As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
Why Is the Solo Traveler the Dominant Coffee Cup Lid?
Why is the Solo Traveler the dominant coffee cup lid?: originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Answer by Brian Roemmele, Alchemist & Metaphysician
The Solo Traveler lid was designed so perfectly, only slight variations to this outstanding design can be found. This design takes in to account human anatomy, ergonomics and functionality in a simple and elegant way. It is very hard to improve upon this form follows function design. It broadcasts, by its very design, how to use the product, many other lid systems do not. The iconic design has been featured in a number of Modern Art exhibits and has won a number of notable design awards.
History
There have been at least 40 different, individually-patented drink-through plastic cup lids created since 1934. The styrene plastic hot beverage lid for Styrofoam and cardboard containers have been around since the early 1970s. Prior to this invention, a cardboard cup lid was the only option. The cardboard cup with the cardboard cup lid became an icon in New York and presented two distinct trends Why do delis put coffee in the bag in New York City? and related, the classic Anthora cup and its history What is the origin of the Greek cups from which New Yorkers drink coffee?
Lid Systems
There are 3 basic lid systems: fully closed, directly drinkable and indirectly drinkable using a straw. We will focus on the directly drinkable version.
The challenge of any directly drinkable lid system is to meet the primary goals:
To stay on the container in a firm and reliable manner
To allow for the beverage to pass through the lid (in most cases)
The secondary goals are:
To protect the cup user from accidental spillage
To allow for ease of drinkability.
Click Here for examples of hot beverage lid designs. The Solo Traveler and copies display a clear eas of use functionality. It is easy for most to visually identify the lid systems that seem to work the best.
There are five basic methods and design concepts for lid designs:
Fully Closed — With this lid the plastic is closed entirely with only a center or side vapor escape hole. To use this lid system the entire lid must be removed.
The Pinch — With this lid the plastic is scored and to use the section is removed from the edge of the lid to allow beverage be sipped. This is done by applied squeezing pressure to a gripping surface with a thumb and forefinger pinch. The Sweetheart corporation uses this system.
The Puncture — With this lid there is a raised element on the lid allowing a puncture to so that the beverage can be sipped. Also known as the Push and Drink lid.
The Peel — With this lid there is a removable wedge in the lid that runs to the edge of the cup fastening system. Radial score lines are used to define a central tear tab with predictable tears leaving the remainder of the lid on the container. The peel-and-lock lid is a vacation on this concept whereby the wedge can be folded back and locked on to the lid with a pressure clamp.
The Pucker — With this lid there is a raised area that can be access for sipping directly. The drinker places their mouth on the protruded polystyrene. The pucker lid requires the user to drink through the lid and not from the cup like the peel lids. The Solo Traveler is the primary example.
The Problem That The Solo Traveler Solves
There are variations to these designs, however there are not too many other options. Many of these design concepts are confusing and perhaps frustrating to use. Some designs are so poor that even in optimal cases the usability is suspect. Just about everyone has experienced this while trying to negotiate the hot beverage. In many cases spillage and perhaps burns are a result of these poor designs.
In most of these lid designs the user’s anatomy, the tip of the nose and the protrusion of the upper lip are not fully addressed. When drinking from a cup the tips of our noses will come so close as to typically enter the cup if there is no lid. Thus with any lid system it is important to address the tip of the nose and the top lip. The Solo Traveler has addressed these issues most directly. And is one of the reasons for the stellar success of the product. The Sweetheart Company has a competing product, the Sweetheart Gourmet lid, however it does not address the anatomy issues directly. On just the ergonomic account alone the Solo Traveler is far more a superior design. This is accomplished by raising the lid surface about 1/2 inch above the edge of the cup. Most completing lid systems sit at or slightly below the edge of the cup and limit how these systems can solve typical lid usability issues.
Heat Transference and Steam Dispersion
All disposable lid systems are not fully able to deal with heat transference and steam dispersion very well. The issue is really one of balancing the needs for this class of product. Other than being burned by a beverage that is too hot to drink, the largest complaint seems to be the pooling of steam that can be as hot as 120 F. Almost all lid systems have a small hole to aid in the venting of steam but they are less then ideal as they must also be small enough to not allow too much beverage to escape. There is also the issue of cooling too rapidly to be balanced. In the case of the Solo Traveler there is actually a “Chimney effect” because of the upward angle on the drinking side of the lid. This is both a benefit and a problem. The “Chimney effect” will efficiently move steam up and out through the drinking hole and it is important to avoid drinking until a reasonable period of time has elapsed to allow the early venting as the beverage cools. The benefit is the Solo Traveler will accelerate this process by its design. One could design a system that is optimized for perfect cooling coefficients but this would create far higher costs.
The Improvement: The Solo Traveler Plus
The Solo Traveler’s design is so well optimized there is little that can be done to improve the design. However there was one issue Solo could address: complete sealing by the lid to limit any inadvertent leakage. They addressed this with the Solo Traveler Plus lid, designed for Solo by Metaphase Design Group of Saint Louis, Mo. This is a luxury improvement to the classic Traveler lid that includes a sliding closure system. Using the same design firm that created the Microsoft 2.0 Mouse and the plastic Listerine bottle Solo challenged them to create an innovation on the basic concept.
Solo approached the company in the early 2000s to create an updated version of the classic Traveler cup lid. The design premise would be centered around the ability for the lid to be resealed so there would be little to no spillage of potentially hot liquid. This was not an easy problem to design for as cost and ease of use was one of the top priorities.
The solution was to create a two piece lid that has a small sliding knob at the top of the lid. To open or close one would slide the knob and a mechanism inside the lid opens or closes the sip hole. This design was tested at a number of locations and became available in the US in early 2004. It was an instant hit with high end coffee houses and restaurants. It went on to become an award-winning design and shown at museums events. The only issue was the cost, about 7 cents per cup in comparison to 2 cents for most versions of the classic Solo Traveler.
Limits To Optimization
With the Solo Traveler lid we see the crystallization of how many competing design elements have been simultaneously addressed. There is a point of optimization where a product can not really be improved upon and I think we see it with this product. I have used this and a few other products as an example of what any startup company would need to achieve as an ultimate goal. However I also use this as an example of how the misunderstood concept of “disruption” is injuring 100s of startups that are entering into mature markets.
As long as human anatomy does not radically change and cups continue to be the primary delivery system for beverages and gravity continues to work, I think we will continue to see the Solo Traveler on into the foreseeable future.
More questions on Quora:
Coffee: What is the origin of the Greek cups from which New Yorkers drink coffee?
Coffee Beans: How can I differentiate between different coffee variants?
Cappuccino: Is there a proper way of drinking a cappuccino such that no foam is left after the liquid is finished?
Robert Downey Jr. Gives 7-Year-Old Boy His Very Own 'Iron Man' Bionic Arm
A boy who was born with a partially developed arm was recently given a special “Iron Man”-themed prosthetic limb — from none other than Tony Stark himself.
In the video above, watch the moving moment when 7-year-old Alex walks into a room to find actor Robert Downey Jr., as his “Iron Man” alter ego, waiting for him.
Downey was there to present Alex with a 3D-printed bionic arm, which was designed by Albert Manero, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the University of Central Florida. Manero is the senior director of Limbitless Solutions, a volunteer organization that designs open-source 3D-printed limbs and donates them to children in need.
“[I] had the absolute privilege of presenting a brand spanking new 3D-printed bionic ‘Iron Man’ arm to Alex, the most dapper 7-year-old I’ve ever met,” Downey wrote on Facebook after the heartwarming meeting, which was captured on film by Microsoft’s “The Collective Project.”
The actor went on to thank Manero and Microsoft “for their work making artificial limbs like this more affordable for families with kids who want to show the playground how badass they are.”
Watch Downey’s meeting with Alex in the video above. Be prepared for so many feels.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Considers Changing Email Deletion Policy
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Thursday that he would meet with state lawmakers and other top officials to discuss revising the state’s email storage policy, which now automatically deletes messages after 90 days.
The announcement came after a top aide to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D), who has had a tense relationship with Cuomo — announced that his office would stop following the 90-day deletion policy and would develop a new one.
“Attorney General Schneiderman is committed to openness, transparency and restoring the trust of New Yorkers in their government,” Schneiderman’s chief of staff, Micah Lasher, wrote in an email to the staff. “Consistent with that commitment, he has decided to suspend, effective immediately, the policy that was first put in place in the Attorney General’s office in 2007 of automatically deleting most office emails after 90 days. He has directed his Counsel to formulate, in short order, a new document retention policy.”
State lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would retain emails of some state employees for at least seven years and subject members of the legislature to the Freedom of Information law.
State legislators have criticized the deletion policy, which has been unevenly enforced, saying it creates a lack of transparency. Cuomo’s office said the policy was put in place by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D). Former Spitzer staffers have disputed that account.
Why 'Britcoins' may soon pay for your latte
Will London become the electronic currency capital?
VIDEO: MIT drones to 'deliver admission news'
BBC Click’s Spencer Kelly looks at some of the best of the week’s technology
Destiny shocks at Bafta games awards
Bungie’s Destiny takes the top prize at 2015′s British Academy Game Awards, despite failing to win other categories it was nominated in.
The Human Factor
Back in 1988, a U.S. warship fighting Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf mistook an Iranian civilian jetliner for an attacking Iranian F14 fighter plane and blew it out of the sky with a heat-seeking missile killing all 290 persons aboard.
The U.S. was quick to accept blame and apologize, but our apology did not in the least mollify the Iranians who then as now were eager to believe the worst about our intentions and conduct. We may have put that event away and forgotten about it, but the Iranians have not forgotten it and are not likely to in the foreseeable future.
Left unanswered was why and how the Vincennes mistook the bulky, wide-bodied Airbus A300 for a sleek, supersonic F14 fighter plane barely a third the transport’s size. The answer I am sure was the same as for some other recent air disasters that seem to occur with increasing frequency these days — the human factor. Modern aircraft are equipped with the latest razzle-dazzle technologies that are generally designed to prevent disasters from happening, and yet somehow the disasters keep coming. In air travel as in every other form of human endeavor, it is impossible to eliminate the possibility of human error.
When I was head of the Signal Corps, I spent many sleepless nights worrying about the security of our nuclear arsenal and the potential for inadvertent disasters. At any given time, we have supersonic bombers airborne with nuclear weapons ready to launch attacks if the order comes, and numerous crews on the ground at missile silos around the clock ready to do the same. We, of course, have failsafe systems in place to guard against an accidental launch, but there really is no such thing as a failsafe system where humans are concerned.
In this digital age, we must also worry about hackers compromising our most secure communications. The primary motive of most hackers is to merely steal money, but there are others there out with far more sinister motives. The potential for disaster is disconcerting.
We are placing far too much trust and reliance in technology. Despite all of our advances in artificial intelligence, the most powerful computer we know of is the human mind. I have read that experts say that most of us barely use perhaps a third of our mental capacity. I am concerned that our increasing reliance on technology will serve primarily to reduce that level of output. Why bother to engage in rigorous study of complex subjects when all you have to do is push a few buttons on a machine?
But there is no system or technology that can eradicate the potential consequences of human error or subversion. Fuzzy thinking is the real enemy. We need people with active minds, vast reservoirs of knowledge, sound values and good judgment fully alert at every post around the clock. That is a tall order made ever tougher by our excessive reliance on technology.
Lt. Gen. Clarence E. “Mac” McKnight, Jr., (USA-Ret) is the author of “From Pigeons to Tweets: A General Who Led Dramatic Change in Military Communications”, published by The History Publishing Company.
These 3D Gifs Will Turn Your Brain Inside Out
We have news for you: The GIFs of old are dead. Like, really, really dead.
They’ve been killed by the unequivocal coolness of split-depth GIFs — optical illusion creations that use white space as a reference point to create mind-boggling depth within GIF animations. No 3D glasses necessary.
With Photoshop and a great deal of patience, GIF creators add white bars and borders to their animations, going frame by frame to conceal and reveal different parts of the image in reference to the blank space.
Reddit user drinkmorecoffee, creator of the penguin GIF below, told The Huffington Post the process is typically “all about masking the frames so they appear to be behind a specific object in the frame, thus making that object appear to jump off the screen.”
It’s time-consuming, surely, but the results are epic. Please accept our apologies in advance for melting your brain.
via Reddit user DrRhymes
via Reddit user siouxsie_siouxv2
via Reddit user PicturElements
via Josh Lake
via Reddit user rootyb
via Reddit user ZurichianAnimations
via Reddit user drinkmorecoffee
via Reddit user Ishnuporah
via Reddit user urban287
via Reddit user PicturElements
via Reddit user AffectedRyan
via Reddit user backwards_d
via TumbleBuggie
via Josh Lake
via Reddit user therealphs
App Could Help Officials Prosecute Rapists In Developing World
A new app is aiming to crack down on rapists in a country where the crime is far too common.
MediCapt will serve as a vital tool in collecting evidence and information on cases concerning sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), TakePart reported. The cell phone app, set to be released in 2016, will digitize the process in which field workers and medical professionals gather and save information provided by rape victims.
MediCapt’s standard form — which asks questions like, “Did the perpetrator have weapons?“, “Was the victim pregnant?”, “Has she tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease?” — allows for this useful information to be stored centrally and be easily accessible to doctors, social workers and forensic teams.
The app will also allow workers to take pictures of evidence — such as a victim’s physical injuries — should the photos be relevant in a court case down the line.
According to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) — the New York City-based nonprofit that created the application — MediCapt will be an important tool that could help officials prosecute violators through the justice system.
A lack of access to computers and poor communication systems country-wide make collecting and saving information from rape cases a challenge for law enforcement, as ThinkProgress reported. Many workers use unreliable methods, like jotting down notes on paper, to record information, according to TakePart.
The app — which launched as a pilot in DRC in January 2014 — has the potential to protect women around the world in the coming years: “International adoption of this new technology will be a crucial contribution to ending impunity for mass atrocities,” PHR website states.
DRC has an abysmal track record when it comes to sexual violence. A study, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2011, that examined Congolese women found that more than 400,000 women ages 15 to 49 were raped between 2006 and 2007 — the equivalent of four women raped every five minutes, according to researchers.
MediCapt’s makers are focused on ensuring women in the developing world can seek out justice easier.
“What was most useful was introducing clinicians to the promise and power of technology as a means for gathering evidence and prosecuting these crimes,” Karen Naimer, PHR’s director of the Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, said in an interview with ThinkProgress last year. “Some of them had never even held a smartphone before, but by the end of the first day everyone was engaged in the idea of the power this technology could bring.”
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Paula Deen Now Has Her Own Video Game App, Because Of Course
Basically everything Paula Deen and Kim Kardashian do borders on the absurd. While Deen basically eats sticks of butter, Kardashian appears to rub it on her body for photo shoots. And while the two might not seem like they have a lot in common — they do now. Paula Deen is launching a mobile video game app.
We’re not quite sure why Deen has taken a techie turn, but Kardashian’s estimated $200 million earnings from her own video game app might have something to do with it. According to a press release, Deen’s game will be called “Paula Deen’s Recipe Quest” and feature puzzles, interactive recipe games and cooking challenges.
“I am a gamer at heart and never leave my home without my ipad,” said Deen. “Paula Deen’s Recipe Quest is an incredible and one-of-a-kind game that will allow y’all to cook up a storm with me while solving exciting puzzles. Plus, it’s free!”
Watch the ridiculous video below to attempt to figure out more about Deen’s game:
You can download the video game for iPhones now. The Android edition launches March 16.
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What's the Next-Generation Internet? Surprise: It's All About the Blockchain!
Co-authored with Alex Tapscott
Yes, the digital revolution has brought countless wonders. The Internet, the World Wide Web, social media, mobile computing, geospatiality, big data, and the cloud have enabled myriad wonderful developments in virtually every aspect of life.
But when it comes to business, a careful analysis shows that, to date, the changes are only scratching the surface. Capitalism’s basic institution, the corporation, has remained relatively unchanged. Hierarchy, vertical integration, and bureaucracy — hallmarks of the industrial age — still reign. And when it comes to the economy as a whole, the digital revolution has not had a positive impact on prosperity for most. Social inequality is growing, and most economists are predicting decades of structural unemployment. The economies of many developed countries are growing, but for the first time in history, there is no commensurate job creation. Most people on the planet don’t participate in the digital economy.
Instead of being the solution, technology has been a big part of the problem, and not just because a new round of automation, robotics, or disruptive business models are wiping out important parts of the workforce. The old paradigm in technology and media, whether broadcasting, print, or mainframe computing, was centralized, controlled by powerful forces, and the recipients were passive. The new paradigm was supposed to be distributed, controlled by everyone, and empowering active participants. However, the distributed Internet was dropped into an economy that has concentrated power structures with an asymmetrical ability to shape this new tool for their own purposes. Whether we’re looking at the old financial-services behemoths, the new titans of Silicon Valley, or the vast government bureaucracies that mine the digital world to monitor their citizens, it’s clear that the dream of a new age of empowerment and participation, free from the power structures of the industrial age, has proved illusive. Wealth, prosperity, and freedom have arrived, but only for a few.
The Internet, as it’s currently designed, is not all that good for doing business, let alone the peer-to-peer business that can democratize prosperity and engage the world’s population more directly in the global economy. The Internet is great for collaboration and information exchange, but when it comes to transactions and commerce, it has some deep flaws.
Overall it has enabled many positive changes — for those with access to it. Without an economic layer to the Net, we can’t establish each other’s identity or trust each other to make transactions without validation from a third party like a bank or a government. Quite the opposite: It allows people to commit fraud, collect our data, and invade our privacy. It excludes 2.5 billion people from the global financial system. It channels power and prosperity to those who already have it, even if they’re no longer earning it.
The next generation of the Internet can be the key to solving those problems. The digital revolution is bringing a new and radically different platform for business and other institutions that can take us through the next quarter-century of human progress. At the core of this next generation is a piece of software ingenuity that may surprise you. It is the technology underlying the digital currency Bitcoin, a technology known simply as the blockchain. This technology platform is open and programmable and therefore holds the potential to unleash countless new applications — of which Bitcoin is one — and as-yet-unrealized capabilities that have the potential to transform everything in the next 25 years.
At its most basic, the blockchain is a global spreadsheet, an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value and importance to humankind: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical procedures, insurance claims, votes, transactions between “smart” objects, and anything else that can be expressed in code. This ledger represents the truth because mass collaboration constantly reconciles it. We will not need to trust each other in the traditional sense, because the new platform ensures integrity.
Some scholars have argued, like Jacob Soll does in The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping enabled the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. Today the new platform enables a reconciliation of digital records; call it the “Digital Reconciliation.” The “Internet of Everything” needs a “Ledger of Everything.” Business, commerce, and the economy need a “Digital Reckoning.” Get ready for the “World Wide Ledger.”
Don Tapscott is the author of 15 widely read books about the digital revolution in business and society, dating back to 1981, the most recent being the 20th-anniversary edition of The Digital Economy. He will be giving a featured speech at SXSW on Monday, March 16, outlining the next stage of the digital revolution.
Alex Tapscott is 28-year-old investment banker based in Toronto and New York. He led the project to design a Bitcoin governance network for the Global Solutions Network Program at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. With Don Tapscott he is leading a research investigation into the next-generation Internet.
Saturn's Moon Enceladus May Have Warm Ocean, Boosting Likelihood Of Life On Icy Satellite
Scientists have found yet another tantalizing clue that Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have the potential to host alien life: Hot springs.
Yes, new research reveals the first clear evidence that there could be hydrothermal activity in the icy moon’s underground ocean.
(Story continues below images.)
Dramatic plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as seen by the Cassini probe during its flyby in 2009.
A deep subsurface ocean is thought to exist at the south pole of Enceladus, below a thick ice crust. This artist’s impression shows hydrothermal activity on the ocean floor.
“These findings add to the possibility that Enceladus … could contain environments suitable for living organisms,” John Grunsfeld, an astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a written statement issued by the agency. “The locations in our solar system where extreme environments occur in which life might exist may bring us closer to answering the question: are we alone in the universe.”
Tiny grains yield their secrets. For the research, an international team of scientists analyzed data on microscopic grains of rock, which were spewed into space by Enceladus’s geysers and collected by NASA’s Cassini space probe’s cosmic dust analyzer (CDA) instrument.
The analysis, along with computer simulations and experiments in the lab, suggested that the silica grains were formed in Enceladus’s vast ocean. Scientists discovered this ocean, which is at least as big as North America’s Lake Superior, last April.
According to the new hypothesis, minerals from Enceladus’s rocky core dissolved in hot water near the seafloor — estimated to be around 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius). As the hot water rose toward the ocean’s surface, it cooled, causing the minerals to condense into the tiny silica grains — just like the ones found in sand and quartz on Earth.
The search for E.T. The new research suggests that Enceladus has three main ingredients needed for life to evolve: water, heat, and nutrients. Just last year, scientists mapped out 101 geysers of water vapor and ice near Enceladus’s south pole.
And given that the moon isn’t the only one of its kind, this has intriguing implications for the possibility of life elsewhere in the Milky Way.
“Enceladus may even represent a very common habitat in the galaxy: icy moons around giant gas planets, located well beyond the ‘habitable zone’ of a star, but still able to maintain liquid water below their icy surface,” Nicolas Altobelli, a Cassini project scientist, said in a written statement issued by the European Space Agency.
Researchers are eager to examine samples from Enceladus to determine whether life exists there, though that may take years.
“It will take more than 20 years to send a space probe to Enceladus and bring samples back to Earth,” Dr. Yasuhito Sekine, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and one of the researchers behind the new finding, told Reuters. “So we’re taking a long breath until we finally get the sample in our hands — maybe more than 30 years — but hopefully by the end of this century, we will reach the conclusion.”
The research was published online Mar. 11 in Nature.
VIDEO: 'Cusp of golden age of gaming'
David Braben will receive the Bafta Fellowship in the British Academy Games Awards.
A Bold Vision for a Better Future Unveiled
A definitive new report has found there is a clean source of energy that could be one of the top sources of electricity in America: wind.
“Wind Vision: A New Era of Wind Power in the United States”, by the U.S. Department of Energy, finds this clean, affordable, homegrown energy source could provide 20 percent of the U.S.’s electricity by 2030, and 35 percent by 2050.
We can do this and we can save you money doing it. This report sets forth aggressive targets for growth, and we can meet them. With common-sense policies in place, we can double U.S. wind power in the next five years, and that is just the beginning.
This is great news for Americans. If policymakers allow the enterprising U.S. wind industry to make this vision a reality, it will mean:
Long-term savings on consumers’ electric bills, reaching14 billion a year by 2050
Electricity prices that are 20 percent less vulnerable to fluctuations in the cost of fossil fuels, helping avoid price spikes for the cost of energy
230,000 additional well-paying jobs by 2030 and 600,000 jobs by 2050
$650 million a year in payments to landowners who lease their land for wind development by 2030, and1 billion a year by 2050
Nearly $1.8 billion in annual tax payments to communities by 2030 and nearly3.2 billion by 2050
$400 billion in avoided climate change damages by 2050
$108 billion in avoided public health costs by cutting air pollutants, including preventing 22,000 premature deaths by 2050
260 billion gallons of water savings a year by 2050, as wind energy displaces 23 percent of total U.S. power plant water consumption
Wind Vision is based on two years of research and peer review. It updates a 2008 Bush administration report, 20% Wind Energy by 2030. It adds a roadmap for the government and businesses who will make it a reality.
That roadmap includes such things as improved layout of turbines at wind farms, more U.S. factories, and the transmission lines to connect low-cost wind power to more population centers.
The new report finds the industry has already blown past the projected cost reductions and growth trajectory in the 2008 report, because of technological improvements and smart, performance-based policies.
Wind energy is already averting energy price spikes, saving consumers $1 billion in just two days during last year’s polar vortex event, for example.
We’re also already making deep cuts in pollution and water use, helping the country meet its commitments to cut carbon emissions.
As wind becomes one of America’s top sources of electricity, the new Wind Vision makes it clear we can expect even bigger benefits for decades to come.
And did I mention? These benefits will never run out.
100 Business, Technology and Leadership Lessons [SLIDE DECK]
100 Business Insights from Fortune 500, Startup CEOs, Venture Capitalists, and Analysts from Vala Afshar
On March 8, 2013, Michael Krigsman and I launched a weekly video series called CXO-Talk. The goal was to connect our network and share wisdom from the most innovative and thoughtful business leaders in the world. Guy Kawasaki joined us for the opening episode. Since then, CXO-Talk has set the standard for thought-provoking enterprise video content. No other enterprise analysis and discussion site possesses the depth of our video library. We have now completed over 100 episodes with extraordinary startup founders, Fortune 250 executives, including over 30 chief information officers (CIOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief digital officers (CDOs). We have spoken with the most well-known venture capitalists, world-renowned technology analysts from Gartner and IDC, bestselling authors, an Emmy award winner, a brigadier general, and an NBA team owner.
The SlideShare presentation above features 116 executives from our first 100 episodes. Our most accomplished and brilliant guests share their business, leadership and technology insights, each captured in a tweetable quote. The slides also each link to the blog summary of the interview and the full video conversation. You will find the Twitter handles for all of our guests. I strongly recommend that you connect with this extraordinary group of thought leaders.
Apple Cleansing Its Stores Of Rival Fitness Trackers
If you’re looking for a Jawbone UP24 or Nike Fuelband, you’re going to have to go somewhere other than the Apple Store.
Re/Code reported on Wednesday that Apple has cleared many of its shelves of competing wrist-worn fitness trackers ahead of the launch of the Apple Watch, which will go on sale in Apple Stores next month.
The Apple Watch, which starts at $349 and goes up to a whopping $17,000 for the 18-karat gold version, has some of the fitness-tracking functions of other wrist-worn activity trackers. The device monitors heart rate and physical activity and alerts users when they’ve been sedentary, among other features.
Major Apple Stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Palo Alto have stopped selling Nike’s FuelBand and Jawbone’s UP, and they’re no longer available online, according to Re/Code’s Dawn Chmielewski and Lauren Goode. Some products from Jawbone that don’t directly compete with the Apple Watch, however, have not been removed: Jawbone’s UP Move, a clip-on pedometer that was released last fall, is still being sold in the stores, Re/Code said, and both the UP Move and Jawbone’s ERA Bluetooth headset were available in Apple’s online store on Thursday afternoon.
The UP24, a wrist-worn tracker, is available for $129 on Jawbone’s site, while the latest version of the Fuelband, the Fuelband SE, costs as little as $79 at certain vendors.
A small image of the Fuelband remains the icon for the “Fitness & Sport” section of Apple’s website, even though there’s no Fuelband to be found if you click on it.
It’s unclear exactly when Apple stopped selling the activity trackers in its stores and on its website. Reached by The Huffington Post for comment, an Apple representative simply said, “We are constantly reviewing and making changes to our merchandising mix.”
Last fall, after Apple first announced the Apple Watch, the company stopped selling products from Fitbit, the maker of popular fitness trackers.
Losing Apple as a retail partner for wrist-worn devices — if that is indeed what’s happening — would be more of an issue for Jawbone than for Nike. Nike hasn’t announced an update to its Fuelband bracelet in more than a year, and the team behind the product was largely dismantled last year.
CNET reported in April 2014 that Nike planned to exit the wearable hardware business. Nike’s CEO said in a CNBC interview shortly after that the company planned to focus more on “the software side of the experience” than the hardware.
The Fuelband does not appear to be for sale on Nike’s website, and isn’t available in the Nike store in New York City’s Flatiron District. However, versions of the Fuelband SE are still available online at stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods, Finish Line and Best Buy.
Nike did not return a request for comment.
Apple’s move might have a bigger impact on San Francisco-based Jawbone, which was supposed to come out with a new activity tracker, the UP3, before the start of 2015 — though it still hasn’t announced a date on which the device will go on sale.
The Jawbone spokesperson said the company would have an update on the UP3′s availability soon, but declined to coment on the status of its retail partnership with Apple.
Daniel Matte, an analyst at the research firm Canalys, said that the loss of Apple as a retail partner “probably won’t be a very big blow to Jawbone.”
“They have really good international distribution,” Matte said. “They’ve done well in markets like China, and they’re not overly dependent on Apple Stores. It should be a relatively small footprint of their retail distribution.”
Here's Why Patents Are Innovation's Worst Enemy
The founding fathers of the United States considered intellectual property so important that they gave it a special place in the Constitution: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
The framers of the U.S. Constitution were not wrong. Patents did serve an important purpose during the days when technological advances happened over decades or centuries. In today’s era of exponentially advancing technologies, however, patents have become the greatest inhibitor to innovation and are holding the United States back. The only way to stay ahead is to out-innovate a competitor; speed to market and constant reinvention are critical. Patents do the reverse: They create disincentives to innovate and slow down innovators by allowing technology laggards and extortionists to sue them.
A new paper, “Does Patent Licensing Mean Innovation,” by Robin Feldman of the University of California-Hastings Law School and my colleague Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, dispels what doubt there may have been about the innovation value of patents. They analyzed the experience of real companies to see how often patent licenses actually spur innovation or technology transfer when patent holders assert their patents against companies. They found that almost no new innovation resulted. When patents were licensed, regardless of whether they were licensed from companies, patent trolls, or universities, they were practically worthless in enabling innovation.
The study underscores the need to broaden the focus of patent-reform efforts.
Instead of looking at licensing revenue and patent filings, as most academic research papers do, Feldman and Lemley did something unusual: They surveyed 188 technology-development companies in 11 different industry sectors, including computers and electronics, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, biotechnology, communications, and energy. They asked detailed questions about patent licensing, lawsuits, and how often patent licenses spur innovation or technology transfer — in other words, the value provided by technology that was licensed.
They learned that when patent holders approached companies to demand that they obtain a license, even if the companies agreed to do this, it rarely led to any new products or other markers of innovation (including transfers of technology or of personnel and joint ventures). Most companies simply paid for the freedom to keep doing what they were already doing with technology that they had independently developed.
Non-practicing entities (NPEs) are companies that buy patents in order to obtain licensing fees from others. They have become notorious for being like a modern-day mafia that extorts fees from innovators. The commonly offered justification for NPEs is that they serve as efficient middlemen by bringing new technology from inventors to those who can implement it. Not surprisingly, Feldman and Lemley confirmed that they don’t do that. The technologies that they license — in the instances that they are able to extort licensing fees from companies — are almost never used in any new or existing products.
The authors hypothesized that if NPEs do not operate as efficient middlemen, then perhaps they are serving the social good by transferring money to small inventors whose ideas have been appropriated. The patent holder has properly contributed to innovation by publishing its ideas in the form of a patent, and the product company has simply taken the idea from the patent’s disclosure. The NPE, therefore, would be operating as a tax collector to facilitate the transfer of an appropriate payment to the person who gave the idea to the world.
Feldman and Lemley found that this hypothesis didn’t hold up. First, much NPE activity occurs in fast-moving technologies such as computers and telecommunications, in which the patent is often on a technology that bears little resemblance to the defendant’s product. In these circumstances the NPE asserts that the patent covers any means of solving a problem, even if the defendant’s implementation looks nothing like the patentee’s original idea. In these cases the distance between the patent disclosures and the accused product makes it unlikely that the company making the product learned the idea from the patent’s disclosure.
According to the authors, the paying-the-true-inventor hypothesis also assumes a level of quality in patents and adequacy of patent disclosure that is generally not attributed to the modern patent system by scholars and commentators. Engineers in the IT industry, for instance, rarely read patents to try to learn new technologies. Most importantly, prior evidence suggests that virtually no patent suits outside the life-sciences industries are filed against people accused of copying the technology. Almost always, patent owners are suing other innovators who independently developed their own technology.
It isn’t just the NPEs that are a problem. The results were the same when the licensing requests or lawsuits came from product-producing companies and universities; patent licensing rarely led to new products or technology transfer. It was the same for computer and electronics companies as for life-science companies: The research shows that licensing in response to patent demands is not serving much of an innovation-promotion function at all, no matter what type of party initiates the licensing demand. It casts significant doubt on a common justification for a large slice of patent activity.
Even though the study did not examine the licensing that occurs when a company itself initiates the approach to a patent holder or the substantial cross-licensing activity taking place between competitors, the net effect is likely to be the same.
Patents simply have no role in the era of exponential technologies. We don’t need toll roads for innovation; we need faster highways.
Thermometers Replace Mercury With Bluetooth
Thermometers have come a long way from fragile glass tubes filled with dangerous mercury. Those rectal thermometers are still one of the nightmares of my childhood. Today, adhesive strips that contain tiny sensors, Bluetooth and smart phones are improving the art of taking a temperature reading. This year, you’ll see the first wave of thermometers that are more accurate, less intrusive and most important, keep records over time. They come in the form of band-aid like strips, ankle bands and pacifiers.
Here are just a couple of new products you’ll be seeing:
Robin Raskin is founder of Living in Digital Times (LIDT), a team of technophiles who bring together top experts and the latest innovations that intersect lifestyle and technology. LIDT produces conferences and expos at CES and throughout the year focusing on how technology enhances every aspect of our lives through the eyes of today’s digital consumer.
Threats and Delights of the Apple Watch
Six months after revealing the Apple Watch to the world, Tim Cook is here again. The official launch of Apple’s new gadget, held at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, could not have been more exciting for its many fans worldwide.
The Watch will be available in three versions: the Sport edition starts at $349 or $399 depending on size (38mm or 42mm); the regular Watch will start at $549, doubling up for the top configuration (users can choose from many design options); the Watch Edition that comes in 18K gold, up to $17,000 – something that very few of us can afford.
Filled with dynamism and sarcasm, Tim Cooks’ presentation didn’t miss to properly introduce Apple Watch key features: a flexible retina display with Force Touch, that uses tiny electrodes around it to distinguish between a light tap and a deep press, real-time notifications for incoming mail, messages, and calls, Siri, Wi-Fi, GPS, Heart Rate Sensor, Accelerometer, but especially the prompt availability of apps such as Twitter, Apple Pay, Uber, Instagram, Facebook, Maps, and many more.
This is a truly wearable gadget that relies on a connected iPhone to perform many of its functions. Therefore, nobody doubts that it will open up a new market for apps for promising industrial sectors such as fitness: Nerio Alessandri, CEO of Technogym, top producer of fitness and wellness equipment and founder of the so-called Wellness Valley, could barely contain his enthusiasm during Tim Cooks’ presentation.
In the automotive industry, Apple Watch could become an ideal substitute for today’s ignition keys and other tasks as well: a field where both BMW and Tesla are sharing a pole position. Equally important will be the new services related to the media sector. Apps like Anthony De Rosa’s Circa, for example, could take advantage of Apple Watch’s real-time notifications to keep its users constantly up-to-date. Similar opportunities are at hand for entertainment and utility companies, such as the well-know music app Shazam. In fact, the watch works with BMW cars, you can challenge friends to runs on the Nike app, and you can control things in your home using the Honeywell app.
But of course there’s no limit to new, smarter apps that will surely pop up soon in many other fields. A trend where a couple of significant clues are already emerging: these apps will mostly focus on integrating existing products on this wearable device, and independent developers will face both a strong attraction and a challenging competition. Indeed, given the 10-second time limit for any Watch-based interaction, how could they actually gain revenues? This specific constraint seems to limit their chances for alternative revenue streams — at least until new ideas will start rolling.
Beside such shining features and opportunities, however, Apple Watch is also stirring up new privacy and security issues. While the company itself promises not to “ever monitor or collect your data,” obviously its users will share an unprecedented amount of personal data: notes, ideas, events, purchase habits, health records — just to mention a few. The actual management of those data raises legitimate concerns, particularly about their encryption during transmission and the security of their storage options, along with obvious problems if the gadget is lost or stolen.
Also, “trust” remains a crucial issue here: future Watch apps will surely collect lots of data about its users (location, contacts, messages, etc.), but how can we trust their fair use policies? And what about the role of intelligence agencies (in the US and elsewhere)? These days they seem very interested in accessing at any cost tech companies’ sensitive and internal info, in order to surreptitiously spy on the final users — such as the recently discovered program carried by the CIA