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Hirobo's Futuristic One-Man Electric Helicopter

Recently showcased at an expo in Nagoya, the helicopter prototype can travel up to 100km/h (62 mph) and fly for 30 minutes at a time. The one-seater chopper is currently under development for use as personal transportation and emergency relief.

Ok - so the title is a little bit of a link-bait - but the article sheds light on a patent which was just awarded to Amazon last week - and it definitely has the potential to disrupt the entire media industry. The patent applies to an online peer-to-peer marketplace for the resale of digital content.

An electronic marketplace for used digital objects is disclosed. Digital objects including e-books, audio, video, computer applications, etc., purchased from an original vendor by a user are stored in a user’s personalized data store. Content in a personalized data store may be accessible to the user via transfer such as moving, streaming, or download. When the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user’s personalized data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user’s personalized data store. When a digital object exceeds a threshold number of moves or downloads, the ability to move may be deemed impermissible and suspended or terminated. Additionally or alternatively, a collection of objects may be assembled from individual digital objects stored in the personalized data stores of different users, and moved to a user’s personalized data store.

The implications could be massive, as pointed out by the post:

Gives Amazon a patent (potential monopoly) on the concept of digital content marketplaces (think ebay for ebooks, music etc.)

Purchase of NEW media will go down, as consumers will opt for the lower priced USED content. Amazon itself will obviously make their cut on each resale, but the content creators won't see much from it OR will at least see a reduced margin. Eventually, this will drive content generators to directly use Amazon's content creation  platforms (publishing etc.)

At the face of it, it would seem that the consumers will benefit from the reduced prices, but as content creators get jaded, it would also reduce the selection and quality of the content that the end user receives.

A lot of the legal aspects are not clear yet - how the licensing gets handled? What about the DRM?

Inching closer to the fountain of youth!

The new study, published in Cell Reports, represents a major discovery and offers new hope for development of targeted treatments for a long list of age-related degenerative diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer's and arthritis, just to name a few.

As amazing as this sounds, I wonder if the world ready for it? If human life expectancy were to go significantly beyond current levels, and if the birth rates remain as-is - you've got to think that we will suck this planet dry in no time... and whatever follows after that, is not going to be pretty. 

Known as STRaND-1, the British-built spacecraft will be fully controlled by a Google Nexus device during part of its six-month mission in orbit.

Uhm... maybe my post making fun of how we use our smartphones was a tad premature.

I first read about this initiative over a year ago, but sounds like it is very close to completion. The Brits have successfully built a satellite powered by a Google Nexus phone.

This is truly fantastic news and could be one possible direction to achieve inexpensive space exploration. But, the question that keeps bugging me is what kind of data plan are they using? ;)

Yesterday, Amazon announced Coins as a new virtual currency for the Kindle Fire. This will enable customers, currently geo-fenced for the US, to use "coins" to purchase apps, games and in-app items.

The thing that really stands-out with this announcement is the ability to use coins to purchase "in-app" items. This clearly implies, that Amazon will expose an API for Coins and will enable Android developers to build Coins-features directly into their apps.

Currently in-app purchases are handled by the Google Play store. If/when Amazon exposes the Coins SDK to the entire Android eco-system, not just Kindle, then they would directly compete with the Google Play Store for in-app purchases. 

Also, Coins would fit in nicely for App developers who use Gamification within their apps. Gamified earning of Coins would be relatively more attractive for the users and will help developers get more ad-generated revenue. 

As more apps (for Kindle or otherwise) use Coins, it'll provide more points of engagement for Amazon to reach Android developers and users. If done right, it could be a powerful game-changer for Amazon.

Rest assured, you can rely on Amazon to get people to adopt their "currency" even if they have to buy you out:

If you are looking for a NOSQL Document-based database solution for the cloud, you may be well advised to take a look at Object Rocket. Their offering is branded as a Database as a Service (DBaaS) and it offers some very powerful features for enterprise grade requirements.Quoting from their website:

"Built from the ground up, ObjectRocket is the premium MongoDB database-as-a-service (DBaaS). The only solution that is by default highly available, automatically sharded and unbelievably fast."

Even though the solution has been around for a while now, my attention was drawn to it by this recent interview conducted by Robert Scoble:

Looks very interesting indeed.

Here is some more about the key features from the site:

Architecture: ObjectRocket is built using a unique architecture called a pod. Pods are a modular design aimed at ensuring easy scalability and availability for MongoDB. When an instance is created, all required components are automatically provisioned. This includes all the mongos servers, mongod servers, config servers, arbiters, load balancing, API access, SSL termination, and backups. Each instance has at least 1 shard, a master and at least one secondary. Adding shards is as simple as a single click.

I think this picture (trending currently) provides a good perspective on the new 128 GB iPad. If you use a tablet for everything in life and your existing 64 Gig iPad is near capacity because you have app and data hoarding problem, then this is the iPad for you.

This is Apple's attempt to preemptively attack the market for the upcoming segment of hybrids (tablet/laptop). They seem to be reacting to  news of Microsoft Surface Pro hybrids coming later in the year. So, the last two iPad launches from Apple - the Mini and 128GB - have both been defensive moves.

Samsung seems to have succeeded where most companies have tried and failed. They have managed to challenge Apple's dominance of what is cool.

To begin with, Samsung demolished Apple in terms of sales numbers over the holiday period.

The Korean company’s results for the fourth quarter of 2012 show profits up a whopping 76 percent since Q4 2011, reaching 7.04 trillion won ($6.55 billion).

Samsung doesn’t break out actual mobile phone shipment volumes in its financial reports, but analyst house IDC estimates shipments of 63.7 million smartphones during the quarter. That’s up against Apple’s 47.8 million iPhone shipments during the same period.

Read more here

Plus recently, in a research conducted by The Telegraph, it was noted that retailers in the UK are recommending Samsung smartphones over the iPhone to their customers.

Apple and Samsung were just as likely to be promoted by advertising in the store or the shop window but sales assistants were far more likely to recommend Samsung.

Read more here

This is obviously a small study (targeting just 8 major retailers), and Apple is still a far more profitable company than Samsung. Moreover, the iPhone 5 was probably the least innovative iPhone thus far, competing against probably the best Android phone in the history of the platform. So, we must take all these numbers with a pinch of salt.

In my opinion, what we need to gather from these stories, is that the average smartphone consumer has reached a level of maturity where they are capable of assessing multiple options and of purchasing a product purely on its merits.

The other takeaway is the maturity of both, iOS and Android ecosystems as they are able to offer comparable quality in terms of applications, accessories, service etc.

In one of my earlier posts about 3D printing, I talked about the potential of using this technology for grafting tissue and organs. This would be a HUGE win as it would reduce the dependence on organ donors. Currently the US alone has ~90,000 people on the transplant list for kidneys - that's just one organ. There are no clear worldwide projections, but you can imagine the numbers to be massive.

Bioprinting thus far is a research-grade concept and an expensive one at that. The cost associated with this also proves to be detrimental to the pace of research in this area and the space desperately needs an inexpensive technical breakthrough.

So now, some folks from the biotech hackerspace BioCurious have written a set of instructions to hack an ordinary desktop printer to build your own BioPrinter. While this is obviously a very rudimentary adsolution, but it shows promise towards making this technology cheaper.

Ambitious initiatives across the pond! EU has been lagging behind the US in Innovation. This is a bold step to try and bridge that gap.

A selection committee of scientists and industrialists took two years to whittle a list of more than 20 projects down to two winners. The members of the selection committee have not been identified, but European Union officials said they were carefully vetted to avoid any conflicts of interest.

The Human Brain Project aims to create the most accurate simulation to date of the brain and its functions. The project could help aid diagnoses of diseases, help with the testing of new drugs, and develop supercomputing techniques modeled on the brain.

Vizify connects to your social profiles and generates an infographic about your life. 

Creating visually appealing identities, or CVs has become a trend, and people are trying to come up with imaginative ways to showcase themselves (See: Man's Amazon style resume goes viral) 

At the core of this activity is the basic principle of personal branding. Increasingly your social and professional connections are relying on your online identity to better understand you. Therefore, managing your content and and your personal brand has never been more important. But, most of us have been social media users for many years now. Therefore, a lot of relevant content about our lives is already sitting online. Hence, there just isn't enough motivation for the average internet user to filter all that detail and collate it again in visual CV. This provided an opportunity for startups like Vizify to do this for you. 

Creating a profile on Vizify is very simple since it just about connecting to your online profiles. Once connected, Vizify creates a graphical view of you - which you can customize extensively. Thereafter, Vizify will keep tabs on your Social profiles and refresh your infographic accordingly.

Google+ Is now the second largest Social Network in the world

A recent Global Web Index report has revealed that Google Plus has surpassed Twitter in active users and continues to grow. Actually both Twitter and Google+ continue to gain ground on Facebook.

While some may still be skeptical, the fact is that it is increasingly important for businesses to pay as much attention to Google+ as they have to Facebook and twitter. 

I've always believed that Google+ is more about Google's cloud services, than it is about social. And as Google+ gets more and more deeply integrated with all of Google's offerings, there is no way to avoid it, so do NOT ignore it.

Going by a recent Patent filing, looks like Google Glass will ship with Bone Conduction Audio. I recently wrote about the concept.

Add this to the recent news about a possible laser projected keyboard, and we are beginning to see a much clearer picture of what Glass will look like.

This is retarded. The big wireless providers are making it unnecessarily complicated for the end consumer to be able to switch carriers - basically, making it harder to make choices which we are entitled to.

I have recently completed my 2-yr contract with my last provider, now I'm considering switching providers... while I haven't decided whether to get a new phone or not - this law just made the decision for me.

This just makes it more expensive to switch carriers and just increases electronic waste... the entire telco business model needs some serious disruptive innovation.

Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday | TechNewsDaily.com

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Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday (secretsofthefed.com)