Friday, 30 December 2011
Thursday, 29 December 2011
Gates Global Aims Played Down in Design of $500 Million Campus
Review by James S. Russell
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- An aerodynamically curved building wing zooms over the entrance court at the new $500 million campus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. Such future-focused imagery suggests an aggressive corporation on the move. Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. founder, and his wife, Melinda, pursue their philanthropic goals with the same impatient fervor that he brought to achieving world domination by Windows. With $33.5 billion in assets (which is growing quickly through gifts from Warren Buffett), the foundation aims to transform global health, agriculture and education.By contrast, the 900,000-square-foot campus located near the foot of the Space Needle north of downtown seems designed to play down the urgency and breadth of that mission. The Seattle- based architecture firm on NBBJ supplies a generic glass-and- metal corporate niceness with comforting wood floors and neutral carpeting. From the street, it looks like a standard-spec office building.The lofty glassy lobby overlooks an alluring plaza that unites two six-story boomerang-shaped buildings with lush plantings heavy on native ferns and ponds spanned by wooden bridges. The ponds, designed by landscape architect Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd., store rain runoff to water plants in dry months. Cool underground water storage reduces power demand for air-conditioning.Sharing IdeasI strolled down sun-filled corridors that run along the tightly curved inside face of the buildings. Lined by small meeting spaces and lounges, these hallways subtly encourage people to stop and share ideas. Coffee and snack areas are organized around spacious stairways showered in daylight at the apex of the boomerangs, so that people trying to end AIDS will cross paths with education reformers.Most people work near a window because the buildings’ profiles are narrow, and the light quality is superb compared to your average cubicle farm. Gates people call this “daylight equity.” It also saves lighting energy.From a high balcony I gazed into a huge space that serves as a cafeteria and “civic room,” as NBBJ managing partner Steve McConnell calls it, because it also hosts large meetings of grantees and other global partners. Receptions spill outside to the lush plaza. In addition, there’s a large conference center.The planned and informal socializing aspires to lead to eureka moments. Too bad they feel ticked off a checklist rather than exuding engagement with the necessary passion and urgency.Default to BlandnessArtifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying.A visitor center will open next year, but it’s conceived as a museum, and may feel like a defense against interested citizens rather than an invitation to them.The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.It put me in mind of Livestrong, Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose recently built home in Austin I had toured not long ago.Founded by the bicycling champion, the organization supports people with cancer. The San Antonio architecture firm Lake/Flato remodeled an old metal warehouse, and bathed its cavernous interior with daylight from bands of windows built into the roof. Informally arranged cubicles flow around boxlike wooden structures enclosing conference spaces.Joy of GivingTouching testimonials from grateful partners and supporters -- heavily bicycle-themed -- clutter the place. The joy of giving and the connection to people served is palpable.Livestrong offers conference space free to nonprofits around the city. In this way it builds community connections not only through its core mission but by mingling with other charitable organizations.At 30,000 square feet, Livestrong is tiny compared to Gates, with a simpler mission focused on people in deep distress. Rather than fence off emotion, the foundation and its architecture invite it in, with the result that the place has a cheerful energy utterly invisible at the posh, sober Gates.(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Manuela Hoelterhoff.
To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Coca-Cola's Marketing Strategy
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
New Ways to Captcha Bots
Are You a Human says mini-games are better than squiggly lines
By Jeff GreenIt’s not your vision going bad: Those blurry words that some websites force you to retype when you log in are getting blurrier. They’re known as captchas, and they’re designed to stop malicious software from accessing a site and, say, using speedy algorithms to snatch up all the tickets to a concert in seconds. Computers have a hard time deciphering the wavy characters, but they are getting better, says Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who invented captchas in 2000. ReCaptcha, the company he founded and sold to Google in 2009, still provides more than half of the 280 million captchas solved each day and has had to steadily ratchet up the difficulty, von Ahn says. “It’s tiny, tiny tweaks, making them harder over time.”
The collateral damage, however, is a legion of ever-more-frustrated computer users who resent the average of 14 seconds that they spend deciphering each captcha. “People have really seen the step-up in difficulty,” says Tyler Paxton, a University of Michigan business school graduate and part of a recent wave of entrepreneurs who think they have a better alternative. He says that if the system doesn’t advance, we’ll reach a threshold. “It’s not really, ‘When are computers going to break it?’ but, ‘When is it going to get so difficult for people that they won’t deal with it?’?”
The solution dreamt up by Paxton and his business school friends Reid Tatoris and Benjamin Blackmer: Mini-games. Their startup, aptly named Are You a Human, has created 10 simple games that, they say, are easy for humans to solve but almost impossible for computers. In one, users see a box with half a dozen or so colored shapes bouncing inside and are asked to drag two red balls into a bin. That sort of spatial-reasoning task is still very hard, if not impossible, for computers to solve, Paxton says.
Paxton first got the idea for the company in 2007 after a friend—he swears it wasn’t him—failed to score Hannah Montana tickets because scalpers’ software programs were able to sneak past the ticketing site’s captcha system and buy up many of the seats. He and his partners founded Are You a Human while at school in 2009 and in October moved into Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert’s Detroit business incubator. The nine-person company has raised more than $750,000, and its 10 games, which have thousands of variations, have started running on 38 websites in the last few weeks. The company allows website owners to determine the difficulty level of the games so that a ticketing site subject to lots of scalpers’ attacks could display harder games than a blog.
Are You a Human plans to make money by charging advertisers or websites to design games that integrate their brands, starting at about $25 per 1,000 games played. The company is running tests with a handful of advertisers, including Fathead, a maker of sports-themed decals. The game Are You a Human designed for Fathead required users to drag football helmets into a box.
Solve Media, launched in 2009, doesn’t rely on distorted, hard-to-read words for its captcha alternative. Instead, the New York startup presents users with a list of advertising slogans, and asks them to retype one. The 30-person company charges advertisers, which include 90 major brands such as Toyota Motor and Symantec, about 30? per “type in,” and says its captcha-like advertisements are better at building brand awareness than banner ads. Solve is still a distant No. 2 after von Ahn’s reCaptcha, says Chief Executive Officer Ari Jacoby, but its type-ins take half as long to fill. Captchas are “like barbed wire, causing a lot of friction,” Jacoby says.
Jacoby estimates there are 1,200 different approaches to creating captchas, from the default distorted letters to puzzles to matching pictures. Spammers tend to find ways around even the most ingenious defenses, however. Some have even built so-called captcha farms and pay workers about $1 for every 1,000 captchas they solve, according to Paxton.
Von Ahn says captcha farms don’t have enough capacity to pose a real problem to his 12-year-old robot-catching technology, and he’s not particularly worried about any of the new competition. He says he already tried and dismissed games such as Paxton’s because he believes computers can easily be trained to outsmart them. “People don’t like captchas, but they really do stop bots,” he says.
The bottom line: Captchas now take an average of 14 seconds to solve. Startups say their alternatives are easier and may bring in advertising dollars.
Green is a reporter for Bloomberg News.It's Always Sunny in Silicon Valley
Illustrations by Johnny Ryan
By Brad StoneEvery so often, the best parties come to represent moments in time. Think of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, the celeb-studded Liberty Island launch of Tina Brown’s ill-fated Talk magazine in 1999, and private equity maven Stephen A. Schwarzman’s 60th birthday bash in 2007, which featured Rod Stewart. Sean Parker’s bacchanal for the streaming music service Spotify on Sept. 22 in San Francisco may well join the ranks of these epic affairs.
The Facebook billionaire—portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a swaggering lush in The Social Network—turned an abandoned warehouse in the city’s Potrero District into a couch-filled pleasure palace. Waiters served piles of lobster, sushi, and roast pig, while journalists each were presented their own $300 bottles of DeLeon Tequila. As Mark Zuckerberg, Apple designer Jony Ive, author Danielle Steel, and other guests mingled, acts including Snoop Dogg, Jane’s Addiction, and the Killers—flown in on private jets—performed for the well-lubricated crowd. “All the recording artists here might not have shown up if they knew I was a nerd,” said an exuberant Parker from the stage.
In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable wealth in the process. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. “And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”
It was never clearer than in 2011 that Silicon Valley exists in an alternate reality—a bubble of prosperity. Restaurants are booked, freeways are packed, and companies are flush with cash. The prosperity bubble isn’t just a state of mind: Times are as good as they’ve been in recent memory. The region gets 40 percent of the country’s venture capital haul, up from 31 percent a decade ago, according to the National Venture Capital Assn. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that growth of the area’s job market led the nation, jumping 3.2 percent, triple the national rate. Even real estate, a cesspool of despair in the rest of the country, is humming along. It’s next to impossible to get a table on a weekend night at the Rosewood in Menlo Park, a watering hole for Sand Hill Road’s technology financiers where the olive-oil-poached steelhead goes for $36. The closest we got to “Occupy: Cupertino” was the line outside Apple stores in October for the iPhone 4S.
It’s tempting to view this latest Golden Age with skepticism, a boom as fleeting and disappointing as the one in the late 1990s, before the dot-com crash. But the strengths underlying the Valley’s optimism appear more solid this time around. Google, Facebook, and Twitter each have hundreds of millions of users around the world and, at least in the first two cases, solid revenues. Valley companies that went public this year, such as LinkedIn and Pandora Media, have actual profits, and Zynga’s initial public offering on Dec. 16—though shares fell slightly in early trading—was the exclamation mark at the end of a thunderous sentence. The offering added yet another Valley billionaire to the regional club: founder Mark Pincus, whose net worth now hovers around $1.3 billion. Even blue chips such as Cisco and Intel, punished by the stock market for missing big market shifts, are notching record revenue. Doomsday isn’t a pending threat here, it’s office art: Photos of mushroom clouds adorn the lobby of fast-rising venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)
German Chancellery Has Cracks in Concrete, Rust, Bild Says
Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Angela Merkel’s 10-year-old chancellery in Berlin has cracks in its concrete, rusting metal on its roof edges and moss disfiguring its facade, Bild-Zeitung reported.
Cracked concrete in the building’s underground parking garage will have to be repaired, while the rusting roof and moss don’t pose any threat, the newspaper cited an unnamed German government spokesman as saying.Bild said the chancellery, which was completed in 2001, has been a “permanent construction site” with repairs to the facade in 2007 and the replacement of glass in roof windows and their insulation in 2008.The design of the building, chosen by Chancellor Helmut Kohl who led Germany from 1982 to 1998, has earned it the nicknames of the Elephant Toilet and the Washing Machine, Bild said.--Editors: Andrew Blackman, Ross Larsen.
To contact the reporter on this story: Leon Mangasarian in Berlin at lmangasarian@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net.
Monday, 26 December 2011
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Ex-Marine’s Afghan Tour Included Rescuing Dogs Forced to Fight
Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Over a pint of Brooklyn Brewery ale at the Half King in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, Pen Farthing recounts his tour of duty in Afghanistan. He was in the U.S. to drum up support not for soldiers, but for dogs.
“Sadly, dogfighting in Afghanistan is a national sport,” said Farthing, an author and former sergeant in Britain’s Royal Marines.In late 2006, he arrived in the Afghan province of Helmand, where he was stationed with Kilo Company. Within a few weeks, Farthing was appalled to find the Afghan National Police staging brutal dogfights, something that hadn’t been allowed under Taliban rule.He broke up one fight and eventually adopted a fierce and scarred Alsatian-looking dog the Marines named Nowzad, after the battle-scarred town in which they were based.“We went into Now Zad thinking we were going to be there for 3 weeks,” he says. “We were there for 33.”During those months of hardship, homesickness and Taliban attacks, Farthing and his men began taking in stray dogs. Soon after Nowzad came RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), Jena and Tali, the latter -- named for the Islamist militants -- with six puppies.Canine ExodusThe soldiers built a shelter and fed the dogs leftover rations. Though the commanding officers of Kilo Company turned a blind eye to the makeshift kennel, eventually the dogs had to be moved. Farthing found an animal shelter hundreds of miles to the north and was able to pay a series of taxi drivers to deliver the dogs in an exodus that lasted several days.In May 2007, Farthing founded Nowzad Dogs, which helps wartime soldiers save dogs or cats they’ve adopted against military regulations. It also educates local communities on animal welfare, no small trick in a culture with mixed feelings about dogs.“Within days of starting the charity, we had our first American soldier asking us for help,” Farthing says. Nowzad Dogs helps find rescued dogs homes in the U.K. and elsewhere, and has expanded to help with rescues in Iraq. Farthing says he’s getting e-mails from “a wave of people from Iran” who are looking for ways to save abused and abandoned dogs there.Profound ValueIn his books and presentations, Farthing speaks of a simple but profound value he and other soldiers derive from dogs. After the typical day of extreme boredom, terrible food and dodging Taliban fire, there is something calming and necessary about the time spent just petting a dog.“There was s--t going on outside the wire,” he says, speaking of the perimeter surrounding his base. “For five minutes I didn’t have to think about that.”He was aware of the ameliorative effects on other soldiers. “That little dog, for that brief period, it’s a positive thing. That’s the general feeling.” Farthing is convinced that simply spending quiet time with a loving dog may help prevent post- traumatic stress.The ex-soldier returns to Afghanistan periodically, in part to relieve the one volunteer overseeing the animal shelter, a woman who manages to function despite cultural constraints, such as not being allowed to attend meetings with community leaders.The animal shelter is near Kabul, but some secrecy is necessary to prevent being targeted by the Taliban. Nor does Nowzad publicize the names of active soldiers who have flouted regulations to adopt pets.About 230 dogs and 10 cats have been saved. One American soldier wanted to bring back a cow.“To him it became a bit like a dog, I suppose,” said Farthing, who couldn’t accommodate that request.Orphaned PegasusOther stories are heart-wrenching. Conrad Lewis was a British paratrooper who adopted a dog he named Pegasus. Lewis was killed in action last February, and the dog was orphaned.Farthing recalls the appeals from Lewis’s distraught parents, who knew of Pegasus: “They said, ‘You’ve got to get this dog. It’s the only connection we have we have to our son,’ When they got the dog back it was quite emotional. Almost like their son came back.”Farthing’s 2009 book, “One Dog at a Time,” recounts the perils of rescuing dogs in a war zone and reads like James Herriot with gunfire. A follow-up published this year, “No Place Like Home,” describes the transplanted dogs’ lives in the U.K. A portion of sales goes to support his work.Farthing is setting up a U.S.-based version of Nowzad Dogs, something he hopes can be done within months. Until then, donors can contribute via American Dog Rescue.“We’re not just fanatical dog-lovers,” he says. “We want to make a difference in Afghanistan.”(Mike Di Paola writes on preservation and the environment for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Jeremy Gerard.
To contact the writer of this column: Mike Di Paola at mdipaola@nyc.rr.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Doomsday Killer Crams Corpse With Snakes; Jerry Lewis Mania: TV
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- This season’s Bible-based plot of “Dexter” wasn’t much of a revelation. Even a gimmicky “Fight Club” twist couldn’t elevate the Doomsday Killer (Colin Hanks) into the show’s pantheon of memorable murderers.
Through much of the sixth season, Dexter (and viewers) believed a string of grisly murders inspired by the Book of Revelation to be the handiwork of two men: a loony theology professor (Edward James Olmos) and his weak-willed protege (Hanks).Nine episodes in, the professor was revealed to be a figment of the student’s twisted psyche.Hanks could then shake off his ho-hum demeanor and head for the nut-job heights of past “Dexter” creeps played by John Lithgow, Jimmy Smits and Christian Camargo.The Doomsday murders were glum and sadistic: a corpse filled with snakes, a severed head attached to a manikin and saddled atop a horse. An early side plot featuring actor Mos Def as a streetwise preacher did little but burden Dex (the impeccable Michael C. Hall) with half-baked soul-searching.The finale, which wasn’t available for review, is titled “This is the Way the World Ends.” Let’s hope not.“Dexter” airs Dec. 18 on Showtime at 9 p.m. New York time. Rating: **1/2Jerry LewisSo what caused that falling out between Jerry Lewis and the Muscular Dystrophy Association last summer?“Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis,” a career-spanning Encore documentary, doesn’t go there. Or anywhere else that might anger the prickly comedian.“Method” is an early holiday gift for Lewis fans, who include the French, the young at heart and Lewis himself.Slickly produced and directed by Gregg Barson, the documentary stitches together film clips, old and recent stage performances, new interviews, and paeans from celebrities including Jerry Seinfeld, Carol Burnett and Steven Spielberg.“He’s like a mountain,” says actor and comic Richard Belzer, whose arm is tattooed with a Lewis caricature. “Some people get caught in the foot scales of him, but you have to scale the peaks to truly appreciate the phenomenon of Jerry Lewis.”What?Still, watching the Elvis-level reception of Lewis and partner Dean Martin in the 1950s is enjoyably mysterious.“Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis” airs Dec. 17 on Encore at 8 p.m. New York time. Rating: **1/2‘Architect and Painter’The chair that changed America might not have been possible without the suffering of soldiers in World War II.The connection between the furniture and the battlefield is a fascinating footnote in “Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter,” a documentary debuting on PBS following a brief theatrical run.The film is a fast-moving, visually pleasing crash course in both modernism and the couple who made it available -- and palatable -- to the masses.Charles Eames and his wife Ray, who revolutionized American design from their studio in Venice, California, were an unlikely duo.Battlefield SplintsHe was a handsome architect-school dropout. She was “a painter who rarely painted,” described as a “dumpling” by a former underling. He loved science and black-and-white. She loved color and playful design.“Eames,” narrated by James Franco, explains how Charles developed the contoured chair that revolutionized furniture design with its curvy lines and rejection of overstuffed fussiness. He only figured out how to bend plywood into that now-ubiquitous shell-shape after inventing a method for making battlefield splints.The documentary, produced and directed by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey, is cluttered yet incomplete. It rarely pauses to consider why the Eames designs transfixed America and why they’re still relevant today.“Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter” airs Dec. 19 on PBS at 10 p.m. New York time. Rating: ***(Greg Evans is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Rick Warner, Jeremy Gerard.
To contact the writer on the story: Greg Evans at gregeaevans@yahoo.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Smart Knife
The Presentation Master features not only the standard-issue nail file, but also built-in wireless Bluetooth remote-control capability for your PC or laptop Nick Ferrari for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Want: A pocket-sized, multipurpose gadget for the office MacGyver, secure enough to keep important contacts and PowerPoints safe from prying eyes.
The Get: The Victorinox Swiss Army Presentation Master may resemble its timeless, Boy Scout counterpart, but its components are cutting edge. In addition to the usual blades, it comes equipped with a 32-GB USB thumb drive—complete with a biometric fingerprint sensor for identification—and a built-in laser pointer. If the device sounds like a Mission: Impossible prop, it won’t surprise you to learn that, if tampered with, its circuitry will self-destruct. The perfect tool for a grunt on the corporate battlefield. $302.14; www.victorinox.com
A short conversation with Major Christoph Brunner, Swiss Army spokesman.
Why does Switzerland have an army if it’s neutral?
To defend the nation and protect the people of Switzerland. We also have peacekeeping soldiers, professionals and conscripts, all over the world—two to five people in various missions across the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East. And we have 220 soldiers in Kosovo. There has to be a United Nations mission, otherwise we do not participate.
What is a Swiss soldier’s basic equipment?
Clothes, in different variations, boots, helmet, and many other articles. The most important is the Swiss-made SG 550 assault rifle. All conscripts are also given a Swiss Army knife. It’s a model you can buy in stores.
Are they given any training on the knife?
No. That’s not necessary. The Swiss are used to these knives from very early on. It’s not considered a weapon, but a tool.
Walk, Bike to Work in Salt Lake’s Answer to Suburban Nightmares
Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- At the southwestern edge of Salt Lake City, tightly packed new homes run along gentle ridgelines. In the background, the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains catch puffs of cloud on a crisp autumn day.
This is the growing community of Daybreak and it’s much more than suburbia in a stunning setting. Someday residents of 20,000 houses and apartments could walk or bike to 2.4 million square feet of shopping and 5 million square feet of offices.The same mix of uses and walkability can be found in City Creek, an estimated $1.5 billion redevelopment covering 23 acres in downtown Salt Lake City, about 45 minutes away.The Salt Lake City area is piloting a federal program called Sustainable Communities that could help cities uncover underserved markets and devise developments that serve them. Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, worked on the program with Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ray LaHood, who heads the Department of Transportation.“More metro areas understand that they need a variety of places for people to live,” Donovan said in an interview in his Washington office. “Or they will end up shutting out whole classes of working people, like teachers, and firefighters. That makes it harder to attract employers.”The hope is that communities can move beyond the brain-dead national models of development and related finance that led to bubble-fed overbuilding. Even now few developers know how to pump out anything but oversized tract houses and identical shopping strips.‘Ghost Towns’“The ghost towns of the housing bust are places that lack transportation options, that aren’t walkable,” Donovan said. “The average family spends 52 cents of every dollar they earn on housing and transportation combined, so the biggest opportunity is in development around transportation.”Providing the link between City Creek, which opens in March, and Daybreak is a light rail line that started operations last August.Daybreak and City Creek got built in sync with a regional planning effort of 18 communities and four counties along the Wasatch Front called Wasatch Choice for 2040.Most real-estate developers and their lenders wouldn’t attempt the density and mix of the Salt Lake City projects. Neither City Creek Reserve Inc., the development arm of the Mormon church, nor Daybreak’s developer, Kennecott Land Co., which is part of the Rio Tinto mining empire, needed conventional lenders.Getting ComfortableSustainable Communities aims at promoting smaller mixed- use, high-density development around transit stops. The federal grant is only $5 million, and local planners are using it to help lenders and developers get comfortable with the market for this so-called transit-oriented development. They may change zoning and parking requirements to lower the barriers to entry.Planners use computer modeling to test transit-oriented neighborhood-design scenarios, trying out different mixes and densities of apartments, offices, shops, schools and parks. The models evaluate the effects “on transportation, utility costs, tax revenue, and on return on investment for developers,” said Andrew Gruber, executive director of the Wasatch Front Regional Council, a local-government group that co-manages Wasatch Choice for 2040.‘Some Kind of Leap’“Communities recognize there’s some kind of leap they have to take,” said Donovan, so that everyone learns what specific kinds of development are likely to work in the future. It’s an effort cities almost never attempt.If Wasatch 2040’s planning tools help reduce development risks, projects can more adventurously pursue amenable growth that saves energy, lowers government costs and eradicates a minimum of farmland and forest.It’s regrettable that Congress has just eliminated the program’s funding for 2012, even though the $98 million it cost this year is meaningless in deficit-reduction terms.“The reason this effort has gotten so much interest at the state and local level is that we are supporting a vision, rather than imposing a vision,” Donovan said.(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.
To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net; web.me.com/jscanlonrussell
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
<em>Mission: Impossible</em>, Starring Tom Cruise and the BMW i8
Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg
By Chris ReiterIn the latest Mission: Impossible film, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, wows his team of special agents with a display of all the tech-laden new gear they’ll have for their next assignment, including a levitation suit. But he saves the best for last. “Wait until you see the car,” a smiling Cruise says. The reference is to the i8 concept, a next-generation supercar from BMW, which helps Cruise and co-star Paula Patton race through Mumbai traffic. The car’s appearance highlights the brand’s return to Hollywood after a hiatus of more than a decade.
The sponsorship of Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, opening in U.S. IMAX theaters on Dec. 16 and nationwide on Dec. 21, comes at the expense of Volkswagen’s Audi brand, which aims to topple BMW as the luxury car leader by 2015. Propaganda GEM, the Hollywood product placement agency that helped Audi boost its image with high-profile car appearances in such films as I, Robot and Transporter 2 and 3, set up the deal for BMW shortly after ending a 15-year relationship advising Audi.
BMW is betting its participation in the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which has averaged 1.1 billion viewers per film, could help widen its lead over Audi. Forecaster IHS Automotive predicts BMW sales will climb 39 percent by 2015, to 1.86 million vehicles, 170,000 more than Audi. “Such blockbuster placements are scarce, and BMW is as integrated into the movie as Tom Cruise,” says Jean-Marc Lehu, author of the book Branded Entertainment and director of communication at Paris’s Pantheon—Sorbonne University. “It’s a win for the brand.”
BMW’s role, its first in a big-budget film since a Z8 roadster was cut to pieces in the 1999 James Bond feature The World Is Not Enough, is a reminder that Hollywood is now a mandatory destination for marketers. With DVRs and on-demand programs allowing consumers to skip television ads, becoming part of the content is key for brands to get noticed. “The consumer today is in charge of where and how they consume content,” says Ruben Igielko-Herrlich, founding partner of Propaganda GEM. “Companies are realizing the value of being where their customers are.”
In addition to featuring the upcoming i8, BMW uses the film to promote its current X3 SUV, 6-Series convertible, and 1-Series compact. In lieu of an upfront payment, the company promised to promote the film in its print and television ads, says Uwe Ellinghaus, head of brand management at BMW. A person familiar with such sponsorships who was not authorized to speak on the record values the deal at more than $10 million. “Mission: Impossible is a whole new dimension for BMW,” says Ellinghaus. “It’s what James Bond used to be.”
The winged-door i8, a plug-in hybrid that accelerates to 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour in 4.6 seconds and can get 78 miles per gallon, will be introduced in 2014—but gets center-stage placement in the film. At the movie’s European premiere at the BMW Welt product showcase in Munich on Dec. 9, the i8 was prominently displayed at the end of the red carpet. Cruise spent more than 90 minutes signing autographs and schmoozing with fans. The film also has scenes that showcase BMW’s in-car communications technology and safety features, such as pedestrian avoidance. “We want to get out of this rat race of who has the fastest cars,” says Ellinghaus. “We want to show that we have the smartest cars.”
The bottom line: Several BMW cars appear in the latest Mission: Impossible movie. The automaker is believed to have spent $10 million promoting the film.
Reiter is a reporter for Bloomberg News in Berlin.Cornell’s $2 Billion Campus Fuels N.Y.C. Search for Tech Jobs
Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Broad sloping buildings roofed by solar panels and swaddled in plants that filter storm water will rise on an island in New York’s East River.
That’s Cornell University’s vision for a new applied- sciences campus in New York City. The school was named yesterday as the winner of a competition set up by the city to build a facility for job-spinning engineering research -- the way Stanford University has helped seed innovation in Silicon Valley.The question now is whether the project will run counter to the trend for spinoff jobs to flee the city for suburbia.Seven proposals involving 15 universities were considered. Cornell’s bid was bolstered by the announcement last week of an anonymous $350 million gift to the university for the project.Cornell, based in Ithaca, New York, worked with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa on a $2 billion proposal for a 10-acre campus on Roosevelt Island. The city offered the site free, along with providing $100 million for infrastructure work.The project could involve more than 2 million square feet for more than 2,000 students. The first 150,000-square-foot building would generate as much power as it would use.In Cornell’s proposal, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, people move through multilevel interior courtyards lit by sun sliding between arrays of photovoltaic panels. The courtyards become places where engineers meet entrepreneurs and new media pioneers pitch budding venture capitalists.Since the campus will be built over a number of years, it could be shaped less by the technology of labs and more by the collaborative necessity to bend very complex teams to daunting tasks. The campus also exemplifies how much “green” design has permeated the world of technology.Uncertain OutlookBeyond the campus, the economic upside for New York is far from clear. The city has proved congenial to small media startups and makers of applications, but can’t compete with the suburbs’ cheaper, horizontal space once a company’s growth requires more room.New York City is a powerhouse of medical research, for example, but much of the spinoff wealth is created in drug labs and medical-device makers that dot New Jersey’s suburbs.And yet the intensely urban and collaborative engineering scene in New York City suggests that tech must increasingly leave isolating suburban office parks behind.“Software and applications need the kind of dense expertise that cities are full of,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the sponsoring New York City Economic Development Corporation in a telephone interview.MIT, HarvardHigh-tech companies that used to locate in office parks along route 128 in Boston’s suburbs now tighten bonds with MIT and Harvard by building large-scale labs in urban Cambridge. That’s the kind of linkage New York City wants to build with the major applied-sciences institution it doesn’t now have.New York hopes that spinoffs create such a Cambridge-style future for gentrifying Long Island City, near Cornell’s planned location. Inevitably, the spinoff would likely benefit the region not just the city. That’s fine as long as suburbs share the costs (mainly in transportation improvements).Stanford University and City College of New York floated a 1.9-million-square-foot Roosevelt Island proposal featuring a street hanging high in the air and dubbed “the river,” but that was withdrawn last week. Other universities sought sites at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in midtown Manhattan and on Governors Island.Falling ShortBefore the competition was announced, New York University had planned to expand its recently acquired Brooklyn Polytechnic, but that campus is small and landlocked. Working with five international institutions, it bid for the new campus anyway. Columbia University offered a slice of its $7 billion expansion in Manhattanville, but winning may have required the university to shift away from its medical-research focus.I hope the high environmental performance and the seamlessly interweaved research and educational facilities proposed by both Cornell and Stanford will spur NYU and Columbia to look anew at their feeble, innovation-averse growth plans.(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.
To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Alain Rossmann's Klip, a Twitter for Videos
Gabriela Hasbun for Bloomberg Businessweek
As Tiger Woods teed off at the Australian Open on Nov. 9, a spectator calling himself JayWalkar used Klip, a new iPhone app, to film the powerful drive down the fairway. Less than a minute later, Alain Rossmann, Klip’s 55-year-old founder, was watching the video on his own iPhone in Palo Alto, Calif., and marveling at how small the planet had become. “We’re moving to a world where everything is captured and everything is shared in real time,” Rossmann says. “Our entire history will be chronicled in a mosaic of video.”
Rossmann created his latest company to assemble that video mosaic and allow people to choose the pieces they want to see. Introduced in the Apple App Store in September, Klip is a little like a Twitter for videos of one minute or less, without all the text. Members specify topics they are interested in and users they want to follow and launch a constant stream of video, as well as additional recommendations they might enjoy. Recent clips showcase elephants in Saudi Arabia and an abandoned tube stop in London.
Rossmann has one of the longer and more storied resumes in Silicon Valley. In the mid-1980s he was a member of the legendary team at Apple that built the original Macintosh. A decade later, he founded Phone.com, which created an early Web browser for the mobile phone. Rossmann also started the Web movie store VUDU, which was acquired by in 2010. And though his wife, Joanna Hoffman, Apple employee No. 5, preferred that he stay retired, earlier this year he founded Klip after realizing it won’t be long before people toting around smart phones upload a billion videos a month.
Now nearly 20 employees, including several from Apple and YouTube, toil in a small office in downtown Palo Alto, and the company has raised $10 million in venture capital from Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. In its first three months, Klip has regularly topped the App Store’s list of most-downloaded video-sharing offerings. The big daddy in the online video world, of course, is Google’s YouTube, but Rossmann believes that site is moving in the opposite direction, accumulating professionally produced content from Hollywood, not shaky-cam material uploaded from mobile phones. Although Klip is not focused on making money yet, Rossmann believes there will be plenty of opportunities for advertising.
Rossmann says this is the best time ever for starting an Internet company. He stores and processes all the company’s videos on Amazon.com’s for-hire Web servers. To keep pornography off the service, he runs algorithms to determine which videos may be suspect and then has actual people screen them, using the freelance workforce available through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labor marketplace. “You can achieve 10 times more now with 10 times fewer people and 10 times less capital. It’s unbelievable. This is the golden age of startups, and I hope America and everyone else takes advantage of it.”
Member of the team that built the original Apple Macintosh
Cloud-based tools make it "the golden age of startups"
Raised $10 million for Klip, a Twitter for videos
Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.Big Brother Is Watching You Shop
Illustration by Jiro Bevis
By Ashley Lutz and Matt TownsendOn the Web, every click and jiggle of the mouse helps e-tailers customize sites and maximize the likelihood of a purchase. Brick-and-mortar stores have long wanted to track consumers in a similar fashion, but following atoms is a lot harder than following bits. For the most part, they’ve been forced to rely on consumer surveys, says Herb Sorensen, an adviser at market research firm TNS Retail & Shopper in London. “The problem with survey research is the consumer can say one thing and do another.”
To get a better understanding of their customers in real time, mall operators are monitoring shoppers’ behavior with devices that track mobile-phone signals, while retailers including Montblanc, T-Mobile, and Family Dollar Stores are finding new uses for old tools such as in-store security cameras. The goal is to divine which variables affect a purchase, then act with Web-like nimbleness to deploy more salespeople, alter displays, or put out red blouses instead of blue. Until recently, “stores have been a black hole,” says Alexei Agratchev, chief executive officer of consultancy RetailNext. “People were convinced something was true and spending tens of millions based on that” without evidence to back it up.
Agratchev says RetailNext was founded in 2007 to change that. It helps retailers build systems to better understand customer behavior. In most cases, the company relies on the video from a store’s existing security camera system. That feed is run through RetailNext’s software, which analyzes the video and correlates it with sales data. The software can also integrate data from hardware such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips and motion sensors to track how often a brand of cereal is picked up or how many customers turn left when they enter a store. The company now has 40 retailer clients, including American Apparel and Family Dollar, and another 20 are testing the systems. RetailNext’s data sometimes refutes conventional wisdom. For instance, many food manufacturers pay a premium for their products to be displayed at the end of an aisle. But customers pay greater attention to products placed in the center of an aisle, according to RetailNext’s analysis.
Luxury retailer Montblanc began testing RetailNext’s video analytics at a store in Miami six months ago. Employees have used it to generate maps showing which parts of the store are best-trafficked and to decide where to place in-store decorations, salespeople, and merchandise. Rodrigo Fajardo, Montblanc’s brand manager in Miami, says RetailNext’s analysis helps his team make decisions faster. “We aren’t taking six months to make a change,” he says. “We analyze one week, and the next week we are making the changes.” He says the software has helped boost sales 20 percent and that Montblanc plans to expand its use to a dozen locations.
T-Mobile employs similar technology from San Francisco’s 3VR, a maker of security systems. Two years ago, 3VR executives realized that its cameras could be used to gather consumer data, according to the company’s CEO, Al Shipp. He says T-Mobile, in Bellevue, Wash., uses 3VR’s technology in some of its retail stores to track how people move around, how long they stand in front of displays, and which phones they pick up and for how long. T-Mobile declined to comment. Now 3VR is testing facial-recognition software that can identify shoppers’ gender and approximate age. The software would give retailers a better handle on customer demographics and help them tailor promotions, Shipp says. “You’ll have the ability someday to measure every metric imaginable. We’re scratching the surface.”
Some retailers are installing gear to track shoppers via cell phones. Path Intelligence, a company in Portsmouth, England, started selling a technology in 2009 that records a phone’s cellular signal and follows its owner through a building. Today it’s used primarily by malls in Europe, and the company says its technology records the paths of more than 1 million customers every day. Some retailers use the data to figure out where in a mall to place their stores, says Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar. Others use it to find out the nationality of their visitors using the country code at the start of their phone numbers.
Skanska Preys on U.S. Acquisitions as Orders Point to Recovery
Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Skanska AB, the Nordic region’s biggest builder, is getting closer to bolstering its U.S. presence by buying a rival with revenue of as much as $1 billion to win infrastructure contracts for roads and railways.
Adding a business in Texas or somewhere in the Midwest region like Chicago would be ideal, Mike McNally, head of the Swedish company’s operation in the U.S., said in a Dec. 14 interview. Both private and publicly listed companies make viable targets, and approaches have already been made, he said.“We’ve got the fishing lines out and we have some that might be on the hook,” McNally said at Skanska’s headquarters in Stockholm.While the U.S. is Skanska’s largest market, accounting for about 27 percent of revenue, its last acquisition there was a Californian roadbuilder a decade ago. Skanska is among European builders that have entered the U.S., with mixed success. Hochtief AG is a major player with its Turner Corp. subsidiary while Dutch builder Royal BAM Groep NV sold its bridge builder Flatiron in 2007 and Bilfinger Berger SE sold its remaining construction activities there this year.Skanska does little infrastructure construction outside New York, Virginia and southern California, and McNally said he’s seeking to broaden its nationwide workload beyond just managing building projects such as hospitals. Companies targeted by Skanska are likely to have revenue of $500 million to $700 million, and they could even touch $1 billion, he added.To help plant its flag in the country, Skanska is also pursuing a marquee contract to build Apple Inc.’s second campus in Cupertino, California to house 13,000 employees.Throwing the Net WideSkanska is the eighth biggest construction firm in the U.S., according to Engineering News-Record. Its bigger rivals include Fluor Corp. and Kiewit Construction Group Inc.McNally said he’s “talked to everybody” except the very biggest in his quest to make an acquisition. The ideal purchase would add a business where Skanska has little presence, such as power-plant construction.“I’d like to see an acquisition in the U.S. so they beef up their infrastructure business,” said David Zaudy, a Stockholm-based analyst at Pareto Ohman, who recommends investors buy Skanska’s shares. “An acquisition, for example, in Chicago would be appreciated.”Skanska’s U.S. orders are continuing on a good level, with “quite strong” bookings in the second half that are pointing to a “promising” few months entering into 2012, Pontus Winqvist, head of Skanska’s investor relations, said at the interview.Bridges, Rail LinesU.S. construction spending in October fell 0.4 percent from a year ago to $799 billion, the Commerce Department said Dec. 1. The U.S. economy is “expanding moderately,” the Federal Open Market Committee said Dec. 13.“For the small and medium-sized contractor it’ll be tough going,” McNally said. “There’s not a lot of the small stuff and there’s enormous competition. But the market for the big contractors is better than it’s been for a while,” driven by decisions in recent years to boost investments in bridges and light-rail mass transit systems, he said.Federal and state infrastructure spending is set to decline over the next couple years, leaving the “short-term future looking bumpy,” McNally said. President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent are likely to promise more construction investments during the election to boost jobs, which may come to fruition starting in 2014, McNally said.In early 2010 Skanska entered the commercial development business in the U.S., building offices to lease and then sell them. It operates this business in Houston, Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C.Skanska is now trying to sell its office building that’s located five blocks east of the White House, seeking to close that deal in early 2012, McNally said.“Our ability now to get sites is fantastic because the banks are not loaning to the local developers” due to the weak economy, McNally said. “We’re going in with our own cash, we’re not going to any banks.”--Editors: Andrew Noel, Benedikt Kammel
To contact the reporter on this story: Ola Kinnander in Stockholm at okinnander@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Benedikt Kammel at bkammel@bloomberg.net
Friday, 9 December 2011
Philly Cream Cheese's Spreading Appeal
All made with Philly Cream Cheese products Courtesy Kraft
By Matthew BoyleShoppers hoping to stick to their post-holiday diets should avoid the dairy aisle come January, when Kraft Foods unveils its newest creation, Philly Indulgence, a sweet-and-tangy blend of cream cheese and chocolate that can be spread on a pretzel or just devoured straight from the tub. A similar concoction introduced in Europe blew past sales projections this year, prompting Chief Executive Officer Irene Rosenfeld to bring it to the U.S. It’s the latest evidence of a surprising revival for Philadelphia cream cheese, Kraft’s $1.7 billion spread that dates back to 1880. (The brand has no link to the City of Brotherly Love—the company’s founder, A.L. Reynolds, thought Philadelphia was synonymous with quality food. That was likely before the invention of the cheese steak.)
When Rosenfeld took over in 2006, the world’s second-largest food company after Nestle was content just to maintain market share against rival cream cheese brands and private-label copycats. Lately, though, an international team of brand managers and research and development teams has expanded Philly’s target market, unveiling new variations that have spread cream cheese far beyond the bagel to everyday cooking and snacking. They’ve doubled Philly’s annual growth rate, to about 15 percent in just one year. “We used to play not to lose,” says George Zoghbi, president of Kraft’s Cheese & Dairy business. “Now we’re playing to win.”
Philly’s resurgence began in 2008, when Kraft researchers learned that frequent buyers of cream cheese were using it as a cooking ingredient, not just as a schmear. “That was quite an eye-opener for us,” says Tuscany native Piero Capizzi, president of Cheese & Grocery in Europe, where Philly generates more than a third of its sales. “It gave us an idea to change our strategy.”
Capizzi launched a marketing campaign in Britain and Western Europe trumpeting how Philly could be added to everything from Spanish tapas to spaghetti carbonara. Websites soon hosted thousands of recipes submitted by consumers, including “Thai Spiced Philadelphia Prawns” and “Middle Eastern Lamb Pies.” Ten Philly fanatics were chosen to shoot an online video where they made their own cream cheese-infused dishes. Kraft even persuaded British retailers including Tesco to sell Philly next to main-dish staples such as salmon to inspire recipe ideas. In the U.K., the share of Philly consumers who use it as an ingredient has nearly doubled, to 37 percent, since the effort started, Capizzi says.
Meanwhile, Kraft’s own food formulators got into the act. At quarterly brainstorming meetings, staffers mixed Philly with everything from curry sauce to Oreos to Kraft’s own Vegemite, a salty spread made from brewers’ yeast extract that Kraft sells in Australia, where it’s a national institution.
Not everything worked. Philly-laced grapefruit smoothies, for one, bombed in U.S. taste tests. Others clicked. Borrowing technology used to make ice cream, Englishman Nigel Kirtley’s R&D team developed Duo, an after-dinner hard table cheese sold in Italy and Spain with a soft Philly-based middle.
The biggest bang came in 2010 when Kirtley found just the right blend of Kraft’s Milka chocolate and Philly. The result: a creamy spread sold first in Germany and now Italy that aims to topple market leader Nutella, made by Italy’s Ferrero. It’s off to a good start, hitting its annual sales goal after just one quarter this year. Kraft also claims it’s better for you than similar products, although one of those items is chocolate frosting.
Healthy or not, the Philly innovation has won over shoppers, and sales soared 20 percent in Europe last quarter. “Philadelphia has had some tremendous commercial successes this year,” says Caroline Roux, a global food analyst at researcher Mintel Group in London. Rosenfeld this year even brought regular Philly to France, the epicenter of cheese snobbery. Roux says the move is risky, but the brand’s American provenance could help it stand out.
Back home, where Philly dominates the traditional cream cheese market with more than a 60 percent share, Kraft has tweaked the cooking ingredient campaign for Americans, dubbing it “Real Women of Philadelphia” and featuring celebrity chef Paula Deen.
Nine varieties of Philly Cooking Creme, including Savory Garlic, are available, offering what Kraft calls “a dollop-able, creamy consistency” that’s “easily added in all your favorite dishes.” While it’s debatable that all those dishes really need more cheese—at eight grams of fat per serving—there’s no denying the campaign’s success. After posting no growth in 2009, U.S. Philly sales are up 9 percent this year, according to market data tracker SymphonyIRI Group.
The bottom line: Kraft Foods has revived growth of Philadelphia cream cheese, a brand with $1.7 billion in global sales, by pitching it as a recipe ingredient.
Boyle is a reporter for Bloomberg News.Hollywood’s Two-Minute Auteurs
Photo Illustration by Steve Caplin; F. Carter Smith/Polaris
The Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Awards are to the Oscars as film trailers are to films: short and sweet. There’s free popcorn and soda, speeches are brief, and the ceremony consists mostly of high-impact montages featuring the best trailers, TV spots, and Internet campaigns Hollywood marketing has to offer. For those still smarting from The Social Network’s Best Picture loss to The King’s Speech, the Oct. 19 ceremony provided a measure of redemption when Mark Woollen won the Grand Key Art Award for his trailer to The Social Network. You might remember it: The two-and-a-half-minute affair showed almost as much footage of actual social networking as it did of the movie itself. The boys’ choir that covered Radiohead’s Creep for the trailer landed a record deal.
With movie marketers desperate to grab the increasingly fractured attention of audiences (and fight declining theater attendance), trailers such as Woollen’s are fast becoming the standard. Heavy-handed voice-over has given way to subtler presentation, and the same overused cues are being replaced by more eclectic music selection. Trailers have begun to resemble tone poems selling a taste of how a film will feel rather than showing audiences everything they will see. They’ve found their medium on the Internet, proving to be snack-size events in their own right.
Trailers have been around almost as long as movies themselves; initially they followed a film’s end card to drive audiences out of theaters between showings (hence “trailers”). Until only a few years ago, a tight-knit world of fewer than 100 editors created the lion’s share of Hollywood trailers. Now these large houses face an expanding market of independent editors working on their own, facilitated by lower-cost editing software such as Final Cut Pro.
Woollen’s hip, modern Santa Monica (Calif.) office belies the stereotype of editors as cloistered, Gollum-like creatures, surfacing from dark rooms only to pick up Chinese takeout. Contrary to Tinseltown custom, Woollen, 40, doesn’t decorate his offices with posters of the films he’s worked on—among them Where the Wild Things Are, The Tree of Life, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—in the belief it stifles creativity: “We’re always trying to do something that honors the unique films we work on,” he says. “What we felt from the movie, that’s the big thing, and seeing if we can communicate that in two minutes.” Woollen relies heavily on sound design and music selection to find the shape of a piece, always listening to his iPod for cues that may one day come in handy: “I’d say music is 90 percent of the work we do; it establishes the rhythm.” The finished product ideally leaves the audience wanting more: “One of the things to figure out is at what point do we leave off, where you’ve ramped up the anticipation enough to do that.”
Studios spend a premium to create that anticipation. Although Hollywood is loath to relinquish marketing costs, it’s generally acknowledged that Prints & Advertising budgets can regularly swell to over half a film’s production cost. (A single trailer can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, though the most lucrative contracts encompass multiple versions of the trailer.) Of all the ways to hype a movie these days—billboards, talk show interviews, junkets, viral campaigns—trailers continue to be the cornerstone of film marketing. Marc Weinstock, president of worldwide marketing for Sony Pictures, says exit surveys consistently show trailers are the most influential driver of audience interest—generating 50 percent, compared with 30 percent for TV spots. With movie attendance at its lowest level since 1997, the pressure increasingly is on trailers to cut through the cultural white noise. “Our biggest fear is being average,” says Weinstock. “We don’t want people to think, ‘Maybe I’ll see that movie the second weekend.’ We want that trailer where people go, ‘I have to see that movie now!’?”
Blind Horses, Dogs Cheat Euthanizers, Find Sweet Life on Farm
Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The Great North Woods were ablaze with color when I visited the Rolling Dog Farm in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Too bad most of its horses and dogs are blind.
When I first heard of a sanctuary for disabled animals, I wondered whether it crossed a line, going beyond compassion. The animals, rescued from shelters all around the U.S., are blind or deaf or have orthopedic and neurological problems.“Many times, the day an animal arrives here is the same day it was supposed to be euthanized,” said Alayne Marker, who co-founded Rolling Dog with her husband, Steve Smith.Part of me was thinking that ending an animal’s suffering might be more humane. Such thoughts are erased within a minute of meeting the animals. For one thing, there is no discernible suffering.In the paddock, six horses are munching on apples fallen from trees outside the fence. When we enter, the braver ones amble over with an odd gait, heads turned slightly sideways, as they tend to lead with their ears.“People think of a 1,000-pound animal that can’t see as a train wreck waiting to happen,” Smith says. “With most horses, if you give them enough time in a safe environment, they can adapt to blindness and have a wonderful quality of life, as you can see.”I can see. The horses may not fully appreciate their idyllic setting, but they seem happy -- and very healthy.Lena the MentorLena is a pure-bred registered quarter-horse who went blind from what sounds like abuse. Her trainer had tried to correct her propensity to rear up by making her tip over, conditioning her to associate rearing with falling. Repeated blows to her head during this “training” destroyed her optic nerve.Lena is now a mentor to younger newcomers, teaching them social skills essential for members of a herd. “The blind leading the blind” is a standard joke here.Marker and Smith founded the Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Montana in 2000, and moved the operation to New Hampshire last year, changing “ranch” to “farm” to reflect regional nomenclature. Compared with Montana’s vast spaces, the New England site is much closer to essential services, such as vets and grocery stores, saving time and fuel.They have 7 horses and about 30 dogs on their 132-acre farm, plus one full-time staffer to help with the endless chores. Last year their operating costs ran about $500,000, all raised through donations. Most of the animals are up for adoption via Petfinder.com, and the farmers spread the word through their website, Facebook and a quarterly newsletter.Future FoodOther residents include some barn cats, a brood of laying hens and 20 Holsteins that graze placidly on the verdant hillside behind the house. The cattle aren’t pampered pets, however, but future food for the dogs.The Holsteins were purchased from a local dairy farmer who had no use for bull calves. Smith and Marker rescued the animals, which would have otherwise had a short and cramped existence before being processed as veal. Instead, they are raised with tender care in an open paddock overlooking the White Mountains. They are even given names.“Our view is, what’s the alternative?” Smith says. “What’s better than raising them yourself and knowing exactly how they were treated, that you did everything possible to give them as humane a life as possible?”Smith and Marker say the most misunderstood animals here are the ones that are both blind and deaf. Most people can’t imagine that a life in darkness and silence can be worth living, so they are difficult to get adopted.Tracy and HepburnI meet Spencer and Katie, an inseparable pair of lively deaf and blind dachshunds, but I don’t think I would have been aware of either disability if I hadn’t been told. They seem happy, and why not? With a diet of grass-fed beef and fresh eggs, they’re eating better than most Americans.“We always tell people, just give them a chance, all they want to be is a dog or a horse and just get on with life, and love and be loved,” says Marker. “That’s really what it’s all about, and we give them that chance here.”(Mike Di Paola writes on preservation and the environment for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Laurie Muchnick.
To contact the writer of this column: Mike Di Paola at mdipaola@nyc.rr.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Voice Control, the End of the TV Remote?
By Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards Before he died on Oct. 5, Steve Jobs left clues that he was working on a new product that would revolutionize how we interact with our TVs. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” he said to biographer Walter Isaacson, and will eliminate the collections of remote controls that litter living rooms. After years of struggling with the Apple TV set-top box, which was never a huge success, “I finally cracked it,” he said.
No one knows for sure what “it” is, and Isaacson isn’t saying. But many tech executives agree that an Apple TV set is likely to make use of humankind’s most natural interface: the voice. Already, millions of Apple customers are talking to their new iPhone 4S, thanks to a program called Siri that tries to provide an answer to questions like, “How’s the weather today?” Whether the rumors are true that Apple is planning to release a TV set by 2013, Siri-like voice recognition is headed for the living room. Microsoft is already there, via its Xbox 360 game console, and Comcast, Samsung Electronics, LG, and Sharp are working on voice-enabled features for TV sets, set-top boxes, and related products. Mike Thompson, senior vice-president at Nuance Communications, the world’s largest supplier of voice recognition technology, says “a wave” of device makers will ship products that understand voice commands next year.
It’s easy to see the appeal. Few would be upset if, instead of figuring out which one of three remotes to use, viewers could sit on the couch and say, “Record the next episode of Modern Family.” And while a growing percentage of new TVs connect to the Internet, many customers are put off by overly complex controls or on-screen keyboards that require the user to type by moving a cursor at an excruciatingly slow pace, says Jakob Nielsen, a product usability expert and co-founder of design consultancy Nielsen Norman Group. “Anything would be better than what we have now,” he says. “We can only go up from here.”
Microsoft has the early lead thanks to Kinect, an Xbox peripheral with cameras and motion sensors for hands-free gaming. Kinect also has sensitive microphones. After waking up the system by saying “Xbox,” subscribers to Microsoft’s $60-a-year Xbox LIVE service can search for shows, movies, and games by speaking to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. “You get a lot of claims saying, ‘We’re about to transform TV,’ ” says Ross Honey, general manager of Xbox LIVE entertainment and advertising for Microsoft. “We already have.”
Most consumers’ first opportunity to talk to their TVs—and have them listen—will be through voice-enabled apps for their smartphone or tablet. More than 3 million Comcast subscribers have downloaded an app that turns their smartphone into a remote control for the company’s Xfinity broadband service. Comcast is looking at adding voice-control features to the app, says spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury. Samsung and Sharp are developing similar apps of their own, according to people familiar with their plans. This may well have been the approach Jobs had in mind. According to one former Apple manager who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly, Jobs saw little reason for a stand-alone remote when iPhones and iPads can do the job better.
Others are looking to fix rather than eliminate the remote. Nuance’s Thompson says TV, DVD, and set-top box makers are all working on models that look more like iPhones, some with touchscreens rather than that gaggle of unused buttons. Some of the prototypes are designed around a single prominent button that activates a microphone, he says. Cost will be a challenge, since such a device would need a microphone and Wi-Fi antenna instead of the infrared sensors now commonly used. Industry politics will also be an issue. Since having every electronic box within earshot respond at once would be a nightmare, equipment makers need to agree on which device runs the show.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Tom Krupenkin's Power Shoes
Kevin Miyazaki for Bloomberg Businessweek
Tom Krupenkin knows he’s not the first person to try making shoes that generate electricity. In 1998 researchers at the MIT Media Lab rigged a pair of Nikes to broadcast a stride-powered radio signal. Three years later, Trevor Baylis, the inventor of a popular wind-up radio, made a boot-heel insert that charged his cell phone during a 100-mile trek across the Namib Desert in southern Africa. “The idea itself goes a very long time back, arguably to the beginning of the 20th century,” says Krupenkin, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Those earlier efforts were based on a technology called piezoelectrics—tiny crystals that create a current as they compress and expand—and didn’t make enough power to be practical. MIT’s Nikes generated a few thousandths of a watt, and Baylis had to walk for days to charge his cell phone. Krupenkin and his lab partner, J. Ashley Taylor, have discovered a more efficient approach called reverse electrowetting.
Normal electrowetting consumes a small electrical charge as it manipulates tiny droplets on a conductive surface. That’s handy for controlling chemical reactions in medical devices and has potential for use in e-ink displays and cellphone screens. Krupenkin and Taylor, who had worked on electrowetting camera lenses at Bell Labs in New Jersey, found that by running the process backward they could create enough electricity to charge a smartphone. “Like an electrical motor,” Krupenkin says, “in reverse you’re going to get a generator.”
A small prototype generated a few milliwatts via the back-and-forth movement of tiny liquid-metal droplets in an electrode-lined channel. With a millimeter-wide channel embedded in a shoe sole, each step could push 1,000 or so droplets past the electrodes and generate up to 10 watts of power. “It’s a very clever idea,” says Jason Heikenfeld, director of the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. Using fluids to generate power, Heikenfeld says, offers more flexibility in design than piezoelectric crystals do, an advantage he says Krupenkin will need as he seeks to create a marketable product.
In 2009, Krupenkin and Taylor co-founded InStep NanoPower to commercialize the technology. They are working on a new prototype the size and shape of a shoe sole that could have a USB-type outlet in the heel. For consumers reluctant to plug wires into their shoes, Krupenkin envisions a mobile hotspot in the toe. The shoe would then handle the high-power signal needed to communicate with cell towers, while the phone would only need to send a signal to the shoe. The savings, says Krupenkin, could extend the life of phone batteries by a factor of 10.
While a shoe-ready insert is still a couple years away, Krupenkin is looking for shoemakers to partner with. “It’s one thing to embed some device,” he says. “It’s a very different story to design footwear in a way that people would love to wear it.”
The Moscow native has PhDs in materials science and physics
Spent a decade at Bell Labs working on nano-engineering
Reversing a process called electrowetting to generate power
Boudway is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.Will Driverless Cars Become the New Road Rage?
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer
By Tim HigginsIt’s a late summer day, and I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a BMW 3 Series at the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in Salinas, Calif. Sitting, not driving. When I lift my hands from the wheel at the beginning of this 2.2-mile course, the car accelerates to 75 mph almost instantly, pushing me and my passengers—BMW engineers and executives—into our leather seats. The car’s computer brain, using satellite signals to navigate the track, is in control.
“Wait until you see what’s coming up,” says Tom Kowaleski, a BMW spokesman, as we head for the Corkscrew, a steep, tight S-curve and the scene of numerous YouTube crash videos. We hit it at about 40 mph, and I have to sit on my hands to keep them from grabbing the wheel back from the machine. The executives chuckle.
This 3 Series is part of BMW’s ongoing efforts to improve the technology behind driverless vehicles and understand how computerized chauffeurs might be used in the real world. Similar projects are under way at General Motors, Volkswagen, Google, and at research labs around the world. While the current technology is good enough to navigate roadways and recognize obstacles, it needs some refinement before it’s street-safe, says Thilo Koslowski, an industry analyst with researcher Gartner. The component costs also need to come down, he says. Still, there’s enough activity that governments are beginning to think about how to regulate the new smart vehicles. “In 10 years you will see the first kind of autonomous vehicles” on regular streets, says Koslowski. “The privilege of driving is going to be redefined.”
The idea of self-driving cars is almost as old as the car itself. GM’s vision for the future of transportation at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York included driverless cars. Automakers say recent advances in computing power and networking technologies make it feasible to build real ones. Although the experiments vary in their details, autonomous cars generally use GPS to recognize where they are on the road. Cameras, lasers, and radar help them keep their distance from other cars and recognize objects like pedestrians. Superfast processors weave all the inputs together, allowing cars to react quickly.
Proponents say the promise is enormous: Turning the wheel over to computers could lead to less traffic, fewer collisions, and more transportation options for aging societies. The world’s population is predicted to grow 33 percent, to 9.3 billion, by 2050. If that population were to live like Americans, there would be 7.7 billion cars on the roads—up from 850 million today. That enormous fleet would consume 375 million barrels of oil per day, more than five times the global production in 2008, according to John Sterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The traffic problem that already cripples many of the world’s megacities would get a whole lot worse. Bringing the reliability of silicon to the roads would help solve these problems: Autonomous cars could potentially drive at high speeds and close together without fear of wrecks or jams, cutting down on wasted time and gas.
Some auto executives worry about what will happen to their businesses if traffic continues to get worse and driving becomes more trouble than it’s worth. “The freedom of mobility that my great-grandfather brought to people is now being threatened,” said Ford Motor Executive Chairman Bill Ford at a speech earlier this year at the TED technology conference. “Global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers, and our quality of life is going to be severely compromised.”
Voice Control, the End of the TV Remote?
By Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards Before he died on Oct. 5, Steve Jobs left clues that he was working on a new product that would revolutionize how we interact with our TVs. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” he said to biographer Walter Isaacson, and will eliminate the collections of remote controls that litter living rooms. After years of struggling with the Apple TV set-top box, which was never a huge success, “I finally cracked it,” he said.
No one knows for sure what “it” is, and Isaacson isn’t saying. But many tech executives agree that an Apple TV set is likely to make use of humankind’s most natural interface: the voice. Already, millions of Apple customers are talking to their new iPhone 4S, thanks to a program called Siri that tries to provide an answer to questions like, “How’s the weather today?” Whether the rumors are true that Apple is planning to release a TV set by 2013, Siri-like voice recognition is headed for the living room. Microsoft is already there, via its Xbox 360 game console, and Comcast, Samsung Electronics, LG, and Sharp are working on voice-enabled features for TV sets, set-top boxes, and related products. Mike Thompson, senior vice-president at Nuance Communications, the world’s largest supplier of voice recognition technology, says “a wave” of device makers will ship products that understand voice commands next year.
It’s easy to see the appeal. Few would be upset if, instead of figuring out which one of three remotes to use, viewers could sit on the couch and say, “Record the next episode of Modern Family.” And while a growing percentage of new TVs connect to the Internet, many customers are put off by overly complex controls or on-screen keyboards that require the user to type by moving a cursor at an excruciatingly slow pace, says Jakob Nielsen, a product usability expert and co-founder of design consultancy Nielsen Norman Group. “Anything would be better than what we have now,” he says. “We can only go up from here.”
Microsoft has the early lead thanks to Kinect, an Xbox peripheral with cameras and motion sensors for hands-free gaming. Kinect also has sensitive microphones. After waking up the system by saying “Xbox,” subscribers to Microsoft’s $60-a-year Xbox LIVE service can search for shows, movies, and games by speaking to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. “You get a lot of claims saying, ‘We’re about to transform TV,’ ” says Ross Honey, general manager of Xbox LIVE entertainment and advertising for Microsoft. “We already have.”
Most consumers’ first opportunity to talk to their TVs—and have them listen—will be through voice-enabled apps for their smartphone or tablet. More than 3 million Comcast subscribers have downloaded an app that turns their smartphone into a remote control for the company’s Xfinity broadband service. Comcast is looking at adding voice-control features to the app, says spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury. Samsung and Sharp are developing similar apps of their own, according to people familiar with their plans. This may well have been the approach Jobs had in mind. According to one former Apple manager who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly, Jobs saw little reason for a stand-alone remote when iPhones and iPads can do the job better.
Others are looking to fix rather than eliminate the remote. Nuance’s Thompson says TV, DVD, and set-top box makers are all working on models that look more like iPhones, some with touchscreens rather than that gaggle of unused buttons. Some of the prototypes are designed around a single prominent button that activates a microphone, he says. Cost will be a challenge, since such a device would need a microphone and Wi-Fi antenna instead of the infrared sensors now commonly used. Industry politics will also be an issue. Since having every electronic box within earshot respond at once would be a nightmare, equipment makers need to agree on which device runs the show.
Flight of the Warbots
A U.S. soldier in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, launches a Raven drone Bryan Denton
By Brad StoneThe members of Apache Troop couldn’t see a thing. It was August 2010, 0200 hours. About 120 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were silently spreading out over a remote farm in northwestern Iraq. Their objective: a mud hut where, according to intelligence reports, two suicide bombers were planning an attack on a checkpoint to coincide with the end of Ramadan. But the allied soldiers, even wearing night vision goggles, couldn’t locate the hut; eight-foot-tall sunflowers obscured their view.
As the troops searched for their target, two U.S. cavalrymen set up on the edge of the squadron, reached into their packs, and withdrew the components of a 4-lb. miniature airplane called the Raven-B. They assembled it in seconds, revved its motor until it buzzed like an angry bee, and threw it into the air. With a hand-held control unit, the soldiers put the aircraft into automatic orbit a few hundred feet above the field. Watching the video transmission from the Raven-B’s infrared camera, they spotted the hut and directed the plane to light up the roof with an infrared laser, which guided the team through the sunflowers to their target. Without firing a shot, they arrested the saboteurs, who were sleeping inside. The suicide vests were buried nearby in a vegetable garden.
When civilians think of the new class of mechanical warriors aiding troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the high-priced, high-tech airplanes that come to mind have names like Predator and Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman, respectively. These unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, operate over the Middle East, conducting in-depth surveillance of potential targets. Some of them are armed. In September, senior al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen by two CIA-controlled Predators launching Hellfire missiles. On Dec. 4, Iran claimed it recovered a RQ-170 Sentinel, the top-secret stealth drone that was used in the May raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.
But aircraft such as the MQ-1 Predator, which has a wingspan of 49 feet and costs up to $30 million, constitute only a sliver of America’s expanding drone fleet. The rest are portable, far less expensive models like the Raven-B. Made with durable composites and packed with electronics, these smaller devices serve as binoculars in the sky for soldiers on the ground. Small UAVs “provide ground commanders with intelligence that five years ago was only available as a general-officer or corps-level asset,” says U.S. Army Captain Keith Benoit, who commanded Apache Troop’s assault through the sunflower field. “They in essence saved the lives of my soldiers because we were able to stage the operation covertly.”
In 2002, U.S. ground forces brought only a few prototype UAVs into Afghanistan. They allowed soldiers to see around the next village block or over the next hill without having to call up the chain of command for air support. As of July of this year, according to the Defense Dept., nearly 7,000 small UAVs were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Any time you empower an individual soldier, seaman, or airman with the ability to gather a little bit of reconnaissance information that he controls, you empower him to make decisions quickly,” says Jeffrey Kline, program director of maritime defense and security research programs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
Even as the U.S. military budget declines in the face of ballooning deficits and the wind-down of two wars, spending on unmanned systems has grown from near nothing two decades ago to a projected $6.2 billion in 2012. Not surprisingly, defense contractors have refocused their efforts. They’re preparing for warfare waged by unmanned vehicles—robots controlled by a combination of artificial intelligence and remote human input.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Walk, Bike to Work in Salt Lake’s Answer to Suburban Nightmares
Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- At the southwestern edge of Salt Lake City, tightly packed new homes run along gentle ridgelines. In the background, the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains catch puffs of cloud on a crisp autumn day.
This is the growing community of Daybreak and it’s much more than suburbia in a stunning setting. Someday residents of 20,000 houses and apartments could walk or bike to 2.4 million square feet of shopping and 5 million square feet of offices.The same mix of uses and walkability can be found in City Creek, an estimated $1.5 billion redevelopment covering 23 acres in downtown Salt Lake City, about 45 minutes away.The Salt Lake City area is piloting a federal program called Sustainable Communities that could help cities uncover underserved markets and devise developments that serve them. Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, worked on the program with Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ray LaHood, who heads the Department of Transportation.“More metro areas understand that they need a variety of places for people to live,” Donovan said in an interview in his Washington office. “Or they will end up shutting out whole classes of working people, like teachers, and firefighters. That makes it harder to attract employers.”The hope is that communities can move beyond the brain-dead national models of development and related finance that led to bubble-fed overbuilding. Even now few developers know how to pump out anything but oversized tract houses and identical shopping strips.‘Ghost Towns’“The ghost towns of the housing bust are places that lack transportation options, that aren’t walkable,” Donovan said. “The average family spends 52 cents of every dollar they earn on housing and transportation combined, so the biggest opportunity is in development around transportation.”Providing the link between City Creek, which opens in March, and Daybreak is a light rail line that started operations last August.Daybreak and City Creek got built in sync with a regional planning effort of 18 communities and four counties along the Wasatch Front called Wasatch Choice for 2040.Most real-estate developers and their lenders wouldn’t attempt the density and mix of the Salt Lake City projects. Neither City Creek Reserve Inc., the development arm of the Mormon church, nor Daybreak’s developer, Kennecott Land Co., which is part of the Rio Tinto mining empire, needed conventional lenders.Getting ComfortableSustainable Communities aims at promoting smaller mixed- use, high-density development around transit stops. The federal grant is only $5 million, and local planners are using it to help lenders and developers get comfortable with the market for this so-called transit-oriented development. They may change zoning and parking requirements to lower the barriers to entry.Planners use computer modeling to test transit-oriented neighborhood-design scenarios, trying out different mixes and densities of apartments, offices, shops, schools and parks. The models evaluate the effects “on transportation, utility costs, tax revenue, and on return on investment for developers,” said Andrew Gruber, executive director of the Wasatch Front Regional Council, a local-government group that co-manages Wasatch Choice for 2040.‘Some Kind of Leap’“Communities recognize there’s some kind of leap they have to take,” said Donovan, so that everyone learns what specific kinds of development are likely to work in the future. It’s an effort cities almost never attempt.If Wasatch 2040’s planning tools help reduce development risks, projects can more adventurously pursue amenable growth that saves energy, lowers government costs and eradicates a minimum of farmland and forest.It’s regrettable that Congress has just eliminated the program’s funding for 2012, even though the $98 million it cost this year is meaningless in deficit-reduction terms.“The reason this effort has gotten so much interest at the state and local level is that we are supporting a vision, rather than imposing a vision,” Donovan said.(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.
To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net; web.me.com/jscanlonrussell
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.IBM Analytics Help Memphis Cops Get 'Smart'
(Bloomberg) — Memphis Police Lieutenant Paul Wright arrived at a shooting scene in the city’s Frayser neighborhood on Nov. 17, just as an ambulance was speeding away with the injured victim.
An instant later, a nearby officer pulled out an HTC Corp. smartphone to file a police report. Within an hour, the information would be scoured by International Business Machines Inc. software, helping the Memphis Police Department determine whether the incident was part of a widespread pattern.
Tennessee’s largest city is taking part in one of more than 2,000 so-called smart city projects aimed at helping urban areas, from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro, use data analysis to cut crime, pollution and traffic congestion. Over a decade, cities will invest $108 billion in related tools, according to Pike Research, creating a windfall for software makers such as IBM, device manufacturers like HTC and Siemens AG, Europe’s top engineering company, Bloomberg Businessweek.com reported.
Crimes such as robberies, burglaries and forcible rapes in Memphis fell to the lowest level in a quarter-century in 2010, reflecting stepped up reliance on technology to fight crime, according to researchers at the University of Memphis.
“It’s not Minority Report—we can’t look at someone’s head and their genes and say they’re going to commit a crime,” said Richard Janikowski, an associate professor at the University of Memphis who has analyzed Memphis crime data. “But can we forecast what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen? Yes, we can.”
While Memphis’s focus has been on reducing crime, other cities such as London are using smart city tools to deal with challenges posed by population growth, as cities attract more people than rural areas for the first time. Last year, about 50.5 percent of the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, lived in cities, according to a March 2010 report from the United Nations. By 2050, the urban population is forecast to rise to 69 percent.
“It will stress the physical and social infrastructure of cities over time,” said Mark Cleverley, director of public safety solutions at Armonk, New York-based IBM.
Just yesterday, IBM announced plans to buy Curam Software Ltd., a Dublin-based maker of software that helps cities manage social and health-care related services. That follows IBM’s October acquisition of I2, a Cambridge, England-based maker of analytics software designed to help cities combat crime.
“Memphis has been an exemplar of one of the principles of our smarter city work: public safety,” Cleverley said.
Sales of smart city-related technology may rise to $57 billion in 2014 from $34 billion last year, according to researcher IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.
The approach has its limits in combating crime. Analytics software can’t replace street patrols. Also, too heavy an emphasis on statistics can induce some officials to downgrade the severity of a crime in a bid to make a city’s results look better, said John Eterno, a retired captain with the New York City Police Department who’s now an associate dean in the Department of Criminal Justice at Molloy College in New York.
“It’s like squeezing a lemon: initially the juice comes out easily, and over time it becomes more difficult,” said Eterno, author of The Crime Numbers Game, due to be published in January. “We’ve seen the numbers manipulated because of this tendency.”
Economic slowdown is also causing city governments to curtail spending on certain kinds of technology to cover budget shortfalls caused by lower tax receipts. That could slow the pace of adoption of smart city tools.
Memphis’s data-analysis effort, called Blue Crush, came about after the success of pilot projects, including one where 5,000 sexual assault cases were examined by variables including location and time of day. Researchers learned that women in low-income neighborhoods were being attacked while using pay phones at convenience stores at night. The phones tended to be located around the corner of the building in poorly lit areas.