and your smartphone will find it for you, up to a range of 50 to 150 feet.
But what makes this one different is that it also a social network of sorts. If your lost jacket isn in some mysterious corner of your home
you can ask all other Tile App users to watch for it. If they get near it,
their phones will beep and they can alert you to the jacket whereabouts. That why its creators, Mike Farley and Nick Evans, call it he world largest lost and found.
In 2013, Tile made news for being the most successful campaign to use open source crowdfunding software elfstarter, on its own website to raise funds.
Mason tells us he dabbles in some Angel investing, specifically nternet of Things (Iot) startups, companies making internet-controlled objects t
accessed via China intellectual property database, the suitcase is equipped also with a GPS navigator, a burglar alarm and a horn.
Set up by two former Google employees, it used remote sensing and other cartographic techniques to map every field in America (all 25m of them) and superimpose on that all the climate information that it could find.
By 2010 its database contained 150 billion soil observations and 10 trillion weather-simulation points.
The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance. But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1 billionne of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen.
Monsanto, the world largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds,
and terabytes of data on their yields. By adding these to the Climate Corporation soil-and-weather database,
it produced a map of America which says which seed grows best in which field, under what conditions.
Fieldscripts uses all these data to run machines made by Precision Planting, a company Monsanto bought in 2012,
Monsanto, loaded with data, can plant a field with different varieties at different depths and spacings, varying all this according to the weather.
to boost its farm-data business. The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5%over two years,
The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushelsiving a terrific boost to growersmeagre margins.
But the story of prescriptive planting is also a cautionary tale about the conflicts that arise when data entrepreneurs meet old-fashioned businessfolk.
it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farmingheir core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method.
They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused.
the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers;
or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets,
and control their data; that companies may not use the information except for the purpose for
Also, once data have been sent and anonymised, farmers might be said no longer to own them, so it is not clear
to negotiate with the data providers. Another worry is that, since the companies have not yet made the data fully ortable farmers may become locked into doing business with a single provider.
To assuage all these concerns the Climate Corporation has set up a free data storage service for farmers,
which others cannot access without the farmerspermission. New niche data-management firms are entering the market,
which should help make it more competitive. For the time being, though, the biggest companies will dominate prescriptive planting.
They collect the most comprehensive data and make better use of them than anyone else.
And that raises a problem which affects big data in all its forms. Prescriptive planting could boost yields everywhere,
But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers or patients) to trust them. If the users think they are taking a disproportionate share of the risks
while firms are getting an excessive chunk of the benefits, trust will remain in short supply
#Demand for computer science programs is booming at colleges across the U s. People in the tech industry have worked to persuade more young people in the U s. to become interested in studying computer science for years.
Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U s, . according to data presented this past week at the NCWIT summit for Women in IT by Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer science and Engineering at the University of Washington,
and Stanford Computer science professor Eric Roberts. Demand is also booming for the less expensive Micro Colleges that teach programming skills like Davinci Coders near Boulder, Colorado,
which only costs $6, 000. At Lazowska own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring the graph below,
published earlier this week by Geekwire, speaks for itself. It not just UW that seeing A CS boom.
Computer science class enrollment is markedly up at a number of institutions, from traditional tech hubs like MIT and Stanford to more humanities-and business-focused schools like Harvard.
But at the academic level Lazowska and Roberts say that this time around things just feel different than they did during the first dot-com frenzy.
According to Lasowska and Roberts, our higher education institutions today aren prepared adequately to handle the surge in computer science education demand.
and 3d printing can improve people lives. Which is a hell of a lot more entertaining than watching Nigel de Jong roughing up Xabi Alonso again n
but a groundbreaking idea could change the face of medicine for good. 3d software design companies Dassault systèmes
the teams developed a realistic 3d model of a human heart featuring software designed to make it function just like the real thing.
and offers up-to-date data on the wearer mental and physical tiredness by linking the MEME to a smartphone feed.
Users can then keep track of their daily energy levels, ideally taking a break when their MEME notes their tiredness,
the MEME glasses rely on monitoring a user eye movements and gaze. The glasses contain small metallic lectrooculographysensors in the portions of the frame that touch the face,
changes in voltage are collected then into data that is measured for parameters such as alertness or fatigue.
There will be an optional attery headbandavailable for purchase that will extend battery life to about 16 hours It is anticipated to be compatible with Mac, Windows, ios,
and Android devices, and will be available in both English and Japanese languageshough there is no word on overseas sales beyond their upcoming 2015 launch in Japan.
It is complicated a mix. he computer simulation of fluid dynamics has changed dramatically in the last 5 years,
An aluminium factory used to stand on the site but was closed down in 2007. The freshwater lagoon will be 300m long
you probably think about electronics products like televisions and computers. Thanks to its CT and other diagnostic imaging machines and technology, Toshiba has made a name for itself in the healthcare industry, too.
#25%of patients now read online physician reviews There has always been a love/hate relationship between doctors and the Internet.
using online review sites. A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan says 25 percent of Americans now look online for doctor reviews before making an appointment.
There are now 40 to 50 doctor-review sites for patients to choose from, the biggest among them being Healthgrades, Ratemds and Vitals.
Also, general review sites such as Yelp also offer ratings for medical practices and specific physicians. It gets better.
doctors can sometimes be preoccupied with their handheld computers. Patients can feel ignored. And doctors sometimes simply must give patients bad news. Some doctors believe bad news in the exam room can cause bad feelings that turn into bad reviews on sites like Healthgrades. com
. But the review sites are on the minds of doctors. Both the Congress of OBGYNS and the American Psychiatric Association have held panel discussions about online reviews at recent meetings
#Longevity gene may enhance brain power For the first time ever, scientists have shown that people who have a variant of a gene called KLOTHO also have improved cognitive abilities,
#UC Irvine School of medicine to add Google glass to its curriculum The University of California at Irvine (UCI) School of medicine announced that it is integrating the already-iconic wearable into its four-year curriculum for medical students.
and perhaps nly half require students to use a laptop or tablet. But, she added,
and was used for collecting data as well as video t would dramatically change medical education. Imagine an attending physician seeing what you saw during a simulation,
Pristine, and Google is involved not currently. In August, another 20 to 30 pairs will go to first-and second-year students, for use in anatomy labs, the medical simulation center, the ultrasound institute,
but he looks forward to incorporating data calling up a patient electronic health record, for instance
Google self-driving cars are legal and in use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications.
Some members of the artificial intelligence, or AI, research and machine ethics communities were quick to applaud the grant. ith drones,
Arkin wrote in a 2007 research paper (PDF. Part of the reason for that, he said,
and that the same as Google cars as it is for military robots, we should begin now to do the research to how far can we get in ensuring the robot systems are safe
via email. n fact there are no technical and economic obstacles to go first to 20 percent of annual electricity demand penetration rate from a combination of those two technologies,
While lithium ion batteries are the dominant batteries these days for laptops, cell phones and early electric cars,
(which explains why your laptop battery dies every couple of years), and they can catch on fire under extreme impact.
While neither Kani or Nishina has a long background with battery chemistry (they hail from the telecom
and software sectors theye brought on Japanese battery cathode expert Kaname Takeya, who developed the cathode tech used today in the Toyota prius
Smartphones, for example, would be able to heal actual cracks in the casing, rather than micro-filling small scuffs and scratches that result from a pocket full of keys.
when he looked at accounting software for small business. Unlike consumer technology, which was quickly moving to a web-based approach,
business software was sold still in boxes. That made it difficult to integrate with other software
and almost impossible for the people who used it to collaborate effectively. So he went to his friend and accountant
Hamish Edwards, and together they decided to build a software company that centered on the relationship between small businesses and their accountants.
Rather than just transferring files every quarter or so, their product would allow accountants to act as real-time advisors.
it seamlessly integrates with a wide array of add-on software tools, from point-of-sale to timesheets to invoicing and payroll.
think back to how software used to work. You would buy a package from a vendor
and it would be installed on your company server or PC. Through partnerships and acquisitions, the software company would could then offer you additional products with expanded capability.
This was not only time consuming and expensive, but it limited you to the vision of your software provider.
If you had a restaurant and wanted to start selling takeout on the Web, you had to either buy a product that was compatible with your accounting software or basically run two sets of books.
In the best case you were held hostage to the partnerships and acquisitions your vendor saw fit to make.
Most of the time though, your ability to was hampered by the strategies and vision of your software provider.
If it didn see why your point-of-sale system needed to be integrated with e-commerce, you were basically out of luck.
Power has shifted from software companies to everyday consumers. Large scale Disruptions Most data are unstructured. Everyday there are millions of social media posts,
customers filling out comment cards, mentions in mass media and on blog posts. For a large enterprise, a keyword search would turn up thousands of hits per day.
It simply not possible for a human to read it all but now machines can. Lexalytics developed one of the most powerful text analysis software packages for exactly that purpose.
The company product can analyze tremendous amounts of content for meaning. So, for example, customer service organizations can monitor the web for complaints
in order to intervene and financial analysts can track sentiment on the companies they cover. The company former Marketing Director
Oleg Rogynskyy, thought there was a better way. He saw that by putting Lexalyticstechnology in the cloud,
It could be downloaded by nontechnical users, in under three minutes and used for less than $1000,
but also improve the software. Because all of the data is housed together rather than distributed on clientsservers,
the algorithms are able to learn and improve from a much wider data set. Semantria business is booming, growing at 20%per month.
Wee All Being disrupted Now Mike Saliter, Global Head of Market Development at Qliktech predicts that the cloud approach will soon become standard.
Anybody with an idea can go to Amazon, Microsoft or Oracle, sign up for a platform as a service and be up and running in minutes.
Competition is fierce and prices are falling while features are expanding. But what makes the cloud so disruptive is that it compels legacy players to change their business models
and for users to adopt the technology cheaply and easily. It seems the cloud is now disrupting every industry it touches.
but can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection. That a real game changer. One thing is clear.
that will grow exponentially over the coming decades much like an Internet of things in space. It has the potential not only to continuously deliver limitless amounts of solar energy to markets On earth,
This panel will be suspended by 6-mile-long wires connected to a small bus which will house the satellite controls and communication systems.
Using a technique called gravity gradient stabilization, the bus acts as a counterweight to the huge panel.
The panel, which will be closer to Earth, will experience more gravitational pull down toward the planet and less centrifugal force away from it,
while the bus will be tugged upward by the opposite effects. This balancing of forces will keep the satellite in a stable orbit,
Since the photovoltaic panel orientation is fixed the amount of sunlight that hits it varies greatly as the geosynchronous satellite and Earth spin.
The mirrors will be positioned so they can direct light onto two photovoltaic panels 24 hours a day.
as well as offer the convenience of simple apps and websites. Simple provides mobile-first banking with no need to visit a branch, no hidden fees and great customer service.
there is an easy-to-use app or web-based money transfer service. Here in the UK, our challenger bank Virgin Money are disrupting that idea with stunning free lounges,
and sell on the go using smartphones. Clinkle is introducing a mobile wallet for day to day transactions
so rather than put your hand in your pocket for small amounts of cash you can just pay with your phone.
#IBM creates a solar magnifying glass that could power the Earth IBM, the American multinational technology and consulting corporation are renowned the world over for being technology leaders
The team at IBM have developed a system called High Concentration Photo Voltaic Thermal (HCPVT), which is capable of concentrating the sun rays into a stream 2000x more powerful.
or delayed flights It can be hard to a book flight on an airline website,
Video) efore today, you had to go to our website or app to give us your flight information.
Airhelp CMO Nicolas Michaelsen told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. ow, you connect your Gmail account,
Digging through all your email could take a while. So after connecting to your Gmail account
Youl receive an email with interesting stats and potential claims a few hours later. After that, you have to give Airhelp the rights to handle the claims,
when each technology will be scientifically viable (the kind of stuff that Google, governments and universities develop),
Collars with GPS, RFID and biometrics can automatically identify and relay vital information about the livestock in real time.
By pre-computing the shape of the field where the inputs are to be used, and by understanding the relative productivity of different areas of the field,
Further understanding of crop variability, geolocated weather data and precise sensors should allow improved automated decision-making and complementary planting techniques.
which together would monitor, predict, cultivate and extract crops from the land with practically no human intervention.
Synthetic biology is about programming biology using standardized parts as one programs computers using standardized libraries today.
#$150 smartphone spectrometer can tell the number of calories in your food If you wanted to look up the calorie content of a specific food you are eating you could take it to a lab and run it through a spectrometer.
however, wants to make it easy as running an app and pairing a bluetooth dongle. The SCIO is a handheld device that pairs with a smartphone through Bluetooth LE being developed by Consumer Physics
an Israel-based startup funded by Kholsa Ventures. It based on near-infrared spectroscopy, which means it reflects light onto an object,
but Kickstarter backers pledging over $300 will receive two years of guaranteed app upgrades. While scientists and researchers use near-infrared spectroscopy on a regular basis,
Consumer Physics will offer both Android and iphone apps, and also hopes to develop a platform upon
In a few seconds, the associated smartphone app will take the spectrometer reading, send it to SCIO servers,
analyze it and compare it to a database of known spectral signatures, and display the information in an easy-to-understand manner.
In turn, the readings provided by users will make the spectral signature database more complete. Consumer Physics has developed three different applications for identifying food, medicines, and plants.
During a short demo, I saw the module return the percentage of fat and number of calories per 100 grams of cheese.
It closer to the size of a smartphone camera module, and could one day be included in a variety of forms,
Developer kits available through the Kickstarter for $200 offer barebones SCIO modules and come with CAD designs for 3d printers.
in addition to developing the hardware, is also populating the first databases and apps that work with the SCIO,
hopefully other companies will build their own apps, using the developer kit available from Kickstarter.
Other companies working in the portable spectrometer space have used also the technology to track calories eaten and nutritional intake through a user sweat.
#A 3d printing breakthrough: 3d printed biological tissue 3d printing capabilities are limited rather despite the excitement that 3-D printing has generated.
It can be used to make complex shapes, but most commonly only out of plastics. Even manufacturers using an advanced version of the technology known as additive manufacturing typically have expanded the material palette only to a few types of metal alloys.
But what if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing
and matching the nkswith precision? Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at Harvard university, is developing the chemistry
This means 3-D printing technology could make objects that sense and respond to their environment. ntegrating form and function,
s the next big thing that needs to happen in 3-D printing. A group at Princeton university has printed a bionic ear, combining biological tissue and electronics,
But even among these impressive efforts to extend the possibilities of 3-D printing Lewis lab stands out for the range of materials
In a basement lab a few hundred yards from Lewis office, her group has jury-rigged a 3-D printer, equipped with a microscope,
Another, larger 3-D printer, using printing nozzles with multiple outlets to print multiple inks simultaneously,
and easily destroyed as they are forced through the printing nozzle. In all cases, though, the inks must be formulated to flow out of the nozzle under pressure
Before coming to Harvard from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year, Lewis had spent more than a decade developing 3-D printing techniques using ceramics, metal nanoparticles, polymers,
Printing blood vessels was an encouraging step toward artificial tissues capable of the complex biological functions found in organs.
Most of us on our small team are musicians who are tired of being stuck behind computer screens, keyboards, faders
lightweight and self-contained system requiring little more than a laptop to function fully. The gloves capture the movements and postures of your hands.
Our software allows this information to be mapped to musical control messages which can then be routed easily to your favourite music software.
Specifically, the gloves track the following: The orientation of your hand The lexof your fingers Your current hand posture (e g. fist, open hand,
backwards) of your hand Sharp movements such as drum hits This information is transmitted wirelessly to your computer, over Wifi (via the x-OSC board on the wrist).
we have developed software allowing you to apglove data to musical control signals (e g. MIDI and OSC.
The software also allows you to combine glove inputs to make complex controls. For example, the software would allow you to program the following:
f I am making a fist with my right hand, and pointing downwards with my left hand,
map the ollof my right wrist to MIDI control change message 60 on channel 2 These mappings can then be used to control third party software such as Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic pro or Max
This ability of the software to combine postures and gestures for mapping, combined with other innovative technological advances,
-more than most MIDI controllers on the market all without having to even look at a screen during performance.
Finally, you can use the software to listen out for other inputs, as well, further increasing the richness of control and expressive mappability with your favourite music software.
Some details about the evolution of the project over the last few years can be seen on our Glove Project Blog.
hardware and software and we have arrived finally at a point where we can make them available to others through this Kickstarter.
Gestural data interface have been around for decades and have been used for many different applications (see our review of other glove systems).
and use to follow a line of text in a book or on a screen.
Fingerreader software recognizes that and offers haptic feedback, even knowing when it reaches the end of a line.
#Mayo Clinic s Better turns your smartphone into a personal health concierge The Mayo Clinic is offering unlimited access to the famed hospital nurses through a smartphone app for about $50 a month.
Along with real-time video chats with Mayo Clinic nurses, the new service also includes personally-tailored health information culled from Mayo Clinic databases
a ymptom checkerthat incorporate individual user health histories, and access to a personal medical concierge who can provide more information or schedule patientsdoctor appointments.
Fast Company has covered previously New york-based medical concierge service Sherpaa and Oscar, a new health insurer which tailors its products for web and mobile use.
or smartphone application is far less than a comparable standalone product, which requires far greater fees for the FDA process.
The Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions wing has been actively building partnerships with everything from benefits providers to a variety of software developers.
The Mayo Clinic is entering a crowded market of smartphone-based concierge medicine firms. Beyond Sherpaa, there also Grand Rounds, Stat Doctors, Doctor on Demand,
which offers subsidized concierge medicine services via smartphones for residents of British columbia. For Better, the Mayo Clinic,
the real (and unanswered) question is just how much of a market for their services really exists via smartphone apps s
announcing a bachelor degree in information technology costing students just under $10, 000 in tuition and fees.
In May of 2013, Georgia Tech announced an online master degree in computer science for $7
According to THECB website, students arriving ith no prior college credits should be able to complete the degree program in three years at a total cost of $13, 000 to $15, 000.
#Facebook and Google are drooling over drone companies Last month it seemed as if Facebook would acquire the long-range solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace
and use its technology to deliver Internet to remote areas of the world. It was ostensibly a hedge against Google balloon-driven Project Loon and the possibility that Google,
rather than Facebook, would connect the ext billioninternet users. Today that picture is opaque at best.
Google not Facebook is buying Titan Aerospace, and Facebook has acquired a different U k.-based solar-powered drones startup called Ascenta.
And an answer to the question of how exactly the two Silicon valley giants will leverage their new technology?
Still elusive. What is clear is that while delivering connectivity to far-flung parts of the globe is advantageous for both Facebook and Google,
the race to acquire unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, technology is about much more. Exactly what, well, that more difficult to discern. ou definitely have to look at it as part of a broader business strategy,
says Mark Bünger, research director at Lux Research. he two of them are shooting for the strategic high ground here Amazon is obviously doing this, too.
For Facebook, the incentive is simple: catch up. Rival Google has been developing a means to provide Internet connectivity to remote regions of the world for years now through Project Loon,
which uses Internet hubs suspended from high-flying balloons to provide bandwidth to areas of New zealand that are wired off the grid.
Facebook isn breaking new ground by getting into commercialized drone technology, Bünger says, just keeping up. oogle has been working on the autonomous vehicles, the Nest acquisition,
and a bunch of other stuff that surprising if you think of them as a search engine company which hopefully nobody does anymore,
Bünger says. Facebook knows that if it wants to remain a major presence in the emerging Internet of things,
it will need to extend beyond software and into hardware. Drones are one means of doing so.
UAS are also a means of bypassing mobile carriers, which have given Facebook some trouble in parts of the developing world,
particularly where the company has attempted to negotiate ero-ratedeals that allow customers to use some of Facebook offerings without it counting against their data plans.
If Facebook does follow through with its ambitious plans to connect the next billion people through Facebook-owned Internet drones
Facebook can not only bypass mobile carriers that don want to play ball, but also push those new users toward Facebook offerings like its recently acquired messaging app Whatapp.
But one oft-overlooked area where UAS technology could really be a boon for Facebook is in data moving the other direction.
Right now, Facebook owns mountains of data on its users, but relatively little on the parts of the world that aren connected already to Facebook.
Comparatively, Google acquisitions and exclusive deals with third parties provide it with everything from the rich trove of geospatial data that powers Google maps to the energy use
and living habits of those using its Nest smart home technology, providing a far more robust picture of the world
and a wider range of services it can provide. With a fleet of UAS in the sky, Facebook could begin gathering its own proprietary geospatial data, aerial imagery, traffic data,
meteorological data information that it could then integrate into new products or sell to companies that need it,
much like Google does and other companies threaten to do, at least with regard to drones. or Facebook and Google and those guys,
they know they need a toehold in this space, Bünger says. here are a hundred other areas like that where theye having to compete now to get a toehold in the technology,
and they can really know right now what theye going to use it for. Nobody really knows.
At $20 million, Facebook found its way into the drone space for a third of
what it was reportedly going to pay to acquire Titan. The terms of Google purchase of Titan haven yet been disclosed,
but whatever the final figure, it will likely be worth it. The acquisitions certainly have the attention of the rest of the drone industry,
which now largely consists of small, privately held companies sitting on various competing technologies that are waiting to see how customers
both of these drone acquisitions by Facebook and Google; a lot of this technology that has to do with wearables;
technologies that have to do with crunching all the data that you get from all these things those are the weapons you need to have with you going into the next competitive battles
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