WhatsApp to Start Offering Internet Phone Calls

Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s chief executive, speaking at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona on Monday.

BARCELONA – Major announcements from WhatsApp, the Internet messaging services, are like city buses: You can wait a long time for one, then two show up at once.

On the heels of its $16 billion deal to be bought by Facebook, WhatsApp announced on Monday that it would start offering free voice services later this year — diversifying beyond its main messaging service into phone calls.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, the tech company’s chief executive, Jan Koum, said users in the second quarter would be able to make Internet calls through their smartphones similar to services that are already available on rival Internet messaging offerings like Kakao of South Korea and Viber of Cyprus.

WhatsApp’s voice service is expected to be available first on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems, then expand to others like Windows Phone and Blackberry, he added.

Mr. Koum, who was born in Ukraine before moving to the United States as a teenager, also said on Monday that WhatsApp would launch a mobile brand in a partnership with the German cellphone carrier E-Plus.

The WhatsApp chief executive said the mobile brand would initially be available only in Germany, though he did not provide any more specifics on the product, which is expected to be launched by the end of the year.

“The world is moving to data very quickly,” Mr. Koum said in a speech. “Data is the next generation in what is driving the mobile industry.”

WhatsApp’s push to offer its 465 million monthly users Internet voice calls is the first announcement since Facebook agreed to buy the San Francisco-based tech company last week for $16 billion. The final price may rise to $19 billion with WhatsApp employees and founders receiving an additional $3 billion in restricted stock, which would vest over the next four years.

Mr. Koum played down rumors that the deal with Facebook would lead to major changes to how WhatsApp operates, including the potential addition of advertising and other revenue-generating services.

“For WhatsApp to be successful, it has to stay independent,” Mr. Koum said on Monday. “There are no planned changes.”

By expanding into voice, WhatsApp is going head-to-head with the likes of Skype and traditional cellphone operators like AT&T and Deutsche Telekom. Analysts say the move also could lead Facebook to revamp its own mobile offerings, which have centered on software called Home that has won few fans since launching last year.

Before Mr. Koum took the stage on Monday, Sirgoo Lee, the co-chief executive of the rival South Korean messaging company Kakao, spoke to the audience about his company’s growth from its Asian roots to now offering Internet messaging to its global users in 14 languages.

Since launching in early 2010, Kakao has expanded to offer voice calls to its customers, as well as smartphone games, online gifts, and mobile payments as a way of generating revenue.

“We are at the initial stage of the smartphone revolution,” Mr. Lee said. “We have 130 million users. That’s not as much as WhatsApp, but we’re getting there.”

source: Newyork times

The Art Of Texting While Walking

The cognitive challenges of walking while texting are well known, both to scientists and to those of us who have ambled into a light pole or a fellow pedestrian or have been on the receiving end of someone else’s distracted movements. Strolling while talking on the phone — or, more particular, texting — ties up the brain’s relatively limited working attentional resources, most researchers would agree, much as those activities do when you are driving.

But walking is not driving. In some ways, it’s more demanding. You sit while you drive. Walking requires a multitude of orchestrated actions and reactions. But whether and how using a phone affects the physical process of walking and whether those impacts might have health costs have been little explored.

So researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, rounded up 26 healthy adults for a study, published last month in PLOS One, and sent them strolling repeatedly along a 28-foot stretch of hallway while cameras captured their steps. In one setup, the volunteers walked without a phone; in another, they read a long text on a phone’s screen; and in a third, they texted “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The volunteers were told to hold the phone and type as they usually would. They were also asked to try to walk as normally as possible.

As it turned out, texting significantly distorted their gait and walking form, whether they intended to contort themselves or not. Most noticeable, the volunteers began to walk with a more upright and rigid body position. Their heads froze into cocked and largely unchanging positions, eyes on the screen, chins bent toward their chests. Their necks and lower back joints had significantly less range of motion. They displayed “tighter mechanical constraint” in their upper bodies and midsections, according to the researchers; arms stopped swinging loosely and were bent and locked into place. The pelvic joints likewise stiffened, making leg motion jerkier. In general, the texters moved “like robots,” said Siobhan Schabrun, an honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, who led the study.

Simultaneously, their gait patterns changed. Texters took significantly shorter steps, and their pace slowed. They also “deviated more from a straight line,” the study’s authors wrote, meaning that with almost every step, they set their feet farther to the side.

These adjustments, although relatively slight, could result in both immediate and longer-term physical consequences, Dr. Schabrun said. In the short term, they increase the likelihood that you will trip, and not merely because you neglect to look where you are going while texting. “Previous studies, many in elderly populations, have shown that a more rigid posture, such as this, can put you at greater risk of falling,” Dr. Schabrun said.

Frequent peripatetic texting also may cause or worsen neck and shoulder pain, Dr. Schabrun suggested, by reducing the neck joint’s natural range of motion. If you walk and text, occasionally move out of pedestrian traffic and gently tilt your head forward and back, an easy exercise to combat neck stiffness.

This brief intermission from texting may also reorient your body’s relationship with space, Dr. Schabrun said. Normally, the body prioritizes maintaining balance over almost all other demands, she pointed out. But in perhaps the most significant implication of her study, her volunteers’ bodies and brains appeared to be “prioritizing texting.”

This article appeared in the Feb. 23, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine

For the first time, women outnumber men in a computer science course at UC berkeley

Students on the steps of sproul hall at UC berkeley.Image by john morgan/

Women are seriously underrepresented in the world of computer science. But in small ways, things are beginning to move in the right direction. PayPal just hired industry veteran Danese Cooper as its head of open source, and at the University of California, Berkeley — a school traditionally at the heart of the computer science world — women now outnumber men in one of the school’s introduction to computer science courses.

Last spring, 106 women and 104 men enrolled in the course. “It was the first time since at least 1993 — as far back as university enrollment records are digitized — that more women enrolled in an introductory computer science course,” San Francisco Chronicle reports. “It was likely the first time ever.”

The course is designed to introduce the concepts of computer science to those not majoring in the subject. But more women taking that first step towards learning to program could go a long way towards correcting the long standing gender imbalance in the tech workforce, which would benefit everyone in the industry. More diverse teams are better problem solvers and make better decisions, according to a study by the Kellogg School of Management.

Berkeley isn’t the only university making improvements in this area. In 2012, Stanford University announced that its introduction to computer science course had an almost equal number of men and women. The increased number of women in computer science courses at both schools are credited to big changes in the curriculum. At Berkeley, that meant expanding the introductory course beyond just programming, and doing more to explain the real-world implications of computing.

The number of women continuing on from beginner’s courses to become computer science remains low, but even those numbers are improving. At Stanford, 20 percent of students graduating with a computer science degree were women in 2011, up from 10.5 percent in 2007. Stanford is ahead of the curve, but according to a study conducted by the Computing Research Association, the percentage of female computer science majors in the U.S. and Canada rose from 11.7 percent to 12.9 percent between 2010 and 2012.

But that’s still a far cry from the percentage in 1991, when nearly 30 percent of computer science bachelor degrees were awarded to women, according to a report published by the National Science Foundation. And education alone won’t address the gender disparity in the tech industry. According to research published by the Harvard Business Review, 52 percent of women in science, engineering and technology leave the field and never come back. Clearly the industry needs to do more to retain the talent it already has.

But seeing more women than men in a major computer science class is still a huge change. One that bodes well for the future.

written by: Klint Finley

source: Wired

Facebook Wins Jan Koum (whatsapp co founder) Over

SAN FRANCISCO — Jan Koum fled the former Soviet Union with his mother when he was 16, leaving his father behind. He worked in the engineering trenches for a decade at Yahoo before starting out on his own. When he was a young man growing up in Mountain View, Calif., his family relied on food stamps to get by.

Now Mr. Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, is a billionaire several times over and a business partner with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief who, in many ways, is his polar opposite. Mr. Zuckerberg, 29, who dropped out of Harvard en route to overnight riches, bought Mr. Koum’s mobile messaging company on Wednesday for at least $16 billion, betting big on an entrepreneur who does not follow the typical young-and-brash Silicon Valley playbook.

Mr. Koum, 38, and his co-founder, Brian Acton, prefer to operate lean and below the radar, with just 55 employees and a nondescript office. They despise advertising and value the privacy of their 450 million users so much that they do not even collect their names.

Mr. Zuckerberg, by contrast, has built his immensely profitable empire by collecting reams of personal data on his 1.2 billion customers and using that to sell ads aimed at them.

Even as Facebook grows more corporate and more complicated to use, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton, 42, are obsessively focused on just one thing: offering a simple, private, nearly free way for people to share text, photo and video messages with the people they care about.

“You don’t want to get in the way of two people communicating,” Mr. Koum said last spring in an interview at WhatsApp’s headquarters in Mountain View.

“Imagine if I said, ‘Let’s stop for a second, let me pull down this slide. Would you like to see a preview of this game?’ ”

After repeatedly insisting that he would not sell his company to an ad-driven behemoth like Facebook, Google or Yahoo, Mr. Koum has now reversed course.

Mr. Koum offered little explanation for his change of heart on Wednesday during a conference call with Mr. Zuckerberg and Wall Street analysts to discuss the deal.

“Facebook is a social network and offers many different and important functionalities than WhatsApp offers as a communication service, and we’re excited to benefit from the unique expertise, knowledge and infrastructure that Mark and the team have built out over the last decade,” he said.

Mr. Koum said WhatsApp would operate independently and would not offer advertising. Mr. Zuckerberg said that he wanted WhatsApp to focus on increasing the number of people who use it to one billion and that he would not pressure the company to add to its modest revenue from its dollar-a-year subscription fee anytime soon.

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton declined interview requests on Thursday.

Mr. Koum and Mr. Zuckerberg do share a common ambition — to connect everyone in the world using their services.

“We want WhatsApp to be on every single smartphone,” Mr. Koum said last month during an onstage interview at the DLD conference in Munich. He expects five billion people to be using smartphones within the next decade, and he wants to serve every one.

The inspiration for WhatsApp came after both founders left their jobs at Yahoo in 2007 and took some time off. Mr. Acton moved to New York to live with his girlfriend (and at one point proclaimed on Twitter that he had applied for a job at Facebook and been rejected). Mr. Koum did some traveling to Argentina and other countries and realized that it was difficult to stay in touch with friends.

International area codes made it difficult for people to call him. Email was simple, but it was not as streamlined as a text message. Text messages, however, were expensive, costing at least 25 cents for each one sent from Europe to the United States. And online chat services from Google and AOL required knowing people’s screen names.

Two years later, Mr. Koum returned to the United States, bought an iPhone and reunited with Mr. Acton to build WhatsApp. The service would take advantage of a phone’s address book to make it as streamlined as text messaging, and it would be nearly free like other Internet messaging services.

Privacy was vital. “For us, everything is built around us knowing as little as possible about the user and what they do on our network,” Mr. Koum said at the Munich conference.

“I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone,” he explained. “The walls had ears and you couldn’t speak freely.”

Just as important to the founders, who share a hippie ethos and distaste for cutthroat capitalism, was the business model.

Instead of financing the service with ads and games like other services free to draw eyeballs to advertisements, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton made WhatsApp a free software download that would charge a nominal fee after the first year. They would make the app usable on a broad range of smartphones, from dated BlackBerrys, which they both still use for texting, to sleek new Android phones and iPhones, so that people rich and poor all over the globe could take advantage of the service.

Those early decisions allowed the company to remain small and independent even as the app took off in several parts of the world, especially Europe. Users enjoyed the simplicity and low cost of communicating with friends and family around the globe. And they also appreciated the privacy of a service that did not analyze or store their messages — a rarity in the Internet age.

Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Ventures, the venture capital firm that invested $60 million in WhatsApp and will make as much as $3 billion in the sale, compared Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton to the founders of YouTube, the video service that Sequoia also funded before it was bought by Google.

“They’re both mavericks, they’re both independent thinkers,” Mr. Goetz said. “Like many of the best entrepreneurs we’ve been affiliated with, they were driven and focused on building something for themselves.”

Unlike Snapchat, another messaging service that Facebook flirted with buying last year, WhatsApp’s messages are intended to offer a permanent record of life’s conversations. Mr. Acton and his family, for example, use the service to share photos and videos of his baby.

In the interview last spring, the founders said they were happy with the success of WhatsApp, which then had a mere 40 employees and 300 million active monthly users, exceeding Twitter, a service designed for the public broadcasting of short messages.

They were also firm on never wanting to sell their company.

“Facebook and Google, Cisco and Apple, and all those companies, they never sold,” Mr. Koum said. “They always took on the path of independent companies and marched them forward and that’s what we want to do. We want to be as good or as great as those companies.”

source: New York Times

Some Apps Made For Walking...Yes.Walking

We spend too much time sitting around. It’s true. Luckily the same smartphones that often keep us sitting down can also encourage us to get up and walk more by tracking our steps.

Apple’s iPhone 5S is the smartphone pedometer king because it has a special M7 chip that can continuously track movement without draining the battery. There are many apps that hook up to this chip. The Moves app, $3 on iOS, is my favorite because of its minimal design.

The display of Moves is simple yet colorful, with a colored circle that counts your steps daily. The more steps you take, the bigger the circle, so it’s easy to see at a glance how well you’re doing.

Beneath this counter is a simple graphic of where you took steps, and whether they were made during walks or runs. Tapping the place icon in the infographic will give you a more detailed map. Swiping across the display takes you to data from previous days. The app can also show how many calories you’ve burned and how far you’ve walked in total — a figure that often surprises me, because I can churn out a mile or so even inside my own home.

And that’s it! It’s deliciously simple and I rely on Moves’ notifications to remind me to make an extra effort on a particular day. Best of all, thanks to the M7 chip, I don’t even have to have the app running for it to collect data — it runs completely in the background. There are one or two hiccups, though: When I was skiing, the app thought I was cycling. It also thinks you were running when you were walking, throwing off the calorie count. But you can always manually correct the activity type.

In its newest version, the app has more than 60 extra activity types, but most are not automatically recognized and must be chosen by hand. Moves also works on iPhones other than the 5S and on many Android units. (It is free on Android.) The app may consume more battery when used on phones other than the 5S.

A similar free app for iOS and Android that measures walks in more detail is Map My Walk. The app is elegantly designed, making it simple to use even though it contains many options and presents a lot of data. For example, the app tracks your location by GPS, it wirelessly syncs with popular heart rate monitors and will speak out loud to prompt you as you walk on your progress. I don’t use it because I prefer a simpler count of my walking habits, and I’m not overly fond of Map My Walk’s interface. But you may like its extra data because it may help you keep on top of your walking regimen.

The popular fitness app brand Runtastic also offers the free Runtastic Pedometer app on Android and iOS. It’s similar in terms of function and interface to Map My Walk, without the location-tracking system. The interface is plain, and this sort of no-nonsense look may appeal. I love the fact that you can tag each day’s data with a little icon to say how you felt or what the weather was like, but the spartan look of the app doesn’t appeal to me.

Simplest of all is the free Pedometer++ app. It is only for iPhone 5S phones, and is pretty to look at and functional. Its interface is even more basic than Moves’. The app just keeps a tally of your daily step count versus a target you set. The results are then shown as a number and simple graph. I love the fact that it sticks a badge on the app’s icon on the home screen that shows you your step count. This means you don’t have to even open the app!

For Android users, a rough equivalent to Pedometer++ is the well-regarded free app Accupedo Pedometer. The app has a relatively clear interface, and tracks steps and distance walked and calories burned. It also has a great Android widget so you can pin your walking data to the home screen for quick review without having to open the app. It’s also available for iOS, but the iPhone version lacks the widget capability.

I’ve used apps like these to make sure I walk more than 10,000 steps a day. This number of steps is generally considered to help you keep fit and burn off a few extra calories, and I’ve definitely noticed that it has helped how I look and feel

source: new york times

Google Glass advice: how to avoid being a glasshole

Google’s smartglass guidelines for early adopters: stop being creepy, don’t be rude, and don’t try to read War and Peace

Google explains how to not be a 'glasshole' wearing the company's pioneering smart glasses. Photograph: Pawel Supernak/EPA

Google has given some official advice on what to do and perhaps more importantly, what not to do, while wearing the company’s Google Glass smartglasses to avoid being a “glasshole”.

Early adopters of Glass, derogatorily called “glassholes”, have come under fire for using it in socially unacceptable conditions where mobile phones aren’t allowed, for being creepy filming people without their permission and for being rude, staring off into the distance for long periods of time.

Glass has gone far beyond the confines of Google employees with its extended “Explorer” early adopter programme. As Google states, it is definitely in the company’s best interest to get its first smartglass customers to behave, as “breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers”.

To try and help Explorers avoid being glassholes and breaking social codes, Google has compiled a list of solid suggestions pulled from the experiences of early Glass adopters, and some of them are really quite funny.

Stop looking like a tech zombie

Glass was designed to avoid the need to stare down at a smartphone or device to get information, placing snippets of text just outside your field of vision, but that can have some pretty creepy consequences.If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time you’re probably looking pretty weird to the people around you.

Google helpfully suggests that reading things like Tolstoy’s 1,225 pages of War and Peace probably isn’t the best idea, suggesting that “things like that are better done on bigger screens”.

Use some common sense

Google encourages Explorers to try Glass in all kinds of situations, but it would probably be best to avoid activities that could see wearers land on their faces.Glass is a piece of technology, so use common sense. Water-skiing, bull-riding or cage-fighting with Glass are probably not good ideas.

At $1,500 (£900) a piece, Glass might be hi-tech but it is not exactly robust when it comes to high-impact sports.

Glass probably doesn’t contribute to a romantic meal

The idea of smartglasses being worn in public is new, and people are curious. Passersby will stop and stare, ask questions or maybe even react badly if you turn to face them, so Google helpfully suggests that taking Glass off might be the best idea.If you’re worried about someone interrupting that romantic dinner at a nice restaurant with a question about Glass, just take it off and put it around the back of your neck or in your bag.

Of course, you also have the fact that your date might be creeped out that you have a head-mounted camera pointed at them all night, regardless of whether or not you are recording their every move.

Stop standing in the corner of the room being creepy

Apparently the temptation to record the every move of people going about their day is insatiable for some Glass Explorers. Google suggests that Glass wearers should treat the camera function like they would a mobile phone camera – ask permission and stop being creepy.“Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through Glass is not going to win you any friends.”

Some people are pretty tetchy when it comes to being caught on camera, just ask the paparazzi.

source: the guardian