The Once Dominant BlackBerry Explores Possible Sale

Thorsten Heins, the new CEO of Blackberry giving a
presentation on the BlackBerry 10.

As reported by Forbes: New CEO. Check. New name. Check. A new owner?

Call it BlackBerry Reboot, version 3.0. BlackBerry, the one-time tech giant battered by the shift to newer mobile-phone models, has formed a special committee to examine strategic alternatives. In other words, the beleaguered handset maker will try to sell itself or figure out some other last-ditch effort to save the business.

The committee will review possible joint ventures, partnerships or an outright sale of the company. Any option chosen should quicken the development of BlackBerry’s new software, the BlackBerry 10, says the Waterloo, Canada-based company. “During the past year, management and the Board have been focused on launching the BlackBerry 10 platform and BES 10, establishing a strong financial position, and evaluating the best approach to delivering long-term value for customers and shareholders,” says director Timothy Dattels, who’ll chair the special committee. “Given the importance and strength of our technology, and the evolving industry and competitive landscape, we believe that now is the right time to explore strategic alternatives.”

Blackberry, formerly RIM,  has been focusing on the release of
the Blackberry 10 and BES 10 prior to it's recent consideration.

Shares of  BlackBerry immediately rose yesterday 6.7% to $10.51 in pre-market trading, after the company momentarily paused training.

The decision to find a new escape route follows five years in which BlackBerry’s phones gave up their industry-leading position to Google‘s Android phones and Apple‘s iPhone. BlackBerry, which changed its name from Research in Motion earlier this year in a different bid to restyle the ailing company, experienced a 93% drop in share price during the past five years. And the company fell deeply into the red in 2012, posting a $646 million loss, in contrast to earning $3.5 billion just two years earlier.

A new name wasn't the only thing that BlackBerry tried. The two men who founded the company, former billionaires Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, both left their roles with the company within the past two years. Balsillie and Lazaridis, who had shared the CEO role, turned over  turned over control to current chief Thorsten Heins in 2012. Soon after, Balsillie stepped down as a director, and Lazaridis did likewise a few months later.

Excitement and increased expectations for the BlackBerry 10 operating system allowed Heins to orchestrate a rally in BlackBerry shares earlier this year. That was eventually quelled by lackluster reviews of the new phones, a dismal point for the company that first made email available in your pocket.

Putting itself up for sale has forced one director to step down. Prem Watsa, CEO of Fairfax Financial, resigned because he feared potential conflicts. Watsa’s Toronto-based Fairfax owns about 10% of BlackBerry, but his time on the board was a only a short stint. He became a director following the 2012 shakeup that propelled Heins to the top job. Watsa, whose investing letter is as closely examined as the annual address from Warren Buffett, is known as a skilled value investor and stockpicker.

Advising BlackBerry in the process are JPMorgan and legal firms Skadden, Arps and Torys.

US Lawmakers attempting to protect consumers privacy rights regarding black box recorders in cars

Event Data Recorders (EDRs) are already operating in most
newer vehicles.

Are reported by Computerworld: Privacy issues are bubbling up in Congress, where lawmakers have filed bipartisan legislation that would give car owners control over data collected in black box-style recorders that may be required in all cars as soon as next year.

Most new cars already have black boxes, known as event data recorders (EDRs), but manufacturers aren't required to inform vehicle owners about their existence or the data they collect, according to the lawmakers.

"For me, this is a basic issue of privacy," Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) said in a statement. "Consumers should have control over the information collected by event data recorders in their own vehicles and they should be able to exercise control over the recording function. Many consumers aren't even aware that this technology is already in most vehicles."

Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed a new standard that would require all light passenger vehicles (weighing 8,500 lbs or less) and motorcycles built on or after Sept. 1, 2014, to have EDRs. The recorders, while similar in function to black boxes in airplanes, record far less information.

In response to the proposed new rules, Capuano and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) filed the "Black Box Privacy Protection Act" to give vehicle owners more control over the information collected through a car or motorcycle EDR. The legislation requires manufacturers to notify consumers if an EDR is installed in their vehicle, to disclose its data collection capabilities, and provide information on how data collected may be used.

The bill also gives vehicle owners control over the data. All data collected by an EDR becomes the property of the vehicle owner under this legislation. The bill would make it illegal for anyone other than the vehicle owner to download or retrieve information without owner consent or a court order.

The legislation also requires manufacturers to give consumers the option of controlling the recording function in future vehicles equipped with event data recorders.

"As a strong supporter of the Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, I believe vehicle owners should have ultimate control over information collected by their vehicle's black box, including what data is recorded and who has access to it," Sensenbrenner said.

According to the NHTSA, however, EDRs do not collect any personal identifying information or record conversations and do not run continuously. What they would record is:

• Vehicle speed;
• Whether the brakes were activated just before a crash;
• Crash forces at the moment of impact;
• Information about the state of the engine throttle;
• Air bag deployment timing and air bag readiness prior to the crash;
• Whether the vehicle occupant's seat belt was buckled.

"EDRs provide critical safety information that might not otherwise be available to NHTSA to evaluate what happened during a crash -- and what future steps could be taken to save lives and prevent injuries," said NHTSA Administrator David Strickland. "A broader EDR requirement would ensure the agency has the safety-related information it needs to determine what factors may contribute to crashes across all vehicle manufacturers."

But lawmakers said many consumers are not aware that this data could be used against them in civil or criminal proceedings, or by their insurer to increase rates.

No federal law exists to clarify the rights of a vehicle owner with respect to this recorded data, according to Capuano.

Tracking devices hidden in London's recycling bins are stalking your smartphone - anonymously

Smartphones are being tracked by recycling bins in
downtown London using Wi-Fi signals.

As reported by the Wire UK: The unique identifying numbers of over half a million smartphones have been recorded by a network of recycling bins in central London.

Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walking past 12 locations unknowingly had the unique MAC address of their smartphones recorded by Renew London.

Data including the "movement, type, direction, and speed of unique devices" was recorded from smartphones that had their Wi-Fi on.

First reported by Quartz, the data gathering appears to be a Minority Report-esque proof-of-concept project, demonstrating the possibility for targeted personal advertising.

"It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices -- entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices -- and should provide a compelling reach data base for predictive analytics (likely places to eat, drink, personal habits etc.)," reads a blog post on the company's site.

In tests running between 21-24 May and 2-9 June, over four million events were captured, with over 530,000 unique devices captured. Further testing is taking place at sites including Liverpool Street Station.

Renew operates around 100 recycling bins around London, primarily in the City of London, which double up as digital advertising boards. Twelve of those bins, were fitted with tracking devices.

The project is the first use of a piece of technology called Presence Orb. Launched by Presence Aware in March of this year, Presence Orb is described as "a cookie for the real world", in reference to web cookies that track your online behavior across sites.

People wishing to opt out should visit the Presence Orb website, which has instructions on how to prevent your phone's MAC address being picked up by their technology.

A map of London where the experimental systems are
tracking unique MAC's using Wi-Fi

The use of personal data in the UK is governed by the Data Protection Act. It is unclear whether the collection of MAC addresses would fall under this act. If it was successfully argued that it was "personal data", perhaps because individual phones are being specifically tracked, then it would fall under the act. If the data was adequately 'anonymised', it could be argued that it isn't personal data.

In a comment to Quartz, Renew London CEO Kaveh Memari said, "London is the most heavily surveillanced city in the world… As long as we don't add a name and home address, it's legal."

"[We collect anonymised and aggregated MAC data -- we don't track individuals or individual MACs. The ORBs aggregate all footfall around a pod for three minutes and send back one anonymised aggregated report from each site so the idea that we are tracking individuals again is more style than substance," says Memari in an email. "There are applications in the future which Quartz focused on but during the trial period we are only looking at anonymised and aggregated MAC data."

He adds, "as some of the technology we will be testing will be on the boundaries of what is regulated and discussed it is our intention to discuss it publicly and especially collaborate with privacy groups like EFF to make sure we lead the charge on [adding necessary protections] as we are with the implementation of the technology."

GPS Tracking of Twitter posts may enhance monitoring of food safety at restaurants

A satellite image showing sample tweets
that indicated food poisoning and marked as such
by the nEmesis system developed by University of Rochester
researchers.

As reported by escience news: A new system could tell you how likely it is for you to become ill if you visit a particular restaurant by 'listening' to the tweets from other restaurant patrons. The University of Rochester researchers say their system, nEmesis, can help people make more informed decisions, and it also has the potential to complement traditional public health methods for monitoring food safety, such as restaurant inspections. For example, it could enable what they call "adaptive inspections," inspections guided in part by the real-time information that nEmesis provides.

The system combines machine-learning and crowdsourcing techniques to analyze millions of tweets to find people reporting food poisoning symptoms following a restaurant visit. This volume of tweets would be impossible to analyze manually, the researchers note. Over a four-month period, the system collected 3.8 million tweets from more than 94,000 unique users in New York City, traced 23,000 restaurant visitors, and found 480 reports of likely food poisoning. They also found they correlate fairly well with public inspection data by the local health department, as the researchers describe in a paper to be presented at the Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing in Palm Springs, Calif., in November.

The system ranks restaurants according to how likely it is for someone to become ill after visiting that restaurant.

"The Twitter reports are not an exact indicator -- any individual case could well be due to factors unrelated to the restaurant meal -- but in aggregate the numbers are revealing," said Henry Kautz, chair of the computer science department at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper. In other words, a "seemingly random collection of online rants becomes an actionable alert," according to Kautz, which can help detect cases of foodborne illness in a timely manner.

nEmesis "listens" to relevant public tweets and detects restaurant visits by matching up where a person tweets from and the known locations of restaurants. People will often tweet from their phones or other mobile devices, which are GPS enabled. This means that tweets can be "geotagged": the tweet not only provides information in the 140 characters allowed, but also about where the user was at the time.

If a user tweets from a location that is determined to be a restaurant (by using the locations of 24,904 restaurants that had been visited by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City), the system will continue to track this person's tweets for 72 hours, even when they're not geotagged, or when they are tweeted from a different device. If a user then tweets about feeling ill, the system captures the information that this person is now ill and had visited a specific restaurant.

The correlation between the Twitter data and the public inspection data means that about one third of the inspection scores could be reliably predicted from the Twitter data. The remainder of the scores show some disagreement. "This disagreement is interesting as the public inspection data is not perfect either," argued co-author Adam Sadilek, formerly a colleague of Kautz at Rochester and who is now at Google. "The adaptive inspections could reveal the real risk, which is currently hidden for both methods."

This work builds on earlier work by Kautz and Sadilek that used Twitter to find out how likely a specific user was to have flu-like symptoms, and also to find the influence of different lifestyle factors on health. At the heart of all this work is the algorithm that Sadilek developed to distinguish between tweets that suggest a person tweeting is sick and those that don't. This algorithm is based on machine-learning, or as Sadilek described it, "it's like teaching a baby a new language," only in this case it's a computational algorithm that is being taught.

In their new system, nEmesis, they brought in an extra layer of complexity to improve the algorithm; they used crowdsourcing. For any one person, it would be exhausting and time-consuming to look through thousands of tweets to categorize them. The end results might not even be very accurate if their judgment is not quite right.

Instead the researchers turned to Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to reach out to a crowd of readily available workers. These were paid small amounts of money to categorize some tweets that could then be used to train the algorithm. They ensured the pool of tweets they were going use was of high accuracy by having more than one worker look at each tweet and incentivizing the right answer by paying the workers when their answer agreed with that of the majority and deducting money when it didn't. The algorithm was then able to learn from the training samples how to spot tweets that show people that are likely to have foodborne illnesses.

Of course, the system only considers people who tweet, who might not even be a representative sample of the whole population or of the population visiting a restaurant. But the Twitter data can be used together with knowledge gained from other sources to detect foodborne illness in a timely manner. It provides an extra layer -- a passive level of monitoring -- which is cost-effective. And the information that nEmesis offers can benefit both Twitter and non-Twitter users.

Harbinger sues Deere and GPS companies for $1.9 billion in damages

As Reported by Reuters: Philip Falcone's Harbinger Capital on Friday sued agricultural equipment maker Deere & Co and Global Positioning System companies and groups for damages of $1.9 billion as it looks to recoup its investment in bankrupt wireless company LightSquared.

The lawsuit's defendants, who include GPS companies Garmin International and Trimble Navigation Ltd, had opposed LightSquared's plans to build a wireless network because of concerns it would interfere with GPS systems, which are used in everything from farming to airline navigation.

Other defendants include industry groups the U.S. GPS Industry Council and the Coalition to Save Our GPS.

Harbinger, which has spent billions of dollars on LightSquared, said in a complaint filed on Friday that it never would have made the investments if the GPS industry had disclosed potential interference problems between the LightSquared spectrum and GPS equipment between 2002 and 2009.

The hedge fund accused the defendants of fraud and negligent misrepresentation among other allegations, saying the defendants "knew years ago" all the material facts on which they based their opposition to the LightSquared network.

The diagram shows the RF spectrum overlap between the proposed LightSquared
signals, and the GPS/GLONASS signalling, which would have degraded
the GNSS signals making it potentially more difficult to extract critical
navigation information.

Trimble general counsel Jim Kirkland said the company would defend itself against the lawsuit he said was without merit. He disputed a Harbinger's assertion that the interference resulted from a problem with the design of GPS devices.

"This interference resulted from the characteristics of LightSquared's new plan for use of satellite spectrum, not the design of GPS devices. The responsibility for Harbinger's losses rests squarely with Harbinger," Kirkland said in an email.

Deere declined to comment on the case. Garmin was not immediately available for comment.

Falcone, once one of the hedge fund industry's most powerful figures, risked the future of Harbinger on a 96 percent ownership of LightSquared, in a bet that it would be able to become a new competitor to the U.S. wireless market.

But LightSquared had to file for bankruptcy protection in May 2012 after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission revoked permission to build out a new high-speed wireless network after tests showed that its network would interfere with GPS systems.

Falcone has also had legal problems himself. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year charged Falcone with market manipulation and other violations. In July the SEC voted to reject a deal its enforcement division had struck with Falcone without explaining its decision.

Harbinger filed the lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Garmin International is a subsidiary of Garmin Ltd.

Integrated Solar-powered Smartphones are Closer to Becoming Reality

An example of  how a Wysip crystal display
would operate on an iPhone.  1 hour of Sun exposure
could provide 30 minutes of wireless air time, while
adding only about $1 of cost to the overall design.

As reported by Zdnet: TCL Communication, a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, is developing smartphones that recharge themselves using solar power. A phone is rather small for a solar panel, but it's using transparent WYSIPS Crystal technology that is bonded to the smartphone screen.

Wysips Crystal -- which stands for What You See Is Photovoltaic Surface -- has been developed by Sunpartner, which is based in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France.  Sunpartner says: "The goal of this partnership is to develop smartphone prototypes powered by solar and artificial light. This project will enable TCL Communication to evaluate the technology in both technical and marketing terms."

TCL also has a French connection, in that it supplies Alcatel with its OneTouch mobile phone. It markets phones in more than 120 countries.

WYSIPS are implemented using lenticular printing, an optical
technology which shows different images depending on the
observers position and is used often to create 3D effects
and animations.

The companies expect that putting an ultra-thin layer of WYSIPS Crystal under the screen will enable a smartphone to generate enough power to maintain a charge. It believes an hour of sunlight will likely provide enough power for 30 minutes of conversation.

Sunpartner is also working with another two large phone companies. It says it "plans to finalize two agreements in the coming months and sign the first licenses during the first half of 2014."

Last month, Sunpartner completed a second round of funding, bringing its total to €9 million ($12 million) over the past three years, and it plans to raise another €6 million ($8 million) to put Wysips Crystal into production in Rousset. (See Recharge : SunPartner, fabricant d’un film solaire pour écrans, signe un accord avec TCL at ZDNet.fr).

Sunpartner says Wysips Crystal could also be used in tablets and e-book readers, watches, electronic tags etc, and in intelligent buildings (windows, facades etc).

Sunpartner showed its first prototypes at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2013.

Location, Location, Location: GPS for Potholes, Poker, and Women's Safety

An innovative GPS application called SpeedBump
uses smartphones traveling in vehicles to find
potholes, so they can be assessed and repaired.

Continued from our prior article: Location information, most of it based on GPS, is being used to solve problems around the globe.

In Boston, an app called Speed Bump records the jolts from potholes as users drive around the streets. The software notes the location of potential potholes by using the phone’s GPS capability and accelerometer to assess the smoothness of the ride. The data is then sent to the city to help road crews find and fix the road divots.

Bwin uses IP location in order to make sure that players
are in compliance with local regulations regarding online
gaming.

Bwin, one of the word’s largest online gambling firms, is using location technology for regulatory compliance in the United States. The firm has to be sure its customers are only accessing its service from one of the handful of states that now allow online gambling.

Fight Back, is a women's safety app that can contact the
local authorities, as well as friends on social media such
as Facebook, to report an impending or ongoing attack.

In India, where a spate of horrendous gang rapes has triggered international headlines, a free app called Fight Back enables women in trouble to call for police assistance with the push of a button. The phone app gives officers the caller’s location and sends out a call for help via email and Facebook to loved ones. The application is one of thousands developed over the last four or five years by Tech Mahindra, an India firm that also does applications testing and develops enterprise applications.

Fight Back, which is India’s first mobile safety app for women, has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, said Karthik Natarajan, the firm’s senior vice president and global head of integrated engineering solutions. It has been used, he estimated, some 10,000 to 12,000 times.