Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here. Have you heard about Uber? In case you haven’t, it is a start up which is creating havoc in the taxi industry. The issue here is that this is not a taxi service. It is a method of connecting people who have cars, with people who need to go somewhere. They are in over 100 cities around the world and growing.…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here. Siri will get a sister. The team that built Siri, left Apple and started a new company called Viv. Google and Microsoft are working hard to make their devices smart. The device which you carry around everywhere and from nostalgia you still call a phone albeit a smart one, is becoming an information hub. Myriad of sensors measuring your body functions,…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here. Last week it was revealed that Russian hackers harvested 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from numerous websites. You should get really upset. People are continuously lectured by security experts on how to create a secure password with upper case, lower case letters, special characters and numbers. Yet, the lack of security of these websites is outrages. The simplicity of the attack…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here. Hilton is going mobile. This is a big deal. 80 countries, 4 000 properties, 650 000 rooms, and you will be able to book online, customize your room and unlock the door. This is a $500 million project. It points to the fact that the penetration of mobile devices is such that they expect guests have a smart phone. Hilton is…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. Omission from the last week. I apologize for not mentioning an important historic event last week. It was on July 20, 1969 when man stepped on the moon for the first time. The crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were the first ones. More on that at —> http://g3t.ca/b7lrY5 The future is here. The unintended consequences of being forgotten…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. What is Really Happening on the Internet The tragedy of Malaysian flight MH17 is on everybody’s mind. It is impossible to comprehend why anybody would commit such an act. While all parties are quick to point fingers at each other, the simple fact remains – there are close to 300 people dead. The propaganda campaign is raging. To get information from around the world, follow…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is – still – here, unfortunately Last Friday, CTV reported yet another security breach –> http://g3t.ca/aqcdF6 This time, the stolen information resides in PharmaNet. To provide context for the story, here is a description of PharmaNet provided by Medinet, the Integrated Electronic Health Solutions entity responsible for managing the system. Out-patient prescriptions filled in British Columbia are entered into PharmaNet, the province-wide pharmacy…
Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends. The future is here Do you have a Facebook account? If so, you may be one of the almost 700,000 people Facebook used as their very own lab rats. Facebook decided to test how negative stories can influence your inclination to write negative posts. According to the authors of the study: “We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states…
Predicting the future isn’t quite a mug’s game anymore. It was once the province of futurists who talked like evangelists and fortune-tellers who paradoxically could never seem to leverage their predictive abilities with a lottery ticket at their local convenience store. Today, lots of folks are into the prediction racket these days – “predictive analysis”, anyway, with an eerie degree of accuracy. It’s all thanks to Big Data – that ambiguous little term every vendor is using to sell their…
Facebook, the place where you can find everything about your friends, is applying for permission from the Ireland’s central bank to allow its users to store and exchange money. There are few details to be worked out, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they manage to satisfy the regulator requirements. It will mean that Facebook will know: who your friends are; your favourite things; your sentiment about causes you care; and provide you with an offer you won’t…
