Tag Archives: information

Samsung hosts launch event on October 24 for Galaxy Note II

The Samsung Galaxy Note II was formally introduced in late August, but launch details, especially in the United States, were scarce. Today, Samsung announced that it is going to host an event on October 24 that will likely unveil the American variant of the Galaxy Note II to the masses. Hopefully, American carriers will announce its own pricing and availability information around this time.

The teaser invite informs use to save the date, but does not reveal any additional information about the event. Fortunately, it does show off the S-Pen, which is going to be a key accessory capable of harnessing the Galaxy Note II’s multimedia power. We are less than a month away from Samsung’s Galaxy Note II event, who’s excited to see the Galaxy Note II?

As a quick recap, here are the specs for the Galaxy Note II: 5.5 inch Super AMOLED HD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on board, 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos processor, 2GB of RAM, 8MP rear facing camera, 1.9MP front facing camera, 4G LTE connectivity, and 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of storage space.

Police: Flight Attendant Stole Passenger’s Gadget

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.

Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.

The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband’s birthday.

Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.

A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.

Police: Flight Attendant Stole Passenger’s Gadget

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.

Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.

The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband’s birthday.

Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.

A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.

Police: Flight Attendant Stole Passenger’s Gadget

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.

Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.

The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband’s birthday.

Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.

A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.

Police: Flight Attendant Stole Passenger’s Gadget

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.

Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.

The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband’s birthday.

Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.

A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.

Police: Flight Attendant Stole Passenger’s Gadget

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.

Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.

The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband’s birthday.

Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.

A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.

Jeffrey Tinsley: FOMO Trumps FOPL With American Adults

It seems like the whole world has been swept into the social media vortex in recent years — after all, when both your Grandma and your neighbor’s Cocker Spaniel have Facebook pages, you know that connectivity has reached an all-time high. And, ask any young professional pursuing a new business opportunity or overall career change — in order to stay current in today’s job market, social media connectedness is paramount to success. While we are definitely seeing “app overload,” staying current on popular apps and social media tools are essential to establishing industry thought leadership, finding new personal and business opportunities, driving awareness around a company and its products, and building rapport with a company’s customer-base. Add to the mix the proliferation of new platforms, networks and apps.

For all the different ways we connect, well, ‘there’s an app for that.’ So it is interesting that a recent study from Pew Internet & American Life suggesting that a fear of the loss of digital privacy was strong enough to prevent American adults from installing and utilizing many applications on their mobile phones (the study suggested about one-half of those surveyed opted not to install an application if it asked for too much personal information). The reality, however, is that the fear of missing out (“FOMO”) is a much stronger deciding factor than the fear of privacy loss (“FOPL”) when it comes to plugging in.

We have become used to staying up-to -date in real-time, with news being delivered and received instantaneously via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and myriad other apps. Connectivity and interactivity is at the point where it’s not official until it’s “Facebook Official” (“FBO,” if you will). Plain and simple — while people may be averse to a loss of privacy, they are even more averse to being left on the sidelines while the rest of their network happily rides off into the social sunset, tweeting and sharing along the way.

A recent study by MyLife.com conducted by Harris Interactive showed nearly two-thirds of American adults (62 percent) are afraid of missing something (be it news, an important event or status update) if they don’t keep an eye on their social networks (and this shoots up to 74 percent for those who are single). In fact, respondents were willing to put up with some pretty terrible trade-offs in order to keep their access to social media- nearly 40 percent of respondents said they would rather do their taxes, get a root canal, or spend a night in jail before they’d delete their social media accounts.

Part of the reason for the reliance on social media is the sense of pleasure and connectedness we find when posting our thoughts and experiences online. A recent Harvard study found that roughly 80 percent percent of posts to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are announcements about one’s own immediate experience, finding that “disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex.” (LA Times). And yet another study, conducted by the University of Chicago, suggested the ‘addiction’ to social media, or the desire to check your email or social networks, was stronger than addiction to alcohol or cigarettes — when it comes to willpower, resistance to social media desires measured the weakest (Science News).

One thing’s for sure, however: not all platforms and applications are created equal (and this will unlikely come as a surprise to anyone…(What? People are more loyal to Facebook than Place My Face?). The Harris study showed users much more reliant on mega-networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn: 84 percent of users can’t go a week without logging into Facebook — and 61 percent of users can’t go even one day. There is a source of frustration, however, when it comes to managing all these networks and platforms — one-third of respondents struggled with remembering different passwords, while other respondents cited keeping track of their multiple accounts and maintaining each account as a burden of social networking. So while it may be true that consumers have some concerns about privacy control, it seems the more overwhelming issue is finding a solution to managing and consolidating our networks into something manageable and protected — once those apps are downloaded. So, people may report favoring privacy over plugging-in but my bet is that — between the fear of missing out, the rush that comes with oversharing online, and the overwhelming desire to log on — social media and the apps that enable us to do consume and share right from our pockets aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Apple’s Lost Mapportunity: How Did A Tech Star Lose Its Way?

Apple’s mojo over the years has come from its knack for releasing products that aren’t the first, but are the best.

Its highly anticipated new Apple Maps offering is neither.

Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 6, has replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps, which many users gripe is an inferior product that misplaces airports, omits entire towns, loses buildings and has even renamed Berlin. It’s the opposite of what’s come to be expected from a company known for taking its time to launch products that, though late to market, boast intuitive, beautifully designed features that “just work.”

So what went wrong? How did Apple lose its way with Maps?

Experts attribute Maps’ shortcomings to the Cupertino company’s reliance on a patchwork of mapping data culled from myriad sources, noting also that Apple may have underestimated the challenge of mapping the world’s lanes and landmarks. The “half-baked” Apple Maps still needs more time, more people and better information, analysts say. Whether it will get those ingredients is another question.

Apple acknowledges that its maps service is “a major initiative” that it is “just getting started with,” yet the risk for Apple is that Maps has only so many chances to help users find their way before they tell it to get lost.

“This could backfire on [Apple] and could create all kinds of consumer resentment,” said Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe. “They’re really going to have to get the ship righted quickly because there are so many alternatives for users.”

Mike Dobson, founder of mapping consultancy TeleMapics, sums up Apple Maps’ problem with one four-letter word: data.

Like a designer trying to create a single garment out of pieces from a dozen different creators, Apple has tried to stitch together a cohesive map using information and services licensed from some 20 sources, each with varying degrees of accuracy and their own system for classifying locations. What one company considers Palo Alto, another might call San Jose. Ultimately, it’s the user who’s left confused.

“Because Apple has licensed data from companies, not created it, they have to do the mixing [of the data], and it’s in mixing that data that mis-associations have occurred,” said Dobson. “They’re taking data from disparate sources, who haven’t classified the data in the same way and may not have had the correct geographic location, and they’re blending them together in the hope that by attaching one map to someone else’s map, it’ll all fit together. It just doesn’t.”

“It appears to me that they seriously underestimated the size of this challenge,” Dobson added. “It’s obvious to me that the first time humans ever saw parts of Apple’s maps is when users looked at it in iOS 6.”

Google tried the same mixing method when it first created its own map service, but quickly realized that building reliable, up-to-date maps required Google to be the source of its own data, notes Dobson. Google launched a fleet of Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles to drive the roads it showed on its maps and ensure the maps’ appearance matched the streets’. Five million miles of driving have gone into Google Maps and the Street View team updates its information regularly.

Knowing that no single company can match the manpower of millions of users, Google built an infrastructure through which to crowdsource information from its users, who have mapped remote areas for Google using Google Map Maker and send Google thousands of corrections a day.

So long as Apple outsources its data collection and relies on software rather than real-world scanning and human analysis, Apple Maps will fall short of Google Maps, Dobson predicts.

“Apple needs to learn what Google learned a long time ago: They also started down the algorithmic path…but Google had an awakening and realized it needed Street View and human operatives to be sure things were where they were supposed to be on the map,” said Dobson. “You have to have, in some way, boots on the ground.”

Apple is already angling to turn its millions of iPhone users into “boots on the ground.” People can report errors directly to Apple via the Maps app, and GPS data from their phones can help Apple monitor the status of streets.

“Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. “We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”

While that GPS data might detect one-way streets, detours and skinny alleyways, Dobson said it can’t provide the same detailed information Street View collects about everything beside the road, from street signs and addresses to speed limits and business locations.

At the same time that it seeks to turn users into data-gatherers, Apple is also aggressively trying to hire maps engineers: There are 18 openings for maps engineers listed on Apple’s website. Tellingly, 15 of those positions were posted this summer.

By comparison, Google relies on hundreds of people to map a single country.

Some analysts say Apple should be out shopping rather than staffing up. Though Apple, which has never made a multi-billion dollar acquisition, has historically preferred buying small companies, experts suggest the company should buy a mapping service rather than attempt to build one. With over $117 billion in cash, it can certainly afford to do so.

“Trying to reinvent the wheel with in-house talent and some acquired talent is a long road,” said Chris Silva, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “And if they were concerned about getting Maps to market in a rapid fashion, then an outright acquisition might have been the way to do that.”

An element of corporate hubris may be hindering Apple’s mapping service, and tech entrepreneur and blogger Anil Dash argues Maps’ troubled debut stems not only from a dearth of data, but a lack of concern for the user.

“Apple made this maps change despite its shortcomings because they put their own priorities for corporate strategy ahead of user experience. That’s a huge change for Apple in the post-iPod era, where they’ve built so much of their value by doing the hard work as a company so that things could be easy for users,” wrote Dash in his blog.

Even if Apple users might have trouble finding their way to Paddington Station or Stratford-upon-Avon (Both are absent from Apple Maps.), it’s doubtful that will keep them from the Apple Store.

Michael Gartenberg, research director at the Gartner Group, predicts Apple Maps’ shortcomings won’t decrease demand for the iPhone 5, and counters Apple Maps is actually an upgrade from Google Maps for some users (particularly drivers who can use its turn-by-turn navigation tool).

People are “still lining up around the block to buy the iPhone 5,” said Gartenberg. “It [Apple Maps] doesn’t strike us as something that will have a lot of impact, especially when Apple says, ‘hey, it’s our first stab at it and we’re going to get better.’ Apple does have pretty good track record of introducing things and improving on them quickly.”

Andreas Bernström: 5 Things Every Business Needs to Know to Have a Successful Mobile Strategy

As use of smartphones and tablets continues to skyrocket, businesses as diverse as financial institutions, restaurants, news outlets, and software publishers are finding that their mobile strategy is often what can mean the difference between success and failure.

According to Canalys, global sales of smartphones overtook PCs for the first time last year, and in several markets, including China, more users access the web through smartphones than laptop and desktop computers

With smartphones and tablets more prevalent than ever, even traditional brick and mortars and web-based businesses stand to benefit from a mobile infusion. If your business needs a mobile strategy (and chances are that it does), here’s a list of five essential things to keep in mind if you want your business to succeed on the third screen:

1. Think cross platform

Potential users and customers are everywhere and the last thing you want to do is limit yourself by sticking to a single platform. That means you need to devote as many resources as possible to getting your product or service on to all major mobile platforms. This doesn’t just mean creating apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, it also means making sure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Furthermore, don’t lock your users into one ecosystem or device if your product is available on multiple platforms. A single customer could very well have a Windows PC, an Apple iPad, and a Google Nexus phone. A customer should be able to quickly and seamlessly use your service across multiple platforms, like how Netflix allows users watching through their TV to pick up a video right where they left off when watching on their phone, or how Amazon’s Kindle platform lets readers save their place in a book and continue reading on anything from a Kindle e-reader, to an iPhone, to a web browser. If you don’t give consumers a seamless and connected service, they might very well turn to a competitor who does.

2. Keep it simple

After getting your service in front of as wide an audience as possible, it’s just as important to make the use of your product on mobile devices accessible. Not only is a good user interface (UI) important, but if the nature of your app or site allows users to get a taste without registering, let them do so. People have very short attention spans and the window of opportunity to convey the value of your service is small.

Keep registration and payment flows as simple as possible. While virtual keyboards have improved greatly, there’s no getting around the fact that entering information on a phone is a slower and more cumbersome process than doing so with a mouse and keyboard (not to mention that mobile users are likely to be on the move when using their devices and not seated at a distraction-free desk.)

Therefore, keep the information users have to enter for payment and registration to the bare minimum. With Facebook more or less owning our identities online, leverage their Single Sign-On solution to reuse as much basic information as you can and only prompt new users for the absolute essentials not provided by Facebook’s APIs. First impressions are key, and if mobile users find a sea of registration fields as soon as they fire up your app, they’re going to be turned off and might just delete your app and go to the next one rather than jump through the hoops you’ve created.

3. Target and reward loyal users

Consumers who love your product or service will do more for you through word of mouth than any ad campaign ever will. Make sure they feel that their admiration for your product or service is being reciprocated and are incentivized to spread the word. Of course, this rule stands true for any business, but is especially important for businesses focusing on mobile, as the methods for broadcasting their loyalty are literally at users’ fingertips.

A couple options are to reward mobile users for preaching the merits of your product by handing out easy-to-redeem referral bonuses, or utilizing location-based technologies to target customers with promotions at “check-in” or when they mention your business in a positive light.

4. Add a social component

Similar to the last point: you want your fans broadcasting their use of your product, and they want ways to share their love of your product with others, so why not reach out to them on social networks that they know and love. It’s a win-win.

Great social integration means more than basic integration with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks. That’s well and good, but it’s been done before.

If you want to stand out, consider adding a gamification component to existing promotions or incentives that encourage user interaction, such as badges that award heavy users and achievements, or leaderboards that show who among their peers are most active.

Not only will users have more fun, but they’ll want to get their friends to use your product so they have more people to play with. Try to build the core of your app around the notion of Metcalfe’s Law with the value of your app increasing for every friend they convince to start using it.

5. Don’t treat mobile as an afterthought

Last but not least is the single the most important ingredient for a successful mobile strategy: give mobile the attention it deserves.

Mobile Internet use has been increasing rapidly for years, and a robust mobile strategy is doubly important if you hope to compete in emerging markets. Thanks to the increasingly low cost of internet-connected phones, many individuals in these markets are experiencing the Internet for the first time through a mobile device.

You can see a cautionary tale in companies that have treated mobile as a secondary focus. Look no further than Facebook and Zynga, which have failed to fully capitalize on mobile and have seen their stock price tumble partly due to this..

Chetan Sharma, a mobile industry analyst, makes an excellent case in his Global Mobile Market Update Report when he says, “In 3-5 years, with few exceptions, if a company is not doing a majority of its digital business on mobile, it is going to be irrelevant.”

I would take that even one step further and add if a company does not have a concrete strategy to target and engage mobile users, they will fall short of their competitors by a wide margin.

So no matter what your business is, you need to make sure that your mobile strategy isn’t relegated to a bullet point in your business plan. Now more than ever, it should be the centerpiece from which the rest of the plan is based.

‘There Is A Difference Between A Map And An App’

By Roberta Cowan

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – TomTom NV stood by the quality of its mapping systems on Friday after Apple Inc’s iPhone 5 launch was marred by glitches in its mapping app, which is built on TomTom’s data.

“We are more than willing to work with Apple to help fix any problems, as we would with any of our customers,” said Caroline Fisher, vice-president of TomTom’s consumer business unit.

Apple launched the iPhone 5 on Wednesday, but soon afterwards users went to social media and blog sites to complain about geographical errors and missing information on the maps feature.

Dutch-based TomTom licenses its map data to Apple, but said each manufacturer applies TomTom’s map data and other content to create their own unique application.

“There is a difference between a map and an app. We don’t develop the app. We license the map data, which is like a foundation. The customer can build on top of that, but we license the same mapping data to all our customers,” said TomTom media manager Cem Cohen.

Apple Maps, which is built on TomTom’s mapping data, has replaced Google Inc’s maps, which is no longer available on iOS 6.

“We don’t know what is causing the issues (on the Apple maps) but from our perspective the quality of our data is great and we stand behind it,” added Fisher.

TomTom does not have an in-house team at Apple, Fisher said.

According to BNP Paribas analyst Alexander Peterc, who points out 20 different information and service providers, including TomTom, are involved in Apple Maps, the problems appear mostly to do with points of interest, or POIs, which include things like restaurants or shops and are not part of the cartography supplied by TomTom.

TomTom’s Fisher declined to comment on whether Apple had asked the Dutch map maker for help, saying it never comments on individual customers.

(Editing by David Goodman and David Holmes)

Asus Padfone 2 announcement set for October 16 in Milan and Taipei

Asus has begun sending out invitations for its latest event taking place on October 16. The star of the event will be the Asus Padfone 2, which is a tablet/smartphone hybrid. The original model was only made available in few markets, but if the Padfone 2 offers a global roll-out, it may gain traction in a crowded mobile sector.

In any case, the event is scheduled to take place on October 16 in Taipei, Taiwan and Milan, Italy. It is interesting to see Asus hosting two events simultaneously. While we do not know too much about the Padfone 2 at this time, it is rumored to contain a quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor. Hopefully, it offers high-end hardware and software with a well-integration tablet docking station.

More information will be made available on October 16 during the event, which we will recap.

[Notebook Italia]

Alex Palombo: Do Not Track May Hinder Campaigns

If you ever want a good laugh, I highly suggest looking through the Google Analytics of yourself, to see what advertisers think of you. For example, mine says that I’m an 18-24 year-old-woman interested in politics and pop culture. The ads I usually get are to buy new seasons of House on DVD, to volunteer for Obama for America, and for some reason, to sign up for Christian Mingle (the Internet is now my mother).

The Analytics determine this based on the material you view online. It tracks what websites your IP address visits most often and a quick description of what those websites cater to. This tracking allows advertisers to find you where you live online and tailor their advertising campaign to their target audience.

A potential wrench in this plan, however, is an emerging “Do Not Track” option on web browsers and websites.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium, The Do Not Track option has been on some, but not all, web browsers for a few years now as a default, an “opt out” rather than an “opt in,” and a quiet option that most web users ignored. But now to comply with White House requests for more Internet privacy and consumer protection, major web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer will now be including a “Do Not Track” option as an opt-in preference – with Google being the last to jump on the bandwagon in adding the privacy setting to Chrome. They’re not just adding the option, though, they’re promoting the change and making users aware that the option even exists. In the new version of browsers (this screenshot is Mozilla Firefox), the option should look something like this:

The idea of this software is to prevent the Internet “big brothers” from accessing personal information about the Internet users, and to stop following them around the Internet with obnoxious pop-ups and analytics-targeted ads. While it doesn’t stop people from “geotagging,” or locating where an IP address is coming from, it does stop them from storing personal information based on past Internet history and preference — at least, from the browser end.

The move could limit how advertisers reach their potential consumers, and may have an effect on pay walls and sponsored websites. It could also limit how political candidates campaign as well.

As I said before, “geotagging” seems to be unaffected by the change in privacy settings, so local candidates can breathe easy knowing their voting districts will still be easy to identify online. Similarly, the Do Not Track option doesn’t seem to interfere with the ability to e-mail and fundraise this way.

What would change is the ability to find what sites a constituency frequents, and where best to advertise to that constituency to get the most coverage for the investment.

For example, if a progressive candidate was planning to campaign to college students regarding their plan for increased scholarships and grants; they would be able to geotag 18-24-year0olds within their district boundaries. They would be able to e-mail them regarding their plans and ask for campaign donations to make that plan happen (although we all know college kids have no money). They would not be able to see which websites these voters frequent, they would not be able to easily tailor an online ad campaign towards this group – and they would not be able to determine which websites would best serve as hosts for online campaigning.

All of this change will mean nothing, however, if websites do not agree to stop tracking users. Some, like Twitter, have already elected to cooperate with the Federal Trade Commission in agreeing to not track web users by their web’s cookies. Facebook released a statement in 2011 regarding the Do Not Track movement, saying:

“We are very pleased that the leading online trade groups are about to endorse the use of the Mozilla “Do Not Track” header as a way users can indicate they don’t wish sites to track them to tailor banner ads at other sites…Don’t get us wrong, we like our ads to be more relevant. But we want users to have transparency and control over what is happening, so that the atmosphere for trust can be restored. If users trust the sites they visit, many will value efforts to provide a more relevant experience.”

This is misleading, however, because Facebook does still track users through Facebook Connect and the “like” button on other sites — anytime a user logs in using their Facebook as an option (for example, sharing an article on Huffington Post), they are still tracked even though they’re not on Facebook’s website.

At this point, the Do Not Track opt-in option will be a part of the major web browsers by the end of this year; when websites will follow suit is a far different story and may take months or years to happen. So for now, advertising and campaigning will continue using online analytics and user preferences to determine where best to place ads. But this is a burgeoning online privacy issue, and we as progressives must evolve our campaign strategies to reach our constituents without raiding their cookies and invading their online privacy to do so.

Alex Palombo: Do Not Track May Hinder Campaigns

If you ever want a good laugh, I highly suggest looking through the Google Analytics of yourself, to see what advertisers think of you. For example, mine says that I’m an 18-24 year-old-woman interested in politics and pop culture. The ads I usually get are to buy new seasons of House on DVD, to volunteer for Obama for America, and for some reason, to sign up for Christian Mingle (the Internet is now my mother).

The Analytics determine this based on the material you view online. It tracks what websites your IP address visits most often and a quick description of what those websites cater to. This tracking allows advertisers to find you where you live online and tailor their advertising campaign to their target audience.

A potential wrench in this plan, however, is an emerging “Do Not Track” option on web browsers and websites.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium, The Do Not Track option has been on some, but not all, web browsers for a few years now as a default, an “opt out” rather than an “opt in,” and a quiet option that most web users ignored. But now to comply with White House requests for more Internet privacy and consumer protection, major web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer will now be including a “Do Not Track” option as an opt-in preference – with Google being the last to jump on the bandwagon in adding the privacy setting to Chrome. They’re not just adding the option, though, they’re promoting the change and making users aware that the option even exists. In the new version of browsers (this screenshot is Mozilla Firefox), the option should look something like this:

The idea of this software is to prevent the Internet “big brothers” from accessing personal information about the Internet users, and to stop following them around the Internet with obnoxious pop-ups and analytics-targeted ads. While it doesn’t stop people from “geotagging,” or locating where an IP address is coming from, it does stop them from storing personal information based on past Internet history and preference — at least, from the browser end.

The move could limit how advertisers reach their potential consumers, and may have an effect on pay walls and sponsored websites. It could also limit how political candidates campaign as well.

As I said before, “geotagging” seems to be unaffected by the change in privacy settings, so local candidates can breathe easy knowing their voting districts will still be easy to identify online. Similarly, the Do Not Track option doesn’t seem to interfere with the ability to e-mail and fundraise this way.

What would change is the ability to find what sites a constituency frequents, and where best to advertise to that constituency to get the most coverage for the investment.

For example, if a progressive candidate was planning to campaign to college students regarding their plan for increased scholarships and grants; they would be able to geotag 18-24-year0olds within their district boundaries. They would be able to e-mail them regarding their plans and ask for campaign donations to make that plan happen (although we all know college kids have no money). They would not be able to see which websites these voters frequent, they would not be able to easily tailor an online ad campaign towards this group – and they would not be able to determine which websites would best serve as hosts for online campaigning.

All of this change will mean nothing, however, if websites do not agree to stop tracking users. Some, like Twitter, have already elected to cooperate with the Federal Trade Commission in agreeing to not track web users by their web’s cookies. Facebook released a statement in 2011 regarding the Do Not Track movement, saying:

“We are very pleased that the leading online trade groups are about to endorse the use of the Mozilla “Do Not Track” header as a way users can indicate they don’t wish sites to track them to tailor banner ads at other sites…Don’t get us wrong, we like our ads to be more relevant. But we want users to have transparency and control over what is happening, so that the atmosphere for trust can be restored. If users trust the sites they visit, many will value efforts to provide a more relevant experience.”

This is misleading, however, because Facebook does still track users through Facebook Connect and the “like” button on other sites — anytime a user logs in using their Facebook as an option (for example, sharing an article on Huffington Post), they are still tracked even though they’re not on Facebook’s website.

At this point, the Do Not Track opt-in option will be a part of the major web browsers by the end of this year; when websites will follow suit is a far different story and may take months or years to happen. So for now, advertising and campaigning will continue using online analytics and user preferences to determine where best to place ads. But this is a burgeoning online privacy issue, and we as progressives must evolve our campaign strategies to reach our constituents without raiding their cookies and invading their online privacy to do so.

Brian_Kelly: How Presidential Candidates Can Use Online Video to Run an Effective Campaign

With the presidential election in less than two months, both sides are revving up their campaign efforts by visiting key states, hosting pivotal conventions and conferences, and releasing their ideas for the future of America. However, there is one tool that can help candidates to get their message across and run a more effective campaign: online video.

What makes online video so different from other communication tools? According to comScore, 85.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed at least one online video in July 2012. That same month, 184 million U.S. Internet users watched 36.9 billion online videos, meaning incorporating the tool within existing campaign strategies would surely get candidates seen by more people.

Typically, we see online video incorporated into political campaigns as advertisements and recordings of speeches. However, it can be much more — a gateway to communication, a campaign management tool, and a tool to build a positive image for the candidate. Here’s how:

Share timely information
Political figures like Hillary Clinton have used internal memos in the past to share timely information with their staff. However, internal memos can be and have been leaked to the press or the general public, which can damage a campaign. Instead, sharing timely information with campaign staff through online means can be a safer alternative.

When using online video internally, it’s important to require user authentication for your videos to ensure they can only be viewed by staff members with the required permissions. For external video viewing with voters, campaigns can utilize public or non-restricted viewing. Find a video platform that will allow both viewing options and metrics tracking, allowing you to see who has viewed your information and for how long. Also, with video platforms that enable real-time discussions, viewers are able to post comments and questions. Collaboration tools can ensure your entire staff — and only your staff — stays on the same page.

Manage campaign staff
Staying organized is the key to a successful campaign, and video enables organizations by communicating updates and key execution plans on a timely basis. Video can be delivered quickly and is easily accessible, especially for those on the campaign trail.

It can be time-consuming and expensive to reach every member of a campaign staff, but video allows you to reach your staff in a cost-effective manner. Training via online video is a sensible alternative to more traditional training methods for a variety of reasons. It’s simple to create whether you’re using pre-recorded material or clips recorded from a webcam. You can also add collaborative elements, like discussion features. Video provides an easy way to update your audience no matter where they are.

Reach your audience
Overall, viewing for online video is up, while TV viewing is down, which indicates the way we seek and receive current information is changing. Barack Obama used online video heavily during the 2008 election, which proved a successful way to “meet” young voters on their preferred medium of communication, the Internet.

Young voters preferred Obama over John McCain by 68 percent to 30 percent, and his Web presence likely caused that. By November 2008, 50 million viewers had spent 14 million hours watching Obama’s campaign-related videos on YouTube, four times McCain’s viewers. The YouTube channel for the Republican National Convention (RNC) has received 2.8 million video views during this year’s event. And the Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) YouTube channel garnered more than 1.6 million views.

From these examples, it’s clear video can be used as a way to communicate with your audience where they’re already seeking information: online. Video provides information in a fast and user-friendly way, and it’s cost-effective. Video can also be updated more easily than hard copies of campaign information, meaning you can quickly swap out clips if there’s a campaign update or change.

In addition, video allows for collaboration with an audience in real-time (assuming your video platform offers this feature). It also provides direct communication, meaning it doesn’t leave room for interpretation or “spinning” from political journalists — your message is clear to voters.

Build a positive persona
President Obama knows reputation is an important aspect of a presidential campaign. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama released nearly 2,000 official YouTube videos, which were watched over 80 million times. He also had 135,000 subscribers and 442,000 instances of user-generated content. Online video can often be less formal than TV or radio spots and can serve to connect a candidate to their audience. Video offered Obama a medium through which he could humanize his campaign and show young voters he wasn’t a disconnected politician.

Online video also gives you a lot more freedom to further understand a candidate — from their personal lives to issues that are important to viewers. For instance, Obama started a fundraising campaign through online video, which featured powerful stories of real people.

More than 1,800 videos were viewed over 110 million times during the last presidential election, according to Steve Grove, head of YouTube politics. “Tech President did a calculation that YouTube was worth $47 million to the Obama campaign if they had bought TV dollars and they didn’t spend a penny on it,” he said. This goes to show that video can not only be an effective medium to build a positive persona, but it can also do so in a cost-effective way.

As more and more voters move online, it’s clear that video is one aspect of communication political figures can use to their advantage. From managing campaign staff to sharing ideas with voters, online video is an effective tool for all candidates and those running political campaigns would be ill-advised to ignore this trend.

Brian Kelly is the Vice President of Sales at KZO Innovations, a video software company that provides an on-demand video platform for small to large enterprises and government customers. Connect with Brian and KZO Innovations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Adam Levin: 94 Million Exposed: The Government’s Epic Fail on Privacy

When you hear a number like “94 million” in the news, it’s usually because somebody won the lottery. This time around, no such luck. This 94 million is the number of Americans’ files in which personal information has been exposed, since 2009, to potential identity theft through data breaches at government agencies. Go ahead, count the zeroes: 94,000,000. That’s like releasing the personal data of every man, woman and child in California, Texas, New York, and Ohio.

Believe it or not, this number — which was just revealed in the latest report from tech security firm Rapid7 — is only the most conservative estimate. When you take into account the difference between reported data breaches, which is what this report measures, and actual incidents, you are talking about a much, much bigger number. As bad as the numbers are, it gets worse. Much worse. Indeed, the biggest threat doesn’t come from smart hackers — it comes from dumb politicians and bureaucrats.

First, let’s consider the scope: The newly released Rapid7 report is based on the list of data breaches compiled by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group (and remember, we’re only talking about the last three years). According to Rapid7′s analysis, government agencies at the local, state and federal level are becoming infinitely more proficient at exposing our personal data, putting more and more of it at risk with each passing year. Government agencies reported that they exposed 1.5 million records containing personally identifiable information (you know, the sensitive stuff: your name, your address, your phone number… ) in all of 2010. The following year that total more than doubled, to 4 million. (If you’re worried that you’re a victim, read this.)

So far this year, government agencies have more than doubled their totals from last year, reaching 9.6 million in just the first five months of 2012. Who knows where we’ll be by the end of the year — or how many innocent people will be exposed to fraud and identity theft due to the negligence of government employees or third-party vendors?

And remember, these are just the breaches we know about. In some states, government agencies are not legally required to publicly report data breaches, or to notify potential victims that their personal information has been exposed. To take one little-known example, local governments in California are exempted from that state’s breach notification law — “a big exception, in my opinion,” as Clearinghouse founder and director Beth Givens told us, since local governments “compile a great deal of personal information.” Furthermore, out of 268 breach incidents reported since 2009, the 67 of the public agencies responsible (and I use that term loosely) couldn’t even figure out how many records were lost. That fact alone will tell anyone with basic math skills and a lick of common sense that this epidemic is much worse than we know.

What’s even more astonishing than the total number of personal records breached is how the databases were compromised in the first place. Despite what news reports, urban legend, and simple logic might lead you to believe, sophisticated, premeditated attacks by hackers accounted for only 40 breaches since 2009, a mere 15 percent of the total.

Plain and simple stupidity and negligence caused most of the rest. In 78 of the breach incidents, government employees inadvertently disclosed citizens’ private information by posting it on a public website or sending it to the wrong people. Loss of physical, paper documents — not digital ones — accounted for another 46 data breaches. In 51 of the cases, government bureaucrats lost our private data by losing track of a portable device such as a laptop, smartphone, hard drive or back-up tape. A few of the breaches took place after these rocket scientists left a device filled with our PII inside an unlocked car.

Of the many screw-ups detailed in this report, that last one is the one that lights my fire. What Neanderthal (with all due respect to the GEICO cavemen) leaves a laptop sitting in the back of an unlocked car — especially a laptop containing the private records of thousands of citizens? What form of bureaucratic insanity allows this to keep happening, over and over and over again?

While the Rapid7 report phrases its description in less incendiary terms, the facts are still damning: “Government agencies are facing an increase in data breaches as a result of cyber attacks, weaknesses in federal information security controls, and poor best practices for protecting data on portable devices.”

“Poor best practices,” indeed.

Meanwhile, other branches of government are busy exacerbating the problem. Based on all the grandstanding by Republican officials about the need to rein in an unaccountable federal bureaucracy and get tough on national security, I expected GOP lawmakers to quickly pass the 2012 Cybersecurity bill, which would have required all organizations that run the nation’s critical infrastructure (think nuclear power plants, water supply systems and roads) to meet certain basic standards that would help defend them against hacker attacks. But Republicans were so myopically focused on preventing President Obama from achieving even the slightest legislative victory in this do-or-die election year that they almost unanimously opposed the bill, even after the Democrats caved entirely by offering to make the bill’s provisions voluntary.

How are we ever going to convince government agencies to take information security seriously when their own bosses in Congress treat our data and our most valuable infrastructure like just another pawn in a never-ending chess match for power?

Here’s the bottom line. We hear a lot of genuine, well-grounded concern about the growing number and sophistication of hacker attacks. But based on the information contained in this report, while hackers are partially to blame, the sad truth is that our own government’s security policies — or lack thereof — have put us all at risk.

Too many bureaucrats are losing track of too much of our data, and their oops! moments are being magnified by civil servants who consistently fail to implement the necessary access controls, encryption, physical security, and performance audits required to comply with the law and keep citizens’ private data private, according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office.

We’ve known for quite some time that government agencies have turned their horrible privacy practices into an art form. The GAO’s report found that out of 24 major government agencies, 18 had inadequate information security controls. Of those, eight federal agencies got failing grades when it came to implementing the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act. (Ah well, a decade is on par with Congressional Standard Time.) Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services, each of which have met just over 50 percent of the law’s requirements.

Terrified yet? As the agencies responsible for running some of the government’s largest entitlement programs, the VA and Health and Human Services retain deeply private, unspeakably sensitive information on millions of Americans. The VA’s terrible performance shows that so far it has failed to learn its lesson on privacy, since this is the agency responsible for one of the largest government data breaches in history — a 2009 incident in which the VA lost a hard drive containing the names and Social Security numbers of tens of millions of veterans.

Combine that with the fact that hacking is on the rise. Only four government data breaches were caused by hackers in 2009, according to the Rapid7 report. By 2011, the total had grown to 18, and there were another 11 breaches perpetrated by hackers in the first five months of 2012. Those numbers will continue to increase — and why wouldn’t they? The government’s own metrics show that the “sophisticated” computer defenses of many federal agencies are on a par with the blundering army of archers defending the fictional European country in the 1959 Peter Sellers movie, “The Mouse That Roared.” Judging by appearances, mining those computers for all the private data they hold is about as daunting to a professional hacker as a child’s piggy bank would be to a professional safe cracker.

Mailing a USB drive brimming with names and Social Security numbers to the wrong person, failing to delete data from discarded drives — the list of governmental idiocies is long. And all of these unforced errors by incompetent or untrained pencil-pushers are like waving a red flag at a herd of very aggressive bulls — in this case, a herd of hackers. The difference is, when those bulls charge, it’s not the bureaucrats who get skewered. It’s you and me: American taxpayers who have been forced to hand over to the government all of our private information — names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers — just to take care of the basics (pay our taxes, receive our Medicare benefits, even register to vote).

Unfortunately, the bureaucrats seem to be unable to fix this mess. That means it’s up to us. What should we do?

First, let’s put some teeth into the law. The Information Security Management Act is ridiculous. Agencies are reviewed regularly for compliance, but what happens when they fail to comply? They receive a very stern talking-to from the GAO. They might even get written up in a report using words like “vulnerable” and “weak.”

Give me a break. We need nationally mandated security protocols, backed by a law that imposes serious sanctions on offending agencies and the bureaucrats who run them.

Low-level bureaucrats who leave unencrypted laptops in unlocked cars should be suspended without pay for meaningful periods of time. High-level bureaucrats who fail to improve their computer security safeguards in compliance with the law should at the very least be fired. In the case of actual data breaches, firing isn’t enough. Depending on the level of negligence, it’s not unreasonable that the bureaucrat should stand trial; if they are convicted of negligence and enabling fraud, they should arguably go to jail.

Second, instead of simply playing defense on data security, we need government to aggressively play offense. The federal government already spends $13.3 billion a year to secure its computer systems and bring federal agencies into compliance with the 2002 Information Security Management Act, according to a report published in March by the Office of Management and Budget. That’s 18 percent of everything those agencies spend on information technology.

However, a security system is only as good as its weakest link — people. Among a host of other initiatives, the government needs to better monitor the systems they have in place, develop effective breach response programs, and pro-actively train people to think security 24/7.

Here’s the point: It’s not just about punishing bad behavior. We must incentivize good behavior and inculcate best practices. Many Federal agencies have good rules in place, unfortunately, not enough are striving to meet them and several could strive a whole lot harder.

Finally, we, the people — the ones government is supposed to protect — need to get fired up and take action. While Federal agencies tend to ignore complaints from individual citizens, they do take complaints from members of Congress very seriously (since enough angry senators could cause an agency major tsouris when budget season comes around). If you are one of the millions of citizens whose information was improperly exposed, and received a notice from a federal agency to that effect, don’t just stand there, do something about it.

Letters to senators — good old fashioned snail-mail, handwritten missives — get noticed. Groups of seniors or veterans or Medicare patients showing up on a Congressman’s office doorstep get noticed. Blog articles that help track identity-related fraud get noticed.

Whatever your skill and whatever your interest, you have something to add to this fight. And if you’re an American taxpayer, you probably have something to gain from it. Rapid7′s report shows that federal bureaucrats still don’t take seriously their responsibility to protect our privacy. It’s high time for us to target the things they do take seriously: their budgets, their jobs, and their freedom.

This article originally appeared on Credit.com. Follow Credit.com on Twitter @creditexperts.

LG Optimus G to land on American shores in November

With a re-announcement of the LG Optimus G occurring earlier today, we now have a few more pieces of information regarding LG’s upcoming flagship device. To begin, the Optimus G will launch in Korea starting next week at the non-subsidized price of $894. In addition, Japanese consumers will get their chance at the Optimus G starting next month.

According to a report surfacing today, LG confirms that the United States will receive its own LG Optimus G sometime in November — right before the critical Holiday season. Since it is an LTE device, chances are T-Mobile will not launch a variant, but hopefully the remaining three major carriers will each launch a version.

As a quick recap of its specs, the Optimus G offers a 4.7 inch touch screen display with 1280 x 768 resolution, Android 4.0, Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core 1.5GHz processor, LTE, 2GB of RAM, 13MP rear facing camera, 1.3MP front facing camera, 21o0 mAh battery, and 32GB of onboard memory.

There is a very good chance we will see the American introduction of the Optimus G tomorrow during LG and Qualcomm’s event.

LG’s latest Optimus G smartphone will surely make a splash around the world, but can it compete with the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III?

[Yahoo! News]

Jure Klepic: Today’s Visualization Tools Help Our Brains Understand Social Monitoring

My last post, “Taking Multi-Dimensional Marketing to the Next Level,” touched on the amazing capacity of the human brain for learning. Through the process of plasticity, we can interpret more complex messages and make decisions faster than we ever believed was possible. With the amount of input coming at us from all ends of the social universe, tools are being developed that can help our brains quickly sort through this information. Tickr is a visual monitoring tool that helps process information and makes it easy to understand. Similar to a stock ticker that provides information needed to make investment decisions, Tickr provides social media information needed to make marketing decisions.

In its teacher’s guide on the brain, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) states that plasticity relates to the brain’s ability to change and reorganize in response to some input. Our brains can form new synapses or strengthen old ones if nurtured and engaged, but can also lose brain functioning if not exercised and challenged regularly. Plasticity is the ability of our brains to change with learning. Social media, when used properly, can keep our brains engaged so we continue to grow and develop. The story changes somewhat, however, for those who are trying to monitor social media for the purpose of brand marketing. Currently these companies and agencies have a number of platforms which are constantly providing information and updates. While their brains are learning to sort through this information avalanche, Tickr points out the crucial bits of information they need to make decisions relating to their product, service or brand.

Companies engaged in brand marketing use Tickr to filter social media mentions in real time and display results in sync with their performance metrics. Case studies show that PepsiCo Gatorade uses Tickr to identify key online influences while Global Financial Services uses it to see the impact of real-word news. Banks of computer screens may have information from other platforms, but often the one displaying the Tickr information is the one that receives attention first.

How Tickr and others adds to social monitoring? “The problem with many existing dashboards is that they quickly overwhelm the senses. They’re powerful tools, but they are also very complicated. Now multiply that by five or ten screens, which is increasingly common with digital control centers at big agencies and large consumer brands, and have a degree of complexity and data overload that can actually hinder rather than facilitate monitoring and analysis of digital events. Tickr simplifies the presentation of digital data by selecting the most relevant information, and displaying it in a way that the human brain can quickly and easily process.” said Olivier Blanchard, the author of Social Media ROI.

Many brands and agencies use tools like Radian6, BrandWatch and Pulse for social media monitoring purposes, but adding Tickr makes the process smoother and easier to understand. Blanchard adds, “Tickr doesn’t compete against those other tools; its value is multiplied when used in conjunction with them. Conversely, their value is enhanced when the most relevant digital information — call it macro-information — can be garnered at a glance at one screen. Tickr allows digital and social monitoring managers to quickly go from a macro-view to a micro-view without having to dive into layers of drill-down menus. It’s a force-multiplier in any monitoring platform ecosystem. It provides the fastest view of what is happening across the most pertinent channels: news, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even your own internal data, like sales. That’s powerful.”

In a section titled “Neuroanthropology, Understanding the Encultured Brain and Body,” Daniel Lende talks about Timothy Ingold’s assessment of the social brain. Ingold was incensed that Robin Dunbar tried to isolate the study of the human brain and separate it from its social functionings. Ingold says that the brain must be considered as part of the universe because our bodies are part of the world.

Tickr is a tool that helps our brains function as a part of the larger, rapidly changing social universe in which we live today.

Philip Seib: The Perils of YouTube Diplomacy

Ten years ago, the Innocence of Muslims controversy would not have happened. YouTube did not exist, and without this means of reaching a global audience, the offensive snippets of the “film” would never have been seen.

The excerpts from the purported movie, which apparently no one has ever seen in its entirety, are hate speech, pure and simple — Constitutionally protected, but existing for no purpose other than to disparage a religion and its 1.6 billion adherents. Condemning this video and its producers (“perpetrators” might be a better word) must be done, but those responsible for foreign policy should also carefully consider the realities of YouTube diplomacy.

Much like the content of Twitter and Facebook, the videos appearing on YouTube are so vast in number that even aside from free speech issues they are impossible to police until after a controversy has arisen. YouTube is the world’s third most popular website, trailing only Google and Facebook. More than 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute, and in 2011 YouTube videos were viewed by more than a trillion visitors. There are plenty of “Look at my cute cat” videos, but plenty of politically charged garbage is also available.

In olden times — a decade or more ago — diplomacy was mostly government to government, with diplomats talking only to other diplomats. In his 1939 classic, Diplomacy, British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote that among his colleagues, “It would have been regarded as an act of unthinkable vulgarity to appeal to the common people upon any issue of international policy.” Today, in the new era of public diplomacy, appealing to “the common people,” more felicitously referred to as “the public,” is essential because there are so many information sources that individuals can tap into on their own. The competition for attention is fierce; with hundreds of millions of people addicted to social media, governments must adapt their messaging to electronic venues that are beyond their direct control.

The response to Innocence of Muslims is reminiscent of the explosive reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006, when caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed led to Internet-fueled anger and violent incidents in the Muslim world in which more than two dozen people were killed. Those disturbances ended after a short time, and the current demonstrations will do so as well. But it is important to recognize the clash of cultures that exists and that is not going to vanish anytime soon. In most Muslim countries, the content of Innocence of Muslims violates the law. In much of the West, it is protected by free speech provisions that are keystones of national norms. These differences cannot be reconciled; the best that can be hoped for is a kind of cultural détente.

Particularly in Arab countries, where years of tensions and frustrations make hair-trigger responses common, the task for public diplomacy by the United States is exceedingly complex and is made more so by the borderless reach of social media. Diplomats must be as determined as are the troublemakers, maintaining a steady stream of information that is presented in ways that can compete effectively for audience. The U.S. State Department recognizes this and delivers high-quality public diplomacy programs, but much remains to be done. Given that online sites are increasingly turned to as substitutes for traditional broadcast channels, the State Department’s YouTube channel, for example, should offer timely, carefully designed content, not merely archival material.

What is so frustrating about the Innocence of Muslims case is that a few loopy hate-mongers can be perceived — even if by a relatively small number of people — as representatives of the United States. That illustrates both the power and the weakness of social media, and it underscores the challenges of YouTube diplomacy.

An App To Help You Avoid Red Lights

By Natasha Baker

TORONTO (Reuters) – Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system that uses dashboard-mounted smartphones to help drivers avoid red lights and reduce fuel consumption.

The app called SignalGuru predicts when a traffic signal is about to change, and the speed that should be driven when approaching an intersection in order to cruise through without stopping.

“The stop-and-go pattern that traffic signals create increases fuel consumption significantly,” said Emmanouil Koukoumidis, the scientist behind the app.

“We wondered how we could help drivers cruise through signal light intersections without stopping, and how much we could save on gas and improve the flow of vehicles,” he added.

When approaching an intersection, the camera on a driver’s dashboard-mounted smart phone is activated, which detects when a signal transitions from red to green and vice versa.

Using this information, the app determines the speed that should be driven to avoid stopping at a red light on the cusp of turning green, or a green light just shy of turning red.

“It tells the drivers that ‘if you drive at 30 miles per hour then you’ll be able to cruise through without stopping,’” explained Koukoumidis, adding that the speed recommended is always within legal speed limits.

Information on the traffic signals, such as when they change, is crowdsourced by other users of the app and then sent back to SignalGuru to improve the accuracy of its predictions.

Koukoumidis said that while testing their prototype in Cambridge, Massachusetts they saw a 20 percent decrease in fuel consumption, which could have a significant monetary and environmental impact.

“In the U.S. we’re spending 1/3 of the annual energy consumption for transportation and a big part of that is vehicles,” he explained.

The system was also tested in Singapore, where the traffic lights vary depending on the volume of traffic.

“It was less accurate compared to Cambridge where signals were pre-timed and had fixed settings but it would still work reasonably well with predictions accurate within two seconds,” Koukoumidis said.

Crowdsourcing information about signal lights is necessary, he said, because this data is difficult to access from traffic authorities, which are not unified and do not always have the information computerized.

But this could also pose safety concerns, for example, a signal not changing when predicted due to inaccuracies.

“SignalGuru will advise the driver when to arrive at the intersection but the driver should always check for himself that the light indeed turned green,” he said, noting that it’s similar to how a driver does not follow a navigation device blindly.

Currently the group is looking for industrial partners to commercialize the software. They also plan to implement other safety features, such as thresholds on deceleration, before making it accessible to the public.

Koukoumidis said that going forward their patented approach could also be used to capture other information about the real world, such as available parking spaces or real-time gas prices.

” are computer eyes looking out into the street that can capture all sorts of information,” he said.

The research project was launched as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s Future Urban Mobility group, in which professors Margaret Mantonosi and Li-Shiuan Peh were advisors.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

An App To Help You Avoid Red Lights

By Natasha Baker

TORONTO (Reuters) – Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system that uses dashboard-mounted smartphones to help drivers avoid red lights and reduce fuel consumption.

The app called SignalGuru predicts when a traffic signal is about to change, and the speed that should be driven when approaching an intersection in order to cruise through without stopping.

“The stop-and-go pattern that traffic signals create increases fuel consumption significantly,” said Emmanouil Koukoumidis, the scientist behind the app.

“We wondered how we could help drivers cruise through signal light intersections without stopping, and how much we could save on gas and improve the flow of vehicles,” he added.

When approaching an intersection, the camera on a driver’s dashboard-mounted smart phone is activated, which detects when a signal transitions from red to green and vice versa.

Using this information, the app determines the speed that should be driven to avoid stopping at a red light on the cusp of turning green, or a green light just shy of turning red.

“It tells the drivers that ‘if you drive at 30 miles per hour then you’ll be able to cruise through without stopping,’” explained Koukoumidis, adding that the speed recommended is always within legal speed limits.

Information on the traffic signals, such as when they change, is crowdsourced by other users of the app and then sent back to SignalGuru to improve the accuracy of its predictions.

Koukoumidis said that while testing their prototype in Cambridge, Massachusetts they saw a 20 percent decrease in fuel consumption, which could have a significant monetary and environmental impact.

“In the U.S. we’re spending 1/3 of the annual energy consumption for transportation and a big part of that is vehicles,” he explained.

The system was also tested in Singapore, where the traffic lights vary depending on the volume of traffic.

“It was less accurate compared to Cambridge where signals were pre-timed and had fixed settings but it would still work reasonably well with predictions accurate within two seconds,” Koukoumidis said.

Crowdsourcing information about signal lights is necessary, he said, because this data is difficult to access from traffic authorities, which are not unified and do not always have the information computerized.

But this could also pose safety concerns, for example, a signal not changing when predicted due to inaccuracies.

“SignalGuru will advise the driver when to arrive at the intersection but the driver should always check for himself that the light indeed turned green,” he said, noting that it’s similar to how a driver does not follow a navigation device blindly.

Currently the group is looking for industrial partners to commercialize the software. They also plan to implement other safety features, such as thresholds on deceleration, before making it accessible to the public.

Koukoumidis said that going forward their patented approach could also be used to capture other information about the real world, such as available parking spaces or real-time gas prices.

” are computer eyes looking out into the street that can capture all sorts of information,” he said.

The research project was launched as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s Future Urban Mobility group, in which professors Margaret Mantonosi and Li-Shiuan Peh were advisors.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)