innovation for media business

In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection and some lunch money will be able to invest in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. But after big brother Facebook’s IPO debacle, should America’s armchair investors pin their hopes and dreams on Silicon Valley’s younger sibling? We help you compare in one easy chart.

The difference between the two is Twitter’s glaring negative sign on its net income. That’s right – Twitter is losing money, where at least Facebook was turning a profit at their IPO.

Other than the sheer size of Facebook’s user base, the companies are wildly divergent: Facebook went public at a valuation in and around $100 billion, and Twitter is expected to price its shares at a level that will value it at under $20 billion.

Facebook, quite simply, was much larger at the time of its IPO. In fact, looking at Twitter’s filing documents, you almost wonder why it is going public now. It has ample cash reserves but accelerating losses, as it invests in its research and development budget and builds out its sales team.

The reason, we think, is that investor pressure has built to the point that Twitter needed a large liquidity event to break free from some of its oldest invested capital. For a company of its scale, there were only two options: sell or IPO. And for Twitter, that meant it only had one option. Hence its S-1. We do not say all that to indicate that Twitter is not a valuable, interesting company. It is both. But the bent of its filing docs feels more like a company heading toward an offering and not the numbers of a firm ready to enact one.

Notes: Twitter’s full-year data is 2012. Facebook’s full-year data is 2011. Facebook two-quarter revenue figure is not listed in its S-1, and so was calculated by deducting its third-quarter 2012 revenue from its nine-month tally that was provided in that release. The initial Facebook S-1 had a lower monthly active user count, but the quoted figure is the number listed in its amended S-1.

FREE!!!!!

Apple’s newest desktop operating system, OS X Mavericks, is the best version of the OS yet. You definitely want to get it—and since it’s a free upgrade, there’s really no reason not to.

what’s new in OS X Marvericks

Apple shared all the new goodies coming to its desktop operating system today at WWDC.

Finder Tabs: You can pull all your windows into a single tab. Each tab has its own location and its own view mode.

Tagging: When you save a document, you can tag it. It’ll appear right in the Finder side bar. You can tag it wherever it is in the Finder. This looks like it will be great for search.

Multiple Displays: When you go full-screen on one display, it doesn’t mess up your other display. This means you can have different apps running in full-screen mode. The menu bars are also now accessible on both displays. When you pan between spaces, you can do it independently on each display.

Compressed Memory: When you’re running an app, a subset of your system memory is inactive. With this new feature, you can compress inactive memory to make free space available almost instantaneously to the application. Apple claims it provides 1.4x the responsiveness under load than Mountain Lion, and 1.5x improvement in waking the system from standby.

App Nap: This feature gives direct power to only apps that need it right now. If something is in the background or inactive, it doesn’t soak up processor resources.

Safari: There’s an under-the-hood overhaul to the browser. There are JavaScript and memory improvements, and Apple says Safari now uses less memory than other browsers. One cool thing in the WWDC demo was the improved scrolling engine — it’s super-smooth. The browser’s rendering engine has also been optimized for Retina displays. Safari has a new sidebar. The most interesting addition is the Shared Links tool, which show all the links your friends are dropping in Twitter and LinkedIn (no Facebook yet). You can scroll through those sidebar links on the left, and see the pages flip by on the right. Bookmarks work the same way, with smooth-scrolling between pages. Also impressive is the updated Reader mode, which strips out most of the page treatments and just shows text and key images in a more readable format. Scrolling between articles is continuous, and super-smooth.

Notifications: You can now reply or respond right inside a notification. Apps that push notifications on your iOS device can now be pushed to OS X. When you wake, it’ll tell you everything you’ve missed on your Lock Screen, just like on your iOS device.

Calendar: Click on a calendar event, and the new inspector shows much more information. It’s aware of location, travel time and weather.

Maps: Apple Maps from iOS comes to the Mac desktop (Uh oh!). You can send routes from OS X to iOS. Any route you send to your phone will appear directly on your lock screen. Unlock the phone, go directly to the route and get your directions. There will be a developer SDK for desktop Maps.

iBooks: It’s also coming to the Mac, so you can read your purchased books on any OS X or iOS device now. Oh, and there’s no weird stitching in the app anymore.

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It’s not just a pretty picture, it’s a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

the rise of wearable computing,I had considered how it makes relationship with fashion and tech closely from the article “Fashion brands absent from wearable tech revolution”.

the important thing the tech might ignore is feeling when we put on them.Human aim to persue comfortable things and efficiency.Alright,how do this new tech makes existing business?I heard Apple now is developing new watch,and Google,Sony as well.but how many company pay attention to feeling that focus on experience of human behavior.In the business for succession,why not we try to get the data of us.