Davemichels

Apple's App Store pulled a Barbie-inspired plastic-surgery app on Tuesday, following intense backlash fueled in part by a Twitter campaign.

The game, which launched last week and was rated for children 9 and older, walked players through the graphic steps of liposuction that must be performed on an "unfortunate girl" to make her "slim and beautiful."

The dubious steps included injecting anesthetic, making incisions with a scalpel and suctioning out fat with a pump. This process was then repeated multiple times on Barbie's different "problem areas."

The game's description in the App Store was also highly questionable: "This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her. In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful. We'll need to make small cuts on problem areas and suck out the extra fat. Will you operate her, doctor?" Read more...

More about App Store, Ios, Tech, and Apps Software

Southern Australia is roasting as temperatures climb as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit, and cool reprieve isn't expected until the end of this weekAverage temperatures in the summer in this region of Australia reach 79 degrees Fahrenheit.

Firefighters are on hand as a severe fire danger rating is in effect for seven of the region's 15 districts. In Melbourne, tennis fans are baking as the Australian Open wraps its second day. A dwindling group of spectators braving the heat are sporting light clothing as armor against the sun while players are retreating to bags of ice between matches Read more...

More about Photos, Weather, Australia, Us World, and World

Enterprise CIOs are racing to implement mobile device management technologies and policies to facilitate BYOD, but a new Gartner report suggests that 20 percent of these programs will eventually fail because these measures are too restrictive.

Hapa Sushi, with a location on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall and three others in the Denver area, is offering a "pairing menu" aimed not at wine or sake connoisseurs, but at the recreational marijuana market.

The news is full of stories about a mobile app turning its developers into millionaires: (Snapchat, Branch, Summly).

And, yes, Apple says that people spent more than $10 billion in its App Store in 2013 — including more than $1 billion in December.

But the truth is, your chances of getting rich from a mobile app is depressingly slim.

There are more than 1 million mobile apps in both Apple's App Store and Google's Play store, and less than 1 percent of them will be any kind of financial success for their developers through 2018, market research firm Gartner says.

Many of those apps aren't intended to generate income and that's a trend that will grow, too. Today about 91 percent of mobile apps are free, reports Network World. By 2017, 94.5% of mobile apps will be free, Gartner says.

Of the remaining 5.5% of apps that people pay for, 90 percent of them will make less than $1,250 a day, or generate less than $500,000 a year.

Now, $500,000 a year is still a healthy income, but very few developers will make that kind of living.

"Our analysis shows that most mobile applications are not generating profits," says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.

But writing free apps can still be a pretty decent source of income. A lead mobile app developer makes an average salary of about $100,000 a year nationwide, according to Indeed.com.

Put it all together and the obvious advice for would-be mobile app entrepreneurs: while working on your strike-it-rich mobile app, don't quit your day job.

SEE ALSO: 21 Enterprise Startups To Bet Your Career On In 2014

Join the conversation about this story »

Microsoft and GoDaddy have struck a strategic partnership to offer Office 365 services.

The deal — the first of its kind — is yet another example of GoDaddy’s efforts to increase the number of business solutions it provides for its 12 million customers.

As part of the agreement, users will have access to email connected to their domain names, cloud storage and other Microsoft productivity solutions such as shared calendars and online conferencing. Plans will have different pricing, starting at $3.99.

GoDaddy is providing customer service for the offerings, said CEO Blake Irving.

“Every small business is looking for solutions in one place, so we want to be able to provide that,” said Irving in an interview. “Rather than go to a lot of different places to get these services, this is part of combining them together to make it easier for them.”

As more and more on-premise software vendors begin their journey to become SaaS vendors they are going to face some obvious challenges. Here’s my view on what they might be.

The street is mean but you can educate investors

Sharp contrast between Amazon and Apple is quite clear. Even though Amazon has been in business for a long time with soaring revenue in mature categories the street sees it as a high growth company and tolerates near zero margin and surprises that Jeff Bezos brings in every quarter. Bezos has managed to convince the street that Amazon is still in heavy growth mode and hasn’t yet arrived. On the other hand despite of Apple’s significant revenue growth—in mature as well as in new disruptive categories—investors treat Apple very differently and have crazy revenue andmargin expectations.

Similarly, traditional pure SaaS companies such as Salesforce is considered a high growth company where investors are focused on growth and not margins. But, if you’re an on-premise vendor transitioning to SaaS the street won’t tolerate a hit on your margins. The street would expect mature on-premise companies to deliver on continuous low double digit growth as well as margins without any blips and dips during their transition to SaaS. As on-premise vendors change their product, delivery, and revenue models investors will be hard on them and stock might take a nosedive if investors don’t quite understand where the vendors are going with their transition. As much as investors love the annuity model of SaaS they don’t like uncertainty and they will punish vendors for lack of their own understanding in the vendor’s model. It’s a vendor’s job to educate investors and continuously communicate with them on their transition.

Isolating on-premise and SaaS businesses is not practical

Hybrid on-premise vendors should (and they do) report on-premise and subscription (SaaS) revenue separately to provide insights to investors into their revenue growth and revenue transition. They also report their data center related cost (to deliver software) as cost of revenue. But, there’s no easy way, if at all there’s one, to split and report separate SG&A costs for their on-premise and SaaS businesses. In fact combined sales and marketing units are the weapons incumbents on-premise vendors have to successfully transition to SaaS. More on that later in this post.

The basic idea behind achieving economies of scale and to keep the overall cost down (remember margins?) is to share and tightly integrate business functions wherever possible. Even though vendors sometime refer to their SaaS and on-premise businesses as separate lines of businesses (LoBs), in reality they are not. These LoBs are intertwined that report numbers as single P&L.

Not being able to charge more for SaaS is a myth

Many people I have spoken to assume that SaaS is a volume-only business and you can’t charge customers what you would typically charge your customers in your traditional license and maintenance revenue business model. This is absolutely not true. If you look at some of the deal sizes and length of SaaS contracts of pure SaaS companies they do charge a premium when they have unique differentiation regardless of volume. Customers are not necessarily against paying premium – for them it is all about bringing down their overall TCO and increasing their ROI with reduced time to value. If a vendor’s product and its delivery model allow customers to accomplish these goals they can charge them premium. In fact in most cases this could be the only way out. As a vendor transitioning from on-premise to SaaS their cost is going to go up; they will continue to invest into building new products and transitioning existing products and they will significantly assume the cost of running operations on behalf of their customers to deliver software as a service. They not only will have to grow their top-line to meet the growth expectations but to offset some of the cost to maintain the margins.

Prime advantage on-premise incumbents have over SaaS entrants

So, what does work in favor of on-premise vendors who are going through this transition?

It’s the sales and marketing machine, my friends.

The dark truth about selling enterprise software is you need salespeople wearing suits driving around in their BMWs to sell software. There’s no way out. If you look at high growth SaaS companies they spend most of what they earn on sales and marketing. Excluding Workday there is not much difference in R&D cost across vendors, on-premise or SaaS. Workday is building out its portfolio and I expect to see this cost go down in a few years.

Over a period of time, many on-premise vendors have built a great brand and achieved amazing market penetration. As these vendors go through SaaS transition they won’t have to spend as much time and money educating the market and customers. In fact I would argue they should thank other SaaS vendors for doing the job for them. On-premise vendors have also built an amazing sales machine with deep relationship with customers and reliable sales processes. If they can maintain their SG&A numbers they will have enough room to deal with a possible initial hit on revenue and additional cost they would incur as they go through this transition.

Be in charge of your own destiny and be aggressive

It’s going to be a tough transition regardless of your loyal customer base and differentiating products. It will test the execution excellence of on-premise vendors. They are walking on a tight rope and there’s not much room to make mistakes. The street is very unforgiving.

Bezos and Benioff have consistently managed to convince the street they are high growth companies and should be treated as such. There’s an important lesson here for on-premise vendors. There is no reason to label yourself an on-premise vendor simply making a transition. You could do a lot more than that; invest into new disruptive categories and rethink existing portfolio. Don’t just chase SaaS for its subscription pricing but make an honest and explicit attempt to become a true SaaS vendor. The street will take a notice and you might catch a break.

(Cross-posted @ Cloud Computing)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Rumors of the next major Windows release codenamed “Threshold” have been circling for some time now, but Paul Thurott has now revealed further details on the next version of Windows.

Threshold will reportedly bring a number of major changes to Windows 8, such as the return of the Start Menu and the beginning of a converged platform encompassing Windows Phone and Windows RT. The company is also working on delivering a single app store across Xbox, Windows Phone and Windows.

Thurott mentions that “Threshold” will likely be titled Windows 9 to “distance the company from the Windows 8 debacle” because “Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public.”

It’s true that Windows 8 has struggled to gain rapid adoption; even with the major tweaks in Windows 8.1 (which is free) the company has not seen more than 25 million PCs install the update, according to Thurott. Windows 8 adoption still lags behind that of Windows 7, despite having been on the market for over a year.

Traditionally, Microsoft releases a preview of an upcoming version of Windows at its BUILD conference (which will be held in April of this year). Instead of previewing a full new version of Windows this year, Thurott believes that the conference will see the release of an interim update labeled “Windows 8.1 Update 1″ alongside the release of Windows Phone 8.1.

Thurott’s sources believe that Windows 9 will be delivered in April 2015 with major changes that refine and develop the Modern UI interface (please, give us windowed mode for Modern apps!) as well as potentially splitting Windows into consumer and enterprise versions.

Delivering Windows 9 in 2015 means that Windows 8 will have been available for almost three years and may mean that consumers will look elsewhere for tablet devices.

Microsoft has its work cut out; three major platforms (Xbox, Windows Phone, Windows) will need new features this year to bring them closer as a family of products before Threshold seals the deal.

Image: Joe Radle/Getty Images

Google has confirmed it is shutting down its goal sharing service Schemer. The company says Schemer’s last day will be February 7, after which all data will be permanently deleted. The iOS app has already been pulled from Apple’s App Store while the Android app on Google Play hasn’t been updated since October 2012.

A leak late last year first suggested Schemer was next on Google’s chopping block. Google Operating System posted a screenshot of an internal version of the Schemer site, which stated the following: “Schemer will be shut down on [insert date]. We had launched over a year ago to help people to do more awesome stuff, and it has been quite an adventure for us as well! However, we have come to the difficult decision to shut down Schemer. Your schemes will be available for download until [insert date].”

Now the date has been filled in. If you’ve been using Schemer, you have less than a month to download your schemes.

To do so, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to schemer.com using your Google account.
2. Select “Email me my schemes” at the top of the page.
3. Your data will be delivered to your Gmail account within 24 hours of the request. You will receive an email from noreply_announce@schemer.com that contains two attachments of the exact same data in two different formats: CSV and HTML. Choose the format that works best for you and download accordingly.

For those who don’t know, Schemer arrived in December 2011. It let users discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and “make the most of your day.” Schemer required a Google+ account but wasn’t promoted by Google, which quietly stopped updating it many months ago.

Google recommends two alternatives to Schemer users: the “Explore” section on Google Maps for Android and iOS for finding interesting things to do nearby and Field Trip to uncover unique things in your city. Both are great for discovery, but neither offer a goal-oriented experience.

For reference, the full Schemer discontinuation announcement reads as follows:

The time has come for Schemer to power down.

Schemer launched in beta over a year ago to help inspire and motivate people to do more awesome stuff, and though the app is shutting down, the adventures will continue. You can use the “Explore” section on Google Maps for Android and iOS to find interesting things to do around you, or Field Trip to uncover hidden or unique things in your city, among others.

All your schemes are available for download until February 7, 2014, after which all data will be permanently deleted. Follow these simple steps: https://support.google.com/schemer/answer/4427755

In the meantime, stay curious, ambitious, daring, and above all, stay adventurous; thank you for all your support on this journey!

-The Schemer Team

See also – Google isn’t done with location, launches Schemer in private beta and A video tour of Schemer, Google’s solution for finding things to do

Last year we brought you our complete guide to in-flight WiFi in the USA, but we thought it was time we catered to the rest of the world and gave a full rundown of all the major airlines that offer WiFi today.

Services are a bit more fragmented than the US, as you might imagine given the wide geographical spread, but there’s still only really a handful of WiFi providers that can keep delivering your emails, LOLcats and the rest of the Web to you in the sky.

While the information below is as accurate at the time of writing as possible, new aircraft are being fitted out with WiFi, and new routes are being added all the time. It’s probably also worth noting that there are a few spots in which you might not be able to use WiFi, even if you’re on a flight that is equipped. While in Chinese airspace, things are still a bit problematic for example. But even this looks like it could soon be rectified.

Without further delay, 34 non-US airlines that offer WiFi:

Aer Lingus

Irish operator Aer Lingus operates a WiFi service on all its A330 aircraft on all its transatlantic routes, but it’s not yet available on European flights. The company notes that it is on the way though, starting later this year.

Aer Lingus uses Panasonic Avionics’ in-flight connectivity system and allows Business class passengers surf for free, a one hour pass costs €10.95/$14.95 or a 24 hour pass costs €19.95/$24.95 .

For that, you’ll get a download speed of approximately 1Mbps and an upload of around 5 Mbps. Obviously, with just 1Mbps downstream, don’t get too many aspirations of doing anything too demanding, but this is pretty much the case whoever is providing the service.

Like many other airlines, Aer Lingus also provides power sockets for keeping devices juiced up during flights, in both Business and Economy class.

Aeroflot

As Russia’s flag carrier, it’s no surprise that Aeroflot has a functioning WiFi service (provided by OnAir) ready and waiting to go on several of its aircraft.

At the beginning of last year, the company said it planned to have it installed on 26 of its A330 and Boeing 777 aircraft on long-haul flights by the end of 2013.

Pricing is set at $5/$10 for 3MB/10MB on a smartphone or at $10/$30 for access via a tablet or laptop. In this instance $10 gets you 10MB and $30 gets you 40MB, so don’t go downloading too many large email attachments.

Out of bundle pricing for most plans is set at $1.50 per MB, although it actually costs $1.70 extra per MB if you go for the cheapest 3MB smartphone-only option. Payment is taken by directly billing your card once the flight is over and your usage has been worked out. You’ll need to enter your VISA, MasterCard, American Express, JCB or Discover debit or credit card details to get access to the service.

Air France-KLM

Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced in May this year that they were both just beginning to start offering an in-flight WiFi service for passengers and would continue to test it out until the end of the year.

It’s currently being offered on two Boeing 777-300s in the fleets and the first flights to use it were one to New York for Air France and Panama for KLM.

Pricing for the service is set at €10.95 per hour or €19.95 for the duration of the flight. Naturally, it’s only operational once the aircraft has reached sufficient height – in this case, 20,000 feet.

Underpinning the service is Panasonic Avionics’ in-flight WiFi services.

British Airways

British Airways is one of the first airlines in Europe to allow its passengers to use their phones from take-off right through to landing, so it’s no surprise to see that it’s also already providing WiFi in flight, as well as text services, on some routes.

However, it’s still pretty limited right now with only customers flying the Club World London City route to JFK airport in New York able to access WiFi. For the record, these use BA’s A318 aircraft and fly the route twice per day.

Pricing for using the OnAir WiFi service on board are set in package deals, with overage charged per MB.

As with some other airlines that provide services via OnAir, passengers on these flights can also send and receive text messages, and emails, via their phone. A BA spokesperson confirmed that there is no charge for receiving an SMS in-flight, but that a roaming plan (on the customer’s own contract) is recommended for customers wanting to use the mobile services. Which is just pretty sensible mobile phone roaming advice, whether you’re on a plane or not.

Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific is another airline in this list that we were told was a Panasonic Avionics customer, but doesn’t seem to yet be ready to offer in-flight WiFi to its passengers. However, in September last year, the company’s general manager of Product told Australian Business Traveller that a timetable is nearly in place to start trialling the service.

It seems the stumbling block has been finding a way to work around the lack of connectivity in Chinese airspace. We’ve asked the company if these plans have been updated since they were first announced and will let you know if there is a new timetable.

Cebu Pacific Air

Cebu Pacific Air struck a deal to offer WiFi and GSM connectivity via OnAir’s services back in 2012, and has since been rolling it out for long-haul flights – which launched in the middle of last year.

The service is available on some Airbus A330 aircraft, and the airline now has the option to install WiFi on its fleet of short-haul Airbus A320 aircraft.

Dragonair

Dragonair, a subsidiary of Cathay Pacific is a Hong Kong-based carrier, which we were also told is a Panasonic Avionics in-flight WiFi customer. However, Dragonair’s in-flight entertainment page doesn’t make note of WiFi services,or clarify that they will be offered in future.

We expect that when Cathay Pacific has formalised its plans for providing passengers with WiFi, it shouldn’t be too long before it makes it across to Dragonair.

EgyptAir

EgyptAir began offering OnAir-provided WiFi on its fleet of A300-330 aircraft back in 2010, and was actually the second customer of OnAir, behind Oman Air.

As with other airlines here, it uses the full OnAir service that also offers telephony services over GSM (SMS, email) networks as well as in-flight WiFi.

Packages are priced from $5 for a smartphone-only plan of 3MB or from $10 for limited access from a tablet or laptop.

Emirates

Emirates is another airline that uses the OnAir system to allow passengers to browser the Internet, check email and generally be a bit more productive while soaring through the sky.

However, as with other airlines that use OnAir, prices can vary. On Emirates, WiFi price plans start from around $2.75 for smartphones and from $7.50 for tablets and laptops, depending on the amount of data you want to purchase, with a full selection of packages being made available once you have connected to the hotspot on board.

OnAir is available on the majority of Emirates’ A380 flights and a select number of Boeing B777 flights. A number of these also include in-flight GPRS/EDGE mobile services (for email or SMS) too, priced comparably to international roaming.

Etihad

Etihad Airways in-flight services are a little less restrictive than some of the others in this list and also allows full mobile service on some flights. Perhaps a little surprisingly, there aren’t restrictions on video streaming services either, according to a spokesperson for Etihad, but the use of VoIP services like Skype are not permitted. Then again, at only ten years old, Etihad could be expected to be a little more forward-thinking than others.

Etihad has two mobile and internet connectivity solutions available across its fleet:

Etihad Wi-Fly is currently available on 28 wide-body aircraft (Boeing 777, Airbus A330 and A340), and is being rolled out on further wide-body aircraft in the future.

The system, which is provided by Panasonic, includes WiFi and mobile phone connectivity (provided by AeroMobile), although calls to 1800/800 numbers are blocked, the company said. WiFi on board these planes will set you back $11.95 for a 2 hour pass, $17.95 for a 4 hour pass or $21.95 for access valid for the duration of your flight.

However, that isn’t the only in-flight connectivity options offered by Etihad, as it also runs the OnAir service on three wide-body, and 12 narrow-body aircraft. The system includes mobile phone connectivity, and internet connectivity (on wide-body aircraft only). It’s considerably more pricey than the Panasonic options though, and will cost $10 for a mobile (only) package with 4MB of data, $20 for a mobile package with 8MB of data, $20 for a laptop/tablet package with 8MB data or $40 for 16MB of data.

Clearly, while some streaming services might not be restricted, if you’re going down the OnAir route, it seems unlikely you’d want to pay for them. For example, streaming an HD 720p YouTube video for just five minutes uses around 37.5MB of data – somewhere around $90 at these prices.

EVA Air

EVA Air is another that shouldn’t quite be included in this list, but as it’s due to take charge of its brand new Boeing 777-300ER aircraft any day now, WiFi services should be available before the year is out.

Finnair

Finnair is a bit of an exception to this list really, in that it doesn’t currently offer in-flight WiFi, but it wants to.

Last year it carried out a trial using the OnAir service and Windows 8-powered HP ElitePad 900 tablets as portable inflight entertainment (IFE) devices, but Finnair’s director of customer entertainment, Jouni Oksanen, said that connectivity is “under discussion” but that the airline would rather adopt a time-based charging model, rather than the megapbyte-based charging of OnAir.

For now, Finnair passengers will have to make do with the traditional in-flight entertainment system.

Garuda Indonesia

Currently in service on its B777-300 ER aircraft, Garuda Indonesia plans to gradually introduce the same service on board the A330-200 and A330-300 fleets that operate on its domestic and international routes. As well as offering WiFi, the B777-300ER also offers live TV options.

Garuda Indonesia is another user of Panasonic’s services and offers WiFi to passengers on a a flat fee basis : one hour for $11.95 or one day for $21.95.

Obviously the airline changed its mind about using the OnAir service instead, as was announced back in 2012.

Gulf Air

Gulf Air’s in-flight WiFi is underpinned by Panasonic Avionics’ connectivity platform and is available on its A330 aircraft on long-haul flights.

Priced at $15 per hour for WiFi access, it’s not perhaps the cheapest option – but that does get you unlimited data usage. A 24 hour pass will set you back $30, but might work out better value if you plan on using it for more than just checking your email.

Hong Kong Airlines

Hong Kong Airlines is another carrier that uses the OnAir system, but it only does so in a limited way. Rather than operate it on all its routes and aircraft, Hong Kong airlines only lists it as offered on its A330-200 aircraft travelling between London and Hong Kong.

While this restricts it’s usefulness somewhat, it’s not to be sniffed at as the service is currently free, subject to bandwidth restrictions. With pricing for OnAir-powered services usually starting from $5 for just a few MBs, free certainly does sound pretty attractive.

Iberia

Iberia announced in July last year that it would soon be offering WiFi on a range of flights, but is still waiting on the go-ahead from the Spanish aviation authority for some of its aircraft, a spokesperson for the company told The Next Web.

All of Iberia’s A330 aircraft (five of which are already in service, and three more are set to arrive “in the next few months”. These planes largely fly from Madrid to the US (Miami, New York, Chicago and during summer, Boston).

Other than the A330, Iberia plans to offer WiFi on its refitted A340-600 craft. Four planes have been refitted already, and the remaining 13 will be equipped during the next year and a half. These planes generally fly to one of 14 Latin American destinations.

Icelandair

Icelandair is one of the few companies in this list to use an in-flight WiFi service not provided by Panasonic Avionics or OnAir, rather, it is delivered by US-based Row 44. Or rather, it would be if it had gone according to plan.

While Icelandair first announced the deal with Row 44 back in 2012 with a view to getting its fleet fully installed by Fall 2013, it seems that the time scale has slipped a bit. In September last year, CEO Birkir Holm Gudnason told the Apex Editor’s Blog that ”if the entire fleet is not equipped for Wi-Fi in 2014, it will be complete by the following year”. So, it should arrive any time now. Should.

Japan Airlines

Japan Airlines’ WiFi service operates on its flights between Tokyo (Narita) and New York/Los Angeles/Chicago/Frankfurt/London/Paris and on flights between Tokyo (Narita) and Jakarta.

Like other Panasonic Avionics’ provided in-flight connectivity, it’s priced at $11.95 for one hour’s access and $21.95 for 24 hours. However, you can save a little bit of these prices (making them $10.75 and 19.75 respectively) by using a JAL Card, JAL USA CARD, JAL / Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Credit Card.

To get going aboard, just connect up to the JAL SKY Wi-Fi hotspot and input your details.

Libyan Airlines

Libyan Airlines has been offering its passengers an in-flight GSM and WiFi service provided by OnAir for some time now, with the first A330 delivering WiFi connectivity in May 2013 on long-haul flights from Tripoli. As with other OnAir-provided services, pricing for the service is based on the amount of data you use. Mobile GSM services are also available, as well as on its A330-200 aircraft.

Lufthansa

Lufthansa uses the Panasonic Avionics system to offer in-flight WiFi to its customers on more than 90 percent of its long-haul flights under the branding of Lufthansa FlyNet, making it one of the best-equipped airlines for providing WiFi access (in a fleet sense). Its A380 Aircraft are also increasingly being fitted out with FlyNet.

Customers heading for, or over, China, will not be able to use the service while in Chinese airspace, and customers on flights to Cape Town are also not offered WiFi access, as there is insufficient satellite capacity on the route.

Mango Airlines

South African carrier Mango Airlines, which launched relatively recently back in 2006,  is the only airline in this list to offer WiFi services via the G-Connect service.

Pricing is a little lower than OnAir’s services too, at ZAR29 (~$3) for a 30MB in-flight bundle and ZAR49 (~$5) for a 60MB package. Pre-paid Top-ups can also be used to purchase in-flight WiFi and are available for between ZAR50 – ZAR200.

Norwegian

Norwegian is one of the few airlines on this list that actually excludes WiFi on long-haul flights, but does offer it on flights within Europe.

As of July 2013, 60 of its 66 Boeing 737-800 aircraft have WiFi on board and in September 2013, it nabbed the Passenger Choice Awards 2013 in the category “Best Inflight Connectivity and Communications”.

Interestingly, since introducing the WiFi service back in 2011, Norwegian continues to offer the service for free and hasn’t said how much it will cost, if it does indeed start charging.

Oman Air

Oman Air, official airline of the Sultanate of Oman, has been offering WiFi and GSM services aboard its A330 aircraft since 2010. Provided by OnAir, access is charged according to what kind of device (smartphone or tablet/laptop) and how much data is used, with prices starting from around $5.

Between January 2012 and January last year, the airline said customer take up of in-flight WiFi had increased 120 percent.

Philippines Airlines (PAL)

Philippines Airlines started offering its WiFi service powered by OnAir in July 2013 on long-haul flights using a fleet of retrofitted Airbus A330-343s and Boeing B777-300ERs.

Bonus fact: PAL was OnAir’s 50th customer.

Qatar Airways

Qatar Airways’ WiFi service is available on all of its B787 Dreamliner aircraft and, like others airlines in this list, also offers inflight mobile services on select A319, A320, A321 and its Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  As the service is provided by OnAir Internet, it costs roughly the same as any other operator using the system – i.e., with costs being comparable to international roaming for texting or emailing via your phone. Costs for accessing the OnAir hotspot are available on the portal on-board, but are in-line with other airlines in this list that use OnAir services.

Royal Jordanian

Royal Jordanian airlines is another to use the OnAir in-flight GSM and WiFi system.

It’s available on 11 of the airline’s Boeing 787 planes, but there’s a catch – they aren’t due to come into service until towards the end of 2014.

Saudia Airlines

Saudia Airlines uses the same OnAir in-flight connectivity package for calls, texts, emailing and Internet access as many of the others in this list.

Currently available for its Airbus A330 aircraft and selected Boeing 777-300ER aircraft. As with other OnAir users, GSM (calls, SMS, emailing) activity is charged directly to your phone bill, while a credit/debit card is required for WiFi access. The service is priced from $5 for 3MB of data on a smartphone, and from $15 for 10MB on a laptop or tablet.

SAS

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) is currently in the process of trialling on-board Internet access on its 737-800 fleet that fly within Europe.

As it’s still in its infancy for SAS, the in-flight WiFi service might not be available on every flight yet, but if you’re a EuroBonus member or SAS Plus or SAS Business traveller, WiFi is free.

For passengers that aren’t either of those things, WiFi access is priced at $10 (€8) for flights within the Nordic region and at $15 for flights within the rest of Europe.

Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines is “progressively” making WiFi available across its entire A380 and Boeing 777-300ER fleet of aircraft. And as with many of the others, it’s provided by OnAir, so the same SMS, data roaming and WiFi services are available.

While it brings the same features, it also brings roughly the same pricey charges: 26MB of internet access for $29.95 or 10MB for $11.95. It’s worth noting, again, that OnAir allows you to continue browsing uninterrupted even if you exceed your agreed data plan by charging you an excess, priced at $0.15 per 0.5MB. If you agree to carry on browsing once your data has run out, the excess is charged directly to your credit card.

Singapore Airlines also offers in-seat power on its A380, A330-300 and Boeing 777-300ER aircraft in all classes.  A universal adaptor is required, except on the A330-300.

TAP Portugal

The Portuguese airline TAP has been offering in-flight WiFi since July last year.

At introduction, the WiFi was only available on some of its A330 aircraft on transatlantic routes between Europe and north and south America, but it planned to use the OnAir WiFi service on its fleet of A350 planes too, once they take to the skies.

The service  allows users to access the Internet via WiFi from mobile devices, tablet and laptops alike and costs a €6 for 4MB of data and €12 for 10MB. Obviously, with these kind of prices, we’d expect to see any particularly demanding uses of the service, like streaming video, off-limits.

Thai Airways

Thai Airways first announced it was launching a WiFi service back in 2012, but has since been caught up in some regulatory red-tape that delayed things for a fair amount of time.

However, in August last year, Thai Airways received permission to go ahead and start offering the services, so it shouldn’t be long now.

Transaero Airlines

Transaero Airlines is another carrier based in Russia that offers WiFi on a range of its flights. In fact, it has done so since 2012 and it’s currently available on onboard 13 aircraft of the airline including seven Boeing 747-400, four Boeing 777-300 and two Boeing 737 which serve as corporate retainers.

Transaero Airlines’ WiFi service is currently going through an expansion phase that should see it made available on a fleet of 30 mid-haul and long-haul aircraft by “the beginning of 2014″.  The service is increasingly available on routes between Moscow and popular domestic and international destinations including Sochi, London, Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, Dubai, Vienna, Yerevan, Shymkent, Aktau, Almaty, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Yekaterinburg.

The company uses Panasonic Avionics’ in-flight connectivity system for some of its aircraft (Boeing 747 and Boeing 777 long-haul routes), while other aircraft use services provided by Route 44.

Pricing for the service on long-haul flights costs RUB 800 (about $25) for the duration of the flight, or RUB 400 (about $12) per hour. Passengers on medium range flights on Boeing 737NG aircraft will pay RUB 600 (about $18) for all-flight Internet connection or RUB 300 ($ 9) per hour.

Turkish Airlines

WiFi was announced for some Turkish Airlines routes in March last year (alongside LiveTV nonetheless, a first in Europe) and is provided via the PLANET IFE Platform, a Global Communication Suite System developed by Panasonic Avionics.

Turkish Airlines is one of a small handful in this list that offer the service for free to its passengers. Whether this will remain the same in the future as more users want to access the service remains to be seen.

Additionally, and like other airlines in this list, Turkish Airlines also offers inflight mobile services at around international roaming cost.

Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic is another airline in this list that, sort of, offers access to the Internet while in the air. However, rather than use OnAir or Panasonic, the company uses the Aeromobile service, which allows passengers to send texts, emails, make calls and connect to the Internet through data roaming. And while this can be used to tether to a tablet, laptop or other device, tethering without a service plan in place can be a very expensive decision indeed, as Virgin Atlantic also warns.

Aeromobile is available on all half of Virgin Atlantic’s fleet based at London Gatwick and selected aircraft at London Heathrow and Manchester airports.

Featured Image Credit – Getty Images

To many people, Google's social media platform, Google+, remains a conundrum. Is it a Facebook competitor? Is it Google's efficient way of consolidating its power disparate services into a cohesive whole? Is it an ASCII penis generator?

One thing it might be is a brand new way to get in trouble. Matthew A. Sawtell sends in this story of one man whose dip into Google's social media pool resulted in his arrest.

Prosecutors say Thomas Gagnon violated a restraining order by sending his former girlfriend an invitation to join his Google Plus circle.

But Gagnon’s attorney says his client has no idea how the woman he once planned to marry — popping the question with a $4,000 ring earlier this month — got such an invitation, suggesting that it might have been sent by a robot.

Gagnon's attorney may not be far off. If Gagnon's estranged ex used other Google services like Gmail to communicate with Gagnon back in happier days, there's a good chance she was inserted into a list of potential Google+ "friends*" in order to easily insert them into Circles.

Then again, how Google generates its suggested contacts is considered a black art by much of the population, although the prevailing notion is that if Google owns it and you use it, you're on the list. The judge presiding over Gagnon's somewhat unexpected appearance in court had this bit of insight on the social media platform.

A Salem District Court judge yesterday admitted he wasn’t sure exactly how such invitations work on Google’s social media site…

That didn't stop him from setting Gagnon's bail at $500 and ordering him to stay away from his ex-girlfriend.

Gagnon's attorney continued to maintain that Google+ auto-violated the restraining order. The judge countered by expressing his doubt of Gagnon's ability to follow court orders, suggesting something went a bit off the rails during the original hearing.

Whether or not Google+ attempted to widen Gagnon's social circle by including a woman who had taken out a restraining order against him is still unclear. What's perfectly clear, however, is that the situation behind Gagnon's current legal problems escalated very quickly.

On Friday, Gagnon gave his momentary fiancée a $4,000 engagement ring. The next day (Saturday) she broke up with him. By Monday, she had taken out a restraining order. By Thursday, Gagnon was back facing the judge after his allegedly inadvertently "mailing out" a Google+ invitation to his ex. (This itself was the result of some speedy escalation. Gagnon's ex took a printout of the invitation to the police who had him in custody less than ninety minutes later.)

What could have provoked this expeditious onslaught of small, personal calamities? Details are sparse, but the article signs off with these lines.

It’s not clear from court papers whether the ring has been returned to Gagnon.

A status hearing in the case is set for Feb. 6.

If Gagnon wants to stay on the good side of the law, he should probably just unplug from the internet. Plenty of social media services mine contact lists and are more than happy to mass mail out invitations with a single click of the "accept" button.

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Lauren Goode

Almost everyone in or near the tech industry knows that, every January, a monster event called the Consumer Electronics Show takes over Las Vegas for about a week. It’s one of the biggest trade shows in the country, and it dumps something like an extra 150,000 souls into the city, making everything from bathrooms to cab lines miserably crowded. I am one of them and I was there, yet again, this week.

All those folks descend on Las Vegas to peruse miles of trade show booths full of electronic gadgets, from giant TVs to tiny earbuds; to court customers and vendors; and maybe do a little gambling and partying. There are even tours of the massive show floor for visitors from outside of the industry, led by perky guides carrying pennants, kind of like the ones you see when busloads of tourists alight at the Eiffel Tower (the real one, not the copy down the road in Vegas).

But outside of the world of regular CES attendees, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about the big show. Lots of tech aficionados, investors, and just plain citizens imagine that CES is the place where the most important, trend-setting, society-impacting new tech products are unveiled.

It isn’t.

To read or watch some of the media coverage of the show, it might seem as though the entire tech and electronics industry worked all year to prepare sensational new things just to launch at CES.

They don’t.

In fact, while CES has plenty of value for the tech industry — just as every industry’s big trade show does — it simply isn’t the stage where the most important new things debut.

In the 22 years I’ve been attending CES — and a now-defunct, similarly huge Vegas tech trade show called Comdex — I have seen hundreds or thousands of new products introduced. But most have been incremental improvements on existing hits, elaborations on existing trends, accessories for hardware that debuted earlier and elsewhere, or ideas that went nowhere.

Save one, all of the biggest, game-changing products during my CES tenure were introduced to the world at other events, away from the cacophony of CES. Their creators chose to reveal them at times that are far more propitious in the annual tech sales cycle than in January, right after the big holiday season and months away from the important back-to-school season.

Did the iPod debut at CES? Nope. How about Windows 95? Nope. Google search, Facebook, the iPad, the first Android phone? Nope, nope, nope and nope. Microsoft’s historic first tablet computer, the Surface? Nope again.

In fact, seven years ago this month, in 2007, Apple — absent as always from CES — lured most of the influential tech reporters and analysts away from Las Vegas right in the middle of CES to watch the late Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone in San Francisco. It was a true game-changing moment that swamped anything that year at CES.

Apple’s rivals absorbed the lesson, and many more started holding their own product-intro events away from CES. Microsoft even killed off its huge, expensive booth at the show.

The one really big electronics product in recent years that did use CES as a launch platform was HDTV. For the TV makers, who were there long before Silicon Valley showed up, CES remains a prime stage. But it took years and years of repeated flogging of HDTV at CES before it took off.

Now, the same TV makers are pushing a higher-resolution type of TV, called 4K or Ultra High Definition (UHD). But, if it succeeds, it will also take years. (This year, some were also pushing an odd new idea that struck many attendees I spoke to as at best a niche — curved TVs.)

So, even when it is the launching pad for something big, CES tends to be a slow cooker, not the sort of sizzling product event Silicon Valley is accustomed to, where a new gadget or app or service is introduced, becomes available a day or a week later, and rapidly sells millions of units or has millions of downloads or signups.

This isn’t to say that CES has no value. A lot of networking and a lot of business is done there. Some genuinely interesting new products are shown behind closed doors to a select few, in meeting rooms and hotel suites — the sub rosa CES. Those are the main reasons I attend.

And this year, as always, small companies showed off their takes on existing trends, and some of them are interesting — like better, cheaper 3-D printers or ways to remotely monitor and control things around your house, or to monitor your health and fitness.

And some big companies made incremental improvements to existing product types, like a Lenovo laptop with a changeable, contextual bar of virtual control buttons above the keyboard; and a Toshiba laptop capable of 4K resolution.

But for all those folks on those tours of the main CES floor, remember this: You are unlikely to see the next huge, disruptive tech product while trailing that perky guide.

Correction: An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly said it had been six years since the iPhone was unveiled. In fact, it has been seven years. The article has been updated to reflect the change.

More Articles About CES 2014:

• I Came Not to Be Buried by CES, But to Be Dazed by It
• CES, the Media Version, Hosted by Michael Kassan
• Marissa Mayer in Las Vegas, Giant TVs and CES Ghosts: Re/code on TV
• Mossberg: CES Is Not What You Think It Is
• Re/code’s Not-So-Quantified CES, Including Critical Jerky Data
• The CES Startup Hardware Report
• BlackBerry Says Keyboards Are the Future
• Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf on China, Cars and Wearables
• Three Things From CES You Should Know About: Thursday Edition
• Tactile Typing on Glass With a Magic Trick of a Keyboard
• Razer Unveils Nabu Smartband
• Three Things From CES: Wednesday Edition
• Behold: Valve’s First Steam Machines
• Samsung Planning More Wearables for Launch of Next Galaxy S, Galaxy Note
• Sony CEO Kaz Hirai on 4K TVs, Wearables and Hanging With Dan Loeb
• It’s Official: Everyone Is Exploring Wearables — Including Lenovo
• Purple People Eaters: Liveblogging Marissa Mayer’s CES Event
• Kaz Hirai on Why Sony’s Pay TV Bid Can Succeed
• Three Things From CES You Should Know About: Tuesday Edition
• T-Mobile CEO on Being Thrown Out of AT&T’s Party: “I Just Wanted to Hear Macklemore”
• Sony, T-Mobile Team Up Again to Bring Waterproof Xperia Z1s to U.S.
• Yahoo’s Mayer Hits CES to Tout Ads, Tech Star Pogue and, Natch, Herself
• First Look: Samsung Goes to Work With the Galaxy NotePro, TabPro
• AT&T’s Ralph De La Vega on T-Mobile, Toll-Free Data and More
• Asus CEO Teases Padfone X Phone-Tablet Hybrid, Coming Soon to AT&T
• First Look: The New Pebble Steel Smartwatch
• In Wireless First, AT&T Says It Is Ready to Offer “Toll-Free” Data
• Three Things From CES: Monday Edition
• First Look: Parrot’s Crazy Jumping Drones
• Google Teams with Audi, GM, Honda, Hyundai and Nvidia for In-car Android
• Mike Bell Explains Intel’s Big Bet on Small Devices
• Nvidia Debuts 192-Core Mobile Chip, the Tegra K1
• “Roku TVs” Coming This Year
• Connected Cars Driving 2014 CES to Become More of an Auto Show
• Amid the Hype, Remember the CES Gadget Graveyard
• Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on Rekindling the Chipmaker’s Innovative Process

Target said names, email addresses and other data was stolen and could affect up to 70 million customers. This disclosure comes on top of a payment card breach outlined in December.

It’s all about home invasion at CES 2014 as companies are continuing to develop products geared toward securing the growing connected home audience. But with so many similar products on the market, how do you know which gadget is right for you?

We met up with several smart home systems designed to help enrich your ever-connected lifestyle and to determine which product is best suited for you.

If you rent your apartment: Canary

Now that we’ve finally seen the Canary in person, the product is as darling as its overwhelming Indiegogo success would indicate. The device is about the size of a 1-liter water bottle, and you can place it anywhere that overlooks the majority of the room you’re monitoring.

The neatest thing about the Canary is the user-friendly app interface. It’s extremely simple to program the device to send alerts when something’s amiss, such as excessive noise, motion, or rapid temperature changes.

If Canary recognizes anything strange, it will send a notification to your smart phone and give you options to call your backup contact, the police, or ignore. This streamlines the process with the hopes that you won’t panic too much if an emergency occurs in your home while you’re gone.

Canary can also record videos of various events and store them in the cloud for future reference. The company will also offer various tiers of subscriptions for extra cloud storage.

Price: $199 pre-order, with an estimated delivery date of July 2014

If you are a control freak: Piper

Of all the smart home security systems we checked out at CES, the Piper is one that gives you the most control over what goes on in your house. Just like Canary, you’ll get a camera and motion surveillance, while the Piper’s fisheye lens let you drag to change perspective and pinch to zoom to get a good view of nearly every corner of the room.

Those who like to fiddle with extra controls will also be happy to know that Piper can be integrated with Z-Wave sensors to add extra security around noise, motion, and power. Even if the Piper camera does not oversee a door or light, as long as you add a Z-Wave sensor, you can turn any object into an Internet-connected device.

You can also set Piper into various modes, such as “Work,” “Vacation,” or “Home” so it knows what to look out for depending on where you will be. You might not need to know if the light comes on or off while you’re home or at work and the kids will return from school, but it might be a good alert to have if everyone will be out on vacation for a week.

Price: $239, available now in North America

If you already own several Internet of Things products: Staples Connect

Maybe you already have a ton of Internet-connected gadgets in your home and don’t want to be bothered to switch between apps to monitor each device. That’s where the Staples Connect hub comes in. The device consolidates all your Internet of Things products into one machine so you can check on everything from one app – from making sure the lights are on by sundown to adjusting the temperature to conserve as much energy as possible.

Staples is continuing to develop partnerships with existing smart gadgets. Current roster includes Honeywell, Philips, GE, and Doorbot.

Price: $139 for a starter kit, available now

Related: Revolv review: An affordable smart home hub with one app to rule them all

If you like being told what to do: Mother

For those who aren’t bothered by the idea of paying something to become your live-in “Mother,” Sen.se’s lifestyle management device might be just the system to get you living properly in your home.

While it doesn’t actually turn your home “smart,” it turns everyday objects into Quantified Self products. For example, if you want to make sure you drink at least 8 ounces of water and take your pills daily, you can stick a Motion Cookie onto the item and Mother will monitor how often you are drinking and taking your pills.

All this data also gets turned into a visually-stunning launchpad where you can check your behavior over time. Since the cookies have different color tabs, you can also assign them to different members of your family. The Cookies can also be re-programmed to monitor different activities, in case you want it to detect unanticipated door motion when you’re away from home versus reminders to take your daily medicine.

Price: $222 for starter kit with four Cookies, extra $99 for additional set of four Cookies, shipping spring 2014

If you’re sick and tired of “Quantified Self” data: Ambient Devices’ Joule

While it may be cool for some to see overwhelming details about their daily habits, Ambient Devices’ Joule smart meter monitor simplifies the data into something you can easily interpret: colors.

Rather than a smartphone push notification, the Joule connects with smart meters and glows in green, yellow, or red to denote the level of energy consumption in your house. The portable device also has a screen that tells you the exact cost of energy usage in real time, but you can also turn it face down to see just the colors.

“The portability allows users to walk around their house, play around with different appliances and investigate how each affect their home’s energy usage,” Ambient Devices’ CEO Pritesh Gandhi said.

Since its pilot tests in August 2013, Gandhi said companies have seen a 20 percent voluntary decrease in energy consumption during peak events (when the Joule would glow red).

The hope is that the colors will help incentivize people to use energy more efficiently, thus helping utility providers monitor power consumption.

Price: Unfortunately, this is not a product you can buy; Ambient Devices is currently working with North American utility companies to offer the Joule as part of the package that comes with the meter service. At the moment, the Joule is primarily available in California, a few mid-Atlantic states, and Ontario, Canada.

13-year old Logan Laplante shares how hacking his education is helping him achieve his goals. This video was posted almost a year ago and went viral soon after, but just in case you have not see it yet I'm posting it here. (Thanks to Jay Pitman for the tip.) Back in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson asked us to ponder a fundamental question in this TED Talk: "What's education for?" The implication being that surely one's education is about much more than just preparing to compete for the "best job" possible several years in the future. "Most education is orientated, for better or worse, towards making a living rather than making a life," Laplante says.

The Pursuit of Happiness
Laplante says at the start of his talk that if you ask a young child what they want to be when they grow up, they often reply innocently with "I want to be happy." This really resonated with me, and I'll tell you why. When I was a 4th grader at Central School in Seaside, Oregon I remember the day our teacher Mr. Doyle asked us to think about what we wanted to be when we grow up and to write our answer down on a piece of paper (you know, the kind of lined paper with chucks of wood still in it). My answer was "I want to be happy." At that time in my life I was often yelled at by my troubled father at home. Many nights I was not happy at all, even if I did not know what happiness really was. On some nights I was down right miserable. Anyway, Mr. Doyle collected the papers and then began to read some of the short, poorly spelled answers to the class. Johnny wants to be a fireman. Susan wants to be a teacher. Steve wants to be a professional football player. And Garr wants to be happy. "Be happy!?" The whole class erupts in laughter. Ha! Ha! Ha! I felt like Charlie Brown at the beginning of every Peanuts TV show ever. I am sure if my own dog was in the classroom, he too would have mocked me. It was humiliating. I guess I did not understand that game. For the next few years, then, I would learn to feel guilty about just wanting to be happy, until around the age of 16 when I finally came out of my shell at school and had a very happy home life. It was my beautiful mother and a couple of caring, wonderful high school teachers who helped me learn to be resilient and that happiness was indeed a worthy lifelong pursuit.



Links
• Twitter: @loganlaplante
• Hackschooling FaceBook page
• Dr. Roger Walsh

At first, T-Mobile's "UnCarrier" initiative was designed to inject some attitude into the company's stodgy public image. But as the company continues to roll out new initiatives, it's forcing Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to compromise their own strategies in order to play catch-up. Which is terrific for consumers no matter how you look at it.

Operation UnCarrier entered its fourth phase on Wednesday as T-Mobile announced it will pay individuals and families who are willing to dump AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint for its service. T-Mobile will pay up to $300 for their old devices, and the company will also pay off customers’ final bills and early termination fees from their previous carriers, up to $350 per line, in the form of a prepaid MasterCard.

“We’re giving families a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card',” John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile, said in a press release. “Carriers have counted on staggered contract end dates and hefty early termination fees to keep people bound to them forever. But now families can switch to T-Mobile without paying a single red cent to leave them behind.”

Trendsetting As A Defensive Strategy

Legere’s boldness has driven a massive reversal in T-Mobile’s fortunes over the last 16 months. Since Legere assumed the magenta throne in September 2012, T-Mobile has become the upstart of the U.S. telecommunications scene, killing off the traditional two-year wireless contract last March (UnCarrier 1.0), introducing the ability to upgrade devices twice a year last July (UnCarrier 2.0), and finally killing off roaming fees in October (UnCarrier 3.0). 

The plan seems to be paying off for Big Pink. Citing a study by Baird Equity, Legere said more potential switchers are considering T-Mobile than any other wireless company, and the company claimed more than 1.6 million new customers this past quarter. In the same quarter last year, T-Mobile lost 32,000 customers. Not a bad turnaround for a company that was almost acquired by AT&T in late 2011.

After T-Mobile introduced its twice-a-year upgrade plan last July, AT&T and Verizon only needed a month to introduce and institute their own efforts—Next and Edge, respectively. Then, when rumors of T-Mobile’s plan to pay customers’ early termination fees surfaced over the holidays, AT&T on January 3 said it will offer any new customers who switch from T-Mobile a $200 credit per phone line and the chance to trade in their smartphones for up to $250.

The offers from AT&T and Verizon aren’t quite as good as T-Mobile’s, but they're better than nothing. And that’s exactly what T-Mobile wanted all along: To force the hands of the other carriers, despite technically being less popular than the other three major carriers when it comes to smartphone sales.

As T-Mobile continues to evolve its own business strategy—and improve its wireless spectrum—customers across all carriers will enjoy the effects of increased competition in the telecommunications space. But T-Mobile’s latest chapter in its UnCarrier initiative may be its most fruitful yet. According to Nielsen Mobile Insights, up to 40 percent of families hold back from switching carriers because of high early termination fees. An online poll from GigaOM showed how 78% of respondents would switch to T-Mobile if their early termination fee was paid off.

“We are either going to take over this whole industry, or these bastards will change and we’ll still be wildly successful,” Legere said (via The Verge). “I’m going to love watching the peckers scream.”

Images courtesy of T-Mobile

Grillbot Featured this year at CES 2014 , there is the Grillbot, an easy-to-use and fully automatic robot that cleans the grill with just a push of the button.     Ethan Woods in the inventor of the Grillbot and says he came up with the idea after getting sick and tired of cleaning his [...]

The selection of a CEO to take over Microsoft is not expected to come before February, according to multiple sources, due to a range of issues, including the packed schedule of the software giant’s chairman Bill Gates this month.

That includes his annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a major communication from the philanthropic organization that comes out every January, this year on the 20th. That will be followed by his attendance at Davos, the annual global gathering in Switzerland where major public figures discuss a range of key policy issues. Gates looms large at the event, which he uses to focus attention on the various initiatives of the foundation.

Gates is a key player in the CEO search, despite the high profile of another director, John Thompson, who is heading the search process. “This is a Gates search, even though the board is very involved,” said one source with knowledge of the situation. “But nothing is going to happen without him, especially since he will be much more involved in the company going forward.”

In addition, Microsoft announces its second-quarter earnings on January 23, which also requires a lot of attention from its top execs, including outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, who is also on its board. And, of course, the company and the tech world has been focused on CES, the yearly consumer electronics event taking place this week in Las Vegas, making any announcement unlikely.

Already, there has been a bit of a slowdown in the process due to the holidays — which a person close to the board called a “breather” to me — especially after Thompson released a statement in mid-December that basically said that.

“We’re moving ahead well, and I expect we’ll complete our work in the early part of 2014,” he wrote, in an attempt to tamp down the intense speculation around who would be the new leader of the company and also assuage the internal tension within the company’s ranks to name a CEO.

And while many thought that could mean by January, sources close to the situation said the process is more likely to extend at least into February and perhaps longer, although the hope is for sooner than later. When Ballmer announced he was leaving, he said the selection of a new CEO could take a year.

No one at Microsoft wants that. “There has to be clarity, because everyone is in limbo and swimming in place, waiting to see who gets the job,” said one high-ranking exec. “With everything moving so quickly in tech, we can hardly afford to take too much more time.”

One of the problems has been the swirling issues around the candidates. Earlier this week, after many non-denial denials, Ford CEO Alan Mulally finally made it explicit that he would stay at the car giant through 2014.

“I would like to end the Microsoft speculation because I have no other plans to do anything other than serve Ford,” Mulally said in an interview with AP. “You don’t have to worry about me leaving.”

Mulally’s decline as frontrunner was already clear in December, as was much reported (including by me), returning focus on other candidates. Internally, the leading one is enterprise chief Satya Nadella, who is a favorite among employees due to his geekier cred. Still, there are worries that Nadella does not have significant enough business and sales expertise.

The other internal candidates are strategy head Tony Bates and, a more distant third, Nokia’s Stephen Elop. Bates has more credibility in the business arena, for sure, although is new to the company, as is Elop.

Externally, there are a number of candidates, although none has risen to prominence publicly. In an update late last year, Gates had noted at its shareholders meeting that the new CEO had to be able to lead a complex and highly technical organization.

It’s a tall order. I had named Patrick Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, as a possible pick, for example. The dream CEO for many inside Microsoft is one of its former top execs, Paul Maritz, who was Gelsinger’s predecessor at VMware and now runs its Pivotal spinoff. He has talked with Gates, said sources, but has nixed himself for the job.

Another name that is mentioned by many both internally and externally is Thompson, who is former CEO of Symantec. “He could pull a Dick Cheney,” said one person, referring to the former Vice President, who led the VP search for former President George W. Bush and ended up taking the job, in speculation I hear all the time.

But let me be clear — this is the longest of long shots and perhaps more fodder from the rumor mill that will continue to churn until Microsoft makes its pick.

Other than that, in his letter, Thompson said that, “we identified over 100 possible candidates, talked with several dozen, and then focused our energy intensely on a group of about 20 individuals, all extremely impressive in their own right. As you would expect, as this group has narrowed, we’ve done deeper research and investigation, including with the full Board.”

Narrow perhaps, but not done — and so the search continues.

Honey, they shrunk the cable box: Netgear introduced a new TV dongle called the NeoMediacast, also known as NTV300D, at CES Monday that seems partially inspired by Google’s Chromecast. The NTV300D is going to be sold to pay TV operators, who may lease or resell it to their customers. In other words, Netgear aiming to replace the cable box with a USB flash drive-sized stick that gets plugged into a TV’s HDMI port.

The NTV300D is powered by Android 4.2, which should allow operators to install a number of Android apps. It’s unclear whether operators would have the option to also access Google Play. Google has been making a push to get more operators to use Android, and offer their customers Google services like YouTube and Chrome on their TV sets.

In fact, the company is in the process of formally replacing the Google TV brand with more flexible branding focused on Android and Google services. However, Netgear’s NTV300D data sheet doesn’t mention Google Play or other Google services, and some operators have in the past resisted the idea of adding an open app store to their devices.

On the hardware front, the NTV300D sports 802.11ac connectivity, expandable storage through a MicroSD port, Bluetooth or RF support for remote control and even an IR blaster to integrate with legacy devices. And there’s one more feature that makes the dongle look a little bit like Chromecast: Netgear added Miracast capability to the device to enable content mirroring from compatible mobile devices and PCs.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer Q4: New Platforms and OTT’s Dynamic Duo Dominated

AT&T

After indicating for two years that it was interested in such a service, AT&T is announcing Monday its plan for “sponsored data,” in which businesses can pick up the bill for consumers using certain apps or services.

For consumers, it’s the data equivalent of making a toll-free call with the business providing the service picking up whatever number of megabytes are consumed.

AT&T is launching the service Monday, with sponsored content expected to begin showing up during the first quarter.

While new to U.S. cellular customers, Wi-Fi providers Gogo and Boingo have been offering similar options. On Virgin America, for example, visits to eBay are free to the consumer, with the online marketplace figuring having a captive shopping audience is worth the cost of underwriting the service.

Facebook also worked with a number of wireless carriers overseas to offer customers free access to the social network as part of its Facebook Zero program.

Among the first to sign up to use AT&T’s sponsored data service is United Health Group, which plans to use sponsored data to deliver educational videos and other healthcare info to its members.

Businesses could also use the option to pay the data cost of workers’ use of certain apps in cases where employees typically pay their own cell phone bills.

One of the concerns around cellular carriers offering sponsored data is whether such services may get priority, but AT&T says sponsored content will be delivered at the same speed and performance level as non-sponsored data.

AT&T had said since 2012 it was interested in offering the service, but had to do a bunch of work on its end to make the service possible, with some help from Amdocs and Ericsson. Also, sponsored data only works on one of AT&T’s fastest two networks (LTE or HSPA+) so it had to also make sure customers in nearly all areas could get one of those two services.

The carrier also said the option to sponsor data will be available to anyone that is interested, with the only requirements being to adhere to guidelines put out by the Mobile Marketing Association and CTIA-The Wireless Association.

Sponsored data is just one of several things that AT&T is announcing Monday as part of a developer forum it holds annually in conjunction with CES. The company has promised to talk more about its in-car efforts, among other things. Stay tuned for more updates from that event, which is just getting underway.

Update, 9:35 a.m. PT: Well, that didn’t take long.

Consumer group Free Press is out with a statement condemning the new option as a bad idea.

“Caps are supposed to help wireless carriers manage congestion,” Free Press policy director Matt Wood said in a statement. “But if getting a big check from another company suddenly makes AT&T’s congestion concerns go away, that shows data caps aren’t necessary in the first place. Caps are merely another way to pad AT&T’s profits.”

More Articles About CES 2014:

• Yahoo’s Mayer Hits CES to Tout Ads, Tech Star Pogue and, Natch, Herself
• First Look: Samsung Goes to Work With the Galaxy NotePro, TabPro
• AT&T’s Ralph De La Vega on T-Mobile, Toll-Free Data and More
• Asus CEO Teases Padfone X Phone-Tablet Hybrid, Coming Soon to AT&T
• First Look: The New Pebble Steel Smartwatch
• In Wireless First, AT&T Says It Is Ready to Offer “Toll-Free” Data
• Three Things From CES: Monday Edition
• First Look: Parrot’s Crazy Jumping Drones
• Google Teams with Audi, GM, Honda, Hyundai and Nvidia for In-car Android
• Nvidia Debuts 192-Core Mobile Chip, the Tegra K1
• “Roku TVs” Coming This Year
• Connected Cars Driving 2014 CES to Become More of an Auto Show
• Amid the Hype, Remember the CES Gadget Graveyard
• Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on Rekindling the Chipmaker’s Innovative Process

Personal 3D printing isn’t the only industry that’s getting more crowded. Huge Japanese trading company Mitsubishi will begin selling a professional-grade metal laser sintering 3D printer in North America this month, 3Ders reports. The printer is made by Matsuura and starts at roughly $850,000. Laser sintering, which uses a laser to seal together powdered particles of a material, has yet to be adapted to the desktop, meaning large, professional machines like these are the norm.

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Where are we, 2 and a half years since we started?

[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

It all started in May 2011, when Google officially announced WebRTC to the world. Since then, a frenzy began. Two and a half years later (give or take a month), I think it is time to look at where we are.

While there are many ways to look at it, I want to focus on two main data points that I have. I think they are interesting.

-

My blog has become a place where people come to read about WebRTC. While I am trying on other topics from time to time, the “main attraction” is WebRTC. Where are the people who visit my blog come from?

The statistics above are from Google Analytics from the span of 2013. Most of the visitors come from the US, and then from UK, India, France and Germany. Israel is there as well – being my home-base, it is somewhat comforting (more on that later).

For some reason, China is there, but too low I think. I don’t have much visibility in what Chinese are doing with this technology, which is… interesting.

Countries that didn’t make it to the top-10, but are in the top-20 and have some interesting vendors and activity around WebRTC include Spain, Russia, Netherlands and Sweden.

While we’re at it, looking at the mix for the last two months of 2013 alone, there is not much difference in the top-20, though there are a few movements along the chart.

-

More interesting is the list of vendors that I am now monitoring.

This list now includes over 300 vendors…

What can we see here? The top-10 countries with WebRTC vendors are similar to the top-10 countries viewing my blog, though China and Australia are missing.

US is taking the lead, but it seems like the “long tail” of countries in this chart is smaller than that of my viewers.

I would also say that while a lot of the focus is in the US (and San Francisco to be more specific), WebRTC is actually a worldwide phenomenon already.

-

There’s much more data that I am now looking at. Some will be available later this month for those who purchased my report. Other bits and pieces will find their way to this blog, or to the research related updates that I am planning to post regularly – but more on that, on another post.

Happy New Year to us all. May 2014 be a year of even more action around WebRTC.

 

The post Where in the World is WebRTC? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

One night, a decade ago, I was on a sales trip. My wife called me up to complain about the $1,700 dinner that I had enjoyed in Bangkok. Of course she was mostly concerned because she knew that I was in Washington, DC, not Thailand. A copy of my credit card had made it there, however. The next day. Someone using my fake card also tried to buy over $2,000 in antiques in Singapore. Fortunately, the credit-card folks were on top of the situation and my only real inconvenience was waiting a few days for a new credit card to show up.

That time I was a victim of one of the then-high-tech pocketable skimmers that unscrupulous employees used while settling your bill at a restaurant. That incident happened long after most businesses quit using carbon-copy credit-card receipts where we had to worry about tearing up the copies that carried our full card number.

Fast forward ten years, and things have gotten worse, not better. The New York Times recently reported that Target is investigating a huge security breach. According to a December 19 update on the Target problem by security reporter Brian Krebs, as many as “40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been impacted between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013.” After first claiming that ATM PINs weren't involved, Target later conceded they were stolen, too.

A Hack On Small-Town America

If you have read some of my articles on ReadWrite, you might know that I live in fairly rural area along the North Carolina coast. I have joked that putting a hand-lettered sheet at the main intersection is a better way of getting information broadcast in our county than Twitter.

Our area is one of those places where you likely recognize the cashier at the grocery store and some places they even remember your name. It is not a place that you think might be a target for high-tech crime, but it turns out that we were an extremely inviting target for organized criminals.

A very large number of area residents were victimized in the last few months. Some estimates suggest that hundreds of people in the area had their ATM cards compromised in recent weeks. That is a lot of folks when the largest town in the area has 3,600 year-round residents. The issue became very personal when in the space of a week both my wife’s and my ATM card numbers were used fraudulently.

This came on top of a credit-card compromise that snared a rarely used card just a month ago. In dealing with these situations, we got a lot of misleading information. Multiple people who were helping us fix the problem claimed that sophisticated new skimmers could read the magnetic stripe on your card without it even being out of your pocket.

I did some research on the Internet and found the information available to be almost as confusing. Just to make us feel better as we were trying to understand the situation, we ordered some credit-card protector sleeves and a couple of blocker cards that we could carry in our wallets. I suspected these were useless, designed to protect the RFID-enabled cards that I don't even have. However, when you have three card numbers stolen in a short space of time, you start looking for solutions quickly and hope that something will work.

What really shocked us was that our ATM cards which were compromised were from a bank that does not even have a branch in the area. I only used my card in the four local grocery stores and my ATM card never leaves my hand. Also each time I was careful when using my PIN. My wife’s card theft was even scarier in that the only time she used it in months was for a small transaction in the local US Post Office when she pulled out the wrong card.

Shortly after we finally resolved our issues with the bank, an article was published in the local newspaper. It suggested that much of the card-number theft might have happened with skimmers on gas pumps.

That was the final straw that convinced me that we were not hearing the full story. I called the regional Secret Service office—that agency is involved in both protecting the President and investigating financial crimes—and talked to the agent that was handling the investigation. He confirmed my suspicions: The problem is far worse than we imagined.

While there are no real answers yet in our area, it appears that some computer systems have been compromised either at stores or in the companies handling the processing of card transactions. In other words, a company involved in the flow of payments has been hacked. It could be more than one company. The computer hacking has exposed everyone whose cards are going through those systems. The thieves are using the ATM card information in a way that does not require the PINs.

As the agent explained it to me, what happens once the thieves have stolen a bunch of numbers from a company is that they print gift cards with their name on them and our billing information on the magnetic stripe. He said they rarely bother with printing up credit cards anymore.

So here is what we have learned.

• ATM cards with their current security are too dangerous to use. The Secret Service agent I talked to quit using his years ago. We no longer use ours. They stay in a secure place in our home. If a thief gets your ATM card, they can clean your bank account out and it can take weeks to fix the problem.
• Credit card issuers are smarter than regular banks when it comes to fraud. When someone tried to do a $7.01 trial purchase using our compromised credit-card number, we got an automated call from the credit card company 30 minutes after the transaction because they thought it was fraud. The transaction never went through.
• When someone tried a similar transaction with my compromised ATM card, we caught it ourselves and called the bank. I had to fill out a fraud affidavit and fax it back to the bank. It took 10 days to get back our money.
• The only reason a $1,400 fraudulent transaction did not go through on my wife’s compromised ATM card was that we only had $1,300 in the account.
• The standard response from the companies is that someone is reading your card number while the card is still in your pocket. That is probably not the case.

What We Can Do

I asked the Secret Service agent for some advice—aside from just not using ATM cards, period.

He said he always tests the card-reading device on a gas pump to make certain it is part of the pump and not an attachment. He also looks for anything suspicious before swiping his credit card in a store. He said if you must use an ATM machine, you should only use a trusted one at your local bank. The banks check those daily.

He also recommended checking your credit-card balances and your bank statement as often as you can, probably once every 24 hours. He also confirmed the online security precautions that most of us are already practicing such as being very careful about downloading any software that you do not trust and avoiding clicking on links that might be suspicious. He basically said that you might as well accept the fact that your cards will be compromised and be ready for it. He said his credit cards had been compromised a number of times.

We were lucky this time and did not lose any money. We have gone back to cash now that our ATM cards have been replaced. The new ones have never been used. I carry only two credit cards in my wallet and even though I suspect the card sleeves do nothing for non-RFID cards, my two credit cards are in them.

As far as RFID cards, I am not interested in one. I have read about some clever smartphone software that uses some of the newest smart phones to read your RFID card information. I do not need more risks in my wallet.

Europeans do make use of make use of chip-and-PIN cards. Those have their own problems—for starters, they're completely unsuitable for e-commerce and mobile payments. And I suspect their protections don't help when the thieves manage to crack into companies processing the transactions. 

Right now cash sounds like a good low-tech solution to me. Maybe the banks should start hiring more tellers if they're not going to fix this problem.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

I believe that the people who work at the NSA are patriots. They devote their considerable intellects to preserve, protect, and defend the people of the United States. I wish their patriotism + brainpower would do the same for the U.S. Constitution. But those issues are getting plenty of ink elsewhere.

My concern is more personal and local: The NSA’s version of patriotism is corroding Silicon Valley. Integrity of our products, creative freedom of talented people, and trust with our users are the casualties. The dolphin in the tuna net is us — our industry, our work, and the social fabric of our community.

Product integrity is doomed when the NSA involves itself in the product development process. The scope of NSA’s activity here is unknowable. But what I hear from founders and other investors — never mind Reuters’ reporting about RSA Security, and Spiegel’s about backdoors in networking products — is beyond my worst expectations.

President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence learned enough about the matter to give it a prominent place in their Dec. 12 report. A key recommendation: “the US Government should … not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.”

It’s incredible to me that this needs to be said at all. That it was phrased as a recommendation by a panel of professors and retired government officials rather than as an imperative truth shouted by Silicon Valley itself is sad. Truthful products come from the union of founders’ values and users’ needs. Letting NSA add “features” strips integrity away; it creates deceitful, incoherent products. Our ambition must be the opposite.

Inside our companies and research centers, talented minds are being conscripted into surveillance. Think about the software developers who wrote the code behind your email service. Or the team who built the guts of a blogging service’s geolocation features. Not one of them chose to work for the NSA. But their work has been co-opted, effectively turned into surveillance tools. The freedom of talented people to work for whom they choose, building what they choose, for the purpose they choose is being deleted. This is another deep violation of our community’s social fabric.

All this leads back to trust. Billions of people let Silicon Valley into their daily lives and they hug it close. They trust our products to find information, to get work done, to talk to each other, to buy and sell stuff, and to have fun. That trust is a decades-old endowment built up by inventor-founders from Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore through to the present day. The magic of compound growth works in our favor when trust is accumulating. But now we are making trust withdrawals every day as people around the world learn how the NSA has woven surveillance, search, and seizure into and around our products. This is the painful flip side of compound growth: The trust withdrawals compound, too.

Silicon Valley’s promise to people is simple and compelling: “We’ll build a bunch of things. Try our work; keep what you love, dump what you don’t love. We’ll learn from it and build on the stuff that you like best.” Sadly, the NSA undermines the promise at its foundation.

We do have options. Modify our user agreements to reinforce users’ property rights and expectations of privacy in their data to address the so-called “third-party doctrine.” Make architecture and encryption decisions that defend against upstream surveillance at the backbone. Appeal objectionable collection orders under Section 215 of the Patriot Act to the full Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the FISC Court of Review, and the Supreme Court, if necessary. Appeal National Security Letters (NSLs) in federal court if you believe warrantless requests for information are toxic to your values and your work.

All of us — founders, CEOs, boards, citizens — are allowed to hold opinions about what is right, and we can exercise our rights and freedoms to act accordingly. God knows we take full advantage of the rights and freedoms in the tax code; we should be at least as creative and engaged when it comes to existential threats to our work.

Smart patriots of the NSA are struggling with a basic question: Of all the ways to get a critical job done, which ways line up with our founding values? The NSA’s answer is deadly to Silicon Valley’s life’s work. That is 100 percent unacceptable.

Michael Dearing (@mcgd) is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and a consulting associate professor at Stanford University.

Chromebooks experienced a surge in popularity in 2013, rising from almost nothing to claim about a fifth of the commercial laptop market.

This according to NPD Group, who said this week that sales of laptops running Google’s Chrome OS accounted for 21 percent of all commercial preconfigured notebook sales through November 2013.

It would seem, then, that Chromebooks have begun to hit their stride. Indeed, Amazon said this week that two out of its three top-selling laptops during the holiday season were Chromebooks designed by Samsung and Acer. No hard numbers there, sure. But certainly anecdotal evidence in support of NPD’s metric.

The year-over-year growth NPD has charted appears, then, to be significant. And evidently it’s coming at Microsoft’s expense, though machines running Windows did account for 34.1 percent of all commercial preconfigured notebook sales during the same period.

Said NPD analyst Stephen Baker, “Tepid Windows PC sales allowed brands with a focus on alternative form factors or operating systems, like Apple and Samsung, to capture significant share of a market traditionally dominated by Windows devices.”

It’s the end of the year, and that means a plethora of stories and lists with a lot of hyperbolic words like “hottest” or “greatest” in the headline rendering some kind of judgment on the prior 12 months.

Usually I tend to avoid these stories because there are too many of them. But I was attracted to this one in part because of its balance of the cynical and the not-cynical, and by the source of the survey data: The CIOs of large corporations.

It comes by way of Sierra Ventures, the enterprise-focused venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, Calif. For years that firm has maintained a network of about 70 CIOs at some of the world’s biggest companies, and has routinely sought their input on their needs from directly in the corporate IT trenches. Sierra has in turn allowed that advice to help guide its investment decisions and how it helps its portfolio companies grow.

Recently it held its annual CIO Summit, and the time came to ask about 40 of those CIOs what was on their minds. The result was a simple survey with one key question: What were the most overhyped and underhyped technologies being hawked to large enterprises during the year? The answers were pretty clear and, at least in the overhyped category, close to unanimous.

The most overhyped, in their view, were social tools aimed at the enterprise. This would include products like Jive, Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Moxie, VMWare’s Socialcast and a host of others.

Their reasoning, as Al Campa, a partner at Sierra Ventures put it, was equally simple: “They don’t feel there’s any evidence for a return on investment or ROI,” he said. “It just didn’t move the needle for them when compared to other technologies they looked at.”

It’s a kind of predictable answer where CIOs are concerned, but not chief marketing officers, or CMOs, said Tim Guleri, a managing partner at Sierra Ventures. “CIOs are all about controlling spending and driving down their costs and finding money to fund innovation elsewhere,” he said. “That’s different than CMOs, who are trying to drive branding and reach. They feel differently about the social tools” and are therefore more willing to experiment with their growing tech budgets.

Okay then. So what was underhyped? There were two answers, both of them kind of intertwined: Mobile and security.

Mobile technology was underhyped, the survey’s respondents said, because of the way it can change business processes that are specific to a given industry. If you’re a hotel chain, how you use smartphones and tablets in your day-to-day operation will differ from how a manufacturing or logistics company does it. The CIOs who took part in the survey, Guleri says, were united in saying that understanding this “vertical context” is incredibly important to their business. Once you establish that, the ROI is usually pretty clear.

But going mobile raises a lot of security questions, which brings us to the second underhyped technology of the year. All those mobile devices fundamentally change the security landscape. “The perimeter that you used to be protected is gone,” Guleri said. Mobile devices open up the possibility for a lot of methods for attacking corporate systems. “There’s a lot of pain and potential for innovation around security,” he said.

Of course much of this is pretty intuitive if you’ve been paying attention to the overarching trends in the corporate IT environment of the last few years. CIOs are often surveyed about their opinions, but it’s a little bit unusual for them to show quite so much unanimity as they appear to have done here.

Cisco is investigating a claim by Germany’s Der Spiegel that the company is among many whose devices have been backdoored by the NSA to assist in the agency’s espionage efforts.

The Sunday article, which was based on leaked NSA documents, said a specialist NSA hacker unit had “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei.” The report also named a variety of other manufacturers, both American and non-U.S., as targets of NSA cracking.

In the case of Cisco, documents published by Der Spiegel on Monday show the affected products to include the company’s 500-series PIX and ASA (5505, 5510, 5520, 5540 and 5550) firewalls. However, the documents date back to 2007, and newer products may also have been cracked.

In a blog post on Sunday, Cisco said it was “deeply concerned with anything that may impact the integrity of our products or our customers’ networks” and was trying to find out more about the claims.

Cisco Chief Security Officer John Stewart wrote:

“We are committed to avoiding security issues in our products, and handling issues professionally when they arise. Our Trustworthy Systems initiatives, Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle, Cisco Common Crypto models, and Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) and Vulnerability Disclosure policies are all industry-leading examples of our commitment to our customers. This is central to how we earn and maintain trust.

“At this time, we do not know of any new product vulnerabilities, and will continue to pursue all avenues to determine if we need to address any new issues. If we learn of a security weakness in any of our products, we will immediately address it.

“As we have stated prior, and communicated to Der Spiegel, we do not work with any government to weaken our products for exploitation, nor to implement any so-called security ‘back doors’ in our products.”

The company also published an official security response late on Sunday, saying it had requested Der Spiegel‘s documents and noting that “Cisco development policies prohibit any product behaviors that weaken the security posture of a Cisco device.” This document may not be useful just yet, but it could be updated in future as and when the company has more to tell its customers.

Although the new revelations aren’t exclusively about American firms – Huawei aside, the firmware in Samsung hard drives has apparently also been targeted – they will no doubt add to distrust outside the U.S. of equipment coming from that country. Cisco must be particularly sensitive to backdoor claims at the moment; its revenue warning in November was one of the first from a major U.S. firm to suggest foreign customers have reacted to Edward Snowden’s disclosures by putting big orders on hold.

U.S. manufacturers of networking equipment have long been required by a law called CALEA to build surveillance capabilities into their products. So when Cisco says it never works with governments to include backdoors, it’s worth noting that the company has several pages online describing the “lawful intercept” capabilities built into some of its equipment, allowing voice and data wiretaps.

This article was updated at 5.45am PT to include reference to the specific Cisco firewall products that are affected.

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One of my favorite memories of Christmas as a kid was watching the annual Yule log broadcast on TV, as I was sitting next to a real fireplace. I will readily admit that this holiday story is warped.

Moving on! In the digital world of today, you can enjoy the tradition via the Internet.

So, here’s an hour of a crackling fire on Google’s YuleTube, oops, YouLog, oops, YouTube:

Serial entrepreneur Jeff Lawson founded Twilio in 2007 after he realized that integrating phone calls and text messaging into software and online services was harder than it needed to be.

The company now powers online communications for many other firms, mostly in ways you've probably never noticed. Ever received a text message from Uber letting you know your car has arrived? That was a Twilio-powered message.

Twilio’s platform lets developers add voice and text services to their mobile and web applications. While text messaging—and arguably voice calling, too—is declining among consumers, businesses are using the technology to power their services in an increasingly mobile-driven world. 

Lawson calls the builders using his service “doers” and is passionate about helping entrepreneurs succeed. In addition to startups and corporations, many nonprofits integrate Twilio into their services, and recently the company launched Twilio.org, a project Lawson hopes will help nonprofit organizations affordably improve communications services to better serve their initiatives. 

Software To Solve A Problem

ReadWrite: What was your original vision for the company? 

Jeff Lawson: We started Twilio to really solve our own problem. I’m a serial entrepreneur, this is the fourth company I’ve started, and I was a product manager at Amazon Web Services. When I left Amazon I knew I wanted to start my next thing. I didn’t have a specific idea in mind.

One thing I realized was, "Hey, at each of my previous companies, we were software people trying to use software to tackle a new industry, create some efficiency, do something better in the world.” And every one of those companies, at one point or another, we wanted to incorporate communications into what we were doing in order to create a great customer experience, create a great product. 

We felt there was this hole in the market. I’ll give you an example: In 2000, I was the first CTO at StubHub. We were using the power of software and the Internet to legitimize secondary ticket transactions, bring it online, make it so it isn’t on the street corner, make it so you don’t feel you’re going to get stabbed after you hand over the cash. We had this great model, but one of the things was, if we were going to compete with the street corner commerce, we’ve got to let you buy a ticket up until the last minute. 

We said, in order to do that, we’re going to have to be able to call the seller. “Hey seller, your ticket just sold! We’re sending a courier to pick it up from you.” Then we had to call a courier. “Hey courier, we got a job for you. We need you to pick up the ticket.” And then we needed to call the buyer. “Hey buyer, the courier is showing up in two minutes on the street corner, make sure you’re ready.” The whole logistics of this thing, and our team—software people—we didn’t know how to make phones ring.

When we figured out we had this problem, three companies in a row, I said, “Let’s solve this.” 

RW: You talk a lot about software people. Can you describe the idea of software people for those of us who might not be as familiar with it? 

JL: Being a software person is a mindset, not a skill set. What it really means is that it’s a worldview where you see the world through that lens of software. You’re always asking that question, “Can I solve this problem with software?” 

When you see a problem in a company, something that’s not efficient, a customer interaction that’s not efficient, your brain jumps to, “Hm, how can software solve this problem?” You see this mindset pop up in not just developers, but anybody who really sees the world that way. 

It could be anyone in an organization, the head of customer service, the head of sales, the CFOs, CEO, COO, and the developers. Interestingly enough, for developers, just because you write code doesn’t mean you look at the world through that lens either.

Apple, that’s a software mindset company, they’re a software people company. Why? Well, they make a whole lot of hardware, including your laptop, and your phone, but really, what these are things about, the iPhone is the minimum amount of hardware required to have an amazing software experience. That was the key innovation that occurred when the very first iPhone came out. No keyboard. Why? Keyboard is hardware. Just limits what we can do.

The Elevator Pitch Gone Horribly Wrong

RW: What was it like describing your ideas to initial investors? 

JL: Terrible.

RW: How exactly did you explain the telco technology thing? 

JL: I’m sure it was a horrible, terrible pitch. Every time I struggled to sit down and say, okay, “How am I going to tell this story?” I think hopefully it got better every time I did it, but it's a tough concept to sell. 

The first time we did it, sat down in front of investors and said, “Hey, we want to build this platform, APIs, that developers can use to build communications.” I got a very common response back which was, “Why developers? You go out and build an application first. Why don’t you go build a PBX [private branch exchange—a hardware phone exchange for use by a single company]. Go compete with RingCentral. If you’re successful then you get an API too.”

That was the most common refrain that we got. We thought about it, and a lot of people gave us that advice, smart, successful people telling us this, and oh, maybe we should listen to that. But at the end of the day that’s not the problem we’re trying to solve. My goal isn’t to provide a PBX for people.

We think that the future is based on APIs, we believe that everything from startups to enterprises are going to be more and more like software companies. They are going to think like software companies, in fact there’s an element of natural selection that’s is going on and going to continue to go on, whereby companies that react to a changing market react to changing technologies the quickest are going to survive. Right? It’s adaptation. 

Companies that are chained to big hardware, big software on a ten-year buying cycle where its millions of dollars in consulting fees just to bring in professional services to make any changes to such a system—those people are going to lose to those who are of an agile mentality. Those who can use the power and flexibility of software to their advantage and respond to a changing market quickly—it seems to me that those are the people who are going to win. Our goal is to serve those people because in our opinion that’s the future... 

It’s like that mentality that says what we need are the right value of building blocks for software people and software oriented organizations to build in to solve problems for their customers. They don’t need another PBX. 

RW: Do you think it’s difficult to maintain that agile mindset and constantly be changing as you grow as a company?

JL: No, because if you do a good job, what you’re doing is breaking down the problem. Anything from a startup to a company of our size with 250 people, to the largest enterprise. The job of a well-run organization is to break down the problems in a way that aligns your organization to your customer’s needs. At any level of scale I think you could do a good job of breaking down your problem—what am I trying to solve for a customer, breaking that down into manageable chunks, doing good planning, and focusing on delivering value in short intervals over big intervals. 

Shorten your iteration cycles. Learn faster, ship faster. What I think is happening with mobile software, it’s happening with manufacturing—the more lean, the more agile the company is in anything that it’s doing, the more able it is to respond to the market with changes or manufacturing defects. You’ve got companies like Toyota who are thinking that way.

RW: You were saying you’re 250 people now. You went really quickly from being a startup to this point. What are some of the challenges that you’ve faced? 

JL: I would say building a company as you scale, continuing to focus on the customer, execute with that urgency as you scale, is the most important thing. That’s a set of systems, processes, philosophies, hiring, so that as you grow, you can be a larger organization, but one that is comprised of small teams, that continue to think the way you did as a startup with three people working out of a coffee shop. 

Every team is fighting for its life to serve a customer and to improve the customer’s experience and solve another problem for that customer. Companies that lose sight of that are the ones where the size of the company becomes a detriment. Companies that keep that focus use size as a benefit. 

Product Built On Communications

RW: What has it been like competing and working with carriers? 

JL: What’s interesting, what Twilio does, one side of a company we work with developers, software companies and enterprises, and we enable them. The other side of the company works with carriers and talks to carriers. 

We’ve got people in our company who work with carriers everyday, we’ve got people who work with enterprises and startups and software people. One of the most interesting things I think is the impedance mismatch between speed. We operate and our customers operate at a speed which is very different than that of carriers.

So how do we solve that impedance mismatch? 

The typical carrier thinks in billions of dollars, whether in costs, revenues, or things like that. Whereas from the point of view of who their customers are on the enterprise side, that’s caused them to think differently, and we can solve that impedance mismatch. Pay as you go, rapid development, in all the modern languages type of model. To a system that, from its legacy, is built from innovation and changes that by design, are on the decades timeframe. 

Because a telco is creating very big, very reliable, very robust systems that operate at enormous scale. It’s fundamentally not an agile world. What we do is bridge those investments. Carriers have immensely valuable assets in these copper and fiber networks under our feet and these airwaves. That’s immensely valuable. What we do is bridging it to the pace and cadence of software people. 

RW: Was it difficult in the beginning to get those telco companies to understand what Twilio was doing? Did they at any point ever see this startup as a competitor to what they were doing? 

JL: Well we never believed that we were competitive with carriers. And I don’t think we’ve positioned ourselves or talked to carriers that way. We’ve always talked to carriers as partners. The people who lose in the world of Twilio are Cisco and Avaya and ShoreTel. And people who are trying to sell a big, expensive, inflexible boxes that you’re going to run in your own closet, and they come every year and charge you 20% support and maintenance just to keep the thing running.

That’s a world that’s disappearing. We’re moving to a flexible world of the cloud. And we’re moving to a world of composeable services. And people trying to sell you inflexible on-premises boxes are going to go away.

Twilio, Just For Developers?

RW: So I imagine it’s fairly easy to convince developers, software people and highly technical business owners that Twilio is a great option for them. But how do you market and sell an API to non-technical business people? 

JL: Well what’s interesting, there’s a question of are we actively trying to sell Twilio to those people? I’ll separate that into a few buckets. 

We don’t necessarily think that your mom who is non-technical, let’s say, has to know who Twilio is, because we are focused on a core market. People who are software thinking people and people who want to leverage the agility and flexibility of software running on the cloud to power communications experiences for their companies, for their customers, etc. 

A non-technical person, depending on the skillset, or depending on what company it is, should understand the benefits of the business for saying yeah, I’m not going to spend a million dollars on Cisco, agility and flexibility in the cloud is important. I can save money, maybe get to market faster, I’m going to have a more flexible solution, they understand that, but they don’t need to understand the details of how the API works. 

There’s two audiences there. I’m thinking about a line of business owner with a big enterprise, or a CIO at an enterprise. Well, they should really care about agility and the impact that has on their ability to compete in the market, attract great talent, and respond to changing conditions. And then a developer is going to say yeah, and I love this API because it makes me successful in minutes. There are sort of two sides to that equation. 

RW: At TwilioCon you talked about developers sort of going against the machine. Can you describe a little more of what you meant by that? 

JL: There’s a mantra in the world of technology, build versus buy. That’s an argument put forth by vendors who already built the thing they’re trying to sell to you. What they’re really saying is that you’d be an idiot to build this again. 

There are these phrases, why reinvent the wheel, right? These are all arguments made by them to say you’re an idiot for building something that already exists because you’re just going to buy it from me. I understand the logic, it can make sense. When you end up with a solution, this monolithic, big, spending a ton of money on all sorts of things you don’t need, it’s inflexible because the more that’s prebuilt, the less flexibility there is. 

Fundamentally that model is proven to be broken. If we look at the big enterprise software, big enterprise hardware legacy of our industry, well 70% of those huge things, those huge software installations fail. You cut in millions of hours to some vendor and two years later the thing isn’t running and then the new CIO comes in and says let’s cut our losses and kill this thing—70% of the time that’s what happens. That’s an amazing failure rate for an industry. Think about all the waste that’s going on there. Think about the number of careers that didn’t go anywhere. It’s silly, and the software people when I look at them, it doesn’t make any sense. 

So my point to software people is like, “Guess what? Because of this movement to the cloud, because of the rise of APIs, and smaller building blocks, it is good to build.” 

In fact, companies that build are going to be the companies that win, because they are the ones going to operate in that agile way. That’s not to say that every company has to become an expert in everything, or you have to build everything. Facebook’s building its own servers, I’m not advocating every company go do that. But rather, you can choose to buy smaller building blocks to maintain that agility. That’s what’s so interesting from software people’s perspective is, it’s empowering. 

RW: So do you think that’s going to be a trend that we see among both big businesses and smaller startups—to rage against the machine and start building their own things in a world where basically everything is an API. Do you think that’s going to be a trend? 

JL: Absolutely. I think that it’s going to be a matter of composeability. Of breaking down problems into constituent parts and building some of those and buying some of those. But I’m not going to buy a huge box that’s going to be brought in with a forklift into my company. 

I’m going to buy small boxes that I can arrange. The companies that are going to essentially survive and thrive are the ones that have that flexibility in their business. I think that’s going to happen across the board. That’s why you see software as a service becoming extremely popular. It used to be if I needed CRM [customer-management software for sales], what would I do? I would go talk to Siebel and spend six months with the sales process and another 6-12 months doing an implementation and a customization phase with professional services. Great, 18 months later I’ve got a CRM. I can go to Salesforce today and sign up in an afternoon with a credit card.

Who’s going to thrive in that world? Then you think about the next layer and well, now we’ve got CRM but it’s not quite what I want. Well then you’ve got APIs, you take that and integrate it into everything else you can do. It’s just composeability that is going to lead companies to actually solve problems faster.

Open Source For Good

RW: You’re a big advocate of open source. How has Twilio benefitted from being in the open source community? And have you noticed more interest from developers in incorporating Twilio into their apps? 

JL: We are big users of open source, big contributors. Open source is baked into the technical ecosystem nowadays. Big users of Linux, and Nginx, and MySQL, and all these technologies that are part of the, I talk about small building blocks. Open source has provided a huge number of these small building blocks that have allowed companies to iterate quickly and grow quickly and do what in ‘97 and the dot-com days was, “Hey I need a $20 million dollar check from OBC just to get my company off the ground.” 

Because we’re building all sorts of stuff and buying all sorts of stuff. They’re saying no, there’s companies who have launched, companies who are using Heroku, right, you can use an application that can launch better and faster for 0 dollars than Pets.com did in ‘98. There’s more power available for free today than there was—it just completely changes the landscape. 

RW: Of course I know you’re very passionate about Twilio.org that gives a $500 Twilio credit and 25 percent discount on Twilio services to eligible nonprofits. Will you talk a little bit about your vision for this organization?

JL: We launched Twilio.org a couple of months ago. Its mission is to power a million messages for good, and it comes based on the observation that over the years, one group that we consistently saw come up were people from the nonprofit universe who have a mission of their own to solve some problem in society, make the world a better place for some segment of the world. 

People kept coming up and saying, “I can use communications to solve the problem, to make the world a better place.” Every time they did we were very excited that our technology could be used that way. We would have very ad-hoc conversations with those people.

Think about it, we’re human beings, when we communicate, when we collaborate we make things happen. So the problems in the world, whether it’s hunger, disease, climate change, whatever the problem is, some amazing percent of the time, people communicating in some way, or people who weren’t communicating before and are now communicating, can now be the solution for that problem.

Our technology can be used to power that. You’ve got all these organizations in the world who see these problems firsthand, and many of those organizations have software people, the software mindset, thinking how we can use technology to solve these problems.

Because we believe that every organization, non-profits included, should have access to the best technology to achieve their mission. 

Businesses Turn To SMS

RW: So consumers are turning more to messaging applications, there’s WhatsApp and Snapchat. It seems you were saying businesses and nonprofits, these unique ways of using SMS are exploding. Are you seeing as far as texting and consumers goes, are you seeing a move to interact with businesses and different products using SMS as opposed to texting friends?  

JL: Absolutely. Think about SMS as a medium as opposed to one person texting another. For an example, you’ve got Uber using software to reinvent transportation. 

I remember when I first moved to the [San Francisco] in 2009, hailing a cab went like this: I would dial one, get the wrong number, dial the other. So I call the number, it’s busy, redialing, redialing, finally I get through, say I need a cab at this corner, 20 minutes later I say, "Where’s the cab?" I call back, it’s busy. Horrible experience.

Along comes Uber and says, you know what great customer experience is. When the cab is a few minutes away I’m going to text you, when the cab is 10 seconds away I’m going to text you. Proactively letting you know where the cab is, and what to expect. That’s an amazing customer experience. It’s good to see so many companies doing interesting things along these lines to create engagement with customers in this proactive sense that you just didn’t get before.

Building The Twilio Community

RW: I know you’ve mentioned doers a few times when we’ve spoken, and you made a huge point to talk about it at TwilioCon. So why do you call people doers? And what do they mean to the Twilio community? 

JL: I don’t know when exactly we started calling them doers, we just kind of sat down and thought well, “What do we think about ourselves, what properties we like in ourselves, and people who are the kind of people who would adopt APIs, or who are building things?” Those people kind of cut through the BS, and don’t sit around wondering, "Maybe we could do this."

That’s not how Silicon Valley operates, that’s not how developers operate. We thought about it, we’re doers, we sit down, we pick up our tools and our skills and go about solving a problem. That’s what causes people like us to wake up every morning.

We came up with the word doer to represent that notion. 

RW: What is one of the most memorable hacks you’ve either seen by an employee or by a doer at a hackathon? 

JL: There was this artist in LA who built this interactive installation as part of an event at the MOMA. It was a miniature golf course, all through the museum. It was like put-put, and there were ones where you would put into an elevator, go down a floor and put out of the elevator. He had ones where it was down stairways, crazy miniature golf. What does this have to do with Twilio? Well, he put an RFID chip in every golf ball. Then he outfitted the hole with an RFID reader. So he knew every ball, which person it was, and every time you sunk a put, your phone rang, it gave you a clue to some puzzle you were trying to solve.

It’s like wait, what? It’s amazing. 

RW: So speaking of the next phase, what are you working on right now? What’s next for Twilio? 

JL: The way we think about it is continually listening to our customers, and see what problems we can solve for them. What are the next layer of problems with interacting with your customers? Or building applications to communicate. How do we enable that, that’s why we launched MMS at Twiliocon, because we heard customers saying there was so much power in the medium of SMS, but there were so many categories of opportunities that you can’t solve.   

All images of courtesy of Twilio