Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 15

A Computer That Never Crashes? Sign Me Up!

Posted in Tumblog

A really cool article on Digital Trends about researchers who have built a computer that never crashes:

“The systemic computer prevents an impending crash by quickly repairing corrupted data and carrying out several tasks simultaneously. Let’s say you give the computer something to do. It divides the result into several copies or “systems,” which are executed all at once so if one system crashes, the computer can simply access another system to carry out your command. Ordinary...

The Future of Contextually Relevant Experience is…Now!

Posted in Tumblog

A movie that changes based on the reaction of the audience? Wow. That is truly a phenomenal step forward in creating rich contextually-relevant experiences. What if this was paired with PrimeSense sensors (the tech behind Xbox’s Kinnect)? What if the movie could understand what the audience generally liked (by linking the data from those sensors to facial recognition to Facebook behavior for any audience member it could match)? Contextually-relevant experiences are truly the...

Do You Know the Engagement Styles of your Social Media Followers?

Posted in Marketing

Although Klout is getting a lot of press lately (well, maybe more the idea of trying to measure influence than just Klout) , they do introduce a very important topic for digital marketing: engagement styles.

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The picture above is a screenshot from my own Klout score analysis. As you can see around the corners of the diagram, there are a number of different “styles” that Klout has identified:

Listening,
Casual,
Consistent,
Focused,
Participating,
Sharing,
Creating, and
Broad.

What’s in...

One Step Closer…

Posted in Tumblog

I am a firm believer that renewable energy sources will eventually become the dominant form of energy production. Up until now, solar has really been an ineffective method to generate electricity. But that’s because we have always been thinking big (i.e., how can we generate enough electricity to power our house).

Researchers at MIT have been trying to think smaller. What if we can produce just enough electricity to power an alarm clock? Then, what if we take the aggregate dem...

Try Fitting That Into Your Glass…

Posted in Tumblog

Almost exactly a year ago, a 251-square-kilometer sheet of ice broke from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland and started slowly drifting into the open ocean. Now, a year later, satellite imagery reveals that the Petermann Ice Island—a Manhattan-sized chunk of that ice sheet—is now floating in Canadian waters and heading toward the fragmented coastline of Newfoundland.

Gene Patey captured this jarring image of a piece of the towering iceberg looming over the idyllic-looking ham...

What the Kindle Fire Means to Amazon?

Posted in Business

I just wrote a post about what the Kindle Fire means to the tablet market, but what does it mean to Amazon? Why did Amazon chose to enter the tablet market? In short, there are two reasons.

First, Amazon is a retail company. They sell things. And what they have begun to sell a lot of is digital products. Music. Videos. Games. Books. And, what’s more, they see the opportunities to sell more bits with tablet-based applications (i.e., the Amazon Android store). Now the Kindle wa...

Do You Know the History of Email?

Posted in Tumblog

There are almost 145bn emails sent every day. How did it all start? Check out this timeline compiled by Mashable. If I had a time machine I might pay a little visit to Mr. Tomlinson!

Originally posted 2013-02-07 09:54:00.

When Healthcare and Automotive Collide

Posted in Healthcare

You might be asking yourself, “what in the heck do automotive and healthcare have in common?”

To answer that, you first have to understand a little bit of the state of healthcare in the U.S.: it’s undergoing a revolution. Technology companies are pouring billions of dollars into fixing a system that is incapable of meeting the needs of its population in a cost-effective manner. Ultimately, the system is broken. Why? I have written before that the system is broken for three...

The Evolution of Evolution

Posted in Science

We sometimes talk about the theories of Evolution in a very matter-of-fact way. But what you may not be aware of is the heated discussions within the evolutionary theorists circles. There is a lot of conjecture about just how evolution works, when it works, and the levels it works at.

The BBC recently hosted a half-an-hour radio show with many of today’s leading evolutionary theorists all representing a lot of different perspectives:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012fr7p

Whet...

iPad, iPhone, and iOS vs. Kindle: It’s the Media Platform War

Posted in Technology

It’s Tuesday, October 4th at 1pm EST and the media is all in a tither about the upcoming announcements from Apple. Will it be the iPhone 4S? The iPhone 5? Regardless, they are missing the bigger picture of how the latest devices from Apple are really about battling for control of personal media.

First, let me say that Kindle is not a device. It’s a software platform. It provides cloud-based storage, in-browser applications for accessing and consuming media (both books and a...