trends
Design In The Age Of AI
We’re on the cusp of a new era of design. Beyond the two-dimensional focus on graphics and the three-dimensional focus on products, we’re now in an era where designers are increasingly focusing on time and space, guided by technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and smart environments.
Source: 10 Principles For Design In The Age Of AI | Co.Design | business + design
Microsoft Declares Psych War on Apple
Even if Microsoft loses out to a sale to a MacBook, it has changed the mindset of a consumer from an automatic purchase to a considered purchase. The Surface range was in play, even for a short time. These tiny moments of mind share will add up over weeks, months, and perhaps years, and the thinking will be that these tiny drips will wear down one of Apple’s weakest areas in its portfolio to Microsoft’s advantage.
The connected car craze
The Internet of Things has created a new market in the automotive industry, which is showing no signs of slowing down. Connected cars and their associated services are expected to grow from $13.6 to over $42 billion by 2022.
A glimpse of our collective future can be seen in Cadillac’s Book by Cadillac entrance — an on-demand, luxury lifestyle-driven vehicles by subscription. The $1,500-a-month car subscription service allows members to swap out different models of high-end sedans and SUVs, beginning in New York in February. It’s the same business model as ClassPass or Netflix, but for the GM-owned Cadillac brand, competing with the likes of Audi’s luxury mobility offering, Audi on Demand.
Tostitos’ Party Bag Will Help Call Uber If You’re Drunk
Doritos might have crashed out of the Super Bowl after a decade of fun ads, but Frito-Lay still has a few party tricks up its sleeve for this year’s big game. The chip maker’s Tostitos brand has made a limited-edition “Party Safe” bag that can tell when you’ve been drinking, and will help you get home safely from that Super Bowl party.
The special bag, created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, comes equipped with a sensor connected to a microcontroller calibrated to detect small traces of alcohol on a person’s breath. If any alcohol is detected, the sensor turns red and forms the image of a steering wheel, along with an Uber code and a “Don’t drink and drive” message. The bag also uses near-field communication (NFC) technology, allowing fans to tap the bag with their phone to call a ride. With Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Tostitos will offer partygoers $10 off their Uber ride during and after the Feb. 5 game.
Source: Tostitos’ New Party Bag Knows When You’ve Been Drinking and Will Even Call You an Uber | Adweek
The Rise of Programmatic Advertising
Ad tech companies are intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, and add value to the ad delivery process by consolidating inventory, automating workflows, and offering precise targeting capabilities at scale. The automation of ad buying is also known as “programmatic advertising” — that is, using technology and software to buy digital ads. Programmatic ad spend in the US is quickly ramping up: It will top $20 billion this year and reach $38.5 billion by year-end 2020.
Schools That Graduate The Most Unicorns
Domenichino, The Virgin with the Unicorn, (working under Annibale Carracci), 1604 – 1605, Fresco, Farnese Palace, Rome., Source: Wikimedia Commons
Stanford is the winner by a mile, with 51. Harvard comes in a distant second, with 37. The University of California with its 10 campuses, trails in third place with 17, and the Indian Institute of Technology, at 13, comes in fourth.
Why care about unicorn founders? Since November 2013, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term in a TechCrunch article, the business world has come to see a $1 billion valuation as a benchmark for breakout success in the growing field of venture-backed startups.
Source: The Schools That Graduate The Most Billion-Dollar Startup Founders
Gen X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials
We all know the stereotype: silly millennials, tethered to their phones, unable to accomplish the simplest tasks without scrolling their Instagram feeds, snapping their friends and/or tweeting inanely. But a Nielsen report released this month shows that Americans ranging from the ages of 18 to 34 are less obsessed with social media than some of their older peers.
Source: Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds – The New York Times
Movies Starring You in a Thousand Plotlines
Moriarty believes that as computer graphics improve, the faces of actors, or even political figures, could be subtly altered to echo the viewer’s own features, to make them more sympathetic. Lifelike avatars could even replace actors entirely, at which point narratives could branch in nearly infinite directions. Directors would not so much build films around specific plots as conceive of generalized situations that computers would set into motion, depending on how viewers reacted.
“What we are looking at here is a breakdown in what a story even means—in that a story is defined as a particular sequence of causally related events, and there is only one true story, one version of what happened,” Moriarty said. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality—technology akin to Pokémon Go—there is no reason that a movie need be confined to a theatrical experience. “The line between what is a movie and what is real is going to be difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet, but it is something like this.”
Source: The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines – The New Yorker
Big Ten Network to Air League of Legends E-Games
In a recognition of the popularity of e-sports on college campuses, most Big Ten universities will field teams in the multiplayer online game League of Legends and compete in a style resembling conference play, in a partnership with the Big Ten Network. Besides streaming competitions on the internet, the Big Ten Network will broadcast select games, including the championship in late March, weekly on its cable network, which is available to more than 60 million households nationally. In the first broadcast, on Jan. 30, teams from the Big Ten’s two newest members, Rutgers and Maryland, will face off, according to a Big Ten Network spokesman.
Source: Big Ten Universities Entering a New Realm: E-Sports – The New York Times
Censoring App Stores
App stores backed by giant corporations have created choke points for the internet, which governments are now exploiting. In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, last week, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the country to register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.
Source: Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier – The New York Times
The Age of Alexa
The overall play for Amazon, says Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson, is to continue to make Alexa more useful with more smart home integration and more media capabilities. Why? The more people use Alexa devices, the more likely they are to spend money on Amazon. And so, unlike many rivals, it can afford to take a loss on the gadgets. “Amazon will increasingly subsidize Echo by bundling content (think music, video) with the device,” Husson says. “They can afford this since this is not core to their business model: the end-goal is to facilitate interactions.”
Source: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider
See also: Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017
Why AI Poker Is Very Hard
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“In a complete information game you can solve a subtree of the game tree,” says Professor Tuomas Sandholm, who built the Libratus system with PhD student Noam Brown. AI trying to win a game of chess or Go can work through how a sequence of moves will play out. “With incomplete-information games, it’s not like that at all. You can’t know what cards the other player has been dealt,” he explains. “That means you don’t know exactly what subgame you’re in. Also, you don’t know which cards chance will produce next from the deck.”
Incomplete information games have thus far proved much harder to solve. CMU’s AI focuses on information sets, a grouping of possible states that take into account the known and unknown variables. It’s a massive mathematical undertaking. “The game has 10 to the power of 160 information sets, and 10 to the power of 165 nodes in the game tree,” says Sandholm. That means there are more possible permutations in a hand of poker than atoms in our universe. “And even if you had another whole universe for each atom in our universe and counted all the atoms in those universes, it would be more than that.”
Source: This AI will battle poker pros for $200,000 in prizes – The Verge
See also:
VR Done Dirt Cheap
The Within app uses 360-degree video technology, similar to virtual technology.
A variety of apps, some using Google’s Cardboard viewer, allow users to sample films and games with 3-D imagery.
Source: Virtual Reality on the Cheap? Try These Apps on Your Phone – The New York Times
2 Google Home Bots Trying to Dialog
Two Google Home devices are deep in conversation. And thousands are watching the robots attempt to mimic human interaction. The bots’ ongoing chat, which has ranged from the meaning of life, religion, love, ninjas and Chuck Norris, is streaming on Twitch. The video has had nearly 780,000 views as of Friday afternoon since it started streaming a few days ago.The bots have been aptly named Vladimir and Estragon, perfect for their endless chatter reminiscent of the two perpetually waiting characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
Source: 2 Google Homes sound like they are drunk flirting, and the internet can’t get enough
Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017
Amazon isn’t at CES in any formal capacity, but once again, it seems to be everywhere thanks to Alexa. Since opening up its voice assistant to other companies’ products, we’ve seen it put in all types of gadgets and gain some strange integrations. And at CES this week, the continuation of that is one of the biggest trends we’ve seen. Here are the highlights:
- Westinghouse, Element, and Seiki are all building TVs that include Fire TV software and a remote that includes Alexa voice control.
- LG put Alexa in a refrigerator, which also has a giant 29-inch touchscreen.
- LG also put Alexa into Hub, its smart home robot.
- Lenovo’s Smart Assistant is basically an Echo by a different name.
- Mattel’s Aristotle is sort of like an Echo, but with features designed to help parents care for newborns.
- Bixi is making a portable puck with Alexa in it.
- GE is presenting its LED ring lamp, which is kind of like what would happen if you put a halo on an Echo Dot.
- Omaker made a portable speaker with Alexa.
- Onvocal made these horrible business neckbuds with Alexa.
- This five-device charging dock includes a speaker with Alexa support.
- A dancing robot.
- A prototype alarm clock.
- A “bedside clock speaker,” which I think is sort of like an alarm clock.
- LG made a wide-eyed robot that uses Alexa.
- Ford is putting Alexa in Fusions and F-150s. Yes, cars!
- Volkswagen plans to do the same (with its own cars, not the F-150).
- Inrix is integrating Alexa with its OpenCar platform. More cars!
- Huawei is including an Alexa app by default on its new Mate 9 smartphone.
- Martian put Alexa in its mVoice smartwatch (poor implementation though).
- Alexa is also inside this creepy eyeball camera.
Source: Amazon’s Alexa is everywhere at CES 2017 – The Verge
Net Freedom 2016
- Internet freedom around the world declined in 2016 for the sixth consecutive year.
- Two-thirds of all internet users — 67 percent — live in countries where criticism of the government, military, or ruling family are subject to censorship.
- Social media users face unprecedented penalties, as authorities in 38 countries made arrests based on social media posts over the past year.
- Globally, 27 percent of all internet users live in countries where people have been arrested for publishing, sharing, or merely “liking” content on Facebook.
- Governments are increasingly going after messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, which can spread information quickly and securely.
Consumer Electronics Show 2017
A look at the trends that will matter at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: Ultra HD TV, smart home and drones.
Source: What to Know About CES 2017 – The New York Times
See also:
Fake News & The Algorithmic Timeline
2016 was the year of “post fact” news, but it was also the year of post-new news. 2016 was the year of the algorithmic timeline, in which tech companies dismantled the concept of time entirely.This year saw Facebook, Twitter and Instagram occupy the role of mainstream media publishers, whether or not they chose to admit it. Each platform instituted similar changes: their “timeline” would no longer display the most recent story at the top, but would use algorithms to decide on what individual users most wanted to see. Depending on our friendships and actions, the system might deliver old news, biased news, or news which had already been disproven. In many cases what we saw was speculation and rumor; stories which weren’t really news at all.
Source: Why 2016 Was the Year of the Algorithmic Timeline | Motherboard
The Great A.I. Awakening
How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.
Bot Gender
By creating interactions that encourage consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects. They may overlook this hazard in part because these workers are, for the most part, men. The field of artificial intelligence has been accused of still lower gender diversity than the tech sector generally. Although women held fifty-seven per cent of all professional jobs last year, they held only a quarter of computing jobs; Latina and black women held just one and three per cent of those jobs, respectively. Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford who helped pioneer computer vision, has recently advocated for greater diversity among A.I. workers, including gender diversity, citing the biases that have plagued machine-learning algorithms.
Source: The Bot Politic – The New Yorker