#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
$750, 000 worth of computers and gadgets at the Apple Store in Salem, N h. It was a performance that might have called for a bottle of Champagne
#America s love affair with the smartphone has helped create tens of thousands of jobs at places like Best Buy
and Verizon Wireless and will this year pump billions into the economy. Within this world, the Apple Store is undisputed the king,
Last year, the company s 327 global stores took in more money per square foot than any other United states retailer#wireless
. 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.
The Internet and advances in computing have created untold millionaires, but most of the jobs created by technology giants are service sector positions#sales employees and customer service representatives,
#said Horace Dediu, an analyst who blogged about the calculation on the site Asymco. Electronics and appliance stores typically post $206, 000 in revenue per employee, according to the latest figures from the National Retail Federation.
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
Wireless, both of which offer commissions to sales staff at their stores. In other areas, Apple has been a leader.
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.
Technicians often move on to higher-paying jobs in information technology, they said, and sales staff have a leg up on the competition
#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.
Those applicants have submitted for years rã sumã s through the company s site. The time-intensive part, former managers say,
R i. There is more roleplaying at Core training, as it s known, this time with pointers on the elaborate etiquette of interacting with customers.
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.
me,#says Mr. Perlman, who now works in information technology. I wouldn t recommend it for my 35-year-old friend with a kid,
#When Work Piles Up The iphone, which arrived in 2007, brought unprecedented crowds to Apple Stores.
several former employees said their stores imposed new rules limiting on-the-spot repairs to 15 minutes for a computer-related problem,
when he logged onto a computer to punch out of work. This window popped up and it said something like,
Jordan Golson, who now blogs at Macrumors, a site that keeps tabs on all things Apple,
Free ipads for everyone was the expectation. Then the lights went down and we had a party in the store, with games and dancing,
Employees often had goals for attachments#as these add-ons are called#40 percent of certain products should include One to One,
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
you could power up your MP3 PLAYER just by sitting still. According to the fabric s creator
David Carroll, a cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone s battery charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours,
It then sends that data to a computer for analysis . Although the skintight shorts are being marketed to athletes and coaches,
you ll be inspired to lead a less sedentary life. 4. The Morning Multi-Tasker The problem with laptops
and tablets, says Mark Rolston of the design firm Frog, is that they re confined by a screen.
He wants to turn the entire room into a monitor, where you can have the news on your kitchen table
instead of a joystick, you control movement by twisting the handle from side to side. Jiang imagines that new types of games could be created,
And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you
The Anti-slouch Screen If you slump down when you re typing on an Ergosensor monitor by Philips,
Algorithms crunch the raw data from the sensor and tell you how to adjust your body to achieve ergonomic correctness.
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,
might also replace passwords on your computer. It could also be the master key to the seven million passwords you set up all over the Internet
but keep forgetting. 17. Terrifying Playgrounds Norwegian psychologists think that modern playgrounds are for wimps.
human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial.
you can text message the cart s built-in tablet computer. Now it knows who you are and
The cart uses Microsoft s Kinect motion-sensor technology to track and follow you through the store,
Better-looking Movies A movie projector flashes 24 images across the screen each second to create the illusion of motion#kind of like a flipbook.
and will transmit brain scans directly to smartphones and tablet computers. We re using sleep, #Low says,
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#Cow collar texts ranchers when animals are sick or in heat Even cows can benefit from having a mobile device.
A new collar being developed for cattle ranchers could send cow health updates to farmers cellphones.
That data is relayed to the rancher via a cellphone using a variety of technologies including 3g.
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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
Smartphones, tablets, 3d television, and supporting peripherals were everywhere. But as the industry was getting sucked towards the gravitational allure of these technologies, many others,
with harder problems to solve, haven t been getting enough attention. It s very easy for the digital world to spot an opportunity,
But going beyond the current capabilities of existing hardware blazing entirely new trails of thinking,
but for most exhibitors their so-called smart clothing has little more than pockets for smartphones or space for video nametags.
Invisible fences, invisible screens, and invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. Ford had its Evos concept car on display at CES 2012 turning heads with style and design,
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
#Dispatching a flying drone with video cameras that transmits a live feed back to a central command center will give first responders critical information to formulate an action plan before they arrive. 8.)Video Projector Drones Once a video projector is added to a flying drone,
) Password Eliminator Technology Even with all our sophisticated security technology being built-in to computer platforms,
3d Food Printers-As we shop for apples in the grocery store, we find ourselves looking for the perfect apple.#
This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper
to 3d printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers. These aren t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising.
) Disposable Batteries for Smartphones At CES there was no shortage of battery companies. Virtually any object that needs power has a battery vendor exhibiting several different options.
But as of yet, there are no cheap disposable batteries for Smartphones. Yes, it is indeed a bad idea to fill landfills with more batteries,
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
or swarms, inspired by the behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. So far no swarmbots have made their way to CES. 25.
Leonar3do is integrated an software and hardware platform that offers a unique, truly immersive VR experience in the sense that you are able to see
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.
Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called#Please Rob Me#that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.#
Continue reading here. 3.)The Coming Food Printer Revolution Would you buy a product that was advertised as Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?#
This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper
to 3d printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers. These aren t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising.
Continue reading here. 2.)Eight False Promises of the Internet In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA.
what doesn t on the Internet. With that in mind I ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive.
Continue reading here. 1.)55 Jobs of the Future One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past.
and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today. Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future,
and change as technology and communication systems make their impact. As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade.
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which can be called by mobile phone, or via tiny sensors built into their eyewear, clothes, watch, ring or bracelet.
adaptive courseware presented by computer-simulated teachers. In the learning process, human adults fill the counsellor
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
and software necessary to have a realistic physical body-double or proxy in a remote meeting#that gives the remote worker#the ability to look around the room,
#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,
but is now much more lifelike, with clearer images. Holograms have gone portable via personal, ipad-sized display pieces, including the Chinese-owned Facebook-Apple Corporation s iholo mobile device.
Food in Qatar is assembled commonly by nanomachines. This food is externally indistinguishable from natural food.
It can be made more wholesome as production can be controlled at the molecular level phasing out the crude genetic modification.
#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.
and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road
A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen:##oein one mile, prepare to resume manual control.#
#Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company s semi-secret lab for experimental technology.
his English has no accent aside from a certain absence of inflection#he bright, electric chatter of a processor in overdrive.#
As a freshman at Berkeley, he launched an intranet service out of his basement that earned him fifty thousand dollars a year.
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.
Levandowski keeps a collection of vintage illustrations and newsreels on his laptop, just to remind him of all the failed schemes
#oewe just got lucky that the computers and sensors were ready for us.##Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps:
a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal and followed it around the curve.
computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,
then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was steering itself around a track.
the computers weren t there, and the mapping wasn t there. Radar was a device on a hilltop that cost two hundred million dollars.
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.
computer-controlled system of shafts and motors to adjust its position every hundredth of a second.#
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.
They added cameras, gyros, G. P. S. modules, computers, roll bars, and an electric motor to turn the wheel.
To win, the teams would have to address a daunting list of failures and shortcomings, from fried hard drives to faulty satellite equipment.
Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks, modelled on those in the brain.
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.
It s often the fastest way for a computer to learn a complex behavior, but it has its drawbacks.
#oeneural networks are like black boxes, #Pomerleau says.##oethat makes people nervous, particularly when they re controlling a two-ton vehicle.#
#Computers, like children, are taught more often by rote. They re given thousands of rules and bits of data to memorize#f X happens,
His team spent twenty-eight days laser-scanning the Mojave to create a computer model of its topography;
then they combined those scans with satellite data to help identify obstacles.##oepeople don t count those who died trying,
Both teams used similar sensors and software, but Thrun and Montemerlo concentrated more heavily on machine learning.#
the computer learned to identify the flat parts as road and the bumpy parts as shoulders.
drive for twenty minutes, realize there was some software bug, then sit there for four hours reprogramming
one out of every eight pixels that the computer labelled as an obstacle was nothing of the sort.
I have a computer, and I need a million bucks. So they were doing things in their home shops,
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.
each with someone staring hard at a screen. It had taken me two years to gain access to this place,
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:
Five years earlier, Page had strapped a video camera on his car and taken several hours of footage around the Bay Area.
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.
Over the next two years, Levandowski shuttled back and forth to Hyderabad, India, to train more than two thousand data processors to create new maps and fix old ones.
When Apple s new mapping software failed so spectacularly a year ago, he knew exactly why.
By then, his team had spent five years entering several million corrections a day. Street view and Maps were logical extensions of a Google search.
They showed you where to locate the things you d found. What was missing was a way to get there.
For Jack Newman, a scientist, creating a new life-form has become as simple as typing out a DNA sequence on his laptop.
#oeyou can now build a cell the same way you might build an app for your iphone,
#Hundreds of products are in the pipeline. Laboratory-grown artemisinin, a key antimalarial drug, went on sale in April with the potential to help stabilize supply issues.
the idea of being able to program cells on a computer was fanciful. Newman was working in a chemical engineering lab run by biotech pioneer Jay Keasling
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.
The car s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s
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.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway, it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit, a litigious society,
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.#
The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second. Glitches occur about every 300 miles.
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,
the company first announced the project in a blog post a year later. Detroit was amused not.
#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 represents a point in space instead of on a two-dimensional screen.)Group a million or so voxels together
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,
#Computers don t have hands. That is a problem. Some states, prodded by Google lobbyists and looking to get ahead of the curve,
have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person either in the driver s seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows. But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.#
Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another, so they travel as a virtual unit.
It uses technology that s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system.
autonomous-software agents negotiating the travel route with other agents on a moment-to-moment basis
in order to optimize the entire network.##In our self-driving future, not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past,
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
Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
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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