Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.

Those successes have made the D.school the envy of universities around the world. Sarah Stein Greenberg, a D.school alum and managing director, says she receives inquiries every week from universities looking to mimic the D.school curriculum.

The school has also become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available. To meet the demand, the D.school is adding full courses and so-called pop-up classes, which focus on a more narrow problem. “Where Did You Go Olympia Snowe?,” a recent pop-up class, challenged students to solve the seemingly most intractable problem of all: rekindling bipartisanship. Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator of Maine, even made a brief guest appearance.

Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.

One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.

That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.

The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.

An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.

A recent boot camp class dispatched students to local hair salons to tackle that age-old problem: the bad haircut.

One group was surprised to learn that sweeping hair off the floor is the bane of many hairdressers. That group designed a prototype for a device that sucks up clippings before they hit the floor. A few courses later, the same students were asked to apply that same analytical process to the shortage of organ donors.

“It’s a guided approach to building that empathy muscle until, pretty soon, they are out there doing it on their own,” Mr. Kelley said.

One of the D.school’s most highly sought courses is “Design for Extreme Affordability.” Over two quarters, students team up with partners from around the world to tackle their real-world problems. So far, “Extreme” students, as they are called, have completed 90 projects with 27 partners in 19 countries. This year, students will work with partners in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Senegal and South Africa.

One of Extreme’s more successful projects is Embrace, a low-cost miniature pouch, not unlike a sleeping bag, that helps prevent newborns from developing hypothermia. Embrace’s inventors say the pouch has helped prevent 22,000 infant deaths.

This year, Ian Connolly and Jeffrey Yang, D.school students, formed a partnership with Miraclefeet, a nonprofit based in North Carolina, to design a brace for children with clubfoot for less than $20.

Tool Kit: Virtual Currency Gains Ground in Actual World

A type of digital cash, bitcoins were invented in 2009 and can be sent directly to anyone, anywhere in the world. You don’t have to go through a financial institution, which means no fees and no one tracking your spending habits. With a current market capitalization of $1 billion, bitcoins are beginning to be more widely accepted. You can use them to pay for a pizza or make speculative bets that could end up financing your child’s college education.

But bitcoins, and other digital currencies, have also come under scrutiny. Liberty Reserve, an online payment system, was shuttered in the spring by New York authorities, who said the company used its digital currency, known as LRs, to launder up to $6 billion. And law enforcement officials have voiced concerns that bitcoins could also abet illegal transactions. Bart Chilton, a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, suggested that bitcoins might be ripe for regulation.

Moreover, some critics say the bitcoin infrastructure is insecure, as hackable as any other computer-based system.

“The way the basic bitcoin system works is both incredibly solid and incredibly clever from a technical standpoint,” said Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, which studies and advances a range of emerging technologies. “The system’s security is fragile, however, and the economic model behind bitcoin is, well, crazy stupid.”

Nonetheless, paying with bitcoins can be a weirdly fun way to make transactions. Here is a primer on how to do it.

Like gold, bitcoins, which are both a currency and a commodity, are in limited supply (there is a cap of 21 million total) and have to be “mined” before they are put in circulation. Anyone can mine for bitcoins by downloading software, known as the bitcoin client, which algorithmically crunches a bunch of numbers to legitimize or authenticate a sequence or “block” of past bitcoin transactions. So bitcoins are basically minted as a reward for contributing to the smooth operation of the system. Validating a block yields 25 bitcoins, which are currently worth $2,675.

The fluctuating price of bitcoins, also like gold, is a function of supply and demand, as well as psychology. “Bitcoins have value because people say they have value,” said Andrew White, a former I.T. manager for the Wikipedia Foundation and now a digital currency entrepreneur in San Francisco.

Unlike fiat currencies like the United States dollar and virtual currencies like Facebook credits and the one invented by Liberty Reserve, bitcoins are not created or controlled by a central authority. But with the blistering rate of bitcoin transactions these days, you need a pricey and complex computer rig to effectively run the bitcoin client and procure some bitcoin bounty. An easier way to get bitcoins is to just find someone willing to sell them to you.

Julian Tosh, an I.T. systems administrator in Las Vegas, for example, lets friends and family buy items on his Amazon wish list and pays them back in bitcoins. “This works well as long as I need stuff,” said Mr. Tosh, who also presides over a Wednesday “Bitcoin Lunch Mob” in Las Vegas, which gathers to discuss and trade bitcoins.

But maybe you don’t personally know any bitcoin enthusiasts like Mr. Tosh or the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, who own around $11 million worth and have filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to form a bitcoin investment trust. If so, you might try localbitcoins.com, which lists people in your area who are willing to exchange bitcoins for cold hard cash. The market price Tuesday afternoon was $107 for a bitcoin. Be sure to check out sellers’ profiles and reviews to make sure they are reputable. And, of course, it’s always a good idea to meet in a public place to make the transaction.

Bitcoins can be easily transferred and stored using a digital wallet app on your Android mobile device. Popular wallet apps include BitcoinSpinner and Bitcoin Wallet. There are no iOS bitcoin wallet apps and Apple did not respond to e-mails seeking an explanation. But Blockchain has an online wallet service that you can access using any Internet-connected desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

You can also get bitcoins through Mt.Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange and where the currency is traded as a commodity. But it’s a cumbersome and lengthy process, requiring wire transfers and scanning identity documents. The company, which is based in Japan, also charges a 0.6 percent fee for all transactions.

Keep in mind that the United States Department of Homeland Security in May seized Mt.Gox’s United States accounts, saying it misrepresented the full extent of its financial operations. The company did not respond to requests for comment but continues to function as before the seizure.

Another option is Coinbase, a bitcoin transaction platform, which recently announced a $5 million infusion of venture capital. While it’s still a nascent venture (not even a year old), the service hasn’t had any major hiccups yet and is relatively simple to use. You just enter your bank account and routing number, how many bitcoins you want and click “buy.” You can also send bitcoins to others through your Coinbase account. Just know you’ll be charged a 1 percent transaction fee.

Once you have your bitcoins, the fun part is spending them. Bitcoin. travel, BitcoinsInVegas.com, Spendbitcoins.com and Reddit have directories of businesses that accept bitcoins as payment. And Bitpremier.com lists high-priced luxury items (cars, jets, yachts, etc.) you can buy with bitcoins.

To make a purchase, all you have to do is type the receiver’s key code or scan their QR code into your bitcoin wallet and you’re done. Like cash transactions, you can’t cancel payment later, so be sure it’s what you want before you click “send.”

Brewster Kahle, a founder of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, said he routinely used bitcoins to pay for lunch at a local sushi restaurant. He’s interested in the technology and appreciates the libertarian aspect of it. “Bitcoin used to be just in the land of computer geeks, but not anymore,” he said.

More businesses are accepting bitcoins lately thanks to Bitpay, which supplies software for processing bitcoin payments. The merchant pays a 0.99 percent fee per transaction versus the 2 to 4 percent fees charged by credit card companies. Bitpay will also immediately convert bitcoins to dollars if the merchant desires.

“Bitcoin users are pretty enthusiastic, so you get instant loyal customers,” said Adam Penn, owner of Veggie Galaxy, a restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., which began accepting bitcoins through Bitpay in May. “So far, it’s been a no-risk revenue generator.”

Also last month, Bitpay announced a partnership with the mobile gift card app Gyft, which will allow people to use bitcoins to purchase gift cards from hundreds of retailers including Brookstone, Lowe’s, Gap, Sephora, GameStop, American Eagle, Nike, Marriott, Burger King and Fandango.

“It’s a huge development,” said Mr. Tosh in Las Vegas, who predicts Gyft’s embrace of bitcoins will lead to widespread use of the alternative currency. “Pandora’s box has been smashed.”

Or maybe not. The legal trouble at Mt.Gox sent a shiver through the market as did S.E.C. charges last week that the founder and operator of the lesser-known Bitcoin Savings and Trust in McKinney, Tex., was running a bitcoin Ponzi scheme.

Still, bitcoin advocates point out that, despite some bad actors, the actual system has not had a major security breach. Nevertheless, even the most ardent bitcoin boosters urge caution. Bitcoins have appreciated more than 700 percent since this time last year — an increase some have compared to a bubble bound to burst.

“It’s supervolatile, so I’d tell people to go slow,” said Peter Vessenes, chairman and executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the currency. “Never hold more bitcoins than you’re prepared to lose.”

Colossatron: Massive World Threat Revealed

Halfbrick Studios, the developer behind Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja, has announced Colossatron: Massive World Threat. Inspired by monster movies and anime of the 80s, Colossatron casts players as a massive, city-smashing robot snake, whose sole purpose is to cause destruction.

The strategy lies in color-coded Powernodes you attach to your Colossatron, each of which features different weapons and abilities, and can be combined for "explosive secrets" within different Powernode tiers.

"Success is measured by one key metric – dollars of damage caused," the developer explains. "The more powerful Colossatron is, the more destroyed and the higher the score. Players can compare and even combine their destructive powers, with additional competitive and cooperative social features revealed soon."

Check out the debut trailer below. Think it'll have the same addictive qualities as Fish out of Water and Jetpack Joyride? Let us know in the comments below.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s currently reading Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook

Facebook soon plans to announce the first results of the initiative, which it calls Facebook for Every Phone: More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20.

Many of those users, who rank among the world’s poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. 

Facebook has only just begun to sell ads to these customers, so it makes no money from them yet. But the countries in which the simple phone software is doing the best — India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Vietnam — are among the fastest-growing markets for use of the Internet and social networks, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Like many other giants of the technology industry, Facebook is struggling with the seismic shift of its customers away from computers to mobile devices and the erosion of profit that can bring.

Last year, the company overhauled its apps for Apple iPhones and Android-based smartphones to improve mobile access while introducing new types of ads that nudge users to install a new game or other apps on their phones. But customer growth in developed markets like the United States has still slowed markedly because just about everyone who wants to be on Facebook has already joined the network.

Analysts say Facebook has a powerful opportunity to win the long-term loyalty of millions of new global users by giving them their first taste of the Internet through Facebook on a simple cellphone.

“In a lot of foreign markets, people think that the Internet is Facebook,” said Clark Fredricksen, a vice president at eMarketer.

Those users, Facebook hopes, will become more attractive to advertisers as their incomes grow and they gain broader access to the Web.

The feature phone project was driven by a small group of people who joined Facebook in 2011, when it purchased a start-up called Snaptu. The team had to re-engineer Facebook’s software to drastically shrink the amount of data sent over slow cellular networks. They also had to find a way to quickly display familiar Facebook features like chat and photos on phones with very basic computing power and low-resolution screens.

“We actually run the apps on our servers,” said Ran Makavy, who was chief executive of Snaptu and now runs Facebook’s feature phone project. “The result was something that looks almost like a smartphone app.”

The software has features that are common in more advanced versions of Facebook, including sticker-size emoticons in chat and Instagram-style filters to dress up photos. (Facebook for Every Phone can be used by feature phone customers anywhere, including those in the United States. It can be downloaded from Facebook using the phone’s mobile browser or obtained from app stores operated by the phone maker or independent companies like Getjar.)

Brian Blau, who studies consumer technologies at the research firm Gartner, said that given Facebook’s mission of linking the entire globe through its service, it needed to reach out to the least tech-savvy customers.

“They talk about socially connecting the world together,” he said. “They can’t do that until they connect people who don’t have smartphones or computers.”

To understand how far Facebook has come in its approach to mobile devices, consider this: until two years ago, the only way to sign up for the service was through a Web browser, which is much slower to use than an app. Facebook originally viewed phones as mostly useful for posting status updates, not as a primary way to access the service, said Javier Olivan, who heads Facebook’s growth team.

Eventually, the company realized that tens of millions of people in developing countries were eager to try Facebook but had no access to a computer, nor could they afford the $600 iPhones or $40-a-month data plans common in the developed world.

“It became very obvious that the next wave of users would come on mobile only,” Mr. Olivan said in an interview last week.

Pogue's Posts: A Journey to the World of European Tech

Greetings from Germany!

I’m visiting here and am amazed by and immersed in how Europe has become a different technological world.

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
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None of this will be new to world travelers. But if you’re an American who hasn’t been to Europe recently, you might enjoy these notes:

* On the flight over, Finnair offers in-flight Wi-Fi. How? Slowly and expensively — via satellite.
Using this service, you pay by the megabyte (as on cellphones), not by time (as in hotels). I decided to try it out: $5 for 10 megabytes.

What did I get for my five bucks? About three e-mails and seven lines of instant messaging. What the heck? How could a little text eat up 10 megabytes?

I suspected that something was sucking down the megs behind the scenes. After scratching my head at 39,000 feet, it finally occurred to me to turn off the iCloud feature of my laptop, which keeps my calendar, address book and other data constantly synchronized with the Web. Genius! That was it.

Now, for another $5, I was able to text-chat for about an hour.

* Americans like to think that conserving power and water is a huge inconvenience. But in Europe, it’s just the way things are, and somehow people survive.

Toilets have two buttons: a big one and a small one, depending on how big a flush you need.

In public buildings and hotels, motion sensors turn the lights on when you enter a hallway, off again once you’re past.

Hotel showers tend to have wall-mounted shampoo dispensers, to prevent millions of small plastic bottles from winding up in the landfill every year.

And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning.

Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can’t leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing. (As a handy by-product, you can’t misplace your room key, either.)

* Speaking of room keys: the hotels we stayed in all had stripeless key cards. That is, you just place your key card next to a sensor rather than inserting it into a slot. The beauty of this system is that there’s no magnetic stripe to get demagnetized by a phone in your pocket.

* I won’t point out how much less expensive cellphone service is here, and how superior the coverage.

* In one of our hotels, there was no Wi-Fi in the rooms — only a wired connection, an Ethernet cable. Since our rooms were adjacent, we resorted to a sneaky trick you might need someday: we hooked up the Ethernet to the producer’s laptop in the middle room, and turned on Internet Sharing.

That’s a feature of both Mac OS X and Windows that turns any computer into a Wi-Fi hot spot. In our case, that meant that the laptops in the rooms on either side could get online.

* I didn’t bother signing up for one of those international roaming plans for my cellphone; it has stayed in airplane mode all week, except for Wi-Fi. I used services like Google Voice and Messages to send and receive text messages whenever I had an Internet signal.

* In Germany, T.S.A. doesn’t stand for “tub stacking agency.” Once you’re past the X-ray machine, you set your tub on edge in a special sloping track. It rolls on its own, gravity-style, back to the front of the line, where the next passenger grabs it. Nobody wastes time collecting them and hauling them around.

The power, water and time savings of the tweaks we’ve observed here are designed to address whole-world problems. And they’re something more American institutions might want to consider.

Advertising: In the World of Content, Web Follows a Trail Left by TV

As a week of presentations by media companies continues in New York, under the banner of the Digital Content NewFronts, the focus is squarely on efforts to create high-quality, engaging Web series and other programming that can be watched on smartphones and tablets as well as on desktop and laptop computers. Borrowing a page from the broadcast networks and cable channels whose so-called upfronts inspired the week’s events, the media companies are recruiting for their shows stars who will work on both sides of the camera.

AOL, in its presentation on Tuesday, described plans for a number of new projects that featured familiar names like the designer Jonathan Adler, Hank Azaria, the chef Rocco DiSpirito, the Nascar driver Dylan Kwasniewski, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and Nicole Richie.

Also on Tuesday, Hulu, the online video Web site, described at its event several series, planned and potential, involving the likes of Mario Batali, the Tony-winning British actor James Corden, Carson Daly, Eva Longoria, Seth Meyers and Jay Mohr.

And on Monday evening, Yahoo shared a lineup of programs involving Ed Helms, Cheryl Hines, Zachary Levi, Morgan Spurlock and John Stamos.

In the last year, Yahoo has more than doubled the original video programming on yahoo.com, said Erin McPherson, vice president and head of video at Yahoo, who shared the stage with stars like Mr. Helms and Mr. Levi. The actors, in a comedic Web series, “Tiny Commando,” will play a private eye who is 4 inches tall (Mr. Helms) and his arch-nemesis, also in miniature (Mr. Levi).

Other new Web shows for Yahoo include “We Need Help,” with Ms. Hines and Rachael Harris as high-maintenance Hollywood divas who share a personal assistant, and “Losing Your Virginity With John Stamos,” in which Mr. Stamos will interview other celebrities about their tales of loss of innocence; Mr. Stamos and Mr. Spurlock are to be the executive producers.

Marissa Mayer, the new president and chief executive at Yahoo, told the audience that premium content was one of her three goals for Yahoo’s products supported by advertising, along with innovation and performance.

Ads were also a topic of discussion at the Hulu presentation, as Jean-Paul Colaco, senior vice president for advertising at Hulu, declared, “We celebrate advertising at Hulu,” where, he said, executives are “building the world’s most effective video advertising service.”

On television, “brands are just one DVR skip from losing valuable viewer engagement,” Mr. Colaco said, referring to the practice, common among owners of digital video recorders, of skipping commercials when watching shows they recorded. By contrast, he added, commercials on Hulu enjoy high recall of the brands as well as their messages.

Several of the original series discussed by Mr. Colaco and other Hulu executives, including those with Mr. Batali, Mr. Daly and Mr. Mohr, are “brand-contingent” — that is, they will be made if advertisers sign up to support them. Such shows would integrate products in the plot lines, a practice known as branded entertainment or content marketing.

Mr. Meyers — who also hosted the Hulu presentation in addition to promoting an original animated Web series, “The Awesomes,” that he is creating for Hulu with Michael Shoemaker — even spoofed Hulu’s practice of refining its commercial-targeting through user surveys. “Was that joke relevant to you? Click yes or no,” Mr. Meyers said at one point, elaborating on the Hulu entreaty “Is this ad relevant to you? Click yes or no.”

Mr. Colaco and the other Hulu executives spoke confidently, despite it being an uncertain time for the company as two of its owners, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, weigh whether to sell. In March, the founding chief executive of Hulu, Jason Kilar, stepped down; one of his top lieutenants, Andy Forssell, is now the acting chief executive and spoke during the presentation, announcing that Hulu doubled the number of subscribers to its paid service, Hulu Plus, in the last year, to four million, with half of them ages 18 to 34.

In the increasingly crowded online environment, commissioning shows is becoming a way to stand out. Hulu, for instance, became this week one of only two places to watch “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the canceled ABC daytime soap operas that were resurrected online by a production company, Prospect Park. (The other outlet is Apple’s iTunes store.)

Stars from each soap appeared during the Hulu presentation, including Erika Slezak of “One Life to Live,” who spoke for the casts of both when she proudly declared the series are “no longer ‘daytime.’ ”

Because they can now be watched “whenever, wherever, however,” Ms. Slezak said, “we are anytime.”

In another sign of the growing prominence of online viewing, Nielsen said on Tuesday that it would begin a pilot of what it called Nielsen digital program ratings, measuring audiences for linear television content watched online. AOL is among the participants in the test, from May through July, along with A&E, ABC, CBS, CW, Discovery Communications, Fox, NBC and Univision.

The Digital Content NewFronts, under the aegis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, are to run through Friday.

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated, in one instance, the title of a cancelled ABC soap opera. It is “One Life to Live,” not “One Live to Live.”

Bits Blog: Networking Battles to Run the World

Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Using sensors, Cisco can keep track of how long people are waiting at train platforms.

Cisco has a simple message: the world has bought so much of its equipment, why stop now?

Both Cisco Systems and one of its biggest competitors, VMware, talked about ambitious strategies Wednesday. The powerful data centers and networks they want to build, tied to millions of sensors and devices, promise to create all kinds of efficient systems with an eye on everything we do. Just as much, they talked about competing with each other.

Even before Cisco spoke, VMware was making its claim to a world where billions of devices were sensing the world and suggesting efficient actions. Rather than depending on legacy customers, VMware is counting on inspiring thousands of software developers, who will use computer networks as a platform for new business.

It is similar to the way Microsoft used outside developers to give it an edge on the personal computer, and Google used them on the Web. Networks are more specialized technologies, however, so it’s not clear they can attract a mass of outside talent. Cisco is hoping big companies will be better allies.

Speaking at a gathering of journalists and networking industry analysts, several Cisco executives outlined what they called a “$14 trillion opportunity” in bringing sensors, communications and data analysis to all the world’s traffic systems, hospitals, refineries, and other civil and business infrastructure.

“The first 10 years (of the commercial Internet) were really about transactions, and the last 10 were about interactions,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer. “The next 10 is about processes being more efficient.”

That efficiency, she and others said, involves developing networks with enough machine intelligence to offer highly personalized experiences, big data analysis, and automated management of the overall system.

In a demonstration that blended the stirring and the slightly creepy, Cisco showed off how it has deployed wireless technology that can see how long people are waiting at train platforms, or moving through markets. Cisco is installing sensors in its own parking spaces, so people can be told where to leave their cars.

Combining these two technologies, the company showed how stores could tell prospective shoppers what the waiting time is at a checkout line, and how much parking is available at the mall. There were similar examples about managing electricity grids, tracking patients, and running safety systems on oil rigs.

Cisco has already deployed about $180 billion worth of network equipment into the world, she said, and will build hardware and software that interacts efficiently with the legacy gear, so new kinds of intelligent systems can be quickly deployed.

Backing up that message of size and scale, Pankaj Patel, Cisco’s chief development officer, noted that Cisco spent $5.5 billion on research and development in 2012, “an amount larger than the revenue of some of our competitors.” VMware’s revenue for 2012 was $4.6 billion.

Impressive for Cisco, though the company has outlined this ambition before. The real challenge may be in reaching customers at stores, dams and the D.M.V., people away from its usual customer base of network engineers.

“We’ve generally dealt with an information technology route to market,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco’s head of sales. Now, “it’s going to be Rockwell, General Electric,” and other companies that create large industrial systems, he said, adding, “it’s a major transformation for the company.”

Ms. Warrior also talked about the strategy as a way that telecommunications providers could increase the value of their products.

VMware, in announcements it made alongside EMC, which owns most of VMware, shared the idea of really big networks tied into more of our lives and systems. VMware said it was merging its Nicira property, perhaps the most advanced network dominated by software, into its data center and security groups, and not into custom hardware, with its cloud computing and security products.

It also announced that it would use its history in server virtualization to enable customers to swap computing jobs among corporate computers and public clouds of computers, like Amazon. There was, in addition, a nod to allowing many different types of devices on its network.

What it needs to do now is inspire lots of developers, filling its networks with Cisco-like futuristic applications. That is probably part of its next big announcement.

Bits: Sticker Apps, Adding More Variety to the Emoticon World

When a friend recently told me that she was sick, I replied with a cartoon row of steaming bowls of soup and a flexing bicep — my way of wishing her a speedy recovery.

I insert all kinds of visual images into messages, including GIFs — those short, looping animated clips — to emphasize a point. When my friend Ray got an iPhone, for example, I texted him a GIF of the singer Rihanna jumping up and down to convey my own enthusiasm for his purchase.

Using emoji, emoticons and GIFs in a texted conversation instantly signals the difference between sincerity and a joke or sarcasm. And it takes less effort. It’s easier to smooth over hurt feelings with an impish cat face than to hastily type a long and winding explanation of why you’re 20 minutes late to your dinner date, or to let a friend know that you are sending your love her way with an animated GIF of two pandas hugging.

Path's new messaging app.

Typically, these mobile phone features have not been big businesses in the United States. But a few young American start-up businesses, including a private social networking service called Path and messaging services called Lango and MessageMe, are trying to change that. Path and MessageMe have released souped-up versions of emoji and emoticons called “stickers” that can be inserted into messages; Lango’s will be introduced on Tuesday. Compared with emoji, stickers are elaborate, artsy creations. On Path, for example, the sticker that’s intended to convey an upset mood shows a frowning face surrounded by a storm cloud and lightning bolts.

“People have always been typing ‘LOL,’ or putting in a YouTube link while communicating,” said Arjun Sethi, one of the founders of MessageMe. “This is a faster and more intuitive way to communicate; it’s about more ways to be expressive in this medium.”

It is an opportunity that has sharp-eyed entrepreneurs and venture capitalists eager to cash in.

“Messaging as a category will evolve to be more commerce-oriented,” says Chi-Hua Chien, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, which has invested in Path and several other messaging applications.

Lango's Super Bowl stickers.

THE sticker apps are free to download. But for a few dollars, users can buy extra packs that include premium items like hand-drawn caricatures of snacks — a dancing slice of pizza, for example — or cartoon characters from the trippy children’s show “Adventure Time.” For the Super Bowl, Lango released a theme pack containing cartoon caricatures of the San Francisco 49ers.

Like emoticons and emoji, these sticker applications have been popular for quite some time in other parts of the world. Line, an app that lets people send stickers, drawings and messages to one another, has enjoyed commercial success in South Korea and Japan. The service, developed by Naver, a South Korean company, says it has more than 100 million users. The company recently opened an office in San Francisco to drum up a big audience for Line in the United States.

Line’s popularity was part of what motivated Lango and MessageMe to bring their own versions of sticker-type messaging to the United States.

The translation might not be as easy as it sounds. Even though I’m in the target audience for these sticker apps — always looking for new ways to spice up my text messages — I have found some of the stickers a bit too gimmicky, at least when compared with their less fussy, emoji predecessors. I found it hard to imagine the images gaining conversational traction among my friends, which is half the fun of using visual icons in the first place.

David Lee, one of the founders of SV Angel, an angel investment venture capital firm, has invested in MessageMe. But he does have one niggling question, which is whether “user behavior and cultural norms in Asia and other countries are so different that they don’t translate well to the U.S.”

Cellphone users in Asia quickly adopted text messaging and found creative ways to express themselves within those messages’ character limits. But many Americans became familiar with emoji only when the iPhone released a software update that included an emoji keyboard a few years ago.

Those who study digital media and culture say the United States is still developing its mobile habits and behavior, so other countries’ trends may not be a good metric for what will work at home.

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Asia and the United States, says it may be too late for these visual stickers to catch on.

“Many users in this country,” she says, “missed many of the kinds of mobile use practices that characterized early mobile texting culture.”

Unlike emoji, the sticker apps do not function on the default texting program, which makes using them more of an effort. And figuring out how to satisfy the American mobile consumer has frustrated companies like Zynga and Facebook, which have struggled to translate Web success to mobile.

Nonetheless, Mr. Lee says he is confident that Americans will embrace visual texting methods. He also says the applications fit well into what he sees as the future of social networking, where friend groups are built around phone address books and texting, rather than a Web site.

Mr. Sethi of MessageMe agrees that my cohort just needs time to adapt to these new visual communication markers.

“People are just now starting to use what’s available technologically on phones,” he said. “We just have to get people used to it.”

Other forms of visual-based communication are catching on here, so maybe there is hope for the mobile stickers. Big audiences have already been gained by video-chatting services, like Skype, as well as by Instagram, the photo-sharing service, and Snapchat, a tool that lets people send photos and videos that self-destruct after a few seconds.

“The U.S. has clearly jumped onto the visual mobile communication bandwagon,” Ms. Ito says. “But in a way that is different from the emoji orientation of the earlier adopters.”

As for me, I’ll stick with my simple emoji vocabulary of hearts, blushing women and half-hatched chicken — for the time being.

World Briefing | Asia: North Korea: Google Leader on Way

Room for Debate asks whether John O. Brennan’s connections to harsh interrogations and drone strikes make him a sound choice to head the agency, or a troubling symbol.

I have a compulsion: I am addicted to looking things up.

World Briefing | Europe: Britain: Police Say They Won’t Charge Hacker

With the nation appalled by the Connecticut shootings, Room for Debate asks: Will lawmakers be open to some restrictions?

Finding out what makes cities smart, through books, conferences and hitting the pavement.

News Analysis: Message, if Murky, From U.S. to the World

At the global treaty conference on telecommunications here, the United States got most of what it wanted. But then it refused to sign the document and left in a huff.

What was that all about? And what does it say about the future of the Internet — which was virtually invented by the United States but now has many more users in the rest of the world?

It may mean little about how the Internet will operate in the coming years. But it might mean everything about the United States’ refusal to acknowledge even symbolic global oversight of the network.

The American delegation, joined by a handful of Western allies, derided the treaty as a threat to Internet freedom. But most other nations signed it. And other participants in the two weeks of talks here were left wondering on Friday whether the Americans had been negotiating in good faith or had planned all along to engage in a public debate only to make a dramatic exit, as they did near midnight on Thursday as the signing deadline approached.

The head of the American delegation, Terry Kramer, announced that it was “with a heavy heart” that he could not “sign the agreement in its current form.” United States delegates said the pact could encourage censorship and undermine the existing, hands-off approach to Internet oversight and replace it with government control.

Anyone reading the treaty, though, might be puzzled by these assertions. “Internet” does not appear anywhere in the 10-page text, which deals mostly with matters like the fees that telecommunications networks should charge one another for connecting calls across borders. After being excised from the pact at United States insistence, the I-word was consigned to a soft-pedaled resolution that is attached to the treaty.

The first paragraph of the treaty states: “These regulations do not address the content-related aspects of telecommunications.” That convoluted phrasing was understood by all parties to refer to the Internet, delegates said, but without referring to it by name so no one could call it an Internet treaty.

A preamble to the treaty commits the signers to adopt the regulations “in a manner that respects and upholds their human rights obligations.”

Both of these provisions were added during the final days of haggling in Dubai, with the support of the United States. If anything, the new treaty appears to make it more intellectually challenging for governments like China and Iran to justify their current censorship of the Internet.

What’s more, two other proposals that raised objections from the United States were removed. One of those stated that treaty signers should share control over the Internet address-assignment system — a function now handled by an international group based in the United States. The other, also removed at the Americans’ behest, called for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to pay telecommunications networks for delivering material to users.

Given that the United States achieved many of its stated goals in the negotiations, why did it reject the treaty in an 11th-hour intervention that had clearly been coordinated with allies like Britain and Canada?

In a Dubai conference call with reporters early on Friday, Mr. Kramer cited a few remaining objections, like references to countering spam and to ensuring “the security and robustness of international telecommunications networks.” This wording, he argued, could be used by nefarious governments to justify crackdowns on free speech.

But even Mr. Kramer acknowledged that his real concerns were less tangible, saying it was the “normative” tone of the debate that had mattered most. The United States and its allies, in other words, saw a chance to use the treaty conference to make a strong statement about the importance of Internet freedom. But by refusing to sign the treaty and boycotting the closing ceremony, they made clear that even to talk about the appearance of global rules for cyberspace was a nonstarter.

It may have been grandstanding, but some United States allies in Europe were happy to go along, saying the strong American stand would underline the importance of keeping the Internet open.

In Mobile World, Tech Giants Scramble to Get Up to Speed

These and other tech companies are scrambling to reinvent their business models now that the old model — a stationary customer sitting at a stationary desk — no longer applies. These companies once disrupted traditional businesses, from selling books and music to booking hotels. Now they are being upended by the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets.

“Companies are having to retool their thinking, saying, ‘What is it that our customers are doing through the mobile channel that is quite distinct from what we are delivering them through our traditional Web channel?’ ” said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, the technology research firm.

He added, “It’s hilarious to talk about traditional Web business like it’s been going on for centuries, but it’s last century.”

The industry giants remain highly profitable drivers of the economy. Yet the world’s shift to computing on mobile devices is taking a toll, including disappointing earnings reports last week from Google, Microsoft and Intel, in large measure related to revenue from mobile devices. Investors are in suspense over Facebook’s earnings to be disclosed Tuesday, for much the same reason. Yahoo’s new chief, Marissa Mayer, said on Monday that Yahoo had failed to capitalize on mobile and must become a predominantly mobile company.

Demand for Intel chips inside computers — which are much more profitable than those inside smartphones — is plummeting. At Microsoft, sales of software for PCs are sharply declining. At Google, the price that advertisers pay when people click on ads has fallen for a year. This is partly because, while mobile ads are exploding, they cost less than Internet ads; advertisers are still figuring out how to make them most effective.

Since its initial public offering, Facebook has lost half its value on Wall Street under pressure to make more money from mobile devices, now that six of 10 Facebook users log in on their phones.

Making money will now depend on how deftly tech companies can track their users from their desktop computers to the phones in their palms and ultimately to the stores, cinemas and pizzerias where they spend their money. It will also depend on how consumers — and government regulators — will react to having every move monitored.

Facebook is already experimenting with ways to use what it knows about its users to show ads when they are using other mobile apps. Google can link what a logged-in user does on the computer and phone, to show someone a cellphone ad based on what they have searched for on a computer at home, for instance. But just last week, European regulators warned Google to amend its privacy policy that allows it to gather information about people across diverse Google products, from Gmail to YouTube.

In addition, Nielsen found that only one in five smartphone users described ads on phones as “acceptable.”

Today almost half of Americans own a smartphone, according to comScore — an astoundingly fast adoption since Apple introduced the iPhone just five years ago. The amount of time people spend on their phones surfing the Web, using apps, playing games and listening to music has more than doubled in the last two years, to 82 minutes a day, according to eMarketer; the time spent online on computers will grow just 3.6 percent this year.

“What has caught people off guard has been acceleration of the multitude of things that you can do with a smartphone,” said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the technology sector.

“The Web started in 1993, ’94,” he added. “It didn’t disrupt everything for a decade and a half. The smartphone revolution started a half decade ago. Because of the existence of the Web, it allowed the phone to have a disruptive impact in a shorter time frame.”

Still, mobile provides huge opportunities for these businesses, industry analysts say. That is largely because people reveal much more about themselves on phones than they do on computers, from where they go and when they sleep to whom they talk to and what they want to buy.

Consumers may be put off by the intrusion of marketers into their daily lives, but companies say the trade-off can be worth it — an unprompted calendar alert, say, that tells you whether you’ll be late for a meeting or a coupon when you are near a shop.

“We’re really starting to live in a new reality, one where the ubiquity of screens really helps users move from intent to action much faster and more seamlessly,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, told analysts last week. “It will create new opportunity in advertising.”

French Music Streaming Service Takes on the World, Sans America

The company, Deezer, is one of the biggest players in digital music streaming, trailing only the market leader, Spotify, in the number of paying customers it has attracted globally. Like Spotify, which is based in London, Deezer, with headquarters in Paris, offers subscribers unlimited access to millions of songs on demand, via PCs, mobile phones and other devices.

Deezer just got a big endorsement for its approach. Access Industries, the owner of Warner Music Group, pumped 100 million euros, or about $130 million, into Deezer this month, in what analysts described as one of the biggest investments ever in a French start-up.

“This shows that they think the music market is beginning to turn around,” Axel Dauchez, chief executive of Deezer, said in an interview.

Deezer, which started in 2007, has just moved into a slick new headquarters, where employees conduct business meetings on lawn chairs and on sofas disguised as musical keyboards. “Paint it black,” reads a neon sign on the somber-toned wall behind Mr. Dauchez. Like the Rolling Stones, Deezer is on a mission to blot out the color red — in this case, from the ailing music industry’s ledgers.

After a battle with piracy that has cut its sales in half in just over a decade, the music industry has high hopes for streaming, which is growing faster than digital purchases, as many listeners decide that ownership makes less sense than in the days of plastic and vinyl.

While Deezer and Spotify are still losing money, their sales are growing rapidly. Deezer generated about 50 million euros in revenue last year, and Mr. Dauchez has set a goal of 1 billion euros in sales in 2016.

With more than two million paying customers, Deezer trails Spotify, which has more than four million. Spotify introduced an American version last year, and it has been growing quickly. But Deezer has turned its back on the United States and plans to use its new money to finance an expansion into more than 160 other countries.

“Like a canny general who decides to march around a heavily fortified stronghold and thus effectively leave it stranded behind enemy lines, so Deezer expects the streaming war to be waged on different shores,” Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst, wrote on his Web site. “They are both right and wrong.”

Analysts say Deezer is right to worry about competition in the United States, where Spotify competes with services like Rhapsody, Pandora and Rdio, even though their business models all vary slightly.

Mr. Mulligan says there is room for growth in the United States, because premium streaming services remain too expensive for most consumers. But the field is less crowded outside the United States, where Spotify is the clear leader in streaming in many of the markets it has entered — except France, where Deezer reigns.

Spotify, too, is planning for the battles ahead. Several people briefed on the company’s plans said it had begun a new round of fund-raising, seeking to secure several hundred million dollars in new investment.

New financing is essential for Deezer and Spotify because they are burning through significant amounts of cash. To attract new listeners, both companies offer free versions of their services, subject to certain restrictions. Yet both companies must pay a royalty to a recording company every time someone listens to one of their tracks.

While streaming services sell advertising to cover some of the costs of free listening, Mr. Dauchez said raising revenue in this way had proved to be more challenging than expected. So Deezer now sees its free service primarily as a way to entice listeners into paying for its premium offerings, which include things like unlimited streaming and special content and recommendations, along with no ads.

This makes expanding into new markets expensive. While Deezer says it was profitable last year, it expects to lose money until 2014 as it enters new markets. The company set up sites in several other European countries in 2011 and accelerated its global expansion this month.

Disruptions: Social Media Upending Privacy in Real World

A pulled pork taco hovered about four inches from my mouth when my phone impolitely interrupted me. “Hey, I see you’re having people over. O.K. if I stop by?” read a text message from someone whom I had not invited to my dinner party.

How did the person know I was even having a party? I needed only to glance at my guests, who were sharing messages and photos of the dinner to their online social networks.

Call it the latest episode of “Nothing’s Private Anymore.”

While you’re going about your daily life, stopping to get coffee with a crush, meeting friends for drinks or going to a Madonna concert, people are watching you on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Path and an interminable list of other social networks.

“But wait,” you’re saying to yourself, “I didn’t ask to be on this show.” [Laughter from the audience.] Too late — you have no choice.

“But … but … I didn’t update any of these services to announce what I’m doing. I’m not even on Facebook.” [More laughter.] You don’t have to be, since other people can announce your location, and share pictures and videos of you, conveniently tagged with your name for anyone to find quickly.

Social stalking doesn’t just happen to people like me, an inveterate social networker who covers this subject for work; it happens to normal people, too. While it can be merely a nuisance when others put you on public view, it can have serious unintended consequences when people discover things you had intended to keep private.

Your former spouse is watching. Your boss? Yup, she’s watching, too. Your mother, father and probably Uncle Pete.

This happened at the dinner party I had last week.

What else besides tacos was on the menu? Well, that isn’t hard to determine either.

I certainly didn’t tweet or share information like that on Facebook, but many of the 15 people in attendance did.

I know that because a few days later, on a work-related call, someone else — who has never stepped foot in my house — told me how much he “just loved” the lamps hanging above my kitchen table.

Over the course of the three-hour dinner, my friends posted seven photos on Path, sent six Twitter messages (five with photos), six photos on Instagram and two people checked in on Foursquare.

When I added up the collective follower counts of the people in the room, my little dinner party was potentially viewed by more people than watch “The Late Show” on CBS: over three million. (Granted, the guests included social media heavyweights like Om Malik, founder of the popular tech blog GigaOM, and Veronica Belmont, an online video host with 1.6 million Twitter followers.)

“I don’t think it’s the norm for most people yet; it is though for the microcosms that are Silicon Valley or South by Southwest,” said Dennis Crowley, the chief executive of Foursquare. “But, at the same time, I think those things predict the future and the way the tech elite act now is the way everyone will experience the world a few years from now.”

Before that happens, customers might force companies into letting them “cloak” themselves for a particular time period. “You can imagine a service that says ‘I don’t want my name to show up on any social services for the next three hours’ and then integrates with other social services,” Mr. Crowley said.

A feature that allowed users to opt out of being mentioned could actually benefit companies like Facebook and Twitter. It would entice people who are afraid of being in the cast of “Nothing’s Private Anymore” to sign up, knowing that they can hide at any given time.

Mr. Malik said he had simply resigned himself to the reality that most of the things he does in public, no matter how banal, will end up on the Internet. “But an offline switch would be a welcome addition for it would give me an illusion of privateness (if not privacy),” he wrote in an e-mail.

But until that exists, if I don’t want people sharing pictures of me at a dinner party, I may have to resort to posting an old piece of technology called a sheet of paper with the message (in less than 140 characters): “Please don’t check in on Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Myspace or any other service. #thanks!”

Art.sy Is Mapping the World of Art on the Web

But until now, there was no automated guidance for art lovers seeking discoveries online — no “If you like Jackson Pollock’s ‘No. 1,’ you may also enjoy Mark Rothko’s ‘No. 18.’ ”

Enter Art.sy, a start-up whose public version went live on Monday. An extensive free repository of fine-art images and an online art appreciation guide, it is predicated on the idea that audiences comfortable with image-driven Web sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are now primed to spend hours browsing through canvases and sculpture on their monitors and tablets, especially with one-click help.

After two years of private testing and with millions of dollars from investors, including some celebrities in the art and technology worlds, the site aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education.

With 275 galleries and 50 museums and institutions as partners, Art.sy has already digitized 20,000 images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. But as it extends the platform’s reach, Art.sy also raises questions about how (or if) digital analytics should be applied to visual art. Can algorithms help explain art?

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, has his doubts. “It depends so much on the information, who’s doing the selection, what the criteria are, and what the cultural assumptions behind those criteria are,” Mr. Storr, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, said. In terms of art comprehension, he added, “I’m sure it will be reductive.”

The technology, at least, is expansive. To make suggestions successfully, computers must be taught expert human judgment, a process that starts with labeling: give a machine codes to tell the difference between a Renaissance portrait and a Modernist drip painting, say, and then it can sort through endless works, making comparisons and drawing connections.

For the Art Genome Project, Matthew Israel, 34, who holds a Ph.D. in art and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, leads a team of a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied. Some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” and recognizes about 800 of them, with more added daily) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography.

Other labels are highly subjective, even quirky; for contemporary art, for example, Art.sy’s curators might attach terms like “globalization” and “culture critique” to give ideological context. “Contemporary traces of memory” is an elastic theme assigned to pieces by the Chinese Conceptual artist Cai Guo-Qiang and the photographer and filmmaker Matt Saunders.

A Picasso might be tagged with “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” all terms that are visible and searchable on the site. Jackson Pollock’s works typically get “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Predictably, some of those criteria show up on paintings by Pollock’s contemporaries Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning, but also on artists from different eras and styles, like Tara Donovan, whose contemporary abstract sculptures using stacked and layered plastic foam and paper plates have also been marked with “repetition.”

As the categories are applied, each is assigned a value between 1 and 100: an Andy Warhol might rate high on the Pop Art scale, while a post-Warholian could rank differently, depending on influences. Software can help filter images for basic visual qualities like color, but the soul of the judgment is human.

“Literally, a person goes in by hand, and they enter a number for all the relevant fields,” Mr. Israel said.

The technical complexity is outweighed by the curatorial challenges. “We learned that the data matters much more than the math,” said Daniel Doubrovkine, 35, who is in charge of engineering at Art.sy. “How are you going to pick something that shows ‘warmth’ with a machine? We’re not.”

Similarly, Pandora has a roomful of musicologists deconstructing each tune; their analysis is then fed into an algorithm, called the Music Genome Project, that recommends songs in its player based on users’ taste and the ratings they give each track. (Joe Kennedy, the chief executive of Pandora, served as a consultant to Art.sy.)

But Art.sy aims to make connections among artworks that are seemingly from different worlds, with a catalog that encompasses pieces from the British Museum, the National Gallery in Washington, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and others. A recent partner, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in Manhattan, a branch of the Smithsonian, has added objects to the mix, which will be a test of the site’s technology and the parallels it draws, said Seb Chan, the Cooper-Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media.

Culturally, “what does it mean to recommend a painting from seeing a seventh-century spoon, for example?” he said. Anticipating such questions, the Art.sy staff has a blog explaining how its process works.

Mind: Recalibrating Therapy for a Wired World - The Digital Doctor

But the virtues of the digital age are not always aligned with those of psychotherapy. It takes time to change behavior and alleviate emotional pain, and for many patients constant access is more harmful than helpful. These days, as never before, therapists are struggling to recalibrate their approach to patients living in a wired world.

For some, the new technology is clearly a boon. Let’s say you have the common anxiety disorder social phobia. You avoid speaking up in class or at work, fearful you’ll embarrass yourself, and the prospect of going to a party inspires dread. You will do anything to avoid social interactions.

You see a therapist who sensibly recommends cognitive-behavioral therapy, which will challenge your dysfunctional thoughts about how people see you and as a result lower your social anxiety. You find that this treatment involves a fair amount of homework: You typically have to keep a written log of your thoughts and feelings to examine them. And since you see your therapist weekly, most of the work is done solo.

As it turns out, there is a smartphone app that will prompt you at various times during the day to record these social interactions and your emotional response to them. You can take the record to your therapist, and you are off and running.

Struggling with major depression? Digital technology may soon have something for you, too. Depressed patients are characteristically lacking in motivation and pleasure; an app easily could lead patients through the day with chores and activities, like having a therapist in one’s pocket. Not just that, but the app might ask you to rate depressive symptoms like sleep, energy, appetite, sex drive and concentration in real time, so that when you next visit your psychiatrist, you can present a more accurate picture of your clinical status without having to worry about your recall.

When it comes to collecting and organizing data, software is hard to beat. But information has a tendency to spread, especially digital information. To wit, electronic medical data containing sensitive personal information can be released, either accidentally or deliberately, and disseminated. Anyone who has followed the hacking of supposedly secure and encrypted financial databases knows this is not a remote possibility.

More worrisome to therapists, perhaps, is that technology also enables access: These days patients reach out via text, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. For some of them, the easy connectivity that technology makes possible is a decidedly bad idea.

Take a patient who has a fundamental problem in maintaining intimate relationships and who can’t tolerate being alone without feeling bored or anxious — in other words, a patient with typical features of borderline personality disorder. Not surprisingly, such a patient would love instant access to a therapist whenever an uncomfortable feeling arises.

In this case, connectivity would interfere with the central goal of any reasonable treatment, namely acquiring the skills to manage painful feelings by oneself and the ability to tolerate some degree of disappointment. Access-on-demand would mitigate efforts to develop patience and frustration tolerance, and might encourage a sense of entitlement and an illusory notion of power and control.

But perhaps the more difficult challenge is this: By removing barriers to access, digital technology can make therapists more real and knowable to their patients. This cuts both ways.

Recently, a patient I had treated for depression was struggling with the approaching death of his beloved dog. Just divorced, he was dreading another loss. One night while surfing the Internet, he came across a piece I wrote years ago about the death of my own dog.

“So you understand what it’s like,” he said during one of our sessions. This discovery made him feel understood and comforted.

Sometimes, though, digital technology can undermine the clinical rationale for a therapist to maintain distance.

For example, in insight-oriented psychotherapy, which focuses on unconscious processes at the root of personal conflicts, the patient essentially uses his relationship with the therapist to understand how he structures relationships with people in general. The therapist must be free to “become” many different important people in the patient’s life; the more the patient knows of the therapist’s real life, the likelier it is that the treatment will be confounded.

Imagine how you might feel if you had a philandering parent and were having trouble in your own relationships, and you discovered that your own therapist was married and having an affair. It would be hard to believe this would not affect your relationship with your therapist.

Many patients don’t want to know how their therapists feel or the details of their personal lives, and for a good reason: It can undermine the perceived authority of the therapist, making patients feel less secure. And it can inhibit patients from being open for fear of hurting or upsetting their therapists.

I wonder if it’s even possible for therapists to remain anonymous in the age of the Internet, where we can all be found in the electronic cloud. A Google search might not reveal a therapist’s deep, dark secrets, but even basic information begins to alter the relationship.

Last summer, a patient learned that I was swimming in a benefit race in Cape Cod because I’d written something about it that was available online.

“Be careful, Dr. Friedman,” he said with a smile on the way out of my office. “I heard there were sharks out there.” Beneath the humor was anxiety — or perhaps something darker.

Digital technology has the potential to either enhance or confound therapy, but much depends on the patient and the condition being treated. Some patients will find that the glowing screen only feeds their psychopathology. Others will find digital technology a boon to self-esteem and assertiveness. We are only beginning to figure out which patients are which.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Now Live

Mists of Pandaria, the newest expansion for World of Warcraft, is available now, offering a new class, new continent, new level cap and more. Players will be able to step into the shoes (well, paws) of the Pandaren race, plus expand their character up to level 90. New features also include scenarios (a new PvE trial), challenge modes, a new talent system, a pet battle system, high-prestige awards for beating new five-player dungeons and much more.

Pandaria is available for $39.99 at retail or digitally, and a Collector’s Edition with a soundtrack CD, behind-the-scenes DVD, hardback artbook, mouse pad and more is available for $79.99 in stores. "Mists of Pandaria takes players back to the roots of World of Warcraft -- exploration, discovery, and the epic conflict between the Alliance and the Horde," Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said today. "It also contains the widest variety of content that we've ever added in an expansion, and we're excited to be able to share it with players around the world this week in our first truly global launch."

Blizzard has a full Mists of Pandaria survival guide running through all the new features, including the new talent system and how it changes each class.

Not sure if you want to play Mists? We’ll be live streaming the new content today at noon PST, plus you can read our Mists of Pandaria review in progress for our impressions as we play.

Will you be buying Mists of Pandaria? Let us know in the comments below.

The Media Equation: Atlantic Covering Business World With Quartz Site

Business titans are generally not prone to self-appraisal, and when they do take stock, it usually begins and ends with a list of their conquests.

David G. Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, has never been like that. He built and then sold the Advisory Board and the Corporate Executive Board, two research advisory firms, but he never trumpeted that or his fancy education — he was a Fulbright scholar with a law degree from Georgetown and an M.B.A. from Harvard — as a significant credential.

When I worked for him — briefly — and then covered him, he made an impression because underneath his waspy, patrician manner he had a very practical understanding of his own limitations, and as a result, Mr. Bradley, 59, is a bit of a brain collector, seeking out intellectual talent and listening closely at every turn.

At lunch a few weeks ago, we talked about Quartz, Atlantic’s new, strictly digital play in global media, a site for business news that is making its debut on Monday at qz.com. He was clearly excited about the new enterprise, but Mr. Bradley spoke candidly about his costly education in the economics of publishing.

“It was expensive and painful,” he said. “I clearly didn’t know what I was getting into.”

After selling his shares in his companies for a reported after-tax gain of $300 million in 1997 and realizing he didn’t have the people’s touch when it came to politics — his first love — he had hoped to buy Newsweek. But that did not work out. So in 1998 he bought The Atlantic Monthly instead, along with National Journal and Government Executive, in part because he wanted to be a Beltway player and in part because he loved the physical aspects of print.

He hoped to turn The Atlantic into a weekly, a glossy artifact that he could proudly display in his office at the Watergate complex, overlooking the Potomac River. But even as a monthly, the economics were baffling.

I called him back after our lunch and he repeated something he had said.

“In a sense, I was born 50 years too late,” he said. “I love the romance of print, but after I took over The Atlantic, I quickly began losing $8 to $10 million a year. It was not a sustainable business, no matter how much I loved being part of it.”

After spending 10 years and $100 million on the Atlantic brand, he realized that making baubles for the coffee table would soon leave him bereft. He hired Justin Smith, the publisher of The Week who had also worked at The Economist, in 2007. Mr. Smith has Mr. Bradley’s polish, but is more ruthless in business matters and less sentimental about print. The pair set about building a ladder out of the hole that the company — and most of print publishing, for that matter — found itself in.

What is the way forward for a 155-year old-magazine that once published Emerson and Longfellow? Digital first and last, with ancillary revenue from conferences. The magazine, edited by James Bennet, is still very much in the middle of the conversation, but these days it is prized mostly for bringing luster to digital assets like TheAtlantic.com, Atlantic Wire, Atlantic Cities, and beginning Monday, Quartz.

Mr. Bradley shared the financials that suggested that revenue at the various Atlantic properties had doubled in the last four years, from $20 million to $40 million, and that the company was profitable for the third year in a row. Digital revenue, he said, now makes up 65 percent of all advertising revenue. (Even though Atlantic Media is a private company, I believe Mr. Bradley; he was always honest when he was losing gobs of money, so I have no reason to doubt him now that he says they are in the black).

“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print,” Mr. Bradley said.

At a time when other media properties are leaning hard on subscriptions and paywalls, Mr. Smith believes that a free product, with revenue from sponsorships and events, can avoid the dependency on commodity ads and play in more rarefied, lucrative terrain.

“We don’t want to be the Royal Navy,” he said. “We want to be the pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy. I’m bearish on print, including our own. It is an inexorable trend that has to be met with some very radical changes.”

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Review in Progress

 

If you're a PC gamer, it’s likely the mention of World of Warcraft affects you in some way. Maybe it triggers pangs of regret over dumping years of your life into Blizzard’s virtual theme park, rosy nostalgia of the vanilla days, earnest anticipation of what’s coming next or a confusing mix of them all. With this fourth expansion, released in a climate of dipping subscriber numbers, Blizzard seems to be building out the end game, adding in many dungeons and long-form progression tracks to keep players busy well beyond launch.

If you still play regularly, maybe you checked out a lot of Mists’ content in beta testing earlier this year, and have been eagerly waiting for launch. Or maybe you’re one of the many who left World of Warcraft behind some at some point during its nearly eight year run, and were waiting for this expansion to log back in.

If you’re part of the latter crowd, expect a longer than usual readjustment period after logging back in. Blizzard recently patched in a significant change to its talent system, getting rid of the old talent trees entirely. In place of the old trees, every fifteen levels you’ll get a choice of one of three new talents, a system where there isn’t necessarily one single best choice.

Take my 85 Paladin, for example. The level 15 tier of talents includes Speed of Light, which boosts move speed by 70 percent for eight seconds, Long Arm of the Law, which spikes move speed up 45 percent for three seconds after a Judgment, and Justice, which gives me an always active 15 percent movement speed bonus with additional percentage bonuses for stored charges of Holy Power. I’ve so far been using Speed of Light to help get away from attacking Horde after stunning them with Fist of Justice (another talent, essentially Hammer of Justice with a halved cooldown), but can see where the other choices would be useful.

IGN will be live streaming Mists of Pandaria starting at noon Pacific on September 25.

Many of the old talent tree abilities you may have been used to have been rolled into class specializations, where you're given different abilities depending on which role you choose for a class. In addition, the Glyph system was adjusted. Prime Glyphs are no longer in the game, so expect to spend a little more time figuring all that out before getting into the rhythm of leveling and dungeon running again.

If you'd like to forget your old characters and create a new one, Blizzard is offering the Monk and Pandaren as new class and race options. Of course, if you really do want to create a Monk, which can be specialized as a healer, tank or damage dealer, you’ll need to level all the way through the old content again to reach the 85 – 90 areas of Pandaria, so it’s going to be a while before you reach the bulk of Blizzard’s latest work. At least if you create a Pandaren character you'll get a glimpse of Pandaria early on, as the 1 - 10 experience takes place in an all new zone that's set on the back of a giant turtle. Pandaren characters are also neutral initially, so you won't pick Horde or Alliance until after you clear the starting area.

The World Loves Resident Evil More Than You Do

The Resident Evil movies have always done better internationally than they have domestically and the current sequel Resident Evil: Retribution 3D is no exception. The movie repeated as the top movie at the international box office in its second weekend even as it fell from the top spot to fifth place at the domestic box office.

TheWrap says Resident Evil: Retribution's second weekend international haul was $37.2 million from 74 territories, making its total international cume $103.4 million so far. Its current worldwide total is $136.9 million.