Michelle Espinoza thought a single photo was going to ruin her business. It was an image of one of the pearl cuff bracelets she designs that showed up on Pinterest, a site where users create virtual bulletin boards, grouping images in categories—whether it be chocolate desserts or bohemian jewelry. For 10 days in April, anybody who clicked on the photo ended up watching pornography or unwittingly downloading a virus. “I can’t gauge how many customers I lost,” says Espinoza, a resident of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. “But I did have people messaging me asking, ‘Are you linked to spam?’ I was just distraught.” When Pinterest debuted two years ago, e-mail was the format of choice for spam peddling diets, sexual enhancement, and get-rich scams. Better ... Continue reading →
History holds lessons, even for those designing futuristic robots. Daniela Rus, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found inspiration in Michelangelo’s statue of David. “David came out of the marble, and we thought we could also make things appear out of a block,” she says. That germ of an idea inspired Rus, a 2002 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, to begin work on a project that will eventually allow someone to reach into a bag of sand and pull out any device or structure imaginable. It’s like Harry Potter meets The Matrix, since the “bag of sand” is actually a collection of tiny robots. The robots can sense their neighbors, receive commands, and attach to each other to form objects. The ... Continue reading →
Mobile Spam Texts Hit 4.5 Billion Raising Consumer Ire By Olga Kharif - Mon Apr 30 04:01:00 GMT 2012 Enlarge image Mobile Spam Texts Hit 4.5 Billion Raising Consumer Ire Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images An Indian officegoer checks a text message on his mobile phone in Mumbai. An Indian officegoer checks a text message on his mobile phone in Mumbai. Photographer: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images April 30 (Bloomberg) -- Jane King summarizes the top stories this morning on the Bloomberg Business Report. (Source: Bloomberg) Enlarge image Mobile Spam Texts Hit 4.5 Billion Raising Consumer Ire Spammers can get phone numbers from the Internet, or use software or websites to randomly generate thousands or even millions of numbers in a particular area code. Spammers can get phone numbers ... Continue reading →
As a physicist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, Andrei Golutvin spends his days smashing subatomic particles into one another at the Large Hadron Collider, a 16.8-mile ring of superconducting magnets buried 328 feet under Switzerland and France. The high-energy collisions of his experiment, one of four currently under way at the LHC, hint at the answers to some of nature’s greatest mysteries—and generate about 20 billion data points each year. Searching the enormous archive for collisions that match specific criteria can take hours. Golutvin got weary of waiting. A few months ago he asked for help from Yandex (YNDX), the dominant Web search company in his native Russia, and on April 10 the two organizations unveiled the result of their collaboration. ... Continue reading →
Who’s Fastest? Google Measures Web Speeds Around the World By Olga Kharif | April 19, 2012 10:10 AM EDT | | 0 Comments Photograph by J.-L. Klein & M.-L. Hubert/Photo Researchers Inc.Indonesia had the slowest average loading speed on desktop computers, clocking in at 20.3 seconds. If you feel the need for online speed, log on in the Slovak Republic or South Korea. Earlier this month, Google measured Web page load speeds on desktop computers and mobile devices in 50 countries with the fastest Internet connections. When it came to the fastest average time for loading Web pages on a desktop computer, the Slovak Republic was tops at a speedy 3.3 seconds, Google said. Meanwhile, South Korea was the zippiest in mobile with an average ... Continue reading →
During his five years as NASA’s chief technology officer for IT, Chris Kemp helped make millions of NASA’s images—such as rover tracks on Mars and lunar craters—available online. And he never hired a single employee. Because of congressional budget cuts, “I saw my vision for the future slowly slip farther from my grasp,” Kemp wrote in a blog post announcing his resignation in March 2011. “I am leaving the place I dreamed of working as a kid to find a garage in Palo Alto to do what I love.” Soon after departing, Kemp, 34, located his metaphorical garage and founded Nebula, a cloud computing startup that makes hardware to help data center servers work in unison. His story isn’t unique. NASA launched its last Space ... Continue reading →
Two years ago, Roi Tiger was managing a team of more than 10 software engineers at a startup outside Tel Aviv when a friend took a trip to Barcelona. He returned with a $1,000 wireless roaming bill. Tiger (pronounced Tigger) recalls that he was struck by “how ridiculous it was, that someone goes on vacation and pays twice what the vacation cost for roaming.” In his spare time, Tiger started experimenting with ways to reduce cell phone bills. That side project became Onavo, the startup where Tiger, 27, serves as chief technology officer. The company makes free apps for iOS and Android devices that help consumers monitor and shrink their data usage—a resonant topic as carriers such as AT&T (T) hike fees and throttle download ... Continue reading →
Google Inc. (GOOG) is weighing changes aimed at improving its Google Wallet mobile-payment system following slow adoption and the departure of two key managers, according to people with knowledge of the project. The company is considering sharing revenue with carriers such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. (T) to get them to embrace the technology, which lets users pay for items at checkout by tapping phones on a reader device, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Google aims to spur demand for its Wallet app, which is designed to boost its share of the multibillion-dollar market for mobile advertising by letting it target shoppers with coupons and promotions. The challenge: Few phones have the right technology installed, ... Continue reading →
