human beings
How Google Translate Works Its Magic
www.readwriteweb.com
Google Translate has reached a milestone of 200 million users on translate.google.com. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t report a basic usage statistic like that, but this one deserves to be celebrated. Google's scale could someday make it possible for all human beings to understand each other. Here's how. Translating the Web into...
Project Aether films northern lights at 100,000 feet using a GoPro camera on a balloon (video)
www.engadget.com
Sadly we can't all be spacemen. Commercial travel beyond the atmosphere is getting closer but still priced way, way, way beyond the budgetary constraints of mere human beings. The closest many of us will get to outer space is photography and, thanks to ever-cheaper and ever-more-durable cameras, getting those...
10 disruptive individuals who are reshaping the mobile industry
venturebeat.com
The mobile industry is at an exciting stage: There are enough smartphone customers that there’s a huge field of opportunity for device makers, carriers, and app makers, but the market is still fragmented enough that no one company dominates. In this kind of frothy market, the risks are high, but...
Apple’s Mothra Quarter Was Actually More Impressive Than Their Godzilla Quarter
techcrunch.com
Two quarters ago, Apple unleashed Godzilla. It was a quarter so spectacular that the only appropriate way to describe it was in pure expletive form. $46 billion in revenue. $13 billion in profit. 37 million iPhones sold. 15 million iPads sold. A gross margin of 44 percent. These weren’t just...
Human hearts replaced by 10,000 RPM artificial pump with no pulse
www.theverge.com
At least fifty calves and three human beings are living with no pulse in their bodies, thanks to an artificial pump that replaced their naturally-grown hearts, as detailed in a story from Popular Science. Doctors Bud Frazier and Billy Cohn devised the artificial organ, and it can completely replace...
Why sound will be bigger than video online
venturebeat.com
The audio-sharing network SoundCloud, which allows users to share not just music but any audio recording from company earnings calls to cat impersonations, just launched a new version “Next Soundcloud” at LeWeb in Paris. “Sound will be bigger than video online”, claims SoundCloud’s CEO Alexander Ljung. VentureBeat once described SoundCloud as...
Also warming up to Apple’s hardware and software: the life sciences industry
thenextweb.com
According to the latest report by a subsidiary of research firm IDC, the life sciences industry is increasingly warming up to the idea of working with Apple hardware and software, following a trend that has been crystal clear in the consumer market and other professional industries. To be clear: Wikipedia...
Top Five Exoskeletons (Gallery)
venturebeat.com
Human beings have been using technology to extend their physical capabilities since the first stone tools but the bionic man is no longer just a sci-fi dream. Meet five exoskeletons which let paraplegics walk again, extend the endurance of soldiers and keep workers safe in a damaged nuclear power...
Plug in Better: A Manifesto
www.theatlantic.com
The trick isn't to unplug from our devices -- it's to unplug from the distractions, information overload, and trash that make us unhappy.A world ruled by spin, in which political influence lasts only until the next embarrassing YouTube video. Industries starved of creative, deep thinking, as focused effort gives way...
Google+ wants to be your new Flickr
venturebeat.com
Google+ is succeeding in small bursts, feature by feature. As an overall Facebook-esque social network it’s a flop, but its video-chat tool Hangouts is a winner. Photo sharing is poised to be the service’s next breakout hit, thanks to an enthusiastic community of photographers who like the focus on...
Windows 8 deep dive: Get to know the Mail and Calendar apps
www.pcworld.com
Email and calendar apps may not be much fun, but they're essential if you intend to live on the grid, interacting with other human beings. Enter Microsoft's new Windows 8 Mail and Calendar apps, each of which takes a prominent position on the new Start screen. Of course, plenty of...
When Facebook and Twitter bring noise, EverySignal offers clarity
venturebeat.com
EverySignal is a new way to find the handful of important announcements from your social networks — all your social networks — in just one daily email digest. The digest brings clarity, organization, and best of all, brevity to an information-gathering process that could take hours, should you choose...
The GOP, Apple And The Power Of Magical Thinking
readwrite.com
I appreciate the value of myth and storytelling, but nevertheless I'm constantly struck by the power that myths have over us, and the ability of human beings to engage in what psychologists call "magical thinking." One example is the GOP, whose adherents last week kept believing that Mitt Romney was...
The great thing about a digital magazine: When you mess up (like we just did) you can fix it
thenextweb.com
Here at The Next Web, as much as we love technology, we’re frustratingly still fleshy human beings with all the flaws that come with that. Luckily, our beloved technology can come to the rescue when things go wrong. Take for example The Next Web Magazine, the new iPad app we...
Computer interaction conference promises cutting-edge demos
www.pcworld.com
There will be a ton of interesting research and prototypes on display at the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Paris this week.The "interactivity" section will be buzzing with activity and there will be hands-on opportunities with some of the most interesting research projects."CHI is a really interesting mix...
Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker on Being the Alternative to Microsoft, Google and Apple
www.wired.com
Mitchell Baker. Photo: Joi/Flickr Fourteen years ago, as a lawyer for Netscape, Mitchell Baker created the open source license that made Netscape’s code free. It was a fateful event for both Baker and the web: Baker ended up leading a small skunkworks project called Mozilla that was eventually spun out...
Two vodka OJs with maverick social entrepreneur Steve Keil at #TNW2012
thenextweb.com
Steve Keil thinks business is broken. He doesn’t think human beings should be treated like cogs in a machine. I happen to agree. At the 7th annual The Next Web Conference, I found Steve by the speaker’s bar enjoying a couple vodka OJ cocktails. His incredibly high energy is addictive and...
China launching first manned space docking mission this month
www.theverge.com
China will be launching the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft later this month to perform the country's first manned space docking mission. The spacecraft, along with three astronauts and the Long March 2-F carrier rocket, is set to rendezvous with the Tiangong-1 space lab module, which lowered to docking orbit earlier this...
The Fight for a Fair and Free Internet
www.theatlantic.com
When Rebecca MacKinnon was working for CNN in Beijing from 1992 to 2001, she and her fellow expats expected that the coming age of global networking would strongly undermine the Communist Party's grip on the reigns. But a decade later, she writes, "I grew to believe that we were naive."...
Ray Kurzweil: “You Are What You Think” [TCTV]
techcrunch.com
Here is the second half of our two-part interview with inventor and thought leader Ray Kurzweil (you can see part one here.) Kurzweil, of course, is the technology icon known among many other things for his Law of Accelerating Returns, which maintains that society is moving at exponentially increasing...
Empire Avenue Revamps Interface, Adds Google+ Scoring
techcrunch.com
Empire Avenue, while a great service, has been a bit confusing. In fact, the idea itself can kind of boggle the mind — users build up their personal brands via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, and allow people to buy and sell virtual shares of human beings. Users can...
Meet Joanne Wilson, Fred Wilson's Wife And Investor In 17 Startups
www.businessinsider.com
When Joanne Wilson was in college, she rented a summer room in a fraternity from one of the brothers, Fred. Now the two are married and they're a couple of New York's most involved, savvy startup investors. Fred is a partner at Union Square Ventures; his investments include Zynga,...
Google Responsible For Other Peoples' Lies, Deems Australian Court
techcrunch.com
Google is now legally responsible for every crazy thing on the Internet–at least, in Australia. A The Supreme Court of Victoria fined Google $200,000 for not removing defamatory rumors linking music promoter, Milorad Trkulja, to organized crime. The court reasoned that Google is a “publisher” because it displays content and links...
First lab-grown kidney successfully implanted in a rat
www.theverge.com
Scientists have implanted a laboratory-grown kidney into a rat for the first time, a medical milestone that they hope will soon lead to similar solutions for human beings needing full organ transplants. "It's the first one ever that's been implanted into an animal," said Harald Ott, MD and PhD...
How Technology Changes Our Relationships
www.readwriteweb.com
Ah, the Internet. The once magnificent and glorious tool has transformed from being a fast-paced information highway to that place where we all admit, rather begrudgingly, that we spend too much time on. Alone. We love the immediate answers, the idea of relying on Google as one aspect of our...
LinkedIn's hacky, wacky Wednesday
www.guardian.co.uk
Site suffers two blows with separate revelations of severe privacy breaches as experts caution to expect more of the sameWith twin security breaches – one of which was self-inflicted – LinkedIn suffered a brutal one-two punch to its reputation on Wednesday. But analysts who watch the online privacy space caution...
Microsoft's vision of our future is big screens and big data
gigaom.com
What do you get when you cross a massive touchscreen, a Kinect, some sort of computing device and a whole lot of data-processing technology? You get Microsoft’s vision of our digital future, both at home and in the office. The company’s struggles to shift from a desktop-and-server-based world to a...
"Dearest Tumblr User" Worm Spreading Spam on Tumblr, Seen It? Then Log Out Of Your Browser
techcrunch.com
According to a report by The Next Web, there’s a hack making its way through some prominent Tumblr blogs, including The Verge and CNet. Along with the spam on the pages itself, users are getting a popup message that would scare anyone’s mom. Trust me, we get these calls all...
Is the internet making us more lonely or less lonely? Yes.
gigaom.com
We’ve seen a rash of essays and articles in the mainstream press recently that take a somewhat scare-mongering tone towards social networks and digital communication of various kinds: a piece in The Atlantic raised the question of whether Facebook is making us lonely, and a New York Times op-ed...
Google Is Turning Search Into The Planet's Biggest Anticipatory System
readwrite.com
Amid a blizzard of announcements at its I/O conference, Google unveiled a major change to its core search product in singularly low-key fashion. Amit Singhal, a senior Google executive in charge of its search efforts, said that Google search, starting today, wouldn't just answer the question implied in the...
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