August 2015

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

Weekly#129

  • The 2015 Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project Report [PDF]
  • Automobile Insurance in the era of autonomous vehicles KPMG [PDF]
    • Infographic Summary [PDF]
  • Both broadband availability and speed are strong drivers in an economy. (2011) Last year Ericsson and Arthur D. Little concluded that for every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration GDP increases by 1 percent. (source)
  • impact of broadband on the economy [ITU 2012 PDF]
  • Apple Thursday sent out invitations to a Sept. 9 event in San Francisco (typically unveils new iPhones in the fall) (WSJ)
  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 1 billion people used the social network on the day of Aug. 24, setting a new milestone for the company. (QZ)
  • According to the NASA, seas around the world have risen an average of three inches (7.6 cm) since 1992, and as much as nine inches (23 cm) in certain places. (QZ)
  • A former Google exec on how to make tough decisions quickly…
    …
    General George Patton said that, and I definitely subscribe to it. Do you remember the last time you were in a meeting and someone said, “We’re going to make this decision before we leave the room?” How great did that feel? Didn’t you just want to hug that person?… (QZ)
  • Appeal of Free: 75 Million Users Download Windows 10 in First Month (NYTimes)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#128

 

  • Google delays its modular smartphone until 2016
    Ara, an Android-based smartphone platform where nearly every piece of hardware, including the battery, processor and camera, is a separate piece of the handset that can be replaced or customized without upgrading to a completely new device.Google said the latest plan is to bring its modular smartphones to a “few locations” in the mainland United States for the initial rollout, but did not elaborate on the cause of the delay or the change of location.
  •  The “drinkable book” combines treated paper with printed information on how and why water should be filtered. Its pages contain nanoparticles of silver or copper, which kill bacteria in the water as it passes through. In trials at 25 contaminated water sources in South Africa, Ghana and Bangladesh, the paper successfully removed more than 99% of bacteria. (BBC)https://on.google.com/hub/ 
  • Google Won the Internet. Now It Wants to Cure Diseases
    Under Alphabet, life sciences will become its own independent division, though it doesn’t have an official name just yet. (The company says to expect more news soon.) But a few hints suggest the life sciences group had been operating fairly independently already. Last month, CFO Ruth Porat singled out life sciences during a quarterly earnings call as one of the areas Google sees as “longer-term sources of revenue.” To get there, the company has been quietly recruiting top scientific talent, from immunologists to neurologists to nanoparticle engineers. (Wired)
  • Rejoice: Google Just Created a Stupidly Simple Wi-Fi Router
    The most striking thing about the OnHub is the way it looks. It’s not your average router, with wires and antennas poking out from every side; it’s a large cylindrical device with a blinking light on the top, shades of the Amazon Echo or Apple’s Airport Extreme router. ..This is intentional: Google doesn’t want you to crawl behind your desk every time you need to get at your router. It wants the OnHub right in the center of everything. This itself is a boon to your connection; hiding your router behind closed doors or underneath your TV is horrible for your signal. (Yes, people do that.)…“We discovered that when you put a router on the floor,” Wuellner says, “versus on the shelf, the one on the shelf performs twice as well as the one on the floor.” Wuellner’s team also discovered that making it a tall cylinder made users less likely to stack things on top of it, which also destroys signal. (Wired)
  • Is The Bitcoin Community Facing an Existential Split?
    The debate revolves around a seemingly small point: whether or not to allow bitcoin’s open ledger, the blockchain, to accept block sizes greater than 1 megabyte. The blocks comprise individual bitcoin transactions; the transactions are packaged into blocks, confirmed, and added to the ledger. The ledger is maintained by the decentralized, independent consortium of miners. Today the size limit is being pressed as the system grows. The problem is that changing the limit at this point will alter the economics of bitcoin mining. Any change to the software requires agreement among the miners, and many have been vocal in their opposition. (WSJ)
  • What Boston Dynamics Is Working on Next (IEEE)
  • Today, 12% of organizations surveyed run 100% of their IT in the cloud; in five years almost 50% of our respondents said they will be moving their IT entirely to the cloud; in 10 years, that number will climb to nearly 70%. (Better Cloud)
  • Google says that its data center networks are some of the largest in the world. With its current network, called Jupiter, Google has succeeded in operating a network running on off-the-shelf switching components that has scaled to more than 1 petabit per second of total bisection bandwidth. Translated, that means each of the 100,000 servers in a warehouse-size data center can communicate with each other in an arbitrary pattern at 10 gigabits per second, according to a Google blog post, published Tuesday (WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#127

  • Google, Alphabet adlı yeni bir şirket altında yeniden organize oldu. Google Alphabet’in parçası olarak Arama, Reklam, Youtube,  Android, Chrome ve Bulut konuları üzerinde çalışmaya devam edecek. Google CEO’su Sundar Pichai oldu. Alphabet’in CEO’su ise Larry Page. Google X( otonom arabalar, teslimat drone’ları ve internet sağlayacı balonlar, Nest, Google Fiber, Google Yatırım ve diğer konular Alphabet bünyesinde devam edecek.
  • Adobe ve PageFair’in hazırladığı rapora göre reklam engelleme hizmetlerinin, reklamlara 2015 yılında22 milyar dolar etkisi olması bekleniyor. Şuan 198 milyon kişi reklam engelleme araçlarını kullanıyor. Rapora burdan erişebilirsiniz.
  • “The Apple Watch is going to gain a significant amount of penetration,” he said Thursday in a phone interview. “The first couple of years will be difficult for watches in fashion categories.”
    The market for watches that cost less than $1,000 is most at risk, as consumers in that price range have indicated they’re the most likely to buy an Apple Watch, Levin said. Sales of watches costing between $50 and $999 registered drops in June, the biggest being a 24 percent decline in timepieces from $100 to $149.99, according to NPD’s data. (Bloomberg)
  • Astronotlar uzayda 15 ayda kendi yetiştirdikleri sebzelerin tadına baktı.
  •  Yıldız Savaşları Yeni Fragman
  • Plastic balls help Los Angeles fight drought

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#126

  • Deutsche Bank Exploring Blockchain UsesDeutsche Bank has shed new light on its exploration of blockchain technology, amid growing interest by financial institutions in the software that powers bitcoin.In its response to a European Securities and Markets Authority consultation on virtual currencies and distributed ledger technology, published by the regulator on July 30, the German bank revealed it has been exploring the potential commercial application of distributed ledgers in areas including the enforcement and clearing of derivatives contracts, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering registries and surveillance, and securities asset servicing. (WSJ)
  • Germany’s Adidas AG is placing a costly bet on catching up with its rivals in the digital fitness world, agreeing to pay €220 million ($239 million) for Runtastic GmbH, an Austrian fitness app maker. (WSJ)
  • MH370: France launches searches around Reunion (BBC)
  • Osborne Effect ?
    3-D Printer Firms Fall Flat, as Buyers Wait for New Models
    3D Systems, Stratasys struggle with an increasingly uncertain outlook (WSJ)
  • Google Inc and Samsung Electronics Co will release monthly security fixes for Android phones, a growing target for hackers, after the disclosure of a bug designed to attack the world’s most popular mobile operating system. (Reuters)
  • A Japanese engineer has developed a portable transporter small enough to be carried in a backpack that he says is the world’s first ‘car in a bag’. (Reuters)
  • The Richest People in Tech (Forbes)
  • Apple’s iOS 9: your device will automatically switch from WiFi to cellular data when the WiFi connection just doesn’t quite cut it. (Fortune)
  •  

     

  •  

  • One of the first things Claure scrutinized closely in his first 90 days was Sprint’s 35,000-person call center operation. Agents recited dozens of rigid scripts for incident calls, whether or not they were relevant to the conversation. Why would someone try to sell a tablet computer to someone calling to report dropped calls, he mused. “We didn’t have a uniform process to handle similar calls.”Within weeks, Claure mandated simpler, more unified processes and took a personal interest in selecting the technology to run them. Ultimately, the project was entrusted to Pegasystems, the same software company overhauling customer engagement at American Express, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and United Health Group. (Fortune)