Everyone remembers Andy Pausch’s famous “Last Lecture,” which the computer science professor gave a couple months before he died of cancer, and which  became hugely popular in the U.S. Andy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University.

In the Last Lecture, Pausch refers to the “Tornado” he founded the ETC with. This Tornado happened to be one of the keynote speakers at this year’s SIGGRAPH: Don Marinelli, Executive Producer of the Entertainment Technology Center.

What is it about these two professors and their Center that made them so influential?

Two men, two opposite backgrounds: Randy the geek, Don the crazy theater professor. They each represent one side of the binary system our society has established between Arts and Sciences/Technology: right and left brain, the creative versus the rational. Why do we have to set the arts and sciences in opposition?

This socially constructed binary is one of the “brick walls” Randy and Don’s ETC is meant to tear down.

The Entertainment Technology Center is a professional graduate program that reconciles arts and technology in many different ways. Students come from extremely diverse backgrounds - there are engineers, architects, musicians, dramatists, computer graphics students, and so on. The goal is to have them build projects together and use their diverse backgrounds for challenging team projects.

Because innovation happens, according to Don and Andy, at the convergence of arts and technology.

During his keynote, Marinelli explained how similar theater and animation are. There’s a storyline, a plot, characters, a virtual world, a structure, and an architecture. They’e both about experience.

“There is a science to art, and an art to sciences,” he says. To him the rehearsals for a theater play are like algorithms for math.

If you consider an innovator, here is the question Don Marinelli would want you to ask yourself: are you ready to paint your office walls?

This question might seem a little overstated, but it is interesting when you think about it. If you want to think out of the box, the first thing you should be able to do is paint your office walls: first, in order to build a more creative environment, and second, because an innovator should be able to transgress the codes and act out of the box.

And that’s exactly what Don and Andy did with the ETC. The building looks like Disneyland.

Not only are their walls painted, but the entire curriculum of ETC is based on this original vision the founders had about connecting arts and technology. The students go rafting to experience risk, they learn Aristotle, try improvisational acting to work on creating a narrative with a team, build virtual worlds and learn game design. What a program! As well, the ETC has official agreements with some of the best actors in the industry – such as EA and Pixar – for them to hire ETC students upon graduation.

So … can you paint your walls?

(Photo: Carnegie Mellon University)

A labyrinth is emerging surrounding the state of network neutrality today involving Google, Verizon and the Federal Communications Commission. Beginning in late June, reports claim that the FCC held meetings with numerous large Internet organizations regarding how service providers may privilege data transfer from paying companies over others.

Net neutrality is concerned with the equality of data flow on the Internet, and many disagreeing groups see the meetings as undermining that concept. To such people, the practice of privileging some data over others would interfere with independent sources, small organizations and free speech. Since the alleged talks have involved the subject of giving more bandwidth to companies that pay ISPs, it would effectively make it more difficult for Internet users to access sites and media from smaller content creators.

Earlier coverage tracks the FCC’s attempted role in these meetings. "We have called off this round of stakeholder discussions. It has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet – one that drives innovation, investment, free speech, and consumer choice," Edward Lazarus, the FCC’s chief of staff, said in a statement quoted by PCMag today. "All options remain on the table as we continue to seek broad input on this vital issue."

This announcement was a response to rumors of a deal between Google and Verizon that was reported yesterday in the New York Times and elsewhere. The coverage speculated that the two media leviathans were "nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege." Responding to this article, Google’s public policy Twitter account posted this morning, "@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet."

While contradictory, this conversation needs more than better fact-checking. Corporations and public interest groups alike have much at stake in the Net Neutrality debate, and these incidents show the sensationalism that can arise on either side.

One of the first examples of virtual reality affecting smell and taste was showcased at last month’s SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. Using visual and olfactory stimuli, the system attempted to alter the subject’s perception of taste using virtual and real life cookies. After donning combination eye/nose goggle headgear, the user saw a visual representation of a flavored cookie, as well as inhaled scented air through nose tubes, and subsequently took a bite of a neutrally flavored cookie.

The contributing team for this project, made up of Takuji Narumi, Takashi Kajinami, Tomohiro Tanikawa and Michitaka Hirose, come from the University of Tokyo. They describe the project itself, "Meta Cookie," as "the world’s first pseudo-gustation system that induces cross-modal effects so humans can perceive various tastes by changing only visual and olfactory information." The system recognizes the sugar cookies that have augmented reality markers printed on them so that the software can properly track movement and time sensory output.

As the team’s article abstract explains, due to flavor being chemical-related, little innovation has been related to computers for this sense, despite how much has been done using the other major senses (vision, touch, hearing, etc). Since much of chemical interaction with taste is not understood, this project has taken advantage of visual and olfactory cues to affect taste. Using these tools, as well as memory, an effective experience can be cobbled together to fool the brain into changing the perception of flavor for the user. "We taste with our yes and nose before any food enters our mouth," says Stuart Fox at MSNBC. If indeed "good chefs know this," then so now will virtual and augmented reality engineers.

Narumi has several projects in the computer science field, including other projects that use non-visual feedback. One project, "Thermotaxis," uses thermal feedback in a social edutainment situation.

The day Flipboard launched, Robert Scoble evangelized it. Which is about as successful a launch a company can hope for, even if it hadn’t yet scaled to handle Scoble’s profound influence.

Scoble continued to play with Flipboard the rest of the day his article appeared (we know; we were sitting next to him), and since then the app has caught the international imagination in a way that no other iPad app has.

It’s the device’s first killer app.

L’Atelier France’s Caroline Leduc caught up with Flipboard CTO Arthur Van Hoff this week.

L’Atelier: Why create a magazine that’s based on user-generated content?

Van Hoff: With a billion messages posted each day on the web, social networks have become the primary tool for for discovering and sharing content. The only thing is, this stream is dispersed and needs to be organized to use it.

Is it the user who organizes their Flipboard, or is the process automated?

In the current version, Flipboard examines the user’s browsing history and what kind of content they normally access, for example be social networks, news, music or sports. In the next version of our app, which should be released by the end of fall, we hope to integrate real-time search software developed by Ellerade. This will let the app determine which information and social connections – friends – the user is closest to. So if I like politics and spend a lot of time on political sites or blogs, the application will refine my Flipboard so that information has a prime spot.

Do you see Flipboard as a form of new media?

Yes, it’s part of a new way of reading and keeping informed. Today on the web you need to go on different sites to be able to follow the information streams around your interests. And if you want to share something with a friend, you need to be able to create a URL link. We want to focus on information that is useful to the user. In Flipboard’s design, Mike McCue and Evan Doll – the creators of the app – were largely inspired by the printing industry. They thought that if it’s possible assemble a certain amount of information on a simple paper document every day, that should easily be as possible with social media. They also realized that you can make social media look better aesthetically with the typographic techniques, page layout – photos – of traditional magazines.

What’s your business model?

We hope that Flipboard becomes a new entry point for brands in the social networking landscape. As such, we hope that all content – advertising included – can have have a “social” aspect.

Today, people want to share everything on the web – photos, comments, opinions. In this sense, Flipboard has the capacity to make the marketing message more immersive. Because the problem today with web advertising is that it’s concentrated on internet users’ clicks and interests, without considering the consumer experience. We hope as well that this electronic magazine will be a new playground for app creators and developers.

We tend to turn to universities when we want to cover emerging tech, but what’s going on in the DIY Scene? They’re meeting our century’s retro quota, playing NES.

With their eyes.

Engineering collective Waterloo Labs, based in Austin, TX, has developed a way to play Super Mario Brothers with their eyes, using electrodes and an a single-board RIO platform.

eyeMario allows users to control Mario’s movements by looking left and right, make him jump while looking up.

How does it work? Electrodes are placed around the eyes, measuring the positive and negative electrons emitted by different eye movements. These bursts are translated by the RIO board into what amounts to cursor controls.

Unfortunately, while eyeMario makes it possible to play NES with your eyes, you still have to clean the cartridges the old fashioned way, by blowing in them.

The future has its limitations, after all.

Waterloo Labs’ past projects include driving a car with an iPhone and playing Half-Life with shovels.

Chris Anderson’s “Atoms are the New Bits” has given increased attention to the wonders coming out of the DIY scene, which dates back in its current iteration to San Francisco’s Survival Research Labs in the late 1970s.

Moore’s Law and attendant metaphors are continually driving down the overhead needed to invent new things. As such, it releases innovation from the restrictions of the corporation and university (and the entities funding the research).

It will take time for things like Waterloo Labs to become totally autonomous entities, but what they are doing leads us to agree with Anderson’s sub-thesis that the resources needed for innovation on the hardware side – the expensive part – will be increasingly leaked into the hands of private individuals, which will add tremendously to the acceleration of innovation cycles.

Twitter users are the most influential online consumers, according to a study by ExactTarget and CoTweet.

A study by twin solution providers equals a massive grain of salt taken, but the findings still warrant conversation.

Twitter users are 72 percent more likely than non-users to publish blog posts at least once a month, and 61 percent more likely to post product reviews at least once a month, according to the study. Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to blog, seven more times likely to contribute to Wikis and three times more likely to post a monthly product review than non-Twitter users.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal, ExactTarget’s research and education group.

“What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter,” Morgan said. “While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The study is sort of the Cartesian circle – Twitter users are more likely to be content producers, who are more likely to be Twitter users, ad infinitum. We still need to figure out how large a circle of influence the influencers have outside of their own circles.

While Twitter users might be more influential as individuals, the influence of Facebook as a megalithic whole is certainly greater, especially as it has become a more brand friendly place during its evolution, something that it wasn’t but Twitter was from its inception. That might be a little old-school in thinking, but Facebook has convinced the mainstream user – and consumer – of its relevance, something that Twitter is still trying to do.

So while Twitter might have the influencers, it’s still probably better to bet on the half billion users.

The consumption of mobile data is constantly growing. According to ABI Research’s report “Mobile subscriber ARPU, Voice, Messaging, and Data Traffic Forecasts,”  American consumers will use an average of 159 megabytes of data in 2010, compared to 100 megabytes last year.

ABI forecasts more than 55 percent growth in mobile data consumption between 2009 and 2015 in the U.S., and 42 percent annual growth in Europe.

“Mobile voice has already been surpassed by mobile data traffic on some networks, and this trend will only accelerate,” says ABI Research wireless analyst Bhavya Khanna.

“This boom in usage is driven by the rapid adoption of smartphones in these markets.”

Despite this explosion in the use of mobile data, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will not exceed 20 percent in the U.S., due to the popularity of fixed unlimited data contracts among consumers, which have caused revenue to plateau. With the large investment that operators have made in 4G networks, these small returns will lead furnishers to change the way they manage their services.

Despite this, emerging markets still represent an important market. For example, Africa, where despite stiff competition among operators, the growth in calls, by minute, has grown 9 percent between 2009 and 2010.

According to a recent report by Ernst & Young, the growth of mobile data will create another risk for operators: to become less important than phone manufacturers and providers.

Originally published by L’Atelier France.

The majority of web browsers offer a “private” mode, which purports to leave no trace of a user’s history on a computer. In reality, certain information is still stored, which allows users to go back to previously visited sites, or at least find out what they were, warn researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

This is partly due to plug-ins and extensions, which mitigate the effectiveness of anonymous browsing modes and leave data accessible to a local attack (which controls a user’s computer), or an attack made by hacked internet sites.

To come to these conclusions, the researchers utilized a model that allowed them to evaluate at long-distance the quality and the resistance of these add-ons. Their findings are relevant for the four major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.

There’s two steps to the system. The first entails analyzing the source codes stored by the browsers and verifying that they’re all protected when users are in private browsing mode. The second step calls for verifying that the protocols used by the browsers don’t affect the private nature of these source codes while in secure mode.

The result is that weaknesses appear, mainly because of the protocols, which preserve and hide the traces of navigation. At the top of the list, according to the researchers: Firefox, which executes the characteristics of HTML, allowing a site to define personal protocols. These, which are established when the user is in safe mode, are still usable and detectable when navigation is ended.

“A hacker could use this to track what a user did on a site and retrace their browsing history,” the researchers say. This is even possible in secure mode.

Other weaknesses, across all the browsers: when a site uses JavaScript, it can order the browser to produce protocols to securitize exchanges, which are used in both public and private modes, and act to define which security objectives to respect, such as server authentication or the confidentiality of exchanged data. In the case of public and private use, the browser can save the information demanded by the protocol outside of secure navigation.

With this, attackers can track the previously-viewed site. The researchers also call out the SMB (Server Message Block), which allows file sharing over local networks on Windows PCs.

“It can undo the anonymity of the ‘private’ mode,” the researchers say.

When Internet Explorer uses SMB to make a file-sharing request with a server, an initial anonymous connection is attempted. If this fails, Internet Explorer sends all the information necessary to complete the exchange: the user name of the server, as well as the name of the computer and the Windows domain. All this while the browser is in secure mode.

The researchers will present their research at next month’s Usenix Security Symposium in Washington, D.C.

Originally published on L’Atelier France.

Americans spend over 900 hundred million hours on social networks and blogs per month, 43 percent more time than they did last year, according to Nielsen.

As you can tell from all the Zynga coverage, online gaming is another quickly growing category, rising in total usage time by 10 percent year-over-year. In fact, online gaming overtook email — which dropped several percentage points in use — to become the second most heavily used category.

More than one-third of internet time is spent on social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging services.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

It would be nice if Nielsen were to stop putting social networking sites and blogs together in the same category. This categorization made sense a few years ago, but now the two are so totally different that it’s time to separate them, as it confuses the results of studies like these.

While Web 2.0 rules the fixed web, Web 1 is the king of the mobile internet. Almost half of mobile internet time is spent emailing (twenty-five minutes out of a total hour), and social networks and blogs are accessed only a quarter of this time, just a little over six minutes per hour.

Here are some of Nielsen’s other findings:

• Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online.

Since launching in November 2008, Groupon has seen insane growth.

“A year ago at this time, we were in 5 or 6 cities,” the social-coupon site’s CEO Andrew Mason said this morning at TechCrunch’s Social Currency Crunchup. “Now we’re in 170 cities and have about 5000 users,” Mason said. “Now we have 12 million users, and are adding 50 employees in the U.S. every month.”

Groupon started in a completely different space: as an organizing and action space.

“It started as a way for one person to get several people to help do something, for example, we had a group raising funds to build a dome over Chicago for winters,” Mason said. “But people were also using the site for buying things, so we introduced coupons for revenue.”

“The success took us by surprise, too,” Mason said.

The first few things Groupon tried to sell didn’t work.

“We had these slippers with flashlights,” Mason said. “About half of the people who bought them sent them back.”

Flashforward from that failure to this figure: 97 percent of businesses who are now featured by Groupon want to be featured again.

“Businesses see it as the most important form of local advertising there is,” Mason said. “They’re not handing over a check, but only paying when a customer walks in the door. For merchants with a low marketing budget, it’s great. “

Groupon sees its role as larger than that of just a coupon provider.

“We’re like a city guide, but we have this deal to nudge people to do things,” Mason said.

Mason wants Groupon to promote local hidden gems. You can think of it as a carrotmob at a glacial scale.

Chances are, Groupon won’t be around forever, seeing as its success is dependent upon social tools that will soon become vestiges. But it’s perfect for the content-sharing Web 2 moment.

Another part of Groupon’s success is that the majority of people who purchase a groupon, use it.

“We don’t build ourselves around breakage, because we think that’s a bad business model,” Mason said. “About 10 percent of customers don’t redeem coupons. Businesses don’t want breakage. “

“The stuff that we’re selling is inherently social,” Mason said. “There’s a natural incentive to share it with people, and Facebook and Twitter make it frictionless model to share.”

Even though Groupon is less than two years old, there are already more than 500 Groupon clones. But Mason doesn’t mind this, and actually thinks there is a place for them.

“The reason a business turns to the clones is because we’ve turned away that business,” Mason said.