Thursday, March 14, 2013

More youth use smartphones as route to Web

Keep computers in a common area so you can monitor what your kids are doing. It's a longstanding directive for online safety - but one that's quickly becoming moot as more young people have mobile devices, often with Internet access. 

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 78 percent of young people, ages 12 to 17, now have cellphones. Nearly half of those are smartphones, a share that's increasing steadily - and that's having a big effect on how, and where, many young people are accessing the Web.

The survey, released Wednesday, finds that one in four young people say they are "cell-mostly" Internet users, a percentage that increases to about half when the phone is a smartphone.


In comparison, just 15 percent of adults said they access the Internet mostly by cellphone.

"It's just part of life now," says Donald Conkey, a high school sophomore in Wilmette, Ill., just north of Chicago, who is among the many teens who have smartphones.

"Everyone's about the same now when it comes to their phones - they're on them a lot."

He and other teens say that if you add up all the time they spend using apps and searching for info, texting and downloading music and videos, they're on their phones for at least a couple hours each day - and that time is only increasing, they say.

"The occasional day where my phone isn't charged or I leave it behind, it feels almost as though I'm naked in public," says Michael Weller, a senior at New Trier High School, where Conkey also attends. "I really need to have that connection and that attachment to my phone all the time."

According to the survey, older teen girls, ages 14 to 17, were among the most likely to say their phones were the primary way they access the Web. And while young people in low-income households were still somewhat less likely to use the Internet, those who had phones were just as likely - and in some cases, more likely - to use their cellphones as the main way they access the Web.

It means that, as this young generation of "mobile surfers" grows and comes of age, the way corporations do business and marketers advertise will only continue to evolve, as will the way mobile devices are monitored.

Already, many smartphones have restriction menus that allow parents to block certain phone functions, or mature content. Cellphone providers have services that allow parents to see a log of their children's texts. And there are a growing number of smartphone applications that at least claim to give parents some level of control on a phone's Web browser, though many tech experts agree that these applications can be hit-or-miss.

Despite the ability to monitor some phone activity, some tech and communication experts question whether surveillance, alone, is the best response to the trend.

Some parents take a hard line on limits. Others, not so much, says Mary Madden, a senior researcher at Pew who co-authored the report.

"It seems like there are two extremes. The parents who are really locking down and monitoring everything - or the ones who are throwing up their hands and saying, `I'm so overwhelmed,'" Madden says.

She says past research also has found that many parents hesitate to confiscate phones as punishment because they want their kids to stay in contact with them.

"Adults are still trying to work out the appropriate rules for themselves, let alone their children," Madden says. "It's a difficult time to be a parent."

And a seemingly difficult time for them to say "no" to a phone, even for kids in elementary school, where the high-tech bling has become a status symbol.

Sherry Budziak, a mom in Vernon Hills, Ill., says her 6-year-old daughter has friends her age who are texting by using applications on the iPod Touch, a media player that has no phone but that has Internet access.

She draws the line there. But she did get her 11-year-old daughter an older model iPhone last fall, so she can stay in touch with her. Budziak, who works in the tech field and understands the ins and outs of the phone, set it so that the sixth-grader can text, make and receive phone calls and play games that her parents download for her.

"So we're on the conservative side, by far," she says.

Budziak also tells her daughter and her daughter's friends that it's Mom's phone, not her daughter's. It means that she and her husband monitor texts on the phone any time they like.

Does their daughter protest about all the restrictions? Occasionally.

"But she wants a phone so badly that it doesn't matter right now," Budziak says. "Having a phone was better than having no phone at all."

Mark Tremayne, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Texas at Arlington, says he and his wife put off getting their son a smartphone longer than most- until his 13th birthday, which is quickly approaching. They plan to monitor it, having already discovered a few "surprises" when checking the Web surfing history on his iPod Touch.

On one hand, Tremayne says it's the sort of stuff he used to look up in books and magazines when he was 13.

"It's pretty clear that kids will do what kids will do," he says. But he acknowledges that having a mobile device can make it that much easier to access.

The key, he says, is to talk to his son about it, and that's what many other tech and communication experts also advise.

"I don't think the technology itself is bad. The benefits vastly outweigh the risks. But parents do need to be aware," says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a research and education think tank based in Washington, D.C.

"Part of it is simply asking, `What are you doing, and why?'"

Too often, he and others say, adults don't fully understand how the smartphones work - or how their kids might use them differently than they do.

So guidance from parents, teachers and other adults can be lacking, says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research who specializes in teens and their tech-driven communication.

"For the last decade, too much of the online safety conversation has focused on surveillance. Surveillance will not help in a world of handhelds, but conversation will," says Boyd, who's also a research assistant professor of media, culture and communication at New York University.

She points to research by Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has long encouraged parents, schools and after-school programs to focus on how to navigate the online world - from developing judgment about credible online sources to using high-tech skills to help build community and pool collective knowledge.

At the Conkey household in suburban Chicago, brothers Donald and Harry know their parents track the music they buy and might look at their Web surfing history when borrowing their sons' laptops. Mom Brooke Conkey acknowledges that she also may glance at the occasional text.

"Oh yeah, she'll look over our shoulders and she'll want to know who we're talking to - and that's to be expected," says Harry Conkey, a high school senior. "It's a parent. It's natural to want to know who your kids are talking to."

His parents don't use filters of any kind because, while there's been the occasional "mistake" when downloading or surfing on their phones or laptops, Mom and Dad think that's just part of learning and growing up. That may change, however, with their 6-year-old son Peter.

"I think that things will get trickier as time goes on," Brooke Conkey says. "And I think things will be easier to get to - the naughty things. So I think I probably would be more proactive than I was with the older boys."

It's a balance, she says, because she and other parents also realize that smartphones and other mobile devices are only likely to become an even more integral part of life and learning. At least at the college level, some schools are seeing the benefit of mobile surfing, and encouraging it, too.

Last fall, Stephen Groening, a film and media studies professor at George Mason University in Virginia, taught a class that examined "cell phone cultures." Students did much of the class work using phones - creating video essays, taking pictures, texting and tweeting.

"I've had students tell me that they bring their cell phones in the shower with them. They sleep with them," Groening says, noting that he never knew a student attached to a laptop in that way

In New Jersey, Seton Hall University gives incoming freshman a free smartphone for the first semester. Among other things, they use them to help them navigate campus, connect with other students and follow campus news that streams on the SHUmobile app.

Kyle Packnick, a freshman at Seton Hall, liked having one of the phones and said they're particularly helpful for students who don't come to school with a smartphone.

But he also thinks people his age could do a better job setting their own limits with technology - and is grateful that his parents didn't even allow him to text on his cell phone when he was in high school. He was only allowed to make phone calls.

"At the time, I definitely wasn't happy about it," the 19-year-old says. But now he feels he's less dependent on his phone than his peers.

Pew's findings are based on a nationally representative phone survey of 802 young people, ages 12 to 17, and their parents. The report, a joint project with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, was conducted between July and September last year. The margin of error was plus-or-minus 4.5 percentage points.

-AP

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Google fast replacing grandparents as 'advice guru'

London: Modern-day kids are increasingly turning to the Internet to solve queries about simple chores rather than seeking advice from their experienced grandparents, a new UK survey has claimed.

Older generations are being replaced by Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, with their grandchildren searching online to solve queries about basic chores, researchers found.

Less than one in four grandparents said they have been asked for advice on basic domestic chores such as washing clothes, learning to cook a family recipe or sewing a button.


Just a third of those surveyed said they had been asked "what was it like when you were young?".

Ninety-six per cent said they asked far more questions of their grandparents when they were young, The Telegraph reported.

The survey of 1,500 grandparents found that children are instead increasingly using the Internet to answer simple questions.

It found almost two thirds of grandparents feel their traditional role is becoming less and less important in modern family life.

"Grandparents believe they are being sidelined by Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the huge resource of advice available on the internet," said Susan Fermor, of cleaning specialist Dr Beckmann, which commissioned the research.

"They are aware that their grandchildren already with their noses buried in a laptop, tablet computer or smartphone find it much easier to search the Internet for instant advice," Fermor said.

"Previous generations of grandparents haven't experienced this phenomena because the internet is still very much in its infancy and is less than a generation old in real terms," Fermor added.

-Press Trust of India

Google Is Building A Same-Day Amazon Prime Competitor, “Google Shopping Express”



Google is stealthily preparing to launch an Amazon Prime competitor called “Google Shopping Express.” According to one source the service will be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime, so $69 or $64 a year and offer same-day delivery from brick-and-mortar stores like Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Safeway (though no specifics were mentioned by our sources).

When and if it launches, the product will be a competitor to Amazon Prime, eBay Now, Postmates’ “Get It Now” and even smaller startups like Instacart.

We’re hearing that the project is being run by Tom Fallows, an e-commerce product manager at Google, and is an effort to focus Google’s e-commerce initiatives. Google Wallet and Google Shopping need a focal point, and serving as a “store shelf” to big-name retailers could be that in. Google has been scrambling for a way to capitalize on its advantages in the space — the fact that it’s arguably one of the first places people visit when they want to find a product — for a while.

If the Google Shopping Express service debuts publicly, and we have no reason to think that it won’t, this would mean that the company could capitalize on its recent acquisitions of both BufferBox and Channel Intelligence to dominate the online-to-offline retail market. Google could possibly use its BufferBox delivery lockers to facilitate the ease of shipment — like what Amazon has been testing in Seattle, New York and the UK. It could use Channel Intelligence’s data-management platform to coordinate sales and delivery.

-TechCrunch

Mahindra To Debut An Electric Car On March 18

India's first new electric car in more than a decade will be launched on March 18, ushering in what may be the first earnest and well-financed competition to petroleum-powered cars in the world’s second-largest country.

The Mahindra E2O is a four-seater hatchback targeted at upper-middle-class families in need of a second car in congested cities like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore, where it expected to first go on sale. It is expected to have a range of 100 kilometers (62 miles) and a top speed of about 80 kilometers (almost 50 miles) an hour.

Unlike the U.S., Europe, China or Japan, all of which have multiple automakers building electric cars and pushing for the infrastructure that supports them, India has just one: Mahindra Reva. The entity came about in 2010 when Mahindra bought Reva, a small electric-car company that over a decade sold less than 5,000 models of its tiny electric car, the REVAi. India has millions of cars on its roadways but only a few thousand electric cars, and almost no public electric car chargers.

I got the chance to to test drive the E2O in January at the Reva factory in Bangalore. At the time, Reva General Manager Kartik Gopal told me that simultaneously with the E2O’s rollout, the company would introduce components to support electric vehicles, including a fast charger intended for public parking spaces and businesses that can fully charge the battery in 70 minutes, as well as the Sun2Car, a 10-meter-wide car canopy covered with solar panels that could partially replenish the battery even if India is suffering from one of its frequent power outages.

At the time, Reva founder Chetan Maini also told me that the company wouldn’t launch the car until it got a promise from the Indian government that it would offer a rebate on each E2O to the tune of at least 150,000 rupees ($2,790). The government has long been planning a $4.13 billion scheme to subsidize electric vehicles in order to reduce the country’s emissions of both CO2 (which warms the atmosphere) and smog (which hangs in a cloud over most large Indian cities).

The government hasn’t made any comment on its electric-car bonanza since January, but given that the country’s flagship electric car is about to roll, an announcement may be forthcoming.

-David Ferris, Forbes

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Facebook to showcase new look for newsfeed on March 7

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc will unveil a new look for its popular "newsfeed" next week, the latest move by the Web company to revamp key elements of its 1 billion member social network.

Facebook will showcase the newsfeed makeover at a media event on March 7 at its Menlo Park, California headquarters, the company said in an emailed invitation to reporters on Friday.

The event will be Facebook's second high-profile product event this year, following the rollout of its social search feature in January.

Facebook's newsfeed, which displays an ever-changing stream of the photos, videos and comments uploaded from a user's network of friends, is one of the three "pillars" of the service, along with search and user profiles, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said.

The last major update to Facebook's newsfeed was in September 2011. Since then, the company has incorporated ads directly into the feed and the company has shifted its focus to creating "mobile first experiences," as more people now access the social network every day on mobile devices than on desktop PCs.

The mobile version of Facebook still lacks many of the features available on the PC version, said Brian Blau, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner. "So maybe this is a way to bring some of that together," he said.

Shares of Facebook, the world's No.1 social network, were up nearly 2 percent, or 52 cents, at $27.77 in midday trading on Friday.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio)