Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

New research by Dr Brock Bastian from UQ's School of Psychology has found evidence that playing violent video games leads players to see themselves, and their opponents, as lacking in core human qualities such as warmth, open-mindedness, and intelligence.

In a recently published paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr Bastian and his co-authors looked at whether the experience of cyber-violence had dehumanising consequences for the self-concept of game players and well as their opponents.

Dr Bastian said given his findings, it was not surprising that many people were concerned about the effects of playing violent video games, especially when they appeared to reflect changes in people's behaviour, emotions, and cognitions in ways consistent with a loss of humanity.

If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

PlateMate's calorie estimates have proved, in tests, to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user's own logs. The research was presented at the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.

“We can take things that used to require experts and do them with crowds,” says Jon Noronha ’11, who co-developed PlateMate as an undergraduate at Harvard and now works at Microsoft. "Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we've expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve."

Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData: WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are:

Attention smartphone users: the recent launch of the first two satellites for Europe’s Galileo global navigation satellite system (GNSS) could make things a lot more interesting in about four years.

Galileo will deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to one meter range, compared to 10 meters for GPS, the European Space Agency (ESA) states, and it plans to give non-European users access.

Meanwhile, Apple’s new iPhone 4S has a chip that will be able to access Glonass (the Russian version of GPS), Engadget reports. Other manufacturers, including Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments, will also support Glonass — and Galileo as soon as it is operational — with new chipsets and software able to receive and integrate all three main GNSS systems.

A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.

The financial services industry is warming up to the idea of using the cloud for some of its critical computing needs. More than half of bank transactions will be supported by cloud-based infrastructure and software by 2015, according to a recent report from Gartner.

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

For banks, the cloud can offer far greater computing power and scalability. Migrating critical operations there won't be without its risks, however. Security and stability are always a concern when moving to the cloud, and that's especially true when highly sensitive data like financial transactions are involved. It simply requires that systems are architected in a secure and fail-proof way.

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items. Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

Barclays Group analyst Ben Reitzes spoke to Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer about the threat the new $199 e-reader/tablet hybrid poses to their uber-dominant iPad. Apparently the two execs were as cool as ice cubes in a fire-proof box on the matter. After the conversation, Reitzes wrote in a note to investors that the low price point will likely make some waves, but that the Android-based Kindle Fire also means more fragmentation in the tablet market--a phenomenon that has helped keep the iPad on top of the heap. Here's more of what Reitzes had to say:

While compatible with Android, the Apps work with Amazon products. The more fragmentation, the better, says Apple, since that could drive more consumers to the stable Apple platform. We believe that Apple will get more aggressive on price with the iPad eventually but not compromise the product quality and experience.

That remains to be seen. Amazon has so far contended that it's not looking to compete head-to-head with the iPad. The Kindle Fire's specs are significantly more spartan than those of Apple's slate, and--coupled with the disruptive price point--target a completely different type of tablet buyer (the iPad 2 starts at $499).

Amazon’s use of the iPhone camera to recognize and classify objects was preceded by Google, which released Google Goggles, a similar technology, for Android in December 2009 and for the iPhone last October.

In late 2008, news broke that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz was leaving the company to launch a new startup of his own, joined by early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. It was a move that led to plenty of raised eyebrows — Facebook’s growth was (and still is) explosive, and there were clearly lots of exciting things going on at the company.

The duo later revealed that they were working on a productivity app called Asana, raising a total of $10.2 million to fund the company. And yesterday, after two years in production and lengthy beta testing, the site held its public launch (you can find our full rundown on the launch right here).

Amazon's cloud services are vulnerable to attack via a "massive security gap" that enables hackers to access user accounts and data, a team of German researchers has revealed.

Security researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) found that Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services was vulnerable to different methods of attack, including signature wrapping and cross site scripting, Those security holes have since been closed.

But similar security holes may still be open in other cloud infrastructure offerings, the RUB team found.

Africa is being tipped to pass one billion mobile subscriptions to become the world’s second largest mobile market by 2016 according to new research from analyst firm Informa.

Mobile activations in the continent, which currently stand at 616 million, are estimated to grow by more than 60 percent over the next five years making the region the world’s second largest telecom market behind only Asia.

Informa explains that the development of the region’s “relatively immature telecoms market” — thanks to increased competition and lower costs — combined with the continued growth of Africa’s population are the primary reasons for its growth predictions. The use of 3G is also tipped to rise at a strong rate from 6.6 percent of Africa’s total mobile subscribers today to 46 percent by the end-2016 .

A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers.

You hear things about Facebook. You see things. As its audience matures, a subtle shift might be under way. Of course, numbers remain staggering. Facebook is heading toward the 800 million users mark, mostly by conquering new markets. The growth is distributed as follows: Middle-East Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America grow by about 60% a year; Europe by 35% to 40%; and North America by 25%.

It now seems Facebook's usage is undergoing a split. Active Facebookers become increasingly engaged, spend more time doing more stuff, while "reasonable" users (over 25) become more reluctant and careful.

older people are joining in western markets, while a younger audience grows in emerging ones. More changes are under way as the internet spreads on both landlines and mobile devices: over the past three years, China added more internet users than exist in the US today. Furthermore, in the fastest growing markets, Facebook captures more than 90% of all social network traffic. So, for the near future, Facebook doesn't have a growth problem.

Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.

For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.

The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of these visual search engines has reached levels that are beginning to be acceptable for eDiscovery, compliance, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

More and more electronically stored information (ESI) is non-text based or does not contain any searchable text components: sound recordings, video and pictures are growing exponentially in size and more and more collaborative and social network applications support (only) these information formats.

In addition, a whole generation is growing up that no longer uses written communication forms such as letters or emails: they only use social networks and other new media forms for communication and collaboration.

Des Moines is the home of mobile payments platform Dwolla. It is an interesting case study - local startup creating buzz within the community and getting retailers and consumers to actually use the platform. Dwolla has created a mobile payments ecosystem from the bottom up.

Within a 5-mile radius of Des Moines there are 500 to 700 business that are using mobile payments through Dwolla. The company works kind of like a payments version of Foursquare. You check at the register in the store using your phone and a pre-loaded Dwolla account.

it is likely that the company will be able to partner with banks and financial institutions in the near future to go straight from a bank account to the retailer.

Google Maps is a big part of Milk’s first mobile app, Oink. And Rose wants to build in more Google technology in future updates.

Oink lets people rate and discover things in the places around them. It is a first step at creating a directory and recommendation system for things in the physical world.