The United States may be synonymous with the high-tech revolution, but it is in danger of losing its high-tech edge, according to Cybercities 2008, a report released Tuesday by AeA, a technology industry trade association.
Because the federal government does not issue a sufficient number of green cards or work visas to talented foreign students studying here, there are a “tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” said Christopher Hansen, AeA’s chief executive.
“We educate them and then tell them to go home. This is absurd,” said Mr. Hansen, whose group has lobbied to increase the number of visas for foreign technology industry workers.
Over all, the number of high-tech jobs in fields like semiconductors, software, computer design and the Internet, remains below 2001 levels. Then, 6.5 million people were employed in the technology sector. But by 2006, that number had dropped to 5.8 million. However, jobs did increase by 2.5 percent from 2005.
The problem is exacerbated, Mr. Hansen says, because American schools are not producing a sufficient number of graduates capable of filling these positions. “Our public schools are not generating the kinds of people who can go into engineering and math and compete.”
According to Mr. Hansen, the result is that large numbers of high-tech jobs are being lost to other countries.
The AeA’s assessment of high-tech employment was its first city-by-city look at the industry since 2000.
The New York metropolitan area leads the nation in the number of high-tech jobs, followed by Washington, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
New York had 316,509 high-tech jobs, and Silicon Valley had 225,343. High-tech pay averaged $79,484, compared with $42,405 for all private-sector work.
Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.
The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.
Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.
By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo.
Google has generally dismissed Powerset’s semantic, or “natural language” approach as being only marginally interesting, even though Google has hired some semantic specialists to work on that approach in limited fashion. Google’s search results are still based primarily on the individual words you type into its search bar, and its approach does very little to understand the possible meaning created by joining two or more words together.
That’s where Powerset sees an opportunity for growth, and perhaps where Microsoft finally sees a chance to get a quality edge. However, Powerset’s technology has remained controversial to people within the industry because, while sexy in theory, the natural language approach is difficult to pull off in practice. Skeptics wonder if the technology can ever be developed enough to be useful within a major search engine. That skepticism abounded during a long secretive stage in Powerset’s development, but the company did launch its service last month to the public, so it’s there for full view. You can use it to search for items within Wikipedia, and we’ve previously outlined various instances where it can be useful.
The Microsoft purchase appears to validate Powerset’s technology, though the amount of the purchase is clearly less than Powerset’s investors had originally hoped for. Powerset was valued at a whopping $42.5 million after the first round of financing two years ago. At the time, investors expected that new technology it was acquiring from PARC would help it make significant breakthroughs. However, the technology has taken longer to develop than expected. Powerset was also burning cash at a fast rate, and so a purchase at $100 million is considered a safe result for an area that is also seeing increasing competition (players such as Hakia, Twine and TextDigger are all using similar approaches).
Rumors of Microsoft’s interest in Powerset first surfaced a month ago in a piece by CNET’s Dan Farber.
The deal does make sense for Microsoft, which has been trying to figure out its strategy in search since the rebuff of its purchase offer by Yahoo. Many analysts saw Yahoo’s advertising platform, not its search technology, as the main reason for Microsoft’s interest. However, Microsoft was left with $50 billion burning a hole in its pocket, and making technology acquisitons makes sense. Also, Yahoo’s search technology is one reason why its ad business is so vibrant. “The most important application for the foreseeable future is search,” Microsoft’s Ballmer said last week. “We don’t have to dominate, but we’d better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time, and we’re working away at it.” Microsoft also recently rolled out a new “Cashback” program that offers cash back to users of its Live Search engine.
Microsoft spokesman Doug Free declined comment, saying the company does “not comment on rumors or speculation.”
Powerset chief executive Barney Pell declined comment. He’s believed to own about a third of the company. The rest is owned by investors, his two cofounders and other employees. FoundationCapital and the FoundersFund are the main investors. A shakeup last year saw one of the founders, Steve Newcomb, leave the company.
In an interview, Pell said the company remains focused on developing its service and is proud of its new application for the iPhone. He said some people have provided feedback that Powerset’s iPhone application is even more useful than the Web version. Things are so broken on the mobile web that improvements in interface such as Powerset’s search are “transformatively better on mobile devices,” he said.
In response to our question about how Google is planning to use semantics, if at all, Google gave a very similar answer to the one Google’s Director of Research Peter Norvig provided last year.
It appears the everyone’s new favorite borg-like monolith corporation is taking it on the chin once again for overly aggressive go-to-market strategies. This time allegations have surfaced about how Google treats its technology partners, specifically with respect to IP infringement. Apparently Chicago-based company LimitNone is claiming Google’s partnership with them, as a third party developer brought on to enhance Google products, went awry when they decided to just steal the small software company’s technology. This technology was rolled into a Google Apps product that basically allows users to migrate their MS Outlook email and contacts into gMail products. LimitNone CEO, Ray Glassman states, “Google claims its core philosophy is ‘Don’t be evil’ but, simply put, they invited us to work with them, to trust them – and then stole our technology… we had to take a stand”.
And of course LimitNone’s legal team had a few thoughts on the matter as well (with visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads we’re sure). “It’s shocking that Google would engage in this type of conduct; particularly when the other party is a small software company that built its business specifically to help Google sell its existing and future products,” said Greenspon. “People need to realize that Google is just another large publicly traded corporation that will do whatever it takes to increase its revenue, even if that means risking its reputation among developers.”
As of late, it certainly seems that Google is a target-rich environment for litigation and that’s typically what happens when large corporations get larger and continue to dominate their markets. When you’re so large that one of your products becomes a household name for an entire market of products (let me “Google” this), it’s safe to say folks will be gunning for you. On the flip side, as the old saying goes, where there’s smoke there’s probably a fire. We imagine the lawyers will sort through all that though, in painstakingly, costly detail.
NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese wireless carrier, is working on what they call the “cell phone of the future“. So far they have one prototype that looks like a freaky pair of headphones with wires and doo-dads popping out everywhere. Inside it’s packed full of sensors and chips that track the electrical current produced by brain when the wearer moves their eye.
In a demonstration the did for the Associated Press, the device was able to make lines on a computer monitor dance around when the wearer moved their eyes. The wearer was also able to turn the volume up on a music player and make it skip the track forward.
It’s still too early to tell if this technology will ever make to the market or how it will be used.
It looks like the talks are back on between the two companies. Techcrunch, however, is hearing something different than CNET - the talks are about a full buyout again, not a sweetened search-only deal.
Apparently Microsoft is talking a price lower than the $33 they were offering when the talks disintegrated in May. Given Yahoo’s recent share price (it’s below), and the fact that just about everyone other than their board and top execs are publicly screaming for a deal.
Microsoft official comment is “no comment,” which actually contains more information than it appears to. For well over a month, Microsoft has officially been saying they’re no longer interested in Yahoo. They didn’t say that today.
Update (11:44 am PST): Additional sources say the Yahoo board offered to sell to Microsoft for the “low $30s per share, and below Microsoft’s original offer” immediately before they signed the Google search deal.
Update (11:47 am PST): From CNBC:
As mentioned at 13:29, CNBC commentator said that a source very close to Microsoft (MSFT), who is ‘in the know’ about negotiations between the two, empathically said there is no deal for the all of YHOO and nothing has changed as of today. Notes that discussions between the two about YHOO’s search business has always been on the table. Reiterates that no deal on the table for the whole co.
Google is expected to unveil a new ad-planning tool for agencies and marketers at an industry conference on Tuesday.
Word that the Internet search giant has something up its sleeve surfaced when the Advertising Research Foundation, which is holding a media conference focused on audience measurement in New York starting Tuesday, publicized a Google presentation scheduled for 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
“Wayne Lin, Google Business Product Manager, will introduce Google’s latest initiative in internet audience measurement,” the ARF said on its Web site. That page was taken down at Google’s request. “They asked us not to reveal any details,” said Joel Rubinson, chief research officer at the ARF. Oops. (Incidentally, thanks to Google’s cache, the page can be found here.
Google declined to comment.
A person familiar with Google’s plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the product before Google makes it public, said that the new tool, called AdPlanner, was designed to help agencies identify sites where their target audience might be active. While it uses audience measurement data, AdPlanner also combines it with search engine data and information from third parties, to determine with more precision what sites attract a certain demographic audience. It then uses that data to help agencies determine where to place ads.
If a media buyer has been successful with ads that ran on WebMD, for example, AdPlanner might be able to easily identify other sites where that media buyer will find similar success because they attract a similar audience, the person said. AdPlanner is expected to be offered for free, at least initially.
Other companies, including comScore, Nielsen Online and Quantcast, offer a variety of audience measurement and media planning tools, including some that help buyers identify more precisely the demographic audiences of Web sites.
On Friday, Google unveiled Google Trends for Web sites, which allows anyone to measure a Web site’s audience. Google said that the service calculates a site’s audience by using a combination of source “such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.”
The person familiar with AdPlanner said there would be “overlap in what it accomplishes,” but added that AdPlanner would be tailored specifically to help media buyers.
By the way, Google Trends for Web sites is great at measuring the audience of all sorts of Web properties, but don’t try to use it to measure Google.com, Orkut, YouTube or any other Google property. The explanation, via a statement from a Google spokesperson: “We do not show Google.com properties on Trends for Websites. We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy.”
The Wired Science blog has been flooded with comments and questions about yesterday’s announcement that the Mars Phoenix Lander has observed ice on Mars. Some of these questions are so good that we can’t let them go unanswered. So here’s our Mars Ice FAQ. If you’ve got more questions, put them in the comments below!
How do you know it’s water ice, not CO2 ice (aka ‘dry ice’)?
There is a lot of CO2 ice on Mars in the winter. However, Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic during the summer (because the lander is solar powered, the extra summer light is a necessity). In the Martian summer it is much too hot for dry ice to be solid. It would be like trying to keep water ice from melting on a 140-degree day here on Earth.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) will freeze on Mars at -125 C. Today’s weather report from the Canadian weather station on Phoenix shows a low of -80 C — way too hot for dry ice to stay solid right now. (Note the largest “pebbles” of ice were seen to stay solid for a day before disappearing).
Why not send instruments to detect life?
If you are going to make a claim like, “I have found life on Mars,” you have to be prepared to show that there is NO chance your sample was contaminated with Earth bacteria before launch. To do that takes an incredible amount of sterilization. Don’t worry — they have already done a lot of sterilizing on the Mars Phoenix before launching it. But to really be sure they would have to go to extreme measures to be able to rule out any contamination, and doing that would have drastically increased the cost of the mission beyond its budget. So NASA and JPL plan missions that look for water and the conditions of life within the budgets they have now.
What about the bright white stuff in the sunshine?
The scientists said they are monitoring the bright patches in the sunshine for changes too. They are seeing some changes, but stay tuned for more explanation and details. As for how the “pebbles” that disappeared did so in the shade, one scientist did mention that the portion of the trench it was in was exposed to morning sunshine earlier in the day.
Why are the pictures not all in color?
Be patient. The first images sent out are the raw files from the lander. The science team is committed to getting us the images to us fresh off the presses, so they send out the raw (monochrome) images first. Typically if you wait a day, the team will release the image in full color once it has been processed (see above for full color version of yesterday’s image).
How can water ice go straight from being a solid to being a gas (sublimation)?
Just like dry ice does here on Earth, water ice goes from solid to gas when the pressure is below 6.1 millibars and it gets heated (like it does in the Martian sun). It can also go straight from solid to gas above 6.1 millibars when the vapor pressure (amount of water vapor in the air) is low enough. This is because the molecules of water in solid form and gas form are not at equilibrium.
You might be surprised to know that the same thing happens here on Earth. If you have a frost-free freezer, you may have noticed that your ice cubes gradually shrink over a period of days. This is sublimation: the fan is constantly sucking water vapor out of the freezer so the ice cubes surrender more and more water molecules to the dry air over time.
The pressure on Mars is about 8 millibars, very close to the “triple point” of water, which is the point where it can easily exist as either a solid, a liquid or a gas (see the chart below). Since the vapor pressure is so low, water can easily sublime in the Martian atmosphere, especially as the surface heats up in the sunshine. When that happens, the soil can often get hotter than the air in the sunshine (think of a lizard sunbathing on a hot rock).
Chrysler wants to turn your car into a rolling WiFi hotspot where you check your Facebook profile, upload pictures to Flickr, and eventually be part of a nationwide traffic-control network.
The UConnect Web system Chrysler will unveil Thursday — and introduce next year — marks the start of the dot-car era and puts Chrysler in front of BMW in their race to bring wireless internet access to your dashboard. Most of the other automakers, not to mention Microsoft, are right behind them, and there’s a push to bring some standards to the hardware.
“It’s something everyone’s looking at,” says Aaron Bragman, an auto-industry analyst at Global Insight. The rush is fueled by the runaway success of Sync, Ford’s hands-free iPod and cellphone system. “It’s very popular, and it drives a lot of sales,” Bragman says.
Sales are something Chrysler desperately needs, and it hopes that filling its cars with gadgets will lure buyers. Among the toys it’s showing off next week are rear-seat swivel screens, blind-spot cameras and something it calls “rear cross-path sensing.”
But UConnect Web is the star of the show, and Chrysler’s betting on it to make its cars appealing to millennials — the twenty-something buyers who’ve made Sync so successful. The company clearly wants to gain a reputation for high-tech cars.
“In today’s market, Chrysler’s mission is to bring innovation to market more quickly,” Chrysler Vice President Frank Klegon says.
Chrysler says UConnect Web uses cellular and WiFi technology to provide “instant access” to the internet. Anyone in the car will be able to check e-mail, download music, play games and even upload photos from an SD card directly to Flickr. Chrysler says any wireless device and “all major gaming systems” will work with UConnect.
It remains to be seen which models will get UConnect and what it will cost. Chrysler says it will be competitive with laptop wireless cards, and customers won’t be tied to long contracts.
It also remains to be seen what regulators might have to say about all those added distractions — “How long before California bans it?” asks Bragman — and whether consumers want them. Although car buyers love hands-free systems like Sync, nothing suggests they want to surf the web behind the wheel.
“There could be some opportunity there, but we constantly see that internet access in the car is pretty much at the end of the priorities for consumers,” says Thilo Koslowki, an IT analyst with the tech research firm Gartner. “The car is not being seen as an internet-browsing platform.”
Koslowski says automakers are “leapfrogging consumer demand” and should focus on making their cars compatible with iPhones, BlackBerrys and other devices. “I don’t think the industry is looking at it from that perspective,” he says. “Right now most of the emphasis is on replicating what you do at home on your desktop or laptop.”
But the drive to bring connectivity to cars is about more than Twittering from the road, and the dot-car era won’t get rolling until the Intelligent Transportation Systems is sorted out, says Egil Juliussen at Telematics Research Group. The idea — which has been promised for years — is to have cars communicate wirelessly with each other and with the road to increase safety, relieve congestion and manage traffic. Among other things, such a system would allow cars to track everything around them and respond accordingly to avoid collisions. It could also provide real-time traffic information — so drivers could avoid backups — and create a national system for paying tolls electronically.
By 2010 the devices will routinely beam 3D films, games and virtual goods into our laps according to Indian technology giant Infosys, which has patented the handset.
The portable machines will capture and send 3D snapshots of the surrounding world, helping accident investigators, teachers and doctors work remotely by instantly relaying realistic depictions of car damage, injuries, medical scans or educational aids.
The patent, granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office, says this allows complex 3D holographic images to be squeezed through the narrow pipes of existing communications networks, by sending only the unprocessed data to be translated into the 3D hologram at the other end.
Infosys’s device will be able to both send and receive these 3D images, displaying them using a projector with a laser source and micro holographic optical elements lenses.
The global 3D screen market is forecast by industry to grow to 8.1 million units by 2010.
A spokeswoman for Infosys said: “Holographic handsets have the capability of enriching the user experience, with an actual 3D experience and higher-quality images. This gives users a more realistic experience in areas like gaming, medicine, movies etc.”
She said the technology would enable 3D images to be displayed without losing resolution, something that is not possible using current 3D technology, such as stereoscopic displays.
Yahoo lost another two executives yesterday as the company continued to lurch from crisis to crisis following the board’s decision to reject Microsoft’s $47bn (£24bn) takeover bid.
This comes as no shock after mass exodus of Yahoo’s talent in last few weeks.
The latest departures include the Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Brad Garlinghouse, the search division’s senior vice-president who wrote the infamous manifesto that criticised the internet firm’s strategy.
Delicious-founder Schacter commented to the announcement on TechCrunch, saying:
I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view.
Yahoo’s management has been criticised for failing to strike a deal with Microsoft, which had offered up to $47.5bn to take over the company. The board, led by co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang, said the offer was too low and eventually agreed a search advertising deal with Google which was greeted with derision by parts of the industry, who viewed it as an admission that Yahoo cannot compete with the search company. Yang faces intense scrutiny and has to deal with the exodus of high-profile staff.
The company said in a statement that it had confidence in its management team. “Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that’s to be expected in the internet industry.”
Naturally, Google and Microsoft are trying to capitalize on the situation by offering Yahoo’s most talented staff new jobs. Microsoft took a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News to tempt Yahoo search staff to move to Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus.
