#Will car makers become internet companies? Connected vehicles will create a new business opportunity proving the internet-based mobile services to the driver.
Car manufacturers will soon be competing against technology companies to provide the online services to connected cars. Autonomous connected vehicles are seen as the first major market for so-called internet of things (Iot.
This will be an important market for IC and hardware system suppliers. But arguably the biggest market opportunity will be in the provision v of online services that support the Iot devices in the car.
and partner with software suppliers. According to chip supplier NXP: Existing automotive technologies and business models that have worked for the car industry for a century are not so well suited to a changing car market with autonomous vehicles and Iot-connected cars.
This will combine car makers with electronics firms and software services suppliers. No single sector will be able to capitalise on this market, due to its diversity and the range of technologies required.
Connecting vehicles to the internet will add a far greater level of complexity to the automotive business model.
and sell internet based services. Whether they are successful in doing this will determine they business growth in the years ahead.
3-D printers that make real human skin. L'oréal USA, the largest arm of The french cosmetics company, recently announced that it is teaming up with a San diego-based bioprinting startup called Organovo Holdings to print actual skin tissue.
#Meet the Machine That's Turning Grocery stores'Food waste Into Fertilizer Larry Lesueur is used to former peers from the software world asking him,
considering the decidedly different turn he and his former Microsoft colleague Jose Lugo took in 2010 when they founded Redmond, Wash.
spent two years using a PCC store as a iving laboratory to understand how food waste is created in a retail grocery environment. n 2010 the WISERG teamith the help of biologists, computer programmers and engineerseveloped a solution:
As the software gets smarter, Harvesters will help markets parse down to the item level to figure out
The Foodily virtual recipe book allows users to search, save and share digital recipes on their smartphones or tablets and,
via partnerships with retailers like Freshdirect, turn recipes into shopping lists and order ingredients online for delivery.
The Smartgrill by Lynx, programmable via smartphone, is activated voice to cook on user command or automatically via a database of more than 200 preprogrammed recipes.
Foodspotting users recommend dishes. The app is searchable by specific foods. Move over lattes. The hottest hot beverages in Manhattan are the sippable one brothsfrom Brodo single-service window, with add-ins like Calabrian chili oil, shiitake mushroom tea and fermented beet juice.
Enjoyfresh online marketplace allows users to search and sign up for unique off-menu dishes and exclusive events at local restaurants.
Amelia is an artificial intelligence platform created by Dube managed IT services firm IPSOFT, a virtual agent avatar poised to redefine how enterprises operate by automating
and enhancing a wide range of business processes. The product of an obsessive and still-ongoing 16-year developmental cycle, shees, everyone at IPSOFT speaks about Amelia using feminine pronounseverages cognitive technologies to interface with consumers
for example, and her patent-pending intelligence algorithms absorb in a matter of seconds the same instruction manuals
She relies on that baseline information to reply to customer email and answer phone calls; if she understands the query,
she scans the web or the corporate intranet for clues. Only when Amelia cannot locate the relevant information does she escalate the case to a human expert,
and comprehend complex problems is what sets her apart from rival AI breakthroughs like IBM Jeopardy!
NTT Group and Baker hughes, tackling everything from overseeing technology help desks to supporting financial operations to advising remote workers in the field.
Dube came to the U s. to pursue a doctorate in theoretical computer science at New york University.
While at NYU he began exploring the artificial intelligence principles and philosophies that form the basis of the Amelia platform, convinced that his research into cloning human thought processes would stretch no longer than a couple of years.
The person who invented the term rtificial intelligence, computer scientist John Mccarthy, himself said that the problem turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated,
the network and the servers become self-aware and self-governing? IPCENTER was the product realization of adaptive learning systems that would be able to self-govern.
IPSOFT efforts capitalized on research in the field of affective computing. e. interactions between humans and computing systems capable of detecting
and responding to the user emotional state based on cues like facial expressions, gestures, speech, even the force or rhythm of key strokes or the temperature of the hand controlling the mouse. f Amelia is to become the most faithful service agent,
she also needs to be able to respond to man need to communicate with somebody who can understand emotionsot just a robotic ress 1 for thisand ress 7 for that,?
You don want to come up with a search engine or a pattern-matching engine. It needs to stand up to the test of doing
utonomics, cognitive computing and robotic process automation are already reconfiguring the outsourcing segment. Alsbridge reports that in recent months,
and now Google has them on the road. The pace of change is so rapidlmost exponentialhat even though Amelia is not yet really operational in too many situations,
and the landscape two years from now could be completely different. all center employees aren the only ones keeping a watchful eye on cognitive technologies. think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.
he development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. rian Christian, a poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy, is the author of The Most Human Human,
a book exploring the history and future of artificial intelligence, as well as humankind evolving relationship to AI technologies. hen
I was on my book tour, the No. 1 question I would get from audiences would be,
It not just people on the street, Christian says. t also true for a lot of the people at the very places developing these technologies. hristian cites the example of Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley,
and co-author of the textbook Artificial intelligence: A Modern Approach, which Christian declares he bible of AI.
and that computers must be programmed to understand human values to guarantee they don do harm to their creators.
But then I talk to people at the biggest computer science departments in the U s. laces like Google
whether artificial intelligence represents a promise or a threat seems likely to grow even louder in the months and years ahead.
he says. n the next few years you will start to see customers hanging up the phone and asking,
and not be able to tell if it a human or an android. I think we are very much approaching that. hat Blade runner future may seem more dystopian than utopian to some.
#Big U s. Data Breaches Offer Treasure trove for Hackers A massive breach of U s. federal computer networks disclosed this week is the latest in a flood of attacks by suspected Chinese hackers aimed at grabbing personal data,
industrial secrets and weapons plans from government and private computers. The Obama administration on Thursday disclosed the breach of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management
and said the records of up to 4 million current and former federal employees may have been compromised.
It was the second computer break-in in less than a year at the OPM, the federal government's personnel office.
The first breach has been linked to earlier thefts of personal data from millions of records at Anthem Inc, the second largest U s. health insurer,
Guidance Software, a cybersecurity firm, said the first signs of data"exfiltration"were detected originally with Einstein
adding that the attack on the pharma company involved malicious software installed together with the Chinese-language search engine Baidu.
and F-35 built by Lockheed martin Corp. Lockheed redoubled security efforts focused on suppliers after a"significant and tenacious"attack on its computer networks in 2011 that was enabled by lax security at a supplier.
including misconfigured and unpatched software. U s. government officials and cyber analysts say Chinese hackers are using high-tech tactics to build massive databases that could be used for traditional espionage goals,
including potential passwords for websites that may be portals to information about weapons systems or other research data."
which hackers gained access to private data of a website administrator by finding passwords on a public website linked to the person's hobby."
These cutting edge companies rely heavily upon mobile and cloud technologies and a wide variety of online services and platforms.
the president and founder of 10up Inc. 10up is a website design and development company with 115 team members working remotely from 20 locations.
While most remote companies reported using phone and video conferencing to conduct job interviews, some used other means.
Automattic, the web development company that operates Wordpress. com and has more than 325 remote workers,
Origin Eight, a web and application development company with 25 remote workers, takes time to build culture.
and machine learning methods originally developed for data-heavy applications such as national security and the healthcare industry to the oil and gas industry,
the mobile assessment software that targets student performance and aims to eliminate hand grading, has announced a collaboration with Pearson through an independent software vendor (ISV) partnership agreement that hopes to help educators quickly score assessments using Quick Key mobile scanner app
and instantly upload results to the Powerschool student information system. uick Key and Powerschool are a perfect match,
said Kyle Hansen, Powerschool Administrator at American Leadership Academy in Spanish Fork, Utah. hen I found Quick Key last year,
15-year veteran teacher and cofounder of Quick Key Mobile. his collaboration puts the power of teaching back into the capable hands of teachers.
the most widely used web-based student information system, supports more than 13 million students globally. Powerschool enables today educators to make timely decisions that impact student performance
Powerschool users will be able to access their Quick Key Dashboard from within the Powerschool dashboard, and vice versa.
Districts can implement Quick Key without upgrades and the mobile app can be used without Wi-fi. Quick Key Team Management
and Quiz Sharing features allow district and school administrators to deliver standards-aligned assessments to all teachers within their district
which monitors his heart function. Everyday he is scanned and his data is sent to his hospital and medical team,
In the beginning, it was GPUS that drastically increased BTC mining capability and kept the operation profitable,
#Google#s Project Ara update: New partners inductive data transfer and cutting-edge battery tech Ever since Google Project Ara debuted,
consumers have been interested in the possibility of a customized smartphone with hot-swappable modules and varying functionality that can be changed on the fly depending on the user needs.
Today, Google gave a major update on where the program is and where it headed through 2015.
Right now, Google is focused on building what it calls the Spiral 2 device, a new version of the hardware that will include multiple modules, greater flexibility,
the option to swap out the battery while the device is in low power mode, and the opportunity to use multiple antennas for better signal sourcing and multiple carrier support.
Spiral 2 also shifts from FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) to ASICS specialized application-specific integrated circuits with superior performance
and generally lower power consumption compared to FPGAS. Spiral 2 still has some problems with signal degradation over the long term
Google is reportedly working on induction signaling, with a 150-micron gap between components that will prevent the wear and tear that comes with repetitive switching back and forth.
Project Ara roadmap Google also laid out the Project Ara longer-term roadmap through 2015,
Spiral 3 will add the Rockchip reference design, an LTE 4g modem, an Android release, packaging
and decorating improvements, and an updated framework for software development that meant to make it easier for both software
and hardware developers to build their projects. Google also talked up the concept of giving new and unusual battery designs a forum to experiment with Project Ara there are battery technologies that offer substantial improvements over conventional lithium polymer architectures
but either cost too much for typical inclusion into smartphones or have specialized other requirements. Some of these could be met within the Project Ara modular concept,
and Google wants to see the platform used for prototyping and market testing. Longer term, the goal is to create an initial pool of some 20-30 modules,
including some of the options shown above. Google didn go into detail on what a ollution sensormight be,
but it possible to include a carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and other types of smoke detector modules in a smartphone platform.
A Project Ara device could conceivably include multiple modules to scan for various types of atmospheric contaminants
along with an LTE modem to report their prevalence at specific locations. Google has stressed the goal of creating an entire ecosystem around this concept rather than simply throwing it to the consumer-wolves,
which implies that the device could at least find targeted applications in specific markets or spaces where its customizability are a selling point.
It not clear if the wider consumer space will take to the device (this will likely be cost-dependent)
and hobbyists who want the ability to customize a phone for particularly long battery life or with specialized sensors.
if the phone can be equipped with a sufficiently flexible LTE radio to allow for a truly global device.
Google intends to move forwards with market availability in the 2016 timeframe 0
#In wake of Paris terror attacks UK Prime minister proposes ending secure communication The recent terror attacks against The french satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have rocked the international community. UK Prime minister
noting that the government has retained always the ability to intercept letter or phone traffic, and that he viewed it as essential that the UK be able to intercept email and online traffic as well.
Cameron has been a strong supporter of the UK internet filtering campaigns and has pushed ISPS to adopt policies that require every single household to choose
whether or not to receive a filtered service as quickly as possible, despite the well-known problems that filter systems have
That law woulde required companies to retain information regarding users for a period of at least 12 months,
#Google throws nearly a billion Android users under the bus refuses to patch OS vulnerability When it comes to providing security updates for previous products,
Some, like Microsoft, tend to provide security updates long after theye stopped selling an operating system (Microsoft only stopped providing WINDOWS XP support last year.
Others, like Google and Apple, have pursued tighter timelines for security updates. Google is now doubling down on that schedule,
refusing to patch bugs in Android 4. 3 or prior, even when those bugs could expose critical vulnerabilities on nearly a billion devices.
The flaws in this case affect Android 4. 1 to 4. 3, aka Jelly bean, which began shipping in mid-2012
and was the primary version of Android through late 2013, or roughly 14 months ago.
Up until quite recently, Google has patched aggressively problems in Android Webview rendering engine. Before Kitkat (Android 4. 4
all versions of Android used the version of Webview found within the Android Browser for rendering HTML webpages.
With Kitkat and Lollipop, Google updated the operating system to use a Webview plugin derived from its Chromium project.
When Security firm Rapid7 discovered a new exploit in the Android Browser version of Webview,
it contacted Google to inform the company that Android 4. 3 and below were vulnerable.
Google response and policy change are raising major eyebrows. Specifically, the company states that: If the affected version of Webview is before 4. 4,
we generally do not develop the patches ourselves, but welcome patches with the report for consideration.
Other than notifying OEMS, we will not be able to take action on any report that is affecting versions before 4. 4 that are accompanied not with a patch.
Google will onsiderthe patch to see if it resolves the problem. If they don, Google now says the only thing it can do is inform various OEMS of the problem.
What Google is doing in essence, is telling its user community orry, you have to tell Samsung, LG,
and Motorola to provide you with an updated version of our operating system. This is hilariously impossible.
It would never fly in the PC WORLD imagine Microsoft telling customers orry, you have to make HP, Dell,
and Lenovo provide you with a free update for our operating system. The disparity is even larger
if you consider that, in most cases, a computer running a previous version of Windows can be upgraded by the end user to run the next version.
That upgrade may be a headache but system requirements on Windows haven budged in nine years.
The average phone or tablet buyer has no way to upgrade their operating system unless the carrier provides an OTA update,
and two-year upgrade cycles means that plenty of people are going to be stuck on broken devices with known exploits that Google isn going to fix.
Granted, the fact that Google fixes an exploit doesn mean that carriers will deploy it,
and fragmentation has been a major problem in Android ecosystem over the years but there a difference between acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining security updates for the entirety of one user base
and flatly refusing to do them. Pushing OEMS off open-source Android One obvious reason for Google to stop fixing Android Browser problems is that the company is aggressively moving to get OEMS to stop using Android open-source features
and to replace them with features licensed directly from Google. Ars Technica has done an extensive write-up on this trend here,
and getting rid of the Android Browser is a key facet of moving away from an Android that actually maintained and useful.
No, Google isn killing Android it just ensuring that the only parts of the program that get feature updates, capability improvements,
and performance enhancements are the parts that require licensing agreements and promises not to develop competing products.
The reason Amazon Kindle Fire has its own app store and Samsung continued interest in Tizen are both the result of Google push to embed itself into the center of mobile business
while paying lip service to the idea of open source. By throwing all of the responsibility for security updates back on carriers and security researchers,
Google is telling OEMS that they can either agree to its licensing terms and fall in line,
or take on the responsibility of performing security updates that theye typically not qualified or funded to do.
It a trick worthy of Microsoft in the Bad Old Days, and it particularly funny to see the company doing this,
given that it threw Microsoft under the bus in December when it published the full details of a security flaw two days before Redmond patched it,
on the grounds that the desktop and laptop OS company wasn moving fast enough S
#Wireless power system charges devices up to 20 feet away A plethora of firms are racing to develop a feasible method for delivering power wirelessly,
but thus far the best wee managed are short-range standards like Qi and PMA. A company called Energous is on hand at CES with a demo of its new wireless power system known amusingly as Wattup.
It uses a mix of Bluetooth and RF to combine the convenience of wireless power with the security of a wireless network.
If it all pans out, Wattup could juice up your phone from up to 20 feet (6. 1 meters) away.
The heart of Wattup is a hub that basically a powerful RF transmitter station. Devices that want to receive power from the hub announce their presence via Bluetooth 4. 0. Wattup then uses that connection to direct the wireless power signal to the device.
It operates in the same unlicensed spectrum as Wifi, which makes me wonder about possible interference in busy wireless environments.
Assuming the connection holds, though, the Wattup signal is absorbed and converted to DC power in the phone or tablet by a receiver chip.
Whenever youe sending an electromagnetic signal through the air, you have to worry about signal drop-off as dictated by the inverse square law.
Some experiments in long-range wireless power have forced simply brute their way through this problem to the point that they actually heat up the air around the transmitter.
That Bluetooth connection is used to focus a tight cone of electromagnetic waves on the target, and it can even track the device and recalibrate as needed.
just like your phone can transfer from one cell tower to the next to maintain a connection.
the system begins charging your phone. When it detects that the phone is full, but maybe your tablet is getting low from an evening of couch computing,
it switches automatically to recharging that one. It could also connect to wearable devices or anything else if they have a receiver.
Wattup also takes into account one of the drawbacks of wireless power you don usually think about:
security. If youe got a wireless power base station that can blast energy 20 feet away (improved from 15 feet last year),
so why not your wireless power network? The Bluetooth tether that is used to direct beam-forming can also authenticate devices.
Wattup can operate in protected mode where only authorized devices can connect, or in public access mode where anyone with the hardware can soak up some electrons (controlled via an app).
The company hopes to license the technology to device makers soon. The hardware required on the phone side is cheap,
so it might gain some traction. However, the energy routers will probably be a substantial investment,
especially considering most homes would need more than one
#Virtual reality comes to the desktop thanks to HP and Zspace The first time I donned a pair of special glasses
It required extremely expensive hardware, and only allowed for a simple, low-resolution, experience of machining a part on a virtual lathe.
but with its new Zvr display, HP is bringing to market a practical and useful VR tool for educators,
interactions with computer-generated models. The heart of the Zvr (if youl forgive the pun) is a special-purpose display from VR startup Zspace,
which incorporates four cameras for head-tracking, a fully gyroscopic stylus that allows for both precise pointing and true 3d manipulation of objects,
HP is also offering Zview software for the sharing of 3d content suitable for use on the Zvr.
or Microsoft Kinect, suffer from a lack of precision, especially when it comes to twisting and turning objects using motions of your wrist and hand.
HP and Zspace are positioning the display primarily for science and technology related disciplines especially for teaching them.
The high-resolution display and 3d manipulation require a fair amount of compute power. You need an HP Z-series
(or similar) workstation to run it. Along with its large size that means it is not suitable for any type of mobile application.
when I stood behind the person seated at the display I didn get any of the 3d effect.
the virtual heart on the display popped into a nearly holographic 3d form. HP and Zspace have not announced a price or exact availability date,
#Google calls on FCC to mandate line-sharing pits itself directly against Comcast and other ISPS In the ongoing battle between net neutrality advocates and the ISPS,
Now, Google has weighed in on the issue, reminding the FCC that reclassifying companies like Comcast would serve the public interest and advance the deployment of high speed Internet.
What common carrier classification does and does not Do it may be helpful at this point to revisit
in the case of the proposed T-Mobile/AT&T merger, 4G LTE networks), is that it costs too much to be economically viable.
AT&T has made and broken repeated promises about network rollouts, often citing cost (Ars Technica has a summary of the shenanigans there over the years).
Verizon stopped deploying Fios citing construction costs and the difficulty of ramping the service in new markets.
Two years ago, an excellent piece by Bruce Kushnik skewered these claims by showing that Verizon total construction costs were dropping year-by-year,
Despite securing additional money specifically for Fios upgrades, the company never spent more cash in real dollars it just used the state funding it received to pay for fiber,
In Verizon case it actively turned to tearing them out. This kind of bait -and-switch is what makes complaints that regulation represents unfair intrusion into the free market so damned egregious.
For decades, the telecommunications industry has gone collectively running to Congress, crying about the need for a greater slice of the tax revenue and service fee pie,
Google argument essentially rests on the idea that as a would-be competitor itself, access to these preexisting networks would allow it to deliver substantially better rates and lower prices to its customers.
After years of breathless reporting on its potential as a long-term solution for logic circuits (computer processors and memory), interest as waned as fundamental research problems have refused to resolve.
however, and a research team from the University of Manchester has published a report detailing how flexible 2d graphene arrays could be used in the next-generation of LED screens.
the Cambridge Graphene Centre demonstrated a display that incorporated a graphene electrode. The new LEDS built by the University of Manchester in this experiment were engineered apparently at an atomic level from multiple layers of crystal lattice as shown below.
the final display is semitransparent, extremely thin, and according to the research team, at least semi-flexible and durable.
While OLEDS have become popular in certain Samsung displays, the OLED revolution in mainstream television has yet to occur.
What was predicted once as The next Big Thing after 1080p has been supplanted largely by conventional LCD technology at higher 4k resolutions.
and that not enough to drive long-term R&d for continuing the technology in large panels.
it possible that TV manufacturers will finally be able to deliver the promise of OLED in a different technology.
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