Sunday, July 22, 2012

Brazil Carnival





Android Tablet, Phone

Image representing Android as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
By now Android is no longer playing second place to the iOS in either the smartphone space or the tablet space. Nexus 7 has been a major arrival. Before that Amazon's Kindle Fire was the best product in the space running Android, but it was not Google's version of Android, and so it did not count for a win in Google's lap.

The Nexus 7 and the Samsung Galaxy S III have exceeded their Apple counterparts. Who is playing catch up now?

Google halts new orders for 16GB Nexus 7, surprised by demand
sales of the Nexus 7 have been "extremely brisk"
Samsung’s Galaxy S III surpasses 10 million sales in less than two months
By the end of the month, the device will be on sale via 296 carriers in 145 countries worldwide...... it and predecessor the Galaxy S, have together passed 50 million sales across the planet..... Samsung now counts itself as the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world ..... an August launch for its next-generation Galaxy Note

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Malaria

Image representing Bill Gates as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase
How Malaria Hijacks Your Immune System
Malaria infects at least 150 million people per year and kills over half a million people.... half the world’s population is susceptible to the disease.
Malaria is one of the things Bill Gates has worked on in his post Microsoft life. Many more people are talking about it now. Otherwise it used to be the poor person's disease.

Malaria is one of those hard to tie down tropical diseases. A software guy struggling with bio has business implications. Gates himself has said if he were to launch a startup today it would be in bio tech.

Software has viruses. Bio has malaria. Bio is still capital intensive. But that does not change its high growth potential status.
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Alzheimer's Stabilization

Alzheimer's Disease
Alzheimer's Disease (Photo credit: AJC1)
Study Suggests Alzheimer's Disease Can Be Stabilized
Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States; 35 million people are estimated to have the disease today, a figure that is expected to balloon in the coming decades.
One of the things people look forward to is getting old with vigor. Perhaps advances will catch up with expectations.
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The Disabled And Computing

Cover of "The Diving Bell and the Butterf...
Cover of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Controlling a Computer with Your Eyes
the French author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly dictated his memoirs solely through eye-movements--one letter at a time, and with the help of an assistant
One of the things about computing has been the help it has provided to the disabled, or rather the physically challenged. At one level we are all physically challenged. Or we would not need computers, right? Computers compute when we can't. Like Steve Jobs said, the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. We are all disabled, we all need bicycles.
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Cyrstal Clear

Human brain - midsagittal cut
Human brain - midsagittal cut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Crystals, Information And The Origin of Life
Crystals are among the most beautiful objects in the natural word. They are well understood, ubiquitously used and much admired.... the convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology is opening up a new approach to the study of structure, form and function. ... the energy landscape in which they exist and the flow of information to and from the environment..... the information a mollusc uses to make mother of pearl; and that is determined by its genome, proteome and so on, which together they call a conchome. .... this information is a kind of algorithm or formula for producing mother of pearl, analogous to an algorithm that produces the digits of pi. ..... a similar change in thinking about form and function is also emerging in the entirely different field of robotics and artificial intelligence. .... turns out that humans perform many actions that are so quick that the human brain cannot possibly be involved .... the brain outsources the control of this movement to materials themselves.... morphological computing.
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Kiva's Robots

English: Logo of Saks Fifth Avenue
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.
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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.
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Manufacturing Woes

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02:  Robots play foo...
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.
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