Moments after Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, announced the company’s grand new plan to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system, she was thanking Microsoft for being a major sponsor of the conference and inviting the company’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage.
Futurist Thomas Frey: A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking opened the world’s eyes to the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning that it has the potential of outsmarting humans in the financial markets. But few people realize that we are already in imminent danger of this happening.
Toyota is looking into the possibility of developing vehicles that are capable of hovering just above the road, technology designed to improve efficiency. At Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing Summit in San Francisco, Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, the managing officer with Toyota’s technical administration group, said in an interview that the company had been studying a similar idea of flying cars at one of its “most advanced” research and development areas, but cautioned that the concept was not like actually flying around in three-dimensional space. Instead, he said, the plan is to get the car “a little bit away” from the road to reduce friction, similar to a hovercraft.
The world’s most highly-efficient solar cells are twice as efficient as the ones people put on their roofs, but hardly anyone uses them because the semiconductor materials they’re made of are so expensive. That could be about to change.
An entire car will be printed in September at the International Manufacturing Technology Show. Local Motors, the company behind the project, recently held what was the world’s first 3D Printed Car Design Challenge to choose its final design. Over 200 groups entered the competition, but when the dust settled and the votes were tallied, two designs stood atop the heap. (Pics)
Jimmy is a $16,000 research robot powered by a Core i7 chip.
Last week, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich showed off a pair of robots claiming that one of them, powered by its embedded Edison processor, would be available for sale by the end of the year. (Videos)
Virtual reality won’t require strapping a bulky contraption to your head in the future. Instead, you may just step into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or look down at a smartwatch and see virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie “Star Wars.”
Trackingpoint is the company behind the U.S. Army’s new smart rifle. They are already famous for developing a gun that does all the hard work of aiming for you. Armed with one of their precision guided firearms, you simply tag your targets as if you were piloting an Air Force jet and then aim your weapon where it tells you to. You’re almost guaranteed to hit your target every time. (Video)
Are you frustrated with rising prices from your cable company? Do you keep getting hit with more fees and charges and you are paying for more channels than you’d ever want to watch? These are just a handful of the most common complaints consumers have when it comes to grappling with cable companies.
Vivek Wadhwa, Singularity University’s vice president of academics and innovation.
Vivek Wadhwa, a Stanford University fellow, and vice president of academics and innovation at Singularity University, stands at the crossroads of the future of nearly every industry business and arts and science has to offer. At the World of Business Innovation event he painted a vivid portrait of 14 freaky technologies just around the corner.
We are set to disrupt the way startup investments are made.
Billions of dollars are flowing through Venture Capital Companies into startups. And that is an incredibly important development to bring more innovation, disruptive thinking and many more businesses to life. However, the Kauffman Foundation, a pretty influential force in the VC world, has expressed their frustration in a recent report: