Raketa will be one of the the first companies in the world to record the production of physical goods in the Blockchain.
Category: business
Iconic American motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson is known for chrome, freedom, and big, beefy V-twin engines — but soon, it’ll also be known for something very different.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Business Journal, Harley senior VP Sean Cummings says that it’ll put an all-electric motorcycle on the road within five years. You might recall that the Wisconsin-based company built a limited number of LiveWire electric prototypes in 2014, letting media and customers go for test rides, but those bikes were never sold to the public and were never intended for a production run. Still, LiveWire’s existence suggested Harley was pretty serious about exploring the notion of an EV motorcycle — and apparently, the customer response was positive.
The LiveWire was pretty impressive for its day, capable of 0 to 60 in under four seconds and a top speed of nearly 100 miles per hour — but the 55-mile range (33 in a high-performance mode) along with the 3.5-hour charging time made it a little less versatile than a traditional gasoline motorcycle. Presumably, Harley will use the next few years to engineer a newer, better powertrain that offers more range and quicker charging.
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Good write up by Peter on Neil Jacobstein’s perspective on AI. Peter never disappoints in his articles.
Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.
Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)
Computers can identify you based on your butt and your walk, not to mention your smell…
Around half of consumers would “choose anything but a traditional username and password account registration when given the option”, according to identity management firm Gigya.
But would they choose these truly bizarre password alternatives that have been proposed over the years, and would your business be safer switching to them? 1. Biometric Buttocks.
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“Managers, hoping to avoid such jolts, spend too much time focusing on short-term performance. ”
Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Apply here to join Singularity University, CNBC, and hundreds of the world’s most forward-thinking financial leaders at Exponential Finance in June 2017.
Modern life is punctuated by market cycles.
One year the gears of commerce are whirring along. Businesses are hiring and investing. People are buying houses and cars, televisions and computers. Things are going great. Then a year later, the gears screech to halt—sweeping layoffs, plummeting investment, and crashing markets. No one’s buying anything.
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Finally, someone is getting the concept about why in tech where you’re producing technologies that ultimately support many areas of the consumer market in the form of bio/ medical, consumer commercial products, art, homes/ buildings, autos, etc. You must be more inclusive in your teams or find your product and services will plataeu as more and more competitors crowd the space over time; something that other industries have learned many many decades ago.
Because most of the quickly growing companies and startups that tend to dominate it emerged from the maker community, the 3D printing industry often seems to find itself a little sequestered from the rest of the tech industry. Part of the reason is that very few of the industry’s largest companies started or are even based in Silicon Valley. While there is more to the tech industry than Northern California, it is often treated like the popular kids’ lunch table: everyone wants to sit there, and those that are tend to ignore those that aren’t. Sure most of the world’s large tech shows and conferences include plenty of 3D printing these days, but there still isn’t as much crossover as you’d expect, and 3D printing is still treated like that weird cousin who you’re not exactly sure is going to amount to anything.
I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but it almost feels as if being off in its own corner has been good for 3D printing. It has allowed a culture that thrives on open source technology and software to take root, and proven that businesses don’t need excessive patents to be successful if they build their companies correctly. In reality, 3D printing, despite being tech- and software-driven, probably has more in common with the manufacturing industry than high tech. However for all of its varied differences, the 3D printing industry does share one thing with most of the big tech companies in the world, it has a bit of a diversity problem.
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“With the LinkedIn acquisition, Microsoft snares two prizes: the massive amounts of data contained in LinkedIn’s 433 million member profiles that are kept scrupulously up to date by business professionals and to which competitors have no access and the brainy computer algorithms that crunch that data.” the writeup.
Buying the Facebook of professional networks is perhaps the best illustration yet that the cloud wars are heating up.
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Excellent acquisition on multiple fronts. However, I will post the question that will most be definitely on the minds of some folks; “what protections around privacy will MSFT employees and others have with their InMails and communications with recruiters and others who they connect with on LinkedIn?” We have not just MSFT employees, Apple, Google, etc. And, many people have used this site to connect for business and joint ventures, to locate their next opportunity, etc. So, if we look at the larger picture this really must be asked.
This is the email I sent to LinkedIn’s global workforce today. I thought it might be interesting to others, too, so I’ve decided to publish it publicly.
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December 15th, 2008, marked the first day of the best job I’ve ever had. My rationale for joining LinkedIn was simple: The opportunity to work with Reid Hoffman, a founder I greatly admired and respected; to join an extremely talented and dedicated team; and to massively scale LinkedIn’s membership and business, both of which had the potential to fundamentally transform the way the world connects to opportunity. Never in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined what would happen in the next 7½ years. Our team has grown from 338 people to over 10,000, our membership from 32M to over 433M and our revenue from $78M to over $3 billion.
Has anyone ever run the numbers on just how many people hours and $ spent on AI since 1950? Think about it for a minute; and how little we have advance v. the enhancement of people since the 1990 with BMI technology, bionics, etc. and it’s cost. My guess is Mr. Elon Musk understands the ROI extremely well between AI/ Robots v. human enhancement technology especially where there is a larger return and repeat business opportunity.
Computing has been getting much smarter since the idea of artificial intelligent was first thought of 60 years ago. But are computers intelligent?
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