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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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.
An all-electric vehicle that never needs to be plugged in
Electric cars carrying receiving coils could charge themselves with embedded transmitting coils in the roadways.
When you think of an all-electric car you may picture it cruising down the highway, emitting little noise and no noxious fumes. It’s such an improvement that you have to wonder why only a handful of all-electric vehicles are now available on the mass market.
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Fabsie – a library for printed furniture
Fabsie stool
Thanks to 3-D printers one day custom furniture can be turned into something for the masses, but for now, James McBennett is more concerned with an older, perhaps less sexy, machine, that essentially does to wood what 3-D printing does to concrete or plastic. It’s called a computer numerical control (CNC) router, and “It’s 60 years old,” McBennett says.
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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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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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Is Google going to abandon Google Alerts?
The internet is a huge and massive web of content. For a long time Google Alerts was a key navigational tool that kept users on top of things that were relevant specific to them. A series of reports in recent months have surfaced that indicate Google Alerts is no longer working as it should.
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Drone blinding system will alert you if someone is spying from the sky and make you invisible
The new system will somehow “neutralize the drone’s capability to see you with its camera.”
Tim Faucett’s company, APlus Mobile makes mobile computer units that manage robots and UAVs for clients like the U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin. But when he looks to the future, he sees a world where it’s not just the military and government piloting UAVS, but you and me.
What happens in one minute on the internet?
What happens in one minute on the Internet? In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube.
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