David Lidsky's Blog, page 2815
January 8, 2016
New Leaked Sprint Document Suggests The 2-Year Smartphone Contract Is Almost Dead
T-Mobile started the movement away from the consumer-unfriendly arrangement and other big wireless carriers have been forced to follow suit.
The two-year phone contract, always a carrier-friendly and consumer-unfriendly arrangement, appears to be on its way out. Finally.
Tinder Is Setting Up Shop In India
In the dating app's first global expansion, Tinder is gearing up to open an office in Delhi, India.
Tinder, the wildly popular dating app, is deepening its global presence with its first international office. And what better place to set up shop than India, where the app supposedly clocks 7.5 million swipes every day?
How Well Do You Know The News? Take The Fast Company Quiz
What happened this week? Here's our quiz for January 8, 2016.
Did you follow the news this week? Research says that one of the best ways to solidify new information is to be tested on it. Here's a chance to bolster your knowledge of current events—and earn a special emoji badge. 
Paging Dr. Robot: The Coming AI Health Care Boom
Use of artificial intelligence in health care to grow tenfold in 5 years, say analysts—for everything from cancer diagnosis to diet tips.
More than six billion dollars: That's how much health care providers and consumers will be spending every year on artificial intelligence tools by 2021—a tenfold increase from today—according to a new report from research firm Frost & Sullivan. (Specifically, it will be a growth from $633.8 million in 2014 to $6,662.2 million in 2021.)
How The Global Hive Mind Is Teaming Up To Find A Cure For Alzheimer's
The initiative is just one example of several efforts that combine crowdsourcing and computing to tackle "hard problems."
Since late computer scientist John McCarthy came up with the term artificial intelligence back in 1955, there's been plenty of scientific research and experimentation around achieving that goal. But we're still a long way off from fully reproducing the complexities of the human mind, despite all the exciting AI-related experiments we are witnessing at Google (autonomous cars), Facebook (facial recognition), Microsoft (language translation) and Amazon (voice recognition).
Ex-Victoria's Secret Designer's New Startup: Source Globally, Make Locally
Nearly a decade working in corporate fashion led the founders of Cienne to seek out a radical new business model.
When apparel designer Nicole Heim quit her job at Victoria's Secret three years ago, she wanted to get as far away from the drudgery of the corporate fashion world as possible. She wound up in Ethiopia, working for the non-profit Charity: Water. "It was kind of crazy, I was by myself with almost no resources in the mountains in Ethiopia," she says. "One day I saw Ethiopian weavers prepping their looms in the same way they have for centuries, and it got me interested to see if we could adapt that in a modern way."
January 7, 2016
Biz Stone Is Bringing Jelly Back
Jelly, the visual Q&A app Biz Stone unveiled two years ago, is making a comeback.
Remember Jelly, the visual Q&A app that launched amid much secrecy in 2014? Biz Stone does. The app is returning as part of an "un-pivot," says the Jelly CEO and Twitter cofounder. On Thursday, Stone took to Medium to announce the second coming of Jelly—exactly two years after first launching the company.
How Google And HUD Plan To Bring Broadband To More Americans
The federal government wants to bridge the digital divide—with help from private-sector partners such as Google Fiber.
At Google's Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt held a "fireside chat" on Thursday morning with Julián Castro, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Much of it addressed the sort of topics you might assume would occupy most of the HUD secretary's attention, such as homelessness and high rents. But—this being Google—the Internet was also a major subject.
Apple Buys A Startup That May Help It Read Your Facial Expressions
The Emotient software could be used to make Siri more aware of the moods of her human masters.
Apple wants its devices to understand the emotional states of human beings. At least its recent acquisitions and patents suggest so.
Are Rats Even Real?
Today in Hoaxes.
Gothamist's John Del Signore has a theory that all the recent viral rats are hoaxes, and it's very convincing. Selfie Rat clearly was, and if you accept that, the others are much easier to believe. This Zardulu person has a lot to answer for in Hull's HMP Humber jail though. And maybe Rob Ford smoking crack was a hoax too? Who knows! He was so high on crack at the time that he can't remember what he smoked. Some things we all wish were hoaxes are tragically real, however, like this project by a Hungarian journalist to model seven different styles of digital blackface. It was extremely bad. The artist, despite "being a human right lawyer[sic] and journalist who knows pretty much[sic] about racism and similar issues[siiiiiic]" took down the post that was most widely mocked, but the internet was left so woke it might never sleep again. And also apparently not a hoax is this vaginal speaker you can use if you want to pretend your developing fetus is Manuel Noriega and your womb is the Vatican embassy in Panama.
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