Tests of Google’s autonomous vehicles in California and Nevada suggests they already outperform human drivers.

By Tom Simonite on October 25, 2013

Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.

Chris Urmson made those claims today at a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California. He presented results from two studies of data from the hundreds of thousands of miles Google’s vehicles have logged on public roads in California and Nevada.

One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were.

“We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”

In addition to painting a rosy picture of his vehicles’ autonomous capabilities, Urmson showed a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over. “Inside the car we’ve gone out of our way to make the human factors work,” he said.

Although that might suggest the company is thinking about how to translate its research project into something used by real motorists, Urmson dodged a question about how that might happen. “We’re thinking about different ways of bringing it to market,” he said. “I can’t tell you any more right now.”

Urmson did say that he is in regular contact with automakers. Many of those companies are independently working on self-driving cars themselves (see “Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think”).

Google has been testing its cars on public roads since 2010 (see “Look, No Hands”), always with a human in the driver’s seat who can take over if necessary.

Urmson dismissed claims that legal and regulatory problems pose a major barrier to cars that are completely autonomous. He pointed out that California, Nevada, and Florida have already adjusted their laws to allow tests of self-driving cars. And existing product liability laws make it clear that a car’s manufacturer would be at fault if the car caused a crash, he said. He also said that when the inevitable accidents do occur, the data autonomous cars collect in order to navigate will provide a powerful and accurate picture of exactly who was responsible.

Urmson showed data from a Google car that was rear-ended in traffic by another driver. Examining the car’s annotated map of its surroundings clearly showed that the Google vehicle smoothly halted before being struck by the other vehicle.

“We don’t have to rely on eyewitnesses that can’t act be trusted as to what happened—we actually have the data,” he said. “The guy around us wasn’t paying enough attention. The data will set you free.”

(Reuters) – The total value of the claims that market makers can recover after suffering losses due to Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s botched handling of Facebook Inc’s initial public offering is $41.6 million, the exchange operator said Friday.

The claims figure, which was calculated by Wall Street’s industry-funded watchdog the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, falls short of the $62 million that Nasdaq had initially set aside to repay brokerages that lost money.

Nasdaq said the figure is lower in part because some claims did not qualify for compensation under its plan.

The main reason for the lower figure, however, was because one firm opted to try to recover funds through arbitration.

The announcement did not name the brokerage, which was UBS AG.

UBS has pegged its losses from the glitch-ridden IPO at $350 million and was vocal in its decision to file an arbitration demand which claimed Nasdaq had violated a contract agreement.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet, however, blocked the bank’s arbitration proceeding over the summer on several grounds, including a determination that the bank’s claims did not fall within the scope of the arbitration provision in their services agreement.

“Nasdaq has demonstrated that the arbitration should be enjoined because it is likely to succeed on the merits and will suffer irreparable harm,” Sweet wrote.

“Given the substantial federal issues posed by UBS claims, the threat of an arbitration panel issuing a decision that may conflict with the decision of a federal court in a parallel litigation also weighs strongly against permitting UBS to proceed with its arbitration proceeding,” he added.

Megan Stinson, a spokeswoman for UBS, told Reuters on Friday that the bank has since appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She could not comment further, as the case is currently under seal.

Facebook’s problematic debut on the Nasdaq exchange on May 18, 2012, resulted from a systems failure that prevented the timely delivery of order confirmations and left more than 30,000 Facebook orders stuck in Nasdaq’s system for more than two hours.

Many brokerages were left in the dark wondering if their trades went through. Major market makers estimated they lost collectively up to $500 million in the IPO.

Nasdaq devised a plan to compensate firms up to $62 million, and laid out the criteria for how firms can be eligible to file claims.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the compensation plan in March, and FINRA was put in charge of processing the claims for restitution.

Several months after approving the plan, the SEC in May filed civil charges against Nasdaq, saying the exchange’s “ill-fated decisions” on the day of the Facebook IPO led to a series of regulatory violations.

Nasdaq settled the charges and agreed to pay a $10 million fine.

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc has set a relatively modest price range for its closely watched initial public offering, but some financial advisers say their clients are not clamoring to invest in the social media phenomenon.

“Nary a tweet,” says William Baldwin, president of Pillar Financial Advisors in Waltham, Massachusetts, when asked about client interest in the deal.

Out of 29 broker-dealers and independent advisers contacted by Reuters, 23 said they are not recommending Twitter shares. Only one said he would recommend it – and only to certain clients. Five others said they would wait to snap up the stock if it plunges after it begins to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

While retail interest might be low, tech industry analysts say there is expected to be a good appetite for Twitter stock from institutional investors at the current valuation. Actual institutional investor sentiment still remains unclear. Retail investors typically account for 10 to 15 percent ofIPOs.

Twitter said on Thursday it will sell 70 million shares at between $17 and $20 apiece, valuing the online messaging company at up to about $11 billion, less than the $15 billion that some analysts had been expecting. If underwriters choose to sell an additional allotment of 10.5 million shares, the IPO could raise as much as $1.6 billion.

Blame last year’s botched Facebook Inc IPO for the diminished interest from Mom and Pop in Twitter.

When the social networking giant’s stock hit the market in May 2012, it encountered allocation problems, trading glitches and a selloff – shares did not recover their IPO price until a year later.

“People are still smarting from that experience,” says René Nourse, a financial adviser at Urban Wealth Management in El Segundo, California. Part of the problem is that investors do not understand Twitter the way they “got” Facebook, Nourse and other advisers say.

NO CALLS ON TWITTER

Three brokers with Morgan Stanley, which was lead underwriter on the Facebook IPO, said clients are showing little or no interest in Twitter.

“With the debacle over Facebook, I haven’t had one client ask about it,” said one of the brokers, based in the southeast. The broker asked not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Another broker, based in northern California, said, “Silicon Valley deals have been super-red hot, but I’ve had no inquiries from clients” about Twitter.

All in all, Twitter is no Facebook.

While Twitter relies on advertising like Facebook to make money, it is not profitable.

Twitter also has a smaller, less-engaged audience and it is not issuing as much stock, argues Kile Lewis, co-chief executive and founder of oXYGen Financial, an independent financial advisory firm that focuses on clients in their 30s and 40s, also known as Generation X and Generation Y.

“In spite of the ‘glow’ from most on Wall Street, I find it hard to make a recommendation for a company that is running a…loss,” Lewis says. “Until they have a clear plan to monetize their product it seems too risky.”

Twitter more than doubled its third-quarter revenue to $168.6 million, but net losses widened to $64.6 million in the September quarter, it disclosed in a filing earlier this month.

Since its creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first-ever tweet in March 2006, the micro-blogging platform has grown to more than 200 million regular users posting more than 400 million tweets a day.

Twitter is expected to set a final IPO price on November 6, according to a document reviewed by Reuters, suggesting that the stock could begin trading as early as November 7.

INVESTORS POLL ON PRICE RANGE

For individual investors, however, the pendulum is swinging the other way.

An online poll conducted through Friday morning on Reuters.com found that 57 percent of 225 respondents want to invest in the IPO at the range of $17 to $20, while 28 percent are not interested in the stock. Fifteen percent say they are waiting to buy the shares on the open market.

One cautious investor is Betty Tanguilig, a 75-year-old retiree and mother of eight. Back when Facebook launched, she was furious that her financial adviser Alan Haft, with California-based Kelly Haft Financial, could not get her more than $46,000 worth of shares from a $400,000 account to buy shares of the social networking site.

Now, Tanguilig is taking a more measured approach to the Twitter IPO. Even though her investment in Facebook is up 40 percent, she says she wants to wait and see how Twitter performs before jumping into the stock.

Tanguilig’s hesitance about Twitter is not the result of a lesson learned from the mishaps of the Facebook IPO, but because like many of her peers, Tanguilig does not quite get Twitter.

“I use Facebook, I read what people are doing … but I have never used Twitter,” she said.

“I will give it a week,” she said. “And if it does well, I would put in around $20,000.”

Several independent advisers said it suited their investment styles more to wait and see how Twitter performed after the offering.

“We expect that Twitter will fall in value eventually post-offering,” said Stacy Francis, president and CEO of Francis Financial in New York. “That is the ideal time to buy.”

An adviser at Raymond James said he would also advise certain clients to buy at the post-IPO price if the stock tanks on the first day. The adviser asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Betsy Billard, an adviser at Ameriprise Financial with offices in Los Angeles and New York, said most large-company mutual funds will be buyers. “My clients will own it – whether they want it or not,” Billard says.

By Trevor Mogg

The Pebble seems to be doing OK in the smartwatch space considering its humble beginnings, though we’re not so sure about the recently released Galaxy Gear. It’s pretty pricey, after all, and only pairs with a couple of Samsung devices. There’s Sony’s offering too, though you don’t seem to hear much about that.

What we really want to see is a device so stunning it blows the market wide open, a watch that leaves us reaching down to the ground to pick up our jaw so that we can fit it back in place to verbally express our glee and happiness that an awesome wrist-based gadget has finally made it to market.

Could Google’s smartwatch be the one? According to a 9to5Google report Monday, we may be about to find out.

An unnamed source told the site the watch would be coming “sooner rather than later” – admittedly a vague forecast, certainly unspecific, and definitely not that useful. But it could mean we see something before the holiday season, rather than next year. Or next week rather than the week after. Or today instead of tomorrow. Sure, it really depends on how you look at it, although one date mentioned in the report is October 31.

The source also told the site that Google Now would be very much at the center of the Mountain View company’s high-tech watch – which is apparently going with the codename ‘Gem’ – with users able to ask a question and receive a response on its interface, as well as receive lots of contextual information via Google Now’s info-laden cards.

The company is also said to be working on ways to extend the battery life of its smartwatch – a major challenge for makers of a little device like this – as well as focusing heavily on Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

The Google Now integration could certainly work to loosen those jaw joints a little, though what’ll really send it groundward will be an awesomely cool design the likes of which we’ve never seen. Can Google come up with the goods? Hopefully all will be revealed sooner rather than later.

A startup pays people around the world to log prices in their local stores each day, offering a real-time way to track how economies are doing.

In early September, news outlets reported that the price of onions in India had suddenly spiked nearly 300 percent over prices a year before. Analysts warned that the jump in price for this food staple could signal an impending economic crisis, and the Research Bank of India quickly raised interest rates.

A startup company called Premise might’ve helped make the response to India’s onion crisis timelier. As part of a novel approach to tracking the global economy from the bottom up, the company has a daily feed of onion prices from stores around India. More than 700 people in cities around the globe use a mobile app to log the prices of key products in local stores each day.

Premise’s cofounder David Soloff says it’s a valuable way to take the pulse of economies around the world, especially since stores frequently update their prices in response to economic pressures such as wholesale costs and consumer confidence. “All this information is hiding in plain sight on store shelves,” he says, “but there’s no way of capturing and aggregating it in any meaningful way.”

That information could provide a quick way to track and even predict inflation measures such as the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Inflation figures influence the financial industry and are used to set governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, but they are typically updated only once a month. Soloff says Premise’s analyses have shown that for some economies, the data the company collects can reliably predict monthly inflation figures four to six weeks in advance. “You don’t look at the weather forecast once a month,” he says.

Premise uses a mixture of in-store logging and online prices to measure U.S. inflation. The company has continued to publish new figures each day even as the federal shutdown triggered by Congress has halted the U.S. government’s indexing program.

The people who check store shelves for Premise are located mostly in cities in Latin America and Asia, including the largest emerging economies: China, India, and Brazil. Soloff says that custom price indexes for food or specific crucial commodities will be of interest to many financial and consumer product companies. “In these developing, huge economies this isn’t an alternative—it’s primary,” he says. “We’re building a map for the first time.”

Each day, Premise’s workers receive a kind of to-do list on their smartphones via a mobile app for Android devices. They’re asked to go to particular stores and log the prices of certain products, and to snap a picture of that product on the shelf. Workers receive between 5 and 15 cents for each price logged and may be asked to record as many as 250 in a day, a workload that would take a couple of hours. The tasks, done with the permission of store managers, are designed to be something workers can fit in around another job or university studies.

Premise can also collect customized data for clients by sending specific questions to its crowd of workers. Consumer goods companies might be interested in paying for information on how its own and competing products are being priced in certain markets, Soloff says.

Soloff says Premise is already working with some consumer goods companies and has begun to feed data to financial companies including Bloomberg, which has since August offered access to certain Premise data feeds on inflation indexes. The company is backed by venture capital firms Harrison Metal, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, is an advisor.

Premise’s data could be a useful new way to monitor prices and unearth new information about how they are changing within economies, says Alberto Cavallo, an assistant professor of economics at MIT and a cofounder ofPriceStats, a company that calculates inflation and price indexes by monitoring online prices for goods in over 70 countries.

However, Cavallo says that Premise will have to constantly check that its workers are recording the price of the exact same items each time they log prices in a store. Research projects that looked into using mobile apps to track prices in stores have sometimes produced unreliable data because people sometimes record the price of a different version or packet size of a product by mistake, says Cavallo.

“That’s potentially the greatest challenge of crowdsourcing,” says Cavallo. “If they can control for that and make sure it is always the same items, it could be a very useful approach.”

Soloff says he is confident his company can do that, because it offers multiple layers of quality control. The company’s workers are carefully trained to be reliable, he says, and Premise can check the location fix and other metadata gathered by its app each time a price is recorded.

The company is also investigating whether image processing software could be used to automatically check the images uploaded with each price check. That could ensure that the correct item was logged and might even allow more sophisticated measures to be added—recording, for example, what condition fresh food is in, or whether shelves are running low on stock.

Premise’s data may have other uses outside the financial industry. As part of a United Nations program called Global Pulse, Cavallo and PriceStats, which was founded after financial professionals began relying on data from an ongoing academic price-indexing effort called the Billion Prices Project, devised bread price indexes for several Latin American countries. Such indexes typically predict street prices and help governments and NGOs spot emerging food crises. Premise’s data could be used in the same way. The information could also be used to monitor areas of the world, such as Africa, where tracking online prices is unreliable, he says.

A wearable depth-sensing camera may soon give sightless people a better way to master their environment.

WHY IT MATTERS

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Governments and established financial institutions are likely to launch a campaign to quash the decentralized digital currency Bitcoin, according to a leading economist and academic. Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, expects Bitcoin to face political pressure and aggressive lobbying from big banks because of its disruptive nature.

“There is going to be a big political backlash,” Johnson said on stage at MIT Technology Review’sEmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last Thursday. “And the question is whether the people behind those currencies are ready for that and have their own political strategy.”

The system of cryptographic software behind Bitcoin represents a significant technical advance, and the currency has inspired many cyber-libertarians (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters”). Mathematical and computer networking principles are used to underpin a system through which financial transactions can be made digitally, without the need for any central authority or financial institution.

The code that supports and regulates the Bitcoin network is built into the software needed to use the currency. It works in a distributed network across the Internet to confirm transactions and prevent counterfeiting. Adding to the mystique, the technical expert or experts who developed the Bitcoin protocol are still unknown.

After several years as a nerdy curiosity, the currency has recently gained momentum as a legitimate means of payment. Many Bitcoin-based businesses are springing up, some backed by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists (see “Bitcoin Hits the Big Time, to the Regret of Some Early Boosters”).

However, Johnson says that Bitcoin’s success will draw increased attention from governments and regulators, who are used to having tight control over currencies. He believes they will be egged on by established financial institutions, which will likely seek to quash the currency. Bitcoin enables very rapid, cheap transfers and payments that could compete with existing fee-based ways of moving money around. “Any bankers watching this should be very afraid,” said Johnson.

Bitcoin opponents could get ammunition for their campaign from the recent case of Silk Road, an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for illicit drugs. The FBI arrested a man on suspicion of running the site and seized the servers that ran Silk Road. The site was hidden from the open Internet using the anonymous networking technology Tor.

Johnson suggested that this kind of controversial association could certainly put pressure on Bitcoin. “People care a lot about how monies are used,” he said. “They care about the various behaviors associated with monies.”

Indeed, it appears that Bitcoin is coming under increased scrutiny from lawmakers and politicians. Stephen Pair, cofounder and CTO of the Bitcoin payments company Bitpay, says his company has been contacted by state and national officials who have subpoenaed information about its activities.

Pair rejects any suggestion that the currency has any special association with illegal activities. “Just because you use Bitcoin and Tor doesn’t mean you can get away with breaking the law,” he says. “I would not advise people to see Bitcoin as a means of subverting the legal system.”

Johnson, who served as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, said he thinks supporters of the “crypto-currency” could head off opponents by persuading politicians and legislators that it represents an opportunity for international innovation. “They shouldn’t sit back and wait for other people to define them in terms of Silk Road or anything else,” he said in an interview after the conference. “They should be proactive and explain why this would be a great industry for the U.S. to develop, and why they should have appropriate regulation around that.”

He also said that some governments outside the U.S. may feel threatened by Bitcoin because it allows citizens and companies to sidestep restrictions on the movement of funds across their borders.

Biotech startup Greenlight Biosciences has a cell-free approach to microbial chemical production.

Biotechnologists have genetically engineered bacteria and other microbes to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources. But complex metabolic pathways in these living organisms can be difficult to control, and the desired products can be poisonous to the microbes. What if you could eliminate the living cell altogether?

Greenlight Biosciences, a Boston-area startup, engineers microbes to make various enzymes that can produce chemicals and then breaks open the bugs to harvest those enzymes. The scientists don’t have to go to the trouble of isolating the enzymes from the other cellular material; instead, they add chemicals to inhibit unwanted biochemical reactions. By mixing slurries based on different microbes with sugars and other carbon-based feedstocks, the company can generate complex reactions to produce a variety of chemicals. Greenlight say its technology enables the company to make cheaper versions of existing chemicals and has already produced a food additive, drug products, and pesticides and herbicides.

The biggest motivation in starting the company was to figure out how to produce such compounds in a more environmentally friendly way, says CEOAndrey Zarur. But Greenlight’s products also have to be cheaper than those produced by chemical- or cell-based manufacturing, he says, or industries will be reluctant to use them.

Greenlight’s strategy is a departure from classic fermentation processes that depend on vats of living microbes. It is also unlike a different approach to genetic engineering, often called synthetic biology, that tweaks the pathways in microbes so that they are optimized to fabricate desirable compounds. Several companies are engineering bacteria and yeast to produce specialty chemicals, but for the most part, these groups keep the bugs alive. Amyris, for example, can make biofuels, medicines, and chemicals used in cosmetics and lubricants by engineering microbes with new sets of enzymes that can modify sugars and other starting materials (see “Amyris Announces Commercial Production of Biochemicals” and “Microbes Can Mass-Produce Malaria Drug”). Metabolix has engineered bacteria to produce biodegradable plastic (see “A Bioplastic Goes Commercial”).

A problem with that strategy is that when bacteria and other microbes are turned into living chemical factories, they still have to put some resources into growing instead of chemical production, says Mark Styczynski, a metabolic engineer and systems biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Furthermore, even in a seemingly simply bacterium, metabolism is complicated. “Metabolic pathways have complex regulation within them and across them,” he says. Changing one metabolic pathway to improve chemical production can have broad and sometimes negative consequences for the rest of the cell.

Thus, separating the production pathway from the needs of the cell could be a huge advantage, he says. Greenlight doesn’t completely avoid microbes. In the company’s sunny lab space north of Boston, researchers use bubbling bioreactors to grow bacteria in liquid culture, maintaining different species and strains that can produce a variety of enzymes. Once the bugs have reached a certain density, the researchers send them through a high-pressure extruder to break them into pieces. Then they add drugs to the resulting gray slurry to turn off most of the cells’ metabolic enzymes; the useful enzymes are unaffected because they have been engineered to resist the drugs.

The technology that keeps the exposed metabolic pathways working was developed by James Swartz, a biochemical engineer at Stanford University who left his position as a protein engineer at the biotechnology company Genentech to develop cell-free methods for producing pharmacological proteins (insulin is an example of a druglike protein that can be produced by biotechnology). Seeking more control over the biological machinery that produces proteins, Swartz figured out how to give that machinery the biochemical environment it needed even outside its normal home in a cell. Not only did his methods enable him to make more complex proteins, but it turned out they could also be used to control biological machinery to make small molecules and chemicals. “We’ve found that by reproducing the chemical conditions that occur inside the cell, we activate a lot of metabolic processes, even ones people thought were too complicated,” he says.

Greenlight can troubleshoot and tweak the metabolic production of chemicals in ways more akin to chemical engineering than anything found in typical microbial engineering. The cell-free slurries are active for 96 hours before the enzymes begin to break down. At that point, a new batch of microbes must be grown.

“One of the beauties of the cell is it is self-replicating,” says David Berry, a principle at Flagship Ventures, who cofounded the biofuels companies LS9 andJoule Unlimited. (Berry is a 2007 MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35.) But even though a cell-free system misses out on that advantage, there are other benefits, such as superior flexibility. “There is the potential to work with more inputs and to work around situations where certain pathways currently don’t work because of the needs of the cell,” Berry says.

Zarur says Greenlight could have its first product on the market at the beginning of next year. It will be a food supplement with health benefits, he says.

The company has also received a $4.5 million grant from ARPA-E to develop a system for converting methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, to liquid fuel. The agency says such technology could “enable mobile fermenters to access remote sources of natural gas for low-cost conversion of natural gas to liquid fuel.”

A new database tool dramatically improves processing speeds using technology that’s already in your computer.

New software can use the graphics processors found on everyday computers to process torrents of data more quickly than is normally possible, opening up new ways to visually explore everything from Twitter posts to political donations.

Known as MapD, or massively parallel database, the new technology achieves big speed gains by storing the data in the onboard memory of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of in central processing units (CPUs), as is conventional. Using a single high-performance GPU card can make data processing up to 70 times faster.

Right now the prototype technology is being demonstrated on tweets; it can show how a meme is propagating in real time on regional or world maps (watch “Visualizing Big Data in Milliseconds on Cheap Computers”). Many large-scale Twitter visualizations—including animated maps and charts—take several seconds or longer to process data before it can be displayed. With MapD, a user can adjust search terms and other parameters—like time frame or geographical region—and see a new visualization instantly, without having to wait for each new map and animation to compute and load.

This public interface can be used to visualize 50 million geocoded tweets posted between September 28 and October 6. The tool allows users to explore different search terms, examine broad geographical trends, and zoom in on each tweet. For each of the 30 frames per second it generates when animating Twitter, Map-D scans all the tweets that have been loaded on the GPUs, constructing visualizations such as maps of how word usage—which could include mentions of a product name or news item—is propagating across a region or around the world in real time.

“The [existing Twitter visualizations] we know of are ‘canned’—based on some previous computation of a map or picture, rather than being truly interactive,” says Samuel Madden, a computer science professor at MIT. “We have built a new kind of database system. It will answer and also map every request by scanning through every tweet in the database, which can be done in just a few milliseconds.” The system can keep up the pace even if the database has hundreds of millions of tweets.

The technology was dreamed up last year by Todd Mostak, then a Harvard graduate student in Middle Eastern studies, who was frustrated by the sluggish processing he encountered as he tried to crunch social-media data sets from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. “By building a tool to explore data sets like this in a truly interactive fashion, with latencies measured in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes, we hope to remove a computational bottleneck from the process of hypothesis formulation, testing, and refinement,” Mostak says.

The technology could make it easier to glean insights from Twitter’s huge corpus of information. Combining census data with tweets, for example, could show how mention of the word “McDonald’s” in geotagged tweets relates to variables like income or unemployment levels.

An early adopter will be the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes openness in campaign financing. That organization is feeding 22 years of U.S. state and federal campaign donation data to MapD, which will provide ways to rapidly vary visualizations that break down more than 20 million donations according to donor, region, elected official, and other parameters. Each new type of query will generate a new visualization in just milliseconds.

Using existing methods, it can take seconds for a visualization to load, because it takes that long to query the information in a database. Faster access enables  researchers to test hypotheses and refine visualizations more quickly. That could make big data sets more useful. “Many laptops even contain fairly powerful GPUs—fast enough to dramatically accelerate the interactive exploration of moderate-sized data sets of, say, 20 million tweets,” Mostak says.

“MapD’s technology promises to make new kinds of real-time queries possible,” says Bob Lannon, a developer at Sunlight Labs, which develops data analysis tools for the Sunlight Foundation. “Soon you will be able to quickly explore large amounts of data and pivot, filter, and summarize it in ways not previously available. We’re excited to see what it could mean for our users.”

Nvidia, one of the leading manufacturers of GPUs, plans to demonstrate MapD on more than one billion tweets using eight GPUs at an upcoming conference. The researchers are also planning to do a joint demo with Gnip, the leading reseller of social-media data from sources like Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook. Elaine Ellis, a spokeswoman for Gnip, said the company was not ready to talk about the collaboration.

Twitter reported recently that it has 215 million monthly active users broadcasting more than 400 million tweets per day. Of these, about seven million tweets contain GPS geolocation tags, typically from mobile devices. Being able to visualize massive streams of geographically identifiable social-media and mobile-phone data in real time could have powerful implications for epidemiology and disaster response (see “Big Data from Cheap Phones”).

Beyond using graphics chips, Madden and Mostak are working with researchers from Intel to allow MapD to take advantage of the company’s new massively parallel processors as well as the ordinary X86 processors that power most computers.

(Reuters) – Japan’s SoftBank Corp said on Friday it agreed to pay $1.26 billion for a 57 percent stake in privately held cellphone distributor Brightstar Corp as it looks to boost its bargaining power with handset makers.

SoftBank, which owns 80 percent of No. 3 U.S. mobile operator Sprint Corp, said under the agreement its ownership of Brightstar would increase to 70 percent over the next five years, or upon certain unspecified events.

SoftBank had announced earlier this week it was in talks with Brightstar. SoftBank’s billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, has said one of the key benefits of the Sprint deal would be to bolster the group’s position with handset makers, an industry dominated globally by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc.

Earlier this week, SoftBank said it spent $1.5 billion for a 51 percent stake in Finnish mobile games maker Supercell, valuing the small maker of hit games “Clash of Clans” and “Hay Day” at $3 billion.

The Brightstar transaction, which has been approved by SoftBank’s board, will be subject to regulatory approval, according to the companies. They expect to close the deal by the end of 2013.

SoftBank said it is financing the deal with $1.26 billion in cash on hand and intends to guarantee Brightstar’s outstanding $350 million senior unsecured notes due 2016 and $250 million senior unsecured notes due 2018.

Under the agreement, Brightstar will become the exclusive provider of handsets to certain SoftBank affiliates.

Brightstar has a presence in over 50 countries, and generated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $260 million on revenues of more than $7 billion for the 12 months ended June 2013, the companies said.

Brightstar acts as a wholesaler between manufacturers of phones, tablets and accessories and wireless operators and retailers.

Goldman, Sachs was financial adviser to Brightstar, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and K&L Gates LLP served as legal counsel. The Raine Group LLC advised SoftBank and Morrison & Foerster LLP acted as lead counsel to SoftBank.