Why has this approach been so successful? Or put another way: Why did decision-makers, prior to data analytics, make such poor decisions? Part of that answer has to do with a kink in human reasoning, according Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball,” which told the story of how the Oakland A’s turned to data analysis to find undervalued players passed over by baseball experts.

Lewis writes in the December issue of Vanity Fair that he did not know the answer to this question until he discovered the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky. Both were psychologists and published work on judgment and decision-making.

“They had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making,” writes Lewis. This problem has to do with the way the brain accesses or remembers information. When making a decision, people tend to base it on examples that are easily remembered. But “reliable statistical evidence will outperform” that thinking, the article says.

Since this is a human problem, it affects not only baseball experts but also hedge fund managers, CEOs and even police officers.

In Memphis, police officers were able to get a better handle on crime patterns once they started using IBM’s data analytics software to figure out crime patterns and forecast where it was going to occur.

For example, Memphis police officers had long known that burglaries tended to spike in the month of March. But until the use of data analytics, nobody realized that the spike corresponded with Spring Break in Memphis-area schools. Once the police added more patrols during that week, the burglary rate dropped.

Tech Beat – BusinessWeek

There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.

Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.

Make file available offline	Update online file

Make file available offline

Update offline file

For those of you with Android tablets, we’ve also improved the Google Docs reading experience. Now, when you open a Google document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-resolution version of the document. Swipe left and right to flip between pages, or use the slider at the bottom to page ahead quickly.

New reading layout on Android tablet

You can learn more about offline capabilities and the new reading layout in our Help Center.

Whether you’re offline or online, these improvements will make it easier to be productive from anywhere.

Posted by: Freeman Liu, Software Engineer

Google Mobile Blog

Idolian.com is pleased to announce the new 7 inch Android tablet PC IdolPad. Idolian is a tablet PC manufacturer and distributor with its offices in Newport Beach, CA, Arkansas and South Korea. Idolian?s vision is to produce reliable Tablet PC, priced between $ 100-$ 299 that any individual or small business can afford.

IdolPad has a sleek new style and feel. It runs on Cortex A8 Chipset, 1 GHz CPU, 512MB, 7? Multi Touch Resistive Screen, Front Facing Camera, 360 G-Sensor, HDMI output on Android 2.3 OS. Also IdolPad offers WI-FI connectivity and a long lasting battery life (4-5 hours), real Android Google Market, Flash Player. Its compact size and light weight is also easy to carry and fast processor makes it easy to operate even with resistive touch screen. IdolPad can streaming Netflix video and supports Skype video chat.

IdolPad can work as eBook Reader, Game player, MP3 players and as video player. Also IdolPad can get turn into mini laptop with the keyboard case.

IdolPad is available to purchase at special promotional price of $ 99.99 at idolian.com. Idolian.com offers “Free UPS shipping both ways” for easy buying decisions for customers.

“We are bombarded with orders for IdolPad already. Every IdolPad we get in goes right out the door. It’s amazing how many IdolPad we are selling,” says Simon Lee, Director of Sales.

IdolPad is currently available to purchase from idolian.com and on all the major online retailers such as Amazon and Sears.com. Thanks to its established retail distribution, Idolian tablet PC?s will be widely available at cellular locations throughout the USA and South Korea in the near future.

All of Idolian?s Tablet PC s comes with a 1 year limited warranty that is serviced in the USA and offers extended warranties and protection plans for sale only on Idolian.com.

About Idolian.com: Idolian.com is division of Idolian Mobile, Inc, an international telecommunication company that terminates calls throughout the world. Idolian Mobile Inc. is headquartered in Newport Beach, California and has two branch offices in Arkansas and Seoul Korea.

Like its slogan ?Tablets for Everyone,? Idolian.com’s mission is to become a major brand for Android Tablet market that everyone can afford.

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Find More Android Tablet Press Releases

Reid Hoffman and Matt Cohler, two of Silicon Valley’s social-networking pioneers, are throwing their hats into the education ring.

The entrepreneurs-turned-venture capitalists today led a $ 15 million investment in Edmodo, a free learning site for teachers and students that claims almost 5 million registered users. The cash pile, from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, gives the management team the runway to hire developers and add products without doing the one thing they prefer not to talk about: making money.

“The platform will always be free for teachers, students and schools and we don’t plan on advertising at all,” says Nic Borg, founder and chief executive officer of the San Mateo, California-based company. “The purpose of this raise and the folks that are coming on board is about driving forward this grassroots movement.”

A free Web service with no ads? Sounds like the early days of Facebook, where Cohler was one of the first employees. But that was back in 2005. This year, the social-networking site is poised to reap more than $ 2 billion in display-ad sales, according to EMarketer, thanks to brands such as Coca-Cola, Subway and Adidas.

Then there’s LinkedIn, the professional-networking site founded by Hoffman, and Cohler’s employer before he joined Facebook. While many of the site’s 100 million plus users don’t pay a cent, they’re subsidized by premium subscribers and advertisers. LinkedIn’s revenue more than doubled in the third quarter to $ 139.5 million. Cohler is now a partner at Benchmark and Hoffman is at Greylock.

In the press release today, Hoffman called Edmodo the “educational graph for learning,” similar to Facebook’s role as the connector of friends and LinkedIn’s position in the workplace. Teachers at more than 60,000 schools, three-quarters of them in the U.S., are using the site to assign and grade homework, post educational videos, and share content with other teachers and classrooms. Edmodo works in the browser and on mobile devices such as smartphones and the iPod Touch.

Rob Hutter, the company’s chairman, said the new financing gives the company “several years” to build and expand the product without worrying about generating revenue. He and Borg are looking for developers who are passionate about education and want to build something that they say is helping change education.

Of course, venture capitalists don’t invest in startups unless they see the opportunity to make several times their money back, and Greylock and Benchmark have been among the most successful firms in that regard.

While expectations for Edmodo are surely no different, Cohler wouldn’t divulge any more than the company, reiterating that the emphasis now is on reaching more people and hiring engineers.

“Revenue opportunities that emerge over time that we get excited about will be ones that are consistent with the mission of the business,” Cohler says.

As for generating revenue today? “That’s not what we’re focused on at this point,” he says.

Tech Beat – BusinessWeek

As we fasten our seatbelts and take off for the cloud, we must be mindful of who’s flying the plane. That’s the message from a study to be released today by Nasuni Corp., which concludes that only six of the leading 16 cloud storage providers are ready for primetime.

Since April 2009, Nasuni has been evaluating the market, testing storage vendors for performance, stability and scalability. The top performers were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, the study found. The other services to pass the test were from AT&T, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting and Rackspace.

Which 10 failed? Nasuni spared those names, and for good reason. It wants them to get better, not go away. The Natick, Massachusetts-based startup provides storage technology and services built on top of existing cloud infrastructure. So the more providers in the market the better the competition and the more prices likely fall for Nasuni, which buys cloud storage and bundles in its proprietary technology to then sell to customers.

“Our hope is that everyone who is not at the top of their game looks at where there are holes and improves upon those,” says Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni’s chief executive officer. “We want to have as many low-cost high volume providers of cloud storage out there as there can possibly be.”

The test was aimed at showing how providers perform in mid-size organizations. Those would be companies that need more storage, security and recovery capacity than startups and mom-and-pop shops but might not get the customer support of a Fortune 500 company because they don’t deliver enough business.

Tech Beat – BusinessWeek