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I just finished reading an interesting hard science fiction book called The Punch Escrow. The story takes place several decades in the future, and it revolves around the idea of quantum foam and teleportation. It points out why teleportation never may be practical, but it brings up the idea of human...
Microsoft and Johnson Controls have unveiled Glas, a smart thermostat that runs on Microsoft's Windows 10 IoT Core, a special OS designed specifically for smaller devices. Glas also utilizes Microsoft's smart voice assistant Cortana and its Azure Cloud to help users save energy while monitoring air ...
Google's augmented reality goggles were a flop several years ago -- when intrepid explorers wore the devices in restaurants and bars, sparking reactions ranging from disapproval to outright violence -- but they have become very welcome in the workplace. Their success in a host of business settings l...
Avnet last week unveiled a beta version of Ask Avnet, a virtual assistant that combines AI with on-demand access to industry experts. Ask Avnet targets "engineers, designers, hobbyists, makers and purchasing specialists across the electronics supply chain -- which includes the product manufacturing ...
With September fast approaching, speculation has begun to roil about the next generation of iPhones, particularly the iPhone 8, or whatever Apple decides to name its special 10th anniversary edition of its smartphone. However, fans aching to get their hands on the iPhone 8 may have to ache longer th...
HP just took over the PC market worldwide. You probably don't get how incredible this is, so here's an analogy: It's as if a crooked referee put a bunch of lead on an overweight racer and shuffled him to the back of the pack, but in the end, the guy finished first. You'd seriously want to look under...
Analytics is "about having a sense of curiosity -- the ability to look at data and say, 'what is it telling me?'" said Olivia Duane Adams, chief customer officer at Alteryx. "I define analytics as 'the ability to ingest any and all relevant sources of data that might help answer a question being ask...
Hyperloop One on Wednesday announced that it had conducted a successful first test of a specially designed vehicle to travel in a vacuum environment. The company achieved controlled propulsion and levitation of a Hyperloop One vehicle at 70 mph on a 315-foot test track in the Nevada desert. The test...
The Echo Show is the first in Amazon's line of smart speakers to incorporate a screen, and it seems very much more "speaker with a display" than "tablet with better audio and microphones." It has all the functionality of Echo, including access to Alexa, Amazon's voice-operated assistant. The screen ...
When a hostile country regularly lobs missiles into the ocean with the stated objective of transforming a U.S. state into a radioactive cloud, we have a problem. One "oops" and we could suddenly become a 49-state nation again. However, approaches to North Korea largely have been in-the-box thinking...
Google recently announced the end of its policy of scanning user emails for targeted advertising purposes -- a controversial practice that riled privacy advocates and spurred legal challenges. Gmail is the world's most widely used email provider, with more than 1.2 billion users. Google attributed i...
Google has introduced a new video format, VR180, developed with input from its Daydream team. The VR180 format, which displays what's in front of the user only, delivers good video quality both on desktop PCs and mobile devices. While VR180 videos appear in 2D on desktops and mobile devices, they ap...
Amazon's significant expansion into yet another market -- this time, grocery stores -- dominated many of my conversations last week. Clearly, Amazon warned us. I've been here before -- you see, back in the 1990s, when Amazon was just books, I was running the company's e-commerce unit. I got into an ...
As Uber reels from the fallout of a sexual harassment scandal that led to the ouster of Travis Kalanick and several of his top executives, the company faces twin dilemmas: how to clean up its corporate work environment and restock its executive ranks; and how to maintain credibility with its custome...