Netizen

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Kiva's Robots

English: Logo of Saks Fifth Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Warehouses, Kiva's Robots Do the Heavy Liftings

Sixty of the automated dollies crisscross the floor carrying shelves to humans, who pick, pack, and ship items without ever taking more than a couple of steps..... as Web retailers look for an edge in a business with low margins and sharp competition.... In addition to Amazon, Kiva's customers include Office Depot, Staples, Crate & Barrel, Toys "R" Us, and Saks Fifth Avenue. .... With the help of robots, workers at Gilt are able to process items three times faster.... After an order comes in to Gilt's website, a robot automatically wheels into a grid of 1,600 shelves arranged in tight rows. The robot locates the right shelf, lifts it onto its back, and carries it to a picking station, where human workers take what is needed. .... From above, the scene looks a little like robot rush hour as dozens of shelves zoom around the warehouse floor.....using them on inventory that gathers dust isn't cost-effective, and larger items also pose problems for the automated shelves. .... the relatively small area where robots operate accounts for 65 percent of all items shipped from the warehouse

This is like FoxConn wanting robots.

This Is Going To Be A Boom Decade

Image representing Fisker Automotive as depict...

Image via CrunchBase

Early Stage Companies Raise Most Funds in a Decade

$2.1 billion went into 410 early-stage deals. Overall, $7 billion went into 898 deals..... The companies that did the best were in the less capital-intensive software and Internet sector. The biotech industry, with $697 million going into 90 deals overall.... More than a third of the total money invested in cleantech companies went into $100 million-plus bets on later-stage funding rounds for Fisker Automotive, Harvest Power, and Bloom Energy—the largest three deals across all industries in the last few months. .... Higher-risk investments in life sciences and clean-tech are still difficult for VCs to touch.

The finance folks solved the problem of too much money ("Oh, so, let's shove it into real estate!") by throwing it to wreck the entire financial system. And the world is not fully out of the doldrums yet. But a rebirth is on the way. Things are going to be bigger and better than ever before.

Manufacturing Woes

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

The Future of Manufacturing Is in America, Not China

new technology is driving a U.S. industrial comeback...... Seduced by government subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, U.S. industry has rushed to China in recent decades, with millions of American jobs lost...... Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. ..... The factory assembly that China is currently performing is child's play compared to the next generation of robots -- which will soon become cheaper than human labor. ..... artificial intelligence (AI) -- software that makes computers, if not intelligent in the human sense, at least good enough to fake it..... AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as the iPhone's Siri, and Face.com, the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired..... a "creator economy" in which mass production is replaced by personalized production, with people customizing designs they download from the Internet or develop themselves. ..... Three-D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. ..... in the next decade, manufacturing will again become a local industry and it will be possible to 3D print electronics and use giant 3D printing scaffolds to print entire buildings. Why would we ship raw materials all the way to China and then ship completed products back to the United States when they can be manufactured more cheaply locally, on demand? .... advances in nanotechnology that change the equation further. .... carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers .... stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable ..... "Over the next two decades," Jacobstein says, "molecular manufacturing will do for our relationship with molecules and matter what the computer did for our relationship with bits and information -- make the precise control of molecules and matter inexpensive and ubiquitous." .... America's ability to innovate, demolish old industries, and continually reinvent itself. The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven't cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.....Google just announced that it will produce its highly-acclaimed Nexus 7 tablet in the United States.

Robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanotechnology -- and boom, the American jobs are back.

A Million People, Or A Million Robots

robots (Photo credit: milky.way)

Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots

an eventual labor shift similar to "the decline of seamstresses or the secretarial pool in America." .... some experts believe the company may be developing its own robots in house..... Most spend their days seated beside a conveyer belt, wearing white gowns, face masks, and hairnets so that stray hairs and specks of dust won't interfere as they perform simple but precise tasks, again and again. Each worker focuses on a single action, like putting stickers on the front of an iPhone or packing a finished product into a box. ..... it takes five days and 325 steps to assemble an iPad..... A robot can be operated 160 hours a week. Even assuming competition from nimble-fingered humans putting in 12-hour shifts, a single robot might replace two workers, and possibly as many as four. ..... industrial robotics "is about to get very hot in China."

Have you heard the line? "I trained my replacement." Looks like FoxConn workers are being asked to build their replacements. I guess this is not exactly Gandhi's khadi movement.

Ads: Not A Problem

Image via CrunchBase

A Social Network Free of Ads

"Twitter created as fundamental a technical innovation as e-mail and HTML itself, and they totally blew it," says Caldwell. He draws an analogy with the early days of the Web, when Netscape got the medium started by releasing the first mass-market Web browser. "If Netscape had decided to build a proprietary ecosystem and become a media company supported by advertising, we wouldn't have the Web we do today," Caldwell says.

Forget social networks. I want even ISPs to be ad supported. The funny thing is at higher speeds better ads are possible and so ad supported ISP makes the most sense at gigabit speeds.

Yahoo, Technology And Media

Image representing Yahoo! as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Content is not a problem. Google has a ton of content. Heck, you could argue they have all the content in the world, quite literally. Facebook has content. Content is all it has. Photos are content. Updates are content. So it is not like Yahoo has been hurting for having too much content.

But Yahoo was born as a technology company. And I don't think it has the option to walk away from that.

Yahoo Needs a New Technology

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Instagram On The Web

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 28: (EDITOR'S NOTE: Image was shot with an iPhone using Instagram) Justin Han of Australia poses during the adidas 2012 Australian Olympic Games competitor uniform launch at Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre on March 28, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Instagram For The Web Coming Soon? Online ‘View Profile’ Link Spotted In The Wild

You can’t take a desktop experience and shove it into a 3-by-4-in screen. It’s a very different behavior pattern. It’s a very different browse pattern. People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

Instagram took too much time to get on the Android platform, and it is a mistake it is not on the web already. But better late than never. Mobile is where the action is, but you ignore the web at your peril.

Instagram's attempt to get on the web will be a good way to mesh the service into its now ownner: Facebook. As is well known Facebook struggles in the mobile space.

If Instagram will have a hard time adopting the web, the two services will have a higher chance of melding.

Friday, July 20, 2012

More Spectrum

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 11: A free Wi-Fi hotspot beams broadband internet from atop a public phone booth on July 11, 2012 in Manhattan, New York City. New York City launched a pilot program Wednesday to provide free public Wi-Fi at public phone booths around the five boroughs. The first ten booths were lit up with Wi-Fi routers attached to the top of existing phone booths, with six booths in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. Additional locations, including ones in the Bronx and Staten Island, are to be added soon. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Bold plan: opening 1,000 MHz of federal spectrum to WiFi-style sharing

the US should identify 1,000 MHz of government-controlled spectrum and share it with private industry to meet the country’s growing need for wireless broadband..... power our future filled with 4G phones and tablets .... already identified more than 200MHz of federal spectrum that can be freed for sharing. Another 195MHz will be identified in a report coming later this year, and the Federal Communications Commission will use incentive auctions "to free up substantially more prime spectrum" .... "For too long, policymakers and industry lobbyists have quarrelled over whether to embrace more exclusive licensing or spectrum sharing as if a gain for one means a loss for the other. We are happy the PCAST report rejects this false choice that has deadlocked our spectrum policy for too long. By embracing sharing while continuing to find clearable spectrum for auction, we can not only ensure an endless supply of cat videos for our smart phones, but also provide enough open spectrum for technological innovation, job creation, and lower connection prices for consumers." .... in response to a 2010 memorandum from Obama that required 500MHz of spectrum to be made available for commercial use over the next ten years. In recommending 1,000MHz of spectrum, PCAST noted that "in just two years, the astonishing growth of mobile information technology—exemplified by smartphones, tablets, and many other devices—has only made the demands on access to spectrum more urgent."