Robotic Farming

This robot blends in. It looks like a small tractor.



A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota

Corn is planted on 100 million acres in the United States, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff is a major pollution problem. .... GPS-guided tractors routinely apply seed and fertilizer across large areas, and new airborne drones are providing farmers with high-resolution sensing ability ..... the ability to apply fertilizer at precise times and locations is “very critical.” ..... The next step is to deploy multiple Rowbots on industrial-scale farms, and to add more sensing capacity to the machines. The company is also testing using them for planting seed on cornfields for fall crops, called cover crops, while the mature corn is still standing.

Agricultural Drones

the vanguard of farmers who are using what was once military aviation technology to grow better grapes using pictures from the air, part of a broader trend of using sensors and robotics to bring big data to precision agriculture.

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Tagged: Chugging Along, But What Differentiates?

Let’s Not Put Tagged In The DeadPool Just Yet TechCrunch On the spam issue: Tagged has always been aggressive about “encouraging” users to add their address book and invite new users. It’s sadly a proven way to get lots of new users ..... Tagged has less than 40 employees and has been profitable for more than two years. They’ve raised just $13.5 million in capital and have revenue in the $10 million - $20 million range. ...... nearly 32 million people visited Tagged in April 2009, up from 14 million a year ago. ....... Those visitors racked up over 5 billion page views in April 2009, up from less than a billion/month a year ago

I don't know how exactly I ended up there, but I am on Tagged.com. It has mystified me as to why some social networking sites do well in some cultures rather than others. Why did Orkut take off in Brazil and India more than other places? I used to get a lot of friend requests from brown people - my kind - on Hi5. I still get a few. What gives?

In social networking there are going to be a few big players, and numerous niche players. Just earlier today I signed up for a site called Jhyaap, that has all of 16 members besides me. These are 16 Nepalis in Minnesota. I met the founder on Twitter and went ahead and signed up. I figured, what the heck? I started a discussion and the founder immediately responded.

What I would like as a user is many niche social networking sites that I can all sign into with Facebook Connect. Having to create a username and password for each separately is a hassle. What gives?

What differentiates? Is Tagged a big player or a niche player? Where is it trying to go? What is it trying to be? What can you do on Tagged that you can not do on Facebook? One difference I see is on Tagged many of your photos are right there on your profile page, and your wall is not another click away. Is that enough differentiation?

And if they can do spam marketing, I wonder if the girl/woman who has been poking me at Tagged is a real person or a Tagged marketing technique, you have to wonder.

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