Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 43

Waze Launches New Danger Zone Alert to Tell You If You’re Entering an Accident-Prone Area

I admit I’m not generally a fan of Waze for driving directions. I find the constant alerts and questions asking if an area is still a speed trap (for example) to be quite distracting. Their latest innovation, though, could change my opinion. Using the vast data stores they and parent company Google have access to, the app now offers “crash history alerts for accident-prone roads” using a combination of AI and user reports to alert drivers when they enter an area where many others have had accide...

The Next Magical Space Material Might Be … Wood

Back in 2022 three different wood samples were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Japanese Experimental Kibo Module. After ten months of exposure to space, the researchers reported that “wood’s ability to withstand simulated low earth orbit – or LEO – conditions astounded us.” Based on this early success, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) is teaming up with NASA to design and launch a wooden satellite into space in 2024.

Most of the stories about this effort focus on the ...

Why Airline Passengers Are Assholes (And How We Can Fix It)

I take a lot of flights and listening to someone singing or promoting themselves is near the bottom of things I would want to listen to. It’s a pretty close second to those desperate pitches to try and get me to fill out an application for an airline credit card.

An unwelcome private concert is what passengers on a recent Delta flight were subjected to when a singer named Bobbi Storm turned her flight into a stage for herself and refused to stop singing claiming she was “doing what the Lord i...

The Beautiful Empathy of Common App’s New Direct Admissions Program

Applying to college can be an intimidating and humbling experience. Even more so for the student who may be the first in their family to consider going to a university. Lots of things can happen along the way to cause a young person to question their credentials and perhaps abandon the whole process. Now through a newly announced program, a student who just “created a Common App account and provided enough academic information” (but has not yet completed their application) can be offered admissi...

Leica Pioneers the Anti-AI Camera That Fights Deepfakes by Certifying Every Picture

This week, German camera maker Leica introduced their new M11-P professional camera, which includes new digital watermarking technology that allows the camera to digitally verify that an image has not been manipulated and even track its future use. The tech is built using standards set by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), an initiative built by Adobe as an open-source method for certifying content authenticity. 

It is an interesting idea to certify content as authentic directly from the ...

WSJ Just Killed Its Bestseller List. Do These Lists Even Matter Anymore?

Books are an anomaly when it comes to how “bestsellers” are ranked. Movies are judged by their total box office numbers. Music is rated based on listens and album sales cumulatively. By contrast, a bestselling book generally earns that designation after a single great week of sales. Or in the case of an Amazon bestseller, maybe just $3 and 5 minutes.

When the Wall Street Journal announced earlier this week that they would be dropping their bestseller lists, it induced a fireball of angst within t...

Announcing the 2023 Inc. Non-Obvious Business Book Awards Longlist!

For the past several months our team at Non-Obvious has been quietly devouring all the books that have come in as submissions for our annual book awards program. It’s always a magical time to have so many books coming in every day and to see just how diverse the topics happen to be.

This year’s selections for the Longlist are our widest range of titles yet, from another hugely competitive year. We considered more than 1000 books published this past year (our award window runs from 11/01/22 to...

Do People Vote for Candidates Who Look Like Them?

There have been several studies in the past that found people tend to prefer going to doctors who share their same ethnic background. This doesn’t seem to be true when it comes to politics, as an interesting article from TIME magazine points out this week by focusing on politicians of Indian origin who are part of the Presidential race of 2024. The South Asian community is anything but aligned when it comes to Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy:

“Neither Harris nor Haley nor Ramaswamy...

Doritos Creates AI That Silences the Sounds of Crunching While Gaming

Listening to someone crunchily eating Doritos is probably high on many lists of annoying behavior but imagine how much worse it must be to listen to the crunching in a headset while playing against a Dorito-eating opponent in a video game. In a beautiful example of knowing their audience, Doritos commissioned an AI company to quantify more than 5000 types of crunching sounds so they could build “crunch canceling” technology that would let users mute it out.

While reading about this, it was hard n...

How Barnes & Noble Is Winning by Rethinking the Usual Retail Conventions

The Barnes & Noble store location in Oviedo, Florida may be a bit harder to locate than others because it has a different name. As a throwback to a brand the bookseller acquired decades ago, this store location is now the one and only B. Dalton Bookseller location in the world. It’s a symbol of B&N Chief Executive James Daunt’s “idiosyncratic approach to mass retail.”

Over the past several years, the resurgent bookseller has abandoned typical branding guidelines, killed the “racetrack checkout” u...