Plays of the day (from Reuters)

This is the Reuters News Agency's tech. newsletter I received only a few minutes ago. All that I read within seemed very good, and too long to post as my "status" on Facebook or as a tweet, so here.

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Hewlett-Packard is close to a deal to buy software company Autonomy for $10 billion and will announce a long-rumored spinoff of its PC division.

Autonomy, which counts Procter & Gamble among a long list of major corporate customers that use its software to search and organize unstructured data like emails, confirmed it was in talks with HP.

Google+, which has picked up more than 25 million users since launching in June, is headed down the right path and is the first serious challenge to Facebook's dominance.

Google's infant social network, which counts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a member, has met skepticism so far but some venture capitalists see reason to be optimistic.

Speaking of Facebook, the social networking giant has won access to computers, files and emails it hopes will prove an upstate New York man's claim to own half of Zuckerberg's stake in the company is a fraud.

At issue is the authenticity of an alleged 2003 contract under which Paul Ceglia said he hired Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University freshman, to work on StreetFax.com, a street-mapping website intended for the insurance industry.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is close to rolling out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices.

The new service is likely part of an attempt by RIM to beef up its BlackBerry Messenger service as it seeks to compete with the mobile media platform strengths of rival Apple and of Google''s Android.

Are governments inching ever closer to the some form of censorship of social media?

British Prime Minister David Cameron has flirted with the idea after recent riots and Western democracies and emerging authoritarian states alike, the temptation to try and regain control through censorship may grow.

As governments draw up strategies for cyberspace they face fundamental questions about the power and limits of the state.

Finally, Blippar has developed a smart phone application which detects the shape of chocolate bars and other objects and converts them into virtual experiences.

Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.

Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.

Sometimes, To Be Ethical Is To Be A Fool.

If free information distribution is considered to be an ethical practice today, at what point does information retention become unethical?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Google Labs"][/caption]

A very good example to illustrate this dilemma would be the products of Google, more specifically the services offered under their Labs feature. The first step in increasing worldwide public access to information was the Google Books project. The unevenness of opportunities presented by lack of space or time was nullified by the access to a range of books written in many languages and of many genres (especially of the classics corpora). On that primary level, any competence that involved information as a principal player saw the latter’s transformation into a tradable commodity. It began to be subjected to the same abuse that money faced: hoarding, thriftiness and deficiency. Therefore, he who hoarded, he who was thrifty and he who caused deficiency was inculpated for unethical practices.

Now, with too much information swimming around the cybersphere, data visualization has been resurrected with greater responsibility and, as a matter of an axiom, greater power. In between the two eras, that of data acquisition and perception, there was a period dominated quietly by a backstage hero called data mining: with more information on more things coming out every second, the proverbial gap between the winner and the loser began to narrow down because the two factions were only separated by the knowledge of what information was worthy and what was not. However, when we bit off more than we could chew, it was soon not a matter of what but of how. When we began to find out more than we ought to have known about the past, the future becomes less of a certainty and more of a possibility.

In line with that thought, Google brought in its Ngram Viewer (NV). A simple extension of the Google Books venture, NV brought together simple data mining, graphical data visualization and hundreds of thousands of books written in the last 200 years in 7 languages to leave the user with a new kind of data, ripe for interpretation. Visit the viewer here and see for yourself how the usage of the words “gay” and “homosexual” has varied in frequency over the years, and how it can be understood to show our perception of the words themselves: the more often they were used, the more they featured in discussion, the more they impacted us.

In this secondary level of information distribution – with the world as such tending to greater access limited by vaguer boundaries – could there be such a thing as information hoarding? Definitely. Compare this scenario you’re in to a ladder: you’re on the bottom rung, raw data is on the top-most rung. Before the raw data can reach you, the number of other filters it goes through on the way is increasing. Even though the greater challenge has been to engender new perspectives, there is also the challenge of leaving some information to be interpreted. On the primary level, the access to the information is increased. On the secondary level, it is classified more logically. On the third level, when it reaches you, you retain a responsibility still to decide:

1. How you use it


2. Why you use it, and


3. Whom do you use it with

Therefore, the ethics of this day and age have not been blurred by the repeated refinements but have only been rendered into a finer and finer line, bent this way and that by corporate greed, capitalist agendas and an overriding anarchism performed as an act of rebellion in most cases. The withholding of information does not spell misdemeanour but, more often than not, caution. This is the very nature of capitalism: to address greed by fostering the need to compete in its players. To be completely ethical in such a day and age is to be a fool.

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• On The Reawakening Of Dreams (enderanimate.wordpress.com)

On The Reawakening Of Dreams

As I was writing the entrance test that’s part of my application to the Columbia University today, my flow was broken, nay individuated, by the third and last question in the paper: “If given one month to report on a topic, what would the topic be? How would you go about studying and reporting it, and what media would you use to garner the maximum width of audience? Ensure that you don’t exceed 500 words.”

Of course, the last line was a terrible jolt to me; since I wasn’t being allowed to use the word-count companion, I began to type slowly, deliberately, counting each word as I put it down. Looking up at the clock, I saw that I had some 30 minutes remaining before the time would be up. I stopped typing and paused to think.

What would I report on? I had known the answer to that one for some four years, “The Impact Of Languages On Society”, but I could not go beyond thewhat of it all. You see, since the time I had completely structured the dream, per se, for myself, a lot of things had changed – the answers to most, if not all, of thehows had assumed different shapes and, with them, the whys, too. For example, if I were to present any statistical data after sampling and surveying (the methods for which have not changed significantly in a long time), I would have done so with tables with a small write-up accompanying each table. Now, I’ll have the tables, yes, but they wouldn’t be the nadirs of my hypotheses. Now, I have the Google Trendalyzer – more recently, it powered the Google Zeitgeist – together with Hans Rosling‘s Gapminder. With the coming of opportunities in programming and data visualization, the gap between raw data and the intended conclusion may have changed for the better. However, by being allowed to assume multiple perspectives with unchanging ease, the width of the audience that understood the praxis grew because the solution was now compatible with all the different ways in which the problem was being perceived by different people.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Prof. Rosling"][/caption]

 

With that also increased involvement: presenting problems and solutions as seemingly dissociated elements only alienates the target audience because a) they feel excluded, b) they see no valid argument, or c) both. With the coming of Gapminder, which is a sterling example towards illustrating the consequential upgrading of perspectives it heralded (and, subsequently, the Trendalyzer), initiating increased audience participation became a 2-step process. In other words, affordable.

Soon, audience-participation and audience-inclusion was everywhere, eventually but quickly transcending crowd-sourcing into cloud-networking, where proactive attempts at bettering it only made it more intuitive. It was no longer necessary that I had to have all the resources to execute my projects; I could even be so much as a singular contributor – the plurality would be derived from a global network of research groups.

What did this mean for my hows? It meant that the long hours I had vouchsafed for perfect data representation had become short minutes, and I had time now to do so many other things – perhaps even spend them coming up with new ways to garner more meaningful data and chamfering the the conclusions. With more participation easierly (yeah, that’s a made-up word, but you get the semantic drift) available, undertaking standalone projects, or even aspiring to do so, would be foolish. In other words, unaffordable.

I went on to complete my paper so quickly that the examiner was surprised. I am sure I exceeded the word-limit but a few words, but I’m not worried. I’m sure they’ll get the point.

By widening the scope of the problem to include a malleated range of parameters to understand change at one end and widening the compatibility of solutions to address a longer list of issues at the other end, technology and the latitude of human thought have reawakened my dreams to a brighter world.