- Big banks plan to coin new digital currency (FT)
- What would happen if your country issued a digital currency like Bitcoin? Bank of England Simulation (WEF)
- The science of habit-forming Products
- 40 Techniques Used by Data Scientists
- Kobe Bryant’s 13 Venture Capital Investments (WSJ)
- Sandvine Report: North American Homes Average Seven Active Connected Devices, PCs now account for less than 25% of network traffic
- Brainstorm Cards – 52 Ways to Generate New Ideas [PDF]
- Singapore became the first country in the world to launch a self-driving taxi service (WSJ)
- Leadership May Not Be the Problem with Your Innovation Team
- Apple Plans iPhone for Japan With Tap-to-Pay for Subways
- LinkedIn Enters The Gig Economy With An Upwork Competitor (Fast Company)
- Domino’s wants to start delivering pizzas by drone in New Zealand (BI)
- Amazon releases auto buying research tool (Tech Crunch)
- Tesla Unveils Electric-Car Battery With a 315-Mile Range
The company says its new ‘Ludicrous’ P100D will be the ‘fastest car in the world’ (WSJ) - Tesla Motors Inc. raised the price of its semi-autonomous Autopilot option by $500, the latest move by the Silicon Valley auto maker to adjust prices and options on its electric vehicles…Tesla’s Autopilot feature will now cost $3,000 (WSJ)
- Cloud-computing provider Rackspace Hosting Inc. is being taken private by private-equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC for $4.3 billion (WSJ)
- Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey says these 7 books changed his life
- Swiss watch exports declined for a 13th consecutive month in July as Hong Kong, traditionally the biggest market for luxury timepieces, slipped to second place for the first time in almost a decade.
- Soon you’ll be able to play ‘over 400’ PlayStation games on your PC
- The Elements of Value [HBR]
…A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver…identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. 
August 2016
Weekly#180
- a half second difference in page load times can make a 10% difference in sales for an online retailer.
- Machine Intelligence 2.0 in charts and graphs (Venture Beat)
- All U.S. Energy Consumption in a Giant Diagram
- Seven months into the year, videogame deals totaled $25.1 billion, eclipsing the previous full-year record of $14.9 billion in 2014, according to Digi-Capital LLC. Of the deals, 88% have been for mobile-game makers, including three acquisitions totaling $18.9 billion. (WSJ)
- Every major cable TV company lost subscribers last quarter
Top pay-TV operators lost 665,000 subscribers in Q2 2016. (Arstechnica) - Uber’s route to the driverless future just got a little clearer. In the next few weeks, Uber will begin deploying a 100-car test fleet of autonomous Volvos in Pittsburgh (beating Google to the consumer market in the process). (Recode)
- Uber paid $680 million for self-driving truck company Otto for the tech, not the trucks (Recode)
- Uber and Volvo commit $300 million to developing autonomous cars together (Recode)
- Rakuten buys struggling bitcoin startup Bitnet to create a ‘blockchain research lab (TechCrunch)
- Tencent, the owner of popular social messaging app WeChat, overtook e-commerce giant Alibaba to become China’s most valuable technology company on Thursday. (cnbc) (2016 Q2 Results pdf)
- New lithium metal batteries could make smartphones, drones, and electric cars last twice as long. (MIT)
- DIY Algorithmic programming
- Onboarding With The IKEA Effect: How To Use UX Friction To Build Retention
- This is why Walmart is purchasing jet.com
- Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology
- Amazon now lets you rent its virtual desktops, Amazon WorkSpaces, by the hour (Tech Crunch)
Weekly#179
- Rumor has it Apple’s next iPhone may be waterproof (QZ)
- SpaceX successfully lands its sixth Falcon 9 rocket after launch
and the fourth drone ship landing (The Verge) - Innovation has become the key to survival. A Standard & Poor’s company can expect to survive just 15 years. That’s down from 67 years in 1920. By 2027, 75% of the S&P 500 firms today will be replaced by new ones. (WEF)
- Google is building a completely new operating system. As in, not just an upgrade to Android or Chrome OS, but instead, a new system that’s not derived from the Linux kernel. It’s called Fuchsia. (The Next Web)
- How does fog computing differ from edge computing?
… When compared to edge computing, fog computing is more scalable as it gives a centralized processing body a more big-picture view of the network as it has multiple data points feeding it information….
… To better explain how these computing methods differ, we will examine a simple use case of a smart, robotic vacuum cleaner… As it relates to our vacuum, a centralized fog node or IoT gateway would receive information continuously from the dirt-detecting sensors, process that information, and deploy the vacuum when and where it determines that dirt is present… In our vacuum scenario, an edge computing solution would enable each dirt-detecting sensor to determine itself whether or not dirt is present and signal the vacuum alerting it of such. (Ryan Matthew Pierson Read Write) - The head of Google’s Brain team is more worried about the lack of diversity in artificial intelligence than an AI apocalypse (Recode)
- World’s largest vertical farm grows without soil, sunlight or water in Newark… It makes a befitting setting for a company that is promising to increase crop yields by as much as 70 times compared to traditional field farms, without using any pesticides or fertilizers…. (The Guardian)
- IBM’s New Artificial Neurons a Big Step Toward Powerful Brain-LikeComputers
- Microsoft Research working on the ultimate wearable: a tattoo to control devices remotely
DuoSkin:Functional, stylish on-skin user interfaces from MIT Media Lab on Vimeo.