Future Tech: What Geeks are talking about from Forbes Magazine

Investor’s Guide To IOT Part 4 – Adding Value In The Fog
This is the fourth and final installment of a 4-part series titled “Investor’s Guide to the IoT (Internet of Things)”. The four articles focus on the following topics:

Mobile Operators Can’t Roll Out Digital Services Fast Enough And Entrepreneurs Can Capitalise
Mobile operators are unable to roll out digital services fast enough to meet growing demand and this spells opportunity for smaller, more agile content providers as well as more modern services like Facebook and Netflix, says a new survey commissioned by telecom and IT solutions provider Tecnotree and carried out by analysts at mobilesquared, who provide data and intelligence on the mobile industry.

Why The Tech Industry Loves ‘Automation’
Not all software needs to be newly reinvented today. We can automate and reuse certain elements of functionality such as a word processor’s spellchecker intelligence. The same kind of thing might happen for a clock, a calculator, a currency converter or some other ‘element’ of software that has the potential to be used elsewhere. Automation intelligence in virtualized abstraction layers across software-defined cloud computing services is the new shape of IT.

Can This Guy Fix The 200-Million Unconnected Car Problem?
Parallel parking on the mean, crowded streets of San Francisco is a grueling rite of passage most newcomers can’t avoid. They soon learn that their 18-foot vehicles don’t fit neatly into 14-ft. parking spaces, but that doesn’t stop many SUV owners from trying, repeatedly bumping whatever cars parked unfortunately in front and behind them in the process. As a witness to such offenses, Chris Carson searched for a DropCam-like solution that would alert him if his street-parked Porsche was ever victim of similar assaults. When he didn’t find one, he did the typical Silicon Valley thing: he made one. In the process, he possibly solved one of the biggest transportation hurdles looming on the horizon: connecting all those unconnected cars on the road.

Antoine Blondeau – The CEO Of The AI Company With The Highest Valuation In The World
Sentient Technologies has patented evolutionary and perceptual capabilities that provide customers with highly sophisticated solutions, powered by the largest compute grid dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence. The company also has a war chest of $143 million in venture investment, the most of any artificial intelligence company. Antoine Blondeau founded Sentient Technologies nearly nine years ago, though it was in stealth mode for the majority of that period.

Infosys Innovation Is A Grassroots Movement
“We started hoping to mine our 8,000+ current client projects for innovation,” said Ravi Kumar S., EVP & Chief Delivery Officer for Infosys, a leading tech consulting and IT services firm. “After looking at 4 or 5, we got excited because we’d found numerous ways to improve client outcomes,” he continued. “Also, we realized it would take a decade to review the rest of them.” Instead, the company decided to unleash a grassroots effort to encourage, tee-up, and vet the best innovative ideas emerging at the points where its people interacted with their clients. The program, launched last April, was appropriately titled Zero Distance. “Most ideation frameworks are anti-innovation,” Kumar explained. “So our initial phase was to provoke ideation and participation with a call to action, informed with just enough design principles to guide the process without dictating it.” To prompt that internal peer momentum, it identified 300 or so influencers across the company who’d serve as initial evangelists for the first 5 weeks after the program was launched last April. The team, dubbed them “The Jedi,” helped encourage incremental, adjacent and cross-functional ideas that could be subsequently celebrated. “Once we had that momentum, we added a social tech platform for posting and sharing the templates, which pushed the conversation further along,” Kumar said.

WhatsApp Is Ending Support For BlackBerry
In a major blow to BlackBerry’s turnaround efforts in mobile, the world’s biggest messaging service won’t work on its phones by the end of 2016.

NASA Venus Landsail Rover Could Launch In 2023
NASA continues working towards a Venus landsail surface rover that could see launch as early as 2023 and mark the first time in a generation that any probe has landed on the planet’s hot, rocky surface. After a five month journey from Earth, the lander-rover — about the size of a windsurfing board — would begin a nominal 50-day surface mission.

Investor’s Guide to IOT Part 3 – IOT Platforms And Services
This is the third installment of a 4-part series titled “Investor’s Guide to the IoT (Internet of Things)”. The four articles will focus on the following topics:

Gartner’s Top 10 Internet Of Things Technologies For 2017 & 2018
Gartner predicts that low-power short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks. For enterprises to adopt and gain the full value of these technologies, significantly higher investments in training are needed. Gartner’s Top 10 IoT technologies provide a glimpse into what their clients are most interested in today.

Investor’s Guide to IOT Part 2 – Understanding The IOT Vendor Landscape
This is the second installment of a 4-part series titled “Investor’s Guide to the IoT (Internet of Things)”. The four articles will focus on the following topics: Part 1 – Understanding the IoT Ecosystem

Astronomers Create Largest-Ever Catalog Of Cosmic Voids
Astronomers have released the largest and most extensive catalog of cosmic voids ever generated — extending out some 8 billion light years in an area covering a quarter of the sky, mostly observable from the Northern hemisphere.

ZOTAC Expands Its Enthusiast Product Offerings With Ultra-Fast PCIe NVMe SONIX SSD
Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, is an interface specification specifically designed for attaching solid state storage media – like NAND flash – to computers via PCI Express. Part of the reason NVMe came to be is because solid state drives quickly began to bump into limitations of the legacy, and ubiquitous SATA interface.  In real world situations, for example, the SATA interface tops out at roughly 550MB/s, which many entry level solid state drives can now achieve with sequential reads. NVMe is not bound by that limitation, and the spec incorporates many other things, like a higher max queue depth, to squeeze much more performance form solid state storage media.

MINIX Bolsters Its Media-Focused Small Form Factor PC Line-Up With Silent, Intel-Powered NGC-1
Small form factor computers have been steadily increasing in popularity for the last few years. Whether we’re talking about ultra-tiny, specialized systems like the diminutive undefinedIntel Compute Stick or sleek, two-in-one systems with clean lines and touch-screens, the power efficiency and relatively miniscule footprint of today’s processors have enabled a wide array of attractive small form factor systems that have resonated with consumers.

Prynt: Transforming an iPhone Into a Polaroid
Two months ago, I previewed in this column several new future-like, functional iPhone cases that were soon coming to market. One of them, the Prynt Case, has hit virtual store shelves. Essentially, it’s a one-inch thick sleeve that your iPhone slides into (note: There is also a version for Samsung phones) and turns your iPhone into a Polaroid camera. The sleeve houses photo paper and acts as a printer.

Sexperts Agree: Mix High Tech And Low Key For A Blissful 2016
Four top sexperts weigh in on 2016’s hottest toys and trends, some long-term favorites, and how to get comfortable enough to lay back and enjoy.

FashHacking Their Way To The Top: The Well Heeled Londoners Behind The Fash-Tech Movement
Anyone who has seen the YouTube video of Bill Gates and senior Microsoft executives celebrating the launch of Windows 95 by dancing on-stage would be hard pressed to make a case for the tech industry being sexy.

SpaceX Falcon Rocket Successfully Launches

SpaceX Postpones Falcon 9 Launch Again
SpaceX has called off its second attempt in as many days to launch the SES-9 satellite into orbit, citing “technical difficulties”.

Incredible Photos Of Pluto From New Horizons

Pluto’s North Pole Is Covered In Frozen Canyons
NASA’s New Horizons has found frozen canyons at Pluto’s North Pole that seem to indicate an ancient period of tectonic activity on the planet.

A New Big Data Predictive Analytics Solution For Ocean Carriers
In logistics, we have not seen all that many examples of Big Data analytics. That is beginning to change.

Microsoft Acquires Cross-Platform Xamarin To Drive ‘Universal Windows’ Dream
Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile software development specialist. The move is essentially a case of Microsoft trying to help its developer community to build apps that could prove poplar on every device and platform.

This Company Wants To Change How We Use Eye Tracking Technology
At the world’s largest mobile event, Mobile World Congress, Feb 22 to 25, 2016 in Barcelona, there’s always a bombardment new features from device makers. This year is no different where the highlights included Huawei’s new MateBook, Samsung Galaxy’s S7 and the new devices running Microsoft’s Windows.

Xiaomi Boldly Undercuts Samsung And Apple With $300 Mi5
In trying to regain marketshare from Apple, Xiaomi has gone back to doing what it does best: making high-end phones for a very low price.

Next-Gen ATLAS Robot Won’t Be Pushed Around By Humans
The next-generation ATLAS robot is here and it’s quieter, smarter and much, much steadier on its feet.

63% Of Companies Operating In The Cloud Can Develop An App In 3 Months Or Less
79% of IT teams are currently developing apps for customers, partners and employees. 68% of CIOs predict they will spend more on mobile applications, cloud migration and security in the next two years. 56% of IT leaders are experiencing a skills gap in data engineering. IT leaders list cloud migration as a top priority in 2016.

Huge Meteor Explodes Over Earth – But No-one Notices
The largest meteor impact on Earth since Chelyabinsk is chewing up headlines today, although it happened weeks ago and no-one noticed.

Digital Disconnect Between User Experience And Business Results: Report
While digital leaders still struggle to put the pieces together, at least there’s a broad understanding of the need for real-time, end-to-end visibility into the customer experience. Furthermore, there is no shortage of performance management tools on the market. Given the extraordinarily competitive nature of the digital landscape today, it’s only a matter of time until enterprises finally get their digital acts together.

Get Ready For The Chat Bot Revolution: They’re Simple, Cheap And About To Be Everywhere
When we’ve got our noses poked into smartphones for hours each day, it’s hard to believe that apps are starting to hit the end of the road. Yet studies consistently show that smartphone users have condensed their daily screentime time into just a handful of favourite apps, often a browser, a couple of chat and social apps and maybe a game or two.

ARM Holdings Releases A Very Tiny Core For IoT And Wearables
Devices are getting smarter and connected – this is a common industry saying and the basis for excitement about IoT. Much of these connected devices run on processors designed by ARM Holdings, PLC  of Cambridge, UK. The company estimates that over 60 billion (with a “b”) chips have shipped with its cores inside. It’s fair to say ARM is the preeminent supplier of processor chip-level intellectual property (IP) to IoT, a market that Intel trying to grow as PC sales decline. Still, the need to connect more devices and make more devices intelligent keeps moving forward.

Mark Zuckerberg And Virtual Reality Outshine Samsung’s Galaxy S7
Samsung is making a bold bet on virtual reality as smartphone growth continues to slow.

Ripple: A New Buzz Electrifying Coffee
Coffee fanatics, it’s time to get even more excited. A new product is transforming your favorite drink into a much more personal experience. Literally. It all started when two friends — both industrial designers — were sitting in an Israeli coffee shop. They were staring into the cups of their lattes and noticed the white froth.

Kanye West Might Be The Future Of Tech
Kanye West’s Donda might be poised to change the future of tech, entertainment and well, pretty much everything.

Google Cloud Vision Helps Computers To ‘See’ Pictures
The Google Cloud Vision venture is developing. The project is designed to help computers ‘see’ images and understand what they depict and represent. Heavily aligned towards the needs of software application developers looking to incorporate image recognition and understanding into their apps, this is essentially part of emerging machine-learning technologies currently in their ascendancy.

Is Drone Racing The New Superbowl For Brands?
There are a few ways to pique my interest in this cynical and ‘seen-it-all’ world we live in.  One of these ways is to receive more than 30 million hits on your first two events doing something.  The videos in question were an introductory video for drone racing and limited footage from two races.  If you aren’t sure what drone racing is imagine an empty stadium, shopping mall or large space with a series of rings in it that flying drones are piloted through at staggering speed.  There are crashes, collisions and some serious adrenalin involved.  Drone racing now has a league, imaginatively titled ‘Drone Racing League’ or DRL – and has more than $8m in investor funding from some impressive names including RSE Ventures, CAA Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Strauss Zelnick (CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software), Allen Debevoise (founder of Machinima), Grant Gittlin (CXO of Medialink), Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Lux Capital, Courtside Ventures, and Gary Vaynerchuk with Vayner/RSE.