Futurist Thomas Frey: A couple years ago I was on a weekend outing in Vail, Colorado and ended up attending a kayaking tournament taking place on the Gore Creek in the heart of town.
Startups usher in retail revolution by clearing out cash registers
Business are replacing traditional cash registers with such products as Square’s Business in a Box.
The cash register has reigned as an icon of American commerce ever since the Civil War era. It’s an American ritual to pay for your purchases at the cash register. But, the average point-of-sale (POS) system is expensive, inconvenient to set up and manage and not connected to the internet. Despite all of this, these types of transactions occur a million times every day. The last significant shift happened in the 1950’s when credit card terminals enter the scene.
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Paywalls rise for online news readers
More newspapers adding paywalls to their online subscriptions.
Several newspapers have recently announced plans to erect paywalls to extract subscription revenues for their most loyal online readers. While the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and the Sun are adding paywalls other paywalls are being tweaked. The NYT paywall is getting less porous, while Andrew Sullivan’s is being tightened up, with a new $2/month option to complement the existing $20/year price point.
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Excessive cleanliness may be making us sick
A little dirt never hurt anyone.
Scientific research suggests that all the antibacterial-wiping, germ-killing cleanliness of the developed world may actually be making us more prone to getting sick — and that a little more dirt might help us stay healthier in the long run.
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138 million people worldwide want to live in the U.S.
138 million people want to live in the U.S.
Gallup released new data on migration this week. Around 630 million people – 13% of the world’s adults – say they would like to move to another country permanently. An estimated 138 million people would like to relocate to the United States. The second-most popular destination was the United Kingdom with 42 million potential migrants. The U.S. and U.K. were followed by Canada, France and Saudi Arabia.
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Gamification increases site engagement 29% according to billions of online user actions
Are you looking to increase commenting, social sharing, and other user engagement on your site? Billions of user actions with partners like Pepsi, Nike, and Dell, adding gamification to your site boosts engagement by almost a third, according to a Gigya study.
Healthcare’s data-driven revolution
Wearable health devices are playing an enormous role in this revolution by helping track your metrics passively.
Swissnex San Francisco explored the topic of Big Data and Health Devices together with The Hive, a Silicon Valley Big Data incubator on March 6th. Roger Magoulas (Director of Research at O’Reilly Media), Ian Blumenfeld (Data Scientist and Co-Founder of InSample), and Rachel Kalmar (Data Scientist at Misfit Wearables) talked about how data science is transforming healthcare, and how we can improve our health by using devices and better analyzing the metrics we track. (videos)
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Andrew Zolli talks about what you are doing wrong when you think about the future
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People are really bad at anticipating events that don’t conform to a very narrow idea of what the future will be, which is why we’re often caught off guard by the unexpected. In the recording of an online conversation above with Andrew Zolli, executive director of PopTech and the author of Resilience, they discuss what about our psyches makes future thinking hard, and how we can recognize major changes–before they happen.
Scary obesity statistics
Fewer that one in ten people were obese up until 1980. In 2010, 35% of the American people were classified as obese.
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Why the Internet of Things needs to create its own economy
Internet of Things exists, but often badly.
If you track the Q rating of tech trends, then you know the cloud is so last minute and big data is good for little more than wrapping fish at Whole Foods. For 2013, it’s all about the Internet of Things. But, for the Internet of Things to succeed it is going to need an economy supported by developers who can rely on open standards and APIs.
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Cell phone theft becomes a national crime epidemic in the U.S.
10% of cellular users said their phone had been stolen at one point.
From San Francisco to Washington, D.C., law enforcement agencies are again sounding an alarm over mobile-phone thefts, demanding that the wireless industry, resellers and lawmakers take new steps to quash the thriving black market for boosted devices.
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U.S. lures young web warriors with hacking games
High school students in Virginia competed in a digital defense simulation.
Arlan Jaska is in the eight grade and he has figured out ow to write a simple script that could switch his keyboard’s Caps Lock key on and off 6,000 times a minute. He would slip his program onto his friends computers when they weren’t looking. It was all fun and games until the program spread to his middle school.
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