Google Interns make more money than you

While most people might associate an internship as the toil and struggle, usually unpaid, that young students or recent grads need to go through in order to make it in the business world, there seems to be a silver lining in some companies. Most notably, companies based around Silicone Valley seem to not only treat their interns well, but they're probably paid more than you are.

Hey Google, want to hire me? / © Google.com

If you're like me, the job search after University was a particularly fun time. Applying to job postings through the Universities job database. Writing and rewriting my resume to match the needs of each specific job. Even going out and applying for some unpaid internships with companies just so that I could get my foot in the door and maybe, hopefully, work my way to a paying position.
However, if I had been one the lucky chosen to work for, say, Google, I’d be laughing right now.  On average, interns are paid roughly $5,800 a month, in US dollars. And that’s for the “less specialized” ad sales or marketing positions. If you’ve got the savvy to be a software engineer, you could be rolling in almost $6,700 a month.  Most of these placements require the interns to at least commit three months of full-time work at the company, so interns can expect to roll in about $20,000 during their stint. Not too shabby!
And while, this may seem a tad bit high, when it comes to the competitive tech industry, highly sought after candidates are rewarded handsomely for the work that they do in order to keep them around. Google isn’t the only company relying on high compensation to attract prospects: Microsoft also ranks pretty high paying Research Interns, on average, $7,000 a month.
Money may not be everything though, as Google is still ranked tops when it comes to job satisfaction, so it’s not surprise that it’s one of the best places to work. On the flip-side, do take heed, Google is also regarded as having the toughest interview process in the industry.

FitStar Raises $4M Round Led By Trinity To Make The Best iPad-Led Home Workouts

FitStar, the San Francisco-based startup that just launched a workout app with Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, just raised $4 million in a round led by Trinity Ventures to expand its line-up of fitness apps. Earlier investors like Google Ventures also participated.

The round was put together a few months ago before the company launched its flagship app earlier this month. CEO Mike Maser, who came up with the idea while traveling solo out in New Zealand, isn’t sharing specific stats yet on retention or the size of the company’s user base because it’s only been a few weeks. But he did say that users have burned at least a collective 4 million calories through the app.

Maser said the deal with Trinity came together in part because the firm had really been looking for a mobile health-related play for a while.

“They are smart, just genuinely good folks with high integrity,” he said. “They’ve been looking at the space for a long time and they were hungry to make an investment in consumer health. There was a just instant simpatico in what they were looking for in an investment and what we were looking for in a new partner.”

FitStar’s first app is a video workout app where Gonzalez leads users through several dozen exercises that can all be done without the assistance of any equipment or a gym. Unlike classic DVD or home video workouts, the app responds to the user and customizes the difficulty of the exercises based on their fitness level. There’s a simple diagnostic questionnaire at the beginning and then the app will raise the difficulty level over time depending on how committed the user is to the regime.

Since launch, the app was featured in the “Editor’s Choice” category by Apple, and stayed in the top 100 apps for about a week. It’s still sitting in the top 5 for the “Health and Fitness” category in the U.S. That’s pretty normal though because the top free ranks tend to be dominated by games and social networking apps, not health and fitness or productivity titles.

Maser said to expect an iPhone version of the app next. He’s still quiet on when the company will eventually come out with workout apps targeted at different demographics with other fitness celebrities.

FitStar has a freemium monetization model with paid versions that give the user more workouts per week, nutritional guidance and e-mail support. The prices of those paid subscription add-ons range from $4.99 to $11.99 per month.

The other component of the business will be merchandising. FitStar also just opened up a store with branded apparel and books on nutrition. They’re also partnering with companies like Kiip, a mobile rewards startup, to offer free Amazon MP3s and other goodies to FitStar users.

“We offer a high fidelity experience that should appeal to apparel makers and food and beverage companies,” Maser said.

FitStar is also backed by Advancit Capital, a VC firm from Viacom and CBS Corporation vice chairman Shari Redstone, and Floodgate.

Samsung’s Shape-Shifting Ativ Q Isn’t Pretty, But Running Windows 8 And Android May Make It A Worthy Workhorse

Samsung just pulled back the curtain on a new line of Ativ Windows notebooks, but perhaps the most interesting of the company’s new Ativs is a 13.3-inch convertible tablet it hopes will appeal those prepping to head back to school. The shape-shifting Ativ Q sports a tablet mode, a video-friendly formfactor with the screen held near vertical, and a more traditional notebook configuration that reveals its built-in QWERTY keyboard, but it’s got an even niftier trick up its sleeve.

While the Ativ Q boots into Windows 8 there’s also a dual-OS mode that allows the users to switch to stock Android 4.2.2, thereby allowing for Microsoft productivity staples such as Office to live in close proximity to the Google Play Store and the usual gamut of Android apps. It’s a cake-and-eat-it-too tablet. Or a tablet for someone who just can’t decide between Windows or Android.

The Ativ Q also supports the classic Windows desktop mode – and since the tablet includes Samsung’s S Pen stylus (which pulls out from a slot in its side) the tiny menus of classic Windows aren’t as fiddly as they would otherwise be to navigate on such a device.

Samsung said photos and files can be shared between the Windows and Android OS modes. Switching between the different OSes seemed fast during my brief hands on, although it’s relatively easy to accidentally revert to Windows. The Ativ Q is not a native Android device, being as it’s not booting directly to Android, but Samsung made a point of demoing a handful of Android games, including Angry Birds, running on the Ativ Q to show it is capable of handling such apps without a significant dip in performance.

The touchscreen display is QHD with a resolution of 3,200 x 1,800, which works out to a pixel density of about 275 PPI. The aspect ratio of the screen means the device feels quite long and narrow (not unlike plenty of other Windows convertibles). The entire device also feels very hefty – it’s not a tablet you want to hold in your hands for long — and it’s relatively thick, at 13.9mm wide. It is a serious bit of kit to lug about, but if you consider it as a laptop replacement rather than an iPad competitor then that’s perhaps to be expected. It’s certainly not the world’s most elegant slice of portable computing but Samsung is obviously hoping its flexibility is what will make it stand out.

Pulling up on the side of the screen when the device is in tablet mode lifts it out on a built-in hinged stand so it can be angled in a variety of ways, including a so-called “floating” mode suitable for presentations when a standing speaker needs to look down at the screen. The display can also be angled steeply up, with the keyboard entirely out of sight, to view videos. And it can be moved into a typing mode where the display is tucked behind the built-in keyboard.

This keyboard felt unpleasantly plasticky to my fingertips but it was relatively roomy, despite taking up less than half the width of the device. There’s no space for a trackpad but Samsung has added in an optical nav key in the centre of the keyboard if you prefer not to use the touchscreen, plus three physical selection keys at the edge of the keyboard to act as mouse keys.

Samsung has sited the device’s CPU and components inside the flexible stand portion of the device, rather than inside the screen or under the keyboard. It said it wanted to keep the hot parts away from the bits the user touches. Whether that’s a huge advantage remains to be seen, but it does mean the screen is thinner than it might have been otherwise, so probably a little easier to move around.

The screen has a Windows touch-key on the front which returns the user to the Windows 8 homescreen, There’s a tile on that interface for switching to the Android OS (and another for Windows Classic). When using the device in the Android scenario, there are additional nav keys along the bottom of the screen for switching back to Windows. The device being demoed during my hands on was running stock Android 4.2.2, rather than having any TouchWiz overlay.

Samsung said pricing for the Ativ Q will be confirmed later, and the price tag is likely going to be the deciding factor on whether this hybrid beast flies. It’s not what you’d call stylish or elegant, and its weight puts its portability in doubt, but it has the potential to be a bit of a workhorse -– with both Windows and Android, and tablet and QWERTY functionality on tap.

Microsoft, Stop Trying To Make Windows RT Happen

Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows RT for small tablets in a seemingly desperate bid to spur sales.

It’s a rather predictable move and a touch sad. Tablets based on Windows RT, an operating system that’s pure garbage, are not selling, because, referring to my first point, Windows RT is trash. And since they’re not selling, Microsoft is making concessions and that means cutting the price.

Windows RT was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to iOS on tablets. Microsoft built the platform to be more robust than the Apple counterpart by including a lot of Windows 8′s desktop tools to run on lower-power devices. But in doing so, Microsoft forked its operating system, forcing developers to choose between Intel-based Windows 8 or ARM-based Windows RT (or Windows Phone 8 or Xbox).

Now, some eight months after Windows RT’s launch, very few mainstream apps have made their way into the Windows Store. There are only a smattering of Windows RT devices available. Meanwhile, Windows 8 devices are quickly becoming as inexpensive as Windows RT.

Microsoft has failed to provide buyers with legitimate reasons to buy a Window RT tablet over an iPad or Android device. Windows RT can run most of Microsoft Office, something traveling shower ring salesmen probably find enticing.

Cutting the price could help.

Android tablets went through the same sort of soul-searching early on, too. For several years, Android tablets were overpriced and without any real reason to exist (remember the HTC Jetstream?).

Then came the $250 B&N Nook Color followed a year later by the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7. Suddenly, thanks to their $200 price tag, Android tablets were a viable option for buyers. As popularity exploded Samsung and others cut the price on larger versions, helping to entice more buyers, thus expanding the Android tablet’s market share.

I’m not sure even a $200 tablet could save Windows RT, though.

Computer makers are dropping Windows RT support en mass. HP killed its RT support early on. Samsung followed suit. HTC recently stopped developing its large RT tablet, instead focusing on a smaller, likely 7-inch model. As Bloomberg notes, Dell also has another RT model in the works.

Just the Dell XPS 10, Surface RT and the Asus VivoTab RT carry the Windows RT banner. Lenovo quickly killed its Windows RT-powered IdeaPad Yoga 11. Any other model is too far outside of the mainstream to matter.

Acer just announced the Iconia W3 at Computex. The 8-inch Windows tablet is supposed to hit at 379 Euros later this month. The small-ish tab packs modest specs: 720p display, dual-core Atom Z2760 CPU, 32 or 64GB internal storage with a microSD expansion slot. But it runs Windows 8, not Windows RT.

In fact, at Computex, Taipei’s massive computer tradeshow, there isn’t a hint of Windows RT. And this is the same tradeshow that featured dozens of Windows RT examples last year. The only talk of Windows 8′s lackluster sibling came from Acer’s chairman who told WSJ that Windows RT won’t be “so influential anymore,” also noting that it would be difficult for Windows RT to overcome the lack of compatibility that the full Windows 8 version has.

Windows RT was a mistake from the onset. It’s ridiculous to force consumers to choose between battery life and usability. They’d prefer both. Like on the iPad.

Microsoft can cut prices and perhaps later introduce device subsidies, but it won’t help. Consumers, and more telling, device manufacturers, have spoken. Neither find Windows RT devices to be worth their money. As widely stated at the Surface RT launch, the platform simply has too many compromises.

New magnetic film could make storage technology 10,000 times more efficient

Magnets, how do they work? Researchers at MIT have recently discovered that we might not have the firm grasp of magnetism once assumed. Past experiments have occasionally hinted at a bizarre phenomenon that caused thin magnetic films to flip polarity in the wrong direction — against the electron flow. Now the team from MIT has published a paper detailing the effect, and it could have a huge impact on storage technology.

Seeing a magnetic pole going in the wrong direction is a rare occurrence, so researchers have been understandably curious about the cause of this effect. Geoffrey Beach and his team at MIT have found that it’s not the magnetic material that’s responsible for the flipping pole, it’s the metal it is placed next to.

Beach used very thin films of ferromagnetic material to work out the specifics. When this film was placed on a slab of platinum and exposed to a current, it exhibited the backwards magnetic pole (or spin orientation). Move it over to a backing of tantalum, and the poles go in the correct direction again. Here is where the plot thickens: both platinum and tantalum are nonmagnetic, so how could they affect the magnetic properties of the film?

The mechanism relies on the way a spin orientation behaves in a very thin magnetic film. In most materials, the direction of pole changes is essentially random over time. With thin materials, all the poles are aligned. The current applied can push the magnetic domains with more or less force depending on the nonmagnetic material it is passing through. Platinum, for example, allows the current to bowl over the spin orientation of the magnetic film to the “wrong” side.

So how does this change storage technology? All magnetic storage media are based on the arrangement of magnetic domains. Positive and negative alignments in a magnetic material make up the ones and zeros that describe your favorite cat GIF, or that video you took on vacation. With this effect, small amounts of power can change the spin orientation of the film dramatically. Thus, it is incredibly high efficiency.

Beach and his team suspect that magnetic storage based on these films could be 10,000 times more energy efficient than traditional technology. Thin magnetic films could be used to provide dense, low-energy storage for both hard drives and solid state systems. This could mean dramatic power savings for mobile devices, which rely on NAND flash memory to store data.

This new class of magnetic material is not even a science-fiction proposition — it is completely compatible with present day manufacturing technology. Manipulation of magnetic domains on this scale was unthinkable even a few years ago, and the benefits could be enormous. Beach suggests thin magnetic films could find their way into consumer storage technology sooner than you think.