Tech workers marching at Gay Pride San Francisco 2019

Guest post by Luciana Carvalho, VP of People and Performance at Movile

Surviving in the post-lockdown economy is going to be the most important test that many business leaders have ever faced. It is during such extraordinary times that we will find out if our management best practices are indeed the right practices for these novel circumstances and what needs to be adjusted.

A widely accepted tenet of management teachings is that building a strong company culture is very important because it acts as a strong foundation for the entire organization.

Companies with a strong culture have a competitive advantage. Daniel Coyle in his best-selling book “The Culture Code” makes the case that the secret behind highly successful teams is due to company culture. Coyle offers the example of Overture, which invented pay-per-click advertising. Google ended up acquiring Overture because its company culture allowed its teams to move faster and grow bigger.

We are about to discover if company cultures can keep businesses afloat during times of extreme crisis. Is a company’s culture sufficient to weather the storms? What are the factors for keeping teams motivated during extraordinary times with unpredictable outcomes? What can be done to strengthen company culture? These have become common questions within every type of organization.

I’d like to share some insights from my career, which I think can help strengthen company culture and improve the odds of survival during these harsh times.

Leaders are the example

It may seem obvious that leadership is important in times of crisis but it is doubly important because that’s when people notice it the most.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, a researcher in leadership, recently wrote an article about “toxicity of leaderism and … the harm it causes.” He argues for elevating the role of managers to leaders. It is “what we need most of all and yet continues to elude us. That is, competent managers who are entrusted to lead.”

Whoever does the job of leading will need to do it for the entire organization. They need to set the tone, the energy, and be able to communicate a strategy of moving forward to every part of the organization.

For example, among the CEO’s many leadership duties is being a “Chief Excitement Officer” because motivation cascades down from the top. And the CEO needs to be in touch with everyone: internally with staff and suppliers and externally with customers and investors.

As in wartime, employees instinctively look to their leaders for information, like should they be scared about their jobs or should they be vigilant about competitors? They need real information. It needs to be brutally honest because anything else damages trust.

I’ve seen this type of transparency in information become an important strategy in strengthening company culture during tough times ― and Brazil has had plenty of downturns and political instabilities; many more than in western countries.

Communication with staff can be done through open dialogues with the entire organization, or by adopting new practices that then become a future habit.

The easy accessibility of leaders during critical times is very important because it helps everyone in the organization stay on the same page and it shows we trust our people, which in turn makes them feel more secure.

Here at Movile, we make videos where our leadership openly explains our positions on key matters and is able to preempt certain questions. We share stories of both success and failure because we believe there is as much, if not more, to learn from failures compared to success stories. This transparency strengthens our culture.

Which brings me to my next insight.

Transparency as a strategy

Transparency brings to mind something that is “crystal clear,” but this is rare because in reality, we are always in situations where nothing is very clear. So you must equip your teams with as much information as is possible. Tell them about the strategies, the next steps, and the immediate short-term actions needed.

Transparency in information is an extremely strategic practice especially when it is able to spread out the decision-making within the organization; when it gives team members the confidence that they have the best information to make the right decisions.

Otherwise, during times of crisis and fast-changing events, teams can become paralyzed with indecision. Transparency in information empowers teams because they understand how to move the business ahead.

Management updates should be communicated in an open forum with easy access for employees who are offsite or in overseas offices. This brings me to my next insight about work.

From systems of control to systems of results

The global COVID-19 lockdowns have forced every company to adopt and adapt to remote work because most team members need to remain at home. Not everyone was happy with this new normal because few organizations had the company culture that was comfortable managing remote teams.

A new fact of life is the potential return of lockdowns as future infectious waves emerge. This means every company needs to be super comfortable managing remote teams in their homes, and having work processes in place that support their productivity.

Management needs to recognize the additional pressures faced by their staff who are working from home; especially in households with young children.

Our regular systems of control based on hours does not take full advantage of the flexibility of remote workers. It is best to let them decide on how to organize their work and shift a company’s management priorities towards a system of results.

Jim Ludema and Amber Johnson at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership at Benedictine University, wrote that it is important for leaders to “trust their team members and validate that trust by watching organizational productivity, not hours. This allows them to celebrate their team’s performance without micromanaging the time clock.”

And a system of results helps build a culture of meritocracy where results and not favoritism are rewarded.

Preserve the core and build out the base

These harsh times are the best times to examine your company culture and decide what is core to it. And, how it can be strengthened through new practices.

Here at Movile, we are helping our people adapt to the crisis and deal with the pressures of working from home. This includes advice and warnings about medical issues and recognizing the mental health issues around loneliness and anxiety.

We are also experimenting with various tools and processes because we’ve been forced to move all our office interactions into virtual worlds. We are still trying to figure out how to celebrate our successes with virtual champagne, and how we can virtually recreate those interactions during coffee breaks when we are not in the same building.

Adopt and adapt

The best company culture for these times is one that is highly adaptive and readily able to adopt new ways of working. During times of crisis, every company responds differently. There will be new rites and rituals and new habits established. New ways of winning will be found. And new practices such as transparency in information will bond teams together in spirit and purpose so they can successfully tackle hard challenges.

- - -

Luciana Carvalho is VP of People and Performance at Movile, an investor in an ecosystem of leading technology companies it operates globally from its headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Carvalho is one of the chief architects of The Movile Way, a methodology taught at Harvard and Stanford universities for building high-performance teams and a culture that is encouraged to take risks, be fearless, and dream big.

Here's a guest post by my good buddy Matt Grimshaw, a long standing veteran in PR and marketing industries and lately in video production. You can see his video interview with me here on episode 5 of his lockdown video interview series "the BIG REORG" In having these conversations with people from diverse backgrounds -- Matt is looking for clues on how things will be different in the COVID- 19 society as it opens up to a new normal. Will it be a small or big reorganization?  We know that many things won't ever be the same. - Tom Foremski

Guest post by Matt Grimshaw

For the last three months, like almost everyone else in the world, I've been trying to make sense of the new reality presented to me by a virus that until late 2019, was primarily the concern of scientists, historians and the odd disaster movie. However, unlike most people, I have access to a lot of business leaders, experts and generally 'clever persons’ in a broad array of businesses and scientific fields from a two decade career in science/tech media, so I've been talking to them about the continuing after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic whilst also trying to work out what to do next myself career-wise.

I've begun producing a lock-down video talk-show, filmed and produced solo from my home in Northern California called "the BIG REORG". It's a way to keep me sane and distracted with what has become a worthwhile project and a potential avenue for commercial projects, following a big reorganization in my work life as client work disappeared back in March. 

With half-a-dozen video interviews completed and more in the can -- I want to share some of the lessons and insights around this project and from the many hours of conversations about the fallout caused by our shared viral nemesis. What should we be thinking about over the next few months and years as we fumble our way towards whatever the world's new reality is going to be -- because if you think we're ever going 'back to normal' I'm here to suggest otherwise.

The lock-down approach taken by the vast majority of the world's governments is essentially a form of economic chemotherapy; the hope is that the local economy can outlast one or two generations of viral transmission and let the virus burn itself out. However, the virus struck when the world's economy was already in the midst of seismic disruptions caused by mass global political upheaval, social media's fake news crisis, the rise of gig economies and the information/automation revolutions that continue to remove value and jobs from the middle sector of many industries.

Consequently the main effect of the pandemic has been to dump petrol on the fire of these changes; segments that were already being disrupted are now minefields of uncertainty and they're the lucky ones. In some cases entire niche industries that cannot keep up with, or which no longer fit within, the new hastily reorganized supply chain are simply being eliminated.

The pre-2020 globalization forces that enabled the consumer technology revolution were built on the back of economic drivers in cheap international transport and labor plus huge tax incentives that in turn created the modern long distance supply chains (see every designed in USA, made in China label) that dominate most manufactured products. Now, that very same supply chain model is broken as it overly relies on the two weakest links in a post-pandemic reality: Humans and travel.

As a short term consequence of this new thinking, everything you buy is likely about to become a tiny bit different and/or more expensive as consumer forces push for an exchange of cheap far flung labor for more controllable local suppliers in order to restock empty shelves.

Every interaction you have is likely to eventually become completely remote if it hasn’t already, from interviews to education, more of our lives will be depressingly via screen. Automation and robotics will explode across the restaurant and food services industries; self driving trucks and no-touch deliveries mean a drone is safer than a human, same for banks too and postal services - physical locations other than for leisure could become a moot point entirely which has untold ripple effects on commercial real estate and town planning.

In essence what this all means is that whatever was dying out before 2020, will continue to do so, except much, much faster. Shopping malls, offices, administration jobs of all kinds, independent media and anything that Google or Facebook can automate or take over is facing a hard future, this is not to mention the obvious casualties of general retail, restaurants and the millions of small businesses that drive local economies.

The push online will echo the manufacturing switch of the 2000's with remote jobs going wherever costs are lowest, the only real face-to-face jobs worth anything will be in real estate or healthcare but again the push to distance us will see more host-free property viewings and less doctors dealing with more patients via 'tele-medicine' - and of course the drug companies will continue to use the blackmail first business model in the US until someone legally tells them it’s a very bad move, however healthcare is also the first area where the pandemic really has shown the cracks in its profit-first thinking. 

Western society, which is already deeply in the grip of a second 'Gilded age', has been virtually printing money for the richest among us since the last financial crisis through increasingly automated manufacturing and infrastructure, legislation enabled tax evasion strategies and monopolies or oligopolies that not only control entire markets unchecked, but whom seem ever more willing to wade into the murky water of politics with very mixed results and leaving everyone else in their wake.

Since the last economic collapse they've been the ones making money hand over fist, and seemingly without gathering too much bad press or infamy as their forebears did a century ago. However, with so many people's lives having been utterly annihilated through no fault of their own and those in charge seemingly only willing to help themselves, opinions are changing very quickly and what once were seen as titans of technology are increasingly seen in the light of robber barons of old.

There's an ever increasing undercurrent of anger across entire populations at the way things have been and are unraveling and an ever decreasing tolerance for the inequality that’s been causing it and it’s hit boiling point. This is seen in the unprecedented global response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 26th May.

The video recording showed the world the truth of it, centuries of oppression and systemic racism that's been in desperate need of addressing since at least the end of the American Civil War. The truth is that it's hard to ignore the stunningly silent reaction from mainstream America to almost every other identical death at the hands of the police up until this juncture, with the main glaring difference between then and now being that much of the country has been trapped indoors for months on end simmering about, well, everything really.

In fact interviewing my 4th guest (Govind Ghambir CEO of MyCircle; a PTSD app in development) highlighted many of the mental challenges to come when some kind of open society returns: Children with stunted social development, learning cycles out of sync, mass PTSD in the medical community, waves of public anxiety caused by fear of transmission and a general breakdown of regular human interactions causing mistrust and suspicion of everyone from ‘elsewhere’. That’s all for starters and if there is a 'second wave' of infections which is starting to look like a near certainty now, it’s hard to see how lock-downs will happen unless aggressively enforced with punitive measures and that’s basically like juggling with dynamite whilst smoking in the current climate.

Bright linings can be seen here and there; the huge 'work from home' experiment that the pandemic forced upon the world has proven that we finally have technologies that have removed the need for a lot of the offices and therefore the commutes we take and if we don’t need to go into the office then now is also likely a great time to address another much needed switch away from killing our home planet by burning everything we can find & dig up towards using technologies that are simply better for all concerned and which may address some of the international disasters that continue to plague us from the 20th Century. 

The BIG REORG is not about any one thing, it's about everything because it's all connected, as indeed are we. The pandemic has set the stage for conversations on some of the worlds most controversial topics that have previously found it difficult to gain traction and that's why I've enjoyed making the show so much and to such a degree that I'm trying to find a way to keep it going. I've already committed to finishing the first run of 10 come what may, but another major aspect of this pandemic - unemployment - is something I too am experiencing along with millions of others of you out there. But while I'm looking for "what's next" for my own career I'll strive to bring you a slice of what my guests think is coming until I'm (hopefully) made an offer I can't refuse or someone at Netflix/Amazon/Disney calls and gives me a bigger platform.

Until one of those happenings, you can enjoy the first five discussions covering medical cannabis, whole brain emulation, remote working, mental health in a pandemic and the health of news media, on Youtube right now and I'll be editing and releasing the final five over the coming weeks featuring COVID-19 testing, a talk on life sciences, a small business & disruptive materials expert, plus the founders of a company that's trying to make a computer chip that can sequence DNA (yes and they want to make a SARS COV-2 version) in 60 mins...all are already recorded and waiting on intro’s and editing.

The future which is always uncertain in the best of times has become some kind of twilight zone which, if the apocalypse bingo card of 2020 has shown us anything, it is likely to get worse before it gets better. So I aim to keep talking about it all because really, when you boil it down everyone is talking about the BIG REORG and its effects, every single day in some shape or form. 

So if you’re as curious as I am then come see some alternative perspectives with my guests and I at "the BIG REORG"

Matt Grimshaw aka “The Documattarian” is a freelance storyteller and documentary maker based in Marin Country - www.thedocumattarian.com 

 Without events and conferences -- IT vendors are having to change how they reach potential customers. Above: Crunchies Awards 2013

Guest Post by Alex Shapiro  @AlexShapiroPR

The battle for influence and attention by the big vendors can’t stop just because of a crisis. So how are the big names of tech reaching their audiences in a time of media and industry upheaval?

The fact that you’re even reading this article at such a crazy time, shows how unpredictable the tech media landscape has become since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Having to focus on work, customers and productivity, while being supportive and empathetic to family, friends and our communities has been difficult for everyone.

By this point, everyone has also felt the effects: a lot of the people in the world lucky enough to be working remotely right now are stressed, online and eager to demonstrate value and productive-ness through pushing themselves and each other to do more. "According to Bloomberg and the findings of NordVP, Working From Home Means Working Longer Hours for Many. These added hours also seem to be showing up in the volume of announcements tech vendors are pumping out. 

This has hit the tech media world in a unique way. Many reporters shifted around to covering the endless flood of news breaking in every sector, including many like Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, who shifted to covering just Covid news. Though March now seems ages ago, back then, even Larry Dignan, the Editor in Chief of the venerable ZDNet, told Sam Whitmore, of Sam Whitmore Media Survey for his article ZDNet's Larry Dignan on Covid-19's Long-Term Implications, and What to Pitch | Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, "We don't want to become the Coronavirus Channel -- though some days we are... and some days we aren't."

It also seems like every company, think tank, expert, open source project, analyst and influencer has a platform around Right Now, what went wrong and where it's going. 

With everyone online, there’s no shortage of attention for news and views around tech. After all, isn’t there something soothing about the relatively low stakes of clouds and APIs, compared to the very real, real news? Some vendors have even reported huge turnouts at the Virtual Summits.

With more news and fewer writers to report it, vendors are upping their game in tipping the balance of attention in their favor.

As New York Times reported, in The Art of the Pitch in the Midst of a Pandemic - The New York Times, PR folks are also doing anything but leaning back during this noisy time.

So here are some highlights of tech storytellers’ clever tactics to cut through the noise and reach tech decision makers like you!

AWS Flexes its Muscles with AppFlow News

AWS isn’t even known for big splashy announcements. Instead, they typically pull out substantial, technical blogs and keep on rolling to Re:Invent, where Andy Jassy might show off a slide marking the staggering number of these updates, which spawned its own piece of great coverage back when I was in the cloud trenches. For a brand that’s known more for doing than talking, this 2016 vintage visual is a rare demonstration of the giant flexing its muscles (back when physical events were a thing).

Amazon re:Invent/Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-aws-is-unstoppable-2016-11

https://i.insider.com/583f38cdba6eb67d058b6d63?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp

That track-record makes it all the more unusual that AWS seemed to do an old school media push behind the launch of AppFlow, which was announced not just with a very visual blog post, but a combination of explainer video and video demo that made it to the editorial video sections of fine outlets like ZDNet’s. The results were a whole slew of prominent pieces in tech press, beyond usual AWS reporters, which seemed to create a bigger PR spike than the typical AWS product announcement. 

Google Explains AI Tech by Showing Instead of Telling

Google Cloud in the meantime has followed up their massive April push to get their bold multi-cloud Anthos support noticed by every tech trade publication, starting with this fine one, in glowing pieces such as Google Cloud's Anthos for AWS generally available, Microsoft Azure in preview.

A priority so strategic that it took actual robots, powered by AI, to follow that act. AI Algorithms are hard to explain because most people don’t have a PhD in what might as well be science fiction. So, when Google needed to explain ‘Deep Reinforcement Learning with Concurrent Control’ they did it by simplifying the heck out of what it does.with the unveiling of ‘Thinking While Moving’. This is a landing site white-paper that resembles a developer-style Medium post, with illustration, diagrams, animations and video of actual side-by-side robots and all the glorious technical detail that the AI community will need to bring. This announcement exemplifies how showing instead of telling together with demystifying jargon can bring even the most technical topics in the world to life for a broader audience. 

Oracle Shows Off Its Friends and Timeliness

As a popular journalist motto goes, ‘names make news’ and the Oracle Product Team certainly took full advantage of the opportunity to be associated with Zoom as that brand becomes a household name. The announcement that, “When the World turned to Zoom, Zoom turned to Oracle” achieved what few customer-selects-vendor announcements can do, securing prominent media coverage for a story that, by definition doesn’t yet have a middle or an end. Of course, it didn’t hurt the story’s appeal that Larry Ellison himself made maybe a first-ever YouTube appearance promoting the relationship entitled, Larry Ellison: Staying Connected - YouTube. (full disclosure, I’m a proud, Oracle Product PR alumni) 

- - -

Alex Shapiro is an enterprise IT PR and Marketing consultant. 

RTB House is a proud sponsor of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs one of nine teams competing in a unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition — autonomous racing drones. And for the team whose AI beats an elite human pilot — there’s fame and fortune.

Guest post by Gary Burtka, VP of U.S. operations for RTB House

Drones promise to revolutionize commerce through the rapid delivery of goods to our doorsteps and lobbies. But the thought of these self-driving robots whizzing around above our heads and homes is a scary one for some people. It evokes images of futuristic movies like “The Fifth Element” and its skyway with vertical lanes full of speeding flying cars, and imagining the fear-inducing chaos if even just one vehicle flies off-course and crashes into others. And what of the people down below?

Safety is why Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others have been pouring money into development of advanced machine learning systems for delivery by drones. Another way to push forward the development of AI drone technology is through competition.

World’s first man vs. machine drone racing challenge 

The Drone Racing League (DRL) is trying to build NASCAR-like excitement around the sport of drone racing. Large audiences gather to see elite human pilots racing at high speeds via custom made drones through a variety of courses -- and the audience is in the racing seat.

Last year the DRL announced a new type of drone racing competition: the Artificial Intelligence Racing Circuit (AIRR) — with no human pilots. Teams create virtual pilots — AI systems that race along the same courses used in regular competitions. Will the machines learn to become faster pilots than humans?

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has put up millions of dollars in sponsorship and prize money as part of its AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge. Like other prize competitions such as the DARPA Grand Challenge, the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge has the potential to develop safer and more efficient drone deliveries.

The AIRR competition attracted 430 teams of drone enthusiasts and developers from 81 countries. Now there are just nine teams remaining and this fall their drones will race through a series of complex 3D courses for $2 million in prizes. 

There’s a special $250,000 prize for the team that can beat a human pilot. 

University of Warsaw team is a top contender

One of the frontrunners in remaining AIRR teams is the Poland-based RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, from the University of Warsaw, well known for its AI education prowess.

AI has been booming in Poland and Warsaw is home to nearly one-half of the country’s AI startups and R&D divisions for global corporations. The University of Warsaw sits in the center of Poland’s main hub for AI innovation and attracts some of the best minds in the world. 

Karol Pieniący, captain of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, is determined to be the first AIRR team to beat a human pilot. Speaking at a recent event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he admitted that it’s a difficult task.

“The DRL human pilots are real pros at what they do, and we think of them as a geekier version of football stars in the drone racing sport that’s quickly moving towards the mainstream,” said Karol Pieniący. 

“Beating them will be extremely difficult, but we’re not giving up. There is a very good chance that our advanced AI will be able to compete with humans and eventually beat them in a head-to-head race.” 

Pieniący noted that they’re getting strong support from AI specialists at the University of Warsaw, in addition to mentors from Lockheed Martin who work with advanced control systems in the space industry. So, when the team asks its mentors for hints on how to solve a problem, they’re getting top-notch thinking for designing solutions that are “literally out of this world.”

So far so good

During preparations for the AIRR competitions, the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs were the only team that were able to start their drone engine, a standard configured quad-copter, fly up and make simple maneuvers. It was a magical moment for them plus it gave them an edge on the competition because now they had valuable data on flight-control responses.

Pieniący did not disclose any of the “secret sauce” that’s propelled them to the top of the AIRR finalists, which he says will stay closely guarded. He added that the world will soon find out which team has the most advanced AI.

This machine versus human competition will be a fast action-packed race. It’ll be more watchable than Google DeepMind playing and beating the world’s top player of Go. 

There’s millions of dollars and reputations at stake. And the team that beats a human pilot will not only make history but also get a lot of attention from the world’s largest tech companies.

Ultimately, these types of AI systems will be central to reinventing how we live, work and enjoy our leisure time.

---

You can follow developments and the evolving timeline and locations for the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge here. To learn more about the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs and follow their progress, visit their Facebook page. 

- - -

Gary Burtka is VP of U.S. operations for RTB House, that provides state-of-the-art marketing technologies for top brands worldwide. He is also a champion jet skier. RTB House’s AI platform is powered by deep learning algorithms to make ad campaigns more personalized and efficient. 

Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (left), and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, onstage at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event.

Guest Post: By Anderson Thees — Managing partner of Redpoint eventures

If the inaugural edition of the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” conference that took place in early April is anywhere close to a fair barometer, the smart capital of Brazil has now “woke” to the tech potential there in a material fashion. I’ve been a venture capitalist in Brazil since 2003, and it has been a privilege to closely witness the evolution of its entrepreneurial ecosystem. There’s been a beautiful blossoming in the last three years, including a first pack of unicorns running free last year. It should be no surprise to me that investors are paying attention. Still, when I walked into the event held at the Computer History Museum in Menlo Park, I was stunned.

Held over two days on April 8-9 in Mountain View, California, the event was organized by students and volunteers, under the impeccable leadership of Rodrigo Xavier, former CEO of both UBS Pactual and of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Brazil. The event had an incredible lineup, covering the latest and hottest people and companies in tech investing and entrepreneurship.

Among the well-heeled and highly influential speakers were unicorn jockeys like David Vélez from Nubank and StoneCo Ltd. Chairman André Street. Other notable speakers included Jorge Paulo Lemann, co-founder of 3G, Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Fernando Madeira, president of ipsy, Frederico Trajano, CEO of Magazine Luiza - one of Brazil’s largest retailers, and Mike Krieger, a Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, to name just a few.

But what impressed me, and most people there, was the caliber of people sitting in the audience. These were people you’d typically see on stage and then have them vanish from the venue after finishing their gigs. Not this time. Instead, they sat through sessions, took notes, and engaged eagerly in the Q&A sessions. This made the networking breaks as interesting as the content itself. Jokes about the vast wealth represented there were not rare: "We surely have one third of Brazil's GDP in that room.” Rich people were impressed that richer ones were there.

Building a Bridge from Silicon Valley to Brazil

In his opening speech, Hugo Barra, who’s now in charge of VR at Facebook, emphasized the importance of building a bridge between two of the world’s most important entrepreneurial epicenters: Silicon Valley and São Paulo, Brazil’s vibrant financial and tech-innovation center. In 2018, Barra left Xiaomi for Facebook and he previously led Android efforts at Google.

That goal of making key connections between Brazil and Silicon Valley has long been part of our mandate as investors, as well as the mission of BayBrazil, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit founded in 2010 that serves as a source of information and a catalyst to connect the two regions. The lessons from Silicon Valley have been invaluable in accelerating the growth of Brazil’s tech ecosystem.

For example, the creation of Cubo, now the world’s second largest entrepreneurial hub in São Paulo, was inspired by trying to duplicate the likelihood of serendipitous encounters based on the sheer volume of entrepreneurs located in one place. Without a major hub like Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, Cubo’s co-founders realized the pace of innovation would be stuck in low gear.

Certainly, the most successful entrepreneurs participating in the first “Brazil at Silicon Valley” are prime examples of promising startups who’ve bridged the two regions and networked with the Brazilian-American tech community.

A prime example is David Vélez, who was one of the featured speakers at the event. Prior to taking the helm of Nubank, which is Brazil’s third unicorn and currently valued at more than $4 billion after Tencent’s $180 million investment, Vélez worked at some of the most prominent investment firms and banks in the U.S. and graduated from Stanford University with an MBA.

Another presenter was Pipefy, a SaaS workflow platform founded by Alessio Alionco that is now used in more than 150 countries by enterprises such Accenture, GE, Visa and Volvo. Founded in Brazil, it now has its global headquarters in San Francisco and a tech development team in Curitiba, Brazil— something we are sure to see more and more of as Brazil-born startups continue to grow and expand internationally.

Mike Krieger, Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, compares the current scenario with Brazil 2010, when the app was released. He believes that, today, it could have been developed in the country.

What a Difference Five Years Makes

About five years ago, I recall a lively debate among VCs actively investing in Brazil at a similar, but much smaller event in Silicon Valley. At the time, the group was wagering whether the tech investing in Brazil had reached a total of a half-billion or a billion U.S. dollars.

Fast forward from five years ago to last fall, and in one of Latin America’s largest deals, Movile raised $400 million for its iFood delivery business. And, then, earlier this year Softbank announced a new U.S.$5 billion Softbank Innovation Fund for Latin American tech companies that it described as “the largest-ever technology fund focused exclusively on the fast-growing Latin American market,” per Crunchbase.

There was a funny moment during “Brazil at Silicon Valley” when Softbank CEO Marcelo Claure was asked how on Earth he could possibly deploy $5 billion in Latin America with the new fund. Claure answered with a chuckle that: “We believe $5 billion is a good start.”

Based on the first edition of McKinsey & Company’s new Brazil Digital Report, published and made available during the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there’s good reason for bullishness.

According to the new report, the Brazilian economy has reached a “tipping point,” consumer and industry confidence are high and inflation and interest rates are at all-decade lows. Brazil’s capital markets are developing and diversifying funding for companies. IPOs have been on the rise. IT investment continues to grow faster than GDP, albeit a slow, steady pace. Pay TV and digital are the fastest-growing channels for media investments. E-commerce is growing. And, Brazil now accounts for 70 percent of the VC, private equity and private investment in LatAm.

One McKinsey & Company chart that really grabbed the audience’s attention, is that seven of the top-10 biggest market cap companies in the U.S. are big tech players including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. That’s simply not the case in Brazil today, but the opportunity is looming, large and compelling. One of the speakers forecast that in five years, at least half of Brazil’s largest companies will be tech companies.

I believe that this inaugural conference was the biggest gathering of Brazilians traveling to Silicon Valley that I have ever witnessed. The runner-up was a big group of about 250 Brazilian entrepreneurs attending TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2012 at the peak of Brazilian euphoria. But, at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there were all sorts of ecosystem players in the room. The very cream of the crop of top entrepreneurs, investors and corporations were all there.

During Disrupt 2012, we took the opportunity to launch our firm, throwing a party on the rooftop of the Transamerica Pyramid building were one of our Silicon Valley partners, e.ventures, is located. That party included a few Samba dancers. After Stanford conference, Mathias Schilling, co-founder of e.ventures, came to the important conclusion that next time around we’ll need a couple of floors, and a full Samba school formation during our party at BayBrazil’s annual “Brazil Week” that will take place in San Francisco in August this year.

- - -

Anderson Thees is managing partner of Redpoint eventures, the Brazilian-focused arm of the Silicon Valley venture firms Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures.

Disclosure: Redpoint eventures is an early investor in Pipefy and a co-founder of CUBO. Anderson Thees is currently a board member of BayBrazil

The Silicon Valley firm that helped Al Gore create a movement to curb climate change introduces strategy team to help leaders spark and sustain change. Guest post by Chris Knight 

In 2012, Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez set out to write a book to help business leaders envision the future and make their big, audacious visions a reality. In their 2016 book Illuminate: Ignite Change through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies and Symbols, they lay out a five-part taxonomy for leadership movements.

Based on four years of in-depth research, Illuminate is rich in case studies about how great leaders like Apple's Steve Jobs, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used speeches, stories, ceremonies and symbols to mobilize the masses.

In a review of Illuminate, Forbes’ contributor Nick Morgan highly recommends the book for organizations that are keen on thinking through and telling stories that take

“best advantage of human cultural symbols, signs and signposts along the way. You can run an organization without telling stories to bring employees, customers, and the public into your fold – but you can’t run it very well.”

Last month, the Sunnyvale-based firm announced the launch of a new strategy practice to help leaders ignite powerful, persuasive movements built on the strategic framework and insights from Illuminate. 

For the past 30 years, Duarte has played a role in many movements that matter, including its work with Silicon Valley's leading brands such as Cisco and Salesforce, former Vice President Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," and the transportation revolution led by Hyperloop One.

Duarte helped Hyperloop One crystallize and communicate its vision for high-speed, on-demand transportation during its first public technology demonstration in the Nevada desert in May 2016. NBC Nightly News was one of the many media outlets to cover the first moment of that movement here.

Introducing Duarte’s new strategy practice team…

From left to right: Patti Sanchez, chief strategy officer and co-author of Illuminate; Becky Waller Bausman, SVP; Brie Osgood, communication strategist; and Dave DeFranco, communication strategist. (Photo credit: Chris Knight)

Duarte's new team of senior strategists are veterans of moving audiences through systematic use of empathy, storytelling and impactful moments.

Practice leader Patti Sanchez has led transformative communications initiatives for brands including Cisco, Hyperloop One, Hewlett-Packard and VMware for more than 25 years.

Other founding practice members include three new senior strategists experienced at C-suite advising:

- Becky Waller Bausman, SVP of Strategy at Duarte, whose background is rooted in positioning and product strategy.

 - Dave DeFranco, who’s led sales enablement and change initiatives for many of the world’s largest B2B tech companies.

- Brie Osgood, who has deep experience with executive communications at Moody’s, Johnson & Johnson, HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The senior team introduces the new Duarte strategy practice in a video here.

"Great leaders create a feeling of hope that inspires people to contribute extra energy to a transformation until they arrive at the goal. The vision – or dream – of the end state must be so compelling that it creates a sense of longing to pull employees, partners, and customers toward the future," says Sanchez.

"To sustain people's interest and commitment over the long haul, leaders need to deliver an ongoing stream of meaningful and timely communications that are articulated with clarity, certainty, passion and empathy."

"Change is hard for a lot of people, which is why a lot of movements fail and a lot of corporate transformations fall flat," says Bausman.

"The collective wisdom we bring as a team helps leaders solve how to best communicate in one moment or over several moments in time to make a movement successful."

To learn more about the new practice, visit www.duarte.com/strategy

- - -

Chris Knight has worked as a brand-marketing consultant for startups and global corporations in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years. He consults for Duarte Inc.

I'll be at the Startup Voodoo conference in St. Louis on June 18. Here is an interview by conference co-founder Aaron Perlut, with one of the keynote speakers: Maxine Clark, who pioneered crowd-sourcing in 1997 to build a very successful business. 

By Aaron Perlut

Veteran retail entrepreneur Maxine Clark is one of our keynote speakers at the 2nd annual Startup Voodoo innovation, entrepreneurship and startups conference in St. Louis June 18.

Not familiar with her name? Well, you should be. Because while crowdsourcing is today all the rage as a means of corporate engagement with customers, Clark’s Build-A-Bear Workshop – with more than 400 locations worldwide — has been at the forefront of the concept since 1997.

Since stepping down as Build-A-Bear CEO in June 2013, Clark’s been sharing her knowledge with other female entrepreneurs, as an investor, and as an advisor with Prosper Women Entrepreneurs, a program aimed at identifying, coaching and advancing women-led companies with a  $50,000 investment in each venture, and an accelerator program that gives them access to world-renowned mentors, resources, introductions and a custom curriculum.

I caught up with Clark to ask her about entrepreneurship and her career:

Q: Do you miss running the company you built from the ground up? 

A: I am heavily engaged in my (non-Prosper) personal investments such as Goldie Blox, myEDmatch.com, St. Frank and as an informal advisor to other entrepreneurs — especially in the not-for profit space. Plus my work in public education where I use my critical thinking skills, experience and my networks on a daily basis.

Build-A-Bear is in great hands and allows me to spend time in our community in other important areas.

What was the biggest challenge you faced as a female entrepreneur?

I faced few of the normal challenges entrepreneurs have when creating a startup. I have over 20 years of business experience so fundraising, and networks were much easier for me to navigate. I was going into retail and I knew retail and how it operates.

Did you have a mentor? 

I have had many mentors — teachers, bosses, fellow business professionals. All of them have supported me in different ways.

What is the advantage in having a mentor?

It can be lonely at the top, especially the first time you’re in the driver’s seat. Second opinions, sounding boards and support are priceless. Mentors share their experience, encourage, and help connect with others. Mentors are more than advisors; they are willing to “spend some of their capital” to further the success of their mentee.

What is Prosper and why should women entrepreneurs apply for funding?

Prosper Women Entrepreneurs is a program which identifies, coaches and advances women-led companies. The Prosper Capital Startup Accelerator invests $50,000 in each women-led startup, as well as business coaching for each entrepreneur accepted into the accelerator program.

The program offers a unique experience developed by experts in entrepreneurship, negotiation, branding, business development and sales. Entrepreneurs should apply to the program to help raise capital, gain access to world-renowned mentors, resources and introductions, and complete a curriculum designed specifically for their unique business.

What sort of startups is Prosper looking to fund?

We’re looking for women-led startups with a focus on technology, health care and consumer products. We define a women-led business as a company with at least one woman in a position of leadership and significant and meaningful equity.

What one piece of advice would you give a woman entrepreneur?

I would give the same advice to any entrepreneur — know your market really well, the potential size of the business, your competition, where you fit in. And have a five-year plan. A plan is a work in progress so it always ebbs and flows but having a plan is critical to success.

You don’t need to have all the money at once but when will you need it? What milestones are you willing to commit to?

- - -

Here is my coverage of Startup Voodoo from last year:

The Startup Spirit Of St. Louis - Building A Sustainable And Socially Conscious Tech Community

Erin Steinbrugge is COO of Crowdsource.com, where she authored the Growth Hacking 101: Rookie Template; and is a contributor to the Accelerate St. Louis startup ecosystem. 

Guest post by Erin Steinbrugge

If there is one area where marketers excel, it’s continually redefining and rebranding the role of marketing itself. As a marketer at heart, I appreciate the continual innovation yet sometimes cringe at the latest and greatest buzzwords and emerging new job titles. The latest title that has caught my fancy and that of Silicon Valley over the last couple years is “growth hacker.”

What exactly is a Growth Hacker?

According to Andrew Chen, “The new job title of ‘growth hacker’ is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer.”

But what does that actually mean? An overly simplistic definition would be that growth hackers are an emerging breed of marketers who excel at leveraging technology in clever ways to rapidly grow a business.

Further refined, however, I would add that leveraging technology “in clever ways” is not the equivalent of taking traditional marketing practices and translating them to a digital environment.

Nor is the growth hacker focused on the common digital marketing mix of e-mail, SEO, PPC, content strategy and social media. Those channels and tactics are tools in their toolkit, but they know better than to get caught up in the deluge of online advice on content strategy to squeeze one more like out of each Facebook post.

Every brand on the planet is doing that, and few are experiencing the kind of hockey-stick growth seen by companies that have landed a truly savvy growth hacker.

The growth hacker is two parts nerd, one part marketer and one part rebel. Although “Growth Hacker” as a title makes me twitch a bit, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit this fusion excites the inner nerd-rebel in me. 

So what do they do?

The day-to-day obsession of the growth hacker is to focus on the growth funnel (above), or more specifically, to increase the rate at which people move through each stage of the funnel. They leverage technology in ways that rapidly increases the rate at which a customer moves from acquisition to revenue, with heavy emphasis on motivating viral sharing at the referral stage, on a continual basis, in order to replenish the funnel.

In the early stages of a new product (or campaign) launch, growth hackers pay close attention to the conversion rates at each step of the funnel. They then A/B test, evaluate results and optimize tactics to accelerate the speed at which people move through the funnel.

He or she pays close attention to signals that the funnel is unhealthy at any given stage, and understands where to apply pressure. For example, if ad campaigns are successful at driving people to a website (acquisition), but conversion rates are low on signups (activation), it makes sense to optimize activation strategy rather than adding more fuel to the marketing engine that is driving acquisition.

Of particular emphasis is the referral stage of the funnel, in which growth hackers rely on viral sharing and word of mouth to drive additional acquisition, resulting in rapid growth on a lean budget. This is where being savvy with technology comes into play.

Some of the greatest success stories in growth hacking have come from companies that have repeatedly innovated, tested and optimized their referral strategies. Some familiar examples include Uber, AirBNB, LinkedIn, DropBox, Hotmail and Zynga. These companies also have been savvy with leveraging existing open platforms to accelerate the acquisition of new users.

Growth Hacking for the Enterprise

Growth hacking is often talked about in terms of small, lean technology startups, but enterprise businesses have much to gain from embracing this mentality. Here are five ways that enterprise businesses can benefit from growth hacking:

1. Optimizing the Sales Funnel: A solid lead generation program and a healthy pipeline are two of the most critical things that a growth hacker can contribute to the enterprise. Recent years have massively disrupted the traditional buying process, and buyers are doing their own research online long before contacting a sales representative.

According to Forrester, buyers are anywhere from two-thirds to 90 percent of the way through their decision-making process before they ever reach out to a vendor. A Growth Hacker will use data to build a solid, online lead generation program that establishes marketplace authority will convert leads into revenue much faster than traditional selling methods.

2. Leveraging Actionable Data: Big data has become an integral part in solving everything from marketing challenges to world problems, but despite increased accessibility to data, many marketers still struggle with leveraging it to achieve results.

A study by IDG found 61 percent of marketers are frustrated with the quality of leads. This same study revealed that marketers lack the data they need to make informed decisions about the optimization of their lead-generation programs. A growth hacker should be savvy with manipulating and interpreting data in a way that is informative and actionable, even for the largest of enterprises. 

3. Learning to Fail Fast: Large enterprises in particular have a habit of investing heavily in marketing initiatives before success is proven or disproven. When the stakes are high, a growth hacker will uncover “shortcuts” to failure. This may sound counterintuitive, but it is a valuable process because it allows the enterprise to adapt and pivot quickly — before a large investment is made.

The concept of embracing failure is foreign to many business-minded professionals. Growth hackers remove the stigma of “failure” by rapidly testing new ideas and discarding the ones that don’t work.

4. Embracing Automation: Paradoxically enough, many great programmers and growth hackers are known for being lazy. Not in the sense that they don’t show up for work, but in their approach to problems. The right combination of cleverness and laziness can pay off big when it comes to finding the simplest, most effective solution to any problem.

Growth hackers will leverage technology to automate time-consuming, redundant processes. Getting around extra work with automation frees up time to test new ideas and ultimately fuels innovation and growth. This inherent “laziness” introduces fresh, new solutions to age-old problems that even the most legacy-bound enterprises can benefit from.

5. Establishing Predictable Viral Lift:  Discussions and case studies on viral lift tend to revolve around technology startups. Why? Startups, by nature, are in an early period of testing and learning, scratching and clawing their way to success, whereas the mature enterprises are often in a state of retainment.

Virality is not something that can be planned or purchased, it happens when a product or message is worth sharing. Achieving predictable viral lift in the referral stage of the funnel requires significant testing and iteration. Growth hackers can help enterprise businesses view opportunities through the eyes of a startup, uncovering opportunities to apply technology solutions that support and accelerate viral lift.

Taking a “startup” mentality to optimizing the growth funnel can have a profound impact on businesses of any size, and at any stage of the lifecycle. Although the title of “Growth Hacker” might be more of a buzzword than something you are likely to see in your organizational chart five years from now, the key attributes and skills of a successful growth hacker are likely to become the most desirable skills in marketing candidates for years to come.

A data lake...

The following is a guest column from Sharmila Mulligan, CEO and founder of ClearStory Data.

By Sharmila Mulligan

In the late 1990s, organizations struggled to solve the problem of who gets access to more information, more applications and more data. As enterprises began amassing more data and making it available to employees, partners and customers, security considerations escalated.

We saw rapid innovation in security technologies. The first single sign-on applications emerged together with many other authentication technologies.  And we saw the first appointments of Chief Security Officers (CSOs), helping these essential applications to proliferate in the enterprise with beneficial results.

Identity management emerged as a new category, from startups such as Oblix, headed by Gordon Eubanks, the founder of Symantec (Oracle acquired Oblix in 2005). And so began the delivery of new suites of software designed to authenticate identity, especially in Web services deployments. 

These ID management startups managed to stay above the turmoil in tech markets. By 2000, industry watchers such as Elise Ackerman of the San Jose Mercury News described these early identity checkers that controlled "who gets access to what" as dot-com bust survivors.

We now face a new challenge when it comes to proliferation of data across the enterprise. Accessibility of data to those who need it -- is absolutely necessary to realize the promise of big data analytics. However, it comes with a challenge that's leading to the appointment of yet another C-level position, the Chief Data Officer (CDO). 

Based on our work with Fortune 1000 companies during the past year, and the buzz around "data lakes" at the recent Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, there's a conundrum that lays ahead in this new Data 2.0 Age: how to widen data access in the enterprise while complying with stricter data governance rules.

The complexities can be seen in the reality of data lakes -- where all types of data are collected in a massive data hub from a variety of sources. This mix of data creates many data governance issues. These include governing what's relevant for analysis; what's not relevant but should be stored for compliance reasons; how fresh is the data; where it came from; when was it updated; who has access to it; who gets to "see" the real information in it; who is excluded; what data should be masked but accessible in an aggregate form; and how will the governance process be managed and audited to ensure all the data is used appropriately.

The number of governance considerations is immense and we are only at the start of a growing list.

What we know for sure is three things: more data is good, speed of data accessibility is important, and the democratization of data held in data lakes is essential to making better business decisions. To realize this, however, will require elevating the importance of having a strict data governance model. 

This task is a large undertaking and is the responsibility of Chief Data Officers. It's still about access and security again, but with a more complex technical challenge because data is bigger, more fluid, and ever changing.

The overall Data 2.0 mission has these considerations:

- The selection of the data lake platform itself -- which could be Apache Hadoop, Hortonworks or Cloudera -- this becomes the central repository for data streamed in from various sources in different formats that can be combined for deeper data intelligence. While business users can examine, dive in, or preview information in data lakes, the new CDO challenge will be securing and governing data usage so only the right people get approved access to particular sets of data.

- The desire for business users from different departments to be more self-reliant with an ability to explore data themselves because they're the domain experts. That requires a fast and intuitive way to see insights with new tools that eliminate the need to be IT-savvy so business leaders can get better answers and explore data analysis and collaborate with peers in real-time.

- The blending and harmonization of diverse data sets from diverse sources and formats -- be it structured, unstructured or semi-structured data -- to reach a holistic insight that answers bigger, deeper business questions. This process includes otherwise hard-to-capture and hard-to-wrangle data coming from an exploding variety of devices and smart sensors connected to an emerging Internet of Everyday Things.

The companies and industries moving the fastest to realize the Data 2.0 advantages are those that aggressively compete against their peers day-to-day. They're accessing more data, faster, as a means to staying ahead of competitors. These companies include retailers, consumer-packaged goods, companies, pharmaceuticals, media and entertainment companies, insurance, automotive, and every industry where the consumer now has all the power, and every day is about attracting and keeping them.

###

Sharmila Mulligan is the CEO and founder at ClearStory Data and has spent more than 18 years building software companies in a variety of markets. She has been EVP at Netscape, Kiva Software, AOL, Opsware, and Aster Data, helping to build multi-billion dollar IT markets.  She is on the board of several start-ups, and is an advisor to numerous companies, and an active investor in early-stage companies.

Guest Post by Chris Knight

With billions of smart devices coming online, the variety and volume of new data sources will require businesses to move from back-end IT and data science to hiring "top chefs" of data.

Delivering on big data's promise for strategic business edge is now far more daunting after a string of news and products coming to market to at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. As some pundits noted, big data was a "quiet star" at the mammoth annual gadget fest.

Everything at the show seemed connected in some way, for some purpose, it was clear to anyone that the future will definitely be an Internet of Everything. From sleep monitors that determine the best time to wake up based on sleeping patterns; to self-driving vehicles, smart lighting systems, home and public safety,  everything was Wi-Fi enabled.

Cisco CEO John Chambers predicted the Internet of Everything would be a $19 trillion market by the end of this decade, connecting 50 billion things. According to Cisco, 50 billion objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Market research from Gartner says that the  IoE boom will create a $300 billion services market.

There's lots of exuberance but there here are some concerns. Alistair Croll wrote on O'Reilly Radar recently: "The Internet of Things and big data are two sides of the same coin; building one without considering the other is a recipe for doom."

One of the big problems Croll predicts is the issue of "datamandering" a.k.a. constant wars over data formats between leading companies, such as we've seen between Apple, Samsung, and Google.  As they "jockey for position to be the central hub of our health, parenting, home of finances."

An increase in the variety of data sources and formats is a huge challenge from an enterprise point of view. Businesses must solve the challenge of unstructured data as billions of "things" communicating in real-time, generate data storms of massive complexities. Big Data enthusiasts constantly talk about the three "Vs" -- volume, velocity and variety of data.

There's been constant debate about which "V" is the most important in the big data equation. With an expected onslaught in unstructured data from billions, if not trillions of connected objects coming online, variety is emerging as the most critical "V" to solve if Big Data is to fulfill its promises. 

Veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sharmila Mulligan, CEO of ClearStory Data, is among those that agree that variety will become the most important "V" in big data analysis.

In her recent 2015 predictions post, she wrote: "As data sources proliferate, they'll be increasingly daunting and more costly to wrestle. Data variety will be the #1 challenge businesses will seek to overcome." (SlideShare of Mulligan's 2015 predictions: http://slidesha.re/1KpXR83)

Mulligan believes that democratizing access to data analysis and business insights across organizations is a vital next step to address this massive increase in data variety generated in the age of IoT.

"Static BI [Business Intelligence] dashboards like Excel are dead," says Mulligan. "They need to be replaced by new platforms that can crunch big volumes of data faster and let employees in different job roles collaborate on various data streams and sources on the fly to get the real story and holistic point of view."

A recent survey of 500+ business executives at Strata + Hadoop World last October, found that the majority of them are struggling to combine a wide variety of data sources and formats and make them usable. Nearly half (49 percent) of those polled said they have to work with eight to more than 15 different data formats. And that's before the future world of IoT kicks in. [See Infographic below.]

We have "Data Scientists" but what we might need is "Data Chefs," experts who know how to mix many different data source "ingredients," into recipes that produce the nutritional sustenance that powers an organization's key execs in making the right decisions, and moving towards the right goals.

Not every data source is needed just because it is available, too much data can spoil a decision just as not having enough data. Combining the right mix of data sources and delivering it all at the right time is an art, and is similar to the work of a  top chef who knows how much of each ingredient is needed to bring a dish together in time, and create a great experience. 

- - -

Chris Knight is a founder and creative director of Divino Group, a new brand marketing and PR firm based in San Francisco that's launching this week. Follow him on Twitter at @DivinoGroup.

http://www.clearstorydata.com

Guest column: By Burton Goldfield, CEO, TriNet.

If you look at the HR cloud market, you’ll find recent growing financial interest and investment in cloud-based, human capital management. Companies like TriNet, Paylocity, Workday and Paycom have all had recent IPOs, while ZenPayroll and Zenefits have received VC funding. Additionally, within the last two years Oracle and Salesforce.com have acquired Internet-based HR software firms.

So, what fuels the recent interest in HR services companies?

Expertise In Navigating the Legislation Maze

Navigating the legislative and regulatory changes that occur throughout the year can be challenging. Managing HR can distract executives from their core competency — running and growing their business. Additionally, for an early stage start-up, the costs associated with a business that isn’t compliant can be extremely damaging.

Over the past 20 years, the risk of non-compliance and lawsuits has risen significantly, arising from a plethora of new laws and regulations, from the Family & Medical Leave Act in 1993 to the various state and local background check laws and most recently, the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Specifically, the requirements ushered in by the Affordable Care Act and recent Supreme Court rulings have made it challenging for companies of all sizes to stay abreast of ever-changing regulations. For example, in May 2014, the IRS provided guidance reiterating that the ACA prohibits employers from reimbursing employees on a pre-tax basis for premiums those employees pay for individual health insurance policies, either in or outside the Marketplace.

In addition, the Supreme Court’s 2013 holding that a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional effectively expanded the federal definition of marriage to include same-sex spouses, which had a significant impact on small businesses, such as in the areas of payroll taxes and health insurance benefits. Due to limited resources, small- and medium-sized businesses are more vulnerable to missing such legal updates.

Evolving employment laws will only grow more complex over time. 

Tools for Hiring and Retaining Workers 

For many start-ups, the first year of business is often hard enough on its own. Developing a value proposition, gaining traction in the market and trying to make sense of the overall business model is challenging. It is even more problematic without the right people.

Attracting the right candidates in this aggressive hiring market has become extremely difficult. Due to the strengthening economy and rise in employment, hiring has become a seller’s market. Start-ups that don’t think strategically about recruiting will struggle t0 recruit the best talent.

Employee retention strategy is even more critical. Small businesses need to invest in ways that both satisfy and advance their staff, through competitive and comprehensive benefit packages or training opportunities to strengthen skill sets.

Convenience and Cost Benefits

A recent survey conducted by Software Advice, discovered that more than 60% of business owners still handle at least a portion of their HR duties through manual processes. In addition, 40% rely solely on manual processes.

About 77%  sought applications that they could access from remote locations or mobile devices to help them in their efforts to create a mobile business. Cloud-based HR management tools save time and reduce employer-related risk with respect to on-boarding, time keeping, and administering payroll and benefits, as examples.

When business leaders take advantage of ways to alleviate human resources challenges, they can be more focused on creating better companies.

Most people don't know much about the business of science publishing. When I tell friends what I do for a living there's a certain look of terror that flashes across their eyes at words such as, 'semiconductors,' 'physics' and 'journals' as if they are about to hear a three-hour lecture on the subject.

Since losing my old publishers job to the very disruption Silicon Valley Watcher covers I've focused on how to build a content discovery engine for science.  The world of science publishing is entangled in the middle of a mostly unreported war that will decide how the world finds out about scientific breakthroughs.

There are two basic types of science media: The first is the trade publishing business: Magazines, websites and journals. These entities are usually funded through advertising and offer free subscriptions and feature news, tech reporting and the invited editorial.

The second media group is the peer reviewed  academic journals that are funded by subscriptions. In a previous life I ran trade journals covering computer chip and solar cell research and manufacture.

Technology disrupted my segment, decimating ad revenues and leaving just a handful of publishers in each technology sector. Common sense suggests the same tale of woe would befall the academic publishers too, but that couldn't be further from the truth: They are thriving. They have not really felt the disruptive heat of the Internet because they have exclusive access to content that they control absolutely. Content that the scientific communities need to function properly.

In other industries the word 'monopoly' would be thrown around. Academic publishing is old, very old and in fact almost as old as science itself.

The problem with it being so venerable is that its methodologies are entrenched within the system and so are used for the communication of new scientific discovery. So intimate is this relationship in order to gain a PhD you must be published in a recognized journal. Now that's cornering a market.

It's a stunningly simple business model: The publisher owns all the prestige via the title/audience. Any academics that want papers peer reviewed pay a fee (depending on the journal) to have it reviewed by a team of reviewers (usually working for free or at low cost) to check the claims over, before publishing the work and charging their audience fees to either subscribe or buy the individual paper containing the research itself. Publishers keep all copyright and own the audience -- anyone that wants access to this closed network, pays.

For one hundred years and more, this is how academic publishing has been executed, but then the Internet came along and did what it did to all types of media; it began to disrupt it. As it did first to us in the trade media -- the web removed publisher control. Firstly of content by giving it a common home on the web, and then it took away the unique capability of building an audience.

Social technologies enabled anyone to build their own audience with limited promotion and then mobile came along and removed any hope of print being remotely sustainable. We in the trade media tried to adapt to this new digital reality by dropping print like a hot stone before trying to survive on digital margins which is near impossible for niche markets.

Meanwhile, those in academic media went the other direction entirely -- they jumped behind paywalls. The trouble with the pay-wall approach is that there's nothing stopping anyone creating open journals, which means a fight was inevitable with the stakes being higher then most recognize.

Open Access journals have sprung up all over the place. The largest I've seen is the Public Library of Science, but there are lots of independent niche journals too -- there's almost ten thousand attached to the Directory of Open Access Journals and there are even more direct attempts at creating peer-to-peer networks like academia.edu for direct sharing of research.

Of course the legacy publishers were not going to sit still and watch their business evaporate but it's hard to see how they'll survive as Open Access gains traction.

There are generations of MBA and PhD candidates preparing to join the science communities, and they all come from a generation that's used to sharing and connecting with community, without paywalls or the legacy rules of century old practices.

However, we should be careful that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are dangers in losing the old establishment as the scientific process requires the checks and balances of the peer review process. And contrary to what the Internet may suggest, content isn't cheap -- especially this type of content.

At InPress Media Group, I'm working on a discovery engine: apptheneum, which aims-- to connect the sciences through content, something we like to call 'content networking' -- think of a "LinkedIn" of science and technology content.

I'm trying to introduce science media to ideas such as: discovery engines, and distributing content based on its relevance to the reader as opposed to the current practice of fencing content into disciplines.

How will it evolve? I think it be a lot like the consumer media market before it. People are like water: They follow the path of least resistance, or in this case least cost.

Economics will eventually decide the winners and losers but will it help us gain from what technology enables us to do, or will science content go the way of click-baiting sites? 

- - -

Here is a description of the apptheneum platform:

InPress Media Group

The technology boom is driving a hiring frenzy, pitting giant companies like LinkedIn, Twitter and Google against small, scrappy start-ups in a battle for talent. Top candidates are able to negotiate four or five offers, with the same cash, equity and even project quality being put on the table.

How can companies optimize for this reality? It starts with data. And while everyone talks about how using data wisely can accelerate confident decisions, reduce costs and drive efficiencies, very few of the current generation of recruiters are applying Moneyball methodologies to their hiring and retention strategies.

Box started collecting rich data about the type of people who were successful in their roles. Google has been doing this for years, and it makes a lot of sense. Box supplements hiring processes with quantitative data (salaries, years of experience, years of education, etc.) and qualitative attributes (logic skills, adaptability to change, response to chaos, etc.). This means they know what they are looking for up front and minimize mismatches along the way.

Here are a few tips that modern recruiters should consider incorporating into their strategy:

1. Get personal. Companies can compete when they focus on building close relationships with candidates. If you start with a rich data set, understanding who you are looking for, you identify them quickly and can spend more time on getting to know them. That gives you the ability to personalize the hiring process.

Instead of setting up grueling hours of conference room interviews, Paxata gives candidates personalized experiences by setting up happy hours and dinners with executives and peers. Candidates have shared that this approach stands out among other organizations because they felt welcomed and get a chance to really experience the vibe and culture of the team they want to join.

2. Be quick about it. When you think about the market, traditionally, big companies move slowly. Use speed as an advantage against other employers who struggle to move candidates through a cumbersome hiring process. An efficient interview process can be the difference between snatching up your top choice or losing them to your rival.

Once you've identified a suitable job candidate, make sure the personnel involved are focused on having seamless communications and tracking for every handoff and signoff. With all the hiring tools available -- from LinkedIn to Lever - losing track of candidates at any point in the process is completely unacceptable.

3. Find them and keep them. Take a data-driven approach to managing talent long after you hire someone. Box uses an Australian-based company called Culture Amp to power engagement surveys and find actionable ways to improve the work environment and culture.

For example, because of the survey, Box made it a priority to focus on improving internal mobility because their employees wanted to learn and grow their careers and explore new jobs without leaving Box. This not only helped day-to-day employee engagements, but is a huge benefit to the recruiting organization, which focuses on hiring internally before looking for talent outside.

4. Eliminate interview slop. Understand the importance of every interview and ensure that you have experienced, skilled interviewers who provide accurate, data-driven feedback. The best companies will focus on building strong interviewing skills early on because of how critical it is to making good hiring decisions.

Make sure everyone in the interview lifecycle understands their explicit role, knows how to ask the right questions and knows what they should be looking for in candidates. They should also recognize the importance of being representatives of the brand and culture.

As you start to apply smarts to the process, remember to collect data that is truly predictive of a candidate's success in a new job. For example, project-based interviews that really shed light on a candidate's work quality tend to be highly predictive. Most importantly, test impressions for biases so feedback is not emotionally driven.

5. Understand the composition of your team. Every company should have strong checks and balances in the hiring process to maintain incredible quality of hire, and then continued focus on how the organizations needs and composition shifts over time. Amazon has their renowned bar-raisers program, for example. Strong leaders will often fight against hires and push their teams to take on long-term views of talent versus settling for hires that fix short-term pain.

Make sure to prioritize diversity -- both background and cognitive -- early on in a company's history. Doing so will allow you to build a strong cultural foundation that really encourages innovation due to different perspectives. If companies wait too long to do this, it creates a very difficult problem to fix.

6. Don't blame the data. With all of the goodness you get from taking an analytic approach, make sure you truly understand data before acting on it. Correlation is not causation, so before applying findings, be certain about the causal nature of your discoveries and assumptions.

One of the biggest misconceptions that organizations, especially individual hiring managers fall victim to, is small sample size. Hiring is a very personal, human-driven process, but often times, people are making decisions based on patterns they've seen in very small sizes, which is really a set of random event data.

For example, companies may hire one or two stellar individuals from a particular company early on, and then desperately try to re-create the success by hiring more individuals from that company, when really, it wasn't the previous company that led to their success, but rather other factors.

7. Act, Analyze, Improve...Repeat. Explore the possibility that traditional hiring and interview methods are broken. If you could re-invent the way your company did these, what would the process look like? How can you really collect accurate data about each candidate's abilities, potential and cultural style.

This is a never-ending process of refinement and experimentation but will really help your company's filters continually improve. The other thing is to require your company to always hire better and better people. Each new hire class should raise the average caliber of talent in your organization. Having this focus will prevent companies from falling into the trap of prioritizing speed and volume over quality.

Bottom line: organizations of any size who want to compete for -- then win and retain -- the best talent should look to data-driven methods that help them personalize their approach, move faster and smarter through the recruitment and selection process, and reap great rewards across the entire employment lifecycle.

People at Oracle World on Wednesday watching Larry Ellison's team win the America's Cup in a spectacular finish. 

By Intel Free Press

“America’s Cup racing is more aggressive in its use of technology, particularly in officiating, than any other sport. Baseball uses lots of data, but the umpire still calls balls and strikes,” said Stan Honey, director of technology for the America’s Cup Event Authority. “The America’s Cup has chosen to use data to make (officiating) calls in real time — all calls based on measurement are made in the booth using data and subjective judgment calls are made by officials out on the water.”

Honey was on dry land recently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. discussing the technology used in the coverage of the sailing match races contested next month on San Francisco Bay. Joining Honey on stage were two members of the Oracle Team USA Racing America’s Cup crew.

Matt Mason, a grinder on the massive AC 72 multihull racing yacht and Ian Burns, the team’s head of performance. Computer History Museum CEO John Hollar moderated the discussion, which was part of the center’s ongoing “Revolutionaries” series, sponsored by Intel.

Sporting fans many not have heard of Honey, but they’ve seen his work. The engineer who once worked at the Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, where he designed radar systems for the military, is best known for the yellow first down line used during televised football games.

His technology company, Sportvision, also is behind the superimposed strike zone TV viewers see during baseball games and graphic insertions used in live video coverage of hockey, auto racing and the Olympics. For the America’s Cup, Honey and his team have developed AC LiveLine, which overlays geo-positioning lines and other data — with accuracy within 2 centimeters — onto live race video shot from helicopters and on the water.

“The principal objective of inserted graphic systems is to take things that are hard to see and make them easy to see,” said Honey.

“Inserting graphics into live sports broadcast provides the most value when there’s information you can’t see. The first down is important to almost every play in football, but you can’t see it. The same is true with sailing. The graphics allow people to interpret visually basic information like who is winning (not always obvious in sailing races when boats are sailing at different angles towards the finish line). The graphics define the field of play and basic information so viewers can embrace the tactics.”

Burns endorsed the value of having graphics help viewers understand the races. He said, “Even expert racers can’t tell when watching sailing racing on TV which boat is winning because everything is moving on the water, nothing is fixed.”

All that motion creates problems that Honey and his team didn’t face with graphic insertions for football, baseball or hockey.

“All the other sports have cameras mounted on tripods,” said Honey. “With sailing, the camera is on a helicopter that’s moving around the sky. The distance is huge, the location, speed and camera angle all change constantly — it’s really a measuring challenge.”

It takes big processing power to compile all the camera variables, data coming from sensors on the boat and insert graphics into live video in almost real time (the TV broadcast is only a second or two behind the action on the water), but it takes a much smaller footprint than when Honey got started.

At the 1996 NHL All-Star game when the puck-tracking technology Honey and his team developed made it’s debut, the set up required a 50-foot truck filled with Silicon Graphics workstations. Today they use less exotic technology.

“We use quad-core PCs,” said Honey. “We get the most powerful PCs we can conveniently buy and run them up to the top edge of what they can do.”

In addition to his technical accomplishments (he’s an IEEE Fellow, holds more than 20 patents and has won multiple Emmy awards), Honey has long harbored a second, parallel career as a professional sailor. He’s been the navigator on private yachts for the likes of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, which led to his work with the America’s Cup. He was named U.S. Sailing’s 2010 Rolex Yachstman of the Year and was the navigator aboard the crew that held the Jules Verne Trophy for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe (in 48 days).

It’s only in his current project that his engineering and sailing careers have merged and his work may bring a new generation to the sport.

“It’s about telling a story so that sports fans who are not sailing fans can become sailing fans,” said Honey.

When you're building your business, you'll come across global corporations that may step on your toes. Here's a timely example of a recent scenario that happened to myTab.

 With a unique twist to gift cards, my company myTab.co has grown leaps and bounds in the past two years since launch. We created an original way to fundraise & save for travels and utilize crowd funding in a powerful fashion.

With accumulated customer funds, we can also negotiate exclusive deals with travel suppliers. We call this Match myCash and it game changes not only travel, but many lifestyle industries. Gifters know their cash will be used wisely (note $30 billion of $100 billion in gift cards a year are discarded), myTabbers have a happier pre travel experience and suppliers target our cash rich audience at a fraction of traditional marketing and advertising costs at slow and long lead times, stabilizing the industry economy.

We've also been talking with global brands about licensing our technology. This includes our full feature set to gift, save, plan, share, set individual or group reminders, Match myCash and purchase online lifestyle products.

Along the way, we've backed up every single correspondence with these Goliaths, to protect our IP as much as any speed-bump can.

Amazon was interested in myTab and we felt they'd greatly benefit from our technology to create a seamless transition from their staccato, limited UX for gift cards, purchases, and wish lists.

Phone calls and emails took place between myTab and Amazon, quite regularly since January 2013, including their request for a full online demo.

They liked what we were doing so we whipped up a full presentation directly related to one of their chosen products (fridges!) and included our group gifting attributes. Our demo firmly stated why our group gifting technology was unique from others.

 On April 3, 2013, Amazon emailed, "I just do not see the connection/application. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, however." Feeling slightly miffed over this reply to our demo, we challenged their 180 change of direction. The response was, "Group gifting is not a scenario that we believe in investing in at this time."

On June 18, Amazon introduced a social group gifting feature: a replica of our technology and customized presentation. This was a big mistake on its part. By emailing the standard, "We're pursuing a similar objective," it would have halted our brakes.

Naturally, the timing of this response would have caused suspicion but without proof of timing, we'd have a minor case in our favor so would have to walk away, with a bad taste in our mouth. Then again, if the Amazon contact had explained that it wasn't privy to the new group gifting feature when we emailed them June 18 with a "what??" to it's group gift announcement, this would have resulted in embarrassment, especially since it's one of the egift card team leaders.

What does the David do to zap Goliath? We're a small business, Amazon is a giant and we're aware it has extensive legal teams who only handle infringement. It loved our work so much, it copied it!

So we've sent the Amazon legal team email, phone logs, and presentation evidence over the past few months and we will come to a resolution on this.

It may take time but the process will be a typical legal scenario: they initially stated that, "this case has no merit," as a default response. Then when they realize we have a solid case and aren't shaking in our boots, we will finally negotiate based on how much it's costing legal versus meeting towards an agreement.

We're very happy and flattered Amazon used our invention; it now needs to cough up the dough or we'll be using that sling-shot.

Just because a corporation is huge, doesn't mean it has the right to steal other businesses ideas. It pays enough for its own teams to create unique feature sets.

It also creates a negative image of Amazon's business and morals, since it is forgetting that myTab's team are also still Amazon customers at the end of the day. And we all know the repercussions of an unhappy customer, who has no problem telling the world of a bad experience.

One word of advice: you must protect your IP and fight back if you feel a Goliath is blatantly using petty-theft approaches that you created. This includes keeping a log of all your email correspondence, backing up your .rtf Outlook files and saving all data on a cloud platform.

Alongside this are the no-brainers such as patent applications (pending or approved), copyright and trademark protection. At myTab, we even have our original invention ideas from 2005 backed up in multi cloud locations, just in case the Northern Hemisphere explodes. 

If you don't cover your backs to any degree, then more fool you for giving away your invention to a corporation, without compensation or any protection system.  As Level 4 (Green Belt) in Krav Maga for 6 years, I've always been trained to attack the attacker and cover all bases.  Protect your business as it's your best defense mechanism from a punch to the gut.

(MyTab is a client of SVW consulting services.) 

By Gaurav Manglik, CEO CliQr Technologies

For many businesses the promise of cloud computing has been the ultimate paradox. What company can argue with having access to almost infinite, third-party supplied and staffed information technology resources on-demand, topped off with a utility billing model that allows companies to only pay for what they use?

Yet even with these promised efficiencies, moving to the cloud remains intimidating for many organizations.

So what's the barrier to entry?

Despite the many promises, most activity around the cloud still involves large companies deploying merchant cloud infrastructures (such as AWS, Microsoft, HP, Google, etc.), simple web 2.0 apps, or using one of the new PaaS platforms to develop new applications for the cloud.

But what about the estimated ten's of millions of enterprise applications -- most of which were architected to be able to scale and leverage the elasticity of the cloud?

In many cases, the answer is simple -- it has been hard due to costly and complex required migrations, unknown costs and performance, and concerns about security on the cloud.

What's needed to really unleash the cloud for businesses?

Let's look:

- Maturation of Cloud Infrastructure Providers. The majority of these providers have only been generally available for less than two years and businesses are looking for stable platforms, reasonable pricing and staying power.

- Strong Service Level Agreements (SLA's). SLA's have only just begun to become more robust based on market demand with businesses wanting SLA's approaching what they expect in their own operational environment.

- Migration Simplicity. Despite what seems to be hundreds of migration vendors, most incumbents make it hard to get to the cloud.

In addition, the majority of these vendors make cloud portability questionable, and in instances when portability is provided, application visibility, scaling and monitoring is compromised unless hard-wired scripting is developed, again compromising portability.

Businesses want a means to move applications to the cloud without having to re-code them, or create a bunch of scripts and cloud-specific virtual machine (VM) images.

-Managed Risk. No more "Blind Corners." Businesses are now sophisticated enough to know that some clouds can support their apps and some architecturally cannot.

They know that some perform better than others with different types of applications and they know that pricing on the cloud continues to change extremely fast. Businesses want to concretely understand these variables before - NOT AFTER - committing to move an application to the cloud.

Not being able to make informed decisions makes it very difficult to confidently move one or more apps to one or more clouds.

- No Cloud Lock-In. To date, most migration tools and approaches have been cloud-specific. Despite messaging around "multi-cloud," incumbent migration vendors require multi-migration efforts to get from one cloud to another for all but the simplest web apps.

Businesses have identified the fact that they do not want to trade the constraints of their own datacenter resources for the constraints of a single cloud provider, especially given the immaturity of the industry.

Companies today want to not only move to, and between, any public cloud with NO additional migration work, they want to be able to move fluidly between private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

- Enterprise/Cloud Connectivity. Very few applications a business uses in production are, or can be, completely siloed on the cloud. Businesses require a means to actively and securely coordinate with other applications, data sources or services such as analytics, license management, printers, fax, etc., that reside in an on-premise datacenter.

This is the true extended enterprise and is required for enterprise-class cloud computing.

- Security. While most clouds provide a secure infrastructure, businesses require more. They need the final layer of cloud security to be able to protect their data and applications as they move to and between clouds, along with key management and network isolation.

The use-cases and benefits of cloud computing are real and understood. With any new topological approach to computing, innovation and new vendors are rapidly emerging with completely new approaches to transparently placing application workloads on the cloud.

For the first time this can be done by enabling newly developed and legacy applications to be moved to the cloud optimally and securely by de-coupling the need to have any knowledge of disparate cloud infrastructure architectures.

This approach uniquely enables applications to fluidly move to, and between, any private, public and hybrid clouds without requiring any costly, complex migration.

This liberation of an application from the inherent constraints of any specific cloud supports choice, portability, benchmarking of price and performance across cloud environments, and ultimately enables free market pressures between cloud providers that will inevitably enhance their offerings, SLA's, security and ensure competitive pricing.

As these forces come into place, businesses will be able to unleash the real potential of the cloud.

Daniel Ha  (above) is the CEO and cofounder of Disqus.

By Daniel Ha

To some, the idea of improving internet comments may provoke flashbacks to the war on drugs or overcoming gridlock in Washington. Some problems are too pervasive to fix, so why even bother?

But comments matter for the simple reason that we read them and they shape our perceptions of daily life. And we’re commenting more than ever.

As one of the leading models for large scale discussion, The Huffington Post set a record last year with over 70 million comments.

Our own data at Disqus shows that nearly half of all article page visits include a trip to the comments.And a growing body of research demonstrates that reader comments shape news perception. 

Trolls help...

Love or loathe them, comments are an increasingly important part of the way world communicates. Let’s first debunk some myths about the problems afflicting comments: Online discussions are full of trolls with nothing of value to contribute.

The truth is that some of the most interesting discussions come from places of controversy and tension. The discussions that fail to scale and do not generate dialogue are ones where there is no tension and nothing at stake.

Trolls sometimes serve as the catalysts that unintentionally spark substantive debate. They may not like to hear it, but sometimes trolls serve a purpose.

Myth of identity...

Another myth is that anonymous contributors are all shadowy figures with hidden agendas.

Internet discussion is self-expression and a choice of identity is a significant part of that. Pseudonymity is a component of freedom of speech and part of the power that comes with that right.

We researched this issue last year and found that commenters using pseudonyms posted positive comments about 60% of the time.

Whistleblowers and activists both have clear and present needs to share their views and what they know while also protecting their identities. The decision between commenter identity and quality of discussion is a false set of choices.

Authenticity is more important than identity. Which leads us to the fallacy that technology is a cure all.

Good communities come from understood rules that the community respects. Ultimately, publishers need to set the ground rules and treat their comments section like they would a social event. If it’s a black-tie event, you had better give guests a heads up.

The best discussion technologies enable community managers and publishers to easily implement their desired experience while reducing the friction to participation. Here’s one example of a great publisher sign-in notice.

Be less defensive... 

Disqus fosters discussion and community on nearly two million websites around the world so we’ve learned a thing or two about what makes communities better. Addressing things whack-a-mole-style doesn’t work.

Comments are sometimes thought of as the after-party once a post goes live. If you’re always playing defense and your strategy is to only to erase the bad actors and offensive comments, you’ll have a boring party.

So instead, play offense.

And by that I mean focus your time and technology on a strategy to surface more of the good comments and discussion. Technology and design can play a significant role here.

For example, the first comments a reader sees are a de facto front page of the comments section. Like the first thing you see when picking up a newspaper or the homepage of a site, it sets the tone for the rest of the experience.

With some math and design, Disqus built a Quality Quotient to address this challenge. It’s a scoring system designed to float the best comments to the top, turn down the not so great comments, and flag users who repeatedly post lower quality comments.

We do this with a set of algorithms that analyze user reputation, other users’ reaction to comments, and the text content itself. But it’s not a pure popularity contest either.

Less popular voices don’t get silenced but offensive ones do get flagged for the publisher to moderate. Think of it as a smarter community scoring system.

Since moving to this new system last summer, we’ve seen abuse reporting decrease by almost 80% and moderator actions decrease by about 25% per week.

This means more of the good stuff is driving more discussion while the bad stuff is not able to ruin it for everyone. As a result, we’re seeing Disqus users spend more time than ever in discussion with an average visit lasting over 6 and a half minutes.

Online comments are the modern day letter-to-the-editor. More people have more things to say than ever. Everyone with an interest in building an audience should welcome this.

But the path to better online discussions starts with strategies that support and surface the best of what people have to say. Serenity now. 

Daniel Ha's background is in product design and web development. He studied computer science engineering at UC Davis before deciding to drop out of school to pursue the startup world. Disqus is the web's most ubiquitous discussion network, reaching nearly one billion unique visitors every month.

Guest post by Amy Seidman - Noble Profit

Jennifer Scholze, Senior Director, Sustainability Solutions Product Safety and Stewardship, explains how SAP is working with women in Ghana as part of the Ghana Shea Value Chain Initiative.

SAP is using its supply chain technology to minimize the number of middle men necessary to get supply to purchasers. The goal of the initiative is to increase the income for women that are harvesting shea nuts.

Scholze discusses how SAP demonstrates their commitment to supporting communities and improving lives in disadvantaged areas of the world. 

Follow Noble Profit on Twitter.com/NobleProfit

Register at Noble Profit to gain valuable insights in related topics.

Interview with Adam Pisoni (above), co-founder of Yammer.

By Intel Free Press

At a time when many doubted social networking could benefit a business' bottom line, Yammer hit the scene with a service that many called "Twitter for the Enterprise."

More than 5 million corporate employees, 85 percent of which are at Fortune 500 companies, reportedly use Yammer.That success drove Microsoft to pay $1.2 billion last year to acquire the private, social network, with ambitions to roll Yammer features into Microsoft's SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 applications.

Yammer co-founder and CTO Adam Pisoni sat down to talk about why empowering employees is central to his product and essential for any business that wants to thrive in today's fast-paced world.

Why have many Fortune 500 companies embraced collaboration tools such as Yammer?

When we started Yammer, we weren't sure which kind of companies would gravitate to it. We assumed that smaller companies and companies that were more tech savvy would, but a lot of companies that have been around for a long time realized that it's difficult to adapt to this level of change.

For companies, being adaptable is becoming the single most important thing they can do. The nature of change has come to the point where you have to be able to adapt quickly, period. Technology has become so easy to get and barriers are so low in most areas that your best bet is to focus on velocity and change.

We're constantly in a process of re-designing ourselves and answering the hard questions as we scale our company. We started in a market that had almost no competition.

Quickly we had very small competitors and now find ourselves in a place where there are large companies claiming to do some aspects of what we do. We adapt as we go, moving in little increments.

It's less about, let's come up with a 10-year strategy and hope that the world is what we think it'll be at that time, and more about how do we take small steps and measure as we go to see whether that's the right direction.

How are such mobile technologies as laptops, smartphones and tablets impacting your business clients?

They're changing the way we think about interacting, consuming and producing the work that we do. [Mobile technologies] really blur the line between our home lives and our work lives, and how we organize our lives in total.

Back when the mobile revolution started in 2008, enterprises completely missed it. In 2011 and 2012, enterprises started understanding how much value they can get from embracing mobile.

My guess is that in 2008, there were people within those companies that saw it coming, and understood how their company could better leverage out of those tools, but they just didn't have access to each other or the right people that would help make that a reality.

How are companies benefiting when their employees are more collaborative?

One industry that's getting more power from this is the consultancy industries, including companies like Deloitte. Deloitte has 200,000 employees, and it's very much the franchise model, where there are all these different organizations that are doing similar things and need to learn the same things.

They need to understand the same trends, but really had no fast and effective way of communicating across the company. By bringing them all together to talk in a more transparent way, they're making their whole company more efficient, transparent, and able to spot trends faster, which is why customers come to them to understand where the future's going.

One of our customers is Super Value, a very large supermarket chain. Historically, a supermarket wants to optimize what goes on its shelves in order to stay competitive.

We used to gather activity data from stores and bring it up to the top of the companies, but that feedback loop is just too slow, and frankly doesn't really leverage the creativity of all the employees and customers. They created a Yammer and asked all the managers to share what's working and what's not.

That feedback loop, along with the data to verify what was going on, allowed them to become so much more adaptable. Once their employees had access to each other's ideas and information, they could move faster.

Do people prefer to compete or collaborate?

There's so much value in having other people see what I'm thinking and doing, and leveraging that to innovate on their own. That's how we as a species have come this far, by sharing and innovating upon what each other is saying.

Who knows what's valuable and what's not? Let someone else be the judge of that.

The next big trends in enterprise communications is trust and transparency in terms of an increased expectation that people and companies are who they say they are. Because there's an increase in access to information, transparency created by social media, for example, is making it more important that your words reflect the actions you take.

The reason why there's this push toward more transparency is because of innovation, that desire that drives us forward. Often we innovate on what somebody else has started because there are very few unique or brand new ideas.

It's pretty much all just building on what other people have done. That's just a part of who we are; I've started something, now can someone else take it further?

How did social networking break into the enterprise?

People have this basic need to find other people who are like them, to feel there's value in what they're saying and doing. The revolution of social media is that it was the first communication tool that supported an infinite number of people talking at the same time.

The telephone and telegraph was great for one-to-one communication. Email revolutionized that by adding one-to-many. Social networking is really the first many-to-many.

Yammer exists because companies weren't offering these [many-to-many] communication tools to their employees, and employees really wanted efficient communication that lets them connect to each other, wherever they are, whenever they need to.

The same way people are choosing a phone or device, they want to use tools at work that work really well, quickly, and that don't require a lot of training.

It was through mobile that enterprises started to realize that the tools that were expected of them had to be as good as what they had in consumers' lives. Employees started to demand that the tools used for work were as good as the ones they have in their home lives.

Are collaboration tools a fad or fabric of doing business?

For a long time, companies very efficiently ran in a command-and-control, top-down way. Companies could organize, create long-term plans, predict outcomes and hit targets. The pace of change is now too fast for this approach.

To keep up with changes in technology or customers' needs, companies are pushing more decision making down to their employees.

Employees need to have better information and better connections with coworkers and the company vision.

That's where tools like Yammer come in to enable better collaboration. Add to that mobility, employees can communicate, find the right person and get information they need quickly wherever they are to help them make informed decisions.

There's such a short window in which really disruptive technology can come and be successful. Yammer is at the confluence of a number of large technological revolutions in the enterprise, including cloud, consumerization, mobile, big data, social, and we seem to be hitting it right at the right point.

It's almost like you know you're at the right time when everybody swears it's too early, but you gain traction anyway.

That said, how we transition in the future, I also think a lot about, because in any kind of disruptive technology, at some point, it has to become mainstream.

It's a massive gender gap that is found within the digital gap -- an economic barrier. But it's also a cultural obstacle. This infographic sent by  Muhammad Saleem from Brain Track illustrates the issues.

Intel Free Press interviewed Trina DasGupta the Director of the GSMA mWomen organization, whose mission is to help more than 300 million women acquire their own mobile phones.

Maryruth Belsey Priebe from Noble Profit, profiles two projects by social entrepreneurs that have helped alleviate women's burdens in the collection and transportation of clean water.

Also: Social By Design announces a new type of marketing lab based on work at Stanford University.

If you have an interesting guest post to contribute please send it to editors@siliconvalleywatcher.com with "guest post" somewhere in the subject line. A wide range of topics is fine. It's OK if it has been published elsewhere. Guest posts might be edited lightly for readability.

DejaView from earlier: 

- Richard Edelman, the head of the world's largest privately held PR firm speaks at the Churchill Club on the contagious lack of trust that is infecting business, government, and entire industry sectors. - Video extracts from Richard Edelman panel at Churchill Club.

- The massive amount of content that's being produced will grow ever larger as web sites pursue falling advertising rates, making it more difficult for all types of content to cut through the noise.

- Silicon Valley has become a Media Valley, a giant virtual Gutenberg machine that's evolved from moveable type to programmable type.

- The martyrdom of Aaron Swartz: Where were the activists when he needed them the most? His suicide is being used to promote open data agendas, and a reform of the judicial system yet he chose not to link his death with anything at all.

- The Crunchies Awards in photos: Geeks dress up and head to San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall for a mutual adoration festival.

Trina DasGupta (above) directs the GSMA mWomen organization, which operates under a cloud of disheartening data. Its research shows that there are more than 300 million women missing from the global mobile communications revolution. 

She recently discussed how her program serves as a mobile-minded advocate for disadvantaged women and as a catalyst in the creation of life-enhancing mobile services such as healthcare, finance, education and entrepreneurship.

What's the potential benefit of mobile technology to women in particular?

Mobile phones are fundamentally changing people's lives, particularly for women. [With] a lot of the markets that we work in there is no other infrastructure. For a lot of people in the emerging markets the mobile phone is the first form of communication that they ever had.

Having a mobile phone means being in touch with your family in the cities. It means being able to get money to your families faster. It means being able to just call a doctor.

We work with partners in Afghanistan where one out of two women die during childbirth, and just being able to call the doctor as opposed to having to go walk and find the doctor is the difference between life and death.

Through our research we know that 9 out of 10 women feel safer because they have a mobile phone. Forty-one percent of women report having greater access to income-generating opportunities.

We fundamentally believe that the mobile phone is a platform that can create massive amounts of life enhancements and there are a lot of different ways we can do that.

What's difference between men and women in terms of owning mobile devices?

What's important to realize is that in low-to middle-income countries there's a mobile phone gender gap. Women are 21 percent less likely to own a mobile phone in these countries and that represents a gap of at least 300 million women.

It may actually be much larger than that, but it's also a $13 billion missed market opportunity. Basically, two-thirds of all the new subscribers over the next 5 years are going to be women.

There are barriers that women face in terms of mobile phone ownership. The first is cost. We have to look at affordability.

We released research that shows women are either the second or third person in the household who will get a mobile phone. The first is usually the husband. A lot of times it's the first-born son who's the next one and then it might be the woman if we're talking about mothers.

The second is technical literacy. Women in emerging markets aren't necessarily comfortable with technology. They have lower education levels.

Our latest research on women who are living on less than $2 a day [indicates that] 83 percent of them didn't have secondary education. Just being able to work with the technology is something that they're fearful of and something we need to look at in terms of doing more intuitive design, more user-centric design -- just making it easier to get around based off their needs.

What about cultural barriers?

In a lot of communities the mobile phone represents empowerment, [so] that means changing gender dynamics. It's not always appropriate for a woman to be able to contact those outside of her home.

A lot of women report that a mobile phone makes her husband feel suspicious, that she might somehow be communicating with someone else. So when we're looking at how to reach these women, we have to be culturally sensitive.

We have to think about things like point of sale. At certain places, women cannot walk into a store where it's all male sales representatives. She can only speak with other women. So how do we look at our whole value chain to make sure that women are being able to access technology?

We've learned that there is a gap; if you don't intentionally include women in your business, they will be unintentionally left behind. We really have to look at what the opportunities are.

We have to understand our consumers better in emerging markets and meet their needs. We need to understand what the mobile phone means to them. That's why we really emphasize the need for ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research, so that when we meet that need there will be definitive commercial and social success for the industry.

We also believe a lot of the innovations will come from the emerging markets because they have the greatest need and they're moving very quickly to meet the demand of billions of people.

Guest post by Maryruth Belsey Priebe at Noble Profit.

Two social entrepreneurs have recently introduced simple, yet astoundingly effective systems that can be used by women living in developing countries to collect and carry clean water.

Many women and children living in water-stressed African regions are forced to travel an average of 3.5 miles (5.6 km) daily with up to 15 liters (5.3 gallons) of water on their backs.

That's an incredible physical burden and an extreme drain on productivity. Having better water-carrying solutions can minimize both the physical pain and the time waste these women and children face.

The Wello WaterWheel

Wello is a social venture focused on finding ways to effectively deliver clean water in developing regions. They have chosen to reframe the issue in terms of an opportunity to reinvent the wheel.

Their goal is to develop a system that is both an income-generating tool for families living in poverty, as well as a highly effective way to collect and transport potable water.

Designed by social entrepreneur, Cynthia Koenig, the Wello WaterWheel is essentially a barrel with a handle for pushing or pulling. The barrel can carry up to 25 gallons (94.6 liters) of water - a volume that weighs 200 pounds (90 kg) and is up to five times more than the average woman can carry on her head.

Not only does the WaterWheel make it much less painful to transport clean water, it also frees up more of their time which they can use to be productive in work or school. And because it is ruggedly built, almost anyone can use the WaterWheel over even the toughest terrain.

Wello is just a few weeks away from releasing WaterWheel 2.0 after nine months of research and countless trips to fetch water.

Watch their website for more information! In the future, they hope to add features such as filtration systems and add-on drop irrigation kits. There's even talk of creating a cell phone charger that would use the wheel's rotation to charge a battery!

WaterWear Backpack

Developed as a collaboration between social entrepreneurs and an industrial packaging manufacturer Greif, the WaterWear backpack is a safe, easy way for people to transport their water.

One of the concerns addressed by Greif is that people living in the developing world often inadvertently use secondhand containers that previously held poisonous compounds. Exposure to these substances through water stored in the used containers can cause severe health concerns.

Greif also wanted to create a design that was both collapsible and lightweight so that the carrier would be easy on the body, unlike some other water carrying devices that put too much strain on the upper portion of the back.

Greif's CEO, David Fischer, is a cancer survivor and a former chemical industry professional. He had this to say about the dangers of contaminated products:

"These containers used [to transport water] oftentimes have been used with paint, fuels, pesticides. Being from a packaging company, I know those packages with tight-knit enclosures on top are impossible to get clean."

As part of the Clinton Global Initiative's water action group, Greif wanted to develop an affordable, safe water carrying solution, and they've done just that.

The WaterWear backpacks cost somewhere around $5.50 to $6 to distribute for disaster relief, with 2,000 packs already handed out in four communities in Haiti, and another 1,000 headed to Guatemala. They come in 20 liter (5.3 gallon) or 15 liter (3.9 gallon) models.

- - -

You can learn more about Maryruth's work at http://www.JadeCreative.ca.

Follow Noble Profit on Twitter.com/NobleProfit

Register at Noble Profit to gain valuable insights in related topics.

Fridays is when SVW opens up to additional voices. If you have an interesting guest post to contribute please send to editors@siliconvalleywatcher.com with "guest post" somewhere in the subject line. A wide range of topics is fine. It's OK if it has been published elsewhere. Guest posts might be edited lightly for readability.

Guest post infographic from Muhammad Saleem, at Consumer Media Network and the former Director of Social Media Strategy at Chicago Media Tribune Group:

Original source: BrainTrack.com

Guest Post: The marketing consultancy Social By Design is charting new territory with a novel service that allows clients to experiment with a variety of strategies before launching a large campaign. It's based on methodology developed at Stanford University. Giovanni Rodriguez and Toby Chaudhuri explain:

2013: The Year Social Science Meets Social Engagement

The second half of 2012 - our maiden voyage as a new consulting firm -- was heady, humbling, and at times heart-stopping. We were fortunate enough to work with both the White House and the DNC, and a few of Silicon Valley's coolest startups.

Most important, we met with scores of businesses, NGOs, and government agencies that are all looking to change the way they enter new markets, engage their constituents, and grow.

If 2012 was intense, we expect 2013 to be even bigger, more challenging, and more rewarding for everyone in the SocialxDesign ecosystem.

To help channel all the energy and support we are getting, we've decided to launch a new service to help companies get started on the path to market engagement: the SocialxDesign Innovation Lab.

An intensive social strategy development program, the Lab enables our clients to rapidly develop, test, and vet social tech solutions and messaging platforms using a unique method called "behavior design." Inspired by the work of researchers at Stanford, the SocialxDesign Innovation Lab provides clients with a fast and practical approach to growing their market presence by empowering the people they serve -- customers, citizens, and partners.

We are working with several consultants trained at Stanford, and have begun conversations with a wide range of organizations eager to work with us. First up: Mondelez International (Nasdaq: MDLZ), formerly Kraft Foods Inc.

If you are not familiar with the name Mondelez, we're sure you know their brands, which include Cadbury, Trident, and, yes, Oreos, which made a big splash during the power outage at the recent Super Bowl.

With New York-based innovation firm Prehype, we're also hosting a spring workshop for Mobile Futures, a Mondelez incubator that's focused on identifying, testing, and marketing mobile applications by teaming its power brands with select startups.

In the end, the Lab represents just one way for organizations to get started on social. It enables them to rapidly develop and test -- a step that too many organizations skip, at their peril their ideas with real human beings.

In the world of social, the human element, of course, matters. The Lab is our way of helping clients get to where they need to be, both quickly and with confidence.

- - -

Learn more about the lab here.

Social By Design is funded by Eastwick Communications.

Please see: SocialxDesign Launches - PR Firms Move Into Business Consulting - SVW

Fridays is when SVW opens up to additional voices. If you have an interesting guest post to contribute please send to editors@siliconvalleywatcher.com with "guest post" somewhere in the subject line. A wide range of topics is fine. It's OK if it has been published elsewhere. Guest posts might be edited lightly for readability.

Here is the first of regular weekly Friday posts from Amy Seidman's Noble Profit, which interviews executives at companies that are striving for a better way of building sustainable businesses.

By Amy Seidman

Watch Anne Smart from Silicon Valley Leadership Group speak about Cap and Trade.

A historic milestone was reached November 14, 2012 when Governor Schwarzenegger's California Global Warming Solutions Act came into law, commonly known as Cap and Trade.

The bill passed in 2006, and since formation companies and citizens have been vying for where the billions of dollars raised as revenue from these taxes will be used.

Cap and Trade forces companies to pay taxes based on carbon emissions and allows companies to trade carbon credits -- if they are good at keeping their footprint below the allotted amount.

When billions of dollars are at stake, without a specified use, the lobbyists are out in droves. And this is BIG money with vague spending limits. Anne Smart explains the power grab and why these creative exchanges are so important to companies.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is a business trade association and 501.c6 member driven organization founded by David Packard of Hewlett Packard in 1978.

They advocate for policies and programs that improve the quality of life for companies and employees in Silicon Valley. Based in San Jose, there are approximately 375 member companies such as Google, Apple, Intel and HP. Almost all of them contribute to the ongoing development of the clean tech marketplace.

As the Director of Energy, Ms. Smart is well versed in the ways of policy and partnerships toggling her time between Sacramento, Washington DC, and Silicon Valley. She leads SVLG's energy group, and her work is helping clean tech companies find access to capital -- or help large tech companies make their campuses more green and sustainable.

Much of her job involves working in Sacramento and Washington DC on regulations and policies to insure there is a business voice in the room and that we are truly advancing clean tech business and technology.

- - -

Learn more about the Silicon Valley Leadership Group http://svlg.org/

Follow us on Twitter.com/NobleProfit

Register at Noble Profit to gain valuable insights in related topics.

My name is Virginia Olive Hoge and I am in the strange and fated position of being one of the first people who noticed that something very alarming was happening on Topix.com. Over three and a half years ago, I noticed how it was being used as a vehicle for slander, to batter people online.

I was dragged onto Topix when my liberal blog was attacked there. I was slandered in a series of attack threads on the Pasadena, CA, Topix forum, the kind I would soon find out were everywhere.

I'm a fighter and I fought back against my attackers and slowly picked up commenting and resistance techniques. I refused to back down to bullying.

I looked around Topix, all over the country and beyond, and found out what happened to me was happening on almost every single forum, in thousands and thousands of towns, with the number of victims probably somewhere in the tens of thousands.

Threads slandering people by their real names, are everywhere on Topix. It is a sad reality, that they have cost jobs, relationships, marriages, even lives.

Topix has replaced newspapers in many of these small towns and people are reading the below-the-belt trashy gossip, even knowing how easy it is to fabricate.

A Google search for "dead beat moms" -- a common thread title you see all over Topix -- reveals just the beginning of the enormous scope of the slander problem. The search results go on and on for pages and pages.

Women are trashed by their real names, their children are named, the works. This Google search will show you: http://bit.ly/XUrDHQ

Here is a very typical Topix real-name slander thread from the Pikeville, KY, Topix forum:

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/pikeville-ky/TNP6R2IE58FB1K3HB

Take a look at the forum and see how many others there are just like it, and remember, this is the forum that Topix CEO Chris Tolles himself linked to in an interview. It is not as bad as some forums, on many others almost every post is a slander thread.

Know that this is just one forum, calculate the number of people being slandered all over the country. The problem is international, check out the Belfast, North Ireland forum:

http://www.topix.com/forum/uk/belfast/T1LOL1A25UTUOO15B

The only way to get something like this removed is to file "Feedback" with Topix and it is notorious for its dysfunctionality. Threads and posts take hours, days, weeks to delete, and the trolls can easily just post another one and start in again.

When some of the many victims try and sue they are blocked by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which fully protects Topix from accountability, from anything posted there.

It has allowed for the tens of thousands of Topix victims to get burned, twice. The first time by the slander, the second by the impossibility of legal recourse.

The pain of Topix victims is very real. I have seen so much of it.

I will never forget a father who was posting on the Topix Palo Alto forum and elsewhere, begging for help. The local trolls on his hometown Topix forum, were posting he was raping his own son, the posts took forever to get removed and were then put back up again by the troll persecuting him.

The agony of that father is repeated every day on Topix.

When I first discovered the scope of the problems on Topix, I was sure that as soon as reporters found out about it about it they would do something to halt the harm that was going on.

But in the surreal time frame of 2005 on -- and I do believe this had a lot to do with it -- newspapers and print media have been in sharp decline, as was investigative journalism.

Speaking out to Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix:

http://open.salon.com/blog/virginia888/2011/10/15/speaking_out_to_chris_tolles_ceo_of_topix

I do not know how they get away with their sex forum: http://www.topix.com/forum/news/sex. Or the sale of illegal drugs on Topix: http://www.topix.com/forum/drug/valium.

This young girl is one of the many not known about Topix suicide victims -- she was 17.

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/morgantown-ky/TDA9T193S8A64BU35

Her life mattered. Every life is important.

Take a look into Topix, far too many innocent lives are being destroyed there.

- - -

Here is a New York Times article from November 2011: 

Small-Town Gossip Moves to the Web, Anonymous and Vicious - NYTimes.com

 A. G Sulzberger reports:

...in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

...

Mr. Tolles acknowledged the biggest problem at the site is “keeping the conversation on the rails.” But he defended it on free-speech grounds. He said the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.

At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site.

...

After a challenge from more than 30 state attorneys general, Topix stopped charging for the expedited removal of offensive comments — which Jack Conway, the attorney general for Kentucky, said “smacked of having to pay a fee to get your good name back.”

If you'd like to participate send your article to editors@siliconvalleywatcher.com with "Guest post" in the subject line somewhere. I don't mind if it's been published somewhere before if it's still relevant. I might lightly edit for clarity and pace but I promise to preserve the spirit and meaning of the original.

This Friday:

Silicon Valley Leadership Group: Anne Smart On The Importance Of Cap And Trade

Take A Look Into Topix - Mass Bullying Across Thousands Of Small US Towns

(Above: Capacitive touchscreens use an electrostatic field to continuously sample the screen surface for movement and relays that information to a processor that can interpret it. )

I've long been curious about how touchscreens work and never got around to finding out. Here's a great explanation.

By Intel Free Press

Today, largely due to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets such as the Apple iPad, sophisticated touchscreens are a common fixture in our digital lives.

To understand how touch technology works, requires a look back to the basics of how touchscreens evolved from primitive interfaces to chic and powerful digital accessories.

Simple Beginnings

It might be surprising to know that touchscreens have been around for decades, although they aren't comparable to today's technology. CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) displays that react to the touch of a human finger or a stylus were developed in the late 1960s, for instance.

These early touchscreens had one significant limitation: they were only responsive to a single point of contact. This was sufficient for, say, taking money out of an ATM when you only needed to use one button touch at a time.

More complex interactions, such as typing, require multi-touch technology, which was only developed within the past 20 years. But to understand the technical details of how multi-touch screens work, let's first examine its single-touch predecessor.

Types of Touchscreen Technology

A touchscreen relies on sensors to pick up the location of a pointing device, whether it's your finger or a stylus. Early touchscreen research soon developed along two paths, with physical devices that used surface pressure to detect location, and using electrical current to translate touch into function.

Physically, touchscreens aren't meant to be used like a mechanical button -- you touch, not press the button. In order to register contact, then, some touchscreens use resistive surfaces.

Resistive technology employs narrowly separated layers of conductive material that react to the location of the contact. In a sense, then, you really are "pushing" a button, insofar as you're completing a circuit.

Because resistive sensors aren't very precise, they're cheap and easy to implement in kiosks and terminals that only require a user to tap large buttons.

Capacitive touchscreens, on the other hand, take the principle behind resistive touchscreens and add precision. Here, the surface itself is electrically charged in the form of a clear conductive coating.

When contact is made, the charge is interrupted and a precise location is registered. Because the only "moving parts" are electrons, capacitive touchscreens last longer and are more durable than their resistive counterparts.

The drawback is that a stylus or other charge-neutral writing instrument isn't going to register, which means capacitive touchscreens rely upon your body's natural electrical charge in order to function.

The actual capacitive touchscreen surface begins with a coating of anti-glare material applied to a transparent protective cover. The cover is treated to guard against scratching and is bonded to the capacitive layer(s).

The layer that does the actual touch sampling can use either self capacitance, which features an array of integrated circuits and electrodes that sense points of contact, or mutual capacitance, which uses two distinct layers to carry and sense current.

Some touchscreen systems, such as the iPhone, use both capacitive methods to detect contact. Only below this layer are the actual LCD display and any backlighting systems.

How It Works

When you use a touchscreen, the effect appears instantaneous. You can give thanks to powerful software for this illusion, for even the simplest interaction with a touchscreen is, under-the-hood, a complicated process.

First, the software must locate where you are on the screen before refining your position. This refinement looks for pressure points (not to be confused with resistive touchscreen technology), eliminates any noise surrounding the input (your finger is blunt, unlike a narrow stylus) and then plots this data to a grid to calculate where it thinks you meant to touch the screen.

More complicated movements are compared against a library of known gestures to understand your input. The device's processor then relays this information to the application level of the software and finally displays the intended result on the display. All this is done in less than a blink of the eye.

Multi-Touch and the Market

In principle, some single-point touchscreen technology is applicable to multi-touch, which allows you to interact with multiple points on the screen simultaneously and can detect complicated motions and gestures. In addition to the capacitive technology, some touchscreen devices utilize infrared, sonar and optical waves to sample surface input.

Silicon Valley VC firm Emergence Capital Partners was an early investor in Salesforce.com and now works exclusively with cloud-based startups primarily focused on business customers. Gordon Ritter writes that they can learn a lot from consumer services companies.

By Gordon Ritter

Consumer internet companies have always been good at harnessing behavioral data from their customers to serve their customers better (and help themselves in the process). Many enterprise cloud companies have the same opportunity but have not focused on the importance of this data.

Maybe it is because there is not the direct correlation between product changes and resulting advertising monetization.

Or that the scale of user interactions seems too small to warrant focusing on it. Whatever the reason, the value of using aggregated customer data to help avoid churn, increase upsell, and ultimately create a more strategic relationship with customers, is at stake.

Here are three steps I encourage all our companies to take as they transform from being "tools" companies to thinking of themselves as "insight" companies:

1. Embed your employee insights into your offering.

Start by getting your key product, marketing and sales teams in a room and ask a simple question:

"What's the most important piece of advice that we tell our customers every day about how to get more value out of our service?"

It could be a common wisdom that your customer success people mention every day when they talk with customers. It could be the little secret that diligent customers find buried in your FAQs.

In my experience every company has these little gems. The key is to embed the insights directly in your service and to use this to build your data strategy.

At Salesforce.com, they saw early on that customers who forecast their sales pipeline were much more likely to stay as customers and add seats. Armed with this knowledge, the product team focused attention on making forecasting easier and encouraged sales reps to predict what a sales opportunity might be worth in the future.

This discovery about the value of forecasting led to a dramatic decrease in churn. I bet your company has 5 or 10 of these same insights but you have not codified them into changes in your offering.

2. Automated benchmark reports bundled with enhanced versions.

Gather aggregate behavioral data from your customers, and create reports that quantify how your customers are doing, compared to other customers. This is commonly called "benchmarking," but for a cloud company, the data is much richer because it is more granular.

Cloud companies can report detailed data about precise usage patterns and the correlation between those patterns and customer success with the product.

At Lithium Technologies, their depth of knowledge on how to build successful customer and marketing communities, led to a "Community Health Index" (CHI). A customer's CHI score is based on detailed usage patterns and is highly predictive about whether a community will succeed or fail.

Once you have automated the creation of these reports, bundle them with more expensive versions of your service as a way to begin to monetize this valuable data.

3. "The Death of McKinsey": C-level recognition that only your company has the data-driven insights.

The reason I call this final stage "The Death of McKinsey" is because you may already have what a strategic consulting firm uses to come up with their CEO-level advice.

Typically, a consulting firm will start their project by interviewing employees and gathering data from a client's IT systems, and then look for patterns to support some strategic change.

You may already have the employee, or end-customer usage patterns, and be able to provide the insights that a consulting firm charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Getting to this final stage will take some time for a young company, but know that some of the largest public cloud venders are starting to think of themselves as "insight-engines" for their customers.

The end goal for your data strategy is to continuously derive so many insights from customer usage patterns, correlated with success metrics, that you can help predict more about their success than your customers can. This will lead to higher productivity for your customers, and far higher ASPs and lower churn for your company.

Whatever industry domain you are in, you have the opportunity to be the best provider of insights for your customers. Take this step to break the "tools" mindset in your company.

- - -

Please see: SVW Interview with Gordon Ritter and Jason Green.

Touch on vertical screens, such as laptops, has been thought to result in so-called "gorilla arm," a term engineers have coined to describe what happens when people use touch interfaces for lengthy periods.

"Touchscreen on the display is ergonomically terrible for longer interactions," Avi Greengart of Current Analysis said to Wired in 2010. In user testing conducted by Intel in Brazil, China, Italy and the United States, however, people embraced touch on laptop displays.

"People told me that touch on the laptop was intuitive, fun, immersive and freed them from the mouse and trackpad, especially when they discovered actions like flicking the screen to scroll up or down and navigate between tasks," said Daria Loi, a user experience manager at Intel.

In testing Loi found that people spent 77 percent of the time touching the laptop screen while running through a variety of tasks such as surfing the Web, watching online video, viewing and editing photos and adjusting the laptop's setting.

"Ninety percent found touch on a laptop screen intuitive," she said.

For tests with consumers, Loi used an off-the-shelf touchscreen laptop running a simulated Windows 8 Metro-style operating system and applications such as PowerPoint. Although the prototype was not fully optimized with a touch operating system, many users said the touch experience transformed the notebook from a work to a play device.

"One person even compared the addition of touch as like having a laptop with an extra gear," she said.

Loi says that the study results debunked another industry concern. "Many thought that hinges holding screens in place wouldn't withstand the forcible pokes and pinches for very long," she said. "But we saw people very gently touching, even caressing the screen."

In her testing, she observed people tilting back the laptop screen and using their thumbs to touch both sides of the screen, similar to how people hold a tablet or smartphone. She also noticed a range of additional informal postures, such as resting one elbow on the table or armrest while touching the screen with the other hand or fluidly switching between right and left hand to navigate via touch.

Loi said that participants strongly expressed that they did not want the keyboard to go away. "Many gave practical or emotional reasons for liking the physical keyboard, such as the way it feels or sounds when pressing down on the different keys. Most participants did not like interacting with the virtual keyboard, even when touch was their favorite input modality."

Daria Loi uses an Intel reference design Ultrabook with multi-touchscreen functionality. Loi conducted user tests and found that people spent 77 percent of the time touching the laptop screen while running through a variety of tasks such as surfing the Web, watching online video, viewing and editing photos and adjusting the laptop's setting.

Strong Desires, High Expectations for Touch

Multi-touch screens are prevalent today on tablet and smartphone devices, and they're even available on desktop computers. But Loi said that with the advent of Windows 8, Microsoft's touch-optimized operating system, she wanted to know if people really did or did not want touch on their laptop.

Loi noted that in her testing people didn't see touch on a vertical surface as a challenge or novelty. "Instead," she said, "they described touch as something that enriched their experience, and something they believed would inevitably come to laptops."

To participants who said they'd like to have touch and the keyboard on one device, Loi asked if they would consider replacing their laptop with a powerful tablet and wireless keyboard. "People said, 'no way, the tablet has its purpose but I still need a laptop. I just want you to add touch,'" Loi said.

Testing occurred before Loi's team revealed the first touchscreen Ultrabook systems this year at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and CeBIT in Germany.

"While Windows 8 will help convince consumers to buy a touch-enabled laptop, it will come down to software and apps that use touch in a real way -- a way that feels natural and simplifies the interaction," said Josh Smith, a reviewer at Notebooks.com.

Hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to responsive touch experiences they're getting on smartphones and tablets. Smith said this has created high expectations for fast and smooth experiences on any touchscreen device. He points to recent Microsoft research aimed at improving average touchscreen reaction time of a 100-millisecond delay down to 1 millisecond over the next decade.

"I think that once this delay issue is overcome, we will see a better user experience and faster adoption," Smith said.

"If I did this study 8 or 10 years ago, I don't think I'd get the same results," Loi said. "In the past few years, people have been exposed to touch through new personal devices and public interactions with ATMs or airport check-in machines. Overall, touchscreens are increasingly becoming smoother and more responsive than ever before. The user interfaces are now optimized for touch."

"Sometimes an idea hits me that I just can't shake," he said. "It starts to dominate my every thought until the only way to get rid of it is to act on it. The Shure 55 microphone is an example. The idea of using it in a computer design ran in the back of my head for nearly a year. One day it all clicked and I just started building what became the Unidyne PC."

He believes that most people like their technology to look like technology. But that's not his audience. "I speak to those who like to express their style in everything they come in contact with," he said.

Stephenson built his first homemade PC when he was a teenager. "It was a Digicomp mechanical 3-bit computer, an educational toy designed to teach about binary numbers," said Stephenson.

Since then he's created 30 unique computers, each a masterpiece blending modern technology and design styles ranging from Art Deco to Mission to Mid-Century Modern. He has never sold any of them, but he did enter his Decomatic living room entertainment PC in the 2007 Intel PC Design Challenge. One of his biggest joys is when his wife uses his creations to decorate their Live Oak, Florida area home.

"My wife says the Mid Century Madness and G-metric Nano are a couple of her 'techno-integration' favorites," said Stephenson.

Unlike computer chips produced by huge teams and fleets of robots in a fab, Stephenson works alone using little more than a Dremel rotary tool and a cordless drill. "I do most of my work from my burgundy leatherLaz-E-Boy recliner," he said. "On a nice day I'll work at a table on my deck."

He designs and builds two to three new pieces a year. Each new project relies on equipment donated by companies such as VIA, which provided mini-ITX motherboards, and Microsoft, which shared a pre-beta version of Windows 8 to run on Stephenson's most recent design. "Projects can take from 100 to 300 hours to finish," he said.

Stephenson bought one of the first mini-ITX form factor motherboards by VIA Technologies in 2003. He liked the idea of having a small, high performing computer. He had trouble finding a case that wasn't expensive or boring. "Then I stumbled across a site that sold wooden desktop cigar humidors, which had perfect dimensions and a stylish exterior," he said.

At the time, Tim Handley, CPU platforms marketing manager at VIA Technologies, was looking for designers who could build PCs in interesting cases that would show how Mini-ITX boards were suitable for small form factor PCs.

"Jeffery approached us with an idea to build a PC in a cigar humidor," said Handley in an interview for this story. "We were so impressed with the workmanship and attention to detail that we invited him to our CES event, where his humidor PC got a lot of media coverage."

The wireless router-equipped Humidor CL Server ended up on CBS-TV and in Popular Science magazine. Handley began donating components and even inviting Stephenson to attend industry events.

"Many of the comments from top management professionals about how good a humidor PC would look on their desk made us consider new product categories and market segments for our Mini-ITX products, which were initially targeted for industrial PCs more than office PCs," said Handley.

Stephenson discovered a 1936 Breakfaster made by Calkins Appliance Co. on eBay. It had no controls, just a power plug. The size, shape and simplistic design inspired him to transform the antique toaster into a machine-age PC powered by an Intel Pentium M processor that he named DECOmputer. (Flickr photo)

For many computer hardware geeks, he is considered the godfather of Mini-ITX modding, according to Sascha Pallenberg, a long-time computer hardware reviewer and founder of Netbooknew.com.

"Jeffrey is a true inspiration for the global modding and design community," said Pallenberg. "He is such a humble guy, but his designs have been the best for the last decade, and it seems that he will never run out of ideas."

Art Deco to Mid-Century Modern

"Art Deco is in my DNA," said Stephenson, who lived in San Francisco in the '60s and New York in the '70s. "It inspires me and I want to be surrounded by it."

Occasionally he experiments with other styles beyond Art Deco. He once transformed a 1936 antique toaster into DECOmputer, a machine age PC. Another time, after seeing a 1964 Danish desk on eBay, he took to building Mid-Century Modern. Design site Core 77 dubbed it "Don Draper's PC," referring to the lead character of the AMC TV series "Mad Men," which prominently features Mid-Century Modern design.

His compact design called Level Eleven uses a solid-state drive, which is compact and quiet as it has no moving parts. "The improved energy efficiency of each new CPU generation helps me to pack more and more computer power into smaller and smaller packages," he said. "This also allows me to concentrate more on a design's style instead of hiding massive air ducts involved in moving quantities of air."

Stephenson says he has learned to call a project complete and walk away from it, although at times he's had to cannibalize equipment from an old design to finish a new project.

"I still have every computer I have ever built," he said. "I have every component ever given to me by equipment sponsors."

Handley, now at GIGABYTE Technology, says that Stephenson has made a significant impact on the computer industry.

"He showed the world that a PC can be a statement about oneself in the same way that a haircut or fashion accessory can be," said Handley. "His designs showed the world that with low-power components you are free to explore more design options than with standard desktop PC parts."

Here is a slideshow of his creations.

As the industry prepares for the release of Windows 8 toward the end of this year, just about every security company is wondering how they will be affected and how the general security landscape may change.

Windows 8 is expected to offer some compelling new security enhancements that have the ability to significantly reduce exposure to digital attacks, and while I believe this is a step in the right direction, fundamental issues still remain with the underlying architecture, leaving the potential for vulnerabilities to be exposed and exploited.

One major shift with Windows 8 is Microsoft's move toward the "App Paradigm" and the ability to provide sandboxing features that isolate one program from the others, as well as requiring permissions to be explicitly defined up front.

This shift gives Microsoft the ability to further restrict what software is allowed to run by limiting what is distributed via the new Windows 8 Marketplace and requiring apps to pass Microsoft's certification criteria prior to being made available for download.

This is a significant move toward appliance architecture, and one that has the potential to bring great reliability and greater security to the market.

The gateway to devices will be the applications they run and in turn, the vulnerabilities that exist within those applications that can potentially be exploited. Anti-malware vendors will need to retool their focus with an emphasis on evaluating the security exposure of certified apps through intense vulnerability analysis.

Additionally, I see a need to offer granular, independent guidance as to the value and integrity of certified apps.

This is a move back to the "Spyware Paradigm" where a major concern will be about what data is collected, how that data is being used, or if there is adult content and/or suggestive language within the app that a parent wouldn't want their child to see. Truly focusing on the applications that are allowed to run within the Windows 8 platform will be a paradigm shift for some vendors.

Another change in the Windows 8 platform is the inclusion of Windows Defender. The industry has had a mixed reaction to this, which purports Windows Defender will become a full-fledged anti-malware solution, including worms, viruses, bots and rootkits.

However, I recall the death knell being sounded for the anti-spyware industry when Microsoft bundled anti-spyware technology into Windows Vista. But rather than kill the market, the anti-spyware category actually expanded after Vista's release as a result of pent-up demand for PCs.

The reality is that a monolithic approach to security represents a security vulnerability in and of itself. If everyone in the world runs the same security software this only serves to create a bright, shining target for malware writers and cybercriminals to attack.

Cybercrime is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and changes at a frightening pace. Gartner predicts the financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10 percent each year through 2016, a direct correlation to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities.

Malware comes in all shapes and sizes and financially motivated attackers will always look for new and innovative attack paths to exploit the constantly changing technology landscape.

Ultimately, all efforts to improve the underlying security of the OS landscape are steps in the right direction, but both businesses and individuals shouldn't rely solely on the promises of Windows 8 when it comes to security.

Windows 8 will no doubt change the complexion of the industry, but there will always be a vibrant market for independent, specialized security vendors that can address the ever-changing and expanding need to stay secure.

Brian David Johnson is Intel's "futurist," which means his job is to look out 10 to 15 years ahead and develop plans that Intel engineers can use to create technology for, well, the future. His job is a complicated mix of sociology and research, looking deeply into how people interact with computers and computation today to anticipate how it will evolve over time.

In a recent interview with Adrenaline, a glossy magazine for software developers published by Intel's Software and Services Group, Johnson talked about his job, his role as a social scientist and the human element of design.

How do you go about projecting 10 to 15 years into the future?

Brian David Johnson: We start with social science. We have, in our lab, ethnographers and anthropologists who go all over the world to study people and give us insights into human behavior -- how humans communicate with each other, how humans live, how people interact with their governments, how they buy things and what their cars are like. Whatever you can think of, they are looking at it.

That gives us a basis -- we have to remember that we are building products for us, for people. From there, I look at the computer science side of things: the people who are doing the innovative hardware and software development that goes on at Intel.

Next we ask, "What is possible with technology?" We look back at those human insights and ask, "OK, how do we make people's lives better?"

Then I like to look at trends, what I call the math of the future. Most people start with population growth and the projections of where we are going. Although those are important to me, they aren't as important as the first two steps -- social science and computer science -- because, again, we have to understand the people we are building for, and then we have to understand the technology that we are building.

In terms of computing, what do you see the future looking like in 20 years?

Johnson: I am an incredible optimist for a number of reasons. Everything I do is based upon social science research. Usually when you talk to people about computers, devices and gadgets, they're generally very optimistic. They think it is cool.

That is one of the things we can't forget -- for most people, the future is going to be pretty awesome. We can't let ourselves forget that we will be surprised, and we can't discount that when we pick up an Ultrabookfor the first time, we'll say, "Wow, that feels really cool." I think when we talk about the future of economies and the future of Intel, we can't forget that in the future that wow is still going to happen -- and that is pretty cool.

What is your history in the tech industry?

Johnson: My first job was at the computer lab at the local university in Virginia. That was back when every printer room had one printer, and that printer was in a soundproof box. And there was an entire room of Wang word-processing machines and a room full of mainframe terminals. I was there when they carted in the first personal computer. The joke was that it was called a personal computer because you could lift it by yourself.

So we have come a long way since then?

Johnson: Oh, yeah! I always laugh about the computers that I learned to program on; today, we carry around more computational power in our pockets.

How has your work as a futurist informed your view of the industry as a whole?

Johnson: Well, it has made me very boring, to be quite honest. I am a very pragmatic futurist. The work I do is for the specifications of processors, so I have to make sure that whatever visions I come up with are really grounded and that we can build them. If I tell Intel that we're all going to have rocket cars and jet packs and come 2020 we don't have rocket cars and jet packs, then this futurist won't have a job.

Everything we do is based in social science first and foremost. We are designing processors, platforms and multiple products, and even the software and the algorithms that go into those products from a human standpoint. The futures we are looking at ... need to be very accomplishable.

What affect do you see smaller screens and portable form factors having on the industry going forward?

Johnson: Computation power has spread and found its way into our living rooms and pockets, and is finding its way into our cars, walls and hospitals. For the longest time people asked, "Will the PC kill the TV?" Now you hear them ask, "Will the smartphone kill the laptop?" or "Will the tablet kill the laptop?"

One device isn't going to rule them all; it is about whatever device people have handy. People really like choice. People will watch "Inception," a big blockbuster movie, on their big-screen TV at home, but if they happen to be stuck in an airport or on a bus, they will watch it on their smartphone. With that type of power on those small screens, computation fits more elegantly into people's lives.

You have a smartphone, a tablet, an Ultrabook, a television -- all these things begin to fit quite nicely together, becoming more about the consumer and the consumer's choice about the kind of screen they would like to interact with.

As these high-powered mobile screens become more and more ubiquitous how do you see them affecting daily life?

Johnson: They allow us to have access. With a lot of the research that I was doing in the more near-term, looking out to 2015, you have all these different screens and the computational power, input and output, battery life, computation and electricity which allow those screens to become windows that give you access to the people and the entertainment you love. That is what drives most people.

All of these mobile form factors and screens really give us a myriad of ways to make that connection in different places, in different areas and in different spaces, and I think that will only continue.

Are the differences between platforms becoming less important to the public at large?

Johnson: It's not just about processor speed or the type of processor. We have multi-core, many-core and single-chip cluster computers. There are different ways of bringing computational power and coming up with solutions to different problems -- whether you want a tablet or a smartphone that lasts all day or you need a high-performance computer that needs to calculate particle physics for the large hadron collider. These are very different types of computation.

Inside Intel, it isn't just about making it smaller, faster and less expensive, although this is important and it's what we will continue to do -- we live in the house of Moore's Law. That is necessary but not sufficient. We have a significant shift where the way that people understand computational power has less to do with the guts and more to do with the experience.

Riding a wave that has seen launches of tablets, Android devices and connected TVs over the past couple of years, the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas looks for another booster shot of relevance despite Apple's continued absence and Microsoft's recently announced swan song.

Momentum carried by recent years of increased key announcements and positive trade show numbers may have taken a hit with Microsoft announcing that the 2012 show will be its last as an exhibitor and keynoter. In a blog post, Frank Shaw, Microsoft's corporate communications vice president, wrote that the company's product news milestones "generally don't align" with the January timing of CES.

"As we look at all of the new ways we tell our consumer stories -- from product momentum disclosures, to exciting events like our Big Windows Phone, to a range of consumer connection points like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft.com and our retail stores -- it feels like the right time to make this transition," Shaw wrote.

Time will tell whether another tech event will benefit from Microsoft pulling out of the show. CES, however, has been on the positive end of another trade show's demise. The collapse of COMDEX in 2004 -- which some industry observers attribute, in part, to IBM abandoning the show in 1997 – laid out the welcome mat for non-traditional companies to make major announcements in Las Vegas each January. A recent example is Ford Motor Co. launching its Ford Focus Electric at the 2011 CES instead of the North American International Auto Show.

COMDEX's fall also opened the door for CES to become the No. 1 trade show in the United States by attendance. CES registration jumped the first 3 years there wasn't a COMDEX, including 2006 when a record 152,203 attended. The economic downturn saw numbers drop until 2010, and in 2011 CES was just 471 registrants shy of again reaching the 150,000 milestone.

By show floor size alone, CES is the world's largest consumer tech show. The 2012 CES trade show will sprawl across 1.8 million square feet, larger than the 1.6 million square feet of space in 2011. That figure, along with 2,700 exhibitors the hosting Consumer Electronics Association said will be at the show, will equal the 2007 event, held 11 months before what economists peg as the start of the most recent global financial crisis.

Long-time CES attendee Danielle Levitas, an IDC analyst, has seen the show's ups and downs first-hand.

"It felt like CES was about to explode in 2006, when attendance hit astonishing numbers," Levitas said. "Then the global crisis hit and understandably, attendance dropped. But it has rebounded and seems to be going strong."

For the worldwide media and analysts covering CES, the number of attendees and square footage pale in importance compared to the show-and-tell over four busy days. The CEA expects more than20,000 new products to be launched at the show, which has one veteran product reviewer upbeat.

"A few years ago there was a sentiment that CES was becoming less relevant because of certain companies dropping out and other reasons, but you don't hear that lately," said Steve Kruschen, better known as "Mr. Gadget" to television and radio audiences.

"What's helped is adding new things," said Kruschen, who is about to attend his 29^th CES. "I've long been an advocate that the CEA expand in housewares, which I call kitchen electronics, and consumer-type medical equipment. They were missing the boat by not including those types of products for so many years. By doing so they've kept CES more relevant than ever."

As for the 20,000 product launches organizers said will be made at CES, Kruschen said exhibitors can actually help the show maintain its significance by taking a less is more approach.

"From tablets with usability issues, interface issues and other issues to products that don't fill a need or have an audience -- we journalists are constantly amused, and not in a good way, when we ask ourselves, 'Why on Earth did they introduce that at CES?'"

Ironically, the same company that Kruschen cited as doing a good job in that department is also absent from the long scroll of 2012 CES exhibitors.

"Apple focuses its stuff at a time and place of its choosing, only introducing a product when it's ready," he said. "Too bad others don't do the same."

Apple, which in the past said that coming up with a dazzling show and mind-blowing new products every January was "unsustainable," may still be the biggest elephant in the room, but it won't be invisible at CES. Apple will be represented by several attendees, according to the CEA, and it will have strong presence at the expanded iLounge pavilion for companies in the business of Apple hardware and accessories.

The CES Effect

Just as CES draws attendees and exhibitors from many walks of commerce, so does the city that has hosted the event since 1978. Las Vegas is expected to be named North America's No. 1 trade show destination for the 18^th straight year when Trade Show News Network's 2011 list is announced.

"CES was one of the first to come here on an annual basis, and it's been great to watch it grow along with Las Vegas as a destination," said Jeremy Handel of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

For the local hospitality scene, CES kicks off the convention season in a big way. MGM Resorts International, whose portfolio includes some of the biggest names on the Strip, said that CES is the highest-grossing trade show for the company annually, even in less than stellar years.

"CES delegates fill our restaurants, shows, retail stores and, of course, our guest rooms, generating nearly 25 percent of our annual room revenue for the month in one week," said Richard Harper, an executive vice president for the company behind
Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, The Mirage, MGM Grand and other major Las Vegas properties.

By the time the last Teamster clocks out, CES 2012 is expected to bring in over $153 million to the Las Vegas area, according to the convention authority, and that doesn't include what attendees will drop in the casinos.

"That's a lot of relevance," Handel said.

He's called SiMan, short for Silicon Man, and on the second day of Intel's big geekfest, he will stand an imposing 18 feet high inside Moscone Center West.

While that height pales in comparison to the 50-foot-tall effigy that burned to the ground earlier this month to the delight of some 50,000 desert-dwelling self-stylists, some wearing nothing but a free spirit, SiMan promises to be a behemoth impressive in his own right.

Besides being regaled by a fully clothed crowd and remaining indoors, SiMan isn't destined for a fiery end. Rather, he will be gloriously illuminated with 1,500 LED bulbs strung together with 180 feet of wiring. And his masters plan to let him live on to serve as a beacon for an embedded future.

"SiMan was created especially for IDF, but my hope is that he will be used for other events," said Steve Reed, director of industry marketing for Intel's Embedded and Communications Group. "We want him to send to as many people as possible the message that embedded technology makes an intelligent connected solutions life possible. SiMan symbolizes that we are already living that life through devices driven by embedded technology."

While a cynical mind could discount SiMan as just a 700-pound marketing stunt, Reed and his team are hoping developers walk away from this towering 360-degree experience feeling that the sizable challenges involved in making an intelligent connected world a reality can be overcome through collaboration.

What Sleeping Beauty's castle is to Disneyland, SiMan promises to be the iconic symbol of this year's IDF Technology Showcase, where on the first floor of the convention center more than 150 companies will demonstrate their newest innovations.

Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, who worked at a frantic pace with the help of a single assistant, Intel's Embedded and Communications Group has a set schedule planned for the dawn of its creation, and is hoping for community involvement during the entire build.

The climax, dubbed "SiMan Glow Time," is scheduled for 6:15 p.m. Wednesday (Sept. 14), but before the embedded giant is lit up like a Christmas tree at New York's Rockefeller Center with IDF revelers waving glow sticks provided by Intel, SiMan will have gone through several stages of construction.

Those who sit through a short video at the in the "Embedded Zone" inside the technology showcase will earn a die-shaped connector piece that they'll place directly on SiMan, be it on his 25-pound head or other body parts that will be attached starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.

In what sounds like a live demonstration of the familiar children's song "Dry Bones," the two-day plan is for the torso to be connected to the head, the right arm to be connected to the torso, and so on. SiMan's first attempt at standing will be aided by motors and beams.

SiMan is the brainchild of a team responsible for driving traffic to the Embedded Zone, where communications infrastructure, machine-to-machine, medical, retail and digital signage will be among the embedded sectors showcased. Several ideas were considered, including a trivia challenge and dancing flash mob, but the concept of a glowing Goliath stuck, and timing was "perfect" with Burning Man having concluded less than 2 weeks prior to IDF.

"We were looking for a 'wow factor,'" said Len Klebba, event marketing team manager for Intel. "We whittled the ideas down to the one we thought was the most fun and had the most legs."

SiMan has two, each weighing 80 pounds, but Klebba was referring to the marketing opportunities, of course. SiMan is a rogue beast, one of a kind, with body parts adorned with processor images used to represent Intel's embedded and communications business. He was conceived to balance art with a high-tech "geek" appeal.

With IDF often referred to as "the world's biggest geekfest," sounds like the perfect birthplace for the big fella.

By Intel Free Press

Looking for the latest back-to-school laptops might have shoppers wondering if the sales associates, themselves, should be going back to school.

That was the appearance, at least, when several retail stores in the Sacramento, Calif. area were visited to see if staff knew a basic piece of information about Intel Core processors.

Always purposely standing in front of a first-generation Intel Core system when approached by a sales associate, we asked this question: "Can you please show me notebooks with second-generation Intel Core so I can buy my kid the latest technology for back-to-school?"

Our findings were mixed, and likely disconcerting for Intel.

For background, second-generation Core processors, previously known by the codename "Sandy Bridge," have been supported with strong marketing since they launched in January, so it was not unreasonable to expect solid knowledge on these products across the board.

Plus, even sales associates with minimal training can spot a second-generation Core system two ways. Perhaps the easiest is by the sticker on the laptop itself; "badges" on second-generation products have a golden holographic stripe that Intel internally calls the "kink." (Stickers on first-generation systems have a peel-back-looking die-resembling treatment on the upper-right corner.)

The other way to identify a 2G Intel Core is by the model number; if the name starts with a "2," as in "i5-2410M," then it's a 2G CPU.

All perfectly clear, right? These were the responses:

"This one here is second generation," said Ernest at the Staples in Roseville. Unfortunately, we were looking at a first-generation core i3 Dell Inspiron. Given a chance to correct himself, he was asked, "Are you sure this is second generation? It has the old sticker." Ernest replied, "It's an older model with a new processor." Say what?

"Oh, you're looking for laptops with Sandy," said Alexa at Fry's Electronics in Roseville. She meant "Sandy Bridge," of course, but even still, it's a codename, not a component. None of Intel's processors have Sandy on the chip, whatever that is.

The hole she dug got deeper the next time she spoke. "All of our Intel laptops are second generation." Alas, we were conversing directly in front of an i5 Toshiba notebook bearing the first-generation sticker, and there were three other 1G laptops on display.

"We've got a couple of older models on the other side, but all of these here are the newer ones," said Nick of the Best Buy in Roseville. When the customer brought to Nick's attention a first-generation i3 HP Pavilion notebook on the supposed 2G-only side, a system that was misleadingly running an on-screen graphic with the new sticker, Nick said, apologetically, "I've got to look into that."

Despite claiming that every Intel notebook on display was second-generation, Raj at the Office Depot in Roseville overlooked a first-generation i5 HP Pavilion on the opposite side of the aisle.

So that's four major retailers that could have sold a customer on a second-generation Core notebook when in actuality the purchase was anything but.

Another store made an even more dramatic error. At the Wal-Mart in Folsom, sales associate Justin correctly stated that the description of the i3 Sony Core on display indicated that this was a 2G model. However, the little sign didn't match the product, a Sony Vaio with Intel's basic-grade Pentium processor.

"Well, that's not right," Justin said, embarrassed.

While discrepancies, misinformation and embarrassing mistakes were found at some stores, others shined.

"All of these are second generation, except that one," said Kris at the Staples in Citrus Heights, pointing out a first-generation HP laptop with the older sticker.

At the Office Max in Folsom, Rudy correctly stated that his store has two 1G models with the others being 2G.

"Those three are second generation and those four are first generation," said Cory at the Staples in Folsom, and he was right. So was Anthony at the Costco in Folsom when he said the only Intel systems customers will find there have second-generation Core processors.

And then there was Matt at the Best Buy in Folsom. Not only did he correctly differentiate between the two iterations of Core on display in the notebook section, but he proactively touted the features of the newer generation, including the benefits of having graphics integrated on the chipset.

"But does it have Sandy?"

Matt looked puzzled by the customer's question. Then after a brief awkward pause, he figured it out.

"Ah, you're asking about Sandy Bridge," Matt said smiling. "That's another name for second-generation Core."

No back-to-school needed for that sales associate. Unless he's the teacher.

By Intel Free Press

Since joining Intel 4 months ago, have you ever asked yourself, "What have I gotten myself into here?"

On day one. I'll tell you the honest truth. Let me first say, I do not regret joining Intel for a second. I've been overwhelmed by the warm reception I've gotten.

I was at the BBC as an executive board member in a media and entertainment company, you get a certain set of privileges when it comes to office spaces.

I had a proper executive suite on the top of the building, lots of windows, a living room set up in my office, projectors, televisions. That's how it's done for those companies for the last 90 years.

When I arrived here on day one and they showed me to my cube on floor five [in the Robert Noyce Building of Intel's Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters], I literally thought, what have I done?

I'll adapt, don't get me wrong. But the delta on day one between the executive suite and my new cube (laughs). I had a bit of detox to go through, I think.

So when I moved [in 2007] from Microsoft to the BBC I had people in front of BBC Television Centre dressed up in these chemical nuclear suits picketing against my appointment.

At Intel, I've only been warmly welcomed by colleagues and folks around the business. And so far, it's been an amazing 4 months.

During your short tenure at Intel, have you seen areas where we can improve?

As someone who's been here for 4 months, I don't claim to have tons of wisdom. I was surprised by the number of steering groups and meetings that happened. Some of these meetings are like professional debating societies, where there are armies of Intel people talking about incredible minutia. I would've thought we would be fleeter of foot.

In these meetings, I am surprised by the number of people doing email. If you don't want to be in a meeting, get out. Don't do mail. Close your laptop.

One of the things that I really learned being in the media industry directly and indirectly for 15, 20 years now, is that what those industries do really well is put the audience at the heart of everything they do. I don't think that's what we do today.

What we talk about is valid stuff like the next process node, or putting more transistors on a die, or can we do more gigahertz or flips or flops or whatever we measure, and we get really excited -- for good reasons. But what's more important is: What does this stuff enable for the consumer?

And I'm not talking about the people who buy our technologies and build end-products. I mean the person who buys the end-product. How is what we build valuable to a 15-year-old who's completely connected?

We need that hardcore technical super-engineering capability that we have in spades here. But we also need the audience insight.

Finally, I'm a big supporter of our investments in software development, and I think that's absolutely critical. We need to attract the best possible engineering talent in order to take a bit more control over our own destiny as a company.

Can you talk more about user experience?

Everyone talks about user experience at Intel these days. I've come to the conclusion that most people don't know what they're talking about.

We have great talent inside Intel, don't get me wrong. Genevieve Bell and the team [Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) group in Intel Labs] clearly get it.

We need to bring top talent that can execute on that user experience and design piece into Intel so that starts to influence our culture, our way of thinking, how we think about products, the audience. So, we just hired a user experience design crew in London.

Why London?

Here in the Silicon Valley, when it comes to those sorts of skills, it's impossible for us to -- well not impossible -- but it's very difficult for us to compete, because you're competing with Facebook, Apple, Google. We don't have that same sort of competitive situation in the UK right now, and traditionally the UK has been a hub for design talent.

Plus, the people that I've been able to attract I know very well, because they worked in my organization. These are the guys that have designed industry award-winning services across television, telephone, tablets, PCs.

I think bringing that expertise into Intel will influence the direction of travel for whatever we do in next-generation silicon, next-generation software, next-generation services, so that we start with that audience in mind, and then we work our way back.

In 2 years, where do you see smart TVs and Intel's play?

My hope is that our play in smart TV is going to be more than just silicon. Silicon is absolutely a critical element to get right, and I would argue that the silicon engineering team has performed miracles.

Just having that platform in your living room means nothing if there's no content, no services, no applications, if there isn't a vibrant ecosystem of third party ISVs and media companies who target that platform as a means of reaching the consumer and building a viable business.

So is DHG only about smart TV?

I think it's important to realize that we have some pretty interesting early momentum. Getting Comcast to work with us is a huge milestone. Getting other service providers to take us seriously, like Free in France, a wonderful success story, and Sony on Google TV. As Intel, we're going beyond the PC. We have early glimpses of what that world could look like in DHG. We have shipping products, we have customers.

My entire career has been dedicated to digital media. And consumers do not care whether it's consumed on a TV, a PC, a phone or a tablet. It doesn't matter.

Consumers today are hungry for taking control over their digital media consumption.

And so to me, DHG is not just about television. DHG can potentially help the rest of Intel with our digital media ambitions.

How would people at the BBC and Microsoft describe your management style?

In some cases, if a project is going completely off the rails, maybe the management style is slightly more autocratic and directive and hands-on and micromanaging. In other cases, you have a great leadership team in place and they're ticking along quite well, it's much more coaching and supporting and helping resolve blocking issues. I don't think there's such a thing as a single style.

Dutch people are very direct, and they call it as they see it, and I think that's very important.

I think everyone always has to work on communication style and over-communicating, because just because you think something doesn't mean that everyone automatically understands what you're saying.

What I've found is that when I get bored of the message, that's when it really starts to ring through with other people.

What made you decide to come to Intel?

[President and CEO] Paul Otellini convinced me that he was absolutely, completely, and utterly dead serious about moving Intel beyond the PC.

The PC was going to remain critically important as were servers, but he was dead-set on making sure that we as an organization were going to be successful in phones, in tablets, in television, and whatever other form or factors comes along. We're going to move from a PC company to be a compute company.


How do you balance work with life?

I'm passionate about what I do. This is not for me about a paycheck. I want to be part of an organization and contribute to an organization and lead an organization that has the ambition to change the world, change the industry.

When you're mission-driven like that, putting in the long hours doesn't matter. You're passionate about it, you love what you do, you enjoy it, that's what gets you out of bed every day. And so, work/life balance is tough, but I'm fortunate that I've got a brilliant wife who's very understanding and forgiving.

I'm passionate about technology, keeping up-to-speed with the latest and greatest of what's happening on the web, what's happening with consumer electronics. I get the latest widgets and gizmos and try them out.

The proposition is simple: Google+ is a social network built on the foundation of what you do and who you know. I'll leave off the qualifier of the word 'online' because, well, d'uh.

The problem with the execution is how heavily it relies on Google Contacts for the who you know bit. This 'product' is so messy and error-prone that I still consider it to be an alpha.

For starters, there's no easy way to handle duplicate contacts within Google Contacts. But Google+'s recommendations for who you could connect with are driven by the information in your Google Contacts.

As a result, Google+ suggests that I should add people who are already in my circles. In fact, not only are they in my circles, they appear multiple times over! So apart from any other considerations I might have, I'm already mistrustful of what I see and reluctant to lose time to a product that doesn't try hard enough to understand me.

Then we get to the actual presentation of content. As I said before, it's cluttered. It's messy. It isn't always clear who's saying what. My friend is going to Burning Man? Cool! Oh, wait, no, it's a post my friend has shared from some other guy who I don't know and don't really have the time or inclination to get to know. And therein lies the rub.

Recently a friend who uses both Facebook and Google+ asked, on Facebook, why so many of his friends have been so slow to dive into Google+. He had to ask on Facebook because the answer on Google+ would have been the lonesome sigh of the solitary tumbleweed rolling across dusty plains.

The torrential response on Facebook -- my own included -- can be summed up thus: Facebook is where all my friends are.

For many people, especially the early adopters, Facebook is the living, breathing representation of thousands of hours of emotional investment. When Google+ presents much the same offering, why on earth would anyone decide to write off that investment, leave their friends behind and start again on another social network?

At best, your friends would follow you and share in the pain of acclimatisation to a new world that though different, is not much better than what they previously knew.

Google+ is hard work. It's confusing and frustrating. It's unsettling and unclear.

Somehow, a product that's meant to connect people leaves this user with a sense that the world is suddenly more fragmented and harder to keep track of.

How do you design for alienation while still giving the impression of sociability?

One experience stands out as a very simple metaphor for how Googlers view the world of users. I was with a group of friends celebrating a friend's birthday.

It's the kind of social occasion where you don't know everyone there but you get to talking and pretty soon the distinct boundaries of your friendship circles start to blur. With any luck you leave knowing more people than you did when you arrived.

In this case, not so much. A group of Googlers came in, talking avidly about something. One of them sat next to me.

I waited for a reasonable break in their conversation, smiled and introduced myself. My neighbour smiled vaguely, gave me her name and quickly ascertained that I was not a fellow Googler.

Then she turned her back on me and resumed the Google conversation. They ordered, ate and carried on with the party without once adapting their discussion to account for the social context.

And that, to me, sums up the Google approach to product design. It's preening, insular and massively self-congratulatory of its own cleverness. Without doubt, there was a lot of cleverness at that table -- but not much in the way of empathy. Googlers design for Googlers, often with breath-taking naiveté.

Now, I know the behaviour of a handful of people observed in a single evening does not a quantifiable survey make. But it's undeniable that a company's products represent the personality of its people.

And if Google continues to hire the best engineers, regardless of whether they know how to talk to other human beings, it will continue to turn out products that don't quite solve everyday problems. You need only take a single look at startups like Rapportive to realise how far off the mark Google's understanding of context really is.

I'll continue keeping half an eye on Google+, but it will take a fair bit more than the current offering to convince me that it is a necessary addition to my life.

By Intel Free Press

Two employees in Intel's Corporate Quality Network have been running a remarkable chip experiment, 2,150 feet beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico.

Norbert Seifert and Matthew Kirsch have been testing how susceptible some of Intel's server devices are to very low-level, low-energy radiation--which can lead to tiny software-correctable errors.

These blips occur at an extraordinarily low rate (the exact figure is confidential) but for mission-critical server parts, Intel wants to keep them as rare as humanly possible.

Their experiment required that they periodically squeeze into a cramped elevator in pitch-black darkness, then descend to the bottom of a salt mine nearly half a vertical mile under the Chihuahuan Desert.

On the earth's surface, it's tough to tease apart the effects of low-level cosmic radiation (mostly neutrons) that streams in from outer space, from another kind of low-level radiation (alpha particles) that regularly emanates out of mundane stuff like your desk, your wristwatch or even a banana.

Or chip 'packaging' materials, i.e the materials that the tiny slices of silicon are placed into so the chips can be attached to a motherboard.

That's why they wanted to check it out in a radiation-free environment. So Intel got access to the US Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a super-deep salt mine where the US Government plans to store uranium waste -- permanently. With half a mile of solid rock overhead, radiation gets neither in nor out.

Down at the bottom of the WIPP, Seifert and Kirsch hooked up a large array of 45nm SRAM devices and began collecting "soft error" data. They monitored the data from Hillsboro, Oregon for a full year.

It turns out that more than 90 percent of all ionizing particles that cause these rare soft errors in logic chips come from the "outside world"--not from the silicon itself or its own packaging.

In the mission-critical server world, this is important data.

Andy Wallace remembers clearly what life was like living in Portland, Oregon before he had the 'Take Me Home' button on his iPhone's PDX Bus app.

Eight years of commuting to work some 250 miles each week had Wallace often sprinting from his public light rail stop in order to catch the right city bus. Relying on quick feet and good timing, he would have to make what he calls "a perfect storm of connections" or else get stuck taking the long way home.

"I have about 1 minute to catch my bus," said Wallace. "I wanted to know if I had to jump off at the train and run to catch the bus, or not."

Wallace knew there had to be a better, smarter way. So he created an app for his iPhone and submitted it to the iTunes Store.

That was back in 2008.

Today PDX Bus is in its 6.0 version. It has become Wallace's gift that keeps giving as he breathes new life into the app, refining it through 15 iterations so far. He even changed it from a closed to open-source app and recently won two awards from CivicApps, a Portland area-based organization that encourages citizens to actively participate in local government.

According to the iTunes store description, PDX Bus "was developed as a volunteer effort to provide a service for TriMet riders, the developer has no affiliation with TriMet, AT&T or Apple."

What it doesn't say is that the developer is an Intel employee who does all this in his spare time. Intel has over 15,000 employees in Oregon, many of whom volunteer and contribute to various other projects in the community. But Wallace's App may be one of the more unique contributions.

"I have a problem with lost weekends fiddling with the app instead of doing yard work," Wallace confessed. "I have to stop myself, really. If I have a new idea, it can take over evenings and weekends until it's done."

This labor of love has become an essential tool for iPhone-carrying commuters who swear by it.

PDX Bus is "a must for any Portlander," wrote Amy Wink in a review posted in the iTunes Store.

Another reviewer, Jennifer Rienella, wrote: "I really don't care about getting my [driver's] license back thanks to this app!"

"In an era of service cuts and changing schedules, Wallace is a digital folk hero," wrote The Oregonian earlier this year.

That's quite a distinction for anyone living in Portland, a city known as much for its savory microbreweries as for its Internet-savvy culture inspired by geek engineers and hip marketers.

Wallace, 40, is an Oxford University graduate who moved from London to Portland about a decade ago after landing a job in Intel's LAN Access Division.

"It helped having my co-workers as beta testers," said Wallace.

At Intel he also learned how to manage the open-source software licensing process, which he says can be complex.

"You practically have to be a paralegal to know how to walk through the minefield of rules," he said.

Wallace built the PDX Bus app in 2weeks during the 2008 Olympics, when he needed something to do during events he didn't like watching.

It was during a period of time when it was becoming popular and easier to build apps for the iPhone.

"I was fiddling around when I noticed that TriMet had developed a mobile Web page with an open Application Programming Interface (API) and thought, 'Perfect, I'll use that to write an iPhone app!'"

TriMet was the first transit agency in the nation to openly share its schedule and arrival data with third-party developers, according to the Oregonian.

Schedules and live tracking data from TriMet are shared publicly online, allowing commuters to know up to the minute when and where to catch the next bus or train.

That TriMet API is funneling through the Internet hordes of live data, which is constantly coming from the 52-mile MAX light rail system with 85 stations, 79 bus lines with over 7,000 bus stops and the 14.7-mile WES Commuter Rail. A Linux-based backend computer system powers the data transmission, according to Wallace.

Today on the TriMet App Center, PDX Bus app is one of 38 free and commercial mobile apps using TriMet'sopen data API.

"When you sign up for TriMet's API, they give you a key that permits only 20,000 users a day," said Wallace. "But last summer they told me that my app kept breaking the daily limit."

TriMet raised the limit for PDX Bus to accommodate 120,000 users each day, an indication of how popular the application has become to people in the Portland Metropolitan Area, which has a population of nearly 2.3 million people.

Portland was recently ranked #5 in the U.S. News and World Report's 10 Best Cities for Public Transportation. The city was praised for providing "riders with a variety of travel options, including buses, light rail, commuter rail, streetcars, and an aerial tram."

Public transportation is a way of life for many people in Portland. It's also a source of civic pride. Last year, public buses and trains travelled 500,000 miles and stopped nearly 1 million times to pick up passengers each week, according to TriMet.

"I use this app multiple times daily to evaluate my commute options," posted PDX Bus app reviewer "Portland Flier" in the iTunes Store.

PDX Bus integrates lots of useful features. The Take Me Home button uses GPS, Google Maps and TriMet's live data to find the best way home from where every a commuter is around Portland. Favorite Trips can be bookmarked and saved, which allows them to be accessible even when an iPhone loses its cell tower signal.

The idea for one of the simplest and possibly most useful features came from Wallace's boss at Intel

The Night Visibility Flashing Light button at the bottom of the app is designed for easy use at night by riders to signal bus drivers to stop and pick them up.

"I had to do that one," he laughed. "But it's actually one of the most famous features."

"Somebody told me that they use the Flashing Light every evening to scare the cats so they don't run out the door when she gets home," chuckled Wallace.

There's also Rider Alert, something that can help out-of-towners know when they've arrive at an unfamiliar stop. It's also helping people get some shut eye.

"I've been waiting for someone to add a GPS proximity alarm to a transit app for a year now," wrote Joshua Linden-Levy in the comment section on iTunes. "This is awesome, now I can nap on the train!"

Wallace says that the Trip Planning feature took the app to a new level of usefulness, allowing people to plan ahead so the travel details were ready at the touch of a button.

Shake the device and arrival times are refreshed.

"When I'm going downtown, I can quickly check to see if I have time for a coffee," said Wallace in a video interview with Good. "You can quickly decide if you can get a coffee or have to run to the bus."

Wallace is surprised that people liked using the PDX Bus app even though TriMet has a website optimized for mobile browsers. He's even more surprised by the amount of suggestions and feedback he gets from friends, co-workers and people who share on Twitter @PDXBus and on the PDX Bus Facebook Fan Page.

"I get a lot of feedback, and it's mostly from people asking if I can create an app for their city," he said. "But usually other cities don't have the backend technology needed to support an app like PDX Bus."

What about an Android version? That's another common question Wallace hears.

"I just don't have the time," he said. "Android requires a very different programming language. I don't have anything against Android. I just don't have the enthusiasm to do it again. The same goes for MeeGo and Intel's own AppUp store. "I just can't muster the enthusiasm now," he said.

With mixed feelings, Wallace says that PDX Bus has been taking a lot of his time.

By Intel Free Press

Ken Privitt is a technical marketing engineer at Intel who happens to have built a small submarine with his father years ago. Now, a lot of Intel employees have interesting hobbies and stories to tell, but Privitt's may be among the more unique. His story involves a nearly 150-year-old shipwreck, the submarine, the Supreme Court, and a fortune in gold. It even has an interesting twist.

The short version goes like this: Fifteen years ago this August, 564 gold $20 double eagle coins were recovered from the wreck of a paddle-wheel steamer named the SS Brother Jonathan using a small submarine. Privitt built that sub - a 15 ½-foot, 5,000-pound steel craft named the Delta - with his dad, Doug, a long-time machinist.

The younger Privitt designed the pressure vessel and electrical, life support and propulsion systems from scratch using a self-built computer with core memory ("Pretty amazing for 1979," Ken said), and those contributions enabled the Delta to go down to 1,320 feet, making the mini-sub ideal for the job.

The before and after give this treasure tale its punch, albeit at the expense of 225 souls who perished in what remains one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history.

On Sunday, July 30, 1865, the Brother Jonathan was headed to Portland from San Francisco carrying 244 passengers and millions of dollars in newly minted gold bars and $20 Double Eagle gold coins. Under Capt. Samuel J. DeWolfe and clear blue skies, the ship made a brief port call to the near-halfway point of Crescent City.

About a half-hour after re-embarking, the paddle steamer ran into a seasonally unusual severe storm. Enduring massive waves, some cresting at 30 feet high, terrified passengers begged the captain to head back to Crescent City, which DeWolfe did. Nearing the harbor, the skies cleared but not the mountainous waves. A strong tailwind made navigating unstable and the ship struck an uncharted rock, the impact sending the nine-story mast through the hull and ensured that the Brother Jonathan would founder.

As screaming passengers were being washed off the decks by the waves, efforts were made to launch the six lifeboats capable of carrying all passengers and crew. Alas, due to the huge waves, only one lifeboat made it safely to shore.

"Because some of the 19 survivors were the crew, we know the details of what happened," said Privitt, 55. Information included what cargo was aboard - goods that lay somewhere on the ocean floor. "A lot of gold was on that. There were shipments that included a U.S. army payroll and an Indian treaty payment, and all the money was in gold coins or bullion. The ship was loaded, some believe overloaded. Back in 1865 there were no shipping rules for packing."

Fast-forward about 125 years and we come to where Privitt enters the story - a part that usually happens only in adventure novels, movies and video games. Aware of the submarine built by Privitt and his father, a representative of Deep Sea Research came knocking at the elder Privitt's machine manufacturing and marine fabrication operation - named MARFAB - in Santa Ana, Calif.

"This guy came in talking about treasure," the son recalled. "He wanted to use our sub to find the SS Brother Jonathan. My dad brushed him off at first, but since the sub was being used for oceanography research in Alaska and was passing Crescent City after dive season anyway, he figured 'What the heck. No skin off my nose.' When the man offered 4 percent of whatever they found, it was a deal."

Ken Privitt poses with the Delta sub he designed with his father. Photo taken in 1982, the year the Delta made its maiden launch.

During the initial salvage mission another contractor's mini-sub, the Snooper, actually found the Brother Jonathan, its gravesite unknown until technology could outsmart Mother Nature's challenges of rocky and dark underwater passageways, treacherous weather and mighty currents, plus human miscalculations of where the ship might have eventually settled.

About a year later, with salvage rights secured, or so one thought, the Privitts' mini-sub would make history roughly 2 miles south of what is now called "Jonathan Rock." On Aug. 30, 1996, the Delta brought to the surface a cigar box-sized container found near the wheelhouse.

"That's where the purser was and my dad figured that's who you'd give valuables too," Privitt said.

When the salvors opened up the box on the team boat, found in mint condition were $2 million in one-ounce $20 double eagle gold coins. The one person who was not there for the big moment was the Delta's co-builder, and for ironic reasons.

"I get seasick," Ken Privitt shared with a laugh. "Before the Brother Jonathan thing, we'd be out on dives for a week and they didn't care I was over the side chumming a bit. I had to work. I was on the boat! Literally, I was seasick 24/7 because I'd get sick in my sleep, too. I would dream that I was working."

As for the sunken treasure, eventually 1,207 gold coins were recovered along with numerous artifacts. Some of the coins were encrusted from a century-plus of sea life, but the reason why many were found in mint condition, and, thus, more valuable, was they were discovered still wrapped in protective oil paper.

As for divvying up the booty, the salvors faced another series of challenges, only this time on land and mostly in the courtroom. Descendants of passengers, shippers and even the salvors themselves all battled for a share of the treasure, but the loudest voice came from the state of California, claiming it not only owned the rights to the wreck and everything located close to its shores.

A long legal battle between the recovery team and the state over ownership of the coins went all the way to the Supreme Court before being unanimously decided in favor of the finders. The appropriately nicknamed "Golden State" threatened to appeal, but in 1999 dropped the matter when it settled for 200 of the $20 double eagles, estimated at $5,000 per coin or $1 million.

The remaining 1,006 coins were sold in a public auction and raised $6.3 million, the low end of what the auctioneers had estimated. After taking their fee, about $4.6 million was left. Deep Sea Research, saddled with all the costs and legal expenses, wound up with a very small return on investment. As for the Privitts, Dad earned $40,000 "and a helluva story," said the son, who received zilch, but a helluva story.

"The money my dad made went into MARFAB, so he really didn't get anything either," he said. "As for me, I enjoy telling the story even though the only active part was in building the submarine. If I hadn't built it none of that would have happened."

The younger Privitt did wind up with three of the auctioned double eagles. The man who helped get them there didn't even merit a discount. Successfully bidding between $2,000 and $2,500 for the three coins, he gave one of them to his mom before she passed away. Dad, 78, now possesses it. The other two gold pieces are earmarked for his two children, ages 22 and 21. Asked why he hasn't given the coins to them yet, he replied with a playful smirk, "They'll get them some day, eventually."

The first in his family to go to college, Privitt earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from UCLA. His destiny of going in that direction was pretty much set at the age of 4, when his father, a curious and adventure-seeking machinist, heard about a man named Ed Armstrong who was building a submarine just down the street in their Torrance neighborhood.

"They immediately hit it off," Privitt said. "I'd say he and my dad built 7 to 11 submarines before they broke off after disagreeing on my dad's new design that put the ballast tanks on the front and back instead of the sides for more stability. My dad's design was correct."

With Dad on his own, the son, who started out as a studious observer, became more hands-on over the years. In fact, during and after college he worked for his dad at MARFAB as a project engineer. His experience designing and building receivers and acoustic beacons helped him land a job at Magnavox, but not before finishing and launching the Delta.

After 5 years of GPS design, working heavily with Intel microprocessors, Privitt left Magnavox for Intel as a field application engineer. That was in 1985 and he's been with the company ever since, earning a prestigious Intel Achievement Award along the way for his contribution to InfiniBand, an architecture and specification for improved data flow between processors and I/O devices.

Though he maintains an office at Intel's Folsom, Calif. campus, not far from where he resided from 1980 to 2006, he now works as a technical marketing engineer out of his home in the San Diego community of Pacific Beach. He lives with Nancy, his wife of 5 years and who he met while studying at UCLA.

Just four years from the sesquicentennial of the Brother Jonathan disaster, there's a murmur among the salvage community about a return to the wreckage that lay a couple of miles off Crescent City. Some say that four-fifths of the treasure remains down there just waiting to be discovered. Should an expedition team be formed with plenty of money and legal rights, don't expect the younger Privitt to be a party to the salvage mission at sea.

"I like working, but I'm just a Joe Average engineer," he said. "Plus, it's the constant bobbing up and down of being at sea. If I had sea legs I would be a submarine operator. It's a very profitable business. I'm at Intel because I get seasick."

Users are invited to collaborate with whomever they want to include and those who are excluded are oblivious to it, that's quite a nifty way to manage the message socially. This form of 'targeted sharing' is in keeping with their core money-spinner, AdWords, too. More on that later.

What we can confirm via Joseph Smarr is that Google+'s backend is built mostly using BigTable and Colossus/GFS and that they use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce which many other Google applications do, too.

Here's where some imaginative integration speculation can spice things up:

Google+ and Docs = collaborative publishing on the fly.
As more groups of people begin to collaborate on cloud-based documents it's going to be important to publish information to certain groups (read Circles) as well.

Eventually, different departments within a business could start publishing information within their Circles and could increase their productivity through this efficient means of data dissemination.

Google+ and Youtube = exponential video sharing.
The chances of a video going viral increase exponentially when you've got influencers sharing with their Circles. With over 20-million potential influencers Google+ is now a very nice home-away-from-home for Youtube. Hangouts also mean increased brand engagement: imagine talking to the Isaiah Mustafah (The Old Spice guy) in real time.

Waiting around on Twitter for your brand to reply to you is going to be so old-school when you've got real time brand immersion.

Google+ and Latitude = Foursquare killer.
It's easy to see how having a location-based application like Latitude could fit into a conglomerated social media environment. You can check in, your friends know where you are and, once Google+ allows in brands and businesses, it's going to be easier than ever for them to do loyalty targeting.

As an aside: If we cast our minds back to November 2010 when rumors of Google acquiring group buying company Groupon were rife we can see the potential in having a group buying application linked to a location based service -- this could be a compelling marketing tool for small and medium businesses.

Google+ and Translate = a true social media Babel fish.
Ever get sick of having foreign friends who are probably posting the most interesting things, but you can't understand Swahili? By integrating Google Translate into Google+, we may no longer have to wonder what our foreign friends are saying or commenting about us -- it's automagically translated.

Google+ and Sites = Facebook Fan page killer.
There's only so much you can do to your Facebook page in order for it to stand out from the rest. Not so, if Google+ integrates Sites. The potential for celebrities, businesses and eccentric geeks to differentiate their pages from each other is going to be huge, coupled with the fact that this allows different forms of transactions to occur, from leading generation to crowd sourcing, your 'site' on Google+ could cover it all.

And, the real kicker:
Google+ and AdWords = a viable, trackable and ROI effective monetization model for social media.
Gone are the days of trying to justify the value of a 'Like' on Facebook or a retweet by an influencer on Twitter, with AdWords contextual targeting advertisers will be able to target Google+ the same way they do with Gmail.

Added to this is the kind of demographic data (age, sex, interests, +1′s) that Facebook has previously only been privy to -- which makes targeting your ads in a social media environment so much more effective. As an addition, if it's reporting you're after: consider that linking AdWords to Analytics is done fairly easily as it is.

In the bigger scheme of things, Google+ is a one-stop shop for all of Google's amazing (yet currently disparate) peripheral applications. Given a bit more time, these speculations could be the death knell for some of the more favored social media entities.

Graeme Lipschitz is a Business Development manager at Clicks2Customers.com. He has previously worked for Google UK and Google South Africa as a lead account strategist, growing accounts in the Travel, Finance and Retail sectors.

Putting Apple MacBooks to work behind the corporate firewall is something many small Silicon Valley startups may have been doing for years, but it may be less likely inside larger, established companies that rely upon heavily protected enterprise networks to manage email, store documents and dispatch software to employees around the world.

That is about to change inside Intel.

In late May, the company quietly unveiled a new program allowing employees to "Bring Your Own Mac" to work, marking a departure from Intel IT's decades-old focus on company-owned laptops based on Windows. It's also creating new learnings for the company's IT department and ushering in a potential new model of self-support.

Intel's estimated 93,000 employees aren't exactly making a mad dash to swap out their existing IT-issued laptops for a MacBook, but Macs are slowing trickling into the work environment. BusinessWeek reported on this trend with "The Mac in the Grey Flannel Suit" cover story a few years ago, but it may finally be coming to fruition as more and more IT shops test the waters.

"Today there are more than 600 Macs in the enterprise and we're getting about 10 new ones added each week," said Jim Ferguson, a client engineer in Intel's IT department who led the effort to formalize a program that started several years ago with a few pilots.

It hasn't been easy.

"When we first started we brought in Powerbook G4 laptops but they didn't support wireless network protocols," Ferguson said. "One of the biggest drawbacks was lack of compatibility between the Apple OS and Windows environment," he said.

As a result, a number of such enterprise applications as SharePoint and iMeeting didn't work properly. There were considerable security, privacy, and legal issues to work through as well.

Some of the Macs inside Intel today are owned and supported by the IT department, but the new program relies more on a self-support model, with employees handling a lot of the basics using their own machines, including technical support.

Intel's IT department, led by Intel CIO Diane Byrant, has been doing a lot of experimenting and testing of the waters with the shift to consumerization, in which employee-owned devices with multiple operating systems are granted access to the company's secure Internet. Bryant says the goal is to enable as many devices as possible in the IT environment to help make employees as productive as they can be.

In 2009, Intel told employees if they had a smartphone device they purchased on their own, they could bring it into the enterprise. In the first 3 months, some 9,000 employees took advantage of the program. The company has also allowed iPads behind the firewall, but very few have abandoned their laptops as a result.
.
The shift to allowing Apple laptops in particular is something Apple fans working inside Intel have been waiting for ever since Intel chips began powering Apple computers in 2006.

Aaron Tersteeg, a software developer in Intel's Software and Services Group, loves the BYOMac program. He joined a smaller-scale Mac pilot program in 2006 on the heels of a handful of Macs being used by Team Apple, the sales team that led the initial engagement a year or so before. Since then, Tersteeg says he's moved on to his third MacBook. He says he prefers the Mac experience with its fluid and consistent interaction between applications, and the elegant interface.

"Media creation and management is top notch," Tersteeg said. "I can open almost any file instantly and I'm never hunting for a tool. The OS comes with almost everything I need."

Getting IT to Think (and Do) Different

Ferguson says the program has really forced Intel's IT department to "think different" about how the company manages its fleet of employee-issued laptops, and is driving IT engineers to expand their programming expertise beyond Microsoft to new operating systems and browsers.

"The BYO Mac program has been a catalyst," Ferguson said. "Three years ago, most of the focus was on Windows or Explorer. Now most teams are working on Firefox and Safari instead of just Explorer."

Kevin Beaver, an information security consultant with Principle Logic has said bringing consumer technologies into the enterprise "is creating a more complex environment that was already extremely complex, and complexity is the enemy of security."

Malcolm Harkins, Intel's chief information security officer responsible for keeping Intel's online information safe, has said in earlier interviews that it's best to manage the risk and complexity up front. This is part of the philosophy inside Intel's IT department that has allowed the experimentation to continue.

"Unless you're moving toward the risk, you won't be able to shape it," Harkins said. "It's better to meet the demand rather than have the demand go around you."


Shifting Support Services

One of the biggest challenges Ferguson's team faced was how to integrate self-support into Intel's support structure.

"Self service flies in the face of everything within IT," he said. "But we think long term it is a lower cost option for IT because if we utilize people, we can build tech savvy employees who can manage their stuff over time."

The self-support model doesn't bother employees like Tersteeg.

"During the first year, things were challenging with limited support for Intel's core business tools," he said.

Even knowing there is IT support available today, Tersteeg says he really doesn't use it. Instead, he turns to the Intel Mac User Group site dubbed iMUG, where Mac fans discuss using Apple systems in the Intel environment.

"The iMUG forum is a great place to ask questions, share experience and BKMs (Best Known Methods)," said Tersteeg. "It is so much better than talking to someone by phone and hearing them read from a script. In the forum, the answers get debated and the best solution rises to the top, and there are tons of Mac fan boys and girls working to be the first to answer any question that arises."

So far, about 85 percent of MacBook users at Intel have technical job descriptions, which may help explain why support calls have been much lower than what Ferguson's team had expected.

"Support call volume was so low that our Technical Assistance Center couldn't maintain their skills. So we stopped using the TAC in 2010," said Ferguson. "We now have one contract worker who handles Mac support calls.

But Ferguson believes this is ultimately more than just allowing employees to use MacBooks and the Apple OS inside Intel.

"This program has laid the groundwork for the compute continuum," he says, referring to a vision where people can get a common, seamless Internet experience securely, no matter what device, operating system or browser they use.

With the rumored imminent launch of the newest MacBook Air with Intel's latest Core processors, Thunderbolt I/O technology and Intel graphics, there may be a lot more BYO Mac users inside Intel soon.

While many top chefs might hold on to their most precious family recipes, Francois Piednoel is touring the Asia giving away what he calls his "recipe" for building an Atom processor-based tablet.

"When companies in Asia heard about the recipe, they wanted it," said Piednoel, a veteran performance analyst at Intel who has traditionally worked on the extreme edge of high-performance PC's.

"But if I give you a recipe of French cooking and you go into your kitchen alone, you are not going to make what my mom used to cook," he says with his native French accent, then chuckles.

"A lot of people building tablets were using the wrong recipe," said Piednoel "They were using things that were designed for today's high-end PCs and they tried to run them on Atom. It's not going to work."

But are tablet makers really interested in hearing from a guy who loves over-clocking and once conceived and developed a screaming dual-socket, dual-CPU desktop machine with multiple graphics options called Skulltrail?

Apparently so. Piednoel steps in as a kind of pied piper, drawing new tablet makers towards his mastery of math and computer code, which he claims can speed up performance of Atom-powered tablets so they respond smoothly at 60-frame-per-second.

Aside from Apple's line of iPads, innovation in tablets has largely disappointed many industry analysts, including IDC researcher Mario Morales, who believes a shakeout in the tablet space is brewing.

"At Computex last year (2010), most companies made a big splash by announcing so many types of different tablets that never saw the light of day," said Morales.

Despite similar criticism rising from this year's Computex, tablet makers continue to bring out new and improved designs to take on Apple's iPad 2 and leading Android tablets like Motorola's Xoom and Samsung's Galaxy Tab.

Making a Recipe with Legacy Ingredients

"I'm going across Japan and Taiwan and sitting with programmers, explaining to them the entire philosophy and they see very quickly that my very simple research is making a big difference," said Piednoel.

"The goal is to get every one of those companies that have OK software today to have very good software by the end of this year. Then you don't get one tablet that's good, but you get many good tablets."

Looking at Piednoel's past, it's like he traded Formula One cars for go-carts. For more than a decade, he has pushed the limits of technology. He and a small team dreamed up then brought to life Skulltrail, a dual CPU socket desktop platform for enthusiasts. It brought together eight processor cores and support for multi-graphics setups, something that continues to inspire innovation among high-end computing aficionados.

While low-power and just enough performance are in vogue in today's tablet market, some might question whether Intel should transform a high-end desktop guy into a tablet cook. Many believe mobile, thin, light, and long battery life - are antithetical to the desktop computing legacy.

The power of legacy...

"If we did something in the legacy before, we had a good reason," said Piednoel. "It always brought us some performance. We have some advantages that we don't talk about very much like the ability of using SSSE3 instructions to get another level of performance. There are a lot of mechanisms, which we can take advantage of, that are built into legacy."

"When going across Asia this is what surprised most of the people. That the x86 architecture legacy is an awesome tool. If you use it right you can do things that nobody else can."

He says it's all about finding the edge, but emphasizes that tablet makers must first know the scientific limits and then get creative about working within and around unmovable constraints.

According Piednoel, his tablet recipe takes into account known memory bottleneck issues, and includes programming tricks that can increase performance from 30 to 60 frames per second.

"Pay attention to smoothness," he says, referring to a key ingredient. "This is the only thing you cannot sacrifice."

First recipe...

Piednoel's recipe first saw the light of day in early June during Computex. Gizmodo said that what Piednoel is doing "is about putting user experience above all else, but doing it in a way that is based on the fundamental math of what performance measures are actually making a difference."

"You start measuring bandwidth and what you can do with the GPU and CPU subsystems," said Piednoel. "Then you figure out the discrepancies between what people experience every day and what's actually possible. When you get a discrepancy, you can analyze it to a point where you say, if I change how it's doing this now, I can get it to go that much faster."

"All of those tricks in my recipe are nothing new," Piednoel said. "It's just about putting them together and making sure people understand them and why they are there. It's about putting the tablet user's needs first, not the operating system."

In his lab, Piednoel demonstrate the responsiveness and media sharing ability of an older Atom-processor based system (Pineview) against a recently released Oaktrail-powered tablet. Both have about the same performance but Oaktrail has up to 10 hours of battery life, more than double the older tablet.

He tests these tablets with a program that his performance lab team built to test high-end PCs. Rather than folders, the program displays an expandable calendar filled with dated photos and videos that can play simultaneously by tapping on the thumbnail.

Finding the edge...

The program was built to show the limits of performance on high-end PC's; by seeing how many videos can be played at once. Today it helps him find the edge of tablet performance, revealing how much a tablet can handle before video playback stutters or the touch-screen experience lags.

Ironically, it is just this kind of legacy PC test however, that is helping Piednoel refine his recipe for tablets today.

"Atom has the processing power of high-end computers from about 8 to 10 years ago, but it can't handle what today's Sandy Bridge Core processors can handle," he said. "Still, if we treat the Atom like a gaming machine of the past, there are lots of ways we can find the edge and then fix things to bring out a smooth user experience."

"Basically what I'm doing here is giving out two years of R&D to anyone who wants to do it, which is OK," he says. "It enables competition by helping other innovate more quickly. I know that my recipe will get into the hands of the other side, but it's OK."

It is the world's second-largest economy and the world's largest labor force. It is China, and Intel is recruiting talented women who live there or want to return -- women who are graduating from Chinese and American universities at nearly the same rate as men and who make up 40 percent of MBA students in top-ranked programs.

Even as Intel actively recruits technical and non-technical women in China, the company is realizing it has to focus on retaining them as well. While women's opportunities in China are growing, they are dealing with cultural expectations that they are responsible for child and elder care according to Intel managers in China. Other issues include gender bias and travel time.

"It's not easy for women to have a role in this [high-tech] industry," said Helen Tian, operations manager of Intel Labs China and co-chairwoman of the Beijing chapter of Women at Intel Network, or WIN.

Still, women represent a rich talent pool that no company can afford to ignore.

Roz Hudnell, Intel's diversity director, recently hosted a conference in Beijing and unveiled a report she co-authored titled, "The Battle for Female Talent in China."

The report included data from 4,350 college-educated men and women in Brazil, Russia, India, China and the United Arab Emirates. Findings showed that women are flooding into universities and graduate schools, representing 65 percent of college graduates in the UAE, 60 percent in Brazil and 47 percent in China.

During her visit to China, Hudnell met with representatives from the United States embassy who are working with companies to develop a formal leadership exchange program to advance female leadership in China. The agreement between the United States and China is being led by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Liu Yandong, the highest ranking woman official in China.

"Businesses should be discussing diversity in the global context and working to hire and retain a workforce comprised of people with different perspectives, backgrounds and cultures," said Hudnell. "It's vitally important as we strive to get closer to end-users and capture new markets."

Lara Tiam, Intel's human resources manager in China, said that while there are millions of working women in China, a shortage of technical women exists. Despite that, Intel China managed to exceed its 2010 goals to hire more technical -- and non-technical women -- mostly for the assembly test facility in Chengdu and the new Fab 68 in Dalian.

"A big recruiting draw for women in China is work flexibility -- the ability to work from home at least once a week, and the culture of flexibility that allows them to attend to family concerns as needed," Tiam said.

Other incentives, she noted, are maternity laws that protect working women from the time they become pregnant until their child is 1 year old, and cultural norms in which grandparents often provide childcare for their working daughters and sons.

However, women who relocate from their hometown to go to Fab 68 in Dalian and Chengdu often lose that support system. In response, Fab 68 has set up childcare support for the working mothers. Both Chengdu and Dalian are currently exploring options to support children's education as well.

"For our Technology Manufacturing Group sites," Tiam explained, "60 to 70 percent of our recruiting is coming from recent college graduates, which the company affectionately refers to in its classic acronym language as "RCG's". We have an active internship program where employees spend from 3 months to a year with Intel before they graduate. We take them inside the factories and they learn the tools and the environment."

"In China, a social stigma is attached to using professional help or placing parents in assisted-living facilities," said Wang-Li Moser, general manager for corporate programs in Intel China. "That responsibility typically is taken care of by daughters, working or not."

Tiam said that given the young workforce in China, Intel China is not currently concerned with a mass exodus of women (and men) leaving to take care of elderly parents. But the company is aware of this issue and working to address it.

Factors like the one-child policy in China -- with many parents pushing their daughters to succeed "just like boys" -- and dreams of a modern lifestyle with a spacious apartment and fancy car are boosting women's enrollment at universities inside and outside China.

CiCi Li, a staffing manager for Intel's China operations, visits a number of Chinese student associations at U.S. universities to persuade women studying abroad to return to China.

Li said most of these women would have preferred to stay in their native China, but there are limited top-rate university spots for the massive number of applicants. Plus, Li added, their parents are still back in China and many students want to be closer to home.

Li also meets with Chinese Intel employees working outside of the country who might want to return to their native land. Most of them left China to study, graduated, and then accepted job offers in other parts of Asia and the States.

Because Intel is hiring more women in China, participation in WIN is increasing, and there are now chapters located in every major China site.

Employee groups such as WIN help women in emerging markets build networks -- one of the four pillars of success to attract and keep talented women, according to the report. The other three include finding talent early at universities; giving working women international exposure and providing plenty of support for families in the host countries; and building ties to clients, customers and communities.

"What I find interesting are the nuances and the cultural implications of what women are going through around the world," Hudnell said. "In China, you now have women entering the workforce who are the products of the one-child policy, and the need for them to develop careers and take care of themselves and their own parents is imminent."

For a self-described redneck, Morris Jarvis sure doesn't fit the mold. For one thing, he's a building information modeling project manager in suburban Phoenix, not a poor Southern farmer as the true definition of "redneck" suggests. Jarvis also has a college degree -- in aerospace engineering, no less. And not one of his leather belts is personalized.

Oh, and the man has a spaceship in his garage. And he wants to send people into space using standard off-the-shelf technology.

The spacecraft is the real deal as far as prototypes go. And once he's fully funded, Jarvis plans to take the craft on suborbital test flights around Earth en route to a final version he hopes will eventually carry paying passengers.

"If I wrote a book it would be called, 'Redneck Rocket Scientist: The Older I Get the Faster I Was,'" Morris said, smiling as what he was standing next to - a quarter-scale NASA space shuttle, basically -- hardly helped sell the country bumpkin image he tries to project.

If Jarvis ever does write that book his friends say he should, it would probably begin with what he describes as a "dysfunctional childhood" that took him to a ranch in New Mexico and the east-central Arizona towns of Eager and Springerville. At times he lived with no radio or TV, other times he earned money splitting wood. But even if he did flirt with a sub-sophisticated lifestyle, his destiny for great things later in life was determined at the age of 4 when he watched the moon landing along with the rest of the TV-accessible world.

"I hunkered down in front of the TV. I was glued to the set," he said. "I struggle with the question of when I got an interest in space because there was never that moment, but I do remember the moon landing."

At the age of 12, Morris built his first liquid rocket engine with alcohol found in the garage and oxygen used for much different purposes by his ailing mother. The result was what they call in model rocketry as a "CATO," an acronym that stands for "Catastrophic Take Off." Or "Catastrophe At Take Off" depending on who you talk to.

"I didn't understand the concept of cooling yet," he recalled. "After a couple of seconds it was glowing and you could tell this wasn't going to be good. I ran for cover and the rocket blew up. It shattered. My mom came running out just in time to see me putting the last of the fire out."

And this man wants to take you into space.

Balloon assisted launch...

"Since then I got an aerospace engineering degree and got better on that sort of thing," Jarvis said with a confident smile. "I understand that cooling is a big deal now."

Had Jarvis not taken a 2-year assignment in Ireland for his day job with Intel, where he's worked for 14 years, the Hermes Spacecraft project might have been at the next stage by now. That's conducting simulated landing tests with the craft attached to a trailer at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. This involves a high-altitude balloon that stretches 400 feet in diameter taking the craft to about 110,000 feet, then gliding back to Earth.

"That's taking the spacecraft to 3 percent atmosphere. You're basically in space," Jarvis said.

Initial test flights would be remote-controlled, but later could be piloted, according to Jarvis, who said the last step is to build a final version of the Hermes with a heat-resistant carbon composite skin and attached to a hybrid rocket powered first stage. After reaching approximately 150,000 feet, the Hermes would then detach and fire either a self-built engine or, if there's funding, an XLR99 rocket engine now sitting inside an old craft in California that was developed for the Air Force's X-15 project.

After expending its fuel, the Hermes would then coast to reach a max altitude of 70 miles above the earth before arching over for its zero "g" return to the atmosphere. Once back inside the Earth's atmosphere, the Hermes would then glide back to Earth for a runway landing.

Intel technology powers most of the data gathering, test and communications systems of the Hermes, named for the mythological Greek messenger of the gods. Showcasing the capabilities of its high-performance, low-power platform products, Intel asked Jarvis to transport the Hermes to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in 2008. The craft's first public display was a show-and-tell for the new Intel EP80579 Integrated Processor SoC [system on chip] product line and the Intel Atom processor Z5xx series.

Bought at Fry's...

"This is all off-the-shelf technology," Jarvis said. "These are the same chips available to the public, as is everything else used in the making of the Hermes. The math is there, the hard physical science is out there. Nothing new - it's all cookbook stuff."

Jarvis makes it sound so easy. But besides know-how, who you know is as important for a project like this. Besides corporate support during various stages from ADI Engineering, Dot Hill, GE Fanuc, MicroSun and National Instruments, in addition to Intel, Jarvis has the backing of several people he affectionately calls "fellow dreamers."

Among them is John Oliver, an Intel computer architect and hardware designer who designed and built the remote cockpit for test use and is currently helping with marketing and fundraising. Steve Reed, another Intel employee who works in the Embedded and Communication Group, was instrumental in program approval and funding.

The most decorated "dreamer" has already lived the dream. Retired NASA astronaut Story Musgrave, the first person to fly on six Space Shuttle missions, attended the developer conference where the Hermes was on display. When asked by a journalist if he'd "fly in that thing," Musgrave responded "sign me up" and even volunteered to pilot the Hermes' first manned test.

Like with so many dreams, it's all a matter of time and money, with an emphasis on the latter.

"When you're working out of your own pocket, like we are, you take baby steps," Jarvis said. "To do the first balloon launch we need $1.5 million." The price tag for the first rocket launch is roughly $5.5 million.

"Honestly, the only thing that separates me from Burt Rutan and Richard Branson is money," Jarvis said, referring to the designer and maverick billionaire who, by this time next year, could be sending well-heeled Virgin Galactic passengers to the same destination as where the Hermes would go.

"Branson is charging $200,000 a ride and collecting $20,000 down payments," Jarvis said. "He already has more than $60 million in down payments. There's a lot of money in this business and we want to be a direct competitor to Virgin Galactic.

"Hopefully at some point we'll get that angel investor who wants to dive right in."

Funding needed...

When that day arrives, by Jarvis' calculations the balloon launch could happen within a year and the first rocket test maybe a half-year later.

The frustrating thing for Jarvis and team is there had been funding over the years, but much of that dried up, along with a documentary on the Discovery Channel, due to the economy and that Ireland gig.

"Stars misaligned," he said. "I went away and everyone knew that if I wasn't pushing things the project would slow down. Then the economy just cratered. Programs like this are the first to get cut. It's no fault of anyone's."

No stranger to economic crashes - "I'd rather deal with those than the other kind," - Jarvis was forced to scrap the forerunner to the Hermes because of the dot-com crash of 2000. "The investor we had lined up lost his ass," he said.

The remnants of that project are in his backyard, along with a few of the 14 total cars and trucks that remind Jarvis why he convinced his wife to not live under the rules of a homeowner association. Some of the four-wheeled machines are eyesores -- rusted, dented, tattered interiors -- but Jarvis, who, yep, is into ground vehicles, too, is quick to point out that all but one runs and what's under the hood for some would excite subscribers of "Car and Driver."

"I bought a shop and my wife got a house in the process," Jarvis laughed as he stood in front of his East Mesa home, which had the selling point of a canal right-of-way on two sides and a retention basin on another. "The only real neighbor I have is a bigger redneck than I am."

As for Susan, his wife of 3 years, "not including a 5-year engagement and being together for 15 years plus," Jarvis said she doesn't share his passion for space and speed. "Amazingly understanding" is how he describes her. No doubt hubby scored points when after returning from Ireland he named the spacecraft the "Sensational Susan."

Morris Jarvis shows off his spaceship.

By Intel Free Press

IFP: First of all, how are you feeling and how does it feel to be back at work and in the middle of everything?

Maloney: It feels great. Physically I'm almost completely recovered. And my speech continues to improve. It's better than when I started in January and it will be better again all through the course of this year.

IFP: You've had a long and successful relationship with the technology community in Taiwan. How does it feel to be coming back and keynoting at Computex during this interesting time when everything is changing and the dynamics of the traditional PC industry are changing?

Maloney: It's an honor. I've done this keynote for years and not doing it last year killed me. The change that you mentioned is a good thing, and our partners in Taiwan are embracing it.

IFP: Are you worried that Intel will be seen as trying to resuscitate the PC at a time when conventional wisdom says that the PC is declining?

Maloney: Well, we don't see it that way. Clearly the PC this year is doing really well, but the PC still has room to grow and we need to kick start that.

IFP: How do you challenge the critics who are saying that some of this is too little, too late -- that the ARM ecosystem is too firmly established now, particularly in tablets and phones?

Maloney: The ARM ecosystem is really well established, but I don't think that anyone is in the position that Intel is in to get all the way from the bottom to the top. In process technology, we are still 2 years or more in front. I think it will be a good 4 or 5 years.

FP: Intel has talked a lot about accelerating the SoC (System-on-a-Chip) roadmap, which according to some pundits can't happen fast enough. Why is it taking so long for the company to accelerate Atom SoCs and is there anything you can do to make it go faster?

Maloney: Well, unfortunately 2 years ago we thought that the market was not moving as fast as it has moved. Now we've announced that we will be doing one new process generation every year for the next 3 or 4 years. That's pretty fast. It's a big acceleration from where we are now.

IFP: Intel CEO and President Paul Otellini mentioned during the recent investors meeting that China is poised to be No. 1 in the PC market next year. What does that mean for Intel?

Maloney: It means everything, right? The U.S. was the first and foremost market for 43 years at Intel. Now it's going to be China, No. 1. That's amazing. Really, I am excited about China. It's the first market for Intel next year. There are so many things we can do in China, and we're going to do them.

Obviously, there is an advantage in collaborating around content, and big companies like Google and Amazon grasp the importance. Look to VMware's recent acquisition of presentation and content sharing company SlideRocket for further proof.

What many companies don't realize, however, is that there are ways we collaborate every day through which large amounts of information are lost or unsecured. The ultimate potential for greatness lies in capturing and sharing our everyday collaboration, like brainstorming sessions, to drive real productivity.

Un-captured data in a company exists in the form of Skype messages, videochats or live discussions in cubicles, meeting rooms and other common areas.

Imagine this scenario: you stop in your VP of Engineering's office to ask a quick question, and this leads to a brief discussion. You reach for a marker and begin to illustrate your points on the whiteboard.

Are either of you recording this information? And if you do, will you only write down bullet points from your conversation, allowing the complete IP that would generate revenue to vanish?

Even worse, do you write "do not erase" in the corner of the board, hoping that the important details you discussed will still be there the next time you need them?

Eliminating the Idea Black Hole

Despite the emergence of more online collaboration tools, the traditional, tangible tools that have been employed for years are still the most accessible and routinely utilized. Look at any boardroom, office, or cubicle and you'll notice that people continue to rely on notepads, easels, and dry erase whiteboards to capture brainstorming sessions and meeting notes.

The reason the traditional forms of collaboration still occur today is two-fold and tell us a lot about how ideas come to fruition.

First of all, ideation is a process in which colleagues bounce thoughts off each other and go through many iterations to develop results and consensus, such that recording data in real time becomes necessary in order to create solid building blocks for the final outcome.

Secondly, the integration of high-tech digital collaboration tools requires more upfront time and money than the affordable traditional tools that are already present in most offices. In short, the addition of high tech devices can be initially disruptive to the collaboration process, and so, as a matter of habit and ease, traditional modes of collaboration often prevail.

The problem with traditional collaboration comes when we try to save the authenticity of the ideas and concepts created during an organic ideation session. Although a notepad, easel, or dry erase board may be great ways to initiate brainstorm sessions, they are terrible ways to save and share important information after it is produced.

Analyst firm Gartner predicts that in the next ten years work processes will become more informal and non-routine, making it even more important for businesses to capture information created on the fly.

The challenge then lies in transforming this raw data into useful enterprise records and eliminating the loss of valuable knowledge, ideas, and IP.

Bringing Together Analog and Digital Worlds

Companies need tools to help preserve important ideas, from brainstorms to detailed diagrams - solutions that can slowly start to replace or enhance the traditional tools.

Managing intellectual property remains at the top of the list of corporate risks today.

Insufficient data management happens repeatedly every day, allowing valuable IP to literally disappear from the workplace. According to the University of Wisconsin Office of Human Resources, some of the common barriers to meeting effectiveness include indecision, a lack of follow-through on tasks, and the tendency to rehash decisions already made.

To avoid these issues, it is critical that information be created, captured, stored, and shared in the most efficient collaboration process possible.

Some technologies have started to tackle this communication chasm and are working to bridge the analog and digital data divide. Innovations in whiteboard technology let users turn any flat surface, like a dry erase whiteboard, into an interactive surface.

These tools capture information directly from a workspace and translate the data into digital files. This technology provides a digital record of any meeting, allowing companies to track how ideas are built, as well as providing data to work from for post-meeting follow-through.

Conferencing tools and telepresence systems are also bringing high-definition video into the boardroom, adding human interaction to the voices on our speakerphones.

Technology can be a great catalyst, transforming traditional brainstorms into more effective collaboration and digital data that can be analyzed and leveraged to enhance overall business performance.