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Hollywood and the recording industry, often called the content industry, have a long and ignoble history of opposition to new technology. That list now includes streaming services. The record industry is pushing every button to try to kill off this growing marketplace. Look at Pandora, which had 77 million active listeners at the end of May. During the month those millions and millions of people listened to 1.73 billion hours of Pandora programming, a 28% increase year over year. Wall Street expects Pandora to grow its revenue 38% this year to 900 million – that’s the good news. The bad...

Israeli company Phinergy claim to have produced a battery that can power a Citroen C1 for 3000km, and have demonstrated a 1800km drive with a more practical version, three times that available from commercial electric cars. Even more dramatically, the battery weighs just 100km, a fifth of the weight of those in the Tesla Model S. Metal-air batteries use the oxygen in the air around them, rather than storing it in liquid or solid chemicals. They can store far more energy than most competing technologies. Not needing to contain the oxygen can also cut the weight dramatically – Phinergy claim...

A couple of months ago, we posted one of our early Google Search/Now rumors, and it was something of a long range rumor compared to others. While things like parking reminders, proper timer management, and bill pay reminders have already seen their public release, the ability to set contact-based reminders ("remind me when I'm with this person"), hasn't come forward yet. But it will likely appear very soon with a new feature in Android called Nearby, which will allow new interactions between you and nearby people, places, and things.

....In 1950, famed London scientist Alan Turing, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, published a paper that put forth that very question. But as quickly he asked the question, he called it “absurd.” The idea of thinking was too difficult to define. Instead, he devised a separate way to quantify mechanical “thinking.”.... What he meant was: Can a computer trick a human into thinking it’s actually a fellow human? That question gave birth to the “Turing Test” 65 years ago... For a computer to pass the test, it must only dupe 30 percent of the human interrogators who...

Editor's note: This column is Part II in a series. Click here for Part I. The information technology industry long has been one of Jesse Jackson’s targets. Well over a decade ago Rainbow/PUSH established its Silicon Valley Project office. There is enormous money to be extracted on behalf of minority groups ostensibly “excluded” from tech industry employment. Whether such concessions benefit a particular company is immaterial. Jackson is a power broker. His specialty is confrontation. He disingenuously uses imagery of fairness and togetherness when it suits his needs, but his ulterior motive is anything but a “win-win.” The world of...

A GPS device hidden inside a teddy bear on Tuesday led police to a thief. Athens-Clarke County police said that Mid-Atlantic Clothing Recycling had recently been experiencing thefts of clothing from its collection bin at Georgia Square Mall. To combat the thefts, a company manager concealed a GPS device inside a teddy bear and he placed it in a bag of clothing that was then tossed into the collection bin, according to police. At about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, the manager called police to report that the teddy bear was on the move, headed toward Timothy Road. An officer in the...

The TIG process, utilized by StrongPrint With today's technology, we have seen some major progress being made within the 3D printing space. Within a couple of years, we have seen 3D printers go from being priced in the $2500+ range, to becoming as affordable as purchasing a video game console. Today, just about anyone can afford to purchase a 3D printer, yet mass adoption has not begun to take place. One of the reasons for this, is because of the limited number of materials that affordable consumer level 3D printers are capable of printing with. We are limited to the...

Human Capital I was honoured to be invited to speak recently at Dubai International Academy’s graduation ceremony for the class of 2014. This diverse class spanned 32 nationalities.What was remarkable for me was how the UAE provided an invaluable setting for this net increase in human capital development. Dubai and the UAE had offered these young people a solid base for the next step of their academic and personal journey. As a Singaporean, whose country relies on developing human capital as its key resource, this resonated strongly with me. They were a talented and dedicated group of young men and...

At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators. Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there. That’s in stark...

Imagine getting an alert on your smartphone seconds before an earthquake strikes. If ongoing research and experiments by various governmental and non-governmental agencies succeed, we could soon receive such a notification, seconds or even minutes before the tremors, thereby saving precious lives. Starting with an initiative by the Community Seismic Network of the California Institute of Technology to the Qatar Computing Research Institute, which has announced various projects related to emergency response in times of an earthquake or other similar natural disasters, efforts are on to leverage the potential of the smartphone and other smart devices to one day being...

There are already more than 101 million working age Americans that are not employed and 20 percent of the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job. So what in the world are we going to do when robots start taking millions upon millions more of our jobs? Thanks to technology, the balance of power between employers and workers in this country is shifting dramatically in favor of the employers. These days, many employers are wondering why they are dealing with so many human worker "headaches" when they can just use technology to...

Hillary Clinton remains the presumptive Democrat nominee for president on 2016, and if polls are to be believed, has an excellent chance of being elected. One of the most shocking elements of her past is the access the Chinese government was given to advanced missile technology during what she herself referred to as the “co-presidency” she and Bill Clinton held from 1993-2001. ~snip~ (Doug) Ross has realized that one person could make public this information, and has laid out his case for doing so in an open letter that we reprint here with permission. For the complete letter with pictures,...

A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies asks whether or not there is a shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers in the United States, and their resounding conclusion is "no". The report released today and written by CIS researchers Steve Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that there are more than 5 million native-born Americans with an undergraduate degree in STEM, but not working in STEM with another 1.2 million degree holders not working at all. Additionally, there are 1.6 million foreign-born residents with an undergraduate degree in STEM that are also not working in STEM...

The idea that we need to allow in more workers with science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) background is an article of faith among American business and political elite. But in a new report, my Center for Immigration Studies colleague Karen Zeigler and I analyze the latest government data and find what other researchers have found: The country has well more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data...

Appearing to confirm rumours of a $3.2 billion Apple buyout, the Beats co-founder says the Forbes rich list has changed "in a big way".

This morning I saw a lovely stained glass window, pulled out my smartphone, snapped a photo, and shot it around to friends. It’s so automatic now that I don’t even think about it. It’s like a motor skill. But wait just a moment. Also this morning, I was at the drugstore and saw a wall of film for sale, the kind you shove into a camera, send off for processing, and get glossies in return. Who does this anymore? Some people apparently. We are in the transition phase from one type of technology to another, and such stores find it...

While the 1970s are known for some terrifying fashions and the human indignity of the Disco Era, the decade (with some assists from the previous generation) also gave us some amazing technological advancements that many of us take for granted today. Here are ten that changed the world:1. Microwave Ovens Before the 1970s, our only option for heating up leftover pizza was the conventional oven and we didn’t have the luxury of 4-minute microwave popcorn (gross as it is). Though the “Radarange” was first sold in the United States in 1947, it wasn’t until the ovens became affordable for...

In a nondescript hotel ballroom last month at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, Andras Forgacs offered a rare glimpse at the sci-fi future of food. Before an audience of tech-industry types, Forgacs produced a plate of small pink wafers -- "steak chips," he called them -- and invited people up for a taste. But these were no ordinary snacks: Instead of being harvested from a steer, they had been grown in a laboratory from tiny samples of animal tissue. One taster's verdict on this Frankenmeat? Not bad, actually. "It was delicious. It tasted like a thin piece of beef...

Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy. The truth is that it’s more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills. That’s the kind of admission you won’t often see here in the pages of Xconomy. The X in our name, after all, stands for exponential, a reference to the stunning pace of technological progress and economic growth over the past 75 years—growth attributable largely to advances in computer hardware and software and the organizational...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will take public comments before moving forward with a new set of net neutrality rules that sparked controversy when they were leaked in a news report earlier Wednesday. The FCC will release a proposal soon to reinstate net neutrality rules that would allow broadband providers to negotiate with content providers for preferential treatment, an agency official confirmed Wednesday.