The future of 3D printing and the retail business

Recently, Marc Andreessen made some bold statements about the future of the retail business:

“Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative,” he says. “You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model.”

 

 

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Four-fifths of all antibiotics are consumed by the meat industry

Livestock consumption of antibiotics reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011.

The Food and Drug Administration, last year,  proposed a set of voluntary “guidelines”designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit.  Since then, the agency has been mulling whether and how to implement the new program. Meanwhile, the meat industry has been merrily gorging away on antibiotics—and churning out meat rife with antibiotic-resistant pathogens—if the latest data from the FDA itself is any indication.

 

 

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Why mobile apps get rejected from the Apple app store

There are nine surprising reasons an app might get rejected from the Apple app store.

To keep the app ecosystem healthy, the Apple App Store review process is designed to protect users from low quality or hostile apps.  It works for the most part.  Sometimes an app rejection might not be for the reason you might expect.  Sometimes it can force developers to rush to push back their launch date or maybe even redevelop key features.

 

 

 

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Top 15 emerging technology trends: Forrester

“We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technology create platforms for future disruption,” analyst Bryan Hopkins writes.

Forrester, a research firm, understands that everyone who’s been listening  knows that mobile, social, cloud, and data are big freight trains of change that are blowing up old business models and old business practices.

 

 

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Yandex surpasses Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings

Logo for the Russian search engine, Yandex.

The biggest search engine few people have ever heard of. is probably Yandex.  According to Search Engine Watch,  the Russian search engine has surpassed Microsoft’s Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings.  Search Engine Watch got its data from ComScore.

 

 

 

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The search for data scientists grows frantic as startups produce more data

There are nowhere near enough “data scientists.”

It is currently accepted that the people who understand Big Data – the enormous datasets of information being collected with nearly every click of every computing device on the planet – will rule the roost in the future. If you can predict behavior by measuring and monitoring people’s machines down to an almost atomic level, you can make both your customers and your shareholders much happier.

 

 

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Coursera moves closer to academic acceptance

Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Stanford University computer science professors who started Coursera,

Coursera, an online-education provider is one step closer to academic acceptance, saying Thursday that the American Council on Education would recommend colleges grant credit for the successful completion of some of its free classes.

 

 

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