[jon at jon silk dot com]

For the first time in the six years of the iPhone’s life, Apple seems to be going on the defensive, and with good reason. Apple’s global marketshare is slowly shrinking alongside the growth of Android, and Samsung is leading the way as smartphone king, shipping over 50 million Galaxy S IIIs since the phone launched.

And remember, that’s just one of dozens of phones Samsung launches on the Android OS every year.

The Samsung Galaxy S4, the latest generation of Samsung’s flagship series, was debuted on Thursday, March 14. It was quite the spectacle. Two days later, Apple erected the “Why iPhone” page, which lists all the reasons why the iPhone 5 is better and everything else is… well, not.

The “Why iPhone” page talks about how the A6 chip and the iPhone 5 battery were carefully crafted by “Apple Scientists” to offer lots of power without sacrificing battery life, as opposed to “settling for a large, off-the-shelf option,” like competitors.

“Why iPhone” also mentions how the iPhone’s camera is the most popular camera on Flickr. “And while other smartphones simply tout large amounts of megapixels, taking great pictures is about so much more,” reads the page. Interesting how major Android competitors, like Samsung and HTC, just recently graduated past the 8-megapixel zone into 13-megapixel territory. Coincidence?

The page talks about how iPhone’s content comes from the Apple iTunes Store, “the world’s most trusted entertainment store.” By buying content from Apple, the page promises, you don’t need to worry about dreaded malware.

This jibes quite well with a very rare tweet out of Apple’s Phil Schiller. After citing a recent security study that in the fourth quarter of last year, “96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered,” Schiller told Phandroids to “be careful out there.”

Be safe out there: f-secure.com/static/doc/lab…

— Philip Schiller (@pschiller) March 7, 2013

Apple usually finds a way to interrupt competing news. The company has been known to drop press releases during CES or send out invites to iPad events during Mobile World Congress. Yet, there hasn’t been a bold, prideful interruption this year, but rather defensive interviews and tweets.

Phil Schiller even did an interview with the WSJ one day before the Galaxy S4 unveiling to slam Android as a whole. “When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with,” said Schiller. “They don’t work seamlessly together.”

And that is but just a taste of the Android bashing.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this newfound defensiveness from Apple is Samsung’s attitude. During the massive Galaxy S4 announcement, it was hard not to notice Samsung’s ego in the whole thing. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it was more of a sense I got. Samsung officially knows its the top global smartphone maker in the world, and more and more you’ll see it start to act that way.

For one, the show was held in a massive venue at Radio City Music Hall, complete with minor celebrity appearances and full-on Broadway skits. Usually, the press gets special front-row seats to these events, with semi-solid WiFi to cover the event. At Samsung Unpacked, we were herded in with general consumers and struggled to get a connection to cover the Galaxy S4 announcement. It’s Samsung’s big phone, and it’s so big they don’t even care if we can cover it.

Meanwhile, Apple seems to be backsliding into a defensive position, no longer surprising us with news in the middle of an Apple-free conference or scoffing at cuts from Google or Samsung.

And it’s real fun to watch it go down.

Amazon Publishing is launching a new imprint, called Little A, that will publish literary fiction — novels and collections of stories — and memoir.

Little A joins Amazon’s six other imprints, which focus on genres like romance and science fiction. Until now, literary fiction had been published under the general Amazon Publishing division in New York, and Little A will be part of that division. It will be overseen by senior editor Ed Park.

Upcoming titles from Little A will include James Franco’s novel Actors Anonymous — which Larry Kirshbaum signed back in 2011, and which will be published this October — among others. A digital-only series called Day One will focus on “short stories from debut writers”; those will be sold in the Kindle Singles store.

As with other titles from Amazon’s New York division, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s New Harvest imprint will distribute print versions of Little A titles.

Here’s the full mini-announcement:

“Little A is a literary fiction imprint under the Amazon Publishing Group, publishing novels, memoirs and story collections. The first titles to be published under Little A are A.L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book (on sale now), an intricate, heartbreaking story of psychics and cruise ships by the dazzling U.K. author; Jake Arnott’s The House of Rumour (on sale 3/19/13), which weaves the secret histories of science fiction and espionage into a modern classic; Jenny Davidson’s The Magic Circle (on sale 3/26/13), a literary thriller about the culture of gaming; and Shawn Vestal’ s Godforsaken Idaho (on sale 4/2/13), stories of the afterlife, the rugged Northwest, and the early days of Mormonism by a ferociously imaginative new writer. Other 2013 Little A titles will include Dan Kennedy’s American Spirit (on sale 5/28/13), Allison Lynn’s The Exiles (on sale 7/2/13), and James Franco’s Actors Anonymous (on sale 10/15/13).

Day One is a digital-only series within Little A that is focused on short stories from debut writers and is available in North America and in the U.K. The first title, Kodi Scheer’s, haunting, fabulist “When a Camel Breaks Your Heart” was released on February 5, 2013. On March 19, Day One will release “Monster” by McSweeney’s contributor Bridget Clerkin, in which a woman struggles to keep her dysfunctional family together amid unsettling events–the family dog goes missing and an unidentified, mysterious animal corpse washes up on the beach.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• How consumer media will change in 2013

More than a third of companies (39%) plan to increase their digital marketing budgets this year at the expense of other channels, according to the new Econsultancy and SoDA Digital Marketing Outlook Report 2013.

A further 16% of respondents said that they would be increasing digital budgets alongside overall marketing spend, while just 11% said they planned to decrease the amount allocated to digital marketing.

Overall it shows that brands are confident of the value of digital marketing and are backing that up with increased investment.

The SoDA Report 2013 includes a survey of 814 marketers, of which more than 84% were key decision makers and influencers, including CMOs, VPs, and directors.

They identified which regions are driving business revenue, told us about the growing number of innovation labs, and gave frank self-assessments of their digital savvy, along with a host of other surprising and not-so-surprising news.

One of the interesting trends investigated by the report is the development of the agency model.

The 2013 survey saw a large increase in the number of respondents from traditional advertising or marketing agencies that had both traditional and digital capabilities. In fact, agency-side respondents were almost evenly split between digital agencies (44%) and traditional shops with digital capabilities (45%).

While the two sets of respondents agreed in many areas, their answers did diverge in a few key topics.

For example, full-service agencies were decidedly less optimistic about the future of independent agencies than their digital-only counterparts.

When asked for their opinion on the negative statement, “Independent agencies do not have a bright future,” only 6% of digital agency respondents agreed compared to a quarter (26%) of full-service agencies.

Similarly, different types of agencies gave almost polar opposite responses when asked for their opinion on the statement: “The best route to growth is specialization.”

A majority of digital agency respondents (56%) agreed that specialization offers the best path to growth as opposed to 32% of respondents from full-service agencies.

While not unexpected that a majority of full-service agencies would disagree with such a statement, it was somewhat surprising that so many actually agreed.

In other words, almost one third of respondents from full-service agencies said they thought the best route to growth is through specialization, suggesting they are not particularly bullish on their own business model.

Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S IV today at its event this evening at 7 PM ET in New York, but the cat is pretty much out of the bag at this point, and new videos have surfaced (via SammyHub) to try to spoil any remaining surprise. The Galaxy S IV videos depicts Floating Touch, SmartPause, the new unlock screen and the GSIV’s new web browsing experience.

Floating Touch works essentially like its name would suggest, allowing a user to get tooltips and other information by hovering a finger over the surface of the screen, rather than with direct touch input. In the video, it’s shown being used to bring up image previews, for example, without opening the image completely. Looks like it’ll take some getting used to, but we’ll wait until hands-on time to pass judgement.

With the Internet browsing experience, Samsung looks to have incorporated not head tracking features, but full hand gestures. The person using the phone in the video is seen using his hand to scroll the page he’s viewing up and down, and also to navigate back and forward in the browser. It looks pretty cool, but again there’s some question about how useful it’ll be in everyday applications.

The SmartPause feature looks like it could be all of what actually launches with the Galaxy S IV that constitutes so-called “eye tracking,” according to a Bloomberg report yesterday. Still, it looks impressive. Essentially, it can pause a video when a user turns away, which is useful if you’re watching something on your mobile device and get interrupted by a pesky coworker asking you to actually do something related to your “job.”

Finally, there’s the new unlock screen. Not much to say about this one, except that it appears to have Tinkerbell-style sparkle effects for tapping, and it unlocks with a swipe gesture.

Samsung had better have some things it kept extra close to the chest at this upcoming event tonight, or else it’ll face the wrath of a thousand tech bloggers who feel ‘disappointed’ because they weren’t surprised by anything. Still, some of these features could go over very big with developers, depending on whether third-parties can access and use these features: hand gestures and Floating Touch in particular might be very useful for game and app makers looking to add some secret sauce to their Google mobile software  offerings for Samsung device owners.

While the late Douglas Adams may have been a passionate Apple fanatic, it's hard to imagine him not raising a smile at the tribute that Google has prepared for him today. On what would have been the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator's 61st birthday, visitors to Google's homepage will see an interactive Doodle that couldn't be more stuffed with references to the classic series.

Ford Prefect's towel, Arthur Dent's cup of tea, and Marvin the Paranoid Android all make an appearance, and there's a version of the Guide itself — looking suspiciously like a Kindle Keyboard — that'll teach you how a babel fish works and exactly how harmless Earth is. The Doodle is rolling out across timezones across the world, so to make sure you can...

Continue reading…

The Curiosity rover has been in an especially precarious position since late last week, when a memory glitch forced it into a safe mode while NASA prepared a backup and diagnosed the trouble. We're glad to report that the worst is over. Scientists have confirmed that the rover left safe mode later on Saturday and started using its high-gain antenna for communication a day later. However, it's not quite out of the woods yet -- if Mars had woods, that is. The backup is still taking on the information it needs to assume full responsibility, and NASA wants to evaluate the suitability of the one-time primary computer as the new backup. Nonetheless, all the early indicators point to Martian exploration going back on track within days.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Alt

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Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

I’m about to move house. Which, as is usual, has involved a painful bank transfer and a lot of paperwork.

One of the steps of self-imposed due diligence I did was to check my credit file. Everything was fine, I had a credit score in the region I expected / hoped and that was the end of it. Contracts done. Property secured.

It got me thinking, though. That one little number is very powerful but, given today’s focus on big data, actually very simplistic in its nature.

For something that can dictate major elements of your life (such as helping the bank decide whether or not you are ‘fit’ to buy a home), the process by which the three main credit reference agencies (Equifax, Experian and Callcredit in the UK) apply a sweeping judgement feels flawed.

I wondered if, instead, social data could provide a more accurate picture of people.

To illustrate this, I want to talk about two of my friends. Anonymously, of course:

John

Friend one (let’s call him John) has a good job, earns a good salary and is someone you’d generally trust in any situation. In his early 30s, he’s never had credit card debt, he doesn’t gamble, he saves every month, etc.

Every mother would be happy for her daughter to marry him. You get the picture. But John’s credit score is firmly in the “poor” region - which meant that when he tried to buy a flat in 2012, he couldn’t get a mortgage.

Jane

Friend two - let’s call her Jane – is 35 and the exact opposite in terms of “profile” to John. Never focused on ambition within her career plan, she hasn’t progressed beyond her fairly junior role, apart from moving agency every year or two.

Her annual income is dwarfed by a mountain of credit card debt (which is more than her annual salary) and her “shopping issues” mean she has zero savings. She’ll sort her situation out one day but openly (and controversially) admits that marrying well is probably Plan A. Her credit score? You guessed it, it’s “very good”.

The reason for the discrepancy in credit scores is simple. John has never had debt so hasn’t been able to “prove himself” as being capable of managing debt. His above-average income counts only so far and his savings balance (and the discipline attached to it) counts for nothing when applying for credit.

On the other hand, Jane makes the minimum repayment on each of her many credit cards, which satisfies the commitments she has made and – as such – is hugely profitable to the banks. They reward her with a credit score that allows her to apply for almost anything she wants.

If she was ever not shopping (!), she could apply for a mortgage based on the same ratio of property value / deposit / salary as John and her credit score would almost certainly see her approved. Which doesn’t quite seem fair, to either of them.

This isn’t an article on financial services or the flaws of banks. Goodness knows there are plenty of those out there. It’s also not about deciding which of my friends is the better person or has the more enviable position. Instead, I make an observation that common sense is nowhere to be seen in this part of the industry.

Social media credit scoring

If I, or the bank, checked John’s public Twitter profile, elements of his lifestyle that could help me form a clear decision on who he is would be clear. He stays in on Friday nights, watching (and Tweeting about) TV to save money.

On Sundays, he checks in at Waitrose on foursquare, highlighting the best way to cook a great value Sunday Roast. Jane’s Twitter feed is a mish mash of shopping, eating out, cocktails, parties, bars and clubs. Anyone with access to a web browser can tell the difference between these two.

Looking further, LinkedIn shows that John is focused, stable and committed to the long term. Jane’s working history is much less so – usually moving to new agencies, without it being for a promotion or bigger account etc, because she knows / met the Creative Director ‘socially’.

A quick Google search for both will show vastly different results too. John’s entire first page is about achievements in his career, trade press coverage and awards won. Jane’s first three entries are public Facebook photos that show her weekends in all too much detail. Any bank making a long term decision on a customer – i.e. the granting of a mortgage – has access to this data, so why don’t they use it?

What would happen if a ‘social data’ approach was adopted by a high street bank?

A mortgage (or any other credit) application process could be much simpler, fairer and representative of someone’s wider existence…
 You could connect with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and allow the bank to analyse your lifestyle.

That data could be cross-referenced with established credit history, third party data and freely available ethnographic segmentation and could then be re-interrogated as a whole picture. All sorts of socially powered products could emerge from it. Imagine making a mutual promise with the bank that the mortgage you wanted would be in reach if you saved X per month, did Y on a regular basis (validated by location based check-ins) and ticked off list Z (using a dedicated app, for example). 

It could be a logical 21st Century version of the discussion you had with bank managers 20 or 30 years ago when you were told (by an actual Bank Manager in an actual branch) to “slow down on the ATM cash withdrawals, save a bit more and come back in six months” for a guaranteed offer.

Credit files are not the only way of understanding your consumer. So why are they the only product used to assess your financial worthiness? We have access to more data now than we ever have. Let’s use it to transform some of the areas that frustrate so many people and make better some of the things that simply don’t work well enough.

(It’s important to note that both ‘John’ and ‘Jane’ read this article before I published it and gave full permission to include the details that I have. I move house at the end of the month and both are still coming to my housewarming party so I obviously didn’t overstep the mark!)

The proportion of email opened on mobile devices reached 41% in the second half of 2012 and is on course to surpass desktop by the end of this year.

The findings, which come from a report by Knotice, show that smartphones now make up 29% of the total while tablets account for 12%.

This increased from 26% and 11% respectively in the first half of 2012.

And despite the increasing dominance of Google’s Android operating system, iOS devices account for the vast majority of mobile email opens.

Of the 29% of email viewed on smartphones, iPhones account for 22% compared to 6% on Android, while iPads account for a massive 11.4% of the 12.1% opened on tablets.

There is no longer a debate over whether brands need to begin the process of optimising email for mobile, though the speed with which it needs to be implemented will vary from business to business.

A recent survey from Nielsen found that 68% of UK smartphone owners used their device to check email in the previous 30 days. Only text messaging was more popular (92%), while using the mobile web (66%) and social networking (63%) achieved similar results.

US smartphone owners exhibit similar behaviours, with 86% using their devices for text, 82% for the mobile web, 75% for email and 63% for social networking.

However our Email Marketing Census reveals that 39% of businesses have no strategy in place for mobile optimisation and a further 37% said their strategy was ‘basic.’

Furthermore, our Marketing Budgets 2013 Report found that only 36% of businesses plan to invest in mobile optimised email this year. This puts it behind mobile apps (47%), QR codes (45%) and mobile search (39%) in terms of priority.

Which of the following mobile channels or technologies do you plan to use in 2013?

Breaking the results from Knotice down by industry, the sectors that achieve the highest mobile open rates are consumer services (50%), hospitality (44%) and cable and telecommunications (40%). And while some categories are levelling out, others saw strong gains. 

Categories such as consumer products (36.22%, up from 29.60%), cable and telecoms (40.35%, up from 35.85%), consumer services (50.29%, up from 42.17%) and hospitality (44.18%, up from 34.35%) saw significant increases in mobile open rates when compared to the first half of 2012.

Knotice’s report also includes stats which debunk a commonly held assertion that consumers use their mobile to check through emails before revisiting them on desktop.

Looking at emails from retail businesses, a mere 2% of messages are opened on more than one device. This suggests that if users see an enticing subject line they want to be able to act on it immediately, which is an extremely compelling argument for optimising email for mobile devices.

Knotice’s report is based on a composite cross sampling of approximately 500 million emails sent across 11 industry segments in the last six months of 2012.

Even as many in the geek-o-sphere drool in anticipation for the onset of Google Glass, some technologists are starting to question the very real privacy issues entangled with the use of these wearable computers and cameras.

Predictably, the first concerns raised about Google Glass were about the user's privacy: If I am transmitting all of this data to Google, it is going to know even more about me than ever! Or so the reasoning goes. I have to admit that this has been bugging me, but since I carry around an Android phone already, I'm pretty sure Google pretty much knows whatever it wants to know about me.

But then there's the other half of the privacy problem, which not many in the community have yet voiced: What about the privacy of the people these devices are looking at?

Anonymous Cameras Everywhere

Being monitored by video cameras is nothing new, of course; it's a risk we run every day. If I happen to absent-mindedly pick my nose in the seemingly empty frozen food aisle at Mega-Mart, it's a pretty sure bet that my gross-out was captured on a video somewhere.

The advent of Google Glass supercharges the equation, because now the number of cameras increases - perhaps exponentially - and they'll show up in ever more unexpected places owned by a much wider variety of people and organizations.

For now, there's an implied trust that someone from the store won't take that nose-picking video and put it on YouTube as part of a "Disgusting Things Journalists Do" montage. Sure, there's nothing really stopping some bored Mega-Mart employee from scraping that video for whatever purpose. But, should they happen to post said video and I happen to see it, I will likely recognize my surroundings in the video and find someone to sue.

Now imagine the same situation, recorded not by the store's cameras, but by someone wearing a Google Glass or similar device who happened to be standing unnoticed at the end of the aisle. Our voyeur records the incident, posts it on the Web anonymously, and -boom! - my reasonable expectation of privacy is violated. And I will likely never be able to find the culprit to take the video down.

The lesson here - beyond "don't pick your nose" - is that if these devices do indeed take off, there is nothing to stop someone from monitoring and tagging me in photos, microblogs or videos - whether or not I know what's going on.

There can be some positives out of this kind of citizen "Eye in the Sky." If someone commits a crime, for instance, they might have been surreptitiously recorded in the act, with less obvious danger to the recorder than holding up a smartphone. Indeed, in his novel Earth, futurist David Brin outlines a near-future where citizens keep down random street-crime just by the existence of video recording equipment they wear.

But there's a flip side to this, when a collection of Brin's characters, a group of street punks, is befriended by an elderly man who seems to want to teach them about the Way Things Were. It all goes well, until after the senior man's death, the gang discovers to their mortification that the man has been logging every conversation for use in a social-observation article about the state of youth in that society.

A little out there? Maybe so, but how long before Tumblr, Flickr and YouTube are filled with text and video content of embarrassing moments captured by Google Glass?

Anyone Can Be a Target

Beyond the voyeur problem, I keep coming back to how this technology can be abused - particularly this very scary scenario:

Imagine someone builds an app that lets you upload a photo of someone to your Google account and then uses facial-recognition software to process the face of every person you see. Sure, there are benign uses for such a tool, such as helping people remember the names of the people they meet.

But what if I was a member of an (alleged!) criminal organization who would love nothing better than to… talk… to the witness that's going to testify in the trial that might prove my organization has done some pretty bad things. We're innocent, of course, but it would be nice to… explain things… to this witness, who is currently ensconced in the U.S. Marshall's Witness Protection program.

To find that witness today, I'd have to be incredibly lucky, hack the Marshall's computer system or bribe (or threaten?) a corrupt law enforcement official. But in a Google Glass world, I could hire private detectives to be on the lookout for my target. Better yet, I could post an ad on Craigslist offering a reward to find "my long-lost cousin/uncle/aunt." Now I have an entire community of people using facial-recognition software helping me find this person. Heck, you might not have to actively employ Google Glass users. Just periodically run a Google Image search of your target's photo for "Images Like This."

Now imagine you're the witness in this scenario.

There are lots of times people don't want to be found - spouses seeking to escape an abusive partner, victims trying to elude stalkers - any one of these types of people could run afoul of these cameras. The technology to do this kind of illicit activity is not quite ready for commercial shelves yet, but the day is soon coming.

But the implications are already disturbing: besides embarrassing videos taken in public, you can add tracking by jealous spouses, overprotective parents or insurance companies to the list. If you're really paranoid, think about government surveillance of legitimate but unpopular activities.

Is this all too much? Maybe. But think about this, because as a father, I sure do: With Google Glass, what's to stop anyone from recording images and audio of children? As a parent, the thought of anyone tracking minors for any reason without parents' permission (unlike the kids in the image from the official Google video above) is abhorrent and potentially dangerous.

The technology itself makes this kind of subtle, continuous recording more likely. Unlike cellphone cameras, Google Glass is always on, always recording, capturing even the quick stuff you can't anticipate. The upshot? Far fewer safe refuges where you're not going to be recorded. 

Ready For Your Close Up?

Plenty of others are worried about how Google Glass will destroy the expectation of privacy in our normal, not-made-for-TV daily lives. Mark Hurst at Creative Good writes (emphasis his):

"Google Glass is like one [Street View] camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

"And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change."

Whether we are just running errands, hanging out with friends or are on the lam from some really bad people, Google Glass has the capability to push our lives into reality of the television kind. But many of us aren't ready for our close up, and never will be.

Images courtesy of Google. 

Author's Note: An earlier version of this story mis-identified the author of the Creative Good article as David Hurst, when it is actually Mark Hurst. The identification has been corrected.

A mission to Mars planned for 2018 intends to make use of human waste to shield its participants from cosmic radiation.

Inspiration Mars aims to take advantage of a particular planetary alignment which would allow a two-person crew to make a round trip to the Red Planet in just 501 days. But, despite the relatively short journey time, a space capsule would still need to find space for nearly two year's worth of food and nearly two year's worth of excrement, as well as keeping the travellers protected from harmful radiation.

By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Liat Clark

Sony may be about to unleash a range of new handsets on specific regions around the world as the Japanese firm looks to become the third largest smartphone manufacturer.

Currently the smartphone world is dominated by Samsung and Apple which account for over half of the market, with Sony sandwiched in between the Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE who sit in third and fifth respectively.

Sony has its eyes on toppling the Chinese competition and Reuters reports that the firm's head of mobile business Kunimasa Suzuki confirmed it will alter its smartphone development for each market.

Budget handsets for some

This suggests that Sony will produce handsets to target particular regions, so we could see a swath of entry level devices roll off the production line destined for the emerging markets.

Firefox OS may be the catalyst to propel Sony into developing countries as the cut down, HTML 5 based platform is destined to land on its devices later this year and looks to provide users with a natural step from feature to smartphone.

Sony enjoyed decent success during the heyday of Sony Ericsson but the brand dwindled in more recent years, with Sony finally pulling the plug on the partnership last year to go solo to go solo.

It's witnessed a relatively strong revival over the last 12 months with the new Sony Xperia Z being the standout handset thus far.

We've been less impressed with Sony's budget offerings, such as the Xperia Miro and Xperia Tipo, but the company has the drive behind it to potentially grab that highly coveted third place.

Agency heralds success of local precipitation data gathered underneath this week's midwestern snowstorms

The blizzards that blanketed parts of the midwest this week have put to the test an initiative that allows people to help researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by reporting precipitation in their area.

A NOAA mobile app, launched in December and available on Android and iPhone, is the product of the Precipitation Identification Near the Ground (Ping) project, an undertaking of the National Severe Storm Laboratory (NSSL) and researchers at the University of Oklahoma. The Ping app is a "citizen scientist" venture that allows people to take the place of satellites and record data on the ground that radar cannot reach.

The Ping website reflects user submissions from the storms that howled across America's plains region earlier this week

NSSL researchers are faced with the usual dilemmas created by crowdsourcing – in particular, how to discern false reports from accurate ones. To tackle the problem of fake or inaccurate user submissions, the NSSL investigates users' identities. Kim Elmore, adjunct professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, says researchers confirm the validity of Ping reports by calling random people in reported areas and asking how the weather is.

She says: "We called [the] meteorology faculty at the University of North Carolina during a major winter storm there and asked them what they observed, then compared that to nearby observations. In all cases, we found that 'expert' observations agreed with 'layman' observations."

On its website, the NSSL insists that the app will help expand scientific research in the field of meteorology. It says: "NSSL scientists will compare your report with what the radar has detected, and develop new radar technologies and techniques to determine what kind of precipitation – such as snow, soft hail, hard hail, or rain – is falling where."

Elmore says the app could help severe-weather warnings reach certain areas at a faster pace – which is all the more necessary given the lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy last fall and this week's blizzard in the American plains.

"From these data, forecasters may gain insights about how a system is evolving, if things are progressing as expected, etc," she says.

Adobe’s fuller-featured image editor, Photoshop Touch, has been out for a year on the iPad and longer on Android tablets, but until now the company has held off on porting it to phones. Today marks the release of Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, which brings the same mechanics of the tablet version to your smartphone, letting you work with multi-layered files up to 12 megapixels in size. And with a downloadable plugin for the desktop versions of Photoshop CS5 or later, you’ll be able to open those same files, layers intact, back on your PC or Mac.

If you haven’t seen the tablet version, Photoshop Touch offers a number of features over the free Photoshop Express, like the ability to make selections and composites, skew...

Continue reading…

Who needs a kettle with four heat settings? A washing machine with a 'freshen up' function? A toaster with six browning modes? What happened to the good old days of the on/off switch?

The modern washing machine has a dozen or more cycles that no one has ever used. The "baby cycle", for example, aimed, presumably, at parents too lazy to wash their babies in the bath. Or, quoting now from a variety of machines, the "duvet", "sports", "bed and bath", "reduced creases", "allergy" and "freshen up" cycles. As in "I'm just going to hop in the washing machine and freshen up." (Yes, I realise it freshens up clothes, not people, but still I bet no one has ever used it non-ironically.)

The washing machine is hardly alone in this; all our appliances have learned new tricks. Posh kettles heat our water to a choice of temperatures, tumble dryers offer a variety of "dryness levels" and even fairly basic toasters now proudly boast a "bagel function". At the top end of the market you can now buy a fridge with a built-in radio and voice recorder, proving we've reached the stage of combining functions entirely arbitrarily. It has all become a little overwhelming.

Function inflation or "setting creep" – both of which are names I've just made up – is not, of course, confined to the kitchen. We can see it in our computers and cars, our phones and televisions, and, in its purest form, in the deranged one-upmanship of a top-of-the-range Swiss Army knife, complete with a "fish scaler", a "chisel" and a "pressurised ballpoint pen". But is the surreal image of a war fought using descaled fish in Switzerland really progress? Or are all these settings just getting in our way?

"Fundamentally," says David Mattin, lead strategist at trendwatching.com, "I'd say function inflation is one consequence of the ever-increasing consumer thirst for the new – new products, services, brands, and yes, new functionality and features – and the way brands and businesses typically respond to that thirst."

"Throwing more functions and features on to an essentially standard product is one easy way for consumer-facing brands to serve the consumer demand for new, more, and better; or at least claim they are serving it. It allows them to constantly iterate and relaunch essentially the same product with new features, and argue that their product is new."

It is not without its benefits. Plenty of life-changing innovations, from the handy oven timer to the job-endangering snooze button, started out as added gimmicks on familiar household items. Many objects we now consider normal were once separate and unrelated: the clock radio, for example, or our DVD-playing games consoles.

But, in the kitchen at least, things are moving a little fast, and rampant function hyperinflation has left many of us staring, uncomprehending, at a washing machine control wheel with more cycles than we have outfits to wash.

In theory, all such functions must be a response to consumer demand: if a washing machine has a "freshen up" cycle, it is because in a focus group somewhere, or on some customer feedback survey, at least a couple of people piped up and said: "I want my clothes fresher, but not cleaned." Yet such demanding shoppers are in fact a small minority: research shows that 70% of people use the same wash cycle almost every time, and nearly half of us are put off by complex multi-setting controls.

"The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers' desire to add value and to differentiate themselves," says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. "But from a consumer's point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all these extra functions and consumers just get perplexed as to how to actually use them."

New settings clearly continue to be seen as an easy road to higher sales. Yet, as Mattin points out, some of the most successful products on the market "succeeded specifically because they did not succumb to function inflation, indeed they made a virtue out of having very few functions".

Though Apple's app store is now a fast-moving bastion of user-controlled function inflation, the iPhone and iPad's predecessor began life as a reaction against it. "The iPod," says Mattin, "is a now-legendary example of  a tech product that was beautiful in its simplicity. Compare earlier MP3 players, laden with various buttons and switches and features, with the iPod's click wheel."

"There's good evidence," he argues, "that the marketplace rewards designers who edit a product down until it does just what it should, and no more. But that takes designers of genius. Mediocre designers – that is, 90% of them – just throw more and more functionality at consumers and see what sticks."

Perhaps, then, despite the current trend, the household of the future will be free of such baffling settings, switches and dials. The ideal household gadget – be it a washer, dryer or toaster – may one day sport a single, simple button marked "Sort this stuff out for me, will you?" The machines can work out for themselves when, if ever, we merely want our clothes freshened up.

Appliances with too much science

Breville VTT377 4 Slice Toaster

Six "toast settings", "independent slot operation", "high-lift", "cancel", "defrost" and "reheat" functions, plus "variable browning" and "illuminated controls". They might as well have called it a toastiere.

Bosch TWK8631GB Styline Kettle

Heats water to your choice of 70°C (white tea), 80°C (green tea), 90°C (hot chocolate or coffee) or a familiar 100°C (boiling). Also beeps at you officiously at the beginning and end of its cycles.

Bush WQP8-9347 Built-In Dishwasher

Five wash programmes, four temperature settings and "a residual heat drying system". Sounds like more hassle to learn, load, configure and unload than just washing the dirty dishes yourself.

Vax Zoom Family and Pet Bagless Cylinder Vacuum Cleaner

The ridiculous name aside, this £150 monument to excessive disposable income includes a "crevice tool", "dusting brush", "turbo tool", "stretch hose" and "flexi crevice tool". You know, for cleaning your flexi-crevices. Which, obviously, aren't a thing.

Hotpoint AQ113D697I White Washing Machine

Although by current standards this model's total of 16 wash programmes is relatively modest, the sheer range of them is baffling. Boasts both the aforementioned "Baby" and "Freshen Up" cycles, as well as "Duvet", "Allergy Care" and "Bed and Bath".

Geeksphone may be an online phone seller based in Spain, but the name of its lower-end Firefox OS reference phone, Keon, appears to be Dutch. Regardless of the title's origin, the part of the phone that's most intriguing is the fact that it's one of the first to bear Mozilla's mobile platform. It isn't much in the way of specs, and that's easy enough to tell from just glancing at it, thanks to a 3.5-inch HVGA display. Still, the Keon's set of specs is actually on par with the Firefox protocol. This means that for roughly around 100 euros, we can expect to see a device with a 3MP camera, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, a 1,580mAh battery and a 1GHz single-core Snapdragon S17225A CPU. Don't expect an earth-shattering experience on this kind of phone, as it's meant to reside strictly on the low end. The Keon will be making its way onto the official company store in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we've made a lovely video and photo gallery below, so check them out.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Roughly two weeks ago, Tweetbot for iOS was graced with in-line viewing of Flickr and Vine content, and now the Mac app has gotten a similar treatment with thumbnail support for both services. Version 1.2 of the client not only accommodates the 6-second films, but it brings a slew of other changes and a handful of bug fixes, to boot. Now, users can opt in for notifications when tweets are sent out from specific Twitter accounts, and can start writing messages by dragging videos or images to the app's icon. Tapbots has also tuned the application to play nice with MP4 files and to allow for account reordering in the preferences section. In addition, the software now uses version 1.1 of Twitter's API and sports a tweaked UI that complies with Costolo and Co.'s new visual requirements. Come March 5th, older versions of Tweetbot for Mac will give up the ghost thanks to Twitter's API changes, but upgrading to the fresh release (or future versions) will ensure your social networking will go uninterrupted. Click the bordering source link for the download and complete changelog.

Filed under: Mobile

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Via: MacStories

Source: iTunes