Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do

And then there is Silicon Valley, where mind-reading personal assistants come in the form of a cellphone app.

A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search — new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was.

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first that is tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. Your context — location, time of day and digital activity — is the query, say the engineers who build these services.

Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, an app called Google Now is an important part of Google’s Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.

Google Now is “kind of blowing my mind right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. “I mean, I’m pretty jaded, right? I’ve seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven’t. Google Now is doing that.”

But for some people, predictive search — also in services like Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld and Evernote — is the latest intrusion into our lives, another disruption pinging and buzzing in our pockets, mining our digital lives for personal information and straddling the line between helpful and creepy.

“To the question of creepiness, the answer is it depends who you ask,” said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the legal implications of technology. “What works for a group of 30-something engineers in Silicon Valley may not be representative of the way that 60-year-old executives in New York tend to use their phones.”

Many software programmers have dreamed of building a tool like this for years. The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information, and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.

“We can’t go on with eight meetings and 200 e-mails a day,” said N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall, which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps. “We have a technology that isn’t waiting for you to ask it a question, but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that.”

The services guess what you want to know based on the digital breadcrumbs you leave, like calendar entries, e-mails, social network activity and the places you take your phone. Many use outside services for things like coupons, news and traffic.

Google Now, which came to some Android phones a year ago and iPhones in April, tells you when it is time to leave for a dinner reservation. That is because it noticed an OpenTable e-mail in your Gmail in-box, knows your location from your phone’s GPS and checked Google Maps for traffic conditions.

A couple days before you travel, it will show you weather in your destination, and when you arrive, currency exchange information and the time back home. Ask aloud that Google Now remind you to pick up milk next time you step in a grocery store, and an alert will appear when you are at Safeway.

DealBook Column: But Wait. Didn’t Yahoo Try a Deal Like This Before?

Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressGeoCities workers after Yahoo bought it in 1999. Some worry the Tumblr deal is similarly poor.

When Yahoo announced its headline-grabbing acquisition, it boasted that the deal gave it access to an “unduplicated” audience of users and that its target was a “popular personal publishing” platform.

“Yahoo will be able to integrate and distribute a powerful set of state-of-the-art editing tools and content published through personal home pages in an array of services,” the company declared.

But Yahoo wasn’t talking about Tumblr. Those quotes came from a news release Yahoo issued in 1999 when it acquired GeoCities, which allowed users to create their own Web pages — not unlike Tumblr — for $3.6 billion in stock. The site was closed in 2009.

As investors and analysts size up Yahoo’s latest $1.1 billion acquisition, it is worth reflecting on the GeoCities deal, which has many similarities. Both companies were money losers when they agreed to be acquired. Tumblr had just $13 million in revenue last year, according to reports.

Both companies had loyal followers that quickly left in droves. According to Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and a competitor, Tumblr users were moving their posts over to WordPress at a rate of 72,000 an hour amid speculation of an impending deal this weekend. (Usually, he said, Tumblr users migrated 400 to 600 posts an hour). Still, for perspective, Tumblr users generate tens of millions of posts a day.

And GeoCities and Tumblr had at one point been averse to accepting advertising. Tumblr’s 26-year-old chief executive (and now multimillionaire), David Karp, said three years ago, “We’re pretty opposed to advertising,” adding that “It turns our stomach.”

The lesson of GeoCities raises this question about Tumblr: How can a company with zero profits (actually, multimillion-dollar losses) and just $13 million in revenue be worth $1.1 billion?

Inside Yahoo, officials dismiss the comparison to GeoCities. Instead, they compare the Tumblr deal to Google’s purchase of YouTube — that is, Yahoo’s management believes that Tumblr is one of a rare few transformative sites on the Internet. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube when it too made no money. At the time of that deal, it seemed heretical. Now, it seems genius.

To Yahoo, Tumblr is the equivalent of beachfront property. With more than 100 million user-generated blogs on Tumblr, there is no question that it brings Yahoo a younger audience. It adds a sense of hipness to a company that had lost its sense of cool.

According to Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, who drove this deal, Tumblr brings Yahoo a possible growth engine for the future.

But that’s a big if. It requires Ms. Mayer’s team to execute brilliantly and online users to continue to want to establish ways to communicate outside of places like Facebook and Twitter.

And then there is the pesky issue of selling ads on Tumblr’s pages without upsetting the site’s finicky users. (One user began a petition to block the deal.)

“It is difficult to justify the premium acquisition price for Tumblr given its low levels of revenue,” wrote Anthony DiClemente of Barclays Capital in a note to investors. “In addition, we believe Yahoo needs to be careful about the manner in which it monetizes Tumblr, as a significant ad load and the perception of a large corporate owner could potentially alienate Tumblr’s core user base. Though we believe Tumblr’s model does have switching costs for users, we do not view its actual barriers to entry as particularly high.”

If you want to do the math on what it would take for Yahoo to justify the price tag, Brian Pitz, an analyst at Jefferies, has sketched it out. By his count, Yahoo will need to figure out a way to make $127 million a year in profit from Tumblr, meaning the site would have to bring in an additional $950 million annually in advertising revenue.

That’s a big challenge, especially considering that Ms. Mayer pledged that while she planned to add more ads to Tumblr, she would do so mostly on the site’s “dashboard” or newsfeed.

“We would like to look at them and understand how we could introduce ads — in a very light ad load — where the impact is really created, because the ads really fit the users’ expectations and follow the form and function of the dashboard,” Ms. Mayer said.

She said she might add advertising to user pages, but only with the permission of the blogger. That means a lot of Web pages will not be monetized.

And there is the issue of porn. Yes, porn. At least some of Tumblr’s users post images that are not exactly “work safe.” Indeed, Tumblr’s own terms of service allows for such content. Such content could make Tumblr a challenging environment for advertisers.

Tumblr’s users also regularly post copyrighted images and other content Yahoo will have to find a way to police. When Tumblr was just an upstart, content owners were unlikely to pursue claims against the company, but now that it might be owned by a big public corporation, you can bet that copyright owners, some of whom compete with Yahoo, will be contacting their lawyers.

Given all of that, you might expect me to say that Yahoo should have never proposed acquiring Tumblr. But I won’t.

It may actually turn out to be the right bet. The key is recognizing that it is a shoot-the-moon gamble. It might work out. It might not.

And even if it does not work out, analysts note that Yahoo can afford to experiment given the billions of dollars it has in cash.

As Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, wrote: “Even a squandering of $1.1 billion in cash, however unlikely that might seem to Yahoo management, would only move the sum-of-parts slightly.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

The DealBook column on Tuesday, about the similarities between Yahoo’s deal for Tumblr and its deal more than a decade ago for GeoCities, misidentified an analyst from Barclays Capital who commented on the Tumblr transaction in a note to investors. He is Anthony DiClemente — not Doug Anmuth, who is an analyst for JPMorgan Chase.

Alan F. Westin, Who Transformed Privacy Debate Before the Web Era, Dies at 83

The cause was cancer, his family said.

A lawyer and political scientist, Mr. Westin was at his death emeritus professor of public law at Columbia, where he had taught for nearly 40 years.

Through his work — notably his book “Privacy and Freedom,” published in 1967 and still a canonical text — Mr. Westin was considered to have created, almost single-handedly, the modern field of privacy law. He testified frequently on the subject before Congress, spoke about it on television and radio and wrote about it for newspapers and magazines.

“He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis,” Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “He transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others.”

Since the first hominid grunted gossip about the hominid next door, every new communications medium has entailed new impingements on privacy. In a seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, were the first to articulate privacy as a legal right, defining it as “the right to be let alone.”

Brandeis and Warren were concerned primarily with covert photography; later scholarship, including work by Mr. Westin in the 1950s, centered on things like illegal wiretapping.

But by the 1960s and ’70s, as the widespread computerization of legal, financial, medical and other personal records loomed, technology had outrun the law.

Reproductive rights cases of the period — including the landmark Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — held that the Constitution protected an individual’s right to privacy in matters of the human body, including contraceptive use and abortion rights. But the law was largely silent on the question of how personal data might be used by government or the private sector.

During these years, long before the personal computer and longer still before the Internet, Mr. Westin set out to codify just this kind of privacy for the modern age.

“He knew social history, and he could appreciate the directions that the technology was pushing the social contract,” Lance J. Hoffman, the director of George Washington’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, said in an interview.

Individuals, Mr. Westin argued in “Privacy and Freedom,” have the right to determine how much of their personal information is disclosed and to whom, how it should be maintained and how disseminated.

“This concept became the cornerstone of our modern right to privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “Part of ‘Privacy and Freedom’ is the argument that privacy enables freedom.”

“Privacy and Freedom” received two prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award and the Hillman Prize.

The book, along with other work by Mr. Westin, is widely considered the foundation of a spate of modern privacy laws, among them the Privacy Act of 1974, the first law to delimit the gathering and use of personal information by the federal government.

Mr. Westin was no absolutist. In his early work on wiretapping, for instance, he condoned its use in certain instances, including cases where national security was at stake.

His argument prefigured the current national debate about privacy engendered by post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act, which Mr. Westin, in a 2003 interview, called “a justified piece of legislation.”

“He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance,” Mr. Rosen said. “Much of his work in the 1960s and ’70s appears so prescient after 9/11 and in the age of Internet.”

When it came to the use of consumers’ personal data by corporations, Mr. Westin also steered a middle course. Consumers were entitled to withhold such data, he argued, but were equally entitled, if they wished, to have it used to alert them to products and services targeted to their interests. (This stance caused Mr. Westin to be accused by some critics of allying himself too closely with business interests.)

Mr. Westin, who in the 1970s was editor in chief of The Civil Liberties Review, a publication of the American Civil Liberties Foundation, published and edited the newsletter Privacy & American Business from 1993 to 2006. He was a consultant on privacy issues to major corporations, including Equifax, the consumer credit reporting giant; GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical concern; and Verizon Communications.

Mr. Westin’s wife died before him, as did a son, David. His survivors include a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Debra Westin; and three grandchildren.

A posthumous book by Mr. Westin, about privacy as a historically and philosophically Jewish construct, is being completed by Mr. Rosen.

In recent years, Mr. Westin turned his attention to the Niagara of personal data loosed by Google, Facebook and their ilk. Trying to stem this tide was a hopeless task, and he knew it.

“He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can’t be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions,” Mr. Rosen said.

The son of Irving Westin and the former Etta Furman, Alan Furman Westin was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1929; received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1948, followed by a law degree from Harvard in 1951; was admitted to the bar in 1952; married Bea Shapoff, a teacher, in 1954 in a ceremony in which the bride wore a waltz-length white gown; joined the Columbia faculty in 1959; earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1965 (his dissertation topic was “Privacy in Western Political History”); lived for many years in Teaneck, N.J.; edited a string of books, including “Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America” (1964), “Information Technology in a Democracy” (1971) and “Getting Angry Six Times a Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons” (1979); once made a sound recording titled “I Wonder Who’s Bugging You Now”; was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Congress; had a Social Security number obtained in Massachusetts; and was a registered Democrat who last voted in 2011 — all public information, obtainable online at the touch of a button or two.

When Phones Come Out Long Before the Turkey

Mr. Spivak, 23, is spending the holiday with his boyfriend’s family in Kennesaw, Ga. His mother will be in Virginia with his grandmother. His sister will be in Ohio, his father and brother in Florida. And his friends will be all over the country.

So he’ll post photographs of dinner to show his tight inner circle on Facebook, send out more general Thanksgiving cheer to his 11,000 Twitter followers and post images of the prettiest dishes to Instagram.

To stay close to his mother, he will use the videoconferencing feature on his phone to talk to her as he sits down to eat.

Multiply Mr. Spivak’s social media activity by that of the millions of others who will be using the platforms to record their Thanksgivings, and this year’s holiday could be the most documented in history.

“This year, more than ever before, we will see how we get along as a national family,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project in Washington. All of the strengths and weaknesses of the American family will be on full display, he said.

Not long ago, pulling out a phone to send a photograph of Thanksgiving dinner or a text about the proceedings was considered rude, a violation of the “eat it, don’t tweet it” rule.

But almost 40 percent of the 234 million Americans over the age of 13 with a mobile phone now use a social network, according to the analyst group comScore, and the numbers are growing fast. Instagram, the darling of people who love to share pictures of what they’re eating, has more than doubled its members to more than 100 million in less than a year, according to Facebook, the company that bought Instagram this spring. Facebook says Thanksgiving is one of its busiest days of the year.

At Twitter, as the holiday approached, the words “turkey,” “Thanksgiving” and “thankful” have been appearing in those 140-word posts more and more each year. In 2011, use of “thankful” alone was up 263 percent on the network from 2010, and more than a thousandfold from a non-holiday, the company said.

“People are sharing on such a scale for common experiences like Thanksgiving,” said Mor Naaman, a professor at Rutgers University and the founder of Mahaya, a social media start-up. “The potential is just mind-blowing.”

Mr. Naaman, along with others who research humanities, social sciences and media trends, says the development of such a vast pool of documentation has staggering possibilities for understanding American culture — at least once they figure out how to harness and make sense of it.

“There is a lot of information that will be available and ready to mine like never before,” he said. “When do the family arguments start? How many people watch the football games? How much do people drink?”

The desire to share a common experience will bring out Sarah Han’s phone with regularity as she and her boyfriend prepare dinner for her extended family in their new house in Oakland, Calif.

Her mother used to take pictures constantly, many of which ended up in a photo album. Sending images of her meal to her followers through Instagram isn’t any different, she says, except that no one has to paste photographs into a book.

And instant photo-sharing creates something a traditional collection of snapshots cannot.

“It is kind of cool when you are on Instagram, and you see a common thread throughout an event,” said Ms. Han, 34, who works as a producer for The Bold Italic, an online magazine in San Francisco.

She cited a double rainbow that recently arced across the city’s skyline.

“Literally within five minutes, everyone’s photos were of a double rainbow,” she said. “The same thing will happen this Thanksgiving. You’ll see everyone’s table setting and turkey and see how everyone does it differently.”

Of course, not everyone is thrilled that Thanksgiving is becoming something to document constantly and share obsessively. The argument is as old as the mobile phone: by trying to stay connected, we end up being less connected.

“The problem is when the cellphones come out, people will take a picture, but then they’ll check Facebook and check e-mail, and it becomes an obsession that distracts everyone,” said Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who writes often about the effects of technology on family life.

Once, people took a photograph and had the patience to get it developed, reliving the moment well after it was over.

“So document the moment, and then worry about passing it around later,” she said. “You don’t need these instant updates of, ‘Oh, look, Grandma’s eating cranberries.’ ”

Sharing that shot of your partner trying to carve the turkey means an instant connection for families celebrating apart.

Most of Rebecca Palsha’s family doesn’t live in Anchorage, where she is a television reporter. She will use social media to keep them close as she and her husband, another journalist, prepare dinner for 10 this year.

Still, she realizes there comes a point where the moment might be better simply experienced.

“At some point, you have to put your phone away,” she said. “You have to realize when it’s time to talk to people here instead of people who aren’t with you.”

Mr. Spivak, a social media manager for Atlantic Station, a planned urban community in Atlanta, disagrees.

“It’s not that you’re missing out on real life,” he said. “Maybe now this is what’s becoming real life.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

Down From Jump: Famous Baby Mommas Who Were Baby Mommas Before Fame

Usually people associate baby mommas as women that came in the game after someone gets famous, has his baby and gets rich. That’s not always the case as many baby mommas were down from day one, just getting lucky that their men went on to stardom. Maybe hese ladies just know a good investment when they see one and should play the stock market or something. Either way, commend them for being down since day one.

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Khloe And Lamar Matrimony-dom In Trouble? Is The NBA Baller Mad His Wife Put Work Before Family?

KHLOE KARDASHIAN scored a slam dunk when she was asked to co-host “The X Factor” – but the prospective gig has left her hoops-playing hubby Lamar Odom feeling like he’s been fouled!

According to insiders, Lamar, 32, is in­censed that 28-year-old Khloe is going back on her word to dedicate this year to starting a family and supporting his NBA comeback in Los Angeles.

“Khloe told Lamar that this was going to be his time – she even agreed to put the third season of their reality show on hold so he could concentrate on getting his confidence back on the bas­ketball court,” said a source.

In April, Lamar was listed as “inactive” with the Dallas Mavericks and did not play for the remainder of the season. But he got another shot when he was traded to the L.A. Clippers in June.

“Khloe promised that his career would be the priority,” continued the insider. “She also agreed that they would spend more time to­gether in an attempt to have a baby.

“They’ve been trying for three years without any luck. And Khloe’s been gung-ho about al­ternative conception methods – including IVF.

“But now she is going to be totally consumed with ‘The X Factor,’ and he’ll be spending a lot of time on the road with the Clippers. So they’ll see less of each other than ever.”

The couple celebrated their third wedding anniversary on Sept. 27, but now friends say there’s so much tension between them that they may not make it an­other year.

In an interview earlier this year, Khloe insisted that women should “put [their] husband first,” and added that “part of being married is knowing when your hus­band needs your support.”

But when Simon Cowell asked Khloe to be co-host on “The X Factor’s” second season with “Extra” hunk Mario Lopez, she seemed quick to put Lamar’s needs on the back burner. She’s been telling pals the offer was simply “too good” to turn down.

“It will bring her huge expo­sure, a large paycheck and make her an even bigger name,” noted the insider.

“Lamar is really hurt and angry. He can’t help feeling be­trayed by Khloe’s decision to spend more time on her career than on his. It’s like she’s choosing money over love.”

Tell that ninja to sit his big depressed azz down somewhere! What if he ends up inactive again? Then he’ll be glad his wife has paper to pay all the bills they’re generating in that house.

Do you think Lamar has a point though? If they’re trying to get pregnant shouldn’t Khloe be resting and taking it easy instead of working on a demanding TV set?

Bits Blog: H.P.’s Chief Says a Revival Is Unlikely Before 2016

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Hewlett-Packard needs four more years “to have confidence in itself,” says Meg Whitman, the company’s chief executive.

7:45 p.m. | Updated

SAN FRANCISCO — Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, beat up her company on Wednesday.

Ms. Whitman told a meeting of Wall Street analysts that they should expect sharply lower revenue and profits. She also told them not to expect the company to fully right itself before 2016. “We have much more work to do,” she said.

While the news was not completely unexpected, the vehemence of Ms. Whitman’s message drove shareholders to the exits. H.P.’s stock dropped about 8 percent while she was speaking and ended the day at $14.91 a share, down nearly 13 percent on unusually high trading volume. The stock had not been that low in a decade.

The drubbing was probably what Ms. Whitman, the former chief  of eBay, had in mind. Executives involved in her presentation, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said she wanted to get as much bad news as possible out at once, so the company could focus on rebuilding rather than having to explain one disappointing quarter after another.

Analysts, while somewhat taken aback by the depth of H.P.’s problems, thought Ms. Whitman had made the right move in putting them out in the open. “In an era where C.E.O.’s watch every word they say, it’s refreshing to see complete candor. H.P. is a mess,” said Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights and Strategy, who attended the meeting. “It will take five to 10 years to fully take care of this, just the way it took I.B.M. to remake itself. Wall Street doesn’t like anything longer than a one- to three-year horizon. It’s too much risk for them.”

For now, Hewlett-Packard is still the world’s leader in sales of personal computers, printers and computer servers, with revenue last year of $127 billion, but it forecast revenue next year of 11 percent to 13 percent below fiscal 2012 levels. Analysts had assumed it would only decrease about 1 percent.

Operating profit margins, which have been about 7 percent, could evaporate completely or, at best, shrink to about 3 percent, the company said. Earnings per share were expected to fall by about 16 percent from what analysts had projected.

The meeting was probably also Ms. Whitman’s last chance to blame previous leaders for any of H.P.’s problems. Since 1999, H.P. has had three other chief executives, each with a different vision and operating strategy. All left under duress, leaving a company that leads the industry in revenue but is internally chaotic.

Those problems now belong to Ms. Whitman, who took over almost 13 months ago. She has replaced a number of top executives, and has initiated changes to product development and the company’s global marketing and branding. These changes will start to appear next year, but she is clearly impatient to fix more things faster.

“Operational excellence should have become a way of life,” she told analysts, but instead, H.P. is hampered by poor internal communications and management systems.

“I’ve learned at H.P. that you do not get what you expect, you get what you inspect,” she said.

Investors may also have been troubled by some of Ms. Whitman’s strategy. She intends to shrink the number of products H.P. makes, and to move out of businesses that are in decline.

For example, she said the company made more than 2,100 varieties of laser printers, causing excess costs in everything from parts to packaging requirements.

Printer cartridges were once responsible for over 90 percent of H.P.’s profits, but they face increasing competition from lower-price suppliers. Consumers are also using their printers less because many of the things they used to print routinely, like maps and boarding passes, are on smartphones.

H.P. is reversing its printer strategy in the developing world by selling cheaper cartridges and more expensive printers. In developed economies like the United States, it wants to move to a subscription model in which business customers pay an annual fee, and their Internet-connected printers get new cartridges when the system detects they are low on ink.

Investors could be skittish about plans like these, simply because they are not yet proved. Indeed, H.P. shares fell further as Ms. Whitman’s lieutenants laid out the new strategies.

In other areas, there are questions about whether H.P.’s new products can replace, or even surpass, the revenue lost from declining businesses. Cloud computing systems, which consist of thousands of servers sold as a unit, are meant for an increasingly important market. Cloud computing is more efficient than existing systems, however, which means it is likely to lower the overall demand for large numbers of servers.

For all the difficulties she identified, Ms. Whitman may have actually cloaked other long-term problems. The new company she foresees, which she projected would exist by 2016 or so, would probably increase revenue no faster than the overall growth of the global economy. Profit margins would improve from better management, but not necessarily from technological innovations.

The new H.P. would most likely employ fewer workers, as well. Ms. Whitman has already announced a total of 29,000 layoffs. The company had 349,600 employees at the end of last October. She said future profitability would depend in part on more automation, indicating even more job cuts.

While Ms. Whitman said H.P. must focus more closely on its top 14 markets and its main  competitors, a continued low stock price may present other worries. The tech industry is facing a transition from traditional PCs and servers to mobile devices and cloud computing, and is consolidating. H.P. could become a target either for corporate raiders or for another tech company in a hostile takeover.

Bits Blog: A New Google App Gives You Local Information - Before You Ask for It

Google has created a new mobile app that gives people facts about the places around them — unprompted, without the need to even ask for the information.

The app, Field Trip, offers historical trivia about a park, an architectural factoid about a building or reviews of a nearby restaurant. Google says it’s like having a local friend with you as you make your way through a city.

“The idea behind the app was to build something that would help people connect with the real, physical world around them,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product at Google who runs a small lab at the company building location-based and social mobile apps. “It’s always running in the background, so it knows where you are and is always looking to see if something interesting is in your immediate physical environment.”

While the app might seem small, it reveals a lot about the big directions Google wants to go.

Google, along with other companies and researchers, dreams of so-called ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence — computers woven into the texture of life as opposed to being separate machines. Eventually, the theory goes, computers will be part of the environment, know where people are and anticipate what they want to know.

The Field Trip app is a small step in that direction, and an example of what Google is capable of doing. Another is Google Glass, the Internet-connected eyeglass frames with a small screen. With Field Trip, Google is trying to move beyond the first generation of mobile apps, which were not much more than desktop transplants, Mr. Hanke said.

Google wants to “move the device out of your way and put the information front and center,” he said, so people can “scan the environment and know what the Web knows about the places around you.”

Fans of “Iron Man,” “The Terminator” or William Gibson’s science fiction will recognize this idea of augmented reality, he said. “What we’re doing is essentially building the information framework and tools to enable that kind of experience in the future.”

More immediately, Field Trip is a big step toward helping Google get its services and ads in front of mobile users. While it has long been a dream of advertising companies to deliver ads to people on their phones when they are near a business, that is still relatively rare. But with Field Trip, Google is able to show restaurant reviews from its Zagat service or sell deals from Google Offers or city tours from Vayable, all based on a person’s location.

In addition to Google’s own services, most of the information in Field Trip comes from a few dozen publishing partners, some esoteric, including Arcadia Publishing, Atlas Obscura, Curbed, Eater and Cool Hunting.

Field Trip uses signals from nearby cellphone towers to determine a user’s location. Its users can choose from which publishers they receive alerts — so they could turn off alerts for Google Offers, for instance — and how frequently they want to receive them. They can also choose not to receive alerts, in which case they open the app to find information.

Users can also ask Field Trip to read them notifications if the phone is connected to a headset or Bluetooth or if they are driving — and the app will determine on its own that they are driving based on how fast they are moving.

Mr. Hanke, who co-founded Keyhole, a mapping start-up that Google bought to help it develop maps, was the head of Google Maps for several years. Last year, he decided he wanted to leave Google to found another start-up. But Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, persuaded him to stay, Mr. Hanke said, and start a small lab in San Francisco. He named it Niantic Labs, after a ship that traveled to San Francisco during the Gold Rush.

Field Trip is available for Android phones; Google is working on an iPhone version. To introduce the app, Google on Saturday is playing host at parties in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis for people to explore the cities. Attendance is free. Registration is at FieldTripDay.com.

Gadgetwise Blog: An iPhone 5 Case Arrives Before the iPhone 5

Before the announcement of the new iPhone 5 was made, the first protective case for the 5 arrived on my desk. I also got a news release promising me that another case was available as well.

How is it possible to build a case for a phone wrapped in secrecy?

The iPhone and many iPhone accessories are manufactured in Shenzhen, China. “There has always been a bit of a rumor mill around the companies in Shenzhen,” said Tim Hickman, whose company Hard Candy Holdings makes both cases I mentioned, one under the Hard Candy brand and one under the Gumdrop brand.

Mr. Hickman said Shenzhen manufacturers routinely pass around design information to the point where it is no longer an open secret but a strategy to attract customers like Mr. Hickman. “The factories have gone from, ‘Shhh, hey, buddy, look at what I have for you,’ to making it part of their presentation,” he said.

Mr. Hickman said his company doesn’t pay for design information or seek it out, but it will examine what it is offered. “We’ve literally had the information e-mailed to use blindly from several factories, so that’s where the data comes from.”

Still, being first to market still holds risks. Mr. Hickman said his company prepared cases based on rumors of a new iPhone last October. “It was a swing and a miss,” he said. “We spent the money to make all of the tooling but didn’t have the lead time to physically make cases.”

This time, though, he said his confidence level was higher. One reason is that a factory with a good track record said it could make cases for the iPhone 5, but rather than show the plans to Mr. Hickman, it had him send designs that the factory would modify.

He lowered the risk this time by ordering the tooling and 5,000 units of each case design, the $45 Gumdrop Drop Tech Series and the $40 Hard Candy Shock Drop. He chose not to ship them from China until he was certain that the phone was really available this time. “The product cost itself is not overly significant,” said Mr. Hickman. “The freight can be more than the iPhone case itself.”

Some of the cases – 3,000 of each were sold overseas, leaving 2,000 of each for the United States – will arrive here in about three days and should start shipping to customers on Sept. 21 or 22,  Mr. Hickman said.

How well the cases fit the phone, I can’t say. I have the case, but no phone.

App Smart: Apps That Recall a Time Before There Were Apps

Now, an app on your smartphone or tablet is that time machine.

Today we’re all playing casual phone games or epics like Skyrim. But if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember the era of home computer games fondly.

Commodore 64 fans will spot the $5 Commodore 64 app in the iTunes App Store with glee, because it even gives you a chance to type in Basic programs. It has a few reproductions of classic games, and more are available as an in-app purchase. The free Android app Frodo C64 is a little simpler, but it requires you to find the original source code for games elsewhere online.

If you were a fan of the ZX Spectrum computer, you’ll love the $9 iPad app 100 Greatest Hits. It has classic 1980s-era 8-bit games from Elite, with more available via an in-app purchase. Everything is emulated nicely, including some of the quirky sound and graphics of the Spectrum. Marvin on Android is a similar free app that goes even further because it emulates the Spectrum’s interface — though again you have to find your own game files.

Atari game fans can download the free Atari’s Greatest Hits app for iOS. This official app contains the classic arcade game Missile Command direct from Atari’s own files and 100 more games via in-app purchase.

Instagram’s retro photo filters are well known. But there are other apps that do the same trick for the higher-resolution photos stored in your phone. For a great app to add a dash of yesteryear’s sepia to photos, try Photo Editor by Aviary, free on iOS and Android. It’s a powerful app, but simple to use. If you spend $1 on its in-app nostalgia pack you can apply some classic effects (and defects) to your photos, even layering them on top of one another.

For a different type of retro effect, I love the $1 iOS app 1-Bit Camera. This generates black-and-white pixilated images like those from the early days of the Macintosh computer. For an even more geeky imaging effect, check out Image to ASCII Lite, free on iOS, or AsciiArt Booth, free on Android. Both are simple apps that turn photos into an array of letters that, from afar, look like the original image.

If you’re nostalgic for vintage films then 8mm Vintage Camera — a very successful $2 iOS app — will be right up your street, thanks to its easy-to-use interface and the great blurry clips it generates. I love its comedic effect when I record my children’s antics on video.

The free Android app Videocam Illusion may actually be a more powerful app because it lets you add different layers of effects, including the 8mm effect. But I found that it was a bit more complex to operate, and the maker warns that some effects will really challenge the processor in less-powerful Android devices.

The app VinylLove, $1 on iOS, tries to bring back some of the old magic of vinyl records. The app’s interface is designed to let you search through your MP3s as if they were stored in a record crate. It places an emphasis on playing and listening to albums in track order, which is a fast-disappearing habit. It’s fun, and if you’re a vinyl fan you may appreciate its visual aesthetic. The static noise effect of dusty records is also rather endearing.

For a different nostalgic sound try out Nostalgic Phone Ringtones, free on Android, which will let your 21st-century smartphone ring with some distinctly 20th-century sounds. (The ads are a bit irritating, but you won’t spend much time in this app.)

To capture the dulcet tones of the Stylophone, and bring back memories of Kraftwerk’s music, check out the $3 Synthophone iOS app. It recreates the look and sounds of that old electronic pocket instrument. For an even older electronic sound try the free Accelerophone app on Windows Phone. It’s not hands-free like a theremin, but it uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope so waving it about is fun.

Enjoy your trip down memory lane!

Quick Calls

New on the iTunes App Store is the $2 app Eisenhower. It’s a “getting things done” app that uses a novel system for organizing your tasks — the Eisenhower matrix. This helps you by timing you during priority events. ... The social Q. and A. Web site Quora — always handy when looking for an informed answer to a question — is releasing its free Android app this week. It comes with neat features like voice search using Android’s built-in system, and it will let you pin some of its content to a widget on your home screen.

Check Out the Before Watchmen: Moloch #1 Cover

As revealed last month, DC Comics has more Before Watchmen on the way in the form of Before Watchmen: Moloch. Today, BuzzFeed revealed the cover to issue #1.

Before Watchmen: Moloch is written by J. Michael Straczynski with art by Eduardo Risso.

Joey is IGN's Comics Editor and a comic book creator himself. Follow Joey on Twitter, or find him on IGN. He loves superhero pets so hard.

Gadgetwise Blog: An iPhone 5 Case Arrives Before the iPhone 5

Before the announcement of the new iPhone 5 was made, the first protective case for the 5 arrived on my desk. I also got a news release promising me that another case was available as well.

How is it possible to build a case for a phone wrapped in secrecy?

The iPhone and many iPhone accessories are manufactured in Shenzhen, China. “There has always been a bit of a rumor mill around the companies in Shenzhen,” said Tim Hickman, whose company Hard Candy Holdings makes both cases I mentioned, one under the Hard Candy brand and one under the Gumdrop brand.

Mr. Hickman said Shenzhen manufacturers routinely pass around design information to the point where it is no longer an open secret but a strategy to attract customers like Mr. Hickman. “The factories have gone from, ‘Shhh, hey, buddy, look at what I have for you,’ to making it part of their presentation,” he said.

Mr. Hickman said his company doesn’t pay for design information or seek it out, but it will examine what it is offered. “We’ve literally had the information e-mailed to use blindly from several factories, so that’s where the data comes from.”

Still, being first to market still holds risks. Mr. Hickman said his company prepared cases based on rumors of a new iPhone last October. “It was a swing and a miss,” he said. “We spent the money to make all of the tooling but didn’t have the lead time to physically make cases.”

This time, though, he said his confidence level was higher. One reason is that a factory with a good track record said it could make cases for the iPhone 5, but rather than show the plans to Mr. Hickman, it had him send designs that the factory would modify.

He lowered the risk this time by ordering the tooling and 5,000 units of each case design, the $45 Gumdrop Drop Tech Series and the $40 Hard Candy Shock Drop. He chose not to ship them from China until he was certain that the phone was really available this time. “The product cost itself is not overly significant,” said Mr. Hickman. “The freight can be more than the iPhone case itself.”

Some of the cases – 3,000 of each were sold overseas, leaving 2,000 of each for the United States – will arrive here in about three days and should start shipping to customers on Sept. 21 or 22,  Mr. Hickman said.

How well the cases fit the phone, I can’t say. I have the case, but no phone.

App Smart: Apps That Recall a Time Before There Were Apps

Now, an app on your smartphone or tablet is that time machine.

Today we’re all playing casual phone games or epics like Skyrim. But if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember the era of home computer games fondly.

Commodore 64 fans will spot the $5 Commodore 64 app in the iTunes App Store with glee, because it even gives you a chance to type in Basic programs. It has a few reproductions of classic games, and more are available as an in-app purchase. The free Android app Frodo C64 is a little simpler, but it requires you to find the original source code for games elsewhere online.

If you were a fan of the ZX Spectrum computer, you’ll love the $9 iPad app 100 Greatest Hits. It has classic 1980s-era 8-bit games from Elite, with more available via an in-app purchase. Everything is emulated nicely, including some of the quirky sound and graphics of the Spectrum. Marvin on Android is a similar free app that goes even further because it emulates the Spectrum’s interface — though again you have to find your own game files.

Atari game fans can download the free Atari’s Greatest Hits app for iOS. This official app contains the classic arcade game Missile Command direct from Atari’s own files and 100 more games via in-app purchase.

Instagram’s retro photo filters are well known. But there are other apps that do the same trick for the higher-resolution photos stored in your phone. For a great app to add a dash of yesteryear’s sepia to photos, try Photo Editor by Aviary, free on iOS and Android. It’s a powerful app, but simple to use. If you spend $1 on its in-app nostalgia pack you can apply some classic effects (and defects) to your photos, even layering them on top of one another.

For a different type of retro effect, I love the $1 iOS app 1-Bit Camera. This generates black-and-white pixilated images like those from the early days of the Macintosh computer. For an even more geeky imaging effect, check out Image to ASCII Lite, free on iOS, or AsciiArt Booth, free on Android. Both are simple apps that turn photos into an array of letters that, from afar, look like the original image.

If you’re nostalgic for vintage films then 8mm Vintage Camera — a very successful $2 iOS app — will be right up your street, thanks to its easy-to-use interface and the great blurry clips it generates. I love its comedic effect when I record my children’s antics on video.

The free Android app Videocam Illusion may actually be a more powerful app because it lets you add different layers of effects, including the 8mm effect. But I found that it was a bit more complex to operate, and the maker warns that some effects will really challenge the processor in less-powerful Android devices.

The app VinylLove, $1 on iOS, tries to bring back some of the old magic of vinyl records. The app’s interface is designed to let you search through your MP3s as if they were stored in a record crate. It places an emphasis on playing and listening to albums in track order, which is a fast-disappearing habit. It’s fun, and if you’re a vinyl fan you may appreciate its visual aesthetic. The static noise effect of dusty records is also rather endearing.

For a different nostalgic sound try out Nostalgic Phone Ringtones, free on Android, which will let your 21st-century smartphone ring with some distinctly 20th-century sounds. (The ads are a bit irritating, but you won’t spend much time in this app.)

To capture the dulcet tones of the Stylophone, and bring back memories of Kraftwerk’s music, check out the $3 Synthophone iOS app. It recreates the look and sounds of that old electronic pocket instrument. For an even older electronic sound try the free Accelerophone app on Windows Phone. It’s not hands-free like a theremin, but it uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope so waving it about is fun.

Enjoy your trip down memory lane!

Quick Calls

New on the iTunes App Store is the $2 app Eisenhower. It’s a “getting things done” app that uses a novel system for organizing your tasks — the Eisenhower matrix. This helps you by timing you during priority events. ... The social Q. and A. Web site Quora — always handy when looking for an informed answer to a question — is releasing its free Android app this week. It comes with neat features like voice search using Android’s built-in system, and it will let you pin some of its content to a widget on your home screen.