Handwriting beats PowerPoint’s teaching power says MIT boffin
Remember that feeling of struggling to stay awake during university lectures? And not just because of the previous night's imbibing?
The same problem affects students in massive online open courses (MOOCs), the free university courses now offered by reputable institutions around the world.
Anant Agarwal, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founder of edX, MIT's MOOC arm, thinks the way to stop the somnolence is by ditching PowerPoint and instead making hand-written material a key part of the online learning experience. Read more...
LinkedIn to buy Pulse, maker of mobile news reader app
LinkedIn, the world's largest professional networking site, continues to beef up its content publishing platform with its agreement to acquire Pulse, which makes a mobile news aggregation, reader, and content distribution application.
LinkedIn has been broadening its site's scope in recent years beyond its core feature of individual professional profiles, where people post career-related information and network with other members.
The Pulse acquisition, announced on Thursday, fits into LinkedIn's recent push around becoming a repository of news articles and columns published by media outlets and professional authors, as well as of member-generated posts that are primarily about career advancement and business.
"We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content," wrote Deep Nishar, LinkedIn's senior vice president of products and user experience, in a blog post. "Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs."
"Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision," he said.
The deal, expected to close this quarter, is worth about $90 million, approximately 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash.
Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari started Pulse in 2010 as a class project at Stanford that grew out of their dissatisfaction with mobile news reading. With Pulse, they aimed for "an effortless experience, with clean design and easy access to all of our favorite sources," they wrote in a separate blog post on Thursday.
Pulse, available for iOS and Android devices, will remain available in its current form for now, and the two teams will work to extend it and create "new offerings," they said, without going into details. It has more than 30 million users in 190 countries and is growing its user base by about 1 million people per month. It's used by more than 750 publishers.
Meanwhile, as of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.
Last month, LinkedIn announced a revamping of its search engine, a move intended to make it easier for its members to find information on the site as the volume of content increases and becomes more varied.
(Source: infoworld.com)
American tech workers lose out in H-1B lottery
Some tech companies won the lottery this week -- not the virtual one creating overnight Bitcoin millionaires, but an actual lottery granting skilled-worker visas known as H-1Bs. However, if Congress answers the tech industry's calls to raise the numbers of visas, it could lead to a hemorrhaging of American tech jobs, opponents warn. Read more...
How Lenovo kept PC sales strong while everyone else tanked
By now you've read the IDC report saying that worldwide PC shipments dipped 13.9 percent, year-on-year, in the first quarter of 2013. You may have also read Gartner's report saying that worldwide PC shipments dropped 11.2 percent in the first quarter. Both companies wail about how PC shipments have fallen off a cliff, in spite of their earlier predictions -- IDC had previously foretold a decline of 7.7 percent in the first quarter, and Gartner had cited a 7.6 percent decline for the year. I figure it's just another "oops, forget what we said last time" moment. Neither company has officially updated its crystal (or brass) balls, but I'm sticking to my prediction that PC sales (net of returns) in 2013 will be around 20 percent lower than in 2012. Read more...
Aruba battles BlackBerry to protect biz from staffers’ nasty iPhone apps
Aruba Networks has joined the mobile container fray with WorkSpace, providing enterprises with a secure BYOD platform which can be distributed to untrusted devices - and taking on BlackBerry and Samsung in the process.
Aruba's container integrates with its existing authentication system, ClearPass, and can make use of the company's priority-by-app Wi-Fi technology, allowing geographical and network restrictions as well as the usual remote management and data security, which keeps the corporate BOFH away from personal stuff - as well as the reverse.
Containers are all the rage these days, with Samsung KNOX taking on BlackBerry's Secure Work Spaces to push the idea of creating schizophrenic devices capable of running highly secured corporate apps alongside - but separated from - Temple Run, Tweetbot and Facebook. Read more...
WhatsApp says it’s not selling to Google after all
Speculation was rife yesterday that messaging app WhatsApp was reportedly in talks to sell itself to Google for a nice little (billion-dollar) sum.
But the company has now denied that this is the case - although it's not clear whether the fact is that talks have ended or that talks were never happening.
Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp's business development head, told AllThingsDigital that the company is in fact "not holding sales talks with Google", though declined to say more than that. Read more...
U.S. gets 124,000 H-1B petitions, 45% above cap
The federal government on Monday reported that it had received 124,000 H-1B visa petitions, 39,000 more than it can fulfill under two hiring caps.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service on Sunday held a computer-generated lottery to distribute the visas, which can be used during the federal government's 2014 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. With the lottery, a U.S.-based company that may be seeking only one or two H-1B visas is on the same footing as a large overseas-based offshore outsourcing firm that may have petitioned for thousands of temporary visas. Read more...
German court says nein to Apple’s slide-to-unlock patent
Apple's slide-to-unlock patent has been ruled invalid by a German court because it's not really a "technological innovation" in the eyes of European patent law.
The Bundespatentgericht (federal patent court) in Munich ruled that the famous patent is invalid because European law doesn't allow for the patenting of software that doesn't represent a "technical solution to a technical problem", the Frankfurter Allgemeine (translated with the help of Google) reported. Read more...
Apple reportedly pushing hard for iRadio launch as soon as June
Apple could launch its long-rumored iRadio service as soon as this summer, finally giving iTunes a streaming music app to take on Pandora and Spotify.
"iRadio is coming. There's no doubt about it anymore," an unnamed music industry source told The Verge.
The report says that Apple is pushing hard for a summertime launch of the streaming music app after making "significant progress" in talks with two top labels, Universal and Warner. Read more...
Dell blames ‘uncertain adoption’ of Windows 8 for some of its financial woes
Dell blamed Microsoft's Windows 8 as one of several causes for its grim financial future, according to a filing with securities regulators.
"The difficult environment faced by the Company as a result of its underperformance relative to a number of its competitors [includes] ... the uncertain adoption of the Windows 8 operating system," Dell said in a lengthy proxy statement filed Friday with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The proxy statement laid out Dell's case for shareholders accepting a $24.4 billion offer, led by its founder and CEO, Michael Dell, to take the PC maker private. Michael Dell has joined with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to buy the company, with Silver Lake in turn tapping Microsoft for a $2 billion contribution. Read more...
H-1B demand this year will be fast, furious
The U.S. begins accepting new H-1B visa petitions on Monday, April 1, and fast demand is expected. This is going to be followed by much fury.
Industry proponents of the H-1B visa will argue -- at megaphone strength -- that high demand is evidence of both an improving economy and need for skilled workers.
Opponents will counter that H-1B visa employees are displacing U.S. workers, and will point in particular to H-1B visa demand by offshore outsourcing companies. Read more...
Google may build early models of Glass in U.S.
Early models of Google's wearable computer, Glass, may be manufactured in the U.S., according to a report.
The Glass eyewear, which is still in development, is expected to be built in Silicon Valley, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed sources. The Times also reported that Google is working on a deal with Hon Hai Precision Industry, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer also known as Foxconn.
The manufacturer would build the computerized eye glasses in Santa Clara, Calif., the Times said.
Google declined to comment on where Glass will be manufactured. Read more...
Romanian citizen sentenced to five years in phishing scheme
A 28-year-old Romanian man was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison for his role in a phishing scheme, as part of a seven-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Cristian Busca, who was sentenced in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Connecticut, pleaded guilty last November to one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, the DOJ said in a news release. He was extradited to the U.S. in December 2011. Read more...
Google improves Chrom’s spel checkr
The new stable version of Chrome, 26.0.1410.43 m for those of you still counting, has baked in the spell check tech The Chocolate Factory uses when you type in its search dialog.
The results, depicted below, add an “ask Google for suggestions” option. Google’s blog announcing the feature shows that feature helping to explain when to use “effect” instead of “affect”.
Google says the new feature is "... powered by the same technologies used by Google search".
Yet when Vulture South’s grammar lab gave the new feature a workout we found it’s not very good at figuring out we’d used “its” when the contraction “it’s” is more appropriate. Nor did sentences in which we used “their” incorrectly as a substitute for the contraction “they’re” or the adverb “there” as an indicator of location produce a useful suggestion from Google’s dictionary.
That sound you just heard was therefore almost certainly a sigh of relief from The Reg’s sub-editorial corps, safe in the knowledge their particular skill remains essential to our ongiong operationses.
(Source: theregister.co.uk)
8 myths about the smartwatch revolution
By the time Apple ships its rumored "iWatch" smartwatch, the company will be entering a crowded market.
A smartwatch is a wristwatch device that connects to the Internet (directly or via a smartphone) and runs apps.
The Financial Times this week reported that Google's Android group (not the company's X Lab) is developing a smartwatch. That suggests Google plans to ship a smartwatch soon, possibly this year, and could even announce it at the Google I/O developers conference on May 15.
A Samsung executive this week not only announced that his company is working on a smartwatch, but that they've been working on it for a long time.
A Chinese company called Gouke plans to sell both an Android version of its Bambook Smart Watch by this summer as well as another version running the Firefox OS. Read more...