The hottest lifestyle startup trends for 2015 take some of the most routine parts of your day and give them a digital makeover. Whether it’s breathing, reading, shaving, doing laundry or getting to know your city better, the next wave of innovations for 2015 are here to help.
This week, the Slush 2014 conference has been showcasing the best and brightest startup ideas. Each year, Slush brings together entrepreneurs, investors, business and political leaders, innovators and dreamers to the Finnish capital Helsinki. Founded in 2008, this was Slush’s biggest extravaganza so far, with more than 1200 entrepreneurs from 80 countries among the 13,000+ attendees: including the Prime Ministers of Finland and Estonia, the Chinese Vice Premier, and scores of C-level business leaders from global corporations.
The opening show of Slush 2014 in Helsinki
Some of the hottest trends emerging this year at Slush were life-enhancing technologies, and here are five that caught my attention:
Beauty & Grooming
“On average, men use six cosmetics products daily like shampoo or shaving foam, and women about 12 cosmetics products daily” says Teppo Hudson, lead mobile developer for Finnish startup Cosmethics. The company’s app lets you scan the barcode of your favourite grooming, beauty and cosmetics products to see if they contain harmful ingredients, and suggests a different, less toxic or damaging product you might want to use instead. “The product ingredients are in Latin, or really hard to understand the chemical names, so we make that easier or transparent” explains Hudson. Cosmethics only launched a few months ago, but has already generated media buzz in Europe. Their initial target customers are likely to be ethical shoppers, or people choosing to buy organic or whole food products. ”We think it’s important for people to know what you’re using in the cosmetics products” says Hudson. The app is free, and Cosmethics makes its profit from the product referral service.
Scan and select your “Cosmethical” products / Credit: Cosmethic
World of Warcraft has once again proven itself the king of MMO hill.
The long-running massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) saw its fifth expansion launch last week, and according to publisher Activision-Blizzard the numbers are looking good.
In the first 24 hours after launch, the expansion sold over 3.3 million copies through to customers. At $49.99 for the Standard and Digital copies (and higher price tiers above that) we’re talking about serious sales, comparable to a full PC release.
The expansion has also helped revitalize World of Warcraft’s flagging subscription numbers. The game was already the king of MMOs, but was dipping into the 7 million range. At 10 million subscribers it’s still well below the glory days of 15 million subscribers. And while it’s the top dog in its genre, other online games like League of Legends are growing fast.
Still, as Paul Tassi reported earlier this summer, in 2013 World of Warcraftstill commanded 36% market share and was bringing in over $1 billion a year.
While the release of Warlords of Draenor has been rocky—Activision-Blizzard has given out free game time as an apology for over-taxed servers—the expansion is still one of the best-selling games of the year. It brings updated character models, a higher level cap, and tons of new content to the table, and it avoids the addition of giant pandas, which many players were unhappy with in the game’s previous expansion.
(Yes, I know they were Pandarens, brewer-monks, which I actually liked, but whatever.)
Warlords of Draenor launched November 13th. It will be interesting to see where subscriber numbers are six months from now. Can the expansion bring people back to the game for long? Is this proof that the subscriber model really can work, at least for established brands?
I think, if nothing more, it’s proof that the subscription model can work for World of Warcraft. It might be viable for a handful of other MMOs—Final Fantasy XIV is doing well apparently—but beyond that the future of the genre is free-to-play. Games like Wildstar and Elder Scrolls: Online face an uphill battle.
I also think the future of MMOs is casual. The next big hit will be the equivalent of Hearthstone. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came from Blizzard.
Everything in our digital universe is connected. Every single day, you wake up and start a series of interactions with people, products and machines. Sometimes, these things influence you, and sometimes you play the role of the influencer. This is how our world is connected, in a network of relationships and influence among people, products and technologies. Understanding connections is the realm of graph analytics and its what’s next in big data.
The better we can understand connected networks, the more knowledge we have to proactively enrich numerous aspects of everyday life and work – to better understand things like traffic patterns, consumer behavior, weather anomalies, and to make predictions about business, crime or disease trends. It is no longer enough just to consider the content of a specific analytic entity, whether that’s a customer or a network; we also have to understand the context of connections between customers and among networks to unlock the insight and value that comes from charting relationships between entities that influence outcomes.
Sounds great, right? So, why hasn’t graph analytics caught on like wildfire, like you’d expect. Typically, the problem has been complexity and scale. As you can imagine, once you move beyond statistical analysis of single entities as they relate to a mean, and start looking at relationships between hundreds, or even thousands of individual entities, the data processing load increases by several magnitudes.
Thus far, graph analytics has been difficult and expensive, requiring specialized systems, unique, hard-to-find skillsets and a patchwork of algorithms to discover these intertwined relationships. And, as a result, the use cases have been relatively limited. But, all that is changing. And, today’s engineered solutions offer a set of advanced, contextual analytics delivered economically and at massive scale on large multi-structured data sets. And, as that happens, these systems for analyzing connections in networks of data will open up new ways of looking at big data, and many new use cases.
Analysis of connections in networks will combine traditional statistics, machine learning and sentiment analysis with influencer analysis to examine customer satisfaction and pinpoint the customers who hold the most influence within a network of people. The ability to track influencers who have the most direct and indirect impact on product purchases can also help inform things like proactive viral marketing campaigns. It will allow companies to detect, in near real-time, the cyber-threats hidden in the flood of diverse data generated from IP, network, server and communication logs – a huge problem, as we know, that exists today.
The ability to track relationships between people, products, processes and other “entities” remains crucial to breaking up sophisticated fraud rings. If you only use a content-based decision model, you can get stuck the minute a fraudster creates a new identity, or changes their behavior. We’ll be able to understand the behavior of connected devices, using sensor data to more efficiently modulate electricity, and power smarter cities. We’ll analyze traffic patterns and driving behaviors, particularly as more connected and self-driving cars start hitting the roadways. In healthcare, providers will be able to quickly scan through network graphs of patients to discover therapies used with other patients with similar characteristics (such as age, clinical history, associated risk factors, etc.) that have the most positive outcomes.
Our own imagination, and those of our data scientists only limit the possibilities when it comes to analyzing relationships and influence among people, products, processes and devices for new insights. As I alluded to earlier, graph analytics is also the future of big data analytics, because everything is connected.
I’d like to think of my new Forbes BrandVoice blog series as a conversation with you about analytics. So let’s start here with the same question that usually comes up at the start of many conversations I have with colleagues, customers, partners and other industry watchers: “How do you define big data, Bill?” Before I share my answer, though, let’s take a quick look at some of the other definitions for “big data” since the term made its debut in 1997.
Most don’t remember, but “big data” was a term coined that year in a scientific article by NASA researchers to describe “the problem of big data” that happens when large visualization files put a strain on computer memory. The term, more or less, incubated for a decade until reports such as a 2008 Computing Community Consortium (CCC) paper on “Big-Data Computing”helped popularize it. The funny thing is, if you take a close look at the reference to big data in the document’s second paragraph you’ll see how even this landmark CCC paper sidesteps an actual definition of the term, and cites examples instead.
There’s been surprisingly little consensus on a definition since then, and today you can still put dozens of the best minds on the case and get a range of definitions. The Berkeley School of Information actually did this, asking 40 thought leaders to convene around the question “What is Big Data.” The answers were all over the map, and I had to laugh at the word cloud generated from all those definitions. My immediate instinct was to find a way – in bold and all caps – to superimpose a giant “WHO CARES?” over the whole tangle of words.
That, by the way, happens to be my answer when people ask, “How do you define big data, Bill?”
WHO CARES?
As someone who makes his living in analytics, why in the world would I say that? The reason is simple. The goal should be to solve a business problem by using new analytics, not to worry about defining a term. That’s because definitions are a distraction from the simple question of “Does this data contain information that is valuable for my business?”
In other words, “What data – if collected, organized and used within an analytics process – would improve the answers that we are able to generate to solve our problem?” And I’ve written before how the answer to this question has absolutely nothing to do with the definition of big data. It could be big data, small data or a bunch of spreadsheets. By the time an organization is at the moment of realizing that it must make use of something resembling big data, it’s too late to worry about the definitions. The data is needed; it’s valuable; you’ve got to figure out how to make use of it.
In fact, “Value” is what is described as the “fourth V” to go along with the famous “Volume, Variety, Velocity” framework that Gartner developed for understanding big data (and Gartner’s is just one of several big data descriptions from influential organizations). But, I would go even further, and elevate value as the Uber-V that determines everything else. The only reason to worry about the other characteristics is because they govern your efforts to collect and analyze the right data you’ve determined as potentially valuable.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. For some businesses, most of the data they’re dealing with fits the archetypal definitions of big data. In this case, the data itself will certainly influence the tools and techniques the organization must use to incorporate big data into its analytics processes. The important distinction here is that the choice of tools and techniques is a tactical issue in service of the initial strategic question: “Is the information this data contains important to my business?” Once that question is answered, an organization must do what it takes to put the data to work. Any formal definitions of big data become irrelevant, after-the-fact labels.
So, don’t get overburdened trying to understand what qualifies as big data and what doesn’t. While defining big data is an interesting academic exercise, frankly it’s a waste of time and even a bit silly if your goal is to solve a business problem. Nobody will care about your definitions; they’ll only care about your results.
Luckily, you don’t necessarily need massive new investment in tools and technology to create a high-performing analytics ecosystem for your business. Sometimes a few changes to policy and access around data can get you there with what you already have. In my next blog, I’ll serve up a non-traditional example to show how that can happen.
Earlier this week Facebook launched a new application. Facebook Groups gives you access to the groups you manage or are a member of. As well as resurfacing an old community mainstay, the return of Groups as a standalone app can be seen as a defensive move for Facebook, ensuing that start-ups in a similar field gain less traction.
Groups on Facebook used to be a really (really) big thing, but they were somewhat overtaken by Pages. Groups never went away, but they remained a touch more inaccessible than more popular features. In part the Groups app (available on iOS and Android) will help expose the feature to Facebook users and potentially introduce it to millions more.
It will also act as fire-break between Facebook and other group-messaging applications. Through a mix of Facebook’s size, limited space on a smartphone’s screen, and doing everything possible to be thought of as ‘first’ in the consumer’s brain, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is going to bring Groups back to life and diminish the prospect of other start-ups and software clients getting a foothold.
Let’s start with the idea of limited space on a smartphone. By this I don’t mean installation size or use of memory in a smartphone, but on icon and widget space. With space for just twenty-four applications on the first screen of an iPhone and a similar number of shortcuts on the primary Android home screens, any application that can reach these first screens will be opened more frequently than those installed at the far end of the app launcher screens.
The trick for Facebook will be to get its app moved up by the user, and this is where the brand name of Facebook will come in useful. It only took me a few days with the standalone Messaging app to move it so it was next to the Facebook app icon on that first screen. I’m sure that Groups will be just as easily promoted (although unlike Messaging, Facebook Groups will continue to be accessible via the main Facebook smartphone app).
CERN’s historic discovery of the elusive Higgs boson — the subatomic particle thought to be at the root of what gives normal matter its mass — may actually represent only a portion of a more complicated and heretofore unexplored particle physics paradigm, say researchers.
After new analysis of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) observations of the Higgs particle, the authors of a paper recently published in the journal Physical Review D crack the door on the possibility that the Higgs particle actually detected by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may not be fundamental (or point-like). Instead, they argue it could be a composite particle made up of two even smaller techni-quarks, bound by a theoretical “Technicolor” force. Yet much of the particle physics community still needs convincing.
In contrast to protons and neutrons that are made up of quark particles, bound by nature’s fundamental strong nuclear force, particle physicists say that the force that would hold such techni-quarks together cannot be one of the existing known forces of nature. That’s because neither gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force nor the strong nuclear force are strong enough to do so.
“[The paper] points out that the particle we discovered at CERN might not turn out to be the simple particle predicted in the Standard Model, but a similar particle predicted by a different theory called Technicolor,” UCLA particle physicist Jay Hauser, now on assignment as a CERN project manager, told Forbes.
An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Here, following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced which decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The key to the Higgs particle is the Higgs field itself which has been compared to “cosmic molasses.” Particles which have mass interact with this unseen field of Higgs particles. And the more mass a given particle has, the more it interacts.
But the Higgs boson has only been measured to a certain precision at the energy levels CERN is currently using. Theorists are quick to point out that there may be more than one Higgs boson or even that the Higgs boson as CERN has currently probed it — at energies of 125 Giga electron Volts (125 GeV), is not sufficiently high to definitively say whether this new particle is composite.
Even so, Mads Toudal Frandsen, one of the study’s co-authors and a particle physicist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, told Forbes it will come as a surprise to some how close the properties of a Techni-Higgs can be to those of CERN’s Higgs particle. He notes that although <span display=”Technicolor remains a “time-honored idea for the origin of mass, it has been abandoned by most of the community.”
“The paper studies CERN findings in the light of a Technicolor Higgs,” said Frandsen. “This paper demonstrates that a Techni-Higgs can look very much like a Standard Model Higgs and thus potentially be what LHC has found.”
Critics of the study outlined in the paper, however, point out that their techni-Higgs arguments are neither provable nor disprovable.
But Frandsen counters their Technicolor specifics and arguments can be proven or disproven by future experiments with the Large Hadron Collider and so-called lattice supercomputer simulations of the Higgs particle’s underlying technical dynamics.
“We are certainly not saying that current LHC data does prove Technicolor as the origin of mass for the elementary particles,” said Frandsen. “But we find that some Technicolor models could plausibly still explain our data. Our arguments can be improved and they can ultimately tested by supercomputer simulations and by LHC experiments.”
To that end, Frandsen notes that he and colleagues are actually currently working with CERN collaborators on strategies to verify or falsify the Technicolor scenario as the origin of mass. He points out that if Technicolor were true, with a sufficiently high energy collider, physicists would be able to see the Techni-quark constituents of the Techni-Higgs — the same way they can see the quark particle constituents of protons.
Hauser says the prospect of confirming a Techni-Higgs makes the idea of taking more data at CERN all the more exciting. He notes that in 2015, the accelerator will produce collisions of protons at higher energy (13 versus 8 trillion electron-volts).
At present, there is still no evidence that the Standard Model needs extending to include a Technicolor scenario, says Darin Acosta, a particle physicist at theUniversity of Florida in Gainesville. That is, Acosta told Forbes, even if the conventional model does leave many unanswered questions, such as the makeup of some 85 percent of mass in the universe, by so-called “non-baryonic” (or exotic) Dark Matter.
Still, Frandsen says at least one such configuration of techni-quarks could explain Dark Matter.
Is there room for Higgs physics beyond the Standard Model?
Although there is room for deviations from the Standard Model, no statistically significant ones have thus far been established, Robert Shrock, a theoretical particle physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Forbes. The bottom line, he says it that CERN’s Higgs-like particle is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson.
As Shrock points out, the LHC experiments test this consistency by measuring the production and decay of the Higgs in a number of different channels to within theoretical and experimental uncertainties. Thus far, all point to the CERN’s discovery being what he terms a “point-like Standard Model Higgs boson.”
When can we expect definitive answers?
“The next 2015 CERN run will be three years long and produce about 10 times as many of the higher-energy collisions as all the data we took during 2010-2012,” said Hauser. “We might discover one or more of the additional particles predicted by Technicolor or maybe something ‘funny’ about the Higgs [itself].”
As organizations look to gain an edge against their competitors, marketing organizations are increasingly being pushed to deliver ever more contextual messages to consumers. One of the areas that marketers personalize messaging is through the use of location-based tools and Adobe is today rolling out some updates to its Marketing Cloud suite to take advantage of new approaches towards location-based marketing.
The idea of the functionality is to allow organizations to tailor marketing messages based on an individual users proximity to iBeacons. Adobe is enabling marketers to deliver location-based messages within applications on a users device – the idea being that engagement, and therefore consumption, will be increased. Location can then be integrated into later email campaigns as a way to deliver specific calls to action for consumers.
Adobe is in a fight for marketing dominance against its primary competitor, Salesforce.com CRM-2.19% and this functionality is another step in a marketing software arms race. Adobe claims that two thirds of the Fortune 50 companies use its marketing cloud suite and that across its customer base some 2.5 trillion mobile transactions are handled annually – CBS Interactive, Wyndham Hotels, Conde Nast and REI are all Adobe customers.
The new functionality being rolled out by Adobe today includes:
In-App Messages: Marketers can create, manage, publish, and measure “in-app” messages to engage with users that interact with apps. The new functionality in Adobe Mobile Services, a core service in Adobe Marketing Cloud, is powered by Adobe Analytics and helps companies promote new content like videos or breaking news and cross promote apps, products, and services to users that have already launched the app. Messages can be triggered by user behaviors, lifecycle metrics, or location data collected from iBeacons. Mobile Services also offer pre-built templates for message types including full-screen banners that can be linked to custom web content, alerts, and local notifications. New in-app messages complement push notifications in Adobe Mobile Services, which are delivered across home screens outside apps
Mobile Campaign Management: The new Digital Content Editor (DCE) in Adobe Campaign allows marketers to create responsive design emails to ensure that emails are rendered appropriately for the device on which they are opened. With DCE, marketers can edit, personalize and preview how the content will look across devices. Adobe is also expanding its iBeacon support by integrating with Adobe Campaign. Using iBeacon interactions, including promotional offers displayed, enables marketers to send personalized follow-up emails to customers based on recent store visits or customer app experiences. Marketers can also use the location data to refine audience segmentation for future campaigns.
Mobile App Management: Developers and marketers can test the performance of apps during the development, production and staging phases and deliver updates across app versions on all major mobile platforms with the new preview app.
Mobile Search Advertising: Adobe Media Optimizer now offers multi-dimensional portfolio modeling. Marketers can use the industry’s first automated Mobile Bid Adjustments (MBAs) to place search ads across mobile devices for the lowest cost at maximum return. MBAs allow marketers to adjust bids in milliseconds based on the targeted device, audience, time-of-day and location using historical data. When calculating the optimal keyword bid, Adobe Media Optimizer takes unique parameters into account such as different conversion rates for retail ad campaigns on tablets and desktops versus smartphones. The new, multi-dimensional portfolio modeling also enables marketers to reliably forecast expected clicks, cost-per-click (CPC) and revenue for search ads by specific devices.
New Adobe Social App: The new, easy-to-use Adobe Social App brings the functionality of Adobe Social from desktops to mobile devices. The new app allows brands to view and manage the companies’ Social activities on the go. Marketers can approve and publish social content like tweets and posts in real-time, upload assets including photos and videos, capture and share ideas with internal teams and more. The app will be available as a beta on iOS and support social activities across Facebook and Twitter TWTR-3.3% first.
It strikes me that the last few years has seen an incredibly high growth in the incidence of consumers using mobile to augment their physical shopping experience. It is the norm now to see consumers inside big box retail outlets using a smartphone to perform price comparisons and check customer reviews of products. To an extent the functionality in the Marketing Cloud is helping organizations “fight back” against the increasing information, and hence competition for consumer dollars.
The future of these mobile marketing initiatives however will be tight integration across the consumer lifecycle– other forms of marketing, historical buying patterns, integration with consumer analytics tools and the like will increasingly become critical as consumers become ever-more savvy and resistant to basic marketing messages and offers. The Adobe Marketing Cloud is a fairly complex beast, and not for the faint hearted – but in order to really deliver the most effective marketing campaigns possible, this level of complexity is a non-negotiable requirement.
Square Enix recently released some new game footage for the upcoming Final Fantasy 15. The focus of this new footage, despite running real-time in-game, is mostly just to show off their new Luminous engine.
This means we don’t get to see any actual gameplay but we do get a sense of the game’s scope (as in rather large), as well as the fact that the increased world size definitely necessitates the use of a car (as seen above).
Tech Demo The tool-set looks decent, especially for an in-house engine. It also has a sensible emphasis on maximizing content creation in order to create large game worlds at scale. The lighting and VFX segments are similarly competent and bode well for the final game, as getting these right is often very difficult. It’s clear that the Luminous engine is competitive thus far, though with a few framerate issues but I’ll get onto that.
Walkthrough This is an actual “walk through” of the game world, rather than an instructional video. So we get to see the game running in a fairly honest way but without anything in the way of real gameplay. However the framerate, while clearly manageable, is a tad sketchy. At this point in development this is actually fairly standard. Most games are optimized once all the content has been finalized, so having a mildly erratic framerate isn’t something to be overly concerned with as yet but definitely something to keep an eye on.
As for the game itself, Final Fantasy 15 will be much more of an action RPG compared to earlier entries (if anything it is expected to be more reminiscent of the Kingdom Hearts games). It will also feature third-person-shooter elements as well.
Nokia's Android powered tablet, the Nokia N1 (image: Nokia.com)
At the Slush conference in Finland today, Nokia announced its next move in the consumer electronics department. The Finnish company, divested of its smartphone and feature phone business, is releasing the N1, a new tablet computer which will be powered by Android.
The N1 is a 7.9 inch tablet with a Gorilla Glass 3 covered IPS panel running at 2048×1536 pixels. The CPU is an Intel Z3580 running at 2.3 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage.
With an eight-megapixel rear camera and a five-megapixel forward facing ‘selfie’ camera (both capable of recording 1080p video), it will be interesting to see if Nokia has retained its legendary imaging capability, or if that knowledge and experience now resides in Redmond.
Weighing 318g, the tablet has comparable specs to other tablets in this space (such as Sony’s recently released Xperia Tablet Z3 Compact, reviewed here on Forbes), and ships with a 5300 mAh battery. The reveal follows a number of teaser images released over the last few days.
Nokia’s Android powered tablet, the Nokia N1 (image: Nokia.com)
Nokia’s sale of its ‘Devices and Services’ business to Microsoft closed earlier this year, and included provisions that prevented Nokia using its brand name on smartphones and feature phones for a set period. There appears to be no restriction on the use of the Nokia name on tablets – an interesting decision given that Nokia had worked on a Windows powered tablet (the Nokia Lumia 2520) before the sale of the division.
In any case Microsoft has moved quickly to remove the Nokia branding from its Lumia handsets, with the recently announced Lumia 535 carrying no Nokia branding at all.
Nokia’s Android powered tablet, the Nokia N1 (image: Nokia.com)
There’s no word on what version of Android the N1 tablet will be using, but there are some pointers on Nokia’s N1 mini-site. The first is the prominent mention of Nokia’s Z Launcher, a UI that looks to learn your favourite applications and choices to present them to you on the home-screen. Previously in beta, the Z Launcher is now available as a free download and will drive the home screen.
Nokia has stated that the N1 will run Android 5.0 Lollipop, but there is no indication if the Finnish company will be using any Google-based services such as Gmail or Google Play. I can’t see any Google-specific app icons in any of the marketing material.
The Finnish company has experience of Android in consumer electronics with the Nokia X handsets released earlier this year. Those handsets were part of the Microsoft deal, so it remains to be seen if the Android fork used in the X handsets will be used in the N1. Just as Nokia’s first Windows Phone handset (the Lumia 800) was manufactured by a third-party (Compal in that case), the tablet is not being manufactured in-house, but by the Taiwan-based Foxconn (reports the FT).
Pricing has been announced as $249 before taxes. The tablet will debut in China, but no dates have yet been announced.
(Read more about the Nokia’s iPad Mini Clone from Gordon Kelly live from Slush 2014).
Of the 7.3 billion people on the planet today, 1.8 billion, including 600 million girls, are between the ages of 10 and 24, a never before demographic, says a new report from the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA.
“Never before have there been so many young people,” the report says. “Never again is there likely to be such potential for economic and social progress. How we meet the needs and aspirations of young people will define our common future.”
Most of the 1.8 billion live in the developing world. India has the highest with 356 million, followed by China at 269 million, Indonesia with 67 million young, the United States with 65 million, Pakistan with 59 million, Nigeria with 57 million, Brazil with 51 million, and Bangladesh with 48 million.
In some countries, especially the poorer ones, the growth of the youth population is outpacing the growth of the economy and outstripping the capacities of institutions charged with providing them basic services, the report says. Will schools and universities be able to meet the demand for education? Some 120 million young people reach working age every year. Will there be enough jobs to accommodate their need for decent work and a good income? Are health services strong enough? Will the young, including adolescents, have the information and services they need to avoid early, unintended and life-changing parenthood? Will the next generation be able to realize its full potential? These are critical questions that the report raises and that all governments need to grapple with and prepare for. So how is life for this demographic? Not pretty, especially for girls:
Today, more than two million 10 to 19-year-olds are living with HIV, the report says. About one in seven of all new HIV infections occur during adolescence.
In 2012, an estimated 1.3 million adolescents died from preventable or treatable diseases.
At least 160 million people aged 15-24 are undernourished.
Today one in three girls in developing countries is married before the age of 18, threatening her health, education and future prospects.
Females aged 15 to 24 are twice as likely as young men to be living with HIV.
An estimated 33 million young women between the ages of 15 and 24 would use contraceptives if they had access to them.
About 2.5 million adolescents have unsafe abortions every year.
More than 500 million young people live on less than $2 a day.
130 million primary school attendees stay for four years but do not attain even minimum benchmarks due to inadequate resources and poor quality instruction.
It’s up to governments on how to view their growing numbers of young people–as a liability, a cohort that will place demands on strained resources, or as an opportunity, the report says. “With the right policies and investments and the engagement of young people in nurturing their own potential, the largest generation of young people in human history can become the problem-solving producers, creators, entrepreneurs, change agents and leaders of the coming decades,” the report says.
So what can governments do? The report offers some suggestions:
Ensure the implementation of policies that promote gender equity, including, giving women the choice in reproductive rights; stopping child marriage; preventing adolescent pregnancies; stopping sexual and gender-based violence.
Beef up universal access to education at primary, secondary and vocational levels and improving the quality of education.
Expand formal sector employment with a focus on manufacturing rather than agriculture.
Improve access to credit and community banking systems, particularly for women.
Create legal and regulatory environments conducive to investment and economic growth. This includes ensuring a country has good governance; predictability in financial and economic institutions; transparency and accountability; as well as well-designed and enforced regulations.
That didn’t take long. Just seven months after Microsoft finalised the long running deal to buy Nokia’s mobile phone division, the Finnish giant is back with a new consumer device… and this time Nokia is backing Android .
Nokia took to the stage at Slush 2014, one of Europe’s largest technology events (where I will be for the next two days), to announce the ‘Nokia N1’ – an iPad mini look-a-like tablet running Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Nokia N1 running Z Launcher – image courtesy of Nokia
Inside, however, it is all change. Nokia has split from its rivals in opting for a 64-bit compatible 2.4GHz quad core Intel Atom Z3580 processor, which it pairs with 2GB RAM and 32GB of storage. The front and rear cameras also have higher megapixel ratings at 5MP and 8MP respectively. In addition the Nokia N1 will be the first consumer device to use the new, reversible USB Type C connector which will come to all new smartphones and tablets over the next year.
Read more: Reversible USB Type C: Everything You Need To Know
At 318g, the N1 is 13 grams lighter than the iPad mini 3, but Nokia has not gone into detail about the battery life of the new tablet. Arguably most interesting about the N1 though, is Nokia’s switch of allegiances which sees it ditch Microsoft in favour of Android 5.0 Lollipop, the latest version of Android.
As is manufacturers’ want, Nokia has customized Android with its own ‘Z Launcher’. Already popular in the Google Play store, Z Launcher is a gesture based skin which lets you filter apps by drawing their first letter and it learns your routine to automatically offer the right apps at the right time. That said Nokia said users would be free to switch launchers, including to the standard Google Launcher and a stock Android experience also awaits beneath this. Having sold on its hardware business, Nokia is using a manufacturing partner in China (currently not revealed) to build the N1 and it will launch in China in time for the new year followed by “several select countries”. With a $249.99 retail price (ex. tax) there is enough about the N1 in a sea of respectable, but not outright brilliant Android tablets to see it gain some traction. Nokia declined to comment on whether its much rumoured licensing plans will see it also re-enter the phone market in the new future. But having made its first steps back into consumer hardware, it seems a logical step.
Nintendo's 'Duck Hunt' Is Coming To The Wii U Version Of Super Smash Bros.
In 1984, Nintendo introduced us to the world of Duck Hunt when the game was bundled with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console. Duck Hunt players had three attempts per round to shoot one or two virtual ducks using Nintendo’s light gun controller called the NES Zapper. Points were awarded for shooting each duck, which were needed to move on to the next level. As the players moved to higher levels, the ducks became faster. If the players missed all of the ducks in the round, the Duck Hunt dog would appear from behind the bushes to laugh at them. Thirty years later, the pompous pooch from Duck Hunt is making a comeback!
During a broadcast yesterday, Nintendo announced that Duck Hunt will be coming to the Wii U Virtual Console, a digital store within the Nintendo eShop to download Wii U content. Instead of having to dust off your NES Zapper, you will need to have a Wii Remote controller to shoot the ducks in the Wii U re-release of the game.
Super Smash Bros. players may have noticed that the Duck Hunt dog and one of the ducks appear as an “unlockable character” for the Nintendo 3DS. Duck Hunt can be unlocked in Super Smash Bros. by completing Classic mode using 8 different characters or 110 Smash matches.
Duck Hunt for Wii U / Credit: Nintendo
Super Smash Bros. for 3DS hit 1 million copies sold in Japan during its opening weekend last month and over 2.8 million total copies worldwide this month. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U will be launching in North America on November 21st, Europe on December 5 and Japan on December 6.
OmniEarth Partners With Ball Aerospace For 'Scientific Quality' Satellite Imaging
Ball Aerospace's Operational Land Imager for the Landsat 8 mission. (Credit: Ball Aerospace)
Data analytics and imaging company OmniEarth is partnering with Ball Aerospace on a planned constellation of 18 imaging satellites, which is set to be fully deployed by 2018.
The 18 satellites will be “about the size of a dishwasher,” OmniEarth CEO Lars Dyrud told me. “We’re focused on small, low-cost satellites. Something that wasn’t even conveivable 5 or 10 years ago.”
The past few years have seen a number of new satellite imaging companies like Planet Labs, which builds low-orbit, inexpensive satellites only about a foot long, begin to compete with older companies such as Digital Globe, which builds satellites that are larger and more expensive but also with more capabilities). OmniEarth’s planned satellites are something of a middle ground in both size.
One key thing that OmniEarth seeks to use to differentiate themselves is the quality of the planned instruments. That’s where Ball comes in. The company has manufactured imaging systems for a number of satellites in the past, most famously the Hubble Space Telescope. Recently they also produced the instruments NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite, which is used to image the Earth for a number of research projects.
Landslide in Washington as seen by Landsat-8. (Credit: NASA)
“The Landsat science community is giddy at the results they’re seeing from the latest Landsat instrument,” Ball’s Operational Space VP and General Manager Cary Ludtke told me. “It’s that much better than the last one. And this is really an unhappy group of scientists.”
Dyrud concurred with that sentiment. “We’re looking to leverage that scientific and commercial understanding of Landsat,” he told me.
The instrument on the OmniEarth satellites won’t be precisely the same as in Landsat-8, Ludtke told me. But the technology is “largely the same.”
“Lars and his guys have a need and requirement for scientific quality data to enable their success in the marketplace,” Ludtke continued. “Our experience on programs such as Landsat is directly applicable. We’ve spent many years developing those kinds of products and capabilities.”
In addition to the high quality of the instrumentation, the OmniEarth satellites will also fly in overlapping configurations, meaning that at a single point in time, the constellation can take satellite photos nearly 200 km wide. This will enable interested parties to track significant changes on the surface on the order of days.
That means, for example, that agricultural companies can keep a close eye on the progress of farming over a season. Or cities in the middle of a drought could better manage water use. Whatever data can be provided, OmniEarth aims to create an information product about it for their customers.
“We’re not a satellite company,” emphasized Dryud. “We’re an information company.”
Mark Pincus hosting a Zynga event back in 2012. (Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Thursday, Zynga founder, former-CEO and on-and-off-again billionaire Mark Pincus announced that he is starting an incubator called Superlabs to find apps smartphone users can’t resist. For a time that was one way to describe the games his former company produced. No longer. The company’s monthly active users went from 331 million in the third quarter 2012 to 133 million in the third quarter of last year to 112 million in the quarter that just ended.
Zynga reported $176.6 million in third quarter revenue after the closing bell Thursday, down 12.8% from the same period last year but somewhat ahead of Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate. On a GAAP — generally accepted account principles — basis the company reported a massive $57 million net loss, or 6 cents per share. Yet using adjustments from the company — excluding things like restructuring expenses and acquisition-related transaction — the net loss was a slightly more palatable $6.7 million. At 1 cents per share the adjusted loss was an improvement from a year earlier’s 2 cent loss and in line with Street expectations.
It’s this rosier adjusted view that investors are focusing on. Shares were up about 5% to $2.50 in after hours trading. Of course, a large percentage swing is not difficult for a stock that closed the trading day $2.36, down 38% year-to-date and 75% from its December 2011 initial public offering.
The company, for its part, still refuses to admit defeat. “I am encouraged by the results of the quarter as we navigate through this time of transition,” said CEO Don Mattrick in a statement on the results. He pointed out that the company’s $175 million in bookings came in at the high end of its earlier guidance and that “core franchises” Casino, Words With Friends and FarmVille grew bookings 30% year-over-year.
Mattrick added, “We have been operating with purpose and it has taken us some time to transform our business as we faced some execution challenges in the quarter. 2014 has been an investment year for us as we assembled a new leadership team, reorganized the company and reset our product pipeline. As we move forward and aggressively compete in an exciting market, we continue to believe that we are well positioned to take advantage of our global scale and diversified product portfolio, and we remain committed to working together as a team to deliver long term value for our consumers, employees and shareholders.”
Next quarter the company expected revenue to come in between $170 million and $200 million, compared to $176 million in the same period last year. The company is forecasting a GAAP loss per share between 6 cents and 4 cent, and a non-GAAP loss of a penny.
iDevices Wants To Show The Smart Home World How To Play Apple's Game
Apple AAPL-0.16% is building a closed ecosystem for the connected home. If device makers want to play with the Cupertino tech giant, they better be prepared to spend a lot of time and money revamping their entire product to fit into Apple’s specifications.
iDevices wants to make that process a little easier. The maker of an app-connected thermometer for grills, iDevices knows how hard it is to fit into Apple’s plans. For the past 10 months, iDevices has worked closely with Apple and spent $10 million on a new product for HomeKit, Apple’s standard for controlling home devices in iOS.
Although the Connecticut-based startup isn’t ready to talk about its specific device until next January–iDevices founder and CEO Chris Allen promises it isn’t another hub–the company wants to start partnering with product makers to accelerate the very long process of getting into Apple’s closed ecosystem.
“By using our platform, they can speed up time to market for working on HomeKit,” said Allen in a phone call. “They don’t have to have a team or existing knowledge base in their company. They can come to us.”
Allen and his team are going to help out with everything from software to hardware for getting devices to integrate into HomeKit. There’s a considerable amount of investment a company needs to make if it ever wants to integrate its smart home device into HomeKit. To become certified under Apple’s HomeKit program, there’s a number physical integrations that need to happen, including specific chips and firmware layered on top. And then on the software side, there are many limitations and requirements app makers have to follow. Apple is also very focused on security and encryption between the device and Apple’s operating system.
In the past year, iDevices has grown from 22 people to 55. This investment has all been related to ramping up for HomeKit.
“We’ve grown as a result of my belief that this is something we’ve been waiting for,” said Allen. “Everybody tries to jump into home automation from the bottom up and force integration. We didn’t believe in that model. When Apple said, ‘we’re going into this space and bring order to the chaos,’ that was exciting.”
Allen said iDevices already has number of companies they’re working with to get their devices into HomeKit and some of them are big names.
“Everybody wants to become HomeKit compatible, but it’s not easy,” said Allen. “Apple is very focused on user experience. You can’t force integration and be a nail in the foot of an 800-pound gorilla. I’d rather ride on the back of an 800-pound gorilla.”
Apple HomeKit was announced in June at its developers conference, but it hasn’t officially launched yet. The protocol is still evolving, said Allen, and there’s plenty of room to evolve.
“My personal belief is that the ‘Internet of Things’ is going to become a quasi old term soon if it’s not already,” said Allen. “The next frontier is building true artificial intelligence, not a piece of software that says turn this light on at this time or that. It’s truly learning people’s habits, how they use products, and making intelligent products for them. It needs to provide true value at the end of the day. That hasn’t happened yet.”
Feds Shutter Illegal Drug Marketplace Silk Road 2.0, Arrest 26-Year-Old San Francisco Programmer
(Screenshot from Blake Benthall's Instagram feed)
By Ryan Mac, Kate Vinton and Kashmir Hill
Another year, another dark web takedown.
A year ago, the FBI shut down Silk Road, an anonymous online narcotics website that generated $1.2 billion in sales, and arrested its alleged creator Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library. On Thursday, the FBI announced that it has done it again, seizing Silk Road successor Silk Road 2.0 and detaining 26-year-old Blake Benthall in the same city. Silk Road 2.0′s seizure comes amid reports of various other anonymous narcotics marketplace shutdowns on Thursday as global authorities look to be cracking down on illegal dark web operations.
“As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise,” said Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement. “Let’s be clear–this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison.”
Bhara, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security allege that Benthall was “Defcon,” the online administrator who anonymously ran Silk Road 2.0. That site, which could only be accessed using online anonymity software Tor and is now inoperative, was said to be selling $8 million-worth of banned opiates, marijuana and other illicit goods a month with 150,000 active users by September.
The shuttering of Silk Road 2.0 is the latest in the whack-a-mole pursuit of illegal dark web drug marketplaces that have emerged since the abrupt end of the original Silk Road last year. At least 18 other operations have emerged since the FBI shut down the first Silk Road, according to DeepDotWeb, fulfilling a need among worldwide users for open access to narcotics and other illegal goods. On Thursday, users of other drug marketplaces including Hydra and Cloud9 reported seeing FBI seizure notices, pointing to a coordinated sting operation against such contraband sites.
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the closures of other drug marketplaces outside of Silk Road 2.0.
Blake Benthall, aka “Defcon”, set up Silk Road 2.0 behind a Tor network to conceal true IP addresses of computers & their users — FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) November 6, 2014
Silk Road 2.0
Silk Road 2.0 was opened for business exactly one year ago, by an administrator known as the “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the pseudonym that authorities said was also used by alleged original Silk Road leader Ulbricht. “You can never kill the idea of Silk Road,” the new Dread Pirate Roberts tweeted twenty minutes before the site’s official launch on Nov. 6, 2013.
In its early months, Silk Road 2.0 experienced numerous problems, including the arrest of prominent moderators, and a February hack that allowed a seller to take advantage of a flaw in the site’s code to steal what amounted to $2.6 million in Bitcoin. The FBI in its report alleged that Defcon took over Silk Road 2.0′s operations in December, overseeing everything from its computer infrastructure to its forum moderators to the “massive profits generated from the operation of the illegal business.”
“I didn’t run with the gold,” wrote Defcon following the Silk Road 2.0 hack. “I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries… It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.”
Silk Road 2.0 seemed to recover from that hack and had more than 13,000 listings for narcotics such as ecstasy and psychedelics as of October. Authorities said that the site had facilitated the transaction of hundreds of kilograms of drugs and the laundering of millions of dollars, though it seemed well short of the $1.2 billion in sales that the original Silk Road achieved during its lifetime.
Who is Blake Benthall?
Intriguingly, Benthall, who could face life in prison if convicted on charges including conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking, shares various similarities to Ulbricht, the alleged creator of the first Silk Road. Like Ulbricht, Benthall hails from Texas and was arrested while living and working in San Francisco. One neighbor at Benthall’s residence in the city’s Mission district said that FBI agents were in the backyard of the residence last night and had cordoned off part of the street.
According to his various social networking pages, Benthall came to San Francisco for work around 2009 after attending Florida College, a private Christian school in Temple Terrace, Florida. His LinkedIn page notes that he worked for various Bay Area tech firms in engineering positions, typically staying a few months at each job. Most recently, he worked at a web and mobile development company Carbon Five and spent six months as a flight software engineer for Space Exploration (SpaceX) Technologies in Los Angeles.
A spokesperson for SpaceX confirmed that the complany employed Benthall from Dec. 2013 to February, but did not provide additional details. Mike Wynholds, CEO of Carbon Five, said that Benthall worked at his firm’s San Francisco office from Dec. 2012 to March 2013 as a full-time contractor before leaving on good terms to address “family issues.”
“He was nice guy but wasn’t super idiosyncratic in any way,” said Wynholds, who interacted with Benthall a few times a month and said he found out about his former employee’s arrest through the news. “He was a good developer, very friendly… It’s a big shock to hear this.”
Benthall most recently worked for himself at Codespike, a technology incubator he ran out of his San Francisco home, according to business records. He called himself a “Bitcoin dreamer” on his Twitter page and left a wide digital footprint online. The criminal complaint against Benthall said that he bought a $127,000 Tesla Model S in late January, making a $70,000 down payment in Bitcoin.
“Who are the most libertarian people you know?” he wrote in a Facebook post in August. “I want to meet them”
“[I'm] working on something I want to share & involve more people in!” he added, in responding to friends on the post. “On the edge of launching a very libertarian finance startup.”
Calls to the phone number listed on Benthall’s business records were not returned. Phone calls to his parents in Houston also went unanswered.
Authorities said that they were able to arrest Benthall after an undercover Homeland Security agent was able to gain the trust of Silk Road 2.0′s administrators and received access to “private, restricted areas” of the site reserved for its leaders. Through that operation, the agent said he was able to interact directly with Defcon.
That agent detailed his investigation in full in the criminal complaint against Benthall, noting that he had attained moderator privileges on a forum that formed after the closure of the original Silk Road site. On that forum, the agent was able to see discussions between users who toyed with the idea of creating a successor site.
In May, agents were able to locate the server hosting Silk Road 2.0 in a foreign country, tracing alleged ownership back to Benthall. As the agent wrote: “Based on a review of records provided by the service provider for the Silk Road 2.0 Server, I have discovered that the server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account blake@benthall.net.”
Benthall’s arrest came shortly after reports that Irish police apprehended two drug trafficking suspects in Dublin earlier on Thursday in an international operation between FBI and Europol called “Onymous.” The two men who were arrested were in their 30′s and had 180,000 Euros-worth of drugs and between 1.5 million and 2 million Euros-worth of Bitcoin on computers seized during a raid. The Onymous operation reportedly ends on Friday.
Benthall, who appeared in a San Francisco court on Thursday unshackled and in street clothes, faces charges of conspiring to commit narcotics trafficking, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in fraudulent identification documents and money laundering conspiracy. Those are similar to the charges leveled at Ulbricht, who has pleaded not guilty on seven different counts and is set to being his trial in January. He is currently being held at a federal detention center in Brooklyn and will appear in court for his final pre-trial conference on Dec. 17.
Scan and select your “Cosmethical” products / Credit: Cosmethic
