Imagine Uber and Waze had a baby, who grew up and married Foodspotting.
Premise, which gathers real-world economic data by paying people to snap photos and record prices of products in their local markets using the company’s free Android app, just raised $50 million dollars in new investment.
Read the rest of the Premise article on Fast Company
If you haven’t heard of group messaging services, you will soon, most likely because of massive hype about Slack—the current superstar of the tech world. Debuting in early 2014, Slack has eclipsed, at least in the public eye, the former hot messaging app, nearly six-year-old HipChat.
Read full HipChat article on Fast Company
Wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, the cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare, an Internet edge service provider (more on what that means later), describes a grand vision of sweeping changes in the Internet infrastructure market, with much of it sliding over to Amazon.
Read the rest on Fast Company
Conor Russomanno, a self-described neurohacker, asks me to close my eyes and relax. After a few seconds, he tells me later, the screen showed a slight spike at around 10 Hz—a rise in the alpha waves that indicates a restful state. Russomanno seems as pleased with the electrical feedback as he is with my verbal feedback (when I tell him the headgear doesn’t hurt). This was his latest, but still not final, version of the Ultracortex—a low-cost, research-grade EEG headset set to hit Kickstarter in the fall.
Read the rest on Fast Company
Apple just ripped off Roku as blatantly as Android ripped off iOS. But Apple has built by far the best Roku Player ever. Despite—or perhaps because of—being a copycat, Apple has a very good chance of winning the Internet-streaming box war.
Read the rest on Fast Company
Today IBM and ARM (which licenses the designs used in billions of mobile device chips) announced an alliance to stake their claim to this new tech territory. ARM-based chips will be equipped to collect data from the devices they live in and package it securely to send to IBM’s cloud servers for processing.
Read the rest on Fast Company
I’m freelancing for several great publications, including FastCompany.com and Yahoo Tech. I’m on the hunt for good story ideas – but in very specific areas. If you have something you really think will fit, please email me.
Here are the deets:
For Fast Company, I’m writing for the new Elasticity section on innovations in cloud technologies and services.
fastcompany.com/section/elasticity
Note the word “innovation.” I’m not interested in writing about a service or product that has been around for more than a month or is similar to its competitors (or has already gotten press). Please blow my mind with some great new idea that will inspire our readers.
Here are some examples:
Google News Lab Mashes Big Data With Old-School Journalism
BuyMeBy Saves Food From The Landfill With Discounts As Expiration Dates Loom
For Yahoo Tech, I’m primarily writing explainers on tech topics that are confusing for consumers and that are in the news – or really should be in the news.
Here’s an example.
What Is Adobe Flash, and How Can You Get Rid of It?
Please send only awesome ideas to seantech@seancaptain.com
If I like it, you will certainly hear from me. If it’s way off base, I may not get back to you, since I’m pretty busy.
Thanks much, Sean
[Fast Company]
Google is no longer just a place to search for news stories; it’s a place to find raw news itself. Among the 432,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day are user clips of important events—from police beatings to political uprisings—that no media crew was around to cover. Google’s trend analysis based on 3.5 billion daily searches can surface patterns in data that traditional reporting misses.
Read full Google News Lab article.
[Yahoo Tech]
Even if you don’t exactly know what Adobe Flash is, this is important news. Whether you know it or not, odds are pretty high that Adobe Flash is on your computer right now, possibly putting your system and your personal information at risk.
Read the full Adobe Flash article.
[Fast Company, Photo: Flickr user A Silly Person]
My Retina Tracker hooks patients with a big, though long-shot, incentive: By uploading their medical records and answering questionnaires, patients may get the attention of researchers who may be doing clinical trials for treating their disease. The more data patients enter, the more interesting they are to researchers.
Read the full My Retina Tracker article.
