Android Tablet, Phone

Image via CrunchBase

By now Android is no longer playing second place to the iOS in either the smartphone space or the tablet space. Nexus 7 has been a major arrival. Before that Amazon's Kindle Fire was the best product in the space running Android, but it was not Google's version of Android, and so it did not count for a win in Google's lap.

The Nexus 7 and the Samsung Galaxy S III have exceeded their Apple counterparts. Who is playing catch up now?

Google halts new orders for 16GB Nexus 7, surprised by demand

sales of the Nexus 7 have been "extremely brisk"

Samsung’s Galaxy S III surpasses 10 million sales in less than two months

By the end of the month, the device will be on sale via 296 carriers in 145 countries worldwide...... it and predecessor the Galaxy S, have together passed 50 million sales across the planet..... Samsung now counts itself as the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world ..... an August launch for its next-generation Galaxy Note

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Malaria

Image via CrunchBase

How Malaria Hijacks Your Immune System

Malaria infects at least 150 million people per year and kills over half a million people.... half the world’s population is susceptible to the disease.

Malaria is one of the things Bill Gates has worked on in his post Microsoft life. Many more people are talking about it now. Otherwise it used to be the poor person's disease.

Malaria is one of those hard to tie down tropical diseases. A software guy struggling with bio has business implications. Gates himself has said if he were to launch a startup today it would be in bio tech.

Software has viruses. Bio has malaria. Bio is still capital intensive. But that does not change its high growth potential status.

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Alzheimer's Stabilization

Alzheimer's Disease (Photo credit: AJC1)

Study Suggests Alzheimer's Disease Can Be Stabilized

Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States; 35 million people are estimated to have the disease today, a figure that is expected to balloon in the coming decades.

One of the things people look forward to is getting old with vigor. Perhaps advances will catch up with expectations.

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The Disabled And Computing

Cover of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Controlling a Computer with Your Eyes

the French author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly dictated his memoirs solely through eye-movements--one letter at a time, and with the help of an assistant

One of the things about computing has been the help it has provided to the disabled, or rather the physically challenged. At one level we are all physically challenged. Or we would not need computers, right? Computers compute when we can't. Like Steve Jobs said, the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. We are all disabled, we all need bicycles.

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Cyrstal Clear

Human brain - midsagittal cut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Crystals, Information And The Origin of Life

Crystals are among the most beautiful objects in the natural word. They are well understood, ubiquitously used and much admired.... the convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology is opening up a new approach to the study of structure, form and function. ... the energy landscape in which they exist and the flow of information to and from the environment..... the information a mollusc uses to make mother of pearl; and that is determined by its genome, proteome and so on, which together they call a conchome. .... this information is a kind of algorithm or formula for producing mother of pearl, analogous to an algorithm that produces the digits of pi. ..... a similar change in thinking about form and function is also emerging in the entirely different field of robotics and artificial intelligence. .... turns out that humans perform many actions that are so quick that the human brain cannot possibly be involved .... the brain outsources the control of this movement to materials themselves.... morphological computing.

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Kiva's Robots

English: Logo of Saks Fifth Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Warehouses, Kiva's Robots Do the Heavy Liftings

Sixty of the automated dollies crisscross the floor carrying shelves to humans, who pick, pack, and ship items without ever taking more than a couple of steps..... as Web retailers look for an edge in a business with low margins and sharp competition.... In addition to Amazon, Kiva's customers include Office Depot, Staples, Crate & Barrel, Toys "R" Us, and Saks Fifth Avenue. .... With the help of robots, workers at Gilt are able to process items three times faster.... After an order comes in to Gilt's website, a robot automatically wheels into a grid of 1,600 shelves arranged in tight rows. The robot locates the right shelf, lifts it onto its back, and carries it to a picking station, where human workers take what is needed. .... From above, the scene looks a little like robot rush hour as dozens of shelves zoom around the warehouse floor.....using them on inventory that gathers dust isn't cost-effective, and larger items also pose problems for the automated shelves. .... the relatively small area where robots operate accounts for 65 percent of all items shipped from the warehouse

This is like FoxConn wanting robots.

This Is Going To Be A Boom Decade

Image via CrunchBase

Early Stage Companies Raise Most Funds in a Decade

$2.1 billion went into 410 early-stage deals. Overall, $7 billion went into 898 deals..... The companies that did the best were in the less capital-intensive software and Internet sector. The biotech industry, with $697 million going into 90 deals overall.... More than a third of the total money invested in cleantech companies went into $100 million-plus bets on later-stage funding rounds for Fisker Automotive, Harvest Power, and Bloom Energy—the largest three deals across all industries in the last few months. .... Higher-risk investments in life sciences and clean-tech are still difficult for VCs to touch.

The finance folks solved the problem of too much money ("Oh, so, let's shove it into real estate!") by throwing it to wreck the entire financial system. And the world is not fully out of the doldrums yet. But a rebirth is on the way. Things are going to be bigger and better than ever before.

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