Shrugging off bias concerns, psychology researchers have long relied on undergraduate college students to be their study subjects - so much so that the average American college student is 4,000 times more likely than an average person to be a subject of a study.

Now researchers think they may have a Web-based solution to address the bias problem that arises when you rely on college students. Call it crowd-sourced psychology.

As outlined in an article in The Economist, researchers are increasingly turning to sites such as Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to find low-cost study subjects. The site’s 500,000 users help researchers overcome the bias that they get from studies that exclusively use college students, who are described in research jargon as WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich and Democratic.

Traditionally, many psychologists have worked under the premise that bodies are different but brains are similar, according to Monika M. Wahi, an independent research consultant and epidemiologist based in Boston. But repeating earlier tests with a broader research base has challenged that notion, showing that some of the earlier studies may have indeed been skewed by using only college students.

College students have been the go-to subjects in such studies because they were in plentiful supply where researchers did their work and they came cheap; in many cases, they could also be incentivized for course credit. Sites like Mechanical Turk also keep research costs low, and they may speed up the process in which research can be completed.

But in an email, Wahi cautioned that it's too soon to tell whether there are unseen problems inherent to using Web-based research subjects, or whether the techniques can be as effective in other research fields.

“If you want a lot of people quick and don't care about bias, it's a pro. If you want accurate research, it still could be a pro, if it's used wisely,â€� she said. “With Mechanical Turk, I see it being difficult to produce results we [epidemiologists] could use, because we can't know what the composition of the background ‘community’ is - but that is not a con if you are of the ‘brains are all the same’ camp.â€�

Some reearchers do need more care than others in selecting their study subjects. Epidemiologists, for example, work with a higher degree of ethical oversight, as they often ask subjects for blood samples and other medical testing; psychologists, by and large, get to rely on surveys. When epidemiologists began to have difficulty recruiting study subjects a decade ago, they turned to a computer-based solution, as well.

“First researchers got mad, then patients got mad [that] they were blocked from research. Consequently, online registries were developed where patients could sign up to be contacted for studies,� Wahi said. “So like psychologists, our way of recruiting is changing in the [Mechanical Turk] direction as well, and the jury is out on how that is going to affect our estimates.�

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When it comes to planning get-togethers, the logistical details can pile up. Thankfully, we have fancy new digital tools to which we can outsource some of the planning. For curating the music, a number of options exist. Spotify, as it turns out, is a pretty good one.

The idea of crowd-sourcing playlists is not new. iTunes DJ has been around for a few years, and a handful of third-party Spotify apps have been hacked up to help make party playlists more collaborative.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I hosted a somewhat last-minute party at my house and decided to use Spotify to build out the playlist, which I later opened up to attendees. It worked well. 

My friends have a pretty wide range of musical tastes. Finding those sweet spots - the songs that a decent-sized cross-section of guests will appreciate - isn't always easy. Some intuition about those preferences is required to build out the initial list, but from there you can let the crowd choose what they want to hear. 

Needed: A Premium Spotify Account and Multiple Devices

The easiest approach is to use Spotify across multiple devices. That way, one of them can be used to stream the music, while the other is used to queue songs. A premium Spotify account will be necessary to stream music from a mobile device, and will have the added benefit of being devoid of any ads. 

In this case, I docked my iPhone on a small but decent-sounding stereo, which was placed in a central location within earshot of most guests. Using a portable stereo worked nicely, but an iPod, iPhone or iPad can easily be hooked up to just about any stereo system, whether via a dock, a quarter-inch cable or another common connector. Have AirPlay-compatible speakers? Even better. 

After the initial playlist cycled through a few songs, I walked around with a laptop open and asked people for requests. By that point, most people had already developed a feel for the types of music being played and thus made requests that weren't wildly inappropriate. Of course, results here may vary, depending on the tastes of attendees and the number of beer bottles in the recycling bin. 

Being the host of the party and all, I eventually asked a music-savvy friend to take over the requests.  

In some cases, you may be able to leave the laptop out for participants to use themselves, but this should be done at your own discretion and probably with simple, written directions to avoid confusion. 

Queueing Tracks from a Secondary Device

The process of adding songs is pretty straightforward, but may not be obvious to people who don't regularly use Spotify. Once a track is displayed in search results (or anywhere else within the app), it can be dragged over onto the title of the playlist, iTunes-style. From there, the song will be queued up to play automatically. The playlist is synced in the cloud, so there's no need to mess with the device that's streaming the music itself.

One word of warning: Whoever is queing up the tracks should be advised to not actually play the track they're selecting. This will cause Spotify to stop playing on the other device. Not the end of the world, but it's worth being diligent about. 

I used a laptop to take requests while my iPhone streamed the music via the stereo. An even better scenario would have been to use an iPad to take requests, since it's a little more portable. The iPhone worked out well, but an iPod might be better if you're the host of the party, since you're likely to have some phone calls and text messages with which to deal. 

Some Drawbacks and Things to Consider

For as simple as it is, this solution is surprisingly effective. It's not without its drawbacks, though. 

A big one is that Spotify doesn't have everything. The service has 18 million tracks, which covers a healthy chunk of major and indie label releases. Inevitably, there will be a more obscure song or two that doesn't turn up in search results. Sites such as YouTube and SoundCloud are better at surfacing stuff like that. Meanwhile, there will always be bigger-name acts that aren't available on streaming services. The Beatles are one of the more obvious examples. 

The limited library issue can be balanced out somewhat using one's local MP3 collection, with which Spotify integrates. Just be sure that those tracks are synced to the device that's playing the tunes.

Other potential issues include wildly unpopular songs being chosen by renegade partygoers, spotty Wi-Fi connections and the risks that naturally come with letting people handle your devices around food and drink.     

If other, trusted attendees have premium Spotify accounts, you can make the playlist collaborative (right-click and choose "Collaborative Playlist"), and then send them the link.

Lead image by NinaZed. 

Bloody battles over intellectual property have become the tech world's new normal. Google just bested Oracle in an epic patent and copyright battle over the use of Java in Android. Apple is fighting in courts around the world. Technicolor, the company that brought color to the movies, is counting on patents suits as a revenue steam. A stellar infographic from visual.ly sketches the tangled alliances and conflicts among tech titans.

Technicolor doesn't appear in the infographic below. Nonetheless, the French company now has an entire division dedicated to ripping apart smartphones, looking for patent infringements the company can negotiate licenses for, according to Bloomberg. Technicolor holds 40,000 patents in video, audio and optics and is targeting large smartphone and tablet manufacturers. Once it analyzes a device, it will send the manufacturer a file that represents a starting point for negotiations. Technicolor is hesitant to sell its large patent portfolio even though the company is losing money, Bloomberg reports. That's because, as Technicolor lawyer Beatrix de Russe said, “If we start selling our patents, revenues will dry out.â€�

The implication is clear: Patents are not a tool for supporting innovation. They are a stick for beating money out of anyone within striking distance. 

One company, backed by some of the largest names in technology, exists almost entirely for this purpose. Rockstar Consortium came together to buy Nortel’s 6,000 mobile-related patents for $4.5 billion last year. Backed by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson and Research In Motion, Rockstar Consortium does nothing but dig through competitors’ devices and analyze them to see if they are violating any of the 4,000 patents that the company controls. 

A quick guide to the chart below: The outside ring represents patents that have been transferred or sold. That's all the light purple lines leaving Nortel and going to companies such as Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Ericsson. IBM sold 2,094 patents to Google, which also acquired 17,000 patents when it acquired Motorola. Note all the lines extending to and from Apple. The iPhone maker is suing HTC, Nokia, Motorola Mobility, Samsung and Kodak. All of those companies have returned fire with their own patent suits against Apple. 

We posted a chart from Reuters last August showing companies embroiled in patent battles across the mobile ecosystem. Since then, some of those lawsuits have been settled and new ones have sprung up. Yet the patent firestorm only intensifies. Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are in a complicated, intertwining dance that began when Yahoo dropped its patent bomb on Facebook. Microsoft responded by acquiring 950 patents from AOL, of which it flipped 650 to Facebook to help protect against Yahoo. Is your head spinning yet? 

In view of this quagmire, top entrepreneurs such as Mark Cuban are calling for patent reform in the United States. â€œThere are industries where patents are used fairly to protect intellectual property. The technology industry is not one of them,â€� Cuban wrote when news broke that Yahoo is suing Facebook over patents. “Ninety-nine percent of the time they are anti-competitive, corruptive, impede creativity and innovation, and can kill small businesses. The ratio of patent law doing a good job protecting company IP versus it being used purely to negatively impact competitors or to troll for un-earned revenue is probably 1,000 to 1.â€�

Twice a year, every tech website seems to devote lavish coverage to just what startups made it into Y Combinator’s latest class. It’s the tech world’s version of covering the presidential primaries: Plenty of these companies aren’t going to exist in a few years (or perhaps even in a few months), but some may go on to do great things.

For those of us actually bent on founding our own startups, the coverage creates mixed feelings. It’s great to see people actually making it. But all the press also reinforces the feeling that every startup needs to go through an incubator in order to succeed. That can be incredibly frustrating for startup entrepreneurs. Not only do we need to come up with a great idea, we have to make sure that it’s something that works for an incubator.

There Is Value in Incubators

Without a doubt, an incubator can help a startup get up and off the ground quickly. Ella Dyer is an alumna of Springboard Enterprises, the Startup Chicks Accelerator and Venture Atlanta. “Winning the first annual pitch competition placed us in a four-month mentoring/coaching program where we learned, were reminded of and shared valuable insights into the making of a successful startup. Throughout the program we were able to network with proven leaders, several who have become close advisers and even investors in our company.�

Many startups point to the value of connections, just as Dyer does. Connections go beyond just getting venture capital, of course. Dyer notes, “The Atlanta chapter of Startup Chicks is ripe with support in every category. From the start we knew who to turn to should we need assistance with spreadsheets (something covered several times throughout our first year) or tax details.� Dyer’s experience with an accelerator had other benefits: “Sharing the launch of our first application, FashionAde, with the vast community of Startup Chicks was a bonus; we immediately had users, feedback and more assistance.� Overall, Dyer considers incubators very valuable and a key to her success.

But is an incubator actually necessary to a startup’s success?

The Counter-Argument

When you’re outside looking in, an incubator seems to do certain things very well: connect you with investment capital and guide you through the process of setting up a business. For this service, most incubators take a percentage of the startup in question. There are some subtler benefits as well: When a new startup lands in one of the better-known incubators (like Y Combinator), it gets a huge amount of attention from the media, at least online. That attention may be enough to turn the tide for a new company.

But what if your startup doesn’t need the services that an incubator offers? What if you can bootstrap the startup you have in mind? For those companies, there may be little point in applying to an incubator. And, as an added bonus, you get to keep control of your entire company.

Considering that incubators tend to look for very specific business models - startups that can grow quickly and offer a major return on investment - a close look at the numbers can sometimes make it hard to justify applying. And if you’re doing something particularly new, you may not be able to get into an incubator even with a truly great idea. Incubators aren’t exactly conservative, but they do clearly prefer the types of startups that they’ve seen before.

Incubators: Nice to Have

We need to cultivate the mindset that incubators are a nice-to-have option, not a need-to-have. I’m saying that as someone who has started a business without needing (or being a good candidate for) an incubator, but who would love to go through an incubator at some point just to get the connections it offers. I see a lot of value in the process. But I also see that plenty of startups can establish themselves without that sort of assistance and go it alone.

People search engine Pipl's people search API is now out of beta and open to all developers. The API can be used to bring a variety of information about an individual, from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to government resources like the United States Patent and Trademark Office and county clerk offices, into any application.

Customer ID, Social Context and CRM

Pipl’s Chief Revenue Officer Jonathan N. Schreiber says the API could be used for customer identification or verification, or to add social context to applications, such as customer relation management (CRM) systems. In this way, Pipl will compete with people-data providers like Rapleaf, which powers services like Rapportive. But it’s a flexible API and could be used in a number of unforeseen ways.

The API, built using Mashery’s platform, is designed to let developers use the GET command to retrieve Pipl’s search results in JSON on XML format, says Schreiber. Developers can specify a specific type of info they want, such as a mailing address, or just the full search results. The results are time-stamped and include a score that reflects how confident the Pipl service is that it has the right person.

Much of the data that Pipl finds is not normally accessible through Web searches but is still publicly available. According to Schreiber, Pipl uses only publicly available, non-logged-in information and respects robots.txt instructions to avoid the collection of information that’s not meant to be crawlable.

Schreiber describes Pipl as a “real search engine,� not a metasearch engine. It doesn’t query each source for each search - it has already crawled and indexed all of this information. Pipl also performs recursive searches: Once it finds an email address associated with a person, it goes back and uses it to find more profiles and information associated with that email address.

Creepy or Not, Here It Comes

This may sound a bit creepy, but Schreiber also says that although Pipl will try to determine an individual’s email addresses, the search engine will never return email address results to users. In fact, Pipl may actually prove useful in cleaning up online profiles by exposing old profiles and information.

Nevertheless, services like Pipl and other people data search engines like Spokeo have proven controversial. See ReadWriteWeb’s recent post: Here Are 20 Companies Who Sell Your Data (& How To Stop Them). While there are plenty of innocent uses for an API like this, it’s not hard to imagine developers using this API to do some unsettling things.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

At every public appearance by Tim Cook - say, Wednesday's on-stage interview at AllThingsD's annual D10 conference, or the upcoming WWDC keynote - commentators see the specter of Steve Jobs looming behind Apple's new CEO. It's no wonder. Jobs was larger than life, and the force of his personality can still be felt nine months after his death. The soft-spoken Cook is far less charismatic. Is he doomed to labor forever in his predecessor's shadow? What could Cook do to escape the ghost of Jobs?

The answer is simple: He's already well on his way. The idea that Tim Cook is a haunted man, trying to live up to the legacy of Jobs, is absurd. He's his own man, his own CEO, and Apple today is doing better than it ever was under Jobs's leadership.

This proposition isn't subjective. Look at Apple's stock value, which is up 55% since Steve Jobs' death on October 5th, 2011. That stock has been buoyed by Apple's two strongest and best-selling products ever, the iPhone 4S and the new iPad - products that were launched under Cook's watch, not Jobs'. Wall Street has a lot more confidence in Apple under Cook than under Jobs.

Investor uncertainty was partly a result of Jobs' chronic health issues. But a bigger part was Wall Street's distrust of the fabled reality distortion field. While Jobs successfully saved Apple from the brink of ruin upon his return to the company in 1997, his cult of personality was such that, to most outside observers, it seemed as though the company itself was hopped up on Steve juice. In other words, Apple was a junkie, and the moment Steve wasn't around to inject another hit, the company was going to crash. That's not a healthy situation, and to this day, investors continue to undervalue Apple's stock.

Cook has proven that assumption to be false. Apple in the post-Jobs era isn't in decline. It's ascendant.

Some will say this is because Jobs, on his death bed, was personally involved in laying a roadmap for everything Apple is currently doing. The iPhone 4S and new iPad, they will say, were Steve's babies, not Cook's. To say this, though, ignores a simple fact: Apple isn't as huge as it is today simply because of its well-designed products. Apple is the largest and most profitable tech company on Earth because it can design these magical products and then manufacture and ship them out on a massive scale without compromise and at unheard-of profit margins. That's Tim Cook's design. That's his product. That's his "one more thing." And that's why he's the CEO Apple needs right now. 

It's not enough to design products that everyone wants to own. You also need to get them into as many hands as possible. Steve Jobs was great at distilling products to their essence and making people covet them, but Apple could not be what it is today without Tim Cook's genius: his ability to get millions upon millions of devices built in total secrecy and then into the hands that want them. When the new iPad launched and lines didn't snake around the block, many saw proof that Apple had lost its mojo. The truth was far simpler: Cook is such a maestro at what he does that almost everyone who wanted a new iPad on the day it came out was able to walk into a store and buy one.

The truth is that Steve Jobs' greatest strength was nurturing talent and excellence. He didn't think of himself as irreplaceable. He set up internal universities at Apple aimed at training the next generation of executives to think more like him. He didn't believe that his way of thinking was unique. He thought it was something anyone could do. 

“Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you," Jobs once said during his wilderness years, "and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use - once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again."

Jobs' goal was not to be indispensable to Apple. His goal was to replicate his DNA and to inject it into Apple's, so that if he ever left the company, it would not be diminished, as it was when he was forced out in 1985. 

Before he died, Steve Jobs cloned himself. Apple is now Steve Jobs' brain, and Tim Cook is the cerebral cortex of that brain, making sure that the organism as a totality - from the cerebellum of Cupertino down to the limbs of Apple's supply chain - works as a unit. Cook doesn't need to live up to his predecessor's legacy. That's something the whole company fulfills, with Tim Cook - Steve's chosen successor - at its core.

John Brownlee is deputy editor of Cult of Mac.

One of the most interesting statistics in Mary Meeker's Internet Trends presentation was that in India, the world's second largest Internet market, the Mobile Web surpassed the Desktop Web during May 2012. A closer analysis reveals that a) mobile only passed desktop during weekends; and b) India's mobile stats are vastly different from any other country's. The global average is only 10% mobile traffic, so has India's mobile traffic been miscounted?

The extraordinary graph above, from Meeker's slides and sourced from web traffic monitoring company Statcounter, shows that mobile Internet traffic in India was almost zero in 2009 and the Desktop Internet close to 100%. Just three short years later, mobile traffic edged past desktop traffic. Or at least it did during parts of May 2012.

It turns out you can check these statistics for yourself, on the Statcounter Global Stats website. This shows that although mobile traffic may have surpassed desktop traffic in India on some days during May, on average desktop traffic was still slightly ahead: 51.29% desktop vs. 48.71% mobile.

The daily traffic graph for India in May reveals that mobile Internet overtook desktop only during the weekends. As a Statcounter representative put it, "mobile browsing peaks at weekends, while desktop browsing is more popular during the working week."

Incidentally, while it's a bit harder to spot the trend in the following graph, U.S. daily data also shows upward bumps every weekend. So the mobile = weekend trend appears to be a global one.

Why Are India's Stats So Different To Other Countries?

The main mystery is why India's mobile traffic statistics are so different from other countries, since the global mobile traffic average is only 10%.

In Japan, which has traditionally been ahead of the curve in mobile, traffic from mobile devices only accounts for 6.4% of its total traffic. In China, it's 4.18%. In the entire continent of Africa, where mobile phone technology is widely used, it's 12.96% (the trend line there has actually dipped in 2012, from a high of 19.17% in January). Meanwhile in the United States, the home of the world's most popular smartphone operating systems iOS and Android, mobile traffic is 9.13% (see graph below).

Faulty Stats?

There has been some suggestion from within India that these statistics aren't representative.

The argument is that Statcounter's data is over-represented by mobile Internet early adopters in India. On its Twitter account, Statcounter responded that it tracks over 900 million page views from Indian IPs per month. While it admits that this is only a sampling of total India traffic, Statcounter insists that it is "a large enough statistical sample [to] approximate the real population."

What's Behind The Mobile Growth in India?

While I think Statcounter's data may be a little suspect, I do agree that 900 million is a significant enough sampling to show the trend. Which leads us to question what is behind that trend; and should we pay it much heed?

One answer is from another slide from Mary Meeker, which showed that 3G subscriptions in India grew by 841% over the past year. India now has 39 million 3G subscribers, up from 4 million a year ago. It should be noted that India still trails the U.S., which has 208 million 3G subscribers, by quite a margin. The difference is that India has a much lower market penetration for mobile than the U.S. (4% in India, 64% in the U.S.).

It's also likely that mobile Internet is more cost efficient and convenient than desktop in many parts of India.

The bottom line is that India is still a very young market for mobile Internet. So readers in more mature mobile markets, like the U.S. and Japan, shouldn't read too much into the India stats. One thing is for sure though, mobile traffic is increasing fast in most countries in the world. Of that statistic, there is no doubt.

Microsoft may be listening to its customers, though the final preview edition of Windows 8 before the product ships this fall indicates that it turned its customers' volume knob down to about two.

Today's release, with its improvements to Start screen customizability, shows that Microsoft is at least slightly aware of users' chief complaints about the two previous Windows 8 previews.  The big customizability option revealed today is a wider range of color scheme choices for the Start Screen.

Now, users may choose a variety of different colors for their Start Screen backgrounds, including brighter reds and oranges, pastels, and combinations of bright colors on grey or charcoal backgrounds.  That's not exactly the tweaks that some early Windows 8 testers - admittedly, including this one - were hoping for.

But there are improvements, and they're worth noting.  The previous Consumer Preview had difficulty logging in to some Microsoft Exchange servers.  For business users who keep their email, contacts, and calendars in Exchange, it's this feature that could very well justify making Windows 8 more similar to Windows Phone 7.

Our freshly installed Release Preview on our test machine did not allow us to keep any of the existing settings we configured in the Consumer Preview, but that may have been just as well.  The Release Preview had a considerably easier time recognizing the existing Windows homegroup in our office.  Because of this, the revised versions of the Metro-style Music, Video, and Photos apps could more quickly connect with media that is not being stored in the cloud.  Connectivity with one's own local media was, after all, the whole point of adding Libraries to Windows 7 in the first place.

This quick connectivity gives the updated Start screen a bit more life.  More like what was originally advertised last September, the Photos tile rotates with photos in your library, the Mail tile shows the subject line of the most recent item received, and the People app tile rotates the faces of people to whom you frequently send mail.  Ironically, with earlier previews, these tiles would only "come alive" for us when we kept Exchange out of the mix, and when we took Windows 8 out of the homegroup.  With the Release Preview, these beta bugs appear to have been fixed.

Also checked off Microsoft's to-do list was a reminder to make error messages associated with apps sound something less like an edict of condemnation.  Although one of Windows 8's prominent "charms" (functional icons pulled up from the right side of the screen) is called "Share," few Metro-style apps and no Desktop apps have been endowed with the ability to share data with other people or other apps in the network (beyond the typical Clipboard).  In a previous article, for example, I showed how an attempt by a well-meaning though ill-informed user (portrayed by myself, of course) to share data with someone appearing inside the People app was met by the anti-prophecy, "People can't share."

That message has since been edited to read, "This app can't share."  Elsewhere, other Windows 8 apps that lack the ability to share greet their users with more friendly-sounding messages.  This doesn't change the fundamental fact, however, that despite the undeniable prominence of a "charm" that conveys a message of sharing all-around, this feature remains a singular link to a concentration of dead-ends.

There remain two modes of operation for applications in Windows 8: the as-yet-unnamed Metro-style world of "apps," and the conventional Desktop.  Previously, I showed how this dualism leads to the confusing existence of two taskbars: one on the Desktop, and one tucked inside the left side of the screen for Metro apps.  Running apps in the Consumer Preview were represented by thumbnails of the apps' screens - which, in many cases, didn't accurately convey their own identities.

Now in the Release Preview, we can see that these thumbnails have now been adorned by titles, making it far easier to recall which Metro apps are running.  From here - just as with applications on the Desktop taskbar - you can right-click a thumbnail (assuming you're using a mouse, which I've recently been told is old fashioned) and from the popup menu, select Close to make that app exit.  You could do this with the Consumer Preview too, but some thumbnails didn't make it easy for you to know which app you would be exiting.  And when a Metro app hung, as a few did in our tests, exiting this way didn't seem to work; only the Task Manager could help us there.  The Task Manager, by the way, is a Desktop app, meaning you have to switch to the Desktop to manage Metro.  We've only had the Release Preview running for a few hours, and have yet to experience a "hung" Metro app, so we don't know yet whether this behavior persists.

As we mentioned earlier today, the Windows 8 Release Preview is being offered by Microsoft as an upgrade only.  Thus, if you try to run it from Windows 7 (or Vista), it will begin assessing your existing Windows installation for an upgrade candidate.  Since the Release Preview is a release candidate, we don't recommend you do this.  If you've never installed the Consumer Preview or the first Developer Preview, then although this may seem difficult, and you don't have access to the Consumer Preview, then we recommend that you install Windows 7 on a separate partition of a different drive (one connected by SATA), and then immediately upgrade it to the Release Preview.  It's an extra headache, for sure, but it only lasts an hour, which is true of most reality shows anyway.

One very noteworthy addition we saw to the Windows 8 Store (which has a few dozen more items for download now) is the prominent addition of Box.net as a featured app. Windows SkyDrive already comes pre-installed on the Desktop, and is used by default by the Photo app for sharing photos through a cloud-based service. But Box is adding features to its system enabling users of tablets, including iPads, to read and even edit Microsoft Office documents. So the availability of Box as a Metro app not only is a step in the right direction for multi-device users, but a show of graciousness by Microsoft towards one of its more important competitors in the cloud storage field.

Microsoft also made available its Release Candidate for what is now being called (no surprise) Visual Studio 2012, and we'll let you know more about how it works soon.

Oracle has been dealt a final blow in its court case over the use of Java in Android. U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed Oracle's copyright infringement claim, bringing to an end a dramatic court case that saw Google win in nearly every single important aspect. Oracle has said it will appeal.

The ruling over whether Google violated the structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of 37 copyrighted APIs fell to the hands of Judge Alsup after the jury came to an impasse during the copyright phase of the trial. The jury was asked to determine several questions concerning whether Google had copied code copyrighted by Oracle after it had acquired the Java programming language when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. The jury did not return a complete verdict, ruling that Google had copied the SSO of the 37 APIs but could not decide whether or not that was considered fair use. 

When viewed as a whole, Oracle lost every significant aspect of the case. The jury found that Google had not infringed on any of Oracle’s patents and was innocent on copyright violations except for nine lines of specific code out of the 15 million lines that constitute the Android mobile operating system. Oracle, which was rumored to be seeking billions of dollars from Google, will now likely only be awarded between $150,000 and $300,000 in statutory copyright damages. 

“The court's decision upholds the principle that open and interoperable computer languages form an essential basis for software development. It's a good day for collaboration and innovation,â€� Google said in an emailed statement to the Los Angeles Times. 

Oracle’s stance on the ruling is profound. While many have viewed the database company’s efforts as a pure money grab, Oracle is trying to present itself and the Java community as victims of what it implies is unabashed theft by Google. As a programming language, Java was created by Sun Microsystems in the 1990s as a way to “write once, run everyâ€� and designed to supersede the closed system created by Microsoft Windows. Oracle alleges that Google has violated the promise of Java and betrayed the entire development ecosystem that relies on the code. 

“Oracle is committed to the protection of Java as both a valuable development platform and a valuable intellectual property asset. It will vigorously pursue an appeal of this decision in order to maintain that protection and to continue to support the broader Java community of over 9 million developers and countless law abiding enterprises. Google's implementation of the accused APIs is not a free pass, since a license has always been required for an implementation of the Java Specification,� Oracle stated in am email to technology publication The Verge. “And the court's reliance on ‘interoperability’ ignores the undisputed fact that Google deliberately eliminated interoperability between Android and all other Java platforms. Google's implementation intentionally fragmented Java and broke the "write once, run anywhere" promise. This ruling, if permitted to stand, would undermine the protection for innovation and invention in the United States and make it far more difficult to defend intellectual property rights against companies anywhere in the world that simply takes them as their own.�

While Google’s victory in the case is a big win for the company and its Android platform, the legal proceedings are by no means over. Oracle’s eventual appeal will have legs based on both Judge Alsup’s ruling on the fair use aspect and the jury’s split decision over the most important copyright issues. 

Facebook introduced five levels of administration to its brand pages Thursday. The added protection means more people are going to have access to (and have to learn how to use) Facebook Insights.

While there are plenty of how-to guides for beginners out there, we wanted to touch on the more advanced side of Insights. We asked three leading social media managers for their top tips on getting the most out of Insights.

More Than Just Likes and Unlikes

Catherine Merritt, an account supervisor in Olson PR’s social and emerging media department, uses Facebook Insights to figure out what is and is not working on the brand pages of her clients. She uses an Insights grid to track what types of posts work and do not work, and doesn’t get hung up on the number of people liking or unliking a page.

“Facebook insights and analytics are part of the puzzle, but in looking at them, it’s important to step back and see what they’re really showing. One of the most important takeaways I leverage from them is what they tell me about the content we’re putting out,� Merritt said. “What are the top five learnings I can gather and what does that mean to the page’s future? It’s not just about the number of Likes [and] Unlikes. It’s about what’s sticking to the wall and making sure you have a malleable page management and content process in place to quickly apply what each nugget is telling.�

Watch for Universal Trends

Tony Wright, the social media manager for Outside Line, manages brand pages for several clients and has used Insights to keep a running list of trends that seem to apply to most brand pages. Among Wright’s findings:

• Serious users should consider using a third-party service to store Insights data to avoid glitches that occasionally show up in Facebook’s system.
• Shorter, snappier posts are more likely to attract user interaction than longer posts.
• Niche brands often need extra attention to build and sustain user engagement.
• Wright is also starting to notice some drop-off in the effectiveness of posts ending with a question or with “a dozen exclamation marks.â€�

“As more brands join Facebook and start competing for exposure among users' busy news feeds, we're seeing lots of brands starting to talk in very similar ways, using quick win tactics to guarantee a good level of response,� Wright said. “While this often works in the short term, users could very well become fatigued.�

Use Insights on Your Domain

Alison Kimszal, a new media business analyst for DefinedLogic, said many users don’t realize they can use Facebook Insights on their domain as well as their Facebook brand page.

“While the Facebook Page Insights are great for gathering how much interaction your posts are getting, the Domain Insights provide you with valuable information on how many people are coming to your domain from Facebook and organically sharing links to your site,� Kimszal said. “Metrics on shares, likes, comments and demographic information for each domain and URL on your site can be measured via the Domain Insights. Domain Insights also collects data on Facebook Social Plugins such as the like button, the send button and the comments box.�

For as long as the iPhone has been available, people in the U.S. have been clamoring for a prepaid version of it. That was never going to happen when AT&T held the iPhone monopoly. The company has to subsidize the cost of cheap phones to customers, and long-term contracts are a way to recoup that expense. Enter Cricket, a small U.S. carrier that will release the iPhone 4S to its network with unlimited data, voice and text for $55 a month. 

This is a very strategic move for Apple and an early Christmas present for Cricket. Apple is showing the Big Three U.S. carriers that it is not entirely reliant on them for iPhone sales in the U.S. One thing that Apple will be losing out on are the subsidies that Sprint, AT&T and Verizon pay for iPhones, but that cost is offset by the fact that the handsets are nearly full-priced for consumers. A 16GB iPhone 4S from Cricket will run $499.99, while an iPhone 4 will be $399.99. Apple is losing a bit of money by going directly to consumers through Cricket, but the volume of sales that Cricket will provide will be small in comparison to what the Big Three sell. For a company that makes near $12-$14 billion in profit a quarter, Apple can afford the small hit on subsidies through Cricket. 

The win for Cricket is obvious. It is the first prepaid iPhone available in the U.S., and it augments the carrier’s thin line of available devices with a high-end smartphone. Check out the lineup of Cricket phones and you will understand. There is much left to be desired beyond the low-end devices from bargain manufacturers ZTE and Huawei. Cricket will offer unlimited voice minutes and texts, which has become pretty standard. In terms of data, it will technically be unlimited but will be throttled after 2.3GB of usage, which the company terms as “fair use.�

There is one clear loser in Apple’s deal with Cricket: T-Mobile. The carrier, which struggles with competition from above by A&T, Verizon and Sprint, now must contend with competitors from below. T-Mobile is, of course, the only major U.S. carrier without the iPhone. It has said repeatedly that it can compete without the signature device and does offer several high-end Android phones. Yet, it must be starting to feel like the ugly stepchild at this point, as it's repeatedly passed over for the affections of Apple. 

The biggest winners, and really the most pertinent for all parties involved, are consumers. A $55 data and voice plan is the lowest entry point for a single individual on the market. The lowest an individual can find among the top three carriers is about $60 (an AT&T voice plan of 450 minutes at $39.99 and 300MB of data for $20). Where Cricket wins in this scenario is that it is both cheap and its voice and text are unlimited. In terms of the 2.3GB “fair usageâ€� plan, that number is likely quantified by the average amount of data that a consumer uses per month through the Big Three carriers. Both AT&T and Verizon price 3GB plans at $30 a month. Over the length of a 24-month contract from the Big Three, consumers can save about $500. That is slightly offset by the higher cost of the phone, but Cricket does not require contracts and there is no early termination fee on the network. 

Look for Apple to start making more deals with prepaid carriers both in the U.S. and abroad. It is one of the remaining untapped markets for the iPhone. 

After completing every objective of its nine-day mission, the first private spacecraft ever to dock with the International Space Station splashed down off the coast of Baja California today. The landing was right on target. The 19-foot-long SpaceX Dragon capsule was quickly recovered to begin its trip back to the SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas. SpaceX's successful mission sets the stage for private spacecraft operations to take over some routine responsibilities from NASA, potentially saving money and increasing capabilities.

The Dragon launched on May 22 aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to make its historic rendezvous, successfully docking with the space station on May 25. The following day, the crew of ISS Expedition 31 opened the hatch and climbed aboard, reporting that the Dragon's interior "smell[ed] like a brand new car."

The Dragon brought some nonessential cargo to the station, which the crew unloaded and replaced with spent equipment to return to NASA. The agency has made Dragon's full cargo manifest available to read. It includes crew provisions and clothes, racks and storage containers for science experiments, plus some mission hardware, including spacewalk gloves.

After completing all the tests and experiments, Dragon spent its last day at the station yesterday as crew finished loading its 1,455 pounds of cargo to return to Earth. Dragon unberthed from the station's robotic arm at 4:05 a.m. Eastern time today.

Dragon fired its engines to slow down and drop from orbit, then streaked through the sky over the Pacific, deploying its parachutes at 45,000 feet and touching down right on target at 11:42 a.m. Eastern time.

In future missions, Dragon will land on a pad using precision thrusters, rather than the more traditional water landing.

See also: Profile of SpaceX founder Elon Musk

With the success of this mission, SpaceX begins a series of cargo missions for NASA under a four-year, $1.6 billion contract. If all goes well, private spaceflight companies will take on even more responsibility. The Dragon capsule is designed to accommodate up to seven crew members, and SpaceX plans to begin manned flights within three years.

With private companies like SpaceX handling routine flights, NASA can free up its resources for more ambitious, longer-term missions.

Lead image via SpaceX/AP

The decision by online travel service Kayak Software to delay its initial public offering has been blamed on Facebook's botched public offering a couple weeks ago. But while Facebook's roughly 25% plunge in share price is a great reason for skepticism in the next Internet company IPO, that's not Kayak's only problem.

The online travel market is crowded and Kayak, which launched in 2004, is battling many more competitors than just other old timers, such as Expedia and Orbitz. Newcomers like Hipmunk are giving Kayak and the others headaches by offering visitors a simpler layout that makes it easier to find the cheapest flight and hotel room.

Founded in 2010, Hipmunk surpassed 1 million monthly searches after its first year in operation and was growing roughly 15% each month, according to the San Francisco-based company. The company raised more than $4 million about a year ago in a funding round headed by Ignition Partners.

As a testimony to its better user experience, Hipmunk has made gains in the market despite its similarities to Kayak. Neither company actually sells airline tickets and makes hotel bookings, like Expedia and Priceline.com. Instead, they get a cut when their visitors book travel at the sites of airlines, hotels and other travel services. Kayak also sells ads.

This doesn't mean Hipmunk hasn't hit some bumps. The company started out only searching for flights and had to add hotel rooms after it realized airlines weren't willing to pay much for having traffic directed to their sites. As a result, hotel bookings have become the bigger revenue generator, according to the company.

Besides fighting Hipmunk, Kayak is also feeling the heat from tech giants. In 2010, Google acquired travel software company ITA Software for $700 million in order to start its own flight-search service. Microsoft is also in the game with Bing Travel, which has its own twist. Rather than just selling an airline ticket, Bing can tell the traveler the probability that fares for that trip to Paris will fall over the next week.

To Kayak's credit, the company has done well over the last year, despite the competition and being a fraction of the size of its largest rivals. The company is profitable. At the end of the first quarter, it reported a profit of $4.15 million, compared to a loss of $6.91 million during the same timeframe a year ago. Revenue rose 39% to $73.3 million. The number of travel searches rose by 45% to 310 million, according to its IPO papers.

And there's no doubt that Facebook's IPO cast a shadow over Internet company IPOs in general. The world's largest social network, with more than 900 million users, went from being the biggest technology IPO on record to the worst-performing public offering in the last decade. The fall from grace has been caused by doubts about its future ad revenue growth and mistrust in the way underwriters handled the share sale. Morgan Stanley led the Facebook IPO and was hired to lead Kayak's offering.

Kayak's IPO to raise $50 million was expected as early as last week. The company, which first filed to go public in November 2010, has denied it has delayed its IPO, saying it never set a firm date. A Kayak spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that the company is waiting for market conditions to improve.

So its unlikely Kayak will be the first post-Facebook tech offering and therefore a bellwether on investor appetite for Internet company IPOs. That honor may go to ServiceNow, an IT cloud-computing services company, or Palo Alto Networks, an Internet security company, according to financial news service Bloomberg. Both are also to be led by Morgan Stanley.

In the meantime, Kayak will have to continue to fight hard and prove the rivals nipping at its heels won't derail its growth.

The worst-kept secret in Microsoft’s history may well lead to a surprise anyway. This afternoon, the company made available a program that prompts curious Windows users to download the latest Windows 8 Release Preview - the final preview before general release expected later this year. But Windows 7 users who run this little jewel will be surprised to find that it tries to upgrade their Windows 7 to the Windows 8 Release Preview.

The Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, available here, assesses whether your existing operating system can be upgraded to run the new Windows 8 preview. ReadWriteWeb is testing the Upgrade Assistant's efficacy on a partition containing the previous Windows 8 Customer Preview (the second of three). We have encountered no problems so far.

So, for now, we can advise you to run the Upgrade Assistant on (or more accurately, from) a partition containing a test version of an operating system, which may be either a disposable test copy of Windows 7 or an earlier Windows 8 preview. The program checks existing applications for their relative compatibility with the upgraded system, but even though we had installed multiple test applications in the Consumer Preview, the Upgrade Assistant did not offer an installation option that would let us keep any of them. “Keep nothing� was the only choice provided.

A Microsoft spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb to expect some of the improvements that many of us have been actively campaigning for. Once we see evidence of them, we’ll photograph them and tell you more about them here. One that we’re particularly keen to see is described as “increased personalization options for the Start screen.� Although tablet users testing the Consumer Preview have been impressed with the Windows 8 Start Screen functionality, the way in which it was visually segregated from the Desktop environment, coupled with Microsoft’s decision to make switching between the Start Screen and the Desktop more obscure, has been the principal complaint among Windows veterans (including myself).

One critical discovery: The "Keep nothing" choice, which may be your only one, means that whatever was in the "My Documents" folder on your old operating system's home partition will be completely deleted. So make certain you back up any contents from that folder that you wish to keep.

More information, including screenshots, still to come.

Perhaps the most visible change to the Windows 8 Desktop (the "old" half of Microsoft's new operating system) will come from live performance graphs. Improved heuristics in the new Task Manager and all-new graphs in Windows Explorer, of all places, will tell you when "burst mode" kicks in and when your hard drive is slowing down.

In this 10-part series, 26-year veteran Windows tester Scott Fulton walks us through the best features, faculties and functions of Windows 8.

Performance, to the user, is the impression that things are moving smoothly and promptly. It's been said that if you find yourself measuring performance, it's because you don't have it - although now that I think about it, a politician may said this, not an IT pro. With Windows 8, Microsoft is becoming more comfortable with giving everyday folks easier access to meaningful performance metrics - and by "meaningful," I mean "not the Windows Experience Index." 

Making Performance Meaningful

Mind you, there have been performance monitoring tools for Windows for quite some time. The screenshot above shows Windows 7 (not Windows 8), and in the upper right is Task Manager, with a graph from its Performance tab. The window on the lower right is an independent tool called Resource Monitor, which can be pulled up from Task Manager. The problem with the original Sysinternals tools (maybe the only one, really) is that they present their data in very rich detail, making it somewhat inaccessible to the amateur. Like the tax code, you can decipher it easily enough if you know what it means.

Last week, one of my hard drives began failing on my multiboot test system. What I noticed first, however, looked like a complete system performance drop-off. I noticed the trouble in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, so I expected a hardware failure. But I wasn't certain: Perhaps the addition of a certain Media Center device driver to both operating systems was interfering with both systems.

It was the new Task Manager in Windows 8 that gave me the evidence I needed of a cache memory failure on one of my disks. I can't show you the exact moment I saw that data, but I can show you where it was: It's in the Task Manager window. Don't you see it? In the screenshot above, it's on the right.

The Performance tab on Windows 8's new Task Manager presents basic utilization charts in a much more easy-to-read format that dispenses with the "stereo volume bars" nonsense. (It's a computer, folks, not a graphic equalizer.) And in its new format, you can select Options > Always On Top, then right-click the window and select Summary View to eliminate the window dressing and narrow it down to just the contents. In this form, you can stretch and size the contents, and then drag them to some out-of-the-way place.

As the screenshot at the top of this article indicates, yes, Task Manager and Metro-style apps can co-exist, and not by means of Metro's funky app-snapping mechanism. For that shot, I double-clicked on the CPU utilization chart to have Task Manager center on that chart only. In case you're wondering, CPU utilization in the context of Windows 8 means the relative workload at any one time for all cores in the CPU collectively. On quad-core PCs, Windows 7-based utilization tools tend to render results on a 400-point scale. So folks who think their Web browsers hog CPU cycles at 105% utilization (as if that's really possible) might be interested to learn that their processor is really being taxed at about 26%. Here in Windows 8, the chart correctly registers full utilization at 100%.

In Windows Explorer (the file manager program), every version of Windows since Windows 95 has had a progress bar indicating the relative completion of long copy operations. In Windows 8, the optional "More Details" view (which you can turn on once and leave on) reveals a heuristic graph showing the bandwidth of transfers in progress, inside a taller version of the progress bar. I was able to isolate my failing hard drive as the cause of the system slowdown by attempting a big copy operation, then watching the graph. Rather than a consistently slow copy, I could see that the bandwidth had been reduced to zero, then would occasionally burst to full and regular speed and maintain that speed for as much as a minute. That's behavior consistent with a hard drive that either has a failing memory cache or whose regulator is not reporting it's spinning at a consistent speed.

A Full Rundown That Makes Sense

Finally, for the first time, Windows now has no problem actually showing you, on a graph, when and how it's crashed over time. One of my absolute favorite new performance graphs in Windows 8 is called Reliability Monitor. Think of it as a crash dump you can actually read.

The line at the top represents a "Reliability Index," which represents Windows' own internal assessment, on a 10-point scale, of how well its internal services, functions and drivers are working. It's surprisingly harsh on itself, grading itself gradually higher for each hour that no critical or nominal events occurred, but scoring itself down the moment something does go wrong. While the index itself may be an unimportant number, the telltale stair-steps in the line tell you when critical events occurred, as plotted against the calendar axis along the bottom.

To get a full report of every Windows-related event that happened on a particular day, including ordinary things like patches, updates and software installations, you click on the day in question. Now, how many times has this happened to you: You install something that Windows Update said you must have, and suddenly your performance slows down. With this chart, you can verify your suspicions: You can see the time when you installed the update (or when your PC installed it automatically), and you can gauge the relative performance drop compared to before the installation.

Microsoft is famous for burying great new features behind mountains of junk, and Reliability Monitor appears to be no exception. The company may change things for the final version, but in the Consumer Preview, you find Reliability Monitor like this: In the Notification Area, click the Action Center flag, and from the pop-up, select Open Action Center. Click the Maintenance category, then from the choices that slide down below it, locate and click the hyperlink View Reliability History.

Hardware fails and software fails. Operating systems fail even more often. These are everyday facts of life, which won't change just because some PC users switch to tablets. The way to cope with and overcome everyday failures is through information - through being able to perceive what's wrong rather than having to guess.

In the Microsoft Vista era, when a security feature was tripped, rather than give you any clue as to why it was failing, the Vista screen went completely black. It's a bit like having a disease, but instead of being told the diagnosis, having all the doctors in the hospital lock themselves in their offices. With that type of response, you might conclude it's not only fatal but contagious. And that could be for something minor like a misplaced Registry entry.

Being explicit about its own performance in Windows 8 tells me that Windows is finally maturing. After three decades of this, it's about time.

Jon has been testing the new Google Chromebook and Chromebox for a couple weeks. He and Dan discussed whether these things are ready for prime time. Then Dan's audio cut out, so he continued to mime comments while Jon answered reader questions. There were lots of them! We hope this video answers all your Chrome OS questions, and if not, leave some more in the comments.

Here are links to the posts and topics we talked about:

• New Chromebook & Chromebox Are Good Enough to Grab Minds & Market Share (Jon's big review)
• Why the New Chromebook Still Doesn't Cut It (Scott's counter-review)
• More Bad News For HP: The New Google Chromebook Compared to a Typical HP Laptop
• Chrome On a Tablet? New Video Emerges (August 9, 2011)

We hang out at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursdays, and you're welcome to join us or just watch live. (Here's the time for every time zone.) Make sure to follow +ReadWriteWeb on Google+ if you want to watch or participate. We'd love to have you!

It’s easy to think of gaming as kids stuff, and the behavior-driving techniques honed by the gaming industry limited to getting the unwashed Internet masses to play Farmville or boost engagement in marketing campaigns. But it turns out that the same motivators that get the adrenaline pumping in a 15-year-old gamer also drive executives. So those gamification techiques are also being used to nudge corporate executives into performing desired functions - including completing online training programs in large multinational corporations.

Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA) is relying on gamification techniques to get more than 10,000 harried corporate executives in 150 companies to complete online training programs. “Fundamentally, what we’re doing with gamification and DLA is to really drive that stickiness to the platform to create semi-addictive behavior,� explained Frank Farrall, national leader for Deloitte Australia’s online consulting practice.

Gamification refers to taking the gaming techniques that harness people’s drive for winning and glory and apply them to education, marketing, scientific research and public policy campaigns. While some experts say they believe the tactics will slowly lose their effectiveness, neuroscientists are finding that earning rewards for completing tasks can cause feel-good chemical reactions that motivate people to move to the next undertaking, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.

Executive leaderboards and badges

Deloitte is getting executives' juices flowing through the use of a leaderboard that ranks how well trainees are doing in learning leadership skills, such as managing people and teams and incorporating techniques for driving innovation. Common in gaming, the leaderboard provides immediate recognition of the top performers.

But gamification in a corporate setting requires a different sensitivity. Deloitte acknowledges that such rankings could cause resentment and drive people away from the program. So DLA avoids placing the “top user on a pedestal� and making the No. 1 position the goal.

“We more want to say, ‘Here are the people who are gaining on you, and here’s what you can do to make sure that you overtake the person above you,’� said James Sander, product and client manager for Deloitte Digital.

Another technique borrowed from games is the awarding of badges for completing tasks. For example, finishing the lessons supplied by Harvard Business Publishing earns the participant a specialist badge for that content. “Basically, you’re giving a bit of a dopamine release to the user whenever they achieve something, and that drives that semi-addictive behavior,� Farrall said.

People can collect multiple badges and announce their achievements on the academy’s social network or on Twitter and LinkedIn. Because the badges carry the Deloitte brand, they have credibility within the professional community, according to Farrall.

The gamification aspects of DLA are licensed from Badgeville, a company specializing in the use of such techniques in training and marketing. Deloitte consulting, which is separate from DLA, has listed gamification as one of the top 10 technology trends of 2012. Beyond education, gaming techniques are being used to motivate people to succeed in the workplace, according to Deloitte.

An executive backlash?

Driving people through rewards and recognition doesn’t sit well with everyone. “If everything was a game, no one would have a reason to invent; any metric corrupts, as people shape their behavior to ensure that they come out on top,� Susan Crawford, former Obama White House technology policy expert, said in the Pew study. “There have to be other routes to excellence… it can’t be that we’ll be adding up points for every salient element of our lives.�

One big question is how well these techniques will apply to sophisticated corporate populations more likely to be aware of how they’re being manipulated. Another issue is whether reliance on gamification for motivation might reduce creativity and “thinking outside the box.�

DLA acknowledges that gaming techniques have their limitations in motivating people. “Common sense would tell you that it will have limits as to how much core influence it’s going to have,� Farrall said. “Otherwise, we would become mindless drones.�

How effective Badgeville’s gaming adaptation will be in the corporate arena remains to be seen. DLA has only recently started using the techniques, so not enough data is available to determine effectiveness. Nevertheless, usage on the academy site is going up and people are earning and talking about their badges on LinkedIn and Twitter – signs that this modern-day form of manipulation is beginning to work. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Jeff Ma, the MIT blackjack team member who served as the inspiration for Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House and the film 21, gave developers at the Atlassian Summit a glimpse of his new stealth startup: TenXer.

TenXer is a tool for measuring employee performance, and is now available as a plugin for Atlassian’s bug-tracking tool JIRA via the relaunched Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian makes a variety of tracking, collaboration and software development products.

Using the JIRA plugin, development teams can track their metrics and see a performance dashboard. This appears to be the first public release of TenXer, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible outside of JIRA yet.

Ma and his fellow MIT students earned big bucks with their card counting system in the 1990s, but were eventually banned from just about every blackjack table in the country. Since then, Ma has occupied his time founding companies like PROTRADE and Citizen Sports, which sold to Yahoo in 2010. He’s also been giving talks on teamwork at various conferences.

In his keynote at Atlassian Summit, Ma explained that he noticed that successful individuals and teams, from athletes to businesses, quantify their performance and measure progress toward specific goals. That led him to found TenXer to create a system tracking employee performance. To this end, the TenXer plugin for JIRA measures metrics - such as bugs closed, bugs fixed and work logged - to help quantify developer performance. The name TenXer comes from the idea that “great employees are 10x better than the average.�

According to Business Insider, Niel Robertson, co-founder of Trada, is also a co-founder of TenXer. AngelList cites David Jeske as an investor.

The Atlassian Marketplace is an app-store style service for purchasing and installing plugins and integrations for Atlassian products. It was formerly known as Atlassian Plugin Exchange and was relaunched today at the summit.

Today's theme is mad scientists. In covering tech, we tend to focus on the products, the problems and the money. But arguably the most important parts of the story are the people themselves. It's their personal obsessions that take dreamy ideas and make them real.

Here are a few science and tech stories focused on fascinating people.

Richard Dawkins has leveled some interesting criticisms of renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, whose new book tries to rewrite the story of natural selection. (via 3quarksdaily)

Sixteen-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved a 350-year-old math and physics problem. (via 3quarksdaily)

Richard Resnick's 11-minute TED talk might convince you that his work on fast genomic sequencing is about to revolutionize health care.

Elizabeth Norton has written up the work of neuroscientist Johan Lundström, who is trying to understand the distinctive scent of older people.

FastCompany has a great interview with Steve Lee, the product lead for Google's Project Glass cyborg goggles.

Are tractor beams technologically feasible? Haifeng Wang thinks so.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Health care privacy laws can’t keep up with rapid technological advances on health websites and social networks, according to a paper in the spring edition of The Neurodiagnostic Journal.

While the Internet has increased the ability to store, communicate and reference medical information, study author Jacquelyn M. Polito of the Neurology Department at South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts wrote that advances in medical information technology have also raised new ethical questions about confidentiality and caused disputes over who is ultimately responsible for a patient’s privacy.

The paper also noted that many of the health information websites that patients rely on to gather information may be inaccurate. One study compared 60 websites with information on childhood diarrhea with recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and found that 80% of those websites contained inaccuracies.

Other findings:

• In a poll, 60% of medical school administrators said they were aware of unprofessional postings, with 13% of those infractions being breaches of patient confidentiality.
• A 2008 review found that some medical school students were making online posts about medical situations in a way that made it possible to identify the patient.
• Not only are laws failing to keep pace with technological advances, but they often give patients and doctors layers of confusion. “The regulatory framework can be a seemingly chaotic tangle of laws and policies by local, state and federal agencies,â€� Polito wrote. “With such ambiguous wording and layers of potentially confusing regulations, therein lies the capacity for different interpretations and misunderstandings among health care providers, patients and their families.â€�

In another poll, 86% of physicians said they had consulted the Internet for the latest medical information and for consulting experts on difficult cases. That, however, could cause problems, Polito wrote, because many organizations that offer electronic health records - including Google Health, which is being discontinued and Microsoft’s HealthVault - are not required to follow HIPAA rules. Those sites usually operate under their own privacy policies, which they can amend at any time without consent, according to the Internet Business Law Services. 

“Despite nearly two decades of burgeoning Internet use, no online activities can be guaranteed absolute privacy. Clearly, these sites and their usage must be closely monitored, yet by whom and how?� Polito concluded. “As technologists and health care professionals, we need to be ever-mindful of safeguarding privacy, of the uncertain integrity of information received, and of emerging policies and laws with regard to Internet use of electronic protected health information with every patient, every time.�

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.