a leading global provider of office supplies and printing services, today announced that as a result of positive consumer feedback, it is expanding the 3D Systems Cube(R) 3D printing experience to 150 Office Depot stores nationwide.
Store associate will demonstrate the Cube's innovative 3D printing capabilities, allowing shoppers to see the latest technology in action.
The 3D Systems Cube 3D Printer is equipped with a contemporary design, tablet-like touch screen and 16 different color options, including two that glow in the dark. It prints objects up to 5.5" x 5.5" x 5.5" in size. Additionally, the CubeX 3D Printer boasts the largest print volume in its category and offers 18 different color options, including two that glow in the dark. It prints objects in all sizes up to 10.8" x 10.45" x 9.5". The Cube 3D and CubeX 3D printers are available at Office Depot for $1,299 and $2,499, respectively.
See the full story here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/office-depot-expands-in-store-3d-printing-customer-experience-2013-12-16?reflink=MW_news_stmp
Earlier this year 4KTVs hit the market with an MSRP of $5,000 – a little over $6,000, which is a lot of money for a new television in almost every household. With the holiday season ending in about 13 days, these prices are falling dramatically, though they aren’t expected to stay low for a very long time.
That’s because soon more models will be rolling out, in more sizes, offering close to the same features as the ones that are available now. Odds are the newer units won’t have any dramatically new features, but the newer line means higher prices then this year’s current offerings.
See the full story here: http://theslanted.com/2013/12/12308/4k-and-ultra-hd-tvs-prices-plummet-for-the-holidays/
The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.
Even setting aside the immorality of killing, doesn’t the notion of enabling small minorities of angry Bitcoin donors to assassinate elected officials sound like an attempt to cripple democracy? “Of course, limiting democracy is why we even have a constitution,” Sanjuro responds. “Majority support does not make a leader legitimate any more than it made slavery legitimate. With this market the great equalising forces of capitalism have the opportunity to work in politics too. One bitcoin paid is one vote closer to a veto of whatever legislation you dislike.”
A few years later, another former Intel engineer named Jim Bell proposed a system of funding assassinations through encrypted, anonymous donations in an essay he called “ Assassination Politics.” The system he described closely matches Sanjuro’s scheme, though anonymity tools like Tor and Bitcoin were mostly theoretical at the time.
See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/
The science-fiction-like world of 3D printing is starting to get some very real attention from Wall Street. This week Jefferies initiated coverage on the sector with “buy” ratings on three of its five major players – 3D Systems DDD +3.89%, Stratasys and ExOne – and “holds” on the other two, Arcam and voxeljet. These companies could revolutionize mass manufacturing, Jefferies says, and could even get competition from a bellwether of the traditional printing industry: Hewlett Packard.
See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2013/12/11/wall-street-says-3d-systems-leads-3d-printing-movement-but-hp-could-become-a-major-player/
[Philip Lelyveld comment: Good grief! Something else William Edward Quigley and I agree on. Hell may be freezing over.]
The problem is caused by the design of the software that underpins Bitcoin. It uses cryptography to allow people to exchange funds securely without trusting each other or needing a third party to oversee the trade. But individual collections of bitcoins are secured using an alphanumeric private key that is impossible to recover or reset if lost or stolen, and is near impossible to memorize.
A private key resides in a simple text file called a wallet file and looks something like this: E9 87 3D 79 C6 D8 7D C0 FB 6A 57 78 63 33 89 F4 45 32 13 30 3D A6 1F 20 BD 67 FC 23 3A A3 32 62. If someone else learns that key or copies your wallet file, he or she can spend your bitcoins; if you lose your key or wallet file, Bitcoin’s cryptographic design makes it impossible to regain access to your bitcoins.
“The hackers figured this out really quickly. I think this is a really bad thing for the bitcoin ecosystem,” said venture capitalist William Quigley at the Future of Money conference in San Francisco on Monday. He believes that bitcoins can’t become more than a plaything for speculators unless tools and companies appear that make it easier to manage and safeguard a bitcoin wallet.
Kenna says the lack of tools to make securing and managing bitcoins easy is hindering the currency’s adoption for payments and other commerce, and that no clear solution seems to be on the horizon. Even so, he remains confident that the potential for making money by selling such services or software means they will soon appear. The total value of all the bitcoins in circulation stands today at more than $11 billion. “This is a tremendous business opportunity,” Kenna says.
Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/522411/bitcoins-rise-constrained-by-heists-and-lost-fortunes/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20131211
[Phil Lelyveld comment: Given their previously announced partnership with Google on self-driving cars, Uber will be the new incumbent to either partner with or directly compete against Amazon.]
Uber's network of cars today transports people with a taxi-like service, but in the future, it'll carry more than that, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said Tuesday.
"We need to stamp out an urban logistics fabric in every city in the world, then it's figuring out other things we can do with that fabric," he said at the LeWeb show here. "It's going to be interesting for us in 2014."
See the full story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57615064-76/get-ready-for-uber-to-hit-overdrive-with-delivery-biz/
Dolby engineers describe the differences in a way that might be called nit-picking. The term nits is industry shorthand for a standard brightness measurement, more formally described as candelas per square meter. A 100-watt light bulb generates about 18,000 nits, Dolby executives say, while a typical TV generates only about 100 nits.
To test the effects of brighter sets, Dolby exposed groups of consumers to what the company describes as a “super-expensive, super-powerful, liquid-cooled TV,” wrote Mike Rockwell, executive vice president of Dolby’s advanced technology group, in a blog post. The test found that 90% of the viewers in the study preferred a TV that could display as much as 20,000 nits.
“This is a pretty fundamental step change from the existing world,” Vlaicu says, “Getting this concept embedded into the post-production world and the broadcast world and the devices requires a lot of details to be figured out.”
See the full story here: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/10/dolby-bets-on-brightness-to-transform-tv/
[Philip Lelyveld comment; Excellent idea, but where is the program for the people who are teaching these subject matter experts?!]
We do not teach history at our school, we teach the future, so we teach anything in that realm to give students a snapshot of all the up-and-coming things that we think they should know about.
“The history of innovation tells us that with only a small number of exceptions, important innovations always come from people with cutting-edge knowledge of the field they’re innovating, whereas this curriculum takes attention away from the hard work of building up cutting-edge knowledge in a particular field and turns it towards much more replicable, easy, short-term soft skills,” he says, criticizing the notion that “we’re all capable of changing the world, we just have to change our attitude and be bold.”
“Sergey [Brin] and Larry [Page of Google] were experts in information retrieval,” he says. “It’s not just ‘I’m feeling bold and courageous.’ That stuff takes hard work. You’re going to have to build the skills if you’re going to have an impact.”
But when asked about the few exceptions that become innovators without having cutting-edge hard skills, Newport mentions people like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, who jump right into startups and see what works, what doesn’t, what needs a new business could fulfill. In other words, Newport admits, the exceptions -- the people who manage to become innovators even if they aren't experts in their fields -- are the ones who run with ideas and see what works -- like Houng, the Draper U alum.
See the full story here: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/the-report/can-draper-university-of-heroes-really-teach-innovation/?curator=MediaREDEF
[Phil Lelyveld comment: Given their previously announced partnership with Google on self-driving cars, Uber will be the new incumbent to either partner with or directly compete against Amazon.]