Natasha Singer

You are currently browsing articles tagged Natasha Singer.

In a few months, Mattel is releasing an interactive, Wi-Fi-enabled version of its most iconic doll, and it’s only surprising that Siri and Barbie haven’t met sooner. It could be a great moment for teaching–or marketing and surveillance. From Natasha Singer at the New York Times:

This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.

“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”

It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.

“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”

The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.•

________________________________

Sally Ride became the first American female to travel into space in 1983, and those enlightened designers at Mattel’s Barbie division were ready to pay tribute to the progress of women–well, to a point. Astronaut Barbie was a trailblazer in outer space, but she also enjoyed dancing in high heels under a disco ball. Seemingly intended for young girls with serious cocaine problems.

Tags: ,

As labor is disrupted by technology, we’re all freelancers, we all have freedom–we’re all practically free. The sharing economy is great except if you’re providing the service, unless you’re the rabbit who’s been tasked, and that’s the side of the fence more of us will find ourselves on. You know those bargains you love? You’re the bargain now, or you may soon be. Nice doing business with you. From Natasha Singer at the New York Times:

“In the promising parlance of the sharing economy, whose sites and apps connect people seeking services with sellers of those services, Ms. [Jennifer] Guidry is a microentrepreneur. That is, an independent contractor who earns money by providing her skills, time or property to consumers in search of a lift, a room to sleep in, a dry-cleaning pickup, a chef, an organizer of closets.

For people seeking a sideline, these services can provide extra income. Beyond the ride services, there are businesses like Airbnb, the short-term-stay broker; task brokers like TaskRabbit and Fiverr; on-demand delivery services like Postmates and Favor; and grocery-shopping services like Instacart.

‘Someone on Sidecar doing the same commute they do on a daily basis and picking up a rider, it’s really free money for the driver and reduced cost for the rider,’ notes Nick Grossman, the general manager for policy and outreach at Union Square Ventures, which is an investor in Sidecar.

In a climate of continuing high unemployment, however, people like Ms. Guidry are less microentrepreneurs than microearners. They often work seven-day weeks, trying to assemble a living wage from a series of one-off gigs. They have little recourse when the services for which they are on call change their business models or pay rates. To reduce the risks, many workers toggle among multiple services.

‘Having a diverse portfolio is the best protection,’ says Sara Horowitz, the founder and executive director of Freelancers Union, an advocacy organization. ‘People are doing this in the midst of wage stagnation and income inequality, and they have to do these things to survive.'”

Tags: , ,

If she’s not exactly hunting for cool, Intel’s Dr. Genevieve Bell is certainly pursuing happiness. The anthropologist leads a team of thinkers and futurists who scour the Earth to figure out what you want from personal technology, even before you can name it. They want to know what’s on your mind. They want to make you happy. From a profile of Dr. Bell by Natasha Singer in the New York Times:

“‘My mandate at Intel has always been to bring the stories of everyone outside the building inside the building — and make them count,’ says Dr. Bell, who considers herself among the outsiders. ‘You have to understand people to build the next generation of technology.’

By ‘outside,’ she isn’t referring only to consumers outside of the United States. Dr. Bell and her team are responsible for sussing out the attributes that people everywhere love, or wish they could have, in their PCs, televisions and so on. Over the last few years, they have been concentrating on consumers’ appetites for hyper-personal technology, like voice-recognition systems and fitness trackers. In essence, they are pushing Intel toward a more people-centric era of personal computing.

Lately, that work has become all the more important to the company. That is because Intel, which has long dominated the laptop processor field, was surprisingly slow to acknowledge the burgeoning market for smartphone chips. In fact, Dr. Bell and her team, among others, had forecast the mobile trend early on, says Diane M. Bryant, the general manager of Intel’s data center group, but Intel didn’t prioritize it at the time. Although the company recently introduced new chips for mobile devices, PC makers are still Intel’s largest customer base, accounting for $33 billion of its $52.7 billion in revenue last year.

Now, attributable in part to the efforts of Dr. Bell and her team, Intel is trying to catch up, forging into realms like wearable gadgets that could showcase its new, lower-powered ultrasmall chips. Futurists on Dr. Bell’s team are also developing a customizable personal robot, about the size of a big teddy bear, based on the new mini-chips. Where even a decade ago Intel still focused largely on turning out increasingly efficient technology for its industrial customers, its executives say, the company now looks to consumer happiness as a starting point of product development.”

Tags: , ,

From Natasha Singer’s smart and scary New York Times article about advances in face-recognition technology:

“FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like Minority Report.

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.”

Tags: