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250 Million Tablets Will Be Sold in 2013
May 21, 2013 Tablet computers are growing so fast that it looks like 2014 or 2015 will be the year sales of tablets eclipse sales of PCs. Here are NPD Displaysearch’s projections for sales of tablet and notebook PCs (multiply the left scale by 1,000). Pay attention to the blue bars. Now compare ...
The Audacious Plan to End Hunger with 3-D Printed Food
May 21, 2013 Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his ...
There Are 12.5 Unprotected Versions of the Average American’s Personal Information on the Web
May 15, 2013 Safe Shepherd is a company that searches the web for all the public records available on Americans, and then presents them in a dashboard. Try it for yourself—it’s free—and the results are almost guaranteed to be unnerving. The information is mostly innocuous, and includes your address, phone number and email, ...
Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon Are Trying to Turn Into the Same Über-Company
May 10, 2013 Who will be the sole provider of all that you desire? Which company’s services will you “hire” to address your every internet-enabled whim? It sounds absurd, but this is the essence of the battle between the big four tech giants—oh and Microsoft too, but these days Microsoft is mostly an ...
Video: Robotic Exoskeleton turns everyday Houseplants Into Cyborgs
May 9, 2013 As if we needed more evidence that we have more technology than we know what to do with, a collaboration between an artist and an engineer has yielded something both whimsical and potentially useful. It gives houseplants autonomy. Such ideas have been explored in science fiction before—in Vernor Vinge’s novel ...
Massive Hacker Strike Against US Government and Banks Turned Out to Be a Dud
May 8, 2013 Yessterday was May 7, the day that Anonymous and various explicitly anti-USA and anti-Israel hacking groups promised to take down the websites of the Pentagon, White House, FBI, Bank of America, Chase bank, and all the other usual symbols of oppression. Except the attacks appeared to be a complete failure. ...
Most Data Isn’t 'Big,' and Businesses Are Wasting Money Pretending It Is
May 7, 2013 Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend. There are many problems with the assumptions behind the “big data” ...
$1 Billion in Bitcoin Was Traded in April—16 Times the Previous Record
May 6, 2013 In April, $1 billion worth of bitcoins was traded across all exchanges, according to an aside in the complaint bitcoin startup Coinlab just filed against the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox. Just a month prior, only $60 million in bitcoin was traded, estimates Jeremy Liew, a managing director at Lightspeed ...
BlackBerry’s CEO Is Correct: There’s No Future in Tablets
May 1, 2013 If you think PC manufacturers are hurting as consumers opt for tablets and other devices, what’s to stop the same downward spiral of razor-thin margins from destroying the fortunes of tablet makers, as well? That appears to be the logic of BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who told Bloomberg today that ...
Commentary: Amazon Takes On Enterprise Cloud Companies
April 29, 2013 “I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books,” said Carl Eschenbach, the chief operating officer of VMWare, at the company’s recent annual confab with its partners and resellers. VMWare competes with Amazon to provide businesses with computing and IT services in ...
