Donate your smartphone to science, but only when you sleep

Donate your smartphone to science, 

but only when you sleep

A new app puts users' smartphones and their processors to good use when they're charging at night.

Called PowerSleep, the app is a collaboration between Samsung and the University of Vienna, and it uses devices' processing power for crunching through scientific research.

It does this via an alarm clock. When it is set and the phone is plugged in for charging and connected to a Wi-Fi network, the university's Faculty of Life Sciences can harness its power for the good of furthering our understanding of genetics, biochemistry and cancer, among other areas.

With the app running, each phone becomes a part of the existing Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, which already draws on the idle processing power of some 60,000 PCs worldwide.

PowerSleep is a great way for cash-strapped academic institutions to build improvised supercomputers, and people who install the app will be able to see how their devices are being used and the nature of the research their processors have been crunching through.

Earlier this month, Cancer Research UK launched a smartphone game called Genes in Space that also aims to harness mobile devices' power in order to further scientific research. However, instead of using idle processor capacity, the game uses players' human ability to spot patterns.

The worlds that players must navigate are actually data points and by plotting a course through each field of what appear to be asteroids they are actually highlighting patterns in research related to breast cancer.

Canadian tykes now better at computers than bike-riding, name-writing or shoe-tying

A global study of how young kids are using the Internet found Canadians were spending less time online and were less likely to have an email address.

Still, more of the three-to five-year-old Canadian children in the study knew how to use a mouse and play computer games than ride a bike or write their name.

The survey of more than 6,000 mothers in 10 countries was conducted by security software company AVG Technologies, which researched how kids between the ages of three to five, and six to nine were engaged with the Internet.

About 89 per cent of the kids in the older group were already Internet users, while the figure was one percentage point higher in Canada. A whopping 97 per cent of the Brazilian kids were familiar with the Internet.

When the parents of the six-to nine-year-old kids were asked how long they allowed their children to go online the most common reply was between two to five hours a week (42 per cent), followed by less than two hours weekly (36 per cent).

About 40 per cent of the Canadian parents said they limited Internet time to less than two hours a week and 48 per cent allowed two to five hours of web time weekly.

Just eight per cent of the parents said they reserved an email address with their child’s name, while six per cent of the Canadian moms did so. Sixteen per cent of Brazilian moms had.

As for what the younger three-to five-year-old kids were doing themselves, 76 per cent of the Canadians could play a basic computer game, 54 per cent knew how to turn a computer on and off, 40 per cent could navigate a tablet or smartphone and 19 per cent could competently browse the web.

Meanwhile, 56 per cent could write their name, 65 per cent could ride a bike, 47 per cent knew their address and 28 per cent could tie their laces.

Credit-cards hacked in Longueuil: IntelCrawler

MONTREAL — Private data were recently pirated from 280 magnetic-stripe credit cards used at a single location in Longueuil, as part of a wide-scope attack that struck several continents, according to a California company that tracks computer malware.

The tracking firm, IntelCrawler LLC of Los Angeles, didn’t specify the type of business struck in Longueuil. It said typical targets include restaurants, stores, gas stations and hotels.

The firm attributed the attack to “a new strain of point-of-sale malware, named JackPOS,” that appears to be based on earlier malware code, dubbed Alina.

“The malware samples are pretty fresh and were created close to the beginning of February,” IntelCrawler added in a detailed summary on its website, suggesting the “bad actors” used sophisticated techniques to break into merchant systems.

IntelCrawler pinpointed a broad swath of breaches. It said 400 cards were compromised in Vancouver; 3,000 in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and others in similar fresh incidents reported in the U.S., Spain, France, India, Argentina and South Korea.

Given the widespread nature of the attack, the Longueuil police force isn’t investigating, Constable Mark David said.

“Normally,” he added, “the cards are cancelled, and the clients are advised and provided with a replacement card. Then, there’s an internal investigation,” usually by banks.

The Longueuil force hadn’t been advised of the local breach, he said, “not on this specific case.”

How to pick between Google and Facebook

Last week was a big week for earnings releases by companies that I hold in my Strategy Lab model growth portfolio. I’d like to focus in on Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in this week’s column. I hold both stocks in my model portfolio (and in real life), but what is a reader to do if he or she wants to profit from the online advertising industry and has to select only one of the two stocks? I’ll walk you through my thinking.

Readers might recall that my model portfolio invested in Google but not Facebook upon inception in September, 2012. I picked the dominant player in online advertising and was initially skeptical of Facebook’s ability to generate ad revenue. This skepticism was not only widespread at the time, but completely wrong. When I realized the strength of Facebook’s platform, I added it to the portfolio instead of Twitter, whose IPO was a bit too rich for my taste.

Google is much larger than Facebook today. Excluding the Motorola business, which Google is selling to Lenovo, the Mountain View, Calif.-based online advertising giant brought in $15.7-billion (U.S.) in revenue last quarter. In the same quarter, Facebook brought in $2.6-billion of revenue. In market capitalization, Google is valued at $395-billion while Facebook is worth $156-billion.

So at first glance, Google has six times the revenue of Facebook, but only 2.5 times the market capitalization. If you assume a dollar of Google revenue today is worth as much as a dollar of Facebook revenue today, you’d quickly conclude that Google is the cheaper investment.

But it’s almost never the case that a dollar of today’s revenue has equal value between the two companies. Facebook has been growing much faster than Google. In fact, Facebook just posted year-over-year revenue growth of 63 per cent compared to Google’s revenue growth of 22 per cent. To be clear, both companies are growing at an impressive rate. But Facebook is smaller and faster right now, which is why investors value a dollar of today’s revenue higher than they value comparable revenue from Google.

Why focus on revenue rather than earnings? Both companies are very profitable, and today, I don’t have a good reason to assume their long-term profitability, as a percentage of revenue, will differ significantly. That might change. But until it does I prefer to keep things simple and explore revenue growth.

In my opinion, there is good reason to assume Facebook will continue to grow faster than Google for the next few years. I’m impressed with how easy it is for small businesses to target a relevant audience with a small budget on Facebook, and there are millions of businesses who have created pages on Facebook but aren’t yet advertising on the platform. That seems like a lot of low hanging fruit to go after. Also, Facebook has not yet launched a tool to allow its ads to show up on partner websites. This is something Google has been doing for years, and is responsible for about one-third of total advertising dollars.

There is also compelling evidence to suggest that Facebook has been more successful in mobile advertising than any other company. A whopping 53 per cent of Facebook’s ad revenue came from people who viewed these ads on mobile devices, not traditional computers. Facebook is practically ignoring the personal computer market, which might be a brilliant move. It’s pushing hard to create new, independent mobile apps such as “Paper,” which combines stories from traditional media with friends from your social network. Obviously these apps will, in time, also show relevant ads to users. While there will always be people who complain about any ads, I have found most ads in my Facebook timeline to be interesting and relevant to me.

I believe Facebook will grow faster than Google in the next three years. But that’s not a long enough horizon for me. What about the next decade or more? This is where I see more opportunity for Google because of its much more diversified R&D investments. I think we’ve yet to see exactly how Google can monetize the Android operating system that powers the majority of the world’s smartphones or the Chrome operating system that powers Chromebook laptops. We haven’t seen what will happen with wearable computers such as Google Glass. And I think there is a lot more growth to come to the world’s No. 2 search engine, YouTube.

As an investor, if I had to chose between the two stocks, I’d probably choose Google. It has the better mix of value, leadership and diversification while still posting growth that demands respect. Both companies are leading the industry in different ways, and I think there is a tremendous amount of growth coming to the online advertising market in the next decade. Rather than pick a single winner, I choose to own both stocks now.