Google’s Rules For Designers Working With AI
As part of a new project to humanize AI, the company created a guide to what it calls “human-centered machine learning.”
The digital native is a myth
The younger generation uses technology in the same ways as older people — and is no better at multitasking.
Source: The digital native is a myth : Nature News & Comment
People Have an Irrational Need to Complete ‘Sets’ of Things
People are irrationally motivated to complete arbitrary sets of tasks, donations, or purchases—and organizations can take advantage of that, according to new research by Kate Barasz, Leslie John, Elizabeth Keenan, and Michael Norton.
Replacing desktop computers with AR smartglasses
One Silicon Valley startup called Meta is actually doing this right now.
Source: People are already replacing desktop computers with AR smartglasses: VIDEO – Business Insider
Battle for the K-12 Market
If there’s a common thread that unites the rival technology giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the education market, it’s this: They’re big. The three major tech companies—along with Amazon, a relatively new player on the scene—go head-to-head in vying for big chunks of school business, most notably in sales of devices and operating systems, and they try to forge their own paths in others. At the same time, all of them are best known for their work outside education, through their sales to consumers, businesses, or both.
The Pendulum Swing Of Disruption
When a new technology disrupts a traditional incumbent, it normally does so by being 3 things to the end user:
- Cheaper/free
- Quicker
- More convenient
Napster, YouTube, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, all of these companies have done exactly this. Because they most often build market share and presence using external funding, such companies turn existing economics upside down with loss leading tactics. The result is that audiences switch in their millions and incumbents are left in tatters. Any old business that relies on scarcity economics will be swept away.
Source: The Internet’s Adolescence: The Real World Catches Up Eventually | Music Industry Blog
22-year-old stopped ransomware malware virus
The researcher — who is known as MalwareTech on Twitter — registered a garbled domain name hidden in the malware to track the virus, a move that halted it.
Source: Marcus Hutchins is 22-year-old who stopped ransomware malware virus – Business Insider
The Future of Wearables
Have wearable devices and smart clothing been on the market for some time now? Yes. Have consumers been buying them? Not really. But that’s expected to change, in oh, five years or so.
AYTM Market Research polled 1,000 US internet users ages 18 and older in February 2017 and asked them if they ever purchased smart clothing or wearable devices. While roughly one in five respondents said they purchased at least one item, a large share—about three-quarters—said they had never purchased any. But many said they are at least somewhat likely to buy either smart clothing or wearables within the next five years. In fact, nearly half of respondents surveyed said that was their plan.
Source: Despite the Hype, Wearables Not Really a Thing – eMarketer
Mobile World Congress Four Years from Now
As over 108,000 attendees from 208 countries filed into the echoing halls of Mobile World Congress last week, I was reminded of the old First World War chant, sung by the soldiers on the front lines in a tone of heavy irony: “We’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here!”
Every year, Mobile World Congress positions itself as the world’s meeting place for the Mobile industry. That’s OK. I get it. But every year, I increasingly wonder, whether it’s really still all about the “mobile world” after all. The fact is that MWC is slowly but surely losing its reason for existing as a mobile-focused event.
A 20 minute taxi drive away from the Gran Fira of MWC is the strangely-named 4YFN (“Four Years From Now”). This conference resembles your average future-focused startup conference these days: there’s a pitching stage, a main stage for speakers and panels to pontificate, an exhibition hall — the usual. But although claiming to attract a healthy 20,000 people, it’s oddly removed from Mobile World Congress, even though anyone who has an entrance pass to MWC also has full access to 4YFN. All the devices which are unveiled at MWC, will eventually run the apps and cloud services which the startups down the road are producing. And yet, they are stuck back in the city.
I hope the rumours are true that next year they will co-locate 4YFN in a new, large, annexe at the main MWC exhibition area.For slowly but surely, the issues that are discussed at MWC, are gradually resembling the solutions and startups showcased at 4YFN.
Source: Let’s face it, Mobile World Congress isn’t about the mobile any more | TechCrunch
When Amazon’s Cloud Goes Down
The dynamics between public and private cloud tip a little more towards private cloud every time that there is an outage or with each new generation of IT technology that folks like Cisco Systems, Dell/EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei Technologies, IBM or Lenovo bring to the market. It is unlikely that businesses will halt their march to the cloud and move back to hosting all their applications on the traditional bare metal or virtualized server environments that had been popular for the last 20 years, but these episodes may cause people to think a little harder about data location and availability. This makes private cloud more interesting. Hybrid IT, gives businesses a combination of their datacenters, co-location and external cloud for hosting applications that could be traditional, virtualized, public cloud or private cloud.
Source: With Its Recent Outage, Amazon Web Services Is Helping To Sell Hybrid IT
Blockchain Goes Legit
Blockchain was originally developed as the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. A vast, globally distributed ledger running on millions of devices, it is capable of recording anything of value. Money, equities, bonds, titles, deeds, contracts, and virtually all other kinds of assets can be moved and stored securely, privately, and from peer to peer, because trust is established not by powerful intermediaries like banks and governments, but by network consensus, cryptography, collaboration, and clever code.
For the first time in human history, two or more parties, be they businesses or individuals who may not even know each other, can forge agreements, make transactions, and build value without relying on intermediaries (such as banks, rating agencies, and government bodies such as the U.S. Department of State) to verify their identities, establish trust, or perform the critical business logic — contracting, clearing, settling, and record-keeping tasks that are foundational to all forms of commerce.
Given the promise and peril of such a disruptive technology, many firms in the financial industry, from banks and insurers to audit and professional service firms, are investing in blockchain solutions. What is driving this deluge of money and interest? Most firms cite opportunities to reduce friction and costs. After all, most financial intermediaries themselves rely on a dizzying, complex, and costly array of intermediaries to run their own operations. Santander, a European bank, put the potential savings at $20 billion a year. Capgemini, a consultancy, estimates that consumers could save up to $16 billion in banking and insurance fees each year through blockchain-based applications.
Connected Spenders
Middle class income is no longer enough to define the consumers that drive the global economy. As technology revolutionizes shopping, it’s creating a new consumer demographic—one that’s plugged in, ready to spend and at the forefront of consumer trends. Connected Spenders span all income levels and are defined by two characteristics: They have internet access and they are willing to spend their discretionary income. What’s more, new research from The Demand Institute projects that they will account for 46% (or $260 trillion) of global consumer spending over the next decade.
Source: Meet the Connected Spender, Digital Consumer of the Future
Tracking What You Look At
“Eye tracking sensors provide two main benefits,” says Oscar Werner, vice president of the eye tracking company Tobii Tech. “First, it makes a device aware of what the user is interested in at any given point in time. And second, it provides an additional way to interact with content, without taking anything else away. That means it increases the communication bandwidth between the user and the device.”
There’s a chance that soon eye tracking will be a standard feature of a new generation of smartphones, laptops and desktop monitors setting the stage for a huge reevaluation of the way we communicate with devices—or how they communicate with us.
Source: Unlocking the potential of eye tracking technology | TechCrunch
See also: Towson University eye-tracking lab
Will Voice-Enabled Gadgets Kill Google’s Cash Cow?
The big player in voice computing right now is Amazon, which sells the Amazon Echo speaker as well as a slew of new and coming products with the Alexa voice assistant built in. Amazon doesn’t need to make money from search ads. Instead, it can use Alexa as a way to encourage users to buy more stuff from Amazon and sign up for services like Amazon Prime.
Google makes its own voice-enabled gadgets to compete with the Echo, called the Home. The problem is that Google can sell plenty of Home devices, but they won’t make up for the bigger loss of ad revenue if voice really catches on and the world moves away from screens. Google needs to figure out a new type of ad or a new business model.
Source: Google CEO Sundar Pichai answers concerns over monetizing voice search – Business Insider
Top 20 Internship Fields
This is high season for securing a summer internship, an essential talent pipeline for employers and steppingstone for students. Postings peak in March, with 30,443 advertised positions in March 2016 (if you don’t have anything by May, you’re probably out of luck). But before sending that résumé, take a good hard look at what’s on it.
Source: Top 20 Fields for Internships: Get Your Skills On – The New York Times
How AI Will Grow Up
Machines contain the breadth of human knowledge, yet they have the common sense of a newborn. The problem is that computers don’t act enough like toddlers. Yann LeCun, director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook, demonstrates this by standing a pen on the table and then holding his phone in front of it. He performs a sleight of hand, and when he picks the phone up—ta-da! The pen is gone. It’s a trick that’ll elicit a gasp from any one-year-old child, but today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence software—and most months-old babies—can’t appreciate that the disappearing act isn’t normal. “Before they’re a few months old, you play this trick on them, and they don’t care,” says LeCun, a 54-year-old father of three. “After a few months, they figure out this is not normal.”
Source: The Future of Computers Is the Mind of a Toddler – Bloomberg
Tech is the End of the Middle Class
At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.
Source: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class | WIRED
New DJ Tech
Although selection may always be at the core of DJing, technology also plays a large part in how they practice their craft. Here we look at eight exciting new pieces of technology that are redefining the future of DJing.
Source: 8 New Technologies Redefining How DJs Play Live – hypebot
My Starbucks Barista
The launch of My Starbucks Barista comes amid the growing usage and adoption of voice-first devices.
- Voice usage is growing. In Q1 2016, 55% of US voice assistant users used their assistants regularly (daily or weekly), according to MindMeld. That’s up from 49% of users the previous quarter.
- Voice-first device shipments are increasing. Shipments of voice-first devices, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, will reach 24.5 million units in 2017, according to VoiceLabs’ recent State of the Industry report. That’s up from 6.5 million devices shipped in 2016.
Source: Starbucks unveils voice ordering – Business Insider
See also: What restaurateurs can learn from Starbuck’s mobile ordering challenges
Make America’s Robots Great Again
American factories still make a lot of stuff. In 2016, the United States hit a manufacturing record, producing more goods than ever. But you don’t hear much gloating about this because manufacturers made all this stuff without a lot of people. Thanks to automation, we now make 85 percent more goods than we did in 1987, but with only two-thirds the number of workers.
This suggests that while Mr. Trump can browbeat manufacturers into staying in America, he can’t force them to hire many people. Instead, companies will most likely invest in lots and lots of robots.
And there’s another wrinkle to this story: The robots won’t be made in America. They might be made in China.
Source: How to Make America’s Robots Great Again – The New York Times