Startup Bitcoin Kinetics, which aims to create hardware that can allow vending machines to accept bitcoin, is offering 10 billion shares of common stock on the website Cryptostocks. This isn’t your typical IPO—Cryptostocks, where Bitcoin Kinetics will be “listed,” describes itself as both a crowd funding platform and a place to “buy shares… and earn dividends.” It’s not clear what the legal status of Cryptostocks is, since it’s not licensed or registered as an exchange. One commenter called Cryptostocks “another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges.” (We reached out to Cryptostocks for comment, and will update this when we hear back from them.)
Spurred by a host of recent converts to the peer-to-peer digital currency, Newsweek has become the first magazine to accept Bitcoin PR pitches. The digital currency’s visibility in popular retailers remains modest, but its presence in our email inboxes has frankly never been higher.
We were talking recently with an executive in the adtech startup scene and got onto the subject of Bitcoin, and how much money was pouring into — and coming out of — the online cryptocurrency in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area.
This source told us that he had heard about a guy who had made more than $200,000 from trading Bitcoin, and had used it to charter a rocket into space.
QUOTATION(S): “…The FUTURE is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed…” AND “…The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you…” AND “…I’m deglitched that the future is unsure. That’s the way it should be…”
CITATION(S): “…From Conventional Wisdom to Shocking Probability. Maybe someday, sooner or later, truly intelligent machines will be built. Until that time, speculation will abound. Much of that speculation is based on what might be called ‘Conventional Wisdom,’ the underlying assumptions and conventions we collectively share. We can list some of these assumptions as follows: The next century will be an extension of this one, with increasingly smarter machines being run by people and for people … Because the human mind is linked to a soul, cybernetic machines will never be fully self-aware like we are … If intelligent robots can be built, it will be a long time before they can be made to do what humans do, as well as humans do it. Perhaps centuries will be required … Even after intelligent robots are made, multitudes of humans will continue to exist on earth, and maybe even in space … Human minds and personal identities will never be able to merge with an electromechanical system … Even if it were possible, we humans would refuse to download our minds onto hardware, no matter how tempting and intelligent the new surroundings might be. We believe that cyberbeings will be emotionless, soulless, and humorless mechanical zombies ─ rather like ‘Star Trek’s’ Lt. Commander Data, a somewhat sad android pining for a humanity he will never achieve … No matter how smart they are, digital minds will never have the insight, intuition, and smooth savvy of the human mind. They will forever remain mentally inferior, and our faithful, self- maintaining servants … The robots will soon prove our mental and physical superiors. Self-generated enhancements will refine them beyond our control. They will enslave us all except, of course, for a renegade band of rebellious, young, good-looking, daring humans armed with battered, recycled surplus weapons, fearlessly following their craggy but wise leader into a fight for truth, justice, and the hominid way … THIS BOOK ARGUES THAT THE NEXT CENTURY WILL PROVE TO BE NOTHING LIKE THIS ONE, NOR ANY FORECAST SO FAR. COMPUTING POWER, NEUROSCIENCE, AND NANOTECHNOLOGIES ARE ADVANCING SO RAPIDLY THAT THEY WILL COMBINE TO PRODUCE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ITSELF … WE MAINTAIN THAT THE HUMAN MIND AND CONSCIOUS THOUGHT ARE EXCLUSIVELY NATURAL AND PHYSICAL IN ORIGIN AND NATURE. ULTIMATELY, THEIR NATURES AND FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES ARE KNOWABLE AND CAN BE REPLICATED FOR THE PURPOSES OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY…”
BOOK(S): Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier. ISBN-13: 978–0544002692
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps
Three rules for success: Michael Raynor at TEDxUniversity
QUOTATION(S): “…It reminds us that, in our accelerating, headlong era, the future presses so close upon us that those who ignore it inhabit not the present but the past …” AND “…The future is not a privilege but a perpetual conquest…”
CITATION(S): “…The world has profoundly changed … The challenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relationships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989 ─ the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall ─ as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance ─ truly a new era ─ Being effective as individuals and organizations is no longer merely an option ─ survival in today’s world requires it. But in order to thrive, innovate, excel, and lead in what Covey calls the new Knowledge Worker Age, we must build on and move beyond effectiveness [long-held assumptions, fallacies and flawed beliefs and faulty conventions]…Accessing the higher levels of human genius and motivation in today’s new reality REQUIRES A SEA CHANGE IN THINKING: a new mind-set, a new skill-set, a new tool-set ─ in short, a whole new habit…”
BOOK(S): The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage by Yossi Sheffi. ISBN-13: 978–0262693493
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
Cars that retain their human drivers despite growing numbers of self-driving vehicles will gain automated safe-driving features in the United States, according to an announcement this week that U.S. federal agencies will encourage vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, communication technology for passenger vehicles.
The proposal relates to a kind of internet in which the connected computers are cars and trucks sharing data about speed, position and nearby traffic signals ten times a second in order to reduce accidents. If two cars on a three-lane road simultaneously attempted to switch into the center lane, for example, the V2V system could warn both drivers. Alternately, if a car two vehicles ahead brakes, the third driver could be alerted whether or not the middle driver braked immediately.
By Nellie Bowles — Re/code The line outside the Ramen Underground in San Francisco’s Japantown stretched through the mall, as some 300 entrepreneurs, speculators, anarchists and street-corner cryptocurrency dealers gathered for the first-ever Bitcoin Fair last night.
Event co-host Nathan Lands, a 29-year-old in a lush gray velvet smoking jacket, welcomed the crowd.
“When you spend your bitcoin, you can see your bitcoin, you feel your bitcoin,” Lands said, in a Southern drawl. “With this fair, and with the much larger one we’ll do next month, we’re trying to make bitcoin available to the average consumer.”
Within five to eight years, search engines will start to appear much more human-like, according to Google Inc.GOOG+1.51% engineering chief Ray Kurzweil. They will respond to long and complex questions, understand the meaning of the documents they are searching, and be on the look-out for information they think might be useful to people. These advances will lead to improved problem-solving, not just for punctual questions, but for longer-term projects, he said.
The Google search engine of today ranks pages according to the number of times they have been cited by other pages. “Larry and Sergey applied page rank to Web pages. If a lot of other pages point to it, then it must be an important page. And that’s worked very well,” Mr. Kurzweil said Monday evening at the Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference in San Diego, where he was interviewed on stage by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker. Mr. Kurzweil is developing a new kind of search. “Google has already taken steps toward actually understanding the meaning and it can read with a little bit of understanding. That’s basically what I’m working on, to actually understand the content of the Web pages.”
QUOTATION(S): “…By mid-century, computers will be linked directly into our nervous systems via nanotechnology, which is so small it could connect every neuron in our brains. By about 2040, there will be a backup of our brains in a computer somewhere, so that when you die it won’t be a major career problem…” AND “…The future is being colonized all the time by people who have the resources, who do spend time thinking about it, planning for it and trying to shape it in their direction…”
CITATION(S): “…By the end of the twentieth century, science had reached the end of an era, unlocking the secrets of the atom, unraveling the molecule of life, and creating the electronic computer. With these three fundamental discoveries, triggered by the quantum revolution, the DNA revolution, and the computer revolution, the basic laws of matter, life, and computation were, in the main, finally solved .… That epic phase of science is now drawing to a close; one era is ending and another is only beginning .… The next era of science promises to be an even deeper, more thoroughgoing, more penetrating one than the last .… Clearly, we are on the threshold of yet another revolution. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS]. In the past decade, more scientific knowledge has been created than in all of human history. COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS. Almost daily, the headlines herald new advances in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, and space exploration. In the wake of this technological upheaval, entire industries and lifestyles are being overturned, only to give rise to entirely new ones. But these rapid, bewildering changes are not just quantitative. They mark the birth pangs of a new era .… FROM NOW TO THE YEAR 2020, SCIENTISTS FORESEE AN EXPLOSION IN SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. IN TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES, COMPUTER POWER AND THE DNA SEQUENCING, WE WILL SEE ENTIRE INDUSTRIES RISE AND FALL ON THE BASIS OF BREATHTAKING SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES. SINCE THE 1950S, THE POWER OF OUR COMPUTERS HAS ADVANCED BY A FACTOR OF ROUGHLY TEN BILLION. IN FACT, BECAUSE BOTH COMPUTER POWER AND DNA SEQUENCING DOUBLE ROUGHLY EVERY TWO YEARS, ONE CAN COMPUTE THE ROUGH TIME FRAME OVER WHICH MANY SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS WILL TAKE PLACE .… BY 2020, MICROPROCESSORS WILL LIKELY BE AS A CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL AS SCRAP PAPER, SCATTERED BY THE MILLIONS INTO ENVIRONMENT, ALLOWING US TO PLACE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE. THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING AROUND US, INCLUDING THE NATURE OF COMMERCE, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, AND THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE, WORK, PLAY, AND LIVE…”
BOOK(S): A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought) by Vernor Vinge. ISBN-13: 978–0812515282
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
uArm, A Mini Robotic Arm You Can Assemble and Control http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/28/uarm-a-mini-robotic-arm…d-control/ QUOTATION(S): “…It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…” AND “…Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion…”
CITATION(S): “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS].…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…”
BOOK(S): Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. ISBN-13: 978–0307473332
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
