Amazon’s Silk Browser Now Tracking User Behavior For New “Trending Now” Section…Wait, What?

Oh did you hear? Amazon announced a bunch of new Kindles yesterday. And here’s another little tidbit – those devices, the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, are also getting an updated version of the Amazon Silk browser. The “cloud accelerated” mobile browser has received a handful of its own improvements, says Amazon, including faster page load speeds, better HTML5 support, an improved Start page, and more. But one of the more interesting features is a new section which Silk calls “Trending Now.” This section identifies which webpages are seeing an unusual amount of traffic, indicating that they may contain some noteworthy information. That’s right – Amazon Kindle’s web browser is now watching for breaking news based on Kindle Fire user behavior.

Crazy, right? Not really. I guess that’s the benefit of vertical integration. Amazon Silk on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet with Amazon web services and EC2 doing the heavy lifting, like the rendering of webpages. One of the touted benefits of such a setup was that Amazon could now track user’s behavior (you know, not in a creepy way), so that the browser could detect which websites a user tended to visit more often, and pre-cache the content so it can be delivered faster. Amazon called this process “Dynamic Split Browsing.”

In a video, here’s how the company described this feature back in 2011:

You can think of Amazon Silk as a small store for files you access. What we have done is create a limitless cache used to render the web pages you view every day. It does not take a single byte of storage on the device itself.”

….

The browser observes user behavior across a large number of sites…Our browser is capable of detecting these aggregate user behavior patterns and detecting the next page you need, before you even know you need it.

And now, Amazon’s ability to track users’ behavior is helping it sell Kindles, because Trending webpages – identified via this same technology – are now a Kindle feature, too. Interesting strategy, Amazon.

That was the significant detail that caught my eye upon hearing the news. I’ve reached out to Amazon for more info on opt-out procedures, and will update when I hear back. Not that Amazon Silk is aggregating personally identifiable information, mind you, but some people would like to know when their data is being put to use like this. And some people just don’t trust big tech companies in general – especially when Amazon’s in the business of selling you products based on personalized recommendations. What a treasure trove of irresistible data your browsing habits must be for them!

[Update: Amazon says "customers can turn off the cloud acceleration feature of Silk from the settings menu at any time, and their data will not be aggregated for the Trending Now feature."]

Another improvement to Amazon Silk, as noted above, is better page load speeds. In internal benchmarking, Amazon found that Silk now registers at least a 30% reduction in page load latency compared with the original version of the Kindle Fire. Silk also registers twice the HTML5 compatibility score (via html5test.com) with improvements in form and element support, geolocation (not for tracking you, I’m sure – just web apps and web content, says Amazon), IndexedDB, web workers, and web notifications. Developers have been pushing for these and more, including in-browser access to the camera, which Amazon says will come “in the months ahead.”

The Start page has also become more organized, no longer displaying a haphazard collection of recently visited sites and bookmarks. Now, those two items are separated, and the Start page itself includes the “Trending Now” section as well as a new section called “Selected Sites” which Amazon says will display other webpages it thinks customers might find interesting. And how does it know what customers might find interesting? Oh right, all that data it’s tracking. Google Zeitgeist, look out. Amazon is starting to build one of its own.

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Berkeley Study: Half-Star Change In Yelp Rating Can Make Or Break A Restaurant

Two Berkeley economists have found that the tiniest changes in online restaurant reviews can make or break a restaurant. A simple half-star improvement on Yelp’s 5-star rating makes it 30-49% more likely that a restaurant will sell out its evening seats. Online reviews, the researchers conclude, “play an increasingly important role in how consumers judge the quality of goods and services.”

The researchers validate the claims by combining yelp reviews of 328 San Francisco restaurants with a database that tracks real-time reservation availability from 6-8pm. The power of Yelp to fill a restaurant’s seats and the owner’s pocketbook holds up even when controlling for the establishment’s décor, service rating, and cost.

Careful readers may note that a higher-quality rating may simply denote a better restaurant, and the study is therefore only capturing patrons who prefer a better experience, who choose where to dine independent of Yelp’s rating. The researchers answer this critique by looking at restaurants whose Yelp rating difference by only a little bit, but whose official rating is at least one-half star different.

For instance, a two restaurants, one with a 3.74 rating and one with 3.76 rating, are similar in actual equality, but because they’ll get rated by yelp 3.5 and 4.0 respectively, could receive dramatically different reservation rates.

See, Yelp officially rates restaurants in half-star intervals, but publishes all of the ratings. The researchers can therefore recreate their own rating for each restaurant with much greater accuracy. It turns out, restaurants with strikingly similar aggregate ratings are nonetheless hurt by the official difference. “Differences in customer flows between such restaurants can therefore be attributed to the ratings themselves rather than differences in the quality of food or service.”

The researchers also note that Yelp does not impact well-known establishments (less than 500 total ratings). In other words, noone is checking Yelp to see if they should binge at McDonald’s or splurge at a celebrity restaurant.

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Inventions and inventors rising in recession-hit UK

Britons have risen to the economic challenges of recent recession by becoming more prolific inventors, a random survey of 2,000 Britons shows.

A third of respondents claimed that the recession has increased the amount they were coming up with inventions and innovative, money-saving solutions.

A third of those with a bright idea were learning more about science and technology to help refine it.

One in 10 had looked into or applied for a patent in the last year.

"This research shows the recession has sparked a real 'can do' attitude amongst ordinary people of all ages who are looking to make some extra cash - and it's amazing to see that, as a nation, we are turning to science and engineering to make the impossible possible," said Dragon's Den success and first "inventor-in-residence" at London's Science Museum Mark Champkins.

"Breakthroughs using science and technology hold the key to not only transforming individuals' lives but the state of our country's future economic growth."

The survey, commissioned by the Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair, found that young people were part of the boom as well; 5% of survey respondents aged 11 to 18 had looked into or applied for a patent in the last year.

It is those young inventors that are of greatest interest to Big Bang fair; organisers are encouraging young inventors and technologists to put forward their ideas in the National Science and Engineering Competition.

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Apple’s Patent Win Is Bad For Us All

Look, I get it. It’s a great story, maybe the greatest in the history of American business. From Day One, Apple did things the right way: clean, elegant, beautiful. But they were brought to their knees by Microsoft’s colossal mediocrity. Their visionary founder was forced out. They teetered on the brink. And then–bam! They were saved (ironically, by Microsoft.) They regained their footing.

And then they built one of the most remarkable corporate empires that has ever been constructed. And they did it by doing things their way. Clean. Elegant. Beautiful. Insanely great.

So I can see why people who were Apple users during the dark days have a messianic zeal. Their ultimate triumph, after such long suffering at the brutal hands of inferiors, must seem to them more than remarkable. It must seem righteous. Add that to one of the weirdest and most unexpected things about the twenty-first century–the extent to which so many people defensively identify with the operating system on their phone–and Apple must seem like a living testament to the ultimate victory of truth, justice, and the American way.

But there’s nothing even remotely admirable about their latest coup. The road to today’s American patent system was paved with good intentions, but it has become a walking catastrophe, like a natural disaster that won’t go away, or even a kind of monster perpetually stalking the tech industry. And Apple’s knight in shining armor just went and retained the monster’s services.

There was a kind of understanding. Maybe you signed on to using patents only defensively. Maybe you wasted billions on patent portfolios to ensure a kind of Cold War mutual-assured-destruction détente. But you didn’t cut a deal with the monster unless you absolutely had to.

Apple didn’t have to. But they did anyways. Was it effective? Hell, yes–in many ways. And most of them are bad for everyone.

Aaron Levie@levie

$1B in damages. Must. Start. Patenting. Everything.

25 Aug 12

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Of course it’s perfectly understandable that Apple would act in their own self-interest for the sake of a billion dollars (not to mention Steve Jobs’s declaration of “thermonuclear war.”) But this time they shouldn’t be celebrated. They should be castigated. Their deal with the patent monster wasn’t the right thing to do for anyone else but them–and that includes their users. Competition from Android makes iOS better, and vice versa.

More generally, thanks to the patent monster, the tech industry is lost in a legal swamp, its visibility occluded by a thick and noxious cloud of FUD, stalked by vicious trolls. Thanks to Apple’s latest move, the swamp is now deeper, the fog thicker, the patent trolls more deadly. No fanboy anywhere, no matter how devoted, should be applauding.

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Think Your Private Data Is Secure? Scientists Can Hack Your Brain

Worry about cybercriminals getting into personal files and online banking accounts? Imagine if someone could actually extract that information directly from your brain.

Scientists from the University of California and the University of Oxford in Geneva are working on developing technology that could hack or retrieve sensitive data from a person’s brain, such as PIN numbers and place of birth, by using a low-cost device.

With the help of an off-the-shelf Emotiv brain-computer ($299) — a wireless head piece — researchers are able to track brain signals when someone is shown familiar messages. For example, scientists asked subjects to wear the device in front a computer screen that displayed a series of banks, maps and PIN numbers. A specific signal called P300 is omitted in the brain when someone recognizes a message, making it easier for researchers to cut down on random data points.

“The captured EEG signal could reveal the user’s private information about bank cards, PIN numbers, area of living and the knowledge of the known persons,” the researchers said in a statement. “This is the first attempt to study the security implications of consumer-grade BCI devices. We show that the entropy of the private information is decreased on the average by approximately 15% – 40% compared to random guessing attacks.”

Do you think this type of technology would be too vulnerable to hackers and could be used for more bad than good? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image via Emotiv

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All Facebook Apps to Soon Have Notification Capability

There could be a lot more notifications from Facebook on the way. The company’s rolled out a beta version of a new notifications API, a tool for developers that lets all Facebook apps send notifications to users.

This could open the floodgates to a plethora of notes under Facebook’s “notification jewel,” where that little red number will start counting itself higher than ever, especially if the user has signed up for lots of apps.

Of course, you can always get rid of an app’s notifications — you simply click on the X in the upper right of a notification box, and the messages will stop. For example, here’s how the box will look for the Tester app:

It’s a good thing this routine is so easy, especially since as soon as this developer tool becomes ubiquitous, any Facebook app you’ve subscribed to will be able to send you notifications without first asking for your permission.

Along with this capability, Facebook is instructing those developers who might abuse it to attempt to build “high-quality notifications.” Facebook software engineer Bo Zhang urges app developers, “Don’t make it look like spam — we all know the words on the DO NOT CLICK list — i.e. ‘Click Here!’ ‘Check this out!’ ‘You have to see this…’ or ‘Here’s something free!’”

Let us know in the comments if you think this new tool will result in more convenience for you, or just more noise.

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Flurry: iOS and Android devices are being adopted faster than any consumer technology in history

According to a report by mobile app analytics company Flurry, iOS and Android devices are being adopted quite fast. They’re growing so fast, in fact, that the current growth rate has surpassed that of any other consumer technology in history.

The first aspect of this report is fairly obvious: smartphones have been gaining ground for quite some time and continue to spread far beyond the US and Europe. What’s special here is what Flurry found when pitting this revolution against others in our industry. The company reports that iOS and Android devices are being adopted “10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption.”

Out of all this, with a claimed 90% reliability in device detection, Flurry states that an estimated 640 million iOS and Android devices were in use during last month alone.

As you can see, the report details exactly where this growth has occurred (above), and where it appears to be heading (below).

We’ve followed Flurry’s reports (and covered them) for quite a while now, and while it’s impossible for a third-party to track this sort of information with 100% accuracy, its reports tend to hold some truth when taken with a grain of salt. In this case, the message is clear: Mobile continues to be the future of computing and for the time being, statistics show this is a two player game.

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