Law and Order: UAV

The Merseyside police deployed the UAV, which they nicknamed the flying saucepan, after a car thief ditched his getaway ride to hide in some bushes. Using the thermal imaging power of the UAV, the bobbies managed to track the 16-year-old perp through the underbrush, and eventually find his hiding spot.

The UAVs used by the English cops are similar to the UAV used by the Scottish rugby team, cost $62,000 a pop, can are remotely controlled from as far away as 500 yards.

To watch the Merseyside PD operate their UAV (although not catch anyone), check out the video below:

[The Daily Mail]

A jet engine shelved in the '80s could improve airplane fuel economy today

Last September, GE began wind-tunnel testing a one-fifth-scale set of the blades at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Using computational-design advances, engineers are redesigning the original blades to evenly distribute the air coming off the tips when they spin at supersonic speeds, which should reduce the noise. The setup more than triples the airflow through the blades, says Theresa Zeug, the project’s lead engineer, and allows them to be 14 feet wide, four feet wider than today’s largest. The engine also saves fuel by tilting the blades to control speed—rather than throttling up or down—which lets it run at a constant, efficient rate.

GE will probably have to execute some spin of its own to get the public on board with the fearsome design, which engineers have dubbed the “flying Cuisinart.” But GE has time to figure that one out: The engine won’t be ready for midsize jets, such as the Boeing 737, until at least 2020.

Motally also recently added former Googler Doug Garland, a vice president of product development for the search company, to Motally’s board of directors.

Forese says his prime task is to grow the company’s footprint of clients, and its footprint of the sites, services and apps measured by Motally. Mobile websites aren’t as hot as apps among startup entrepreneurs, but they’re still a growth market. Motally recently launched an API for uploading and downloading large sets of mobile website log files for analysis. That will make them irreplaceable to some of their largest clients.

I talked to Forese by phone earlier this week. At the time, I was agitated because Motally competitor Flurry had published a report on app stats, and then issued a major correction twelve hours later after everyone in Techmeme-land had read the wrong results. How do I know to trust you guys, I asked?

“You’ve got to be very transparent on methodology and you need to be consistent over time,” Forese said. “It’s early days. Even the Internet [i.e. website stats] is still trying to figure out the metrics that matter.”

Motally’s hook is that they handle both mobile websites and mobile app stats, while Flurry (and Pinch Media, with which Flurry recently merged) are focused on apps. “When you think about the mobile Web,” Forese told me, “that’s not just the Web of smartphones. It’s a way to get a very large base of people who for one reason or another have feature phones. You still want to get to them with mobile media.”

The San Francisco-based company was founded in early 2009, and received an undisclosed amount of first round funding from Blue Run Ventures and super-angel Ron Conway.

Companies: Flurry, Motally

People: Doug Garland, John Forese

The agency may also open up parts of the spectrum for private experimentation

The tools on the FCC's Spectrum Dashboard provide access to information about the current spectrum allocations by frequency, type of use, and user. Study enabled by this dashboard can help us to better understand how portions of the spectrum are used and in what areas experimentation and innovation are possible.

The Spectrum Band Browser provides a color-coded breakdown of the current spectrum allocation scheme. Moving the mouse over a portion of the spectrum gives key details on the type of use.

If you find you like this spectrum chart so much that you would like to have a copy of your very own, the full chart is available for download here. Regrettably, the Government Printing Office no longer carries this poster, so you will have to make your own printing arrangements if you'd like to have this on your wall, as I do.

The Spectrum Dashboard also provides two tools for researching license holders and the portions of the spectrum to which they have been given access. Pictured above is a screen shot of the Map tool, which reveals license holders by county. Searching by both the legally registered and common brand name of the license holder is also supported.

The spectrum availability map by county provides a visualization of the amount of the licensed bands not currently allocated to license holders. For most of us at the present time, it is somewhere right around none.

If you find yourself interested in the details of the frequency bands, don't miss the "Search by FCC License Categories" tool. This is a search interface for detailed information about each of the allocated bands in the radio spectrum.

Radio-wave tinkerers may find something else to like. According to a recent New York Times article, "The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies."

While there are already parts of the spectrum available for public usage, both through the portions allocated for amateur radio and the portions allocated for unlicensed operation, the FCC broadband plan acknowledges the benefits and innovations that have resulted from federal support of research and development and specifically addresses the issue of expanding the parts of the spectrum that are made available for research and experimentation. In section 7 of the plan, it states "Allowing research organizations such as universities greater flexibility to temporarily use fallow spectrum can promote more efficient and innovative communications systems."

When Tron Legacy comes out in theaters, it'll be one of the most expensive movies ever made. But it isn't being directed by James Cameron or Michael Bay or Peter Jackson. It'll actually be a first-time feature for Joseph Kosinski--who didn't train as a film-maker. Instead, he went to grad-school for architecture at Columbia; after that, he founded a Web-design firm, of all things.

And that background might be what distinguishes the movie and makes it great: Kosinski (pictured above, right) knows how to handle 3-D space, and he's fluent with animation technology in a way totally different from any mainstream director working today.

[youtube fCasmjk00C0]

As you can see in the video, Kosinski has an amazing design background. As an undergrad at Stanford, he took an engineering class with David Kelley--the founder of IDEO--and Kelley urged him to take up design, rather than engineering. That in turn led him to Columbia's architecture school, which at the time was notable for being on the cutting edge of introducing high-end computer programs into architecture. (One of his professors was Gregg Lynn, a leading proponent of "blobitecture.")

That eventually led him to create a Web-design firm while dabbling in short-films made entirely on the computer. At the time, people laughed at him for either wasting his architecture education--or presuming that a trained-architect could ever make a decent movie. After meeting director David Fincher (best-known for Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), he started working in production, then directing commercials--such as a trailer for the videogame Gears of War--and now, he's bootstrapped himself up to directing Tron Legacy.

The star of the new movie, Jeff Bridges, has already spotted the benefits of Kosinski's background. As he told Hitflix:

In retrospect, it all makes a perfect sense: The director of Tron, which is being shot in 3-D, needs to have a fine appreciation of space and how it flows; the texture of the movie means that he also had to have a knack with graphic design and product-design; and the heavy CGI means he has to understand animation work flows like a master. Who else but a trained-architect has a resume like that?

The test began with a short runway takeoff at 93 miles per hour, after which the pilot swung around, positioned the plane over the runway, and lowered it down. The test pilot, a former Royal Air Force aviator with experience piloting VSTOL planes, said he found landing the F-35 vertically far easier than landing older planes, like the Harrier, the same way.

This test moves the F-35 program significantly closer to deployment. In fact, the Marine Corps hopes to start training its first round of F-35 pilots this fall. However, with February's announcement that the entire program has been delayed a year, and cost overruns threatening automatic program restructuring under the Nunn-McCurdy Amendment, I wouldn't bet on the Marines keeping to that schedule, even in light of this recent successful test.

[The Bay Net]

At first glance the feature doesn’t seem to be much of an addition, since you obviously know who you went out with last Wednesday. The bigger trend is adding context to your past location and Foursquare (with similar other services) is seeking to find new ways to do that.

“We want to let you see how your social graph changes over time. You can look at who you were hanging out with five years ago. You’ll see the people you were spending the most time with and what you used to do with them. You can do all types of contextualizing with this kind of information, and getting the history out there is the first step,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said in a phone interview.

The contextualizing Crowley is discussing can involve prioritizing your contacts. Of all the people who share similar interests with you, who is good for going out for drinks or a game of racquetball? Maybe this information can help Foursquare provide users with fine-tuned recommendations about places to go and people to see. Also, Foursquare plans to enable gazing into the distant past, back to 2003 (a lifetime in Internet years). Before Foursquare, Crowley was trying to break into the location-based service scene with Dodgeball, acquired by Google and then discontinued. However, Dodgeball users can build a full history all the way back to 2003 if they imported their data to the system before it shut down.

Gowalla, another location-based mobile service built on the idea of check-ins (when you go to a venue like a bar, you check yourself in with your mobile phone; the people with most check-ins at a venue get special titles or points), is thinking hard about bringing context to location. At Gowalla’s website, users have been able to read through their history since the service launched in beta a year ago, but the company is revamping the functionality along with the rest of its site. “Gowalla likes to think of the check-in as a ‘bucket’,” says CEO Josh Williams. “You can add various of things to that ‘bucket’ to provide context.”

“This might be the type of place you were at, the date, was it a special event, and so on. Two things we’ve added recently to the bucket are conversations and photos. Now, when you check in, a friend can comment on that check in and start a dialog. This makes it super-easy to say, ‘Stay there, I’ll be over in 20 minutes’, or, ‘Try the BBQ, it’s the best in Austin.’ Photos are great, too, and certainly add depth to the concept of checking in,” Williams wrote in an e-mail, adding that more features are coming to the check-in function soon.

Williams thinks contextualizing location in different ways will make a big difference to users and developers. “In the end, it [adding data to location] will make it fun for users to review the highlight reel of their lives and potentially fun for developers to mash up this information in aggregate, in the form of ‘visualizers,’ or who knows what. Lots of fun to be had here.”

Visualization is on Crowley’s mind, too. Foursquare’s website already provides lots of statistics about users, such as average check-ins when out, percentage of check-ins at new places, distribution of check-ins by day of week, and so on. Foursquare refers to the excellent and meticulously (or downright obsessively) compiled Feltron Annual Reports of Nicholas Felton, and Crowley says this type of information lends itself perfectly to some cool visualizations.

“What’s interesting about the Feltron Reports is that the data Felton has compiled lets you see how he has grown personally, and this is something we would like to enable in some form for other people,” Crowley said.

Crowley also said these features will be a part of Foursquare’s API, or application programming interface. Developers can take that functionality and use it in ways that Foursquare hasn’t invented yet; in other words, they’ll throw it out there and see what third-party developers can turn it into.

Getting a cool graph with bells and whistles about your social life can be interesting to you, but not to you only. The functionality opens the door to an obvious privacy concern: Not everyone wants to let people know who they were with even when they’re willing to share their location. The connections could spark conflicts (jealousy or maybe suspicions of leaking sensitive information come to mind) and raise questions about why these people are, or seem to be, connected. In any case this may be the type of information some people would not be comfortable seeing out in public.

Foursquare says it is wary of the privacy issues and backlash new features might incite (think Google Buzz) and this is why the functionality is restricted, at least for now, to users’ approved Foursquare friends only. Users can also delete history they don’t want to make public, and Dennis Crowley says that tools to hide or even delete friends from users’ history are easy to provide.

So, while the idea of building a personal highlight reel will appeal to many, Foursquare, Gowalla, Burbn (a newcomer that wants to bring rich media to people’s whereabouts) and all the other services based on people’s willingness to share their location will have to tread carefully.

[This story is part of a weekly series on location-based services, written by VentureBeat's JP Manninen. If you have an idea for a story you would like to see in this series, drop a line at jp@venturebeat.com]

Tags: Foursquare, Gowalla, location

"Oh ar, oi'm a movie pirate, I am. Oh arrrr!"...does that sound sexy to you? Does it bring visions of a be-hatted Johnny Depp to mind? According to some content providers it might, and they want to rename online piracy. Losers.

This idea is being discussed over at ArsTechnica, and it stems from some words by Agnete Haaland, the president of the International Actors Federation. She was speaking in a press conference after the International Chamber of Commerce revealed the results of a new study that suggested over 1.2 million jobs would be lost in Europe alone thanks to download piracy by 2015, along with over €240 billion lost income. Haaland's comments pretty much echo the sentiment I describe above: "To me, piracy is something adventurous, it makes you think about Johnny Depp. We all want to be a bit like Johnny Depp." And this is the core of her argument that "we [the industries concerned] should change the term piracy."

But really, Agnete, you're just guilty of rampant PR spin, aren't you? It's not as simple as that. That phrase has been used as a weapon to demonize the notion of downloading by the authorities for years--digital pirates are like thieves and ruffians. It's even expressly referred to as such in those irritating "educational" inserts we have to watch at the start of DVDs, and in some movie presentations in theaters now too. They're so ridiculously over the top they've almost become a self-parody, as this clip from the fabulous I.T. Crowd shows.

[youtube 059i_EPK8Xs]

Note this isn't the real clip, as we can't embed it: Its IP owners are happy to get the free PR from YouTube, but not confident enough to let "pirates" promote the show outside of the confines of YouTube's own page (To see the non-Lego version, click here.) This is another interpretation of ownership of the IP in online content...and it taps into the whole Viacom versus YouTube fiasco that's slowly exploding right now.

But it's in a slightly different explanation of piracy, outlined by Rupert Murdoch's son James, that the weakness at the heart of all of these arguments is exposed: Murdoch was speaking in Abu Dhabi last week and said "There is no difference with going into a store and stealing Pringles or a handbag and taking this stuff." But he then tried to tap into the philosophy and hard economics of the matter: "It's a basic condition for investment and economic growth and there should be the same level of property rights whether it's a house or a movie," he began. This is essentially true, but it assumes that economic model is rigid and unchanging, rather than dynamic and reacting to society's needs.

Murdoch went on: "The idea that there's a new consumer class and you have to be consumer-friendly when they're stealing stuff. No. There should be the same level of sanctity as there is around property." Hmmm. This is weird, and it exposes the backwards logic at the heart of all these anti-piracy stances. Because the content generation industry is slave to the needs of the people it supplies to, not the other way around. And rampant piracy is an indication by literally millions of people around the world that the IP owners have to change their model, not aggressively defend it. Pirating something is a direct message that the item in question--particularly something as ephemeral as the IP of a movie--is just too expensive (or possibly not available in your region, for obscure business reasons). Economic worth is a completely imaginary construct, after all, and it's a fluid, fickle thing, completely unlike the rigid, inflexible suggestions James and Agnete put forward.

A fabulous example of this is in the recent economic meltdown. The magic of Wall Street is almost completely smoke and mirrors: Look at something like a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It's a trick whereby buying a bunch of debts from someone actually generates income--which just doesn't fit well in a common sense world. But the bankers and dealers perceive value in these things, and the system worked. Until it suddenly didn't, and all these artificial financial entities suddenly revealed their true worth--nothing. The result is the model was in conflict with reality, and all sorts of mayhem befell.

Rename piracy? Ohohoho no, me hearties. We need to re-rig the thinking of folk like Murdoch and Haaland to suit the winds of change.

To read more news like this follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter. If there's spare room on your pirated-movie-laden smartphone, you can use a barcode app to get the URL from the QR code on the left there.

Every company envies the buzz that accompanies new products released by Apple. How do they do it, time and again? One secret to their product launch success is secrecy itself. When details do leak about new Apple products, they are often false--and you never see a major Apple product leak the way Microsoft's Courier tablet did last year.

But now, for the first time, sketchy details of the non-disclosure agreements that the company insists on its partners signing, are emerging. And it offers evidence about just how far Apple is willing to go to protect its IP. Here are some of the highlights of the ten-plus-page NDA document.

Master marketeer Jobs understands that the less that leaks about Apple products, the more of a Boom! they make on the market, ergo, more units shifted, is vitally important to a company's health. Its stringent secrecy rules are, in part, due to the company's success in this area. And Jobs is utterly ruthless about enforcing this rule within the company, as well as amongst its partners.

"In fact, we've been allowed to work on one, and it's under padlock and key," said Rupert Murdoch at a conference in early march. "The key is turned by Apple every night..."

One senior systems engineer with the company in the first half of this millennium, was let go after he provided unreleased Mac software to a customer. A Wall Street Journal editor who told the world via his Twitter account that he'd had his mitts on the iPad removed the tweet from the site. A couple of developers, one a former head of Marketing at Apple who left to start Electronic Arts, begged and pleaded for an iPad for development purposes. Computer company said No.

First rule about Apple R&D, obviously, is that you do not talk about Apple R&D. This policy extends to its manufacturers, sometimes with devastating results. Whether the firm's Worldwide Loyalty Team exists or not, Cupertino is remarkably airtight. But maybe that's because its inhabitants are highly aware that loose lips sink ships. Sometimes, the firm even makes minute alterations to products when it sends them out in order to trace potential leaks.

And perhaps this uber-cautious approach is why we're now hearing reports suggesting that Apple is scrambling to attract more content partners to the iPad. Their reluctance to hand the iPad out to developers en masse is limiting the number of facets that can be added to the company's latest jewel by launch. Apple must be banking on the fact that the legions of fans who indulge in its monotheistic brand worship will last long enough for the developers to get their apps built after the device is on sale.

However draconian you may or may not think Apple's NDA is, however, it's a silken cord (albeit a legal one) when compared to some companies. A military research establishment in the UK had its own secure room. In a basement, it boasted Faraday-cage doors and isolated power supplies. Inside sat a solitary PC on a desk, with locked blocking units in its USB--and other--ports. There was no way you could connect it up to anything else. 

[Via Business Week and Wall Street Journal, Image Via ArsTechnica]

As the spotlight beams brightly on ChatRoulette and its attendant lumps, humps, and hairy backs, there is another, more wholesome, site that's just debuted. It promises all the thrill of videochatting with strangers with the protection that comes from limiting the audience to college coeds in possession of an .edu email address. Behold RandomDorm.com.

How It Started

RandomDorm.com grew out of another recently launched site that cheekily claims to "connect student bodies." Called GoodCrush, the concept is the brainchild of Josh Weinstein, a recent Princeton grad who appears to have had a Newton's apple moment, romance version 2.0.

"During my sophomore year an idea hit me--there needs to be an easy way to offer my peers (read: myself) a risk-free way of expressing a crush wherein their (my) identity is only revealed if there's a match," explains Weinstein. Enter the Crush Finder.

The utility was simple: Enter the names of five people you've got a crush on and the Finder lets them know. If they've input your name too, it's a "Good Crush." "Then you two live happily ever after--or at least for a few days," Weinstein says. If there's no match, the crusher's identity remains a secret. Period.

The site was so popular at Princeton that within one 24 hour period 30% of said "student bodies" were connecting. Now a month after the site officially launched beyond the hallowed halls of Princeton, Weinstein says they’ve received over 12,000 user signups at over a dozen schools across the country.

Weinstein says the chat component was always part of GoodCrush's overall concept, and right now he sees RandomDorm as "a cool, fun way to bring college students together without a romantic focus." The similarity to ChatRoulette ends with enabling person-to-person video interactions via two windows on the screen. RandomDorm is supposed to reduce (ahem) inappropriate conduct, if not prevent it altogether, he says.

How it Works

RandomDorm is a gated community (albeit one with a South Park-like background image), with a login wall of protection. The secret password is that college email address which can be typed in directly, or can be accessed through Facebook if the user's FB account is under an .edu email (another shared trait with Facebook's early incarnation). Once in, the fun (supposedly) begins.

To test out this thing, Fast Company dispatched our .edu email-using intrepid intern Austin Carr, who ventured into the outback of RandomDorm's unchartered territory Thursday evening. He found it ... almost empty. He did notice that unlike ChatRoulette, users have the option to narrow down potential partners to girls, guys, or both--the assumption, which is a bit closed-minded, is that girls are looking for guys and vice versa (isn't college the time of experimentation?). There's even a "cool people only" option, though it's unclear how the site vets the coolness factor.

Here's Austin's experience, in his own words:

First off, you'll have trouble finding anybody, and unfortunately, there's no automated Next feature--you have to click Next each frickin' time, even when it can't find anybody! And believe me, there's nobody on this service. Get used to clicking Next, Next, Next.

Don't try searching for girls, cause you won't find any. You're constantly presented with this message: "All users are currently engaged in sessions. Hit NEXT to try again." Click Next again, see the same message again. Over and over. Nobody. No chicks man! What gives! What did I go to college for!? Switching to "Both," I got the following message: "Found somebody!" Trying to connect you to a partner. After 20 seconds: "Could not connect to your partner. She or he might have left." Such a tease! That exclamatory "found somebody" after minutes of searching can seem like a miracle. But alas, nobody’s there, and I have to hit Next. Again.

(I’m basically nexting myself at this point.)

Plus, during those 20 seconds, the Next button is gray-ed out – you can’t even click Next, you have to wait those painful 20 seconds while, I guess, the service figures out that nobody's on the other end.

So I finally went for "guys." Cha-ching! "You are connected. Chat along!" Sweet, finally, here's where everyone was hiding. All the guys looking for non-existent girls. You can tell this is legitimately a dorm-room service by the solitary confinement lighting and white walls--heck, you can even see the occasional university banner in the background.Of course, these dudes instantly nexted me. But no matter: I connected with them two seconds later, then they nexted me, then we connected…then again…then again…then again. It was like a game of peek-a-boo. We couldn't NOT connect to one another. We were the only ones on the service.

After, like, the 12th time of seeing these two dudes on the service, I finally flagged them down before they Nexted me. Here's our brief convo (before they Next-ed me again, and then, predictably, reconnected again…I mean, they just didn’t get it):

23:33:48> You: quick question23:33:59> You: i'm doing a small story on chat roulette vs random dorm 23:34:03> You: this service seems to suck 23:34:09> You: has that been your general experience? 23:34:19> You: have you been able to see one girl so far? 23:34:20> Partner: Not enough dicks! 23:34:23> You: ha, right 23:34:26> You: i'll quote you on that

23:34:34> Partner: NOTENOUGHDICKS

The problem is that right now, there are too few users and those that are on are seeking something more. It removes the best part of ChatRoulette: to leap into the foggy abyss of video-chat and experience micro-interactions with mostly naked men and your occasional blurry-hooded figure.

How It Makes Money

Weinstein is, nonetheless, cheerfully upbeat and focusing on the positive. "I see a huge opportunity by both connecting students--who are experiencing and contemplating similar issues, questions, social lives, opportunities and coursework--as well as potentially creating an international college video pen pal program."

It's too early to tell if RandomDorm will morph into a more desirable service but Weinstein's already been able to raise seed funding from FirstMark Capital to launch GoodCrush and is looking for more. That said, GoodCrush itself is still a work in progress and though monetization is on the menu, Weinstein says improving the service must come before implementing potential revenue models. What do those look like? "Potentially premium services and virtual goods."

What About the Competition?

ChatRoulette aside, Weinstein is quick to note that GoodCrush should not be dismissed as just another dating site. "We know first-hand that students are unaccounted for on other dating sites. There is a bit of a stigma associated with students joining prototypical dating sites like Plenty of Fish or eHarmony," he says adding that most students wouldn’t feel comfortable admitting they needed help to find a match.

GoodCrush aims to be much more social, playful, and informal. Adds Weinstein, "Our goal isn’t for users to spend their time on their computer, but rather use our services as a social utility to complement and catalyze off-line activities and opportunities."

The Big Question - Privacy

It’s also hard not to draw parallels to that other (wildly successful) social utility founded by an Ivy League student. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's original site, Facemash, had a "Hot or Not" voting function that quickly gained a huge campus following.

Similarly, GoodCrush's voting function has spawned a "Top 10 Most Crushed" which so far seems to be authentic (and rated PG-13). Can GoodCrush prevent users from posting compromising photos of someone else and creating a subset that isn’t all good clean fun? Sure, until it all becomes the next inspiration for a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law & Order.

Weinstein maintains the campus approach offers significant privacy. GoodCrush does have several layers of moderation including site administrators and crowdsourcing to let users flag inappropriate content.

GoodCrush also has double-blind messaging in response to missed connections. It’s a feature that Weinstein says would be less appealing if the other individual weren’t a member of your social network or college community. "In addition to the additional privacy, it also increases the excitement of and likelihood of success for missed connections and anonymous matching." 

And unlike Zuckerberg’s alleged breach of user privacy when he used Facebook login information to hack into email accounts, Weinstein wants everyone to know that despite being hounded via email, text, and phone, he’s never revealed a the identity of an unrequited crush.

So Who’s Josh's Crush?

That goes for him, too. Though Weinstein is no longer in the target user base, he hasn't gone crushless. "I have a sneaking suspicion that one or two of the missed connections are about me and I have received a few crushes--so there is temptation--everyone always wants to know who their secret admirer is!"

Austin Carr contributed to this report.