March 2015

There were 4 posts published in March 2015 (this is page 1 of 1).

Weekly#107

  • Morse Code Translator
  • Facebook is building a fleet of giant solar-powered drones (Business Insider). Aquila can reportedly stay in the air for up to three months at a time, and beam high-speed internet from between 60,000 and 90,000 feet in the air. They’ll be lighter than a small car, but as long as a Boeing 767.

  • Apple could release 3 new iPhones this year (Business Insider)
    the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 6S Plus, and a smaller device currently known as the iPhone 6C.

  • Amazon Cloud Drive Unlimited Storage for 60 USD (Digital Trends)
  • A Navy Diving Suit That Recycles Wasted Oxygen and Helium (Wired)
  • Adorable Plant Monitors (Trendhunter)
  • Google To Build Robotic Surgery Platform With Johnson & Johnson (TechCrunch)

 

 

 


 

 

 

Weekly#106

  • Smart cities will house 9.7 billion IoT devices by 2020: Gartner (ZDNet)
  • Germany Moves Away From U.S.-Dominated IoT Standards Groups (WSJ)
  • Top 15 IoT Takeaways From South By Southwest (Forbes)
  • The Digital Transformation of Industry(PDF Report by Roland Berger)
    • “By 2025, Europe could see its manufacturing industry add gross value worth 1.25 trillion euros – or suffer the loss of 605 billion euros in foregone value added.”
  • PowerPoint Karaoke Brings Stress Relief to Silicon Valley’s Embattled Office Workers (WSJ) Participants give improvised talks in front of slides they haven’t seen before.
  • Microsoft announces Azure IoT Suite (Microsoft Blog)
  • 27 Revenue Model Options (SlideShare)
  • A developer kit for Nvidia’s self-driving car platform, the Drive PX, will go on sale in May for $10,000, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said today at the company’s GPU Technology Conference. (Recode)
  • 5 Internet of Things Things from CeBit (WSJ)
  • Xiaomi began public beta testing Tuesday of an online money-market fund that lets users earn interest on money saved in Xiaomi’s wallet app, a spokeswoman said (WSJ)
  • Ford Motor Co. is turning to longtime partner Microsoft Corp. to make over-the-air software updates standard in its next generation of cars. (WSJ)
  • Andreessen Horowitz Invests $7.5 Million in Big-Data Startup Tachyon “Tachyon is a memory-centric storage system that is both faster and more reliable than the previous generation of file-based storage systems, Mr. Levine said.” (WSJ)
  • Facebook Announces a Payments Feature for Its Messenger App (NyTimes)
  • Orange Seeks Foreign Partner for Video Site Dailymotion (NyTimes)
  • Google Now will open more broadly to more third-party apps (Mashable)
  • Carbon3D’s revolutionary new 3D printer is 25 to 100 times faster (Inhabitat)
  • Delphi’s self-driving car is set to take a road trip from San Francisco to NYC (Inhabitat)

 

 

 

Weekly#105

  • Algorithmia Launches With More Than 800 Algorithms On Its Marketplace (Techcrunch)
  • Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence (HBR)
  • Smartphones are about to become network hubs (NetworkWorld)
  • Apple Event in 90 Seconds (TechCrunch)
  • Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay Expands to the Pacific Northwest (Yahoo)
  • Three European countries have already hit their 2020 renewable energy goals (QZ)
    • In 2010, the European Union set a goal of producing 20% of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020. The latest figures show that the union as a whole reached the 15% mark in 2013. But the combined figure includes some countries already exceeding thier targets, while others lag far behind.
      Three out of the 28 EU member states have surpassed their 2020 goals. Sweden had one of the most ambitious goals, planning to produce 49% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. It’s already gone further than that, with 52.1% from renewable sources in 2013. Bulgaria and Estonia also are producing more than they had been targeting, five years ahead of schedule
  • 4G around the globe: Spain has the fastest LTE speeds, the U.S. has among the slowest (VentureBeat)
  • WhatsApp hits 1 billion installs on Android, the second non-Google app to do so (VentureBeat)
  • Who Coined ‘Cloud Computing’? (Technology Review)
    Part of the debate is who should get credit for inventing the idea. The notion of network-based computing dates to the 1960s, but many believe the first use of “cloud computing” in its modern context occurred on August 9, 2006, when then Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduced the term to an industry conference. “What’s interesting [now] is that there is an emergent new model,” Schmidt said, “I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing—they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”

    The term began to see wider use the following year, after companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM started to tout cloud-computing efforts as well. That was also when it first appeared in newspaper articles, such as a New York Times report from November 15, 2007, that carried the headline “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing,’ Using Data From Afar.” It described vague plans for “Internet-based supercomputing.”

    Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix, says cloud computing took hold among techies because it described something important. “We now had a common handle for a number of trends that we had been observing, such as the consumerization and commoditization of IT,” he wrote in an e-mail.

    Johnston says it’s never been clear who coined the term. As an editor of the Wikipedia entry for cloud computing, Johnston keeps a close eye on any attempts at misappropriation. He was first to raise alarms about Dell’s trademark application and this summer he removed a citation from Wikipedia saying a professor at Emory had coined the phrase in the late 1990s. There have been “many attempts to coopt the term, as well as various claims of invention,” says Johnston. (Source)

 

 

 

 

Weekly#104

    • Google’s Android to Take On Facebook in Virtual Reality
      Secret team at search giant working on new version of popular OS for virtual reality (WSJ)
    • Zombie Projects: How to Find Them and Kill Them (HBR)
      • 1- Use simple, transparent, predetermined criteria. 
      • 2-Involve outsiders. 
      • 3-Codify lessons learned along the way. 
      • 4-Expand the definition of success.
      • 5-Communicate widely. 
      • 6-Provide closure.
    • Preview 27 different Apple Watch apps in your browser (GigaOM)
    • Sony to release Playstation 4 virtual reality headset in 2016 (GigaOM)
    • Report: Google preparing iOS app for Android Wear smartwatches (GigaOM)
    • How companies assess your financial risk based only on your email address (QZ)
      • Email domain: “The analysis of the email domain can be very powerful, as it allows the understanding of the existing controls around the creation of an email address,” Carvalho tells Quartz. In general, corporate email addresses pose less risk when it comes to online fraud versus email services open to the public, such as Yahoo or Gmail.
        Age of email address: Emailage can obtain information about the age of some email addresses. An email address created around the time an order was placed is another red flag for merchants.
        Numeric patterns: Patterns in email handles, such as the numbers in John12345, can also be a possible sign of fraud.
        Logic patterns: More sophisticated fraudsters use technology to automatically generate email addresses. “The act of creating these addresses often reveals patterns of logic used to create them,” says Carvalho. “We can detect these patterns and identify other email addresses associated with the same fraud ring before fraud happens.”
        Email tumbling: Some email addresses, such as those from Gmail, still work when users add special characters, such as a period or plus sign, to the handle. People sometimes use this workaround to create multiple accounts with one email address. (Source QZ)
    • Apple Suppliers Told to Produce Larger iPad in Second Half (WSJ)
    • Minecraft’s Markus Persson Tells All On His Sale To Microsoft, And What’s Next (Forbes)
    • Haiku Deck’s new AI tool can automatically generate your next presentation (TNW)
    • Microsoft releases Office for Mac 2016 Preview with Retina graphics and cloud integration (TNW)
    • Apple may partner with HBO on the launch of its $15/month streaming service (VentureBeat)
    • Reid Hoffman’s Two Rules for Strategy Decisions (HBR)
      • Reid’s first principle is speed. One of his most popular quotes is, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” Another is, “In founding a startup, you throw yourself off a cliff and build an airplane on the way down.” Practically, Reid employs several decision making hacks to prioritize speed as a factor for which option is best — and to speed up the process of making the decision itself.
      • Reid’s second principle is simplicity — simplicity enables speed
    • Music discovery app Shazam will now identify products (BI)

    • Here’s why Apple joining the Dow is a ‘historic moment’ for the company (BI)

      * Stocks in the Dow have more visibility
      * Joining the Dow also opens up Apple to a new class of investor
      * According to Dow Jones, “a stock typically is added only if the company has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth, and is of interest to a large number of investors,” and so on some level, Dow Jones is reaffirming Apple’s corporate reputation with this addition.