A researcher envisions the ultimate cure for “range anxiety”: roadway-powered vehicles with modified on-board power receivers.

By Martin LaMonica on November 19, 2013

One way to extend the range of electric vehicles may be to provide power wirelessly through coils placed under the surface of a road. But charging moving vehicles with high-power wireless chargers below them is complex.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method to deliver power to moving vehicles using simple electronic components, rather than the expensive power electronics or complex sensors previously employed. The system uses a specialized receiver that induces a burst of power only when a vehicle passes over a wireless transmitter. Initial models indicate that placing charging coils in 10 percent of a roadway would extend the driving range of an EV from about 60 miles to 300 miles, says Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NCSU.

Wireless charging through magnetic induction—the same type typically used for electric toothbrushes—is being pursued by a number of companies for consumer electronics and electric vehicles (see “Wireless Charging—Has the Time Finally Arrived?”). Such chargers work by sending current through a coil, which produces a magnetic field. When a car with its own coil is placed above the transmitter, the magnetic field induces a flow of power that charges the batteries.

Stationary inductive chargers for electric vehicles typically use sensors to ensure that the receiver coils on the vehicle are aligned above wireless charging pads correctly. The NCSU researchers’ system operates without position sensors in an attempt to simplify the design and make it more efficient. When there are no vehicles, the transmitter coil gives off a weak field. But when a vehicle with a receiver passes by, electronics in the receiver trigger a strong magnetic field and an accompanying flow of power, says Lukic.

Precisely controlling when the roadway coils produce a magnetic field is important for safety reasons; if the field misses the car’s receiving coils, it could attach to parts of the car or attract stray objects. “Somehow we have to channel or contain the magnetic field produced by the transmitter to always be right below the receiver. We cannot just beam out a strong field into the environment,” he says. Some designs have a series of coils that are always energized, but that approach is not energy-efficient, Lukic says.

In a stationary induction charger, the power receiver is made with a simple coil. The NCSU device is more sophisticated. It uses capacitors and inductors to manipulate the power transfer and magnetic field, says Lukic. The coupling between transmitter and receiver could be done with power electronics, but such a system would be more expensive than the NCSU device, he says.

The researchers have made a low-power prototype and intend to reach a rate of 50 kilowatts, which is equivalent to direct-current fast chargers, which work more efficiently than conventional alternating-current chargers.

Commercial interest in wireless charging systems for moving vehicles is growing. Qualcomm is working on a “dynamic” charging system that builds off its current stationary wireless EV charger. The University of Utah has tested a wireless charging infrastructure for city buses and has spun out a company calledWireless Advanced Vehicle Electrification to build commercial products. With the Utah system a bus could charge from coils placed under the road surface where passengers load or at traffic lights. Dynamic wireless power transfer could also be used for robots.

The techniques that the NCSU researchers used for dynamic EV charging have already been applied in some consumer electronics, says Katie Hall, the chief technology officer of WiTricity, a company that makes wireless charging equipment. But the electronic tooling used for small electronics, such as switches, isn’t readily available for high-power applications. “That kind of technology doesn’t seamlessly scale to kilowatts or hundreds of kilowatts,” she says.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is also working on ways to automatically match the wireless power transmitter and receiver, says Omer Onar, a researcher who works on wireless vehicle charging there. The new work addresses only one of the barriers of the dynamic charging, he says: “Most of the [commercial] barriers are associated with cost and infrastructure.”

A more efficient engine and composite wings that fold up will reduce fuel consumption on Boeing’s 777x.

In 2020, Boeing says it will start deliveries of a new airplane, which is called 777x for now, that will be 12 percent more fuel efficient than its competition. That would bring huge savings to airlines in reduced fuel costs.

The plane is based, as the name suggests, on Boeing’s large 777 airliner. To get the fuel savings, Boeing is using the new GE9X engine from GE Aviation. It will also have composite wings that are longer than the ones on the current 777. Longer wings are known to improve efficiency, but pose a problem for negotiating airports. One solution is to add vertical winglets, which has much the same effect. With the 777x, Boeing has opted for longer wings that fold up when the plane is on the ground, shortening the wingspan by just over 6 meters.

Boeing has received 259 orders for the airplane.

Airplane design will change slowly because of the high need for reliability. But aircraft designers are working on new technologies that could eventualy cut fuel consumption in half (see “A More Efficient Jet Engine Is Made from Lighter Parts, Some 3-D Printed” and “’Hybrid Wing’ Uses Half the Fuel of a Standard Airplane”). Even greater benefits could come from radical engine designs and the use of batteries to augment them (see “Exploding Engine Could Reduce Fuel Consumption” and “Once a Joke, Battery-Powered Airplanes Are Nearing Reality”).

Responding to reports of mass surveillance, engineers say they’ll make encryption standard in all Web traffic.

By David Talbot on November 18, 2013

In response to the public outcry over mass Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), the engineers who develop the protocols that underpin the Internet are deep into an effort to encrypt all Web traffic, and expect to have a revamped system ready to roll out by the end of next year.

The effort, by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, involves HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, which governs information exchanges between the Web browser on your phone and computer and the servers that hold the data of the website you are visiting.

Leaked documents brought to light by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest the NSA routinely harvests and stores huge amounts of information from major cloud computing platforms and wireless carriers. Today, much of the Web traffic between your device and Web server is not encrypted unless websites choose to use a variant of the HTTP protocol called HTTPS—which includes an encryption step, called transport layer security. This is commonly used by banks, e-commerce sites, and by some big sites, including Google and Facebook. (If a website’s address starts with “https://” it already uses encryption.)

The IETF change would introduce encryption by default for all Internet traffic. And the work to make this happen in the next generation of HTTP, called HTTP 2.0, is proceeding “very frantically,” says Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College in Dublin who is part of the project.

The hope is that a specification will be ready by the end of 2014. It would then be up to websites to actually adopt the technology, which is not mandatory.

Many experts have pointed out that mass Internet spying is done in part because it’s so easy to do. Some argue that making life a little harder for agencies like the NSA may make them focus on legitimate national security targets rather than scooping up everything and asking questions later (see “Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe” and “NSA Leak Leaves Crypto Math Intact but Highlights Known Workarounds”).

“I think we can make a difference in the near team to have Web and e-mail encryption be ubiquitous,” Farrell says.

Indeed, an even nearer-term step the IETF is taking, he says, involves beefing up security in e-mail and instant message traffic—two key targets for dragnet surveillance. Right now, protocols exist to encrypt these communications as they make several hops: first from your device to your e-mail provider, then to the recipient’s e-mail provider, and finally to the recipient’s phone or computer.

The problem is that often the protocols needed for encryption are not set correctly and then don’t work between different e-mail servers, such as those of small organizations, or when they hop between big encrypted services like Gmail and that of a small company or institution.

When this happens, your e-mail winds up being sent “in the clear” because e-mail protocols elevate actual delivery over all other concerns, including whether or not the encryption actually was working. “I think we can do better on that,” Farrell says, to make the setup easier and verifiable.

In some ways this is an about-face, because a year and a half ago a group within the IETF had decided against adding encryption by default in HTTP. Part of what makes the task hard, Farrell says, involves the static portion of Web pages that are “cached,” or stored on local servers nearer to the user.

Caching is problematic because the cached content sits between the browser and the server, and it is typically kept “in the clear”—or unencrypted—so it can be identified. By its nature, encryption makes every piece of content appear unique. “The issue is, if you turn on the crypto, you make it harder to do that caching,” Farrell says. “And the technical challenge is, how do we get the security benefit and keep the caching benefit? That’s being worked on.”

A range of other potential technical avenues for tightening up Internet privacy was outlined in a recent blog by Tim Bray, who helped develop several key Web protocols and now works at Google. He attended an IETF meeting last week in Vancouver (see “Time for Internet Engineers to Fight Back Against the Surveillance Internet”).

Bray did not reply to an interview request but outlined the relevance of these efforts in his post. “At the end of the day this is a policy problem [and] not a technology problem; but to the extent that anything can be done at the technology level, a lot of the people who can do it are here,” he wrote, referring to the engineers and browser makers attending the IETF.

Indeed, Jari Arkko, the IETF chair and an expert on Internet architecture with Ericsson Research, says that nobody should harbor illusions about technical quick fixes. “I need to be honest and open—technology is only part of the issue here,” he says.

A Kansas City hospital is pioneering genomic testing to solve life-threatening mysteries involving infants and kids with developmental  disorders.

By Susan Young on November 19, 2013

Earlier this month, doctors at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City were able to use rapid DNA sequencing and analysis to identify the genetic mutation keeping a baby girl from eating and growing.

The hospital team identified the cause of her problems—a genetic disorder that can be treated with intensive nutritional support and vitamins to stimulate her mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells—and ruled out other progressive and often fatal conditions. In other words, the genomic diagnosis helped shape her clinical care, pointing the way to the nutritional supplements the girl needed to improve and the best way to feed her.

The baby girl is one of two dozen critically sick infants whose genomes have been scrutinized using one of the fastest whole-genome analyses in the world. The hope is that such rapid genome analysis will help doctors better diagnose and then treat infants born with genetic disorders. Over the next five years, the Kansas City team of doctors and geneticists will analyze the genomes of hundreds of more babies born with serious disorders to evaluate the benefits of two-day genomic diagnoses to patients and their families.

The Children’s Mercy team is one of a few groups across the U.S. pioneering the use of genome sequencing in the care of children with puzzling conditions. Earlier this year, the hospital’s genomics center reported that it had developed a system to sequence and interpret a newborn’s genome in just 48 hours (see “Sick Babies Could Have Genomes Sequenced in Days”). The hospital has focused its rapid genome analyses on neonatal intensive care patients because a diagnosis could change the care of these infants at a critical time. “We can make more educated decisions,” says Sarah Soden, the medical director of the genome center. This could decrease the time a sick newborn has to spend in the stressful and expensive neonatal ICU.

The rapid diagnosis could also have lifelong benefits for newborns. In the case of the newborn girl who wasn’t eating, her muscles were so weak that she had trouble swallowing; she had to be fed through a tube. But once her condition was diagnosed, her doctors realized they could feed her a thickened formula, which will allow her to learn how to eat in a critical developmental window. “Kids who aren’t allowed to eat in the first months of life are really hard to later teach to eat,” says Soden.

Gene tests and whole-genome analyses often take weeks, but the Kansas City hospital has developed computational tools to more quickly identify the potentially medically relevant variations in a patient’s three billion base pairs. Whole-genome analyses, as opposed to targeted gene tests, can be especially beneficial for newborns because they may not yet show all the symptoms of a given condition. “The ability to cast a wide net and look at all relevant genes is very helpful for newborns who may not have fully presented with all of a disease’s classic features,” says Soden.

The analysis starts with a speedy 25-hour DNA sequencing process. The data is then analyzed by software developed by Children’s Mercy. The software first looks at genes known to be connected to symptoms exhibited by the infant. If none are found, the analysis is then expanded to all DNA variants known to potentially cause disease.

With a recent $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the hospital will study the benefits and risks of using rapid genomic sequencing on severely ill newborns. The study will involve 1,000 infants; doctors will use the rapid sequencing for half of these newborns as part of their diagnostic workup.

Sequencing is still a relatively new medical testing tool, and this large study, along with three others underway at other NIH-funded centers, will determine how to best incorporate the technology into newborn care, or whether it should be incorporated at all, says Geoffrey Ginsburg, director of Genomic Medicine at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. These tests may help improve the accuracy, reduce the turnaround time, and lower the cost of such screening, says Ginsburg.

The Children’s Mercy team has already used its rapid sequencing analyses on two dozen patients. Soden and her colleagues say the results often help guide families and doctors. The rapid whole-genome analysis costs around $10,000 per sample. For less time-pressured cases where more is known about a child’s condition, Children’s Mercy also offers a lower cost and more targeted analysis. This screen focuses on 514 different genes that are each known to cause genetic disorders in young patients. That test, which takes a few weeks, can help families that have struggled with the mystery of undiagnosed and often debilitating conditions for years.

By Jennifer Booton

The malicious software used by bad guys to steal banking data is on the rise.

While the crackdown on digital currencies has helped thwart some operations used by cyber criminals to launder money, crime through Trojans to nab critical banking data nevertheless remains a problem.

In the third quarter, online banking Trojans, which are used to steal banking information from the user, soared to a record high with more than 200,000 infections, the highest since 2002, according to new data from TrendLabs.

The next highest in more recent history was 146,000 infections, which took place in the second quarter.

Just three countries – the U.S., Brazil and Japan – accounted for more than half of the infections, though TrendLabs said infections spread across the globe and were no longer concentrated on just Europe and the Americas.

“Cybercriminals continued to refine their techniques this quarter,” TrustLabs said in its third-quarter report. “Online banking malware infections increased in several regions … we also caught a glimpse of the massive scale of compromised sites.”

This, of course, comes as more people around the globe bank on the go, using their phones and PCs to do anything from check their balance and transfer money to pay their bills.

In an August survey by the Federal Reserve, nearly 21% of U.S. mobile phone users said they used mobile banking in the past 12 months, while 11% of those who had not yet used it reported they would “definitely” or “probably” bank in the next year.

The security firm also pointed to the rise in malicious and high-risk apps targeting Google’s (GOOG) Android. That category reached the one-million mark for the first time in September, with 800,000 having malicious characteristics.

The remaining apps, considered to be high risk, included those that aggressively pushed ads to users, known as “adware,” which can lead to device information theft.

SAN FRANCISCO –  Netflix is reprogramming the way its Internet video subscription service appears on millions of television screens in an attempt to hook viewers for even longer periods.

The makeover of Netflix’s TV menu will start showing up Wednesday on televisions that connect to the Internet through recently released Blu-ray disc players, PlayStation and Xbox video game consoles and the Roku 3 set-top box.

Netflix’s service will look the same on its applications for mobile devices and its website, as well as on TVs that rely on Apple TV and a variety of other gadgets that stream Internet video.

As has been the case for years, Netflix Inc.’s revamped TV menu will continue to highlight entertainment that the company’s automated recommendation system picks based on each subscriber’s viewing preferences.

But the new design includes more visual thumbnails and details about the recommendations, including a capsule explaining why a particular movie or TV series might appeal to the interests of each subscriber. A blurb about each episode in TV series also will be shown. If a subscriber has enabled their Netflix activity to be tied to Facebook’s social network, the new format also will list friends who have previously watched the video.

“This is the biggest change to the Netflix experience on televisions in our history,” said Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer.

Netflix’s move marks another step in the company’s push to make its online streaming service as compelling as any of the channels on cable and satellite systems. Unlike those channels, which are bundled in subscription packages, Netflix Inc. pipes its service through high-speed Internet connections and sells it as a stand-alone option for $8 month.

The company’s alternative approach is increasingly popular, helping Netflix attract 31 million U.S. subscribers — an audience that just surpassed that of HBO’s older pay-TV channel. HBO, owned by Time Warner Inc. still has a far larger global audience, with 114 million worldwide subscribers compared to 40 million for Netflix.

In a change from past updates, Netflix is simultaneously releasing its redesigned menu on multiple video-streaming devices. The new look will gradually roll out during the next two weeks to Netflix subscribers watching the service through Roku’s latest player, newer Blu-ray players and Smart TVs and the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Xbox 360 video-game consoles. The Los Gatos, Calif. company is planning to introduce the new look on older Roku players and other streaming devices next year.

Although Netflix also works on computers and smartphones, TVs accounted for most of the 5 billion hours watched on the service during the three months ending in September. The total usage works out to an average of about 42 viewing hours per subscriber each month, up from an average of 38 hours per subscriber in the middle of last year.

The rising popularity of Netflix’s service has helped lift the company’s stock price, which has more than tripled this year.

By John R. Quain

They did warn us.

You get a message from a friend: “Hey, didn’t know you were using those adult diapers! Great choice!” It turns out your picture is attached to an ad going out to thousands of people—and you didn’t know a thing about it.

You’re mortified to discover that Google + simply culled your likeness and tied it to the ad. It’s part of what’s called “Shared Endorsements.” Google has done something similar in the past with its “+1” program but now it has expanded the program, adding pictures and quotes from you to an ad even if all you did was follow that store or service.

HOW TO DISABLE IT

As of this week, Google will start using your face and words in third-party ads for products and services. If that sounds disconcerting to you, here’s how to disable it:

You can opt out by unchecking the box at the bottom of this page.

Google did warn users about the coming change in the company’s terms of service about a month ago, and this week it finally made good on the promise. And it’s easy enough to turn off the feature. If you follow a store or coffee company, your image and ungrammatical words, could appear under an ad for the company displayed to tens of thousands of people.

So what’s the big deal?

There’s the Money:
Celebrities live off their endorsements, so what are you, chopped liver? Why shouldn’t you get something for it? If your endorsement is so valuable to Google, shouldn’t they pay for it? The company could at least toss some Bitcoin your way or a free latte.

Of course, the standard response from tech companies is that you are using the service for free (and Google has some amazingly great services), but those services have to be paid for somehow. That’s why it is increasingly forcing users to sign up to Google + to use some YouTube features. This kind of “innovative” and “disruptive” advertising and dataming is a way to pay for such amazingly great services.

It sounds like a reasonable argument except that Google is already one of the most profitable tech businesses in the world. The Google billionaires don’t seem to be hurting for revenues. Squeezing more money out of you by using your visage and tracking your online behavior seems, well, greedy.

It’s Deceptive:
Just because you like something, it doesn’t mean you would recommend that millions buy it or that you endorse the behavior of the CEO. But that is exactly what these customized Google ads imply, that you are endorsing a person, place or thing without qualification. That is blatantly false, of course, but at the moment, it’s legal.

It’s also intentionally deceptive in that adding your appearance (or MOS, man on the street, image) to the ad makes it appear that you consented, but of course you’ve done no such thing. It also doesn’t convey other information that may have influenced that endorsement (hey, my sister in law runs the store, of course I liked it). It looks ripe for a Federal Communications Commission complaint.

You Cannot Give Consent:
No one calls you or sends you a text (or a contract) asking for your permission. If they did, then perhaps many of us would say, “Why not? I love their skiis!” But you are not given the option to publicly like one product or choose not be associated with a certain pizza chain.

Yes, you can go to the Google + settings and turn off Shared Endorsements, but it’s a Facebook-style move that is designed to fly under the radar. They’re hoping you don’t notice.

Privacy and Piracy:|
Publishing your likes, the products you buy, and the services you use is not a harmless practice. It can lay you open to burglars, hackers, fraud and identity theft. Pretending that it doesn’t is simply not being truthful to people.

Sure, there are those who want to be chosen and won’t be. Those people can go Tweet their endorsements.

You’re Fair Game:
In a world where everyone from the National Security Agency to Google is tracking your every move, people should know better. That’s the attitude from folks like Google’s Eric Schmidt. It’s a digital retread of caveat emptor, buyer beware.

However, when every Web site can change its terms of service every day, it’s unreasonable to ask each of us to track and police on a daily basis what these companies do.

Naturally, you can opt out, not converse with friends online, and limit your career opportunities by eschewing every sort of social networking. Or you can protest. Send Google messages, and do what many have done: Switch your picture with that of Eric Schmidt. Then you can like as many embarrassing products as you want.

Genomic technology could accelerate patient trials of new cancer drugs that are targeted to a tumor’s individual molecular profile.

By Susan Young on November 12, 2013

A novel kind of clinical trial is set to test several new lung cancer drugs based on the molecular profiles of each participating patient’s tumor.

If successful, the trial could help bring cancer-genome-targeted medicines to patients more quickly than has been possible to date. Trials often only test one new drug at a time, and in cases when researchers do use genomic profiling to match a patient to a new treatment, they may struggle to find suitable candidates.

One of the great promises of genomic medicine is that doctors will be able to tailor treatments to an individual patient’s disease. In the case of cancer, patients could be given an effective drug from the get-go based on a tumor’s particular molecular disruptions instead of going through a trial-and-error process to find a drug that works.

But the clinical trials that test new drugs for safety and efficacy—and that move compounds from labs and into patient care—haven’t yet adopted this new paradigm. “Despite the fact that we have genomic characterizations of lung cancer, we have the frustrating situation that we haven’t been able to implement them in clinical trials to develop targeted drugs,” says Vali Papadimitrakopoulou, an oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and lead investigator of the trial.

That’s in part due to the costs and unreliability of DNA sequencing technology, she says. But now, with lower cost and more accurate high-speed methods for sequencing, a large coalition of drug companies, academic researchers, federal regulators, and patient advocacy groups is looking to a novel clinical trial setup to speed targeted cancer drugs to patients. The trial, dubbed the “master protocol,” will test several new lung cancer drugs, which will be given to patients individually based on the genomic profile of their tumors. If successful, the new trial setup could bring forward a faster and more efficient way of conducting late-stage patient trials.

The trial will focus on compounds designed to treat squamous cell lung cancer. The genomic changes that drive cancers can be wildly different from patient to patient, or even between two patients who have tumors in the same organ. A given molecular abnormality can be rare, which creates a challenge for researchers trying to find patients to participate in a clinical trial of a molecularly targeted drug. If a drug is designed to target a particular molecular abnormality, researchers may have to screen 100 patients to find even two that can join a clinical trial, says Papadimitrakopoulou. “We are trying to offer a trial where patients can participate no matter what their profile looks like,” she says.

To create this more inclusive trial, Papadimitrakopoulou and colleagues identified the most common genomic profiles for squamous cell lung cancer and identified drugs in development that could address each form of the disease. Several drug companies, including Amgen, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer are involved, the first time these players will work together in a late-stage patient test that could end with a new drug approved by the FDA, says Roy Herbst, an oncologist at Yale Cancer Center who is helping lead the trial. Although drug companies have pooled resources to test cancer drugs in the past, they have never worked together to test drugs in such a late-stage setting.

“This is the future way of doing trials in the genomic age,” says Herbst.

Patients who have tumors with genomic profiles that do not match any of the targeted drugs can still receive an experimental treatment—one arm of the trial will test a drug designed to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer.

Last week, the Boston-area cancer genomics company Foundation Medicine announced that it would provide the tumor-screening technology for the trial. Foundation Medicine offers a diagnostic tumor screen for use by doctors treating cancer patients. Doctors send in a biopsied sample of a patient’s tumor, and Foundation Medicine sequences the tumor’s DNA and then reports back any DNA mutations that suggest a certain drug will or won’t work (see “Foundation Medicine: Personalizing Cancer Drugs”).

The master protocol trial is set to start in 2014. Its leaders are already anticipating that the new trial design will be applied to other types of cancer and potentially other types of disease.

“I think [the new approach] will result in drugs being much more quickly approved,” says Herbst.

BY GERRY SHIH

(Reuters) – Dropbox Inc on Wednesday unveiled what it described as one of the most comprehensive upgrades to its service for businesses, including a feature that allows users to easily maintain both personal and corporate accounts.

The new features come at a time when large rivals like Microsoft Corp and Amazon Inc and smaller competitors are battling to win the cloud-storage market, which is widely seen as a strategic linchpin in the era of mobile computing.

The upgrades reflect the changing business focus at Dropbox – one of the most closely-watched privately held Internet companies – toward becoming a file-sharing solution for corporate customer, a critically important and lucrative market. Dropbox, valued at $4 billion by venture capital investors, is viewed as a hot prospect for an initial public offering within the next two or three years.

Dropbox said Wednesday it would let users store files in separate accounts in order to separate their personal and professional lives. The corporate Dropboxes, which are controlled by the user’s employer’s IT administrators, would also have additional security tools such as logs that track when files have been opened or moved. Administrators could also remotely wipe files from mobile devices connected to the corporate Dropbox.

The announcement came on the same day Amazon unveiled a similar tool called WorkSpaces for large enterprises at an event in Las Vegas.

Amazon’s announcement, which sent shares of the Seattle-based giant 2 percent higher on Wednesday, underscores the intensifying competition in the area of file-sharing across multiple computers and mobile devices.

Reuters reported last week that Box, one of Dropbox’s privately held competitors, had chosen bankers to lead a highly-anticipated initial public offering in early 2014. Box has positioned itself as an enterprise-grade alternative to Dropbox, with an emphasis on security and other features that corporate IT departments demand.

Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley holds that Dropbox, which is praised for its ease of use and slick interface, needs to win over enterprise clients who are willing to pay hefty sums if it is to dominate its competition.

Dropbox offers limited amounts of storage for free to individual consumers, which had been its focus. The company said Wednesday it has 200 million consumer-grade accounts.

Dropbox for Business costs $795 a year for unlimited storage for five users and $125 for each additional user. The service has 4 million subscribers so far, Chief Executive Drew Houston said.

Ilya Fushman, the head of product for business, told Reuters that Dropbox identified its business products as the top priority for 2013.

“We don’t think of Dropbox as a personal or business product anymore,” Fushman said.

About 60 of Dropbox’s roughly 200 employees worked for a year on the new business features, which drew resources from across the company, Fushman said. For the past half year employees have worn ties and blazers to the San Francisco office every day as a playful nod to the Dropbox for Business effort – a departure for a company with a famously geeky, unbuttoned work culture.

Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.

By Tom Simonite on November 8, 2013

Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs—conscious or otherwise—from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.

Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.

“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” says Michelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”

Zhou’s software develops a personality profile based on a person’s most recent few hundred or thousand Twitter updates. That profile scores the “big five” traitscommonly used in psychological research: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It also scores the person on measures of “values” (for example, hedonism and conservatism) and “needs” (for example, curiosity and social harmony).

Zhou says she is working with several IBM customers to test how the technology might help their businesses. She declines to identify the companies but says they might use the system, for example, to tune marketing messages sent by e-mail or social media, or to select the promotional content displayed when a customer logs in to his or her account.

A crucial part of the pilot program will test whether messages targeted with the technology’s help perform better than others. “Our hypothesis is that the conversion rates will be quite high,” says Zhou. At least, she expects them to be higher than is typical: e-mail marketing messages ordinarily have a response rate of just 0.34 percent, she says, and phone marketing calls achieve about 13 percent.

Zhou says that having a rough idea of a person’s personality could also help in call centers or other customer service settings, such as when an airline must break the news that a flight has been cancelled or delayed.

“Studies show people that are extroverted want a reward and recognition, like 10,000 [frequent flyer] points,” she says. “Conscientious people want efficiency, to know their new flight right away.” In a call center scenario, a customer’s personality profile might advise a customer service agent whether to efficiently provide “just the facts” or to try to be more engaging and supportive, says Zhou.

Many businesses already make use of software that analyzes social-media activity. However, it is aimed either at helping corporate representatives interact with customers or at summarizing the overall volume and tone of a discussion (see “A Social-Media Decoder”), not at profiling individuals.

IBM’s software was developed by recruiting people to answer psychological questionnaires and comparing the results with their Twitter activity. Machine learning software then looked at how different patterns of word use matched with psychological traits. Those correlations were used to derive models that can create a profile from a person’s tweets alone.

In a study where 300 people had their Twitter profiles processed by the software and also took psychometric surveys, the results were “highly correlated” more than 80 percent of the time, says Zhou. However, she notes that when people use Twitter in a specialized way—for example, journalists discussing their beat—their tweet-derived profiles may not be so representative.

Still, Zhou argues that since the methods companies currently use to target and understand their customers are relatively imprecise, IBM’s software doesn’t have to capture a person’s personality completely to be useful. She also says it should be possible to adapt the software to use other sources of data, such as call center transcripts or online customer service chats.

Software like Zhou’s that relies on language use should be able to usefully capture something of a person’s personality, says Andrew Schwartz, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently published a major study of how personality traits show up in Facebook activity (See “How Your Facebook Profile Reveals More About Your Personality Than You Know”). He says previous research has shown that measured personality traits can predict future actions, such as the number of sick days or doctor’s visits a person will report.

“It seems reasonable that personality would be useful for presenting ads that resonate better with the recipient,” says Schwartz. “The ad-targeting application has been talked about for a few years now, but I think language-based measures of personality are just now becoming reliable enough to see it happen.”