Innovation: Who Made That Dial Tone?

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Innovation: Who Made That Smoke Alarm?

Jens Mortensen for The New York TimesIn the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a “static neutralizer” — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he’d just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. “You have no way of knowing whether it’s operational unless you set fire to your house,” wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. “Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test.”

You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they’re working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. “You’d hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep,” says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. “Then the family comedy would ensue.” In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the “unloved object” in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we’re being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. “You’re like, ‘I’m just burning the toast!’ ” Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, “ ‘Hey honey, I smell something,’ ” he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, “Heads up!” in a woman’s voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, “Honey, I got this.” The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: “When it glows green, it’s saying, ‘Everything’s working just fine.’ If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, ‘Batteries are low,’ ” according to Fadell.

But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.

AIR-QUALITY CONTROL

Mark Belinsky invented a “smart air monitor” called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.

How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.

You’ve designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it’s there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what’s in your house, but also what’s in the neighborhood and your city.

And how’s your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.

Innovation: Who Made That 3-D Printer?

It was the UV lights that gave Hull his insight in the first place. The lamps were used in factories to harden a plastic veneer onto tabletops or rubber tiles. Hull realized that he could use UV light to etch plastic layers into whatever shape he liked and then stack these layers to form a 3-D object.

At first he had to write code to tell his machine how to cut each layer, a painstaking process. “I was limited to fairly simple shapes,” he says. One day, for instance, he brought home a Munchkin-size cup to show his wife. “It looked like that thing you buy in the drugstore to wash out your eyes,” he says. And his first 3-D printer “was so kludged together that it looked post-apocalyptic, like some of the equipment they used in that movie ‘Waterworld.’ ”

But by the mid-1980s, the printer had evolved into a working product, albeit one with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the printer was too heavy to lug to demos, Hull made home movies to show to executives. “The movies were pretty corny,” but even so, he says, “we got a tremendous response.” Particularly in Detroit. “Back then, the U.S. automotive industry had fallen way behind Japan,” Hull says, and the car companies were desperate for a secret weapon. The 3-D printer was just that: Engineers could create their own prototypes for door handles or stick-shift knobs, rather than sending blueprints to a tool-and-dye shop, shaving months off the design process.

Now that the technology is becoming affordable (printers start at $1,299), all kinds of people have caught 3-D fever. A University of California professor is working on printing out an entire house. Another 3-D artist has sculpted a “cyborg hand” that lets his son (who was born without several fingers) pick up a water bottle. More disturbing, a group called Defense Distributed claims to have produced a working gun from open-source plans and then printed it out.

“Anything that can be made will be made by anyone anywhere,” wrote Joris Peels, a 3-D pioneer. “Anyone could 3-D-print a spoon, a land mine or a rose.”

PROJECT SKUNKWORKS

Tim Anderson co-founded Z Corp., which pioneered a fast method of 3-D printing.

How did you end up working on 3-D printers? I was living in a student-run machine shop at M.I.T. It was an anarchist utopia where you could just show up and tinker. I was making a robot named Van Gogo that painted oil paintings. One day I was wandering the halls of M.I.T. picking through junk piles, and I ended up meeting people in the basement of Building 35. They were doing research on 3-D printing, and they needed an electronics guy. I said I was one. They came over to see my painting robot, and then they went their merry way. Then I had the revelation: “Gee, I should follow up on this. Because I could do the same stuff I was doing as an artist, call myself an engineer and get paid.” That’s how I spent three years as a gnome inside a 3-D printer.

How did you first build a working prototype? I wasn’t hung up on appearances. I was Mr. Skunkworks. I went through junk piles to find parts from inkjet printers, and then built with those parts. We used a lot of inkjet nozzles in our machines.

What were some of the earliest things that you scanned and printed at Z Corp.? The printer was popular right away for medical imaging. So we had a lot of skulls around. It’s good for surgeons to be able to see skulls in 3-D and practice breaking them and putting them back together.

Bits Blog: 5 Reasons That Innovation at Twitter Might Take a Hit

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Bezos Brings Promise of Innovation to Washington Post

What, many are asking, does Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, see in a 135-year-old newspaper that others do not?

If Mr. Bezos’s business history is any indication, don’t expect a quick answer and don’t expect any short-term fixes for The Post, which has suffered from years of sliding revenue and circulation. While terms like disrupter and innovator are often used to describe Mr. Bezos in his years at Amazon, he has also proved to be a long-term thinker, someone willing to buck Wall Street demands for big profits in order to invest in his company’s growth.

Now that he is the private owner of The Post, it would not be surprising to see him worry little about turning a quick profit and instead push to upend the often ossified world of newspaper publishing, just as he did with books more than a decade ago.

Indeed, Mr. Bezos, who declined a request for an interview, hinted in a letter to employees that he felt a “need to invent, which means we will need to experiment,” and that “there will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years.”

But just what those experiments will be is anyone’s guess.

“Jeff Bezos doesn’t need The Washington Post to make money tomorrow or even in five years,” said Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin, a real estate site that, like Amazon, is based in Seattle. “He’s proven that he’s able to think over a geological time scale.”

In recent years, newspapers large and small have experimented with concepts aimed at capturing elusive online revenue to make up for losses in print circulation and advertising. The Post, for example, has dabbled in some experimental news products, including the creation of a social reader for Facebook and a recommendation engine called Trove.

Other news organizations have toyed with various strategies, most with limited success. The Daily, an iPad-only news app developed by News Corporation, shuttered after less than two years. The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Post have adopted various pay models for digital readers. The Guardian started a United States-based operation in 2011 to experiment with a digitally focused newsroom.

All of these companies have created mobile apps and made significant investments in online video, where advertising revenue is expected to grow, but no paper has cracked the code on how to replace steep declines in print advertising. Other traditional print magazines, like The New Yorker and Vogue, have digitized and sold portions of their archives.

They have also dabbled with new ways to make money through Amazon, particularly through the Kindle Singles, which are shorter e-books. Amazon’s biggest influence has been disrupting the economics of newspapers through millions of its Kindle mobile devices.

Mr. Bezos said The Post would be run separately from Amazon, but there is little doubt that he will bring what he has learned over the years to the newspaper world.

“He’s done an amazing job of bringing e-books to reality,” said Matt Galligan, the co-founder of the mobile news start-up Circa. “There’s a strong likelihood that a similar transition could happen at The Post.”

Though Mr. Bezos demurely noted in his letter that he had no history in newspapers, that he is an outsider not steeped in the old ways of newspaper management has excited some.

“Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos?! I’d actually return to the journalism world if I could work for him,” wrote Adrian Holovaty on Twitter after the news broke.

Six years ago, Mr. Holovaty held the title “editor for editorial innovation” at The Post, but left in 2007. The co-creator of the popular Web framework Django, he thinks Mr. Bezos will bring “fresh, baggage-less thinking.”

No baggage — and deep pockets — means room to try new things. Might Mr. Bezos apply tech industry concepts like frictionless payments, e-commerce integration, recommendation engines, data analytics or improved concepts for mobile reading?

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Glenn Kelman. He is the chief executive of Redfin, not the founder.

Critic’s Notebook: Unwelcome Innovation Earns Gamers’ Jeers

The applause was not only for Sony, which was promoting its forthcoming PlayStation 4 at an event on the eve of the three-day show. It was also a sign of growing resentment toward Microsoft, which was promoting its own new console, the Xbox One.

Microsoft has proposed limiting players’ ability to resell games that will be made for the Xbox One, due in stores in November. Companies that create games for Xbox One, Microsoft said, will be able effectively to prevent consumers from reselling the games by ensuring that the resold games no longer function on the console. No companies that create games have yet indicated that they will exercise this right.

This controversy led to the odd spectacle on Monday: At an industry event devoted to new games, there was raucous enthusiasm for the untrammeled right to sell and purchase old games.

Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.

Microsoft says Xbox One users will be able to give away a single copy of each game to one other player, provided that player has been an Xbox Live friend for 30 days. Whether players will be able merely to lend games to one another, or to rent copies for a few days from a store, remains unclear.

Sony’s PlayStation 4, also scheduled for release later this year, is promising no such restrictions. And, for the record, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of games like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda for Nintendo, which makes the Wii U, said during an interview this week, “We would never create our system that way.”

Microsoft’s problem is that it is heralding a fully digital, downloadable experience, but offering a game system that is powered only partly by the Web. Players will still have to buy and install game discs on their Xbox Ones.

We may be heading toward Internet distribution of all games, but we won’t be there in 2013. Disc-based games are here to stay, at least for a while.

Because they are such large digital files, games have been slower than books, music and movies to adapt to downloadable and streaming media. In the interim — and it could be a very long interim — Microsoft looks as if it were trying to place restrictions that are commonplace on the virtual Internet onto physical discs. People don’t complain about their inability to lend or resell their iPhone games, so Microsoft argues that its position has a precedent. But many gamers are responding as if Amazon tried to apply the rules for the Kindle to new hardcover books.

At some point, Microsoft is going to win this fight. Even Sony is not promising to let players lend and resell the downloadable games they purchase for the PlayStation 4.

What’s more worrisome to me, as a lover of games and a believer in their historical importance, is the possibility that Xbox One games are destined for oblivion when the inevitable day comes, 10 years or so in the future, when Microsoft stops supporting the Xbox One. I can still play games that were made for an Atari 2600 or the Nintendo Entertainment System as long as I have a working version of the hardware.

The Xbox One, on the other hand, demands a daily check-in with Microsoft’s servers. And it is a near certainty that one day Microsoft will turn off those servers. That means that most of the Xbox One’s games will be enjoyed only by the current generation of players.

Maybe that’s fine. Once upon a time, when a movie left theaters, you couldn’t see it anymore. When a TV show was canceled, it was gone forever. And when a Broadway show closes, you can’t expect it to reside forever in digital memory somewhere for your convenient retrieval.

Still, there is a downside to using the Web for instant access to books, movies and music: a sharp reduction in our ownership rights. In the world of new media, we’re all renters.

When it comes to novels, songs and movies, you can choose to rent, paying less for a service like Netflix, or to own, paying more for, say, Blu-ray discs.

When it comes to video games, the Xbox One will no longer offer that choice. That’s why players are responding as if they were being treated not like renters, but serfs.

Innovation: Who Made That Mouse?

Engelbart had always been good at solving mechanical problems. When he was 13, his neighbor had an old Ford sitting in his barn, his daughter Christina told me. “My dad got it running again,” she said. “A car in those days — you used the steering wheel, a choke and both of your feet on the pedals. Your whole body was involved.” (Her father, now 88, is no longer giving interviews.)

Engelbart wanted to give people the same kind of physical control over a computer. In 1963, he began a series of experiments at his lab at the Stanford Research Institute, placing subjects in front of a monitor that looked like a 1950s TV set. The screen, as round as a porthole, displayed flickering words. Various devices were used to move the cursor — to correct an error or add a sentence — requiring so much new technology that the workstation cost about $100,000. Engelbart even rigged a helmet-mounted pointer that let you move the cursor with a nod of your head, but users found it awkward. In the end, the best cursor-control device turned out to be a box on wheels that you rolled around the desk like a toy car, which Engelbart designed himself.

The researchers in his lab nicknamed this device the mouse. “It was just what they called it affectionately,” Christina Engelbart said. Her father thought the name sounded unprofessional, so he christened it the “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” But with its wire tail and way of scampering across the desk, the gizmo was born cute. The name stuck.

MOUSEKETEER

Bill English, an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute lab in the ’60s, was instrumental in the design of the first mouse.

In Doug Engelbart’s lab, you also tried out a knee-operated pointer, right? Oh, yes, the knee pointer, in terms of functionality, turned out to be second only to the mouse.

The knee? Who knew? The knee can be a good controller. You’re rotating your foot, so you can precisely move the cursor to the left or right, up and down. But of course it was impractical, because the device had to be built to fit the person who operated it.

What kind of design considerations went into the mouse? One of the fundamental things you had to decide was the ratio of mouse movement to the movement of the cursor on the screen. I remember sitting there playing with a box on my desk and thinking, How far would I be willing to move my hand to make the cursor move across a line of text? That’s how I got a feel for how big the wheel ought to be.

So you had to figure out what kind of hand gestures would be ideal for moving the cursor? Yeah, I just moved a box around the desk and thought, That feels about right.

Are we still using the same kind of hand movements? Well, let’s see. I’m sitting here at my screen right now and moving my mouse. Yeah, it’s pretty much the same as the original one.

Innovation: Who Made That Digital Camouflage?

What started on vehicles eventually moved onto clothing. In 2002, the Marines adopted a uniform inspired by the digital-

camouflage idea, with a pixel pattern that gave soldiers the look of video-game characters. O’Neill, who retired in 2001, found himself working on the project. “I helped the Marine Corps out,” he says, “particularly on the physical descriptions for patent rights.”

The fabric came in two color schemes — one for woodland terrain and one for the desert. In 2004, the U.S. Army announced that it would use digital camouflage on its uniforms as well. But O’Neill was dismayed when it issued the camouflage pattern in only one color meant to hide soldiers anywhere in the world, from sand dunes to jungles. “I had 10 cat fits and a dog fit,” he says, because he believed a so-called universal camouflage would be “useless everywhere.” After prodding by Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Army began to re-evaluate the pattern in 2009.

“Everybody suddenly wanted digital camouflage,” O’Neill says. The problem was that “everybody didn’t know how to do it.”

The Army has been field-testing new camouflage to replace the universal pattern and, in the interim, has issued an unpixelated fabric called MultiCam to some troops. The pattern uses seven colors.

INVISIBLE CITIES

Guy Cramer is the chief executive and president of the HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation, which specializes in camouflage design.

Your company has been working on a “Harry Potter” cloak that you claim can render people invisible. How does it work? It bends light in the same way a fiber-optic cable bends light. So if a soldier was wearing this, it would work from every angle. Right now, research scientists have made objects disappear, but you have to be looking directly at the object, and it can be only a half-inch tall. But our company can do an entire building or a ship or a submarine.

You’ve reported that you have shown this to the U.S. and Canadian militaries, but some remain skeptical. Why won’t you demonstrate this to the general public? Do you want the North Koreans to have access to this? I’ve been bombarded by people who want to see the real thing and wonder how much it costs. But this is not a moneymaking scheme. This is about the safety of the troops.

What’s the next step? We have to put it into production. But how do we do that so that people who are on the production line don’t talk about how this thing works? We’re talking about using retired Special Forces people on the assembly line — retired Navy SEALs, for instance.

Disruptions: New Motto for Silicon Valley: First Security, Then Innovation

The Twitter account of The Associated Press was among many recently hacked.

At Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., are stark white posters with bright red statements like “Done is better than perfect” and “Move fast and break things.”

These disruptive philosophies embody the spirit not just of Facebook but of Silicon Valley. Yet today, when technology companies have become the prime targets of rogue governments and hackers, the ideologies that drive these companies to provoke could end up disrupting these companies.

Conversely, the signs sitting in security research firms across the country warn, “Carelessness causes security incidents.”

Although technology companies say they take security seriously, protecting their customers seems to come second to announcing new products. Take Twitter, where people’s accounts are frequently hacked. In the last few months alone, this has happened to Burger King, BBC, NPR, The Associated Press and a slew of celebrities and users. In that time, Twitter has proudly announced updates to features on its mobile and desktop apps, introduced a music Web site and redesigned its company blog. But it still hasn’t released two-factor authentication, a security tool used by the rest of the industry to deter hackers.

Although Twitter declined to comment, I’m sure most of the people on the site who have seen their accounts pilfered over the last several years would rather have two-factor authentication than a shiny new Twitter blog.

One solution is a bill crawling through Congress over the last two years, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as Cispa. The bill would make it easy for tech companies to share information about computer security threats with government agencies, helping fortify against cyberattacks.

But privacy groups say that Cispa is not a solution to the problem, and that instead it hands the highly sensitive personal data we want protected to the government.

“It has to be the obligation of these tech companies to build in security from the very beginning before we start moving into solutions about bringing the government into the private sector,” said Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based advocacy group financed by a broad coalition of technology and telecommunication companies. “You want to see these very innovative companies step up and become the leaders in security solutions first.”

Cispa’s creators and defenders see it differently. They argue that companies are not simply fortifying against a child in his bedroom who is trying to get into their servers for fun. Today’s hackers hail from foreign governments like those in China, Syria and Estonia, and are adept at getting what they want.

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who was one of the authors of Cispa, recently said that “our government, our industries and your personal information will be subjected to hundreds of thousands of attempts at hacking” in a single day. “We are in a stealthy cyber war in America. And we’re losing.”

He thinks the government can solve that problem.

Kelsey Knight, director of communications for Mr. Rogers, said in a phone interview that Cispa could stop “90 percent of the current security breaches” that happen today. “Then, in reverse, these companies would be able to share their threat of information and code back to the government and that will add to the list of zeros and ones that we can keep defending against together.”

Ms. Knight noted that start-ups cannot defend themselves against today’s advanced attacks because the cost can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. She said Cispa and other government groups can help.

One thing is clear: today’s tactics are not working.

During the State of the Union address this year, President Obama cited the need to protect “national security” and “privacy” while defending against cyber attacks. The president has also been meeting with chief executives to discuss ways to combat the threat of computer warfare and corporate espionage.

Cispa, now in the Senate, could take months, if not years, if it is to emerge at all from Congress. Until then, advocacy groups believe it falls to the start-ups to put more effort into security.

“The ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy is not a philosophy that has necessarily been good for our privacy,” Ms. Harris said. “I certainly believe that government and companies should be working together, but information sharing is just a very small part of the cyber security puzzle. It’s companies investing the resources to strengthen their own security first.”

Maybe it’s time for companies in Silicon Valley to replace those posters with ones that say, “Move slowly and protect your users.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Innovation: Who Made That Cellphone?

After the stunt, Cooper — who was head of the communications-systems division at Motorola — met with journalists inside the Hilton. The first cellphone, weighing more than two pounds, had all the sex appeal of a doorstop. Still, it was a triumph of engineering. To prove that the phone wasn’t an elaborate fake, he handed it around. One reporter called Australia and was astonished when her mother’s voice came out of the plastic-covered device.

“I have a mantra that people are naturally, fundamentally and inherently mobile,” Cooper says. While working on car phones, he imagined a world in which people would carry the devices on their bodies — and he liked to joke that “when you were born, you would be assigned a phone number.” That idea seemed wildly futuristic in the 1960s, when car phones needed 30-pound batteries. But by the early 1970s, “the electronics had improved,” he says. “We could get by with a small battery and very small parts, and you could actually carry the phone with you.”

It would be another decade before you could actually buy one. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, left, went on sale in 1983 for about $4,000 — and became a symbol of yuppie excess. In the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko strolls on the beach at sunrise and snarls into his brick-size phone, “This is your wake-up call, pal.” Soon enough, everyone else would get the wake-up call, too.

SPYING ON YOURSELF

Alex Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Lab at M.I.T., studies cellphone data for clues about our behavior.

The phone tracks our movements, as well as our calls and texts, so it can reveal a lot about our daily lives. What did you learn about yourself by studying your own cellphone data? That I’m very predictable. We tend to pay attention only to the new things in our lives. Meanwhile, our habits are invisible to us. You may say you don’t always eat Tex-Mex food, but if you’re always at the Tex-Mex restaurant, I’d have to disagree.

If you were to look at my cellphone data, could you predict where I’ll be next Tuesday? Probably.

In a recent study, you looked at people’s cellphone data and found that their behavior changed just before they reported feeling sick. Yes. It turns out that all of us have very consistent responses when we’re getting the flu. We move around more before we come down with the illness — it’s that last gasp of activity before you get really sick.

You asked the people in your study to tell you how many hours they slept. Did you discover anything when you put together the sleep logs with calls, texts and other cellphone data? It turns out that there’s a strong correlation between social stimulation and good sleep. If you don’t sleep well, you are more likely to be a hermit. Some of the people in our study discovered that the correlation was very strong for them — they needed good sleep in order to be social.

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Microsoft Inherits Sticky Data Collection Issues From Skype

BARCELONA — When Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion, it acquired not only the technology behind the world’s dominant Internet voice and video service, but a connection with more than 250 million active users.

But perhaps what Microsoft did not anticipate when it made the purchase was that it would inherit the delicate privacy aspects of Skype’s business, including its billions of encrypted, peer-to-peer Internet conversations.

Those conversations, and the access Microsoft grants to them, are now the focus of a lobbying campaign by 50 digital rights groups and dozens of individuals.

In a letter sent in January, the group asked Microsoft to disclose what data it collected from Skype users and whether that data was passed on — whether to potential advertisers or to law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations.

The group, a collection of Internet activists from around the world that includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and Zwiebelfreunde, a German university group, called on Microsoft to begin publishing regular transparency reports listing the requests made by government agencies for Skype client information around the world.

Amid the pressure, there are signs that Microsoft may be preparing to relent and publish what are known as transparency reports, which disclose the level of government requests for information. Google has provided the reports since 2010. Since then, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, have moved toward offering regular reports — but not Microsoft.

Besides public disclosures, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group also wanted to know the location of Skype’s headquarters — whether in Luxembourg, as it was before it was acquired by Microsoft, or at Microsoft’s base in Redmond, Washington.

The location is important, Ms. Galperin said, because if Skype’s headquarters are in the United States, Microsoft and Skype would be required to comply with requests made by U.S. intelligence services under Calea, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which gives agencies easier access to monitor data from online businesses like Skype.

Internet activists in countries with authoritarian regimes also need to know whether their Skype conversations, once considered a hack-proof way of avoiding government phone wiretaps because of the peer-to-peer nature of the exchanges, are still secure, she said.

“What we know right now is that we don’t know,” said Paul Bernal, a lawyer and professor of technology, intellectual property and media law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, one of 61 individuals who also signed the open letter to Microsoft.

“We need to know how Microsoft and Skype cooperate with law enforcement and others around the world,” Mr. Bernal said. “People living under authoritarian regimes need to know what kinds of personal risks they are taking when using Skype.”

Dominic Carr, a Microsoft spokesman in Redmond, said that Skype’s headquarters, even after the purchase, remained in Luxembourg and the company was subject to laws of Luxembourg and the European Union, not the United States.

Luxembourg, like other E.U. countries, has mutual assistance pacts and other legal mechanisms that permit companies like Microsoft to share information with foreign law enforcement agencies in continuing investigations. The purchase of Skype by Microsoft has not changed the ability of law enforcement to gain access to Skype data, Mark Gillett, a corporate vice president responsible for Skype engineering and operations, wrote in a blog post.

According to Microsoft’s published privacy policy, three types of information are generated by Skype: personally identifiable information on users; nonidentifiable information; and the actual contents of Skype-to-Skype audio and video conversations.

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Ericsson Finds a Chinese Rival Hot on Its Heels

BARCELONA — As long as there have been mobile phones, Ericsson has dominated the global market for equipment for wireless telecom networks, selling the biggest share of gear to mobile phone operators around the world. But last year something happened that even the longtime market leader, based in Stockholm, had never faced.

A competitor, Huawei of China, pulled even in overall sales.

The rivals have different business mixes — Ericsson makes 43 percent of its sales by managing wireless networks, while Huawei also sells smartphones and corporate communication grids. And excluding those side businesses, Huawei’s sold $25 billion of equipment to operators last year, 29 percent less than Ericsson, which remains the biggest seller of key components like data and voice lines and routers, according to Dell’Oro, a research firm in Redwood City, California.

But Huawei, an upstart founded in 1987 initially to resell telephone switches in rural China, has become a global peer of equal scale, matching Ericsson with $35.7 billion in total sales.

Momentum for the time being appears to be with Huawei, whose profit rose 33 percent last year, to 15.4 billion renminbi, or $2.5 billion, as sales rose 8 percent to 220.2 billion renminbi, according to preliminary, unaudited figures from the company, based in Shenzhen. In the same period, Ericsson’s profit fell 53 percent, to 5.9 billion Swedish kronor, or $919 million, as network equipment sales dropped 11 percent, to 117.3 billion kronor.

Hans Vestberg, an Ericsson employee for 25 years who has been chief executive since January 2010, led the company’s diversification into network management, an outsourcing business that has helped Ericsson offset its equipment rivalry with Huawei. During an interview, Mr. Vestberg declined to discuss Huawei directly but noted that Ericsson had hundreds of competitors, depending on the type of equipment, the type of customer and geography.

Even so, remaining the overall market leader is important, he said.

“Ericsson has been the market leader throughout its 136-year history, and my job I guess is to make sure we hold on to that for another 130,” Mr. Vestberg said.

Product innovations, like antenna-integrated radio, or AIR, an antenna for a cellphone base station that has the radio transmitter built directly into the aerial to save space, electricity and cost for network operators, will keep Ericsson on top, he said.

But the rivalry, because of the increasingly strategic value of global communication networks, also has a significant geopolitical dimension. Amid national security concerns, the U.S. market for operator equipment has been essentially closed to Huawei, which was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army.

The largest U.S. operators have not bought from Huawei, and, last October, the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence recommended that they continue to avoid purchases from Huawei and another Chinese vendor, ZTE.

The House report, which followed hearings with Chinese company executives, concluded that Huawei had not supplied the requested information on its relationship with the Chinese government and a group of 10 state-owned Chinese banks that were among Huawei’s commercial lenders. The bipartisan panel, in its public report, concluded that Huawei was an extension of the Chinese government, using public subsidies to underbid and win business.

“Based on available information, the committee finds that Huawei receives substantial support from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned banks, which is at least partially responsible for its position in the global marketplace,” according to the report.

A senior executive at an American maker of network equipment said he believed Huawei to be a de facto arm of the Chinese government, receiving preferential subsidies and support that had allowed it to undercut Ericsson and the other suppliers of equipment, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks, to build its market share.

Special Report: Technology & Innovation: Robotic Gadgets Are Becoming Within Reach of Average Consumer

His creation, the Hexy, is a six-legged, crablike creature that can navigate its own environment and respond to humans with a hand wave or other programmable gesture. Mr. Schlesinger said he had been able to lower production costs by using free software and by molding a lot of the plastic parts locally in Massachusetts, not in China.

Since setting up his company, ArcBotics, in suburban Somerville, Massachusetts, Mr. Schlesinger has built a backlog of more than 1,000 orders. His goal, he said, was to become “the Ikea of robotics.”

“I think the market for consumer robotics is poised to explode,” said Mr. Schlesinger, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “We are only at the beginning.”

Since the 1960s, robots have assumed major roles in industrial manufacturing and assembly, the remote detonation of explosives, search and rescue, and academic research. But the devices have remained out of reach, in affordability and practicality, to most consumers.

That, according to Professor Andrew Ng, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in California, is about to change. One big reason, Mr. Ng said, is the mass production of smartphones and game consoles, which has driven down the size and price of robotic building blocks like accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors.

On the edges of consumer consciousness, the first generation of devices with rudimentary artificial intelligence are beginning to appear: entertainment and educational robots like the Hexy, and a line of tireless household drones that can mow lawns, sweep floors, clean swimming pools and even enhance golf games.

“I’m seeing a huge explosion of robotic toys and believe that there will be one soon in industry,” said Mr. Ng, an associated professor of computer science at Stanford.

The most advanced robots remain exotic workhorses like NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, which cost $2.5 billion, and the LS3, a doglike robot being developed for the U.S. military that can carry a 400-pound, or 180-kilogram load more than 20 miles, or about 30 kilometers. The mechanical beast of burden, whose price is not public, is being made by a consortium led by Boston Dynamics. In Menlo Park, California, engineers at Willow Garage, a robotics firm, are selling the two-armed, 5-foot-4 inch (1.63-meter) rolling robot called the PR2 for $400,000.

A video on Willow Garage’s Web site shows the PR2 fetching beer from a refrigerator, which while an engineering and programming feat, is an expensive way to get beer.

“I think we’re still some years away from useful personal robots making pervasive appearances in our homes,” Mr. Ng said.

Right now, for the masses, there is the CaddyTrek, a robotic golf club carrier that follows a player from tee to fairway to green through tall grass, up 30-degree slopes and in snow, for as many as 27 holes on a single charge. Players wear a remote control on their belts, which acts as a homing beacon for the self-propelled cart, which trails six paces behind the player.

Golfers can also navigate the robotic cart, which is made by FTR Systems, to the next tee while they finish putting.

“Someone ran up to me last week and said that my golf cart had broken free and was rolling through the parking lot,” said Richard Nagle, the sales manager for CaddyTrek in North America and Europe. “Most people just stop and stare. They’re not used to this.”

FTR Systems does not disclose the proprietary technology it uses to power the CaddyTrek, which sells for $1,595, but Mr. Nagle said sales of the robot carriers had been strong, and the company had been rushing to meet orders in the United States and Europe.

I.H.T. Special Report: Technology & Innovation: New Player in E.U. Data Privacy Battle

This January, when Ireland assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union, Mr. Shatter, who is now Ireland’s minister of justice, equality and defense, will take on another big challenge: putting together an agreement to extend the Union’s 17-year-old data protection law to Web businesses and the digital economy.

Mr. Shatter is Ireland’s lead negotiator on the issue in the Council of Ministers, the legislative body in Brussels that acts as the European Parliament’s upper house. The Union’s 27 members are at odds over how to apply E.U. data protection laws in the digital world, and an agreement could require companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to provide the bloc’s 503.7 million consumers with far greater control over their online data than people have in the United States.

An important part of the proposal, which is now before two committees in the European Parliament, would require Web companies to ask E.U. citizens for their explicit consent before collecting online data and tracking Internet activity used to tailor marketing and advertising to individuals.

The proposal, which was drafted by Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission, has been welcomed by E.U. privacy regulators, who are battling Google over its data collection practices.

But it is opposed by many large Web businesses, as well as by the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union. Opponents view the prior consent clause as an onerous condition that threatens an Internet financial model that relies on advertising to pay for content.

That has raised concerns among E.U. lawmakers, who are afraid that overly burdensome regulation would stifle Internet commerce and job growth.

Into this predicament steps Mr. Shatter, 61. In an interview, he said that he looked forward to working on advancing the data protection proposal, which has been packaged as a “regulation,” a rarely used binding form of E.U. law that would take effect immediately upon adoption in Brussels and apply to all 27 member countries.

“There is a need to improve trust and confidence to reassure people that their personal data won’t be misused,” Mr. Shatter said. “Putting stronger data protection standards in place will make individual citizens across Europe more trustful of the technology and its use.”

Mr. Shatter said he would aim for a compromise that recognized the growing importance of the digital economy to the European Union, as well as the need for hard-and-fast legal protections for E.U. citizens, who are increasingly making their purchases and many everyday decisions via the Internet.

Without privacy constraints, those movements online can be tracked.

“I think it is possible to reconcile the legitimate and economically important activities of the advertising industry with privacy issues,” he said. “I don’t think we can commoditize individuals and simply regard them as something of business value to be sold on.”

Such strict new rules would replace a law from 1995, which was conceived as more of a legal directive that effectively limited the possibilities of wide-scale data mining for direct marketing or other commercial purposes.

Because of the existing law’s optional nature and a loophole allowing companies to collect data for “legitimate interests,” Internet companies have been able largely to evade the directive’s principle of obtaining prior consent.

Mr. Shatter has been part of a lot of groundbreaking. His law firm, Gallagher Shatter, was the first in Ireland to represent and win a civil judgment for a victim of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, which it did in the early 1990s. Mr. Shatter, who is also a trained professional mediator — a skill that could serve him well — has published several books on Irish family law, as well as the 1989 novel “Laura,” a story about a custody battle involving a fictional politician.