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Maria Gurova

The Personal Blog of Zack Kanter - How Uber's Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million J... - 1 views

  • . 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
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  • The car purchasers of the future will not be you and me – cars will be purchased and operated by ride sharing and car sharing companies.
  • , it is unlikely that major automakers like General Motors, Ford, and Toyota will survive the leap.
  • while startup automakers like Tesla will thrive on a smaller number of fleet sales to operators like Uber by offering standardized models with fewer options.
  • 884,000 people are employed in motor vehicles and parts manufacturing, and an additional 3.02 million in the dealer and maintenance network.22 Truck, bus, delivery, and taxi drivers account for nearly 6 million professional driving jobs. Virtually all of these 10 million jobs will be eliminated within 10-15 years
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    an article about autonomous transportation and how disruptive they might be not only for the car and transport industry but for entire economy
Maria Gurova

'Snowpiercer's' VOD gamble is paying off | EW.com - 0 views

  • distributors are usually loathe to discuss VOD specifics publicly. When consumers are used to seeing $60 to $100 million opening weekends for major blockbusters in wide release, VOD numbers, no matter how “good,” look miniscule in comparison. Add on the fact that Snowpiercer is the widest multi-platform release ever, and the tricky exercise of figuring out how to combine theatrical earnings with weekend estimates from digital and cable providers, and the territory gets even more unfamiliar.
  • Snowpiercer earning an estimated $1.1 million from VOD this past weekend, nearly twice as much as the $635,000 it earned in theaters. “From a layman’s perspective these numbers are possibly not that interesting,” admits RADiUS-TWC co-president Tom Quinn. “But from an industry perspective, it’s a game changer.”
  • VOD is both cheaper and more profitable. “That $1.1 million gross is actually worth almost double to me in terms of how it nets out in our bottom line,”
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  • VOD—with access to 85 million homes—doesn’t have the same drastic theatrical drop-offs from week to week.
  • Still, a two-week theatrical exclusive is an extremely short window, especially since Snowpiercer opened in only eight theaters and is currently showing at a mere 356 locations
  • “This is completely uncharted territory but it’s 100 percent within the consumer’s control how you want to see this film,”
alexbelov

How the internet is disrupting politics - Vox - 0 views

  • But thanks to the internet, that hasn't stopped Bernie Sanders from putting up a serious fight. He was able to leverage his online support to raise $73 million from 1 million donors in 2015 — most of whom gave small amounts. He raised another $20 million in January and $40 million in February, with an average contribution size of $27.
  • But one safe bet is that the media of the future will be even more decentralized than today's media. It will be easier than ever for voters dissatisfied with the status quo to find each other, organize, and back political outsiders willing to champion their concerns.
  • the political process finally feels the full impact of the internet revolution, it will be "more like a phase change than just an incremental shift." The Trump and Sanders campaigns might seem like a dramatic change from the status quo, but the internet's political revolution is just getting started.
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    Political campaigns become decentralised and independent of traditional media and elites. Candidates collect large sums online for their election campaigns, new channels, like social networks, allow them to gain support of the masses. The old media still works but its influence rapidly weakens.
Anton Vorykhalov

IMAX Raises $50 Million for VR Efforts | Digital Trends - 0 views

  • IMAX is going VR, so put on your headsets and hold on
  • Late last week, IMAX announced that it had “completed the first phase of a $50 million virtual reality fund between IMAX and other strategic investors to help finance the creation of at least 25 interactive VR content experiences over the next three years for use across all VR platforms including in IMAX VR centers.” That means that at some point in the near future, we’ll be able to enjoy higher-quality VR content on really, really giant screens.
Maria Gurova

Imax's Richard Gelfond on Virtual Reality, Woody Allen and Reservations Over Netflix - ... - 0 views

  • Given Imax receipts typically account for about 10 percent of the average tentpole's box office, studios and top filmmakers frequently shift their release dates to land a big-screen berth
  • Looking forward, the company is making a big push into virtual reality, partnering with Google on a camera, and will launch its first VR space in Los Angeles this year. On the content front, Michael Bay is in talks to create original VR content for Imax
  • Any regrets about partnering with Netflix to release the low-grossing Crouching Tiger 2? I have no regrets about experimenting because, especially with the windows changing distribution patterns, with digital distribution and over‑the‑top alternatives evolving quickly, the industry is going to have to experiment and learn.
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  • If someone came to us and said, "Would you launch a TV series in Imax day-and-date?", that's definitely something we would consider
  • We have over 300 theaters open; we have over 200 theaters in backlog [where a theater has been approved and the space designated, but it hasn't been built yet]. We just announced a 10‑theater deal.
  • Wanda, which accounts for the largest number of Imax screens in China, has its own giant-screen technology. Worried? I'm not very worried.
  • If the public wants an experience that's better than a standard 35mm but not as good as an Imax, there's a category they fit in.
  • In 2015, you announced the creation of the Imax China Film Fund to invest in Chinese tentpoles.
  • We can leverage those relationships, plus the Imax technology, plus the Imax release windows, and create value by investing in the right films.
  • We could get into original programming, but we're not going to be a small participant in a $200 million movie. Could I see there being a $10 million or $20 million film that is with an Imax filmmaker who loves Imax and plays well to the Imax audience and has the right ancillary distribution afterward? Yes. That's something we're exploring.
Anton Vorykhalov

Kuwait Makes Registration Mandatory For DNA Database | Digital Trends - 0 views

  • Citizens of Kuwait must now register their DNA with the government or face hefty fines
  • In a bold and controversial move, Kuwait has just passed a new law that makes it mandatory to register your DNA with the government. Starting soon, the 1.3 million citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents of Kuwait will have to enter their individual DNA profiles into a government database.
  • Since the program is being mandated, the government of Kuwait will spend the equivalent of about $400 million to subsidize the DNA testing and management. Refusal to comply or DNA tampering could result in fines as high as $33,000, and even time in prison.
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  • The hope is that capitalizing on the availability of DNA technology in today’s market will help deter criminal acts in the future, as well as expedite arrests and investigations when incidents do occur.
al_semenchenko

The driverless truck is coming, and it's going to automate millions of jobs | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam.
  • the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.
  • While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.
Maria Gurova

Pixar Vets Reinvent Speech Recognition So It Works for Kids | WIRED - 0 views

  • Though characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear are wonderfully realistic and lovable, the relationship that kids have with them is largely one-sided. Kids can hear these characters talk—not only through movies, but games, toys, and other movie merchandise—but they can’t engage them.
  • It was this idea that inspired Jacob to team up with his former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy, and launch a new company, ToyTalk. The San Francisco-based outfit develops mobile games that let kids have conversations with animated characters—dialogues that can last for hours
  • Known as PullString, it’s equal parts speech recognition engine and script writing tool, and it’s quite a departure from other speech rec tools developed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It’s tailored specifically to kids, whose sentence structure, pitch, and vocal tone have posed challenges for traditional tools.
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  • “The way kids talk and communicate is very different from how adults do, both in terms of how they use language and the fundamental frequencies that come out of their throats,
  • But as he points out, the way today’s children use technology will likely dictate the tech landscape for decades to come. If you can get kids hooked on speech technology young, they’ll stay with it forever.
  • Kids don’t want to ask a monkey character in a game what the weather will be on Tuesday. They want to sing him a song or ask him about life in the zoo.
  • While ToyTalk uses existing third party technology for its raw speech recognition, it works with those partners to develop better recognition models using ToyTalk’s own data. Now, ToyTalk has a trove of some 20 million children’s utterances, which Jacob believes is the largest database of kids conversation in the world
  • “Virtual assistants are awesome when they can answer every question. In our case, it’s the opposite,” Jacob says. “I have to know a lot of things that I’m not able to answer, and redirect the conversation to something that is within character.”
  • And Jacob says some toy companies are already testing PullString to power apps based on existing characters.
  • this technology could give kids a whole new way to play that falls somewhere in between the playground and the imaginary friend. “I think at some deep level if we succeed, we’ll inspire the imagination of kids to talk about things they might not otherwise talk about,”
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    the voice rec technology developed by ex-Pixar guy that is targeted to kids. It considers all nuances of kids speech behavior and analyses millions of kids conversations to make interaction with favorite characters within all possible media truly engaging
alexbelov

UK government invests £60 million in Skylon 'super-plane' that could cut Lond... - 0 views

  • UK government invests £60 million in Skylon 'super-plane' that could cut London to Sydney flights to just four hours
  • Its 'Sabre' engine - a hybrid rocket and jet propulsion system which theoretically allows travel anywhere on Earth in four hours or less - could become a reality in a decade.
  • A full ground-based engine test is currently planned for 2020.
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  • The super-plane will rely on cooling an incoming airstream from 1,000 degrees C to minus 150 C almost instantly, at close to 1/100th of a second.
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    Aerospace flight research aiming to speed up long-distance flights. However investment volume seems inadequate for such a huge project.
Maria Gurova

Star Wars Characters Will Now Teach Your Kids To Code | WIRED - 1 views

  • Today, as part of its annual Hour of Code event, Code.org is launching a free online tutorial that prompts kids to build their own games, based on characters in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
  • where they’ll learn to write code to design their own games featuring characters like R2-D2 ad C-3PO.
  • Of the 5 million students currently registered on Code.org, around 2 million are girls and around 2 million are black or Hispanic.
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  • That’s one reason why the Hour of Code tutorial, which is available to anyone online, focuses on the film’s prominent female characters, instead of, say Han Solo or Luke Skywalker.
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    New collaboration between Code.org that spread the popularity of coding among kids and Disney. This time featuring SW franchise 
isoldatenkova

Netflix's 'Murder Mystery' Would've Killed in the Theaters | Fortune - 0 views

  • Murder Mystery scored a record-breaking 30.8 million viewers—the highest weekend ever for a Netflix debut—which would put its theoretical global haul $278.1 million—great results for Netflix and Sandler, who signed a four-movie deal with the streaming service in 2017.
  • Murder Mystery does prove is that Netflix’s deal with Sandler and its other forays into original filmmaking can produce blockbuster results.
  • To be fair, Toy Story 4 is expected to have a worldwide opening of $260 million, but Netflix is still clearly winning by putting out a middling movie that people can watch in the comfort of their own home, in the backseat of a car, or wherever else they choose.
alexbelov

Facebook's Messenger Bot Store could be the most important launch since the App Store |... - 0 views

  • Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users – more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. Messenger’s current active user base exceeds even the total number of iPhones ever sold. Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.
  • If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Conversational user interfaces are about to change the way billions of users interact with the world around them.
  • Pavel Durov announced the expansion of the Telegram Bot Store and Ted Livingston staked out Kik’s claim to be the WeChat of the West. By the end of the year, Slack had announced the Slack App Directory, supported by an $80 million fund to fuel the growth of the ecosystem, and Google was rumored to be developing its own chatbots.
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  • 2016 would be “the year of conversational commerce”, but the Messenger bot platform will inevitably extend far beyond commerce.
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    Facebook is developing chatbot platform for its messenger. It will open new opportunities for online businesses, including conversational commerce. Message bots will become new apps and challenge existing industries.
Ekaterina Yanovskaya

Driving in the Networked Age | Reid Hoffman | LinkedIn - 0 views

  • how soon will it be illegal to operate human-driven cars on public streets?
  • autonomous vehicles will also be able to share information with each other better than human drivers can, in both real-time situations and over time. Every car on the road will benefit from what every other car has learned. Driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge.
  • when thousands and then even millions of cars are connected in this way, new capabilities are going to emerge.
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  • But the benefits of self-driving cars are so significant that in time the public will demand prohibitions against old-fashioned legacy driving in most public spaces
  • there are more than 2 billion legacy cars on the road, globally. Currently, the car industry can only produce around 100 million new vehicles a year. Just from a manufacturing perspective, it could take 20 years to build a new fleet that approximates the one we have now.
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    driverless cars that will function with a "zero
Maria Gurova

BBC - Future - Is e-waste an untapped treasure? - 0 views

  • Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem
  • Yet many are realising that the gadgets we chuck away can be ripped apart and transformed into something new – brand new technology, or even art.
  • In 2012, we discarded 48.9 million tonnes of electrical and electronic products. If current trends continue, by 2017, the annual amount of e-waste produced globally will reach 65.4 million tonnes – that’s roughly 20% of the weight of all the people living on Earth.
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  • Using parts and wires from old computers, scanners and photocopiers (some of it for free, but most bought), and an Arduino electronics card as the brain, they managed to put together a working prototype for a few hundred euros (see below).
  • “In Togo, there are many people who can’t have access to computers, because they don’t have money to buy a new computer,” says Allahare. “But we have many computers that are broken and not working. It’s sometimes just a little piece that is spoiled in it. W.Jies can help people get connected, get information, and help kids learn ICT from low-cost computers.”
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    in 2012 china alone produced 11.1 mlm tones of e-waste, what can be considered trash in one part of the world, can indeed become a treasure in the other part of the world
Maria Gurova

YouTube's Grand Plan to Make VR Accessible to Everybody | WIRED - 0 views

  • Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody
  • social network is now seeing 8 billion daily video views. Facebook itself recently debuted 360 video. And the social networking giant owns Oculus,
  • But Facebook, its biggest competitor, is rapidly encroaching on YouTube’s turf.
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  • expects that library of content to grow “very rapidly,” especially as the company works with YouTube creators to get more VR content up on the platform
  • According to Variety, these YouTube stars are even more influential among US teens than Hollywood celebrities.
  • The one stumbling block is that not that many people have the equipment to experience VR. Google says some 1 million folks already own the Cardboard viewer
  • it’s convenient that the company is launching these virtual reality features right before The New York Times ships 1.3 million Google Cardboard sets this weekend, as it debuts its new VR documentary, “The Displaced.”
anna_nelidova

Head tracker knows what you're doing and helps you multitask | New Scientist - 1 views

  • wearable system that tracks human movements to understand what task you’re doing, how difficult it is, and when you switch to something else. His goal is to help us control our multitasking lives
  • Gathering patterns of data that describe humans doing different tasks has more potential than just helping us work more efficiently.
  • the device could turn your phone to silent or deliver only emergency notifications. It could also tell you when you need to take a break
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  • Epps’s team has made a device which straps to a baseball cap that can work out the intensity of a task and when a person switches to another task – just from their head movements.
  • o use the data from wearables to train artificial intelligences.
  • Epps’s team is building a new prototype made from cheap components that can be worn on glasses, which tracks eye movement and speech as well as head motion.
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    A wearable system that tracks head movements could help people to multitask and handle distractions. The data generated by wearables on millions of humans can be useful for learning purposes of robots and AI. 
evgeny lavrov

2050 Demographics Projections | Prediction | Future | Technology | Timeline | Trend | 2... - 0 views

  • the average desktop computer now has the raw processing power equivalent to all of the human brains on Earth combined
  • There is no longer a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence
  • Full immersion VR is now a mainstream phenomenon
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  • Entire new societies have formed in cyberspace
  • By the mid-2050s, traditional Western news corporations no longer exist
  • News gathering, analysis and distribution has fragmented - shifting to millions of creative individuals, bloggers, citizen journalists and small-scale enterprises.
  • Traditional Western TV channels have largely disappeared
  • replaced by unique "personalised" web channels, covering practically any subject or combination of subjects imaginable
  • Debates are now occurring over "synthetic people" entering the population.
Anton Vorykhalov

Stealth Ads on Instagram Not Just Limited to Posts by Celebs | Digital Trends - 0 views

  • Undisclosed ads on Instagram are no longer just limited to posts by celebs
  • General users may be able to make the distinction when they see a Kardashian, for example, posing with a brand of tea they’ve never heard of. But the problem now facing the FTC and Instagram is that these types of posts are no longer limited to celebs and influencers. In fact, marketers are now targeting regular users, or what they term “microinfluencers” by offering them free products in exchange for social media posts.
  • The letter highlights two websiteS in particular, operated by Influenster and Bzzagent, that encourage users to share posts in which they’re seen using a free product. In exchange, the so-called “microinfluencer” receives even more freebies from brands including Maybelline, BITE beauty, Kleenex, and International Delight. Anyone with a social media account can join the websites and receive free products.
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  • On its home page, Influenster (which sends out boxes filled with cosmetics to its members) claims to have more than 2 million “socially active trendsetters.”
Maria Gurova

HBO NOW Pushing the Cord-Cutting Trend - App Annie Blog - 3 views

  • In 2007, Netflix changed the landscape by introducing streaming on PC, allowing customers to instantly watch shows. By 2010, Netflix video streaming became available on additional platforms, including iOS devices. Today, video streaming services Netflix and Hulu have a strong hold among combined iOS and Android Top US Apps.
  • These convenient apps have set the stage for a preferred entertainment delivery. A whole generation of consumers have grown up with video streaming, rather than (or in addition to) paying for cable television: cord cutters and cord nevers. Major premium cable networks, HBO and Showtime, are now after a piece of the pie Netflix and Hulu have carved out
  • Both HBO NOW and Showtime are taking different approaches to standalone streaming partnerships. HBO NOW has gotten more traction in part to a heavy promotion from Apple, resulting in positive metrics. Showtime’s success is less clear, being married into Hulu’s already strong performance
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  • Netflix isn’t being left in the dust completely, kicking off their original film initiative with “Beasts of No Nation”, which will launch both in theaters and streaming video on October 16th. HBO, Showtime, Netflix and Hulu will still need to compete with each other to retain users in a new “entertainment as a service” landscape where retention is not a given, but an earned currency.
  • Cable provider Comcast hasn’t felt the heat from the cord-cutting trend, having its second best Q2 in nine years. Comcast is also in an advantageous place as a broadband provider, with 22.3 million total customers in Q2. Good quality video streaming relies on broadband internet, meaning cable providers that offer bundled internet service will still be valuable
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    the rise of streaming services and how cable networks are competing with video streaming services on their battle field 
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