#New Traceability Rule Represents Major Adjustment for U s. Food industry Where does your food come from?
Paul Chang, who leads the traceability initiative at IBM, said the company is basically taking the tracking system it uses for the pharmaceutical industry
With very high-profile food recalls, cellphones and iphones, people have been trained that they can access information very quickly.
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#Five technologies IBM predicts will be possible in the next 5 years What if a computer could let us feel#the texture of a fabric before we buy clothes online?
Or gives us a whiff or taste of a meal we re thinking of preparing?
it s all within the realm of possibility in the next 5 years, according to IBM s list of technologies it thinks are on the cusp of adoption.
Every year IBM polls its R&d brain trust about what technologies that may have been at the hairy edge before
#IBM fellow and VP of innovation Bernie Meyerson told me recently. This year those closer-to-the-scalp#technologies converge around computers growing ability to handle richer,
So, without further ado, here s IBM s sixth annual 5 in 5 technology picks. 1. Computer with a sense of touch Even people who love shopping online say that it s hard to get a good read on the finished
IBM thinks they also need to hear total sounds#ambient noise, words, music, a lot of inputs to get the full story.
if a cell phone caller is in a car with an engine running at 2, 000 rpm,
teething, or something more serious. 4. Digitized taste buds IBM s brainiacs think that machines will increasingly be able to taste things#like chocolate
For example, researcher and app developer Foodpairing has broken down flavor to its molecular components and has compiled databases that can match the flavor of those ingredients against other completely different ingredients.
By compiling foodpairing trees#its technology can identify vegetable or seafood ingredients that reinforce the flavor of different meats,
So, how s IBM doing as a sooth sayer? Since I m still waiting for the jet packs we were promised decades ago, I m skeptical about technology predictions,
but IBM s list provides a good starting point to track tech progress and priorities. It s also fun to grade its prognostication skills.
IBM has 4 more years to make good. Taking the longer view, looking at IBM s inaugural list in 2006,
it does better. It was on the money with its call that people would be able to access healthcare remotely.
IBM also predicted real-time speech translation now exemplified by products like Samsung s Galaxy speech translation.
Meyerson admits to some less successful calls#especially one about hydrogen-powered vehicles#but he s pretty happy overall with IBM s effort.
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#Boom in app development lures coders but it s tough to make a living Software engineers now outnumber farmers
writing software applications for mobile devices like the iphone or ipad. Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high
the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category.
These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers. Much as the Web set off the dot-com boom 15 years ago,
apps have inspired a new class of entrepreneurs. These innovators have turned cellphones and tablets into tools for discovering,
The iphone and ipad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds. Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real,
and lasting, the rise in app employment might be. Despite the rumors of hordes of hip programmers starting million-dollar businesses from their kitchen tables, only a small minority of developers actually make a living by creating their own apps, according to surveys and experts.
The Grimeses began their venture with high hopes but their apps, most of them for toddlers, did not come quickly enough
or sell fast enough. And programming is not a skill that just anyone can learn. While people already employed in tech jobs have added app writing to their rsums, the profession offers few options to most unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers.
One success story is Ethan Nicholas, who earned more than $1 million in 2009 after writing a game for the iphone.
But he says the app writing world has experienced tectonic shifts since then. Can someone drop everything
and start writing apps? Sure,#said Mr. Nicholas, 34, who quit his job to write apps after ishoot,
an artillery game, became a sensation. Can they start writing good apps? Not often, no.
I got lucky with ishoot, because back then a decent app could still be successful.
But competition is fierce nowadays, and decent isn t good enough.##The boom in apps comes as economists are debating the changing nature of work,
which technology is reshaping at an accelerating speed. The upheaval, in some ways echoing the mechanization of agriculture a century ago,
began its latest turbulent phase with the migration of tech manufacturing to places like China.
Four of the most valuable American companies#Apple, Google, Microsoft and I b m.#are rooted in technology.
that set off the app revolution with the iphone and ipad. Since Apple unleashed the world s freelance coders to build applications four years ago,
and the exact composition of a jobs subcategory to reflect the new prominence of apps.
And the tech industry has begun making claims about how apps are contributing to the broader economy A study commissioned by the tech advocacy group Technet found that the app economy##including Apple, Facebook,
Google s Android and other app platforms#was responsible, directly and indirectly, for 466,000 jobs.
Apple said this month that its app business had generated 291,250 jobs for the American economy,
as varied as developers and U. P. S. drivers. That number rose 39 percent in less than a year.
During that time, the number of United states developers paying the $99 annual fee to register with Apple rose 10 percent to 275
Some of these registered developers have other full-time jobs and write apps in their spare time.
Apple has become increasingly assertive in promoting the economic benefits of apps as its own wealth
and prominence have grown and its employment and other business practices have come under scrutiny. The company issued a statement for this article saying it was incredibly proud of the opportunities the App store gives developers of all sizes,
#but declined to answer questions. At the company s annual meeting this spring, the chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, noted that just a few years ago mobile app#wasn t even in people s vocabulary.
Now there s this enormous entirely new job segment that didn t exist before, #he said.
The guy who writes an Apple app one day will write an Android app the next day,
#For many of the developers not working at traditional companies, moreover, job#is a misnomer.
Streaming Color Studios, a game developer, did a survey of game makers late last year.
while not a scientifically valid sample and restricted to one segment of the app market,
the app world is weighted an ecology heavily toward a few winners. A quarter of the respondents said they had made less than $200 in lifetime revenue from Apple.
A few apps have made it extremely big, including Instagram, the photo-sharing app that was bought by Facebook in April for $1 billion.
When app developers dream, they dream of triumphs like that. Most developers, however, make their money
when someone buys or upgrades their app from Apple s online store, the only place consumers can buy an iphone or ipad app.
Apple keeps 30 percent of each app sale. While its job creation report trumpets the $6. 5 billion the company has paid out in royalties,
it does not note that as much as half of that money goes to developers outside the United states. The pie,
while growing rapidly, is smaller than it seems. My guess is that very few developers make a living off their own apps,
#said Jeff Scott, who runs the Apple app review site 148apps. com and closely tracks developments in the field.
The Struggling Entrepreneur Like many computer experts Shawn Grimes started experimenting with apps almost as soon as Apple opened its doors for the iphone.
He wrote an Internet security program as well as a tool for studio photographers to manage portrait sessions.
Those amateur apps pulled in more than $5, 000 from Apple. Late last year, Mr. Grimes was laid off as a computer security specialist by Legg Mason, the Baltimore financial firm.
The dismissal shook his confidence. I worked really hard, #he said. I did my best.
But ultimately my career was not in my hands.##The layoff, a result of Legg Mason s decision to eliminate the jobs of 300 tech support workers,
had been in the works for more than a year, which gave Mr. Grimes and his wife, Stephanie,
Google, which receives two million applications a year, interviewed Mr. Grimes, but he did not make it past the preliminary stages.
With direct employment out of reach, he decided to work independently by writing apps. He had no illusion that he was likely to become rich.
But with hundreds of new apps introduced every day in Apple s store, the field is overcrowded#something the Grimeses learned quickly and painfully.
Ms. Grimes, 32, quit her job teaching kindergartners to join the couple s new venture, Campfire Apps.
They worked steadily on apps that revolved around children. Henry s Smart Headlamp was a learning game for preschoolers
a hunt for hidden objects that the Grimeses hoped iphone-wielding parents would think was worth $2 for a moment of distraction.
The couple aimed for one new app a month, but progress was slow and sales were slower.
In March, with the apps bringing in only about $20 a day, they cashed in Mr. Grimes s 401 (k),
Pro, two ipad 2s, two Apple TVS, two iphone 4s and an iphone 3gs. We justify buying new models by saying we need them to test out the apps,
#Mr. Grimes said. Soon, though, it got to the point where Mr. Grimes needed to take on freelance work,
but took time away from Campfire Apps. By the beginning of summer, troubled by several persistent health care issues
Mr. Grimes now works as an app developer for ELC Technologies, an Oregon company that allowed him to stay in Baltimore.
Ms. Grimes is still working on Campfire Apps. While Mr. Grimes was angry at Legg Mason for laying him off,
So far this year, their eight apps have earned $4, 964. When the newest iphone came out at the end of September,
the couple immediately bought two. Success Beyond Dreams Ethan Nicholas was a Sun microsystems programmer, a games enthusiast and a father of two very young boys,
and he needed some extra cash. So in late 2008 he wrote an artillery game that could be played on the iphone,
which was still relatively new. There were about 11 million in circulation#certainly a large number but nothing like the 270 million that have now been sold.
They founded echobase, a start-up with 14 employees that is developing apps to allow doctors and nurses to view
whose doctors download the app free. Apple makes no money here, but it gets a long-term benefit:
start-ups that succeed will embed the ipad and the iphone more thoroughly into society. The company is, in a sense, another arm of Apple s research and development program.
Apple s brilliant but mercurial chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, agreed to unlock the gates of the fledgling iphone only after much internal argument
and he made sure that Apple would retain strict oversight of every app. In retrospect, it might have been the smartest decision ever made by a company that prides itself on creating the future.
The App store opened in July 2008 with 500 apps. In an interview, Mr. Jobs laid bare the company s goal:
Sell more iphones.##And so, thanks in large part to the multitude of apps, it came to pass.
More iphones#nearly seven million#were sold in the next three months than in the entire previous year,
and that was just the beginning of the ascent. Apps changed the iphone from a simple phone into a mobile computer,
#said Mr. Scott of148apps. com. Apple s financial documents show just how crucial app inventors are.
If the developers stop developing, the company warned again last month, customers may choose not to buy the company s products.#
#So far, there has not been much risk of revolt. Developers have expressed flickers of grumpiness at Apple s 30 percent cut of each app sale.
A shadowy group calling itself theapp Developer Union briefly posted a petition online this summer asking for something more equitable.#
#Apple declined to comment about the union, which disappeared from the Web as mysteriously as it had arrived.
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#Global manufacturing is changing with a new wave of robots At the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif,
Factories like the one here in The netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants,
Apple s iphone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones,
This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee, economists at the Massachusetts institute of technology, made the case for a rapid transformation.
Mr. Mcafee argues. At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?##asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics,
a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in Silicon valley and is increasingly automating assembly work.
the director of robotics technology at an Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate how quickly robots would pay for themselves.
If the United states does not compete for advanced manufacturing in industries like consumer electronics, it could lose product engineering
The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft s Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.
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#Apple s retail employees are long on loyalty but short on pay Apple employees During Jordan Golson s best three-month stretch last year, he sold bout
and Verizon Wireless and will this year pump billions into the economy. Within this world, the Apple Store is undisputed the king,
. as the company s heart and soul, a majority of its workers in the United states are not engineers or executives with hefty salaries and bonuses but rather hourly wage earners selling iphones and Macbooks.
Though a significant increase, Mr. Moll s new salary of about $36, 000 puts him on the low side of the wage scale at the other large sellers of Apple products, AT&T and Verizon
yet these days some former employees describe a work environment that was too hectic and stressful, thanks in large part to the runaway popularity of the iphone and ipad.
#says Ms. Jackson, who now works at Groupon. It was sort of like, Congratulations. You ve done
Initially, that involved walking into stores, including those operated by Sprint and AT&T, and scouting out promising employees.
ask for permission before touching anyone s iphone. And we told trainees that the first thing they needed to do was acknowledge the problem,
because aspiring sales employees would clearly be better off working at one of the country s other big sellers of Apple products, AT&T and Verizon Wireless,
It s not at all common but there are sales agents at Verizon who earn six figures, #says Jonathan Jarboe,
who managed Verizon Wireless stores in Oklahoma until last summer. Several former Verizon Wireless managers said that annual pay ran from $35
000 up to $100, 000 in rare cases, with the sweet spot in the $50, 000 to $60, 000 range.
#When Work Piles Up The iphone, which arrived in 2007, brought unprecedented crowds to Apple Stores.
After the great influx that started with the iphone, the company started plucking managers from stores like the Gap and Banana republic.
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#32 technological innovations that will change your tomorrow The electric light bulb was a failure. In the early 1800#s, The british chemist Humphry Davy invented the light bulb
David Carroll, a cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone s battery charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours,
And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you
Your Body, Your Login A team of Dutch and Italian researchers has found that the way you move your phone to your ear
The most common iphone password is 1234.##Down the line, simple movements, like the way you shift in your chair,
The cart uses Microsoft s Kinect motion-sensor technology to track and follow you through the store,
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#Cow collar texts ranchers when animals are sick or in heat Even cows can benefit from having a mobile device.
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#Is there any hope for a non-genetically modified future in America, or Africa? It is really only a matter of time before our food crisis becomes crippling.
Environmental Health News highlights the failed hope of GM crop developers: That these proprietary crops will stay where they are planted
Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. 6.)Ground-Based Delivery Drones Before we have sold driverless passenger cars in any sizable quantities
Accomplishment-Based Educational Apps-Much of what happens in today s colleges and universities is based on symbols of achievement,#not actual accomplishments.
A new generation of apps will soon be developed that allow students to autonomously work their way through an actual accomplishment
and the request that product developers continue to work on disruptive technologies. We are still in the awkward in-between stages of technology.
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of Communicating with the Future#the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati swfobject. embedswf (http//www. youtube
, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood,
I presented my thoughts on the Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals#at our monthly Night with a Futurist event.
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According to Android vice president Hugo Barra, these were near-perfect for some languages in 2013. However
it took much longer for Google, Microsoft and Japan s NTT Docomo to deliver the service in a non-intrusive
and fashionably acceptable way soft contact lenses are evolved sleek, and from Google glass. Innovega led the early work here,
Audi, BMW, GM and Google tested them first. The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020
Job posts by Microsoft Research in mid-2013 suggested that it was then#oedeveloping the hardware
#By 2050, The Human Media Lab at Queen s university in Kingston, Ontario in Canada has developed a life-sized hologram-like telepod that uses Microsoft s Kinect System and a cylindrical display for live
the cost of solar photovoltaics in sun belt countries would have dropped to just QAR0. 2-0. 39 per kilo watt hours clean electricity is already very affordable in 2050.
since the days of IBM s first contract in Qatar, because air pollution and congestion are no longer a problem,
altering the economy as products (from micro-batteries to phones and medical implants) can be produced for a fraction of their traditional manufacture costs.
Nokia was an early mover in holographic advertising. Available for a long time, it uses a combination of Mylar screens, super high-definition overhead projectors and reflective surfaces,
Holograms have gone portable via personal, ipad-sized display pieces, including the Chinese-owned Facebook-Apple Corporation s iholo mobile device.
#Google s self-driving car. Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights,
signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids.
He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so.
#Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company s semi-secret lab for experimental technology.
As a sophomore, he won a national robotics competition with a machine made out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money#fair analogy for what he s been doing for Google lately.
He was one of the principal architects of Street view and the Google maps database, but those were just warmups.#
The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction: this year s model of last century s Make it belongs to the gleaming,
I was told by Ron Medford, a former deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now works for Google.
is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve.
He gradually scraped together thirty thousand dollars from Raytheon, Advanced micro devices, and others. No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project.
Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.
Their lead programmer had lifted his preliminary algorithms from textbooks on video-game design.##oewhen you look back at that first Grand Challenge,
By then, Thrun and Levandowski were both working for Google. The driverless car project occupies a lofty, garagelike space in suburban Mountain view.
It s part of a sprawling campus built by Silicon graphics in the early nineties and repurposed by Google, the conquering army, a decade later.
Google guards its secrets more jealously than most. At the gourmet cafeterias that dot the campus, signs warn against#oetailgaters##orporate spies who might slink in behind an employee before the door swings shut.
the cofounder of Google, told me. Brin was dressed in a charcoal hoodie, baggy pants, and sneakers.
#When Thrun and Levandowski first came to Google, in 2007, they were given a simpler task:
Google engineers went on to jury-rig some vans with G. P. S . and rooftop cameras that could shoot in every direction.
and sent them all over the United states. Google street view has since spread to more than a hundred countries. It s both a practical tool and a kind of magic trick#spyglass onto distant worlds.
which Google had been leasing from companies like navteq. The street and exit names could be drawn straight from photographs
but Google maps had to be comprehensive: every logging road logged on a computer, every gravel drive driven down.
Street view and Maps were logical extensions of a Google search. They showed you where to locate the things you d found.
#oeyou can now build a cell the same way you might build an app for your iphone,
They say that representing Evolva s laboratory-grown flavoring as something similar to vanilla extract from an orchid plant is deceptive,
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#Google s quest to popularize self-driving cars How a self-driving car sees the world.
At about 8am every morning, Anthony Levandowski gets into the driver s seat of his white Lexus for his daily commute to work.
And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
It s not just Google that s developing the technology, but also most of the major car manufacturers:
Following Google policy, Levandowski drives through residential roads and surface streets himself, while Chauffeur drives the freeways.
#Levandowski works at Google s headquarters in Mountain view, California. He s the business lead of Google s self-driving-car project, an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Google has a small fleet of driverless cars now plying public roads. They are test vehicles,
but they are also simply doing their job: ferrying Google employees back and forth from work. Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars#asily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof#n average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500,000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year, where Governor Jerry brown signed California s self-driving-car bill into law, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said#oeyou
can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.##In other words, a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a#oeclick here to download#button.
In the language particular to Google, the researchers are#oedogfooding#the car#riving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
#oewe have a saying here at Google, #says Levandowski.##oein God we trust#ll others must bring data.#
Chris Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D c,
Google s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques#ncluding emergency braking, high-speed lane changes,
to put down that coffee or phone, and refocus.##oeit could be 20 seconds; it could be 10 seconds,
There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google. A self-driving car near Google s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago#he Stone age,
in the foreshortened timelines of software development#nd, according to Google spokespeople, the car was not in self-driving mode at the time,
Considering that the Google self-driving program has clocked already half a million miles, the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
It s not an argument Google makes to the public because Levandowski says the system hasn encountered t enough challenging situations in its real-world commutes.#
#oewe can speculate; we have models, but we don t actually know the value of the technology to society,
#Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009,
#Google is still not saying much to reporters (including this one) about its plans, but since it was accused of being the bad guy in a real-life Matrix,
Google lobbyists have made the rounds with legislators in Washington. Its engineers have made pilgrimages to Detroit and abroad.
Google wants to make#oeavailable to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use,
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
#Instead of rebuilding a whole operating system from scratch, he said, automakers should focus on making the user experience their own.
if Google is proposing to give away the software. For the car companies, the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
But at $75, 000 to $85, 000 each, Google s lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined, including the car itself.
A grizzled maverick of an engineer named David Hall designed the lidar that Google uses.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration. Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask
Google, to its credit, shows no signs that it s allowing Detroit to slow it down.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one, Levandowski says. So what s the plan?#
#In other words, Google thinks a new generation of bot-rodders may kick things off. Google won t say anything more,
but since there s really only one place to turn for the all-important lidar, I ask David Hall
and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it, Hall doesn t see the point. He imagines talking to potential customers.#
#oe#Almost as good as Google s?##The other fight is the legal one. It too is filled with catch-22 s. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker s analysis of self-driving-car technology.#
The Google car doesn t work without one, as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10,20,
Some states, prodded by Google lobbyists and looking to get ahead of the curve, have made the cars explicitly legal.
the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows. But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.#
Wayne Gerdes, the father of#oehypermiling,#can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Level three has the Google-style autopilot. And level four is the holy grail#he car that can drive you home
who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.##oepeople start doing all kinds of things they shouldn t#igging around in the backseat, for example.
#Google is betting that established car manufacturers, working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap.
NHTSA s former deputy director, Ron Medford, has signed just on as Google s director of safety for the self-driving-car project.#
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