A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
The success of companies like Uber can be attributed to one factor: independent contractors. A business model built around the sharing economy, it’s brought about a boom of cash flow in niche markets. But with new territory comes new challenges, and already these industries are feeling the heat for their approach to labor management. Continue reading… “1099 or W-2? Uber, changing the way we think of transit”
If you could see the invisible world around us you would see it ripples with information as the radio waves pulse around us and an electromagnetic tide washes over everything.
Continue reading… “An iPad app that lets you “see” Wi-Fi signals”
With the help of Google Maps, there is a new service called Project Sunroof that aims to provide a “treasure map” of solar energy. Sunroof gives homeowners detailed information about how much solar power their roof can generate and how much money they could save on electricity costs by adding solar panels.
Vail Resorts is trying something different on its ski slopes this winter. The resort has updated its EpicMix smartphone app to offer its crowdsourced, real-time wait times for ski lifts. The app will collect data from the RFID-enabled season passes skiers carry at the resort. It’s one of the most ambitious efforts yet to bring Waze-style crowdsourced location data into the sports and vacation spheres.
Google’s new search feature shows users when local restaurants are booked up and what stores have the most foot traffic. The Google Search tweak is rolling out today on mobile for some users, and shows graphs—presumably based on geolocation from smartphones—indicating when a given venue is busiest during the day.
Continue reading… “Google Search will now tell you when a restaurant or store is too busy”
Douglas Coupland: I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture — by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data — and I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner. I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing an app to do so and I’m calling it Wonkr — which somehow seems appropriate for a politically geared app. I dropped the “e” to make it feel more appy.
Continue reading… “Data is the future of machine intelligence”
Modern da Vincni – I sat quiet and still in a clean, worn armchair; a good balance between luxurious and cheap. The near absolute silence was a pleasant break from campus outside. Were it not for the electrodes taped to my head, I might have been comfortable. The television before me, much like the one in my apartment at the time, would have been welcome if it weren’t for the oversized words flickering in black font on a white screen.
NOTE: Anyone interested in learning to code, DaVinci Coders offers multiple courses designed to get you into the rapidly growing technology industry. For more info please visit davincicoders.com.
Continue reading… “Leonardo da Vinci would be a programmer today”
Someone, somewhere, actually wrote the code for the apps and games you use every day. Even the underlying platforms and hardware that those apps run on. And the web. And the entire Internet itself. And the programming languages that people use to build this stuff first had to be written by somebody else.
NOTE: Anyone interested in learning to code, DaVinci Coders offers multiple courses designed to get you into the rapidly growing technology industry. For more info please visit davincicoders.com.
Continue reading… “The 12 most influential programmers today”
Your average wearable is good at conveying information – fitness trackers, email-alert rings, bracelets that tell you how much sun you’ve gotten – but not much more. Continue reading… “The future of wearables”
According to new figures from eMarketer, US mobile game revenues—including both downloads and in-app purchases—will grow 16.5% this year to reach $3.04 billion. Continue reading… “Mobile game revenues will grow 16.5% in 2015, to more than $3B”
Interest in Apple’s new Swift programming language is rapidly accelerating, with iOS and OS X developers from American Airlines, Getty Images, LinkedIn and Duolingo reporting favorable impressions.
NOTE: For those wanting to enter the fast moving world of mobile technology, starting April 6th, DaVinci Coders will be teaching a mobile apps course using Apple’s new Swift programming language.
According to a photo that has gone viral on social media in China, there are app manipulation farms, a place where devs can pay for their apps’ download numbers to be artificially inflated. Continue reading… “How Chinese workers manipulate App Store rankings”
