Futurist Thomas Frey: Fifteen years ago in an article I wrote for The Futurist Magazine, I made the prediction that once we had talking computers, we would soon have downloadable personalities to create a more human-like experience. I went on to suggest that most of us would actually download multiple personalities so we could interact with the right persona at any given moment.
Continue reading… “Downloadable Personalities for Your Computer”
One of the blast sites on Boylston Street near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon.
There is a lot of restless energy surging through the web.A legion of Internet investigators are scrutinizing every available photo of the Boston Marathon finish line, searching for clues that will help nab a killer. At Reddit, Imgur and a zillion blogs, notes are being shared, theories propounded — and, without question, innocent people are getting slandered.
Continue reading… “Future of crowd-mobbed vigilantism”
Demand for gourmet cupcakes exploded in the early 2000’s.
The gourmet cupcake became a cultural and economic phenomenon over the last ten years, with gourmet cupcake shops proliferating across the country, selling increasingly elaborate and expensive concoctions.
Continue reading… “The gourmet cupcake market is crumbling”
Comparing salaries among colleagues has long been a taboo of workplace chatter,
Brian Bader said at the orientation for a tech-support job with Apple Inc. that human-resources managers ran down the list of guidelines workers were expected to follow. Don’t use explicit language on calls with customers. Treat other employees with respect. And, he says, they told the assembled recruits, don’t discuss your pay with co-workers.
Continue reading… “Employees share their salary secrets”
Minister Marco Antonio Raupp releases the Start-up Brazil program.
The government in Brazil is offering foreign companies visas and funding to relocate to South America. Startup Brasil is a new program offering up to $78 million in investment for domestic and foreign high-tech companies. Firms that participate would have to relocate to Brazil and hire local employees; disbursement of funds would take place through a series of government-subsidized accelerators concentrated in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero. One of the participating accelerators, 21212, also has a New York office.
Continue reading… “Startup Brasil – Brazil offers foreign startups visas and funding”
MOOCs – massive open online courses
One of the world’s oldest, largest, and best business schools is the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They have 11 academic departments, 20 research centers, 230 standing faculty, and an endowment nearing $1 billion. With all those resource, it has produced 92,000 living alumni.
Continue reading… “A view into the digital world of MOOCs”
The online education movement is transforming physical colleges at a fast pace.
The California State University system is the largest university system in America and they are aggressively expanding its experimental foray into Massive Online Open Learning (MOOCs), based on an unusually promising pilot course. They will offer a special “flipped” version of an electrical engineering course at 11 more universities, where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home, while class time is devoted to hands-on problem solving. A San Jose State University pilot found that the flipped class increased pass rates a whopping 46%, which university President Mohammad Qayoumi believes is enough to move full-steam ahead.
Continue reading… “California universities are aggressively expanding online courses”
Americans enjoy diving into a good book, but more and more of them prefer the digital version.
Ebook sales made up 22.5 percent of the publishing industry’s net revenue last year, according to a new survey from the Association of American Publishers. That’s up from just 0.05 percent 10 years prior, when the AAP first began keeping track of ebook sales, and up from 16.98 percent in 2011. The categories that saw the biggest increase in ebook revenues included adult fiction, adult nonfiction, and religious books. Even more encouraging, the overall net revenue for the US publishing industry was $7.1 billion, up 6.2 percent from 2011.
Continue reading… “eBooks account for nearly 23% of all U.S. publishing revenue”
The arguments in favor of self-driving cars are many: computer-sorted traffic could yield higher maximum speeds and optimized drive times (sayonara “stop and go,” hello increased fuel efficiency!), the option to drive whether you’ve had too much to drink or not and driverless valet park anywhere you go (as well as make better use of parking space — no more sloppy two-for-one parking jobs). Imagine your vehicle driving itself off to a maintenance facility without your assistance, returning home on its own, or the option to be as distracted as you like while your vehicle’s escorting you around, from texting to watching a video to catching up on your notes for a morning work meeting. (Infographic)
“Content marketing” seems to be the buzzword of choice these days. If you run a startup — or a small company that is navigating the waters of content marketing for the first time — read this before you dive head-first into any content marketing initiatives.
Americans like an average of 70 pages.
Facebook wants you to like more pages so they have really been pushing users to like pages and it seems to be working. As Socialbakers notes, the average Facebook user in 2009 liked 4.5 pages. Now that figure has risen to 40. In the U.S., Facebook users like an average of 70 pages.
Continue reading… “How many pages does an average Facebook user like?”
By 2017 Verizon expects that number to grow to two-thirds.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s speech at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on Tuesday indicated that half of the traffic on Verizon’s mobile networks is now video, FierceWireless reported, and by 2017 Verizon expects that number to grow to two-thirds.
Continue reading… “50 percent of Verizon’s mobile network traffic is video”
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