The games won’t be made widely available to districts until the spring of 2014, but they’re being piloted now in a few schools across the country. Naturally, the games can be played on Amplify’s own branded tablet – the 10-inch Asus device running the Jellybean Android operating system, which it launched at SXSWedu earlier this year. But the games will also run on other major mobile operating systems, including iOS. Schools can buy them as part of a broader Amplify curriculum or separately, the company said.

In pitching its tablet, Amplify talked up the benefits of giving schools an entire learning package of hardware and software (each Amplify tablet is specially optimized at the manufacturer level for use in schools and comes pre-loaded with learning tools and content). But the company also sees an opportunity in offering schools just a tablet-based curriculum, of which the new video games are a part.

The games, which include an English language game world called Lexica, an arcade-style game called Food Web and a real-time strategy game called TyrAnt, were designed to hold students’ attention as much as for learning. The hope is that students will be hooked enough to play the games outside of the classroom and extend learning time, the company said.

“We’re not designing homework here,” Joel Klein, Amplify’s CEO and the former New York City Schools Chancellor, said in a statement. “These games will improve learning not because kids have to play them in school, but because they want to play them in their own free time.”

It remains to be seen just how effective these games will be in boosting students’ skills, but interest in educational games, generally, is growing. Earlier this year, New Schools Venture Fund and social gaming company Zynga announced an accelerator for educational gaming startups. And, last year, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put their weight behind a project at Electronic Arts called the Games, Learning and Assessment (GLASS) Lab.

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Since then, Accel has put a name on the types of companies it’s seeking to fund with the new allocation — namely, those selling what it calls “data-driven software.” That’s a fancy way of saying that it’s not looking to fund infrastructure-level software such as Hadoop or NoSQL databases, but rather software that leverages these technologies and others in order to make analytics simpler. It wants to fund startups targeting business users rather than data scientists.

Accel Partner Ping Li (second from right) at Structure 2011. (c) Pinar Ozger

This type of company isn’t too difficult to come by anymore. Just about everywhere you look, someone is trying to put a big data spin on an old problem or invent some new methods for doing business intelligence. Accel has recently funded a number of them including RelateIQ, Opower, Sumo Logic  and Causata. Among the non-Accel-funded startups GigaOM has covered in just the past few months are Ayasdi, Wise.io, Spinnakr, Statwing and BloomReach.

All this interest in data-driven software is no doubt inspired by the proven utility and wildly successful initial public offerings by enterprise data software companies such as Splunk and Tableau. Entrepreneurs can see the value in rethinking legacy business software or processes for the era of big data and cloud computing, and investors have dollar signs in their eyes as they try to get a piece of the most-promising companies.

As with all trends, much of this startup and investing activity will prove to be overkill, but there’s no denying the promise that the right products have for everyone involved. Businesses really are hurting for better ways to make sense of all the data they’re generating and being exposed to, and they’ll pay handsomely to software vendors that can solve the problem.

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The chip firm is introducing three new parts for servers. One is a more muscular core combining AMD’s graphics processing prowess with a CPU core (what AMD calls an APU) that will be aimed at the traditional enterprise computing and high-performance-computing market. AMD dubs this chip Warsaw.

The other two parts, Seattle and Berlin, are less powerful and designed more for webscale workloads that can be parallelized. Berlin is a smaller, X86 chip that uses an Atom-like core, while Seattle is the 64-bit ARM-based chip that could bring AMD out from Intel’s shadow. The Seattle chip will be in servers in the second half of 2014 and have eight and eventually 16 cores using the ARM Cortex A-57 design that can run at up to 2 GHz per core.

Andrew Feldman (pictured above), the corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s server business unit, and a speaker at the GigaOM Structure event happening this week in San Francisco, says it’s clear that ARM will have a place in the data center, but he understands that he needs to make a case for AMD as a viable builder of ARM-based chips for that market.

He thinks that AMD’s experience building server chips will help it, as will his experience building out networking fabrics at SeaMicro, the company AMD purchased last year as part of a bid to get into the more power-efficient and dense server architectures. Feldman and I have discussed the changes in the data center — from small workloads to the need for power efficiency — for the last three years. It’s nice to see this vision closer to playing out in the mass market.

It’s too early to say how AMD will stack up against the myriad other vendors trying to build out ARM-based chips for the data center — or even how it will continue to stack up against Intel. But the new chips are a clear attempt to bring AMD into the new era of cloud computing. It’s a welcome step.

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Peering is essentially an arrangement between two bandwidth providers where they send and receive traffic from each other for free. The logic is that the data sent from one network to another is reciprocated. Verizon runs one of the largest last mile networks and owns the descendants of MCI. Cogent is one of the largest bandwidth providers, and its network is spread across the globe in hundreds of cities.

Cogent and Verizon peer to each other at about ten locations and they exchange traffic through several ports. These ports typically send and receive data at speeds of around 10 gigabit per second. When the ports start to fill up (usually at 50 percent of their capacity), the internet companies add more ports. In this case, through, Verizon is allowing the ports that connect to Cogent to get crammed. ”They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,” said Dave Schaffer, chief executive officer of Cogent said in an interview. “Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.”

“Think of it as the on-ramp to the freeway being log-jammed,” Shaffer said. And that means your Netflix content, especially content sent by Netflix’s content delivery network, slows down, and you get pixelated pictures and buffering.

While not naming Netflix directly, Verizon has indicated to Cogent that the reason behind its actions is that Cogent is moving traffic for a large video provider. Schaffer confirmed the Netflix is one of their largest customers. “Over the past year Netflix has become a big partner for us. This is a business model problem, not an engineering problem,” Schaffer said.

Our sources tell us that Netflix recently bought 2 Terabits of bandwidth capacity in part to get around such cramming that was happening in places where it sends traffic directly to certain internet service providers.

When we called Verizon about this story asking if Verizon was having a problem with Cogent over peering issues associated with Netflix, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula said he’d get back to us. A few minutes later he sent the following reply that didn’t answer our question:

Verizon operates one of America’s lowest-latency, highest capacity networks. The various classes of Internet speeds we offer are among the fastest in the nation. Time and again, customers rate us best in class in various reports and surveys. Our customers enjoy a consistently superior Internet experience because our networks can adapt and grow with their use

Netflix has been growing like crazy and it now accounts for a whole lot of Internet traffic — almost one out of every 3 bits (32.3 percent) sent downstream to users in North America is Netflix traffic according to Sandvine, a company that makes traffic monitoring gear for ISPs. That’s a lot of congested ports.

Netflix’s growing popularity has made it a target of ISP (internet service providers) vitriol and anger, especially those who offer competitive services. Verizon, for instance owns 50 percent of Redbox, a video-over-the-Internet service that is competitive with Netflix. Time Warner Cable and Comcast are other large providers that has allowed degradation of the online video experience on its networks — after all the logic is that as people start to have a bad Netflix experience, they start to look for alternatives — perhaps the ISP’s own pay TV offering.

This isn’t the first application last mile network operators have tried to degrade — last year the wrath of the Baby Bells and cable companies fell on Megaupload, a file sharing company started by Kim Dotcom, Schaffer said. That too was one of the big bandwidth-hungry services popular with the end customers of the ISPs — actual consumers.

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Sprint has already claimed that Dish’s offer to take a 25 percent or greater stake in Clearwire is illegal under the corporate laws of Delaware, where Clearwire is incorporated. It now seems prepared to back up its claims before a judge.

Sprint is still Clearwire’s largest stakeholder, even though it doesn’t have direct control of the company. Sprint is claiming that Clearwire can’t accept an offer from Dish without its approval — approval it’s not prepared to give. Sprint also claimed that Dish is demanding veto powers and board seats that Clearwire has no right to give due to its equity holder’s agreement.

Sprint has been trying to buy up control of Clearwire since December, but it found thwarted by Dish at every turn. Clearwire originally backed Sprint’s bid, but in a surprising turn last week it switched allegiances.

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It might sound futuristic, but the techniques behind Corvix have actually been around for a while. The platform uses agent-based modeling to build, essentially, a reasonable facsimile of some sort of complex system and then simulate its evolution over time. The “agents” represent the atomic units of those systems, such as individual people in the case of human populations or perhaps cells in the case of a biological simulation. They act according to a set of rules in any given situation, which is how the models are able to keep the simulations progressing.

However, thanks to the advent of big data, GE Healthcare Chief Economist Mitch Higashi thinks the time is right for a platform like Corvix to provide some real value to real-world decisions. There’s enough raw computing power, machine intelligence and data-modeling expertise to start doing fast, accurate simulations over very large and complicated datasets. Also, advances in user-interface design have made these types of models more consumable: GE’s Corvix uses a game-like UI “that any 10-year-old can figure out how to use in 10 minutes,” Higashi said.

In the field in India

The first live run for Corvix happened in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, where the system simulated a population of 80 million people in order to figure out where to build hospitals and medical training centers over the coming years. The GE team used two census datasets and one health care survey in order to build what Higashi calls “a reasonable representation of 80 million people,” as well as a map of India’s existing hospital and energy grid. Health care analysts studying the problem of where to build can drag a new hospital over an area on the map and see how the situation plays out, Higashi explained.

The original plan, said Chaitanya Sarawate, GE’s head of health economics and reimbursement for India, was for the Public Health Foundation of India to invest $2 billion building training institutions in different cities over the next five years. Corvix suggested some possible changes in location of those institutions, including placing two institutions in the country’s most-populous state, Uttar Pradesh, instead of just one as was originally planned. The advice is part of a report from the foundation to India’s Minstry of Health, which will make the ultimate decision.

Developing countries such as India are great places to use this type of technology, Higashi explained, because they are doing greenfield investing in areas such as health infrastructure and a lot of good can happen if they get it right off the bat. The problem, Sarawate noted, is that they often lack detailed data that can help governments make objective comparisons — that’s the kind of stuff a company like GE, in this case, can track down and try to feed into a model that takes into account its relative importance.

In fact, GE is already working on projects with other governments in India, as well as with private organizations and governments in other developing countries.

More data, better simulations

GE has bigger plans for Corvix, though, including deployments in countries like the United States, and possibly into different areas within health care and some outside of health care. Ruslan Horblyuk, director of health economics for GE Healthcare, said deploying Corvix in developed economies will probably be a bit easier because there’s often more data available to choose from when building the models.

“You do need a lot of data, there’s no doubt about it,” he explained, but you also need the right data to avoid making the models too simplistic on the one hand or too complex on the other. So, the more data available on specific diseases, for example, the deeper GE could go on modeling its progression over time — maybe across certain demographic groups or down to the level of a single organ. If exact data (e.g., literacy or disease state) aren’t available for people, there might be proxy data points available that could serve the same purpose.

Independent agents act on their own.

Horblyuk points to the U.S. Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as a good example of where Corvix could provide value. As hospital chains grow larger but also try to improve their efficiency, an agent-based model could help them figure out how to make the best use of their available infrastructure. Maybe that means targeting certain illnesses in certain geographies, or moving from general-purpose facilities to facilities focused on treating specific conditions.

Assuming governments and other stakeholders are willing to trust the data at least in part, Higashi sees an even broader applicability for the types of simulations GE is enabling via Corvix. Like all things big data, the promise with simulations is about speed. Compared with traditional methods of making policy decisions, which might take years of data gathering and analysis, data-based simulations can produce numerous forecasts in mere weeks or months and can be iterated upon as new data becomes available. The forecasts might not be entirely accurate, Higashi acknowledges, but “we can tell you the likely path the country’s on.”

“One day, all policy will be developed in the digital world before being implemented in the real world,” he said. “… There is a not a better way to plan your resources for the future. … (If you have $400 or $500 million to build hospitals), you don’t get to do a redo.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user discpicture.

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Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before 3D printing spreads to real estate. The blog arm of real-estate search site Movoto did some number crunching, and concluded that it would take a single MakerBot Replicator 2 about 220 years, four months and 11 days to finish the bricks required for a standard two-story, 2,500-square-foot house. And it would cost $332,820 in plastic.

Movoto blogger Randy Nelson came up with the equation by timing how long it took a Replicator 2 desktop printer to build a single brick measuring 8 x 3.5 x 2.75 inches. From there, he extrapolated how many bricks a standard house would require, and multiplied that number by the time – 2.9 days per brick. The reason each brick takes so long is because of its density. Unlike standard 3D printed objects, which are often hollow or rely on geodesic design to keep production time down, each brick in this hypothetical hosue is completely solid and built with the Replicator 2′s .225 millimeter detail setting.

The time, of course, is just a rough guideline, as it doesn’t take into account the standard woes of building a home, including weather and assorted other delays, nor any part of the interior structure of the house.

Still it’s fun to apply Nelson’s equation — and the $48 market price for 1 kg of ABS plastic — to some of the most famous properties in the world:

• A 3D printed White House would cost $5,070,696 and take 3,357 years, 3 months and 23 days.
• The Palace Versailles would cost $101,184,060 and take 66,994 years and 4 days.
• The Empire State Building would cost  $222,336,480 and take 147,209 years, 1 month and 1 day.

The enormous price and time wasted on printing a home brick by brick obscures the ways in which 3D printing could actually streamline home construction, with large-scale printers using cement or sustainable materials to product a house as one continuous structure the same way that smaller printers create models. While it may not be efficient now, there’s certainly a chance that 3D printing will make an impact on building in the future.

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Wysips won’t replace products like Mophie’s Juice Pack Air case, which can double an iPhone’s battery life, but at a few dollars each they are an especially cheap option. They collect power with strips of thin solar cells. These are covered with a layer of lenses that render the cells nearly invisible while concentrating solar energy. Without any external accessory or charger, phones could use idle time to recharge with natural or artificial light — and even recover from a dead battery.

A boost from the sun would be especially useful in a disaster situation or an area with little power connectivity. Wysips won’t charge the phone endlessly, but it would allow a quick call here and there. Devices that use less power, such as a Kindle, could rely solely on a Wysips to stay charged.

SunPartner reports the screens are currently 90 percent transparent. That’s a step above more-expensive transparent solar cells, which absorb infrared but not visible light to preserve the screen’s visibility. The company wants to double the screens’ energy output by 2014.

Wysips wouldn’t replace the traditional phone battery. But they would provide an easy charge in a bind and make routine activities like listening to music have very little impact on battery life. SunPartner also isn’t stopping with small device screens either; it is working on embedding Wysips in glass and other materials, which would expand its territory to billboards, car windows, building surfaces and beyond.

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In April, GigaOm described major updates to Disconnect that sought to provide faster browsing experience and an easy visualization of the websites that it blocks. If you haven’t seen it before, here’s how Disconnect looks in action:

The Disconnect icon sits in the top right of the browser shows how many sites want to track you for advertising, social or other purposes:

If you click on the icon, it provides more detailed lists of which websites want your information:

When we spoke in April, former Google engineer Brian Kennish, who is one of Disconnect’s founders along with consumer rights attorney, Casey Oppenheim, explained that the company has a three-fold goal: privacy, speed and “don’t break the internet” — ie the tool is supposed to let you use the web just like you always do.

In addition to the new funding, which cames as a Series A led by FirstMark Capital, Disconnect also received “B Corporation” status which amounts to a certification mark for companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Etsy that want to formalize public service as part of their corporate missions.

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Wi-Fi is now one of the most essential services a hotel can provide apart from a bed, and yet poor internet connection is on the top 3 list of complaints from hotel guests around the world.

Nah! It is really my #1 complaint.

There was time when all of us road warriors walked around with a laptop and a phone (probably a Blackberry). Now we carry around a phone, a tablet (or a Kindle) and a laptop. I am guessing connected cameras are coming next and a slew of other gadgets with a built-in need for the network. And at the same time we are all going to be using cloud services for everything; listening to music, watching videos, working, buying and ordering food. In such a world, the network (both in terms of stability and quality) takes on greater importance.

The common refrain is — well let’s just use LTE. And while we all like to believe that LTE is the panacea to our networking woes, the fact remains that we still are heavily reliant and will be reliant on Wi-Fi, especially when on the go. According to ABI Research, there were a total of 4.9 million hotspots owned by carriers (including those run by the likes of Boingo and iPass) and the total number will hit about 6.3 million in 2016.

Of course, the place where one feels the pain most acutely is in the hotels — who in my opinion are the worst offenders in providing decent and generous connectivity. It is not as if they don’t have a way to quietly tuck in the charges into our room rates! As someone who spends a sizable amount of time on the road checking into random hotels, I can safely say that bad Wi-Fi is one of my biggest complaints.

According to Hotel Chatter’s 2013 Hotel WiFi Report:

• Nearly two-thirds of hotels offer some kind of free Wi-Fi. (It is hard to say if it really is free if the price of the hotel room goes up a few dollars a night and we don’t know about it.)
• The standard amount of bandwidth in a hotel with free Wi-Fi is usually about 1Mbps per each room. (I can categorically state that is not really true.)

It doesn’t matter if the hotels (or motels) are big or small. It doesn’t matter if they are in New York or Nashville, the fact of the matter is that both the quality of network connections and the bandwidth available on the network simply sucks. Even in the best of hotels one struggles to 500 Kbps to 600 Kbps. Try watching Netflix at that bandwidth, or in my case the MLB game! I guess our shifting media habits are killing the in-room video-on-demand business, a lucrative sideline for the hotel industry. (When I am in a really bad mood, I am likely to call it a nice racket!)

Sure, I can do some basic surfing and emails on this so-called free Wi-Fi, but that’s about it. And someone who needs to blog — and thus keep up with a whole slew of news and information sources when on the go — it is virtually impossible to use the Wi-Fi for even getting the work done. I almost always take the upgrade option, paying more for more bandwidth only to find that it still sucks. Unless these guys get their act together and build high-quality robust networks, they can’t really expect people to pay up.

For now, I almost always end up using the LTE network (if it is available.) But we are already starting to see that LTE networks are getting crowded and slower and slower. So it is not difficult to imagine things are going to get a lot worse for those of us dependent on-the-go internet.

Like I said — I love the connectivity in the hotels, I just hate the poor quality networks.

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