Facebook Shares Touch a Symbolic Threshold

On Wednesday morning, the company’s stock crossed an important psychological barrier, trading above $38 a share, the price at which Facebook, the world’s leading social network, first sold shares to the public in May 2012.

The catalyst for the rise was the company’s surprisingly strong second-quarter earnings report last Wednesday, which quelled many investors’ doubts about Facebook’s ability to make money from its legions of mobile users and suggested that the company’s profit stream would continue growing.

Since last week’s report, shares have risen about 34 percent. Early Wednesday, they briefly touched $38.31 a share, although they pulled back to end at $36.80 a share at the time the market closed.

The company’s shares hit a low of $17.55 last fall. Since then, investors have warmed to the company as its management demonstrated that it can increase profits and not just users.

“There was a perception that they hadn’t monetized the users they have,” said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at the Raymond James brokerage firm, referring to last summer, when the Facebook’s stock was trading at half the current level.

These days, Wall Street sees revenue potential everywhere — from soon-to-come video ads in the Facebook news feed to the expansion of high-dollar ads targeted to specific swaths of Facebook users.

“Facebook was caught flat-footed by the shift to mobile,” said Mark S. Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Now, he said, “they appear to be set up as a sustainable, high-growth business.”

Still, there are reasons to be concerned. Mobile messaging platforms like Snapchat and WhatsApp are grabbing the attention of many of Facebook’s younger users. Twitter is mounting a major effort to go after marketers, especially brands that typically advertise on television, as it prepares for its own likely public offering.

And Facebook risks turning off users with too many ads. About 1 in 20 items in the news feed, the main flow of items that a Facebook user sees, is an ad. During the company’s quarterly conference call with analysts, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said that users were beginning to notice the number of ads, suggesting that the company could not greatly increase their frequency without losing some users.

Nate Elliott, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, said Facebook users who visit the site on a computer’s browser still see too many cheap, poorly targeted ads on the right side of the page. “They’ve got to get much better at targeting,” he said.

Despite these worries, investors’ views of the company’s prospects have clearly changed.

Mr. Mahaney, whose firm has a $40 price target on the Facebook stock, said that analysts across Wall Street had increased their projections of the company’s financial performance. Analysts now expect Facebook to increase its profits 30 to 35 percent a year through 2015.

Because stocks tend to trade as a multiple of a company’s future profits, those upgrades last week sent Facebook’s stock soaring.

Facebook officials declined to comment on the stock rise on Wednesday. But for the company’s executives, who had urged investors to be patient as their strategy played out, the surge surely offers some vindication.

The company raised $16 billion from the initial public offering on May 18, 2012, vaulting it into the big leagues of American stocks, but problems struck immediately. The Nasdaq stock exchange botched the handling of buy and sell orders on the first day of trading — so badly, in fact, that regulators eventually fined Nasdaq $10 million for the fiasco.

In ensuing weeks, Facebook shares continued to fall. Instead of pouring into the stock, as they did a decade earlier with Google, many investors questioned whether Facebook’s stock was overpriced at $38 a share.

Particularly worrisome was Facebook’s seemingly nonexistent mobile strategy just as Internet users were abandoning PCs for their smartphones. The company’s smartphone and iPad applications were clunky, and it was generating no revenue from mobile ads.

Facebook’s management, including Mr. Zuckerberg, recognized the problem and began a crash course to revamp the company’s approach to mobile and better position the company for fast-growing emerging markets.

The company overhauled its apps, introduced ads into its users’ news feeds, and created a new category of revenue called app-install ads. With the app-install ads, a game maker, for example, can promote its new game in Facebook’s mobile software and give users an easy way to install the app with just a couple of clicks.

Facebook also introduced new advertising products meant to give marketers more ways to target specific groups of customers, which allowed the service to charge higher advertising rates.

While mobile advertising continues to grow, and was about 41 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue in the second quarter, investors are also looking to new areas of potential profit growth. Those include video advertising in the news feed, which is expected to begin later this year, and the possible sale of ads in Instagram, the fast-growing photo and video-sharing app that Facebook bought in 2012.

“All of those seem like relatively large low-hanging fruit, and they are starting to go after them,” Mr. Mahaney said.

Touch Screens Are Tested for Piloting Passenger Jets

With a swipe of his finger across its surface, Mr. Bonnet called up a list of European airports and selected Charles de Gaulle, near Paris. A vivid three-dimensional map appeared, representing a proposed flight plan, which he manipulated using the familiar pinch and zoom gestures used to operate smartphones and tablet computers. The development of touch-screen technology has enabled a similar revolutionary new approach to cockpit design.

By the end of the decade, says Thales, one of the world’s largest makers of aircraft cockpits, pilots could start dispensing with buttons, trackballs and keypads for performing many routine flying tasks in favor of icons that can be dragged and slide-to-scroll menus.

“The idea is to reduce as much as possible the number of buttons and control panels and replace them with virtualization,” said Mr. Bonnet, the head of cockpit innovation at Thales.

“We have reached such a high level of complexity today,” he said, with the flood of data that streams into cockpit computers from the plane’s systems and from the ground. “We want to create an interaction that is more intuitive and that reduces the workload, helping to keep the pilot focused on flying.”

Since the transition more than a generation ago from mechanical flight controls to fly-by-wire systems that use computers to control many aspects of flight, avionics engineers have sought to harness the power of electronics to make air travel safer and more efficient. While marketing touch screens for cockpits is a way to get plane makers and airlines to upgrade their systems, the migration toward touch screens is advanced by manufacturers as having the potential to enhance flight safety and improve efficiency.

Touch-screen advocates list several advantages over traditional cockpits, including the elimination of physical space constraints for instrument displays, since all the information the flight crew needs can be searched for and reached from the same set of screens. The displays can also be customized to present only the relevant data and input options that the pilot needs for a specific phase of the flight, be it takeoff, cruise or landing.

“It’s a bit like using your iPhone to find a pizza place,” said Mr. Bonnet of Thales. “You are very happy, once you have located it on your map, to be able to have the telephone number displayed as well — the right information, close to where you would expect it to be and not somewhere deep inside the user interface. The idea is to hide the complexity.”

Of course, avionics makers face challenges familiar to anyone who has tried to read a tablet outdoors on a sunny day or type a text message while being jostled in the back seat of a speeding taxi. “Sunlight readability is a big one that we are working to solve, because unlike a portable device, you can’t pick up a dashboard display to turn it” away from the sun, said Kenneth Snodgrass, director of technical sales at Honeywell International in Phoenix, another avionics maker. “A second is inadvertent touch. If you’re flying in bad weather, in turbulence, and you need to be able to change something, you have to be able to make sure you get it right.”

Touch screens first made their way into military jets two decades ago, when Thales integrated the technology into the cockpit of the French Rafale fighter. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being developed by Lockheed Martin will also have instrument panels with touch-screen interfaces. But the concept is still relatively new to commercial jets.

Two years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States and its counterparts in other countries approved the use of so-called electronic flight bags. Pilots could replace reams of paper operating manuals, checklists and charts with digital versions loaded onto a tablet computer. Several airlines have embraced this paperless system.

“Touch screens have had to earn their way on board,” said Mr. Snodgrass. “It can’t just be a bunch of pretty colors. It has to be something the pilot can use.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 9, 2013

A picture on Saturday with an article about the development of touch screen controls for passenger jets carried an incorrect credit. The photograph of a touch screen was taken by Kathy Houser of Rockwell Collins; it was not provided by the Thales Group.

Gadgetwise Blog: Harmony Touch Remote Needs Some Tuning

Logitech’s Harmony remotes have long made it possible to reduce the collection of clickers on your coffee table by combining them into a single Harmony device.

The newest entry, the Harmony Touch, adds a 2.4-inch touch screen. And why not? People must want touch screens, right?

The $250 Touch is a smart looking device, now cleared of busy-looking buttons. But the touch screen did not make it any less work than a device covered with buttons.

That is because to get access to buttons, you have to go through multiple screens. On my old remote, when I want to scroll through the listings a page at a time, I toggle the “Page Up” button. When I want to do the same thing with the Touch, I go from the watch TV screen, to a command screen, and scroll to the Page Up and Page Down buttons. Or I can go one screen deeper, to the “gestures screen,” then slide a finger up or down to control the onscreen guide.

I often had difficulty getting to the screen I wanted. I’m sure it becomes easier with practice.

A touch screen makes sense when searching for a show, though. Instead of having to toggle around a grid of letters to spell out the title or name, you can type it. But the Touch offers a virtual alphanumeric pad, as on rudimentary mobile phones. To type a C, you go to the number screen, then press the number 2 three times.

The Touch offers some customization that lets you save your 50 favorite channels, making it easy to hop between them.

You can also customize the control gestures, such as what swiping a finger across the screen will do, or change the look of the screen and icons.

One of Harmony’s great strengths has been the way the remote is programmed. You connect it to a computer, then enter the makes and models of all your devices. Answer some questions about which devices control which, and you are in business.

But even this process has become harder where it was intended to be easier.

The Harmony setup page doesn’t tell you if you can make the easy transfer or not; it will simply fail over and over again for no apparent reason. The people at Logitech said they were working on that. I would suggest a few other things they need to work on, too. For example, why have separate IDs and passwords for the Harmony site and the Harmony devices?

A Robot With a Delicate Touch

The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.

Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future will work directly with humans in the workplace.

That is a marked shift from today’s machines, which are kept safely isolated from humans, either inside glass cages or behind laser-controlled “light curtains,” because they move with Terminator-like speed and accuracy and could flatten any human they encountered.

By contrast, Baxter, which comes encased in plastic and has a nine-foot “wingspan,” is relatively slow and imprecise in the way it moves. And it has an elaborate array of safety mechanisms and sensors to protect the human workers it assists.

Here in a brick factory that was once one of the first electrified manufacturing sites in New England, Rodney A. Brooks, the legendary roboticist who is Rethink’s founder, proves its safety by placing his head in the path of Baxter’s arm while it moves objects on an assembly line.

The arm senses his head and abruptly stops moving with a soft clunk. Dr. Brooks, unfazed, points out that the arm is what roboticists call “compliant”: intended to sense unexpected obstacles and adjust itself accordingly.

The $22,000 robot that Rethink will begin selling in October is the clearest evidence yet that robotics is more than a laboratory curiosity or a tool only for large companies with vast amounts of capital. The company is betting it can broaden the market for robots by selling an inexpensive machine that can collaborate with human workers, the way the computer industry took off in the 1980s when the prices of PCs fell sharply and people without programming experience could start using them right out of the box.

“It feels like a true Macintosh moment for the robot world,” said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw the development of the iPod and the iPhone.

Baxter will come equipped with a library of simple tasks, or behaviors — for example, a “common sense” capability to recognize it must have an object in its hand before it can move and release it.

Although it will be possible to program Baxter, the Rethink designers avoid the term. Instead they talk about “training by demonstration.” For example, to pick up an object and move it, a human will instruct the robot by physically moving its arm and making it grab the object.

The robot’s redundant layers of safety mechanisms include a crown of sonar sensors ringing its head that automatically slows its movements whenever a human approaches. Its computer-screen face turns red to let workers know that it is aware of their presence.

And each robot has a large red “e-stop” button, causing immediate shutdown, even though Dr. Brooks says it is about as necessary as the Locomotive Acts, the 19th-century British laws requiring that early automobiles be preceded by a walker waving a red flag.

Soon, Dr. Brooks predicts, robots will be mingling with humans, routinely and safely. “With the current standards, we have to have it,” he said of the e-stop button. “But at some point we have to get over it.”

What kind of work will Baxter and its ilk perform? Rethink, which is manufacturing Baxter in New Hampshire, has secretly tested prototypes at a handful of small companies around the country where manufacturing and assembly involve repetitive tasks. It estimates that the robots can work for the equivalent of about $4 an hour.

“It fit in with our stable of equipment and augmented the robots we already have,” said Chris Budnick, president of Vanguard Plastics, a 30-person company in Southington, Conn., that makes custom-molded components.

Employees whose menial tasks are done by robots are not being laid off, he said, but assigned to jobs that require higher-level skills — including training the robots to work on manufacturing lines with short production runs where the tasks change frequently.

“Our folks loved it and they felt very comfortable with it,” Mr. Budnick said. “Even the older folks didn’t perceive it as a threat.”

Other efforts are under way to design robots that interact safely with human workers. Universal Robots, a Danish firm, has introduced a robot arm that does not need to be put in a glass cage — though the system requires a skilled programmer to operate.

And late last year Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, where he took videos of workers in factories where jobs have been outsourced from the United States.

State of the Art: On Touch Screens, Rest Your Finger by Using a Stylus - State of the Art

Well, in that case, thousands of people are happily blowing it every day. The stylus is one of the most popular accessories in the touch-screen age.

Mr. Jobs’s point, of course, was that you don’t need a stylus. Everything on the iPhone and iPad — every button, slider, list item — is designed to be big enough for a fat fingertip. But a stylus can be handy when you’re wearing gloves, you have long nails, or you’re a germophobe.

Then there’s the precision thing. Now, technically, a stylus is no more precise than a finger. Most touch screens these days, including Apple’s, are capacitive screens: they ignore touches by pens, toothpicks and almost anything else not made of flesh. But they require a fairly big contact area (a diameter of four millimeters) to register a touch, so a stylus needs a similarly broad tip.

Even so, a stylus feels more precise. Part of that is visibility: it blocks less of your view. And holding a penlike stick may be more comfortable than maintaining pointing position for hours, especially when drawing and writing. Don’t even think about playing Draw Something without a stylus.

I rounded up 40 styluses from Just Mobile, BoxWave, Griffin, Hand, SuckUK, Hard Candy, Hub, Kensington, Kuel, Logiix, MediaDevil, oStylus, Studio Neat, Targus and Wacom; even then, I’m sure I missed a few. I tested them in art apps like Paper and Sketchbook Pro, in note-taking apps like Penultimate and in everyday navigation on tablets and phones. Next time, I’ll tackle something less labor-intensive, like solving the energy crisis.

Here’s a guide to a panoply of styluses, organized by the problems that their designs address. (Most come in various colors.)

PROBLEM: TOO MUCH BAGGAGE A number of companies offer combo stylus/ink pens. On some, the rubber tip is on the end of the cap. That includes premium, handsome twist-open models: the hexagonal-barreled aluminum AluPen Pro ($33) and the Mont Blanc look-alike Kensington Virtuoso Signature ($23). They’re beautiful, but when you’re using the rubber end, the ink end is pointing at your face — a weird, upside-down feeling.

The perfectly weighted Wacom Bamboo Duo ($36) and shiny, polished Targus Executive Stylus and Pen ($29) don’t have that problem. Their caps click onto the end you’re not using.

The Hard Candy Capacitive iPad Stylus and Pen ($35) and nearly identical Gumdrop ($35) are striking, mirror-finish, double-ended bullets. Pull off one cap for stylus, the other cap for ink. Unfortunately, you don’t know which end is which — and there’s nowhere to stow the cap while you’re working.

PROBLEM: MUSHY RUBBER TIPS Most stylus tips are black, bulbous, mushy rubber bulbs, meant to mimic your fingertip. The choices range from the beautifully weighted Wacom Bamboo ($25), to the blasted-aluminum hexagonal heft of the AluPen ($15), to the bare-bones Amazon.com models labeled “Generic” — three for $1.18.

For a little more money, you can get a nicer stylus with a retractable tip, like the penlike Kuel H12 ($20). Its barrel is made of “Harmless Material Plated Brass.” (Whew!)

The black rubber tips glide nicely across the glass, but they wear or tear over time. And they’re so fat, you feel as if you’re drawing with a sausage.

There are alternatives. On BoxWave’s hollow-feeling EverTouch Capacitive Stylus ($14), the tip is covered with a fine fabric mesh that’s firmer and more secure than rubber. The company says it doesn’t require replacement like rubber, and, as a bonus, actually cleans the screen while you use it.

Nomad’s Compose stylus ($26), meanwhile, is — get this — a paintbrush. Now, the iPad still detects only a single point of contact among the bristles; don’t think you’re going to get brushlike paint strokes (unless you have an app that simulates that effect). Still, artists love the familiar feeling of gently bending bristles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about styluses for use on touch-screen devices, described incorrectly the size of the contact point necessary to register a touch on most touch screens. They require a contact area with a diameter of four millimeters, not four square millimeters.

State of the Art: On Touch Screens, Rest Your Finger by Using a Stylus - State of the Art

Well, in that case, thousands of people are happily blowing it every day. The stylus is one of the most popular accessories in the touch-screen age.

Mr. Jobs’s point, of course, was that you don’t need a stylus. Everything on the iPhone and iPad — every button, slider, list item — is designed to be big enough for a fat fingertip. But a stylus can be handy when you’re wearing gloves, you have long nails, or you’re a germophobe.

Then there’s the precision thing. Now, technically, a stylus is no more precise than a finger. Most touch screens these days, including Apple’s, are capacitive screens: they ignore touches by pens, toothpicks and almost anything else not made of flesh. But they require a fairly big contact area (a diameter of four millimeters) to register a touch, so a stylus needs a similarly broad tip.

Even so, a stylus feels more precise. Part of that is visibility: it blocks less of your view. And holding a penlike stick may be more comfortable than maintaining pointing position for hours, especially when drawing and writing. Don’t even think about playing Draw Something without a stylus.

I rounded up 40 styluses from Just Mobile, BoxWave, Griffin, Hand, SuckUK, Hard Candy, Hub, Kensington, Kuel, Logiix, MediaDevil, oStylus, Studio Neat, Targus and Wacom; even then, I’m sure I missed a few. I tested them in art apps like Paper and Sketchbook Pro, in note-taking apps like Penultimate and in everyday navigation on tablets and phones. Next time, I’ll tackle something less labor-intensive, like solving the energy crisis.

Here’s a guide to a panoply of styluses, organized by the problems that their designs address. (Most come in various colors.)

PROBLEM: TOO MUCH BAGGAGE A number of companies offer combo stylus/ink pens. On some, the rubber tip is on the end of the cap. That includes premium, handsome twist-open models: the hexagonal-barreled aluminum AluPen Pro ($33) and the Mont Blanc look-alike Kensington Virtuoso Signature ($23). They’re beautiful, but when you’re using the rubber end, the ink end is pointing at your face — a weird, upside-down feeling.

The perfectly weighted Wacom Bamboo Duo ($36) and shiny, polished Targus Executive Stylus and Pen ($29) don’t have that problem. Their caps click onto the end you’re not using.

The Hard Candy Capacitive iPad Stylus and Pen ($35) and nearly identical Gumdrop ($35) are striking, mirror-finish, double-ended bullets. Pull off one cap for stylus, the other cap for ink. Unfortunately, you don’t know which end is which — and there’s nowhere to stow the cap while you’re working.

PROBLEM: MUSHY RUBBER TIPS Most stylus tips are black, bulbous, mushy rubber bulbs, meant to mimic your fingertip. The choices range from the beautifully weighted Wacom Bamboo ($25), to the blasted-aluminum hexagonal heft of the AluPen ($15), to the bare-bones Amazon.com models labeled “Generic” — three for $1.18.

For a little more money, you can get a nicer stylus with a retractable tip, like the penlike Kuel H12 ($20). Its barrel is made of “Harmless Material Plated Brass.” (Whew!)

The black rubber tips glide nicely across the glass, but they wear or tear over time. And they’re so fat, you feel as if you’re drawing with a sausage.

There are alternatives. On BoxWave’s hollow-feeling EverTouch Capacitive Stylus ($14), the tip is covered with a fine fabric mesh that’s firmer and more secure than rubber. The company says it doesn’t require replacement like rubber, and, as a bonus, actually cleans the screen while you use it.

Nomad’s Compose stylus ($26), meanwhile, is — get this — a paintbrush. Now, the iPad still detects only a single point of contact among the bristles; don’t think you’re going to get brushlike paint strokes (unless you have an app that simulates that effect). Still, artists love the familiar feeling of gently bending bristles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about styluses for use on touch-screen devices, described incorrectly the size of the contact point necessary to register a touch on most touch screens. They require a contact area with a diameter of four millimeters, not four square millimeters.