“[T]he United States needs a more systematic way to help its bottled-up new-science innovators deliver their ideas to the world.”
“What could the FAA, an agency whose chief concern is air travel, want with outer space? Well, the FAA is the agency that grants licenses for commercial space launches (the ones that aren’t performed for NASA or the Defense Department, anyway). This potentially gives the nation’s aviation regulators a tremendous amount of power over the fledgling private space industry.” Read more
“Can tech companies really offer better experiences than the taqueria, flower shop or dry cleaner down the street, while taking a cut for themselves? Not necessarily. Quality control is a challenge when the supervisor is just software.
Michael Maiello — Daily Beast
On Tuesday in the United Kingdom, United States law enforcement arrested futures trader Navinder Singh Sarao and froze more than $7 million of his assets in banks around the world. The Department of Justice says that Singh manipulated commodities markets and partially caused the May 6, 2010, “Flash Crash” that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 1,000 points in minutes.
Bloomberg Business — Ashlee Vance
On May 8, 2013, Tesla Motors shocked just about everyone by posting its first-ever quarterly profit, reporting higher-than-expected demand for its Model S electric sedan. That moment marked the beginning of a turnaround for Elon Musk’s tumultuous automaker. The next year would see the Model S win most of the automotive industry’s major awards and Tesla’s share price rise roughly fivefold, to more than $200. The 2013 profit announcement was fortuitous. Just weeks before, Tesla had been on the verge of bankruptcy. Read more
By Tom Simonite — MIT Technology Review
Social-security and credit-card numbers frequently leak or are stolen from corporate networks—and surface on the black market. Adam Ghetti, founder of Ionic Security, says he has invented technology that could largely end the problem. His software keeps corporate data such as e-mails and documents encrypted at all times, except for when someone views it on an authorized computer or mobile device.
Workers at a company using Ghetti’s system can create and exchange e-mails or documents as normal. But Ionic’s software invisibly encrypts what they type on the fly. If someone tries to load a stolen document on a computer outside the company’s network, they would see only the encrypted data—a jumbled string of letters. “A network breach no longer has to mean a data breach,” says Ghetti.
‘New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs’ is a series by i4j (Innovation for Jobs) and the GPA exploring perspectives on important topics that will impact the future of work, jobs and employment.
About i4j: (iiij.org/i4j) Innovation for Jobs conferences bring together individuals from the public and private sectors to discuss the changing economy. “We engage in initiatives creating structures for developing shared language across silos. The starting point for any innovation is the creation of shared language, enabling stakeholders and change agents to interact horizontally.”
This film was created at the Mountain View 2015 i4j Conference. What are your hopes and fears about the future of meaningful work?
Quoted: “Ethereum’s developers believe their project will lead to the proliferation of programs they call “smart contracts,” in which the terms of an agreement are written in code and enforced by software. These smart contracts could carry out the instructions of a complex algorithm based on data feed—such as a stock ticker. They could facilitate practically any financial transaction, such as holding money in escrow or dispersing micropayments among autonomous machines. They could be used to create a peer-to-peer gambling network, a peer-to-peer stock trading platform, a peer-to-peer social network, a prenuptial agreement, a will, a standard agreement to split a dinner check, or a public registry for keeping track of who owns what land in a city.
Gupta predicts that these smart contracts will be so cheap and versatile that they’ll do “a lot of things that today we do informally,” and take on a lot of the “donkey work of running a society.””
Read the article here > http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/here-comes-ethereum-an-information-techn
Davey Alba — Wired
A little while back, we started to hear a few voices speaking up against the drumbeat of doom. No, PCs weren’t dead. They were maybe even coming back.
Well, they’re not.
Market research outfit IDC has revised its prediction of PC shipments in 2015 downward. It’s projecting a drop of nearly 5 percent this year, worse than its earlier forecast of a 3.3 percent decline. In all, IDC expects 293.1 million PC units to ship this year.
Read more
‘New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs’ is a series by i4j (Innovation for Jobs) and the GPA exploring perspectives on important topics that will impact the future of work, jobs and employment.
Quoted: “Ethereum’s developers believe their project will lead to the proliferation of programs they call “smart contracts,” in which the terms of an agreement are written in code and enforced by software. These smart contracts could carry out the instructions of a complex algorithm based on data feed—such as a stock ticker. They could facilitate practically any financial transaction, such as holding money in escrow or dispersing micropayments among autonomous machines. They could be used to create a peer-to-peer gambling network, a peer-to-peer stock trading platform, a peer-to-peer social network, a prenuptial agreement, a will, a standard agreement to split a dinner check, or a public registry for keeping track of who owns what land in a city.
