Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is the Best E-Ink Screen You Can Buy [REVIEW]

One thing Amazon is not afraid of is change. It alters product designs as often as some people change shirts or at least hairstyles. The point is: The way your Amazon Kindle looks today is not necessarily the way it’ll look tomorrow. The new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite e-ink-based e-reader is, for example, quite a departure from the most recent Kindle Touch. Unlike that ugly shirt or bad hairdo, though, Amazon once again gets its new look just right.

You might not notice at first, but viewed separately, a quick glance at the two devices released just one year apart reveals a host of significant changes. The Paperwhite is smaller, thinner (6.7″ x 4.6″ x .36″ versus 6.8″ x 4.7″ x .40″) and black where the Touch is slate gray. The Paperwhite moves the eponymous Kindle logo to the bottom edge; it also loses the Touch’s home button and audio-out capabilities (not something I am going to miss).

The screens are similarly sized, but the Paperwhite’s biggest change is that there’s a built-in light within its grayish display.

See the Light

Like Barnes and Noble’s Nook Simple Touch Glowlight, the Kindle Paperwhite incorporates a series of LEDs in the bottom edge (the Nook actually has two fewer LEDs along the top), and uses patented fiber-optic technology to spread that light evenly across the 6-inch display. The result is you can now read your Kindle books on your Kindle e-ink-based Paperwhite e-reader without the need for an external light source.

I love the effect on both devices, though the Paperwhite does a somewhat better job of creating the illusion of a single light source. Only at the lower edge, right near the lights, do you see the coverage gaps (they appear as slightly gray or dimmer areas), but it quickly resolves into a very evenly lit display. At full brightness, the Paperwhite almost lives up to its name â€" that is, it’s almost white â€" an effect enhanced by the now black body. Nook’s Glowlight is very good, but you can notice a bit more blotchiness in the light coverage.

It’s worth noting that the Paperwhite’s LEDs are always on, even when you turn the light all the way down. Amazon reps told me this is intended, because they believe the lights are always useful and do not, according to them, diminish the promised eight weeks of continuous-use battery life (a claim I could not test in my relatively short time with the device).

The Paperwhite differs from the Nook Glowlight in another way. Both e-readers let you adjust light brightness via touchscreen, but only Amazon’s interface tries to explain which light settings are right for you. Unless you understand a little bit about how the eyes respond to lit screens in different lighting situations, however, it may not make much sense to you.

The Paperwhite has a super easy-to-use slider that says, “In brightly lit rooms use a high setting” and “Use a low setting for dark rooms.” I read this over and over again, and wondered why it seemed so counterintuitive. Amazon representatives explained that reading a brightly lit screen in a darkened room is not comfortable for your eyes. Instead, the brightness should almost match the surrounding light level for maximum comfort. I understand this with backlit displays like the LCD panels found on the iPad and Kindle Fire HD, but for an e-ink e-reader that in sunlight needs no internal illumination, this had me scratching my head.

Outdoors, the Paperwhite screen looks fantastic, and I have no idea what purpose the light would serve. Yet indoors, in a variety of situations, I did find that the most comfortable setting was far less bright than I would have originally expected.

Touch

Despite the layers for e-ink and light, the Kindle Paperwhite is an impressive touch-screen device that responds well to taps and gestures. I have a second-generation Kindle, and there is no comparison. The Paperwhite is also faster than the Kindle Touch. I’d say it matches the touchscreen Nook Glowlight in terms of responsiveness, though I can’t use, say, a pinch gesture to change font size on the Barnes and Noble device.

As with the previous Kindle Touch, the Paperwhite takes full advantage of the touch interface. A tap at the top of the screen displays a full menu with Home, Back, the light control, shopping, search, reading options, font sizes, Go-to, the X-Ray feature and Share options. You can link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to tweet and add status updates directly from the Paperwhite; the updates include a link to whatever you’re reading.

Every part of the interface is a thousand times better than when the Kindle started, and every Kindle update brings fresh and useful ideas. One of the newest and most clever additions is Reading Progress, which you access from the main drop-down menu; this lets you select how you want the feature to display within whatever you’re reading. It can be the original Location in book, which is not actually a page number, but some random metric Amazon uses to judge progress in an e-book. I’m glad Amazon now also includes the paper page number and percentage read.

The news additions, though, are quite smart. There’s Time Left in Chapter and Time Left in Book.

Each will do as advertised, and based on your reading speed, tell you how long (in days, hours and minutes) it should take to finish the current chapter or entire tome. The metric is remarkably accurate; it told me I would finish the current chapter in eight minutes, and that was exactly how long it took.

The Kindle Paperwhite’s other nifty trick is X-Ray. Introduced last year, it’s a snapshot (at article, chapter or book level) of how often a topic or character appears. You can use it to quickly skip to parts of the book when said person or topic is mentioned. I would never do this in a book for fear of spoilers. Yet, I could see it as an incredibly helpful tool for textbooks and for students who have to write about character development in a novel.

Staying Connected

Since the very first Kindle launched in 2007, the e-readers have offered free access to the Whispernet, which is AT&T’s 3G network. I tested the Wi-Fi/3G version of the Kindle Paperwhite, and found that the Whispernet still works well, as long as I could find decent connectivity, which was not always possible. Fortunately, the Wi-Fi works smoothly, and it was easy to connect the Kindle Paperwhite to my office and home networks. If you want to be able to shop for books wherever you are, however, you may want to consider the 3G model.

Shopping on the Paperwhite is a pleasure. The touchscreen allows for e-ink-style scroll (which means the image blinks when you scroll) through Kindle’s Tops or “select” 25 books, a list of featured titles (Best Sellers, Deals, New Noteworthy), and an area for Kindle Singles, the new Serials, Magazines and Newspapers.

Like the Nook Glowlight, you can get a Paperwhite for $139. The 3G model I tested is $199. If you accept special offers, you can get the Wi-Fi version for $119 and the 3G model for $179. While some people are really turned off by these sleep-slate ads (which also appear on the new, subsidized Kindle Fire HD), I don’t mind them at all. Barnes and Noble recently lowered the price of its Glowlight e-reader to $119; but this price does not require users to accept adsm and it also includes an AC charger. As with the Kindle Fire HD, Amazon doesn’t ship the Paperwhite with an AC adapter â€" just the charging cable, which will plug into your powered USB port or the handful of USB-ready AC adapters you may have lying around.

With the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon has achieved something that’s better than Barnes and Noble’s Simple Touch with Glowlight. With a couple of notable exceptions, they match up pretty evenly on price, book selection, screen resolution and touch responsiveness. But the Kindle Paperwhite gets the edge on screen quality with the light on, variety of useful gestures and intuitive features like X-Ray and Reading Progress.

If you own a second- or third-generation Kindle, this is a valuable upgrade. Trading in the similar Kindle Touch isn’t worthwhile, at least until the battery stops charging. If you’re deep in the Barnes and Noble book ecosystem, a switch probably isn’t necessary; but if you’re a first time e-reader, the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is â€" with a small edge on performance and features, as well as a better established ecosystem of products and services â€" tough to beat.

All Kindle Paperwhite e-readers are available for order now, and start shipping on Oct. 1.

Read More

5 Mobile Photographers Capturing the World With Android

With advances in smartphone technology and camera resolution, it’s now easier than ever to capture quality images with the mobile device you carry everywhere. The rise of photo editing apps has added to this movement toward mobile photography, which is becoming a burgeoning and reputable art form.

It may seem like iPhone users, or “iPhoneographers,” dominate this art form, but there’s a sizeable “Androidographer” community as well, especially on platforms like Google+, Instagram and Flickr.

We spoke to five photographers who use their Android devices â€" exclusively or in addition to other cameras â€" to shoot, edit and share beautiful photos, and they offered some advice for those looking to enter the field.

1. Linda Stokes

Linda Stokes uses a Samsung Galaxy III for nearly every shot she takes, but she has a backup phone for emergency situations â€" for instance, if her battery dies and she’s capturing a special moment, such as a wedding.

“Shooting with my Droid is my favorite thing to do with my clothes on,” Stokes says. She finds her Android device, with its camera and sharing capabilities, to be a perfect immediate art form. “The more pictures I took, the more I saw what could be achieved, and the more I liked it,” she says.

Stokes enjoys shooting nature â€" waterscapes, flowers, sunrises and sunsets â€" as well as anything she sees during the day with an interesting light or unusual aspect. “My Android device inspires me with its versatility … and absolutely beautiful color and results,” she says.

Stokes mentions that mobile photographers should make shooting with their phones a habit, or a ritual â€" that way, it will “quickly, almost automatically, become one of your favorite art forms.”

2. Katie Cowden

When Katie Cowden isn’t photographing her daily progress on whichever textile art project she’s working on, she uses her T-Mobile myTouch Slide to capture whatever catches her eye. With the help of editing apps like Vignette and Instagram, she particularly likes to photograph graffiti, architecture and the people around her.

“I use my Android because it fits in my pocket or purse in a way a DSLR just doesn’t,” she says. “Not having a million settings forces me to think about the photo in a different way.”

Cowden advises mobile photographers to make sure the lens is always clean, and to always be on the lookout for natural light. “Since the camera phone is not very adjustable, I try to start out with good lighting so I can focus on framing and composition,” she says.

3. Donny Tidmore

Out of the 10 photography apps Donny Tidmore has on his Samsung Galaxy S II, he consistently uses three to edit his photos: Vignette, Little Photo and Pixlr-o-matic. He doesn’t use Instagram for editing â€" only as a social network to share his art.

For Tidmore, the benefit of using an Android device extends past its convenient size â€" he likes that everything is maintained on one device. “It’s being able to do all of my editing, and upload [photos] to a social network, all on my phone no matter where I am,” he says. “I have a job where I’m out and about all day, and being able to create on my phone while I should be working is awesome.”

His main piece of advice for mobile photographers? Experiment with apps. “There is no shortage of photography apps in the App Store or Google Play. Spend a lot of time working with different ones until you find your ‘style’ or something that really clicks with you,” he advises. “Other than that, shoot often … and have fun!”

4. François-René Hamelin

Even though François-René Hamelin owns a Canon PowerShot G11 and a Canon EOS 7D â€" both high-quality DSLRs â€" he uses his Android HTC Desire HD with Ice Cold Sandwich (Android v 4.0.4) for mobile photography. The fact that he always has his smartphone with him makes it his main tool for taking pictures.

Hamelin uses editing apps like UCam Ultra Camera (which allows him to focus easier) and Pixlr-o-matic for filters. The HTC Desire also includes camera software that creates panoramic photos.

“I always try to have pictures that tell stories or at least that give a feeling,” Hamelin says. “All my pictures taken with my smartphone are made to be seen by my friends that live far away from me [in Belgium], so I try to put what I feel inside.”

Hamelin suggests that fellow mobile photographers “look everywhere, shoot, move, shoot again â€" the more you take pictures, the more you find what works and what does not.”

5. Jaina Mistry

Like Tidmore, Jaina Mistry uses her Samsung Galaxy S II for photography, documenting the world around her. Her go-to editing app is Vignette for the filters, as well as the basic editing tools such as brightness, contrast, saturation and temperature.

“Convenience is the biggest factor,” Mistry says. “I have my phone on me all the time, and it has a pretty good camera attached to it. I do usually carry my DSLR around with me, too, but sometimes it’s just quicker to get that snapshot with my phone.” She explains that being able to share her photos instantly is another reason why her smartphone’s camera comes in handy.

Mistry is an advocate for editing photos, but she advises mobile photographers to be smart about it.

“I know there’s a lot of backlash against filters on your photos, and I can understand [that] backlash,” she says. “Which is why I say use filters, but don’t abuse filters. Don’t feel the need to add a filter if your photo doesn’t need it. Sometimes a photo is perfectly brilliant without a filter over the top of it.”

BONUS: 7 Photo Editing Apps to Use With Instagram

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, franckreporter.

Read More

Apple Cites Improved Working Conditions in Foreign Factories [REPORT]

Apple is making some progress toward correcting poor working conditions and human rights abuses at its supplier plants, including China’s Foxconn factories, which have initiated global criticism, on-site riots and worker suicides.

Apple updated its Labor and Human Rights page to reflect its latest progress â€" increasing employee compliance with a shorter 60-hour week and monitoring more employees. The Next Web spotted the updates to Apple’s Labor and Human Rights page.

The latest progress report celebrates workers at Apple’s supplier plants nearing 100% compliance, currently at 97%, with the standard 60-hour work week. Apple is also expanding its weekly tracking of 800,000 workers, an increase from 700,000 employees in July, TNW reports.

The Cupertino-based company pledged to curtail working hours and increase hourly wages at China’s Foxconn locations after coming under intense scrutiny. Some of the details that emerged from independent investigations were shocking â€" Foxconn workers were reportedly receiving $1.78 an hour, while working 12-hour shifts.

In March, a Fair Labor Association independent investigation found workers were working more than 60 hours weekly. Some employees were working excessively for more than 11 days in a row. The report revealed 14% of workers were not receiving compensation for excessive overtime. The FLA also reported health violations including the presence of dangerous aluminum dust and blocked exits.

The iPhone 5 maker is also expanding audits to suppliers in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and in countries where suppliers rely on migrant workers. This is an effort to stop unofficial “recruiting agents” from pressing contract workers for high recruitment fees. Apple states it’s working with government agencies, NGOs and peer companies to educate suppliers about legitimate recruiting practices.

SEE ALSO: Foxconn China Plant Closed After Massive Brawl

Apple also wants to prevent the hiring of underage workers. Audits completed this year turned up “found no cases of underage labor,” but The New York Times report on September 10 states Foxconn still has interns on manufacturing lines. According to local Chinese news outlets, vocational school students were required to on “assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages.”

Foxconn’s internship program makes up 2.7% of the total 1.2 million-person workforce. In the FLA report, interns are required to work less than eight hours a week, five days per week and never overnight or over their time limit. Apple is monitoring the “treatment of workers who are old enough to work legally but are younger than 18.”

Updates will be continually added to Apple’s Supplier Responsibility page.

Do you think Apple is doing enough to press for change at its manufacturing plants and supplier factories? Tell us in the comments.

Read More

Sorry iPhone Users, Google Maps ‘App’ on iOS 6 Isn’t Great Either

I lost all patience with Apple’s Maps app when it directed me to the middle of a state park when it should have been taking me home.

The turn-by-turn directions, supposedly the saving grace of the troubled iOS 6 Maps app, work wonderfully â€" but they’re only as good as the information you put in them. And Maps, in conjunction with Siri, had decided “home” was in a park with the same name as my street, six miles away. (Bafflingly, it got the directions right on the second try.)

It was time to test the emergency backup option â€" maps.google.com on the iPhone’s browser. Ever helpful, Google has started telling everyone who visits that site how to turn it into an app-like shortcut on your home page:

Sadly for iPhone users, it looks like the best use you’re going to get out of this is as a means to fool your Android-toting friends: look, I got Google Maps for iOS 6 early!

Because if you’re expecting anything like the Google Maps iPhone app we knew and loved in iOS 5 and previous releases, you’re going to be disappointed. Here’s what the maps.google.com interface looks like:

Those four icons at the top of the screen? In order, here’s what they do: take you to your present location; take you to a separate ‘directions’ page; also take you to a separate ‘directions’ page; and take you to a list of other things you can do.

To refresh your memory, here’s what the old Google Maps app looked like:

The interface was smoother, the search/directions distinction clearer, and neither needed to take you to a separate page. It was much easier to turn a search into directions. Maps were sharp and looked great on the Retina screen (the maps.google.com alternative is low-res and blocky by comparison).

With a bit of futzing with those “extra” features, I was able to get the maps.google.com replacement to add a traffic layer â€" but again, it looks thicker and blockier. It was also harder to scroll around the screen, and impossible to drop a pin anywhere.

I found myself having to reload often, rather than look at a featureless grey grid. Reloading ain’t easy: maps.google.com takes up all of Safari’s screen real estate, so you can’t just hit the reload button.

Oh, and those directions? No way you’re getting them one by one, the way the Google Maps app used to do. The best you’re getting is a list of turns, or one map that shows the entire route. And you can’t view both at once.

I can see some scenarios where the maps.google.com applet will come in handy â€" for example, when you need transit directions. I’ll keep it around for further tests on that score, but there are already a host of apps that give you transit options.

Have you tried maps.google.com on an iPhone? Let us know your experience in the comments.

Read More

How Much Bandwidth Will the Vice Presidential Debate Need?

Centre College in Danville, Ky. is home to this year’s vice presidential debate. With thousands of attendees, campaign staff and reporters â€" and all of their smartphones, tablets, laptops and other connected gear â€" descending on campus Oct. 11, it takes impressive technology and a coordinated effort to keep the data running smoothly.

To give an idea of the challenge, the college’s IT crew is expecting approximately 1,500-2,000 wireless-connected devices at any given time, with an average 2.5 wireless devices per attendee â€" and that doesn’t count the computers and other equipment that calls for a hardline connection. It’s also, the team admits, an estimation.

“Bandwidth is a big guess,” said Shane Wilson, coordinator of Network Services at Centre College. “The only data we have is from 2008, and that’s basically ancient history. We feel very confident about 2 gigabits of bandwidth.”

How is the college preparing to deliver problem-free data connections?

More Bandwidth, Please

To make sure there’s enough bandwidth to go around, Centre College will be temporarily expanding its Internet connection from 250 megabits to 2 gigabits. That’s an eightfold increase using two single-gigabit links running simultaneously. Mobile providers are also bringing in trucks to help boost the mobile phone and data signals in the immediate area.

Department of Redundancy Department

And what about network problems? For network engineers concerned about stability during a high-traffic event, redundancy is the name of the game. Accordingly, Centre Network worked with several vendors to set up a temporary network that’s running separate from the campus network.

The new network is fully redundant with four routers, multiple backbone links and multiple core paths, giving Centre College’s IT staff the ability to quickly adapt is something goes wrong on debate day.

SEE ALSO: Behind the Social Media Campaigns of Obama and Romney

There’s also a power redundancy â€" the debate hall is run on a diesel generator, but it can be quickly switched to standard line power if there’s a problem (it’s quicker to switch from diesel to electric than vice-versa). And like a military tanker jet high above a field of combat, diesel gas trucks will be waiting nearby in case they need to refuel.

And what if something goes wrong on the provider side, like physical damage to fiber? The college’s staff will have support cases with CISCO, AT&T and Time Warner Cable open in advance, drastically speeding up any necessary repairs. AT&T and Time Warner will also have trained technicians on site, ready to go in case of an emergency â€" think of them as network first responders.

Keeping Safe

With so many connected devices, security is surely a concern. Centre College’s staff says they’ll be using separate VLAN SSID networks for each of the campaigns as well for the media and other major groups involved with the debate. Each network will use encrypted 802.11x to help keep the campaigns from spying on one another’s traffic and the media from spying on the campaigns’ traffic.

Testing, Testing

Will it all work? On Thursday afternoon, Centre College invited about 120 faculty, staff and students to help test the network and look for problems. A few were found and quickly fixed â€" a result that built confidence among the Centre College team.

“We discovered problems and corrected them â€" and that was the goal,” said Wilson. “I feel much better than if everything had gone smoothly. If that happened, I would’ve wondered what was left uncovered.”

History (Not) Repeating

The tech involved in running a nationally-televised debate has drastically changed in the last 12 years, said Art Moore, Centre College’s director of information technology services. Moore was at the college when it hosted the 2000 vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman.

“The world completely has changed in the last 12 years, when it was all about analog telephone lines,” said Moore. “The media then was doing dial-up to get Internet access. We provided phone lines… and gave one data line each to the campaign workspaces. We didn’t even have laptops in 2000.”

Images courtesy of Flickr, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gage Skidmore

Read More

New App Remakes the Tamagotchi for the Smartphone Era

The Spark of Genius Series is made possible by MicrosoftBizSpark. Each post highlights a unique feature of a startup. If you'd like your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Photogotchi

Quick Pitch: Tamagotchi game meets camera app.

Genius Idea: This free smartphone game encourages users to snap pictures and feed the images to their Photogotchi, a digital creature inspired by the Tamagotchi, to make it grow.

---

Remember Tamagotchis, and how obsessed kids were with feeding them so they could watch them grow up? Well, Tamagotchi’s may have disappeared, but now their relative is here â€" the Photogotchi.

The free gaming app transforms your pictures into pixel-art images, which are then fed to your Photogotchi â€" a digital creature inspired by the Tamagotchi â€" to make it grow. The more photos you feed the Photogotchi, the bigger and more colorful it becomes.

Users can adopt and name their own Photogotchi once they download the app, and then choose a color which determines the type of creature they get. You can take photos of anything you like, and then turn them into unique images using five different 8-bit filters in the app.

The goal of the game is to earn points by taking as many photos as you want to feed your pet. In the process, it motivates users to become active photographers in their day-to-day lives.

There are a number of ways to earn points in the game, including taking a lot of photos, sharing them on different social networks or snapping pictures at night. The more points you have, the bigger your creature will get. You can watch as your Photogotchi starts off as an egg, cracks and then grows up.

The company is planning to add a feature that will allow users with the same color Photogotchi’s to play a game against teams with different colors.

Photogotchi was developed in August by CarnationGroup, a digital agency in Europe. The team was inspired by the Tamagotchi craze in the nineties and wanted to bring back the nostalgia of the popular virtual pets by incorporating them into a fun game.

CarnationGroup doesn’t have a business model in place for the app yet, but the team is considering making t-shirts for users with photos of their Photogotchi’s.

The app will be released for iPhones on October 1 and for Windows phones a couple days later.

---

Series presented by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible byMicrosoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives software startups three-year access to Microsoft software development tools, marketing visibility to help promote their business and a connection to the BizSpark ecosystem, giving them access to investors, advisors and mentors. There is no cost to join, so if your startup is privately owned, less than three years old and generates less than U.S. $1M in annual revenue, sign up today.

Read More

NFL Player Gains 90,000 Followers After Profane Viral Tweets

NFL player T.J. Lang wrote two tweets on Monday night after his Green Bay Packers lost under dubious circumstances to the Seattle Seahawks and the messages instantly went viral.

How viral? This viral: As of Wednesday morning one tweet had garnered in excess of 68,000 retweets and 17,000 favorites. More than 55,000 of those retweets came in the first 45 minutes after he shared the message. A second tweet he posted shortly after now has more than 95,000 retweets and 27,000 favorites.

Lang’s profane and, ahem, rather direct tweets may lead to a substantial fine by the NFL’s corporate enforcers, but he’ll still have something to show for them beyond just cred on the street and in the locker room â€" namely, more than 90,000 new Twitter followers.

Tuesday night, Lang took a few seconds to give his new audience a digital nod with a message most of us follower-hoarding Twitter users can only dream of writing one day:

S/O to my 90k new followers.

â€" TJ Lang (@TJLang70) September 26, 2012

At the start of Monday night’s game, Lang had just more than 20,000 followers. At time of writing, he had 116,000. If you’ve been living under a rock â€" or just taking extreme lengths to avoid pro football’s larger-than-ever penetration of the national conversation â€" here’s what happened in between:

The Packers lost the game after last-second Hail Mary pass by Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson was ruled a touchdown by one referee and judged an interception by another. Replays showed the interception call should have stood, but the pass was called a touchdown and Seattle won amid much controversy.

SEE ALSO: On Facebook, NFL Can’t Decide What to Do About Controversial Ending

Immediately, fans, media and other NFL players on Twitter decided the play to be a moment of historic ignominy and a tipping point in the NFL’s ongoing labor dispute with its regular officials’ union. Under-qualified replacement officials culled from the boondocks of organized football have overseen the NFL preseason and first three weeks of the regular season.

Just minutes after the game ended, Lang wrote his viral tweet. This is it:

Got fucked by the refs.. Embarrassing. Thanks nfl

â€" TJ Lang (@TJLang70) September 25, 2012

Forty minutes later, Lang fired off this tweet:

Fuck it NFL.. Fine me and use the money to pay the regular refs.

â€" TJ Lang (@TJLang70) September 25, 2012

The next day, Lang returned to Twitter to say he stood by his original messages, but had just one point of contrition. “Only thing I regret from my tweets are the F bombs,” he wrote. “Sorry bout that.”

Despite Lang’s lukewarm apology, there’s a lesson here for athletes on Twitter: Raw honesty pays off in social media. To be sure, keeping it too real can go wrong, but candid thoughts and access to athletes’ minds and experiences during transcendent moments are what makes Twitter a treat for sports fans in the first place. And Lang’s not the only one to astronomically add followers by taking off all filters; NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski gained more than 100,000 in less than two hours when he live-tweeted photos from the Daytona 500 after an explosion and fire on the racetrack.

Were Lang’s tweets awesome to you, or should he have exercised a little more self-restraint? Give us your take in the comments.

Read More

Protect Your Data With a Personal Cloud

This article is brought to you by Western Digital. Western Digital’s My Book Live â€" a personal cloud solution â€" lets you store up to 3 TB of photos, videos, music and files, and access them from anywhere on your tablet, smartphone, PC or Mac. For more information about BrandSpeak, click here.

Surpassing earthly boundaries, digital data storage has set up shop in the firmament. “The Cloud” is an increasingly popular term for remote data centers, usually with astronomical storage capacity, which people can access via the Internet using their various devices.

Attempting to mimic the convenience of cloud computing, new technology allows people to set up a “personal cloud” on their home networks. Let’s backtrack and first take a moment to talk about the “public” cloud.

The Public Cloud

The cloud refers to anything from Dropbox, a storage space for personal files, to Netflix, a reservoir of movies and TV shows people can stream to their computers, tablets and phones. Internet giants like Google, Apple and Facebook all offer various forms of cloud services, which is often referred to as third-party data storage because the company that is hosting the data is separate from the entity that owns the data and the entity accessing it.

Based on private analysis, Gartner Inc., a technology research firm, believes cloud computing will continue to grow precipitously going forward.

“The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users’ digital life,” the report concluded.

The popularity of the cloud stems from convenience and reliability. Conveniently, one can access his or her files anywhere the Internet is available. In addition, the cloud is reliable as a way to back up data. With traditional storage methods such as on a home computer or external hard drive, there is a risk of hardware failure, like when your computer breaks or you drop your external hard drive or iPod. As you might imagine, a cloud is significantly more difficult to destroy, and it’s a safe place for your data.

The Personal Cloud

Sharing is at the heart of cloud computing. Cloud services provide smart and easy-to-use channels to selectively make files available to friends, family and colleagues.

On the downside, security and privacy are serious concerns many have with sending data into the digital stratosphere. What are those companies doing with all that data you are sending to them anyway? Maybe they are using the information to build a marketing profile that they will turn around and sell to advertising companies.

Enter the personal cloud, a piece of hardware that works with your wireless router. When configured, the device automatically saves data from home computers, tablets, phones and game consoles onto a localized cloud. The data can be accessed by any device within the wireless network â€" like your smartphone, tablet and laptop â€" and outside of the network through mobile apps. The basic hardware starts at around $150 for 1TB of storage, and prices increase with storage capacity.

SEE ALSO: 7 Ways Your Family Can Get More Out of the Cloud

The personal cloud, like its public counterpart, can be a great tool for families. It is a convenient way to have a centralized location for pictures, videos and songs, stored right in your own home. Also, it allows for the peace of mind of having data automatically backed up in a safe, secure and nearby location, without having to wonder whether or not third parties have access to your private and personal information.

When it comes to digital data storage, unlike weather, a cloudy horizon may not be foreboding. Thanks to the convenience of cloud computing, the days of toting around disks and drives (both floppy and hard) will soon be as out-of-date as yesterday’s iPhone.

Image courtesy of Flickr, lennysan

Read More

Inside Adidas and Derrick Rose’s Digital ‘Return’

If you’re a sports fan who spends much time on the Internet, chances are high you’ve come across something called “The Return of D. Rose.” It’s a series of web videos, produced by Adidas, that chronicle the return of star point guard and sneaker pitchman Derrick Rose from a major knee injury.

Last week, we did a short rundown of how the player and brand have used the web to turn misfortune into great marketing. More recently, we caught up with Ryan Morlan, Adidas’ director of marketing for basketball, for the inside story behind the digital-first campaign.

A star sneaker endorser going down with a serious injury would typically be a brand’s worst-case senario. But Morlan says an “overwhelming” outpouring of support for Rose from fans on social media created a unique opportunity perfectly suited for the digital age.

As Rose worked his way back way to playing shape, Morlan says, “we felt a responsibility to let fans feel like they’re a part of this process.”

Rose tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the first game of last season’s playoffs. Voted the 2011 NBA MVP, he has his own line of shoes as Adidas’ biggest basketball name.

He plays for the Chicago Bulls, was a high school phenom in the same city, and is generally regarded as one of the league’s brightest and most humble young stars. In a recent clip that’s gone viral among sports fans, Rose sobs at a press conference while thanking his fans and family and juxtaposing his own success with the violence that plagues his hometown.

SEE ALSO: How ‘Uncle Drew’ Went from Viral YouTube Hit to NBA Finals Ad [VIDEO]

Morlan says a social media emphasis was an easy choice for “The Return” campaign, given how much player and brand wanted to make sure Rose’s fans felt connected. The YouTube platform and serialized mini-doc format provided a perfect opportunity to give fans access to footage not seen anywhere else and break the story into digital-sized chunks.

“You cannot deny the power and reach of YouTube, especially with a teenage basketball player,” Morlan says. “And we knew there was this threshold of about a three-minute attention span with the consumer. We wanted to give you content you could see, feel good about and then hopefully continue the conversation on Twitter.”

In the month since the campaign launched, three installments of what will eventually be a six-part documentary plus a couple promotional spots have gained a total of more than 3.3 million YouTube views. The first two documentary installments are over a million views apiece.

The release of each new video â€" which typically run about three minutes and feature a mix of candid interviews, dramatic music and intimate rehab footage â€" inspires a wave of buzz on Twitter among basketball fans and regularly inspires fan tweets such as this one:

#TheReturn is inspiring knowing something like a career threatening injury cant stop someone. @drose

â€" ⇦Anthony ツ♪♬♬ (@Baster_mated) September 20, 2012

Ryan says that feedback on Twitter is essential to achieving the campaign’s goal of making fans feel included in Rose’s return. At the end of each video, fan tweets are displayed and the external website aggregates tweets and Instagram photos from around the world that feature the hashtag #TheReturn.

The final three installments of “The Return” will run over the next month and lead into the start of the NBA season. The series’ first episode is embedded above, and you can check out other videos here. On a lighter note, meanwhile, you won’t want to miss this awesome mashup of “The Return” with a trailer for “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Do you think YouTube mini-docs can grow as marketing tools? What are some of the best examples you’ve seen? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Read More

AOL’s Awesome Social Video Game is Like ‘Taboo With Friends’

If you like the board game Taboo, you’ll love AOL’s new mobile social game, Clucks.

If you’re not familiar with Taboo, it’s a card game where you have a limited amount of time to describe a word to your teammate. The catch is you can’t use the word itself, or a selection of additional words on the card.

Clucks [iTunes link] modernizes that concept for the world of smartphones, video and social gaming. Think of it as “Taboo With Friends.”

The iPhone game works like this:

You are given a word to describe, along with a list of other words that you cannot say. Then you have 12 seconds to describe the word on video, taken with your phone’s camera.

The next part is where the game gets awesome. AOL has embedded Nuance’s voice recognition technology into the app, and it scans your video to make sure you didn’t say any of the forbidden words. If you’re caught cheating, you get penalized.

Your friend then watches your recording and has a limited amount of time to guess the right answer. Your opponents’ reactions are recorded, and you can see their reactions on playback on the next turn. It’s pretty cute.

AOL has teamed up with Viddy to allow users to post their reactions or clues to the social video site. This is the first time that Viddy has allowed publisher access to its API.

The game is incredibly addictive. I had a blast with the pre-release version this week. It’s the perfect kind of mobile social game, since it can be played asynchronously â€" yet you still get to feel like you’re playing with another human being.

The theme of the game is barnyard animals, hence the title Clucks and the appearance of roosters, chickens and donkeys.

According to Sol Lipman, VP of AOL’s mobile first division, that’s because everyone on his team has a barnyard animal obsession.

AOL’s Push for Mobile

When I spoke to Limpan about the game, I told him I was surprised to see this kind of content from AOL. Sure, the media company has drifted into the mobile space â€" notably with its Editions social reading app â€" but this is certainly a new avenue for the company.

Lipman says that the goal of the app is not just to let AOL break into the mobile gaming space, but to focus on social video. This is a subject near and dear to Lipman’s heart.

Prior to joining AOL (via the acquisition of his startup, Rally Up), Lipman co-founded 12seconds.tv â€" basically Viddy and Social Cam, but circa 2009, before everyone had phones with video cameras.

He sees gaming as a place where social video can really take off, especially in the turn-based realm. One of the limiting factors of traditional social games, he points out, is the lack of human interaction.

It doesn’t hurt that video is the perfect fit for a game like Clucks.

Lipman says that Clucks is just the start for the Mobile First division at AOL and that his team has other projects in the pipeline.

Making Money

Lots of people are in the mobile social gaming space, but very few are making money off the game. Most of the time, the revenue model is built-around in-app ads, in-app purchase and promoted game elements.

For Clucks, AOL is not going to have advertising in the game â€" not in the traditional sense. That means no pop-ups, no ad banners, no video pre-roll.

Instead, the goal is the goal is to partner with advertisers to create organic tie-ins within the game itself.

Sony Pictures is a launch partner for Clucks. The studio will promote films in Bonus Rounds of the games, by having actors from those projects describe a word.

“We wanted to make it as complimentary to the game as possible,” Lipman said.

This offers better value for advertisers too â€" the more natural the integration, the more users might pay attention to the message.

Of course, for this strategy to work, Clucks will need a large user base. Having spent some time with the game, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.

Other Thoughts

One of the nice surprises to the game is that it supports the new iPhone 5 screen. Lipman told me the team was hard at work creating new assets as soon as the iPhone 5 was announced, ensuring it would be ready for launch.

I also really like the way Viddy is integrated into the game. Players can earn additional coins â€" which can let them do things like “try again at guessing a clue” â€" by sharing their reactions to Viddy. But it doesn’t feel forced.

Is it the next Draw Something? I have no idea. For now, however, it’s something I can certainly see myself playing in my down time.

Clucks is free and available for the iPhone. What do you think of the game? Let us know in the comments.

Read More

Register to Vote for Internet Freedom

Would the fight for Internet freedom get you to vote? That’s the hope of a new voter registration drive labeled “Internet Votes.”

Launched today, the initiative has been organized by the Center For Rights and Fight For The Future. The two non-partisan advocacy groups organized some of the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) as well as the Internet Defense League.

With this new initiative they hope to make Internet freedom a more prominent issue in this year’s presidential election. Through InternetVotes.org you can quickly register to vote and the website also provides code to include a widget on your website to get more people to register. The website also encourages netizens to use the hashtag #internetvotes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy group, featured the initiative in a Monday night blog post titled “Stop the Next SOPA and CISPA: Register to Vote for Internet Freedom.” In a phone interview with Mashable, the author of the blog post, Trevor Timm, said that people showed how much they care at the beginning of the year with the massive protests against SOPA. Also, according to him, if either party really came out with a strong stance on consumer rights regarding personal data protection, “they could really get somewhere with voters.”

In the post Timm suggests that by voting and supporting Internet freedom netizens could get to help pass key legislation. The EFF activists highlighted three key issues.

First, patent reform. Rep. DeFazio proposed a bill that “would fix much of the broken patent system that is engulfing giant tech companies in billion dollar patent suits and paralyzing up-and-coming companies with legal costs,” wrote Timm.

The second issue is email privacy. As it stands right now, emails don’t enjoy 4th Amendment protections like regular mail. That means that law-enforcement agencies don’t need a warrant to access your electronic conversations. Currently both the House and the Senate are discussing bills to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. In the Senate the fix was proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy and is attached to the reform of the old Video Privacy Protection Act. If approved, it would require law-enforcement agencies to obtain a search warrant to obtain data stored in the cloud, including emails. This change would be in accordance with a federal appeals court that ruled in 2010 that emails should indeed be protected.

SEE ALSO: Iran Blocks Google in Preparation for Domestic Internet

Recently, senators decided to delay discussion on the proposal after the National Sheriff’s Association asked to reconsider “until a more comprehensive review of its impact on law enforcement investigations is conducted.”

Lastly, Timm referred to the GPS Act, which would force police to obtain a warrant to get cellphone location data. Noting that authorities demanded cellphone users’ information more than 1.3 million times last year, Timm thinks that your smartphone is “one of the most privacy invasive tools out there,” and accessing your geo-location data should be protected by the 4th amendment.

Personal Democracy Media announced its collaboration in the initiative on Sept. 19, with a blog post penned by Micah Sifry on TechPresident. Referring to a new study that shows Facebook can increase voter turnout, Sifry underlined the power of social media and the importance of voting. “If you’re an Internet user,” he wrote, “you’re already pretty familiar with the need to register to use your favorite websites. And you’re also probably voting pretty often on those sites, by rating things or upvoting links. So why not make sure you’re registered to vote on the most important site of all â€" your polling place on Election Day?”

After the January 18 protests against the two controversial bills that made Wikipedia blackout and Google put a black banner on its logo, Internet freedom has never been as popular as it is now. Both Democrats and Republicans have included calls for freedom online in their platforms.

It’s unclear what this commitment to Internet freedom will actually mean and what particular policies the two parties support. “I think the wording it’s vague for a reason,” Timm told Mashable. For him, both parties wanted to capitalize on citizen’s concerns, but “they are not specific enough for voters.”

With the Internet Votes initiative, online freedom advocates hope to change that.

Do you think Internet freedom is an important issue in the presidential election? Are you going to vote with that in mind? Tell us in the comments.

Read More

‘XCOM’ Reboot Will Thrill Die-Hard Fans and Noobs

If you’re a fan of high-level strategy games and want to kick alien butt Will Smith-style, you’ll be excited to play XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The game, out in two weeks for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, is a reboot of X-COM: UFO Defense, a 1994 strategy classic gamers still reminisce about. The new game, like the original, is made by Firaxis, and will be published by 2K Games.

Aliens have invaded Earth, and a shadowy council has organized the world’s major powers into XCOM (Extraterrestrial Combat Unit) to fight the global siege. If you fail, the planet is toast, so you’d better put your strategizing hat on.

Mashable spent some quality time with Enemy Unknown on the Xbox 360, and it has high potential to satisfy fans of the series and those entirely new to the franchise.

Good for Strategy Newbies

If you aren’t very familiar with turn-based strategy games, Enemy Unknown is ready for you. You’re quickly dropped into the action with a small squad, and the game takes you step-by-step through setting up your troops, finding cover, and shooting a variety of weapons all without dragging you through a burdensome tutorial.

The game absolutely rewards strategic decisions, and doesn’t allow you to run headlong into a fight without really feeling the repercussions. Each soldier’s route is clearly laid as you move them, so you can see if you are running them past danger or if your cover is protective enough. You can gauge almost every decision on statistics, and decide what weapons to use from there.

The fighting is really satisfying and flows well. You are given so many ways to use your squad, especially given the variety of terrain you’ll fight on. Soldiers can run in and out of buildings, and use the roof to take down aliens with a sniper or a rocket launcher. Your squad can also play more defensively thanks to a function called “overwatch,” which allows you to spend turn actions waiting for an enemy to come in range or out of cover so you can fire on it.

The most important thing the game drills into your head early is that the soldiers you send out for missions aren’t a nameless, expendable force. You’ll need to keep them alive so you can promote them, and train them with new skills. It’s all part of the broad asset management system that takes the game to the next strategic level.

More Than One Game

XCOM: Enemy Unknown doesn’t stop at the battlefield, though. Your base can also provide hours of potential gameplay. Once you arrive, you’re greeted with a view referred to as “the ant farm” â€" a bisected version of your base where you can voyeuristically watch your staff doing their jobs.

You’ll use your base to level up almost everything. You can promote and train soldiers in the barracks, research the alien technologies you’ve collected in the lab, and build new equipment in the engineering room. The number of staff you allocate to those posts determines how quickly you can accomplish objectives, because new equipment is vital to winning battles on the ground.

You’re also given a screen showing the levels of distress of XCOM member nations as they are attacked by aliens. If you let any of those countries boil over, they’ll leave the alliance, and you need their resources. But you also have to weigh that against what countries are offering the best rewards for your help. As you can see, every action has a consequence, and you can take wildly different paths during each playthrough.

The game content doesn’t stop there, because Enemy Unknown also offers a multiplayer mode for a 1-versus-1 battle. Players can pick human or alien soldiers to fill out their squads, then outfit them with weapons based on a certain point buy. Players can even save dream teams for future matches. Playing versus another person wasn’t something available in the original titles, but it allows players to really experiment with unique play styles against their friends.

Reliving Nostalgia

For fans of the series, the refresh should be welcome, and all the improvements made to the game seem to add to its depth. After playing on a console controller, I think I would probably prefer the accuracy of a mouse and keyboard for this game, which makes sense for a strategy title. Some of the console controls seemed a little loose or non-intuitive, but that can also be attributed to only playing for an hour and a half.

The free demo of XCOM: Enemy Unknown is available on Steam, and a console version will follow. If you want to relive your nostalgia, or compare the gameplay of the two, X-COM: UFO Defense is also available on Steam for $4.99. The full version of the game is out Oct. 9.

Are you excited to play XCOM: Enemy Unknown? Let us know in the comments.

Read More

7 Reasons Some Entrepreneurs Don’t Meet Their Potential

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

No one ever said being an entrepreneur is easy. Creating your own business and career path is tough â€" and succeeding in this lifestyle seems to require an elusive mix of traits.

After all, most of the entrepreneurs I know are intelligent. They are hardworking and usually at the top of their given field. However, all too often I’ve watched these smart people go from thriving in the workplace to struggling as a business owner.

There are numerous reasons why some entrepreneurs make it big, while others flounder. Here are seven key reasons why some entrepreneurs fail to live up to their potential.

1. They Don’t Have a Passion for Running a Business

Passion is usually not in short supply with entrepreneurs; however, this doesn’t mean that all entrepreneurs have a passion for what’s needed. Many times, people have tremendous passion for their product, service or technology â€" but this doesn’t necessarily translate into a passion for managing a company. Running a business doesn’t just mean developing a product; it takes sales, dealing with customers (and investors), finding partners, managing employees, vendors and more.

2. They Need to Please

Kindness is a wonderful trait â€" and one that we need more of in business today. However, a relentless need to please can be detrimental to the entrepreneur. People with this tendency often overextend themselves in the workplace and bend over backwards for others. In short, it’s hard to achieve your own goals when you’re constantly focused on trying to make everyone else in the room happy.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you’ll need to recognize the difference between being generous (i.e. wanting to help a customer or colleague) and wanting to avoid conflict and disappoint others.

3. They Can’t Work Without a Playbook

When you run your own business, you call the shots. This can be both a blessing and a curse. To thrive in this environment, you’ll need to feel comfortable navigating some unchartered (and often rocky) waters. You’ll need to be confident making decisions on the fly and setting your own course without any instructions. If these aren’t your strengths right now, you’ll need to learn them pretty fast.

4. They Fear Failure

If you’re scared of failing, you’re probably playing it too safe as an entrepreneur. Fear of failure is one of the strongest forces holding people back from their potential. If you fall into this category, you’ve learned that it’s easier to slide along with the status quo than to take that important first step.

But for successful entrepreneurs, failure is practically a rite of passage. In business, like in life, there are valuable lessons to be learned in each failure. And a failure in one business venture is far from the final conclusion to the overall story. If you find yourself nervous about what might happen, think about all the opportunities and possibilities you leave behind by not ever trying. Trying (no matter what’s the outcome) is your first step toward success.

5. They’re Overloaded With Busywork

With all of today’s digital chatter, it’s easier than ever to lose control of one’s schedule and goals. After all, we’re bombarded with emails, tweets, and phone calls â€" each one expecting a real-time response. In this environment, one could spend an entire day doing a lot, while accomplishing very little.

Savvy entrepreneurs know how to stay focused on their priorities in the face of these distractions. They understand how to manage and lead their time, rather than simply react to issues and requests as they come in.

6. They Can’t Get Past Temporary Disappointment

When you’re passionate about what you do, it’s hard not to take each rejection personally. And entrepreneurs get a lot of bad news … rejection from investors or an incubator program, a lost sale or a lackluster blog review. If you spend time dwelling on the rejection or feeling bitter, you’re just wasting your time. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you’ll need to learn how to take each rejection as an opportunity to learn, as well as realize that it’s not the twenty “no’s” but that one “yes” that matters.

7. They Care More About the Product Than Their Customers

Don’t get me wrong, it’s critically important to be passionate about whatever product or service your company provides. However, a successful company is even more passionate about solving customer needs. To make it as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to stay focused on your customers … what are they looking for, what would help them, and how can you make a difference. By being too inwardly focused on your own products, you may miss out on key opportunities in the market.

Last but not least, being an entrepreneur is not easy. You’ve got to feel strongly about what you’re doing and enjoy the ride (including the ups and downs).

---

More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum

---

- Marketing to Women? Keep These 3 Facts in Mind
- Everything You Need to Know About Foursquare’s New Merchant Tools
- How to Master Social Media Like a Famous Comedian

Images courtesy of Flickr tambako,

Read More

Graph Databases: The New Way to Access Super Fast Social Data

Emil Eifrem is the founder of the Neo4j graph database project and CEO of Neo Technology, the world’s leading graph database. Emil is an internationally recognized thought leader in new database technology, having spoken at conferences in three continents.

Until the NOSQL wave hit a few years ago, the least fun part of a project was dealing with its database. Now there are new technologies to keep the adventuresome developer busy. The catch is, most of these post-relational databases, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Riak, are designed to handle simple data. However, the most interesting applications deal with a complex, connected world.

A new type of database significantly changes the standard direction taken by NOSQL. Graph databases, unlike their NOSQL and relational brethren, are designed for lightning-fast access to complex data found in social networks, recommendation engines and networked systems.

Pancake, for example, which is Mozilla’s next-generation browser project, uses a graph database to store browsing history in the cloud, since the web is just one big graph.

Graph theory dates back to 1735, when Leonard Euler solved the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem by devising a topology consisting of nodes and relationships to answer the then-famous question, “Is it possible to trace a walk through the city that crosses every bridge just once?” Graph theory has since found many uses, but only recently has it been applied to storing and managing data.

It turns out that graphs are a very intuitive way to represent relationships between data.

Think back to your earliest whiteboard graphing session. Traditionally, the developer would hand this off to a DBA, and if she were lucky, would receive a database one month later and start coding. This is because the relational model is tabular, and it takes both time and expertise to represent non-tabular data in a tabular format.

Graph databases let you represent related data as it inherently is: as a set of objects connected by a set of relationships, each with its own set of descriptive properties. With a graph database, the developer can start coding immediately, because the data stored in the database directly parallels the whiteboard representation.

Development agility is handy, but it wouldn’t amount to anything without nose-bleeding speed. A recent benchmark took a “friends of friends” query (which finds all of the immediately adjacent nodes and progresses outward one level at a time) and compared performance between a relational database to a graph database. With a query depth of three, the graph database ran over 150 times faster. With a query depth of four, the graph database was over 1,000 times faster.

The reason for this vast difference in performance lies in how data and relationships are stored inside the database. Native graph databases use a technique called “index-free adjacency.” In simple terms, this means that each data element points directly to its inbound and outbound relationships, which in turn, point directly to related nodes, and so on. This technique allows million of related records to be traversed per second.

Relational databases, on the other hand, need to carry out a number of steps to determine whether and how things are connected, and then to retrieve related data records. Response times slow down as a relational database grows in volume, which causes problems as a business grows. However with a graph database, traversal speed remains constant, not depending on the total amount of data stored. This allows the database to naturally keep up with one’s business as it grows.

To understand a graph database, it helps to envision at how data is represented inside a relational database, like Oracle’s or MySQL’s. Two invariant concepts in the world of relational databases are: 1) the structure of the data is determined ahead of time, and 2) data structures are tabular.

Graph databases differ in that the data is the structure. This provides a level of flexibility and resilience that is a great match for today’s fast-moving business and agile development methods.

The data representation also differs fundamentally. Graph databases represent data as “things” (or nodes) and relationships between things. This comes much closer to the way we think about complex systems.

Relational databases are great if you’re storing tabular data. But surprisingly â€" or maybe not so surprisingly â€" much of the real world is not a table. Things can start getting really complex if you try to turn, for example, a biological system, a social network or the web into a set of tables.

Some of the best-known uses of graph databases include Google’s Knowledge Graph, Facebook’s Social Graph and Twitter’s Interest Graph.

However, graphs aren’t just for the Internet giants anymore. Word is starting to get out. A few of the commercial uses that we are seeing with graph databases include:

• Social Networking and Recommendations: We’ve seen a few social network startups begin with relational and learn very quickly that, as they scaled, they needed to move over to a graph database. Most large/successful social networks use graph databases at their core. Graph database provide exceptional power insofar as they can recommendation algorithms.
• Network and Cloud Management: A number of telephone companies are using graph databases to model their networks, in support of network optimization activities and to conduct “what if” failure analysis.
• Master Data Management: Cisco recently deployed a new hierarchy management system that handles complex master data, such as organization and product. Because of the flexibility and performance advantages over relational, this system is built on top of a graph database.
• Geospatial: The “original” graph use case pioneered by Euler remains alive today. Mobile cell analysis, shortest-path analysis and logistics are three such use cases (among many) where graph databases are currently in use.
• Bioinformatics: Era7 Bioinformatics uses graph databases to relate a complex web of information that includes genes, proteins and enzymes.
• Content Management and Security and Access Control: Adobe’s Creative Cloud uses a graph database to manage access to content and the relationships between users, groups, assets and collections. Telenor, one of the world’s largest telcos, brought its login time down from minutes to milliseconds by moving the part of its relational system that handled access control over to a graph database.

While we’re certainly not predicting the demise of traditional databases anytime soon, we are seeing an increasing number of applications where graph databases are being used to accelerate development and massively speed up performance. Relational databases are great when it comes to relatively static and predictable tabular data.

The complexities and dynamics of the real world, however call, for new methods. This is particularly true when the world is moving at the speed of web, and everybody is racing to get ahead of everybody else. Intricate and complex processes like human behavior, as well as dynamic interconnected systems, such as those found in nature and on the web, tend to be less static and predictable, and are ideal candidates for graph databases.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, woraput, Flickr, Jason Michael, Marc_Smith

Read More

Will Twitter Replace Your Follower Count?

There are two kinds of Twitter users: those who pay close attention to their follower counts, and those who are lying.

Okay, that’s not quite accurate. (It doesn’t account for the vast swathe of inactive Twitter users who aren’t paying attention at all.) But it’s not far from the truth, is it? Even non-sentient spambot accounts spend their time trying to gain as many followers as possible.

The Twitter follower count has become, in effect, the most played videogame on the planet. It’s a game few of us will admit to playing, or talk about in public, or even tweet about. But we’re playing it nonetheless.

When you’re trying to decide whether to follow someone on Twitter, does their number of followers factor in your decision (ie. if they have a lot, they must be worth following)? Do you ever sneak a look at friends’ or co-workers’ pages to see who has more followers, you or them? Have you ever tweeted something purely in the hopes of getting more followers via retweets? Have you watched closely as you zero in on a milestone, such as your first 1,000 followers?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you, my friend, are playing the game too. And now Twitter may be thinking about changing the rules altogether.

SEE ALSO: Former Twitter CEO Says Network Needs a Better Metric Than Follower Count

“The dream metric is really how many people see your tweet,” Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said at an event Monday night. That was in response to a question about whether Twitter should remove inactive and spam followers from your total, and simply list the number of active followers.

“I would endorse that … I think that’s a great idea,” Williams said, before proposing his alternate retweet metric as an even better idea. The former CEO remains on Twitter’s board.

If Williams is talking about it, you can guarantee the idea has been frequently batted around at Twitter HQ. The sheer weight of fake and inactive followers is not great for the company’s image. Even the @Twitter account itself has 33% fake followers, according to one count.

Every time a news story shows up with inactive followers in the headline, you can almost hear CEO Dick Costolo wincing. This time last year, GOP candidate Newt Gingrich was battling accusations that 92% of his followers were non-human. The truth turned out to be somewhat more nuanced. But it kicked off an endless round of stories about politicians and celebrities with masses of fakes in their flocks.

SEE ALSO: Obama Has Millions of Fake Twitter Followers

Option 1: Real Followers for Real People.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea, in theory, for Twitter to remove inactive users from their counts. The company already highlights the active user metric whenever it wants to update us on how many people are on Twitter, and tends to hide the total number.

The latest active user count, back in March: 140 million. An unofficial count of total Twitter users, including the fakes: half a billion.

So why not walk the talk when it comes to individual users? Because, to put it politely, the feces would really hit the rotator blades. Many of Twitter’s most prominent users would lose a third to a half of their followers; maybe more.

Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, two of Twitter’s most-followed users, would both see their counts drop by 70%. Mitt Romney wouldn’t fare much better, with a 50% drop. If Twitter did this before the election, it would be headline news across the planet, and the company would be accused of stepping into the race.

But any time it did it, the company would have to be fully braced for the impact. Think about it: 140 million people wake up one day with their videogame score changed by the referees. Your co-worker suddenly has more followers than you. Your favorite celebrity is having a meltdown. In the cacophony that follows, does anyone really hear the ref saying this system is more fair?

Option 2: The Retweet Metric.

Williams’ “dream metric” was deliberately vague. “How many people see your tweet” could mean a lot of things. How many times you’ve been retweeted ever, or in the last year? How many people have certifiably seen it, clicked on it, followed a link? Some algorithm that measures your influence on Twitter, like a Klout score?

One thing it would certainly mean: a rapid rise in retweeting, as those 140 million players once again attempt to game the system. It would also mean a rapid rise in users urging you to RT them.

If you’re already sick of tweets that start “RT if you agree!”, then Twitter may well become unreadable. Perhaps the algorithm needs to be smart enough to mark you down for indiscriminate retweet begging.

Option 3: All of the Above.

Twitter could also start to de-emphasize the follower count, by hiding it in plain sight. It could add those other metrics â€" retweets and active followers â€" right next to the regular count on your profile page.

There are a couple of problems with that approach, though. The first is that it would be almost as bad as simply replacing your follower count with active followers. It’s not like people can’t do the math, especially when there’s a videogame score at stake.

The rough number of fakes in your following could be calculated at a glance. Active followers would become the default metric anyway â€" and if your total follower count is significantly larger, that would be socially embarrassing in itself. Total followers could well become a negative score.

Secondly, a company that sees Apple as a mentor is not likely to want to clutter up its design with any more elements. You have three numbers that tell the story of your account: your tweets, the people you’re following, who follows you. Anything more and the page starts to look like a NASA mission control dashboard.

How would you solve Twitter’s follower count problem? Give us your take in the comments.

Read More

How Microsoft Re-Invented Office for Touch, Social and the Cloud

The Tech Innovators Series is presented by Lenovo. Lenovo does not just manufacture technology. They make Do machines -- super-powered creation engines designed to help the people who do, do more, do better, do in brand new ways.

In tech, apps come and go. Anyone working in publishing in the 1990s and early 2000s saw Aldus PageMaker give way to QuarkXPress, which eventually ceded to Adobe InDesign. No matter how good any app may be at a given time, technology doesn’t stop advancing, which in turn changes people’s needs. That opens up opportunities for more nimble competitors to win over customers with apps that better serve those needs.

Until recently, Microsoft Office has been fairly immune to this cycle. It’s been a mainstay of productivity software for more than 20 years â€" if you’ve worked with electronic documents at all, chances are you’re more than familiar with it.

However, the rise of mobile devices and cloud computing allows competitors to chip away at the office empire. Many people now turn to free and mobile-friendly alternatives, like Google Drive or QuickOffice for building documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

But there’s a reason Office was the go-to productivity software for more than two decades: Microsoft can adapt. And it’s doing so in a big way for the next version of Office, called Office 2013, which works hand in hand with Windows 8, set for a big debut this fall. Windows 8 re-invents the computing experience for touch screens, social networks and the cloud â€" and the new Office takes full advantage of that modern tech trinity.

“It’s going to start with how people get Office,” says P.J. Hough, Microsoft’s vice president of Office program management. “We’re going to stream Office to every user. We’ve done a lot of work to make the streaming incredibly fast. It’s single-digit minutes to get Office installed and up and running on your computer.”

Office 2013 doesn’t just download once and rest on your computer, either. Hough says the new Office will be as much as service as an app, with continual updates via the network. Microsoft’s also changing the how it sells the software â€" instead of buying it once, users will now subscribe, with different plans for personal and business use.

“It actually changes the relationship with the customer,” Hough says. “Your computer stops owning Office and you personally own Office. If you get a new computer and you’re a subscriber, office goes on the new computer. I go to office.com, I sign in, I say I want Office on this computer and we stream it down.”

The cloud also plays a big role in Office 2013. The default location for all saved documents will now be Microsoft’s cloud-storage service, SkyDrive, so you’ll be able to pick up documents right where you left off when you switch machines. In addition, content-based features that used to be delivered locally, such as document templates for Word and PowerPoint, will now be powered by the cloud.

“We’ve already done a lot of this work with Office 365, our enterprise offering, but this is taking that same cloud-driven view of Office to the consumer” says Hough. “[Office 2013] is backed by relevant services â€" SkyDrive, Skype â€" so we think there’s an equivalent experience that I want as a consumer, that’s online and connected.”

However, Hough stresses that Office 2013 works just as you’d expect when you’re offline. The apps are installed locally, and work will get saved even if you’re off the network and set up to save to SkyDrive.

The re-invented Office also integrates social networks much more closely. While in previous years, social networking may have been looked at as a distraction from productivity, it’s become clear that Microsoft sees the value in being able to easily connect with contacts, colleagues and collaborators.

“Sometimes, the way that I get work done is not by starting work on an artefact, but by finding a person first,” Hough says. “Our acquisition of Yammer is yet more evidence of the merging together of social with productivity. They’re not two separate things. It’s not a waste of time to have a feed that shows you what people are working on or lets you get in touch with people easily.”

It’s Outlook that exhibits Office’s new social abilities the most, calling up a contact’s schedule and recent projects when you address them in an email. But Word and PowerPoint are more social, too, with improved ways to collaborate on documents with better organized footnotes and a streamlined Track Changes feature.

Finally, there was the hardware to consider. The new Office is made to work on both traditional PCs as well as tablets. That includes both full-functioning Windows tablets â€" which will run old Windows 7 apps â€" and the new Windows RT devices, which will come with a free version of Office. However, to unlock many abilities, such as seamless saving to the cloud, you’ll need to subscribe.

The big change in a tablet environment is the inclusion of touch interfaces. PowerPoint, for example, now supports pinch to zoom and typical gestures. The backbone of Office 2013 also benefits from improvements in Windows 8 to make sure apps respond quickly and properly to every tap and swipe.

“We’ve made a bet this time around in Office on graphics hardware acceleration â€" work that the Windows team did in Windows 7 that they’ve really doubled down on in Windows 8,” Hough says. “It’s allowed us to build a set of apps in Office that are responsive and fluid.”

Are all these improvements enough to keep competitors at bay and ensure Microsoft Office dominates for another decade? That’s the plan, and Microsoft has included many new features in Office 2013 â€" such as Excel predicting exactly what table you want and apps that can integrate real-time data â€" that competitors will find tough to match.

Has Office 2013 impressed you? Why? Share your thoughts in the comments.

---

Series presented by Lenovo

---

The Tech Innovators Series is presented by Lenovo. Lenovo makes machines specifically for the innovators. The creators. The people who move the world forward. Machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad, meticulously engineered with visibly smart second-generation Intel® CoreTM processors to help the people who do, do what's never been done.

Read More