What the Tesla Battery Fire Means for Electric Vehicles

A Tesla Model S caught fire. What happened brings both good news and bad news for electric vehicles.

Kevin Bullis

October 3, 2013

(UPDATE: Tesla has provided more information about the accident. See below.)

This week a Tesla Motors Model S electric vehicle caught on fire after the driver ran over a chunk of metal in the road, an incident that’s been reported all over the place now.

And this is news, why?

After all, vehicle fires are very common. One battery researcher, Jeff Dahn of Dalhousie University, pointed out to me this afternoon that there were 187,000 vehicle fires in the United Statesin 2011. That’s one fire for every 1,738 cars on the road. With Tesla this fire makes one out of almost 20,000. “That’s 10X less frequent,” he told me in an email, typing in all caps.

A Taste of Future Twitter Technologies

Twitter is losing money and is much smaller than Facebook, so new technology is more important than ever. 

David Talbot

October 4, 2013

Now that we know Twitter isn’t making money (see “Twitter IPO Filing Shows it Ain’t No Facebook”), it’s worth looking at emerging technologies that might help the company turn that around. Though Twitter is much smaller than Facebook, most tweets are public. So the company has an advantage to work with.  Here are examples of how it can do better capitalizing on the crush of real-time information it trades in:

Predicting Trends: Researchers at MIT have been honing a way to predict Twitter trends hours in advance. Their analyses suggest with as much as 95 percent accuracy which words, phrases or hashtags are going to suddenly get very popular.  This can be of importance to marketers and public relations officials who might want to capitalize on (or react to) that trend, and also to public safety agencies.

Sorting through chaff: During emergencies and breaking news events, Twitter feeds get overwhelmed.  But real-time information contained in some of those Tweets can be uniquely valuable.  In a project at the University of California, Boulder, researchers were able to identify the most important tweets–with objective, factual information-with 80 percent accuracy. The same researchers were later able to classify the important tweets by various categories, such as requests for help and reports on damage.  Such analyses could bolster Twitter as a must-use platform.

Discerning location: Fewer than 1 percent of tweets are “geotagged” by users, and IP addresses are always changing on mobile devices.  Yet location information could greatly improve the value of Twitter as a real-time news source–and help them sell sponsored Tweets. Help is on the way. For example, recent research has shown that the locations of friends—people you follow on Twitter who are also following you—can be used to infer your location to within 10 kilometers half the time.

Twitter surely has more such tricks up its sleeve, and is working out how to make money from them. For more on such ideas, see “How Twitter Can Cash in With New Technology”.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519931/a-taste-of-future-twitter-technologies/

The Lessons of Aaron Swartz

With technology comes power. Shouldn’t MIT teach students how to use it responsibly? 

Hal Abelson

October 4, 2013

Hal Abelson

On the day after Aaron Swartz’s death in January, President Reif and I spoke about how MIT might respond to the breaking news of his suicide. A well-known Internet activist and advocate for democratic principles and open access, Swartz, 26, had made important technical contributions to the Web’s architecture at age 14. For his last two years, he had been the subject of a vigorous federal prosecution by the Boston U.S. attorney on charges of using a laptop connected to the MIT network to download millions of research journal articles from JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

A Charger Powers Your Smartphone, Sniffs for Malware

Kaprica’s malware-scanning charger does its job without actually residing on your phone.

• By Rachel Metz on October 4, 2013

Why It Matters

As smartphones become ubiquitous, they’re an increasingly likely target for hackers.

Charge it: Kaprica Security’s Skorpion smartphone charger is also an external malware scanner.

At the annual Black Hat security conference this summer, researchers demonstrated how it would be possible to add malware to an iPhone by connecting it to a modified charger. Now a mobile security startup is attempting to do the opposite, by selling a charger that can scan your smartphone for malware—and repair it, if necessary—while powering it up.

There are already plenty of mobile security apps on the market from companies like Lookout Mobile and TrustGo. Yet Kaprica Security believes that because its Skorpion charger is physically separate from your smartphone, it is better suited to spot the kind of malware that can sit silently on the device, stealing files or login information like your bank or credit card username and password, from which a hacker may be able to profit while remaining undetected.

Twitter IPO Filing Shows It Ain't No Facebook

IPO filings published today suggest Twitter will remain tiny compared to its rival Facebook 

Tom Simonite

October 3, 2013

Talk of the power, future and technology of social networking always centers on two companies: Facebook and Twitter. Yet despite that equal billing, filings published today in advance of Twitter’s intial public offering show that the company is significantly smaller than its rival, and is likely to remain so.

Twitter is seeking to raise $1 billion in its forthcoming IPO, and reports that it has 215 million monthly active users. That’s not much advance on the “more than 200M” the company boasted of last December. When Facebook was eight years old, as Twitter is now, it had over 600 million active users; it now has 1.15 billion.

What the Tesla Battery Fire Means for Electric Vehicles

A Tesla Model S caught fire. What happened brings both good news and bad news for electric vehicles.

Kevin Bullis

October 3, 2013

This week a Tesla Motors Model S electric vehicle caught on fire after the driver ran over a chunk of metal in the road, an incident that’s been reported all over the place now.

And this is news, why?

After all, vehicle fires are very common. One battery researcher, Jeff Dahn of Dalhousie University, pointed out to me this afternoon that there were 187,000 vehicle fires in the United Statesin 2011. That’s one fire for every 1,738 cars on the road. With Tesla this fire makes one out of almost 20,000. “That’s 10X less frequent,” he told me in an email, typing in all caps.

New Answer from IBM's Watson: A Recipe for Swiss-Thai Fusion Quiche

As IBM launches research collaboration with four universities and institutes, it shows how Watson can build recipes. 

David Talbot

October 3, 2013

Here’s a taste of what IBM’s Watson supercomputer now can do: it can devise a recipe for a Swiss-Thai fusion asparagus quiche, or a paprika-infused papaya custard with orange juice reduction.

During a day of demonstrations and talks Wednesday about the future of cognitive computing at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, the computational feat of building recipes in response to custom requests–and drawing on recipe databases and knowledge of human taste and smell preferences to do so–was clearly a light moment. But it also spoke to the challenges the company faces in finding killer applications for the question-and-answer technology.

The Big Data Conundrum: How to Define It?

Big Data is revolutionising 21st-century business without anybody knowing what it actually means. Now computer scientists have come up with a definition they hope everyone can agree on. 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 3, 2013

 

One of the biggest new ideas in computing is “big data”. There is unanimous agreement that big data is revolutionising commerce in the 21st century. When it comes to business, big data offers unporecedented insight, improved decision-making and reveals untapped sources of profit.

And yet ask a chief technology officer to define big data and he or she will will scuff their feet and stare at the floor. Chances are, you will get as many definitions as the number of people you ask. And that’s a problem for anyone attempting to buy or sell or use big data services–what exactly is on offer?

Genetically Modified Bacteria Produce 50 Percent More Fuel

By changing the way certain organisms process sugar, UCLA researchers have shown how to produce more biofuel.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 3, 2013

Why It Matters

If it can be made cost effectively, and without producing any carbon dioxide, biofuel could lessen our reliance on fossil fuels.

Ethanol boosters: The bacteria in this petri dish have been genetically modified to increase the amount of biofuel that can be made from sugar.

Researchers at UCLA have opened a path to cheaper and cleaner biofuels by using genetic engineering to fundamentally change how certain organisms process sugar.

Conventional biofuels are either too expensive to compete with fossil fuels or they release so much carbon dioxide that they’re hardly worth making—or both.

The UCLA advance, which increases the amount of biofuel that can be made from sugar by 50 percent, could make it cheaper to produce biofuels from a variety of sources, especially biomass such as wood chips and grass. The U.S. biofuels industry is in desperate need of such advances—even though Congress has mandated that a certain amount of biofuel from biomass be blended with gasoline, high costs and other factors have limited production, leading the EPA to repeatedly waive the requirement.

What Will Your Robot Servant Look Like?

A Georgia Tech study finds that preferences for robo-servants vary by our ages and according to the chosen task. 

Rachel Metz

October 3, 2013

As we inch closer to the day when we can go online and buy personal robot servants (and, perhaps, an insurrection in which these same robo-workers take over), it’s worth thinking about what these machines should look like.

Fortunately, there’s already a study with a few ideas: Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Psychology is presenting results of a study this week that explores whether two groups of people (young adults and senior citizens) prefer a robot with a more human or mechanical face, or something in between.

The results are interesting, as they reveal not just different preferences for each age group but also for the job the robot is assigned–which might offer some insights for how to design more advanced robots that people will feel comfortable using.

Researchers found that, generally, the majority of college students surveyed preferred faces that look more robotic, while older study participants gravitated toward human-like faces.

Their preferences changed somewhat depending on what the robot was helping with, though. For example, for help in making decisions (like investing), younger people preferred a face with an in-between human/robot look. The study also found that for a robot that could help with personal care (like taking a bath), people surveyed either wanted it to look very robotic to preserve their privacy or extremely human since that would make the robot seem more caring or trustworthy. Nobody seemed to care what a robot that helped with chores looked like, however.

The paper, written by graduate student Akanksha Prakash and psychology professor Wendy Rogers, is being presented at the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in San Diego this week.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519781/what-will-your-robot-servant-look-like/

Silk Road Bust Could Halt Bitcoin Economy

Many of the bitcoins in existence could likely be traced back to the Silk Road marketplace seized by the FBI today.

Tom Simonite

October 2, 2013

News that the FBI had arrested a man on suspicion of running the notorious online marketplace Silk Road, where bitcoins were traded for illegal drugs, sent many people scurrying to watch how the value of the bitcoin reacted. After an initial 20 percent plunge in the value, the currency soon recovered–which some virtual-currency enthusiasts saw as proof that the bitcoin economy could easily handle the bad press and loss of Silk Road.

In fact, it’s too early to make that call. There’s good reason to believe that the Silk Road bust may cause a freeze in bitcoin transactions that could trouble its still-nascent economy. Silk Road was popular in part due to bitcoin’s reputation for providing anonymity. But recent research shows it is relatively easy to track their flows and identify their owners. Many people that used Silk Road - likely a significant proportion of bitcoin users - are at risk of being traced. They are probably understandably wary of spending their bitcoins.

Research by Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University published this year suggested that Silk Road alone comprised between 4.5 and 9 percent of daily bitcoin transactions. Figures in the criminal complaint published today underline that the marketplace was a giant in the bitcoin economy. Silk Road is said to have brought in 9.5 million bitcoins since 2011. Although some of the cryptocoins will have passed through the marketplace twice, that’s a striking figure given that only 11.75 million bitcoins have ever been created.

We learned earlier this month that law enforcement could likely already identify many people that had done business on Silk Road thanks to the way bitcoin transactions are publicly logged (see “Mapping the Bitcoin Economy Could Reveal Users’ Identities”).

Sarah Meiklejohn, the University of California San Diego researcher who led that research told me that she had briefed a law enforcement agency on her techniques. She also demonstrated their power by tracing a Silk Road transaction made by Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg. Combined with the information the FBI gathered through its Silk Road investigation and seizures, many more people now stand at risk of being traced.

That could mean we see a string of secondary arrests in coming days of people that made use of Silk Road. It surely means that many people are in possession of bitcoins that could tie them to Silk Road, and that they would be unwise to spend.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519846/silk-road-bust-could-halt-bitcoin-economy/

Pragmatic Enterprise Application Rationalization

Communicating the Cost of the Application Portfolio

• By Josh Harbert, Senior Director, Marketing, Apptio on October 2, 2013 | Provided by Apptio

Application sprawl is a scourge that silently sucks IT resources and budget away from innovative business initiatives. Business users want IT leaders to support more and more apps with fewer resources. But these business users rarely know how much it costs to maintain an application.

And IT professionals aren’t very well equipped to tell them. CIOs often don’t know how many applications have been deployed, which applications are critical to the business mission, or how much it costs to run the enterprise’s application portfolio. They can’t say for sure which apps should be retired, replaced, moved to the cloud, or invested in.

Viral Marketing Successfully Modelled By Network Theorists

Network models famously fail to capture the dynamics of many real-world marketing campaigns. Now computer scientists say they’ve solved the problem. 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 2, 2013

How likely are you to buy the latest James Bond novel by William Boyd? Or to watch the second installment of The Hobbit movie trilogy when it is released in December? Or to vote Democrat in the next election?

The probability that you will buy a certain product or adopt a certain opinion, lies at the heart of one of the hottest problems in network theory: how to predict whether a product, opinion or message is likely to go viral.

There is no shortage of potential answers. Indeed, one of the important successes of network theory is that it demonstrates how information spreads through a network based on the connectivity of the individuals within it.

Graphene Could Make Data Centers and Supercomputers More Efficient

New research suggests graphene could enable highly efficient optical communication in chips for data centers and supercomputers.

• By Mike Orcutt on October 2, 2013

Why It Matters

Technologies that make computers more energy efficient will be vital to the future of the industry.

Illuminating graphene: A colored scanning electron microscope image shows a graphene photodetector (purple) integrated with a silicon waveguide (the ridge in the middle). On each side sits a metal electrode (green).

Computer chips that use light, instead of electrons, to move data between electronic components and to other chips could be essential for more efficient supercomputers and data centers. Several industrial research labs are working toward such optical interconnects that rely on germanium to turn light into ones and zeros. But recent research suggests that graphene devices could be far better and cheaper.

An optical interconnect consists of a modulator that converts electrical signals into optical ones, and a photodetector, which does the reverse. Current iterations feature modulators made of silicon and photodetectors made of germanium. Intel recently announced plans to use such technology and begin manufacturing a product it calls “silicon photonics,” for use in data centers (see “Intel’s Laser Chips Could Make Data Centers Run Better”).

How about Your Facebook Profile Reveals More About Your Personality Than You Know

Researchers look at social media to understand how updates and “likes” differ between personality types. 

Aviva Hope Rutkin

October 1, 2013

Words most commonly used by women. The researchers could predict users’ genders with 92% accuracy.

 

What do your status updates really say about you?

In a study published last week at PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania examined the language used in 75,000 Facebook profiles. They found differences across ages, genders, and certain personality traits. This allowed the group, led by computer and information scientist H. Andrew Schwartz, to make predictions about the profile of each user.

The researchers found that they could predict a user’s gender with 92 percent accuracy. They could also guess a user’s age within three years more than half of the time.

Technology Is Moving Too Slowly to Make Climate-Change Target

The IPCC says we can emit a trillion tons of carbon and still avoid major warming. We’ll emit much more.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 1, 2013

Why It Matters

Improved technology could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change.

One of the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last week was that we need to emit no more than one trillion tons of carbon in order to stand a good chance of limiting global warming to 2 °C. The problem is this: technology is not progressing fast enough to make this happen.

The trillion-ton figure is really an estimate, as no one knows precisely how many tons of carbon will raise the temperature of the planet by 2 °C. And less warming than that could cause significant damage, while humans will probably survive higher levels. That said, the number provides one of the clearest ways of thinking about what most climate scientists believe needs to be done to avert serious climate change.

AAD22L: Automatic Acronym Detection in 22 Languages Unveiled in Europe

Ever puzzled over an incomprehensible acronym? Help is at hand thanks to the work of European researchers who say their acronym recognition algorithm works in 22 languages and should work in others too 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 1, 2013

We’ve all had the experience of reading a report, scientific paper or just a long news article that is ruined by TMUA (Too Many Unnecessary Acronyms).  The author introduces one acronym in the first paragraph, others in the second and third paragraphs leading to a final paragraph that is no more than a sequence of incomprehensible capital letters.

Today, we have help thanks to the work of Maud Ehrmann at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and a few pals who have developed a text analyser that recognises over 1 million acronyms in 22 different languages. The work is part of a broader effort to analyse the content of news stories to keep track of the media’s coverage of organisations, companies, governments and so on.

Depth-Sensing Cameras Head to Mobile Devices

Adding 3-D sensors to existing and future mobile devices will enable augmented-reality games, handheld 3-D scanning, and better photography.

• By Tom Simonite on October 1, 2013

Why It Matters

People find novel ways to use new sensors whenever they’re added to mobile computers.

Copy and paste: A tablet can be used to make 3-D scans of an object using the Structure Sensor and other new hardware coming to mobile devices.

Just over a decade since cameras first appeared in cell phones, they remain one of the most used features of mobile devices, underpinning wildly popular and valuable companies such as Instagram and Snapchat. Now hardware that gives handheld computers 3-D vision may open up a new dimension to imaging apps, and enable new ways of using these devices. Early mobile apps that can scan the world in 3-D show potential for new forms of gaming, commerce, and photography.

The first mobile depth-sensing technology to hit the market is likely to be the Structure Sensor, an accessory for Apple’s iPad that gives the device capabilities similar to those of Microsoft’s Kinect gaming controller.  Occipital, the San Francisco company behind the device, says it will start shipping its product in February 2014. A Kickstarter campaign for the device has raised almost $750,000, with more than a month to run.

Surrounded By Google Glass

At a conference teeming with Google Glass wearers, this glasses-wearer felt out of place. 

Rachel Metz

September 30, 2013

Until today, I had never been around more than one or two people at a time wearing Google’s yet-to-be-released head-worn computer, Google Glass. Then I walked into the Glazed Conference here in San Francisco–an event focused on wearable technology put together by wearable tech incubator Stained Glass Labs.

Glass wearers were everywhere: chatting in the halls, attending panel sessions, eating lunch, occasionally stroking the touchpad on its side. There were short people, tall people, slender people, chubby people–all united by their headwear.

It wasn’t that the majority of people at Glazed were wearing Glass, but that the people who were wearing it really stood out. Not really because of Glass’ bright hues, though they do factor into it (you can’t really be that incognito with bright orange or blue or stark white eyewear). It was more about the little, prismatic display in the corner of the wearer’s eye, and how I couldn’t shake the feeling that they might be at least splitting their attention between me and something else projected in their field of view. I know this wasn’t the case (you can see a tiny mirror image of what’s on the display when a person wearing Glass is using it, and many of the functions are voice-operated), but the feeling was impossible to ignore.

I left wondering if in-person interactions will be more and more like this in the next few years as wearable technology improves and spreads. Hopefully, it will also get less distracting.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519751/surrounded-by-google-glass/

A Google Glass App Knows What You're Looking At

An app for Google’s wearable computer Glass can recognize objects in front of a person wearing the device. 

Tom Simonite

September 30, 2013

 

 Seeing Clearly: This machine vision app is 67 percent sure that it is looking at a desk (Credit: AlchemyAPI)

Google has shown that the camera integrated into Google Glass, the company’s head-worn computer, can capture some striking video. Now machine learning company AlchemyAPI has built an app that uses that camera to recognize what a person is looking at. The app was built at an employee hack session held by the company this month to experiment with ways to demonstrate their new image recognition service.

The app can either work on photos taken by a person wearing Glass, or constantly grab images from the device’s camera. Those are sent to the cloud or a nearby computer for processing by AlchemyAPI’s image recognition software. The software sends back its best guess at what it sees and then Glass will display, or speak, the verdict.

“There’s a slight delay and then you’ll hear it say ‘arm chair’ or ‘desktop computer,’” says AlchemyAPI’s CEO Elliot Turner. “It takes about 250ms to analyze a given frame.”

Here’s a video of the app in action:

You could say Turner’s app simply states the obvious, but doing that in (almost) real time is no mean feat for computer vision software. AlchemyAPI’s image recognition system is built on a system of complex simulated neural networks of the type known as “deep learning”, which can produce systems that learn faster and smarter than more established techniques. Google has been a pioneer in this area (see “Deep Learning”) and many other large companies including Microsoft (see “Microsoft Brings Star Trek’s Voice Translator to Life”) and Facebook (“Facebook Launches Advanced AI Research Group”) are also investing in the technology.

An online demo shows the capability of AlchemyAPI’s image recognition software. It shows the system responding to a constant train of images pulled from Google Image search and Flickr.

Although far from perfect, the software’s performance is impressive. The insight the demo gives into the certainty of each judgement it makes also suggests it could easily be made to appear more competent. Many of the system’s failures come when it tries to be very specific. Saying “This is an insect” would be better than “I’m not sure what this is, it could be a mantis or a cricket”. Turner says that early customers for the image recognition offering are mostly media companies that want to categorise and search large collections of unlabelled photographs.

Object recognition systems can be compared by testing them against the standard ImageNet database, which contains more than 50 million images labeled with 22,000 different categories. Elliot won’t share exact figures, but says his system performs on par with the best systems publicly tested against that, which typically get about 15-17 percent of their guesses wrong. One such system now powers the object recognition built into Google’s image search feature for its Google Plus social network, after Google bought a startup founded by deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519726/a-google-glass-app-knows-what-youre-looking-at/

World’s First Quantum Metamaterial Unveiled

German researchers have designed, built and tested the first metamaterial made out of superconducting quantum resonators 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

September 30, 2013

In recent years, physicists have been excitedly exploring the potential of an entirely new class of materials known as metamaterials. This stuff is built from repeating patterns of sub-wavelength-sized structures that interact with photons, steering them in ways that are impossible with naturally occuring materials.

The first metamaterials were made from split-ring resonators (C-shaped pieces of metal) the size of dimes that were designed to interact with microwaves with a wavelength of a few centimetres. These metamaterials had exotic properties such as a negative refractive index that could bend light “the wrong way”.

How Apple Could Boost Speeds 20 Times on the Next iPhone

The new iPhone breaks ground by seamlessly sharing Wi-Fi and 4G for Siri. Further tweaks could boost bandwidth 20-fold in some cases.

• By David Talbot on September 30, 2013

Why It Matters

By one estimate, global mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold between 2012 and 2017, requiring new solutions for adding capacity.

A wireless networking technology found in Apple’s new operating system could—if tweaked—provide a 10- to 20-fold bandwidth increase in some situations, like on a moving train or in a busy urban environment, new research suggests.

The technology is called multipath TCP. It allows you to use multiple wireless networks—such as 4G and Wi-Fi—at the same time. But Apple isn’t using it fully, nor is it using an advanced version—one that also encodes the data being transmitted in new ways— recently shown to provide those dramatic potential gains.

When Will Gene Therapy Come to the U.S.?

Several gene therapies are or will soon be in late-stage human trials. One of them could be the first to get FDA approval for sale in the U.S.

• By Susan Young on September 30, 2013

Why It Matters

For patients with genetic diseases, gene therapy could offer a lifetime of benefits after a single treatment. For cancer patients, it could be a new way to fight the disease even as it spreads.

Though many gene therapies have been tested in patients around the world in hopes of curing hereditary diseases, few governments have approved their sale, and none has been approved in the United States. That could change in coming years as several therapies enter advanced trials.

A big step forward already came in November 2012, when the European Medicines Agency gave the Dutch biotech startup UniQure permission to sell its treatment. That approval came as a relief to many in the field, who had been waiting for a break in the clouds hanging over the technology since failed and fatal trials in the 1990s. “You see a resurgence in terms of investors, and in truth, a number of problems have been solved,” says Katherine High, a medical researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who is overseeing a late-stage clinical trial for a different gene therapy.

Why Qualcomm Is Betting on Wireless Health

One of the world’s largest chip makers is helping to instigate a boom in wireless health devices.

• By Jon Cohen on September 30, 2013

Why It Matters

Wireless health devices could permit constant physiological monitoring.

Part of our Business Report:

A Cure for Health-Care Costs

Health-care spending is out of control. Can technology save us money?

Asthmapolis has a GPS sensor for inhalers that uses a Bluetooth radio so people with asthma can track where and when they needed help breathing. CleverCap attaches to pill bottles, flashes and beeps when it’s time to take medication, and then, using Wi-Fi and cellular networks, reports to the Internet whether the pills were taken. The Garmin heart-rate monitor straps across the chest and digitally communicates beeps and blips with yet another wireless protocol, called ANT-plus.

That’s just a fraction of the wireless health devices reaching the “mobile health” market, gadgets that could one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. But this is no seamless ecosystem: these three devices alone use three different communication protocols. The potential flood of data pouring out of the machines might as well just disappear into the ether if it’s not stored, organized, and made accessible to the right people in real time.