The cyborg in Terminator 2. Form an orderly queue. Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchiveA burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Noah Smith:
Barely a day goes by when I don't read about some advance in cyborg tech. For example, a Stanford engineer just invented a way to safely transfer energy to biomechanical implants. A University of California-San Francisco team won a grant to build brain implants to fight depression and PTSD. There's a man who can hear colours, thanks to a mechanical implant. Brain-controlled flight is now real. Bionic implants are ending disability as we know it. And these are only a few of the cyborg headlines from the last couple of weeks.
This is enormous. It's absolutely history-ending, world-shaking stuff. And by and large, the press is ignoring it.
Why is cyborg tech so earth-shattering? Because it represents a qualitatively different kind of technology.
He's correct that biomechanical implants can be absolutely transformative. But elective surgery to insert a piece of technology that isn't essential and that might fail in unpredictable ways at an unpredictable time? As any woman who received a breast implant from PIP what she thinks of it now.
Based on a greater decline in demand than predicted in the first quarter and concerns that tablets and 2-in-1s will face additional market challenges the rest of the year, International Data Corporation (IDC) has lowered its 2014 worldwide tablet plus 2-in-1 forecast to 245.4m units, down from the previous forecast of 260.9 million units. The new forecast represents a 12.1% year-over-year growth rate, which is notably lower than the 51.8% year-over-year growth of 2013.
"Two major issues are causing the tablet market to slow down. First, consumers are keeping their tablets, especially higher-cost models from major vendors, far longer than originally anticipated. And when they do buy a new one they are often passing their existing tablet off to another member of the family," said Tom Mainelli, Program Vice President, Devices & Displays at IDC. "Second, the rise of phablets – smartphones with 5.5in and larger screens – are causing many people to second-guess tablet purchases as the larger screens on these phones are often adequate for tasks once reserved for tablets."
In the past year alone, the phablet share of smartphone shipments has more than doubled, from 4.3% in the first quarter of 2013 to 10.5% in the first quarter of this year, representing 30.1m units shipped.
China definitely loves phablets - and that's killing the white box vendors. Apple's not thriving in this space any more either - but this might presage a shift to larger screens.
Jan Dawson has a list. It's reasonable - achievable, even. Many people will agree with his desire to have "iTunes on the web so I don't have to use [the] iTunes software."
Mike Vakulenko:
In essence, Beats aims to become Uber of music by aggregating demand, connecting listeners to artists and empowering the artists to build thriving business on top of the platform. Much like Uber, which promises to end the era of poorly paid cab drivers. Or like Apple App Store, which connects users with app developers allowing them to build businesses on top of the platform.
Pandora, Spotify, Play Music and Amazon that are all designed to sell music, will have very hard time to compete against a platform for building businesses on top of music. As Marshall Van Alstyne said in slightly underestimated way (pun intended):
"There is a strong argument that platforms beat products every time."
Be interesting to see how the much-expected YouTube branded music service competes. It has the scale, and can offer the money through advertising. And of course commenters are known via Google+
The anonymous developers responsible for building and maintaining the free whole-disk encryption suite TrueCrypt apparently threw in the towel this week, shuttering the TrueCrypt site and warning users that the product is no longer secure now that Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP.
Sometime in the last 24 hours, truecrypt.org began forwarding visitors to the program's home page on sourceforge.net, a Web-based source code repository. That page includes instructions for helping Windows users transition drives protected by TrueCrypt over to BitlLocker, the proprietary disk encryption program that ships with every Windows version since Vista. The page also includes this ominous warning:
"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues"
Great deal of discussion as to whether the abandonment was so the developers wouldn't be obliged to put back doors in. But the warning seems to imply that they're already in there.
In a Google+ post, Senior Developer Advocate at Google Timothy Jordan highlighted how notifications will be handled on Google's upcoming Android Wear platform.
Basically, any app that serves notifications on your Android smartphone or tablet can be extended to show notifications on a wearable device running Android Wear with minimal effort. Jordan mentioned by adding a few lines of code, devs can "deliver even richer experiences on the wearable by using stacks, pages, and voice replies."
The notifications are identified by the app icon, which is featured in the top right corner. The notifications themselves seem to take up the lower half of the screen, with Google also demoing a right-to-left swipe gesture that allows you to view longer notifications over multiple screens.
Spor is a start up that wants to put solar power in your pocket. They are now live on Kickstarter trying to raise money to make a packable portable solar charger available to you and the developing world. Their innovative unit let's you connect and daisy chain Spor devices together to charge multiple things.
Because the casing of the Spor charger is 3D printed and the team of Drexel students used 3D printing to develop the Spor I asked them some questions on how they used 3D printing to design and manufacture.
Looks interesting. (Disclosure: I'm a backer on Kickstarter.)
New data released on Wednesday by Morgan Stanley obtained by AppleInsider estimates that last quarter the App Store was 41% of Apple's services revenue, while iTunes accounted for the remaining 59%. But that balance of power is expected to shift, and quickly.
Analyst Katy Huberty projects that by the fourth quarter of calendar 2014, the App Store will represent 53% of Apple's online services revenue. That would leave the iTunes Store with a 47% share — a number that she expects will continue to shrink as music sales decline.
Given those numbers, perhaps Apple would want to acquire a paid-for music streaming service that's available on the three largest smartphone platforms.
Amazon will be using 10,000 robots in its warehouses by the end of the year.
CEO Jeff Bezos told investors at a shareholder meeting Wednesday that he expects to significantly increase the number of robots used to fulfill customer orders.
There are currently about 1,000 robot workers on Amazon floors. The increase won't change the number of actual people employed, an Amazon spokeswoman said.
Done using the robot company Amazon bought for $775m two years ago. One hopes they're not standing over the staff with lasers or anything.
While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the "power bricks" that charge them remain heavy and bulky. But now, MIT spinout FINsix has invented an adapter that's roughly one-quarter the size and one-sixth the weight of a conventional brick, and just as efficient.
Co-founded by four MIT alumni — Vanessa Green MNG '08, MBA '11; Anthony Sagneri SM '07, PhD '12; George Hwang PhD '10; and Justin Burkhart SM '10 — FINsix has developed the world's smallest laptop adapter, called the Dart. Around 2 1/2 cubic inches in size and weighing around 2 ounces, the adapter is only slightly larger than an ordinary plug.
The Dart runs on novel very-high frequency (VHF) power-conversion technology, co-invented by Sagneri, that delivers energy more often and in smaller chunks than traditional adapters, ultimately wasting less energy. It does so by making the adapter's switching frequency — which transfers energy from the adapter to the battery — run 1,000 times faster.
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