Archive for the 'High Tech & Media' Category

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Meet the young innovators who are changing the world

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Each year Technology Review honors 35 innovators under 35 who are tackling important problems in transformative ways. Candidates come from around the globe, some from regional TR35 competitions run by TR’s international editions. Find the ranking here.

Selecting Technology Review’s yearly list of 35 innovators under the age of 35 is a difficult but rewarding process. We search for candidates around the world who are opening up new possibilities in technology, and then we seek the advice of a panel of expert judges before finally selecting the winners. We look for people who are tackling important problems in transformative ways [Read more].

Sometimes that transformation comes from developing an entirely new technology, such as graphene transistors that could one day replace silicon devices in microprocessors. Sometimes it means using existing technologies in novel ways, such as creating an effective way for local businesses to advertise electronically or organizing social networks to build up a community of patients suffering from a disease.

The hottest new internet companies are growing up outside the USA

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

High-value financings for venture-backed private internet and digital media companies seem to be happening at a rapid pace. Dropbox, Tumblr, AirBnB, Foursquare, and Spotify have all raked in big fundings and attained record valuations in recent months. Meanwhile, public investors are decidedly less sanguine. The Nasdaq Composite index is flat for the year – and the average internet and digital media company is down 50% from 52-week highs.

As you can see from the chart, only six of the 116 publicly-traded internet companies are projected by analysts to achieve over 30% top-line growth in 2011 and 2012 and to achieve 2012 EBITDA margins of at least 30%. That means only 5% of the current crop of public internet companies are in the top echelon in terms of profitability and growth.

Let’s take a further look at these six companies: Baidu, Tencent, Yandex, Mail.ru, Qihoo 360 Technology, and MercadoLibre. What do these companies all have in common? Most obviously, they all operate outside the U.S. Second, they are being richly rewarded by public investors – all six are presently valued at at least 10x revenue – a very meaningful premium over the group of internet and digital media companies as a whole, where median revenue multiples fall in the 1-3x range, depending on subset [Read more].

Ubiquitous computing: Technology will become even more personal

Published on October 16, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Researchers such as Ms Bell conclude that ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp” to its fans, is no longer the realm of science fiction. In a series of articles in the 1990s Mark Weiser, the chief technologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be everywhere yet all but invisible. Instead of the conventional desktop or laptop, Mr Weiser (who died in 1999) and one of his colleagues, John Seely Brown, predicted that in this new era of “calm technology” gadgets would adapt to people rather than vice versa.

If there is one part of the world where personal technology is on its way towards becoming ubiquitous it is Asia, where several richer countries have created impressive infrastructures on which all sorts of personal technologies can work. South Korea, for instance, plans that every home in the country should have an internet connection with a speed of up to one gigabit per second (fast enough to download a full-length feature film in a matter of seconds). And it also intends greatly to increase the capacity of the country’s wireless-broadband networks [Read more].

Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn’t Near

Published on October 14, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The Singularity Summit approaches this weekend in New York. But the Microsoft cofounder and a colleague say the singularity itself is a long way off.

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point [Read more].

Innovation, made in Russia

Published on October 13, 2011 in Global Strategy and High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Skolkovo, just outside of Moscow, wants to become Russia’s Silicon Valley.

The first trip to the Silicon Valley often has a profound impact on foreign entrepreneurs. But for 13 Russian startups currently touring the region, visiting the Valley isn’t just about changing their own point of view; it’s about changing their country.

The idea is to encourage young Russians to take risks, pursue IT opportunities, and maybe adopt a little bit of Silicon Valley culture in the process. Like the idea that failing with a startup doesn’t mean you need to change careers. IT Cluster Deputy Director for Education and Research Katia Gaika told me that Silicon Valley’s embrace of failing is very foreign to people in Russia. “Failure is not acceptable,” she said.

The startups, all part of the state-sponsored Skolkovo IT Cluster, are accompanied by a reality TV crew that documents their every move [Read more].

Beyond the PC

Published on October 9, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Mobile digital gadgets are overshadowing the personal computer, says Martin Giles. Their impact will be far-reaching.

This marks a turning-point in the world of personal technology. For around 30 years PCs in various forms have been people’s main computing devices. Indeed, they were the first machines truly to democratise computing power, boosting personal productivity and giving people access, via the internet, to a host of services from their homes and offices. Now the rise of smartphones and tablet computers threatens to erode the PC’s dominance, prompting talk that a “post-PC” era is finally dawning.

The rise of tablets and smartphones also reflects a big shift in the world of technology itself. For years many of the most exciting advances in personal computing have come from the armed forces, large research centres or big businesses that focused mainly on corporate customers. Sometimes these breakthroughs found their way to consumers after being modified for mass consumption. The internet, for instance, was inspired by technology first developed by America’s defence establishment[Read more].

Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle tablet set for November at $250

Published on September 4, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Amazon’s long-rumored tablet, dubbed simply the Kindle, is “very real” and headed your way this November for $250, reports TechCrunch’s MG Siegler.

Amazon also plans to offer free Prime subscriptions with the tablet. The premium service typically costs $79 a year and offers perks like free two-day shipping and access to Amazon’s Instant Video. A free Prime membership alone would net Amazon plenty of interested buyers, but at $250 the tablet seems like a downright steal (that will also ingeniously tempt owners into buying more stuff from Amazon).

The tablet runs a heavily customized version of Android 2.2, and Siegler writes that it “looks nothing like the Android you’re used to seeing.” The main screen features a carousel of all your content on the device (or linked to your Amazon account), and it sounds like the interface shares little with the stock Android setup. The Kindle tablet is so deeply customized, Siegler says, that there’s no Android Market, only Amazon’s Android marketplace, and no default Android apps from Google [Read more].

In Silicon Valley, the Night Is Still Young

Published on August 24, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

LET the rest of the country worry about a double-dip recession. Tech land, stretching from San Jose to San Francisco, is in a time warp, and times here are still flush.

Even now, technology types in their 20s and 30s are dropping a million-plus each on modest ranch houses in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and Victorian duplexes in San Francisco, and home prices in some parts have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last six months.

Jobs — good, six-figure jobs, with perks like free haircuts and lessons on how to create the next start-up company — are here for the taking, at least for software engineers.

And for anyone with a decent idea and the drive to start a company, $100,000 to get it off the ground is easy to come by [Source].

Why HP Wants Autonomy: Math Skills

Published on August 22, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Autonomy excels at analyzing the vast amounts of “unstructured data” being produced every day.

News broke today that HP, the world’s biggest manufacturer of personal computers, had offered to acquire the British software company Autonomy. While the latter is hardly a household name, it gets close to $1 billion in revenue each year from software that can turn huge volumes of images, text, and video into useful statistics and insights for businesses.

Acquiring that technology will enable HP to expand its business software products, and put it in a good position to exploit a trend dubbed “big data.” Businesses are increasingly interested in finding ways to distill meaning from the growing piles of digital information, from tweets to video, flowing through our lives at work and at home [Source].

YouTube hits 3 billion daily views on its sixth birthday

Published on May 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Proving yet again that it’s an unstoppable video juggernaut, YouTube announced today that it surpassed 3 billion daily page views this past weekend — a 50 percent increase over last year.

That’s a pretty good birthday present for the company, which launched six years ago in May 2005. On its fifth birthday last year, the company announced that it had hit 2 billion daily views, which was just six months after it hit 1 billion daily views.

With the rise of 4G networks and faster smartphones this year, I suspect YouTube will hit 4 billion daily views before its next birthday [Source].