Google’s Marissa Mayer Will Try to Save Yahoo as CEO

by Sarah Mitroff

Longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer will become CEO of Yahoo, thrusting the prominent 37-year-old executive into a public highwire act as she tries to turn around the languishing company.

“There is a lot to do and I can’t wait to get started,” Mayer said in the official announcement.

Mayer’s eagerness aside, the move is a gamble for her. Employee number 20 at Google, Mayer became a key executive at the company, overseeing search products and user interface for five years and eventually taking over local and location services. In 2010, she ascended to Google’s elite operating committee.

Mayer’s personal wealth from pre-IPO Google stock has allowed her to buy a penthouse in San Francisco’s Four Seasons along with a home in well-to-do Palo Alto and a posh Vogue wedding.

There’s little doubt she could remain at Google, or quit conventional work entirely, and live in considerable comfort. She doesn’t need to try and revive Yahoo.

“Marissa has been a tireless champion of our users,” Google CEO Larry Page writes. “We will miss her talents at Google.”

By the end of 2011 Mayer’s influence seemed to be waning. She was among several executives pushed out of the operating committee, Reuters reported, and wasn’t visible at Google IO this past June despite having keynoted in prior years.

Still, it’s likely Mayer could have continued to make significant contributions at Google if she’d chosen to hang in. Her oversight of local put Mayer in charge of a crucial crossroads for Google.
At Yahoo, Mayer is rolling the dice on a much more daunting challenge. The company’s C-suite has been a revolving door and Yahoo has bled top talent.

“Marissa has the energy and drive Yahoo needs,” says YCombinator’s Paul Buchheit, who worked closely with Mayer during the creation of Google’s GMail. “I can’t wait to see what she does with the company.”

A former Yahoo executive who left the company in recent years says Mayer will have to move quickly to repair Yahoo’s reputation and bolster its flagging momentum. “Her joining Yahoo! is like a bomb,” this person says. “The ‘shock and awe’ will briefly destabilize the legacy elements and parties that have been holding the company back. She needs to use her first 100 days aggressively to confront entrenched interests.”

Mayer’s ascent is a sign that Yahoo will compete aggressively on technology development rather than retreating into becoming an online media company that merely sells advertising, says Morningstar analyst Rick Summer. That means going up against formidable competitors like Microsoft, Facebook — and Mayer’s former employer.

“Yahoo has had declining use in its communications services and not much mobile success,” says Summer. “It is the polar opposite from Google…. She’ll need to lead a team that creates a few strong technology products that will engage users and stem the loss in Yahoo’s search business.”

Mayer certainly has the chops to lead tech product development. She helped oversee the development of GMail, Google News and Google Images. She has a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford and is famous for her data-driven approach to product decisions.

But in other ways the job will be an odd fit. For one, Mayer has no real professional experience outside of her six different jobs at Google, a sort of parallel corporate universe where the gusher of profits from contextual advertising has subsidized virtually all of the company’s operations for more than a decade.

Also, Yahoo has for the past decade operated not like Google, which is obsessed with software development, but as a sort of media company. Since Terry Semel took the reins in 2001, Yahoo’s leadership has focused on advertising and marketing initiatives over technical advancement (with the possible exception of Jerry Yang’s brief stint as CEO). In 2009, Yahoo ceded  its once-core search engine to Microsoft, whose servers began powering Yahoo searches.

Restarting Yahoo tech development might have great long-term potential, but in the meantime it’s relatively low-tech display ads that keep the lights on at Yahoo. Mayer will need help to keep that lifeline strong.

If she does pull off an unlikely turnaround, of course, Mayer’s reputation in Silicon Valley will be sterling. She’ll join turnaround Gods like Steve Jobs at Apple and Louis Gerstner at IBM in the top tier of tech’s pantheon.

Former Yahoo employees say Mayer needs to get climbing now if she’ll ever reach those heights.
“It’s not like she needs the money,” one wrote in a closed Facebook group for Yahoo alumni. “She has to honestly feel like she can turn this ship around after it’s already hit the iceberg, which is a pretty monumental challenge.”

Is Google Finally Getting That Design Matters? First Look at the 2012 Android Development Kit

By Tim Maly

You may think of Android as an OS for phones and tablets, but Google’s ambitions run deeper. They’re pitching it as a platform that could run on all kinds of devices. To get developers on board with that plan, the company announced an update to the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK) 2012 at Google I/O.

The ADK allows makers to quickly get up to speed on the platform’s function, but we were much more impressed with how great the form looked, especially when compared to the bare-bones 2011 edition. Has Google finally been bit by the design bug? We spoke with Android Communications’ Gina Scigliano to find out more.

The ADK 2012 comes out of the box as a working alarm clock and audio dock that’s compatible with your Android devices. Why an alarm clock? “Because it’s the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning!” says Scigliano. By making an object that fits into your life, Google hopes that you’ll be more likely to think about it when you’re deciding what to hack up next.

If you do decide to go deeper, Google has made that as easy as possible. The box is held together by magnets — there’s not a screw in sight. Squeeze it in the right place, and it pops open, revealing an Arduino-compatible board attached to an army of sensors.

The board can be detached if you want but with the included abilities to measure light, color, proximity, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, acceleration, and the local magnetic field, to say nothing of the capacitive buttons, an SD card reader, USB, Bluetooth, LEDs and a speaker, there’s plenty to do using the kit.

“We ended up putting in a bunch of sensors without really knowing what we would use them for,” says Scigliano, “hopefully [they] will inspire people to make all kinds of interesting accessories, especially ones that nobody has made before.”

The kit you see here is a limited edition reference design. Only people who made it to Google I/O will get the boxes, but the schematics are available online. “We want people to copy the ADK,” Scigliano says, “both direct copies and heavily modified derivatives.”

The point is to lure makers and designers into giving the platform a try, at all levels of skill. The kit is very user-friendly, even for beginners. It’s designed to be easy to set up and customize out of the box. Interested in going deeper? Google will share all the details, right down to the source code and hardware schematics.

To get hackers fired up, Scigliano offers some possible uses the kit: “a smarter homebrew robot, picosatellite, hotel room alarm, irrigation controller, motorized remote controlled drapes, smart thermostat, egg timer with atmospheric pressure compensation, talking clock, data logging weather station, and did I mention robots? It’ll be really fun to see what people build.”

Lucky Number 7

The Nexus 7, the first tablet to wear Google’s Nexus brand, sets a new standard for smaller slates, proving that just because it isn’t as big as Apple’s iPad doesn’t mean it can’t be just as useful, as fast, or as fun. If you’ve been on the fence about Android, or tablets in general, this is the tablet you’ve been waiting for.

While the Nexus 7 isn’t a full-on iPad-killer, it far out-classes anything else offered in the 7-inch category, and most 10-inch tablets too. The Nexus 7 does this by offering smartly designed, powerful hardware and the best Android tablet experience to date. For those who only use their gadgets to surf the web, check e-mail, play games and update their social media feeds, the Nexus 7 might be an even better choice than an iPad, given how much easier it is to carry around.

But the feature that will probably be the most enticing to consumers is the price. The Nexus 7 sells for $200 with 8GB of storage. That’s the same price as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet at the same storage capacity. If you want a bit more room to download HD movies, music, games and apps, you can get the 16GB version for $250. At these prices, the Nexus 7 is frankly a steal when you compare it to what else is out there at the same cost.

The 1280×800 IPS touchscreen is beautiful. It’s the best display I’ve seen on a 7-inch tablet, and almost as good as the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the third-generation iPad. It’s not quite Retina display quality, but with a pixel density of 216ppi, it’s very close. Colors are balanced without being over-saturated, a common issue on many mobile devices nowadays, particularly those from Samsung.

Also absent are any software performance problems. Where the Fire and Nook suffer from unresponsiveness, slow animations and stuttering screens, the Nexus 7 screams. In fact, Google’s tablet responds as quickly and scrolls as smoothly as just about any tablet I’ve seen, no matter the size. It feels as fast as Asus’ larger Transformer tablets, and it performs as smoothly as the iPad, even when playing high definition games such as ShadowGun or playing back HD movies.

Basically, the Nexus 7 is a beast. Navigating around Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (yes, this is the first Jelly Bean tablet) is super clean. There’s no hesitation on the part of the Nexus 7 when loading magazines, books, apps, video, games, music or web pages.

This can be attributed to Nvidia’s 1.2GHz Tegra 3 quad-core processor — yep, this is the first quad-core 7-inch tablet, too. Alongside that is a 12-core Nvidia GPU and 1GB of RAM. The only noticeable delay comes when you first turn on the Nexus 7. There’s a lag of a few seconds while your content loads into the interactive home screen widgets pre-installed by Google.

The widgets show you what content — books, music, magazines, movies and TV shows — is available in the Google Play store for you to consume, via either streaming or downloading.

These widgets make extensive use of cover art, so they are colorful and attractive. They’re easy to use, expanding and contracting as you cycle through the various options. Most importantly, they reduce a lot of the friction around finding stuff in Google Play, both for content you’ve already purchased, as well as enticing new options. The widgets are very much “in your face,” and they clearly suggest that Google intends to be your go-to destination for buying, renting and streaming digital media.

The Fire and the Nook — the Nexus 7′s primary competitors, which also follow the “device as content portal” philosophy — also offer an array of entertainment options on their home screens, but Google’s arrangement is far prettier to look and less intrusive. Amazon Fire’s shows a cludgy carousel of content, and even that’s better than the random assortment of book covers found on the Nook’s home screen.

These Google Play widgets come installed by default on every Nexus 7, but you can easily remove them and use a fully customized Android home screen of your own design. If you’re not into buying content from Google, you can download Amazon’s apps and get your stuff there. You can still get Netflix, or Hulu for video. Rdio, Mog, Spotify, Pandora and other music streaming services are there, too. This isn’t a user experience that forces you to buy all your content from one storefront.

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Google Glass Team: ‘Wearable Computing Will Be the Norm’

By Steven Levy

Even though I followed Google’s I/O Conference from across the country, the event made it obvious that a company created with a strict focus on search has become an omnivorous factory of tech products both hard and soft. Google now regards its developers conference as a launch pad for a shotgun spread of announcements, almost like a CES springing from a single company. (Whatever happened to “more wood behind fewer arrows”?)

But the Google product that threatened to steal the entire show probably won’t be sold to the public until 2014. This is the prosthetic eye-based display computer called Project Glass, which is coming out of the company’s experimental unit, Google[x]. Announced last April, it was dropped into the conference in dramatic fashion: An extravagant demo hosted by Google co-founder Sergey Brin involved skydivers, stunt cyclists, and a death-defying Google+ hangout. It quickly attained legendary status.

Even before people got to sample Glass, it was popping their eyes out.

Google wouldn’t provide a date or product details for Glass’ eventual appearance as a consumer product — and in fact made it clear that the team was still figuring out the key details of what that product would be. But Google made waves by announcing that it would take orders for a $1,500 “explorer’s version,” sold only to I/O attendees and shipped sometime early next year. Hungry to get their hands on what seemed to be groundbreaking new technology, developers lined up to put their money down.

Meanwhile, I just as hungrily bit at the opportunity to do a phone interview with two of the leaders of Glass. Google originally hired project head Babak Parviz from the University of Washington, where he was the McMorrow Innovation Associate Professor, specializing in the interface between biology and technology. (One relevant piece of work: a paper called “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.”)
The other Glass honcho, product manager Steve Lee, is a longtime Google product manager, specializing in location and mapping areas. Here is the edited conversation.

Wired: Where are you now with Glass as compared to what Google will eventually release?
Babak Parviz: Project Glass is something that Steve and I have worked on together for a bit more than two years now. It has gone through lots of prototypes and fortunately we’ve arrived at something that sort of works right now. It still is a prototype, but we can do more experimentation with it. We’re excited about this. This could be a radically new technology that really enables people to do things that otherwise they couldn’t do. There are two broad areas that we’re looking at. One is to enable people to communicate with images in new ways, and in a better way. The second is very rapid access to information.

Wired: Let’s talk about some of the product basics. For instance, I’m still not clear whether Glass is something that works with the phone in your pocket, or a stand-alone product.

Parviz: Right now it doesn’t have a cell radio, it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. If you’re outdoors or on the go, at least for the immediate future, if you would like to have data connection, you would need a phone.

Steve Lee: Eventually it’ll be a stand-alone product in its own right.

Wired: What are the other current basics?

Parviz: We have a pretty powerful processor and a lot of memory in the device. There’s quite a bit of storage on board, so you can store images and video on board, or you can just live stream it out. We have a see-through display, so it shows images and video if you like, and it’s all self-contained. It has a camera that can collect photographs or video. It has a touchpad so it can interact with the system, and it has gyroscope, accelerometers, and compasses for making the system aware in terms of location and direction. It has microphones for collecting sound, it has a small speaker for getting sound back to the person who’s wearing it, and it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And GPS.

This is the configuration that most likely will ship to the developers, but it’s not 100 percent sure that this is the configuration that will we ship to the broader consumer market.
Wired: How much does it weigh?

Lee: It’s comparable to a pair of sunglasses. You can stack three of these up and balance a scale with a smart phone.

Wired: What was your thinking when you embarked on the project, and how did that thinking evolve?

Parviz: We did look at many, many different possibilities early on. One of the things that we looked at was very immersive AR [Augmented Reality] environments — how much that would allow people to do, how much could come between you and the physical world, and how much that can be distractive. Over time we really found that particular picture less and less compelling. As we used the device ourselves, what became more compelling to use was a type of technology that doesn’t come between you and the physical world. So you do what you normally do but when you want to access it, it’s immediately relevant — it can help you do something, it would help you connect to other people with images or video, or it would help you get a snippet of information very quickly. So we decided that having the technology out of the way is much, much more compelling than immersive AR, at least at this time.

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Wedding DJs beware - dancing music robot picks songs, shimmies to the beat and even reacts to the mood of the crowd

By Rob Waugh

The news should send a shiver down the spines of wedding DJs - a new robot disc jockey is set to take to the stage at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco today.

Shimi picks tunes, dances in time to the music and even reacts to the 'mood' of the crowd to keep the dancefloor pumping.

Unlike many human DJs, he also does requests

If a user taps of claps a beat,v Shimi analyzes it, scans the phone's musical library and immediately plays the song that best matches the suggestion. Once the music starts, Shimi dances to the rhythm.

The robot's 'eyes' can also follow people round a room and ensure that speakers are aimed at them.

Shimi, a musical companion developed by Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology, recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback.

The smartphone-enabled, one-foot-tall robot is billed as an interactive ‘musical buddy.’

‘Shimi is designed to change the way that people enjoy and think about their music,’ said Professor Gil Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology and the robot's creator.

The robot was shown off at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

A band of three Shimi robots strutted their stuff for guests, dancing in sync to music created in the lab and composed according to its movements.

Shimi is essentially a docking station with a ‘brain’ powered by an Android phone. Once docked, the robot gains the sensing and musical generation capabilities of the user's mobile device. In other words, if there's an ‘app for that,’ Shimi is ready.

For instance, by using the phone's camera and face-detecting software, the bot can follow a listener around the room and position its ‘ears,’ or speakers, for optimal sound.

Another recognition feature is based on rhythm and tempo. If the user taps or claps a beat,

‘Many people think that robots are limited by their programming instructions,’ said Music Technology Ph.D. candidate Mason Bretan. ‘Shimi shows us that robots can be creative and interactive.’

Future apps in the works will allow the user to shake their head in disagreement or wave a hand in the air to alert Shimi to skip to the next song or increase/decrease the volume. The robot will also have the capability to recommend new music based on the user's song choices and provide feedback on the music play list.

Weinberg hopes other developers will be inspired to create more apps to expand Shimi's creative and interactive capabilities, allowing the machine to leave the lab and head into the real world.

‘I believe that our center is ahead of a revolution that will see more robots in homes, bypassing some of the fears some people have about machines doing everyday functions in their lives,’ Weinberg said.

Weinberg is in the process of commercializing Shimi through an exclusive licensing agreement with Georgia Tech. A new start-up company, Tovbot, has been formed and Weinberg hopes to make the robot available to consumers by the 2013 holiday season. Shimi was developed in collaboration with the Media Innovation Lab at IDC Herzliya and led by

Professor Guy Hoffmann. Entrepreneur Ian Campbell and robot designer Roberto Aimi were also part of the Shimi team.

This is the third robotic musician created by the Center for Music Technology. Haile is a percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time and improvise with music of its own. Shimon is an interactive marimba player.

‘If robots are going to arrive in homes, we think that they will be these kind of machines - small, entertaining and fun,’ Weinberg said. ‘They will enhance your life and pave the way for more sophisticated service robots in our lives.’

WATCH VIDEO

Nexus 7 Tablet and Android Jelly Bean Announcement Expected Today At Google I/O Conference

By JOANNA STERN

Apple and Microsoft both had their turns to show off their latest software and hardware this month; today it is Google's turn.

Google executives will take the stage at the annual Google I/O Developer's Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where they will show off the latest versions of Google software, including Android and other services.

Google's next version of its Android operating system is expected to be one of the major points of conversation. Like earlier Android versions, this one is named after a dessert -- Jelly Bean. Ice Cream Sandwich, the current version of Android, was announced last November. Before Ice Cream Sandwich, there was Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Google put out a statue of a bowl of jelly beans at its Silicon Valley campus yesterday.

While there haven't been many details to spill out yet about Jelly Bean, Google is likely to announce a tablet to go along with the new operating system. Rumored to be called the Nexus 7, the tablet is said to have a 7-inch screen, a fast quad-core processor, and a very affordable $199 price. The tablet is expected to go head-to-head with Amazon's Kindle Fire. These rumors have been widely reported, and most recently the Wall Street Journal corroborated the reports.

While there have been lots of Android tablets released, none have been as successful as the iPad. It is expected that the Nexus 7 will ship in July and that Taiwanese manufacturer Asus is making the tablet itself. Microsoft's Windows 8 Surface tablets, which were announced last week, aren't expected until later this year.

But Google isn't only expected to talk about Android and its tablet strategy. The search giant will discuss its maps platform and other services like its Cloud storage solutions, including the new Google Drive. Apple recently ditched the Google Maps in iOS 6; it has created its own 3-D mapping for the iPad and iPhone.

Over 5,550 thousand developers will be at I/O this year. A Google spokesperson also said that the mini-kitchens at the Moscone Center will stock 1,455 pounds of snacks for the three day event. ABC News did see a Jelly Belly truck pull up in front of the conference center yesterday.

Google, Amazon lead rush for new Web domain suffixes in bids to ICANN

By Hayley Tsukayama and Peter Whoriskey

Amazon and Google are staking claims to large swaths of the Internet under a new system for labeling Web domains, bolstering their ability to control traffic as the Web expands beyond the realms of “.com,” “.gov” and “.org.”

The bids by those companies to acquire new domain names such as “.book,” “.shop” and “.movie” renewed fears among competitors that a powerful few will dominate the Internet marketplace of the future.

A slate of roughly 2,000 new Web suffixes, including “.app” and “.sex,” was revealed Wednesday by the nonprofit organization tasked with regulating domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The group announced last year that it would take applications for new domain names to foster growth and competition online. The new domains are scheduled to go into effect next year.

“We’re standing at the cusp of a new era of online innovation,” said Rod Beckstrom, president of the group, known as ICANN.

If Internet users embrace the new domains, the companies that control them could bear considerable influence on Web traffic.

Amazon has applied to control the “.book” and “.movie” names, for example, meaning that anyone else selling those items would have to get the company’s permission to be listed within that domain.

The National Retail Federation had urged that oversight of such generic domain names be given to impartial entities rather than individual companies.

“The results for now are as potentially unfair to businesses and consumers as we feared they might be,” said Mallory Duncan, general counsel for the trade group.

For example, if a grocery store controls the “.grocery” suffix, it could theoretically exclude competitors from listing their sites there.

Duncan said consumers may not realize that the new domains are under private control and that the open competition that prevails within the “.com” realm may not exist within, say, “.grocery.”

“Consumers going to that domain may not realize that all of their shopping is being done with one company instead of a competitive market,” Duncan said.

Google was among the most prolific applicants, seeking to register 101 names at an application cost of $18.7 million. Never lacking in its quest for virtual completeness, the company is seeking to control “.mom,” “.dad” and “.kid.”

Amazon applied for 76 new names, including “.amazon” and “.zappos.”

The expansion of Web domains has the potential to make over how surfers conceive of the Internet. Until now, entities have largely broken down by type of institution: “.gov” for government agencies, “.com” for businesses and “.org” for other groups.

The new suffixes add a potentially confusing array of categories. Among the many that have been formally proposed are “.sucks,” “.rip” and “.vip.” While some might sound like jokes, the fact that the application fee for each is $185,000 tends to keep things serious.

Applicants were heavily concentrated in North America (911), Europe (675) and the Asia-Pacific region (303). There were only 17 applications from Africa, which raised questions about whether the cost of an application was too high to be equitable.

Many of the potential new domain names are being sought by multiple companies. The most popular was “.app” with 13 applications, but even “.sucks” is the prize in a three-way contest.

The applicants must first pass an initial review by ICANN. If groups competing for a domain name cannot reach an agreement among themselves, the names will be auctioned off.

ICANN said it expects the first new address to go live in 2013.

What’s not clear, however, is whether consumers will embrace any of the new names.

“It’s going to present users with a lot of new choices,” said Brian Cute, chief executive of the Public Interest Registry, which runs the “.org” domain. “If you have 50 choices of toothpaste, the average consumer is going to the brands they know. That could be the case here.”

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, said: “It’s a matter of changing the ingrained habits of millions of people on the Web. Maybe they can do that, and maybe they can’t.”

Even so, many companies are bracing for potential changes to their business.

Advertisers have criticized ICANN’s proposal, saying their concerns were not adequately addressed during the initial review process. Advertisers and others have raised concerns that companies will have to have several defensive addresses — negative-sounding names that the company purchases to keep a rival from exploiting them — to keep counterfeiters at bay.

Beckstrom said Wednesday that ICANN has added several protective provisions, including the option for rapid takedown when brand holders feel their intellectual property may be threatened. ICANN also reserves the right to take a domain name back if there is significant abuse.

Others, however, are bracing for the giants of the Internet to seize even more power over its commerce.

“It would be wrong on so many levels for Amazon to acquire either the ‘.book’ or ‘.author’ top-level domains,” said Paul Aiken of the Author’s Guild. “Their ambitions to extend their monopoly in bookselling have long been abundantly clear, and with their cash, their technical knowledge, this could be yet another way in which they’ve extended their control over the book market. This really makes no sense.”

Flash Drives Replace Disks At Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox

By Cade Metz

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — If you drive south from San Jose until the buildings are few and far between, exit the highway, and take a quick left, you’ll find a data center occupied by some of the biggest names on the web. Run by a company called Equinix, the facility is a place where the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon can plug their machines straight into the big internet service providers.

If you’re allowed inside and you walk past the cages of servers and other hardware, you can’t see much. In most cages, the lights are off, and even when they’re on, there are few ways of knowing what gear belongs to what company. Some companies don’t want you to see. Google engineers have been known to wear miner helmets when installing new hardware, determined to keep their specialized gear hidden from the competition.

But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. But at the same time, it doesn’t think this hardware is all that different from what the rest of the world is using. And that’s about right.

Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction. In other words, Dropbox is like the web as a whole. Such names as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Wikia are also using solid-state storage in their data centers, and judging from anecdotal evidence, the trend goes even further.

Like a hard drive, an SSD is a device for storing information. But unlike a hard drive, it doesn’t have any moving parts. Today’s SSD are built with flash memory — the same stuff that stores data and applications on your iPhone. These drives have been around for years, but they’ve been slow to make headway in the real world, in part because they’re more expensive than traditional hard drives. A 300GB flash drive sells for around $500, whereas a comparable hard drive is closer to $100. A 300 terabyte hard drive — which is about ten times larger — sells for around $350.

But in just the last 12 months, SSDs have turned the corner. They’re appearing in high-profile laptops such as Google’s Chromebooks and Apple’s brand-new MacBook Pros, and in the data center, many companies are realizing that they make economic sense even with their higher price tags.

In 2011, according to Jim Handy, an analyst with research outfit Objective Analysis, businesses purchased an estimated 79 million SSDs that connect to servers using the serial-ATA interface — i.e., the interface that traditional hard drives use. That’s a $2.2 billion market, says Handy, and he expects this to grow to 13 million devices and $3.6 billion in 2012.

“I think this is getting pretty common,” says Artur Bergman, the founder of Fastly, a San Francisco outfit that uses SSDs exclusively in providing a service that helps other businesses speed their delivery of pages over the net. “Though some people still have a hard time grasping it, these drives save a tremendous amount of money. They look more expensive, but when you need higher performance, you need way less of them.”

The Speech

About a year ago, Bergman gave a four-minute speech at a Silicon Valley conference attended almost exclusively by engineers who sit on the cutting edge of web infrastructure. He started by asking if anyone in the audience used SSDs in the data center, and less than 20 percent raised their hands. And when he asked who used only SSDs in their data centers, one person raised his hand — the head of engineering at Wikia, who had inherited his SSD-happy data center from Bergman, the outfit’s previous head of engineering.

Anyone who hadn’t raised a hand, Bergman said, was “wasting their life.” Yes, wasting their life. “I keep repeating that to every single individual I talk to, and what I get back is: ‘[SSDs are] too expensive,’” he said. “Actually, they’re cheaper.” Cost shouldn’t be measured by the price tag on an individual SSD, he said, but by how much you spend on drives across the data center in order to juggle the required information with each passing second.

One SSD, he said, can handle about 40,000 reads or writes a second, whereas the average hardware gives you about 180. And it runs at about one watt as opposed to 15 watts, which means you spend far less on power. “Do the math on how much you can save,” he said. In short, you need fewer servers to do the same amount of work. At Wikia, Bergman first installed SSDs on the company’s caching servers, used for providing quick access to data that repeatedly accessed by web surfers. Then, he moved them into the company’s database servers, where data stored more permanently. This provided so much additional speed, Bergman says, the caching servers were no longer needed.

When he gave the speech, Bergman had been preaching this same message for about two and half years — and few listened. But twelve months on, he says, it seems that the web is finally heeding his advice. Companies are constantly emailing him, just to let him know they’ve embraced SSDs.

Yes, many companies are still holding back, in part because they’re waiting for prices to come down even further, in part for other reasons. SSDs are not only more expensive than traditional hard drives, they can accept only so much data before they can’t accept any more. In other words, they have a limited lifespan.

But so do hard drives, which are prone to sudden and unexpected death. Bergman doesn’t see a SSD’s limited life as a big issue. “It’s a pretty good failure mode compared to a hard drive, which just takes longer and longer to write data before dying,” he says. At Wikia, he says, he replaced the company’s first SSDs after two years, and didn’t have any write problems before that.

“I don’t trust a hard drive after three years,” he says. “They don’t fail because they run out of write cycles, but they still fail.”

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Beware the spy in the sky: After those Street View snoopers, Google and Apple use planes that can film you sunbathing in your back garden

Software giants will use military-grade cameras to take powerful satellite images

By Vanessa Allen

Spy planes able to photograph sunbathers in their back gardens are being deployed by Google and Apple.

The U.S. technology giants are racing to produce aerial maps so detailed they can show up objects just four inches wide.

But campaigners say the technology is a sinister development that brings the surveillance society a step closer.

Google admits it has already sent planes over cities while Apple has acquired a firm using spy-in-the-sky technology that has been tested on at least 20 locations, including London.

Apple’s military-grade cameras are understood to be so powerful they could potentially see into homes through skylights and windows. The technology is similar to that used by intelligence agencies in identifying terrorist targets in Afghanistan.

Google will use its spy planes to help create 3D maps with much more detail than its satellite-derived Google Earth images.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, warned that privacy risked being sacrificed in a commercial ‘race to the bottom’.

‘The next generation of maps is taking us over the garden fence,’ he warned. ‘You won’t be able to sunbathe in your garden without worrying about an Apple or Google plane buzzing overhead taking pictures.’

He said householders should be asked for their consent before images of their homes go online. Apple is expected to unveil its new mapping applications for its iPhone and other devices today – along with privacy safeguards. Its 3D maps will reportedly show for the first time the sides of tall buildings, such as the Big Ben clock tower.

Google expects by the end of the year to have 3D coverage of towns and cities with a combined population of 300million. It has not revealed any locations so far.

Current 3D mapping technology relies on aerial images taken at a much lower resolution than the technology Apple is thought to be using. This means that when users ‘zoom in’, details tend to be lost because of the poor image quality.

Google ran into trouble when it emerged that its Street View cars, which gathered ground-level panoramic photographs for Google Maps, had also harvested personal data from household wifi networks.

Emails, text messages, photographs and documents were taken from unsecured wifi networks all around Britain.

Google claimed it was a mistake even though a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the extra information was being captured. Around one in four home networks is thought to be unsecured because they lack password protection.

Little has been revealed about the technology involved in the spy planes used to capture the aerial images.

But they are thought to be able to photograph around 40 square miles every hour, suggesting they would be flying too quickly and at too great a height to access domestic wifi networks.

Like Google Maps, the resulting images would not be streamed live to computers but would provide a snapshot image of the moment the camera passed by.

Google pixellates faces and car number plates but faced criticism after its service showed one recognisable man leaving a sex shop and another being sick in the street.

Amie Stepanovich, of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in America, said she believed Apple and Google would be forced to blur out homes in the same way Street View pixellates faces.

She said: ‘With satellite images, privacy is built in because you can’t zoom down into a garden. Homeowners need to be asked to opt in to show their property in high definition – otherwise it should be blurred out.’

Apple has previously used Google for its mapping services but last year it emerged it had bought C3 Technologies, a 3D mapping company that uses technology developed by Saab AB, the aerospace and defence company.

At the time C3 had already mapped 20 cities and it is believed to have added more with Apple’s backing. Its photographs have been shot from 1,600ft and one C3 executive described it as ‘Google on steroids’.

There are already 3D maps available online for most big city centres, but the images are often low resolution, meaning they are of little use for navigation and users cannot zoom in on detail.

Critics have argued that Apple and Google will face a backlash if they offer detailed 3D mapping of residential areas in suburbs and rural locations.