Predictive Smartphone Assistant Gives You a Heads-Up

Startup Sherpa’s predictive intelligence offers valuable insights when and where you need them.

• By Rachel Metz on March 25, 2013

Why It Matters

Assistant apps that can mine data on our smartphones are likely to be the next big wave of digital helpers.

Mountains of data: Sherpa looks at your e-mail, calendar, and location to figure out when and where to present you with useful information.

Google Now, an app for Android smartphones that serves up useful information such as flight details when it thinks you need it, is getting some competition from a former Googler.

Sherpa, a free smartphone app, mines your e-mails, calendar, and location data to determine the best time and place to let you know something like your flight information and help with next steps, such as getting a cab to the airport.

Bill Ferrell, the company’s founder and CEO, used to work on search advertising quality at Google. He spent a lot of time traveling for work, pulling out his laptop to look up when his flight was leaving or which hotel he was staying at. Why, he wondered, couldn’t the information just come to you?

Google was apparently thinking the same thing: Google Now came out last summer. But Ferrell believes smartphone owners will take a shine to Sherpa despite Google’s resources and head start. “We’re trying to figure out what are the relevant pieces of information that we can bring to you,” he says. “By using location as the angle of attack, how do we slice space and time together to bring you that information?”

Sherpa begins an invite-only beta test on the iPhone today. The company plans to make the app publicly available soon, but it hasn’t said when. It has also announced venture backing—a seed round of $1.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, InterWest Partners, and some angel investors.

Sherpa is joining a growing group of mobile apps attempting to push beyond Apple’s sassy digital assistant, Siri, by bringing you helpful data before you even ask for it. Besides Google Now, others include Grokr (see “The iPhone Gets an Answer to Google Now”). Ferrell expects Sherpa’s predictive intelligence to help it stand out. Once you give the app permission to access your calendar, e-mail, and location data, it starts figuring out how to be useful. If it knows you have an afternoon meeting somewhere, for example, Sherpa’s remote server may send you an alert letting you know you need to leave early because traffic is bad, Ferrell says.

Sherpa can even make connections between a regular appointment on your calendar that has no location attached to it—a piano lesson, for example, at 2 p.m. every Tuesday—and the location you go to whenever that appointment occurs. “Now we can say, ‘Hey, Bill, it looks like you’re running late for your piano lesson,’” Ferrell says.

Sherpa uses machine learning to understand the content of your e-mail; the company’s technology classifies messages into types and then extracts key information. It creates a geo-fence in the Sherpa app around a relevant geographic area, so when you arrive in a new city for a few days, for example, Sherpa will know to pop up your hotel information.

Since Sherpa only needs to figure out where you are to within about a kilometer, Ferrell says, it tends to use cell-tower and Wi-Fi hotspot pinging to find your location. Those techniques are less accurate than GPS but chug less battery power.

Ramon Llamas, a mobile analyst at the research company IDC, thinks it will be challenging for Sherpa to make sense of all the information it collects from users and figure out how to deal with it. Yet Ferrell seems confident that Sherpa can not only do this but make money off it, by allowing some companies to be preferred service providers. Eventually, when Sherpa reminds you about your flight to New York tomorrow and asks if you need a cab to the airport, it may suggest a taxi service that pays Sherpa for bringing in customers.

Ferrell also envisions Sherpa offering additional features. It’s currently testing one at a Philz Coffee in downtown Palo Alto: if you tend to get coffee there each morning, Sherpa can alert you when you’re about 500 meters away from the shop and ask if you want your regular cup. If you respond yes, it will be ready for you when you walk in the door.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512781/predictive-smartphone-assistant-gives-you-a-heads-up

 

Microchip Adapts to Severe Damage

An integrated circuit that adjusts to damage shows a way to make ordinary chips more efficient and reliable.

• By Katherine Bourzac on March 25, 2013

Why It Matters

The reliability and resilience of electronic circuitry is crucial to modern computing.

Blast off: A scanning electron microscope image shows damage caused to a circuit by a laser.

Caltech researchers have demonstrated a complex integrated circuit that survives substantial damage by reconfiguring the way it processes information.

The chip does not physically repair flaws; it uses a second processor to come up with new ways to perform a task in spite of the damage. The chip can also be programmed to prioritize energy savings or speed. Ali Hajimiri, the Caltech professor of electrical engineering who led the work, says chips that tune their own performance on the fly could also perform better under ordinary circumstances.

Self-healing circuits could be resilient to manufacturing flaws, and they could withstand damage caused by high temperatures or the deterioration that comes with aging. That could mean more robust military communications equipment and portable consumer electronics that can take a beating.

Hajimiri’s group is the first to demonstrate this kind of capability in a complex integrated circuit—in this case a power amplifier, a type of circuit that processes signal transmission in cell phones and other telecommunication devices. The self-healing chip consists of 100,000 transistors, several types of sensors, and an additional embedded processor that monitors the circuit’s performance and runs algorithms to assess how it can be improved.

In work published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, the Caltech group showed that circuits equipped with the self-healing system continue to work even after the circuit has been repeatedly blasted with a laser to knock out about half the transistors. It takes just tens of milliseconds to adjust to the damage. A circuit that wasn’t subjected to this attack was able to consume 50 percent less power than an ordinary circuit by reconfiguring itself for maximum efficiency.

The secondary processor that makes these results possible monitors the circuit by running a program that analyzes sensor data about temperature, voltage, current, power, and more. It can be programmed to optimize these parameters for a particular outcome—for example, to maximize the purity or power of the signal produced by the amplifier. The program then figures out how to change the circuit to best achieve that goal. It is possible to change the voltage applied to particular transistors in the circuit, or to change the way signals are routed through it so as to avoid a damaged area. Hajimiri says the circuit has about 250,000 possible states.

Hajimiri says it should be possible to apply this concept to any kind of circuit, no matter the function. In the power amplifier demonstration, the self-healing system doesn’t take up any extra area because the secondary processor is positioned underneath.

The concept could free chip designers from having to make sure that circuits can withstand rare events like temperature extremes, voltage fluctuations, or interference. The ability to do so usually comes at a cost of performance.

“You can design a chip that will run in these worst-case scenarios, but most of the time it’s not the worst case, and you could be running faster or with less power most of the time,” says Subhasish Mitra, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, who was not involved with the work. As silicon transistors are ever more aggressively miniaturized, says Mitra, manufacturers will need circuit designers to provide more reliability.

“Until recently, the economics discouraged this kind of design,” says Thomas H. Lee, who heads the Stanford Microwave Integrated Circuits Laboratory. “But it’s getting a lot harder to do a good job of manufacturing chips, and I think embedded repair systems will become common.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512776/microchip-adapts-to-severe-damage

New 3-D Display Could Let Phones and Tablets Produce Holograms

Optical trickery lets a modified LCD produce hologram-like still images and videos.

• By Katherine Bourzac on March 20, 2013

Why It Matters

Multiview 3-D displays will be used to produce radically different computer interfaces and new kinds of entertainment.

New view: Researchers from HP Labs used their new display to produce an image of the company’s logo.

 

A new kind of three-dimensional display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like walking around a real object.

The screen is made by modifying a conventional liquid-crystal display (LCD), the same kind of display found in most phones, laptops, tablets, and televisions. Researchers hope these 3-D systems will enable new kinds of user interfaces for portable electronics, gaming, and data visualization. The work, carried out at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, relies on complex physics to make 3-D displays that are as thin as half a millimeter.

Conventional 3-D—the type found in movie theaters—provides the viewer with only one perspective. The key to making a multiview 3-D display is reproducing all the light rays reflecting off an object from every angle and to get a different image to the left and right eye of the viewer. Some systems for producing multiview 3-D images require rapidly spinning mirrors; others use systems of lasers and multiple graphics processors.
 

The HP display uses nanopatterned grooves, which HP researcher David Fattal, who led the work, calls “directional pixels,” to send light off in different directions. This requires no new moving parts, and the patterns are built into an existing display component, the backlight.

A conventional LCD uses a sheet of plastic or glass that’s covered in bumps that scatter white light and direct it through the display’s color filters, polarizers, and shutters to the viewer. The new 3-D display builds on optics research demonstrating how the path, color, and other properties of light can be manipulated by passing it through materials patterned at the nanoscale.



The HP display replaces the randomly scattering bumps in a normal LCD with deliberately patterned grooves. Each “directional pixel” has three sets of grooves that direct red, green, and blue light in one particular direction. The number of directional pixels determines the number of viewpoints the display can produce. Light from the pixels then passes through a conventional array of liquid crystal shutters that pass or block the light to make a moving image—just like in a conventional LCD.
 

The HP researchers showed that they could make static images with 200 viewpoints, or videos with 64 viewpoints and 30 frames per second—so far. The number of viewpoints in the video system has been limited by their ability to put the backlight together with the nanopatterned liquid-crystal shutters in the lab. Fattal says the system should ultimately be easy to manufacture, because it’s a modified LCD. The work is described today in the journal Nature.
 

Science fiction has provided no shortage of visions of futuristic computer interfaces that allow people to manipulate data, images, and maps by waving their hands through streams of holograms. The technology for tracking gestures is pretty well developed, says Fattal—systems like Microsoft’s Kinect are available off the shelf. All that’s lacking, he says, are practical systems for producing high-quality 3-D images that can be viewed from multiple positions around a screen.

 

There has been very little innovation in the basic physics for making 3-D images since early in the 20th century, says Gordon Wetzstein, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group. Wetzstein was not involved with the work. Most 3-D televisions and other systems on the market use old optical tricks—special glasses to filter part of the image for the left or right eye, for example—to create the illusion of depth. He says the new display “is transforming a technology that’s been around for 100 years.”
 

Fattal acknowledges that producing content for the new display requires 200 different images. Some of this image data can be reconstructed digitally—it’s not necessary to have 200 cameras—but for the foreseeable future, the most promising applications for the displays will be in showing computer-generated images. “A 3-D interface for a cell phone or laptop might display different windows next to each other, or architects could use a tablet to show a 3-D model to a customer, instead of building a physical model,” Fattal says. “Or you might use a smart watch to view Google Maps in 3-D.”
 

David Krum, codirector of the University of Southern California’s Mixed Reality Lab, says many computer scientists are now working on content development for 3-D systems. Part of the challenge, he says, is understanding human perception and which light rays can be left out while still creating the perception of a 3-D image for the viewer. Without addressing this, mobile 3-D will create big bandwidth and data-storage burdens, he says.

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512716/new-3-d-display-could-let-phones-and-tablets-produce-holograms

Video Chat That’s a Little Closer to Hanging Out in Real Life

A startup called Rabbit believes consumers will jump for always-on video chatting that lets you watch movies with an infinite number of friends.

• By Rachel Metz on March 20, 2013

Why It Matters

With expanding access to speedy Internet service and powerful smartphones and tablets, video calling is likely to become more common.

Online hangout: Rabbit, a video-chat service now in private beta, lets users watch videos or listen to music with faraway friends.

With so many video-chat applications already on the market, it sounds like a silly idea: build a new one while pretending the others never existed.

Yet that was what the cofounders of San Francisco startup Rabbit did in 2011, and it seems to have helped them dream up something original. The result, now in a free private beta as a Mac desktop application, seeks to make video chatting less like a scheduled event and more like an ongoing hangout session. Participants can even watch movies with an unlimited number of friends.

Rabbit emerges at a time when video chat is increasingly popular—especially among younger users—and an ever-growing number of devices capable of streaming video are connected to the Web. A report released last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicated that 37 percent of kids ages 12 to 17 use video-chat applications.

Video-calling services have already multiplied like, well, rabbits: well-known examples include Skype, Apple’s FaceTime, Google+ Hangouts, Tango, and ooVoo. But Rabbit hopes it can stand out from the pack. Its distinctive features include simultaneous video-chat and content streaming and little on-screen bubbles that can hover atop other applications, showing who is participating in the chat.

In some ways, Rabbit’s design harks back to the early days of online chat. For example, before you can start a conversation you need to either create a “room,” which you can then invite others to join, or wait until someone else asks you to join a room. There is one public room, appropriately titled “Hop In!”—but most people I saw hopping in there quickly bounded away.

Once you are inside a room with a few buddies, though, Rabbit’s aims become clearer. Everyone you chat with shows up in a circular frame, and the person currently speaking (or speaking loudest) is perched in a larger circle above the others. The bubble shape is intended to obscure the background and make you forget that everyone is in a different place, cofounder Stephanie Morgan says.

People in rooms can further subdivide into smaller chat groups, each represented by an on-screen bubble showing the current speaker in that group at any given time. Hovering over one of these little groups reveals who’s in it, what interests they share, and who within the group each member is friends with on Facebook. You can listen to the different conversations and flit from one to another.

Like many other video-chat applications, Rabbit allows you to share your computer screen with friends. But whereas some applications cannot share audio, Rabbit makes it possible to share videos, music, and other Web content in real time, whether it’s music playing in Spotify or a TV show streamed from Netflix. You can also share just a portion of your screen, if you’d like.

Morgan explains that while Rabbit captures conversation audio that is fed into your computer when you speak into a microphone and streams that to your friends—as video-chat programs usually do—it also captures video and audio directly from your computer so they can be streamed as well. This means you can have conversations while sharing a TV show on Hulu, although the quality of that content on your friend’s end will depend on how good your computer and Internet connection are.

And if you do have conversations over streaming content, Rabbit will detect this and respond by automatically lowering the volume of the video, bumping it back up when it determines that the conversation has ended.

“The whole idea for all of the design, including the technical design, is to have Rabbit be really responsive and kind of organic, and blend into the background,” Morgan says.

For now, the application is available only on Macs running the latest version of Apple’s operating software. This is partly because Rabbit’s method of capturing audio doesn’t work on existing mobile operating systems or over the Web, Morgan says. Eventually, she hopes to offer Rabbit on other platforms, and on mobile devices, too.

I tried Rabbit and found that it’s still extremely deserving of its “private beta” label—streaming videos tended to look pixelated, and talking over them sounded choppy, despite up-to-date computers and speedy Internet connections. But friends I spoke with did feel a bit more “there” than with, say, Skype, and I enjoyed being schooled on details of Downton Abbey while watching with a friend several cities away.

Even so, it may be tough for Rabbit to get enough users. While video chat is increasingly widespread, even some efforts with big-name backing haven’t taken off (see “Napster’s Founders Try a Video Chat Do-Over”). Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says this may be because social expectations are much higher when you’re on camera. Some people prefer not to be seen; it’s much harder to yawn, multitask, or tune others out when you’re being recorded.

Yet while it’s hard to predict what will be popular, he says, Rabbit seems to integrate popular features in an interesting way.

“It seems like it may be poised to do well in a world where more bandwidth, and more bandwidth, and more bandwidth, is available,” he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512146/video-chat-thats-a-little-closer-to-hanging-out-in-real-life

 

Making Money in Mobile

Hope to make money in mobile computing? It’s the fastest-spreading consumer technology in history. But 65 percent of the world isn’t even online. That means the real change in the technology business is only just beginning.

Amazon’s Head of Mobile Interfaces

The man responsible for Amazon’s mobile shopping strategy talks about app design, shopping habits, and how to make it easier to act on your impulses.

• By Rachel Metz on March 25, 2013

Sam Hall doesn’t just eat his own dog food, as the Silicon Valley saying goes. He also orders it on his mobile phone.

As vice president of mobile shopping at the world’s largest online retailer, Hall is in charge of making sure it’s easy, and very fast, to shop on Amazon using its apps and mobile websites. His mantra is that people should go from “wanting to buying in 30 seconds,” and Hall is a compulsive tester of the process, using his phone to buy basketball hoops, dental floss, shampoo, and even a gorilla costume for Halloween.

Mobile shopping is still a sliver of overall retail, and of Amazon’s revenue. While the company doesn’t divulge details, analysts think that maybe 8 percent of the company’s $61 billion in annual sales come from phones and tablets. But Hall’s domain is growing as more people use smartphones and tablets.

Amazon runs a slew of mobile apps, including the basic Amazon Mobile shopping app. There’s also Flow, which pulls up price information (and a chance to buy on Amazon instead) for any product you aim your smartphone’s camera at.
Amazon is tight-lipped about its operations and plans, and Hall is no exception. MIT Technology Review spoke with him about his work.

What’s the big thing on your mind these days?
I spend most of my time worrying about how we continue to invent, on behalf of our customers, newer, faster, better, easier ways that they can shop on their mobile phones and tablets.

You’ve said Amazon wants to shorten the time between wanting and buying an item to less than 30 seconds. How short can it get?
We believe that customers want the time from wanting to buying to be as close to instant as possible.

How do you do this, technologically?
We are very, very focused on making sure our experiences are fast. That every page loads quickly—from the time you press the icon on your phone to the time you see a search box, it’s very, very quick. For instance, we focus on input. We know one of the hardest things about shopping on a mobile device is just inputting what you want.

What is an example of how you design for that?
When you’re typing in something in the search box, we put up search suggestions very, very quickly. Earlier this week, I ran out of razor blades. I use Gillette Fusion razor blades. I was able to type “gil” and one of the first few suggestions that came up was Gillette Fusion razor blades. I only had to type the first three letters of what is probably a 26- or 27-letter title to quickly get to that item.

Some researchers are working on software that tries to actually anticipate what a person wants. Is Amazon involved in this type of research? 
What I can say is, we have a search team that focuses specifically on the very fastest way we can get customers from typing in what they want to the detail page of what they actually want.

 What are the most surprising things you’ve learned about people’s shopping behavior on mobile devices?
I think people tend to assume there are certain categories that do better on mobile than others, but the reality is, customers are buying everything on their mobile phones. We’ve sold, believe it or not, engagement rings, bicycles, razor blades, jeans, dresses. People buy the whole variety of what Amazon has.

Another recent observation that’s been interesting is that one of our busiest days happens to be on Christmas Day, for mobile phones and tablets in particular. My theory, at least, is you open up all your presents, you didn’t get what you want, and you’re able to quickly buy what you really wanted for Christmas.


http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511821/amazons-head-of-mobile-interfaces/

Five Opportunities for Mobile Computing

Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. We picked five.

• By Rachel Metz on March 22, 2013

About three dozen mobile-computing startup companies get funded by investors each month in the United States, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Around the world, tens of thousands more entrepreneurs are dreaming and coding and trying to invent something big.

Here’s what we think are five large opportunities in mobile computing, and a startup company pursuing each.

Transportation

If you live in San Francisco, you’ve probably seen cars roving around with hot-pink furry mustaches on their grills. This signals that the drivers are for hire through Lyft, a ride-sharing app offered by startup Zimride. Anyone with a car can become a limo driver and pick up fares, who can hail a driver using the app. Lyft takes about 20 percent of the revenue from each ride.

 

Zimride and competitors Uber and SideCar are using smartphones to challenge the taxi industry. It hasn’t been smooth. In November, the California Public Utilities Commission fined all three for operating illegal taxi companies.

Who’ll win the struggle isn’t clear. But the mobile-app companies have a numerical advantage. In San Francisco, there are 1,700 licensed cabs but more than 380,000 registered cars.

How much? San Francisco taxicabs licenses have been sold for $300,000. (Source: SFMTA)

Internet Access
Many people in poorer countries are still using feature phones with prepaid minutes. A switch to smartphones is happening fast—yet few can afford a data plan to connect to the Internet.

Blaast, a startup based in Helsinki, Finland, thinks the key to these markets will be shrinking the apps people use and making them work cheaply over older, slower wireless networks. The company compresses and caches streamlined versions of apps like Facebook and Twitter, offering access to a package of applications for 5 to 10 cents per day.

How many? India has nearly as many cell-phone subscribers (1.1 billion) as people. Only 4 percent use smartphones. (Source: KPCB)

Things That Communicate
What if any object could talk to your phone?

Tagstand, a San Francisco–based startup, sells inexpensive near-field communication (NFC) tags that can be stuck anywhere. The tags communicate information or commands over short distances to phones that also have an NFC chip. When you set your phone down on your bedside table, for example, a tag on the table could turn the phone off and turn your alarm on. Cofounder Omar Seyal says NFC tags at movie theaters’ entrances could automatically silence your phone.

How soon? About one in five smartphones sold has an NFC chip. (Source: ABI Research)

Phone Security
Online bad guys have been paying attention to the swift growth of smartphones and tablets, and malware for the small screen is on the rise.

One of the first to jump to phones’ defense was Lookout, whose security apps are now used by 30 million people. Lookout’s free software for Android can scan downloaded apps for malware and back up smartphone contacts. Features include Signal Flare, which can help find a missing phone by logging its location as the battery is dying, and Lock Cam, which will silently take and send a photo of any person who tries and fails three times to unlock your smartphone.

All this warms up users for the company’s premium service, which costs $3 per month and adds extras like the ability to remotely erase your phone’s memory.

How safe? By 2016, consumers will spend more than $2.4 billion a year downloading mobile security software. (Source: Infonetics)

Credit Card Payments
Smartphones and tablets are changing the way people pay for things. One startup in the field is Braintree, which processes credit card payments, mostly for high-profile Web merchants.

Braintree recently launched Venmo Touch, an app that will let any other app execute a payment with “one touch” if a person’s credit card information is already on file. The feature is available with popular apps like the last-minute hotel booker HotelTonight and the errand-running service TaskRabbit.

Braintree CEO Bill Ready says the company is processing more than $1 billion in mobile transactions annually. It charges 2.9 percent of the purchase price, plus another 30 cents for each transaction, though it pays most of that money on to banks and card companies.

How much? In 2013, people in the U.S. will spend about $13 billion using mobile phones. (Source: Forrester)


http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511816/five-opportunities-for-mobile-computing/ 

 

 

Smartphones Are Eating the World

The spread of mobile computers, in numbers.

• By Benedict Evans on March 15, 2013

Smartphones have created a bridge between two previously separate industries—wireless networks and personal computing. For Internet firms and device makers, this means access to the world’s largest network of people. As can be seen above, the wireless telephone business is large compared to personal computing. In 2012, the world’s mobile operators did $1.2 trillion in business and served around 3.2 billion people, versus perhaps 1.7 billion people who used PCs to access the Internet. By comparison, the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, and the entire global PC industry was $590 billion. Online advertising, the main driver of the consumer Internet, generated only $89 billion in revenue.

PCs still represent a majority of personal computing devices in use globally. But not for long. As smartphone and tablet sales increase rapidly, they are replacing PCs and Microsoft Windows as the dominant personal-computing paradigm. At right are the number of PCs, tablets, smartphones, and all mobile phone handsets in use, as well as the number of each sold in 2012. Growth in smartphone sales are coming largely at the expense of older-style “feature phones,” as people replace them, typically once every two years. As can be seen, two-thirds of the mobile phone market has yet to convert to smartphones. Close to a billion smartphones will be sold in 2013, while PC sales will gradually decline.

Smartphones have greatly increased the profitability of the mobile phone handset business. The average selling price of all mobile phones rose from about $105 in 2010 to $180 at the end of 2012, largely driven by Apple’s iPhone. In 2012, Apple sold 136 million iPhones for $85 billion, averaging $629 per phone. By comparison, the average selling price of a PC is about $700. With a further $33 billion in revenue from iPads, Apple’s annual revenue now exceeds the combined business of Intel and Microsoft. Sales by other companies of Android smartphones (not shown) reached 480 million units in 2012, generating an estimated $120 billion in revenue at an average selling price of $250.

http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/511791/smartphones-are-eating-the-world/