In the past year, we’ve seen the “Internet of Things” era come to life, with connected devices and hardware products popping up everywhere – from Google Glass to August to Coin – and this is just the beginning. We live in a world that is searching for technology to enable easier accessibility and simplicity. Being able to lock up your home, turn off the lights and drive your car, all with the press of a button has become a reality.
When you think of Blu-ray, you think of movies on a disc. You don’t think of a data center. But Facebook executives saw beyond that minor detail.
Facebook has worked with a vendor to create a super-cheap, long-lasting, and downright cool storage vault that keeps files on Blu-ray discs. With 10,000 discs, each containing 100 GB, a single one of these cabinets has room for a petabyte — or 1,000 TB — of data.
It’s the sort of technology that befits a company of Facebook’s magnitude. It could help Facebook, but later on the model could be useful to large-scale cloud providers keen on cost-effectively storing companies’ data for the long haul.
Speaktoit, the Russian startup behind Speaktoit Assistant, a Siri alternative for Android, iOS and Windows Phone that also competes with a host of other AI and natural language-driven ‘personal assistants’, has raised a new round of funding. The amount remains undisclosed, but once again Intel Capital, the chip maker’s venture and M&A arm, is investing, along with new investor Alpine Electronics through its Alpine Technology Fund. Two strategic investors is better than one, I guess.
The tech industry runs on coffee, which is perhaps why a bevy of venture capitalists and investment bankers are throwing more money at Blue Bottle.
The artisanal coffee chain announced today it has received a $25.75 million round led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management along with a number of well-known venture capital firms and a glittering assortment of angel investors.
So why might tech-focused venture capitalists be drawn to coffee, you might be asking?
Le Département d'Ingénierie Environnementale (Department of Environmental Engineering) de l'Université Nationale Cheng Kung (National Cheng Kung University, NCKU, Tainan) et l'Agence des Ressources en Eau (Water Resources Agency, WRA) du Ministère des Affaires Economiques ont conjointement mis au point le premier laboratoire mobile au monde de surveillance de la qualité de l'eau. La laboratoire, installé dans un van, est équipé d'un système d'analyse de la qualité de l'eau qui permet de donner des résultats précis dans les deux heures. D'après l'université, la laboratoire mobile permet également de suivre la croissance des algues et l'eutrophisation des réserves d'eau.
Big Data holds the potential to boost economic growth in Europe by 1.9 per cent by 2020, according to a new report. But how will this be achieved and what needs to be done to try and ensure the benefits are equally spread?
Big data has the potential to contribute €206 billion to the European economy by 2020, a sum equivalent to a 1.9 per cent increase in the gross domestic product of the 28 member states, according to a new study published this week by the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies (WISE)
To give a sense of the contribution this could make to revitalising national economies, a 1.9 per cent increase in GDP is equivalent to one full year of growth in the EU.
NYC startup and TechCrunch Battlefield winner Enigma has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding, the company has revealed today. The new round was led by Comcast Ventures, and includes participation from American Express Ventures, Crosslink Capital and the New York Times Company. Some of the new funders are clearly strategic partners, who are interested in seeing where Enigma’s unique approach to mining public data can take them.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter: These are the apps that likely come to mind when you think of social networking. But with the rise of mobile and location sharing, the face of social networks is changing. A new wave of apps and platforms are gaining traction — those that focus on solving problems.
Take the example of Life360. Where are you? If you are a parent, that’s the question you might ask a child, by phone or text, six eight times a day. And if you don’t get an immediate answer, you might find yourself waiting and wondering. Did he make it to soccer practice on time? Is she over at a friend’s house?
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created ingestible batteries, that could make internal devices a possibility.
While wearable technology is bringing smart devices even closer to home, another emerging field is the development of electronics that actually sit inside our bodies. We recently reported on TruTag — ingestible nanoscale electronic tags that could help tackle pharma fraud — and now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created edible batteries, that could be used to power biodegradable devices located inside the body.
The study of the electrical properties of plants is sleepy backwater of botany that has never generated widespread interest or finding. For example, in 1995 one group carefully evaluated the physiological state of a cucumber by measuring it electrical impedance. Others have done the same for olive trees. That’s surely interesting work but hardly likely to set the world on fire.
Today, Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England in Bristol argues that the electrical properties of plants have been overlooked. And he takes one step to putting this right by measuring the electrical properties of lettuce seedlings, just three or four days after they’ve sprouted.
