Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.

But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is avoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy.

Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger Darya Rose, who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose, is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: Foodist, a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting.

Reading her book a couple of weeks ago, I came across a passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate:

“We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on.

“We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’” Systrom explained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.”

Systrom had gained 25 pounds between Instagram’s launch in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist. ”And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.”

How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BitTorrent is taking a new step today in its efforts to help creators make money (and make money itself) — it’s releasing a new content packaging format called the BitTorrent Bundle in alpha mode.

The company has already been working with different creators to launch promotional bundles. For example, author Tim Ferriss packaged chapters of his book with other supplementary media material as a way to promote sales of his newest work, while musicians like DJ Shadow have used BitTorrent to promote new tracks and albums. However, spokesperson Christian Averill told me that today’s announcement signals the company’s intention to move beyond one-off experiments and actually “productize” these efforts.

Averill also said that today is the first time BitTorrent has actually “gated” one of these bundles. Specifically, it’s partnering with music label Ultra to promote the behind-the-scenes documentary of Kaskade’s 2012 Freaks of Nature tour. Users can access half the content (a remix and a tour trailer) for free, but to get the rest (a digital tour booklet and unreleased footage of Kaskade’s Staples Center show), they need to enter their email address. In his blog post announcing the bundle, BitTorrent’s vice president of marketing Matt Mason described the package as a “functional record store.”

“This is a completely new way to look at monetizing content,” Mason said. “Instead of putting the content in the store, what if you put the store in the content? What if the interaction happened in the unit of content in itself?”

Mason said that the first bundle focuses on collecting email addresses, because for most musicians, email is “the most important way to connect with fans.” At the same time, he said BitTorrent will be experimenting with other ways to structure the bundle, including ones where users actually pay money to. (When he spoke to us last fall, Mason said that the music business has become more relationship-based, meaning that musicians usually have to build a relationship with their fans before they can start asking them to pay.)

The ultimate goal is to release a publishing tool that will allow any artist to create their own bundles, and to structure those bundles however they like — that’s probably coming in the fourth quarter of this year.

“BitTorrent users are clearly fans,” Mason added. “It’s now up to us to build the right sort of publishing tools so that that relationship between artists and fans can just be completely optimized.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There were plenty of promising startups showing off at Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley (one of them even became a Battlefield finalist as an audience choice), but none managed to yank on the ol’ heartstrings quite as much Tapgram. Long story short, Tapgram is a social service that aims to dramatically simplify the process of communicating for people who have trouble doing it otherwise.

Rather than force people to peck out responses, Tapgram lets them respond by tapping large, simple icons that signify moods — the yawning face means you’re feeling a bit sleepy, and and you can probably guess what the big purple frowny face signifies. Nestled below that grid of faces are four severity modifiers so you can temper or emphasize the message you’re trying to send. After all, there’s a considerable difference between feeling a little groovy and extremely groovy (and before you ask, those are indeed real options).

Switching over to the location menu lets those users tap even more big bright icons to share places they’ve gone to, are thinking about going to, or want to go to. From there, those messages get pushed into a stream of activity for friends and loved ones to keep track of, and a quick change in the settings automatically pushes those messages to connected Facebook newsfeed.

But why take such a simplistic approach to communication? Well, for some people, it’s much easier than the alternative. That’s the case for Tapgram creator Ruble’s mother. After having a stroke she has been has dealing with a condition called aphasia that prevents her from processing language as the rest of do, which makes more traditional modes of communication woefully complex. His name could sound familiar if you’ve been keeping tabs on thoughtful accessibility hacks — Ruble was also responsible for a Kinect project that used Microsoft’s gesture-tracking camera to help his mother send emails, a hack that ultimately led to Tapgram’s creation.

It’s simple, sure, but Ruble says it’s been very effective not only for people dealing with aphasia. So far, the service has been available as a public beta for the past four months or so and counts people with autism and those coping with traumatic brain injuries among its hundreds of users. As you’d expect from a beta service it’s all still a little rough around the edges, but it works mostly as intended and Ruble pointed to the possibility of native apps down the road to help make the experience of communicating via Tapgram a little smoother. If nothing else, it’s already helping some people (and the folks that care about them) communicate easier, and that’s worthy of some praise in my book.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Daily deals company LivingSocial continues to face challenges in the market. In the last quarter it posted sales of $135 million, up 23% on a year ago, but it also swung to a net loss of $50 million, from net income of $156 million in Q1 2012. The numbers were revealed in a 10-Q filing from one of its key investors, Amazon, in line with its Q1 earnings reported on Thursday.

The filing also shows that Amazon was the majority investor in the $110 million round earlier this year. Amazon put in $56 million of that sum.

“Additionally, in Q1 2013 we made a $56 million investment in LivingSocial that we have recorded as a cost method investment,” it notes.

LivingSocial’s operating loss, meanwhile, was down to about half the size of last year, at $44 million. The Washington Business Journal cites a source that notes that LivingSocial has reduced its operating cash burn to single-digit millions to continue that trend. The company has been making an effort to cut expenses; in November it laid of 10% of its staff, equivalent to about 400 people.

E-commerce giant Amazon has a 29% equity stake in the company, it noted in the SEC filing. It also writes in the 10-Q that the book value of its equity-method investment was $36 million at the end of March. The losses at LivingSocial had a $17 million negative impact on Amazon.

Overall, Amazon saw revenues of $16 billion, falling just short of analyst expectations of $16.2 billion, with a bleak outlook for the quarter ahead, with its aggressive, thin-margin strategy leading it to an operating loss of up to $340 million. Right now, its stock is trading nearly 7% down.

The market for daily deals sites is less than healthy right now. Rival Groupon in February also reported a worse-than-expected loss and then lost its founder and CEO Andrew Mason in the wake of the news, and now it’s working on a pivot to become more of a multi-purpose local commerce player.

LivingSocial, which has been around since 2007, has raised an eye-watering $918 million in the last six years — and what that much sunk into the company, you can see why existing investors are key to keep it from falling over. CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy noted in February that its most recent $110 million round of fundraising was indeed a “down round”, valuing the company at around $1.5 billion, lower than in its last fundraise. But it was not an emergency debt infusion, he maintained: at least some of the investors took equity in the company as part of the deal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today marks the anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Garcilaso de la Vega and the birthdays of Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Druon, and Josep Pla. This date, as chosen by the UN, celebrates the book and all it has wrought and, perhaps more important, the place of the book as artifact and sextant in our lives.

Happy World Book Day. Please nibble a madeline in honor of those timeless tombstones of information that have, for centuries, been our guiding stars through the darkness of ignorance.

All is not well for the book. As I’ve written before, I think the printed word will soon enter the domain of enthusiasts and, in the case of educational materials, the catastrophically underfunded. I can see a day when bookstores are few and far between and act more like vinyl record shops than fonts of information. To be clear, that’s not the case yet but it will be shortly.

The age of book as newsmaker is also fading. With so much content to wade through daily, the average reader has the time to read a few novels a year or a non-fiction book a quarter. Talking about books at work has been replaced with talking about TMZ and the endless news cycle ensures dinner conversation is less about Michael Pollan and more about Michael Phelps.

As a writer I have to hope that long form survives this upheaval. Unfortunately, the dedicated book delivery system – namely the book – is fast fading and we have yet to find a perfect replacement. I have found that the only way I can read books these days is on a dedicated e-reader. Cracking them open on an iPad, for example, encourages a sort of half-attention as dozens of other news sources vie for attention through notifications or just through a nagging sensation of FOMO. The happiest I’ve been in a long while was a week’s vacation where all I had was an e-ink Kindle, a series of ever stronger tequila sunrises, and a beach chair. I roasted myself in the tropical sun while doing the sort of reading – long, dedicated, focused – I had not done since I was a teenager devouring Stephen King novels after school. This is the magic of reading: it is not air but it is as important as breathing. It is not food but you hunger for it when it is gone.

The UN wants World Book Day to celebrate the pleasure of reading. I would wager they would do better to encourage the pleasure of understanding. Reading we do all day, every day. We consume relentlessly, throwing away the things we read instantly and forgetting them even faster. The men and women the UN celebrates, the authors of old and the authors of late that once were boldface names back when newspapers printed boldface names, give us a view on the world that is unique and allows us to begin to understand the world around us. Books are messages through time. Those messages become more and more occluded and it is our job, as readers and as lovers of the word, to blow away the dust and teach our kids the value of a good book.

There’s a lot of talk about censorship these days – which books are banned, which books are burned – but I worry more about apathy. Without a reading culture, without men and women and children who love the idea of a good book, be it in real ink or e-ink, we do the censors job for them. I disagree that the book, as a physical object, is important. I would defend to the death the importance of the book to world.

Bill Hicks, that poet of our modern age, once said:

“I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I’m not proud of it, I was hungry. And I’m alone, I’m eating and I’m reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: ‘Hey, whatcha readin’ for?’ Isn’t that the weirdest fuckin’ question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, godammit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm . . . I dunno . . . I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don’t end up being a f***n’ waffle waitress.”

While there are some smart waffle waitresses, I’d wager a young woman or man, given books and time and a well-lit room, would enter the world with far more enlightenment than anything even Hicks could imagine. We need books. Please, if you have the time and the means, give a book to someone today. Happy World Book Day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TorrentFreak is reporting that links to Cory Doctorow’s book, Homeland, are being shut down after a DMCA request by Fox. Why is Cory’s Creative Commons licensed book that is available for free being attacked? It kind of sounds like it could be a copy of Homeland, the TV series, so they shut it down.

Homeland is available on multiple sites, including Doctorow’s own, and is also available on some torrent sites. The takedown notice names a number of Fox’s own properties, including Homeland, as well as ripped copies of Hitchcock, Life Of Pi, and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelpia.

Apparently Cory himself replied to the DMCA takedown, saying to TorrentFreak: “I think you can safely say I’m incandescent with rage. BRING ME THE SEVERED HEAD OF RUPERT MURDOCH!”

Sadly, even Cory’s own publisher, Tor, is sending DMCA takedowns for his book, Rapture Of The Nerds. It’s also available for free but is popping up on torrent sites.

Obviously both of these instances are cases of an overzealous robot hunting down potentially infringing content. However, given Doctorow’s tendency towards copyfighting, it’s a bit funny that his CC-licensed books are being so zealously attacked.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, delivered a keynote speech at the she++ conference today, sharing what technology is exciting him right now, what he thinks about current startup culture, and how Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, affected his view of Silicon Valley.

Andreessen described Google Glass as “potentially transformative for the entire industry. ”

“You put it on and you’re like ‘Oh my God, I have the entire internet in my vision. Where have you been all my life?,’” he said.

“I like to tell people that I’m beta testing the new Google Contact Lenses,” he joked to moderator Ruchi Sanghvi, VP of operations at Dropbox.

He added that Facebook and Google are taking search in very different directions and opined “There’s a lot more to be done with search.”

“New Facebook Graph Search capability I think is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen…It makes me wish a little bit that I was single again,” he said to laughter.

Andreessen said he switches phones every six months (between Android and iPhone) and he’ll get Facebook Home next week.

Sanghvi turned the discussion to Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In.

“Before Sheryl’s book, for 20 years, the answer has been, ‘Be gender blind,’” Andreessen said. “’Be gender blind.’ It’s not important; in fact, it’s not to be discussed. It certainly should not be brought into the hiring criteria and certainly should not influence how people manage. And basically have a straight meritocracy and ignore gender. Sheryl has provided a very, very provocative set of arguments that 1) That’s not actually working and 2) That managers, both female and male, actually have to take gender on squarely.”

“We’ll have to completely retrain managers and executives of all kinds to be able to do this,” he continued. “[Sandberg] argues very persuasively that it’s necessary, but it’s like landmine central with the way employment law works these days.”

“I think her book has been a wake up call that the current approach to solving the problem of gender imbalance— number one it’s not working, which is fairly obvious, and number two, it requires a rethink of basic communication and basic management. I think it’s a very good thing to be talking about this and debating this. I think that it’s going to take quite a while,” he said.

“Startups as a general category are probably highly overrated,” he said, responding to Sanghvi’s question about Stanford students graduating and deciding between starting companies and finding jobs.

“Basically its an irrational act,” he said, explaining the right reason for starting a company. “This idea was so powerful and compelling that if I didn’t do it I’d hate myself for the rest of my life.”

“I think that’s the part that’s getting lost,” he continued. “I think the cult of startups, and of course Stanford’s ground zero for this…Those startups are miserable experiences.”

Andreessen argued that far too many entrepreneurs have an “incredible blind spot” to distribution, sales, and marketing in Silicon Valley right now, and shared his thoughts on immigration and innovation.

Sanghvi finished her scripted segment (before an open Q&A period) by throwing out words and getting Andreessen’s reactions to them:

“Mobile: under-hyped

Social: extremely powerful, and people underestimate how powerful it is

Enterprise: being reinvented

Silicon Valley: the world would be much better if we had 50 more Silicon Valleys but we don’t and we probably won’t for a long time

Genomics: largely a disappointment

Big Data: lots of social, cultural, political implications, not yet figured out

Aaron Swartz: tragedy. Absolute tragedy. Hopefully a future inspiration

2020: more people on the planet with smartphones than running water”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: David Lieb is co-founder and CEO of Bump, creators of the popular app that lets people share contact information, photos, and other content by bumping their phones together. Bump has been downloaded more than 130 million times.

It’s been hard to ignore the massive shift in the last decade toward simple products. The minimalist design aesthetic pioneered by Dieter Rams in the 1960s on alarm clocks and toasters was popularized by Apple and Google in the 2000s on iPods and search boxes. Soon after, Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users. Startup accelerators and design gurus popped up proselytizing “simplicity!”, and the rapid growth of mobile in the last 5 years has created an almost strict requirement for simple products that work on our new small screens and increasingly small attention spans. Some of the most popular products today (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram) all have simplicity of design and experience at their core.

This Ain’t Is Your Grandma’s Internet

So why did this happen, and why mostly in the last 10 years? Some say that good design simply lags technology and design has finally caught up. Others point to the evolution of our devices and our environments; definitely a major factor.

But I believe the high order bit is even more straightforward: It’s only been in the last 10 years that technology products have reached the mass market. The market size of the entire broadband internet in 2000 was 50 million people; today it is 2 billion people; in a few short years with the shift to mobile it will be more than 5 billion people. This mass market is comprised mostly of people who sit in the middle of the tech adopter bell curve, and since they aren’t product designers, computer programmers, and tech bloggers, they require an even higher degree of simplicity.

“Simple” Isn’t What You Think

But “simplicity” comes in many flavors. We can make products simpler by optimizing along a number of vectors:

• minimize number of steps in the flow
• minimize time required
• minimize number of features
• minimize elements on each page
• ….

But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity. This is an idea that slowly emerged as my company, Bump, tried to understand exactly why Bump is so popular, especially in the non-tech crowd. We believe product builders should first and foremost minimize the Cognitive Overhead of their products, even though it often comes at the cost of simplicity in other areas.

Cognitive Overhead

There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field. The best definition on the web comes from a web designer and engineer in Chicago named David Demaree:

Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc) into meaning and purpose. We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products’ patterns are well practiced.

This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products. Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead, now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another. This isn’t 1999, when your users were sitting in their quiet bedrooms checking out your website on a large monitor while waiting for their Napster downloads to finish; they are out in the real world being bombarded with distractions.

My, What Big Cognitive Overhead You Have 

To illustrate the difference between generic simplicity and cognitive simplicity, let’s look at a couple products that, on the surface, might be regarded as being simple to use, but rank in my book as some of the most cognitively complex products of late.

QR Codes –  Designed to check the simplicity boxes of speed, ubiquity, and small number of steps, QR codes really dropped the ball on cognitive overhead. “So it’s a barcode? No? It’s a website? Ok. But I open websites with my web browser, not my camera. So I take a picture of it? No, I take a picture of it with an app? Which app?”

iCloud / PhotoStream –  When we heard Steve Jobs preach the utopian future where all of our photos and data would be seamlessly synchronized among all our devices, we smelled the Apple simplicity we’d all grown to love. But in practice, iCloud is rife with cognitive overhead — it only backs up your most recent photos, it works on certain select apps but not others, you have to create an icloud.com email account for it to sync your mail and notes but not everything else. Oh, and it works on new iPhone and iPads and Macs running OS X v10.7.4 or later, but not your PC or Android tablet. Try explaining that to your mother.

Cognitive Simplicity Winners

So which products really nail cognitive simplicity? Here are a couple examples:

Shazam — An app that magically hears what song is playing and tells you what it is? Seems pretty complex, and what’s happening under the covers actually is. But Shazam does a phenomenal job keeping the user’s cognitive burden low. They force people to press a button to “start listening”, show real-time feedback that shows the app is hearing the sounds, and it buzzes when a result is found. Shazam could have made the flow faster or fewer taps, but it would come at the cost of cognitive simplicity.

Nintendo Wii –  In most ways, the Wii was far more complicated than its game console peers in 2006. It used accelerometers and IR blasters and detectors that required setup and calibration, and it was a departure from the mental model most people had for video games. But the payoff was a system with low cognitive overhead — you swing the controller to the left, and the little avatar on screen swings his racquet to the left. And voila, toddlers and grandparents alike suddenly became gamers.

Could Go Either Way?

Finally, a couple of my personal favorite daily-use products that could be argued either way. What do you think?

Dropbox –  I love Dropbox. All of my stuff is in my Dropbox; Dropbox is on all my devices; so all my stuff is on all my devices. Pretty cognitively simple. But there are certainly some potential cognitive hurdles, or, perhaps better put, cognitive activation energy required before reaching the low cognitive overhead state. Is Dropbox a folder on your desktop or a cloud-storage website? Oh and it’s a program to install on my computer too? When do things get backed up? Did it work?

Facebook –  Facebook started out with very low cognitive overhead — it was a digital version of the paper facebooks that already commanded high engagement and retention of college kids. Question: Has Facebook’s cognitive overhead increased or decreased as it has expanded to the mass market? What cognitive hurdles have arisen recently that weren’t present in the past? Should this worry Facebook?

How To make Cognitively Simple Products 

Make people work more, not less.

Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully. (Bump puts the user in the middle of the flow quite physically. While there were other ways to build a scalable solution without the physical bump, it’s very effective for helping people internalize exactly what’s going on.)

Give people real-time feedback.

If your user has to wonder, “So, did it work?”, you’ve failed. Walk people through using your product like a magician leads the audience through an illusion. Point out the steps along the way, or whatever magic your product is providing could be lost to the user.

Slow down your product.

We’ve all heard stories of Google’s relentless quest for search result speed, but sometimes you need to let your user understand and appreciate what your service is doing for them. Studies have shown that intentionally slowing down results on travel search websites can actually increase perceived user value — people realize and appreciate that the service is doing a lot of work searching all the different travel options on their behalf.

How To Know If You’ve Succeeded

Test on the young, old, …and drunk.

The very young and the very old are even more sensitive to cognitive overhead, as their brains aren’t accustomed to the sort of logical leaps our products sometimes require. Grandparents and children make great cognitive overhead detectors.

When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation. In fact, while building Bump 3.0, we literally took teams of designers and engineers to bars in San Francisco and Palo Alto and watched people use Bump, tweaking the product to accommodate.

Ask your users/customers to repeat what your product does and how it works.

Let people use your product, and then ask them to tell you what it does. They’ll think you are crazy for not knowing already, but what you hear can point to cognitive hurdles you’ve missed. One technique that scales that we use at Bump is to show a one question survey to a small fraction of users inside the app right after they are done bumping, asking “What is Bump for?” or “How do you use Bump?” The answers help us eliminate cognitive hurdles that remain.

There’s never been a time when cognitive simplicity matters more. As the mobile wave continues over the next 5 years, the world will see arguably the most rapid deployment of any new technology in our history. Products that are truly mass market will need to simultaneously target the Silicon Valley early adopter and the kid riding on the back of a motor scooter in Thailand. Which products will win, and which will lose? My money is on those that focus on cognitive simplicity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers.

Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars log detailed data their manufacturers can access if they so desire. Oh, and “if you carry a phone, your location is being recorded every minute of every day.”

In 1999, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Sadly, that sounds more prophetic every week.

I’ve been arguing for years that “Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world…they’ll be more or less extinct.” The hunt for the Boston bombers is to the coming world of surveillance as a 1980s PC is to a modern server farm. Facial recognition, gait recognition, drones the size of dragonflies — all here already. Just imagine twenty years from now. Every step you take outside will automatically be tracked, indexed, and correlated to all of your previous activity ever.

One can reasonably dispute whether the collective crowdsourced 4chan/Reddit attempt to identify the Boston bomber was a good thing or not, and interesting people are engaged in both sides of just that argument –

Wild how Reddit users crowdsource photo of Boston suspect, zoom, enhance. is.gd/w11k6e Source: is.gd/iIkKEE—
Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) April 19, 2013

Some remarkable interweb Boston Marathon photo-sleuthing – imgur.com/a/sUrnA—
Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) April 17, 2013

If you/someone you know is circulating CCTV pix of random people from Boston Marathon circled b/c they have a backpack, STOP. THAT IS DUMB.—
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 17, 2013

Seriously: circulating photos you and yer Scooby Doo crimefighter pals have determined to be of the Boston Bomber is criminally stupid—
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 17, 2013

– but to me, the important thing is the precedent it sets.

As never before in history, as proved in Boston, the observed world is becoming the recorded world. bit.ly/14APAvO—
Gus Silber (@gussilber) April 19, 2013

A lot of people (just read the comments on my last Google Glass post) are seriously squicked by the possibility of individual video surveillance, but are essentially OK with being watched by governments or corporations. I think that is an extremely wrong and dangerous attitude, because I believe one-way transparency will inevitably breed corruption and abuse.

I am not in favor of the death of personal privacy in public spaces. I just think it’s inevitable. Soon enough cameras and surveillance software will be ubiquitous. There are already terrified voices, eg Farhad Manjoo’s, crying for “installing surveillance cameras everywhere” on the eyebrow-raising grounds that “we’re already being watched—just not systematically”.

And that’s why–despite its potentially undesirable social side effects–I’m a cheerleader for Google Glass and its ilk. If transparency will be forced on us, then it needs to be two-way transparency. It’s a given that the strong and rich will be able to watch the weak and poor; we need to ensure that the converse is possible as well. We need to democratize surveillance, and Google Glass is the first of a new kind of tool which can help us do just that.

As the book “Cypherpunks” by my friend @ioerror et al says what we need is to democratize massive crypto tools #cd13—
Renata Avila (@avilarenata) March 18, 2013

For instance, I’d like law enforcement, border patrol, the TSA, and other authorities to wear Glass-like cameras at all time, and for that video to be accessible by the public when the abuse of authority is alleged. Interestingly, there’s now some real data supporting that stance: “Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers.”

In the words of the ACLU:

We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse. [but] When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.

Giving the public some access to police footage isn’t enough, though. We need the people to be able to watch and record their government, just as their government keeps them under constant surveillance. Unfortunately, that inevitably also means that individuals can and will frequently surveil and record each other. Which means bullying, stalking, trolling, and doxing on, well, almost a New York Post scale:

Becoming hard to tell difference between credible news organizations like 4chan and troll sites like New York Post.—
Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) April 19, 2013

I’m not happy about any of this. But drastically increased surveillance in public places is inevitable. Sorry. It’s just going to be too cheap, too easy, too convenient, and too reassuring to too many. Two-way transparency, however, will be a huge battle. The powers that be have every incentive to foster a moral panic about the stalker evils of personal cameras like Google Glass, and crowdsourced surveillance like that of 4chan and Reddit.

Again, I don’t actually think either is necessarily desirable in and of themselves. But I fear that they’re the price we’ll have to pay to have a society relatively free of systematic hierarchical abuse of authority and power — because, more and more, we live in a world where privacy is power.

Image credit: Lingeswaran Marimuthukumar, Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was on stage today at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile event in NYC, talking about his book and his vision for Google. When asked about how he and Google feel about projects that take Android as their base and then build something different with them, like Amazon’s KindleOS or Facebook Home. Schmidt’s response was extremely positive.

On the subject of Android forking and Facebook Home, he responded “I think it’s fantastic.” “This is what open source is all about,” he said, adding that he “suspect[s] it’s one of the few reasons Android is the number one solution right now.” At the time of its unveiling, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company didn’t even have to work with Google to make Home a reality.

That, and Facebook Home UX features, like the removal of the Google search bar from the home screen, and in general the backgrounding of various Google features, led some to speculate that it isn’t exactly something Google would be thrilled with. Google issued an official statement on the matter, talking about how it “demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular.”

Schmidt’s statement stuck to the company line but also went further, indicating an enthusiasm for efforts like those undertaken by Facebook and Android. He said that people who don’t work with open source technology can’t seem to understand the value of people taking your OS and doing something different with it, but at Google, there’s a genuine appreciate for those kinds of projects.

“This is called ‘what Android is about,’” he said later in response to a question by Business Insider’s Steve Kovach. “[Facebook] read the rules and they adhered to them. If you look at what Facebook did they maintained full application compatibility. I think it’s a tremendous endorsement of the platform and what it can do.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch