Within months of launch, Orkut’s user community started to change.
Did you know Google had a social network that predated Google+? Google’s social network was called: Orkut and it launched a few months before Facebook launched as a Harvard-only site.
Continue reading… “Dalton Caldwell: Critical mass vs network effects”
Futurist Thomas Frey: People are seriously worried. I’ve been in a number of conversations recently where people are very worried about our coming era of automation where fewer and fewer jobs will be left for people to do.
Many do not have the entrepreneurial mindset when we start a business.
Most people are born with entrepreneurial traits when they start their business. Those traits are acquired along the way. The biggest hurdle to overcome in your business usually is fear. Despite wanted to succeed in life this fear holds us back to do what we want to do. Here are five steps to overcome fear in business.
This is an artist’s concept of excess left-hand aspartic acid created in asteroids and delivered to Earth via meteorite impacts. The line at the bottom is a chromatogram showing that left-hand aspartic acid (tall peak in the center, with diagram of left-hand aspartic acid molecule on top) was four times more abundant in the meteorite sample than right-hand aspartic acid (smaller peak to the left, with right-handed aspartic acid molecule on top).
Researchers analyzing meteorite fragments that fell on a frozen lake in Canada have developed an explanation for the origin of life’s handedness — why living things only use molecules with specific orientations. The work also gave the strongest evidence to date that liquid water inside an asteroid leads to a strong preference of left-handed over right-handed forms of some common protein amino acids in meteorites. The result makes the search for extraterrestrial life more challenging…
“The lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving.”
The New York Times has come out with another story about technology addiction. The Times‘ Matt Richtel talked with a some people in Silicon Valley who think we need to step away from our devices. The basic argument is this:
Continue reading… “Are we addicted to our gadgets?”
Craig Venter
Craig Venter: I was asked earlier whether the goal is to dissect what Schrödinger had spoken and written, or to present the new summary, and I always like to be forward-looking, so I won’t give you a history lesson except for very briefly. I will present our findings on first on reading the genetic code, and then learning to synthesize and write the genetic code, and as many of you know, we synthesized an entire genome, booted it up to create an entirely new synthetic cell where every protein in the cell was based on the synthetic DNA code.
Continue reading… “Craig Venter: A 21st century perspective on life”
Here’s a frightening yet informative graphic by Tony Shin, et al. of Criminal Justice Degree about Transportation Security Administration excesses and oversights. (The full infographic can be viewed after the jump.)
The TSA has been around for the last decade and I’ve never read a positive news article about them. It isn’t that I’m avoiding these articles, its that there just aren’t any. Try it yourself: go to Google News and search for TSA. Some of the most recent articles are titled ‘TSA body scanners’ apparent flaw’ and ‘TSA pats down toddler in wheelchair’. Just a few weeks ago the new full body scanners were proved to be practically useless. This isn’t the first time the TSA has missed the boat either…
Continue reading… “Grope and Pillage TSA infographic”
Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek” a few days ago. It is a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records. While this sounds like a good idea, it gave a wealthier, more powerful group a chance to erase older, traditional records that hadn’t been properly codified. One effect of passing laws requiring standardized, digital data is to marginalize all data that can’t be standardized or digitized, and to marginalize the people who don’t control the process of standardization.
Continue reading… “The dark side of open data”
Online buyers in India will spend nearly five times more on travel than on retail purchases in 2012.
India’s ecommerce is rising quickly as consumers turn to the web for products and services, but more than 80% of the country’s online sales come from travel purchases. Online buyers in India spend nearly five times more on leisure and unmanaged business travel than they spend on retail purchases.
Continue reading… “83% of ecommerce in India is from online travel sales”
The more we replace with our phones, the fewer consumer electronics we have to keep updated, and the less cluttered our lives can become.
We can easily get caught up in what’s new in smartphones, from novel applications of near field communication to their potential as detectors of environmental pollutants. But it’s also useful to occasionally look back on what they’ve granted us already. A recent survey in the UK found 4 in 10 smartphone users said their phone was “more important for accessing the Internet than any other device.”
Continue reading… “List of things replaced by smartphones”
Online video will soon dominate your time spent on the web.
Chances are that in the past three years that you have watched an online video. Almost every site on the internet that you visit has a video displayed in some form. Video viewership has skyrocketed and there are no signs of it slowing down.
Continue reading… “Why online videos are the future of marketing”
Chinese workers go about their chores at a textile factory.
The real estate and infrastructure bubbles are a great concern in China. But these challenges are short term that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.
Continue reading… “The end of China’s manufacturing dominance”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.