Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Gaming Has Been Bigger Than Movies A While Now



Made in America: Game industry grows 4 times faster than U.S. economy
the game-industry .. business grew more than 9 percent annually from 2009 to 2012. That rate more than quadrupled the wider U.S. economy, which spent those years stuck around a mediocre 2 percent growth. ..... games contribute more than $6.2 billion to the American economy in 2012. ..... Annual job growth for gaming from 2009 to 2012 outpaced the rest of the economy 13-fold. Gaming averaged 9 percent while the rest of the labor markets only grew jobs by less than a percent. ..... ESA’s study found that 42,000 people work directly for the game industry throughout 36 states. If you widen the focus and look at people directly and indirectly employed due to gaming, that number grows to 146,000 individuals. The average salary for industry employees is $95,000, and direct compensation averaged more than $4 billion over the three-year period

Satya Nadella Goes To India

Wi-Fi Signal logo
Wi-Fi Signal logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a magic bullet. This would do more to transform India than any other single thing.

This TV spectrum thing is more promising than satellites and drones. Drones might be best for the least populated parts of the world.

Microsoft plans to provide free internet access across India
the firm has proposed to use the "white space" - the unused spectrum between two TV channels - to provide free connectivity to large sections of the Indian population. ...... The 200-300 MHz spectrum band available in the white space can reach up to 10 km compared to 100 metres range provided by Wifi ..... This spectrum belongs mainly to Doordarshan and the government and is not used at all. The firm has sought clearance from the government for a pilot project in two districts ..... The programme would be implemented in phases from this year till 2018 and ensure that government services are available to citizens electronically.


Innovating The Smartphone Battery

If my smartphone battery gave me four times more juice, it might last a full day of rigorous use. But it doesn't.

Battery is hard to do, but worth trying. But maybe Samsung should plot to move to one of the next big things: rHealth.

In fast food it is not McDonald's that is number one. The Chinese restaurants collectively are bigger. The same seems to be true of smartphones. Samsung is like McDonald's. It is number two.

Samsung’s Future Is Bleak Because Phones Themselves No Longer Matter
With the possible exception of radically improved battery life, hardware differences become about subtle preferences, not clear-cut metrics of superiority.


rHEALTH And One Drop Of Blood



This is a health care assistant that Fidel Castro could only have dreamed of. Like the smartphone is the computer for the final six billion, this device is the doctor for the final three billion, or maybe six. And I am sure there will be improvements. It is awesome as is, and it will get better. Finally a health "app" that actually does something serious pretty fast.

Heck, this is not just something for the have nots. This will displace many mainstream devices currently in use. This has the ease of a good old thermometer.

This Device Diagnoses Hundreds of Diseases Using a Single Drop of Blood
a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. ..... First hatched by DMI in response to a NASA challenge to create a diagnostics device that could work even in space, rHEALTH was portable from the beginning. ..... One small drop of blood is dropped into a small receptacle, where nanostrips and reagents react to the blood’s contents. The whole cocktail then goes through a spiral micro-mixer and is streamed past lasers that use variations in light intensity and scattering to come up with a diagnosis, from flu to a more serious illness such as pneumonia—or even Ebola—within a few minutes. ..... There’s also a vitals patch that users can wear to get continuous health readings—EKG, heart rate, body temperature—delivered to their smartphone or the rHEALTH device itself via a Bluetooth link. An app called CHAS (Comprehensive Health Assessment Unit) can walk the user through the process of self-diagnosis. ....... getting all the diagnostics technologies packed together into one handheld device ..... patients will need to give 1,500 times less blood than they would for regular tests ..... the device has even been tested in simulated lunar and zero gravity. “It’s a symphony of innovations, but we’ve pushed all of them individually to create the device” ..... rHEALTH is reliable for cell counts, HIV detection, vitamin D levels, and various protein markers in the body. The next challenges .. are adding more tests, scaling up production, and going through the laborious process of getting the rHEALTH commercialized. ...... three different models: the rHEALTH One, which will be used for translational research; the rHEALTH X, meant to be used as a kind of power tool for clinicians; and the rHEALTH X1, which will be available for consumers. ...... The goal is to create a universal, Star Trek-inspired medical diagnostic tool that detects up to 16 separate health conditions