Monday, July 30, 2012

Personal Data For Personal Sale

New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange (Photo credit: inkwellmusings)
A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Data
Companies already make billions because they know our online habits. What if we could take a cut? ..... Today, people have no choice but to give away their personal information—sometimes in exchange for free networking on Twitter or searching on Google, but other times to third-party data-aggregation firms without realizing it at all...... something akin to a New York Stock Exchange for personal data. A trusted market operator could take a small cut of each transaction and help arrive at a realistic price for a sale. ..... fresh ideas and business models that promise users control over their privacy are gaining momentum. Startups like Personal and Singly are working on these challenges already. The World Economic Forum recently called an individual's data an emerging "asset class." .... Giving people control on a trustworthy market could encourage more and new kinds of data to be shared
I am a huge proponent of collecting and selling this data to make gigabit broadband free for every human being on the planet.
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A Display Windscreen

Major carmakers in Detroit are also planning to integrate the technology into their vehicles by 2016 .... the lasers' pure, saturated colors result in more vivid images with a higher contrast ratio, so they are visible in daylight. ..... mobile connectivity is on the rise, and drivers need more and more information to be displayed in the least distracting way possible. That means the head-up display market for cars could be on the cusp of significant growth.
But then driverless cars don't really need these display windscreens. Well, I guess you could use it for entertainment purposes.
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Quantum Dots


Quantum Dots Give Notebooks a New Glow
A layer of nanomaterial that gives a liquid-crystal display the rich range of colors usually possible only with more expensive technologies will be commercialized later this year by the materials giant 3M and Nanosys ..... Liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) .... organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) ..... their film—a sheet of plastic embedded with nanoscale spheres of indium-phosphide and cadmium quantum dots—makes it possible to match the color gamut of an OLED in an LCD ...... a typical high-end LCD provides only about 70 percent of the color range in a standard called Adobe RGB, while an LCD with this film provides the full gamut (as does an OLED display)
OLED quality displays at the price of LCDs.

Nanotech is seeping into traditional tech.


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The Commandos Behind Facebook's Growth

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
If you are like me you though the massive growth happened on its own.

Chasing Facebook's Next Billion Users
The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. ..... the growth team struck a deal with Google to let the search engine show Facebook profiles in its results. They also launched a feature called “People You May Know” ....... a companywide push to create a translation tool that let users in Spain, France, and Germany navigate the site in their native languages. Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million. ..... a key to building more active members is spotting what she calls “magic moments.” That’s when a new user moves from thinking, “‘What the hell is this Facebook thing all about’ to ‘Aha! I understand, this is cool,’” says Gleit. Facebook tries to get users to experience this moment as early as possible by helping them find friends effortlessly. ...... her job entails wrangling with other teams at Facebook to highlight features on the site that improve engagement ..... “The next billions of people, we believe, are going to come through mobile” ...... governmental barriers like in China, and occasionally Vietnam, or competitive barriers like VKontakte in Russia ..... Quora, online storage company Dropbox, and Twitter now have their own growth teams
I was going to say Facebook's next billion will come from China. Zuckerberg's marriage to a Chinese woman, was that strategic?
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The Red Hot Mobile Space

The official online color is: #A4C639 . 한국어: 공...
The official online color is: #A4C639 . 한국어: 공식 온라인 색은: #A4C639 . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Funny how Windows and the Mac operating system never went to war like this. HP and Dell should have been at loggerheads back in the days.

Apple vs. Samsung: Shaping the Mobile Battlefield
On July 9, a British judge named Colin Birss ruled that Samsung’s tablet computers were unlikely to be confused with Apple’s iPad because they’re “not as cool.” ..... a globe-spanning courtroom free-for-all over who invented what in smartphones and tablets .... the struggle for domination in the booming $312 billion mobile device market ..... Google’s open approach threatens Apple’s pitch to consumers that its exclusive, “walled garden” offerings are different and better. ..... a marathon bout, or perhaps cage match. Having fought over the past two years on four continents ..... Apple will try to convince jurors of one essential idea: Samsung is a copycat. .... Android phones manufactured by Samsung and other companies—all of which Apple has also serially sued in numerous forums worldwide—offer consumers a more flexible, open operating system with greater product choices at a variety of price points as an alternative to Apple’s single, expensive, and closed-system devices. ...... Samsung’s filings indicate that it will acknowledge that it closely studies its rival’s products. ..... Samsung said in its pretrial filing that Apple must prove that an ordinary consumer would be “deceived” into buying a Samsung tablet or phone, thinking that it was made by Apple. .... Apple’s Cook and Choi Gee Sung, the former CEO of Samsung, had tried and failed to settle the case in court-ordered mediation. ..... Samsung being one of Apple’s main suppliers of flash memory chips, display screens, and other components.
This reminds me of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. This fight is a waste of the two companies' resources.


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