Tag: Addy Dugdale

Facebook‘s office space is expanding. The firm got the go-ahead from the Palo Alto council on Tuesday night to build a second campus at Menlo Park. The project will be designed by Frank Gehry and is expected to be an “extremely long” 433,555-square-foot building that will connect to the existing offices via a tunnel running under the Bayfront Expressway, which will divide the two campuses.

Will the new one look like a spaceship? Too soon to tell.

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3007571/most-innovative-companies-2013/facebook-gets-thumbs-build-second-menlo-park-campus-designed-?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Google‘s nearly here wearable tech, Project Glass, will be made in California.

Google has entrusted the manufacture of its AR glasses (the first batch of which are about to be sent to 8,000 lucky recipients) to Taiwanese firm Hon Hai, which you may know as Foxconn–yes, the guys that make, among other products, the iPhone.

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3007565/tech-forecast/google-glass-be-made-usa-foxconn?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Carrie Fisher is to appear in the new movie in the Star Wars franchise. The actor, who played Princess Leia in the first three George Lucas films, confirmed the news with a simple “Yes,” in a Q&A with Palm Beach Illustrated.

Asked to describe how George Lucas’ sole female part with any lines–bar two–would probably be today, Fisher, no stranger to wit, said this.

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3006660/fast-feed/carrie-fisher-will-play-princess-leia-again-new-star-wars-movie?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Research into smartphone security has revealed that your phone’s sensors could help criminals unlock your stolen gadget. And, given that these elements all come as standard on most smartphone models, and are not subject to the same controls as other phone functions, they are a bigger security risk. The study was carried out by a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, who analyzed data captured from a smartphone’s accelerometer–that’s the gadget that analyzes the direction your phone is tilting or moving and turns the screen accordingly, and used for games like Doodle Jump–and found it could be used to work out where someone tapped the screen.

Dr Adam J. Aviv and his team, from the University of Pennsylvania, developed software to analyze the results and, the more guesses it was allowed, the more accurate it became, spotting a user PIN with around 43% of success, and user PIN patterns around 73% of the time. One way of foxing the software, however, was by tapping in the digits while on the move. The added movement, acted as “noise” and went some way to blocking out the patterns.

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3005177/smartphone-users-privacy-betrayed-their-gadget-sensors-says-study?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Larry Page, cofounder and CEO of Google, which has just announced the creation of a brand new £1-billion HQ in London’s King’s Cross, has given a wide-ranging interview to Wired‘s Steven Levy. In it, the billionaire, of whom Levy says, “Some Googlers wonder if Page, clearly at his happiest working on moon shots, is essentially taking one for the team by assuming the sometimes prosaic tasks of a CEO.” Here, in a nutshell, are some of the juiciest tidbits of the piece.

• Incremental improvement will, says Page, become obsolete–especially in technology. He sees his job as “to get people focused on things that are not just incremental.” By that tenet, Google’s launch of Gmail was “a leap… not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.”
• The commercial aspect of an invention is just as important as the invention itself. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. Then I realized there’s a lot of sad stories about inventors like Nikola Tesla, amazing people who didn’t have much impact, because they never turned their inventions into businesses.”
• “A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products.”
• “How well is [Steve Jobs‘s thermonuclear war on Android] working?”
• “At the time we bought Android, it was pretty obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You couldn’t write software for them. Compare that to what we have now.”
• “We had real issues with how our users shared information, how they expressed their identity and so on. And yeah, [Facebook] is a company that’s strong in that space. But they’re also doing a really bad job on their products.”
• “I do think the Internet’s under much greater attack than it has been in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms. I think that governments fight users’ freedoms at their own peril.”

Finally, a look at the philanthropist in him. Page is paying for free flu shots for kids in the whole Bay Area after he saw epidemiological behavior on Google Search’s flu-tracking service.

[Image by Flickr user Fimoculous]

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004922/larry-pages-wired-interview-innovation-nothing-without-commercialization?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Instagram has released details of its user data for the first time. The photo-sharing site, which was bought by Facebook last year for $715 million, had last week stopped reporting its traffic numbers on AppData. So, what have we learnt? Despite the hoo-ha surrounding the firm after it decided to change its terms of service–rafts of people deserted the site, and it was forced to change tack over its proposals–Instagram is big business. After all, we knew it would be once we saw those Thanksgiving figures last year.

• 90 million people use Instagram on a monthly basis.
• Numbers increased by 10%, month on month, between December 2012 and January 2013.
• A thousand comments are left each second.
• 40 million photos are posted each day.
• There are 8,500 likes per second, although this figure increases to 10,000 per second at peak times.

This is what Kevin Systrom had to say about the figures. “Instagram continues to see very strong growth around the world. With many of the product and internationalization improvements we’ve made, we’ve been excited to see these efforts resonate with users globally.”

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004921/instagram-reveals-monthly-active-user-data-first-time?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Carmen Ortiz has released a statement regarding the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz. In it, the U.S. Attorney defends her department’s conduct, calling it a “difficult task” to enforce the laws that govern the use of computers and the Internet. “The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct… did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress.”

As well as expressing sympathy to Swartz’s family and friends, calling his suicide a “tragic result,” Ms. Ortiz reveals that prosecutors were seeking a six-month jail term in a low-security setting. “At no time did this office ever seek–or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek–maximum penalties under the law. Do you think that a six-month, low-security sentence was acceptable, or do you feel that, after Swartz’s tragic death, the law needs changing?

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004876/us-attorney-carmen-ortiz-releases-statement-regarding-aaron-swartzs-death?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Facebook users in the U.S. will now be able to make free phone calls on their iPhones. The new service is an expansion of the firm’s move two weeks ago into VoIP calls, which has initially been testing in Canada. It’s the second big announcement this week for the social media network, which unveiled Graph Search, its occasionally NSFW new search feature, two days ago.

The service works on the Messenger app–no update is needed. Just tap on the “i” button in the top corner and select Free Call. It’s just the latest move by Facebook to position itself as the Internet’s one-stop shop, displacing Google in the process.

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004874/facebook-rolling-out-free-phone-calls-us-iphone-users?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

As Bill Clinton flies to the Middle East in the hope of effecting a truce between Israel and the Palestinians, an NGO has called for a worldwide ban on automated weapons. Human Rights Watch yesterday released a 50-page report that outlines the case against Killer Robots. Although the sharp end of defense is still at the semi-automated stage, the research arms of the various weaponry firms are looking at systems which need no human input whatsoever. This is great news for governments, who can go to war without worrying so much about their own soldiers’ loss of life, not so good for civilians caught up in the conflict.

As well as using drones, the Israelis rely on a semi-automated border patrol system, which replaces guards in situ with a weapon and camera. HRW fears that the technology is already in place to make these machines automated, meaning they can make their own decisions as to whether to take out the target or not. And how, adds the non-profit organisation, can it differentiate between an assailant holding a gun and a kid holding an ice cream?

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3003300/human-rights-watch-calls-ban-killer-robots-gaza-attack-enters-seventh-day?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Remember earlier this month, when Apple lost its appeal in the U.K. against Samsung for a High Court ruling earlier this year? Well, on the bottom of the home page of Apple’s U.K. website is a little linky that says “Samsung/Apple judgment.” Click on that and up comes a linguistic masterclass in how to say sorry without, um, saying, er, sorry.

The letter, which will be visible on the site for a month, starts off with the usual legal guff. And the next para is a direct quotation from the judge’s rulings. The iPad, it surmises, is a “cool design.” And then, onto the third, talking about Samsung’s products. They, apparently, “are not cool.” Then there’s more legalese, with a zinger in the final paragraph. We may have lost this one, to paraphrase Apple, but go to Germany, because that’s where Samsung were found guilty of gadget plagiarism. SO THERE. (Samsung are probably too busy celebrating record profits to care.)

Perhaps this is how they should have done it.

via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3002468/apples-apology-samsung-were-cool-youre-not?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29