LinkedIn acquires alerts service Newsle

LinkedIn has agreed to acquire Newsle, an alerts service that will undoubtedly bolster the social network's features for tracking users outside its website.

In joint statements Monday, the two companies indicated the service will help users know more about what various people on the site are doing. The technology will likely bolster LinkedIn's existing feature for alerting a user's connections when they're mentioned in news articles. 

"For example, knowing more about the people in your network -- like when they're mentioned in the news -- can surface relevant insights that help you hit your next meeting with them out of the park," said Ryan Roslansky, a LinkedIn spokesman. 

A LinkedIn spokesman declined to disclose the terms of the deal.

The acquisition is the latest among social networking companies, which have been spending big recently, particularly on advertising technology. Twitter, for example, last month bought TapCommerce, an advertising company that specializes in convincing consumers to reopen and use commerce apps (like eBay) already downloaded to their phones. 

In LinkedIn's case, its acquisitions have appeared to hue away from advertising efforts, and more toward bolstering various functions on its site. For example, in February, LinkedIn agreed to pay $120 million for Bright, a data-driven job search startup. The goal was to bolster LinkedIn's job-search features. A few months later, LinkedIn released a new mobile app for job seekers, claiming more than 40 percent of users now look for jobs using their mobile devices.

Newsle will likely help bolster LinkedIn's efforts to get users to interact with its site even more. Last week, it released a new version of its contacts app, which includes notifications about other user's activities.

Internet Providers Gird for Battle in Austin, Texas

 With Google Fiber months away from its launch in Austin, competitors are ramping up their Internet speeds and services in preparation for a titan-sized fight over customers.

 

When it comes to Internet service, Austin is about to become one of the most competitive markets in the nation.

Google Inc. is still months away from launching its superfast Google Fiber Internet service in Austin, but Google’s competitors are already gearing up for a titan-sized fight over customers by ramping up their own Internet speeds and services.

As the battle heats up, the beneficiaries could be Austin consumers, who will have more options when it comes to Internet and subscription TV services.

“That’s great for the people of Austin,” said Austin City Council Member Laura Morrison, who played a key role in luring Google Fiber to the region. “I think it’s bonus and a benefit for the people of Austin to have choice.”

Google began the Internet arms race in April 2013, when it announced that Austin would be the second U.S. city — after Kansas City— to get its Google Fiber 1 gigabit Internet broadband network. Google Fiber is more than 100 times faster than today’s typical broadband Internet access. At 1 gigabit, a user could download 25 songs in 1 second, a TV show in 3 seconds and a high-definition movie in less than 36 seconds, according to data from AT&T.

Local leaders said landing the service would accelerate the development of new tech companies and help with new broadband services for schools and hospitals and other parts of the city. Google is currently working on the infrastructure for the Google Fiber service. Last week, an American-Statesman review of hundreds of city-issued permits found that the search-engine giant is in the midst of installing thousands of feet of cable conduit along 176 city streets – mostly in South Austin and East Austin.

After Google’s announcement that Google Fiber was coming to Austin, the city’s two big established broadband Internet providers, Time Warner Cable and AT&T Inc., said they were ready to make additional investments in their networks as they prepare to compete with the arrival of Google Fiber — and they have done so.

Late last year, AT&T rolled out its fast-growing U-Verse service with its “GigaPower” feature, which offers speeds of up to 300 megabits per second. This year, the San Antonio-based telecom giant said, it plans to up those speeds to 1 gigabit per second.

AT&T said it would double the reach of its Austin area fiber network — already available to thousands of homes — after the “incredible response” to a December rollout of their faster U-Verse product, said Tracy King, AT&T’s vice president of public affairs.

“Sales continue to exceed our expectations and it’s clear that residents want our fastest speeds,” King said. “We can’t wait to get our faster broadband speeds into their hands and homes.”

Already, the two companies have faced off in Kansas City, where Google Fiber first launched last year and has taken market share from AT&T, the company said in federal filings.

The filings, which are tied to AT&T’s ongoing efforts to buy DirectTV, say early performance in Kansas City has led experts to predict that Google Fiber will capture the business of at least half of the covered households in three to four years. In Kansas City, the basic price for 1-gigabit Internet access is $70 a month. Internet plus cable TV costs $120 a month. The company also offers a slower basic broadband package free for seven years after a $300 network construction fee is paid.

“Google Fiber is the most ambitious and potentially disruptive BSP,” or fiber-based broadband service provider, the filings said.

“The potential of gigabit Internet has provoked competitive responses from AT&T and other MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors.) In Austin, four MVPDs now provide broadband Internet speeds of at least 300 mbps,” the filings said.

AT&T has “responded to Google’s planned entry into Austin with competitive offers and advertisements,” the filings said.

Time Warner, meanwhile, also continues to ramp up its fight for customers. The provider began rolling out faster Internet speeds this summer with close to 40 percent of its Austin-area customers — about 100,000 customers — already receiving the new speeds, said Melissa Sorola, director of public relations at Time Warner Cable.

Customers with all six of Time Warner’s Internet service plans are seeing an increase in speeds. For example, Time Warner customers who subscribe to their standard plan are going from to 15 Mbps to 50 Mbps. The move, Sorola said, comes “at no extra charge.”

The first round of boosted speeds were launched in downtown Austin, West Campus and Hyde Park, among other communities.

This month, another 20 percent of Time Warner customers will see new speeds, including Central Texas residents in far South Austin, Lago Vista, Round Rock, Marble Falls and the Bastrop County community of Smithville. In August, another 20 percent will see the new speeds in areas that include San Marcos, Bastrop, Lakeway, and Duval.

By the end of fall, all of Time Warner’s customers will have access to faster Internet speeds, Sorola said.

“Feedback has been positive,” she said. “We’re seeing a steady flow of customers coming in for a new modem (required to get the new service) and …excitement about being able to experience the faster speeds.”

Another local competitor, Grande Communications — a smaller, San Marcos-based service provider — has also boosted speeds, services and plans in recent months.

In February, Grande Communications jumped ahead of Google and AT&T by launching super-fast Internet in West Austin with speeds of up to 1 gigabit.

Grande has said its new Internet service will cost $65 per month with no contract required and the price decreases when the service is bundled with cable TV and home phone service. The Grande service was initially available to about a quarter of the 75,000 homes and businesses in the Austin area that are wired for their service, including the Belmont, Rosedale, Bryker Woods, Pemberton Heights, Tarrytown, Oakmont Heights and Old Enfield neighborhoods.

At the time of the announcement, president Matt Murphy said the bump in speed is, in part, an effort to fend off AT&T and Google.

“There’s a certain sizzle to 1 gigabit that people are excited about, ” he said. “We’re nimble and able to do things faster. We’re consciously doing this to beat Google.”

Finding Ways to Use Big Data to Help Small Shops

Brian Janezic at one of the Auto Wash Express car washes he owns in Tucson. Credit Chris Richards for The New York Times

Brian Janezic, 27, was in the equipment room of one of the two Auto Wash Express self-service locations he owns in Tucson, going through his cleaning supplies and vending machine items to determine what to reorder, when it hit him. “We have machines that automatically size and wash a car, mix chemicals, activate pumps, turn on lights — and here I am still counting inventory by hand.”

An online search introduced him to FileMaker Pro, a software product well suited to small businesses and tailored to the iPads that Mr. Janezic envisioned for himself and his three remote employees — not to mention the employees serving the six Arizona Auto Wash Express locations owned by his parents. “Now we can pull up any of our sites and see what’s on hand,” he said, adding that the FileMaker software “creates a PDF of a purchase order for us to send to one of our local suppliers or an online supplier.”

That was only part of the savings. Before Mr. Janezic installed sensors linked to FileMaker on each location’s eight drums of carwash chemicals — windshield bug removal solutions, pre-wash chemicals for tires, waxes, glass cleaners — monitoring use meant taking a yardstick to each drum, noting liquid levels and measuring again a week later. Gallons consumed divided by the number of cars washed told him how much of each solution was consumed per wash.

Mr. Janezic uses software to monitor fluid levels in the drums of carwash chemicals.  Credit Chris Richards for The New York Times

“Now we’re able to monitor those levels continuously,” he said. “So instead of having two data points in the span of a week, we’ll have 500 data points. And we can do that across our entire company. We might want to see how much pre-soak we’re using, because we have a standard we want to keep within.” So the new system improves quality control, and it can send a text message or email alert should, say, a valve stick open, potentially draining a $250 drum of soap.

A wealth of information that some call big data is becoming increasingly available to small businesses. Such information was once available only to big corporations with vast computing power and deep information technology departments — and more recently to online start-up companies with data-mining capabilities.

In 2010, just 1.7 percent of small businesses were using business intelligence software, according to a survey of companies with fewer than 100 employees conducted by IDC, whose analysts provide information technology advice to businesses small and large. By last year, 9.2 percent had adopted such tools, reported Ray Boggs, a small-business market analyst at IDC, citing easier-to-use products and lower prices as prime drivers of the increase.

“You don’t need a degree. You don’t need a manual,” said Ramon Ray, co-creator and host of the annual Small Business Summit, where entrepreneurs meet with technology and marketing experts. “You can drag and drop spreadsheets, upload a file — even from your phone. If you have fleets of vehicles, you run those vehicles better; you can staff better, because you know where your employees should be, and when. The new tools provide better customer insights, so you know better what to sell them or what not to sell them; you can see which of your products has the best profit margin. You don’t have to do things on gut check anymore.”

With price plans starting at $3 a user a month, one such software tool, Desk.com, helps small businesses address customer feedback — not just by pooling and parsing emails to customer service reps but also by monitoring Facebook feeds, Twitter comments and Yelp posts to help quell brush fires promptly.

“Say you’re a mom-and-pop dry cleaner and somebody says on Twitter, ‘My dry cleaner is terrible. They broke all my buttons,' ” said Leyla Seka, senior vice president and general manager of Desk.com. “That would show up in Desk. And then you could respond: ‘Sorry, please bring your shirts back and we’ll fix them immediately. And here’s a 20-percent-off coupon.’

Chris Mittelstaedt, founder of the FruitGuys, based in South San Francisco, Calif., said the software had helped his 90-employee company respond to and better interpret the 1,000 to 1,300 emails fielded weekly by customer service representatives. The FruitGuys sell fresh fruit to workplaces across the country. Until a year ago, before the company agreed to pay about $40 a month to Desk.com, its four customer service representatives tended to work in isolation. Now, a shared email inbox helps them to spot information and trends. It also speeds response time.

“Embarrassing as it is to admit, there’s some basic data that we didn’t have before, things like how many emails per week and our response time,” Mr. Mittelstaedt said. “It often took us over 24 hours to get back to people, which was not acceptable. Now, we’re getting back to customers and solving complicated issues within two hours.”

The company also gets helpful business intelligence, according to Nicole Wagner, who is the chief of customer service. “We’ll see trends,” she said, including late deliveries and multiple emails like, “ ‘Hey, we really loved the avocados this week’ — information we can pass on to our buyers.”

“We’ve always been able to get waitstaff check averages,” said Andy Husbands, who is chef and owner at Tremont 647, a 100-seat restaurant in Boston. “But now we’re able to bore down deeper.” On a new performance page for a star waiter named David, up popped a $5 brunch item, specialty pop tarts. Mr. Husbands realized David got virtually every Sunday morning table he served to order at least one. It was no surprise, then, that Mr. Husbands promptly invited David to share his pop-tart-selling prowess at a premeal staff meeting.

Mr. Husbands and his managers use such performance pages and other business metrics, many pertaining to customers, through a cloud-based tool called Swipely. Angus Davis, the founder and chief executive of Swipely, calls it “an affordable on-ramp to big data.” By replacing so-called payment processing companies that exist between merchants and the banks that issue consumer credit cards, Swipely gains access to a wealth of data, which it analyzes and presents on easy-to-understand dashboards, “more than half the time at little or no cost,” according to Mr. Davis.

“The crux of Swipely is using the data behind transactions to help businesses make smarter decisions — bringing the same tools and technologies that online companies have been using for years to the 95 percent of retail that happens off line,” Mr. Davis said. “We’ve built specialized tools for retailers and restaurants that answer the types of questions those small businesses have, like which item on their menu is most likely to turn a first-time customer into a repeat customer. But answering that question requires us to look at a tremendous amount of data.”

Examining his own data, in fact, prompted Mr. Janezic to look beyond his family’s Auto Wash Express locations. After enhancing his FileMaker Pro inventory management system on a different platform, he created a spinoff enterprise called WashStat, which he now sells to other carwash owners. That, too, is business intelligence.

"Ebay reaches out to advanced small business' technology in what they call 'acqui-hired"

McLean’s AppTek is latest to be ‘aqui-hired’ by eBay

About 18 months ago, eBay faced a linguistics problem.

The e-commerce giant had about 650 million items listed for sale, by 25 million people worldwide.

Interested buyers typically searched for products by typing words into a query. The site would then find items whose descriptions contained those words, written by the seller.

But what if the buyer and seller didn’t read or write the same language? Buyers were limited to items with descriptions they could understand, and sellers could only reach a subset of the global market.
So the company started investing in text translation, aiming to automatically translate descriptions into the buyer’s preferred language. As part of this project, eBay recently agreed to acquire translation software developed by AppTek, a McLean-based technology company.

AppTek is the latest target of an eBay “acqui-hire” — a strategy in which a business buys a company, or its intellectual property, with the intent of hiring its technology development talent. Between 2008 and 2014, eBay has completed more than 35 acquisitions; since 2010, 80 percent of the founders of those companies have remained at eBay, according to eBay. As per the agreement between AppTek and eBay, about eight of the Virginia company’s 20 employees — including its co-founder, Mudar Yaghi — are joining eBay’s translation team.

“These language scientists are few and far between when you scan the globe,” said Wendy Jones, eBay’s vice president of geographic expansion and cross-border trade.

She noted that in this case, the experts who developed the software are just as valuable to eBay — if not more so — than the software itself. “What we’re trying to do is marry the [translation] capability with all [of eBay’s] insights around e-commerce,” Jones said.

For instance, Jones said, eBay is trying to make its translation software more sophisticated — shifting from, “Is this translated correctly?” to, “Have I done this in a way that is compelling enough to the consumer so that they’re going to behave differently?”

The AppTek deal is part of eBay’s “ambitious journey to extend our footprint into markets we traditionally haven’t focused on,” Jones said. Better translation could allow more global online trade, she said — not only among large nations and newer markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, but also in parts of Europe such as France, Italy and Spain.

Before deciding to acquire AppTek’s technology, eBay had been developing its own software in-house, called “eBay Machine Translation,” Jones said. The division, which AppTek’s former employees will join, is currently made up of about two dozen developers.

“We started with the [Brazil, Russia, India and China] focus, but the bigger opportunities are in the existing markets where eBay already has strong, healthy business,” Jones said, explaining that people who already use the site regularly will soon find many more options than they did before every time they search — five, six, seven times as much, she added.

In some countries, as much as 70 to 80 percent of demand on eBay can be fulfilled through cross-border trade, Jones said. “It’s a great opportunity to help sellers reach markets they wouldn’t otherwise think about participating in.”

In some countries, as much as 70 to 80 percent of demand on eBay can be fulfilled through cross-border trade, Jones said. “It’s a great opportunity to help sellers reach markets they wouldn’t otherwise think about participating in.”

For AppTek, the sale offers an opportunity to narrow its focus on speech recognition software, co-chief executive Mohammad Shihadah said in an interview. Before the sale, the company’s time, talent and resources were divided between newer technologies and machine translation.

For instance, AppTek hopes to market its technology to TV news sources for closed-captioning, Shihadah said. AppTek’s speech recognition software is currently being used at al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language news network, for subtitling and captioning.

The company is also working on speech recognition for mobile phone users, as well as voice response systems.

Compared to the machine translation software they sold to eBay, he said, “we believe this is equally important in terms of the future.”

The Busiest Man On The Internet

Tim Hwang was gaming the system as far back as high school, which was only 11 years ago. As a sophomore at the posh Newark Academy in New Jersey he started a group called the Strategic Gaming Forum Syndicate. Fancy name, but “it was just a nerdy, board-gaming club,” says Hwang. To raise money Hwang held bake sales, buying packaged Entenmann’s cookies and cakes and selling them “at a ridiculous markup.” The kids didn’t mind. Hwang had earned their respect earlier selling them George Orwell parody T-shirts of a smiling Tim in braces with the words Big Tim Is Watching You. “My parents were concerned, but they played along,” says Hwang. “They resigned themselves to doing 100 iron-ons all weekend with me. I made a profit on that one, too.”

Thin and excitable, with spiky black hair and black glasses, the 28-year-old Hwang represents a new kind of Web entrepreneur who is equal parts huckster and activist. Rather than seek riches, Hwang seeks legitimacy for digital concepts such as crowdfunding (done), social bots that interact with humans on Twitter TWTR +0.3% (done) and software to automate rote but expensive human functions such as the law (not done yet).
He has yet to hold a full-time job for longer than two years, but Hwang gets more done in a week than most people do in a month.

“I have a list of ideas in two columns–Someday and Maybe–that I’ve been keeping since college,” says Hwang. “It’s now 200 items long.” During his junior year at Harvard Hwang started working at the college’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society but grew frustrated with academics who merely theorized about Internet culture. Hwang decided to bring Internet culture to the campus. In 2008, during his senior year, he created a rudimentary Web page for an event he dubbed ROFLcon (ROFL = Rolling On the Floor Laughing) and started inviting “memes” to attend. The first year brought 600 people. It’s now a biennial event attended by 900 people to meet luminaries such as Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain, 4Chan’s Christopher Poole and the “Double Rainbow” viral video guy.

But Hwang lost interest once things went pro. “By 2012 I was on the phone with GrumpyCat’s agent. It just didn’t seem fun anymore,” says Hwang. The conference is currently on hiatus.
Hwang stayed on at the Berkman Center after graduation. He and his friends would sit around and complain about the lack of cool things to do in Boston. So Hwang launched the Awesome Foundation. They each threw in $100 to make a $1,000 grant for the creation of something “awesome.” The first grant went to a Rhode Island School of Design professor who applied to make a 33-foot-long hammock that sat in Boston’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.

Crowdfunding over the Web was a new concept at the time (Kickstarter launched in April 2009), and the idea, once online, became a meme of its own. The Awesome Foundation–Hwang loves overblown titles–now has 94 chapters in 19 countries and has given out more than $1 million in grants to more than 1,000 projects, putting Hwang on lists, alongside Bono and Bill Gates, of the world’s most innovative philanthropists. “He uses the power of faceless organizations to disguise the fact that it’s just him working on it,” says Christina Xu, Hwang’s partner on ROFLcon and the Awesome Foundation, where her title is Chancellor at the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hwang has built a brain trust of people into whose ideas and expertise he can tap to realize his projects, using email list-servs expertly to reach them.
Internet marketing outfit The Barbarian Group recognized Hwang’s branding savvy and hired him away. But mapping the social influence of cereal maker Kashi didn’t hold Hwang’s attention for long. So he secretly applied to and got accepted at the University of California, Berkeley law school. For six months he held down the marketing job from California without his bosses knowing he was in law school. “I did a lot of studying on airplanes flying to clients’ offices,” he says.

Meanwhile, he kept churning out more Internet projects and groups: He launched the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory when a nuclear power plant site told him he needed to be part of an official group to go on a tour. It recently raised $20,000 on Kickstarter for a book of essays about shipping containers. He did consulting work for Google GOOGL +0.12%, Tumblr, and Mozilla, organizing an “Open Internet Preservation Society” event for the latter. He named himself chief scientist for the Pacific Social Architecting Corp., which creates “social bots”–swarms of automated, credible identities on social media platforms that interact with unsuspecting humans. Pacific Social has spun out a startup that charges hedge funds and retailers up to “six figures” to use its human-imitating bots to conduct market research on Twitter among people who don’t realize they’re being polled (or that it’s being done by algorithms). Pacific Social’s research was cited in an NSA PowerPoint leaked by Edward Snowden.

“I was wondering if anyone was ever going to catch on that all these projects were coming from the same guy,” says Rick Webb, co-founder of Barbarian Group. Hwang also just has a contagious sense of humor about technology and Internet culture that easily translates into performance art. Last year, to mock “Start-up Weekend,” he organized “Hype Up Weekend,” where people gathered to pitch ludicrous ideas for tech companies, such as “Scraps – to get your leftovers into the share economy.”

Last summer Hwang tried again to go mainstream, joining prestigious law firm Davis Polk after graduation. He had wowed them with his efficiency as a summer associate the year before. Little did they know that he had written software to handle simple tasks he’d been assigned. He stayed at Davis Polk for only seven months, all the time he needed to lay the groundwork for his own firm, Robot, Robot & Hwang. It’s a joke name, and the firm isn’t real, but Hwang has assembled a group of programmers that this summer will release a free software package to automate the document review and IPO-form-filling work that’s assigned to a first-year law firm associate. “I was in it to kill it. I want to replace lawyers with code,” says Hwang.

Hwang’s latest full-time job, as of March, is head of special initiatives at Imgur, an image-sharing and meme-generation site that recently scooped up $40 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Responsible for promoting offline networking among Imgur’s thriving 130-million-member online community, Hwang recently spent a week visiting summer camps to find one for a company-hosted meet-up. Imgur CEO Alan Schaaf knows about Hwang’s many hats and doesn’t mind them. “He concocts these far-out ideas and then brings them down to earth and actually does them. We’re lucky to have him,” says Schaff.

How does he manage to get it all done? Hwang as a teenager had to make the transition from an unstructured Montessori to a regimented prep school. So he started planning his days carefully, something he still does, meticulously blocking out each hour of each day. When I met with him one Sunday afternoon in his San Francisco apartment, I was crunched between Brunch and Netrunner Card Game.

Ian Pearce, a developer who is one of Hwang’s many collaborators, has a different explanation: “He’s a robot with a soul.”

Google’s Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No Steering Wheel or Brake Pedals

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Humans might be the one problem Google can’t solve.

For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now say they can’t make that handoff work anytime soon.

Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving.

 

 

The car would be summoned with a smartphone application. It would pick up a passenger and automatically drive to a destination selected on a smartphone app without any human intervention.

Google won’t say if it intends to get into the car manufacturing business or simply supply technology to carmakers, but it says there are plenty of possibilities if it can persuade regulators to allow cars with no drivers. One potential use: driverless taxi cabs.

In an interview at Google’s headquarters here, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder who is actively involved in the research program, said the company decided to change the car project more than a year ago after an experiment in which Google employees used autonomous vehicles for their normal commutes to work.

There were no crashes. But Google engineers realized that asking a human passenger — who could be reading or daydreaming or even sleeping — to take over in an emergency won’t work.

“We saw stuff that made us a little nervous,” said Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University roboticist who directs the car project at Google.

The vehicles will have electronic sensors that can see about 600 feet in all directions. Despite that, they will have rearview mirrors because they are required by California’s vehicle code, Dr. Urmson said. The front of the car will be made from a foamlike material in case the computer fails and it hits a pedestrian. It looks like a little bubble car from the future, streamlined to run by itself — a big change from the boxy Lexus SUV Google has been retrofitting the last few years with self-driving technology.

The new Google strategy for autonomous cars is a break from many competing vehicle projects. Mercedes, BMW and Volvo have introduced cars that have the ability to travel without driver intervention in limited circumstances — though none completely eliminate the driver.

That feature, which is generally known as Traffic Jam Assist, allows the car to steer and follow another vehicle in stop-and-go highway driving at low speeds. In the Mercedes version, the system disengages itself if the driver takes his hands off the steering wheel for more than 10 seconds.

 

Volvo said that by 2017 it planned to have the cars in the hands of ordinary consumers for testing in the streets of Gothenburg, Sweden, where the company has its headquarters.

In the interview, Mr. Brin acknowledged those advances, but said they were incremental. “That stuff seems not entirely in keeping with our mission of being transformative,” he said.

Google’s prototype for its new cars will limit them to a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The cars are intended for driving in urban and suburban settings, not on highways. The low speed will probably keep the cars out of more restrictive regulatory categories for vehicles, giving them more design flexibility.

Google is having 100 cars built by a manufacturer in the Detroit area, which it declined to name. Nor would it say how much the prototype vehicles cost. They will have a range of about 100 miles, powered by an electric motor that is roughly equivalent to the one used by Fiat’s 500e, Dr. Urmson said. They should be road-ready by early next year, Google said.

Photo

A self-driving car Google has worked on for four years out for a spin in Mountain View, Calif. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

The current plan is to conduct pilot tests in California, starting with ferrying Google employees between buildings around its sprawling corporate campus here.

 Laws permit autonomous vehicles in California, Nevada and Florida. But those laws have generally been written with the expectation that a human driver would be able to take control in emergencies.

Google executives said the initial prototypes would comply with current California automated-driving regulations, issued on May 20. They will have manual controls for testing on California public roads.

In the future, Google hopes to persuade regulators that the cars can operate safely without driver, steering wheel, brake or accelerator pedal. Those cars would rely entirely on Google sensors and software to control them.

So where might the driverless cars be used besides at Google’s offices?

Last year, Lawrence D. Burns, former vice president for research and development at General Motors and now a Google consultant, led a study at the Earth Institute at Columbia University on transforming personal mobility.

The researchers found that Manhattan’s 13,000 taxis made 470,000 trips a day. Their average speed was 10 to 11 m.p.h., carrying an average of 1.4 passengers per trip with an average wait time of five minutes.

In comparison, the report said, it is possible for a futuristic robot fleet of 9,000 shared automated vehicles hailed by smartphone to match that capacity with a wait time of less than one minute. Assuming a 15 percent profit, the current cost of taxi service would be about $4 per trip mile, while in contrast, it was estimated, a Manhattan-based driverless vehicle fleet would cost about 50 cents per mile.

The report showed similar savings in two other case studies — in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Babcock Ranch, a planned community in Florida.

Google is one of the few companies that could take on a challenge like that, said John J. Leonard, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist. But he added: “I do not expect there to be driverless taxis in Manhattan in my lifetime.”

Mr. Brin said the change in Google’s car strategy did not mean that the company was giving up on its ultimate goal of transforming modern transportation.

“Obviously it will take time, a long time, but I think it has a lot of potential,” he said. “Self-driving cars have the potential to drive in trains much closer together and, in theory, in the future at much higher speeds.

“There is nothing to say that once you demonstrate the safety, why can’t you go 100 miles per hour?”

It's Official: Apple Adds Dr. Dre With $3 Billion Beats Deal

Rap is coming to Cupertino in a big way.

After weeks of rumor, Apple finally announced it has acquired headphone maker Beats Electronic for $3 billion, including $2.6 billion cash up front and approximately $400 million in stock that will vest over time. As part of the deal, Beats co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine will join Apple AAPL -1.09% in undisclosed roles.

“Music is such an important part of all of our lives and holds a special place within our hearts at Apple,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “That’s why we have kept investing in music and are bringing together these extraordinary teams so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world.”

This acquisition is Apple’s biggest ever, and largest since it brought back Steve Jobs in 1997 though a $400 million purchase of NeXT. However, the $3 billion price is still just a tiny fraction of the company’s $150 billion cash reserves, and Beats’ estimated annual sales of $2 billion represents barely over 1% of Apple’s $171 billion revenue last year.

“I’ve always known in my heart that Beats belonged with Apple,” Iovine said. “The idea when we started the company was inspired by Apple’s unmatched ability to marry culture and technology. Apple’s deep commitment to music fans, artists, songwriters and the music industry is something special.”
The $3 billion purchase price includes Beats Music, the sister company that runs a subscription streaming music service. In fact, Apple’s press release mentioned that before the more well-known headphone business. While some analysts have wondered why Apple doesn’t simply build its own streaming service within iTunes, Cook must believe this deal gives him a quicker way to catch up with Spotify and others.

“The addition of Beats will make our music lineup even better, from free streaming with iTunes Radio to a world-class subscription service in Beats, and of course buying music from the iTunes Store as customers have loved to do for years,” Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said.

Apple shares fell slightly on Wednesday in trading before the announcement, but remain up over 17% since April 23rd. Shares have crested $624, the highest mark Apple has traded at since October 2012.