Posted on

Iran Says It Fired A Monkey Into Space, Landed It

The country’s defense ministry says the nation has successfully flown a monkey into space on a rocket trip.

Though details are sparse, the Iranian defense ministry is claiming today that it has successfully launched a capsule containing a live monkey into space atop a rocket. The capsule was later successfully recovered “intact” on the ground and the monkey, according to the report, is safe.

Iran is, if the news proves true, following in the footsteps of the U.S., which successfully flew several monkeys into space–Albert II was the first to survive the flight beyond the atmosphere in 1949 (though he died when the capsule impacted the ground). Iran has been continually developing its space rocket program over the years–including flying other “creatures.” This has been to the discomfort of many who note that the technology needed to propel a capsule into space is equivalent to Intercontinental Ballistic Missile systems. Launching and retrieving a monkey would represent a huge technological leap, and may be an attempt to demonstrate the space program has peaceful goals.

Read Full Story

via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3005111/iran-says-it-fired-monkey-space-landed-it?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Posted on

Larry Page’s Wired Interview: Innovation Is Nothing Without Commercialization

The CEO of Google is revealed as a “moon shot” man, and who believes in 1,000% improvements, not the 10% that most CEOs aim for.

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]

Read Full Story

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

Posted on

Instagram Reveals Monthly Active User Data For First Time

The stats that matter are this: 90 million active monthly users, 40 million photos uploaded per day, and 10,000 “Likes” during peak time.

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.”

Read Full Story

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

Posted on

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Releases Statement Regarding Aaron Swartz’s Death

The conduct of the U.S. Attorney’s office was “appropriate” in the bringing and handling of the case, says Ortiz.

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?

Read Full Story

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

Posted on

Facebook Rolling Out Free Phone Calls In U.S. For iPhone Users

The VoIP service is just another way for the social network to become the Internet’s one-stop shop.

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.

Read Full Story

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

Posted on

They’re Happily Married. They Created The Smash-Hit Game “Temple Run.” How Perfect Is This Union?

For Imangi Studios’ Keith Shepherd and his wife/business partner Natalia Luckyanova, love is talking mobile-gaming apps. Their sequel to “Temple Run” is out today. They say none of it would have happened without marriage.

“It’s very polarizing when we say that we’re married and work together,” says Keith Shepherd of his partnership with his wife Natalia Luckyanova. The couple founded Imangi Studios, a mobile gaming company, back in 2008; their app Temple Run is iconic, having garnered over 170 million downloads, with a sequel out today. “It’s always either, ‘Awesome, that sounds great,’” says Shepherd of reactions to their working arrangement, “or ‘Oh my God, that sounds like the worst thing ever.’”

For Shepherd, 33, and Luckyanova, 31, it’s mostly been awesome. Indeed, without having their life partner also be their business partner, Shepherd and Luckyanova wonder whether this journey would have even been possible. The two met as software engineers in Washington, DC; when they married a little over five years ago, they found themselves continually scheming about how they could work for themselves. When news came out about Apple opening up its app store to independent developers, they decided to take the plunge.

“We knew that if one of us could support the other while we got something going, it was less risky than going it by yourself.”

Read Full Story

via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004832/theyre-happily-married-they-created-smash-hit-game-temple-run-how-perfect-union?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Posted on

Human Rights Watch Calls For Ban On Killer Robots As Gaza Attack Enters Seventh Day

It’s the first time a non-governmental body has called for automated weapons such as drones and machine guns to be outlawed.

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?

Read Full Story

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

Posted on

The People’s Bailout: Occupy Wall Street To Erase $1 Million In Debt—Maybe Even Yours

It’s maybe Occupy’s most radical idea: buy up overdue debt on the secondary market and cancel it, leaving lucky people across the country debt free. It’s so crazy it just might work.

Before they became known for hurricane relief or even encampments in public parks, Occupy Wall Street was an intellectual leftist movement with connections to the anti-austerity protests in Greece and Spain. They’ll be returning to those roots this week with an imaginative new action campaign that will strike at the heart of what ails the economy, strike a blow against economic business as usual, and maybe even strike fear in the guts of the 1%, by buying up consumer debt and then forgiving it.

Total American consumer debt, from medical debt to student loans to credit cards, currently stands at a record $2.74 trillion. When payers fall behind on this debt it becomes delinquent, and banks often clear it off their books by selling it to third-party debt collectors for pennies on the dollar. These collectors then try to get you to make good on the full amount plus interest with often unfair or abusive results.

Read Full Story

via Fast Company http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680888/the-peoples-bailout-occupy-wall-street-to-erase-1-million-in-debt-maybe-even-yours?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Posted on

Visualizing The Biggest Questions In The World, In Stark Black And White

The Luxury Of Protest’s graphic depictions of our society’s worst moments will make you stop and think about what it means to be human.

Peter Crnokrak began his career researching quantitative genetics, a field that’s all about math, statistics and massive datasets, and mining for the hidden patterns between them. This helps explain much about his work today. A decade ago, the Croatian-born Crnokrak left science to become, instead, a graphic artist. He tried for several years to stay away from technical work, from creating illustrations out of math and algorithms. But he eventually gave in to that subset of design–data visualization–that’s not so far removed from quantitative genetics. “As a designer,” he says, “I just kind of fell into that desire to want to get lost in visual detail.”

His visualizations, created under the nom de data viz of The Luxury of Protest, are both visually stunning and scientifically precise. And, as with his previous genetics research (he was trying to tease out the difference between nature and nurture in our genes), Crnokrak the graphic artist wrestles with enormous, core questions about humanity and history.

Read Full Story

via Fast Company http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680803/visualizing-the-biggest-questions-in-the-world-in-stark-black-and-white?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Posted on

Apple’s Apology To Samsung: We’re Cool, You’re Not

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