drag2share: Nike Has Fired Most Of Its FuelBand Team And Will Stop Making Wearable Devices

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/nike-fires-fuelband-team-2014-4

There have been rumors that Nike will stop making its FuelBand wearable device, and now it looks like the rumors have come true.

A person familiar with Nike's plans confirmed to CNET that the company will get out of the fitness band business and will stick with software, such as the Nike+ app for the iPhone.  

"As a fast-paced, global business we continually align resources with business priorities," Nike spokesman Brian Strong tells CNET. "As our Digital Sport priorities evolve, we expect to make changes within the team, and there will be a small number of layoffs. We do not comment on individual employment matters."

As many as 55 people of the 70-person hardware team, part of the larger Digital Sport division, were let go on Thursday, according to CNET's source. 

It seems obvious that Nike would jump out of the hardware game right now, with the upcoming iWatch on its way, as well as wearable Android devices, such as Samsung's Gear Fit, flooding the market.

But as CNET reports:

As Apple enters the fray, Nike has a potential partner. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who was seen wearing a FuelBand at the company's launch of the in October of 2012, sits on Nike's board, and has for the last nine years. That relationship has been fruitful over the years, helping Nike enter the wearable market as early as 2006, with the Nike+iPod shoe sensor package, with a strong brand partner.

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drag2share: Satellite photo shows giant, monster-like biological shape at Loch Ness

Source: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/satellite-photo-show-giant-monster-like-biological-sha-1564884841/+caseychan

Is that the Loch Ness monster in this satellite photo used by Apple Maps? Or at least something that looks like a giant biological form underwater? It's strangely similar to the shape spotted in Google's satellite imagery. Could it really be an underwater creature, a long-forgotten aquatic dinosaur?

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drag2share: 7 Charming and Wacky Treehouses You Can Rent For a Night in the Forest

Source: http://gizmodo.com/7-charming-and-wacky-treehouses-you-can-rent-for-a-nigh-1563869303

At Treehotel in the north of Sweden, the rooms rise up like trees in an enchanted forest: a UFO, a mirrorcube, a giant bird's nest. It's some of your wildest childhood fantasies—brought to life by Swedish architects. So how did it all begin?

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drag2share: Hadoop analytics startup Karmasphere sells itself to FICO

Source: http://gigaom.com/2014/04/17/hadoop-analytics-startup-karmasphere-sells-itself-to-fico/

The Fair Isaac Corporation, better known as FICO, has acquired the intellectual property of Hadoop startup Karmasphere. Karmasphere launched in 2010, and was one of the first companies to push the idea of an easy, visual interface for analyzing Hadoop data, and even analyzing it using traditional SQL queries.

According to a press release announcing the acquisition, Karmasphere’s technology will be folded into FICO Analytic Cloud service, which lets users analyze consumer credit data. Martin Hall, Karmasphere’s founder, will join FICO. I have reached out to Karmasphere for further details about the acquisition.

A screenshot of the Karmasphere product.

From the outside, though, the deal looks like a fire sale. I began hearing questions about the company’s future in early 2013 after some key executive departures, although the company did still release a new version of its analytics software in June. Karmasphere had raised $14.5 million in venture capital from Hummer Winblad, US Venture Partners and Presidio Ventures, but the last round was only a partial close ($3.5 million out of the $5 million it was looking for) in December 2012.

When I asked Hummer Winblad Managing Director Mitchell Kertzman (whose firm was one of Karmasphere’s main investors) about the fate of Karmasphere on the Structure Show podcast in November, he had this to say:

“To some extent, I think what happened in that space was real Hadoop adoption happened slowly … In other words, if Hadoop had really taken off … then the bet [on Karmapshere] would have gotten to market faster. Since Hadoop wasn’t being adopted as fast, then tools for Hadoop weren’t being required as fast.”

That’s a fair point. By the time the idea of real interactive analytics on Hadoop data really took off, there were newer, shinier options such as Datameer and Platfora available. Popular tools such as Tableau began connecting nicely with Hadoop, too, and the Hadoop community helped improve that story with SQL query engines that sped up backend processing.

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drag2share: Twitterâs data grants will be used to research food poisoning, cancer, happiness

Source: http://gigaom.com/2014/04/17/twitters-data-grants-will-be-used-to-research-food-poisoning-cancer-happiness/

Twitter announced on Thursday the six winners of the data grants program that the social networking platform announced in February. The winning researchers will get access to the entire history of tweets to search for posts relevant to their studies.

Here is the list of winners and winning projects, as described by Twitter:

• Harvard Medical School / Boston Children’s Hospital (US): Foodborne Gastrointestinal Illness Surveillance using Twitter Data
• NICT (Japan): Disaster Information Analysis System
• University of Twente (Netherlands): The Diffusion And Effectiveness of Cancer Early Detection Campaigns on Twitter
• UCSD (US): Do happy people take happy images? Measuring happiness of cities
• University of Wollongong (Australia): Using GeoSocial Intelligence to Model Urban Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia
• University of East London (UK): Exploring the relationship between Tweets and Sports Team Performance

However, as interesting as these projects might be, they represent just a small fraction of the types of questions that could be researched using data from Twitter and other social networking sites. As I wrote when Twitter announced its grant program, there’s a bit of tension between researchers who want access to data and companies that want — often for good reason — to keep it largely under wraps. For this program alone, Twitter says it received more than 1,300 submissions.

Gnip, which Twitter bought this week and which runs a service around letting users access social data, is supplying the data for the grant recipients. One can only imagine the volumes of data they’ll be receiving: Gnip recently supplied me with one month worth of bitcoin-related tweets, which numbered more than 1.3 million and spanned dozens of metadata categories. Measuring tweets about sports for any prolonged period? Ouch.

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