Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Avoiding Metro Manila Traffic (article from Manila Standard)

AS a motorist, I’ve never been a big fan of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority. The mention of the agency conjures up images of traffic aides skulking around the bend, waiting to arrest hapless motorists on bogus “swerving” charges. Invariably, the arrest is followed by the descent of a small mob of other traffic aides who mill around the unfortunate victim like a wake of vultures hovering around carrion.

With these images hardwired into my brain, I was pleasantly surprised to see another side to the MMDA, one that helps rather than hassles motorists. Metro Manila Traffic Navigator (http://mmdatraffic.interaksyon.com) is a Web-based application designed to give the public quick access to live traffic conditions along six major Metro Manila thoroughfares: EDSA, Quezon Avenue, Espana, C5, Roxas Boulevard and the South Luzon Expressway.

Developed by the MMDA in cooperation with TV5, the Web site is a nifty tool for planning your route before heading out to the crowded Metro Manila streets. The default system view shows what looks like a subway map, color coded to indicate traffic conditions along those streets: green for light, yellow for moderate and red for heavy traffic. Clicking on any major intersection opens up a window that tells you how long ago the information was updated. The MMDA says information is updated every 15 minutes, which seems often enough to be truly useful.

Clicking on any of the six major routes on the left side of the screen opens up a line view, which clearly indicates traffic conditions on all major intersections along the thoroughfare. Clicking on the magnifying lens icon brings up the chosen route on Google Maps. Traffic Navigator is the brainchild of Yves Gonzalez, 28, a lawyer and iPad developer who joined the agency’s chairman, Francis Tolentino, when he first took over the agency in July 2010.

From conception to public beta, the Traffic Navigator took about nine months to develop, Gonzalez says. Data comes from the MMDA’s network of closed-circuit TVs, traffic enforcers with hand-held radios, and from the public through Twitter (@MMDANavigator) or SMS (0933-7401258). The Navigator team then plugs in the information into Navigator using a Web-based backend, and is reflected on the front-end for the public to view.

In cases where a public report is from an unknown source, Gonzalez says, the data is first verified by having a traffic enforcer go to the area if it is not covered by a CCTV. “I am now looking into ways to improve or automate the data collection for the Navigator so that we can improve our data’s accuracy,” Gonzalez says.

He adds that efforts are underway to expand the Traffic Navigator to include Ortigas Avenue, Marcos Highway, and Commonwealth Avenue, and to extend the C5 line all the way to Tandang Sora Avenue. Even at this early stage, the Traffic Navigator has received positive feedback, both from end-users and other developers. In fact, the project recently won a Boomerang Award, which recognizes the outstanding work in Internet and mobile marketing, for the innovative use of applications, technology or platforms.

“For me, this award symbolizes the power of combining technology and public service to bring real positive change to our country,” Gonzalez says in a post on Google+. Gonzalez, who has also been responsible for the MMDA’s use of social networks, says the move has already reaped many benefits, including the ability to quickly and efficiently get information out to the public, including the traditional media.

Social networks also allow the agency to get the message out to a broad audience at a minimal cost, he adds, compared to the now defunct radio and TV operations that used to cost the MMDA more than P15 million a year in salaries, equipment and leases. Gonzalez, who was recently named traffic czar for Metro Manila, adds that social networks allow the agency to respond to the public’s needs in real time, from basic inquiries to situations that require immediate action.

“Wherever I am, I can monitor Twitter to know where there are problem traffic areas that require immediate attention, so that I can then dispatch my enforcers where they are needed most. This would not have been possible before without social media,” he says. The downside?

“For those of us tasked with monitoring Twitter and Facebook 24/7, it can be very time-consuming as it eats up a lot of our personal time,” he says. For motorists who benefit from the MMDA system, however, it’s time well spent. Our own suggestions to improve Traffic Navigator: 1) Add flood alerts to indicate areas that are impassable during heavy downpours; and 2) Add icons to indicate where the traffic aides are lurking.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Why Software is Eating The World

Why Software is Eating the World (Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal)

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In an interview with WSJ's Kevin Delaney, Groupon and LinkedIn investor Marc Andreessen insists that the recent popularity of tech companies does not constitute a bubble. He also stressed that both Apple and Google are undervalued and that "the market doesn't like tech."

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple's immense profitability and dominant market position (Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!"

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Why is this happening now?

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon's cloud costs about $1,500 a month.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant. Oops.

Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today's largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today's dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple's iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

Today's fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago. And the fastest growing major videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including FarmVille), which delivers its games entirely online. Zynga's first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues from a year earlier. Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this year (the company was nearly bankrupt when it debuted the popular game on the iPhone in late 2009). Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic Arts and Nintendo have seen revenues stagnate and fall.

The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.

Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn't include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodak's place.

Today's largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it's been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.

Today's fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink's revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers.

LinkedIn is today's fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on LinkedIn, employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time—giving LinkedIn the opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.

Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily existing in the physical world. In today's cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks. The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content. The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will only accelerate the software shift—electric cars are completely computer controlled. And the creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car companies.

Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition. Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached. And the success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets and optimize routes and yields correctly—with software.

Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis, which are crucial to today's oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is increasingly powered by software as well, including satellite analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software algorithms.

The financial services industry has been visibly transformed by software over the last 30 years. Practically every financial transaction, from someone buying a cup of coffee to someone trading a trillion dollars of credit default derivatives, is done in software. And many of the leading innovators in financial services are software companies, such as Square, which allows anyone to accept credit card payments with a mobile phone, and PayPal, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year, up 31% over the previous year.

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.

Even national defense is increasingly software-based. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance. Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.

Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. This includes even industries that are software-based today. Great incumbent software companies like Oracle and Microsoft are increasingly threatened with irrelevance by new software offerings like Salesforce.com and Android (especially in a world where Google owns a major handset maker).

In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term "creative destruction," would be proud.

And while people watching the values of their 401(k)s bounce up and down the last few weeks might doubt it, this is a profoundly positive story for the American economy, in particular. It's not an accident that many of the biggest recent technology companies—including Google, Amazon, eBay and more—are American companies. Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.

Still, we face several challenges.

First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster.

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

I'm privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell you they're really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others' expectations, they are going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.

Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let's seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.

That's the big opportunity. I know where I'm putting my money.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Bill Gates on the Past, Present, and Future of the PC

The most significant innovation in personal computing over the last 30 years has been the evolution of natural interfaces, with the GUI, speech recognition, gestures and touch receiving equal weight, according to Bill Gates, a co-founder and the former chief executive of Microsoft.

As the PC turns 30, PCMag.com asked Gates, as well as other industry leaders, for their thoughts on the most significant innovation in personal computing, and how PCs have changed people's lives for the better – or worse. Finally, PCMag.com wanted to know what the future holds for personal computing – and maybe whether the "Personal Computer" would exist in its current form.

While Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak arguably invented and popularized the personal computer, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and later Steve Ballmer at Microsoft crafted and shaped the Windows operating system which became synonomous with the term "PC". The Apple Macintosh and Windows pushed the graphical user interface into the mainstream, driven by the increasing performance of microprocessors from Intel Corp., and later from chips designed by Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix, Via Technology, and others.

"The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible," Gates said.

"On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant," Gates added. "We just take it for granted now, but the graphical user interface was an amazing breakthrough that made computers dramatically easier for almost everyone to use. Today, we're seeing speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies coming into the mainstream. Touchscreens on phones, tablets and PCs have opened up an incredible new world of applications. And we've barely scratched the surface with new interfaces such as those in Kinect, which incorporate facial recognition along with gesture-based and voice control."

Gates has evolved much as the PC has: in its infancy, the personal computer was a hobbyist product, and expanded into a consumer device, a business tool, and then an ubiquitous device that has helped shape human culture. In his role as the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has taken his technology and business acumen on the road, using technology as a tool to crack fundamental problems facing humanity: education, poverty, health care, and agricultural research, among others.

It's the role of the PC as a cultural touchstone for which Gates seems most proud. When asked if the PC had changed people's lives for the better, Gates replied, "There's no question that it has."

"The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of," Gates said. "Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard. All of these have their roots in what the PC made possible, amplified and extended by other devices.

"But we're still falling short in some areas," Gates added. "Education is one example, where the impact of technology lags behind almost every other part of society. There's so much more that can be done to utilize technology in engage students, help teachers, and customize learning for each child."

The question now is how the personal computer will evolve. Clearly, the days of the desktop PC are over; in Oct. 2008, laptops began outpacing the sales of desktop PCs, and that trend has continued to accelerate. And phones have made the computing experience even more personal; the addition of GPS chips to phones allowed the phone to provide location-based services, a capability that notebooks simply haven't been able to adequately duplicate.

Computing devices have become gateways to the Internet, Gates said, and will continue to serve that role.

"On a personal level, technology will be more seamlessly integrated into our lives. We see this taking shape now – so many things are becoming available in digital form and are accessible to us wherever and whenever we need it," Gates said.

"On a societal level, technology will contribute to solving many of our greatest challenges," Gates added. "In global health, it will advance scientific discovery, diagnostics, and delivery of health services to the world's poor. In education, it has the potential to ignite student interest in learning and help teachers understand what's working and what's not in the classroom. And in many other areas, including energy and the environment, computers already are and will continue to be an essential tool for data collection, analysis, and innovation."

And what's on the road ahead? Who knows. "The next 30 years are going to be equally remarkable as the last 30," Gates said. "We're really still just at the beginning of what's possible."

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Stanford University Free Online Course

Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun and Google director of research Peter Norvig are making their artificial intelligence class this fall free to anyone online. The online course will run in tandem with the actual class from October to December, and online students will be expected to watch the lectures, complete the assignments, and take the exams. Although online students will not earn college credit for the class, Thrun and Norvig say they will receive grades and a certificate if they pass it. Since the course was announced in late July, more than 8,000 people have asked to be put on an email list for more details. The researchers want the online students to interact with Stanford's students, and are encouraging that interaction by having the courses run simultaneously. The professors recommend that online students buy the class textbook and dedicate at least 10 hours a week to the course, which is an intermediate-level class, requiring some mathematical and programming knowledge. Norvig says the course might appeal to students at universities that do not offer similar courses, to technology professionals, or to ambitious high-school students.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

ParaSail Programming Language

SofCheck's Tucker Taft has developed the Parallel Specification and Implementation Language (ParaSail), a new programming language designed to maximize the potential of multicore computer processors by avoiding the problems associated with multicore chips, such as dividing tasks and sending them to each core in parallel. ParaSail, which will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, is similar to the C and C++ programming languages, except that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can be spread across cores, which allows for the greatest number of tasks to be completed in parallel. ParaSail also automatically debugs the programs, which makes the code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says. ParaSail has several other components that are based on older programming languages developed in the 1980s and 1990s for supercomputers. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," Taft says.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Flocking to Google+ By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, July 11, 2011

Although the system has only been open to a few million people, the big well-orchestrated buzz over the past week has been about Google+, the Facebook clone. I'm trying to figure out why this product is so attractive when Google, much like Yahoo, has produced numerous and very similar Facebook clones in the past. Google still supports Orkut, for example. Why wasn't Orkut just upgraded years ago to what is now Google+?

And Google+ is not popular just because of all the early adopters who jump on every new thing are jacked up over it. The influence of these early adopters is questionable. You know who I'm talking about. It's the usual suspects—the online crazy joiners who jump on every new product no matter how sketchy. And, of course, they're led by their ersatz leader, the ubiquitous Scoble, the blogger.

Scoble has become so famous for jumping on board with the first tranche of adopters that he's sort of become one of those one-named "celebrities." He's just Scoble now. What was his first name anyway? Ed? Buddy? Lester? I cannot recall for the life of me. There are others who pile on before most of us ever hear of a product, but Scoble is their leader—although they may not want to admit this.

Generally speaking, the first tranche of reviewers, the Scobalites, tend to like everything unless it is out and out terrible or an awful scam. They act as a crude but liberal filter. This releases the second tranche of mavens. This would be like the Gizmodo folks or David Pogue or the group of professional big-name reviewers, including the ones here at PCMag.com. Now we start to get some insight into the third tranche: common reviewers and pundits with all sorts of opinions.

About now, I come along, with a few other meta reviewers who frankly do not give a crap about this social networking stuff because I'm not 14 anymore. It's up to us to try and figure out what the fuss is about so people can say, "Ah, now THAT actually makes sense." And let's face it, the mania around much of this makes no sense. And, yes, I do bumble around the house moaning when I see someone wasting time on Facebook. But I digress.

I do think I know what is going on, though. First of all, make no mistake, Google is acting like Microsoft did in the 1990s when Netscape came along. Netscape stupidly and aggressively said it was going to kill Microsoft because the browser would be the new OS and everything would be done on the Internet. Microsoft immediately believed this was an actual and credible threat and went to work to destroy Netscape.

Facebook pulled a similar dumb stunt by threatening Google with an assertion that all search will gravitate towards social search and it was implied that Facebook would eventually kill Google. This idea has permeated the scene in a curiously subversive way.

Google began to toy with the social mechanism, with some false starts, and then suddenly Google+ hits the scene and people are analyzing it seriously and paying attention to it. The company also rolled it out like Gmail, meaning it would be limited to the thought leaders first and then ratcheted out to the public. So far everyone is pleased with Google+, and it appears that people are beginning to turn away—somewhat—from Facebook. Why?

I think the reason is simple. All of the complaints about Facebook policies have finally caught up with the company. I noticed this with people who have looked at and reviewed Google+. They all make a comment about how the privacy settings are better or easier to access or less intrusive. This small factor is almost always mentioned. The fact is that Facebook was behaving like a classic monopolist and acting in a highly cavalier manner regarding its users. There was a take it or -leave it attitude. This was compounded by the apparent anti-social arrogance of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I honestly believe that all the buzz and enthusiasm around this Google product has more to do with a pent-up reaction to Facebook than it does with the Google+ product itself. It's a backlash, if you will. And Google has the extra benefit of Gmail and the ability of users to leverage their contact lists and socialize them quickly. So it's not as if it will take forever to get a network established.

I have no idea how long this honeymoon with Google+ will last, but Facebook needs to be concerned about it and do something to reverse the enthusiasm. Otherwise, it will become yet another flattened dead skunk on the social networking superhighway.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

"Social Network" Movie Inspires More Students To Take Computer Courses

After a decade of decreases, computer science programs are experiencing a resurgence, even as politicians warn about the decline of U.S. competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and math. Educators and technologists say the increased interested in computer science is directly related to the popularity of companies such as Apple and Facebook, as well as The Social Network, the movie depicting the success of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "It's a national call, a Sputnik moment," says Mehran Sahami, Stanford University's associate chairman for computer science education. The rise in the number of computer science degrees awarded started in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, according to the Computing Research Association. In addition, the number of students who are pursuing a computer science degree but have not yet declared their major increased by 50 percent last year. Institutions such as Stanford, and universities of Washington and Southern California, have recently redesigned their computer science curriculums to attract new students. The new curriculums emphasize the vast number of careers that use computer science and focus on teaching its practical applications, instead of just vocational skills such as programming languages, which change quickly. Despite the changes and its renewed popularity, the number of computer science graduates does not come close to filling the available jobs.

Friday, May 27, 2011

I.T. Graduates In Demand

Employers are looking to hire graduates with degrees in computer science more than any other college graduates, according to a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). More than 56 percent of computer science majors who have applied for a job have received an offer, giving the major the highest offer rate for the class of 2011. NACE surveyed more than 50,000 college students and found that the job offer rate for computer science graduates has increased 13.8 percent from 2010. Half of engineering graduates who have applied for jobs have received an offer, and the overall job offer rate for 2011 graduates has risen to 41.2 percent from 38.2 percent a year ago. In a separate survey released earlier in the month, NACE reported that computer science graduates were receiving starting salaries of $63,000.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

What Makes an Image Memorable?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed an algorithm that can identify which photos humans will find memorable, based on statistical data taken from a study of people remembering images. The researchers, led by MIT's Phillip Isola, found that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects, while landscapes are not as memorable. After gathering the data, the researchers created memorability maps of each image by asking people to label all of the objects in the images. A computer model analyzed the maps to determine which objects make an image memorable. Then the researchers used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability rate, which enabled them to create an algorithm that can predict the memorability of images the computer has not previously analyzed.

I.T. Professionals in High Demand

There are more technology job openings in a single day on Dice's career Web site than there are computer science graduates joining the U.S. workforce, according a Dice Holdings report. The report also found that 18 states have shortages of local graduates compared to job openings, particularly in key tech markets such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. The report notes that the gap between graduates and job openings has created competition for talent among tech companies. There are at least two or three jobs for every computer science graduate, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Ann Hunter. " 'America's Tech Talent Crunch' is a snapshot of how businesses, educational institutions, and employees are dealing with palpable shortages in real time," the report says. An earlier Dice report found that, on average, technology professionals had not received salary raises in the last two years. However, "companies can no longer get away with paltry salary increases for their technology staffs based on the demand we are seeing for talent," says Dice's Tom Silver.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Path Social Network Limits Users to 50 Friends

Most people on Facebook have several hundred "friends," so it's safe to assume that the average person does not divulge their most private thoughts on the site. A new social network from a former Facebook executive, however, aims to tighten your personal network to just 50 people so you can feel more comfortable sharing details of your life. The Personal Network, or Path, is a photo-based service that lets you upload photos and share that moment with your closest family and friends. It launched last November as an iPhone app, but a Web-based version is also available. Path is the brainchild of Dave Morin, a former senior platform manager at Facebook who will serve as Path's chief executive. The company's lineup, however, is a who's who in the tech startup world, including Napster founding Shawn Fanning. Digg founder Kevin Rose is also an investor. Path social network. "Path allows you to capture your life's most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most," Morin wrote in a blog post. "Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal. Path is a place where you can be yourself."

Monday, April 18, 2011

Path: How's the Weather?

As our obsession with the moment continues, we are always looking for new ways to help you add context to your moments. In thinking about context, we like to think of the important questions good friends ask each other to start a conversation over a distance: How are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? Where are you? And often times the question of: How’s the weather? Weather often times defines our days. A beautiful sunny day evokes feelings of warmth and happiness. While a cold and rainy day reminds us of staying inside and cuddling in blankets while listening to the rain against the windows. Weather is ever changing but always a constant and important context. Path & SimpleGeo worked together to add weather, including the temperature and the forecast, to all of your moments. Bringing a new layer of context to the social web.

Path, A New Social Network

Path limits users to 50 friends. The photo-centric service, built for smart phones, is designed to help users share information only with people they trust. It was launched November 2010. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has a famous theory that the number of people with whom one can maintain a close relationship is limited to 150 by the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language. The Internet has made it quicker and easier to connect with far-flung acquaintances, but Dunbar says it's impossible to overcome that basic brain programming. With high rollers on Facebook boasting up to 5,000 "friends," digital friendship has become increasingly indiscriminate. And that keeps some people from feeling comfortable sharing the more intimate details of their lives. That's the motivation behind Path, a San Francisco company that is offering a more exclusive social network. Path bills itself instead as a "personal network."Dave Morin, formerly an executive at Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., and Shawn Fanning, co-founder of Napster, are betting that people crave more private interaction with a much smaller social circle: Path lets each user designate only 50 friends. Morin estimates that, based on Dunbar's research, 50 is "roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks."

Friday, April 15, 2011

Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series 2011

Computational thinking ought to be embedded within educational programs in order to cultivate children's analytical ability, says Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeannette M. Wing. "Computational thinking helps us figure out how to solve problems through reduction, embedding, transformation, decomposition, or simulation," Wing told attendees at Carnegie Mellon Qatar's Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series. Everyday skills such as planning, learning, scheduling, searching, and making trade-offs come into play with computational thinking, she says. "Teaching computational thinking cannot only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science because of its intellectual adventure, but will benefit people in all fields," Wing says. Everyone is capable of learning computational thinking concepts, according to Wing, and she says the tech-savvy generation should be exploited to teach more people computer science. Carnegie Mellon Qatar professor Kemal Oflazer notes that a discussion on how computer science needed to be perceived in an educational context was started by Wing's 2006 opinion paper in the Communications of the ACM. She persuasively contended that computer scientists' wide-ranging skills represent a universally applicable attitude and skill set required for everyone.

Demand High for Mobile App Developers

Many companies increasingly want to hire mobile application engineers, but there are not enough developers for all the available positions. The increased demand is forcing companies to increase wages, retrain software engineers, outsource work to third-party developers, and set up offshore development labs. The number of mobile development jobs offered on Elance.com, a freelancer Web site, doubled between the first quarters of last year and this year, twice as fast as job growth overall. Some companies are trying to attract new developers by holding recruitment drives at college campuses and public technology seminars, while others are choosing to retrain software engineers in mobile development. Meanwhile, 31 percent of companies reported that the average salary among mobile software developers increased at a higher rate than normal, according to a Dice.com survey. The survey also found that the average mobile salary was about $76,000, but many companies pay as much as $150,000 a year.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Major Advance in Artificial Intelligence

IBM's Watson supercomputer represents a major advance for artificial intelligence (AI) research through its ability to answer verbal questions posed by people. IBM researchers and industry analysts say this skill makes the system better equipped than any previous machine to organize its responses and engage in verbal conversation with humans. "To reach [a computer] conversationally and have it respond with knowledgeable answers is a sea change in computing," says analyst Richard Doherty. The goal of AI researchers to create a computer capable of mimicking human intelligence took a step forward this week with Watson competing against human players on the game show Jeopardy! "Watson is a significant step, allowing people to interact with a computer as they would a human being," says IBM researcher Jennifer Chu-Carroll. "Watson doesn't give you a list of documents to go through but gives the user an answer." The Jeopardy! match especially showcased the confidence the IBM researchers instilled within the supercomputer, as demonstrated by its frequent buzzing in. Chu-Carroll anticipates computers learning to use actual common sense within the next decade, and Doherty believes such advances will revitalize competition between AI researchers.

IBM Supercomputer wins in Jeopardy TV Game Show

IBM's Watson supercomputer concluded its third and final televised round of Jeopardy! on Wednesday in triumph, defeating the human players and winning the three-day tournament. Watson finished the three rounds with $77,147, while the two other contestants won $24,000 and $21,600. Watson proved very proficient at buzzing in quickly to answer questions--a reflection of its confidence in its answers--and its victory was a vindication for computer science and the notion of developing a thinking machine. The supercomputer excels at parsing language. For example, it responded to "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called 'This of the Hedgehog,'" with "What is Elegance?" IBM plans to announce a collaborative venture with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to develop a doctor's assistant service based on the Watson technology, which will permit physicians to ask questions of a cybernetic assistant. Another collaboration with Nuance Communications will strive to add voice recognition to the assistant, possibly making the service available in as soon as 18 months. IBM executives also are discussing the development of a version of Watson that can engage with consumers on various topics such as buying decisions and technical support.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

IT Job Sector Continues to Strengthen

Information technology-related (IT) jobs experienced a net gain of 11,800 in January, the eighth straight month of positive growth, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five bellwether IT job segments had a net gain of 74,200 jobs over the past 12 months, led by management and technical consulting services and computer systems design and related services segments, which together accounted for close to 95 percent of all new IT jobs. Foote Partners CEO David Foote says the government defines the IT professional narrowly, recognizing just 21 job titles, which are all traditional infrastructure jobs in systems analysis, programming, data communications and networks, tech support, and database administration. "The role of technology in the enterprise is now so pervasive that managing it is no longer entrusted to one group but instead split among every department, function, line of business and product group," Foote says. "The job of each one of these entities is to determine how to make the best use of information technology for producing revenues and profitability, building market share, ensuring satisfied customers, controlling costs, innovating solutions, and generally to stay competitive in their industries."