Nokia updates Lumia smartphones with camera app, better imaging

Nokia has started rolling out the Amber software update to its Lumia smartphones, which will allow users to take better pictures and get new camera apps.

The Finnish handset maker continues to put a lot of effort into improving camera functionality and picture quality on its Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

The Amber update brings improved algorithms for better noise reduction, color reproduction, exposure control and autofocus. On the 920, controls to adjust the ISO settings of the camera from 800 to 3200 allow even better low-light performance, Nokia said in a blog post on Thursday.

After installing the update, users will also be able to get the Smart Camera app, which premiered on the 925. It includes features such as Best Shot, Action Shot and Change Faces. The latter allows users to create better group pictures by choosing the best from a series of images or removing unwanted objects. Action Shot lets users combine shots of people in movement into one image.

The quality of images taken with the Smart Camera app will be affected by the performance of each phone. On the 720, 620 and 520, the burst mode used for some effects takes seven pictures rather than ten, for example.

In addition to the Amber update, the Pro Camera app is available for the 920, 925, and 928, Nokia said. The app's user interface has a number of sliders that lets users control camera settings such as shutter speed, exposure value, ISO settings, white balance and the manual focus. The app is also available on the 1020.

Amber isn't just about imaging; Nokia has also added a feature called Glance Screen, which adds a clock to the standby screen. It also adds indicators to show when the phone is running on a low battery or when the phone is charging or set to silent mode.



The software won't be available on the 520 and 625, because those two smartphones have a smaller display memory, according to Nokia.

Two features from older phones are also making an appearance in Amber: flipping the phone over to mute an incoming call and a double-tap on the screen to unlock the screen.

The Lumia 920 and 820 in selected countries as well as the 521, 810, and 928 in the U.S. will get the update first. Owners of the 520, 620 and 720 will have to wait a bit longer, but Nokia expects everyone will get Amber by end September.

The Mac office: Picturing a better way to communicate

An AT&T commercial from 1993 asked, among other things, “Have you ever tucked your baby in from a phone booth?” We see a mother making a video call to her child in a public phone booth, and the voice-over assures us, “You will.”

Twenty years ago, the vision for video calling in the future was that it would be universal—and as simple and interoperable as telephones. Now we all have cameras built into our Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and maybe even our TVs. And it is indeed possible to buy a device called a videophone. Video communication is commonplace, but the problem is that there are dozens of competing systems, services, and protocols. Whichever one of these you choose on a given occasion may or may not work for the party on the other end. And if two people have several options to choose from, figuring out which works best can be an exercise in frustration.

Because I work at home and my colleagues and clients are scattered around the world, I regularly rely on video for meetings, presentations, demos, and other business get-togethers. So I have software installed, and accounts set up, for Facebook Video Calling, FaceTime, Google+ Hangouts, Messages, Skype, and a few others services—each on several different devices. And yet, I rarely have a truly satisfactory voice- or video-chat experience. Nearly every time someone wants to conduct a video call with me, we have to go through multiple rounds of negotiation and fiddling, and even then something often goes wrong.

In Messages, you can use more than one protocol with the same account—for example, you might use a mac.com address with both iMessages and AIM. The choice matters because different protocols have different features.
If I want to have a plain, one-on-one video call with someone, nearly any service will work. But, if one party or the other wants to share a computer’s screen, our choices narrow. (FaceTime and Facebook are out, for example.) If I want the other party to see my face and all or part of my screen at the same time—as I do, for example, when delivering a remote video presentation to a user group—I have even fewer options. And if we want more than two parties to be involved in the conversation, yet another set of constraints kicks in.

Then there are technical issues. Although Skype was once my go-to service, almost every Skype call I’ve had in the last two years with more than two participants (whether audio-only or video) has degraded to the point of uselessness within a half hour or so, forcing us to stop the call and reconnect—even though all parties have great bandwidth, fast computers, and up-to-date software.

Time and again, I’ve had problems with people using Messages because they had it configured to use the right account but with the wrong protocol. And even when the account is set up correctly, I frequently find that Messages users on public Wi-Fi networks can’t connect, because some of the ports Messages needs are commonly blocked. My Macworld editors can attest to the problem of horrible echoing in Google+ Hangouts if microphones are placed incorrectly in a meeting room.

Now, I can guess what you’re thinking, even before you write it in the comments, which I know you will: “Your whole problem is that you haven’t mentioned my favorite video service, X, which is brilliant and perfect and the best thing ever! How could you have omitted the obvious solution?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

The reason I mentioned the services I did is that any Mac or iOS user can access them for free, and most of us already have the software and accounts we need. Anything else requires something extra—usually downloading an app or plug-in, struggling with a Flash-based interface, setting up an account, paying a monthly fee, or some combination of the above. All those things are barriers for every other participant.

The reason I mentioned the services I did is that any Mac or iOS user can access them for free, and most of us already have the software and accounts we need. Anything else requires something extra.
True story: A developer wanted to demo some new software for me, so we set up an online meeting. I thought we were going to use Skype or Google+ Hangouts, but at the last minute, I received a message saying we’d be using GoToMeeting, a commercial videoconferencing service. To participate in the call, I had to download, install, and configure GoToMeeting’s software on my Mac, an annoying extra step. A few days later, the same developer wanted to follow up on some additional features, and I assumed we’d use GoToMeeting again. But this time they wanted to use join.me, which would have forced me to download and install yet another plug-in. I said no: Life is too short, and I don’t need to junk up my Mac with a bunch of software I’ll use only once and forget about.

Yes, I’m familiar with other consumer services such as ooVoo and other business-oriented services such as MegaMeeting.com and WebEx Meetings. There are tons of ways to have a video conversation online, but that’s the problem. They’re all proprietary, and they all require extra effort or expense from at least one of the participants. I can never just say, “I’ll call you,” as I can with telephone calls.

A Google+ Hangout can include up to ten participants, and if you choose to make it public, you can also have it automatically recorded and posted on YouTube.
I still want the future that AT&T promised in 1993. I want to be able to give someone my video ID and know for certain that we’ll be able to see and hear each other regardless of who manufactured our devices or what service we’ve subscribed to. I’d like it even better if I could make the same assumptions about videoconference calls that I can make with audio calls, and if screen sharing were universal.

But it doesn’t look like that future will be coming any time soon. In the meantime, here’s how I choose which service to use:

One-on-one video calls: I use FaceTime for family and close friends who I know have iOS devices, and Skype for everyone else (or when screen sharing is necessary).

Meetings with three or more participants: Google+ Hangouts is the best option here, because almost everyone already has a Google account, and pretty much everyone I work with already has Google’s voice- and video-chat plug-in installed. (Unlike Messages, Hangouts supports up to ten participants; and unlike Skype, Hangouts lets you conduct a multiperson video chat for free.)

For presentations in which I want the other party to see live video of my face alongside a Keynote presentation, I usually use Messages with an AIM account so that I can take advantage of Theater mode. For presentations involving video of two or more people at the same time plus a shared screen, I use Hangouts, logging in from two computers at the same time—one for my face and the other for screen sharing.

If you want the other party to see live video of your face as well as a Keynote presentation, Messages (using the AIM protocol) is an excellent choice. Before you schedule a video meeting, reflect on two questions. Ask yourself not only whether the service you intend to use has all the features you need, but also how convenient your choice will be for the other party or parties. If you can avoid making someone else jump through extra hoops to accommodate you, you'll get your meeting off to a much better start. 

How Intel's modded chips make your smartphone a better listener

For years, Intel and other chip makers designed processors like stock engines, dropping them into PCs, notebooks, and servers. Now, Intel has shown a newfound willingness to mod custom silicon for server customers, tweaking them with hardware and software accelerators to improve their performance.
These same servers are the ones powering cloud applications that include email and storage, but also interpret the gestures and spoken commands of smartphone users. On Monday, for example, Intel and Nuance Communications disclosed that Intel is developing an accelerator to improve Nuance’s voice recognition, which powers as many as 6 billion connected devices, according to Sean Brown, Nuance’s senior manager of innovation.

Intel has also developed custom chips for both eBay and Facebook, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group, at an Intel datacenter event on Monday.

IntelIntel’s Jason Waxman holds a server motherboard.
The bottom line? By specifically improving these cloud functions, smartphone and PC users will see their performance increase over time, for free, with new capabilities. “With advanced natural language processing, you can really say anything to [connected devices] and have a natural response,” Nuance’s Brown said. “But the personal systems of tomorrow will be proactive, when you need it automatically.”

Intel has been designing “accelerators” for decades, Waxman explained, dating back to the MultiMedia eXtensions (MMX) instruction set that it shipped with 1997’s Pentium MMX. Those chips included dedicated hardware registers that were designed to accelerate software written with the MMX software in mind, a technique that Intel used with subsequent chips up to and including its Core processors. Most of today’s server chips ship with dedicated hardware logic blocks on board designed to specifically accelerate functions like encryption. Accelerators for technologies like Nuance take the same approach, but are optimized for a single company.

IntelIntel’s Pentium with MMX Technology.
Meanwhile, incoming Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich has invited non-competing chip customers to manufacture their chips at Intel’s own fabs, analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy noted. Intel has had partners that would like Intel to design accelerators around their technology, but lacked the resources, Waxman said. The new spirit of collaboration benefits both sides.

Waxman referred to Intel’s new approach as an “SoC methodology,” an industry term for the systems-on-a-chip (SoC) approach used by many consumer manufacturers, including rival AMD, to optimize chips for specific products.

As an example of Intel’s commitment to custom chips, Intel announced a 14-nm “Broadwell SOC,” Intel’s first semi-custom chip, that will ship as part of Intel’s Atom line in 2014 or later. For years, Intel has shipped its Xeon chip to server customers, but recent shifts in the server space caused Intel to beef up its Atom tablet and set-top chip line to address enterprise customers.

In part, Intel’s hand is being forced by ARM and the smartphones and tablets that those chips power. ARM is riding three trends: first, a general shift away from the PC—Intel’s center of power—to slimmer, cheaper, tablets and smartphones. That’s a segment of the market Intel hopes to address with its Atom processor, whose “Bay Trail” derivative could power Windows and Atom tablets and convertibles as low as $150 by the holidays.

Intel has already begun mixing and matching chips to various customer segments.

An ARM chip.
”The first thing [that’s different about Intel] is that they’re using an array of products,” said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. “If you go back a few years, they designed a chip for the desktop, and then they optimized it a little bit for mobile, and they put a bigger cache on it and called it [a] server [chip]. And there were three basic markets being served by one design. And now, they’re taking stuff that was designed for mobile... Atom stuff, that can also can go into servers, with server stuff. And now they’re taking another chip that they designed for a laptop, and they’re beefing that up... for desktops.”

The second trend that benefits ARM is that ARM, unlike Intel, doesn’t manufacture its own chips. Instead, it licenses its processors as essentially a kit—intellectual property that can be used as is, or surrounded with a chip designer’s own peripheral logic. That’s forced Intel’s hand, Moorhead said. “So they’re going to have to be custom, and more flexible, to keep their 95 percent market share,” Moorhead said of Intel.

Finally, while the PC has remained generally unchanged for decades, server manufacturers have shown a willingness to optimize their servers for specific functions, known as “disaggregation”. Currently, racks of servers perch one over the other in a server chassis, all with their own CPU, storage, and memory.

 Eventually, the idea is that servers will have “pools” of computing, storage, and I/O resources, much like the a bunch of flash chips are combined together to make a single flash “drive”.

In recent years, Intel has arguably invested more in the server space than it has in the PC, into software, services, networking, storage, and other areas. For right now, the trend is toward custom-designed servers, with specific applications in mind.

“Flexibility is the key, because the architecture is disaggregating, meaning the only way to efficiency in the datacenter is workload by workload, where virtualization is not cutting it,” Moorhead said. “In the scale out data center, you have to have a specific server type for a server workload, whether it be Web tier, data mining, Hadoop or otherwise.”

The talk now is of a software-defined future, where applications “ask” for resources, which are managed by a central server—powered by Intel, the company hopes. ARM is hoping to cash in on the third trend, with low-power 64-bit server processors it will ship later this year. For right now, however, Intel hopes it can control the conversation—part of the reason executives are holed up with analysts and customers this week. 

Human Decency Is Not Enough: Why Cons Need Better Anti-Harassment Policies

There’s little debate about the fact that there’s no place for harassment at conventions like Comic-Con. People go to conventions to have fun, and just about everyone realizes that being verbally or physically abused is the complete opposite of fun. The real convention harassment debate–the one that’s once again igniting communities of fans, professionals, and convention organizers–is what we should do about it, and whether we need explicit policies to define harassment and how to respond when it inevitably occurs.

There’s been consistent pushback against developing and implementing convention anti-harassment policies, but it’s not that anyone thinks harassment at conventions is okay. In fact, it’s just the opposite: The most vociferous of opponents to anti-harassment policies are often people who assume that “don’t harass people” is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be articulated.

They’re not exactly wrong. Harassment should be an obvious taboo, and in an ideal world, human decency, common sense, and basic social etiquette would render the issue moot. But if that were enough, con harassment wouldn’t be the epidemic that it is. The fact is that people do harass and assault each other at conventions; that that the problem is pervasive among both fans and professionals; and that the community and official response to it is often vastly insufficient.

John Scalzi, the author and former president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, forced the issue when he announced last week that he will no longer attend any convention that lacks an explicit, well-publicized, and enforced anti-harassment policy. Since then, nearly a thousand other fans and professionals have signed the pledge.

Nor is Scalzi the first person to suggest that conventions need official harassment policies. Five years ago, in response to a series of incidents at San Diego Comic-Con–which had no official harassment policy at the time–the Con Anti-Harassment Project launched a campaign encouraging conventions to establish, articulate, and enforce anti-harassment policies. Personal appeals and awareness campaigns are terrific tools for publicizing the issue of convention harassment, but there’s only so much they can do without strict policies and staff training to enforce them.

Conventions need anti-harassment policies. Not because convention attendees are disproportionately boorish or creepy–they’re really not–or because of social obliviousness. Rather, the difficulty lies in the very thing that makes conventions conventions: the social phenomena that come into play whenever humans gather in large groups.

Diffusion of responsibility refers to the tendency of people in large groups to avoid decisive action. It’s linked to two specific circumstances: a large enough group of people, and a scenario in which responsibility isn’t explicitly assigned–say, a convention with no clear guidelines for what constitutes harassment, or for reporting and intervention. It’s because of diffusion of responsibility that companies over a certain size need to have protocols for emergencies and people explicitly responsible for implementing them. It’s a Somebody Else’s Problem Field that grows in direct proportion to the number of Somebody Elses in the room. And there are a lot of Somebody Else’s at a convention.

The bystander effect, or, bystander apathy, refers specifically to the way diffusion of responsibility deters people from intervening in crises. Bystander apathy is also called the Genovese effect, after a young woman named Kitty Genovese who was stabbed to death over the course of about half an hour while dozens of people allegedly witnessed the attack but failed to intervene or alert authorities. It wasn’t that they didn’t care: It was that everyone assumed that someone else must already have taken action.

The Genovese case is extreme–and there’s strong evidence that the numbers involved were inflated in the reporting–but it led psychologists to investigate bystander behavior in crises. Again and again, they found that an individual’s tendency to intervene in or act on a crisis, regardless its scale, consistently dropped as the number of bystanders rose.

For the most part, bystander apathy isn’t a conscious choice. It’s hardwired into our brains and behavior on a level that requires conscious effort to recognize and resist. There are two primary means of overcoming bystander apathy: bystander intervention training, in which participants learn and practice techniques for intervention; and explicit assignment of responsibility, in which members of a group are explicitly assigned individual or collective responsibility for action in crises and provided with the tools and protocols to act on it.

Let’s look at how these apply to conventions. We’ll assume that, say, 99 out of 100 convention attendees are basically decent folks there to have a good time, who will adhere to basic social etiquette. Number 100 is a different story. This person is offering free hugs to every passer-by–and when someone declines, hugging them anyway, even if it means chasing and heckling them halfway across the con floor. Everyone else knows there’s something off, but, unless (and sometimes even if) they’re involved, they probably won’t be able to pinpoint it. After all, if that person really was behaving inappropriately, someone else would already have intervened, right?

Diffusion of responsibility makes it a lot harder for us to intervene and respond when harassment occurs. But social phenomena don’t just affect how we respond to harassment—they contribute directly to its prevalence.

Our behavioral norms—the rules, conscious or not, that determine both how we act and how we judge others’ actions—are largely situational. We behave differently and expect different behaviors from others at home and at school, at work and at bars, at sporting events and at the grocery store. But all of those are routine settings, parts of day-to-day life. How do we work out the rules when we’re dropped into an atypical situation, like a convention?

Humans are extremely social animals, and in social settings, we look–consciously or unconsciously–to the people around us for the proper way to behave. It’s irrelevant whether those people know any more than we do; we’ll still look to them for cues and use their behavior to extrapolate the rules for any given situation. Social Proof, or informational social influence, is amplified by out-of-the-ordinary circumstances like a convention and by an individual’s similarity to the people around them–say, a large group of individuals who have congregated based on their shared interests.

Let’s go back to those 100 hypothetical con attendees. We’ll postulate that one person is definitely going to harass people. The other 99, left to their own devices, wouldn’t. But there are enough of them in the room that bystander apathy is going to come into play: They may not engage in direct harassment, but they probably won’t intervene if they witness it. At the same time, they’re all looking to each other–to everyone in the room–for a sense of what constitutes correct behavior in this context.

Say someone observes an incident of harassment, but none of the people around them–people they recognize and sympathize with as peers–intervene. The observer may still realize that the behavior would be considered inappropriate in most circumstances. However, a convention is an irregular circumstance, removed from the majority of their lives, and so normal rules may not apply. Inappropriate behavior is behavior that inspires intervention, and this behavior did not.

And the people walking past aren’t the only ones those 99 attendees may recognize and sympathize with: odds are that they recognize the harasser as a fellow fan. From there, it’s a short step to another conclusion: maybe their behavior is appropriate in this context. Thus, they might infer, it is not necessary in this situation to intervene. The odds of arriving at that conclusion skyrocket when the harasser is a professional or individual in a position of explicit or implicit authority, like a security guard or speaker.

The scenario above won’t simply influence the way people act at a convention: it’ll affect their personal rubric for what behavior is and isn’t objectively okay. And so it is harassment can go from an absolute taboo, to a behavior we tolerate from within a crowd, to an accepted norm.

Social reinforcement doesn’t deter harassment at conventions. It also reinforces it. Even if we put aside other cultural contributors to harassment, as long as there’s even a single person who refuses to abide by social compact (and there will always be one), large crowds united by common interests make conventions the perfect habitats for toleration, normalization, and propagation of harassment.

That’s where anti-harassment policies come in, and why they’re indispensible. They’re not babysitting or tyranny, nor do they assume malevolence or incompetence. Rather, they’re a means of counterbalancing the power of social phenomena like bystander apathy and social proof.

First of all, it establishes clear, external guidelines for situation-appropriate behavior, bypassing social proof and prompting attendees to regulate their own behavior rather than relying on communal cues. That awareness—and clear delineation of inappropriate behavior—also combats they bystander effect, empowering attendees to recognize and act in response to inappropriate behavior.

Second, an effective anti-harassment policy provides attendees with a concrete means of responding to harassment they experience or witness. It’s not enough to merely have a policy: it needs to be publicized, publicly visible, and easily accessible. And it should detail not only unacceptable behavior, but course of action for attendees to follow when an incident occurs. Social proof and bystander apathy are both relative to how people perceive their individual power and responsibility, and giving convention attendees concrete tools for responding to harassment not only empowers them to act, but increases the likelihood that they’ll see it as their responsibility to do so.

Finally, an anti-harassment policy must be procedurally reinforced. No matter how clear your rules or how alert and engaged your attendees, there will be incidents of harassment. Convention staff and volunteers need to be able to recognize inappropriate behavior and intervene as necessary, and understand how and where to respond to and escalate complaints.

It’s important, too, to remember that staff and volunteers are parts of the same community as attendees–and, to some extent, vulnerable to the same phenomena, as both victims and potential perpetrators of harassment. You can’t instinctually assume that they’ll do the right thing. They not only need to be familiar with the anti-harassment policy, but understand their specific responsibilities under it.

While San Diego Comic-Con now has an official harassment policy, you won’t find it at their website, or, indeed, anywhere but the program handed out at the convention. The most a Google search will yield is a version of the policy transcribed from a photo of last year’s program at an unaffiliated blog. Worse, there’s no evidence that Comic-Con staff and volunteers are trained directly in either the content or the enforcement of the policy.

Last year, a volunteer wrote about her experience being assigned to and left in an isolated position, without staff support, for an extended period. She had, months before, received a document that listed the harassment policy for Comic-Con, but told Wired it was never subsequently reviewed or addressed, leaving her unsure how to deal with harassment she endured during the convention.

Wired asked a Comic-Con representative to outline the training provided to volunteers and staff members but received no response. In a previous conversation with Wired, marketing director David Glanzer said the convention has “no tolerance for harassment” and “encourage[s] anyone who feels they’re being harassed to contact a member of security or staff.”

Although the addition of an explicit anti-harassment policy to the official convention program is a good start, and speaks to the organizers’ willingness to take at least some concrete action, it isn’t enough. If Comic-Con and other conventions want their guests to take anti-harassment policies seriously and feel comfortable reporting incidents to staff, they need to actively publicize those policies, and provide staff and volunteers with the training to enforce them and take decisive action when they’re violated.

Social phenomena like diffusion of responsibility and social proof aren’t the only factors that contributes to convention harassment, but they’re among the few that convention organizers have the power to directly and effectively address, with immediate impact. And they must.

Pogue’s Posts Blog: A Better Google Maps App for Apple and Android Devices

Google Map’s new directory buttons.
Our story so far: Last September, Apple decided to dump the Google Maps app that had been on the iPhone for years. Apple replaced it with its own Maps app — software with so many problems that Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, apologized and even recommended that people use other apps until Apple could fix its own one.

In December — incredibly quickly — Google responded by introducing its own Maps app for iPhone. It’s a spectacular app, among the best apps ever written. It’s fast, beautiful and so good at guessing what you mean when you start typing a destination, it’s almost mind reading. You can read the details here.

Today, that delightful news gets even better. Not only has Google improved Google Maps for iPhone, it’s also brought that same free app to three machines that never had it: the iPad, Android phones and Android tablets. (The Android versions are available for download today; it requires the Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean version of Android — recent versions, in other words. The iOS versions will be available shortly.)

For Androidians, the biggest news is the design of the app itself. It’s modeled on the iPhone app, the one that’s simple and fast and elegant. It’s also uncluttered by the morass of menus that have always plagued the existing Maps app for Android.

But for practitioners of all religions — tablet, phone, iOS, Android — the other news is the new features that today’s new version brings. They include:

* Greater speed. All app versions are faster than before.

* Better place information. Half the time, you don’t even need navigation instructions; you just use Google Maps as the world’s smartest Yellow Pages, to find a nearby restaurant, movie theater, drugstore or whatever.

The details for found places now include a one-line description (“Chinese restaurant famous for dim sum”); a five-star rating system (including a decimal — “4.3,” for example — because, let’s face it, almost everything these days winds up with a four-star rating); the ability to upload your own photos of a place; and a more complete integration of the Zagat guides, which Google bought.

* Greater emphasis on exploration. Google Maps has always excelled at getting you to a known destination. But Google now wants the app to help you choose a restaurant, bar, store, recreation center or hotel, at least in major United States and European cities.

If you tap in the Search box without typing anything, new, photographic buttons appear: Eat, Drink, Shop, Play, Sleep. Each opens lists of corresponding facilities, sorted by criteria like Local Favorites, Popular with Tourists and so on. (Google says that these recommendations are never paid placement.)

* Traffic incidents and auto-rerouting. At last: Google Maps shows more than colored lines indicating current traffic speeds on major roads. Now it also displays tiny icons that represent accidents and construction. Tap one to read the details: “Right lane blocked on 680,” for example. (In case you were wondering, the information on traffic incidents doesn’t come from Waze, the traffic-incident app that Google recently bought. That data has yet to be incorporated into Maps.)

Better yet: Maps now looks ahead for traffic jams on your route, and interrupts your drive with a dialog box that offers to route you around it (if the new path would be quicker, of course). On its own.

* Offline maps. This feature is something of an Easter egg. It’s undocumented, a feature inserted by Google engineers simply because they wanted it. You can access it only if you know the secret. But wow, is it worth it.

This feature memorizes the map data for whatever area is displayed on your screen right now (up to a whole city in size). That way, you can use Google Maps even when you’re overseas and don’t want to turn on data roaming (because that’s insanely expensive), or when you’re in an area where there’s no cell reception. It’s very handy.

To capture a map snapshot like this, tap in the Search box. Use the speech-recognition button and say, “OK Maps.” (It’s a riff on the command “OK Glass” that prepares Google Glass, the company’s “smart headband,” for voice commands.)

A message quietly lets you know you’ve successfully stored the displayed area.

*Nice tablet layouts. On a tablet, Maps really shines. The app smartly reformats itself to take best advantage of whatever screen shape you have: two or three columns of place listings, for example, and luxuriously displayed photos and reviews for each business.

This new, improved Maps app works identically on both major flavors of phone and tablet. You know what? I don’t care how much you distrust Google and its motives. This is crazy good software, some of the best work Google has ever done.

Paying bug bounties is a better investment than hiring a security team, study claims

Paying rewards to independent security researchers for finding software problems is a vastly better investment than hiring employees to do the same work, according to researchers from the University of California Berkeley.

Their study looked at vulnerability reward programs (VRPs) run by Google and Mozilla for the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.

Over the last three years, Google has paid $580,000 in rewards, and Mozilla has paid $570,000. In the course of those programs, hundreds of vulnerabilities have been fixed in the widely used products.

The programs are very cost effective. Since a North American developer’s salary will cost a company about $100,000 with a 50 percent overhead, “we see that the cost of either of these VRPs is comparable to the cost of just one member of the browser security team,” the researchers wrote.

Additionally, more eyes on the code meant the VRPs uncovered many more software flaws than just one hired developer could find.

The study provides a sound foundation for reward programs, which are not embraced by all vendors. Adobe Systems and Oracle do not pay for vulnerability information.

Microsoft has traditionally not paid bounties, but did implement a one-off program last month. Through July 26, Microsoft will pay up to $11,000 for bugs in its Internet Explorer 11 browser.

Bug bounties have other advantages, such as by reducing the number of vulnerabilities that are sold to malicious actors who would use the information for criminal activity. The programs also make it harder for hackers to find vulnerabilities, the researchers wrote.

But a key difference between Google’s and Mozilla’s programs may affect their effectiveness.

Mozilla pays a flat $3,000 reward for a vulnerability. Google pays on a sliding scale, which ranges from $500 to $10,000. Google judges vulnerabilities and exploits on factors such as difficulty and impact.

Google’s average payout is just $1,000, but the chance of obtaining a much higher reward appears to provide an incentive for more people to participate in its program, the researchers wrote.

Google’s program, while costing about the same as Mozilla’s, “has identified more than three times as many bugs, is more popular and shows similar participation from repeat and first-time participants.”

“This makes sense with an understanding of incentives in lotteries: the larger the potential prize amount, the more willing participants are to accept a lower expected return, which, for VRPs, means the program can expect more participants,” according to the paper.

Also, browser penetration contests such as “Pwnium” run by Google with rewards up to $150,000 sparks more interest among researchers.

“We believe this sort of ‘gamification’ leads to a higher profile for the Chrome VRP, which may help encourage participation, particularly from researchers interested in wider recognition,” the paper said.

“Accordingly, we recommend Mozilla change their reward structure to a tiered system like that of Chrome,” it said.

Bits Blog: With Big Data, Fail Cheaper, Fail Better

Kim Steele for The New York Times More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data.
There are lots of reasons for the current boom (some would say bubble) in data, including cheap computing, sensors everywhere and lots of new algorithms.

To all of those, perhaps we should add the rising likelihood of failure, both the expensive kind and the cheap kind.

The expensive kind is when your business or employer gets wiped out. That is happening with greater frequency. According to Richard N. Foster of Yale University, the average tenure of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 is now about 16 years, down from 60 years in 1959.

“The duration of your working life is now almost certainly greater than the lifespan of a company,” said Alistair Croll, an entrepreneur and author. “That makes everyone more willing to accept that they will be disrupted.” When people know there are reasons to think their business will be blown up by new market developments, he said, they’re more likely to seek data that helps them respond.
 Alistair Croll, author of “Lean Analytics.”
Mr. Croll is the author of the book “Lean Analytics,” which is about how companies, and start-ups in particular, can better focus on change by working with lots of different data sources.

More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data. That term may be somewhat hyped, but there is no doubt that analysis of standardized information is becoming the norm in more of our lives, from personal medicine to real-time analytics of big industrial machines.

It is also cheaper to take risks and fail, both for start-ups and corporate divisions. Many costs that existed even a decade ago have fallen sharply. Computer hardware and software are now rented through cloud computing, social media is a proxy for much of marketing and a burgeoning number of business applications are sold cheaply in Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS stores.

“When things like that happen,” Mr. Croll says, “companies focus less on costs, and more on experimentation about what is going to make their original idea work. There is more desire to experiment.”

Experimentation, of course, involves a lot of failure, as failure is where most learning takes place. Data around the failures of others are collected and studied as part of the overall process now. Data on failure is cheaper to create, and cheaper to come by. That is another way of saying that people are more likely to make new and interesting mistakes, instead of the same old ones, which is probably a good thing.

One big result of this failure-driven world, Mr. Croll says, is that organizational leadership is changing toward a more structured learning environment. “In the past, a leader was someone who could get you to do stuff in the absence of information,” he says. “Now it’s the person who can ask the best question about what’s going on, and find an answer.”