#0012: Mates’ rates

Interesting quote from Jean-Louis Gassée (an early Apple exec): “I used to greatly admire Mark Zuckerberg. Now, I fear him.” Here’s why: Zuckerberg World President. #politics

The numbers here are staggering: “_ …people need roughly 23 minutes to go back to their tasks after a major interruption, but the plot deepens if you’re a programmer. Add at least 10 minutes to the forced break (the minimum amount of time you need to start editing code again) and there you go — that’s a solid half hour you lose whenever someone approaches you. It gets worse if that interruption is planned._”. #work

I have spent quite a bit of time over the years working with payments systems of one form or another. Most people have very little idea what is going on. So, here’s a great article that does a deep dive into what happens when you swipe your card. #transactional

This is some next-level home hacking: How I built a fully-automated system that restocks my kitchen’s coffee from Amazon. #automation #transactional

The first on-site house has been printed in Russia. #mechanised #automation

There is a huge amount of change coming up for the transportation industry. It’s possible that the advances in the industry over the next 10 years will vastly eclipse the changes over the past half century. #mechanised #cognitive #autonomous

Here are three things you need to know about machine learning. #cognitive

Given how intelligence has been used throughout history, is it any wonder that we fear super-smart robots? #cognitive #autonomous

There are a lot of opportunity areas for technology startups. Too many, in fact, to really get your head around. However, this matrix of start-up ideas maps a whole variety of meta-ideas (x-axis) onto a long list of consumer verticals (y-axis). The startup ideas at each of the (x,y) cells in not exhaustive, but there sure are a whole lot of blank spaces left to explore. The original article is here. There is also a B2B version.

According to a UBS analyst, Apple could have over 1,000 engineers working on Augmented Reality technology in Israel. #interactive

This is a some way off being ready for production rollout, but Disney is doing some very interesting work with wireless charging. Imagine walking into a room and automatically having all of your devices charged wirelessly. #mobile #power

What is the future of AI in fashion? #transactional #fashion

Apple has had another crack at trying to explain HomeKit. Hmm. #automation #mechanised

Here’s a big list of all of the startups that qualify as Unicorns. #investing #startup

We all have a massive amount of personal data stored online, either voluntarily, or by virtue of our participation in social media. This data is obviously enormously valuable, as evidenced by the valuations of Facebook and Google. The Mobile Ecosystem Forum thinks that the personal data economy is going to be a thing, and that we should all be making money out of our own data. #transactional #data #pii

AI/ML is moving fast. Here’s two bits of amazing news coming out of Google and Amazon. Firstly, Google announced that it’s new machine learning API recognises objects in videos. And not to be outdone, Amazon can also do something similar, in typical Amazon-style, as-a-service on AWS: Amazon Rekognition. Need more detail? Here’s an Amazon Recoknition walkthrough in Ruby, for the programmatically minded. #computational #cognitive

And if that wasn’t amazing enough, the folks at DeepMind just published a mind blowing paper: PathNet, which potentially describes how general artificial intelligence might look, once we end up creating it. #computational #cognitive

Also, apparently we owe the creation of civilisation to alcohol and caffeine. I would agree. #alcohol #caffeine #civilisation

I’m not convinced we’ve seen the full impact of blockchain yet, or even understood its potential, but I am convinced that a whole lot of what is spoken about it is often complete nonsense. Will the blockchain do to banks and law firms what the Internet did to media? Great question. Blockchain certainly has the potential to have a big impact, particularly if you consider what happens in financial services if settlement can be moved closer to clearance on a global scale. Fascinating times. #transactional #blockchain

And finally, this has to be the coolest expense claim ever: Buzz Aldrin claims $33 for his trip: Florida to Moon to Pacific Ocean to Hawaii to Houston. #expenses

Only in Australia

Well, not quite. But this was such a great story, I couldn’t resist. Mike Cannon-Brookes (one of the founders of Atlassian) and also one of Australia’s richest people thanks to the recent Atlasssian float, has just done one of the most Aussie things ever by hitting up Elon Musk for “mates rates” for an installation of Tesla Batteries for the entire State of South Australia. This followed the head of Tesla’s battery division claiming on Twitter that Tesla could solve South Australia’s power woes within 100 days of being asked. Of course, there’s all sorts of reasons why this won’t or can’t work (not the least of which is a raft of ridiculous protectionist legislation designed to support ailing coal and gas power generators), but we can always hope.

And yes, I know. He was born in the USA. But we do love to adopt success stories in Oz.

Friday Teaser

Today’s teaser is from a colleague, and it’s a doozey:

You have 100 coins placed heads-up on a table. You are blindfolded. Someone turns over 10 of the coins at random. Your task is to, without looking, place all of the coins into two groups where each group contains the same number of tails.

As usual, immediate entry to the Eternal Pantheon of Friday Teaser Winners awaits the first correct entry in the comments.

Regards,
M@