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Features: Ships with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion 2560 x 1600 13.3-inch at 227 PPI 128GB SSD 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 Processor MSRP: $1,499 Pros: Portability combined with high-quality display Super speedy sleep and resume Good battery life Cons: Just two USB ports Non-upgradeable RAM If I could only have one MacBook (which is usually the case for your average laptop-buyer), this is the one I’d pick without hesitation. Fewer issues than its 15-inch cousin, which pioneered the Retina line, combined with a much lighter design with a smaller desktop footprint for a display that can still give you crazy amounts of screen real estate all add up to a sure-fire winner. The Most Flexible Mac I’ve owned a lot of Macs. To find myself so ready to claim any single one a clear “winner” seems crazy, but the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is it. The smaller Retina notebook has proven itself through trial by fire and continues to be the Mac I pick for nearly every situation. For example it’s my constant companion at every travel event I ever go to. The 15-inch is just a hair too heavy and unwieldy, but the 13-inch Retina hits the sweet spot. It slides easily into any bag, takes up an amount of desk space that’s better for your peripherals and for those seated around you, and yet can stil provide you with one of the best screens in the business. True Retina-quality graphics isn’t the reason to own this notebook. Apple’s “Best for Retina display” radial button in the Displays settings menu is something you can go ahead and forget about right now; instead, select “scaled” and crank that sucker up to the “More Space” maximum. But if that’s not enough, go grab DisplayMode from the Mac App Store and enjoy up to 2560 x 1280 resolution, which is beyond that supported by Apple’s official settings. My eyes suffer after 2048 x 1280, so that’s where I keep it, but even there you get so much screen real estate it feels positively sinful. If you’re used to a Cinema display or two at home, there’s nothing else that compares. The hardware is up to Apple expectations, and while I’ve experienced case creak on the 15-inch version (a widely reported issue), I’ve never had a problem with the 13 inch’s fit and finish. It feels as sturdy as a laptop can (with the possible exception of Google’s leaden Chromebook Pixel) and it withstands rough treatment with gusto, as a busy blogger can attest. In terms of Geekbench, the base Core i5 13-inch, which is the version I’m reviewing here, consistently scores between 6,000 and 7,000. That’s not a chart-topping number, but the machine hardly stutters, even under fairly demanding conditions. I thought I’d miss the dedicated graphics card or upgraded RAM from my 15-inch model, but I don’t, at least not for anything short of using Final Cut Pro X. Another nice win for the 13-inch is battery life. The Pro can stretch itself to around seven and a half hours if I need it to, but even with my incredibly sloppy, multi-app setup with tons of things going on in the background and about a thousand Chrome tabs open, it seems to average around five. Who is it for? Designers Yes. The one complaint that designers might have with the Retina MacBook Pro is that its screen is still glossy and that the color rendering and contrast are a little exaggerated to make photos pop. But if you need a device for running Photoshop or Illustrator, the Retina scratches that itch, even with the minimum specs at the $1,499 level. Plus, you can always power up to three external displays via Thunderbolt and HDMI out, but I’d only recommend doing this if you’re very cold and also enjoy the sound of a fan operating at maximum power. Still, in a pinch the Retina Pro becomes a solid companion for a 27-inch Cinema Display, giving designers even more flexibility. Founders Yes. John p

With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, there are many things one could focus on: hardware, flashy games, entertainment, etc. But one aspect really gets me fired up: game developers will now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever. Wired reports that the Xbox One will offer game developers the ability to tap Azure for all kinds of things. Developers won’t be forced to use Azure, but Microsoft will push for them to do so. The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to play games, but it does generally require a connection to the Internet. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost the power of a game, a web connection will be required to play that game. Why Azure? Microsoft has been building out Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier. Microsoft opened up Azure so it could be used for pure cloud infrastructure in June 2012. It now competes head to head with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine. Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second. Azure applications in gaming Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power. The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One will be making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements will be synced and available wherever you are. You’ll also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches will be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session. Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better than ever. Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud. “It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.” Screenshot via Microsoft Filed under: Cloud, Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Microsoft lifted the curtain on its Xbox One console today in a one-hour presentation. Unsurprisingly, the event left gamers with just as many questions as answers. For example, will the Xbox One work with used games? We asked Microsoft what it plans for used games on Xbox One. A company spokesperson parroted an answer that is currently available on the Xbox One frequently asked questions page on Xbox.com. “We are designing the Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat. “We’ll have more details to share later.” Following the Xbox One presentation, tech website Wired posted a story in which a Microsoft representative claims gamers have to pay a fee to activate used games on a second account. Microsoft has since clamped up on the subject. It hasn’t confirmed any fees, but it also hasn’t denied them. It will only say that it will share more details later. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — What do the most innovative doctors and nurses really think about the new wave of medical technology? While investors and entrepreneurs are making noise about opportunities in the space, health care providers are often the silent, reluctant partner. But to continue to stay at the top of their field, providers are keeping tabs on innovation and new products. So we invited clinicians from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University to HealthBeat to discuss the new technology they are piloting in their hospitals, and the gaps that entrepreneurs can fill. “One of our big challenges is making ourselves accessible,” said Faye Karnavy Sahai, vice president of innovation at Kaiser Permanente (pictured above, right). But Kaiser has built its brand around innovation at the front lines of healthcare, and claims its 17,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses are exposed to new ideas across the spectrum. “We also work independently with a lot of entrepreneurs and give them advice,” added Sumbul Desai (above, center), a doctor who works as the associate chief medical officer for strategy and innovation at Stanford. To guide investment in the space, Stanford offers startup founders the opportunity to pilot their technology. A number of innovation fellowships are also available, and the hospital works closely with the accelerator program StartX Med. “Every morning we’ll meet with folks in the entrepreneurial community — we love doing it and are super invested,” Desai said. What are the biggest challenges for health entrepreneurs? Desai said one of the biggest issues is that entrepreneurs don’t do their homework. There are unique regulatory, privacy and compliance issues involved with health care — HIPAA compliance is just the beginning. In addition, founders aren’t as aware as they should be about the competitive market. The other challenge is integration. Desai stressed that new products need to work well with existing workflows. Kaiser is working on centralizing its electronic medical records (EMR) system, echoing a nationwide trend. To that end, Kaiser inked a deal with Epic Systems, the electronic health record company that health entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with. “Epic is the cornerstone of how we look at our data,” said Karnavy Sahai. Epic has been criticized for hampering innovation due to its closed system that shuts out third parties. But it has a dominant position in hospitals, and isn’t wise to ignore. Another issue the speakers raised is that entrepreneurs can often get too fixated on the idea, and not consider the organization that they plan to fit into. It’s easier said than done. So for this reason, startup founders like ConsultingMD’s Owen Tripp are opting to team up with physicians. And the biggest opportunities? One of the hottest areas is patient care, but Desai warned that it’s “just one piece of the puzzle.” Consumer technology is slowly making its way into hospitals. Kaiser is experimenting with putting real-time location data in sponges to prevent them from being left in patients’ bodies during surgery (and producing an ensuing publicity nightmare). In addition, nurses can check in using location proximity badges, making it far easier to track their movements. Some of the less “sexy” areas include reimbursement and data analysis. “Big data and analytics will be huge — expect to see predictive diagnostic capabilities,” said Desai. Much of this data will be mined from fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone’s Up, which are used by patients as part of a “quantified self” trend. When asked about the one piece of technology that would be most beneficial, Desai urged innovators in the audience to think big. Physicians need ”an overall digital experience,” she explained, that will clearly list out patient visits, se

Ireland to everyone: Hey, don’t blame us for Apple’s low tax rate. Private equity firms’ interest in money manager investments is rising. PE firms are also circling the grocery ad network MyWebGrocer. How Jamie Dimon kept his job. Why Silicon Valley is not the second coming of the Gilded Age. Meet the founder (and sole employee) of 14-year-old Urban Dictionary, the 77th biggest Website in the country. Vine: The latest social media concern for employers. New York cracks down on Airbnb. San Francisco gets the Super Bowl in 2016. What things have come to: There is now an app that counts candy in a jar. 12 signs that you’re burned out. Hedge fund mogul Steven Cohen may be trying to strike a deal with prosecutors. This guy wants you to know he also made a windfall off Tumblr’s sale to Yahoo. Photo: Apple Operations International, a subsidiary of Apple Inc, is seen in Hollyhill, Cork, in the south of Ireland in this October 6, 2011 file photo. Credit: REUTERS/Michael MacSweeney/files The post peHUB Second Opinion 5.21 appeared first on peHUB.

CharityBuzz has gotten a taste of the tech world’s power, and it wants more. Weeks after auctioning off coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook for a staggering $610,000, CharityBuzz is starting a new auction, this time aimed right down the strike zone of startup company founders: Bid to pitch your favorite venture capitalist. The charity is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the world’s largest volunteer health agency dedicated to curing blood cancers, and 21 leading venture capitalists from some of the biggest-name investment firms in the country have donated lunch, dinner, or pitch meetings to hear your best ideas … after you’ve coughed up a bit of coin for charity. Those VCs include all-stars like Tim Draper, who’s offering a not just a 15-minute pitch session but a full two-hour dinner for three at the “famous Tamarine Restaurant” in Palo Alto, CA. Menlo Ventures is represented by Shervin Pishevar, and Keith Rabois will be donating a “power lunch” somewhere on the also-famous Sand Hill Road. Which means you’ll have the full time and attention of a powerful, experienced, and — most importantly — looking-to-invest venture capitalist for at least an hour, and up to two hours. Which might be hard to pass up for founders who are looking to make connections and close funding rounds. Here’s the stellar line-up: Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson Founder & Managing Director) Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures Venture Advisor) Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures) Brian Singerman (Founders Fund Partner) Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates Partner) Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant (AngelList Co-founders) Brian O’Malley (Battery Ventures General Partner) George Bischof (Meritech Capital Managing Director) David J. Blumberg (Blumberg Capital Founder & Managing Director) Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes (First Round Capital Founder & Partner) Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Partner) Tod Francis (Shasta Ventures Managing Director) Ajay Chopra (Trinity Ventures General Partner) Ann Miura-Ko & Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate Fund Co-founding Partner & Managing Partner) Jon Soberg (Blumberg Capital Managing Director) Tim Chang (Mayfield Fund Managing Director) Gus Tai (Trinity Ventures General Partner) Geoff Lewis (Founders Fund Principal) Ellen Pao (Reddit Strategic Partnerships) Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures Principal James Cham) David Lee (SV Angel Co-founder & Managing Director) But it won’t be easy. If the Tim Cook auction is any indicator, prices could get high. Dinner for three with Tim Draper carries an estimated value of $30,000, and already has a bid at $3,000. Many of the others have estimated valuations of $5,000. Ellen Pao A successful relationship with a big-name VC, of course, could be worth many times those numbers. But — and this might be the trouble with this particular auction — founders who are just starting out tend not to have huge sums of money to throw at speculative meetings. Which means that already-funding entrepreneurs who are looking to close a B, C, or D round might have a better shot. If they can convince their boards that this is a good investment. But, lest we forget, it’s all for a good cause in the end, and can probably be written off as a charitable donation. “We are deeply grateful to the venture capitalists who have donated their time to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society,” Christina Resasco, Founder of MobilizeForTheCure, said in a statement. “Their generosity will provide crucial funding needed to advance blood cancer research and development for LLS and give hope to those suffering from the disease.” The project is part of the Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series, which has raised about $200,000 since 2010. Last year’s winners included entrepreneurs from Australia, Poland, Russia, and the Philippines. Filed under: Business, Deals, Entrepreneur,

Microsoft’s team of super hardware geeks talked about what is inside the new Xbox One console. Gamers may not care about the hardware so long as it runs games smoothly and doesn’t get in their way. But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily-engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive. If you look at all of the tasks that the machine does, it’s clear there isn’t enough silicon in the box. Nick Baker, one of the head silicon engineers at Microsoft and a key architect on the Xbox 360 chips as well as the Xbox One chips. But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing. That means the hardware inside the box isn’t fixed. Over time, the hardware can get better as Microsoft upgrades the technology in the data centers. For now, Microsoft has more than 300,000 servers in its data centers to support Xbox One and the Xbox Live online entertainment service. The Microsoft super geeks spoke on a panel at the Xbox Reveal in a session moderated by Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb. That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox, from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV. That kind of processing exists alongside other things going on at the same time. You can, for instance, watch TV and then receive a Skype call without turning off the TV show. “There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the loads onto,” said Boyd Multerer, one of the software experts at Microsoft. “I think it’s an inflection point. So over time, your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.” Todd Holmdahl, another longtime Microsoft hardware executive, said the load can shift from one device to another. The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering. The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are the tasks that still have to be handled inside the box.   “This is a radically different way of thinking about a game console,” he said. The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in internet speeds. It has multiple power states so it can reduce power consumption when necessary. Holmdahl said that the Kinect system was redesigned from the ground up. The sensors are now smart enough to detect your facial expressions, allowing for smarter games that know how you are feeling as you play the game. Kinect has a variety of sensors it can rely on, like time-of-flight depth cameras and infrared, which is good at detecting low-light movements. Baker said that the internal Microsoft chip team had to design five pieces of silicon to handle all of the tasks in the console and the Kinect subsystem, which now comes bundled with the box. The team had to test the chips thoroughly, running 10 trillion cycles of simulation in order to make sure everything worked right. The chips had to be designed to work with each other in a coherent way. The GPU is multitasking, so that it can run compute and cloud tasks at the same time that it renders graphics, Baker said. The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second. Holmdahl said, “We started with a blank slate. We talked to the hardware, software people. One of the good things about Microsoft is you have those people under the same roof.” Holmdahl said developers will be able to exploit these technologies as they learn more about things like instantaneous voice command integration into the game console. The work started a few years ago. “The development of these things tak

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Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop. Executives from Cedar’s-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management. “We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy.” said Julie Vilardi, a registered nurse, as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.” She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay from the medication you’re prescribed, to food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels, and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective, but because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due. Darren Dworking, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said the center recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong. “A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworking. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.” Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworking, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications. According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however. Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com. Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Business, Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Microsoft revealed its next-gen Xbox One today, and we are discovering new details about the powerful device. After the event, Microsoft corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten told The Verge that the Xbox One will not work with Xbox 360 games. It will support 450 original Xbox games through emulation. We’ve contacted Microsoft to ask if it plans to sell Xbox 360 games through a digital store and what will happen to digital purchases including Xbox Live Arcade games. The company has not yet responded to our request, but we will update with any new information. Sony’s PlayStation 4 has almost the identical problem. Like the Xbox One, it is using a new architecture compared to its predecessor that prevents PlayStation 3 games, including PlayStation Network titles, from working on the next-gen console. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }