Austin Bomber Bombed Out

Good news!

The Austin bomber blew himself up in his own car last night after the Austin Police Department chased him down as he escaped a Red Roof Inn hotel.

So I guess we can say the Mini-Unabomber’s career was cut short by what can only be referred to as “foreseen” circumstances.

I tell you one damn true thing: The entire Austin metropolitan area took a long, deep breath when they woke up to the news this morning.

Like so many armchair sleuths were probably thinking, I would imagine when all was said and done, walking into those FedEx’s with only a baseball cap and stringy blond hair…yeah, that wasn’t one of your more brilliant moves, Einstein.

Austin Police Chief Brian Manley indicated “there were several leads that led us to this person,” including, he said, the surveillance video.

Officials apparently haven’t ruled out that the 24-year old man could have had accomplices, nor do they have any insights into his motives. Apparently he wasn’t up for a chat before he took himself out.

Just to recap: The guy was responsible for at least six bombs that killed at least two people and wounded five others, and I would imagine, sent shivers through FedEx, UPS, and other distribution workers across the city.

Acting out of an abundance of caution, Austin Mayor Steve Adler has warned city residents to continue to watch out for suspicious packages that the bomber may have planted before his untimely demise. 

As for all those thoughts and prayers that came Austin’s way these past two weeks (and yes, a little bit of hate, too), they were much appreciated, as was the support from the FBI, ATF, and all the other three letter agencies that landed in Travis County ready to hunt this mother——— down. 

Not to sound too terribly bloodthirsty, but it was a proper and fitting end. When you play with matches…

Now They’re Bombing FedEx

Now bombs are going off and being found in FedEx facilities.

Early this morning, a bomb that was bound for Austin exploded at a FedEx facility in Schertz, Texas.  One person was injured by the “concussive” impact of the blast.

It happened just after midnight, according to a report from the Washington Post, but authorities provided few other details.

Then, later this morning, authorities responded to a call about a suspicious package at a FedEx facility near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Southeast Austin.

That is a developing story, and we Austinites are still waiting to hear what the Austin FedEx situation brings.

FedEx: When it positively, absolutely has to blow up near Austin overnight.

Hey, I can joke about this, I live here.

What is no joke is that authorities are being very tightlipped so as not to tip their hands re: the signature of the bomber, but because of this, and despite their being 500+ federal agents on the ground, the public knows jack and is getting antsy.

It’s one thing to pick up a strange package on your porch and have it blow up.  It’s another thing for it to be a package from FedEx.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  Could this, in fact, be a Unabomber, Jr., one out to demonstrate how vulnerable our 21st century retail, e-commerce, and delivery chain really is?!

Latest Austin Bomb Involved a Trip Wire

So another bomb went off here in Austin last night.

This one was in the southwest side of Austin, probably about 4 miles due southwest of where I live just south of downtown.

Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said this morning that Sunday night’s bomb, which injured two men in their twenties, was triggered by a trip wire and thus "showing a different level of skill above what we were already concerned that this suspect or suspects may possess."

Investigators indicated the device was made to blend in with the surroundings.

They are still investigating whether the blast was a copy cat of the March 2 and March 12 bombings, or the same person. They will not be able to make that determination until they can more closely reveal the kind of shrapnel that was used in the explosive device, although initial reports last night suggested there were nails used in this latest bomb.

In this latest case, the two victims were Anglo males, according to Chief Manley, which, were the bomb made by the same perpetrator, could start to throw into question that these incidents are hate crimes.

If it is the same perp for this latest bomb, they’ve clearly upped the ante with the trip wire.

Now, don’t pick up strange packages whose provenance you don’t know off your front porch, AND watch out for trip wires.

Austin’s SparkCognition Sparks $24M Series B

Austin Inno is reporting that Austin-based AI firm SparkCognition announced today it has completed a Series B funding round of $24 million.

That round builds on an earlier round last June of $32.5 million. 

SparkCognition builds AI solutions for applications in energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, finance, aerospace, defense, and security. Its website currently lists four core product lines which the company claims provides “human intelligence at machine scale.”

Austin Inno observes that SparkCognition’s new funding is “part of a wave of recent investment in Austin-based AI and machine learning companies,” with large rounds going to CognitiveScale, Conversable, Tethr, and Cerebri AI last year, among others.

Big Dell Deal?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Dell is considering a range of strategic alternatives that could transform the maker of PCs and data-storage devices.

According to the story, the review, which is in a preliminary stage, Dell is expected to explore options including an IPO and a purchase of the rest of VMware, a publicly-traded cloud infrastructure company

Currently, VMware has a market value north of $50 billion.

If Dell pursued a public listing, writes the Journal, it would be one of the biggest IPOs in recent years, and could also provide the company with cash to invest in the business and pay down debt.

The backstory: Dell went private in a roughly $25 billion leveraged buyout in 2013 by Its founder, Michael Dell, and investment firm Silver Lake. In 2016, Dell bought EMC for $67 billion in the largest technology takeover ever.

Bloomberg is also now reporting this story, and indicated that the board is meeting later this month to discuss strategic options, including the IPO.

Raising cash could help the company further expand or pay off some of its debt, Bloomberg continues, noting that Dell currently has about $46 billion in debt.

Dell is also considering a public share sale for its Pivotal Software Inc. cloud-computing venture. Dell met with bankers last year to discuss that possibility and was told the company could fetch a valuation of $5 billion to $7 billion, said one of the people. Still, any Pivotal offering may wait until the company has converted more of its business into wider-margin software and subscriptions and away from less-profitable services businesses, the person said.
– via Bloomberg.com

 

 

Apple Acquires Workflow

Happy Thursday… Much as with March Madness, there were some significant upsets yesterday in the Dell World Golf Championships here in Austin Texas… Most tragic was last year’s winner, Jason Day, announcing his withdrawal from the tournament after six holes due to his mother’s terminal cancer. He held a gutwrenching press conference, but the former world number one golfer clearly has his priorities in the right place.

Jason, here’s wishing you and your entire family all the best as your mom fights for her life. For those of us familiar with your backstory, we know how much of a fighter she is and how much she helped you get to where you are today.

Now, back to the technology news of the day: Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow, a tool that lets you put together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks.

TechCrunch reported the news, but was unable to get financial details for the deal. As they write:

Workflow has been around for a couple of years and we’ve covered it and its updates. It shares some similarity with the service IFTTT, in that it allows people to group together a bunch of actions that can allow them to perform complicated tasks with one tap. It had built up a sizeable number of users and downloads over the past few years.
– via TechCrunch

They also report that the Workflow app will continue to be made available on the App Store and will be made free later today.

Which makes all you people who bought the app in the last week suckers.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down…

What a week.  I spent most of it either in meetings or on airplanes (save for that happy detour to Fenway Park, which still has a smile on my face).

Speaking of which, it’s April 20, 2012 — the official anniversary of the 100^th year of Fenway’s existence.  Happy birthday to all my friends in Boston, and to people everywhere who adore Fenway Park — of which I now count myself a happy one.

FYI, for the hardcore Fenway fanatics, Sports Illustrated is offering up a very nice tome about the history of Fenway for $21.00 US.  You can find it here.

But boy, what a week otherwise.  The jokes about today being 4/20 aside (a point which many marketers are taking advantage of…for example, the Magnolia bio-documentary about Bob Marley, entitled simply “Marley,” is out today…And Austin is unveiling the new Willie Nelson statue today at 4:20 PM this afternoon.  Coincidence?)

You can read all about the marketing advantage being taken of on this date from none other than the Wall Street Journal.

No, I was more referring to the bummer news about Dick Clark and Levon Helm.  Helm, of course, was the drummer in Bob Dylan’s original backing band, “Levon and the Hawks,” before going on to co-found the band named, appropriately enough, “The Band.”

Helm died of throat cancer earlier this week, and in recent years had been most known for his “Midnight Rambles” at his studio in Woodstock, NY, which earned him three Grammys in recent years.  But of course, “The Band” fans remember classics like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up On Cripple Creek.”

Bob Dylan had this to say about his old friend and former band-mate on his own website: “He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.”

Surely we will.

But we’ll also miss Dick Clark, a radio and TV personality who’s “American Bandstand” helped grow generations of music fans, and helped launch or boost the careers of an endless stream of renowned musicians, ranging from first guest Elvis Presley (who used to sign my mom’s arm during his Louisiana Hayride performances!) to Smokey Robinson to the Talking Heads…the list of musical acts featured on “Bandstand” goes on and on and on.

And never mind us welcoming Dick Clark into our homes, and the subsequent New Year, every New Year’s Rockin’ Eve starting in 1972.

We’ll miss you both terribly, Dick and Levon.  May you both continue to find the musical beat in the Great Beyond.

How fitting, then, that the very same week, the friends who brought you some of the great hack attacks of the late 2000s, Anonymous, announce they’re putting together a social music platform, one that pulls up songs streaming from all around the Internet (including from the likes of YouTube), and lets anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — all while intending to shield the service from being shut down by lawsuits.

Ladies and germs, welcome to “Anontune.”  This short video (featured on Wired’s Web site) indicates it will focus on “information about the music.”

We’ll wait and see if Anontune makes it past the first “bridge,” but my read on the situation is that this move could revitalize Hilary Rosen’s career (CEO of the RIAA from 1998-2003, Rosen led the organization in its successful efforts to bring down Napster).

When It Rains, It Pours

Considering that the city of Austin and much of Texas have not gotten very much rain this year, it’s somewhat ironic that IBM and the University of Texas at Austin are announcing today applied advanced analytics solutions for river systems that can help with flood prevention and preparedness.

Floods are the most common natural disaster in the United States, but traditionally flood prediction methods are focused only on the main stems of the largest rivers — overlooking extensive tributary networks where flooding actually starts, and where flash floods threaten lives and property.

IBM researchers and researchers from UT Austin are using these analytics to predict the Guadalupe River’s behavior more than 100 times the normal speed.

IBM’s new flood prediction technology can simulate tens of thousands of river branches at a time, and could scale further to predict the behavior of millions of branches simultaneously.

By coupling analytics software with advanced weather simulation models, such as IBM’s Deep Thunder, municipalities and disaster response teams could make emergency plans and pinpoint potential flood areas on a river.

As a testing ground, the team is presently applying the model to predict the entire 230 mile-long Guadalupe River and over 9,000 miles of tributaries in Texas.  In a single hour the system can currently generate up to 100 hours of river behavior!

“Combining IBM’s complex system modeling with our research into river physics, we’ve developed new ways to look at an old problem,” said Ben Hodges, Associate Professor at UT Austin Center for Research in Water Resources. “Unlike previous methods, the IBM approach scales-up for massive networks and has the potential to simulate millions of river miles at once. With the use of river sensors integrated into web-based information systems, we can take this model even further.”

Speed on this scale is a significant advantage for smaller scale river problems, such as urban and suburban flash flooding caused by severe thunderstorms.

Within the emergency response network in Austin, Texas, professors from University of Texas at Austin are linking the river model directly to NEXRAD radar precipitation to better predict flood risk on a creek-by-creek basis.

In addition to flood prediction, a similar system could be used for irrigation management, helping to create equitable irrigation plans and ensure compliance with habitat conservation efforts.

The models could allow managers to evaluate multiple “what if” scenarios to create better plans for handling both droughts and water surplus.

The project is currently being run on IBM’s Power 7 systems, which accelerate the simulation and prediction significantly, allowing for additional disaster prevention and emergency response preparation.

Texas News You Can Use

So Rupert Murdoch is suggesting that he may soon make News Corp. content unfindable to Google searchers, soon being after he launches his paid content strategy.

But as the mUmBRELLA blog from Australia points out, all Murdoch and team need do is block said content from the Google index using the robots.txt protocol.

My only question to News Corp. is, isn’t that kind of like making yourself invisible in cyberspace?

Unless, of course, you want to be invisible, in which case, have at it.

Hey, I understand it’s a difficult time for many major media in terms of economics.  As someone who studied mass communications for his master’s degree, I can relate to the massive earthshaking taking place in the media industry: Craig’s List classifieds, dwindling readership, less advertisers…I get it.

On the other hand, all media have always been about gaining individual attention, and if the attention stream is now defined through search engines instead of the front page, that’s a reality that must be reckoned with.

New realities bring new business models — just take the new Texas Tribune, which former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith left one of the seemingly cushiest magazine jobs around right here in Austin to help co-found.

The Tribune positions itself as a “non-profit, nonpartisan public media organization,” whose mission is “to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern.”

The Tribune launched in record time (I think I read their site build was less than 6 weeks) on November 3, and it’s “About Us” page suggests that folks should read the Tribune and their local paper.

It also says that the Tribune will cover a “full range of big, important topics, including immigration, education, transportation, health care, water, the environment, criminal justice, energy, poverty — pretty much every line in the state budget.”

They had me going until that last line, but hey, maybe there’s more to the Texas state budget than meets the eye.

The point being, they at least aspire to provide coverage that is geared towards bringing sunshine into the political process and telling stories about public policy and government that impact the lives of millions of Texans, rather than focusing all their attention exclusively on the latest bright and shiny object.

Not without some irony, the major media — in this case, The New York Times — wrote an organizational profile piece today about the Tribune, explaining how that instead of going deep on the Ft. Hood shootings last Friday, the Texas Tribune was instead focusing on the “50 highest paid state employees and an exclusive about a state representative who had switched parties.”

I am glad to see a new news entity here in Texas moving beyond the sensational and into public service journalism, and hope the new sunshine can also help make some rain for the citizens of Texas, while also making payroll for the Texas Tribune.

As for Rupert Murdoch, I wish him and his News Corp. properties good luck with turning off the Google attention stream.

If he needs some help, here’s some instructions for disabling that robots.txt file.

It’s not very often you get to see a world-renowned media celebrity play virtual Russian Roulette.

Debrief: Austin City Limits Music Festival

It’s only two days to the Eighth Annual Austin City Limits Music Festival here in my glorious Austin, Texas.

For those of you who have been before, you know how special an event it is.  For those of you who haven’t, what are you waiting for?

“ACL,” as we Austinites have come to refer to it, began as a small festival in 2002 and has grown (some would say too large, but I say the more the merrier) into a world-class music festival.

Which is just what it should be, if we’re to fully live up to our mantra of being the “live music capitol of the world!”

This year, a couple of things are worthy of note.  First, Zilker Park has been completely reseeded from the ground up.  Not the patchwork improvements made after the great Coldplay duststorm of 2005.

No, this is a serious overhauling of the park, and the grass looks absolutely gorgeous.  And, it’s nice and fluffy to sit on.

Second, the festival is being held a week later than normal, and after our 60+ days of 100+ heat in Austin this year, that could be the key difference maker.

In prior years (like 2005), temperatures have reached up to 106 degrees during the festival.  It’s currently a lovely 73 degrees outside.  I went for a long mountain bike ride very early this morning on the Austin greenbelt and there was almost a chill in the air.

If you don’t have a ticket already, this year’s 3-day passes are sold out, so check your favorite ticket vendor or Craig’s List.  If you do, get over to the Box Office now (3pm-8pm daily) and get that wristband.  You will be hating yourself if you wait until Friday to pick it up, as you’ll be standing in line with hundreds of others while you listen to the music from afar.

Some other tips: Bring suntan lotion, just in case, and I always like to take a small umbrella.  You can bring a portable, collapsible chair, and I always take some small binoculars as well.  Otherwise, leave stuff at home, because you likely won’t be able to bring it in, and it’s a long trip back to wherever your car is.

This year, the festival has gone all social media on us.  You can share your personalized schedule from their Web site via Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Me, I like to roam around from act to act freestyle (schedules are for my workday!), but here’s a few of the acts I hope to take in:

John Legend, Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, Asleep at the Wheel, Poi Dog Pondering, Heartless Bastards, Mishka, Reckless Kelly, Dave Mathews Band, The Scabs, Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, David Garza, Rodriquez…and lots, lots more.

By the way, I just downloaded the new Pearl Jam album, “Backspacer,” on iTunes, and upon first listen have decided it’s some of the best stuff they’ve done since they emerged into the scene in the early 90s.

Eddie Vedder has never been better, and I’m really looking forward to seeing he and his band perofrm in our refurbished park right down the street from Turboville!

So, get on a plane and get yourself down to Austin.  The Festival starts mid-day Friday and goes through Sunday night.

You can learn more at the ACL Website.

P.S. And leave your agita at home.  This is the mellowest, coolest music festival you’ll ever go to, and the people who attend it, both visitors and locals, are very well behaved and all about the music, and we want to keep it that way!