www.adpub.info: 07/14/14

Door Lock Provides Peace of Mind With Real-Time Security

arduino door lock

[HSP] got tired of locking his door with a key, so he decided to upgrade to a keypad system which he’s designed himself.

It uses an Arduino Mega with the standard 44780 display, a standard keypad, and the “key override” (shown above) for fun. The locking mechanism is a standard 12V actuator based lock which was modified to run off of only 7.5V, by softening up the spring inside and running it upside down (as to let gravity help do the work). The whole system draws less than half a watt on standby, and engaging the lock peaks at only 4-7W.

What’s really clever about this design is how he locks it from inside the room. He’s programmed the Arduino to write 1 to address 128 of the EEPROM — at power on it will increment this by 1, and after 5 seconds, it will reset to 1. This means it can detect a quick power cycle, so you can lock the door by turning it off, turning it on for a few seconds, and turning it off and on again — he did this so he didn’t have to make a button or console, or any kind of wireless control on the inside.

Now we know that kind of adds a huge flaw to the overall security of the system… but [HSP] learned his lesson last time he built something “too” secure.

The relay board is inside the box on the wall on the outside, and the lock is only locked with power. This is insecurity by design. This is to keep the casual people out. The door itself is thin wood with cardboard in between. I previously had a lock which was locked on power failure, and the machine (Windows) running it, crashed. I got to climb through the roof window, 7 meters up to get inside without trashing the door, so now I have a little respect for the possibility of failure, and design my systems for the expected threat-level.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

Red Bull Creation: Giant Cannons Shooting Salt

Hackaday took a trip to Detroit last weekend for the Red Bull Creation Contest. It was a blast, we had a lot of fun, and we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse at seven teams hacking, grinding, sawing, and soldering their way through the 72 hour buildoff.

Team Detroitus started their build with the idea of building a giant air cannon. The theme of the build was ‘reinventing the wheel’, but they apparently didn’t let that get in the way of building a giant double barrel air cannon, filling it with candy and stuffed animals, and shooting it, point blank, at children. I was wanged by a lemon Starburst, but that’s my favorite flavor anyway.

Filed under: contests

Silicon Valley VC’s plan to split California into 6 states may actually make the ballot

Above: Tim Draper of DFJ

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

If you thought venture capitalist Tim Draper’s plan to split California into six states was ludicrous, get ready for two more years of intensely rolling your eyes.

Draper’s team will announce tomorrow that it has collected more than the 807,615 signatures required to put the constitutional amendment on the ballot, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

However, because the deadline for this year’s election has already passed, this means that the measure will appear on the November 2016 ballot — more than two years off.

Above: Tim Draper’s proposed Six Californias

Image Credit: GeoCurrents

That will give Draper, a founder of prominent Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, plenty of time to try to sway public opinion on his proposal.

It would make Silicon Valley (including Oakland and San Jose as well as San Francisco) into an actual U.S. state, instead of just a state of mind and a TV show. Currently, public opinion is running about 59 percent opposed to Draper’s plan.

It would also turn San Diego and Orange County into South California; Los Angeles and Santa Barbara into West California, the agricultural Central Valley region into Central California, and Marin and Sonoma counties, plus Sacramento, into North California. The more remote counties further to the north would become Jefferson — a proposal that some people in that region have actually embraced in the past.

There are a lot of reasons to think that this proposal is ludicrous and unlikely to be passed. In addition to winning the approval of the people of California, it would also have to pass the California state legislature as well as the U.S. Congress.

Draper, of course, thinks his proposal is reasonable and that it would restore more accountability to government, as he explained to VentureBeat earlier this year.

But if the Chronicle’s report is correct, starting tomorrow we will have a lot more time — and reason — to talk about it in the coming two years.

Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!

Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California with affiliate offices in more than 30 cities around the world and over $7 billion in capital commitments. The firm has funded well-known technolo... read more »

Tim Draper, Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is one of the most successful early-stage venture capitalists of the past 20 years. His original suggestion to use "viral marketing" in web-based e-mail to geometr... read more »

‘How can this be a billion dollar company?’ and other BS questions VCs ask

Image Credit: Rob Boudon/Flickr

I was in the bathroom this morning catching up on all the blogs (via Feedly) that I hadn't read this week since my head was in a bunch of other things. I came across one from Nic Brisbourne (Forward Ventures) titled I'm a stock picker. I wish he had called it "This Unicorn Thing Is Bullshit For Early Stage Investing" but I think he's a little more restrained than I am.

My original title for this post was "’How Can This Be A Billion Dollar Company?’ and other bullshit VCs ask early stage companies." [VB editor's note: We're going with that!]

It was asked by VCs to several companies I'm involved in last week. While I get why a late stage investor would ask the question when the valuation is in the $250 million range, I really don't understand why a seed investor would ask this question when the valuation is in the $5m range.

Now, I've invested in a few unicorns in my investing career, including at least one unicorn that went bankrupt a few years later (I guess that's a dead unicorn.) But I've also invested in a number of companies that have had exits between $100m and $1b that resulted in much larger returns for me, both on an absolute basis as well as a relative basis, than unicorns have for their later stage investors.

I've never, ever felt like the "billion dollar" aspiration, which we are now all calling "unicorn", made any sense as the financial goal of the company. Nor have I felt it made sense as a VC investing strategy, especially for early stage investors. We never use the phrase "unicorn" in our language at Foundry Group and while we aspire to have extraordinarily valuable companies, we never approach it from the perspective of "could this be a billion dollar company" when we first invest.

Instead, we focus on whether or not we think we can make at least 10 times our money on our investment. Our view of a strong success in an investment in a 10x return. Our view is simple – we don't really view anything below 3x return a success. Sure – it's nice, but that wasn't a real success. 5x – now that's nice. 10x – ok – now we are in the success zone. 25x – superb. 50x or more – awesomeness.

We also know that when we invest in three people and an MVP, we have absolutely no idea whether this can be a billion dollar company. Nor do we care – we are much more focused on the product and the founders. Do we think they are amazing and deeply obsessed with their product? Do we understand their vision? Do we have affinity for the product? Do we believe that a real business can be created and we can get at least a 10x return on our investment at this entry point?

I recognize other VCs have different strategies than us, especially when they are investing at a later stage. Applying our model, if the entry point valuation is $100m or more, then you do have to believe that the company is going to be able to be worth over $1 billion if you use a 10x filter. But in my experience, most later stage investors are focused on a smaller absolute return as a threshold – usually in the 3x to 5x range. And, very late stage / pre-IPO investors already investing in companies worth over $1 billion are interested in an even smaller absolute return, often being delighted with 2x in a relatively short period of time.

So, let's zone this in on an early stage discussion. Should the question "how can this be a $1 billion company" be a useful to question at the seed stage? I don't think so. If it's simply being used to elicit a response and understand what the entrepreneurs' aspiration is, that's fine.

But if I asked this question and an entrepreneur responded with, "I have no fucking idea – but I'm going to do everything I know how to do to figure it out," I'd be delighted with that response.

This story originally appeared on Brad Feld.

Use a free or cheap marketing automation system? Tell us what's great about it (and not so great), and we'll share survey data from everyone else with you.

Find out what’s going on around you — and escape the tourist traps — with this app

Image Credit: Inside.co

MapHook, a social discovery application, just launched a major upgrade for iOS allowing people to quickly search find and share information about places, events, and trending news near them.

MapHook sets itself apart from traditional social networking apps by providing a flexible, yet organized way to input information and search for content. Users place location-based entries, termed "hooks," to create geo-tagged digital memories, which can then be searched based on a variety of criteria.

MapHook users focus on what is around them, what to do, and where to go, while also seamlessly integrating with third-party content from Yelp, Wikipedia, Foursquare, and Twitter. People can add reviews about anything from the local music scene to hiking trails to restaurants and more.

The app goes beyond a Google Maps pin or writing a review on Yelp. By adding "hooks" to places visited, users catalog interest spots. Users add text, links from social networks, and photos and then make them available to other MapHook users. The "hooks" are made visible when users are in the area.

In the latest release, MapHook has added new features to make the app more useful for those who enjoy traveling and experiencing new locations. MapHook's new features include:

Comprehensive design: The app pulls from 6 popular social media sources, including Yelp, Wikipedia, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, and Yahoo! Trends.
Map view: MapHook offers a streamlined view of the surrounding area, complete with restaurant recommendations and the area's highlights.
Trending dashboard: Find local activity from Twitter and Foursquare on MapHook.
In-app purchasing: Purchase Groupons for local businesses, without leaving the app.
Custom "hooks": Bookmark and share favorite spots by pinning them to the map interface and sharing with other travelers.
Share with friends: Ability to share trends and user experiences from the "HookStream" dashboard over a social network and email.

"To date, map based apps have been limited in the features they provide users. Some are good at getting users around and others are good at allowing them to check into their favorite locations," says Dr. Paul Carter, president and chief executive of MapHook, in a statement. "The launch of the new MapHook app gives users one clean and simple app to access curated information and trending activity."

You can download the MapHook app for free in the App Store or on Google Play, via the company’s website.

MapHook was created by MapHook, Inc., a software applications development firm based in Dulles, VA. The MapHook app is the company's first offering and was originally released in 2010. To date, users have added "hooks" to MapHook from 50 countries around the world.

Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!

Microsoft to announce major layoffs later this week — report

Above: Ned Stark's motto: "Winter is coming."

Image Credit: HBO

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella needs an editor, according to investor and former tech executive Jean-Louis Gassée.

Today, we have a report that seems to confirm Gassée’s interpretation about Nadella’s true message: Winter is coming.

Gassée critiqued the long-winded, 3,100-word strategy memo that Nadella sent to employees (and the world) last week. The memo was filled with platitudes and generalities that, Gassée said, amounted to a simple, but coded message: “Shape up or ship out.”

This week, Bloomberg reports, Microsoft will take the first step towards delivering on that coded promise: It plans a round of layoffs, centered on the recently-acquired Nokia handset unit, which could cost thousands of Microsoft employees their jobs.

The cuts “may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history, topping the 5,800 jobs cut in 2009,” Bloomberg wrote.

Microsoft added about 30,000 jobs with its recent Nokia acquisition, bringing its total number of employees to over 127,000. In addition to the handset unit, Bloomberg’s unnamed sources said that cuts would focus on marketing (including in its Xbox division), engineering, and product testing.

Microsoft has already promised $600 million in annual cost savings, post-merger, by eliminating areas where the two companies overlap — and that means these job cuts have been no secret for some time.

Now, it appears, it’s just a question of exactly who is getting the axe — and when.

Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!

Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through ... read more »

Never mind Amazon. IBM’s great blue hope is the cloud

Above: Lance Crosby, chief executive of IBM's SoftLayer cloud business, at the SoftLayer data center in Dallas.

Image Credit: Ron Jenkins/Feature Photo Service for IBM

Talk to Lance Crosby, chief executive of IBM’s SoftLayer cloud division, and you’ll hear confidence.

Revenue growth. Big customers. A smorgasbord of services, including some with fancy “cognitive” capability.

That’s all become real in the year since IBM paid a reported $2 billion for SoftLayer, which sells cloud-based storage and servers and server slivers to companies.

“The real news here is, you know, the enterprise is buying en masse,” Crosby said in an interview with VentureBeat. “They’re no longer just looking or talking about cloud.”

Executives from top cloud provider Amazon Web Services have spouted that message in recent months, but it’s one thing for the market leader to say it, and another thing for companies in a less-dominant position. Now Big Blue, which is a giant in computing services generally but a distant follower to Amazon in the market for cloud services, is also seeing substantial growth.

Since the acquisition, SoftLayer has picked up more than 6,000 new customers, and 3,000 existing IBM customers have shelled out money to use SoftLayer’s infrastructure, Crosby said.

New customers include Macy's, Sicoss Group, Whirlpool, and moovel Gmbh, a subsidiary of Daimler.

At the same time, IBM’s competitors are hardly standing still. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been adding customers fast as they race to stay competitive with one another on price and features.

No need to fuss over prices, as Crosby sees it.

“There’s no question that Amazon wants to be the price leader, and that’s not our strategy,” he said. “Our strategy is to bring value and the most features at the best cost.”

To that end, IBM made several feature announcements today, including the availability of the Watson Engagement Advisor on SoftLayer atop IBM’s POWER8 chips; hourly pricing for more dedicated “bare metal” servers running no virtualization software; and Elastic Storage, which was previously marketed as GPFS.

Oh, and by the way, IBM has no intention of devouring its own ecosystem, as Amazon did last week by introducing mobile-backend and file-sharing services that compete with some of its partners.

“You have to look at the history of IBM,” Crosby said. “IBM’s customers are Capgemini, Deloitte, Accenture — companies that we could easily compete with, but instead we enable them to build solutions and grow themselves. We want to put all the components together to allow our customers to build solutions. Because my conviction is I cannot think of everything.”

Crosby would not comment on how much of IBM’s nebulous cloud revenue comes from the use of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure.

He pointed to Amazon’s own cloudy cloud-revenue reporting conventions.

“The point is, it’s more of a competitive nature,” he said. “Nobody wants to until we have to.”

Additional SoftLayer data centers are on the way this year in Frankfurt, Toronto, Montreal, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and other cities, Crosby said.

Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!

International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed Big Blue (for its official corporate color), is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in the Northeast US. IBM is the largest technology and ... read more »

Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer... read more »

Need a supercomputer? Maybe you can build it from salvaged parts

Above: Roadrunner, a hybrid supercomputer built in 2008 at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Image Credit: LANL

Sometimes the way to build a supercomputer is to assemble it from parts.

Cerillos was the long-serving 14,400-core supercomputer that the Los Alamos National Laboratory used for the study and design of nuclear warhead physics. It was recently mothballed by the iconic weapons lab in Northern California.

But rather than scrap it completely, researchers are salvaging some of its parts to build a new supercomputer.

That’s Narwahl, Carnegie Mellon University’s new computing cluster, which it built with leftover parts from Cerillos.

Narwahl is now being configured for heavy research into mass-scale computer systems with an eye toward developing educational research for supercomputers. Narwahl is pretty righteous in its own right, built from the ground up with 448 blade computers salvaged from Cerillos. Narwahl includes 1,792 processor cores.

Cerillos never got the attention of its bigger sibling: Livermore’s Roadrunner supercomputer. Roadrunner was one of the world’s fastest computers, in its time, and was used in the construction of the world’s most powerful nuclear bombs and warheads. In 2008, according to researchers, Roadrunner became the world’s first computer to perform 1 billion calculations per second, known as a petaflop. Roadrunner had 122,400 cores.

“With Narwhal, we open a new front — assistance with large-scale computer systems software education. Roadrunner and Cerrillos may be retired, but even a sliver of these machines' core capabilities is more capable than most educational computing resources,” Carnegie Mellon said.

Supercomputers studying supercomputers. Indeed, Narwahl, a highbrow whose pedigree is of the enviable sort, was created, in part, by the generosity of the U.S. Department of Energy, which loaned the necessary equipment to the researchers at Los Almos and CMU.

We don’t know the Narwahl’s pricetag so far, but Roadrunner cost $120 million when it was built 8 years ago. And Roadrunner, named after the Looney Tunes character of the same name, was instrumental to sustaining America’s nuclear deterrent by providing researchers astonishing scientific insight into the physics of nuclear explosions.

For now, Narwahl will support nonclassified research at the CMU campus in Pittsburgh. Educators at CMU are optimistic, eager even, to see if Narwahl’s daisy chain approach pays the dividends that Cerillos and Roadrunner did for the design and effects for nuclear bomb research.

CMU’s Garth Gibson said the Narwahl cluster will be an incredible resource for the study of supercomputers for both students and researchers.

"With Narwhal, we open a new front — assistance with large-scale computer systems software education,” said Gibson. “Roadrunner and Cerrillos may be retired, but even a sliver of these machines' core capabilities is more capable than most educational computing resources.”

Total Pageviews