PTC Expands Their Industrial Automation via the Internet of Things
PTC has experienced a busy year with the Internet of Things (IoT). Only seven months ago they invested at least half a billion dollars into integrating third-party software and big data analytics for IoT.
Now, that investment has grown to about $750 million dollars thanks to their ongoing acquisition efforts. The latest IoT companies added to the PTC family appear to be the augmented reality software company Qualcomm (Vuforia) and industrial automation software company Kepware.
see the full story here: http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/11238/PTC-Expands-Their-Industrial-Automation-via-the-Internet-of-Things.aspx
Innovation without Age Limits
Research by my team revealed that the average and median age of the founders of successful U.S. technology businesses (with real revenues) is 39. We found twice as many successful founders over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20. So everyone has a shot at success, but age provides a distinct advantage.
Are venture capitalists misguided, then, in funding companies with baby-faced CEOs? Perhaps one answer lies in the results of a study conducted by the Kauffman Foundation. It found that during the period when funding young technology entrepreneurs became the norm, from 1997 to 2007, the venture industry grew dramatically. But returns actually stagnated and then declined—precipitously. The returns of venture industry lagged those of the small-cap Russell 2000 Index by 10 percent over the 10-year time frame.
When you meet entrepreneurs in India, Ireland, Brazil, and other parts of the world, you find many of the same dynamics at play. The young have the outrageous ideas, but its older people who achieve business success.
So entrepreneurs all over the world are trying again and again. In the process, they are getting older and smarter, and eventually achieving success.
But understanding these diverse technologies isn’t the domain of the young. Though college dropouts may know all about social media, it is very unlikely that they understand the intricacies of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence as well as their elders do. These are complex technologies that require not only a strong education but also the ability to work across domains and collaborate with intellectual peers in different disciplines of science and engineering.
The reality is that there is no age requirement for innovation. The young and old can both innovate. The young dominate new-era software development, and software will be a key driving force in the convergence of other technologies that are expanding exponentially. So we badly need our young. And we need our older entrepreneurs to develop cross-disciplinary solutions that solve the grand challenges of humanity.
Vivek Wadhwa is VP of academics and innovation at Singularity University and has affiliations at Duke, Stanford, and Emory. He is 54 years old.
See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/426760/innovation-without-age-limits/page/1/
Book Review: Narrative as Virtual Reality 2
This lucidly written updated book by independent literary scholar Marie-Laure Ryanaddresses virtual reality (VR) not as a medium associated with specific hardware, but more loosely as a form of storytelling primarily concerned with immersion and interactivity. Noting "we may still have to wait a few years to see whether the promises and threats associated with VR will materialize," Ryan focuses on the dominant narrative form of the 20th century: text. This approach is remarkably helpful in placing VR in a continuum of storytelling and media (visual art, conventional and digital literature especially hypertext, and computer games) and pre-digital immersive experiences like Baroque architecture, children's make-believe, ritual, and some forms of theater such as Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Moreover, in adopting a looser definition of virtuality, Ryan mostly avoids making definitive or "how-to" statements about this still emerging art form. Instead, by elucidating key elements such as gesture, spatiality, temporal and emotional immersion and important dynamics such as interactivity vs. immersion, game vs. world, and signification vs. simulation, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 provides a framework for asking the right questions about storytelling in VR.
See the full story here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/illya-szilak/book-review-narrativity-a_b_8887720.html
Play an augmented reality game on your Android Wear watch with Tilt
One developer made an app that turns an Android Wear watch when viewed through a camera into a game.
In Tilt, your task is to guide a ball to pick up objects while staying away from holes. When you look through the camera view in the Tilt app, your Wear device becomes the board that you tilt around to move the ball. In the mean time, your watch is displaying a pattern for the phone to project a virtual reality board on.
It’s a fun tech demo, probably worthy of being an Android Experiment. Graphics are blocky and not the most high-resolution, and it’s not the most practical game to play (holding a phone up at a specific angle can quickly get tiresome and certainly looks odd from afar), but it does serve as a good demo and introduction for what an AR game could be in the future.
The game is ad free and there are no in-app purchases, and the developer will be releasing an expanded version with more levels and features in the future. They are taking feedback and bug fixes in the reviews section of the Play Store.
See the full story here: http://9to5google.com/2015/12/29/tilt-augmented-reality-android-wear/
Voxelus Virtual Reality Currency Presale Begins On Uphold Platform
[Philip Lelyveld comment: Mike Terpin is advising and doing PR for this company that hopes to create a bridge between VR and the blockchain to enable walled-garden VR business development.]
The Voxelus virtual reality (VR) content creation platform is making its VOX currency available on the Uphold cloud money platform in a beta pre-sale. Uphold users can order VOX on Upland before its general release on March 30, 2016, according to Anthony Watson, president and CEO of Uphold Inc.
Voxelus allows users to create VR games and experiences without having to rewrite code. It offers a VR player app that plays content using the desktop content tool on Samsung VR or Oculus Rift and is developing even more features.
According to the Voxelus website, the voxel will be the first digital currency besides bitcoin that is exchangeable on a major currency exchange for Euro, USD, gold silver and more than 30 other currencies.
The current exchange rate, independently determined by Voxelus at this writing, is 1 BTC for 650 Voxel/VOX, via debit or credit card, banks transfer or with the user’s currently-held funds.
See the full story here: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/voxelus-virtual-reality-currency-presale-begins-uphold-platform/
Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry Are ‘Living and Breathing Intellectual Property,’ Glu Says
“We’re looking to turn these games into permanent services — call it late-night TV,” de Masi said. “It’s the Kim TV show, but instead of just Sunday for 30 minutes or an hour, you have to tune in or you miss it, effectively these games are giving you access to Kim’s world whenever you want.”
De Masi wants to shift consumers’ mindsets so that gaming, across all the different screens in their lives, will be a constant part of their relationship with celebrities.
“The personalization of media is an enduring trend,” he said. “It’s living and breathing intellectual property.”
See the full story here: http://recode.net/2015/12/28/kim-kardashian-and-katy-perry-are-living-and-breathing-intellectual-property-glu-says/?
US Troops Need Training to Battle in Future Megacities, Marine General Warns
US land forces will eventually find themselves locked in fights within huge, dense urban environments where skyscrapers tower over enormous shanty towns, and these troops need more realistic training to operate within these future megacities, a US Marine general is warning.
“I’ve trained in every environment, jungle, the desert, the mountains, cold weather, but I’ve never really trained well in an urban environment,” said Brig. Gen. Julian Alford, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory commander, earlier this month at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida.
For him, that’s a problem because “the first time I ever dropped a bomb, shot a rocket, threw a grenade, killed a person was for real in an urban environment,” he said. “That should never happen again.”
The one-star general asked industry participants at I/ITSEC to help coming up with ways to prepare troops to better fight in an environment that is becoming a reality.
“We are going to have these megacities that are ringed with these shanty towns and we are going to fight there because it will be the people who are uneducated, unemployed, the young men who are not married and they are mad about their lot in life,” Alford said.
“We talk about the three-block war, but we are moving quickly to the four-floor war,” he added. “We are going to be on the top floor of a skyscraper . . . evacuating civilians and helping people. The middle floor, we might be detaining really bad people that we’ve caught. On the first floor we will be down there killing them. … At the same time they will be getting away through the subway or subterrain. How do we train to fight that? Because it is coming, that fight right there is coming I do believe with all my heart.”
Augmented reality shows a real landscape and other troops but can, using head-mounted displays, superimpose or overlay virtual reality images and effects such as vehicles, explosions and aircraft dropping bombs.
See the full story here: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/training-simulation/2015/12/28/us-troops-need-training-battle-future-megacities-marine-general-warns/77826210/