That would mean that users could sign in with their Flickr and Vimeo accounts within the Settings app on their iOS device, just as they can now with Twitter and Facebook. Then when the user hits the share button in an app, the menu will include the services that they’ve registered.

iOS is expected to be detailed by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. 9to5Mac noted that the decision to include two additional social services could be reversed before any announcement is made. But the report does make a lot of sense.

Such a move could be read as a bit more anti-Google maneuvering from Apple. After all, the company last year shed all iOS-Google tie-ins in iOS 6 with the exception of keeping Google search as the default option in mobile Safari. YouTube is available as a third-party app from the App Store, but it’s no longer the default video service in iOS. Apple could also take up the move to support Vimeo in response to Google allowing iOS developers to enable a setting in their own apps that automatically opens YouTube videos in the YouTube app, instead of mobile Safari.

But it’s also just as likely that Apple is simply increasing feature parity between iOS and Mac OS X. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has built-in Flickr and Vimeo integration, as well as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook integration also began on OS X and moved to iOS, so Yahoo’s photo service and Vimeo’s social video service could be following that same path.

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Even before the news was confirmed on Monday, critics with long memories were reminding anyone who would listen about Yahoo’s track record with acquisitions, which has some rather notorious bumps in it, including two major ones known as GeoCities and Flickr. Those two deals alone have made many question whether Yahoo will be able to do the right thing with Tumblr — and while it may be unfair to lay the blame for these at Marissa Mayer’s feet, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the future of this latest acquisition.

How long will it take yahoo to ruin tumblr?—
Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) May 19, 2013

GeoCities + Flickr: billions in missed opportunities

In 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3.5 billion, which even at the time was an eye-popping amount. Although it was over a decade ago, which is eons in internet time, there are some broad similarities between what GeoCities was then and what Tumblr is now: both were distinctive and somewhat chaotic communities, focused on allowing individuals to create their own space. Yahoo did a number of things that arguably accelerated the demise of its high-priced acquisition, including trying to monetize it through hosting fees and cheesy banner ads.

The other stick that many anti-Yahoo types use when they want to beat the company up about its acquisition strategy is Flickr, the pioneering photo community that languished under Yahoo’s ownership until relatively recently. As many of its hard-core fans (including me) have argued in the past, Flickr was — or at least could have been — Instagram before Instagram.

There have been a number of post-mortems on what happened with Flickr, but in a nutshell Yahoo did almost everything wrong: the larger company took away or smothered much of the photo-sharing community’s most important features, prevented its employees from innovating or growing, and forced all kinds of integration between the two platforms that did nothing to benefit users — in fact, precisely the opposite. It was like the trifecta of failure, and a perfect example of why most large-scale acquisitions don’t work.

“All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.”

Successful mergers are exceedingly rare

It’s certainly reasonable to argue — as many of her fans in Silicon Valley have since the Tumblr deal was announced — that Marissa Mayer shouldn’t be held to account for these lapses, since she had nothing to do with them and the internet has changed a lot since then. Yahoo is also substantially more desperate than it used to be (if that’s possible), and that has arguably made Mayer more cautious about potential screw-ups.

But the bottom line is that just because Mayer is a new CEO doesn’t mean she or the company won’t screw Tumblr up somehow anyway — either deliberately or by accident. That’s because large companies like Yahoo have a way of destroying the value of the things they acquire even if they don’t mean to do so, especially when the thing they have acquired is a somewhat unique community with special characteristics, which Tumblr arguably is.

This is why successful large acquisitions of web communities or services are so rare — rare enough that almost everyone can only point to a single example: namely, Google buying YouTube (although Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is looking like it may be another one). The question for Yahoo and Mayer is whether Tumblr can be kept as a distinct entity and yet still monetized, as YouTube has been, or whether the process of monetization will inevitably turn Tumblr into the latest example of a MySpace-style failure.

Can Yahoo do what Google did with YouTube?

Former YouTube exec Hunter Walk took a look at what Google did right in the case of YouTube, and boiled it down to five factors, including keeping the product from getting too intertwined with the parent company and maintaining a separate physical identity. But to me the most important ones were:

Protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos: This is where the accidental destruction of acquisitions often comes from — people who just want to help, but whose requests for features and other attempts at integration wound up almost “hugging us to death,” as Walk puts it. There is a powerful desire to get efficiencies out of acquisitions, but many of those attempts fail badly and ruin the thing they were trying to monetize or grow in the first place.

Stop short-term monetization that won’t scale: Walk talks about how YouTube managed to avoid the natural desire to build all sorts of easy-win monetization methods into the platform, and focused instead on longer-term approaches that were harder to sell in the early going but built more value. If Yahoo sees Tumblr as a way to bulk up its banner ad or other programs, it could wind up making the exact same mistake that YouTube was able to avoid.

In the end, much of the answer to the question about Yahoo screwing up Tumblr rests on Marissa Mayer, and her ability to stave off the desires of both the board of directors and the other senior managers who see Tumblr as either a distraction or a digital cow to be milked and then sent to the abbatoir.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Stephen Brace and Getty Images / Chris Jackson and Pamuk Sekerli Tardis

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The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.

Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using close captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.

“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.

He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.

The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.

There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.

Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.

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We included Amprius, which was launched in 2008 as a spin out from Stanford University, on our list of 13 battery startups to watch in 2013. The startup has developed a battery based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, and its lithium ion batteries, announced Tuesday, use a nano-structured silicon material for the anode part of the battery.

A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Amprius’ nanostructured material allows the anode to be shrunk fourfold, delivering a fourfold increase in energy density.

Battery energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per given volume. Amprius said its initial batteries can deliver 580 and 600 watt hours per liter, and its next-gen batteries can deliver 650 and 700 watt hours per liter. Traditional lithium ion batteries are operating at closer to 400 watt hours per liter.

Another one of the challenges that Amprius said it has overcome when building this battery is that it has had to engineer the silicon to make it stable enough to be charged and discharged repeatedly over time. The more stable the silicon, the longer the life time of the battery. Amprius said the anode can be charged and discharged more than 500 times while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity (a requirement for original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs).

Amprius is supplying its batteries to unnamed smartphone and tablet OEMs and is also working with OEMs to design its batteries in custom ways to fit into new consumer electronics, it said. The next-gen batteries are supposed to go into pilot production later this year.

Amprius has raised at least $25 million from investors including the ones listed above as well as IPV Capital, and Trident Capital. The company has an R&D lab in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an R&D lab and pilot production line in Nanjing, China.

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But Cook, for his first time offering public testimony before Congress, acquitted himself quite well despite the scolding his company faced, which makes sense if you think about it: Sen. Levin is probably nowhere near as scary as Steve Jobs. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and its head of tax operations Phil Bullock were tasked with explaining the details of Apple’s accounting, while Cook extolled Apple’s virtues, the jobs it creates and its values as an American company.

Apple normally gets to choose how it’s shown in the spotlight. So it was an unusually defensive position for the company and its chief executive, known for its preference for privacy, to be in and have the nitty gritty of its corporate accounting practices exposed for all to see.

But Cook did indeed choose to go to Washington. He probably could have sent a senior vice president, but he showed up to speak for his company. And in doing so, he continued to rewrite our expectations of an Apple CEO. While his predecessor met privately with public officials, Apple was not in the spotlight in years past the way it has been recently. As profits have soared and some of its corporate practices both abroad and at home have come to light, Cook has had to face increased public scrutiny in a way Apple didn’t see quite as much during Jobs’ tenure as CEO. (With the exception of the stock-options backdating controversy, though the penalties for that were minimal.)

In the same manner he smoothly handled outrage at the practices at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partners and offered solutions, Cook used his particular experience at Apple to talk about taxes. As the company’s former operations officer, he ably explained pricing transfer and other complex accounting practices his company uses, and laid out suggestions for how to reform the U.S. tax code to encourage more companies like his to bring more of their foreign earnings home.

Grilling Apple

Two experts on tax law testified earlier in the morning how Apple allocates some income to a holding company and subsidiaries in Ireland that don’t file corporate tax returns in the U.S. or anywhere else. But as was oft-repeated, what Apple has been doing doesn’t break any U.S. laws. (Sen. Rand Paul twice decried Apple being “harangued and bullied” by the committee and repeatedly made the point that if Apple weren’t minimizing its tax burden, it would be irresponsible to its shareholders.)

Cook defused some of the more pointed insinuations made by the committee diplomatically, using the same brand of charm and salesmanship we see from him during keynote speeches at Apple events. “We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar,” Cook said during his testimony. “We comply with the laws but also the spirit of the laws.”

Many of the senators present Tuesday admitted to being big fans and users of Apple products. But the reason the company they all admire was being grilled wasn’t completely explained. It did appear Apple was being used as an example of common corporate accounting practices because it is the largest corporate tax payer in the U.S. — and, as Sen. Tom Carper noted, because of the current political climate surrounding the national deficit. Apple and many other U.S. companies have been operating in this manner for years, but in the shadow of the “sequester,” several members present acknowledged that Congress is looking for tax revenue that it’s not getting.

In the end, Apple’s presence seemed to serve as an intermediary for the senators to argue amongst themselves about how out-of-control the U.S. tax code is. The hearing itself seemed mostly a pointless exercise, as these hearings tend to be, with little promise of any real change. Apple will likely go home to Cupertino and keep doing what its doing, and Congress will continue to disagree over how to appropriately tax businesses.

Meanwhile, Cook gets to continue to raise his public profile as an elite American businessman and cement his company’s stature as critical to the American economy and the overall tech industry.

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The company is pitching the platform for both legacy vSphere applications already running in company data centers  and for brand new applications designed from the ground up.  VMware execs up to and including CEO Pat Gelsinger promised “seamless” interoperability between on-premises implementation and vCloud Hybrid Services.

They promised it will let customers move data from on-premise infrastructure to public clouds on Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks and create the same virtual-networking infrastructure like load balancers and firewalls. Management will happen all inside current VMware software tools. Managing and moving virtual machines will be possible inside vSphere through a free-plugin. The idea is to help customers move existing applications around and develop new applications on the public cloud. Some customers will want to run specified applications on the public cloud and keep key data on premises, said Gelsinger, who will be a featured speaker at GigaOM Structure next month.

Bill Fathers, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud services, described vCloud Hybrid Service as the easiest public cloud to adopt. It will be available through current partners, so licensing won’t be different. And customers can get support for the vCloud Hybrid Service from VMware, just as they can for other services.

Partners that endorsed the platform included  Tibco, Microsoft, SAP, Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and Pivotal, VMware’s step-brother that is co-owned by VMware and parent company EMC. VMware  holds a significant stake in Puppet. “VMware will be the first and only cloud provider to provide SAP software, including HANA, as a subscription service on premise and in the cloud,” Fathers said.

The vCloud Hybrid Service actually has two flavors: a Dedicated Cloud mode has “physically isolated and reserved compute resources” for predictable workloads and a Virtual Private Cloud for seasonal workloads that require greater elasticity but are multitenant in nature. The former service will start at 13 cents an hour for a 1 GB virtual machine with a single processor on an annual basis, while the latter will start at 4.5 cents an hour on a monthly basis. But those prices will come as year-long licenses. Fathers said he expects customers to use both in parallel. The pricing model helps, but it doesn’t provide insight into the cost of storage and networking services.

To provide the infrastructure for the vCloud Hybrid Service in the United States, VMware will pull from infrastructure in Santa Clara, Calif.; Las Vegas; Dallas; and Sterling, Va. Fathers said the plan is for “an asset-light model” in which the facilities in those cities are “third-party data centers.”

Beta customer, Julio Sobral, senior vice president of post production for Fox Broadcasting, said the movement of certain applications to VMware’s public cloud, particularly collaboration tools for dispersed employees, had, in fact, been “seamless.

Other beta customers include the state of Michigan, the city of Melrose, Mass.; and Planview. The question is how many of VMware’s roughly 500,000 customers will move onto the service too, rather than keep using IaaS providers such as Amazon (a amzn) Web Services for certain applications, as some customers have.

There could also be friction with existing VMware cloud partners. They have been underwhelmed by the offering and the service provider partners not selected to host the offering now feel they are competing with their supplier, as my colleague Barb Darrow has noted.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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(Update: Clearwire has rescheduled the meeting again, this time for Friday, May 31.)

Ever since Sprint made its $2.1 billion buyout offer in December, Clearwire shareholders have been expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the terms of the deal, especially after Dish Network swooped in with a counter offer. Sprint’s new bid is 19 percent higher than its old one and beats out Dish’s $3.30-a-share proposal.

Even if Clearwire shareholders accept Sprint’s new terms, Dish isn’t going away. The company is playing multiple hands, offering to buyout Sprint itself, despite the buyout deal it struck with Softbank. Sprint has kept Dish at arm’s length throughout the negotiations, but on Monday Softbank agreed to let Sprint start working directly with Dish, releasing internal documents necessary for any merger negotiation.

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Microsoft said that the new device will launch “later this year,” but didn’t give a firm launch date or any information on what the Xbox One will actually cost.

The new device will offer direct access to live TV, which users can start with a simple voice command. The console can switch between games, music, live TV and apps through voice commands as well as through new, universal gestures. For example, to leave a full-screen live TV experience users grab an imaginary floating bar with both hands and then pull these hands together along the bar. It looks like the device will always be on and listening for the phrase “Xbox On” to launch into full-blown voice and gesture recognition.

There is also a so-called snap mode that will overlay an app over live TV to allow side-by-side multitasking. One of the apps taking advantage of this is Microsoft’s Skype, which will offer group video calls on the TV — something that isn’t possible with any other TV-based Skype integration, according to Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. Users can watch a movie and launch a Skype call while the movie continues.

The snap mode can also be used to add contextual information to live TV, something that Microsoft will rolling out with ESPN: Viewes can add a fantasy league widget to live games.But wait, there’s more fantasy football: Microsoft is also partnering with the NFL to bring exclusive, interactive  fantasy football content to the Xbox One as games unfold.

Part of the package is also a live TV guide that is meant to replace the program guide delivered by your cable company. It integrates video-on-demand results and offers users quick access to their favorite TV shows as well as to shows currently trending on TV. The guide looks otherwise like your traditional TV guide grid, but it can be controlled by voice commands throughout.

Microsoft also announced the launch of a live action Halo TV series in cooperation with Steven Spielberg that will add interactive elements to scripted entertainment. “Xbox is about to become the next watercooler,” said Nancy Tellem, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s LA Studios, where the show is being produced.

Hardware-wise, the new device didn’t offer that many surprises: The Xbox One utilizes 8 GB RAM and a yet-unnamed x86 processor. It comes with a Blu-ray drive, and uses Wi-Fi Direct and USB 3 as well as a completely redesigned Kinect sensor device. That’s in line with earlier leaks, which had already pointed to the two HDMI ports, as well as Microsoft using a more PC-like architecture, with an AMD x86-processor powering the device.

Developing story, check back for updates.

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According to the testing details, the device in question uses a 1280 x 800 display and is running Android 4.2.2. The processor can run between 800 MHz and 1.6 GHz clock cycles and uses a PowerVR 533 for graphics, which fits the bill as an Intel Atom chip, possibly the newest CloverTrail+ that Intel recently announced.

So does this particular device perform? Based on the benchmarks: Quite good. Here’s a comparison of the graphics performance of the tested Galaxy Tab 3 and last year’s Galaxy Tab 2 model, for example.

And SamMobile recently noted a different benchmark test of the Tab 3 using the Antutu test, finding that the device scored the highest ever for an Android tablet in terms of overall performance.

So why would Samsung, which makes it own chips for smartphones and tablets, consider an Intel inside its newest Galaxy Tab? Samsung could be keeping the Exynos for its own handsets, such as the new Galaxy S 4, because it sells more handsets than tablets. The company’s tablets wouldn’t like suffer any performance hit by using Intel’s silicon either; at least not if the early benchmarks are valid.

If Intel’s Atom does power the Galaxy Tab 3, it would be one of the biggest mobile design wins yet for Intel. The chipmaker does power a few smartphone products, but hasn’t yet cracked the U.S. market with a top-tier hardware partner such as Samsung.

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About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor 10gen for “Considerations for rolling out a NoSQL strategy in the enterprise,” a free analyst webinar on Tuesday, June 4, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT.

Nvidia is showing that even though it’s new to the radio silicon market, it’s keeping up with the technical prowess of the competition. The 150 Mbps benchmark is the most cutting edge LTE device currently available (in industry parlance it’s know as category 4 LTE), meaning the Tegra 4i can go head-to-head to with the superchips designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor.

Nvidia’s 150 Mbps demo at CTIA Wireless

But also like its competitors, Nvidia is been playing fast and loose with its marketing. It’s calling its modem “LTE-Advanced,” a benchmark no chipmaker in the industry is even close to matching. These chips are still 150 Mbps shy of meeting even the most minimal definition of LTE-Advanced. Nvidia and its peers are clearly abusing the term.

Nvidia has long made powerful applications and graphics processors for smartphones and tablets, but its momentum in the market has always been hampered by its lack of an integrated processor-modem. Integrated chips take up less space, draw less power and are generally cheaper, making it difficult for Nvidia to compete against mobile silicon giant Qualcomm in everything but the highest tier of the smartphone market.

Nvidia rectified the situation in 2011 by purchasing software defined wireless radio maker Icera. It gained an impressive modem to match its impressive multimedia processor, but it still needed to spend two years integrating the two into a single tight package. The Tegra 4i was the result.

When Nvidia first announced the chip back in February, however, it appeared that Nvidia was still having trouble keeping up with the competition. It’s processor was cutting edge, but the LTE modem was still an iteration behind – using category 3 LTE — making it a third slower than the other chips then hitting the market. Nvidia said it was able to rectify that quickly by utilizing Icera’s software defined radio architecture: it upgraded to category 4 with a simple firmware update.

Networks that support category 4 speeds don’t yet exist, though we could start seeing in them appear in the next year or two. That timing, though, works out well since Nvidia and other silicon vendors won’t have their superchips ready for commercial devices until late 2013 or early 2014. In the meantime, Nvidia is demoing Tegra 4i’s 150 Mbps throughput at CTIA over a simulated network, not a real one.

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Investor Steve Jurvetson next to a pulse fridge that cools a D-Wave quantum computer

As you can see in this photo from venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, D-Wave uses a pulse fridge to cool the quantum computer to .02 degrees above absolute zero, and they use Helium-3 in the cooling process.

Quantum computers use a different type of processing compared to traditional computing. As GigaOM’s Jordan Novet explained it earlier this year, “rather than working with binary yes-or-no questions — ones and zeros — quantum computing is more probabilistic, also allowing a combination of zero and one to simultaneously answer many questions with quantum bits of information, or qubits, and tell users more about the likelihood of a situation. It’s not necessarily useful for all kinds of computing, but it could solve problems that current computers can’t.”

Keeping quantum computers that can perform such functions cool can be a tricky process. It’s highly energy intensive and can get expensive. But if the quantum computers are not cooled down, the molecules — which are being manipulated to store data — move around chaotically and can’t be manipulated and read.

Earlier this year physicists at UCLA developed a new cooling process that immerses charged barium chloride molecules into a super cold cloud of calcium atoms. That research is being funded by the Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

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Now MySiteApp, the Israeli company that previously put out the UppSite tool for converting websites into native apps, has brought out a new service called Brow.si for making mobile websites behave like apps. Brow.si is a multifunctional toolbar that can be easily inserted in a responsive website through the addition of some Javascript. It’s now in public beta, following a two-week closed beta period in which it was already used by a million people.

Pushing for the web

Much of this functionality is the sort of thing a publisher can put into a mobile website itself – content sharing through social networks, read-later options such as Pocket, font resizing and so on – but Brow.si aims to make its addition easier.

It also introduces something that’s previously only been available on apps: push notifications. Without the user having to install anything, they can subscribe to notifications from all the websites they visit that are using Brow.si, and consume that content through the platform’s own reader. Again, users don’t have to create an account for this – they just need to log into a social network (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) for sharing purposes, after which Brow.si will know which user is which.

What’s more, MySiteApp has become a WordPress VIP (see disclosure) feature partner, meaning sites using that publishing platform can easily install the Brow.si plugin. But again, that’s not all: as alluded to above, Brow.si is a platform in its own right, and it aims to help publishers monetize their content.

Cashing in

As MySiteApp CEO Gal Brill explained to me, publishers can add so-called “mini applications” that will only show up when the user activates the Brow.si toolbar. When the toolbar is swiped across the screen, it introduces new real estate below it, so the publisher could for example add a mini-app for the content recommendation engine Taboola, or they could even use this new space for traditional ads.

Mini-apps will be made available through Brow.si’s marketplace, and the company has an open API so third-party developers can help populate that marketplace with their own efforts.

It’s all very clever, and the simplicity of installation should give Brow.si a flying start. It remains to be seen, though, whether this sort of functionality will help publishers monetize their content on the mobile web. There are many variables at play here, from users’ desire for content-related push notifications (granularity seems to be lacking) to publishers’ desire for differentiated presentation.

That said, the addition of a new and relatively unobtrusive patch of mobile screen real estate for advertising purposes could turn out to be a welcome development.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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Between the two, they have more than 2,500 wireless charging installations at public locations such as airports, coffee shops, malls and arenas. PowerKiss recently added some charging mats at select McDonalds Europe locations. The idea behind these installs is to allow customers to place their mobile device on a wireless charging pad and add juice to the battery. Of course, the device has to natively support wireless charging, such as Nokia’s Lumia 920, or be compatible with an add-on product such as a wireless charging cover.

Overall, the ability to recharge a device by placing it on a special mat really hasn’t taken off with the mainstream public. Part of the reason is a battle over the technology standards: If you have a device that supports wireless charging but doesn’t work with a compatible charging mat, you’ll have to plug in your device, of course.

Powermat Technologies is part of the PMA, or Power Matters Alliance, which boasts that 80 percent of its partner members represent the entire wireless install base. That sounds good, so what’s the issue?

Well, there’s another body, the Wireless Power Consortium, that’s been at this longer than the PMA by about four years and uses the Qi-branded standard. Even worse: Some partners are members of both groups. So while the PMA gained a new member through marriage, there are still plenty of fish in the sea using a different wireless standard.

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And this wasn’t just true in Iraq: Gourley’s team had also analyzed insurgent-led wars in other parts of the world — from Colombia to Senegal — and had discovered the very same pattern, even though the underlying issues in those conflicts were totally different.

Sean Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, Quid Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

Gourley has since moved on from war zones. He helped found a company called Quid that does big data projects for companies like Intel, Visa and Samsung. In March, he spoke at our Structure:Data conference in New York, where he talked about the difference between “data science” (which is about finding correlations) and “data intelligence” (which is about solving problems). He said we need to shift our focus toward the latter if we want to tackle the biggest challenges our world is facing.

I followed up with him after the conference to talk more about big data in wartime. In hindsight, we were fighting the data war in Baghdad with fairly primitive tools. It was before the explosion of social media and the flowering of open-source data. In future battles, he said, governments will be using data not just to predict violence but to fight “the war of ideas.”

Just what does that mean? It means using big data to track the types of conversations that people are having about a war — and then injecting counter-stories back into the system to change those prevailing ways of thinking. A government like the U.S. could use this tactic in a war zone to, say, try to weaken a violent insurgent movement, but the government could also employ it at home to build domestic support for the war.

We often talk about companies using data science to get people to buy more shoes or more airline tickets. But just as drones are helping to automate wars, we’re moving into an era where data can help automate propaganda — and that creates the potential for some pretty potent new experiments in brain washing. It makes dropping cookies on people’s browsers seem quaint.

Below is an edited transcript of my Skype interview with Gourley.

Q: How would you use data differently in Iraq if you were doing it all over again?

A: It’s important to remind ourselves in 2013 where the information landscape was at the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, the world was very excited about something called blogging. We didn’t have Twitter. Cellphone coverage at the start of the war was exceedingly low. What we’ve seen over the past decade as the war unfolded was one of the biggest changes in the information landscape from a militaristic perspective in a long, long time.

The reporters in the bureaus, from the New York Times, say, would be bunkered down in a fortified compound — they didn’t get out a lot. I mean, you wouldn’t if you were there, why would you? They would send stringers out on motorbikes with cellphones and they would text in if any attack happened. They would be paid based on their reporting of events.

A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S—
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011

Since taliban (probably) don't have helicpoters, and since they're saying it was not "ours", so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad—
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011

You had a crowdsourced version of Twitter, but it wasn’t Twitter. As the conflict went on, in 2008-09, you saw the first adoption of Twitter coming in. Most of that conflict, it was text-based, written by bureaus, and reported on by collating paid people. And that, in and of itself, gave us a landscape that was more complete and in many ways more accurate than what the military was able to do with their eyes on the ground.

Now, there is already more information being collected by the collective intelligence than by the military intelligence. One one hand, we’re moving into a world where you have drones recording continuous HD video. But we’re also seeing an upscaling in human reporting now with the likes of Instagram. You’re not just tweeting — you’re taking pictures that are triangulated.

The crowdsourced info is still going to be more complete and at a higher resolution than even the stuff that is done with the advent of drones and sensors by the military.

Q: You’ve said that what was missing in Iraq was “narrative structure” to the data. What do you mean by that? 

A: The stories being told in Iraq and around the world about why we were going to war, how the war was going. Numbers are one thing, but stories and being able to analyze the stories is another.

Now in 2013, we’re just now at that phase where we can start to process narratives, and that’s pretty exciting. Because as much as wars are fought with bullets, they’re also fought with stories.

There is a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract out at the moment that is looking to South America particularly to track the formation of new ideas. Part of that is to inject new ideas back into the system. {You could say, for example} I don’t like the way people are talking about this, and then inject a new idea {into the conversation}. And not one based on my gut intuition or a random story, but one that recombines existing ideas and is positioned to nudge and manipulate a conversation in a particular direction. It means fine-tuned control of the stories people are telling each other about why the war is happening. We’re going to get a lot better at getting those stories and language adopted.

From the standpoint of how you stop these wars and bring them to a resolution … One thing there is watching the language (in conversations) change from an “us” to an “us” and “them.” As soon as you have an us and them, you can have a war. You can’t really have a war without an us and them.

The second piece of that is the stories that are being told by the different insurgent groups essentially as a recruiting tool. If you want to disrupt an insurgency, one key piece of that is a story that attracts them away from those groups and into jobs that are paying that don’t involve killing. So combating insurgent narratives in a way that allow people to gravitate toward a different kind of activity.

There are patterns in the stories that are told. We can track them, and we can start to have narratives compete against each other. Exactly how that will be used and how it will unfold, we’re in the process of trying to figure that out.

Q: Would the government use this tactic of story manipulation domestically as well as in the war zones themselves?

A: You could have a much higher-resolution storytelling for convincing a nation to go to war. As the war progresses, you see words like “quagmire,” “civil war” and “intractable” — that language starts to pop up.

Could you change the story of civil war and quagmire to something that was made it seem more positive— like the story of the underdogs fighting back? I don’t know how that would play out, but it was the Americans’ willingness to go to war that the insurgents were fighting against. So they’re killing people to change a narrative that America holds. The violence is targeted against that idea. This tool is more likely to be used by political parties inside the country going to war than inside the country at war.

Q: It seems like the U.S. government had a pretty good handle on the marketing of the war. The problem wasn’t the lack of messaging — it was that over time, it simply became a harder sell. Do you think the government could have been more convincing if it had better data?

A: (Laughs) I don’t think I would have gone and advised the government on how to sell their conflict. But a hypothetical person using mathematical tools, yes, absolutely. It becomes a more difficult sell as you go on, but there is basic stuff. Like once 10 people die in an attack, there is a big bump in news coverage. So if you stabilize below 10 in an attack, you can keep the news at a lower proportion. Just how the news of the attack resonates — you can start to see those patterns and then play around with them. That’s one piece of it.

The other is we constructed stories at the start, and then the war got more difficult and the stories that we were telling didn’t evolve and adapt to keep resolution. Was there a story that the American people would have bought half way through the war? Yeah, quite possibility.  Would data have helped us get that story? It wouldn’t have come up with it for us, but I think it definitely would have helped us get to it.

You would try 10 different stories, 50 different stories, and see which started to get resonance. You would monitor those that were already out there to see which were getting traction and start to collect those to get a broader narrative. The monitoring and tracking of that stuff would have helped massively.

You could think of a war now using the simple tools of Facebook and Google and targeting ads, pictures and stories. How would you target those things using social networks? You could have hundreds of different stories. A war unfolding in a media landcape like we have today would have a very different set of tools available to manipulate public opinion.

Getty Images

Q: So it’s like the old-style propaganda campaigns, but supercharged by social networks and open-source.

A: That’s right, but it’s also supercharged by an understanding of how people hold ideas in their heads. It’s not just, we can organize a protest via Twitter and we can have a lot of people show up in one place. It’s that we can actually change what they are thinking. That’t the algorithmic side.

With all the sharing of information, we can process that algorithmically and determine the stories that people hold to justify different political beliefs, different idealogical beliefs and different reasons for why they would take certain actions. That’s the big difference. The real breakthrough here is the natural language processing that enables computers to understand stories.

Q: Does the government acknowledge that the majority of useful data now comes from open sources?

A: A former director of the defense intelligence agency said that 90 percent of our data comes from open sources. It’s the 10 percent that is the James Bond stuff. That’s the stuff that people get most excited by, but the reality is that most of the data is from open sources. They (the government) may be slow to the punch, but they’re not stupid.

Q: This war of ideas — you can fight it from some desk in a some office building in some random city, right?

Precisely. You can do a lot of this remotely. Yes, it’s very conceivable it would be done in Arlington, Va., it wouldn’t be done in Baghdad. The people making decisions off this stuff are still the higher ups. They are going to take these recommendations and combine with their gut instincts for what’s going on the ground, their feel for the political, and maybe a conversation they had with a young kid that morning.

This is not a machine that is going to be making all your decisions. The human side of it is still going to combine with recommendations. I don’t think if you were designing this thing you’d just have a computer spit out a message and immediately accept that. Although it might spit out a message that says “experiment and see what resonates.”

Getty Images

Q: How much money would it take and how many people to create this kind of idea-shaping machine for wartime?

A: At the moment, you’d have to do a lot of R&D to get this stuff up and running. There is as a lot of custom fitting that needs to happen. But I’d be surprised if in five years there isn’t something more off the shelf. At the moment, a team of a 100 could very feasibly do this. Maybe if it’s in government it’s going to be 200. But in Silicon Valley, a team of 100 could certainly do it. And that’s today. In five years, that could be cut in half.

You’re probably going to invest $20 million or $30 million in a team that does this.

Q: How close is all this to being a reality?

A: I don’t think we’d be surprised if in 2016-17, this stuff was at the same place that the self driving was at 2008. As far as the militaries of the world are concerned, this is still near-term science fiction. It’s certainly not stuff they’re running here and now today. The state of integrating open source isn’t done in s particularly coherent fashion or a particularly smart fashion. The models they’re running underneath this have little or no impact on the data they’re collecting. Any kind of analysis they’re running on top of the narratives are cutting short at the length of sentiment

The brightest minds in the world out there — they used to be at the NSA. They aren’t now. They used to go to finance. Now they don’t. They come out here to the Valley. The brightest minds doing these linguistic techniques are out in this part of the world — they’re not working for government. So we have a pretty good barometer in this Valley for what is possible.

Q: Propaganda and spin, of course, are nothing new. But now governments have the power to take it to a new level. Should we applaud that or be scared by it?

A: Technology is neither good nor bad — but then it is also never neutral. We as technologists have the responsibility that comes with creating this technology to ensure that it is used to make the world a better place. This, of course, is very difficult — you make bets to give the technology only to one government and not another, and you may end up on the wrong side of an unjust war. Don’t give it to anyone and you risk extending a conflict that could have been ended much sooner.

My own take here is that you ultimately have to believe in the goodness of humanity — that on average, there are more good people in the world than there are people that want to harm it. Thus, the more accessible a technology becomes, the better people will use it, and more good people will do good things with it than bad people will do bad things. A simple equation — but perhaps the right one — and one that requires us to distribute the technology as widely as possible.

As a final note, we already give corporations a huge amount of control over the information we share and in turn allow their algorithms to process and ultimately influence the information we receive. Should we be more or less wary of giving it to a government?

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The winning startup will be announced at Book Expo America on May 31 and will receive $10,000 and the chance to pitch its product to William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Ari Emanuel.

Here are the finalists:

• BookCity: A way to find books set in your travel destination [photo illustrating this post]
• Captiv: Makes book recommendations based on your Twitter activity
• Coverlist: A solution that focuses on browsing book jackets
• Evoke:  A way to discover young adult literature through characters and browse books by emotion: “Readers may determine if they wish to be inspired, challenged, amused, or informed during their next read based on content generated by an audience-in-common” [photo on right]
• KooBrowser: Makes book recommendations based on your web browsing habits [photo on left]
• LibraryAtlas: A book discovery solution based on geolocation

I attended the demos on Sunday. A few thoughts:

• It’s hard to come up with a book discovery idea that is not similar to Goodreads in some way, though the finalists above did a good job. Many of the teams built ideas on Goodreads data or pulled other information from it.
• Book-recommendation algorithms were big (and, you’ll notice, didn’t make the cut above). A lot of teams described their idea as “Pandora for books” or “Netflix for books,” but they just meant that the software serves content recommendations, not that it actually streams content.
• Of the above, I thought that KooBrowser seemed most useful and like something I’d actually use. The idea is that, if you’re reading an article online, you could pull up a list of book recommendations based on the content of that article. The success of KooBrowser depends on how good the recommendations are, of course. But this idea seems to fit well into users’ actual everyday activity without being annoying. (I’m still not sold on the idea of receiving book recommendations pushed to my phone when I’m out and about.)

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It’s not that I’m a big gambler (whenever I’ve ever been to Vegas, I’ve wanted to spend more time poolside than tableside), it’s just that shelling out a few bucks into a hat with the prospect of winning a mini-windfall makes me see the game in a whole different way.

Similarly, a new startup, called LifeVest, hopes that by tying employee health goals to the opportunity to win or lose cash — through what it calls a “stock market for health” — it can encourage people to see their health differently and take the necessary steps to make it better. It may not be the right solution for every company, but I think it underscores an important lesson for many employers trying to get their employees to improve their health: having skin in the game can be a powerful motivator.

In theory, we all know that being healthy is a reward in itself — in matters of our health and wellness, we always, literally, have skin in the game. But when it comes to incentivizing people to lose weight, quit smoking and lower their blood pressure, a clean bill of health often isn’t a big enough carrot and the threat of chronic disease often isn’t a severe enough stick.

Blending carrots and sticks

Facing rising health care costs, more employers have started upping the ante for employees with wellness programs that either financially reward or penalize employees depending on how active they are in improving their health. CVS, for example, recently generated a ton of buzz for its decision to penalize employees who didn’t participate in its wellness program. And UnitedHealthCare is one of an increasing number of employers that offer employees financial rewards for getting their weight down and taking healthy steps.

But LifeVest, which spun out of heathcare IT company Trizetto, offers employers a model that blends rewards and penalties.

“We’ve got this notion of a stock tied to your health, which is powerful because it does a few things,” said CEO and co-founder Jon Cooper. “It changes the way people think about their health and [for a company] … markets are effective way to optimize an incentive budget.”

To start, employers can choose to invest a minimum amount in each employee, which can depend on the demographics of their employee base and their goals. Then, each employee, as well as his family and friends, can add to the amount with their own investments. Employers can opt to match outside investments up to a certain amount.

The more employees improve their weight, blood pressure and other health indicators, the greater their earnings and the less they improve, the less they stand to get paid (and the more they lose of their own investment).

Getting an upfront commitment

A Mayo Clinic study earlier this year supported the notion that financial incentives can lead to greater weight loss. But some argue that the fear of losing money can be a more powerful incentive for action than the prospect of gaining money and others say the effects may be short-lived.

What I like about LifeVest is that it enables companies to carry a big stick while still giving employees some choice — in contrast to some penalty-based programs, like that promoted by CVS, employees that don’t want to participate aren’t forced to pay, while those that want to participate can still benefit from the “loss aversion” incentive. Sure, you might have some holdouts. But it lets the company focus on the people who are interested in making a change — and the promise of a financial prize could even be a way to get non-health-enthusiasts to the table.

Also, similar to Stickk.com, a goal-setting site launched by Yale economists, it gets people to make the all-important upfront commitment. Just like paying for a membership to a gym or subscription to the philharmonic, it gets people invested in — and therefore more likely to follow through on — the activities we would like to have done but don’t always want to actually do.

Amid the crowd of companies pitching employers with this or that approach to boosting employee health, LifeVest is a relatively small and new player — it just launched in October and recently graduated from the Tigerlabs health tech accelerator. And it doesn’t include all the health-tracking and engagement features of bigger companies like Keas or WellTok (although Cooper said it could be complementary to services like those).

But I think its approach to incentivizing employees makes it an interesting company to watch — I don’t have any skin in this particular game, but you can be sure I’ll be paying attention.

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Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital.

“Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.”

Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries.

In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners.

While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

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Arment says:

“Anything that is really sensitive or extremely valuable or needs to be kept very secret, I wouldn’t store on anybody else’s servers. That, to me, seems ridiculous unless I held the encryption keys like with the online backup service that I use.”

Public cloud-based locker services hold the keys to encrypt and decrypt your data on their servers. Why? It’s important to remember they are used as a collaboration tool. To offer public file sharing features, they need to decrypt data stored on their servers. In addition, employee could view or steal your data. To make matters worse, public cloud services are more likely to be hit by hackers because they are high value targets.

However, there is an alternative. Varonis DatAnywhere is a private cloud-based file sharing solution that is secure and easy to use.

• Create a secure private cloud experience using your existing file sharing infrastructure
• Keep your data on your file servers
• Keep your existing permissions (e.g., NTFS and Active Directory)
• Provide secure, enterprise-capable file synchronization and mobile access
• Collaborate with the same ease-of-use as public cloud solutions

At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia:

I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy.

“If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.”

Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them.

“Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.”

The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms.

“It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didin’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.”

Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job.

Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums:

“I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.”

(Image by ArTono via Shutterstock)

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Keeping data isolated inside any one database prevents companies from making discoveries across multiple data sets. Plus, he said, at least one database tends to have trouble at any given time.

Earlier this year, Falco started Orchestrate.io to respond to these issues. The company provides a single API through which customers can send data from multiple databases. This way, customers can join, say, geolocation data, time-series data and tweets, drawing graph relationships and doing full-text searches on top of it all.

To build out the infrastructure to do this with multiple cloud providers and bring on customers, Portland, Ore.-based Orchestrate.io is taking on $3 million in seed funding. True Ventures is leading the round (see disclosure) alongside contributions from Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners.

Some companies were already testing out the Orchestrate.io service, although Falco declined to identify them. He said the price of using the service is tied to the number of queries per second customer make.

When it comes to competition, Falco said, “Certainly there’s Amazon.” On Amazon Web Services, customers can get a slew of tools, from RDS for relational databases to DynamoDB for nonrelational work to Elastic MapReduce for Hadoop. And, of course, if companies don’t buy into the Orchestrate.io logic, existing databases constitute challengers. But Falco has an answer for that. “Databases can do most of these queries,” he said. “The problem is, they can’t do them efficiently and at scale at the same time.”

After the company comes out of private beta, Falco thinks Orchestrate.io has the potential to be a go-to provider for lots of different kinds of data-analysis services, Falco said, just as companies look to Twilio for voice services and SendGrid for email. “(There’s a) shift of operational burden from a corporation or the end user to a service provider,” he said. “I think we’re just part of the trend. You’re going to continue to see that over the next several years.”

Disclosure: Orchestrate.io is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says.

“The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital.

Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD.

While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours.

For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs).

For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records.

For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up.

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On Tuesday, the Boston-based company is launching a preview of AppGuru which aims to help IT  deal with the burgeoning bring-your-own-application (BYOA) craze which forces admins to deal with cloud-delivered personal applications that employees use at work but may not be officially sanctioned.

AppGuru promises a central console for managing multiple apps; an easy way to create, import or move users which works with Active Directory if it’s installed; and tools for managing licenses. It also vows to provide an easy way to set policy management and granular controls as needed. That’s a mighty tall order.

Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeI

Michael Simon, CEO of the Boston-based company, said LogMeIn gets invaluable perspective from both the consumer and the IT side of the BYOA divide.

“We don’t just have heavily used applications — with 55 million users — but we get visibility from consumer and IT perspectives,” Simon said.

AppGuru will manage LogMeIn’s web conferencing and collaboration application; Joinme screen sharing and Cubby, a Dropbox alternative for businesses, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, he said.

Simon said small and medium sized businesses are the company’s sweet spot but it has some very large enterprise accounts as well. Last quarter, for example, it announced a seven-figure deal with Hewlett-Packard, for LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s’ remote support offering.

Simon did not disclose pricing but said AppGuru should be commercially available this fall.

LogMeIn may have the chops to attack both the consumer and admin side of the equation, but it also faces formidable competition on the file-sync-and-share side of its business. Dropbox, the consumer champ, is gearing up Dropbox for Business while Google and Microsoft are pushing their respective application and storage tandems; and other competitors include Accellion, Egnyte and OwnCloud. They all claim to combine Dropbox-like simplicity with enterprise management perks.

That’s probably why LogMeIn is adding enterprise perks that go beyond file storage and sync. The IT issues that arise from BYOD and BYOA will be a hot topic at GigaOM’s Structure Europe event in September.

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This is the latest move in what appears to be an interesting new trend. Plano, Texas-based CRM firm Alliance Data recently started seeking out workers on the autistic spectrum, as have other IT-related businesses such as the Berlin-based consultancy Auticon. SAP is the first major multinational to adopt similar hiring policies.

Because autism tends to impair the sufferer’s social abilities, it can be problematic in a work environment. As a result, many sufferers find it difficult to gain and hold a job. However, the autistic spectrum is wide and many of those with low-level autistic spectrum disorder – such as the recently reclassified Asperger Syndrome – can function in a work setting.

People with autistic spectrum disorders often display highly focused and analytical behavior and it is these characteristics that companies such as SAP and Alliance Data are finding can work to their advantage, particularly in the context of software testing and programming. In its statement on Tuesday, SAP said it saw “a potential competitive advantage to leveraging the unique talents of people with autism.”

According to SAP human resources chief Luisa Delgado:

“By concentrating on the abilities that every talent brings to the table, we can redefine the way we manage diverse talents. With Specialisterne, we share a common belief that innovation comes from the ‘edges.’ Only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st century.”

SAP previously piloted its new hiring policies in India, where it worked with Specialisterne – a Denmark-based IT consultancy specializing in employing autistic workers – to hire 6 autistic software testers. It claims the result was a boost in productivity.

SAP also recently completed the screening process for hiring 5 autistic workers in Ireland. The company said the global expansion of the new policy would begin in the U.S., Canada and Germany this year.

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