In 2013, we have seen a reincarnation of “man vs. machine,” except this time, the machines aren’t algorithms — the machine is government. Within a few months, various levels of government across the United States have made headlines with respect to new technologies, products, and services. Unmanned aerial drones, which have a touchy relationship with citizens worldwide already, present complicated scenarios. The Texas state government, for instance, recently banned drones for most private use; the state of North Carolina is considering a ban on direct sales of Tesla vehicles; Airbnb was deemed illegal in New York state by a judge; ride-sharing startups like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar face constant threats and hurdles as they expand outside of the Bay Area; and of course, there’s Bitcoin, where Mt. Gox suffered a recent Fed crackdown as the most active exchange for the popular crypto-currency. The ways things are going, 3-D printers will be banned because some fanatic will hack software that lets him print a 3-D gun.
Google, LinkedIn and Amazon have thousands of engineers who point their work inward to build better recommendations, search and other Internet-scale features. 
After 24 hours of staring at their screens, the teams that participated have now finished their projects for our Disrupt 2013 NY Hackathon and are currently presenting their project on stage. With over 160 hacks, there are far too many cool ones to write about, but one that stood out to me was NewsRel, an iPad-based news app that uses machine learning techniques to understand how news stories relate to each other. The app uses Google Maps as its main interface and automatically decides which location is most appropriate for any given story. The app currently uses Reuters‘ RSS feed and analyzes the stories, looking for clusters of related stories and then puts them on the map. Say you are looking at a story about the Boston Marathon bombings. The app, of course, will show you a number of news stories about it clustered around Boston, then maybe something about the president’s comments about it from Washington and another article that relates it to the massacre during the Munich Olympics in 1972. In addition to this, the team built an algorithm that picks the most important sentences from each story to summarize it for you. As you scroll through the stories, the app always recalculates the related stories on the fly, too, which makes for a pretty interesting news reading experience. Besides the map, the team also decided to develop the user interface around gestures, so you swipe down to read the full story on the news service’s webpage and you can swipe left and right to scroll from one story to the next The team members have a background in machine learning and iOS engineering. The met during their undergrad studies a few years ago and decided to team up for the Hackathon. They told me that they plan to keep working on the app and release it in the near future.
Famed inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist 
New York-based startup 
For Oracle, it’s about the machine, not the user; this became abundantly clear this week at Oracle Open World. Oracle talks the cloud talk but what the company is really doing is protecting its base, and building engineered systems that by all accounts is extraordinary technology.
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