In January, The New York Times wondered aloud why Apple did not make the iPhone in America. The story heaped a torrent of commentary and scrutiny on Silicon Valley’s most valuable company. Whether you think manufacturing in the U.S. is right or not for Apple, Cadillac is proving that American-made technology can compete with the best.

The new Cadillac ATS was designed to be a luxury car world-beater - a tall order that required catching up to the likes of BMW’s 3-series and Mercedes’ C-class. But the folks at General Motors took a unique approach to the job and the ATS definitely arrives at the head of its class.

What Cadillac did is often overlooked in Silicon Valley. To help design the Cadillac User Experience (CUE), the company assembled a team of designers, engineers and software developers to shadow drivers while observing them in their natural habitat.

This “contextual design” technique required team members to accompany actual consumers, an eye-opening experience. The shadow team was able to identify several different driving styles, which were categorized under a pseudonym. One type of driver, dubbed “Spencer,” always needed to check text messages immediately, while ‘‘Emily” liked listening to music, whether on her phone, iPod or flash drive.

Cadillac spokesperson David Caldwell tells me, “We took a hard look at what carmakers call 'infotainment.' Everyone’s doing that, that’s sort of par for the course. We took a bit of a riskier approach: Is there something we can do that says ‘hey these guys are doing something different?’”

Enter A New GUI

What became clear quickly is that most drivers are distracted by a myriad of bells, beeps and whistles emitted by our digital lifestyle tools. So Cadillac engineers set out to develop a less invasive type of user interface, one that communicates via seat vibrations.

You might call it “BUI,” but GM prefers the less colloquial Cadillac Safety Alert Seat. The Alert Seat is able to tell a driver whether an object is nearby on the left by triggering a pulse on the left side of the seat.

Cadillac also joins another innovative force in technology: the open source movement. The CUE system runs on a triple-core ARM 11 processor and uses a Linux platform so developers can help keep the architecture fresh with new extensions.

CUE powers both an 8-inch capacitive touch screen, reportedly the first non-resistive display in an automobile, and a second, 12.3-inch fully configurable instrument cluster mounted behind the steering wheel.

Another automotive engineering feat was the addition of haptic feedback. There’s a proximity sensor, which brightens the display when a driver’s hand approaches the system’s user interface and a touch screen that provides both pulse feedback and the ability to swipe and pinch.

Living In America

That producing a product as complex as a car with its myriad of alloys and steel and hundreds of technology features is not a trivial procedure is underscored by this Esquire article, How to Build an American Car, which breathtakingly describes the production process.

So would Apple benefit from building the iPhone in America? There are two trends to consider here. First, it’s increasingly likely that volatility in the oil business will cause fuel prices to double in the not-too-distant future. That will make shipping even a high-value iPhone from China via FedEx a less attractive proposition.

Another is that increasingly the added value in any consumer product is software. And in this area, America still out-shines the rest of the world although domestic educational obstacles and the ascent of India may diminish that advantage.

Still though, I’m happy to see that once-considered-dead General Motors can not only match global competitors in engineering but also reinvent an area where automobiles will increasingly have to shine - the human-machine interface. Don’t believe me? I have just one word to say, iDrive.

Happy motoring America, and please contribute software innovations for the automobile and computer revolution to our Spigit innovation crowdsourcing engine.

Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.

 Here's the NY Times' description of Fech from its first release last year:

Journalists who work with these filings need to extract their data from complex text files that can reach hundreds of megabytes. Turning a new set into usable data involves using the F.E.C.'s data dictionaries to match all the fields to their positions in the data. But the available fields have changed over time, and subsequent versions don't always match up. For example, finding a committee's total operating expenses in version 7 means knowing to look in column 52 of the “F3P” line. It used to be found at column 50 in version 6, and at column 44 in version 5. To make this process faster, my co-intern Evan Carmi and I created a library to do that matching automatically.

Fech (think “F.E.C.h,” say “fetch”), is a Ruby gem that abstracts away any need to map data points to their meanings by hand. When you give Fech a filing, it checks to see which version of the F.E.C.'s software generated it. Then, when you ask for a field like “total operating expenses,” Fech knows how to retrieve the proper value, no matter where in the filing that particular software version stores it.

Derek Willis of the NY Times announced the 1.0 release of Fech last month. This release covers "all of the current form types that candidates and committees submit." Perhaps most importantly, this release allows comparing two filings against one another.

Why Fech Matters

Fech is already being used by the NYT for its reporting and interactive visualizations of campaign spending. But that's just one editorial team. Putting this tool in the hands of any developer or reporter that wants to work with the data opens a lot more possibilities.

For example, there's ProPublica, which is using Fech and the NY Times' APIs for its reporting and interactive graphics. ProPublica is able to show not just what campaigns are spending, but how much and with whom. (So far the biggest winner is Mentzer Media Services, an ad agency that specializes in GOP campaigns - including the Swift Boaters. Fech doesn't automatically point that out, of course, but it helps journalists uncover it.

Data without context is useless. By helping developers and journalists work with the filings in a more structured way, Fech helps newsrooms (or any other group) put the data in context to find the story behind the data. It's a long way from being simple to use, but it represents a significant improvement over the raw data. It's Apache-licensed, so it might find its way into all kinds of data analysis tools over time.

With Fech maturing well before the elections this fall, it could help all kinds of organizations follow the money trails much more efficiently. Here's hoping that happens.

I tried out MaaS360 on both a Kindle Fire and an iPad and got them under my corporate thumb within about an hour, including the time it took to learn more about the various requirements for the service. Fiberlink claims that they are the first Fire supporter, I wasn't able to verify that. Here is a nice short video explanation of what the product does with an interview with our own Dan Rowinski.

If you are going to evaluate any of these products, the first thing you want to examine is which devices do they manage. For that, you will need special client software. If you want to allow anything on your network, you need some kind of agent that keeps track of what your end users are doing with it, and can protect it in case of malware or other infections. MaaS360 has versions for iOS, Android/Kindle, Blackberry, Louts Traveler, and Microsoft Exchange, among numerous other tools. Its download page (you can freely try any of these out for 30 days) is almost overwhelming.

Depending on what platform you are protecting, you will have to go through a process to install the agent and set things up. Any iOS device requires a series of cryptographic certification installation steps to get things going, which is somewhat annoying (this is from Apple, not the fault of anybody else). MaaS360 is fairly straightforward: you register your device on this screen:

And then it sends you an email with the download link that you open in the mobile's browser to finish things up.

Once you have your agent up and running, you go into your portal to track what is going on. You can get lots of detail such as the report below on a Kindle Fire (running the Android OS) that you see below:

MaaS360 can integrate with your Active Directory or LDAP server so you can bulk load up your management system without having to do much manual installation, but there still is some work involved.

A second issue is in understanding the portal page where the service tracks what is going on across your network. What information is presented, what is actionable, what you can safely ignore. It could be more work to understand what you are seeing than you bargained. This is somewhat akin to when intrusion detection products first came into corporate networks; we needed to train our security staff what they were reporting and what they needed to pay more attention to.

Next, you want to examine how flexible the device management policies are with the service. With MaaS360, you have dozens of different levers you can push to prevent the device from connecting to particular Wifi networks, allow installation of particular apps from outside the approved marketplaces, and enforce device encryption.

Finally, what is all this going to cost? MaaS360 starts at $6 apiece per month in quantity of 100 devices and discounts are available as the number of devices increases.

MaaS360 is just one of dozens of MDM and endpoint products that are out there. One of my favorite for ordinary Windows and Mac desktops is Symantec's Endpoint Protection, which currently doesn't offer any mobile agents - yet.

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and worked with a group of developers, including Ken Thompson, to create UNIX, the first version of which was released in 1969. Initially called UNICS (following a system called MULTICS) was written in a low-level assembly language by Thompson. According to Thompson, Ritchie's contribution to UNIX was "mostly on the language and the I/O system."

The Creation of C

The language, of course, was C. So named because it followed the B (for Bell Labs) programming language, C is a higher-level language designed to allow cross-platform programming. To make it portable to different hardware, it was re-written in C, and released in 1971 as UNIX.

Brian Kerninghan said that with C "Dennis managed to find a perfect balance between expressiveness and efficiency. It was just right for creating systems programs like compilers, editors, and even operating systems. C made it possible for a programmer to get close to the machine for efficiency but remain far enough away to avoid being tied to a specific machine... As a result, C became in effect a universal assembler: close enough to the machine to be cost effective, but far enough away that a C program could be compiled for and run well on any machine."

The concept of a multi-platform language and operating system no doubt seem, well, unexceptional today. However, at the time, it was unheard of, as Herb Sutter notes.

"Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths... There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware."

Tim Bray writes, "Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I've seen or am likely to see in my lifetime... It is impossible – absolutely impossible – to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

The combination of C and UNIX have been at the core of computing ever since, and are (in slightly altered form) still going strong today. UNIX, as a portable and multi-user operating system, became extremely popular. AT&T was prohibited from entering the computer market at the time UNIX was created, so it was freely spread far and wide to businesses, schools, and within the U.S. government.

UNIX ultimately spawned dozens of versions, including SunOS and Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, NeXTSTEP, BSD, A/UX, Mac OS X and many others. UNIX inspired the GNU Project and Linux, though they are not derived from the same codebase.

C is still widely used, as are its direct descendants; C++, Perl, Objective-C, Java, C#, PHP and many others.

K&R

The popularity of C has been helped by The C Programming Language, often referred to as K&R for its co-authors: Kerninghan and Ritchie.

The book was published in 1978, and is a comprehensive guide to C in less than 300 pages. Kerninghan said that he "twisted Dennis's arm into writing it" which was "probably the smartest thing I ever did." Kerninghan called Ritchie "an exceptionally clear and elegant writer."

K&R continues to be considered an important guide to C. It was revised in 1988 to accommodate the ANSI C standard, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Kerninghan said that the book has been successful "in large part because of the success of C, though it probably helped that the book, like the language, is rather small and simple, and made it possible for people to do useful things quickly."

The book made popular the now-obligatory "Hello World!" example, which explains how to create a small program that prints "Hello World!" to the display.

Later Career

Later in his career, Ritchie continued in computer research and contributed to the creation of Plan 9 and Inferno distributed operating systems.

While neither Plan 9 or Inferno have achieved widespread popularity, Inferno has been released as open source and is under continued development.

Ritchie retired as the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department in 2007. He received numerous awards for his achievements, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1999 in conjunction with Thompson.

Rob Pike, who worked with Ritchie at Bell Labs and on the Plan 9 and Inferno projects, reported Ritchie's passing yesterday, saying, "He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind."

The first snag many noticed was the estimated download time for the software. As more people downloaded iOS 5, some began to see prolonged wait times, sometimes up to a few hours. The problems only got worse from there.

During the activation, many reported getting a 3200 error code, which effectively stopped the process to restore and reboot their device. Other errors included notifications that the software update server could not be contacted, or that one's device simply could not be restored. This was cause for some anxiety for some, since during the installation they had wiped the data from their phone and were for it to be restored.

It's not clear exactly how widespread the problem was, but the term "3200 error" briefly became a trending topic on Twitter.

Music tech blogger Elliott Van Buskirk published a detailed account of his experience trying to upgrade to iOS 5, screen shots and all. For quite some time, his iPhone was effectively bricked, wiped clean of its data, but unable to connect to Apple's servers for a proper update.

Our experience wasn't quite as riddled with error messages, but the initial software download did take an extraordinary amount of time.

This morning, Apple seems to have caught up with the demand and 9to5 Mac reports that the iOS 5 upgrade is running smoothly.

Image via Evolver.fm

Simon uses social media to better connect with you, the shopper. It is somewhat ironic. After all, wasn't technology supposed to make it easier for us to go directly to the merchant, and by-pass the middleman? Instead, Simon uses Facebook and Twitter and ordinary email to draw in customers to various mall activities and special events, and notify them about sales.

Each mall has its own Facebook page and each local region has at least one digital point of contact to oversee digital marketing efforts. This person gets a lot of hands-on training, including regularly scheduled conference calls and email newsletter prototypes that can form the basis of the mall's own email blasts to its local customers.

"We invite our shoppers to in-mall events via social media, such as our Kidgits events, that not only provide a fun experience for kids and parents, but also drive traffic into our malls at off times, something that retailers get excited about," says Patrick Flanagan, vice president, Digital Strategy at Simon. The company uses various tools to provide "insider information" about other events and deals.

The Facebook pages have been a hit, and some of them have gotten tens of thousands of fans, such as this one from the Houston Galleria mall. This week at the mall's page you can win a $1000 shopping spree gift certificate for example. The enormous complex has Neiman Marcus, Macy's, Nordstrom's, and Saks, along with an indoor ice rink and a Westin hotel.

Simon tries to integrate its own social media push with what its retailers are doing to complement their efforts. "Most of our retailers have their own social presence as well and we work to cross promote to these fan bases when relevant," he says. The goal isn't just to connect with current shoppers, but bring in new folks too.

And each Facebook page is tied into its Twitter stream for easy reference too, according to Flanagan.

"We trend about a 10:1 ratio between Facebook vs. Twitter; which is actually higher than much of our industry on the Twitter side. We provide different content for Twitter, but often in the same themes as the Facebook content. The main difference is frequency of posts as well as the need for every Tweet to be engaging. We are working on a project that helps our malls interact with Foursquare users via Twitter automatically, but in a more personalized tone."

Keeping track of 200 Facebook pages is a daunting task, but Flanagan uses Webtrends to watch what is working and what isn't across all of this content. "With over 500 field employees interacting with our shoppers across 200 localized Facebook Pages, we're always looking for new methodology to improve our already robust digital offerings. Webtrends Hoverstats and its proprietary PSI metric give us better insight into what content most effectively engages our shoppers - just in time for the holiday season." An example of the output from Webtrends can be seen below.

"The new Webtrends PSI tool will help our local malls levels learn what content 'works' and what content does not for their specific page. It is amazing to see that the same post on two different pages can work so differently: some mall Facebook communities are value centric while others are family or fashion centric and the content should be tailored based on these learnings."

And these efforts are getting results. "Our social program has been a net gain for Simon and our mall retailers. It's provided an additional outlet to promote retailer deals and events as well as drive general mall traffic, all things our retailers value."

The growth Kickstarter has seen is astronomical. A year ago, they were just under 300,000 backers. By last week, that number had grown by well over 200%.

Of those who have backed projects, 89% of them have supported at least one idea that was successful. The vast majority of backers, 84%, have been one-time backers, whereas the other 16% backed more than one project.

So how much are people shelling out to support projects? Individually, not much. It's the aggregate spending across many backers that gets projects funded. Ninety percent of all 1.4 pledges have been for $100 or less. Three quarters have been for $50 or less.

Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement. Can Qrank extend that formula out across the mobile web?

I'm not a big game player, but I like Qrank. It's a game that treats me like an intelligent adult, but also incorporates a fast pace and immediate on-boarding into the experience. The default game's questions are thought provoking, the design is nice, the experience is fast paced and social. It's good.

I'd love to see how the platform could turn a body of content from ReadWriteWeb, or from a set of known websites about a common topic, into a social quiz game.

Launched 18 months ago by Austin, Texas based Ricochet Labs, the startup has been working with Goldman as an advisor since June. Also advising the company is Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital. CEO Rodney Gibbs previously built and sold a game development company called Fizz Factor.

Goldman is widely understood to have been essential to the creation of Twitter's early product. He left the company last December and joined Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone at Obvious Corp, now an investment group for social good minded startups. Obvious's first investment was a stealth startup called Lift, which we published the first details about in August.

Goldman invested in Qrank independent of Obvious. Joining him are Sam Shank,
Trip Levis, Wild Basin Investments and Chris Sherman.

Then Redmonk analyst Michael Coté called Qrank one of Austin's most interesting startups last year, especially from a business model perspective.

The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it requested by the U.S. government using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.

Sonic.net, a smaller ISP who was also asked to hand over data related Appelbaum, tried to challenge the order in court, but ultimately lost and was to give up the information. It's not known if Google resisted the request, but both companies did try to ensure that Appelbaum could at least be made aware of the data retrieval.

According to the company's own Transparency Report, Google received 4,601 user data requests from the U.S. government in the second half of 2010, and it complied with 94% of them. Those requests include warrantless inquiries as well as those accompanied by a search warrant.

Some Troubling Implications

The idea of an ISP handing over user data to governments without the aid of a search warrant has some troubling implications for privacy advocates and civil liberties proponents.

In the WikiLeaks case, the line between advocates and participants in the transfer of data can sometimes be blurry. If in its ongoing investigation into WikiLeaks the U.S. Department of Justice is free to ask Google, Twitter or Facebook for private data without users' knowledge, who's to say they can't access private information about people who have merely expressed sympathy for the organization?

Tech companies haven't necessarily rolled over and played dead on the issue. When the DoJ made a similar WikiLeaks-related request of Twitter in December, the company succeeded in having the order unsealed, meaning it was able to notify users about the request.

Google is among a number of tech companies that are asking Congress to rethink the law in light of the unexpected ways in which the Web has evolved in the last several years.

UPDATE: The original version of this story stated conclusively that Google had in fact handed over the requested information. That is not necessarily accurate. While Sonic is confirmed to have handed over data in this case, it is not clear whether Google actually produced the requested information or challenged the order. We regret any confusion the original wording may have caused.

To put things in perspective, when the iPhone 4 launched last year, it set a record for Apple by racking up 600,000 pre-orders in a single day. Even though it's not the dramatically overhauled iPhone 5 many were hoping for, Apple's latest gadget has smashed the company's previous single day sales record by more than 66 percent. In terms of first day pre-orders, the iPhone 4S is the most successful product Apple has ever released.

Whatever qualms some may have with Apple's iterative product release strategy, these latest sales numbers demonstrate that the demand for a bulletproof mobile user experience is enormous among consumers. The ability to not just communicate, but to easily consume and create content on the go is something that people are increasingly seeking, and Apple has done an especially good job of packaging that experience for them.

How iPhone 4S Enables Content Creation (and Consumption)

The iPhone 4S offers a few crucial upgrades to the users' ability to both consume and create content. Siri, the iPhone's new voice-activated "personal assistant" feature could represent a new way for people to interact with machines big and small, assuming it works as well as consumers expect it to. It's not the first time this type of sophisticated voice search has been available on smartphones; Siri was already an app before Apple bought it, Dragon Go! uses similar technology and Google offers Voice Actions for Android.

By baking it so thoroughly into the operating system of a hot consumer mobile handset, Apple could do what it does best and propel the technology toward mainstream adoption. While controlling one's phone by voice isn't necessarily in all circumstances, it can be pretty useful while driving. If things go well, we could perhaps expect it to see the technology built into larger interfaces like laptops running Mac OS X and Apple's rumored HDTV set ("Show me the latest episode of 'Two and a Half Men', Siri!")

With each iPhone release, Apple is getting more serious about content creation as well. In the iPhone 4S, the company set their sights on improving the camera significantly. The iPhone 4 is already the most widely-used camera on Flickr and it remains the only platform on which Instagram exists.

The 8 megapixel camera in the newest iPhone not only improves on the picture quality and enables better low-light photography, but it's much faster and iOS 5 will turn the phone's volume button into a shutter release, making it easier to snap a picture without jumping through hoops.

Steve Jobs' Last Hurrah

One of the many hopeful rumors floating around the Web prior to last week's launch was the possibility that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs would make an appearance at the event in Cupertino. Sadly, we now know that even if such a move would have been a good idea from a marketing standpoint (this was widely debated), an appearance by Jobs was never to be. He passed away the next day, seven years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Whether or not the outpouring of grief over Jobs' death contributed to the boost in iPhone sales, we'll never know, nor does it much matter. The iPhone 4S probably wasn't the last Apple product that Jobs had a hand in creating, but its success is a testament to much of what the eulogies have pointed out in the last several days.

Steve Jobs illustration by Tim Gough.

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

As if getting your own science experiment performed live on the ISS for the entire world wasn't enough, there are also prizes like zero-G flights, Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, a trip to Japan to watch your experiment launched into space, or a cosmonaut training experience in Star City, Russia.

Space Lab is part of YouTube's educational channels available at YouTube.com/EDU. Teachers can visit YouTube.com/Teachers to learn how to incorporate Space Lab into their classrooms.

Read more on the official YouTube blog.

Having heard those complaints loud and clear, the company has decided to axe Qwikster altogether and keep their DVD rental service as part of the Netflix brand. This summer's price hike will stay in place, but the company hopes to stop the slow exodous of customers by capitulating on the Qwikster issue, which had proved wildly unpopular.

Netflix had a pretty rough September. The day their controversial price increase took effect, the company lost a major content contract with Starz Entertainment, putting a valuable collection of streaming content at risk of being pulled from the service. Customers were still reeling from the price hike when Hastings announced the Qwikster plan in mid-September. It did not go over well.

"It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a blog post. "This means no change: one website, one account, one password... in other words, no Qwikster."

The prospect of having two separate Websites with different login credentials and movie queues did not sit well with many customers, who have grown accustomed to managing everything from a single account with a common interface. The backlash was quite loud online, and it apparently wasn't just chatter and empty threats. Evidently, the company has been seeing enough canceled subscriptions (some of which were expected) to warrant a change of plans.

Even as the company gives in to customers' wishes and backs off of an unpopular decision, many commenters on the Netflix company blog remain disastified, many of them demanding that Hastings step down as CEO and criticizing the company's recent series of PR gaffes. Some people remain hard to please, but Netflix is hoping that this latest move will begin to turn things around.

By 2016, the number of households that do not subscribe to a traditional pay TV service will triple from what it is today. All told, 9 million households won't have cable, Magnaglobal predicts. Of those, about 4 million are what we'd call cord cutters; people who once subscribed to cable but canceled it in favor of accessing television content via the Internet using a set top box or computer hooked up to their TV sets.

Comprising an even bigger number of cable-free consumers will be those who never signed up for cable or satellite service in the first place. This group of consumers is growing. Teenagers live more and more of their lives online, where they consume most of their media, even if their parents are paying for cable subscription at home. As that generation goes away to college, there's little reason for many of them to pay up for cable TV on campus when Hulu, Netflix and a variety of competiting services await them. Once they graduate and enter the job market, cable is just not something they are likely to feel they need.

The number of people who never signed up for cable is expected to double - to 5 million, from 2.5 million today - by 2016, according to the report. Meanwhile, growth of DVR ownership is expected to slow down, as the devices become less necessary in light of stream-anytime Web content sitting waiting in people's video queues.

The cable industry, having seen this coming, is preparing its own preemptive strikes. Comcast and Verizon are rumored to be bringing cable subcriptions to Microsoft's XBox 360, a gaming console that effectively doubles as a set-top box. Comcast has rolled out its own Web TV initiative called "TV Anywhere" that lets paying subscribers watch content from a variety of devices. They also bought a giant content company, just in case.

Photo by Windell Oskay

The Hangout will be held tomorrow (Saturday, October 8) at 10:30 a.m. South African time (GMT +2:00). Unfortunately for U.S. readers, that's 4:30 a.m. Eastern, 1:30 a.m. Pacific. Google SVP Vic Gundotra says the video will be available shortly thereafter. You can follow the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Google Plus.

The Dalai Lama is unable to attend the lecture in person, because the South African government has not responded to his application for a visa multiple times. Official acknowledgement of the Dalai Lama's legitimacy is politically sensitive, since it can be perceived as an affront to China. In refusing to grant the Dalai Lama entry, the South African government may be capitulating to that pressure. The Hangout will provide the opportunity for these two global spiritual leaders to converse remotely.

As an exiled leader, as well as a worldwide figure, the Web is an important part of the Dalai Lama's outreach. He has maintained a Twitter presence (@DalaiLama) since 2010, and he has a Facebook page with over 2 million fans. He spoke to ecademy that year about his views on social media:

"Alongside our natural ability to empathize with others, we also have a need for others' kindness, which runs like a thread throughout our whole life. It is most apparent when we are young and when we are old, but we have only to fall ill to be reminded how important it is to be loved and cared about, even in our prime ...years."

The 14th Dalai Lama has been in exile in India since 1959 after Tibet was annexed by China. Desmond Tutu is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who has been a longtime champion of human rights causes.

Follow the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Google Plus for more updates.

But advertisers don't want to be in the background. They want ads to be engaging, interesting, even fun - whatever creates a lasting memory of the product. It's an attention economy, and whatever can grab users' attention wins. But touch-driven mobile apps are so immersive, advertisers need to step their game up. Palo Alto-based Cooliris has a solution, and the team thinks the science backs it up. World, ready or not, here comes interactive, touch-controlled, 3D mobile advertising.

"The advertisement experience does not have to be sub-par compared to the application experience," Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar says. "Good experience matters, because that is what delivers high engagement." To deliver that experience, Cooliris has created a standalone business unit called Adjitsu to build 3D mobile ads that users can touch to move, pinch, zoom and explore products.

"What we wanted to do was create a new generation of ads that allowed people to decide which parts of the experience they wanted to indulge in," says Aneesh Karve, product manager at AdJitsu. "Our mantra is pretty simple. It's 'Beyond HTML5.' We think [AdJitsu ads are] the next generation, which goes beyond video and beyond HTML."

"Video is telling the consumer what they should look at," Karve says. "What we've tried to do with our ads is to allow the consumer to decide which part of the ad they're most interested in."

The Ad Is An App

An AdJitsu ad starts off as a small, out-of-the-way display ad, but it has a 3D model of a product, like a new smartphone, suspended inside it. The model is linked to the device's accelerometer. As the user tilts the phone or tablet he or she is using, the product tilts and turns, catching the user's attention. Ideally, the user will then tap the ad, which expands to into a full-screen, app-like experience where the user can manipulate the product using typical touchscreen gestures.

The advertiser can display more info about the product on the screen alongside the model, but the experience is designed around letting the user closely examine the product and kick the tires a little bit - virtually, of course.

Karve says these ads are especially effective for "products that consumers need to hold in their hands." It's not just for consumer electronics, but jewelry or clothing, too. "People want to see how a fabric hangs or how a material looks in a certain light, and we're uniquely capable of providing those kinds of experiences."

This Is Your Brain On AdJitsu

It's neat, it's technologically advanced, and it shows off the product better than any static or video ad can. But does it really engage users with the product? Cooliris has enlisted a neuromarketing firm called MindSign to prove that it does, and this is where things get a little... edgy.

MindSign is a San Diego facility that uses functional MRI to analyze consumer reactions to products and advertising. An fMRI scanner magnetically tracks hemoglobin, the iron-rich protein in the blood, as blood flows in the brain. When blood cells offload oxygen to activated brain cells, the hemoglobin's magnetic field changes, which shows up in the scan. This allows researchers to measure the level of activity in specific areas of the brain in real time.

MindSign did a study for Cooliris that presented one group of subjects with a Cooliris ad and another with a video ad that was the same, shot by shot, but not interactive. Using the fMRI, MindSign produced video of the subjects' brain activity as they experienced the ads. MindSign found that the passive act of watching video was the "most deactivating" experience across all subjects. The subjects who manipulated the 3D ads were lit up all over their brains, engaging motor and attention areas.

We're not neuroscientists at RWW, so the subtle differences between the scans might be lost on us, but one clearly defined area of difference was the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, what MindSign calls the "personal meaning area." This is a central region of the brain involved in decision making. "It's an area that activates with what I would call good, engaging content," says MindSign vice president Philip Carlsen.

Unfortunately, MindSign couldn't provide RWW with a shareable video that compared the control and 3D subjects side by side, but they did offer these still images that show an average activation across the whole trial. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is mostly dark for the control group, but it's brightly colored for the group that saw the AdJitsu ads:

Is Neuromarketing For Real?

Does this activation necessarily correspond to the kind of engagement advertisers want? MindSign couldn't really answer that. This is a brand new science, and MindSign admits it. "fMRI is still in an infant state as far as neuromarketing goes," says Carlsen. "Activation is compared to a baseline looking at a blank screen with a crosshair on it, so you're going to want your stimuli to be more activating than the crosshair."

"Whether that's good activation because they love it or bad activation because they're disgusted," Carlsen says, "that depends on the stimuli."

"The reporting that we do fits into the traditional marketing reports of memory retention, brand recognition, value judgments, but we can do lots more than that," MindSign president Devin Hubbard says. "You can quantify, pretty objectively, the brain reaction in these key areas that are researched and known to be caused by certain stimuli, and they react accordingly."

For now, it sounds like the best fMRI can do for advertisers is provide a corroborating hunch alongside traditional marketing surveys.

Bringing UI Into Advertising

"The importance of engaging MindSign was to show the brands that they could get a higher return on their investment for their dollars," Karve says. "A lot of the really deep things advertisers want to track, you can't do with just Internet cookies or tracking session data from an app. So by going to the brain data, we want to establish how this is going to really have an impact on people."

The brain data do look differently between the control group and the 3D ad subjects, but it's hard to make the case conclusively that this means 3D ads are really better ads. But there's no question that these AdJitsu ads make fuller use of the Web technology and hardware that users love than traditional ads do.

What do you think? From a user standpoint, does the opportunity to play with the ad in 3D make it more interesting to you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Today's announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

Google has strained under the weight of mapping the entire wold. After launching Map Maker to crowdsource the effort in 2008, it has steadily increased the importance of community contributions. In April, Google opened Map Maker in the U.S., a tacit admission that it can't map all the locations and businesses itself, even in the world's most wired places.

In September, the Google LatLong team even shifted some of the Map Maker approval process onto Regional Expert Reviewers from the community, rather than having staff moderate all changes.

The system has shown signs of strain. It took the Google Maps team two months to recognize South Sudan's independence, despite a clamoring community. But Google has pressed forward with its effort to expand the global importance of Maps. In August, 40 new countries received localized top-level domains for Google Maps.

As curating Maps becomes a worldwide effort, crowd contributions from Map Maker will only become more important. Today's large crop of graduates is a recognition of great work by a community of volunteers around the world.

Congratulations to the graduates!

For more before-after photos and videos, check out the Google LatLong Blog.

Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.

LinkedIn has made an effort to enhance its social features this year, opening its Groups API to developers and adding Groups to its new native mobile apps. The professional social network also set a good precedent for sharing in its first-ever public earnings call, making the slide deck embeddable for anyone and live-tweeting the call.

LinkedIn is moving toward becoming the human resources hub for companies on the Web, not just a place for two-way networking. In July, LinkedIn enabled employers to let job applicants apply with LinkedIn from a company's own website. Today's update adds another way for companies and professionals to interact using LinkedIn.

[8/23/2011 10:11:32 AM] Abraham Hyatt: Check out the slides from LinkedIn's Q2 2011 earnings call:

Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.

In a way, the Web served as sort of a global virtual meeting place for mourners to gather in the wake of the loss of one of the technology world's most celebrated figures. Within a few hours of the news breaking, five different Steve Jobs-related phrases were trending globally on Twitter. Google Plus was awash in links to written tributes, video clips of Jobs and photos taken outside of Apple retail stores. Meanwhile, news sites from all over the world began publishing formal obituaries for Jobs.

Among the most widely-circulated (and worth reading) tributes came from Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, who was friends with Jobs, and Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who recounted the exuberant experience of meeting Jobs, as well as the more tense exchanges the two later had when Gizmodo acquired a stolen prototype of the iPhone 4 before its release.

This Week in Tech host Leo Laporte streamed a special, impromptu segment in which he and other technology journalists and commentators shared stories and thoughts related to Steve Jobs, sometimes on the verge of tears.

While the epicenter of the mourning was undoubtedly the Silicon Valley and the news dominated major media outlets across the United States, the passing of Steve Jobs was in fact a global news story.

"Steve Jobs is dead and I learned about it first through a notification on my android from a #Libya colleague on Facebook," tweeted Small World News founder Brian Conley. Another tweet, this one from NPR social media guru Andy Carvin read, "Right now I'm seeing tweets from Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, all united by one thing: #RIPstevejobs."

While most of the reflections on Jobs' life and career were highly positive, sometimes bordering on deifying, the reaction was not without criticism of some of his business practices. Some tactfully pointed out common critiques of Apple, including factory working conditions, their environmental impact and the limited nature of Jobs' philanthropic efforts.

It was was with somewhat less tact, however, that controversial Westboro Baptist Church tweeted about plans to picket Jobs' funeral because he "gave God no glory & taught sin." That tweet, as many were quick to point out, was sent from an iPhone.

More on Steve Jobs From ReadWriteWeb:

• Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
• A Great User Experience: The Web Legacy of Steve Jobs
• What Steve Meant Back Then
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works

In this post I want to highlight 3 main things that I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for: 1) re-defining mobile computing with the iPhone and iPad; 2) his design philosophy; 3) his leadership. Steve Jobs strived for greatness in the products his company built, which resulted in a great user experience on the Web for millions of people.

Boom! The Mobile Web Revolution Begins...

Over the years, Steve Jobs had been at the helm of a number of revolutionary technology products, including the MacIntosh computer in 1984 and the iPod in 2001. In January 2007, Steve Jobs announced what was arguably his biggest triumph: the iPhone.

At the time, Jobs described the strange new product as "three revolutionary new products" all rolled up into one device. Part iPod, part phone and part "internet mobile communicator". He boldly claimed that this new hybrid product, called an iPhone, would reinvent the phone. It would be "the Internet in your pocket for the first time ever."

As Steve Jobs was fond of saying at the time: boom! Because the iPhone more than lived up to Jobs' descriptions. It brought the Mobile Web alive with its touchscreen display, native apps and Web browser.

Although the native apps would later come to define the Mobile Web on iPhone, in January 2007 it was the Web browser - Apple's Safari browser optimized for iPhone - that was probably the most impressive thing about the new device. Jobs called it "the first fully-usable browser on a cellphone." For those of us who came of age with the WAP version of Mobile Internet - a puny, minimal version of the Web for previous generations of smartphones - this was indeed a revelation. So this is what the Web should be like on a mobile phone!

When I wrote up the iPhone launch in January 2007 (nearly 5 years ago now, can you believe it!), I wrote:

Apple is really upping the ante in the Mobile Web market. I think this will finally propel mobile Internet into the mainstream. Maybe 2007 will be the year of the Mobile Web after all!

Just a couple of weeks prior to the iPhone launch, the Mobile Web was merely third in a RWW poll asking what would be the defining trend of 2007. That's how skeptical most people were, in that pre-iPhone time, about the long-promised dream of the Mobile Web. But after Steve Jobs showed the world his company's new fangled device, that all changed.

If the iPhone was a revolution for the Mobile Web, then the iPad was Act II. The iPad was announced by Jobs in January 2010 and once again re-defined how people read and write on the Web.

Design Ethos: Make Great Products

Steve Jobs was always the first to say that the revolutionary Apple products he announced were team efforts. But a lot of the success of those products came down to the design ethos that Steve Jobs had and infused into his company. He was a perfectionist and strived to make great products.

While Jobs' design ethos was primarily focused on hardware decisions - for MacIntosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad and other big Apple products - it also had a huge impact on the Web. It raised peoples expectations for what the user experience on the Web should be. Sometimes, Jobs made contentious decisions - for example deciding to exclude Flash technology from all iOS devices, which essentially meant that many Web videos could not be viewed on the iPhone or iPad. But he always had a design reason for those decisions (in the case of Flash, because it slowed down the device and thus made for a frustrating user experience).

The following video gives a glimpse of the quest for "greatness" that Steve Jobs pursued at Apple:

Leadership: Jobs at The Center

Steve Jobs was one of the great leaders of the modern technology era, rivaled only by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The two had more in common than is generally recognized. Both were visionary, driven to succeed and very focused. Also, both companies revolved around the controlling leadership of their iconic founders.

A book about Steve Jobs that I reviewed in May 2008 - Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney - asserted that much of Apple's success can be attributed to the personality traits of Jobs. Here's just one example of how the decisions that Steve Jobs made led to the eventual success of the company (it became the most valuable company in the world in August): when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in the 90's, one of the first things he did was cut down the number of products Apple had, from around 40 to just 4. Jobs simplified Apple's brand and focused it on the key products that consumers wanted.

An organization chart that Forbes Magazine created earlier this year perfectly encapsulates Jobs' leadership style. All major decision makers within Apple were only one or two people removed from the man himself. Jobs also created a culture of accountability - his staff had to take direct responsibility for things. As Fortune described it:

At Apple there is never any confusion as to who is responsible for what. Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the "DRI," or directly responsible individual. Often the DRI's name will appear on an agenda for a meeting, so everybody knows who is responsible.

The design ethos and leadership style of Steve Jobs led to two revolutionary Mobile Web products, amongst the many other Apple products that have changed peoples lives over the past 30+ years.

Steve Jobs, you will be sadly missed. I'm grateful for all that you gave us - and for helping to make the Web truly great. R.I.P., sir.

The technology world was saddened to learn today that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., has passed away. He was 56 years old.

Apple's board of directors released this statement:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple on August 24, naming Tim Cook as his successor. Jobs had suffered from pancreatic cancer and went on medical leave at the beginning of this year.

To remember him, watch his famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University entitled "How To Live Before You Die:"

Here are some of our favorite posts celebrating this world-changing icon:

• Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works
• As Steve Jobs Steps Down, Linux Turns 20: Which Changed the World More?
• What is Apple Without Steve Jobs?