Fredric Paul

Author Archives: Fredric Paul

Google’s biggest, craziest ‘moonshot’ yet

Google is nothing if not ambitious. It’s famed “moonshot” projects have taken on notoriously large projects, from extending human lifespans to drones that can stay aloft for years at a time. But this one takes the cake.According to the subscription tech news site The Information, Alphabet, Google’s holding company, is trying to get CEO Larry Page to sign off on “Project Sidewalk.” The Information describes the effort as an attempt “to create an area in the U.S. that serves as a test bed for new technologies from superfast internet to autonomous cars. … An area that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people has been contemplated.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Golden State Warriors demonstrate how to use group chat technology for success

By now even casual sports fans know that the Golden State Warriors just eclipsed Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls for the best regular season in NBA history. Many even realize the team is owned by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Joe Lacob, and that it relied heavily on technology and advanced analytics to construct its roster and set its strategy and tactics.Even with all that, winning 73 games in an 82-game season was far from a foregone conclusion. Many observers—and team officials—worried that the ongoing effort required to set the record would fatigue the players and increase the risk of injury. That could jeopardize the ultimate goal, winning the franchise’s second-consecutive championship.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China is working on a big data Minority Report system

Think there’s a limit to how far countries can go to monitor their citizens? Think again. China’s new plan to create software to track a wide variety of data to predict who might commit terrorist acts pushes the envelop into the realm of science fiction, a la Minority Report.Last December, I wrote about China's planned Social Credit System, which takes invasion of privacy to terrifying new levels by going well beyond Western-style credit scores to create a mandatory scheme to "rate the trustworthiness of citizens in all facets of life, from business deals to social behavior,” according to the New Republic. The national database will combine records of Internet data with financial information and government data into a score designed to determine eligibility for all kinds of things, including credit, employment and access to social benefits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

At least some consumers are paying attention to cybersecurity

When it comes to cybersecurity, it's long been safe to assume that almost nobody is doing much of anything to protect themselves. But a new survey by credit-monitoring company Experian reveals that notion may no longer be completely accurate.While the survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted by Edelman Berland in September 2015, reveals plenty of the kind of security holes that give professionals nightmares, it also showed that a significant number of people are now paying at least some attention to online security and privacy issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How will Dell justify its massive payout for EMC?

Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC stacks up as the largest technology deal in history. But if Michael Dell is gobbling up storage giant EMC in an attempt to stem the tide of movement from on-premise proprietary data centers to the cloud, it might be too little too late. Aside from merely bulking up, what exactly is Dell trying to do with EMC? If he hopes to leverage his new toy and its 83% stake in VMware to move deeper into the cloud, then this deal could end up justifying its enormous price tag. In a conference call about the deal, EMC CEO Joe Tucci reportedly claimed that being part of Dell as a private company would speed the development of cloud-based technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Unlike Uber, more sharing-economy companies are hiring workers as employees

Amidst the battles raging over whether sharing-economy workers should be considered contractors or employees, last week I called for a compromise that would combine the appropriate features of both independent contractors and employees to create a new way to deal with this new kind of business relationship.I still believe that this is the best approach for coping with an emerging class of workers that doesn't fit neatly into either of the existing categories. But what happens until companies, workers, and regulators can strike such a compromise? And what if compromise proves impossible to achieve? Will forcing companies like Uber to actually "hire" its workforce really spell doom for the sharing economy?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Signs of the times: 2 unexpected ways technoloy is changing the world

Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady.Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Signs of the times: 2 unexpected ways technology is changing the world

Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady. Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A case for compromise on Uber’s ‘contractor’ legal dispute

Uber ought to be on top of the world. The "ride-sharing" app has already raised more than $5 billion and is worth an estimated $50 billion. Just as important, it has reached the stage of ubiquity where people use its name as a verb: "Forget driving, we'll just Uber over to the event."And yet, a dark cloud is shadowing Uber's future, along with that of many other companies riding the wave of the so-called "sharing economy." Many of those companies' business models are built around workers classified as contractors, not employees, but it seems increasingly clear that no matter how convenient for Uber and its ilk, that classification is unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At least not without major changes in the law and the way these sharing-economy companies do business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iOS 9 could be a step toward saving the tablet market

Earlier this week, I laid out some ideas on what Apple needs to do inject new life into the fading tablet category. It seems that Apple was already on track with at least part of my message. "For many, the iPad is the primary computer," Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi noted at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference keynote yesterday.See also: 5 ways Apple should re-invent the iPad To help out those people, who I think represent the future of the tablet market, the company delivered on a couple of the things I asked for. As many observers expected, Apple announced split screen and picture-in-picture functionality in iOS 9, as well as a new software keyboard that can also work a trackpad. (Personally, the improvements in text selection and movement could be the biggest benefit to using the iPad for real work—I've always found that process frustratingly awkward and inexact.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways Apple should reinvent the iPad

After enormous early success, Apple's iPad and its myriad competitors and imitators are facing a bit of an identity crisis. As laptops get smaller and lighter and smartphones get bigger and more powerful, tablet sales are slowing. According to IDC, the global 2015 tablet market will be 221.8 million units in 2015, down 3.8% from 2014.That's still a lot of tablets, of course, but the devices are increasingly seen as "nice-to-have" complements to smartphones for everyday use and awkward substitutes for a PC when you have to do real work. If tablets are going to regain their place at the center of mobile computing, something has to change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New projected smartphone display could make device size irrelevant

As regular TechWatch readers (hi Mom!) readers know, I'm a big "phan" of giant phablet devices. That's not because I like to tote around comically large slabs of metal and plastic, but because I find smartphones more useful the more screen real estate they present.Last week, Chinese tech manufacturer Lenovo showed off its Smart Cast concept phone at its own Tech World conference in Beijing. Like a concept car, it's not clear if the Smart Cast phone will ever make it to production, but the technology has the potential to eventually shatter the connection between device size and screen size. By projecting the device's touch screen on to any convenient surface, smartphones may one day be able to have displays of any size. Critically, the Smart Cast technology lets you interact with the projected screen, so you can use it as a keyboard or other input channel, as well as a monitor. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How a Florida fender-bender could threaten Uber’s business model

A March collision between a Mitsubishi Outlander and a scooter in the Miami area could have huge repercussions in Silicon Valley. According to reports in Buzzfeed and elsewhere, the minor accident caused only a few thousand dollars in damages. But it could have a nationwide impact on the business models of ridesharing and other app-driven services. Because the SUV was dropping off Uber passengers at the time, the driver asked the company's insurance to cover the costs. But Uber and the driver couldn't come to an agreement, so—unable to keep driving until the vehicle was fixed or replaced—Darrin McGillis ended up filing an unemployment insurance claim against Uber and a subsidiary. That forced the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity to determine whether the driver was actually an employee of Uber, not an independent contractor, as the company claims. Last week, the Florida DEO's initial determination held that McGillis was indeed an employee, not a contractor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Heads up: Google Glass may be coming back

According to reports last week in the Financial Times, Google really is working on a new version of Glass, the now-cancelled wearable device that became the poster child for clueless tech products creeping out normal people.Google has claimed that it would continue working on the device since it stopped selling it in January, but until now there's been no word on what the company had in mind. Was it hoping to make a few tweaks and come up with a new marketing campaign and hope that would be enough for a successful re-launch? Or was the plan to completely scrap Google Glass as is and develop a new product based on what it learned from the first attempt?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft does something else right with Windows 10

Microsoft seems determined to do the right thing with the upcoming version of Windows. After decades of sticking it to loyal Windows users with pricey upgrades and short-term perspectives, Microsoft under Satya Nadella seems to have seen the light.See also: Microsoft does the right thing, makes Windows 10 a free upgrade Earlier this year, Microsoft made the enlightened decision to make Windows 10 a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, and it has recently become clear that Microsoft will take another step to support Windows 10 users. The company intends to bypass the mobile carriers and update Windows 10 mobile devices directly as well—at least for business users with its Windows Update for Business program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It’s Google and Facebook’s web, we just surf in it

It's not exactly news that Facebook and (especially) Google dominate a large portion of what happens online. Add in a few other major players—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft maybe, you know them all—and the supposedly wide-open internet increasingly seems like the private playground and captive market.Google's "buy" button? Two unrelated events last week brought that reality home for me. First, and most importantly, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is planning to add a "buy" button to its ubiquitous search results pages. Google hasn't confirmed the report, and the Journal says the buttons will appear only on a small percentage of mobile devices (not desktop Web browsers), at least at first. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How China’s smartphone market is evolving

The Chinese mobile market has long been described as the ultimate prize for smartphone handset makers and app developers. China has the most people, income is rising, and the population has an insatiable appetite for mobile technology.That's all true, except when the facts don't quite support the narrative.For example, the conventional wisdom holds that most Chinese mobile consumers are interested in inexpensive phones from upstart manufacturers like Xiaomi, Huawei, and ZTE. And that's true, up to a point. According to IDC's latest Mobile Phone Tracker, many of those brands are trying to move up into the mid- and high-end segments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zynga’s data center troubles prove cloud computing isn’t a game

Last week, embattled game maker Zynga announced $100 million in spending reductions. The hundreds of layoffs rightly garnered most of the headlines, but there was another important development as well – the company also said that it was abandoning the data centers on which it reportedly just spent $100 million to build. Zynga will return its infrastructure to the cloud.It seems that after being a big Amazon Web Services customer for several years (running a reported 80% of its computing load), in 2012 the company made a "dramatic shift" from the public cloud to its own network, called zCloud. At the time, Allan Leinwand, Zynga's CTO for infrastructure, told PC World that AWS was like a four-door sedan, and that, "we love four-door sedans, but it's a car that's used for a lot of things – doing the shopping, moving the kids. I like to think of zCloud as the sports car built for the Le Mans of social gaming. It's tuned for the track." (Of course, the company still ran some workloads on AWS using a hybrid cloud model.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 troubling similarities between the Apple Watch and Google Glass

Call it heresy, but now that I've had the chance to actually get my hands on the Apple Watch, I keep being struck by the parallels with the much-maligned Google Glass. That doesn't necessarily mean the Apple Watch will fail spectacularly the way Glass did, just that it will face many of the same challenges. Let's take a look at a few of them.(Note that I tried the Apple Watch only at the Apple Store. Actual deliveries don't begin until Friday, April 24. I have spent much more time with Google Glass… just not in public).They're both too expensiveThe Apple Watch starts at $350, but the "nice" ones start at twice that price and soar well into five freaking figures! Even more annoying, if you just want to upgrade the aluminum sport model with a slightly less-cheesy leather band, it'll cost you another $250. Really? $250 for a leather watchband?! In comparison, the $1,500 price tag on Google Glass no longer seems so outrageous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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