technology
We’d all be better off with our health records on Facebook
We’d all be better off with our health records on Facebook
There is no unified, single patient record—every doctor I’ve ever visited has his or her own separate copy of my records. And in an age where we can conduct banking transactions on my smartphone, many patients still can’t access or contribute to the medical records their doctors keep for them.$
Controversial but not baseless. Should a private company solve this problem?
Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
The naysayers were out in force. “Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense,” bleated Wired‘s Marcus Wohlsen. Dan Lyons reacted to the piece with a condemnation of “the credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes,” again complaining that drone deliveries are “years away.” The Guardian‘s James Bell dismissed it as “little more than a publicity stunt,” and added: “what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?” And Slate called it “hot air” and compared it to an April Fool’s joke.
What is wrong with these people? Do they moonlight as stock analysts who only care about the next quarter’s results? Do they have no vision at all? Do they not care about anything unless it will directly interact with them tomorrow, or at the absolute latest, next year? They’re the same ilk who, I’m sure, claimed that credit cards would never work, that merchants would never adopt them, that people would not use them, that fraud would make their use untenable.
I fully agree with Jon Evans. People say it won’t happen. But can you now imagine a world where this kind of stuff does not exist? I’m not sure. It looks like it’s bound to happen. “Is it bad?” is the correct question, not “will it happen?”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a drone-delivery service for Amazon Prime customers, Amazon Prime Air yesterday on 60 minutes.
That’s what I was thinking about here.
You can learn more about it here.
Don’t expect it before a number of years, though.
Was Snapchat right in refusing the $3 billion offer from Facebook?
Was Snapchat right in refusing the $3 billion offer from Facebook?
Michael Carney writing for PandoDaily:
The answer boils down to your belief about whether the company can defy the odds and stay hot within the notoriously fickly teen and young adult demographic. Because that’s what this valuation is all about: teens. Facebook is losing its grip on young social users; SnapChat has them in spades.
What will Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy come up with to make teens stick to the service? How will they monetise?
The real problem here is that if teens just change their mind about Snapchat, or suddenly find Facebook attractive again, the trend will fade away. There needs to be constant innovation in terms of stickiness (making people want to use the app and especially come back) and the Snapchat team should not be resting on the sight of exponential user growth.
Amid intensifying interest from deep-pocketed investors, the startup is looking to raise up to $200 million at a valuation of $3 to $4 billion, according to people briefed on the matter.
More than 50,000 employees pass through Changjo Kwan and its sister facilities in a given year. In sessions that last anywhere from a few days to several months, they are inculcated in all things Samsung: They learn about the three P’s (products, process, and people); they learn about “global management” so that Samsung can expand into new markets; some employees go through the exercise of making kimchi together, to learn about teamwork and Korean culture.
On Samsung's genius
Great analysis by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate, explaining why Samsung’s strategy (building everything from refrigerators to computers) is actually working:
This flood-the-market strategy isn’t elegant. It can be confusing for customers, a pain for Samsung’s carrier partners, and very difficult for the firm’s engineers and designers to keep up with. It also doesn’t have history on its side. Other firms that have tried the build-everything approach—see Apple in the early 1990s, or Hewlett-Packard over the last decade—eventually begin to lumber under their own complexity.
Yet Samsung’s strategy is extremely well suited to our current tech era. We live in a time of profound transition, when the future of everything is up in the air. The world’s tech-addled masses are switching from desktop devices to mobile ones, from bulky programs to sleek apps, from limited local storage to acres of space in the clouds. When everything is in flux, predicting what will be hot a year from now—“skating to where the puck is going to be,” to quote Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretzky—becomes all but impossible. Samsung’s strategy is to put a man at every spot on the ice. Be in enough places and you’re bound to catch something no one was predicting—like, for instance, the world’s bizarre love affair with phablets.
Smart guns don't kill the wrong people
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. You all heard that. But it’s like saying: toasters don’t toast toast, people toast toast – which is untrue.
A big element has been missing in the new gun control debate that is taking place in the USA. What about technology?
Technology exists, or could exist, that would make guns safer. The idea of a safe gun might seem to be the ultimate oxymoron: guns are designed to kill. But something missing from the gun-control debate that has followed the killing of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the role of technology in preventing or at least limiting gun deaths.
Biometrics and grip pattern detection can sense the registered owner of a gun and allow only that person to fire it. For example, the iGun, made by Mossberg Group, cannot be fired unless its owner is wearing a ring with a chip that activates the gun.
Programming for all, part 1
Ars Technica writer Matt Ford published a very interesting piece on programming that everyone — I do mean it — can follow and understand. It basically explains how computers work and it explains that very well.
At their base, even though they run much of the world, computers are one thing: stupid. A computer knows nothing. Its brain is little more than a large collection of on/off switches. The fact that you can play video games, browse the Internet, and pump gas at a gas station is thanks to the programs the computers have been given by a human. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the basic concepts of computer programming: how a person teaches a computer something and how the ideas encapsulated in the program go from something we can understand to something a computer understands.
First, it needs to be said that programming is not some black art, something arcane that only the learned few may ever attempt. It is a method of communication whereby a person tells a computer what, exactly, they want it to do. Computers are picky and stupid, but they will indeed do exactly as they are told. Therefore, each program you write should be like an elegant recipe that anyone—including a computer—can follow. Ideally, each step in a program should be clearly described and, if it is complicated, broken down into smaller steps to remove all doubt about what is to happen.
Another reblog from explore-blog:
Networked Society – Seth Godin and others on the future of learning in a new project by Ericsson, two years after Ericsson’s 2020 Project exploring the future of technology.
In the beginning of the video we are told that the origin of a complex bureaucratic system similar to higher education took its roots in the military, leaders needed formatted soldiers. Interesting point of view.