For years, Facebook’s leaders have
claimed that its useful and wildly popular service could target ads so
well they wouldn’t be out of place in a stream of updates from a
person’s friends and family. On an earnings call in May, founder Mark
Zuckerberg said that even as his company increased the number of ads on
the service, people still reported “satisfaction with all content, including ads.”
But today the company admitted that its ad targeting technology needs work. A blog post by Hong Ge, a manager in charge of ads in the company’s news feed, says:
“We are currently working on some updates to the ads algorithm to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see.”
Those
changes are said to be happening over “coming weeks”. They will involve
the company paying more attention to signals from people that have been
shown an ad that is irrelevant, such as them clicking the “report” or
“hide” links on Facebook’s ad units.
Why Facebook isn’t already
paying attention to such feedback from the people it supposedly runs its
service for isn’t explained. It may be deduced from the way Ge’s post
carefully balances promises to both ad-beseiged users of Facebook and
the companies paying Facebook to besiege them.
Ge cautions
marketers that they may see “some variation in the distribution of their
ads” as the changes to ad targeting roll out, but that in the long run
they will benefit from reaching the right people. Facebook has two kinds
of customers – those that pay with money and those that pay with time
and attention. The company’s ad technology has apparently not managed to
balance the happiness of the two as well as Zuckerberg and others at
Facebook have claimed it could.
The latest report from the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that scientists are more
certain than ever that humans are causing global warming, and that
climate change will get worse if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise.
The report is influential with policymakers because it represents the
consensus of hundreds of scientists who have worked for years to draw
conclusions from the scientific research on climate change.
The report, the first of four IPCC reports scheduled for this year,
focuses on the science of climate change. The other reports will take a
closer look at the likely impacts of climate change and what can be done
to minimize them.
Final slide: In 2011, Steve Jobs spent $100,000 to discover the genetic basis of the cancer that killed him.
If you need proof of how information technology is influencing
biotech, take a look at Foundation Medicine, the Boston-area diagnostics
company that went public on Wednesday.
Its stock price quickly
doubled after the IPO. And one reason is surely its links to
stratospheric tech names from the West Coast. The company is backed by
both Google and Bill Gates, and the core idea behind its technology was
once tried out on Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Foundation sells a
$5,800 test that looks in detail at the DNA of a person with cancer. The
concept is that a comprehensive catalogue of genetic mutations in a
person’s tumor will show exactly what’s driving the cancer and help
doctors choose what drug will work best (see “Foundation Medicine: Personalizing Cancer Drugs.”)
Robots usually look rigid and nonhuman, with joints engineered to
avoid the elasticity that can make their movements less predictable and
harder to control. Roboy, a robot developed by Rolf Pfeifer
and colleagues in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of
Zurich, is an example of a different approach that is slowly gaining
momentum.
Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of
“muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic
muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons.
Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of
biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter,
safer, and move in a more natural way.
Duly noted:, Note-taking app maker Evernote announced partnerships with Post-it maker 3M and others at its annual conference Thursday.
Evernote
which makes popular note-taking software that allows you to create and
synchronize digital notes across gadgets, unveiled a decidedly retro
image of its future at its annual conference Thursday in San Francisco:
Post-it Notes.
In front of a crowd of nearly 1,000 reporters, developers, partners, and Evernote employees, Phil Libin,
Evernote’s CEO, and Jesse Singh, global leader of the Post-it and
Scotch brands for 3M, introduced a new Evernote mobile app that can
easily digitize the ubiquitous office notes.
A new United Nations report makes clear that broadband access is surging around the world. By the end of 2013, there will be 2.1
billion mobile broadband connections, or almost three times the number
of fixed-line ones, it predicts. Some countries are already completely
saturated: Japan and Singapore each had more subscriptions than people, reflecting ownership of multiple devices. Others are lagging: China had 17 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 residents last year.
Overall,
the report is well worth reading for a deep look at what it calls the
“far-reaching change brought abosut by the smartphone.” It notes:
Mass connectivity via basic and advanced data access technologies seems assured, with the number of mobile subscriptions set to exceed 7 billion and overtake the total world population in 2014. Mobile subscriptions in Africa and the Middle-East alone exceeded one billion in [the first quarter of] 2013.
Of
course, the downsides are also becoming clearer. We’ve have a long
string of revelations about the depth of U.S. National Security Agency
surveillance of the Internet and mobile communications (see “NSA Spying is Making Us Less Safe”). And in some countries, the Internet operates at the whim of the government, as we were reminded on Wednesday as the Sudanese government apparently shut off of the Internet amid anti-government protests.
Google announced a series of upgrades
to its search engine and mobile search apps today that strengthen its
ability to understand queries in the form of natural sentences like
those used in conversation. The changes are particularly focused on
enabling more complex spoken interactions with Google’s mobile apps,
boosting the company’s challenge to Apple’s Siri personal assistant.
“We
are making your conversation with Google more natural,” said Amit
Singhal, who leads search technology at Google. He spoke at a press
conference held in the Menlo Park garage that Google cofounders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin made their first office space in 2000.
