After news began getting around that Apple was cutting back retail staff store hours and letting go some newer employees, the company on Thursday issued something of an apology to both its employees and the public.
According to a Dow Jones report:
In a communication with store leadership teams, senior vice president of retail, John Browett, who took the reins of Apple’s retailstores in April, said that the company had been trying a new staffing formula for its retail stores, leading some employees to see their hourly shifts cut and retail locations to be understaffed. This happened for a few weeks before the company decided to revert to its older system, hoping to rectify the problem.
An Apple PR representative added: ”Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed. … Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”
Apple doesn’t often apologize, but in this case it’s easy to see why it did. Apple’s chain of hundreds of worldwide retail stores overflowing with chipper, non-pushy employees is one of its most valuable assets in attracting new customers — and its secret weapon for keeping current ones satisfied. The in-person customer service shoppers or browsers in the stores receive is key to the relationship. Attempting to save some money by having fewer employees messes with that formula. It’s a good thing Apple saw this right away for the mistake that it was.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/apple/apple-retail-staff-snafu-brings-quick-apology/?utm_so...
 Wellframe
For just over two months, 14 teams have been chipping away at their companies in Highland Capital Partners’ Kendall Square and Sand Hill Road offices. And as the Summer@HIGHLAND program begins to wind down, eight or nine of those teams can say they’ll be walking away with an angel round within the next 45 days while the remainder will continuing working on their startup, according to Michael Gaiss, Highland’s senior vice president. “We’ve never had as many teams as we’ve had this year,” Gaiss says, admitting they just couldn’t “make the call” after seeing so many talented applicants. Over 250 university-affiliated startups applied for consideration in this year’s program. Largely because, as Gaiss describes it, “The value proposition keeps going up.” Not only were admitted teams offered $15,000 and complimentary office space, but they were also given access to a roster of over 40 events, including talks from Matt Lauzon, founder and CEO of Gemvara; Keith Rabois, COO of Square; Bill Clerico, founder and CEO of WePay; Bob Van Nortwick, business development manager at Amazon; Troy Brennan, executive vice president of CVS Caremark; and Victoria Ransom, founder and CEO of Wildfire. Jacob Sattelmair, co-founder of Summer@HIGHLAND team Wellframe, said he wasn’t initially sold on the events, telling his team, “Let’s just skip them and focus on work.” After attending the first event, however, he admits he was sold and together they went to every single one. “One of the speakers is now an advisor to the team,” Sattelmair says. Wellframe is currently organizing clinical knowledge and using human-centered design to build a technology-enabled treatment program for cardiovascular disease. Built into the Wellframe app are reminders to take medications, an accelerometer that can track steps, as well as the ability to send messages between the clinician, patient and the patient’s family, among other features. “We’re re-engineering patient care outside of the hospital,” Sattelmair says, claiming hospitals need to find a better way to facilitate and maintain relationships with their patients in between appointments. The first patients will be entered into the Wellframe system come September. The Wellframe team — comprised of Sattelmair, Trishan Panch, Vinayak Ramesh and Archit Bhise — come from different schools of thought, ranging from primary care to program management, as well different schools: Harvard and MIT. When asked whether or not they feel as though they’ve created a network through the summer program, they all responded positively. “We now have connections we never would have had before,” Sattelmair says. Nine out of last year’s 10 teams are still going strong, according to Gaiss. Just last week, he says one of the teams was in a meeting with a Highland General Partner talking funding. “Once you’re in the family, you’re in the family,” Gaiss admits. Now, the focus of the program is on getting teams out into the marketplace and finding them a place to work. After hearing the success they’ve already found just after two months, however, they likely won’t have to look very far.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/15/once-youre-in-the-family-youre-in-the-family-a...
A day after Uber Boston announced it had received a cease and desist from state officials due to regulatory conflict with their metering system, riders that frequently call on the deluxe traveling service to get around town created a petition to keep Uber running while continuing to foster innovation in the Hub.
“The Commonwealth is stifling innovation by issuing a cease & desist against Uber…Consumers want Uber…Further, if Boston is to continue to be a hot bed of start ups and innovation, we need to provide an environment where new ideas and business models can take root,” according to the petition, which was created and posted on Change.org on Wednesday. The petition blasted the Division of Standards of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for telling Uber to recently stop operations. BostInno reader Ben Bates posted the petition on the BostInno story from Tuesday, which outlined the problems Uber is currently dealing with in Cambridge and the Hub. Already, 25 people have signed on to support the company and their cause. “The Commonwealth should invest their efforts in improving Taxi/Cab regulations & hold them accountable for tardiness, rude & inappropriate behavior instead of getting rid of Uber,” wrote Nelly Carreno underneath the petition. Jonathan Bingham also showed his support by saying Uber is “a tremendous asset to the city.” “As a customer I believe that the [service] is worth every penny,” he said. Others said they feel safer taking Uber over a traditional cab service and “it would be an embarrassment to the greater Boston area’s reputation as a world class city to stifle innovation and free competition in this manner.” On Tuesday, representatives from the company posted a statement on their blog, along with an order from the state’s Division of Standards that said “until the National Institute of Standards and Technology has guidelines in place for GPS location technology,” the company cannot provide their application to the public. Uber uses a smartphone app and GPS devices to charge customers using the service, which doesn’t jive, according to state officials, with what is on the books. According to a ruling by the Commonwealth, “only approved devices can be used in commercial transactions” and “the use of the unapproved GPS systems to assess transportation charges must be discontinued.” But despite the cease and desist, Uber representatives said they would keep supplying rides to their customers. “It is our strong belief that the technology and service we offer does not violate existing law and regulations,” according to Uber representatives. On Wednesday, city officials said they plan on meeting with the company to talk about the issues. “We continue to support new ideas and look forward to working with anyone who’s developing new ways to help our residents and visitors,” said Mayor Thomas Menino in a statement to BostInno.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/15/uber-boston-petition/

Pinterest is rolling out its mobile apps and making it easy for users to pin things on the go. The image-centric social network announced today that it released a universal iOS app that includes a new iPad version and an updated iPhone version.
On the iPad, the app mimics the website with a fullscreen layout that lets users view a handful of pins at a time. Pinterest users can swipe to call up the navigation menu to view different categories and use the integrated browser to visit the site that was the source of a pin. The app supports most of the social features of Pinterest including sharing, liking, repinning and commenting.
The iPhone app received an update that improves the mobile experience with a new two-column layout and faster performance. This improved UI lets users see more Pins on their display, so they can enjoy Pinterest when they are away from their iPad or desktop.
The Pinterest app is available for free from the iOS App Store. Pinterest now ready for iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/15/pinterest-now-ready-for-ipad/
Test scores and academic performance get a lot of talk in education – and rightly so – but classroom learning isn’t just about ingesting information and mastering skills, it’s about developing habits of mind and building character. Teachers spend a significant amount of their time managing student behavior but, for the most part, they’ve had few tools to help them out.
Since launching last year, however, San Francisco-based ClassDojo has shown that game mechanics (and cutesy avatars) can go a long way in helping teachers not only keep their students on track but encourage positive behavioral skills. On Wednesday, the startup, which was part of education startup accelerator Imagine K12‘s first class, is announcing that it is officially launching out of beta and has raised $1.6 million in seed funding from top investors. The long list includes Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator (it was a personal investment), Ron Conway at SV Angel, Jeff Clavier at SoftTech VC, Kapor Capital, the Start Fund, General Catalyst, Morado Ventures, Lerer Ventures,Learn Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund and other angels.
Co-founded by Sam Chaudhary, a former high school teacher and McKinsey analyst, and Liam Don, a game developer and computer science PhD candidate, the mobile and web app lets teachers give students real-time feedback using any computer or mobile device and a smartboard or display screen.
Each student corresponds with an avatar that appears on a colorful chart and, during the class, teachers can award points (for creativity or teamwork, for example) or subtract them (for actions like tardiness or interruption) in full view of the entire class. All the data is automatically assembled into reports that help teachers monitor progress and follow trends, as well as share information with parents and administrators.
The founders said they developed the tool after speaking with hundreds of teachers who identified behavior management as their biggest problem. In fact, the startup said, 40 percent of U.S. teachers report spending more than 50 percent of their time managing student behavior.
“It has become this punitive, negative thing,” said Chaudhary. “We wanted to move it beyond that to being more about building opportunities for learning and building positive skills and helping teachers do that in a data-driven way, while also solving the pain point.”
It seems to be working. Since its launch, more than 3.5 million teachers and students in 30 countries have used ClassDojo and, when surveyed, users reported a 45 to 90 percent increase in incidents of positive behavior and a 50 to 85 percent decrease in incidents of negative behavior.
The animated avatars and whimsical feel of the platform make it seem more appropriate for younger students and the founders said they’re getting the biggest response from K-9 teachers, but they said teachers of higher grades are using it too.
Going forward, the startup is committed to providing the service to teachers for free but said it could earn revenue by selling additional tools to parents that help build positive character and learning traits.
“We’ve done a good job listening to what teachers want and building for teachers but there are two other important stakeholders, students and parents, and we haven’t done enough for them,” said Chaudhary. “There will be more for them in the coming months.”


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/08/15/classdojo-scores-1-6m-from-top-investors-for-gam...
Hadoop doesn’t have to be so hard, just ask Etsy, Airbnb and the Climate Corporation. All three, it turns out, are using the Cascading framework atop Amazon Web Services’ Elastic MapReduce service to make creating and running big data jobs simpler than is possible using Hadoop alone.
Cascading is an open source Java framework that acts as an intermediary between users and Hadoop. Users create data workflows using Cascading’s Java-compatible APIs (rather than writing Hadoop MapReduce jobs), and it handles the task of making Hadoop process the data. Cascading is backed by a commercial entity called Concurrent (see disclosure), which is headed up by creator Chris Wensel, and is the foundation of several variations including Cascalog (a Clojure-based query language for Hadoop) and Scalding (Twitter’s Scala API for Hadoop).

Elastic MapReduce is AWS’s on-demand service that gives users access to cloud computing resources, rather than a collection of physical servers, for running Hadoop workloads. Writing MapReduce jobs is both difficult and limiting in terms of functionality, and Hadoop cluster management is notoriously difficult, so it’s no surprise that Cascading and Elastic MapReduce are an appealing combination.
They’re hardly the only options for simplifying the Hadoop process, though. Infochimps, for example, offers a service that features tools for automating configuration and creating dataflows using Ruby. Mortar Data has created a managed service that runs atop AWS and lets users process data using Python scripts. And, of course, there are numerous Elastic MapReduce competitors on the market, including offerings from Microsoft, IBM and Sungard.
To read more about how Etsy and the Climate Corporation are using Hadoop, check these posts on Etsy’s Hadoop-powered recommendation engine and Climate Corp.’s 5,000-core weather simulations.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user JTP.
Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/data/meet-the-combo-behind-etsy-airbnb-and-climate-corp-had...
MrSeb writes "Utilizing neuroscience, gene therapy, and optogenetics, a pair of researchers from Cornell University have created a bionic prosthetic eye that can restore almost-normal vision to animals blinded by destroyed retinas. Prosthetic eyes have been created before, but for the most part these have been dumb prosthetics — chips that wire themselves into the ganglion cells behind the retina, which are the interface between the retina and optic nerve. These chips receive optical stimuli (via a CMOS sensor, for example), which they transmit as electrical signals to the ganglion cells. These prosthetic eyes can produce a low-resolution grayscale field that the brain can then interpret — which is probably better than being completely blind — but they don't actually restore sight. The Cornell prosthetic eye however, developed by Sheila Nirenberg and Chethan Pandarinath, is a much closer analog to a real eye, almost completely restoring sight in mice — and within 1 or 2 years, humans (PDF)." Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
from Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/15/1827225/scientists-reverse-enginee...
Yesterday I wrote about Unbaby.me, the Chrome extension that will block baby photos from appearing in your Facebook feed. I was surprised and dismayed that multiple writers took issue at the existence of the tool, seeing it as a sign of some kind of insidious anti-baby or anti-parent culture. To me, it looked like just a better filter.
Within minutes of posting, I was pointed by a friend to this article in Jezebel, in which author Tracy Moore makes the valid point that baby pictures aren’t a special case: Hey there kids, lissen, lemme make sure I got this straight, though: Posting a picture every couple weeks of my kid is unbearable, but 87 photos of your home-brewing phase is totally coolzville? Don’t get me started on Mustache May, the facial hair equivalent of a baby.
It’s a great point. I might want to block baby photos, but I’m quite certain that most of my Facebook friends want to block the political articles I post not infrequently. Which brings me to my point… Facebook’s News Feed is still, after all this time, a terrible filter. It knows something about who I care about, but seems to know almost nothing about what I care about. To account for its terribleness, I’ve slowly but surely been teaching it, by selecting to see “Only Important” updates from lots of my friends. But my sense is that most people don’t do this, perhaps because Facebook hardly advertises the feature. And, in any case, it’s a really blunt way to improve my feed. Social news filters work through a combination of algorithms that guess what you like based on your behavior and by simply asking you what you like. Beyond asking me who I’m friends with and what brands I like, Facebook does almost none of the latter. Compare that to Twitter, where the primary impetus is on the user to craft the perfect feed, with algorithmic recommendations a secondary feature. (Facebook has tried moving to a subscription model for public figures, but it is not the core experience.) In an ideal world, Facebook would know the people whose musical recommendations I want to know about, the ones whose political opinions I respect, that I care about a restaurant recommendation only if you live in my city, etc. In the meantime, all our vanity, our self-absorption, our niche obsessions are left on full display. We start to hate each other for posting baby photos or epic party recaps or preachy articles. And then some among us blame a culture of over-sharing, even though that’s not the problem. There’s a technical solution for all of this, in the vein of Unbaby.me. We need better filters, and quickly.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/15/dear-facebook-please-build-a-better-news-feed-...
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