geek stuff

App challenge: what if you knew an earthquake will hit 5 seconds from now?

9 December 2017 by Steve Blum
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The biggest natural disaster threat to Californians comes from earthquakes, wild fires notwithstanding. One quake can take out more homes, businesses and infrastructure in a few seconds than all of this year’s fires combined. There’s no scientifically valid way of predicting earthquakes, so most people assume they strike without warning.

Not so. Earthquakes run for many seconds, even minutes. The first vibrations that ripple out are called P-waves, which seldom do damage but carry critical information about location and intensity several seconds ahead of the big shake.… More

Arizona innovates self driving cars while California pioneers regulation

25 November 2017 by Steve Blum
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California is on the receiving end of another slagging for its top heavy approach to regulating the development and deployment of self-driving cars. Ian Adams works for the R Street Institute, a Washington, D.C. consulting group – AKA think tank – that finds its home on the dark public policy corner where industry, academia and government intersect. Writing in The Hill, he points to the departure of the Waymo – formerly Google – autonomous vehicle venture for free range Arizona…

The reasoning behind Waymo’s deployment decision was simple: California opted for an overly prescriptive approach to regulating technological innovation.

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Commercial drone experiments outsourced to cities, counties

28 October 2017 by Steve Blum
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Local governments have a chance to jump into the drone development business, by invitation from none other than the Trump administration. An order signed by president Trump gives the Federal Aviation Administration three months to create a program that will allow local, state and tribal governments to propose unmanned aircraft system (UAS) pilot projects, in partnership with private companies, to see what might and might not be feasible to write into FAA regulations in the future.… More

Peru flooding kicks Project Loon into the real world

20 September 2017 by Steve Blum
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Project Loon demonstrated a real-world usage case earlier this year, when the worst flooding in decades hit Peru. The stratospheric balloon-based broadband system under development by Alphabet, Inc. – Google’s parent company – was deployed to backfill mobile networks that were damaged or overwhelmed by the disaster.

That’s according to Anne Bray, Project Loon’s business development director. She was speaking at the inaugural Mobile World Congress Americas trade show in San Francisco last week.

She said that Project Loon began working with Telefonica in Peru a year ago.… More

Feds ready to tell California DMV to drop self-driving car rules

9 September 2017 by Steve Blum
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The U.S. congress isn’t completely gridlocked, at least not where self-driving cars are concerned. This week, the U.S. house of representatives passed a bill – with a whopping bipartisan majority – that would put the federal transportation department in charge of setting standards for autonomous vehicles, and determining whether or not any particular design is safe to operate on open roads, anywhere in the country. If it makes it into law – it still has to be approved by the U.S.… More

FINsix Dart universal power adaptor works great, when it works

3 September 2017 by Steve Blum
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From pitch to product, with some bumps in the road.

It’s not often I have the pleasure of actually using a product that’s made it from the fundraising stage all the way to the open market. One of the top finishers at the 2014 Showstoppers LaunchIt beauty pageant, held during the Consumer Electronics Show, was FINsix, which was pitching a small, universal power supply for laptops and phones. It took second place, largely, it seemed, on its personal appeal to the judges who, as I noted at the time, had a “gleam in their eyes as they thought about trading two power bricks for one that’s barely bigger than a plug alone”.… More

Bitcoin's disruption is the healthy and rewarding result of a free market

6 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are different from other software and standards-based platforms. There are no governing authorities or dominant players or established industry groups. That’s deliberate. The whole point is to create a way of exchanging value that’s not centrally regulated by governments or private organisations. But that means a super-majority of the millions of individual users have to accept and adopt software updates, or else there’s the risk that Bitcoin will splinter into different versions with different values.… More

Cryptocurrencies' crowd source incentives prevent collapse into one crowd

5 August 2017 by Steve Blum
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The disruption in cryptocurrency markets this week, when Bitcoin sorta split into two, was the result of disagreements between different interests about the technology and crowd-sourced methods used to run it. It was also inevitable and purposeful – cryptocurrencies are intended to rise and fall according to the cumulative decisions of millions – eventually, billions – of sovereign, individual users, who won’t always agree with each other.

Bitcoin’s underlying software can’t keep up with the growing number and speed of transactions between its users.… More

Microsoft discovers Google's business model in spectral gaps

22 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Me too.

Microsoft’s TV white space broadband initiative is many things – a worthy effort to expand Internet access, a way of squeezing more useable bandwidth out of finite radio spectrum, a call to action for rural economic development and, as willingly acknowledged, a business opportunity.

It is also a foray into the market economics of free software. White space is the gaps between active television channels, which vary according to where you are in relation to whatever TV stations might be around.… More

Texan judges and juries can't hold high tech hostage any more


Goodbye to all that.

A particularly pathological cottage industry in east Texas is coming to an end, much to the delight of high tech entrepreneurs, and they have a low tech court case to thank for it. The federal supreme court ruled that patent trolls can’t go shopping for the most easily bamboozled judges and juries, but instead have to file law suits in the home state of the companies they’re trying to shake down.

According to a story in the Hill, the decision came in a case where Kraft – decidedly not a troll – tried to sue an Indiana-based company, TC Heartland, over water flavoring technology in a Delaware-based court…

The ruling will have broad implications for patent lawsuits, which are frequently moved to certain districts that have a track record of being favorable to patent infringement claims.

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