#ALGORITHMS: "Social Media Conquering Ebooks"

Annotating ebooks--that is sharing notes in the margins with other readers of the same book--is poised to be the next ubiquitous use of social media.



Social media in the form of ubiquitous user-generated product reviews, where people who have bought and used a product previously can alert new buyers to their experiences with the product, are something that in pre-Internet days had to be obtained from a publication like "Consumer Reports. "

Now, it looks like the next ubiquitous social media success will be the ability to share notes in the margins with other ebook readers. These clickable threads alongside highlighted text in any ebook could become the next big win for social media. And some see the messages as being especially useful for young readers, including students who want to share their notes with their classmates.

In this popular novel, "The Game of Thrones" by George R. R. Martin, a highlighted passage (left) reads "dead men sing no songs" to which Garcia (top right) recounts a similar passage "songs the dead men sing" and Morbus (bottom right) adds "dead men tell no tales."

Students have long had to get together in libraries or dorm rooms to share their notes and questions about specific reading assignments. With ebooks-based textbooks, students will see icons in the margins from their classmates as they read an assignment. When clicked, these icons reveal threaded comments from the other students, the teacher and anyone else who has read the ebook. Even in novels, icons can be left by other readers--hopefully not giving away the plot.

Readers who add margin notes in books can also add links to relevant Websites, online reports, discussion groups, audio, photos and videos. The threaded comment format makes it easy for readers to trace the train of thought of comments and insert their own at just the right spots.

The brainchild of social networking for ebooks was Subtext Media Inc., which recently raised $3 million from investors led by Google Ventures. Subtext Media plans to allow user-generated commentaries to be shared across platforms.
"We want to help everyone get more out of--and put more into--their books," said Andrew Goldman, CEO of Subtext. "Our goal is nothing less than to transform the way people read."

Subtext recently released its first iPad application and 18 demonstration books in the Apple Store with margin comments already inserted by the books’ authors, giving behind-the-scenes facts and revealing secrets about the writing of their books. Subtext also announced that it had struck a deal with Google Books to integrate its social media with all the books in the Google eBookstore.

#ALGORITHMS: "SmartCamp Picks Winning Ideas"

The smartest new startups will be announced this week at the IBM SmartCamp 2012. The three-day event will see entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders gather to pick a winner in the program’s competition to help build a Smarter Planet.



The world's smartest startups will be hawking their ideas this week at IBM's SmartCamp 2012 in San Francisco.

IBM has major investments in funds sponsored by mainstream venture capitalists, and acquires up to 20 companies per year, but it does not directly invest in startups. Instead, it sponsors a yearly SmartCamp, where budding entrepreneurs describe their farsighted new ideas in hopes of being crowned one of the smartest startups on the planet.
IBM's SmartCamp gathers applicants from around the world to compete in the world finals.

Now in its third year, IBM's SmartCamp specializes in uncovering companies that have smarter ideas about instilling intelligence into everyday items like clothing, household appliances, office buildings, farms, waterways, power grids, automobiles and more.
As a result, "we discovered how infectious the passion of entrepreneurs is--how exciting it is to be surrounded by individuals who believe they can change the world," Martin Kelly, a partner in IBM's Venture Capital Group, said in a recent blog posting. "We were amazed at how some of the best and most experienced investors and mentors were willing to give up their time to be part of this for nothing material in return."

Since its inception, the IBM SmartCamp has attracted partners and what it calls "mentors" in cities around the world, including Austin, Texas; Boston; Barcelona; Bangalore; Istanbul; London; New York; Rio; Silicon Valley; Stockholm; Shanghai and Tel Aviv.
In San Francisco, the IBM SmartCamp will be holding its second annual "world finals," where a select group of leading startups will be pitching their smart new ideas, to be judged by an international panel of experts. The winner will be picked Thursday.

No cash awards will be granted, but the recognition given to these startups is sure to increase their ability to secure venture capital funding. For instance, the winners at last year's SmartCamp have received more than $40 million in independent funding, and one, Streetline, has now become a global IBM partner for its smart automobile system that alerts drivers on their smartphones as to where parking spots are available in busy urban areas. Streetline, and most of the startups chosen at IBM's SmartCamp, combine networked sensors with cloud analytics to enable smarter solutions to global problems.

Speakers at SmartCamp 2012 will include California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome and an array of venture capitalists, including Bill Reichert, Promod Haque and John China, as well as futurist Guy Kawasaki and IBM Watson Solutions General Manager Manoj Saxena, and Gerry Mooney, general manager of IBM Smart Cities

#MEMS: "Automating Design Processes"

With the market for micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chips growing at a 50 percent annual growth rate, according to Goldman Sachs (New York), electronic design automation (EDA) tool vendor Coventor Inc. (Cary, N.C.) aims to speed-up the MEMS chip design process by adding scripted automation and by dramatically expanding the size of the devices it can simulate.
Further Reading

#CLOUD: "Rent a Virtual PC in the Cloud"

Your next PC may be in the cloud, where free storage and rentable apps allows anyone to sync their Windows desktop with an iOS device such as an iPad, an Android tablet, a laptop and a desktop computer, whether its Windows, Linux or even a Mac.



Virtualization allows cloud servers to execute Windows applications remotely from any iOS, Android, Mac, Windows or Linux device, including iPads, Android tablets, laptops and desktop computers. And by renting apps by the month--only paying during months you use them--all your software and storage can be constantly up-to-date in the cloud at a fraction of the cost of owning your own PC. Or so the story goes.

"We believe that 2012 will begin the era of the cloud for ordinary Windows users," said Nivio co-founder Sachin Dev Duggal. "Whether you're on your desktop PC, laptop, Android tablet or an iOS device like the iPad, you will be synched to the same cloud-based Windows desktop."

Desktop virtualization is already being offered as cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), such as when using Norton Ghost, Citrix XenDesktop or VMware's View. In fact, the enterprise market for desktop virtualization is predicted to top $5 billion by 2016. The consumer market, on the other hand, includes all the private citizens out there running Windows on a PC but wishing they could just carry a tablet.

Nivio's virtual Windows desktop called your nDesktop offers thousands of Windows applications in its App-Store (center) which you can rent for a few dollars per month, paying only during months that you use them.

Nivio (Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Switzerland) is aiming for that consumer market with its just-announced, cloud-based, virtual-Windows service at, of all places, this week's MacWorld/iWorld 2012. By installing the new Nivio app on an iPad, a virtual mouse can navigate a cloud-based Windows desktop. And if you decide to switch to an Android tablet, netbook, laptop or desktop PC running Linux, Windows or MacOS, you just select the appropriate app, sign in with your username and password, and your new device will be synced.

"We envision people migrating to our cloud-based Windows desktops for the convenience of using their favorite device, and because they don't want the hassle with installing and keeping a PC up-to-date, and because it is just more economical to rent Windows applications when you need them, rather than purchasing them," said Duggal. "We are offering Windows 7 desktops now, but we are already working on Windows 8 compatibility, because we think people will opt for the convenience of running it on their iOS or Android tablet."

Nivio is free for 30 days, including 10GB of storage on a personal nDrive, after which maintaining an nDesktop in the clouds costs from $5 to $15 a month (plus a small surcharge for whichever applications you might have used during any given month). The Windows desktop is synced across any three devices as part of the basic package, and alteration of a file on one device takes only about 30 seconds to sync with all your other devices. Users can also access their Windows nDesktop from an HTML5 browser, such as Google Chrome. Sharing an nDesktop is done with a custom URL.

Nivio runs on Rackspace and Wyse cloud servers located in the United States, Switzerland, India and Australia. The service is available for preregistration and will go live worldwide on Feb. 14th.

#MARKETS: "Business Ethics Takes Center Stage"

Unlike the popular image of corporations as unfeeling centers of greed that exploit workers to enrich their CEOs, leading academic and industry organizations counter that the most successful enterprises are those that enforce strict ethical principles.



Corporate business ethics might sound like a contradiction in terms to the "Occupy Wall Street" mavens, but the Business Ethics Alliance maintains that abuses are an aberration and that in reality corporate success in integrally tied to good ethics practices.

This week the Business Ethics Alliance will drive home its point with an “Ethics of Hiring” panel discussion called "The Dialogue" which will be hosted at Gallup headquarters in Omaha, Neb. Open to the business public today, an RSVP is required for attendance.
The panel discussion on the ethical issues of hiring new employees will include Tawanna Black, CEO, Innovations by Design; David Brown, president and CEO, Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce; and Dean Hodges, owner of Jimmy Johns restaurants.
The Dialogue is sponsored in partnership with Gallup Poll and the Better Business Bureau.

Questions to be addressed at The Dialogue include:
1) How is the hiring process informed by our values?
2) Do ethics come into play when small, medium and large firms make hiring decisions?
3) Should employers consider extraneous status values such as a person’s veteran status or sexual orientation?
4) Is it ethical to avoid hiring people who lost their jobs or those out of work for more than a year?

In its sixth year, The Dialogue is just one series of many ethics programs offered by the Business Ethics Alliance. The event is aimed at "increasing awareness of the links between ethics and business performance," said Creighton University business professor Beverly Kracher, executive director of the Business Ethics Alliance.

"When companies are led by and managed according to sound, practical business ethics - they grow faster, more sustainably and more profitably," said Todd Johnson, practice leader of Job Creation at Gallup.

Also this week, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business was ranked as No. 1 in business ethics education by Business and Society, the official journal of the International Association for Business and Society. The designation was the result of a survey administered to 320 business ethics scholars that included members of the European Academy of Business in Society, the Society for Business Ethics, the European Business Ethics Network, the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, and the International Association for Business and Society.

The University of Virginia Darden received 57 votes, but the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business received 56 votes--a statistical tie. The next highest vote total was 24, received by Harvard University.
"The knowledge that Darden and the Institute are creating around key issues…are critical to the success of their businesses in creating long-term, sustainable value," said Dean Krehmeyer, executive director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.

Housed at the Darden School of Business is the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, which is an association of CEOs from leading U.S. companies with more than $6 trillion in revenues and more than 14 million employees.

#ENERGY: "Freescale, Inside Secure team on smart-meter reference design"

Smart meters promise to sweep away energy inefficiencies by allowing users to monitor, control and optimize their energy usage remotely. Unfortunately, those virtues come at the expense of reduced security, leaving open hacker backdoors that enable snooping, fraud and criminal tampering with safety systems.


To remedy these concerns, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas) partnered with Inside Secure (Aix-en-Provence, France) in a smart-meter reference design that cure these security ills with near field communication (NFC) technology that has already been proven in the banking industry.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "Science Ed Crafting Multiplayer Games"

"If you can't beat them, join them" is the mantra at MIT, where a massive multiplayer online game is slated to teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).



A $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding MIT's first massively multiplayer online game--a three-year effort with the goal of attracting 10,000 students whose avatars interact during the game.

Gaming is usually a distraction from education, soaking up hours of a student's time each day that could have been spent studying. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are the biggest time-sink of the genre, since players become immersed in a fantasy world where only their skills matter, unlike the real world where status often overrules skill. But as the old saying goes: If you can't beat them, join them.

MIT's Education Arcade has developed a number of games that try to lure students away from time-wasting alternatives. But it has not yet attempted so vast an undertaking as crafting the virtual world of a massively multiplayer online game.

"We have worked on Web delivered and mobile games and a large collaborative alternate reality game recently," said MIT professor Eric Klopfer, director of the Education Arcade. "But this is the first MMOG that the Education Arcade has worked on."

Filament Games is working with MIT to design this massively multiplayer online educational game.
Klopfer claims that massively multiplayer online games are a good fit for higher education because knowledge is often built collaboratively in both science and MMOGs. In both arenas, participants often must work on teams.

"Much scientific discovery and engineering includes working together on teams with diverse skills," said Klopfer. He noted that this is something that students often don't get to experience, so there was a desire to model that experience in some way.

According to Klopfer, developers of commercial MMOGs have already shown that the best players use a technique akin to the "scientific method" where hypotheses are conceived, then debated, modeled and tested in collaboration with other players. Thus the same type of forums where players debate the best way to solve "Dungeons & Dragons" riddles can be enlisted to simulate scientists, engineers and technologists working together on multidisciplinary STEM problems.

"I must admit that I was skeptical about MMOGs for a number of years until I started playing," Klopfer said. "The community, pace of the games and sense of exploration that you get fits well with a world of building STEM knowledge."

The game, which is being developed in collaboration with Filament Games, will allow players to assume the roles of specialists in various fields. For instance, to teach biology, students might assume the roles of ecologist, geneticist and molecular biologist, who must work together to solve a question chain about Mendelian genetics. The players progress through the question chain by accomplishing tasks. For instance, the ecologist might collect samples, which the geneticist then needs to breed and the molecular biologist evaluates.

"Similarly, scaling a tower may involve calculating the height of that tower to get the right amount of rope. This in turn involves calculations based on similar triangles and the Pythagorean Theorem; all of which is done in the game through tasks," Klopfer said.
The students will be judged on how much progress they make getting through the question chains, with teachers getting daily feedback reports that pinpoint where particular students are struggling. The MMOG will conform to the Next Generation Science Standards, as well as the Common Core Standards in mathematics.

#MEMS: "Smart Sensors Conquering Sports"

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) in sports, health and fitness have already modernized the pedometer with wearable accelerometers which wirelessly link with smartphones apps for sports training, rehabilitation, calorie-counting, and other health and fitness programs.


Now, second-generation pedometers are being introduced, including models that add gyroscopes to detect rotation, MEMS pressure sensors to track elevation, heart-rate, and to enable more accurate analytics that reflect how hard an athlete is exercising and whether they are working against gravity (going up hills) or with it (down hills).
Further Reading