Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You - WSJ.com

  • Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city
  • The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people's habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
  • The company's dense network of sensors can track any phone that has Wi-Fi turned on, enabling the company to build profiles of consumers lifestyles.

• Technology and jobs: Coming to an office near you | The Economist

  • The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers.
  • From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.
  • Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people.

• Bitcoin a Fool's Gold Standard - NYTimes.com

  • People would learn soon enough why nongovernment money works badly.

     

    Deflation is an obvious issue. Price declines are inevitable when a finite supply of Bitcoin money, a feature of the software, meets an expanding supply of purchased goods and services. That would be uncomfortable. Consumers might delay purchases as they wait for prices to fall, workers might chafe at regular annual wage cuts, and creditors would be even worse off

  • the popular interest in Bitcoin can be interpreted as a sign of ignorance of economic history. More realistically, it is a sad statement of a loss of faith in a monetary system that has not worked as well as promised. Unfortunately, Bitcoin is no more than a high-tech version of an even worse system

• Will the robot 'jobocalypse' make YOU obsolete? 2014 could be the year a droid takes your job, say experts | Mail Online

  • A huge 70% of occupations could become automated over next 30 years
  • I believe we are the inflection point where robotics are going to change everything you know and do,

• Why Bitcoin Matters - NYTimes.com

  • What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014.
  • Bitcoin is the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem
  • Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.
  • What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money
  • All these are exchanged through a distributed network of trust that does not require or rely upon a central intermediary like a bank or broker. And all in a way where only the owner of an asset can send it, only the intended recipient can receive it, the asset can only exist in one place at a time, and everyone can validate transactions and ownership of all assets anytime they want.
  • (including converting dollars from your account into Bitcoin, if you did not own any Bitcoin

• Does your coffee machine need its own domain name? - Tech News and Analysis

  • of The Wireless Registry, a company trying to build the equivalent of a domain name server for the itnernet of things

• Are app developers enabled enough in the Internet of Things era? - The Next Web

  • The world of smart devices is dazzling, the potential is there but what’s holding us back isn’t technology but our ability to know what to do with it.
  • The “Internet of Things” and open source hardware and software is surely going to turn up some ingenius uses of smart devices – and these are going to arise from the next crop of entrepreneurs and niche start-ups.
  • the demand for apps to control the plethora of sensors increases.

• Another day another cloud alliance: This time its VMware and Capgemini - Tech News and Analysis

  • there are three cloud layers. At the base there is infrastructure — provided by the aforementioned AWS, VCHS, Microsoft Windows Azure clouds. Then there’s a middle layer, like the one described above, that lets the customer aggregate base services needed from the infrastructure providers. Then atop that there’s a business application layer that will likewise aggregate Software-as-a-Service applications from many providers — say Salesforce.com for CRM;

• Porn.com's marketing director: 'I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin's killer app' - The Next Web

  • Kay believes porn.com’s increase in sales thanks to Bitcoin is the result of more than just hype. Sure, Bitcoin fans are rushing out to support a site that takes their preferred form of payment, but he also argues privacy and confidentiality are “paramount” for the majority of users joining an adult service.
  • Most porn is available for free, but premium services require forking over some dough, almost always accompanied by personal information like your full name and address. Bitcoin circumvents all that, although it doesn’t support recurring payments, which makes it impractical for renewable subscriptions.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.