Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time

On December 4, 1974, a hapless pizza restaurant worker answered the phone and heard a strange, robotic voice. “I’d like to order a pizza,” the voice said. “A large pizza, please. Pepperoni and mushrooms.” The worker asked for the address, but then hung-up when the voice took too long to respond.

The caller on the other end was Donald Sherman. But it wasn’t his voice. He had a rare disorder called Möbius syndrome, which results in facial paralysis and makes speech difficult. Sherman was calling from the Michigan State University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was using one of the very first text-to-speech systems to try to order a pizza.

Sherman was using a system designed by John Eulenberg and J. J. Jackson and consisting of a CDC 6500 mainframe computer nicknamed “Alexander” and a device called the Votrax voice synthesizer.

The first few places Sherman called thought it was a prank, but at last someone took the call seriously. Alexander could speak clearly enough to place the order, and the pizza was delivered.

It was the first time anyone used a computer to order a pizza, and more importantly, it proved that text-to-speech systems could be used to effectively communicate in the real-world. Forty years before Siri.

Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time

On December 4, 1974, a hapless pizza restaurant worker answered the phone and heard a strange, robotic voice. “I’d like to order a pizza,” the voice said. “A large pizza, please. Pepperoni and mushrooms.” The worker asked for the address, but then hung-up when the voice took too long to respond.

The caller on the other end was Donald Sherman. But it wasn’t his voice. He had a rare disorder called Möbius syndrome, which results in facial paralysis and makes speech difficult. Sherman was calling from the Michigan State University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was using one of the very first text-to-speech systems to try to order a pizza.

Sherman was using a system designed by John Eulenberg and J. J. Jackson and consisting of a CDC 6500 mainframe computer nicknamed “Alexander” and a device called the Votrax voice synthesizer.

The first few places Sherman called thought it was a prank, but at last someone took the call seriously. Alexander could speak clearly enough to place the order, and the pizza was delivered.

It was the first time anyone used a computer to order a pizza, and more importantly, it proved that text-to-speech systems could be used to effectively communicate in the real-world. Forty years before Siri.

Facebook Is Making News Feed Better By Asking Real People Direct Questions

Getty Images

It’s a well-known fact that Facebook’s flagship feature, News Feed, is run by algorithms.

Essentially, invisible computations are going on all the time that automatically optimize future items you see on your feed, depending on the actions you take now—what you click on, what you like, what you comment on. The goal, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told WIRED in 2013, is “to build the perfect personalized newspaper for 1.1 billion people and counting.”

But Facebook knows that it can do better than relying solely on these cold computations.

As detailed in a new piece on Backchannel by former WIRED writer Steven Levy, Facebook is currently running a focus-group-like program that asks people direct questions about News Feed items in an effort to improve post relevance. According to Levy, the pilot program started last August, testing just 30 Facebook users in an office in Knoxville, Tennessee.

It has now expanded to 600 people around the country, who are paid by Facebook to work answering News Feed questions four hours a day from home. Eventually, Facebook could offer some kind of direct questioning to its entire population of users.

The project works like this: each of these 600 Facebook users is presented with 30 top News Feed stories in a random order. Then they go through each story one by one. They can comment, share, follow a link, or choose to ignore the story. After that they answer eight questions about each item, including how much they cared about the subject of the story, how welcome the story was in their News Feed, how entertaining it was, and how much the story connected them to friends and family. Finally, they are asked to write a few sentences describing their overall feelings about the News Feed story.

Facebook itself acknowledges there are problems with how News Feed is currently set up. It’s already very good at delivering personal news from close friends—things like marriages, childbirths and vacations—but it’s also overrun with items that are sugary sweet and designed to tug at your emotions, which Levy has dubbed the “Dozen Doughnuts problem.”

The donut-y content contrasts with a “vegetables” of real journalism and hard news. When so many of those donuts are presented to you at a time, you’re bound to click on at least one item. And that click sends a strong signal to Facebook: you want to see more of the same thing.

Facebook could interfere. But especially in the case of News Feed, it prefers not to be heavy-handed. “We really try to not express any editorial judgment,” Adam Mosseri, News Feed product director, tells Levy. “We might think that Ferguson is more important than the Ice Bucket Challenge but we don’t think we should be forcing people to eat their vegetables even though we may or may not think vegetables are healthy.”

Preliminary results have already emerged. As expected, news from close friends—especially tagged and photo stories—has been consistently rated as highly relevant. But other things, like the meaning of a “like,” has proven to be more ambiguous. It could mean anything from the approval of a story to validation of a user’s connection to the author.

Unfortunately, so far, it looks like users are less willing to engage with “meaningful” stories or news, preferring anything that triggers a strong emotional response. But Facebook is hopeful that when it begins asking users about sets of stories instead of individual items people will start to reward informative content.

Though some Facebook employees are quoted in Levy’s story as wanting to do the right thing by fixing the News Feed, the real reason why Facebook may have a vested interest in making News Feed the best product it can be is glossed over. Facebook made $2 billion in ad revenue last quarter, more than two-thirds of its total $3.59 billion in ad revenue for 2014.

And where do those ads live? In News Feed. If the social network can crack the problem of what users really want from News Feed, they can presumably apply those learnings to ads, too—and make those ads irresistible to its users in the process.

How Imgur’s New GIF-Maker Stacks Up Against Other Tools Out There

There’s a new kid on the GIF-creation scene, and it’s a good kid. This week, Imgur launched a new “Video to GIF” feature that lets you enter a URL, adjust the parameters of a clip, and get a great-looking GIF or GIFV file within a few seconds. It puts that animation on an Imgur page, so if you have an account, you can share it on Imgur and host comments from all the wonderful Internet people.

Of course, Imgur is not the first or the only free GIF-creation tool on the Web. We take a look at the newest GIF generator, and see how it stacks up against some other offerings we’ve used.

Imgur Video to GIF

What it does: Converts any video URL to a GIF or GIFV. The newest GIF-creator on the block is also one of the most versatile—at least if you want to convert a video. The new Video to GIF option at Imgur allows you to just pop in a video URL—YouTube, Vimeo, Funny Or Die, or pretty much any other video service. You select an entry point for the clip, pick a length from 0.5 to 15 seconds with the scrubber, and even add a text subtitle if you want. The tool spits out a GIF if the file is less than 10MB, or a GIFV if it’s bigger. The results show up in an Imgur template, but you can open the file alone in a new window or tab by right-clicking on it. You can also embed it in a web page using an iframe, like this:

GifYouTube

What it does: Converts any YouTube video to a GIF or WebM video. If you’re working with a YouTube clip, GIFYouTube is probably the fastest way to get what you need; you just add “gif” before the “youtube” in the address bar, and you’re off to the GIF-making races. You can turn clips into GIFs that are 1 to 15 seconds long, and GIFYouTube gives you the option of viewing it as a WebM video file or a GIF. Your results show up in a GIFYouTube template, but you can also view the GIF by its lonesome if you copy image URL. GIFYouTube doesn’t do text overlays, and the GIFs are grainier than Imgur’s output, but it’s a really quick way to get it done from a YouTube page.

EZGIF

What it does: Lets you edit existing GIFs. EZGIF is a go-to post-production tool if you’re really serious about your GIFs. You can use it to create GIFs from images or uploaded video (it doesn’t create them from YouTube links). But it’s the editing options that are killer. You can resize and crop existing GIFs by their URL, and you can add effects to existing GIFs. The “GIF Effects” tab lets you apply filters, flip the GIF horizontally or vertically, add a text overlay, or change its speed.

Imgflip

What it does: Converts video files, YouTube videos, and images to GIFs. Imgflip is certainly a versatile GIF-creation tool, but it requires registration to get the most of it. There are tons of options: You can fine-tune the speed, size, and image quality of the GIF, and you can add text, crop, rotate the GIF, and even reverse it. But in order to create a GIF from a YouTube video, you need to create a free account. You also need to create an account to “claim” your GIF, or else it will be deleted after an hour. Imgflip’s free GIFs are watermarked, too—you need a $10-per-month Pro account to get watermark-free images.

Picasion

What it does: Converts a series of static images to slideshow GIFs (see above). Picasion doesn’t offer the video-to-GIF abilities or crazy tweakability of Imgflip, but it does crank out clean GIFs without an annoying wrapper page. No registration is needed, either. The service lets you set the size of the GIF and the frame-by-frame playback speed.

GifMaker.me

What it does: Converts images to GIFs. This one’s another quick-and-easy service for turning a bunch of images into a slideshow-style GIF, but you can only view your work on GifMaker’s page template. There’s no clean GIF-only URL, which is a bummer. You can adjust the size, speed, and repeat settings for your GIF with this service.

Deal With It GIF Creator

What it does: Converts images to “Deal With It” montages. This site only does one thing, but it does it well: It makes a pair of sunglasses fall from the sky, stop where you want them to, and then displays the text “Deal With It” at the bottom of the GIF. You can edit the text to say what you want, change up the text color, resize the sunglasses, and even add several more pairs of shades to the mix. Assert your authority!

Facebook Is Making News Feed Better By Asking Real People Direct Questions

Getty Images

It’s a well-known fact that Facebook’s flagship feature, News Feed, is run by algorithms.

Essentially, invisible computations are going on all the time that automatically optimize future items you see on your feed, depending on the actions you take now—what you click on, what you like, what you comment on. The goal, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told WIRED in 2013, is “to build the perfect personalized newspaper for 1.1 billion people and counting.”

But Facebook knows that it can do better than relying solely on these cold computations.

As detailed in a new piece on Backchannel by former WIRED writer Steven Levy, Facebook is currently running a focus-group-like program that asks people direct questions about News Feed items in an effort to improve post relevance. According to Levy, the pilot program started last August, testing just 30 Facebook users in an office in Knoxville, Tennessee.

It has now expanded to 600 people around the country, who are paid by Facebook to work answering News Feed questions four hours a day from home. Eventually, Facebook could offer some kind of direct questioning to its entire population of users.

The project works like this: each of these 600 Facebook users is presented with 30 top News Feed stories in a random order. Then they go through each story one by one. They can comment, share, follow a link, or choose to ignore the story. After that they answer eight questions about each item, including how much they cared about the subject of the story, how welcome the story was in their News Feed, how entertaining it was, and how much the story connected them to friends and family. Finally, they are asked to write a few sentences describing their overall feelings about the News Feed story.

Facebook itself acknowledges there are problems with how News Feed is currently set up. It’s already very good at delivering personal news from close friends—things like marriages, childbirths and vacations—but it’s also overrun with items that are sugary sweet and designed to tug at your emotions, which Levy has dubbed the “Dozen Doughnuts problem.”

The donut-y content contrasts with a “vegetables” of real journalism and hard news. When so many of those donuts are presented to you at a time, you’re bound to click on at least one item. And that click sends a strong signal to Facebook: you want to see more of the same thing.

Facebook could interfere. But especially in the case of News Feed, it prefers not to be heavy-handed. “We really try to not express any editorial judgment,” Adam Mosseri, News Feed product director, tells Levy. “We might think that Ferguson is more important than the Ice Bucket Challenge but we don’t think we should be forcing people to eat their vegetables even though we may or may not think vegetables are healthy.”

Preliminary results have already emerged. As expected, news from close friends—especially tagged and photo stories—has been consistently rated as highly relevant. But other things, like the meaning of a “like,” has proven to be more ambiguous. It could mean anything from the approval of a story to validation of a user’s connection to the author.

Unfortunately, so far, it looks like users are less willing to engage with “meaningful” stories or news, preferring anything that triggers a strong emotional response. But Facebook is hopeful that when it begins asking users about sets of stories instead of individual items people will start to reward informative content.

Though some Facebook employees are quoted in Levy’s story as wanting to do the right thing by fixing the News Feed, the real reason why Facebook may have a vested interest in making News Feed the best product it can be is glossed over. Facebook made $2 billion in ad revenue last quarter, more than two-thirds of its total $3.59 billion in ad revenue for 2014.

And where do those ads live? In News Feed. If the social network can crack the problem of what users really want from News Feed, they can presumably apply those learnings to ads, too—and make those ads irresistible to its users in the process.

Imgur’s New GIF Tool Is Awesome. Here Are Some Other Great Options

There’s a new kid on the GIF-creation scene, and it’s a good kid. This week, Imgur launched a new “Video to GIF” feature that lets you enter a URL, adjust the parameters of a clip, and get a great-looking GIF or GIFV file within a few seconds. It puts that animation on an Imgur page, so if you have an account, you can share it on Imgur and host comments from all the wonderful Internet people.

Of course, Imgur is not the first or the only free GIF-creation tool on the Web. We take a look at the newest GIF generator, and see how it stacks up against some other offerings we’ve used.

Imgur Video to GIF

What it does: Converts any video URL to a GIF or GIFV. The newest GIF-creator on the block is also one of the most versatile—at least if you want to convert a video. The new Video to GIF option at Imgur allows you to just pop in a video URL—YouTube, Vimeo, Funny Or Die, or pretty much any other video service. You select an entry point for the clip, pick a length from 0.5 to 15 seconds with the scrubber, and even add a text subtitle if you want. The tool spits out a GIF if the file is less than 10MB, or a GIFV if it’s bigger. The results show up in an Imgur template, but you can open the file alone in a new window or tab by right-clicking on it. You can also embed it in a web page using an iframe, like this:

GifYouTube

What it does: Converts any YouTube video to a GIF or WebM video. If you’re working with a YouTube clip, GIFYouTube is probably the fastest way to get what you need; you just add “gif” before the “youtube” in the address bar, and you’re off to the GIF-making races. You can turn clips into GIFs that are 1 to 15 seconds long, and GIFYouTube gives you the option of viewing it as a WebM video file or a GIF. Your results show up in a GIFYouTube template, but you can also view the GIF by its lonesome if you copy image URL. GIFYouTube doesn’t do text overlays, and the GIFs are grainier than Imgur’s output, but it’s a really quick way to get it done from a YouTube page.

EZGIF

What it does: Lets you edit existing GIFs. EZGIF is a go-to post-production tool if you’re really serious about your GIFs. You can use it to create GIFs from images or uploaded video (it doesn’t create them from YouTube links). But it’s the editing options that are killer. You can resize and crop existing GIFs by their URL, and you can add effects to existing GIFs. The “GIF Effects” tab lets you apply filters, flip the GIF horizontally or vertically, add a text overlay, or change its speed.

Imgflip

What it does: Converts video files, YouTube videos, and images to GIFs. Imgflip is certainly a versatile GIF-creation tool, but it requires registration to get the most of it. There are tons of options: You can fine-tune the speed, size, and image quality of the GIF, and you can add text, crop, rotate the GIF, and even reverse it. But in order to create a GIF from a YouTube video, you need to create a free account. You also need to create an account to “claim” your GIF, or else it will be deleted after an hour. Imgflip’s free GIFs are watermarked, too—you need a $10-per-month Pro account to get watermark-free images.

Picasion

What it does: Converts a series of static images to slideshow GIFs (see above). Picasion doesn’t offer the video-to-GIF abilities or crazy tweakability of Imgflip, but it does crank out clean GIFs without an annoying wrapper page. No registration is needed, either. The service lets you set the size of the GIF and the frame-by-frame playback speed.

GifMaker.me

What it does: Converts images to GIFs. This one’s another quick-and-easy service for turning a bunch of images into a slideshow-style GIF, but you can only view your work on GifMaker’s page template. There’s no clean GIF-only URL, which is a bummer. You can adjust the size, speed, and repeat settings for your GIF with this service.

Deal With It GIF Creator

What it does: Converts images to “Deal With It” montages. This site only does one thing, but it does it well: It makes a pair of sunglasses fall from the sky, stop where you want them to, and then displays the text “Deal With It” at the bottom of the GIF. You can edit the text to say what you want, change up the text color, resize the sunglasses, and even add several more pairs of shades to the mix. Assert your authority!

Vinyl or CDs: Tech Doesn’t Do Sentimental — Listening Habits Show What’s Next for Cloud

incredibleguy/Flickr

I am old enough to be of the generation that grew up with vinyl. Unlike the romantics of today I remember the scratches, the arguments over borrowing my brother’s records, putting them on my worn and generally abused record player and the reality that after the first few plays, even with that brand new stylus, the quality degraded to that “warm” or, in reality, muffled sound that I remember. The revival we see today is a choice, largely based on the sentimental feelings that we tend to attach to music. Yes, I miss the artwork, the feel and smell, but do I miss the general faff? Not really. Even with a vinyl revival, we have moved light years away in terms of the volume of recordings available digitally today. There are very few who would want to go back to how it used to be. The choice of vinyl is from the world of irrationality not the rational.

The point is that technology doesn’t do sentimental. Compact Discs wiped the floor with vinyl records because they could hold more, were more robust and the sound was consistently good. Downloads have taken this further mainly driven not by sound quality but convenience of format, i.e. the iPod. We are driving down the all too familiar silicon integration cost convenience curve which is underpinned by Moore’s law; skip the box, skip the media and the album. I just want the song. In fact, I don’t have the patience to download, I’m going to stream it… and so on we go.

How do we get from this to thinking about the future of cloud? Well, for me the two are related. My first ever job was working for the American mixed signal chipmaker Analog Devices. Mixed signal simply means analog and digital signals; analog being the “real world” and digital being that of a computer. So their trade was and is in the conversion of the real world into the easier to manipulate, more robust and generally cheaper world of digital – and back again.

When I first started there, the division I worked in made an esoteric analog-digital converter which translated the movement of transducers found on airplanes, tanks, steel mills and missiles into digital so control systems could make the right decisions. There were two methods for making the same thing: the “Hybrid” and the “Monolithic”. At that time, 1987, the Hybrids ruled the day. In those days, the term “hybrid” was used to describe a component where we had to use two different types of silicon to get the thing to work. Hybrid literally means “different elements”. Conversely Monolithic means “(on) the same piece”. The key point was that the monolithic product was cheaper to make – a lot, lot cheaper. It didn’t require the hands of a surgeon to place components on ceramic substrates with gold interconnects. It relied instead on an automated semiconductor process. You know which production method eventually won out.

Let’s move the argument to the current state of cloud computing. Hybrid clouds are very much in vogue and characterize a status quo where the current internet-based cloud doesn’t meet the requirements of all the applications we have. So, we marry the public cloud with private cloud architectures, where we traditionally have foregone flexibility and elasticity for security and control.

As happened in the past, for those analog-digital semiconductors, the world of hybrid cloud is also just a transition, simply a stopping point, not a destination. We currently have pools of computing connected by a variety of communication methods, and we simply haven’t worked out the process to reach the “monolithic” stage. But we will. Current cloud computing is generally made of three things, elastic CPU, RAM and Disk. These can be reached via the internet or some fixed network. Just as semiconductors evolved architectures and designs so that they could become “monolithic”, the same will apply to cloud computing, but writ large across the globe.

The evolution of cloud from pools out on the internet will therefore evolve from today’s triple play to a “quad play” as the fourth element, the network, is integrated and automated for both private and public cloud types of environments – or to give network back its original name, Inter Process Communication, (tipping my hat here to a long line of luminaries who have made this point, from the father of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, to Professor John Day pioneering the next evolution of the internet).

Cloud is not a technology but a dynamic way of optimizing your consumption with the availability of resources – the same evolution that has taken us from vinyl to CD to download. The challenge is therefore to restore the original vision of the founding fathers of the core technology that underpins the digital and with it the global economy. The arrival at a global, monolithic “platform of computing” where the network is the computer isn’t a vision or choice. It’s simply the realization of a world set out and supported by a model which has remained faithfully predictable for the last 50 years.

Matthew Finnie is Group CTO and EVP of Cloud Services at Interoute.

The New Space Race: Bringing Internet to the Other 4 Billion

A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. The USSR’s small satellite is responsible for starting the space race with the US. Today’s race is off and running. NASA

Back in the 1960s, the race was on between the United States and the USSR to see who could get to the moon first. That high-stakes competition ushered in a new era of space exploration featuring incredible levels of ingenuity, creativity, and scientific mastery. Now, decades later, we are on the verge of yet another space race – the race to build a satellite network capable of bringing the Internet to the estimated 4.4 billion people currently living without access to the “world wide” web.

The company most invested in providing Internet access to the entire planet is ‘net behemoth Google. Through at least two initiatives of their own and a recent $1 billion investment in SpaceX, Google has made it clear that connecting the globe is a serious priority both in the immediate future and beyond.

At the moment, three major efforts are being made to connect the globe to the power of the Internet. And while each has a similar short-term mission, the future applications of each is impressively distinct.

Project Loon

Adopting an innovative – if unorthodox – strategy, Google’s own Project Loon aims to make the Internet more widely available through the use of giant balloons. These special high-altitude balloons are launched into the stratosphere (around 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth) where they float safely above the danger of airplanes and unfavorable weather. Though it sounds strange, the project is actually ingenious.

Google’s hopes are that Project Loon will provide an inexpensive method for increasing the coverage area needed to bring the web to inhabitants of especially remote areas. The balloons in question are designed with an algorithm utilizes natural patterns of sub-atmospheric wind to ensure that consistent coverage is provided when and where it’s needed most. In effect, the balloons form an enormous communication network that may one day span the entire globe.

In addition to smart programming, the balloons are solar-powered and can provide Internet coverage to an area around 40 kilometers in diameter. By partnering with numerous telecommunications companies, Google hopes Project Loon can use wireless LTE technology to allow people within the coverage area to connect to the web from phones and other mobile devices. The first tests for Project Loon began in the summer of 2013 in New Zealand and have since expanded to cover more ground. The results are have promising, meaning that balloons may be a big part of the Internet’s future.

OneWeb

Led by former Google innovator Greg Wyler, OneWeb looks to bring the Internet to billions through a massive satellite network, one they say will be the largest in the world. Wyler is no stranger to delivering the Internet to remote areas, having set up Africa’s first 3G cell network. He also founded O3B (another company dedicated to bringing the Internet to the entirety of the mankind) before being recruited by Google to head an in-house initiative with the same goal.

OneWeb’s plan includes launching nearly 700 satellites into space, creating a network built to provide high speed Internet at a low cost. The project has already receiving up to $2 billion from financial backers like Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic , with the latter providing use of its LauncherOne program to put the satellites into orbit.

Though still a few years behind Project Loon, OneWeb’s more advanced technology promises far more complex network security and a broader overall reach (it could become a truly worldwide provider, rather than solely focusing on underdeveloped areas.) The OneWeb project has also cleared another important hurdle that remains in place for competitor SpaceX — obtaining the rights to the spectrum needed to deliver the Internet from space

SpaceX

The latest venture for billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has already made a splash with its work to advance private space travel. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the company is a major player in the race for worldwide Internet. Musk’s project is similar in design to that being worked on by OneWeb, Musk asserts that his undertaking will be “an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg (Wyler) wants.” In fact, some reports have indicated that Musk and Wyler were interested in partnering, but disagreements over technology and Wyler’s refusal to give up a large stake in O3b broke off any partnership.

Instead, Musk has pushed ahead, stating that he believes “there should be two competing systems.” This competition will be bolstered by the recent $1 billion investment recently poured into SpaceX by investors Google and Fidelity.

The biggest hurdle remaining is the rights to a broadcast spectrum like the one that OneWeb has already locked up. Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is a key OneWeb investor, believes this could be a dealbreaker for SpaceX. “I don’t think Elon can do a competing thing,” Branson says. “Greg has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network — like there physically is not enough space. If Elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us.” Musk has instead “discussed using optical-laser technology in his satellites,” though lasers (which can’t pass through clouds) would be a far less reliable method of delivering a connection. Undaunted, Musk says the first stage of the project could be done within five years, but later stages may expand the scope beyond Earth. The long-term goal for the project is to expand a connected network all the way to Mars, where Musk hopes to build a colony in the not-too-distant future.

With billions of dollars in financial backing, all three of these projects seem poised to achieve the goal of delivering the Internet to the entire globe. And for the first time in decades, a new space race has the potential to radically change the life of billions here on earth.

Rick Delgado is a technology commentator and freelance journalist.

Jay-Z Makes a Bid to Acquire a Swedish Streaming Music Company

Jay-Z performs at the 3rd Global Citizen Festival in Central Park in New York, on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014. Brad Barket/Invision/AP

Jay-Z’s empire may soon be a little bit larger. The rapper and business mogul is about to get into the streaming music business.

On Friday, the Swedish company Aspiro, which is behind the streaming services WiMP and Tidal, announced that Jay-Z’s company, Project Panther, had submitted a bid to acquire Aspiro for $56 million. The deal, which already has unanimous approval, according to a board statement, would catapult Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, into one of tech’s most competitive industries.

Gone are the days when Pandora was the only option around for streaming music. Today, there’s Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and Sony’s newly announced Playstation Music, which is powered by Spotify. Each service offers a different breadth of music options, for different prices, on different devices, in hopes of eking out a bigger slice of the music streaming pie. If Pandora’s going to be pre-loaded in your BMW, then Spotify’s going to seize on your Uber ride, and Apple’s going to make sure that Beats Music, which it acquired along with Beats’ hardware business last year, is on every single iPhone.

With WiMP and Tidal, Jay-Z would have lots of catching up to do. Today, WiMP has just 512,000 paying users, compared against Spotify’s 15 million and counting. Tidal has yet to release its numbers. Still, both WiMP and Tidal do promise music lovers something different from leading competitors: a higher quality listening experience. That’s because it uses a process called lossless compression that preserves the original audio data, even when the file is compressed. While other options exist for high fidelity audio, including Neil Young’s recently released PonoMusic player (which has faced some harsh criticism since its debut), they’ve yet to truly catch on with the masses. That could be because, generally, they tend to be more expensive than the alternatives, which is a tough sell for a generation that’s grown up on all-you-can-eat, free streaming. Tidal, for one, costs $20 a month.

Still, as arguably one of the most famous faces in music today — not to mention one half of the most famous couple in music today — Jay-Z may be able to bring some much needed cachet to this new type of streaming technology. And for Jay, the advantage is clear. With his hands on a streaming service, he’ll be better able to promote the other parts of his empire, including his entertainment company Roc Nation, and the artists it represents.

Vinyl or CDs: Tech Doesn’t Do Sentimental — Listening Habits Show What’s Next for Cloud

incredibleguy/Flickr

I am old enough to be of the generation that grew up with vinyl. Unlike the romantics of today I remember the scratches, the arguments over borrowing my brother’s records, putting them on my worn and generally abused record player and the reality that after the first few plays, even with that brand new stylus, the quality degraded to that “warm” or, in reality, muffled sound that I remember. The revival we see today is a choice, largely based on the sentimental feelings that we tend to attach to music. Yes, I miss the artwork, the feel and smell, but do I miss the general faff? Not really. Even with a vinyl revival, we have moved light years away in terms of the volume of recordings available digitally today. There are very few who would want to go back to how it used to be. The choice of vinyl is from the world of irrationality not the rational.

The point is that technology doesn’t do sentimental. Compact Discs wiped the floor with vinyl records because they could hold more, were more robust and the sound was consistently good. Downloads have taken this further mainly driven not by sound quality but convenience of format, i.e. the iPod. We are driving down the all too familiar silicon integration cost convenience curve which is underpinned by Moore’s law; skip the box, skip the media and the album. I just want the song. In fact, I don’t have the patience to download, I’m going to stream it… and so on we go.

How do we get from this to thinking about the future of cloud? Well, for me the two are related. My first ever job was working for the American mixed signal chipmaker Analog Devices. Mixed signal simply means analog and digital signals; analog being the “real world” and digital being that of a computer. So their trade was and is in the conversion of the real world into the easier to manipulate, more robust and generally cheaper world of digital – and back again.

When I first started there, the division I worked in made an esoteric analog-digital converter which translated the movement of transducers found on airplanes, tanks, steel mills and missiles into digital so control systems could make the right decisions. There were two methods for making the same thing: the “Hybrid” and the “Monolithic”. At that time, 1987, the Hybrids ruled the day. In those days, the term “hybrid” was used to describe a component where we had to use two different types of silicon to get the thing to work. Hybrid literally means “different elements”. Conversely Monolithic means “(on) the same piece”. The key point was that the monolithic product was cheaper to make – a lot, lot cheaper. It didn’t require the hands of a surgeon to place components on ceramic substrates with gold interconnects. It relied instead on an automated semiconductor process. You know which production method eventually won out.

Let’s move the argument to the current state of cloud computing. Hybrid clouds are very much in vogue and characterize a status quo where the current internet-based cloud doesn’t meet the requirements of all the applications we have. So, we marry the public cloud with private cloud architectures, where we traditionally have foregone flexibility and elasticity for security and control.

As happened in the past, for those analog-digital semiconductors, the world of hybrid cloud is also just a transition, simply a stopping point, not a destination. We currently have pools of computing connected by a variety of communication methods, and we simply haven’t worked out the process to reach the “monolithic” stage. But we will. Current cloud computing is generally made of three things, elastic CPU, RAM and Disk. These can be reached via the internet or some fixed network. Just as semiconductors evolved architectures and designs so that they could become “monolithic”, the same will apply to cloud computing, but writ large across the globe.

The evolution of cloud from pools out on the internet will therefore evolve from today’s triple play to a “quad play” as the fourth element, the network, is integrated and automated for both private and public cloud types of environments – or to give network back its original name, Inter Process Communication, (tipping my hat here to a long line of luminaries who have made this point, from the father of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, to Professor John Day pioneering the next evolution of the internet).

Cloud is not a technology but a dynamic way of optimizing your consumption with the availability of resources – the same evolution that has taken us from vinyl to CD to download. The challenge is therefore to restore the original vision of the founding fathers of the core technology that underpins the digital and with it the global economy. The arrival at a global, monolithic “platform of computing” where the network is the computer isn’t a vision or choice. It’s simply the realization of a world set out and supported by a model which has remained faithfully predictable for the last 50 years.

Matthew Finnie is Group CTO and EVP of Cloud Services at Interoute.

The New Space Race: Bringing Internet to the Other 4 Billion

A replica of Sputnik 1 at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. The USSR’s small satellite is responsible for starting the space race with the US. Today’s race is off and running. NASA

Back in the 1960s, the race was on between the United States and the USSR to see who could get to the moon first. That high-stakes competition ushered in a new era of space exploration featuring incredible levels of ingenuity, creativity, and scientific mastery. Now, decades later, we are on the verge of yet another space race – the race to build a satellite network capable of bringing the Internet to the estimated 4.4 billion people currently living without access to the “world wide” web.

The company most invested in providing Internet access to the entire planet is ‘net behemoth Google. Through at least two initiatives of their own and a recent $1 billion investment in SpaceX, Google has made it clear that connecting the globe is a serious priority both in the immediate future and beyond.

At the moment, three major efforts are being made to connect the globe to the power of the Internet. And while each has a similar short-term mission, the future applications of each is impressively distinct.

Project Loon

Adopting an innovative – if unorthodox – strategy, Google’s own Project Loon aims to make the Internet more widely available through the use of giant balloons. These special high-altitude balloons are launched into the stratosphere (around 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth) where they float safely above the danger of airplanes and unfavorable weather. Though it sounds strange, the project is actually ingenious.

Google’s hopes are that Project Loon will provide an inexpensive method for increasing the coverage area needed to bring the web to inhabitants of especially remote areas. The balloons in question are designed with an algorithm utilizes natural patterns of sub-atmospheric wind to ensure that consistent coverage is provided when and where it’s needed most. In effect, the balloons form an enormous communication network that may one day span the entire globe.

In addition to smart programming, the balloons are solar-powered and can provide Internet coverage to an area around 40 kilometers in diameter. By partnering with numerous telecommunications companies, Google hopes Project Loon can use wireless LTE technology to allow people within the coverage area to connect to the web from phones and other mobile devices. The first tests for Project Loon began in the summer of 2013 in New Zealand and have since expanded to cover more ground. The results are have promising, meaning that balloons may be a big part of the Internet’s future.

OneWeb

Led by former Google innovator Greg Wyler, OneWeb looks to bring the Internet to billions through a massive satellite network, one they say will be the largest in the world. Wyler is no stranger to delivering the Internet to remote areas, having set up Africa’s first 3G cell network. He also founded O3B (another company dedicated to bringing the Internet to the entirety of the mankind) before being recruited by Google to head an in-house initiative with the same goal.

OneWeb’s plan includes launching nearly 700 satellites into space, creating a network built to provide high speed Internet at a low cost. The project has already receiving up to $2 billion from financial backers like Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic , with the latter providing use of its LauncherOne program to put the satellites into orbit.

Though still a few years behind Project Loon, OneWeb’s more advanced technology promises far more complex network security and a broader overall reach (it could become a truly worldwide provider, rather than solely focusing on underdeveloped areas.) The OneWeb project has also cleared another important hurdle that remains in place for competitor SpaceX — obtaining the rights to the spectrum needed to deliver the Internet from space

SpaceX

The latest venture for billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX has already made a splash with its work to advance private space travel. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the company is a major player in the race for worldwide Internet. Musk’s project is similar in design to that being worked on by OneWeb, Musk asserts that his undertaking will be “an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg (Wyler) wants.” In fact, some reports have indicated that Musk and Wyler were interested in partnering, but disagreements over technology and Wyler’s refusal to give up a large stake in O3b broke off any partnership.

Instead, Musk has pushed ahead, stating that he believes “there should be two competing systems.” This competition will be bolstered by the recent $1 billion investment recently poured into SpaceX by investors Google and Fidelity.

The biggest hurdle remaining is the rights to a broadcast spectrum like the one that OneWeb has already locked up. Richard Branson, whose Virgin brand is a key OneWeb investor, believes this could be a dealbreaker for SpaceX. “I don’t think Elon can do a competing thing,” Branson says. “Greg has the rights, and there isn’t space for another network — like there physically is not enough space. If Elon wants to get into this area, the logical thing for him would be to tie up with us.” Musk has instead “discussed using optical-laser technology in his satellites,” though lasers (which can’t pass through clouds) would be a far less reliable method of delivering a connection. Undaunted, Musk says the first stage of the project could be done within five years, but later stages may expand the scope beyond Earth. The long-term goal for the project is to expand a connected network all the way to Mars, where Musk hopes to build a colony in the not-too-distant future.

With billions of dollars in financial backing, all three of these projects seem poised to achieve the goal of delivering the Internet to the entire globe. And for the first time in decades, a new space race has the potential to radically change the life of billions here on earth.

Rick Delgado is a technology commentator and freelance journalist.

Jay-Z Enters Streaming Music Industry, With Bid to Acquire Swedish Company

Jay-Z’s empire may soon be a little bit larger. The rapper and business mogul is about to get into the streaming music business.

On Friday, the Swedish company Aspiro, which is behind the streaming services WiMP and Tidal, announced that Jay-Z’s company, Project Panther, had submitted a bid to acquire Aspiro for $56 million. The deal, which already has unanimous approval, according to a board statement, would catapult Jay-Z, whose given name is Shawn Carter, into one of tech’s most competitive industries.

Gone are the days when Pandora was the only option around for streaming music. Today, there’s Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and Sony’s newly announced Playstation Music, which is powered by Spotify. Each service offers a different breadth of music options, for different prices, on different devices, in hopes of eking out a bigger slice of the music streaming pie. If Pandora’s going to be pre-loaded in your BMW, then Spotify’s going to seize on your Uber ride, and Apple’s going to make sure that Beats Music, which it acquired along with Beats’ hardware business last year, is on every single iPhone.

With WiMP and Tidal, Jay-Z would have lots of catching up to do. Today, WiMP has just 512,000 paying users, compared against Spotify’s 15 million and counting. Tidal has yet to release its numbers. Still, both WiMP and Tidal do promise music lovers something different from leading competitors: a higher quality listening experience. That’s because it uses a process called lossless compression that preserves the original audio data, even when the file is compressed. While other options exist for high fidelity audio, including Neil Young’s recently released PonoMusic player (which has faced some harsh criticism since its debut), they’ve yet to truly catch on with the masses. That could be because, generally, they tend to be more expensive than the alternatives, which is a tough sell for a generation that’s grown up on all-you-can-eat, free streaming. Tidal, for one, costs $20 a month.

Still, as arguably one of the most famous faces in music today — not to mention one half of the most famous couple in music today — Jay-Z may be able to bring some much needed cachet to this new type of streaming technology. And for Jay, the advantage is clear. With his hands on a streaming service, he’ll be better able to promote the other parts of his empire, including his entertainment company Roc Nation, and the artists it represents.

Adblock for Real Life. Adblock for Real Life!

A recent hackathon yielded a head-mounted display that automatically detects and blurs ads. Getty Images/WIRED

Like nature, advertising abhors a vacuum. There’s no reason to assume that future virtual worlds—the fantastic ones we’ll inhabit inside headsets like Oculus Rift, or the augmented ones we might espy through devices like HoloLens—will be any different. The moment there’s a convincing simulacrum of Mars for you to explore, you can bet someone will be trying erect a billboard inside it.

But new technologies offer opportunities for subversion, as well. “Brand Killer,” created by a group of students for the PennApps hackathon, is one such exploration. It’s a customized head-mounted display that uses image processing to recognize brands and logos and blur them in real time. Think of it as ad-block for real life. The idea, its creators write, is to make people “blind to the excesses of corporate branding,” quite literally.

Water purification: Running fuel cells on bacteria

Researchers in Norway have succeeded in getting bacteria to power a fuel cell. The "fuel" used is wastewater, and the products of the process are purified water droplets and electricity.

This is an environmentally-friendly process for the purification of water derived from industrial processes and suchlike. It also generates small amounts of electricity -- in practice enough to drive a small fan, a sensor or a light-emitting diode.

In the future, the researchers hope to scale up this energy generation to enable the same energy to be used to power the water purification process, which commonly consists of many stages, often involving mechanical and energy-demanding decontamination steps at its outset.

Nature's own generator

The biological fuel cell is powered by entirely natural processes -- with the help of living microorganisms.

"In simple terms, this type of fuel cell works because the bacteria consume the waste materials found in the water," explains SINTEF researcher Luis Cesar Colmenares, who is running the project together with his colleague Roman Netzer. "As they eat, the bacteria produce electrons and protons. The voltage that arises between these particles generates energy that we can exploit. Since the waste in the wastewater (organic material) is consumed and thus removed, the water itself becomes purified," he says.

Searching for the best bacteria

"Our challenge has been to find the mechanisms and bacteria that are best suited for use in this water purification method," says Netzer. "To start with, we had to find a bacterium which was not only able to consume the waste products in the water, but which could also transfer electrons to a metal electrode," he says.

The idea behind this water purification approach was born many years ago when the two scientists first met and began discussing how bacteria could be used to generate energy. Since then, they have both been working to put the idea into practice -- each from their own respective fields of expertise. While Netzer is an expert in bacteria, Colmenares is an electrochemist with a knowledge of, and interest in, water purification.

Today, they have a small demonstration plant bubbling away in the lab -- efficiently exploiting the bacterias' ability to purify dirty water and generate electricity. The wastewater comes from the local Tine dairy and is rich in organic acids, which are ideal for this process. But this is not essential -- other types of wastewater work just as well.

"At the moment, we're not talking about producing large volumes of energy," says Netzer. "But the process is very interesting because water purification processes are very energy-demanding using current technology. We're particularly pleased at being able to produce just as much energy using low-cost materials as others are achieving using much more expensive approaches," he says.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by SINTEF . The original article was written by Christina Benjaminsen. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The Grand Plan to Give Everyone a Free Year of Online College

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One of the boldest proposals of President Obama’s recent State of the Union address was his $60 billion plan to make community college free. And, yes, it’s also one of the most controversial.

Some, like The Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter, have likened the idea to the G.I. Bill, calling it “a powerful engine for restoring the American middle class.”

Others, like Republican Representative Bradley Byrne, have decried the proposal, saying it would saddle states that “are already stretched far too thin” with an undue financial burden.

It’s a debate that will likely fester in Congress for years to come. And that’s one reason why Steven Klinsky—a philanthropist and founder of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital—is taking matters into his own hands.

This month, Klinsky and the non-profit he founded, Modern States Education Alliance, announced the launch of a new initiative called Freshman Year for Free, which aims to make a full range of freshman-level college courses available to anyone for free online. Unlike most so-called massively open online courses or MOOCs, which have sprouted up over the last few years, these courses will directly prepare students for accredited exams like the Advanced Placement test and the College Level Examination Program (or CLEP) exam. That way, after completing the courses, the students can get real college credit—potentially, even a full year’s worth.

Patching the Hole

With Freshman Year for Free, Klinsky is applying a neat little patch to a gaping hole in online education. Today, thanks to the rise of MOOC providers like Coursera and edX, millions of people have taken free online courses online from leading institutions like Harvard and MIT.

Many of them never complete the courses, but those who do have no way of getting college credit for the work they’ve done. As Klinsky put it: “It’s like giving out free Cadillacs, but no one can get a driver’s license.”

But changing that would require broad systemic change. It would also require universities to cannibalize their own businesses by giving the same credit to those who do pay tuition as they to do those who don’t. So Klinsky, who has funded education reform for decades, came up with a clever workaround. By using these courses to prepare students for exams that colleges already award credit for, Freshman Year for Free would help students lop off an entire year’s worth of enrollment, without asking universities to overhaul their business models.

“It’s not meant to attack the traditional system,” Klinsky says, noting that he expects most students will be people who either never went to college or who dropped out and want to go back. “What we’re trying to do is have an onramp that helps you with the initial costs.”

No More ‘Hierarchies of Privilege’

So Far, Klinsky has donated $1 million to edX, which is now working with top colleges to develop a series of courses specifically designed for the Freshman Year for Free program. EdX already offers 10 AP and CLEP test prep courses, and the funding from Modern States will help create 20 more, all of which will live on the so-called Modern States Portal.

Already, top university administrators are eager for a chance to participate. According to Caroline Levander, vice president of strategic initiatives in digital education at Rice University, a program like Freshman Year for Free could help level the playing field between incoming students who had access to AP courses before starting college and those who did not.

“Those students have a strategic advantage that I hope our AP courses will help to equalize,” she says. “It’s our goal to get all students through the undergraduate degree in a timely fashion and not perpetuate inequalities of access or hierarchies of privilege.”

‘New Age Public Library’

Klinsky is fully aware of the criticisms about the MOOC model. Plagued by low retention rates, MOOCs have been lambasted by critics, who say students aren’t really learning as much as the MOOC providers say they are. But Klinsky believes that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Instead, he thinks of MOOCs as a new age public library. Lots of people leaf through books, and not everyone reads them, but having the library there to begin with is the first step.

Klinsky says he’s been thinking about a project like this since long before the president’s big pitch to Congress. In fact, he wrote an article for Barron’s on this very topic back in 2012. But the timing of the President’s proposal doesn’t surprise him.

“There’s a clear need for wider universal access to secondary education, and a lot of people are thinking about how to solve it,” Klinsky says. “The revolution started totally separate from us. We’re just trying to make it useful for people.”

Review: Toshiba Chromebook 2

The Toshiba Chromebook 2 has a nice 1080p IPS display. It costs $329. Toshiba

Buying a Chromebook is an exercise in compromises. Want a solid construction and a nice display panel? You’ll probably have to sacrifice something like battery life, or the quality of the trackpad. Or, perhaps you want a bigger screen? There are a few models out now that offer 13-inch and even 15-inch 1080p screens. I tested Samsung’s 13-inch Chromebook 2 last month, and while the screen was great, the price was too high. All these compromises!

While it’s not perfect, the new Toshiba Chromebook 2 manages to do what the similarly named Samsung Chromebook 2 could not: deliver a really nice 13.3-inch 1080p screen while keeping the price reasonable. If you’ve been waiting for a decent screen to arrive before you test the Chromebook waters, this is a machine to check out. (Acer also makes a 13-inch 1080p Chromebook, and we’re looking at that one next.)

I tested the Toshiba CB35-B3340, which features a 2.58 GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor, 4GB of RAM, 16GB SSD—you also get two years of a 100GB Google Drive account included for free, which helps underline the whole Chromebook philosophy. There’s also one USB 2 port, one USB 3 port, an HDMI port and a pretty decent gesture-enabled touchpad. Those are quite solid specs for the price, and they’re backed by two outstanding features: the 1080p display and the Skullcandy audio. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 retails for $329.

The result is that Toshiba’s Chromebook is an excellent machine for watching movies when you’re away from your TV. The sound is great—well, great within the obvious limitations, as this is still a laptop—and the screen is bright and clear, with vivid colors, nice deep blacks and the wide viewing angles you’d expect from an IPS display. It is still a glossy screen though, so bright sunlight is not your friend.

I should note that Toshiba also offers a 1366×768 model for $250, if you just don’t want to pay for the 1080p screen. And note that while the resolution is lower, it’s still an IPS display and should be considerably nicer than the washed out TN displays in many Chromebooks. (For further proof of this, check out the Lenovo Yoga 11e Chromebook, which has the lower-res display, but also uses an IPS panel.) However, if you can afford it, the better resolution is well worth the money.

The sound is also noteworthy, having been “tuned” by Skullcandy, which, if nothing else, resulted in Skullcandy’s logo getting slapped prominently just below the keyboard. Whatever “tuned” may mean, the audio output is really great, and not at all tinny or flat the way laptop speakers typically are. If you really crank it up, you can feel the bass through the keyboard.

The keyboard itself is the standard Chromebook layout with chiclet keys. You can re-map it however you’d like. Physically, it’s on par with pretty much every other Chromebook I’ve used—nothing special, but no real annoyances either. The same is true of the trackpad. It works, but it won’t draw any accolades.

Overall, the build quality of the Toshiba is excellent. The case is sturdy and doesn’t flex at all when being carried with one hand. In fact, if someone handed me the case with all logos removed, I never would have guessed it was a Chromebook. It has the look and feel of a much higher-end laptop. The 13-inch screen does of course make it bigger and heavier than the more common 11.6-inch Chromebooks. Again, this is a trade off. But in my opinion, the slight increase in size and weight are well worth it for the vastly better display.

Despite my enthusiasm for the display and speakers, the Toshiba is not without its downsides. Foremost, performance suffers. The 4GB of RAM is a nice step up from the typical 2GB that ship with low-end Chromebooks, but the Bay Trail processor used here doesn’t have the power of Haswell-based devices like the Acer C720.

In real-world terms, that means if you’re flipping between tabs when you have six or seven of them open, you will notice some lag. I also experienced stuttering in some WebGL demos. Suffice to say that if browser-based gaming is your primary use for a Chromebook, you should look at a machine with a beefier processor. On the bright side, the Bay Trail chip is excellent at power management, and you should consistently get more than 8 hours out of the battery.

So I still haven’t found the perfect Chromebook. The Toshiba almost cuts it, but as with the previous machines I’ve reviewed, I still think the best Chromebook is an amalgamation of several. For example the Toshiba would be greatly improved by adding the screen flipping capabilities in the Lenovo n20p, especially since movies are actually watchable on the Toshiba, unlike on the Lenovo. That said, based on the price, the battery life, and the quality of that big, lovely screen, the Toshiba is my new favorite Chromebook.

The Smartest, Richest Companies Can’t Crack Mobile. The Future Belongs to Anyone Who Can

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The world’s smartest and richest tech companies posted their quarterly earnings this week, and if you had to draw one lesson from the results, it’s this: mobile matters—more than anything.

The companies seeing the strongest growth—Apple and Facebook—are the ones with the most successful mobile strategies. The companies seeing declines, missing expectations, or falling short of their former glories—Google, Alibaba, and Microsoft—are the ones that can’t quite make mobile work for them. And in that faltering, opportunity opens up for the next great business idea—an idea not weighed down by the legacy of the desktop.

Yes, these are all huge companies with many moving parts that make the math behind their business successes and failures complex. But sometimes, applying Occam’s razor can be instructive.

Apple and Facebook On Top

Take Apple. It pretty much invented the current iteration of mobile as a category—as a business all these other companies had to bother to figure out in the first place. It makes the hardware that people want to always have with them. And on Tuesday, it posted the biggest quarterly profit by a public company in corporate history.

While Apple invented the modern-day mobile device, Facebook invented the thing people most want to do on them. The same day Facebook posted record revenues of $3.85 billion—including more than $2 billion in mobile ad revenue—app analytics firm App Annie released a report that found the top four mobile downloads of 2014 were all apps owned by Facebook.

Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp joined the original Facebook app itself at the top of the chart. Of those four, Facebook has only really figured out how to make money off of one: Facebook proper. But by investing deeply in teaching machines to understand how well those ads are working, Facebook seems poised to make the rest of its app roster pay off.

Google’s Search

Of all the companies that reported earnings this week, Google’s relationship to mobile is the most paradoxical. Its Android mobile operating system dominates smartphones the world over. But Android installs are not in themselves an important source of revenue.

The company makes money when people click on ads. And in the last quarter, the number of people clicking on those ads increased by 14 percent. But the cost of those ads to advertisers keeps falling.

Google doesn’t break out its mobile versus desktop ad revenue. But the continuing drop in the value of its ads—a longtime trend that has paralleled the rise in mobile device use—suggests that years into the shift away from PCs as the primary connected device, Google still hasn’t figured out how to make mobile pay.

Giants Misstep

Though Alibaba is most often contrasted to Amazon, the more apt comparison is Google. Alibaba doesn’t sell its own inventory like Amazon. Instead, it makes much of its money from merchants paying for ads that show up in the product search results on its Taobao marketplace.

Alibaba was one of last year’s most successful IPOs, but shareholders punished the company severely Thursday as its revenue missed expectations. The number of mobile users of Alibaba’s services surged, but as with Google, the price Alibaba can charge for those ads appears to be lower than on the desktop.

As for Amazon, it’s always a strange outlier in the conversation around mobile. It doesn’t make most of its money selling hardware or software but stuff. Its own effort to make a smartphone was a big flop. But one-click shopping in its mobile apps, instant video for Prime members, and its e-book business all show ways Amazon has leveraged the mobile migration well.

Microsoft is far less complicated to explain. In the context of its own dismal record, the last three months were a banner quarter for Microsoft’s mobile strategy. Its Surface tablet finally topped $1 billion in sales. Microsoft-owned Nokia shipped 10.5 million Lumia smartphones—a record. But Windows phones only own a pittance of the worldwide market share in mobile. And Microsoft’s $26.4 billion in revenue sounds nice—until you consider that Apple made a significant fraction of that in profit alone ($18 billion).

The Future Is Wide Open

If the smartest, richest companies in the world can’t figure out how to make mobile work, who can? Well, maybe anyone. Optimism seems like a totally rational response to the tumult tech companies are enduring as mobile devices become the primary computing platform.

After all, the global economy is in the earliest days of the mobile shift. The iPhone debuted less than a decade ago. And all of these companies, the heaviest of tech heavyweights, first rose to prominence before mobile mattered as anything beyond a way to make a phone call and maybe send a text or an email.

In other words, the first great mobile-native tech company has yet to rise. At its current massive valuation, Uber may be poised to take that crown. After all, its business doesn’t make sense except on mobile. But while Uber still has billions of other people’s money to play with, we won’t know if that value proves out.

Whether it does or not, the future is wide open to the best new ideas for turning mobile devices into money-makers. As the upstarts become the incumbents, the innovator’s dilemma inexorably slows them down. Revenue becomes a hindrance as well as a help. And the future opens up to what’s next in your pocket.