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Amazon be designing and testing order delivery by drone while Yudala be delivering already! Big up, Yudala!

Yudala first!

 

Amazon, the US tech and retail giant, has been designing and working on a drone delivery project, Prime Air, for a while now. Amazon intends to deliver customer orders by drone within minutes in the near future, but guess what? Nigeria online e-commerce site has already delivered its first order by drone, right here in Lagos. Yea, cool, huh?

*Evil grin* Well, Yudala actually beat Amazon to the race many thanks to delays and strict US regulations.

Become a Deloitte apprentice by playing a game!

Become a Deloitte apprentice by playing a game!

Well, if you are my generation (generation Y) or better still, from the techie school of thought, then you will most likely agree with me that a lot of old things are still going on around here.

But hey, it's not an all gloomy picture; some important developments and changes in attitude are already taking place and these are inspiring. Deloitte, the professional services giant, is set to trial a process of selecting the best talent using a game. This disregards traditionally held beliefs of university education and academic excellence as proof of intelligence and I think this is wonderful.

This may not make any sense to the older generation, but if you recognize that a lot of Millennials currently see schooling as an unnecessary and stifling undertaking, then the logic in using this radical method of recruitment is not far fetched. We call it "radical" now, it may as well become the norm in the future.

Read full story here and here.

3-D printed human organs; Rejecting free internet in India? ; Mobile West Africa 2015; Snap pictures non-stop;

Hello buddies, it  has been another eventful week, thank God for the gift of life and the gift of science and technology!

3-D printed human organs

Do you remember this piece on  3-D printing? Well, although scientists have been 3-D printing human tissues for a while, see here also, lately there has been a buzz about the team at Cornell University printing a human ear (which is an organ; tissues make up organs).

Two Million Phones sold in a day; Smart Watches; US blocks Intel China upgrade; Apple jostling for exclusive tunes like Jay-Z

What a hectic week it has been for me as well as on the tech scene. I'm gonna keep it short and simple on this one.

Yep! you read the heading right, Xiaomi sold just over two million smartphones in one single day! that's crazy, right? Well, apparently, Xiaomi often called the apple of China, made $335 million (don't scream, pls) during its annual "Mi Fan Fest" selling a range of devices. The company is already one of the top electronics manufacturers in the world making smart watches, phones, TVs etc. Of course, its Chinese, what else did you expect?

  
Apple also debuted its much anticipated Apple smartwatch  and MacBook this week. The smartwatch was available for trial in select stores around the world, and trust Apples fans there's already a backlog of orders. But, hey a range of other companies also have smartwatches in the market already, including Samsung. Well, I haven't tried an Apple smart-watch yet, so I'm just gonna chill for the reviews to come in.

Well, Tianhe-2 located in China, has been the most powerful computer for a while now and China wanted to upgrade it. However, the upgrade was to use chips from Intel, a US manufacturer. Apparently, US has sighted fears over nuclear research to stop Intel from supplying China with the chips. Read story here. But trust China, they have decided to accelerate development of homegrown chipmakers to supply the needed chips. I think what this story speaks to is that regulatory risks are real! Do not neglect them.

Lastly, do you remember what happened with Jay-Z, Tidal and Spotify? Well, here's the story. Jay-Z and some other musicians including Madonna, Kanye West, Beyonce, Daft Punk, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Alicia Keys and Calvin Harris, floated their own music streaming service, Tidal. Well, apparently in order to boost sales, Jay-Z pulled his album, Reasonable Doubt, from Spotify, a dominant music streaming service, and put it exclusively on Tidal (talk about business guts!). Well, I think that might have just sparked a race for exclusive content. In recent news, Apple has joined the race, read here.

Muchas gracias!

Spectranet partners iROKOtv: gifts 30 days viewing on iROKOtv

Please take note of the date of this post: 5th April, 2015. As I shall not be liable for any exhaustion of your data as a result of billed streaming on iROKOtv.com. lol.

Well, I just love it when I hear of any development on naija's tech scene, it gives me joy!!

iROKOtv.com, in case you haven't heard of them, is a pan-African internet TV station, with strong roots in Nigeria. That's just the simplest way to put it. They have a lot of movies in their catalogue: Nollywood, Bollywood, Hollywood, (what else?-wood), telenova (ask your wife what this is), etc. which you can either view online or download to see later. Cool, huh!

On the other hand, you have Spectranet, a 4G, LTE internet service provider. 4G LTE basically means super-fast internet connectivity, I think its one of the fastest commercial internet speed you can get around depending on the implementation (telecoms guys, please correct me).

The issue with on-demand video streaming is that it requires a fast and dependable network to be enjoyable, and I guess this has been an issue hindering market penetration of iROKOtv, but Spectranet has a fast and dependable network, and now they (i.e. iROKOtv and Spectranet) have formed a partnership- you get the gist, huh!

SYNERGY!!!! That's the gist!! This may mean increased revenue for Spectranet, because video streaming consumes a lot of data, so you would have to keep buying more from Spectranet. It may also mean an increased quality of service from iROKOtv; I mean, if you see a movie displaying seamlessly just like your traditional TV from iROKOtv, that's quality service. With quality service comes consumer loyalty and brand reputation- you get the gist, huh!

Well, I use "may" above, because the actual details of the deal was not announced, and we do not know what they have agreed on precisely, but whatever it is, it should be SYNERGISTIC!

So much talk about talking Barbie

I forgive you if you do not know what Barbie is, especially if you are a male and an adult who grew up in Africa. It's a doll, a female doll, kids love to play with. It has been marketed for over 50 fifty years through novels, TV etc. So, recently, Mattel (toy giant and makers of Barbie) in association with ToyTalk (a start-up), announced a revamped Barbie. A Barbie that can have conversations with your kids, yep! converse with your kids!

Mark Lennihan/AP

  

The technology

The technology is not entirely new. Hello Barbie, as she is called, is equipped with a microphone, WiFi (basically internet access) with which it connects to a cloud (basically computing power residing in a remote location). So when a person speaks to Barbie, the words are collected, sent over the internet to a cloud where some software analyses and composes a response for Barbie to reply with. The data is even stored, so Barbie can give you intelligent replies based on what you have told her before. Cool, huh!

The outburst

Well, as you can imagine, there has been an outcry from some folks. They raise issues that are quite germane:

• Invasion of privacy
• Exploitation of the data collected for marketing purposes

In the toy makers defense, they have said that the technology is not so different from what we have in the market already in the form of Siri and Cortana. They have also said that the data collected will not be used for marketing purposes and that a mechanism for seeking parental consent will be in place before the doll is launched.

The business lessons

1. "Flow" with the trend or be the trend: we see Mattel keying into popular trends of Internet of things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. The internet of things phenomenon basically says that at some point in the future, most things will be connected to the internet, if not all things. Here, I think Hello Barbie is gonna be the trend for smart toys. I believe we will see a plethora of toys making use of technology come into the market very soon. Good thing Mattel did not wait to be shown the way.
2. Start-ups: yea, I know, you have heard so much about them lately. ToyTalk is a start-up, and Mattel is a long time industry player. The truth is that start-ups have a lot of strengths: they are agile, innovative, flexible, on top of the trend, risk-takers etc. Rather than see them as competition, take them as collaborators and make something cool with them. Make it a win-win situation.

Wanna discuss some more? techmaxng@gmail.com

Windows kills Internet Explorer with "Project Spartan"

Earlier this year at the Microsoft Windows 10 event, the software giant unveiled what consumers can expect from Windows 10. We had a number of features unveiled: Cortana (the virtual assistant), HoloLens glasses (Holographic Virtual Reality, which we will discuss later), a lot of visual changes and integration features which you can find here. For this post we will be discussing "Project Spartan", the browser billed to replace Internet Explorer.

 Copyright: Windows

If you are part of my generation, then Internet Explorer most likely has a huge imprint on your "digital" history. It has been the default Windows browser for so long and after going through so many iterations, Microsoft finally feels the need to re-brand and relaunch their browser offering (important lesson for your business). The new browser, dubbed "Project Spartan" (because an actual name has not been chosen), and in fact the entire Windows 10 offering, is designed for the age we are now: touch screen devices and mobile multi-device folks (you gotta evolve with your market!). Briefly, the new browser, as it appears in the public preview build, has note-taking features which allows you to actually make notes on the webpage you are viewing. It is very clean and trim, it has a reading mode feature that allows you to read without distraction and a host of others you can find here.   

The takeaway

 The Internet Explorer (IE) has been under fierce competition lately from other browsers. After suffering a major brand damage from the notorious security flaws of IE 6, I think Microsoft feels its the right time to re-brand their browser offering and keep it up-to-date with the current consumer preference. This also keys in with the launch of what Microsoft is pushing as a radically redesigned operating system, Windows 10.  It remains to be seen if "Project Spartan" and indeed Windows 10 will see massive consumer adoption.

   

Self-driving car travels from coast to coast in the US

Well, it's one of those futuristic ideas gradually turning into a reality. The 2014 Audi SQ5 fitted by Delphi travelled across 15 states from San Francisco to New York City. Many companies including Google, Mercedes Benz and Tesla have been active in self-driving car research;  many believe this to be the future.

Pending the arrival of self-driving cars, what we actually see in the market right now are advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). ADAS are implemented to aid the driver and ensure safer, better driving. In ADAS, we see cars fitted with sensors, cameras, data networks and communication systems (vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure).  Some ADAS only warn the driver while others go as far as taking control of the system. There are a plethora of ADAS including driver drowsiness detection, forward collision warning, blind spot monitor  and we have even seen movie scenes come to life: BMW i3 parks itself at the touch of a smartwatch .

7 year old Girl Receives 3-D Printed Prosthetic Hand

You love the title of this post, right? Yes, that's the kind of amazing stuff technology does. While the technology (3-D printing) behind the news in this article has been around for a while and has been put to a wide variety of use, I still get fascinated by the varied use 3-D technology.

So what is 3-D printing?

Well, there is Wikipedia, where you can get an instant information overload on 3-D printing, so I won't go into details. I'll just give a brief overview of it. Let's use the image below to describe it.
Assuming you have Yoda's entire body (the Star Wars character in the picture below) graphically designed on a software. Then you want to "manufacture" it using plastic. What you see in the picture below is a 3-D printer that can 'print' (manufacture) the Yoda computer model you have using plastic(not exactly plastic but something similar). The 3-D printer below has a movable nozzle that carefully 'prints' the 'molten' plastic layer by layer until the model is printed. In the picture below, the head has been printed, layer by layer.

                                         Image Credit: Gizmodo

Tech giants push computers on sticks!

No pun intended in the title :-D  You know a USB 'stick', right? That's the type of stick I'm referring to. So, recently, we have seen technology giants competing to push computing devices, approximately the size of a large-size USB stick to the market; and as everything else technology does, it excites me. Not to worry, I'll bring you up to speed in a moment and get you exited too.

The technology

If you are as "recent" as I think you are, then you should be quite familiar with the laptop. If you do not know the laptop, then you might be in a wrong time period. Take a good look at the laptop, you basically have a large screen, a large keyboard, battery and then the real computing stuff on the mother board. What a bunch of smart guys have said is that how about we cram "computing power" (not as powerful as those in laptops though) in something a little larger than a USB stick, equip the "large USB stick" with a means to connect to TVs or other computers, and then put WiFi and/or USB connectivity on it. The result is a "pocketable computer", which I will call a "ComStick" (it's still so new, that there is no standard industry name for it). So the "ComStick" is usually connectable via an HDMI (basically a good interface for transferring audio/video) port or USB. When you connect the "ComStick" to a TV for instance, the screen of the TV becomes your display monitor, you can use a mouse and keyboard with the "ComStick" via Bluetooth, and the inbuilt WiFi can be used to connect the "ComStick" to the internet. What you have then set-up is basically a computer.

So what? Why are we discussing this?

Google patents robot personality development systems and methods

So, a few year ago, google acquired a number of artificial intelligence (basically means giving machines reasoning abilities) and robotics companies including Boston Dynamics and Deep mind. As is the trend in the tech sector, Google gave no clear indications of the long term strategy of acquiring these companies, however, industry followers knew this was a move by google to establish a presence in the humanoid (human form) robotics sector. Although google already had a presence in robotics e.g. google cars, the companies it acquired then were more specialized in AI and humanoid form of robotics and we are already seeing the results of this.

On 31 March, 2015, Google filed a patent with US Patent and Technology Office detailing methods and systems for robot personality developments. Read news article here. In the lengthy filing, Google describes a cloud-based system where a robot connects to the cloud to collect information about the personality trait it is trying to manifest, particularly information on characters, word choice and sentence structure. The robot will then analyse the situation around it and act in accordance with the personality data it is programmed with from the cloud. "The robot personality may also be modifiable within a base personality construct (i.e., a default-persona) to provide states or moods representing transitory conditions of happiness, fear, surprise, perplexion, thoughtfulness, derision, and so forth" says the patent. "These moods can again be triggered by cues or circumstances detected by the robot, or elicited on command. The personality and state may be shared with other robots so as to clone this robot within another device or devices." says the patent. This means that a user can travel to another city and download the personality in another robot.

Issues of importance

First post: Why this blog?

If you are an ardent follower of developments in the field of science and technology, like I am, then you would agree with me that the speed of development in this field is hypersonic. It's so fast that you literally have to be keep refreshing your tech news sites like you refresh your Twitter page to keep abreast.

But that's not all, the problem of jargon also sets in. For people without a science background, use of unfamiliar jargon in reporting can hamper their ability to grasp the significance of the news being passed across.

The far-reaching effects science and technology is having on businesses and life styles today mean that it is inexcusable to be ignorant of developments in this field. So, you might ask, I'm always busy throughout the week or I do not have a science background, or I do not know how to find information, how do I then keep up? Well, have no fear! There are two ways to go about it:

•  For busy people, enter your email into the "Our Mailing List " box on the right of this page and voila! I will mail you the latest developments in Sci & Tech regularly in clear, concise language with analysis of what the developments mean for you. 
• Visit this website regularly (bookmark it).