Just what i find

While IBM's latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can't dance after all (https://www.ft.com/content/84dfe694-432f-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd), Microsoft's pivot from a software to cloud services company is really starting to pay off – reporting revenue nearly $1bn higher than market expectations last year. Changing the direction has clearly been hard (e.g. disbanding the Windows Engineering team, previously the Continue reading →

Scratch is a great tool for introducing young children to programming, so I’m glad to see it continues to evolve and grow. https://medium.com/scratchteam-blog/3-things-to-know-about-scratch-3-0-18ee2f564278 A new version of Scratch is coming this August! Continue reading →

Construction sites are perfect examples of chaotic environments – a massive number of moving parts, unpredictable environmental conditions, hundreds of people – and there’s a very real risk of injury or even death for every human present. Automation therefore is highly complex, but the first steps are starting to be taken, with robots moving parts Continue reading →

Most power outages are due to failures in the transmission network (storms, broken power lines), not instability in supply. Making the move to newer, cleaner energy solutions is going to be difficult and take time – and cause pain for those involved. But that's not a good reason to prop up old, dirty, under-utilized coal Continue reading →

I'd love to have a robot butler. Previous attempts have been hilariously unsuccessful – so i'm not holding my breath – but the goal is certainly worth chasing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/amazon-is-said-to-be-working-on-another-big-bet-home-robots Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out Continue reading →

Find yourself snowed under with no time to come up with your next big idea? Most of us come back from holidays refreshed and with new goals and objectives – but how do we achieve that level of innovative ideation on a more regular basis? Make time – two hours a week, locked away from Continue reading →

“AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said at Davos said. “Any time you work with technology, you need to learn to harness the benefits while minimising the downsides.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/google-ceo-ai-will-be-bigger-than-electricity-or-fire The technology could eliminate Continue reading →

As more and more services compete for valuable kerb space (deliveries, ride shares, taxis, emergency vehicles), having a common framework, platform, and language to share valuable data on utilisation and timings can help city planners optimise rules and maximise value, ensuring they do this without compromising customer confidentiality (does the city need to know who Continue reading →

A fascinating insight – what traces would be left of a civilisation which died out 4 million years ago? Certainly nothing on the surface (the oldest is only 1.8m years), and fossils are incredibly rare (only a few thousand dinosaur fossils exist despite their 180m year existence) – but what about chemical traces? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=technology_review&utm_source=facebook.com Continue reading →

Assembling an Ikea chair in 20 minutes, rather than the 5 that a person takes, doesn’t seem like much of an advance. But while computers excel at trigonometry and logic games like chess, evolution’s billion year head start on interacting with the physical environment means that advances like this are drawing us (very) slowly closer Continue reading →