L'Atelier US : The high-tech studio for a changing world

idCHECK is Like a Credit Report for Your ID

Mark Alvarez — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:41:09 GMT

More than 36 million Americans have been the victim of identity theft in the last four years, according to Javelin. Usually, the way you find out our ID was stolen is when your bank account or credit is affected. ID Watchdog’s idCHECK, promises to change that by alerting consumers that their ID has been stolen [...]

Product Recommendations Less Relevant, Study Shows

Ivory King — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:32:17 GMT

Part 2 of ChoiceStream’s 2009 Personalization Survey was released this week, showing that consumers found online product recommendations less useful last year than 2008. Other findings were published by the recommendations service provider, who works with big brands such as Tesco, Zappos.com and more. The decrease in credibility for consumers is specified by retail category. Overall, 31 [...]

Product Personalization Benefits Most From Timing, Survey Says

Ivory King — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:15:20 GMT

The development of personalization and product recommendation has become an integral part of online commerce. The annual ChoiceStream Personalization Survey released key findings this and last month regarding the developing role of mobile recommendations, recommendation quality, and more. The adoption of smartphones has made mobile site optimization a must, as the small screen space makes for [...]

Facebook’s Redesign: Pop-Up Menus Make Everything Better

Ivory King — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:12:00 GMT

Image via Wikipedia Facebook started rolling out navigation updates to its user homepage yesterday, with an emphasis on making the menu bars more powerful and quick to use. Since the new features are still being phased in, most users will still be stuck with the previous design and other people’s screengrabs of the new look, just [...]

VirtuOZ: From Virtual Agents to Virtual Advocates

Mark Alvarez — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:40:12 GMT

Fifty-seven percent of consumers are likely to abandon an online purchase if they can’t find quick answers to questions, according to Forrester. “If 50 percent of customers can’t find the answer they’re looking for on a site, they leave the site and become what eBay calls ‘silent sufferers,’” says Mark Gaydos, VP of Worldwide Marketing for [...]

New Terms of Service for Facebook Makes Advertisers Accountable

Ivory King — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:01:44 GMT

Facebook released new terms for advertising providers Wednesday, clearly delineating policies that favor honesty and consumer rights. Some of the agreements for ad providers include: Limits on data collection, storage and usage including some prohibitions on developers sharing data with monetization providers Making available the contact information for all operators and employees of the ad provider, [...]

Using the Wii to Improve Aerospace Manufacturing

Mark Alvarez — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:16:27 GMT

University of Missouri professor Ming Leu is testing the use of the Nintendo Wii’s remotes – Wiimotes – to streamline the aerospace manufacturing process. Leu is using the Wiimote to record an assembly process to improve employee training, shorten cycle time, reduce injuries and improve global communication between plants. The benefits of the Wii are its cheap [...]

Most Online Bank Customers Lax with Passwords

Mark Alvarez — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:46:47 GMT

Recently it was revealed that the most popular password for online sites is ‘123456.’ Not exactly Dan Brown-level cryptography. Even more eye-opening is that consumers aren’t even careful with the stuff that’s really vulnerable – their bank passwords. Seventy-three percent of people reuse their bank passwords on other, non-financial, sites, according to online security firm Trusteer (PDF). Forty-seven [...]

Malware and Spam on Social Networks Up 70 Percent

Mark Alvarez — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:37:19 GMT

Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos. Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks. “Computer users are [...]

Is Cybersecurity a Civic Duty?

Mark Alvarez — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:14:56 GMT

The recent attacks on Google have brought increased attention to cybersecurity. Now a new report (PDF) from political scientists at the University of Cincinnati says that defense is ultimately in our hands as citizens. In what has undertones of the Cold War and the Patriot Act – but also indicates the new levels of engagement, both [...]

New Rubber Can Harvest Energy From Movement

Ivory King — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:58:01 GMT

Mobile renewable energy has received innovations with limited usefulness. Solar or other methods have so far given us little to power our mobile phones, laptops, music players, etc. But our own bodies may provide the means to energize this category of devices. A type of rubber film can now be used to store the negligible [...]

Amazon Kicks Macmillan Out of Kindle Store

Ivory King — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:32:47 GMT

Yesterday evening, electronic books from publisher Macmillan disappeared from Amazon.com. According to the New York Times technology blog Bits, Amazon is expressing a strong disagreement to Macmillan’s request to raise the price of e-books from $9.99 for a Kindle purchase to $15. Other publishers have made the same request, but it is was not immediately [...]

New Study an About-Face on the Efficacy of Banning Use of Phones While Driving

Mark Alvarez — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:49:36 GMT

As we’ve written before, using a phone while driving has been deemed to be as dangerous – if not more – than driving drunk. (We’ve also recently learned that things are doubly bad, as a new study claims that driving reduces your ability to talk on the phone, too, but that’s outside the scope of [...]

FrontlineSMS:Medic Founder Creates “Makeshift 911″ in Haiti

Mark Alvarez — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:06:13 GMT

Looking back I shouldn’t be surprised. I was reading Kim-Mai Cutler’s VentureBeat article on how Twitter is aiding medical efforts in Haiti when I got to the point of the story where they named the guy who put the whole thing together: Josh Nesbit, founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic. With a just a Twitter message, Nesbit ended up [...]

Happy Data Privacy Day!

Mark Alvarez — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:46:04 GMT

January 28 is Data Privacy Day in North America and Europe. The day was created to bring attention to online privacy. “Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information,” according to The Privacy Projects, a non-profit think tank dedicated to privacy and data protection. Back when people first [...]

Baby Boomers and Social Networking

Ivory King — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:25:07 GMT

Baby Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and keep them better connected, according to several complementary studies. Socially speaking, this section of the population are cultivating their existing relationships and creating new ones at unique rates compared to other age groups. “Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these [...]

What We Want in Our Tech

Ivory King — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:39:52 GMT

Disappointment and a little elation are proliferating after the release of Apple’s iPad. Hype and conjecture were clouds of flocculence preceding the release date, only to congeal into a giant iPhone. Looking forward to the coming reception by regular consumers, who will be the ones who will actually define this new device as a success [...]

Smart Meters to Reach 212 Million by 2012

Mark Alvarez — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:07:47 GMT

The number of smart grids will grow to 212 million in 2012, up from 2009’s total of 76 million, according to ABI. Driving this growth in the U.S. is the recently granted stimulus funds that are going towards smart-grid projects. “In the US, $3.4 billion in federal economic stimulus funding was directed to smart grid development in [...]

Navy: Video Games Can Make Better Soldiers

Mark Alvarez — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:57:36 GMT

Research by the Naval Department of Research indicates that video games can help make better soldiers and, in general, make people smarter. “We have discovered that video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players,” said Ray Perez, a program officer at [...]

Apple (Finally) Unveils the iPad, its Much-Anticipated Tablet

Mark Alvarez — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:00:56 GMT

So it’s official. The Apple tablet rumors have ended. At this morning’s Apple event in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled what Silicon Valley has been whispering about for years. Dubbed the ‘iPad,’ Apple’s tablet could be just the thing to launch smartphone-notebook hybrids (what have been up to now been casually, if controversially, known as smartbooks) [...]

Will the Future of Human-Machine Interaction Come From Microsoft Video Games?

Atelier — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:38:43 GMT

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Usually when we think about human-machine interaction, we imagine robots acting like regular people but without any emotions. Science fiction has tried to define what the future of these machines that might one day replace humanity will be, but that event doesn’t actually seem possible in the next few years. [...]

More than Half of Employees Use Social Media for Business Weekly

Mark Alvarez — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:45:53 GMT

Fifty-seven percent of workers polled by IDC use social media at least once weekly for business purposes. Generally, the tools are being used to acquire knowledge and ask questions of the community. Fifteen percent of those surveyed use consumer social tools instead of corporate-sponsored social tools because of their ease of use, familiarity due to personal use [...]

More than 1/4 of University Students Take Courses Online

Mark Alvarez — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:43:52 GMT

Over 4.6 million students took online courses in fall 2008, a 17 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report from the Sloan Consortium with research undertaken by Babson. This increase is more than 10 times the growth of the entire higher education population, which increased only 1.2 percent during that period. “Online education continues [...]

Purdue and Oxygen Education offer Online Green Technology Training

Mark Alvarez — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:12:29 GMT

The Purdue Research Foundation and Oxygen Education LLC have teamed up to offer online green technology training. Green Generalist Training is designed to provide educational institutions, business, industry and workforce development initiatives to provide training in green IT. “Making Green Generalist Training available online to the public will provide the opportunity to learn about green technology, [...]

Social networking is becoming the playground within the Internet

Atelier — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:01:38 GMT

The latest study from the Nielsen company shows that social networking is becoming the number one activity on the Web in terms of time spent, averaging five-and-a-half hours per user per month in December 2009. It’s 82% more time than one year ago and is still growing. It’s interesting to note that the other biggest [...]