What should A.I. Developers and Marketers know about the Autonomous Car revolution
Your automobile will soon be the ultimate media immersion tool, watch Netflix (jobs at Netflix), YouTube, Play VR baseball against your friend in another autonomous car. Yeah so what if that was supposed to be Science Fiction stuff, it is here now, accept it! Could you imagine planning an even longer commute to get more work done while in your car away from the husband and kids. Jason Harrison, global CEO of Gain Theory says “Cars are essentially becoming the next must-have mobile device.” PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that spending in the autonomous-car industry will balloon to $43.2 billion globally by 2021. Electric Car manufacturer Tesla (jobs at Tesla) is adding 1,600 employees to fast-track its autonomous driving efforts. Ford just made a deal with Google to collaborate on the automaker’s autonomous ambitions. General Motors revealed it is investing $500 million in the car-service app Lyft in order to beat its competitors to the self-driving future. Mercedes-Benz joined with connected-home player Nest to create ETA, a tool that enables a car approaching one’s house to send a signal to adjust the thermostat ahead of time. “Rather than opening up an owner’s manual that’s 500-600 pages long, you watch a little bit of the video, put…
E-Payments in Cars with “Selfies” Facial Recognition and Fingerprints, Oh Boy!
The sad truth is we currently live in a world where everyone wants to get paid, and fast; so Freshbooks, Visa and Mastercard are working towards making E-payments occur as fast as humanly possible. So how are all these quick transactions of currency going to happen? Let’s first take a look at what Freshbooks is up to. Founded in Toronto back in 2003 as a cloud based accountancy software, they’ve moved into the credit card reader business to accept cards through a smartphone. They announced it back in December and have tested it with invite only customers for a limited time. Their $29 reader is a direct competitor for Jack Dorsey’s Square which went public 3 months ago. The reader unit that plugs directly into an iPhone’s audio jack and is designed to help freelancers and small-business owners go “cash-free” by accepting most common bank payment cards. However, the card reader integrates with FreshBooks broader software offering, meaning that merchants’ invoices and financial reports will be synced in real time when each payment is processed. In addition to the $29, merchants will be charged 2.7 percent + $0.30 for each Visa and MasterCard transaction, and 3.4 percent + $0.30 for American…
Diffbot – Machine learning is the new Big Data and Giving it away might be a Money Maker.
“Everything’s becoming intelligent, but the limiting factor of intelligence is access to structured data,” Tung says. Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources wants to scrape all the data on the web (all of it) to put it into a structured format. Making it useful for all sorts of business purposes and make money doing so. The company says its technology “uses computer vision and NLP algorithms to extract and structure any web page into the world’s largest structured database… with no human curation or oversight.” Founded in 2009 The Palo Alto, CA-based startup announced today it raised $10 million from investors to expand its “knowledge-as-a-service” offerings to businesses and consumer apps. They have raised close to $13 million since its seed round in 2012. Diffbot’s plan is to catalog trillions of facts across the Web—many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can’t be mined by traditional search engines. Web-mining can be a competitive advantage for apps as well as the proliferating devices of the Internet of Things, Tung says. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion…
Disney Research on Augmented Reality Demand you Color Within the Lines
That good ol’ company Disney is always on the forefront of doing something cool. Earlier this month we spoke about their using Li-Fi (Read Li-Fi article here). Now they’re working with AR for kids who like to color in books. Why, you might ask? Because they’ve figure out how to turn 2D flat colored images and transform them into 3D characters that you can manipulate. So it takes the image of the character in the coloring book and maps the colors applied by the user to a pre-made 3D animation of the character. So a child begins coloring the characters, the character itself comes to life before your very eyes – that is, with the help of an AR app on any given device. Essentially, as the child draws and colors, the Disney character then springs to life in real-time like magic. Disney (jobs at Disney) believes that technologies such as AR could help re-ignite their innate drive at being creative by integrating the technology with coloring books. By providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements, Disney hopes the mind of child could equally be enhanced in tandem. “[C]hildren spend an increasing amount of time passively consuming content…
Fuse Li-Fi and LED Fabrics together and you get the Future of Media?
So if you recall not too long ago I had written about Li-Fi or light fidelity and how it was a game changer. Well it so happens that the inventor Professor Harald Haas has recently presented a TED talk showcasing a prototype example of how his “light internet” would work. I’ll reiterate again what this is, “broadband transmission using the Visible Light Spectrum or VLS. This is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just like radio waves, is safe, practical to use and multi-functional”. So with standard-off-the-shelf LED’s (light-emitting diode), numerous tests were made and it appears that LED lighting fixtures can transmit wireless data at very competitive high speeds. I definitely recommend that you watch the TED talk here: A commercial product started shipping several months ago as Haas has launched a commercial venture called pureLiFi. The product, Li-Flame, turns standard LED fixtures into wireless Internet access points. Let’s take this idea a little further. You know we’ve also been following wearable tech like Disney’s EM-Sense, but what would happen if the clothes you wore on your body was a Li-Fi hotspot or hub? Well you know that the applications can only be guessed at but researchers at the Korea…
