Group items tagged

. Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030

They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.

Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time,5 which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year.6

High-profile mobile money launches by Apple and Samsung may have caught the headlines

But it is the developments in payments systems in supposedly less developed nations in Africa and Asia that point the way to the probable future for wider mobile banking.

the reality remains that the mobile phone as a means of payment remains relatively niche even in developed markets.

the ODE efficiently mobilizes supply chains and workforces while enabling collaboration and asset sharing. Uber harnesses the supply effortlessly because their workforce is essentially any person with a smartphone and a car. Sharing and access by phone is nothing new, but Uber was one of the first to apply it to the ODE in a massive scale.

One-Click Interface

While the one-click interface creates a compelling user experience, the optimized value chain is what makes the user stick around in the long term

As America switches from an industrial economy to a digital one, its bluest collar workers are facing the toughest challenge of their lives. Can miners really learn how to code?

Say what you will about the long-term environmental effects (Justice, for one, is very pro-coal) but the impact on the area’s one-source economy has been brutal.

The Rusty Justice seminar concludes for today. The coders swivel back to their computers, and Michael announces weekend plans to no one in particular: “Looks like I better learn C#.”

Russia’s economy is at a turning point. Following a decade of spectacular growth fueled by high energy prices, the country could either use its newfound riches to finance much-needed modernization and become a driver of innovation and growth, or muddle through by continuing to rely on its large yet maturing hydrocarbon base.

Ranking the importance of different drivers for Russia’s economic development in terms of impact and uncertainty over the way in which they may evolve over time, the group highlighted oil and gas prices as well as economic diversification and competition as critical uncertainties (see exhibit).

In the case of Russia, these numbers assume that its current demographic decline is counterbalanced and gradually reversed by the effects of an Arctic windfall, and that it can maintain effective control of its Far East region.

Ignoring the effects of environmental change, China will be by far the largest economy, with a GDP that is 40 percent of the total for the top twenty economies. The US will be second with a GDP well under half that of China. India will be third and Brazil will be fourth.

Taking environmental change into account, China and the US will be neck-and-neck with 24 percent each of the GDP for the top twenty, Russia will be third, Brazil fourth and India fifth. Most of China’s catch-up will happen early, prior to 2030; before climate change really bites.

Петербуржец запустил Locolo: Airbnb для аренды вещей

Бывший издатель онлайн-журнала Apparat Артем Игнатьев анонсировал запуск сервиса для аренды вещей от пользователя к пользователю. Locolo обещает помочь, если вам понадобятся колонки для вечеринки, дрель на сутки или фрак на свадьбу.

Люди перестали хотеть обладать самими вещами, им нужна лишь их временная польза. Именно поэтому развиваются сервисы по шерингу машин, аренде квартир и прочего.

M-Pesa’s success has been phenomenal. Recent statistics show that fully one-quarter of the Kenyan economy flows through M-Pesa.

Other countries are taking a crack at a similar mobile digital currency. Vodacom

has launched M-Pesa in other African nations, as well as India and parts of Eastern Europe. In Latin America, Ecuador recently announced it would launch a nationwide digital currency, residing largely on people’s smartphones

Few doubt that our future — both immediate and long term — will be heavily impacted by robots

A pair of Oxford researchers recently estimated that 47 percent of the total U.S. employment is at risk of being eliminated.

On the other end of the spectrum, Mercedes announced it is trading out some of its production robots for human labor — the machines could not keep up with the increasing options for customization

“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?” “Yes,” she replied.

through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do.

The City Council's Housing and Buildings Committee heard testimony Tuesday from residents, housing advocates, city officials and companies about the effects of the growing industry on the city.

In November 2014, about 15,300 New York City listings were entire homes or apartments representing about 59% of the available listings on the site that month, according to Slee. There were also 9,704 listings for private rooms, and 753 listings for shared rooms. The analysis also showed that 2,764 users were renting out two or more units, which opponents have cited as evidence the service is helping illegal hotels. More than 200 users were renting out five units or more

Airbnb is calling for "smart regulation," which it has had success with in cities including Portland, Oregon; San Jose and San Francisco, California; Amsterdam; and Paris. Airbnb collects lodging tax directly from hosts in those cities, and several local governments have passed laws that allow short-term rentals in some form.

The prospect of genetically much altered future generations is no longer in the distant science fiction future but rather in the "some of the people reading this will live to see it on large scale" future.

Some more competitive governments might mandate genetic editing to put a floor on intelligence. Want a first class high tech economy? Allow no kid below 120 IQ. The first government to do that will have the highest per capita income economy in the world 50 years later if not much sooner.

My expectation is that differences in regulatory response to germ line genetic engineering technologies will cause the populations of the world's various countries to diverge in a variety of ways that will be immediately visibl

Consumers in China spent $116.8 billion on luxury goods abroad in 2015

This translates to 46% of the global volume of high-end goods, which includes branded leather goods, cosmetics and electronics, according to consultants at Beijing-based Fortune Character Group, which derived these figures from the revenues of some 20,000 brands.

The government says that 120 million Chinese tourists — just about 1% of the population — went overseas in 2015, and contributed to 12% of global spending on their holidays.

Across industries, disrupters are reinventing how the business works. Less obvious, and just as important, they are also reinventing what it is to be a company.

The rise of big financial institutions (that hold about 70% of the value of America’s stockmarkets) has further weakened the link between the people who nominally own companies and the companies themselves.

The number of companies listed on America’s stock exchanges has fallen by half since 1996, partly because of consolidation, but also because talented managers would sooner stay private.

Recently, an app called Peeple got a whole lot of attention for trying to be the Yelp for Humans

But what would it be like if we lived in a world where everything you do is subject to a rating doled out by a combination of machines and other people?

Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com and the author of the book The Reputation Economy, talks on the episode about all the ways that brands and companies are already compiling your information into a profile that helps them make decisions about you. Linkedin, AirBnB, Uber, they’re all gathering what Fertik calls your “digital exhaust” to learn more about you

Бот поддерживает функцию поиска по раздачам и может сортировать по сидам, личам, размеру раздачи, дате регистрации и количеству скачиваний.

чуть больше двух недель назад бота в мессенджере запустила «Флибуста». Он бесплатно распространяет книги, в том числе и те, за которые онлайн-библиотеку забанили на территории страны.

Правообладатели уже пригрозили заблокировать мессенджер, если администрация Telegram не удалит бота.

innovation is coming from private companies. These companies are starting to have better insights about how a city works compared to local governments.

Cities should be collecting all the data these companies are generating — Airbnb, Uber, drone delivery, Google self-driving cars. You can run analytics and look at the efficiency of the city

The startup is building a platform so that all the companies can send their data to this platform using an API approach.

Slice Intelligence just revealed that people who bought products in mobile video games last year spent an average of $87 dollars on their “free-to-play” games. This redefines how we view hardcore gamers: people who purchase games for traditional consoles and PCs spend only $5 dollars more on average on their gaming entertainment.

The mobile game with the largest average in-app spend is Game of War, where players spend, on average, $550