Future Tech: What Geeks are talking about from Forbes Magazine

Here is the latest Future Tech News from Forbes Magazine.

Google’s A.I. Program AlphaGo Claims Second Victory Against ‘Go’ Champion
AlphaGo just needs to win its third match on Saturday to claim overall victory in the human vs. A.I. tournament

Do These 2 Co-founders Hold The Secrets To Startup Success?
In the startup world they call it the “secret sauce”; those unknown elements that help make a collaboration between 2 or more founders greater than the sum of its parts.

Would A ‘Brexit’ Spell Disaster For London’s Tech Innovators?
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has apparently passed comment on a British exit (‘Brexit’) from the European Union (EU). So too has Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who yesterday was interpreted as indicating his support for staying in or ‘Bremaining’. But what potential consequences loom for London’s IT sector and innovators from a Brexit?

Google Makes A.I. History By Beating World ‘Go’ Champion
Its AlphaGo computer just beat Lee Sedol at the ultra-complex game, a landmark as important as Deep Blue?s win over chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Microsoft Is Testing Azure IoT Platform From The Stratosphere
Microsoft is attempting to pull off a rare feat that may be hard for its competitors to emulate. The team at Microsoft Research is deploying a balloon in the stratosphere loaded with sensors and cameras, which is connected to the Azure IoT platform. The balloon will send real-time telemetry along with live flight video.

Alexa Is Helping Amazon Win The Smart Home Game
The smart home market is extremely crowded and fragmented. Tech-savvy consumers who are the early adopters of home automation products are struggling with the incompatibility of devices. This segment is predominantly controlled by Apple through HomeKit, Google through Nest, and Amazon through Echo. Surprisingly, it’s Amazon that’s gaining the mindshare and market share.

Intuit Announces Sale Of QuickBase Low-Code Platform
Low-code platforms like QuickBase empower a wide range of people with little to no programming skills – known as ‘citizen developers’ – to build enterprise-class applications that run on mobile, desktop, or web. Such applications can meet the needs of the business quickly and efficiently, and can be an important part of how transformed IT organizations empower self-service capabilities as part of broader enterprise digital transformation initiatives.

Stunning Photos Of Google’s Massive Data Centers

Messaging App Fleep Wants To Make You Love Email Again, Then Help You Switch To Something Better
I recently caught up with Henn Ruukel, founder of Fleep, a messaging service that combines team chat and email into one simple to use platform. This week the team announced that company email can now be sent and received within their platform. Is this the end of email as we know it?

Meet Tina, The Clever Chat Bot Charming 2.6 Million People In Iran
Anna Farzaneh has plenty of friends to socialize with when she’s not working as an interior designer in Tehran, Iran. But about once or twice a week, on evenings when something heavier is on her mind and she can’t thinking of the right friend to call, she’ll turn to Tina.

The Experiment Is Over: Google Opens Its Project Fi Wireless Service To All
It drops the invite-only requirement and throws in a Nexus 5X for $200 in the hopes of bringing on a wave of new customers.

The Magic of Universal Orlando: Revealing the Technology Behind the Rides
I just saw a man run through a wall. He simply disappeared as he met the bricks. And I’m not sure how he did it.

MapR: Converged Data, What It Means And How It Works
The days of the plain old database are gone, it seems. Today we see IT vendors offering ‘data platforms’ as a whole. These compound multi-modal technologies can feature everything from a relational database management system (RDBMS) to a wider software base for converging data tasks in one place.

What Is The Best Platform For Building A Budget Gaming PC?
What Is The Best Platform For Building A Budget Gaming PC? This question was originally answered on Quora by Jae Alexis Lee.

Machines Will Never Replace Men (Danger: Slippery Slope Ahead)
A couple of recent news stories and the responses they have generated got me thinking once again about the slippery slope fallacy, whereby an event is presented as the catalyst for a chain of other events, even though there is no evidence to support the thesis.

Fitbit Blaze Reviews Are In: Is The Stock Crash Justified?
We were all expecting Fitbit to reveal a new flagship at CES back in January but, instead, the fitness tracking giant took the covers off of the Fitbit Blaze – a “smart fitness watch” that sits between the Charge HR and the Surge in the San Francisco company’s ever expanding product range.

Watch Google’s AI Try To Beat World’s Best Go Player
An artificial intelligence system from Google’s DeepMind unit on Tuesday will try to beat the very top player in the ancient Chinese board game Go.

Why Your Digital Strategy Needs A Little Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent
The streets of West Hollywood will be quieter than normal tonight as Season 8 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race premieres on Logo TV at 9/8C.  If you aren’t yet initiated, Ru Paul’s Drag Race is a competition where multiple drag queens face off against one another with a dizzying array of challenges each week for a title and some hefty prizes to boot.   Beyond the TV show is a vibrant ecosystem that not only supports the show but keeps it bubbling along when the show is being shot.

BMW Reveals First Of Four Concept Cars To Show The Future Driving
A dashboard that changes shape, seats that swivel, and switching between self and autonomous driving modes. What will BMW’s future vehicles look like?

Strategy In Junior Auto Racing Series Gets Serious
On Sunday, the 2016 season of America’s IndyCar Series will get under-way in St Petersburg Florida but, for once, the most revolutionary technical development will make its début lower down the race card.

Machine Learning Needs A Human-In-The-Loop
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a problem — it’s artificial. To be fair, AI and its sister disciplines of machine learning, cognitive computing, sentiment analysis and neural networking have a problem — they’re artificially created through the power of software developers’ algorithms. Computers are great at analysing tough tactical situations, but are still not as good as humans at understanding long term strategy. The planet is still safe, for now.

Google Could Easily Decide The Next U.S. President
Since 2013, Robert Epstein and colleagues have conducted a number of experiments in the US and India to determine whether search results can impact people’s political opinions.

Jailed Facebook Exec Says There’s ‘No Data’ To Give Brazilian Authorities
Diego Dzodan says he was ‘treated with respect’ during his 24 hours behind bars, but it would have been impossible to hand over encrypted WhatsApp messages to officials.

Four Reasons Today’s Disruptive Innovations Are Better And Cheaper, And What To Do About It
Technology that drives better and cheaper innovation isn’t just a random event. Four converging economic trends are driving the phenomenon, certain to disrupt industries far from computers and consumer electronics with Big Bangs yet to come.

Six Lessons Learned From Kronos’ Cloud Computing Strategy
90% of new Kronos software purchases are cloud-based today, and there are 17,000 active customers on Kronos Cloud. Kronos’ latest release is written in HTML5 in response to customers’ requests for greater user interface flexibility and a more intuitive user experience. Providing customers the freedom to define their cadence of cloud adoption from licensed on-premise software and not forcing migration with pricing or contracts is key. Enabling a direct line of communication from Customer Advisory Councils and go-live reports to the CEO brings urgency to achieving customer satisfaction and taking action on new product and service ideas.

Facebook Messenger Adds Music Sharing With Spotify Integration
In another step towards turning Messenger into a platform for sharing everything, Facebook has integrated its first music sharing service into the chat app.

This $100 Security System Could Protect Your Home From Burglars
With a sub-$100 home security product, Korner used to have to convince consumers is really worked. Now they can just show people their product in action on the 5 o’clock news.

IoT Will Drive PaaS Adoption, Just Not The Way You’d Expect
Platform as a Service (PaaS) adoption has been slow to gain broad acceptance in enterprises. We’ve seen some large enterprises embrace PaaS within in a specific product line or vertical within a company, but it is rare that we see PaaS as an architecture standard adopted across an entire company.

Using Google’s Deep Learning AI To Geolocate Global News Imagery
What it looks like to feed 19.6 million global news images into Google?s deep learning algorithms to estimate their location and put them all on a map

Space Voyage with DiCaprio, Everest with Cousteau: Tycoon Vasily Klyukin is a Real Life Walter Mitty
Flying into space with Oscar winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, trekking Mt. Everest with Philippe Cousteau by helicopter, taking selfies with wild elephants, this is the daily life for famed Russian businessman, philanthropist and designer Vasily Klyukin.

Bugatti Chiron Survives To Generate Superlatives After VW “Dieselgate” Threat
The Bugatti Chiron is the fastest road car in the world with a top speed of about 260 mph. It is the most expensive one too, priced at $2.6 million before taxes. It is the world’s first production sports to produce 1,500 hp, and its 8.0 liter 16-cylinder engine will blast the car from rest to 60 mph in just over two seconds.

IMAX And NASA Partner On Epic ‘A Beautiful Planet’ Documentary
Very few humans have ever had the privilege of experiencing life in outer space or witnessing the breathtaking view of Earth from outside of our atmosphere firsthand. The closest most of us will get is by watching ‘A Beautiful Planet’—a new IMAX feature created in cooperation with NASA.

The Best Of The Geneva Motor Show

Sexiest, Most Expensive And Fastest Cars At The Geneva Auto Show
The Bugatti Chiron, at $2.6 million before tax and 260 mph, is the fastest and most expensive supercar at the Geneva Car Show. Is the Aston Martin DB11 the sexiest?

How Do You Sell Lots Of Smart Home Gear? Scare Off A Burglar, Natch
With a sub-$100 home security product, Korner used to have to convince consumers is really worked. Now they can just show people their product in action on the 5 o’clock news.

10 Cars With The Worst Resale Values

New ‘Smart’ Tires Coming For Self-Driving Cars
Designed specifically for the coming generation of autonomous driving cars, Goodyear unveiled two concepts that are miles ahead of today’s tires in terms of technology and safety, one with a shape resembling a children’s kickball that will allow a car to move in all directions.

How APIs Drive New Digital Business
Aren’t we tired of talking about this so-called drive towards ‘digital disruption’ yet? It appears not, but there might still a few fresh themes and avenues to explore. Let’s remember, 100 years ago (during the second industrial revolution), firms still had a Chief Electricity Officer (CEO) to handle this new thing called electricity. If we accept that we’ve just been through the third industrial revolution (the PC era) and the disruption that mobile-first has brought to technology, the fourth industrial revolution (the digital global business era) has yet to be fully played out. This month’s ‘I ♥ APIs’ event in the city of London threw up some new angles and notions in relation to the way software APIs connect to new value chains being created in the new digital economy.

WhatsApp Challenges Slack And E-Mail With New File-Sharing Feature
A new update has made it possible for users to share encrypted documents in a chat.

Innovation At Experian: Build, Don’t Just Buy
When Experian’s Eric Haller put his 5-slide proposal for an innovation lab in front of his boss’s boss back in 2010, the exec stopped him at the second slide and said, “I’ve wanted to do this for years, so I’ll give you the money if you can find the people.” “I can’t remember what was on that first slide,” admits Haller, who now runs Experian’s DataLabs in San Diego, London, and San Paolo. “It probably talked about product cycles, and the competencies we needed to build it out.” Haller’s experience managing products, strategic partnerships, and M&A for the credit bureau had made him think about the time it took to find the right acquisitions, the risk inherent in those relationships, and the overall inefficiencies inherent in the “buy” approach to innovation. “Even though M&A will always be an important and fundamental part of our strategy, high risk, growth R&D opportunities were not always organically funded within the company,” he said. With that in mind, that boss’s boss (Kerry Williams, now global chief operating officer and Haller’s boss) convened the presidents of Experian’s four business units over dinner, let Haller get through all of his slides, and then hit them up for the funding. Each committed to three years, with the requirement of a monthly status meeting. Literally the next day, Haller started working his network to recruit what he calls “navy seals of data science…the kinds of folks you find in startups,” and had his core team of 8 staff in place three weeks later. Each got an assessment of Experian’s businesses and strategic goals, and was given a week to come up with questions for meetings with the units less than a week later. “We skipped the overviews, and fast-forwarded to Q&A and conversation,” said Haller. “It let us compile a list of opportunities for our existing data, which we distilled into a dozen or so initiatives that could get to market the fastest, and have the highest likelihood of success.”

Top 10 Autonomous Car Facts: When Will Self-Driving Cars Arrive, What’s Holding Them Up?
At the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January Audipresented its new E-tron Quattro concept car. As a 100-percent electric vehicle with a 310-mile range between charges, not to mention the latest in autonomous driving technology, the E-tron Quattro is a fairly accurate representation of how Audi’s first fully-autonomous car will look — and drive. But even more interesting than the concept car was the background information provided by Audi’s team of engineers responsible for this advanced vehicle.

Indispensible & Obvious Technology Trends – #4 in the Nasty 6-Pack for Digital Entrepreneurs
This is part 4 of a 6-part series where I discuss a set of start/build/exit best practices for digital entrepreneurs.

Microsoft Locks Down Another Popular Smartphone Star
If you’re keeping track of Microsoft’s recent acquisitions, you can ink in the purchase of SwiftKey. Microsoft confirmed today that it has completed the acquisition of SwiftKey including the popular SwiftKey keyboard for Android and iOS, SwiftKey’s predictive technology, and SwiftKey’s ongoing research into artificial intelligence.

Is this One-of-a-Kind Coupe the Most Eco-Friendly Car in the World?
Developed by UK-based creative firm Riversimple, “Rasa” is even greener than your typical hydrogen-powered auto.

Are Political Speeches Written By Computer Programs? Could You Tell If They Were?
Can you tell the difference between a political speech written by a computer and one written by a speechwriter? Listen to both and consider why some might find the program troubling.

Women In Technology: The Challenge And The Responsibility
Is it almost reverse logic in some ways to call out ‘women in technology’ as an issue that needs addressing? Surely it should just be people in technology, some of whom are women, right? The truth is that yes, in some ways it becomes a negative — but there is an imbalance in the industry and so its even worse if we don’t do it.

An Immigrant Entrepreneur With A Gift For Data Finds A Little-Noticed Niche: Tiny Grocers
There are a couple of moments Mohamed Aly particularly remembers when he thinks about the long journey to bring his dream of starting a company to reality.

Google Research Team Makes Unexpected Find Regarding Solid State Flash Storage
In a technical session at the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant of Google Inc., and Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto, with help from the Platforms Storage Team at Google, presented some surprising data about the reliability of flash storage in big-iron, data-center production environments.

Honda Bets That Cars Are The Next Mobile Payment Platform
The future of mobile commerce could be in the car. Honda teamed with Visa to demonstrate at the 2016 Mobile World Congress that apps embedded in its infotainments system could soon be used to pay for items without leaving the comfort of their car.