Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer… Read more »
Monthly Archives: February 2017
Tinder wants AI to set you up on a date
Tinder is growing up. It’s now a serious technology company tackling one of life’s most important matters, and is by far the most popular dating app worldwide. After a lot of boardroom musical chairs, Mr Rad is the chairman of both Tinder and Swipe Ventures, the arm of the company designed to buy other dating-related… Read more »
Robots Will Soon Do Your Taxes. Bye-Bye, Accounting Jobs
Machines won’t be able to automatically file taxes with the IRS for a few years. But do these commercials signal that robots can come close, requiring fewer human experts, mostly for sanity checks? Is another human profession on the verge of biting the dust? It sure seems that way. As research shows, robots are best-suited… Read more »
Under Pressure to Prove Its Ads Actually Work, Google Opens Up
GOOGLE IS AMAZING at search and fantastic at turning those searches into ad dollars. The other great coup Google has pulled off in its rise to become the world’s second-most valuable company? Convincing the world that its way of advertising is the best way. But a new period of doubt is setting in. After multiple… Read more »
Anyone can be an internet troll if the situation is right
The picture you have of an internet troll may not be as accurate as you think. In fact, new research finds that a troll could be anyone if the circumstances are right. Researchers at Stanford University and Cornell University recently looked into what creates internet trolls. “While the common knowledge is that trolls are particularly… Read more »
Can a ‘superpower force field’ protect us from hackers?
In the Disney Pixar animation The Incredibles, the daughter in the family of superheroes, Violet, has a particular superpower. She can create a protective force field around herself – an impenetrable bubble. She can also make herself invisible. Businesses trying to ward off millions of dangerous cyber-attacks in an increasingly connected world probably wish they… Read more »
How we started the Arab world’s biggest music service
At the turn of the century, as mobile phones were taking off, there was a fad for novelty ringtones. People were paying small sums for their new Nokia phones to play a simple version of popular tunes as a call alert. “It was a silly trend at the time,” says Eddy Maroun, co-founder of Anghami,… Read more »
The Australian company unlocking parking in city centres
Divvy Parking has a free app that allows motorists to search for and book a parking space in commercial buildings owned or run by dozens of property groups, including Mirvac, Dexus, Knight Frank and TFE Hotels. These firms also make money from this digital marketplace for parking, which is akin to a subterranean Airbnb. Source: BBC… Read more »
Tomorrow’s Cities – the future of a good night out
It’s time to head for a night out. Let’s begin with an app. If you are in London, Paris, New York or Berlin you could make use of CityMapper, which draws on public data to plot the best route between A and B, even offering a rain-safe route. And there are no shortage of information… Read more »
Smile, you’re on camera, and it knows who you are
Facial recognition technology has evolved at breakneck speed, with consequences that could be benign or altogether more sinister, depending on your point of view. High-definition cameras combined with clever software capable of measuring the scores of “nodal points” on our faces – the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose, for… Read more »
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