- Latest Tablets (Luke Wroblewski) — table showing the astonishing variety of tablets released in the last two months.
- Google Code-In Contest for High Schoolers — an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. (via Andy Oram)
- Watch Your Incentives — NASDAQ added two new incentives programs, and robotraders responded. On November 1st, there were 369 seconds where the number of quotes in BAC exceeded 17,000; a total of 6.6 million quotes. During those seconds, only 1,879 trades executed. Between market open (9:30am) and 12:45, BAC had 7.8 million quotes and 116,000 trades. Which means 85% of all BAC quotes occurred in those 369 seconds. Which means it is likely that one algo from one firm (all of this quote spam is from Nasdaq) is responsible for 85% of all canceled orders in BAC. (via Robert O’Brien)
- Predicting Web Search Abandonment Rationales (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on how to predict why people cease to search or to click through on the search results. I’m really impressed by how well they could distinguish “bah, the Internet doesn’t have it, I’m giving up” from “oh, the answer was in a search result snippet, my work here is done.” (via Mark Alen)
ENTRIES TAGGED "Google"
Four short links: 2 November 2012
Tablet table, Google contest for students, watch your incentives, research on web search abandonment.
Commerce Weekly: Will NYC taxis get Square?
Square cab fares, Wal-Mart looks to beat Amazon to the same-day punch, and a major player update in the mobile payments war.
Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week.
Square may be courting cabs
Square not only is gearing up to launch in Starbucks stores in November — it may also be looking to enter the New York City taxi cab market….
Apple’s maps
Apple's maps problem isn't about software or design. It's about data.
I promise not to make any snarky remarks about Apple’s maps disaster, and the mistakes of letting a corporate vendetta get in the way of good business decisions. Oops, I lied. But it’s good to see that Tim Cook agrees, at…
Four short links: 28 September 2012
Mobile Content, Google Math, Mobile Linux, and Mozilla's Strategy
- Mobile Content Strategy — Mobile is a catalyst that can help you make your content tighter without loss of clarity or information. If you make your content work well on mobile, it will work everywhere. Excellent presentation, one I want to thump on every decision-maker’s desk and say “THIS!”.
- Math at Google (PDF) — presentation showing the different types of math used to build Google. Good as overview, and as way to motivate highschool and college kids to do their math homework. “See, it really is useful! Really!” (via Ben Lorica)
- Tizen 2.0 Alpha Released — Tizen is the Linux Foundation’s mobile Linux kernel, device drivers, middleware subsystems, and Web APIs. (via The Linux Foundation)
- Explaining WebMaker Crisply (Mark Surman) — if you’ve wondered wtf Mozilla is up to, this is excellent. Mozilla has big priorities right now: the web on the desktop; the web on mobile; and web literacy.
Why we need Go
Rob Pike on how Go fits into today's computing environment
The Go programming language was created by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Robert Griesemer. Pike (@rob_pike) recently told me that Go was born while they were waiting a long while for some code to compile — too long.
C++ and Java have long…
The many sides to shipping a great software project
An interview with Shipping Greatness author Chris Vander Mey.
Chris Vander Mey, CEO of Scaled Recognition, and author of a new O’Reilly book, Shipping Greatness, lays out in this video some of the deep lessons he learned during his years working on some very high-impact and high-priority projects at Google and Amazon.
Chris takes a very expansive view of project management, stressing the crucial decisions and attitudes that…
Commerce Weekly: Starbucks gives Square’s mobile payment a big push
Square and Starbucks unite, same-day delivery from eBay and checking in on the mobile wallet wars.
Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week.
Square gets Starbucks, cash and Howard Schultz
Square announced a new partnership with Starbucks this week. Peter Ha at TechCrunch reports:
“Beginning this fall, Square will begin processing all U.S. credit and debit…
Four short links: 8 August 2012
Reading Minds, Satellites in the Cloud, Units for Risk, and Valuing Autism
- Reconstructing Visual Experiences (PDF) — early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.
- Earth Engine — satellite imagery and API for coding against it, to do things like detecting deforestation, classifying land cover, estimating forest biomass and carbon, and mapping the world’s roadless areas.
- Microlives — 30m of your life expectancy. Here are some things that would, on average, cost a 30-year-old man 1 microlife: Smoking 2 cigarettes; Drinking 7 units of alcohol (eg 2 pints of strong beer); Each day of being 5 Kg overweight. A chest X-ray will set a middle-aged person back around 2 microlives, while a whole body CT-scan would weigh in at around 180 microlives.
- Autistics Need Opportunities More Than Treatment — Laurent gave a powerful talk at Sci Foo: if the autistic brain is better at pattern matching, find jobs where that’s useful. Like, say, science. The autistic woman who was delivering mail became a research assistant in his lab, now has papers galore to her name for original research.
Commerce Weekly: Lessons for ecommerce in store closings and old supply chains
Connecting dots between the Sears supply chain and modern ecommerce. Plus: A look at mobile partnerships and NFC keychains.
An analyst says online commerce is a descendant (and a return) of the circa-1900s catalog model, Deutsche Telekom partners with MasterCard for its mobile wallet platform, and NFC keychains may spark technology solutions. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Publishing News: Google's win may be Amazon's loss
Google and France reach an agreement, a look at the Espresso Book Machine, and ebook industry predictions.
Book-scanning lawsuits against Google were dropped in France, perhaps spelling trouble for Amazon in Europe. Elsewhere, the Espresso Book Machine is proving a plus for retailers and authors, and Laura Hazard Owen digs into PricewaterhouseCoopers' data.
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 