Pope Francis today described the internet as a "gift from God," hailing its ability to foster dialogue among disparate groups, though he acknowledged that the speed of social media can make it difficult for users to engage in self-reflection. Francis made the comments in a statement released Thursday, for the Catholic Church's World Communications Day.
In the statement, the Argentine-born pope said that "unprecedented advances" in technology and digital media have made it easier to engage with people of different religions, thereby "creating a sense of the unity of the human family." Using the web to communicate with various groups, he added, could help resolve religious, economic, or political differences.
T-Mobile’s biggest goal over the last year has been to disturb the roost that rival U.S. carriers have been sitting comfortably in for years. By eliminating carrier subsidies, creating new payment plans for smartphones and allowing customers to upgrade their smartphones more frequently, its competitors—AT&T, Verizon and Sprint—have all raced to match or exceed T-Mobile's offerings.
But T-Mobile’s competitors may not want to follow "Big Magenta" in its latest attempt to shake up the cellular industry.
T-Mobile announced Wednesday that it is getting into … personal finance. Called “Mobile Money,” T-Mobile’s new program is designed to disrupt the finance industry’s model of forcing people to pay to manage their own money via check cards, bank accounts and other fees.
Mobile Money is targeted at millions of Americans that have few banking options, or don't have a bank account at all. T-Mobile will offer consumers a reloadable T-Mobile Prepaid Visa card along with a mobile money management app, and while the program is available for all consumers, Mobile Money will be completely free to T-Mobile subscribers.
The T-Mobile Visa cards will be able to be reloaded at carrier stores and later grocery chains like Safeway. T-Mobile will make it free to withdraw money from 42,000 ATMs across the country and the card can be used anywhere that Visa is accepted.
“We’ve already transformed how Americans use and pay for phones, tablets and wireless service; why stop there?” John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile, said in a press release. “Millions of Americans pay outrageous fees to check cashers, payday lenders and other predatory businesses—just for the right to use their own money. Mobile Money shifts the balance of power for T-Mobile customers and keeps more money in their pockets.”
Will Other Carriers Follow T-Mobile Into Personal Finance?
Mobile Money is kind of a strange play by T-Mobile. On the surface, the program has really nothing to do with its primary cellular business. T-Mobile vice president Andrew Sherrard told Recode.net that the program is not designed to make money by itself, but to create more loyal T-Mobile subscribers.
Mobile Money is also not a stab by T-Mobile to control the burgeoning market for mobile payments at retail stores. T-Mobile is part of the ISIS Consortium (with AT&T and Verizon) that uses Near Field Communications through a digital wallet to enable payments at retail stores. This is a pure personal finance move by T-Mobile.
It is difficult to judge the motivations of T-Mobile in creating Mobile Money. With all the noise it made in changing the structure of smartphone contracts in 2013, it led the other three big carriers down a new road in how they charge consumers for their services. Does T-Mobile hope that Sprint, Verizon and AT&T will follow it down the personal finance road as well, creating large and difficult-to-manage business verticals that could ultimately cost the carriers more money than they're worth?
Matching T-Mobile’s tweaks to customer contracts was fairly easy for the other carriers. Personal finance is another thing entirely.
It is doubtful that personal finance issuers will follow T-Mobile’s move to eliminate management fees either. The banks, transaction processors, credit unions et al. are so entrenched in their ways and have such deep pockets that they can basically afford to ignore the pesky T-Mobile and proceed with business as usual.
What Mobile Money may ultimately come down to is good public relations for T-Mobile. It can say, “hey, look at us! We look out for the little guy. The other carriers don’t do that!” But only time will tell if this strategy actually pays off.
LiveMinutes, the collaborative productivity service for enterprise, has rolled out a redesigned Web app featuring a new activity feed and Evernote integration that’s all about real-time.
The San Francisco-based company unveiled its platform last year, serving up a tool that lets companies create workspaces to collaborate around documents such as PDFs, Office files, PSDs and more. It was also underpinned by HTML5 and WebRTC, meaning that it could support conference calls via the Web, Skype and more.
Although Evernote integration was already a core facet, it omitted real-time, collaborative editing a-la Google Docs, something that has been remedied with this latest launch. Users can import their notes from Evernote, view real-time edits with other team members and sync back to Evernote. And with the new activity feed in tow, this lets teams track everything that’s happened across all documents, displaying an interactive timeline of all projects.
There is a little thrill in watching something you designed get built, layer by layer, by a 3D printer.
But it's a slow thrill.
3D printing, even for a small object, can take a loooooong time. If you're just trying to make a little widget on a one-off basis, (say a piece for a board game or something), a little wait while one strip of plastic is extruded upon another is no big deal. But for professional designers, speed is, doctoral student Stefanie Mueller says, "mission critical."
According to Mueller, designers often allow their plans to print overnight, so as to waste less time. But that limits them to "a single iteration per day." Over a whole design process, that really gums up the works. "A typical iteration process when refining a prototype easily adds up to a week—even though the actual design work may not have taken longer than a day," she wrote to me. The whole process gets bottlenecked at the 3D printer.
This is why Mueller built faBrickator, a program that marries 3D printing with a building material beloved around the world: Legos. Using faBrickator, designers can sub Legos into their designs, and only print small pieces.
For example, Mueller says, consider this design for a head-mounted visual display glasses:
Head-mounted visual display glasses, front (Stefanie Mueller)
Head-mounted visual display glasses, back (Stefanie Mueller)
For such a project, the details of the casing will require less attention than the part around the lenses, which will need to be tinkered with until the right optical path is achieved. To print the entire thing takes about 14 hours, Mueller says. But the whole thing doesn't need to be printed each time to perfect just one part. With faBrickator, Mueller explained to me, designers can "mark the lens mounts as 'high-resolution'," which will leave those parts for the 3D printer. "faBrickator then exports these parts for 3D printing and generates instructions that show users how to create everything else from Lego bricks. If users iterate on the design later, faBrickator offers even greater benefit as it allows re-printing only the elements that changed."
She demonstrates how that works in the video below:
Mueller says that many experienced designers do this kind of blending of 3D printed bespoke parts and existing materials already, but doing so "requires a good amount of ingenuity and experience." With faBrickator, built at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at Hasso Plattner Institute, designers easily play with which parts need to be custom built and which Legos can easily substitute. After all the parts are perfected, designers can revert the whole project to 3D printing, and drop all the Legos out.
Mueller says that though many materials may make good 3D printing supplements, Legos are particularly ripe for this sort of integration. "We used Legos as an example to demonstrate the concept since Legos exist in many different sizes and shapes, are inexpensive, and can quickly be assembled and taken apart," she explains.
There are so many to-do list apps now that instead of figuring out the differences between all of them, it might seem like a better use of time to just go back to pen and paper (or the infamous white board). But iOS app Life Graphy lends a refreshing new twist to task management. It lets you visualize how many things you manage to complete over the course of each month with a unique calendar view and pie charts (which it calls “masks”) for each day.
Created by a Korean startup, Life Graphy is targeted toward the same people who gravitate toward to-do list apps like Clear and Any.Do because they are easy-to-use and visually appealing. Life Graphy, however, has several key differences. It is meant as a tracker for the kind of recurring, everyday tasks (like taking vitamins or watering houseplants) that are easy to miss, but its simple design means that you can use the app in many different ways.
I am currently using Life Graphy to track how often I manage to hit all of my daily health and fitness goals. The app lets you enter up to 10 items, each with its own icon. Right now mine include six: taking my supplements; getting a certain amount of exercise per day; remembering to fill out my food diary in MyFitnessPal; sleeping at at least 7 hours a night; doing a bit of yoga or meditation; and watering my houseplants (the latter technically isn’t a personal health goal, but I’m trying to cure my black thumb).
Since I started using Life Graphy a couple weeks ago, I’ve done a better job of remembering each goal because at the end of the day, I really want to see a full pie chart. On the other hand, Life Graphy also let me see that I tend to let my routine slip on weekends and Mondays.
But Life Graphy’s simplicity also has several drawbacks. For example, every segment of the pie chart should be a different color to match the customizable buttons assigned to each tasks, so you get more information when looking at the calendar view.
I also wished Life Graphy would allow me to create more than one calendar. For example, I have a couple of prescriptions I need to take varying dosages of throughout the month. If I had a separate calendar, I would set each segment of my daily pie chart to represent increments of milligrams.
The app previously only had six tasks, but its developers quickly increased that number to 10 because of user demand, so I’m hopeful that they will continue to make improvements to Life Graphy. For now, the app is helping me stay on top of my most important daily health goals, and it’s satisfying to see each week’s accomplishments lined up in neat rows of little circles.
Eager to tap the largely unexplored market for erotic Google Glass experiences, a team of hackathon participants have somehow created both an intriguing app and a weird, depressing commentary on gender.
Called Sex with Glass, the app shares some DNA with James Deen's parody video: assuming that you and your partner are both participating in a closed beta that requires purchase of a $1,500 headset, you can both don the fragile prototypes and have extremely cautious intercourse while watching a live camera feed from the other person's viewpoint. There are a few other commands ("Okay Glass, play Marvin Gaye…" and "Okay Glass, give me ideas…") and a few dirty puns, but these are all distractions from the main event. Afterwards, it...
According to Variety, the distribution rights to Wish I Was Here — the second film written and directed by actor Zach Braff after 2004's Garden State — have been purchased by Focus Features in a deal worth $2.75 million. Deadline reports the comedy drama will reach 500 screens on its theatrical release in the US.
The movie, co-written by Braff's brother Adam, was partially funded by Kickstarter. Braff took to the crowdfunding site in April last year with a goal of raising $2 million. That money, he said, would help him retain creative control of the picture, but his project received criticism from people who felt celebrities with Braff's wealth and connections should stick with traditional funding models rather than use the...
by Martin Hart-Landsberg, PhD at Sociological Images
Officially our most recent recession began December 2007 and ended June 2009. The following chart provides an important perspective on the recovery period.
Stocks and profits have enjoyed a remarkable recovery. While income is slightly up over the period, it is critical to remember that this is average income and the increase largely reflects gains for those at the very top of the income distribution. Jobs and housing have yet to recover.
So, with returns to capital booming, it is easy to understand why business leaders are relatively content with current policies and, by extension, political leaders are reluctant to rock the boat.
Unfortunately, current policies are unlikely to do much to improve the job prospects or income of most workers. In fact, the rise in business profits owes much to our depressed labor conditions. Unless something dramatic happens, we can expect the next few years to look very much like the past few years.
