How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?
In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.
Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country.
I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway’s Innovation House Silicon Valley, a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles — it was part of Making View‘s demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was “pretty awesome.”)
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Samsung has quietly slipped a new smartphone into the market, this one destined for Straight Talk and bestowed with the Galaxy Centura name. The phone wasn’t announced, instead appearing over on Samsung’s website, where it currently sits without a price or launch date, but alongside a list of specifications that point to an all-around basic
It’s a little bit sexy and a little bit dorky, but Google Glass has finally arrived. Beyond the initial productivity uses of the device, how important are games going to be for driving its adoption, and what kind of games might work for it?
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The Epson Moverio BT-100 is a pair of augmented reality glasses that, in the wake of the future success of Google Glass and the Occulus Rift, keeps itself unique with its own combination of abilities. This week SlashGear had a chat with Eric Mizufuka, Product Manager of New Markets at Epson and Scott, a member
We often give short shrift to hardware at Disrupt mostly because investors are afraid to look at companies that can’t pivot without trashing 30 days of inventory. No longer. Limor Fried AKA Ladyada will join me on stage to talk about what it takes to build a profitable, cool, and amazingly popular hardware company out of a dorm room.
There is a marquis name that has appeared on the S-1s of the most high-profile IPOs in the past two years—Goldman Sachs. And joining us at Disrupt NY is the man responsible for many of the investment bank’s bets on technology, Anthony Noto, the global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ global telecommunications, media and technology group.
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Nuance, a company known for its voice technology, is getting into the advertising business.
It’s launching a new product called Voice Ads, which brings Nuance capabilities to mobile advertising. These are ads that you can actually have a (limited) conversation with, potentially creating a much more interactive and fun advertising experience — which is particularly challenging for mobile advertisers who have to work with limited screen space.
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin took the stage at the TED Conference late in February, delivering a talk about Google Glass in which he dropped his now infamous quote about smartphones being “emasculating.” Now the video is available in full for all to see, so you can see not only the money moment at around 4:26, but also hear Brin’s thoughts on Glass and its origins.
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Lawdingo, a startup that connects users with lawyers for online consultations (sometimes instantly), is announcing that it’s part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator.
I last wrote about Lawdingo in November. You can browse lawyers on the site based on their expertise and location, and if you find one you like, you can schedule an appointment or in some cases hit the “talk now” button. The goal is to make finding a lawyer more convenient and more affordable. (On the affordability side, many of the lawyers on the site offer free consultations, and since you’re choosing from a broad geographic selection, you can probably find lower rates.)
In the their first Google+ hangout, astronauts onboard the International Space Station said they didn’t panic when their communication link to the ground was cut off for three hours this week.
Computerworld News
Google is reportedly in talks with Warby Parker to make glasses that look less like Geordi La Forge’s eyewear and more like something a style-conscious person in the early 21st century would be happy to put on his or her face. A New York Times story cites unnamed sources who say that Google is negotiating with the NYC-based e-commerce startup to help it create fashionable frames (both companies declined to confirm the report).
Editor’s note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information.
There is just NO good reason Tim Cook should be speaking at a Goldman Conference. Goldman employees use BlackBerrys not for any great reason. They hide their iPhones and iPads at home. The great Goldman Sachs firewall is not Apple’s friend.
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Or rather, the wrist. Is Apple looking into an “iWatch”?
An Apple watch, long whispered about (let’s face it, an Apple anything has long been whispered about) may actually be a reality soon, according to a New York Times report citing those tech-journalism stalwarts, “people familiar with” the matter.
P4 and P5 aren’t the sorts of names that impart the manner of excitement space exploration companies and organizations are looking to inspire in the next generation of enthusiasts (nor the customers, philanthropists and tax payers destined to fund those explorations). The SETI Institute, a private non-profit, best known for its ties to the eponymous search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, is looking to add a little bit of audience participation to the act of naming Pluto’s newly discovered moons, which sport those rather uninspired alphanumeric designations.
Beginning today, SETI will open up an online contest to name the moons, both of which were discovered via the Hubble Telescope fairly recently. As with the rest of the dwarf planet’s moons, the organization’s asking that the names be associated with Hades (the underworld), with ties to Greek or Roman mythology. SETI will pre-select candidates and is also allowing for write-in candidates (though it’s retaining editorial discretion here, so, for better or worse, we’re not likely to see a Baba Booey moon in the near future).
On a recent trip to the Bay Area, we had the opportunity to speak to Mark Showalter, the senior research scientist at the organization’s Carl Sagan Center, an astronomer who played a key role in the discovery of the celestial bodies. You can check out that interview just after the break, before heading off to vote. Showalter is also co-hosting a Google+ Hangout with astronomer Hal Weaver today at 2PM ET.
Source: Pluto Rocks
The veep will join social-media guru Guy Kawasaki and others in a Hangout to discuss ways to reduce gun violence. [Read more]
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Eric Schmidt attracted headlines when he visited North Korea, but until now he has said little about the trip. Today he broke his silence with a Google+ post. He says in part: “As the world becomes increasingly connected, the North Korean decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world and their economic growth. It will make it harder for them to catch up economically. We made that alternative very, very clear. Once the internet starts in any country, citizens in that country can certainly build on top of it, but the government has to do one thing: open up the Internet first. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet, which the government of North Korea has not yet done. It is their choice now, and in my view, it’s time for them to start, or they will remain behind.” His daughter had some interesting things to say as well, “The best description we could come up with: it’s like The Truman Show, at country scale.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Expect Labs hopes to reinvent the phone call by providing real-time search results.
Apple’s voice-activated assistant Siri works by pulling up information that a person asks for. A startup called Expect Labs is skipping the asking step.
The 10-person company is developing what it calls an “always-on Siri”—a technology that listens to a phone call between two or more people, interprets the conversation as it happens, and brings up what it thinks is useful information.
In the next few weeks, the San Francisco-based company plans to launch its first product, MindMeld, an iPad app for making video and voice calls. It also intends to license its “anticipatory computing” engine to businesses this year, and this could give speech apps on tablets, phones, car dashboards, and elsewhere new capabilities. At a large workplace, for example, a business could build software that pulls up old meeting notes during conference calls by accessing document servers and calendars. A call center company could use it to bring up purchase histories as representatives talk to customers.
“This is contextual, continuous, predictive search that occurs alongside a real-time conversation,” says CEO Timothy Tuttle, an entrepreneur and computer scientist who launched Expect Labs in 2011. Backed by investors including Google Ventures and Greylock Partners, MindMeld will be the first product on the market to have these combined abilities, Tuttle says.
The startup demonstrated MindMeld at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month. Users can sign up or log in through Facebook and hold free video or voice calls with up to eight people through the app. If a participant taps on a button in the app during a call, MindMeld will review the previous 15 to 30 seconds of conversation by relying on Nuance’s voice recognition technology. It will identify key terms in context—in a discussion to find a sushi restaurant, for example, or one about a big news story that day—and then search Google News, Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and a few other sources for relevant results. Images and links are displayed in a stream for the person who tapped the button to review. With a finger swipe, he or she can choose to share a result with others on the call.
Tuttle views MindMeld mostly as a way to test the technology before it’s made more widely available to others—there’s no plan to show ads, and there’s only a small download fee. The app requires users to press a button to trigger its listening features so they won’t be overwhelmed with a stream of search results when they don’t need them, Tuttle says. However, the technology platform the company plans to license can listen in continuously to conversations of any length as it runs predictive models to find search results that are relevant to the discussion. Its information sources can be any to which a software developer has access.
The technology is similar to some of Google’s latest products. Like MindMeld, Google Now, a feature of Google’s Android operating system, works to find relevant information on mobile devices without a person asking (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”). Google Now makes predictions based on a person’s location, e-mail and Web search history. As the search giant readies to launch Google Glass, its goggle-like wearable computer, such hands-free interaction modes that can simply run in the background will become even more of a necessity.
“They’ve really hit a nice niche,” Anind Dey, a Carnegie Mellon University human-computer interaction researcher, says of Expect Lab’s technology. “That it doesn’t require explicit interaction is really quite exciting.”
The Audiophiliac talks with a few music lovers who grew up in a mostly digital world and are just now starting to play LPs. [Read more]
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It’s a serious conversation Instagram is having with its users right now. It raises the question of whether web services should update their terms of services to cover their newfound monetization strategies as early as they know what they’ll look like? Or right before the ads go live?
TechCrunch
Stephen Colbert has been promoting his new book recently, and as part of this he stopped by Google’s New York office to sit down with chairman Eric Schmidt and participate in the company’s Authors@Google speaker series.
TechCrunch
Amidst the awkward barrage of family disfunction that is the American Thanksgiving tradition, there is one constant: the interrogation of career-focused twentysomethings about why they haven’t given their parents any grandchildren yet. Knowing that much of our entrepreneurial young readers fall into this troubled demographic, we thought it would be helpful for them to know about a new book that can arm them with evidence for a compelling retort: older first-time moms may live longer.
TechCrunch
Competition in the low-cost tablet space has been heating up for a while now thanks to strong new hardware from the likes of Asus, Google, and Barnes & Noble, but it seems the time has come for the Kindle Fire hucksters at Amazon to go on the offensive against a very prominent rival: Apple’s iPad mini.
dcblogs writes “Iran recently held a security trade show and conference, attended by high-ranking police and military officials. A video by an Iranian news outlet shows some of the products, from crossbows to unidentified systems, and includes an interview with Iran’s police chief, Brig. Gen. Esmail Ahmadi-Moqadam: ‘It’s true that the U.S. made Stuxnet virus did some damage to our facilities but we were able to get them all up and running in no time. However, those who attack should expect retaliation and we haven’t gone there just yet.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mark Zuckerberg is really going whole hog on this Russia thing.
The Facebook CEO is currently on a visit to Russia as part of a campaign to expand his super-popular social network there. As part of his visit, he’s checked out Red Square, met with prime minister Dmitry Medvedev.
And, in a remarkable show of “being a good sport,” Zuckerberg also appeared as a guest on Evening Urgant, a late-night show that is comparable to the United States’ Late Show With David Letterman or The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.
TechCrunch
LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman has become known for giving solid advice — both to the entrepreneurs in which he invests, as well as the general public with his recent book The Startup Of You. So when he came backstage at Disrupt SF earlier this week after his fireside chat with Michael Arrington, we just had to ask him: What is some bad advice that people often give to entrepreneurs that they should ignore?
TechCrunch
Fisker has had more than its fair share of teething troubles with the Karma, but it has to be given credit for going out of its way to listen to early adopters. The hybrid car builder has confirmed to Autoblog that a question and answer session making the rounds is the official result of town hall discussions that have both acknowledged problems and promised fixes where they’re possible. The answers we’ve been given are a mix of sober realities and practical remedies. Drivers hoping for outright hardware upgrades to improve performance with existing Karmas will have to keep wishing; thankfully, a host of firmware fixes are on the way to improve at least the sedan’s Command Center system and mirrors. PR lead Roger Ormisher even hints that there could be an in-person council that would tackle concerns more directly than the remote pep talks. We’re mostly hoping for the day when Fisker stamps out the bugs and doesn’t need the Q&A to put Karma owners’ minds at ease.
Filed under: Transportation
Fisker confirms Q&A outlining Karma woes and fixes, may establish council to talk issues in person originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Aug 2012 06:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Simulation screenshots show an iPhone with five rows of icons instead of four, 9to5Mac found.
[Read more]
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Apple is hosting a talk at this week’s Black Hat conference to discuss iOS security. It’s the company’s first appearance there.
[Read more]
CNET News
Look guys and gals in publishing, sit down. You can bring in your Coco Water. Totally. Yeah. We have some gluten-free sandwiches coming in and I promise this won’t effect summer hours. You can still not come in on Friday. Yeah, you can take off your loafers. Whatever.
Ok. I know you’re confused and hurting. Revenues are falling and ebooks are killing your old surefire model of shipping books in big boxes to big stores where they were remaindered and sent back for pulping. We had some good times. Remember all that money you made on cookbooks? Before the Epicurious app? Good times. That shit paid for your house on the Vineyard.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has responded to rumors that Ma Bell plans to add an additional levy upon those planning to use FaceTime over cellular. Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm conference, he’s quoted as saying that he’d “heard the same rumor,” but that it was “too early to talk about pricing.” At present, he says his primary focus is to work with Apple on ensuring the video calling technology works smoothly across his company’s data network, with iOS 6 due to arrive later this year.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless
AT&T CEO responds to paid 3G FaceTime rumor, says it’s ‘too early’ to talk pricing originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 06:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Last week, incubator and early-stage investment firm 500 Startups hosted an event it called “Aloha Friday”, where food startups and other friends of the firm ate meals prepared by famous Hawaiian chef Roy Yamaguchi (founder of Roy’s).
500 Startups founder Dave McClure admitted that the event was mostly an excuse to eat good food. But it was also an opportunity to talk about the intersection of food and tech. McClure actually spoke on the subject last year at the first Hawaii Food and Wine Festival (an event that Yamaguchi helps organize) and he plans to return this year with startups in tow to a fully-fledged tech track at the event.
TechCrunch
Although the Magellan range of navigation devices is primarily used by landlubbers, it should be noted that the original Portuguese namesake for MiTAC Digital Corporation’s line of portable GPS units earned his reputation by navigating on water. As such, the release of the new Magellan eXplorist 510 Marine Edition for boaters can be considered to be quite fitting. Fresh from releasing seven new Roadmate GPS units, Magellan’s latest addition to its eXplorist line boasts custom Navionics charts and data for US coastal waters up to two miles offshore. It also has information for inland waters — including high-definition content for 12,000 lakes. Other features for the waterproof navigation device include a built-in camera and 3-inch color touchscreen that’s readable in direct sunlight. The release of the eXplorist 510 Marine Edition is pegged for August at MagellanGPS.com and authorized dealers, with a suggested retail price of $ 479.99. For more info, go ahead and wade into the obligatory PR after the break.
Filed under: GPS
Magellan eXplorist 510 Marine Edition sets sights on boaters, out in time for Talk Like a Pirate Day originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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One possible future for digital styluses.
A recent patent application reveals a possible future for the digital stylus, a technology that has yet to come of age, but for which there is considerable demand. The patent application came from Samsung Electronics, and envisions a stylus for use with the Galaxy S III and other devices. The site Patent Bolt first spotted the application.
Robots are hard to talk to. They’re not friendly, they’re mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there’s ApriPetit.
Toshiba’s R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation.
TechCrunch
Gigabyte is clearly hoping to carve out a name for itself in a very crowded ultraportable space; it sent us word of a media event for a new X11 laptop in its native Taipei on May 31st, just a few days ahead of Computex. The PC designer claims that the X11 will be the “lightest notebook on Earth,” a pretty audacious claim considering the featherweight competition. Most of the braggadocio, we suspect, is rooted in the choice of material: Gigabyte is promising rather ominously to “conquer the 6th element,” and unless it’s financing the sequel to a Luc Besson movie, we’re reasonably sure the firm means extra-light carbon fiber. Other details are scarce, including whether there’s any relation to the U2442 Ultrabook due this summer. We’ll know in just over a week.
Gigabyte to unveil X11 on May 31st as lightest laptop ever, spooks us with talk of ‘sixth element’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 May 2012 11:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A growing body of evidence suggests that the molecular machinery of life emits and absorb photons. Now one biologist has evidence that this light is a new form of cellular communication
One of the more curious backwaters of biology is the study of biophotons: optical or ultraviolet photons emitted by living cells in a way that is distinct from conventional bioluminescence.
It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people “stop out of school.”
For these reasons, Thiel’s decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” One of his students, Blake Masters, provides a glimpse into Thiel’s lectures through his comprehensive class notes.
Masters has turned his notes into essays and posted them on his blog, one of which is a fascinating conversation between the investor and Marc Andreessen on the past, present, and future of the tech industry, which we’ve highlighted herein.
TechCrunch
Just like SOPA, Facebook has responded to the growing concerns rising around an internet “security” bill presented to the House of Representatives this week – only this time they’re taking the opposite stance. If you’ll recall, SOPA (and its twin PIPA) were bills that allowed the US Government to effectively shut down any website it
Facebook and Twitter are available in other languages. But only 15 percent of their privacy policies have been fully translated.
The world is increasingly talking about privacy these days. But when people try to read the actual privacy policies of major social networking sites, they often must do so in English.
Brent Weinstein and Eric Kuhn stopped by the studio to talk about technology in entertainment, and these guys are worth listening to. Brent is Head of Digital Media for United Talent Agency in Los Angeles, where he oversees the agency’s work in online entertainment, social media, video games, and the agency’s digital consulting practice. Eric is the department’s Head of Social Media. UTA is one of the premier agencies in Hollywood, repping the likes of Johnny Depp, Seth Rogen and Ice Cube. So, these guys are kind of a big deal. Ever read the NBA’s Twitter feed? Eric is the guy who started it, and he also created and ran the social media operations for CBS News and CNN before moving to Los Angeles (and UTA).
TechCrunch
With all the talk surrounding the Apple TV dominating discussions around Cupertino, I thought it’d be a good time to think about some of the features reportedly making its way to that set. Chief among them is Siri, Apple’s virtual personal assistant. According to the latest reports, Siri would allow Apple TV owners to give [...]
SlashGear
First time accepted submitter Trapezium Artist writes “Four friends apprehended exploring the disused Aldwych station in London’s Underground are faced with an ‘anti-social behaviour order’ (ASBO) which would forbid them from talking to each other for a full 10 years. The so-called ‘Aldwych four,’ experienced urban explorers, were discovered in the tunnels under the UK’s capital city a few days before last year’s royal wedding and the greatly increased security measures in place led to their being interviewed by senior members of the British Transport Police. Nevertheless, once their benign intentions had been established, they were let off with a caution. However, following an accident caused by another, unrelated group of urban explorers in the tunnels a few months later, Transport for London applied to have ASBOs issued to the Aldwych four. These would forbid them from any further expeditions, from blogging or otherwise publicly discussing any exploits, and even from talking with each other for the 10 year duration of the order. One could argue about the ethics of urban exploration, but this nevertheless seems like an astonishingly heavy-handed over-reaction by TfL.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple is unlikely to pull the trigger on a smaller-sized iPad, experts said today.
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