4D PRINTING SELF-BUILDING SPACE STATIONS!

Forget 3D, 4D is the future! The kinks are still being worked out, but this new technology could transform life here on Earth, and even outer space. Anthony tells us how.

Facebook smartphone with HTC launching soon, ad campaign in the works

Follow years of rumors and speculation, Facebook is finally readying an entry into the mobile phone market. The social network is again hooking up with HTC which will design the hardware. The two companies have been working on a major marketing campaign in Southern California in recent weeks.

According to people familiar with the development of the marketing campaign for the Facebook/HTC phone, the advertisements are designed to focus on the potential user of the device, not on the hardware or software. As a nod to this phone being a much expanded version of the Facebook application found on iOS and standard Android devices, one of the tag-lines for the device is “more than just an app”.

The idea is that Facebook and HTC are selling their phone and OS as a lifestyle brand, not specifically for its hardware or software. Facebook and HTC previously hooked up on the Salsa and Cha-cha devices which frankly flopped. This will be a deeper, forked version of Android rather than a Facebook-ified version of Sense.

Of course, the hardware and software for this phone are competitive with the current mobile device landscape. It is unclear if the company is announcing its phone at its event next week. TechCrunch says that the event will discuss a Facebook OS based on Android at the very least.

Sources who have seen the Facebook/HTC smartphone hardware in-person say it is reminiscent of an iPhone. It includes an iPhone-like “home button” on the bottom center, and this button is surrounded by horizontal function keys on the right and left side. These buttons are said to be capacitive.

Above the keys is a display slightly larger in size to the 4-inch display found on the iPhone 5. Recent rumors have pointed to a collaborative Facebook/HTC phone featuring a 4.3-inch display.

The phone hardware, itself, is said to be about the size of an iPhone 5. The phone sports rounded edges and the design is fairly beveled. UnwiredView previously claimed that the Facebook/HTC phone will feature a 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 5 megapixel rear camera, and a 1.6 megapixel front-facing camera.

The phone’s software is a forked version of the Android operating system. Facebook’s features, like messaging, photo uploading, and contacts integration is fully integrated throughout the operating system.

Our sources also say that it is likely Facebook and HTC are already in discussions with at least a couple of cellular carriers around the world about carrying the device.

Bloomberg previously reported that Facebook is working on a phone with HTC for a mid-2013 launch. They, and The New York Times, also said that Facebook has hired away multiple early Apple iOS developers to work on the project. AllThingsD previously reported multiple details about the project, including that the phone will be based on a modified version of Android.

What most schools don't teach!

Learn about a new "superpower" that isn't being taught in in 90% of US schools. 

Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi. Directed by Lesley Chilcott, executive producers Hadi and Ali Partovi.

Code.org owes special thanks to all the cast and the film crew, and also Microsoft, Google/YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter for helping us spread the word

(If you want to help translate to other languages, visit 
http://bit.ly/codetranslate)

EARTH’S HISTORY IN 2 MINUTES

Let’s start with the fact that this was done by a 19 year old. Then we can add that he is in a beginners video production class. Then lets add that he was able to find all of these photos with quick and easy internet searches for photos. Now add to the whole picture that after he uploaded the video, in three months he received over 1 million views. It is a different world from when older generations used linear editing systems.

For those of you that do not know, non-linear editing is the standard of today. It is when you can jump to any part of a video, add just about any type of digital media, then hit export and voilà, you have a thought provoking video with a soundtrack. Before, the process involved a whole lot of fast forwarding or rewinding of video tapes, or in some cases, splicing together the actual filmstrip – but that is the story for another post.

Now, high school students like the one who made this video, have everything they need at their fingertips to produce media. In some cases, these young minds produce more than just a mindless YouTube video of their friends cracking their head open on a skateboard. This student made the video for “Cutaway Productions,” which is a production class at his high school. He says in the end of his video description, “I just did this video for fun and I spent many hours on it, so please don’t sue me.” Well, drivinman687, I sure hope the record labels and angry men up top don’t try to sue, but your video seems to lean toward the likelihood that man is capable of much more sinister things.

This is what the internet was made for , Edition 2012

A little something to enjoy and be amazed by ♥

The biggest LIKE of the world!

AMAZING snake panting in ONE brushstroke!

Recently, an amazing video showing an art master producing a snake drawing has gone viral online. With only one stroke of the brush, she managed to draw a snake from head to tail. She didn’t even miss the little details like the animal’s tongue, skin pattern, white belly and the body parts that curled up. Impressive stuff!
and just In case you didn't figure it out, 2013's Lunar New Yea`f the Snake.

A Strange Computer Promises Great Speed

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code.

But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time.

It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.

Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — isconfident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.

Skeptics say that D-Wave has yet to prove to outside scientists that it has solved the myriad challenges involved in quantum computation.

But if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said. “It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems to be solved rapidly.

D-Wave, a 12-year-old company based in Vancouver, has received investments from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, which operates one of the world’s largest computer systems, as well as from the investment bank Goldman Sachs and from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies.

“What we’re doing is a parallel development to the kind of computing we’ve had for the past 70 years,” said Vern Brownell, D-Wave’s chief executive.

Mr. Brownell, who joined D-Wave in 2009, was until 2000 the chief technical officer at Goldman Sachs. “In those days, we had 50,000 servers just doing simulations” to figure out trading strategies, he said. “I’m sure there is a lot more than that now, but we’ll be able to do that with one machine, for far less money.”

D-Wave, and the broader vision of quantum-supercharged computing, is not without its critics. Much of the criticism stems from D-Wave’s own claims in 2007, later withdrawn, that it would produce a commercial quantum computer within a year.

“There’s no reason quantum computing shouldn’t be possible, but people talked about heavier-than-air flight for a long time before the Wright brothers solved the problem,” said Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. D-Wave, he said, “has said things in the past that were just ridiculous, things that give you very little confidence.”

But others say people working in quantum computing are generally optimistic about breakthroughs to come. Quantum researchers “are taking a step out of the theoretical domain and into the applied,” said Peter Lee, the head of Microsoft’s research arm, which has a team in Santa Barbara, Calif., pursuing its own quantum work. “There is a sense among top researchers that we’re all in a race.”

If Microsoft’s work pans out, he said, the millions of possible combinations of the proteins in a human gene could be worked out “fairly easily.”

Quantum computing has been a goal of researchers for more than three decades, but it has proved remarkably difficult to achieve. The idea has been to exploit a property of matter in a quantum state known as superposition, which makes it possible for the basic elements of a quantum computer, known as qubits, to hold a vast array of values simultaneously.

There are a variety of ways scientists create the conditions needed to achieve superposition as well as a second quantum state known as entanglement, which are both necessary for quantum computing. Researchers have suspended ions in magnetic fields, trapped photons or manipulated phosphorus atoms in silicon.

The D-Wave computer that Lockheed has bought uses a different mathematical approach than competing efforts. In the D-Wave system, a quantum computing processor, made from a lattice of tiny superconducting wires, is chilled close to absolute zero. It is then programmed by loading a set of mathematical equations into the lattice.

The processor then moves through a near-infinity of possibilities to determine the lowest energy required to form those relationships. That state, seen as the optimal outcome, is the answer.
The approach, which is known as adiabatic quantum computing, has been shown to have promise in applications like calculating protein folding, and D-Wave’s designers said it could potentially be used to evaluate complicated financial strategies or vast logistics problems.

However, the company’s scientists have not yet published scientific data showing that the system computes faster than today’s conventional binary computers. While similar subatomic properties are used by plants to turn sunlight into photosynthetic energy in a few million-billionths of a second, critics of D-Wave’s method say it is not quantum computing at all, but a form of standard thermal behavior.

One Minute of Life-Changing Advice From Steve Jobs

Why get a mobile app for your business?

• Would you like to have customers engage and love you on mobile?
• Do you know why you need to get your business on mobile and smart devices?

The rate of mobile adoption has been far faster than any technology before it; The iPhone came on to market in 2002 and it took seven years for Apple to reach 40 million smartphone sales a year (Apple WWDC Conference 2009).

However, tablet devices such as the iPad have had a meteoric rise in comparison. It took the iPad only one year to sell the same volume.

In comparison, the PC and laptop market has grown year on year from 1996 through to 2011, with only a minor slow down through the recession in the early 2000’s. Gartner (technology research), reports in 2012 sales of PC’s have actually declined for the first time because users are shifting to more mobile devices such as tablets and phones. These smaller devices are easy to use, portable and cheaper.

Meanwhile the Internet is all around us. With its genesis in the military, spreading through universities, out to business and then into homes, many of us cannot live without being connected.  Nielsen’s Statistics on Internet use per capita show that North America are on top of the pile at 72%, with Australia second at 68% of the population connected and active on the Internet.

However, the numbers are staggering when you look at Asia. With a population in excess of 4 billion, the market is only just getting started with around 16% penetration.  Regardless of location these numbers will grow over 2013 with more tablets and smartphones entering the market. Africa is also coming online very fast, mostly through the use of connected smart phones and tablets.

We are also seeing a shift in usage patterns. A substantial shift to using a device other than a desktop or laptop is being seen across the world. This is noticeable especially whilst travelling or commuting. In 2011 a survey reported that 55% of users are connected and active on their devices whilst doing another activity such as watching TV in the evenings between 6-9pm.

The Apple iPhone has set the standard in terms of useability and design, leaving the other platforms and devices in its wake in the last few years. With recent devices; however, Google Android and Microsoft Windows phones are making the transition and catching up. The legacy from this lead is that users expect a seamless experience on the device. It is no longer acceptable to a user to have a non-native experience, one that does not fit in with the other apps on their device.

With 780,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, and Google Play catching fast with over 600,000 in June 2012, competition for a user is fierce, allowing unprecedented consumer choice. This means a poorly designed application will be installed, tried for a few minutes and dropped just as quickly if it doesn’t meet consumer standards.

In real terms, we see about 21% of mobile device visitors on SixFive client sites. This is a cross section of industries (tech, entertainment, design, finance, legal, local community) with the highest at 35%. Our clients have seen the change in mobile visitors grow enormously in 2012.  Comparing December 2011 to December 2012 shows a growth in visitor numbers on mobile up 432%.  

Users on mobile devices that visit a non mobile optimised site stay a quarter of the time on the site to that of a user on a laptop or PC. The experience is not good enough for them to complete the task they came for, and this also results in them visiting only one third of the pages a full site user would.

In fact users are spending more time on apps than they are on web based browsing. It’s easier to access the app than open the browser and type in a URL. The app is specific and does one job really well, and the user has invested time and effort into getting the app on their phone, their personal device. They are invested and engaged, and there are no distractions (like Facebook).

Why get a mobile app for your business?

• Stand out from your competitors
• Engage and delight users on a regular basis
• Always be in your end users pocket (literally)

If you’d like some assistance creating and launching a mobile app for your business, drop us a line, we’d be only too happy to assist you.

If you enjoyed this blog, don’t be shy, please share the love with your network!

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The complete guide to taking notes effectively at work

The value of note-taking—or notebooks at least—gets a stock market capitalization in the coming weeks with Moleskine’s planned IPO. The Italian stationery firm has boosted the profile of note-taking at companies around the world. But is all of the scribbling on nicely bound paper actually helping business people? And what are the best ways to use note-taking—in notebooks and on digital devices—to actually boost your productivity?

Here’s everything you need to know about taking notes at work, but never bothered to ask:

To have or to take?

Many of us take notes in meetings and never go back to read them again. Does that do enough to organize and cement our memory of the essential takeaways? Likely not on its own—re-reading notes later does make a difference, according to experts. Research published in the Teaching of Psychology Journal in the ’80s concluded that students were messing up on their tests not because they’d taken bad notes, but because they weren’t re-reading them before the exams. And researchers at Keele University in the UK found that three-quarters of academic studies on note-taking concluded its chief value was storing information so it could be consulted later. The takeaway: if you have a bunch of pads or notebooks filled with meeting notes that you never consult, your note-taking isn’t providing the most value over time.

Your boss might judge you if you turn up to a meeting with a paper pad

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel said that if she turns up to a meeting and sees a paper notebook tucked under her colleague’s arm, she’s not impressed. Seriously not impressed. Samuel is a digital note-taking extremist. She believes electronic notes are vastly superior to their analog equivalents. She dismisses the argument that having laptops and tablets in meetings tempts distraction, saying it’s the meeting leader’s responsibility to keep his or her audience sufficiently hooked on their every word. Not everyone agrees with her.

Digital vs. analog notes

There’s little research into the benefits of digital note-taking over handwritten notes. The bulk of studies focus on whether typing out notes or copying and pasting them–taking whole chunks of text from pre-prepared digital materials and pasting them into notes–is better. A team from Carnegie Mellon looked at best practices for designing note-taking technologies and found that typing out notes improves later recall, while copy and pasting text into notes is actually detrimental to learning because it encourages wordiness.

The US Air Force Academy teamed up with West Virginia University to work out the art of electronic note-taking. They were particularly curious to learn whether scaffolding notes horizontally across a row of cells, or down a column made a difference in terms of subjects’ ability to recall the information. It didn’t.

And if you’re worried about the environment, Slate weighed the green implications of taking notes on an iPad. The bottom line is it’s complicated, but using recycled paper is better for the world under most scenarios than buying a battery-powered gadget.

Supercharge your notes

The more OCD you are about organizing your notes, the better. The Journal of Reading compared different note-taking methods and found that the most rigorously structured–those with hierarchal ordering and numbered subsections–were of the highest quality and accuracy. A two-column method came in a close second; these notes were arranged such that the left column contained the information from the given event (i.e. the meeting, lecture or talk) and the right column was used later to fill out follow-up points and highlight key themes. Although these notes were significantly more precise than freestyle note-taking, there was little difference in the ability of the note-taker to recall the material.

Doodling isn’t just for fun

The British Journal of Educational Technology found mind-mapping to be significantly more effective than just writing out notes. Mind-mapping brings visual structure to notes, usually involving writing one word in the center and drawing offshoots from it with related ideas and phrases. Researchers studying two groups of note-takers, those using the SmartWisdom method (a popular alternative mind-mapping system) and those writing traditional notes found that although there was no difference in the accuracy of the notes, the mind-mappers were able to present the information back with more clarity and coherence than their counterparts.

The bottom line in note-taking

Underlining something makes it stand out against other words and that makes recalling that word easier. The scientific term for this is the Von Restorff effect.

Note breaking

The typical meeting format of continuous talking and simultaneous scribbling might not be ideal for optimum note-taking. It turns out that not everyone is all that good at listening and writing at the same time. The Journal of Educational Psychology researched lecture structures and found that incorporating periodic, short breaks greatly improved the quality of notes taken. One wat to approach this would be to have little moments of quiet writing reflection in between meeting agenda items. Wouldn’t that be pleasant?

Note-taking as a legal defense

Lawyers say it doesn’t matter whether your notes are digital or analog if you’re looking to use them as supporting evidence in any legal tussle. The legal stance is that notes will stand up as evidence in court, should you ever need to rely on them. Canadian human rights lawyer Donna Seale writes about this on her blog, emphasizing the need to basically write down every word said in the office.

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