Case Study: A Content Company Weighs Becoming a Technology Company

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European Automakers Hope Technology Can Lure Younger Buyers

With sales at their lowest level in two decades, auto industry managers gathering for the Frankfurt auto show next week will be doing their best to focus on shiny new technologies rather than on the European car market, which, in contrast to the thriving market in the United States, is in a terrible state.

The buzz at the show, which opens to the public on Wednesday, is likely to be about new battery-powered cars and vehicles that are able to drive themselves. Those are more cheerful topics than auto sales, which have fallen 20 percent in Western Europe since the financial crisis began in 2008 and are at their lowest level since 1993.

Only European carmakers with substantial sales in the United States or China — BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen — have escaped relatively unscathed.

The emphasis on technology is more than just a distraction from market misery. Carmakers are desperate for ways to excite young buyers, who are increasingly apathetic about car ownership. The push toward cars that are rechargeable and loaded with software is part of a search to make automobiles as essential to young adults as smartphones. Otherwise, there is a big risk that auto sales may never reach their previous peaks even if the European economy keeps improving.

“There are products that are hipper for young people than cars,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen in northern Germany and an industry analyst. “The car companies are still using the old marketing pitch — more horsepower. That doesn’t speak to young people any more.”

Interest in battery-powered cars has faded after disappointing initial sales, but it could pick up again this year with the market introduction of the BMW i3. The vehicle has perhaps the most revolutionary new design by an established carmaker in years, not only because of its electric propulsion system but also because the passenger compartment is made of carbon fiber rather than steel, to save weight and extend the distance the car can travel between charges.

There is also speculation that Continental, a German parts supplier, will announce an alliance with Google next week to further develop self-driving cars. A spokesman for Continental, which will hold a news conference at the auto show on Tuesday, declined to comment.

As such initiatives illustrate, it is no longer enough for a car to take a person from one place to another without breaking down. A car must be green, so the owner does not feel guilty driving it. And being in the car should not interrupt the perpetual connectivity that many younger people take for granted.

BMW is going to extremes to make the i3 the most carbon-neutral car on the road. A wind turbine outside the BMW factory in Leipzig provides power for the i3 assembly line, and the carbon fiber for the passenger compartment comes from a factory in Washington State that uses hydropower. And of course the i3 itself has no tailpipe emissions (unless buyers choose a range-extender version that has a small gasoline motor).

With a price of about $42,000 in the United States, the i3 will be an option only for higher-end buyers when it arrives in showrooms by the middle of next year, though government incentives could lower the price by more than $7,000. But since BMW’s clientele already tends to be wealthy and urban, the company may be in a better position than other carmakers to find a market.

“What the mobile phone did for communication, electric mobility will do for individual mobility,” Norbert Reithofer, the chief executive of BMW, said during an introduction event for the i3 in New York in July.

Despite Mr. Reithofer’s enthusiasm, no one expects battery-powered cars to sell in large numbers soon, and certainly not to solve the industry’s deep-seated problems. About 77,000 electric vehicles were sold in the United States in the last 12 months, far more than in any other country, according to Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in Munich. That number, which includes cars like the Chevy Volt that have range-extender motors, is tiny compared with the 14.5 million cars of all types sold in the United States last year.

Modest expectations may also be in order for self-driving cars. Cars are coming on the market that can relieve drivers of some of the tedium of driving in traffic or on the highway. The latest edition of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, introduced this year, can steer and brake autonomously in traffic or on the autobahn.

Economic Scene: Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology

I traveled to Japan with a Tandy TRS-80 portable computer, which ran on AA batteries and had plastic cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.

Articles are more thorough — informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.

For all its financial troubles, never has The New York Times been read by more people: 44 million unique viewers online in the United States every month. Yet if you were to rummage through American economic statistics you would find little evidence of journalism’s technological leaps. Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty must exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.

Government statistics lend support to his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

The Commerce Department is in the process of revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions to be announced this summer are expected to make the economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses how dating sites reduce the cost and increase the odds of finding a mate. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online. Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.

Technology Investor Is Reported Choice for F.C.C.

Mr. Wheeler, who more than a decade ago led two telecommunications industry trade groups, has prompted concern in recent weeks by some consumer advocacy groups who anticipated his nomination and said his background investing in and lobbying for cable and wireless companies troubled them. Many of them felt that the outgoing chairman, Julius Genachowski, refused to stand up to powerful telecommunications companies during his four-year tenure.

But Mr. Wheeler received cautious approval on Tuesday from Public Knowledge, one of Mr. Genachowski’s harshest critics. Officials at Public Knowledge pointed out that when Mr. Wheeler lobbied for the cable companies and the cellphone industry, those industries were either upstarts themselves or far less concentrated than they are today.

A White House official said that Mignon Clyburn, an F.C.C. commissioner since August 2009, will be appointed to serve as acting chairwoman until Mr. Wheeler is confirmed and sworn in. Prior to joining the F.C.C., Ms. Clyburn served for 11 years on the South Carolina Public Service Commission, including two as its chairwoman.

Mr. Wheeler currently is a managing director at Core Capital Partners, a Washington investment firm with $350 million under management. At Core Capital, he has helped to oversee the firm’s investments in an array of start-ups and small to midsize technology companies, including GoMobo, Twisted Pair Solutions and Jacked. He also is a member of the board of EarthLink, an Internet service provider that competes aggressively with Verizon and AT&T.

In columns on his Web site, www.mobilemusings.net, Mr. Wheeler has voiced strong opinions about some of the issues that he will find on his desk at the F.C.C.

He has strongly supported the voluntary incentive auctions that the F.C.C. has been planning. The agency is aiming to reclaim airwaves from television broadcasters and sell them to wireless phone companies for use in mobile broadband services.

In 2011, Mr. Wheeler criticized the broadcast industry for not moving more aggressively to use their airwaves for mobile digital television, or the broadcast of television signals to smartphones. At the same time, he said, broadcasters have been reluctant to let go of the part of the nation’s airwaves, or spectrum, that they do not fully use. The F.C.C., backed by Congress, is preparing to auction off many of those unused airwaves, potentially for billions of dollars.

“I’ve been mystified why broadcasters have declared jihad against the voluntary spectrum auction,” Mr. Wheeler wrote.

“Getting big dollars for an asset for which you paid nothing while still being able to run your traditional business over cable,” he added, “seems a pretty good business proposition – unless you really are serious about providing new and innovative services and need all that spectrum.”

Telecommunications industry watchers who have expressed misgivings about Mr. Wheeler’s work as a lobbyist point out that he oversaw the National Cable Television Association from 1979 to 1984. That could mean that he would look kindly on companies like Comcast, one of the largest cable and broadband service providers.

Free Press, an advocacy group that often opposes telecommunications industry proposals, said the F.C.C. needs as its chairman “someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest.” “On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations,” the group said in a statement. “But he now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong.”

In recent weeks, there has been a fair amount of jostling and lobbying around the chairman’s post. In March, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat, sent a letter signed by 32 senators to Mr. Obama recommending Jessica Rosenworcel, the other sitting Democrat on the five-member commission and a former aide to Mr. Rockefeller, for the top job.

Three weeks later, a group of Washington technology policy advisers sent a letter to Mr. Obama saying that Mr. Wheeler should be the nominee. “He has consistently fought on the side of increasing competition,” the group wrote.

Some Schools Urge Students to Bring Their Own Technology

Officials at the schools say the students’ own devices are the simplest way to use a new generation of learning apps that can, for example, teach them math, test them with quizzes and enable them to share and comment on each other’s essays.

Advocates of this new trend, called B.Y.O.T. for bring your own technology, say there is another advantage: it saves money for schools short of cash.

Some large school districts in Central Florida and near Houston and Atlanta have already signed on, and they are fielding calls and providing tours to administrators from hundreds of other districts that are considering whether to follow their lead.

But B.Y.O.T. has many skeptics, even among people who otherwise see benefits of using more technology in classrooms.

“The schools are hoping, hoping there’s going to be a for-free solution because they don’t have any money,” said Elliot Soloway, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who consults with many school districts about the use of computers to promote learning.

“If you look at initiatives in public education, this has the momentum.”

But Mr. Soloway also said he was “frightened” by the notion of schools using B.Y.O.T. as a quick budget fix because there was no evidence that a classroom full of students using different personal devices would enhance learning. Roy Pea, a professor of learning sciences at Stanford University, also has doubts. He is the co-author of a White House-backed National Educational Technology Plan published in 2011 that advocates for technology-centric classrooms.

But he said the B.Y.O.T. approach could be counterproductive if teachers were forced to build lessons around different devices — in effect, subverting curriculum to technology.

“Why are they so happy to have these devices when just a few years ago they didn’t want them in the classroom?” Dr. Pea asked about school administrators.

The Volusia County School District in Central Florida, bordering Daytona Beach, is one of the places that used to have signs around its schools that admonished students: no cellphones allowed. But the signs have been replaced over the last two years with new ones that read: B.Y.O.T.

Volusia school officials say that they realized they should take advantage of, rather than fight, students’ deep connections with their devices. At the same time, the district found that the cost of providing and maintaining computers for students was becoming prohibitive.

Since the change, Volusia officials say, they have not encountered many tech support problems or complaints from teachers. Rather, students are more engaged, they say, and the only problem that regularly crops up is that students forget to charge the batteries in their devices.

“It’s almost like bringing your homework,” said Jessica Levene, manager of learning technologies for the Volusia district, where 21 of 70 schools are using B.Y.O.T. “Make sure you have your device and that it’s charged.”

She conceded that students could text each other more easily now but said the school was keeping them busy on their devices. And while district administrators worried initially that poorer students would not own devices, they discovered something of “an inverse relationship” between family income and the sophistication of their devices, particularly smartphones, said Don Boulware, the district’s director of technology services.

At Woodward Avenue Elementary School in the Volusia district, fifth-grade teacher Dana Zacharko said her students tended to bring in smartphones or iPod Touches. She said she had found apps that allowed her to teach all kinds of subjects.

Mobile Apps Drive Rapid Changes in Search Technology

Google has repeatedly made the argument — and the commission agreed — that the speed of change in the technology industry made it impossible for regulators to impose restrictions without stalling future innovations.

Exhibit A is the mobile device. Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming.

“Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.”

When the commission began its investigation 19 months ago, for instance, the iPhone did not have the Siri voice search, Apple did not have its own mapping service and Yelp’s mobile apps had no ads. By the time the inquiry concluded, all of that had changed. Google had new competitors on all sides trying to chip away at its hold on the mobile search and advertising market.

Still, Google is even more dominant on mobile phones than on desktop computers. It has 96 percent of the world’s mobile search market, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. It collects 57 percent of mobile ad revenue in the United States, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, gets just 9 percent, according to eMarketer.

But, analysts say, as people change their search habits on mobile devices — bypassing Google to go straight to apps like Yelp’s, for example — that dominance could wane, or a competitor could swoop in and knock Google off its perch.

“It’s important to recognize that many mobile apps are really vertical search engines,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “It is impossible to really say anyone dominates a section of mobile in a secure way right now.”

On cellphones or tablets, for instance, people increasingly skip Google altogether in favor of apps like Flixster for movie times or Kayak for flights.

Apple is taking on mobile search with Siri on the iPhone, which can answer questions about the weather or search for nearby restaurants. With its new mapping service, Apple has also entered local search.

On Friday, Blekko, a search start-up, introduced an app called Izik for Apple and Android devices. It tries to make searching more tablet-friendly by showing images instead of just links, and making it easier to swipe through many pages of results with a finger.

On mobile devices, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “the user experience is so different that we think it opens things up. On your desktop, if it doesn’t look like Google, you think that’s not a search engine. On a tablet, it’s just vastly different.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said at a news conference Thursday that the speed of change in the tech industry meant that “you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

The commission also considered Google’s partnerships with cellphone makers like Samsung and HTC that license Google search on phones, so that a search box shows up on the home screen. In the end it decided not to take action against Google.

Some Google critics said that even though the competitive landscape is different on mobile devices, it should not have influenced the government’s analysis of Google’s behavior on the desktop Web.

“There’s no doubt that mobile applications, including Yelp’s, give consumers the ability to bypass the major search engines and go directly to the best provider of the service they’re looking for,” said Vince Sollitto, vice president for government relations at Yelp. Still, he added, “I don’t see how that impacts how someone is acting anticompetitively on the desktop.”

(One of Google’s concessions to the federal agency, that it would allow other Web companies to ask Google not to show their content in its own vertical search products — a chief complaint of Yelp’s — applies to mobile as well.)

But others said antitrust enforcement in the 21st century needs to be more agile.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

TECHNOLOGY: TimesCast Media+Tech | January 2, 2013

January 2, 2013By Fritzie Andrade, Emily B. Hager, Krishnan Vasudevan, Pedro Rafael Rosado and Samantha Stark

Austin Wintory, Grammy-nominated composer. | Apps to help keep New Year’s resolutions. | Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Law Technology News: Is It Time to Wave Goodbye to the Personal Computer?

Is the personal computer dead? The usefulness of Apple's iPads and other mobile devices has been heavily debated in legal organizations; the "consumerization" of IT has been extensively discussed.

Microsoft Renews Relevance With Machine Learning Technology

SEATTLE — Eric Horvitz joined Microsoft Research 20 years ago with a medical degree, a Ph.D. in computer science and no plans to stay. “I thought I’d be here six months,” he said.

He remained at M.S.R., as Microsoft’s advanced research arm is known, for the fast computers and the chance to work with a growing team of big brains interested in cutting-edge research. His goal was to build predictive software that could get continually smarter.

In a few months, Mr. Horvitz, 54, may get his long-awaited payoff: the advanced computing technologies he has spent decades working on are being incorporated into numerous Microsoft products.

Next year’s version of the Excel spreadsheet program, part of the Office suite of software, will be able to comb very large amounts of data. For example, it could scan 12 million Twitter posts and create charts to show which Oscar nominee was getting the most buzz.

A new version of Outlook, the e-mail program, is being tested that employs Mr. Horvitz’s machine-learning specialty to review users’ e-mail habits. It could be able to suggest whether a user wants to read each message that comes in.

Elsewhere, Microsoft’s machine-learning software will crawl internal corporate computer systems much the way the company’s Bing search engine crawls the Internet looking for Web sites and the links among them. The idea is to predict which software applications are most likely to fail when seemingly unrelated programs are tweaked.

If its new products work as advertised, Microsoft will find itself in a position it has not occupied for the last few years: relevant to where technology is going.

While researchers at M.S.R. helped develop Bing to compete with Google, the unit was widely viewed as a pretty playground where Bill Gates had indulged his flights of fancy. Now it is beginning to put Microsoft close to the center of a number of new businesses, like algorithm stores and speech recognition services. “We have more data in many ways than Google,” said Qi Lu, who oversees search, online advertising and the MSN portal at Microsoft.

M.S.R. owes its increased prominence as much to the transformation of the computing industry as to its own hard work. The explosion of data from sensors, connected devices and powerful cloud computing centers has created the Big Data industry. Computers are needed to find patterns in the mountains of data produced each day.

“Everything in the world is generating data,” said David Smith, a senior analyst with Gartner, a technology research firm. “Microsoft has so many points of presence, with Windows, Internet Explorer, Skype, Bing and other things, that they could do a lot. Analyzing vast amounts of data could be a big business for them.”

Microsoft is hardly alone among old-line tech companies in injecting Big Data into its products. Later this year, Hewlett-Packard will showcase printers that connect to the Internet and store documents, which can later be searched for new information. I.B.M. has hired more than 400 mathematicians and statisticians to augment its software and consulting. Oracle and SAP, two of the largest suppliers of software to businesses, have their own machine-learning efforts.

In the long term, Microsoft hopes to combine even more machine learning with its cloud computing system, called Azure, to rent out data sets and algorithms so businesses can build their own prediction engines. The hope is that Microsoft may eventually sell services created by software, in addition to the software itself.

“Azure is a real threat to Amazon Web Services, Google and other cloud companies because of its installed base,” said Anthony Goldbloom, the founder of Kaggle, a predictive analytics company. “They have data from places like Bing and Xbox, and in Excel they have the world’s most widely used analysis software.”

Like other giants, Microsoft also has something that start-ups like Kaggle do not: immense amounts of money — $67 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of the last quarter — and the ability to work for 10 years, or even 20, on a big project.

It has been a long trip for Microsoft researchers. M.S.R. employs 850 Ph.D.’s in 13 labs around the world. They work in more than 55 areas of computing, including algorithm theory, cryptography and computational biology.

Machine learning involves computers deriving meaning and making predictions from things like language, intentions and behavior. When search engines like Google or Bing offer “did you mean?” alternatives to what you misspelled in a query, they are employing machine learning. Mr. Horvitz, now a distinguished scientist at M.S.R., uses machine learning to analyze 25,000 variables and predict hospital patients’ readmission risk. He has also used it to deduce the likelihood of traffic jams on a holiday when it is expected to rain.

Mr. Horvitz started making prototypes of the Outlook assistant about 15 years ago. He keeps digital records of every e-mail, appointment and phone call so the software can learn when his meetings might run long, or which message he should answer first.

“Major shifts depend on incremental changes,” he said.

At a retreat in March, 100 top Microsoft executives were told to think of new ways that machine learning could be used in their businesses.

“It’s exciting when the sales and marketing divisions start pulling harder than we can deliver,” Mr. Horvitz said. “Magic in the first go-round becomes expectation in the next.”

DealBook: Citigroup Pays Fine and Fires Star Technology Analyst

John Tlumacki/Boston GlobeWilliam F. Galvin, the top financial regulator in Massachusetts.

Citigroup paid a $2 million fine and fired a prominent technology analyst after authorities accused the bank of improperly leaking to the media unpublished information about YouTube and confidential research on Facebook‘s initial public offering.

William F. Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, accused a junior Citigroup analyst of sharing nonpublic information about Facebook to TechCrunch, a blog focused on the technology world. The disclosure included Citigroup’s private revenue estimates for Facebook, as well as “Investment Risks” and “Investment Positives.”

Citigroup fired the junior analyst in September, according to Mr. Galvin’s order.

In a more surprising move, the bank on Friday also terminated his boss, Mark Mahaney, according to a person briefed on the matter.

“We are pleased to have this matter resolved,” a Citigroup spokeswoman said in a statement. “We take our internal policies and procedures very seriously and have taken the appropriate actions.”

Mr. Mahaney, a star analyst who covered the recent wave of technology I.P.O.s for Citigroup’s San Francisco research team, was not accused of any legal wrongdoing over Facebook’s public offering. The leak came solely from the junior analyst.

Mr. Mahaney was, however, blamed for not thwarting the illegal activity. Mr. Galvin did not disclose the name of the junior analyst.

Mr. Galvin’s order further took aim at Mr. Mahaney for discussing YouTube’s earnings with a reporter from a French magazine, Capital, without permission from Citigroup. The dialogue conflicted with Citigroup’s policy that research analysts receive internal approval before talking to reporters. The bank, like most Wall Street firms, also prevents analysts from expressing a viewpoint on companies unless the information is published in a report.

But ultimately, according to the person briefed on the matter, the decision to fire Mr. Mahaney had less to do with a breach of arcane compliance rules than his perceived cover-up.

The French reporter approached Mr. Mahaney in April seeking projections about YouTube’s revenue and earnings growth — information that Citigroup had not yet published in a report. Mr. Mahaney gave a terse e-mail reply that answered the essence of the reporter’s questions.

But when a bank spokeswoman followed up to remind Mr. Mahaney about seeking approval before an interview, he denied ever e-mailing the reporter. “I won’t respond,” he said, according to Mr. Galvin’s order.

The reporter later informed Citigroup that Mr. Mahaney did in fact respond. According to Mr. Galvin’s order, the analyst then asked bank employees to fudge the timing of the interview, an apparent attempt to avoid blame for not seeking approval.

When told that the accurate time was already submitted, he replied in an e-mail cited in the order: “This could get me into trouble. Shoot.”

It is unclear whether his e-mails amount to legal violations. But securities rules, Mr. Galvin noted, prohibit “unethical or dishonest conduct.”

Mr. Galvin also cited past problems in which Citigroup rebuked Mr. Mahaney for granting a February interview to Bloomberg Radio about Facebook before he officially covered the company. On another occasion this year, Mr. Galvin said, Citigroup cited Mr. Mahaney for not receiving approval before going on Canadian television.

Despite the focus on Mr. Mahaney, the main legal violations stemmed from the disclosure of Facebook information.

In May, the junior Citigroup analyst e-mailed two TechCrunch employees to say “I am ramping up coverage of FB and thought you guys might like to see how the street is thinking about it (and our estimates).” He attached a “Facebook one pager,” that featured an array of confidential information, including Mr. Mahaney’s private revenue estimates meant as an internal guide for the bank’s analysts.

Under securities rules and a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, Citigroup analysts were banned from “disseminating written research” about the social networking giant until 40 days after the I.P.O. The restriction, which applied to all banks that helped take Facebook public in May, was created to prevent research analysts from improperly promoting companies in a bid to drum up business for bankers.

The rules were reinforced in a landmark 2003 settlement with several banks, including Citigroup. The case, led by a former New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, built a Chinese wall between Wall Street research analysts and investment bankers.

A TechCrunch employee sought to post the document on the Web, but the junior analyst balked.

“My boss would eat me alive,” he said.

Bits Blog: Digital Diary: Does Technology Replace Memory or Augment It?

Jenna Wortham for The New York Times Concertgoers use their smartphones to capture a Miguel concert in New York.

Last night, a friend offered me an extra ticket to see one of my favorite new musical artists, Miguel. I quickly made my way to the event, where we chatted for a few minutes before the lights went down. Almost immediately, dozens of hands went up, holding softly glowing screens. I took a quick count and tallied no less than 50 cellphones and cameras, all straining to capture the show.

One woman’s look at technology and life.

In the past, this would have irritated me to the point of no return. Having to watch the show through a myriad of tiny screens, bobbing in and out of my field of vision, would have most likely ruined the night for me. Although I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an obsessive documenter of my life and the world around me, I tend to limit myself to a snap or two at the beginning or end of a performance, as an effort to keep my focus on the show and not be distracted by trying to post details to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

At this show, however, I noticed something different. People pulled out their cameras at the introduction of the show and then again when Miguel segued into his most popular hits, the peaks in the performance when the energy was at its highest. They didn’t appear to be trying to record the entire show, just the feverish moments that invoked the shivery chills that keep us coming to live concerts and other gatherings despite the readily available alternatives on the Internet and Web.

Maybe these videos serve another purpose, beyond being just grainy, shaky clips that serve as little more than proof of attendance and a source of bragging rights among friends. Perhaps instead of trying to obsessively document the night, my fellow concertgoers were interested in capturing small snippets of the show to serve as a trigger in the future, reactivating the way they felt during those moments. The videos could augment that physical recollection of the night, rather than serve as a replacement for it.

Of course, plenty of people still try to capture every moment throughout the day; it’s compulsive and endemic of the way we interact and share information about our lives through the social Web. But maybe our reasons for recording are maturing, evolving past basic impulse. Maybe we’re starting to overdose on the amount of memories we can reasonably review and adapting our behavior to cope.

Maybe we’re starting to prioritize and selectively capture the flashes that seem most important, most evocative, and most likely to transport us back to the moment when they happened the first time around.

Uranium Plant Using Laser Technology Wins U.S. Approval

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a license to General Electric-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment this week to build and operate a uranium enrichment plant near Wilmington, N.C., deploying the laser technology instead of costlier centrifuges.

The approval alarmed some advocates of nuclear weapons control, who say they fear that allowing companies to use the cheaper and easier technology could increase the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.

“We think the approval of the license was done without due consideration of proliferation,” said Edwin S. Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re already grappling with how to cope with Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability” and the laser technology “could make the problem of global proliferation intractable and uncontrollable.”

G.E.-Hitachi said it had not yet decided whether the project would be profitable enough to begin construction of the $1 billion plant. Part of the evaluation will involve weighing whether markets for enriched uranium will hold for years into the future, said Christopher White, a spokesman for the partnership.

But the company made assurances that its hold on the classified technology was secure.

“The company has worked with the N.R.C., the U.S. Departments of State and Energy and independent nonproliferation experts for several years to ensure the security of this technology and has met — and in many cases exceeded — all regulations pertaining to safeguarding this technology,” G.E.-Hitachi Nuclear Energy said in a statement.

The license, awarded Tuesday, allows G.E.-Hitachi to enrich uranium to 8 percent by weight. Uranium is enriched to 90 percent purity to build atomic bombs.

The United States and five other world powers have imposed sanctions on Iran because it has enriched uranium to 20 percent, a level that could be turned into weapons-grade material much more quickly than power-plant fuel.