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A player avatar runs on a treadmill in the virtual world of Second Life. Researchers used the online game to see if it could help people maintain weight loss habits in the real world.

Courtesy of Univeristy of Kansas Medical Center

There is no shortage of diet programs available to those that seek to lose weight. But for many, taking those initial steps into a weight loss and exercise program can be an intimidating leap.

A new study from the University of Kansas Medical Center, however, shows that the online game Second Life helped some people lose weight — and keep it off — in real life.

Second Life is an online game that takes place in a massive virtual world populated by other players represented by avatars. Players can shop, socialize, date, buy virtual property and just about anything else you can do in the real world — including eating and exercising.

Dietician Debra Sullivan told Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin that it's often maintaining weight loss that many people struggle with, and the study found using Second Life helped.

"The behaviors that they were able to practice in Second Life translated better than our face-to-face group," Sullivan says.

Exercise played a role too. The participants in the study had all of things available to them in the real world like a gym, a pool and running paths. Sullivan says a lot of people that are overweight don't feel comfortable going in to the gym initially, and that the game can help get over that fear.

"Their avatar doing those things in Second Life, we believe does inspire them to do those activities in real life," she says.

As a result of her preliminary research, Sullivan's team has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue the research.

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The new Google Maps features tailor-made results based on users' habits and search histories.

Google

This week, Google, already a leader in mapping, created more space between itself and its competitors by more deeply mining the data users provide the company when using its various services.

At the Google developers' conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps, crowed about the company's mapping app for the iPhone — and couldn't quite stop himself from taking a dig at Apple.

"People called it sleek, simple, beautiful, and let's not forget, accurate," he said.

The company unveiled a new Google Maps with a number of new features: a clearer user interface; social recommendations; maps that are tailor-made for the searches and habits of an individual user; maps that highlight all the museums in a city after you search for one; maps that identify your favorite places and make them landmarks on the map that you see.

If you frequent a certain restaurant in San Francisco, for example, Google will take note and attempt to find similar places to highlight when you search for a restaurant in, say, Austin, Texas, or Prague.

When I opened up the new Google Maps on my computer, the first thing I saw in the upper left-hand corner were three pre-populated addresses: one was for my daughters' school, one was for our house (it was labeled "Home") and one was for the house we used to live in.

It is clear from the very first moment using the new Google Maps that this map is made just for me. But it also was another disconcerting reminder of how much information about me and my family is being captured and stored and analyzed by Google every day.

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Larry Page, Google co-founder and CEO, speaks Wednesday at the Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco. The new version of Google Maps incorporates images from Google Earth.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Over time, Google Maps will create local landmarks on my map — highlighting places I like to go. When I search for "coffee" in the search bar, Cafe Barrone, a place right next to our local bookstore, pops up prominently because we've searched for it in the past.

When Google revised its privacy policies last year — removing most of the barriers between its various services and clearing the way for the company to use data it collects about me in everything from search to my Google Calendar — it made services like its new maps possible. But it also meant that Google began creating hundreds of millions of individualized portfolios of information about its users that were capturing information about us in all sorts of ways.

"Generating new data from other data is fundamentally what Google does," said Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering at Google responsible for maps.

The mapping program, which for now is only available on desktops and laptops, also seamlessly incorporates images from Google Earth — without the need to download the Google Earth app. But this is only possible if you have a relatively new computer running the latest operating systems.

On a new, fast machine the results are gorgeous: As you scroll out and away from your neighborhood and rise up into the clouds, you see Earth as you would from space. Even the clouds are updated live and in real time. You can spin the globe and see the sun in the background, and you can watch the lights of cities on the dark side of the planet come on.

But not everyone will get this experience right away. When I booted the new Google Maps on my NPR laptop, the first thing I saw was a note letting me know that some of the slickest 3-D imagery wouldn't work.

If you want the full experience of 3-D maps, you need a current operating system — like Windows 7 or Windows 8. NPR, like many cost-conscious organizations, still has lots of laptops out in the field running Windows XP — including mine.

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A TrackingPoint rifle features a high-tech scope that includes a laser rangefinder and a Wi-Fi server.

Courtesy of TrackingPoint

A new rifle goes on sale on Wednesday, and it's not like any other. It uses lasers and computers to make shooters very accurate. A startup gun company in Texas developed the rifle, which is so effective that some in the shooting community say it should not be sold to the public.

It's called the TrackingPoint rifle. On a firing range just outside Austin in the city of Liberty Hill, a novice shooter holds one and takes aim at a target 500 yards away. Normally it takes years of practice to hit something at that distance. But this shooter nails it on the first try.

The rifle's scope features a sophisticated color graphics display. The shooter locks a laser on the target by pushing a small button by the trigger. It's like a video game. But here's where it's different: You pull the trigger but the gun decides when to shoot. It fires only when the weapon has been pointed in exactly the right place, taking into account dozens of variables, including wind, shake and distance to the target.

The rifle has a built-in laser range finder, a ballistics computer and a Wi-Fi transmitter to stream live video and audio to a nearby iPad. Every shot is recorded so it can be replayed, or posted to YouTube or Facebook.

"Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle," says company President Jason Schauble. He says the TrackingPoint system was built for hunters and target shooters, especially a younger generation that embraces social media.

"They like to post videos; they like to be in constant communication with groups or networks," Schauble says. "This kind of technology, in addition to making shooting more fun for them, also allows shooting to be something that they can share with others."

A team of 70 people spent three years creating the technology. Schauble says there's nothing else like it, even in the military. For civilians, TrackingPoint sells its high-end, long-range guns directly. With price tags of up to $22,000, they're not cheap.

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The TrackingPoint rifle's display as seen through the scope.

Courtesy of TrackingPoint

One hunter who doesn't want one is Chris Wilbratte. He says the TrackingPoint system undermines what he calls hunting's "fair chase."

"It's the traditional shooting fish in a barrel or the sitting duck. I mean, there's no skill in it, right? It's just you point, you let the weapon system do its thing and you pull the trigger and now you've killed a deer. There's no skill," Wilbratte says.

This new rifle is being released as the gun control debate continues to simmer in Washington.

Chris Frandsen, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam, doesn't believe the TrackingPoint technology should be allowed in the civilian world. The gun makes it too easy for a criminal or a terrorist to shoot people from a distance without being detected, he says.

"Where we have mental health issues, where we have children that are disassociated from society early on, when we have terrorists who have political cards to play, we have to restrict weapons that make them more efficient in terrorizing the population," Frandsen says.

Schauble says because the company sells directly — instead of going through gun dealers — it knows who its customers are and will vet them. And he says there's a key feature that prevents anyone other than the registered owner from utilizing the gun's capabilities.

All Tech Considered

Can 'Smart Gun' Technology Help Prevent Violence?

"It has a password protection on the scope. When a user stores it, he can password protect the scope that takes the advanced functionality out. So the gun will still operate as a firearm itself, but you cannot do the tag/track/exact, the long range, the technology-driven precision-guided firearm piece without entering that pass code," he says.

Schauble says demand has been "overwhelming." TrackingPoint now has a waiting list. Others are interested, too: Rifle maker Remington Arms wants to use the technology in rifles it wants to sell for around $5,000.

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Everyone is tracked by marketers online. Federico Zannier wants to sell his information.

myprivacy.info

You know you're being tracked by marketers online. But instead of fighting it, a grad student in New York decided to sell his personal data directly.

It wasn't hard to get hold of Federico Zannier. His phone number and email are right on his website. For a couple of bucks, I could have learned a lot more about him.

For 50 days, Zannier recorded every website he visited, every chat conversation he had, every mouse movement. He even tracked where he walked and took a picture of himself using his computer every 30 seconds. He's selling that trove of personal information for $2 a day or $250 for the whole lot.

"In the market, people are making money with my personal data, and as a provocation, I said, 'OK, I want to try to make money with my own data.' "

He's not expecting any marketers to pay up. This is a thesis project for his New York University grad program. Alhough, more than 115 people have already bought some of his data on the crowd funding site Kickstarter.

So, is $2 a good deal? Zannier isn't sure.

"I don't know. It just was a random number."

But Jaron Lanier, the author of Who Owns the Future? says he thinks Zannier is undercharging.

Research firm eMarketer says online advertisers are spending about 48 cents a day just to advertise to you, but that doesn't count all your data that are bought and sold behind your back.

Lenier says Zannier is on to something: We're going to want to sell our own data.

"This is the inevitable future," Lanier says. "We have to sell our information someday. There's no other way."

But Zannier says he just wanted to shine a light on the tracking. He isn't necessarily critical. Heck, his dream job is to work for Amazon.

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A new iPad app lets viewers watch live ABC programming starting Tuesday in New York and Philadelphia.

ABC

There's another way television is moving online. Starting Tuesday, ABC will let viewers in New York and Philadelphia watch their local stations over the Internet. But this is not a way to cut your cable bill.

NPR's Dan Bobkoff discusses the change with All Things Considered co-host Audie Cornish.

Interview Highlights

On what's new here

"Starting Tuesday afternoon, if you live in the New York City or Philadelphia markets, you'll be able to fire up a free app called Watch ABC and stream your local station as if you were watching it on TV. The app will be available for the Apple iPhone and iPad as well as the Kindle Fire. Or you'll be able to watch at abc.com.

"ABC and other networks have long allowed you to watch their prime-time shows online after they air on TV, but ABC is the first broadcast over-the-air network to let you watch their live feed — including local news, daytime talk shows and prime-time dramas.

"Over the next few months, it will expand to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Eventually, ABC expects most of its affiliates will be onboard."

On why ABC is doing this

"Many people are starting to wonder if cable is worth keeping, and they're thinking of cutting the cord and going online only since they can get content from Netflix, Amazon and other places. Live streaming is a way the broadcast industry is trying to cement the system they've had in place for a long time, even as more people are watching TV and video online. So, they're going where the viewers are going, but they're scared that people are going to cancel their cable subscriptions."

On keeping the connection to cable

"What they've done here is they've forced you to log in to this app using your cable company's username and password, so they know you're a subscriber. Even if you're in the office or you're out of your home, they know who you are and that you pay for cable each month.

"You could set up an antenna and get ABC over the air for free. But most Americans watch all the broadcast channels through cable. And cable's become a very important revenue stream for the local affiliates at ABC, CBS and NBC, which over the past few years have been demanding fees, per customer, from the cable companies.

Monkey See

PBS Continues The March Into Streaming Programming

All Tech Considered

Startup CEO Wields Small Antenna In TV Streaming Battle

"When you pay your cable bill, you might actually be paying $1 per network, according to the media research firm SNL Kagan. For these local stations that have a big decline in advertising revenue, that's become a very important source of revenue. And by locking you into cable, they're trying to maintain that."

On what users will see when they log in Tuesday

"If you're in New York or Philadelphia, you'll be able to pull up this app on your smartphone or your tablet and you can hit the "Live" button and see more or less what you see on your TV from your local ABC affiliate. The biggest difference will be the ads — ABC says it has built in the ability to serve targeted ads. So they know who you are, they know what you like and, at least theoretically, you could get different ads than your friends eventually."

On whether competitors will follow ABC in offering live streaming

"You can already watch a number of cable channels this way, including ESPN and CNN. But some of ABC's broadcast competitors are also expected to follow suit. There's some speculation around CBS, which has already invested in an online streaming company and that could help CBS launch something similar down the line."

Kim Parsons of Hermitage, Tenn., is part of a class-action lawsuit against Facebook. Neighbors called Parsons when they saw her daughter's picture posted with an ad for a local ice cream store.

Courtesy of Kim Parsons

A San Francisco judge will decide this month whether to approve a settlement in a class-action lawsuit that could affect more than 70 million Facebook users. The $20 million deal would mark the end of a years-long battle over the social network's "Sponsored Stories" advertising.

But Facebook users' images could still appear in ads if they don't change their settings. And many users say the deal before the judge doesn't go far enough to protect their privacy.

The Back Story

The lawsuit alleges that the company "unlawfully used the names, profile pictures, photographs, likenesses, and identities of Facebook users in the United States to advertise or sell products and services through Sponsored Stories without obtaining those users' consent."

It happened to the teen daughter of Kim Parsons of Hermitage, Tenn. Neighbors called Parsons when they saw her daughter's picture posted with an ad for a local ice cream store. At first Parsons thought her 13-year-old had managed to visit the ice cream shop without her, but she hadn't. Her daughter had just clicked a "like" button online.

Her daughter's photo and the endorsement of the business were being used by Facebook to make money online. That's generally how the Sponsored Stories service works. Facebook started the program in 2011, and typical posts show a photo of a user with the tag line saying, for example, "Steve Henn likes Patriotic Pants." (Friends would see that ad because sometime in the past I clicked "like" next to one of their ads.)

Parson's daughter had clicked "like" on Facebook more than 200 times. So her daughter's image was being used in ads constantly. And Parsons felt like she had no way to stop it. "I should not have to come in on the back end trying to protect my child; that should be understood," she said.

"There is a very strong legal case here," said Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in class-action torts and ethics. "I have no question in my mind that as a matter of business ethics Facebook acted entirely unscrupulously. This is bad behavior. They intentionally and knowingly appropriated people's images without getting their permission for commercial use."

Facebook denies any wrongdoing, but in the settlement deal before a judge, the company has agreed to pay $20 million. If approved, it could result in $10 payouts for individual users.

Opt-Out Options

As part of the settlement proposal, Facebook will let adults opt out of this ad program, but only for two years. The settlement would also create an elaborate system to give parents the ability to prevent their kids' images from appearing in these ads. But before that could happen, both the parents and children would have to tell Facebook they are related, and then the parent would need to dig into his or her settings and ask Facebook to stop using the child in ads. Feldman says it's laughable.

"Do you know what is hilarious about that?" asked Feldman. "That becomes just another data collection mechanism for Facebook. I mean, just think how valuable it would be for them to find out who is related to whom on Facebook. For marketing purposes — I mean, my God — parents are already targeted."

A mock-up of an online form for parents who want to prevent their children's images from being used in Facebook's Sponsored Stories.

Facebook

The settlement does provide one option for parents who are not on Facebook. If they would like to prevent their children's images from being used in Facebook's ads they can submit an online form and attach a "notarized statement declaring your rights as a parent or guardian."

Facebook sent a mock-up of what this form could look like to the court. In the mock-up, the company added, "If you don't submit this statement or we find it to be insufficient we won't be able to process your request."

The price of getting a letter notarized at the local UPS in Facebook's home town of Menlo Park, Calif., is $10, which coincidentally is the same amount Facebook is offering to pay users whose images were used in Sponsored Stories without permission.

Facebook calls this settlement proposal both fair and adequate. If the judge doesn't sign off next month, the attorneys will try to negotiate a new deal or head toward trial.

Parsons, the mother of three from Tennessee, has another idea. She'd like the court to require Facebook to simply stop using images of minors in ads. And, she says, if the company wants to use her picture it should have to ask first — for each and every ad.

NPR's Elise Hu contributed to this report.

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A visitor at the "NEXT Berlin" conference tries out Google Glass on April 24 in Berlin.

AFP/Getty Images

Google Glass isn't even for sale yet, but it's already facing backlash.

There have been articles in the Atlantic and Wired mocking techies who have a pair, and even Saturday Night Live got in on the jabbing at the technology.

The New York Times ran a front-page story about Google Glass and privacy, and the gadget has been banned from a bar in Seattle and casinos in Las Vegas.

But for the earnest Googlers who helped create Glass, and the enthusiastic techies who already have their hands on a pair, all this hate can be a little bewildering. Most of the people I've talked to who have the fancy eyewear just love them.

"Just taking a hike on a Sunday, I've been blown away by taking pictures and taking video," said Javier Echeverria.

Mary Lambert got cooking instructions using Glass. "The friend who I was doing it with could see what I was doing and was like 'No no no, that's all wrong,' which was really helpful and I didn't expect it," she says.

Right now, Google Glass might be the world's worst spy camera; if you go out in public with a pair on, you are guaranteed to attract attention. Still, the idea of techies mounting a tiny screen and a little camera to their faces makes millions of people uncomfortable.

According to Sarah Rotman Epps, a tech analyst at Forrester Research, that is why Google is rolling out Glass to the world slowly in stages.

"Google has been incredibly transparent ... with their Glass rollout," Epps says. "They realize that Google Glass will require shifting social norms to be accepted."

In that regard, the past few weeks have been rough for Google. If the company is going to turn around the public's impression of this product, it will need some help — from people like Sarah Hill.

Hill is a storyteller for the Veterans United Network and a volunteer for Veterans Virtual Tours. She wants to use Google Glass to take World War II vets on virtual tours of places they might be too old or frail to visit in person.

"Places like the World War II memorial, Arlington National Cemetery [or] Pearl Harbor even," she says.

Hill is convinced that leading a virtual tour for veterans while wearing Google Glass would be completely different for them than showing the group just a DVD. She says it gives them the ability to ask questions and request certain sights and sounds, like the waves on the beaches of Normandy or the waterfalls at the World War II memorial.

"And when people ask those ... veterans, 'Have you ever seen your memorial?' before they pass away, they can say, 'Yes I did,' " she says.

Google is hoping that people like Hill could begin to help the public imagine the positive things they could do with the gadget.

Last week, Google released a video of Andrew Vanden Heuvel, a high school physics teacher from Grand Rapids, Mich., using Glass to go on a virtual field trip to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.

Sam Aybar wants to build an app to identify packaged foods that are free of the allergens that make his son sick. The app would use bar codes to create a list of safe products.

"I think Glass could be really helpful for 5 [million] to 10 million families in the United States that are dealing with food allergies," Aybar said.

For many tech enthusiasts, the upsides of Glass seem obvious.

"I've spent my life essentially helping to build the Internet, and this thing is the Internet in your field of vision," says Web pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. "For me that's the big thing ... that's the killer app."

Andreessen, who founded Netscape, among other Internet properties, is now funding startups hoping to build apps on Glass.

But even in the Andreessen household, Glass has created controversy. He says his wife has likely wanted to rip them off and throw them out the window.

"I think she's been tempted to do that with almost every piece of gadgetry we own," he says.

And battles like that could determine whether Google Glass becomes the next iPhone or has a fate more similar to Apple's Newton.

Sony's Entertainment Access Glasses, seen here in a prototype image, display captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing moviegoers.

Sony Entertainment

There will be a special attraction for deaf people in theaters nationwide soon. By the end of this month, Regal Cinemas plans to have distributed closed-captioning glasses to 6,000 screens across the country.

Sony Entertainment Access Glasses are sort of like 3-D glasses, but for captioning. The captions are projected onto the glasses and appear to float about 10 feet in front of the user. They also come with audio tracks that describe the action on the screen for blind people, or they can boost the audio levels of the movie for those who are hard of hearing.

This is a big moment for the deaf, many of whom haven't been to the movies in a long time. Captioned screenings are few and far between, and current personal captioning devices that fit inside a cup holder with a screen attached are bulky, display the text out of their line of vision to the screen, and distract the other patrons.

Randy Smith Jr., the chief administrative officer for Regal Cinemas, says he has worked for more than a decade to find a solution to this problem. He tells Arun Rath, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that it has been his goal since 1998 "to develop a technology that would allow accessibility to the deaf and blind for every show time, for every feature."

Luckily, he had his own "personal guinea pig" at home, he says, in the form of his deaf son, Ryan, now 23. Smith said that as the tech companies would send him new prototypes, he and Ryan would test it out at the movies together, with Ryan giving him feedback along the way.

"We'd do that until we got to a point that we felt it was comfortable enough," Smith says.

Smith says he couldn't put into words what it felt like to finally be at this point, but after announcing the new device, he received a letter from a parent. Smith said that letter described the feeling perfectly:

"I've attempted to enjoy a movie with my son so many times over the last 26 years, but to no avail. After watching a movie I would try to discuss it with him. The comments he would make would in no way relate to the plot of the movie and at one point he finally confessed that as he watched the screen, he simply made up the story in his head. He didn't really know what was going on. The fact that I can take my son to a movie when he visits at the end of June is literally bringing tears to my eyes. It would seem silly to most people but I would imagine you understand what it feels like."

Smith says he can't express it any better than that.

Bitstrips is a popular website and Facebook app that has teens and others making their own cartoons.

Bitstrips

Jacob Blackstock first conceived of the burgeoning social comics site Bitstrips as a way to let the rest of the Internet participate in his childhood passion. As a kid, the comics he most enjoyed creating "were the ones I would make for my friends, starring those friends," he says.

In December, he converted that idea into an app (that has since gone viral). It lets Facebook users create cartoon avatars of themselves and their Facebook friends, and place those characters into customized comic strips.

But the cold reality is, it's not easy to create a respectably funny (and thus, shareable) comic.

The first version of Bitstrips, launched at the South by Southwest festival in 2008, was a digital comics toolkit site. Users could render a comic, a character or a scene using Bitstrips' extensive art library and basic drag-and-drop tools. But narratively, it was essentially a blank slate.

Anyone who has ever stared down the screen, struggling to articulate a framing concept, can understand how this absence of a storyline could be a paralyzing prospect. Thus, creating a cartoon avatar might be as much engagement with the Bitstrips site as an amateur like me might attempt.

The possibilities for user engagement opened up dramatically with the release of the company's Facebook app, which "instantly, stratospherically eclipsed the boost we got from SXSW" by more than 6,000 percent, Blackstock says. Just a few months later, the app has about 8.4 million active users.

What was the company's paradigm shift, exactly? Blackstock says the most significant adjustment was to tackle that blank slate. With the release of the app, professional cartoonists on Bitstrips' 12-person team began creating daily comics templates for users.

Here's one of the recent templates of the day, which the Bitstrips team captioned this way:

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(User) found a way to take care of her chores and her homework at the same time!

Bitstrips

And here's what Bitstrips user @Serg_15 did with the template:

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Bitstrips

"The fact that almost 90 percent of our users customize these scenes tells us that they're still treating it as their own creative process, turning them into their own inside jokes," Blackstock says. "In that sense, we're engaged in a massive ongoing creative collaboration with millions of people, which I think is really cool — not just for us and our users, but for the medium of comics as a whole."

The combination of professionally created templates with amateur cartoonist aspirations amounts to a digital, customizable version of The New Yorker 's caption contest, with broader appeal. But what has also propelled the app's traction is that your comics almost beg to be pasted to friends' Facebook pages, like this one that I made about my colleague Lissa that would only delight those who know that she's obsessed with the movie Brokeback Mountain.

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Nishat wishes she could quit Lissa.

Bitstrips

"We've designed it so you can literally just hit share," Blackstock says of templates like that one, "and it's going to be a quality comic."

Other captioned templates that the app offered up to me this week included:

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Nishat's got spring fever.

Bitstrips

and

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"Jump, Nishat! Ayesha will catch you!"

Bitstrips

You get the picture.

At Bitstrips' suggestion, I was placed in a comic with my friend Ayesha Mattu. She says she doesn't actually get around to making too many comics of her own. "I find the Facebook interface a bit confusing," she explained. "But I love the idea of the avatar — another way of seeing yourself (i.e., brown people) reflected in art and lit. I'm planning on using it with my nieces and nephews as a way for them to create comic strips with characters that look like them, an empowering form of storytelling."

And though it's a Canadian, English-based app, some of Bitstrips' most prolific cartoonists are rendering their talk bubbles in other languages. "The first viral outbreak of Bitstrips was in Portugal, and then it was in Argentina. Now it's huge in Mexico and Peru and Algeria and Italy and Spain and Turkey," Blackstock says. "Once it's over a few hundred [users in a city] simultaneously, that's when it starts to take off."

Cities like Monterrey, Mexico, have racked up more than 300,000 users, but Blackstock isn't sure why. Elizabeth Betancur Arboleda, a 24-year-old user in Colombia, wouldn't speculate about that, either ("Humor is universal," she wrote), except to say that maybe it's because the app allows personalization of the text. Betancur Arboleda creates comics in Spanish and English, and says Bitstrips got her to start using Facebook more frequently after she had almost abandoned the social network.

"I'm always drawing me and my friends in all kinds of situations, even at work meetings. So when I discovered this tool that allowed me to make the same thing immediately and besides share it with many people," she says, she began using the app nearly every day. She sent this one to me at the bottom of an email:

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Bitstrips

Also of note in the apps' user demographics: Perhaps unsurprisingly, a full 92 percent are young adults, and a little more than a quarter of users are teenagers.

Bitstrips hasn't had a typical "Silicon Valley startup" trajectory — for one thing, it's based in Ontario. For another, before the app launched, the biggest customer base had been educators, who, dispensing with the outmoded notion that comics don't belong in a classroom, began using the customizable strips in their lesson plans. Bitstrips has been adopted systemwide by the Ontario school district, and the company charges to license its product to educators.

Back in 2008, the founders poured their own money into Bitstrips (though Blackstock won't say how much), quitting their jobs to work on the site full time. The educational licensing has paid a lot of the bills since. But now that the app's social comics concept is taking off, it's time to explore new revenue models. There are a few small display ads nondescriptly squeezed between comics templates of the day, but Blackstock says the founders are also searching for investors that could help the company grow.

Turnstyle News is a tech and digital culture site from Youth Radio.

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iStockphoto.com

The Internet has managed to disrupt many industries, from publishing to music. So why not lending?

Google is teaming up with the nation's largest peer-to-peer lender. The search and tech giant is investing $125 million in Lending Club, which gets borrowers and lenders together outside the conventional banking system. Google's move and the actions of other big players reflect a growing interest in peer-to-peer lending.

Chanda Lugere works for a bank, but when she wanted a loan to consolidate her credit card debt, which carried a high interest rate, the bank didn't have much to offer. She tried other banks, but even with her excellent credit score she got nowhere.

So Lugere, who's in her 30s, went online seeking alternatives. She found Lending Club.

"I went ahead and applied for the loan and I was able to get it funded in one week. And my rate was 6 percent. So it's half of what I had been paying. I thought it was a really great experience from beginning to end — really easy, you apply online and they gave you status updates."

Both Lending Club and its much smaller rival, a company called Prosper, have been around for several years. But lately things have really taken off at both companies.

"Last year we facilitated about $800 million in loans and we are planning on $2 billion this year," says Renaud Laplanche, the CEO of Lending Club.

The system works like this: Investors put up the money to fund the loans; typically they'll have pieces of hundreds, even thousands of loans which are ranked according to risk. An investor's rate of return will vary accordingly.

Laplanche says investors make a nice profit, but consumers still get lower rates than they would with a conventional lender because peer-to-peer lending operates like a marketplace.

"It is a more direct funding process between the investors and the borrowers," he says. "There's no branch network. Everything happens online and it is really powered by technology and the Internet. And we use technology to lower cost."

In the industry's early days, most of the money for loans came from individual investors. But today — and this is a big change — large institutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds have put up a lot of the cash.

"That is about one simple thing and it's called yield," says Peter Renton, who blogs and teaches courses about investing in peer-to-peer, or P2P, lending. In recent years, he says, institutional investors have had a hard time finding good fixed-income investments. But P2P lending can offer that. And with more institutional money flowing in, the lenders can make more loans.

(Renton invests some of his own money in these P2P loans and when he directs investors to Lending Club and Prosper he gets referral fees.)

So, what about Google's investment? It's not putting money into loans but is making an investment in Lending Club itself. Neither company is saying exactly what it plans to do. But Renton and others speculate that Google sees synergies between Lending Club and Google Wallet, the company's virtual payment system. Imagine, for example, Google's own credit card or perhaps an instant big-ticket loan.

"If you can hook up a loan institution who is really innovative that can get something happening quickly, there is the potential that Google Wallet could hook up with Lending Club and you could go buy a car on your cellphone," Renton says.

Indeed Lending Club's Laplanche has grand ambitions: He wants to make small-business loans, student loans, car loans, even mortgage loans. For him, the multitrillion-dollar market for consumer credit is a giant opportunity.

"It's really one of the few large markets that has not been fully transformed by the Internet, so we believe we can become the mainstream alternative to the banking system," Laplanche says.

But David Schehr, who follows banking and investment services at the research firm Gartner, says P2P lenders won't be putting conventional banks out of business anytime soon.

"They're growing, they're growing steadily, but realize they're growing off a very small base," he says. "Their total volume of lending might be what a small two- or three-branch community bank does in a year."

And he says it can take a long time for consumers to change their behavior when it comes to banking.

YouTube is expected to announce in the coming days that it will launch paid subscription channels, a first for the online video platform that's been around since 2005. But, with the growing number of subscription services available for entertainment, shopping and news, some consumers say they're reaching digital subscription overload.

Mary Gaughan and her husband get near that point when they think about what movie or TV show they want to watch on free evenings at home. "Where do we get it? We've already paid for these services. Is it [streaming free] or should we get the DVD? It's just like become a headache to me," Gaughan said.

For entertainment, the Gaughans subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime and cable TV. For music, they have a Spotify account and occasionally use Pandora and listen to radio. "It's just way too complicated, and I feel like I need a strategy for managing my media consumption," Gaughan said.

When she thinks about all the little fees on her credit card, she just laughs.

Gaughan is 48, married and has two kids. Her aversion to all these online subscriptions could be generational. But 27-year-old Michael Weinberger feels the same way. He maintains subscriptions for Hulu, Netflix, Spotify and a variety of other services. He got rid of cable because of the price, and decided against Amazon Prime because he didn't want additional dings on his credit card.

"I felt that to sign up for another program, which would have ultimately been a fee and probably would have been redundant, I kind of hit a saturation point," Weinberger said.

Forrester media analyst James McQuivey says a lot of professional producers aren't happy with only ad dollars, leading to YouTube's move toward paid subscriptions.

"YouTube is in a revenue problem," says McQuivey. "They are doing a good job getting advertising from the content that is appropriate for advertisers, but it's not enough money for the companies making all of the videos on YouTube, spending what is now millions of dollars."

While McQuivey agrees that YouTube is entering an increasingly crowded market of entertainment subscription services, he says it's actually still early days for consumer subscription choices.

"There is so much new content coming out and so many new ways to watch it that I think consumers are in a relatively extended honeymoon period with the idea of subscription," says McQuivey.

The proof may be in the numbers. Paid subscribers to Hulu doubled in 2012 and hit 4 million last quarter. Netflix is inching up to 30 million paying subscribers. Since launching in the U.S. about 18 months ago, the music service Spotify has picked up more than a million paying customers.

As the number of separate services increases, it's likely to open the door to a new business — new tools or services that help consumers organize all those subscriptions and make it easier to find what they want.

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Universal Elliot Corp., a belt-maker in New York City, is one of the fashion companies featured on the Maker's Row website.

Courtesy of Maker's Row

Hundreds of people died when a garment factory collapsed last month in Bangladesh. The tragedy is a reminder of the unsafe working conditions in overseas factories that produce so much of the clothing we buy.

Some people want more clothing to be made in the United States. A new website is connecting American designers and American manufacturers who want to produce high-quality fashion.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne has to order 10,000 Batman masks from a company in China — but they all come back with defects.

This is actually a common problem with outsourcing fashion. And if you're not a billionaire crime fighter — if you're just a small businessman in Brooklyn like Matthew Burnett — you can't write off 10,000 defects.

A few years ago, Burnett was making fancy designers wristwatches. He thought the only way to manufacturer them was to use foreign companies. It turned out to be a nightmare.

"There were the language barriers," Burnett says. "There was the time zone differences. So I would be waiting up at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning to respond to emails."

Matthew Burnett co-founded Maker's Row after deciding it was too difficult to find information about U.S. clothing factories.

Courtesy of Maker's Row

For his next company, a clothing line, he wanted everything to be "Made in the USA." The orders could be smaller. If there were problems, he could easily call up the factories. But he had no idea how to find factories in the United States. At one point, he went to local trade show and looked through a print catalog. For a guy raised on the Internet, a printed page can be frustrating.

"You have about a 2-inch-by-2-inch square to describe your specialty — and that's ridiculous," Burnett says.

So he and his business partners created a website where people who design things can find people who make things. The site is called Maker's Row. It's like a combination of The Yellow Pages and Match.com.

American manufacturers can put up a listing and even a video introduction. So let's say you want to find someone who prints T-shirts. You might turn to Neil Breslau, one of the owners and president of First2Print, which is featured on the website. Or if you're a belt designer, you might check out Universal Elliot Corp., a family-run business in New York City.

For designers, this is pretty exciting. Erica Murphy, a recent college grad, spent six frustrating months trying to start a line of children's clothes. "It's very difficult as a new entrant into this community to get information and to find contacts," she says.

Then she learned about Maker's Row. She went on the site and quickly found a company in South Carolina that makes elastics. "I contacted them and they got back to me, and they told me about their product and they gave me information about it," Murphy says.

Nicole Levy is one manufacturer who likes the new website. Her small factory, Baikal, makes fashionable handbags in Manhattan. She got a lot of calls from designers who saw her video online. She even had to hire more workers to keep up with demand.

"It could revolutionize the industry domestically because it could create a lot of labor for domestic factories and keep them around," Levy says.

Also, a "Made in the USA" label could be a good selling point for American consumers who want to avoid ethical questions about overseas manufacturing. But there are still some kinks to work out.

Some new designers don't quite understand how domestic manufacturing works. Their rookie mistakes and naïve questions can be irritating to an old-timer like Terry Schwartz. His company, Sherry Accessories, has been in New York's Garment District for decades.

"The ones I can't handle are the ones who are making a product, who want to know why I can't make it for the same price as the Dominican Republic," Schwartz says.

He did take a few jobs from these new designers, and he's impressed with their creativity.

"I do have some things that are very unique," Schwartz says. "I honestly never saw things like this before, and I'm trying to create these for these people, to make them work."

And the Maker's Row site is still evolving, trying to be a better matchmaker. In less than six months, it has enlisted 1,700 manufacturers from across the country. Each factory is getting about 30 calls a month from potential clients.

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Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system was criticized when it was released last year for features some said didn't mesh with a desktop PC environment. The company has indicated that it will address some of those issues in an upcoming update.

Richard Drew/AP

When Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last year, the software giant billed the new operating system as one of the most critical releases in its history. The system would bridge the gap between personal computers and the fast-growing mobile world of tablets and smartphones.

But this week, the company sent signals that it might soon alter Windows 8 to address some early criticism of the operating system.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Tami Reller, head of marketing and finance for the Windows business, said "key elements" of the flagship product will be changed and rolled back when the company releases an update — which was code named Blue — later this year.

The Financial Times played this as a major concession, calling it a "U-turn," and implied that Microsoft was backing away from the touch-centric user interface that really defined the new operating system and was supposed to take the company into the next generation of computing to help it compete in a world that's in love with the tablet.

Analysts compared the apparent turnaround to the New Coke debacle in the 1980s, and within hours Microsoft issued a statement saying the FT got the story wrong.

Clearly this wasn't the story Microsoft was trying to tell. It wanted to trumpet the fact that more than 100 million copies of this operating system had been sold. That's a big, impressive number, but it comes at a time when PC sales are falling and some manufacturers are blaming Microsoft for that.

Windows 8 has been criticized by many who found the software's new touch-centric user interface difficult to navigate on a desktop. Microsoft has been trying to respond to those critics, and it's likely some key features — like the start button — that disappeared from Windows 8 will be back.

The next update is certain to make this latest version of windows more familiar and easier to use on a desktop. Microsoft says it will release that update to developers this June.

Microsoft isn't backing away from tablets, however, and this software's touch interface isn't going to disappear. In fact, the update will also feature changes that the company says will make the operating system easier to use on smaller tablets.

Apple CEO Tim Cook famously compared Microsoft's attempt to create one OS for both desktops and tablets to trying to merge a refrigerator and a toaster. Obviously, a tablet and a PC are pretty different, and people use them differently.

Microsoft expected its tablets to be an attractive alternative to an iPad, for executives and road warriors who wanted something that worked for movies and books or on a plane, but also had all the tools to do real work.

The bigger problem for Microsoft is that more and more people are wondering why they need a desktop PC in the first place.

Most of what you need a desktop PC for, you can do pretty well on a tablet: Answering email, surfing the Web and even writing or mixing a radio story are all things you could do on an iPad.

Desktop PCs and laptops are generally still much more powerful machines than a tablet. Many of us have computers that 20 years ago would have passed for supercomputers. They are powerful enough to run facial recognition programs or produce animated movies, but we're just using them to do mundane things on the Internet.

There hasn't been a boom in creative software that would inspire people to buy these machines, except in high-end gaming. For many people who buy them, though, they just kind of sit there and their potential goes largely untapped.

Microsoft has tried to address that with the creation of the Windows Store, but there aren't as many apps there yet as the company originally hoped. They also are not really the kinds of programs that set a PC apart.

If Microsoft is to reclaim its former glory, it needs a healthy developer ecosystem that helps answer this question: What can I do with a PC that I just can't on a tablet?

You know you've made the big time when Saturday Night Live parodies your product. On last weekend's show, Fred Armisen demonstrated Google Glass, the all-the-rage wearable computer the tech giant has been testing with the help of volunteers. Let's just say that Armisen, as Weekend Update tech correspondent Randall Meeks, finds a few flaws in the device.

Watch the video. (And maybe plan on adding a neck brace to your future Google Glass purchase order).

Additional Information:

Spam

A Shadow History of the Internet

by Finn Brunton

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Finn Brunton is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information.

Jay Jackson/Courtesy Finn Brunton

Open up your email on any given morning and you might get two or three notes from friends — and twice as many from people trying to sell you energy pills, offshore real estate or virility enhancers.

And some promise riches: You've just won the Lithuanian National Lottery, which you cannot recall entering, or that a man in Kenya needs your help: "Please, sir, only you can help" to move $20 million through your bank account; all he needs is your routing number.

That's spam. Not the meat-like loaf, but unbidden emails, many of them not even sent by actual people, but robot programs. And their volume is often much greater than the amount of real information people find in their inboxes.

In Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information, explains how those unwanted emails make their way into our inbox.

Brunton talks about this daily irritation, its origins and ways to avoid online dangers with NPR's Scott Simon.

Interview Highlights

On how a tiny island in the South Pacific become the center for spam

"It's a marvelous story. Pitcairn Island, which is the least populated jurisdiction in the world, fascinated me because I was familiar with it only as an extremely minor historical event. It's where the Bounty mutineers went when they needed to find an extremely remote place to hide. And I was shocked to learn that, per capita, Pitcairn Island was the world's No. 1 source of spam. I was just wondering ... how is this possible? What has happened is one of the computers on the island has been taken over by a malware program — so this island with 45 or 50 people is broadcasting spam without anyone consciously intending it."

On how a Monty Python sketch became the name for all that unwanted email

"The old rule of thumb in media history was that the first private use for any new major communications technology is pornography. But somewhere, cheek by jowl with that, is humor. One of my favorite details about the history of the telegraph is how quickly an incredible subculture of jokes and gags and pranks and references began to proliferate among the telegraph boys who were actually managing the equipment.

"But indeed, in the case of the Internet, from very early on when it was just these early, often somewhat ragged or haphazard networks between computers mostly in academic settings, the graduate students who were using these machines — as soon as they were not required to use them for some professional purpose, as soon as they had an off hour to kill in the basement — started using them to replay old Monty Python routines — getting back to jokes.

"And of course one of the most famous Monty Python routines is the sort of spam chorus that the Vikings deliver in the made-up Green Midget Café in that sketch where that couple is trying to order something from the menu and everything has spam in it. So it sort of starts off as a joke, but the term very quickly becomes the universal term for anyone who's doing that kind of annoying, jokey, time-wasting behavior on these very early computer networks."

On how spam can become far more than just a nuisance

"When you get a spam message, sometimes it'll have an attachment and ... it will be a message from a friend. And it'll say, 'Oh hey, could you take a look at this?' And then you open it and it doesn't seem to do anything; it's just a bunch of weird symbols or it fails to open. And you assume something went wrong, I'll just delete this and carry on with my day.

"When you've launched that, an exploit within the structure of the software that you're using has quietly taken over your computer and it is using the computer's broadband connection to quietly, in the background, without your knowledge, begin sending out spam messages following the instructions of a central network called a command and control system .

"So what that means if it costs you nothing to send 100 million messages and only some vanishingly small percentage of a percentage ever get through, well just send 100 million more, you know? And if you can get another 2,000 or 3,000 actually through, you can still make a viable business out of it."

On how spam turns from a business to a criminal enterprise

"You always had spammers who were just crooks. But then you had a lot of people who were moving business models in from the world of, for example, pharmaceutical advertisements in the back pages of weightlifting magazines. The people working now are out and out criminals, and that actually frees them up to potentially make a lot more money than they did before. Because if they can convince you to buy something, it's no longer about actually selling you the pharmaceuticals; it's about taking your credit card information and then using that for identity theft purposes.

"And to be clear, spam email is upwards of 85 to 90 percent of all email sent on any given day. It's just that most of the time we don't see most of it because our filters are pretty good. But it's a tidal wave that's slamming into these walls that we've built day after day after day. And we see the little bit that slops over."

On how you can protect yourself from identity theft online

"I use what's called a password manager in my browser. This is a system [that] will automatically generate very, very long passwords for any new account you need to set up and it will keep track of all of them for you and log you in. Because the major danger here is not that someone will necessarily steal your computer. The major danger is an automatic system that breaks into Gawker's password store [for example] and then begins to systematically search the Internet for other things of yours that it can access using that particular arrangement of email and password. Having a good password manager makes that impossible."

WEB EXTRA: On one more thing you do to guard your important accounts

"For everything of real importance in your life, like your banking information or your personal, central email account, see if they will allow you to use something called two-factor authentication. It's a system in which you simultaneously have your password and then, you also have to have something else — generally a number — that changes over time. And you have to be able to enter that as well. For example, Gmail has allowed this. When you're logging into your Gmail account, you type in your [login] name and your password and then it texts a brief set of digits to your phone. You have to enter those as well. This is important because it means you have to be physically in possession of your phone as well as your password to actually log in, which prevents the whole world of people just trying attacks where they guess every password in the dictionary or guess every password in a certain space."