering Manager John Affaki said during a presentation at the conference Thursday that the goal was to make the social use of Chromecast in the living room easier.

Google’s YouTube app already allows users to build collaborative queues for on-the-fly YouTube parties, and Affaki said Thursday that the support for these kinds of queues will be added to the Chromecast software developer’s kit to bring it to other apps as well. However, the challenge is that users need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, and sharing Wi-Fi passwords can be cumbersome. “The initial step of getting on the same Wi-Fi network can be really complicated,” said Affaki.

The new pairing feature will enable users to cast their content even if their phone is connected to a mobile network. To enable this, Chromecast owners have to first allow support for nearby devices. After that, any user in the vicinity of a Chromecast can request from within any cast-enabled app. The Chromecast streaming stick then plays a unique ultrasonic sound through the TV’s loudspeakers. That sound won’t be audible by human ears, but a mobile device in the same room will be able to pick it up and pair with the TV. Alternatively there will also be a four-digit pin displayed on the TV screen, making it possible to manually pair both devices.

The idea of ultrasonic networking was originally conceived by Google engineer Boris Smus, who published an experimental web app using ultrasound for messaging and pairing on his website last year.

Google also announced support for customization of the Chromecast home screen, including personal photos, weather and news content. All of this will come to Chromecast in the coming weeks.

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It’s 24 hours later, and I’m still furious.

When news of Aereo’s demise broke yesterday morning, I did my best to calmly explain why six people used the law to kill the most innovative TV service in a generation. But now I might as well say how I really feel.

The Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that Aereo’s streaming service infringed on broadcasters’ copyright, was not just wrong. It was terrible, stupid and misguided.

Where to begin? First, there’s the slapdash legal reasoning that led the court to declare that Aereo engaged in a “public performance” when it rented antennas and DVRs that let consumers watch and record over-the-air TV. By the letter of the law, Aereo clearly did no such thing — but the good judges swept this aside with what the dissent rightly called “an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) that will sow confusion for years to come.”

The court’s improvisation turned on the 1976 Copyright Act that, under a provision called the “transmit clause,” gave broadcasters new rights over-the-air signals sent to the public. The court, however, brushed aside the hard question of how exactly Aereo’s discrete one-to-one streams were “public,” and instead said it didn’t matter since it was a “behind-the-scenes” issue.

This legal mess, on its own, is almost tolerable. After all, courts pull this sort of slight-of-hand all the time when they try to stuff the square pegs of policy into the round holes of law. Instead, it’s the court’s policy choice that’s so plainly stupid and bad.

In crippling Aereo, you see, the six judges made a choice to entrench the current, badly broken model of TV. That model has let the TV business largely defy the logic of digital distribution, and instead impose a form of cartel pricing on consumers — requiring people to buy a slew of channels they don’t want in order to watch the handful of ones they do.

Have any doubts about the effect of the court’s decision? Just look at how the share price of old-line TV companies popped on Wednesday on the news that the Supreme Court had chosen to bless and protect the status quo.

But while CBS and ABC investors may be throwing around high fives at the sop from the Supremes, the average consumer just took a bath. Not only did the court just stick it to them by protecting the TV industry’s bundle rip-offs, consumers also lose access to a marvelous technology.

Aereo, you see, was different. It gave urban dwellers like me a cheap way to see over-the-air shows (which the broadcasters send out for free in the first place, don’t forget) on their computers and phones.

The service, to be sure, was from perfect. The show streams could be choppy, and in the case of sports, the short time delay could be frustrating — I would sometimes learn about a goal on social media right before seeing it on Aereo. And it lacked the lazy, channel-clicking pleasure of TV.

But Aereo did point out what could be: a commonsense way to watch TV over the internet at a reasonable price. Now, we’re stuck instead with the TV industry’s over-priced bundles and, in the case of mobile, a confusing and convoluted “TV everywhere” system that seeks to replicate an out-of-date form of linear TV watching that no one wants in the first place.

The defenders of the TV cartel claim that the entire entertainment industry sky might have fallen if Aereo had lived. Indeed, some said, even the mighty NFL was threatened by Aereo’s antennas! Nonsense.

History shows that the TV business has always thrown a legal tantrum in the face of new technologies, including cable TV and the VCR, but soon after adopted and even embraced them. In the case of Aereo, there’s a good chance that CBS and the rest of them would have pressured Congress to impose some sort of licensing regime on the company, and that Aereo in turn would have forced the TV business to get its act together in offering more internet-based alternatives. The net result would have been a better TV experience at a better price.

Instead, thanks to the Supremes, we’re stuck with the crummy status quo, in which the TV industry treats us as dumb jerks who are to be tethered to bad technology at inflated prices.

I could go on. There’s the fact that the broadcasters who killed Aereo are sitting on huge amounts of valuable public spectrum that is supposed to be used to provide free TV. There is also the chilling effect the court’s decision, despite its assurances of a narrow ruling, could have on other would be cloud-computing startups like Aereo.

But I’ll stop here. I have to go contemplate on how to replace the terrific, $8-a-month TV service the Supreme Court just took away for no good reason.

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In the race to deliver connected cars that now includes almost every automotive manufacturer, Toyota this week announced that it will partner with IBM to create a platform for building applications.

The total data traffic on the IT networks of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil has already surpassed 32 terabytes in 10 days, according to the event’s internet and communications provider Oi – and we’re not even halfway through the tournament.

That 32 terabytes represents the total volume of data traversing the IT networks used by FIFA, the 32 teams playing and the 20,000 international journalists covering the event in 12 stadiums and other broadcast sites within Brazil. It doesn’t even count the reams of photos, videos and social media posts coming from millions of fans using public Wi-Fi and mobile data networks in and around the stadium.

“The first 10 days of the World Cup saw an amount of data equivalent to 171 Super  Bowls per day transmitted on the Oi networks for FIFA,” Oi said in a statement.

Oi, Brazil’s largest telecommunications provider, claims IT traffic has already surpassed the IT traffic in the entire 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and it’s well on its way to pass the other major international sporting event of the year, the Sochi Winter Olympics, which saw 34 TBs consumed in 17 days.

Much of the increased consumption comes from multiple connections per user. Oi said that 152,000 different devices were connected to Oi’s media-only Wi-Fi networks in the tournaments 12 stadiums over those 10 days. That works out to b 7.6 devices per journalist.

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If you're a developer, email probably isn't the most exciting technology today, but Google just made it a lot more interesting thanks to the new Gmail API it announced Wednesday at the Google I/O developer conference.

Using the Chromecast with friends is about to get better, thanks to this handy update: Google announced at its Google I/O developer conference that users will no longer have to join the same network, just to cast videos and music to Chromecast-connected TVs. 

What Google didn’t announce, at least on stage, was how that was going to work. But the company's engineers clued me in: Later this year, smartphones and tablets will be able to link to Chromecast over ultrasonic signals, which are undetectable to the naked human ear—not too different from the high-pitched signals bats use for echolocation.

The idea is to enhance the Chromecast experience when shared among several users in a room, Chromecast Product Manager Jagit Singh Chawla explained to me. He said that the engineers asked themselves how they could eliminate the need for friends to type in passwords, just to join the host's Wi-Fi network. Bluetooth pairing often uses PIN codes, so the team "asked if there was a way to further reduce the friction of even entering the PIN."

What they came up with was ultrasonic pairing, which works even when the phone is on a cellular connection. Here’s how: Chromecast users first enable the setting, so their streaming sticks can connect with the mobile gadgets present. Then friends use Netflix, YouTube or another Cast-enabled app to request Chromecast access, which prompts the TV dongle to emit distinct ultrasonic audio. The mobile receives the signal and pairs with the Chromecast. 

The only data transmitted is very minimal—the equivalent of a PIN code—and the process is location-based, so the gadgets know they are in the same room with each other. "It won't leave the room," said Chawla, who also noted that the ultrasonic signal doesn't bounce around or go through walls. "Think of it as a proximity technology." That means your neighbor won't be able to hijack your casting sessions. If the process fails for some reason, users can type in a code that pops up on screen. 

GigaOm notes that ultrasonic networking was the brainchild of Google engineer Boris Smus, whose Web app project used it for messaging and pairing last year. 

In related news, it appears that YouTube won’t be hogging TV Queue anymore. Other apps will get the ability to support this handy feature, which lets multiple people add videos to a single viewing queue. This and the ultrasonic pairing are both part of the same push to make Chromecast simpler and more fun as a vehicle for social TV viewing. 

Updated to include more information and context from Google's Chromecast engineers. 

For people raised on mobile phones and texting, calling a help line can be a exercise in obsolescence: first, it requires you to make a voice call, often to speak to an robot, or hold for what seems like hours while listening to muzak. On Thursday, toll-free numbers administered by wholesale VoIP provider Bandwidth will gain the ability to send and receive text messages — which could mean that you never have to hold for an operator again.

Bandwidth, which is the nation’s sixth largest telco based the number of telephone numbers it has, isn’t designing the toll-free SMS program for its clients. Instead, it’ll be up to each company or software provider to design their system using Bandwidth’s APIs protocols.

So there aren’t many toll-free numbers you can text today. Still; imagine a world where instead of being put on hold, you can simply receive a text when an operator is available. As more companies adapt to this new capability, that’s exactly what will happen.

While mobile numbers can receive SMS messages, landline phones largely can’t. It’s both a technical and a regulatory issue. First, you need an SMS client running on a device to receive texts — which is a technical problem. For a toll-free number, there isn’t a device like a phone receiving it, which is where Bandwidth comes in. Its service acts as a switch that recognizes when a message has been sent to one of its numbers.

The other barrier was regulatory, but in recent years, the mobile industry association CTIA has gradually worked with carriers to open up their networks to make landline SMS texting possible. Zipwhip was one of the first companies to take advantage of the new regulations, and also offers SMS texting to toll-free numbers.

Bandwidth also announced two new features for developers of over-the-top messaging apps. Historically, over-the-top messaging users, like the ones using Bandwidth’s platform, have only been able to send SMS messages, not rich MMS messages. If you’ve used Google Voice in the past, you’ve probably run into this problem. Now over-the-top messaging services using Bandwidth can send and receive MMS messages, and can even receive messages containing short-codes, bringing the dream of having your main number in a cross-platform app just a little bit closer.

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The New York Times took a look at the state of the voicemail in this story by Teddy Wayne.

To that all-important demographic known as "the millennial", the voicemail is antiquated at best and quickly approaching obsolescence. Texting is on the rise, according to a Pew report, with teens sending and receiving a median of 60 messages per day in 2011, up from 50 per day in 2009. And a text can effectively serve the same purpose as a voicemail — it's a communiqué for the recipient to catch at his or her convenience.

Wayne's story also sheds light on a surprising amount of anxiety some feel when confronted with an answering machine message:

Kate Greathead, 31, a writer in New York and a friend of mine, didn’t enjoy leaving voice mail messages for friends in college, “but it had to happen, and I would do it,” she said. Have her messaging abilities atrophied in the age of texting? “Definitely,” she said. “I’m fine telling a story in front of 400 strangers, but get dry-mouthed when leaving a voice mail.” (She is a four-time Moth StorySLAM winner.)

“Sometimes I write a script out beforehand,” Ms. Greathead said. “Most voice mail has an option to review your message. If it doesn’t have that, I don’t always leave one. If it does, I’ll review it before sending it and sometimes do different takes. Though I’ve learned not to trust that function. Once I accidentally recorded two versions of the same voice mail.”

With the modern smartphone's ability to show missed calls, that's often all information one needs to return a call.

How do you relate to voicemail? Let us know in the comments, then check out Wayne's full story at the NYT »

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Google just revamped its productivity suite with updates to its Docs and Sheets apps, as well as with the launch of Google Slides, it's PowerPoint-esque presentation maker, for Android (and soon iOS). 

Docs, Sheets, and Slides are Google's free solution to Microsoft's not-so-free Office Suite. The new updates now let you edit Office files without needing to convert them. This means that if you're working with someone who uses Microsoft Office, you can make changes to a document and seamlessly send it back to them in its original format.

The company is also launched a Suggested Edits mode for desktop (coming soon to mobile) that lets multiple people make edits that the others can then either accept or reject. Microsoft Word has long had the same feature, and this new addition is one more way Google can further its quest to prove its productivity suite can offer the average user anything that Microsoft's can — for free. 

Docs, Sheets, and Slides — whether you're using them on mobile or desktop — will also have full offline support so you can view, edit, and create files even when you don't have an internet connection.

Google said Wednesday there are 190 million active users on the company's productivity suite and cloud service Drive.

SEE ALSO: Google Just Launched Android TV To Further Infiltrate Your Living Room

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Jerry Seinfeld is offering some tips on social media etiquette in the latest issue of Wired.

"Since I'm a cutting edge technology guy, I get asked a lot of technical questions," the 60-year-old comedian said sarcastically in a video for Wired. "So, I'm going to answer a few of them now."

1. Fan Question: "I think my neighbor is feeding my cat. Is it cool to use a drone to spy on him?"

Jerry's Answer: "What's wrong with someone feeding your cat? They're doing you a favor, leave them alone."

2. Q: "If someone posts about a death in their family, is it appropriate to 'like' the post?"

A: "Yes, death is not 100% bad — we need the room."

3. Q: "Is it okay to video a concert with my iPad?"

A: "Sure, sure go ahead. So you won't enjoy the concert and you won't enjoy the video, you will have negated everything."

4. Q: "Our human resources director just posted a nude photo of herself on Facebook. Is it okay to like it?"

A: "I've never had a job, not interested."

5. Q:  "Is it hazardous to tweet on Ambien?"

A: "I don't think so, I don't think there's anything that can go wrong with a tweet. I think it's interesting we invented tweeting because we so admired birds, we thought, 'Oh my god we gotta be doing this — we also must drop an annoying series of small daily turds on the earth!'"

To read more social media etiquette tips from Wired, click here.

Watch more of Seinfeld's answers below in the full, funny video:

SEE ALSO: Jon Stewart and Sarah Jessica Parker Ride With Seinfeld In New Season Of 'Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee'

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