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The Massive Scale Of Amazon’s Distribution Operations, Revealed Through Startling Images (AMZN)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/massive-scale-of-amazons-distribution-operations-2012-11
As the world’s largest online retailer, it’s no surprise that its biggest fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona is the size of 28 football fields.
That’s because it’s their goal to have everything anyone wants at anytime.
Amazon has 80 fulfillment centers in the world to handle all of its orders.
Even though Amazon already has massive operations, it’s still planning to open at least two new fulfillment centers in California over the next year or so.
And with the holiday shopping season in full force, Amazon hired an additional 50,000 employees to help with the expected demand.
Thanks to Imgur user SippingTea’s incredible photos, we have a sense of that this incredible scale actually looks like.
Stacks of shelves line the warehouse
Employees need carts to navigate through the massive amounts of inventory
Hundreds of boxes full of products cover the floor
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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It Happened Again)
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5958105/this-voting-machine-wont-let-you-vote-for-obama
If this is what it looks like, it’s terrifying: an electronic voting machine that won’t let you vote for who you want to vote for.
The video, uploaded today which surfaced on Reddit, is allegedly from a voting station in Pennsylvania—a major state in the election. The man who recorded the faulty machine, which is either deliberately not allowing a touch vote for Obama, malfunctioning, or maybe just has a bad touchscreen, said the following:
My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.
I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
Again, there’s no proof that this is deliberate vote manipulation—or even that it’s real. Maybe the video is edited. But maybe it’s not. And if there’s a day we should err on the side of scrutiny, it’s the day when we pick the President of the United States with fallible machines. The original poster says he’s “not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.”
This shouldn’t be happening anywhere, not even once.
[via Reddit]
Update: Our bros at Gawker talked to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Senior Staff Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who says the problem is “obviously” a miscalibrated touchscreen.
Update 2: NBC says the machine in the video is no longer in use.
Update 3: Mother Jones reports that the misfiring machine has been recalibrated and is back online.
Update 4: CNN reports a second machine in Pennsylvania has exhibited the touchscreen malfunction—but has been restored.
Facebook Just Launched Its Next Billion-Dollar Business (FB)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-paid-app-installs-2012-10
For months, Facebook has been testing a new kind of ad on mobile devices—ads for other apps.
Now it’s officially launched the app-ad program to all developers.
Here’s how it works: Developers place ads on Facebook’s website and its mobile apps. When users install their apps, developers pay a fee.
Because Facebook has a huge audience, and because its fast-growing base of mobile users have already shown they’re willing to download Facebook’s own app, it’s a natural audience for these ads. TinyCo, a mobile games maker, reported having 50 percent higher click-through rates. Companies like Zoosk, the online-dating service, and Fab, the e-commerce site, have also been running ads in tests.
Facebook has been swiftly laying the groundwork for this business, first launching its App Center, a centralized place for promoting apps, in May and rolling it out internationally.
Having proven it can drive traffic to apps through the App Center and through ads placed in Facebook users’ News Feeds, Facebook’s now seeking to make money off of that traffic.
Here’s a bonus: It keeps iPhone and Android developers, who might otherwise favor tools built into Apple and Google’s mobile platforms, loyal to Facebook, s! ince add ing Facebook’s social features to their apps is pretty much a requirement to get distribution—paid or unpaid—on Facebook.
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This Chart Is A Complete Nightmare For Marissa Mayer And Yahoo (YHOO)
Stifel analyst Jordan Rohan put out a note this morning reducing estimates for Yahoo’s financials in the third quarter “and beyond.”
The main reason?
Yahoo’s search share is tanking at an alarming rate.
That’s a problem because search is a pure profit center for Yahoo. Rohan decreased his Q3 revenue projection for Yahoo $80 million and his EBITDA projection $70 million.
Here’s a chart based on ComScore data of Yahoo’s core search “growth”:
Yahoo outsources search tech and search monetization, and Yahoo.com isn’t growing much at all.
You might think that this kind of atrophy is normal for a company in that position. You’d be wrong.
Look at AOL, which outsources search to Google:
And look at Ask, which also uses Google:
The silver lining for Yahoo, YHOO owners, and Mayer is this: Looking at AOL and Ask reveals search growth can turn around.
It might help for Yahoo to switch to Google. The DoJ barred Yahoo from doing that back in 2009, but it’s obviously a different era ! now.
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Jury finds Apple did not infringe on Samsung’s patents, awards no damages
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/24/jury-finds-apple-didnt-infringe-on-samsung-patents-awards-no-d/
The jury in Apple v. Samsung dealt a big blow to Samsung by finding that it did infringe on some of the Apple patents at the center of the case, and it didn’t have any better news for the company when it came to Samsung’s own claims that Apple infringed on some of its patents as well. The jury found that Apple did not infringe on those in all five cases (the so-called utility patents), although it did rule that the patents were valid. That also, of course, means no damages awarded to Samsung.
Filed under: Cellphones
Jury finds Apple did not infringe on Samsung’s patents, awards no damages originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | The Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News! | Email this | Comments
Nielsen has Android near 52 percent of US smartphone share in Q2, iPhone ekes out gains
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/12/nielsen-has-android-near-52-percent-of-us-smartphone-share-in-q2/
If there was doubt as to whether or not Android would soon become the majority smartphone platform in the US, that’s just been erased by Nielsen. Google crossed the tipping point in the second quarter after getting close in the winter, with 51.8 percent of current smartphone users running some variant on the green robot’s OS. As we’ve seen in the past, though, the increase is coming mostly at the expenses of platforms already being squeezed to within an inch of their lives, such as the BlackBerry (8.1 percent) and Windows (4.3 percent combined). Apple still isn’t in a position to fret: it kept climbing to 34.3 percent and swung the attention of recent buyers just slightly back in its direction. The real question for many of us might center on what happens in a summer where Samsung has thrown a Galaxy S III-sized curveball at Americans and any new iPhone is likely still a few months away.
Filed under: Cellphones
Nielsen has Android! near 52 percent of US smartphone share in Q2, iPhone ekes out gains originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Nielsen | Email this | Comments
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5920461/the-google-world-wonders-project-shows-you-the-world-from-street-level
Some of the world’s most beautiful and historic places are in some of the most difficult to visit locations. If globetrekking isn’t in your budget, take a desktop vacation instead with the Google World Wonders Project and view beautiful places like the Toshodai-ji Temple in Japan, the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew in the UK, or the old town of Ouro Preto in Brazil.
The World Wonders Project uses Google’s Street View technology to take you on virtual tours of some of the world’s most historically significant places. With destinations in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, you can browse areas of interest by selecting a continent or a theme from the menus at the top of the page, by clicking through the photo carousel in the center, or even by clicking and dragging the globe at the bottom until you see something you like. Then, just click “explore this site now” to take a Street View-powered walking tour.
The links on the right side of the page will give you more information about the location, related videos and other walkthroughs, and even photos and 3D models of the location so you can see more detail. It’s definitely not as good as going and experiencing some of these beautiful places on your own, but if you’re stuck at your desk, it may be the next best thing. Best of all, if you have a Panoramio account, you can even contribute some of your own photos, if you ever do visit.
Hit the link below to give it a try, and check out this related video for a fun behind the scenes look at how all of these images were captured. Have you been to any of these places yourself, or did we inspire you to pack your bags? Let us know where you’ve been in the comments below.
Dramatic Declines In Usage of Traditional News Sources; Internet The Only One Growing
Source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/168697/where-did-they-hear-that.html
Campaign News Sources |
||||
|
% of Consumers Who Regularly Get Campaign News From: |
|||
Source |
2000 |
2004 |
2008 |
2012 |
Cable news |
34% |
38% |
38% |
36% |
Local TV news |
48 |
43 |
40 |
32 |
Network news |
45 |
35 |
32 |
26 |
Internet |
9 |
13 |
24 |
25 |
Local paper |
49 |
31 |
31 |
20 |
Source: Pew Research Center, January 4-8, 2012 |
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/168697/where-did-they-hear-that.html#ixzz1nlia383u
Gamers Redesign a Protein That Stumped Scientists for Years [Science]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5878459/gamers-redesign-a-protein-that-stumped-scientists-for-years
Folding: it’s detestable and boring, as any Gap employee can tell you. But it’s also a totally fun thing you can do in a video game! And today it’s particularly exciting because players of the online game Foldit have redesigned a protein, and their work is published in the science journal Nature Biotechnology.
It seems nobler than shooting people in the face, somehow. Granted, Foldit attracts a unique kind of gamer who enjoys obsessing over biological protein folding patterns. Proteins get their function from the way they are folded into coils like in the image above. When the amino acids in a protein interact, they create that coiled, three-dimensional structure. Scientists can manipulate the structure to make the protein more efficient. In Foldit, designs that create the most efficient proteins garner the highest scores.
University of Washington in Seattle scientists Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker developed Foldit (which is different from Folding@home, Stanford software that lets people donate their idle computer processing power to create a protein-folding supercomputer). By playing it, at-home gamers have redesigned a protein for the first time, and they did it better and faster than scientists who have trained their entire careers to build better proteins. Justin Siegel, a biophysicist in Baker’s group told Scientific American:
I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it. Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.
Here’s how it works: Researchers send a series of puzzles to Foldit’s 240,000 registered users. The scientists sift through the results for the best designs and take those into the lab for real-life testing. They combed through 180,000 designs to get to the version of the protein published today. The paper details an enzyme that thanks to the crowdsourced redesign is 18-fold more active than the original version.
Now for the anticlimactic part: this particular enzyme doesn’t really have any practical uses. But the researchers say it’s a proof of concept, and future Foldit designs will be more useful. In fact, Baker has fed players a protein that blocks the flu virus that led to the 1918 pandemic—and their puzzle solving for this one could lead to an actual drug.
Nature via Scientific American
Image: Foldit
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