Davemichels

A full U.K. exit from the EU isn't inevitable.

On Monday John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, met with British and European leaders for private talks to discuss the ramifications of Brexit, last week's vote for the U.K. to leave the EU. But the very next day during a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, something unexpected happened: Kerry suggested that Brexit may never actually happen. He provided two reasons— that Leave campaigners actually didn't know how to achieve a Brexit, and that further they don't truly want a divorce from the EU. As the Guardian reports:

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Apparel startup Baubax made waves last year when it raised $9.1 million on Kickstarter to fund its Travel Jacket, a SCOTTeVEST-like jacket that stuffed 15 different compartments for devices and accessories into one frame.

Currently, it’s the fifth-most funded Kickstarter in the history of the site.

On Tuesday, the company announced its second campaign, and it’s taking a more tech-focused approach along with it. Its new line of “Wireless Charging Apparel” consists of clothes, wallets, handbags, and device accessories that, as the name suggests, are all designed to make your outfits double as wireless charging bases.

So, it's a bit different. Let’s take a closer look.

SEE ALSO: The top 17 startups to launch so far in 2016

At its core, Baubax is still selling clothes, so it’s got a range of outerwear for both men and women, along with a few pairs of men’s pants and shorts. This is one of its sweatshirts, for instance.

You can see a full listing on the company’s online store, but alongside the jackets, vests, and so forth, there’s also a handful of wallets and wristlets.

I’m far from a fashion expert, so I’ll leave for you to decide whether or not all this suits your style. After a brief hands-on (or body-on), though, I will say that the men’s vests and jackets didn’t come off as cheaply put together.

Inside that outerwear are tiny wireless charging pads. Those connect to a small battery bank, which can be stashed separately or within one of Baubax’s wallets. This is what allows the charging to work.

That portable battery holds 4,000mAh of power on its own. That’s not a ton, so you’ll likely want to recharge it (over microUSB) after every phone refill. Baubax CEO Hiral Sanghavi did say the company is still planning to refine the pack before launch, though.

Baubax also says those charging pads are machine washable, so you shouldn’t have any reason to fear your washing machine here.

On a base level, Baubax isn’t doing anything different than any other wireless charging solution. There’s a pad, a power source, and a compatible device. The difference is that the cables that connect all of this are integrated into the apparel.

While my demo wasn’t extensive, everything did work. I slid a case-covered iPhone into the pocket of a vest like the one above, and it started powering up a few seconds later. The natural worry is that things could come loose if you move too wildly, but, outside of making sure you insert the phone the right way, nothing about it felt particularly unnatural.

Everything here uses the Qi wireless charging standard.

That’s still the most popular of the few that are out there, with native support from Samsung’s Galaxy phones among other Android devices.

Per usual, though, iPhone owners will have to pay up for a Qi-compatible case to get any of this to work. Baubax is selling its own versions of those for the 6, 6s, 6 Plus, 6s Plus, SE, 5s, 5, and 5c. The company says it’ll launch a new model when the next iPhone inevitably launches later this year.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

By Beth Schultz
CEO Alan Masarek shares his insight on Vonage's cloud communications strategy, perspective on the communications API opportunity, and more.

Verizon’s experts say that enterprise IoT startup companies will raise two to three more times in capital in 2016 compared to their consumer IoT counterparts.

Cisco announced another acquisition Tuesday morning. It's picking up CloudLock, a Waltham, Mass. company with Israeli roots, for $$293 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention-based incentives for CloudLock employees who join Cisco, it says.

The company has about 145 employees, it says.

CloudLock was founded in 2007 by three Israelis Gil Zimmermann, Ron Zalkind and Tsahy Shapsa, and had raised  about $35 million from backers like Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce's venture funds and Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners.

CloudLock makes technology that allows companies to watch the security of their apps in the cloud, ensure employees aren't sharing sensitive data even with cloud apps that are not built or managed by IT. For instance, it can watch files shared via Box, Dropbox, Office 365, Slack and Amazon Web Services. It claims 700 customers including HBO, Motorola, the US Army, and NASA.

CloudLock fits into Cisco's portfolio in a couple of ways. Cisco is filling out its security offerings to cover more cloud tech. The company is also moving more heavily into software and trying to get itself into the cloud software subscription world, where its customers pay it for software on monthly and annual subscriptions.

The CloudLock team is joining Cisco's Networking and Security Business Group reporting to general manager David Goeckeler. This is Cisco's fifth acquisition of 2016.

SEE ALSO: Cisco scored a major win against hated rival Arista and has shown 'no interest in settling'

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NOW WATCH: This explosive elixir played a huge role in the 'Game of Thrones' finale

Twilio, the tech company that had a blockbuster initial public offering last week, is on fire again.

Shares of the company, which makes communications software, were up as  high as 21% in midday trading, at $33 — a new high. They finished the day up about 10%.

The broader market is enjoying a bounce-back on Tuesday, after the massive sell-off triggered by the Brexit vote last week. But Twilio's pop is much bigger than the Nasdaq Composite's 60 point increase, which finished up about 2%.

And Twilio's gains on Tuesday exceeded its lost ground, about 5%, over the past couple of days.

There's no immediate news about Twilio's business. On Monday, CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer endorsed the company, calling it a "unicorn with real value" and noting that the market "may be willing to pay up for growth again."

Here's what the spike looked like early in the day.

SEE ALSO: This VC firm wrote a $125,000 check over breakfast to Twilio — now it owns a $500 million stake in the company

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NOW WATCH: The most annoying thing about the iPhone isn't changing any time soon

This is definitely the most interesting pill dispenser you've ever read about. Pillo is a new "home health robot" built by Pillo Health that supposedly combines machine learning, face recognition, video conferencing, and automation to create a personal health assistant that can dispense your vitamins and medication.

According to the company, Pillo will recognize each users face and voice, dispense the proper pills at the appropriate time (pills are stores in a tamper-proof casing, according to the company), and automatically reorder your medicine before it runs out.

Continue reading…

Sam Paper spent hours creating a PowerPoint presentation on office snack consumption, and now, he was feeling defeated. Though his spreadsheets were complete and his math was double-checked, he realized the whole thing was a little bland. Sure, his C-level overseers always enjoy a good budget discussion, but would they really care about office snack statistics? Everyone already knows the community seltzer water barely sticks around longer than a day while the packs of raisins chill for weeks. Still, these are important numbers, Sam thought. How could he make them care?

Dell

A 70-inch interactive conference room touchscreen monitor with 10-point hand touch and two styluses. Maybe that’s the way.

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Dell's...

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Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Following a prominent cheating incident earlier this year, participants in the upcoming Tour de France will have to have their bikes scanned for concealed electric motors and batteries. Cycling officials plan to conduct between 3,000 and 4,000 tests, the Union Cycliste Internationale said today. This technology has been used at multiple other races, but this will be the first time it is deployed at the Tour de France.

"Technological fraud tests" rely on a tablet, case, adapter, and software to scan a bike, its wheels, frame, groupset, and other components in under a minute. The scanner creates a magnetic field and then allows the tablet to detect interruptions to that field. The UCI says those disruptions often come from a motor, magnet, or battery. If they’re detected, officials will dismantle the bike and inspect it.

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The scanners are the result of tests going back to 2015. Those included trials with thermal imaging, X-rays, and ultrasonic detection. Earlier this year, one professional cyclist was found to have concealed a motor in her bike at the sport’s world championships in Belgium.

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Van Moof bike has an electric motor

By Andrew Prokop
If I can get functionality, power, and ease of use in the same package, I'd be a fool to look the other way.

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver is exasperated with Brexit.

We all knew this rant was coming. On Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delivered a nearly apoplectic monologue about Brexit, the U.K.'s recent vote to leave the European Union.

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The best investors often know how to spot the hidden gems.

For Silicon Valley-based Bessemer Ventures, communications-software maker Twilio goes down as one of its early bets that turned out to be a home run.

In fact, Bessemer liked Twilio so much that it wrote a $125,000 check for its seed investment on the spot over breakfast.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson didn't end up cashing that check, but eventually took the money a few weeks later when Bessemer wired it in.

"We wanted to make it clear that we were in because we were so enthusiastic," Bessemer Ventures' partner Byron Deeter told Business Insider. "That just anchored our relationship and we took it from there."

Bessemer joined all subsequent investment rounds for Twilio, investing roughly $70 million in the company. Twilio raised over $230 million before going public last week, and now has a market cap over $2.1 billion. That makes Bessemer's 25% ownership stake in Twilio — largest among all shareholders — worth over $500 million as of Friday's closing share price.

Early conviction

Twilio, which makes it easy for developers to embed calling and text-messaging features into their software, is now one of the most widely used tools in cloud software.

But Deeter says even from the early days it was clear that Lawson had the conviction and vision to take his company to the next level.

"He's one of those people you believe will run through walls to get it done. He's just a total force of nature," Deeter says.

That conviction was most apparent when Lawson was offered a huge nine-figure buyout deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars from a large public tech company in 2010, according to Deeter, who sits on Twilio's board. Lawson debated between selling the company or taking a Series B investment to keep growing it on its own.

Eventually he chose the latter, taking a $12 million round led by Bessemer. To show its support for Twilio, Bessemer even built a term-sheet app on top of Twilio's software so Lawson would get the fully drafted term sheet texted to him, Deeter says.

"It was clear that Jeff was willing to bet his own net worth on the ability to grow something even bigger and that conviction helped us get support for continuing to lead the subsequent rounds as well," Deeter said.

Best in cloud

Bessemer's early investment in Twilio is just another testament to the VC firm's strong track record in the cloud-software space.

Deeter points out that Bessemer was an anchor investor in five of the last eight cloud company IPOs, and that it invested in one-quarter of the top publicly traded cloud companies by market cap. Bessemer's "Top 10 Laws of Cloud Computing" is a must-read for any cloud-company founder, and its "BVP Cloud Index" is a closely tracked chart for public cloud companies.

Deeter says the public market will start to warm up to cloud companies again, as there are a number of companies with strong fundamentals. And for those still in the early process of building a cloud-software maker, Deeter offered the following advice on how to scale your business:

• Stay hyper-focused on the customer: Lawson built Twilio's software when his developer-centric approach was not obvious to the market. Most people didn't believe in it, but Lawson kept pushing for targeting the developer market. "When you get that CEO vision for that super-tight product focus, it’s a huge advantage and central part of it," Deeter says.
• Keep an efficient business model: Focus early on the things that really matter. Clearly establish what your business model or marketing strategy is going to be before committing to other expansion plans that require more spending. "These things are really hard to change, but really impact the business-model efficiency over the time," Deeter says.
• Pick long-term partners: Subscription models take a long time to build, and you have to be patient to really scale the business. That means you'll be around with your cofounders, investors, and board members for a long time. So choose the right people you want to work with. "You've got to look at this as a eight-plus year journey, and really pick world-class people, but also people you enjoy as friends because you’ll be working with them for a long time together," Deeter says.

SEE ALSO: Twilio gets a big chunk of its revenue from WhatsApp — but its CFO downplays it as just 'gravy'

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NOW WATCH: A computer scientist built an AI baby that looks realistic and can learn freakishly fast

Twilio, the communications software maker that had a strong IPO Thursday, drives roughly 15% of its revenue from a single customer, WhatsApp.

What's more worrying is that Twilio doesn't have a long-term contract with WhatsApp, meaning it's always under the risk of suddenly losing a big chunk of its revenue without advance notice, as warned in its regulatory filing.

But Twilio's CFO Lee Kirkpatrick downplayed those concerns, saying WhatsApp's revenue pie doesn't represent the most important part of its business.

Instead, the company's more focused on growing its most loyal customers who commit to 12-month contracts, looped under the "Base Revenue" category. Those "base" accounts comprise of most of Twilio's revenue and are growing at a faster pace than customers that don't commit to long-term contracts, like WhatsApp, mixed under the "Variable Revenue" category.

"We run and plan our business on 'base revenue,' and while we’re happy WhatsApp's on our platform, we really treat that business and revenue as gravy," Kirkpatrick told Business Insider.

In fact, of the 28,000-plus Twilio customers, only 9 were in the "variable" category, representing 16% of its total revenue. And although "Variable" revenue spiked 129% in 2015, that was likely due to WhatsApp increasing its usage, not because the overall pie of non-long term contract users growing.

On top of that, those "base" customers have proven to spend a lot more money on Twilio as the years go by. According to its filing, the customers who first signed up in 2012 more than doubled its spend by 2015, while those signed up in 2013 spent 2.7-times more by 2015. And the customers that first signed a long-term contract with Twilio in 2014 saw its spending jump a whopping 3.7X by 2015.

"Our 'base' revenue growth has been over 80% over the last several years," Kirkpatrick said. "We feel really good about our prospects."

SEE ALSO: Twilio's CEO just got $100 million richer

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NOW WATCH: There's a 'danger triangle' on your face that could kill you if you're not careful

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Slack, the workplace collaboration platform for businesses, announced its new Message Buttons tool on Tuesday.

The feature will appear within the message thread on Slack, giving users the option to either accept or deny an action such as approving expenses (see image) or booking flights. It will also allow users to cycle between windows to complete tasks.

Slack hopes that the addition of this new feature will help encourage developers to build apps specifically for its platform. It currently integrates third-party apps that enable functions such as file sharing and group chats, but also peer-to-peer payments, car services, and food delivery.

However, many of these functions are utilized by tapping the forward slash key and scrolling through command options. Message Buttons are intended to be an easier and more intuitive way to issue commands on the platform. For now, the message buttons work with 12 apps, but Slack plans to expand that number to its entire directory of over 500 apps.

Messaging apps are becoming increasingly popular and important as they evolve from simple text communication tools to full ecosystems that include commerce, file sharing, and more.

Will McKitterick, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, has compiled a detailed report on messaging apps that takes a close look at the size of the messaging app market, how these apps are changing, and the types of opportunities for monetization that have emerged from the growing audience that uses messaging services daily.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Mobile messaging apps are massive. The largest services have hundreds of millions of monthly active users (MAU). Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel their growth.
• Messaging apps are about more than messaging. The first stage of the chat app revolution was focused on growth. In the next phase, companies will focus on building out services and monetizing chat apps’ massive user base.
• Popular Asian messaging apps like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE have taken the lead in finding innovative ways to keep users engaged. They’ve also built successful strategies for monetizing their services.
• Media companies, and marketers are still investing more time and resources into social networks like Facebook and Twitter than they are into messaging services. That will change as messaging companies build out their services and provide more avenues for connecting brands, publishers, and advertisers with users.

In full, this report:

• Gives a high-level overview of the messaging market in the US by comparing total monthly active users for the top chat apps.
• Examines the user behavior of chat app users, specifically what makes them so attractive to brands, publishers, and advertisers.
• Identifies what distinguishes chat apps in the West from their counterparts in the East.
• Discusses the potentially lucrative avenues companies are pursuing to monetize their services.
• Offers key insights and implications for marketers as they consider interacting with users through these new platforms.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the future of messaging apps.

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 Twilio today said it would price its initial public offering at $15 per share, which would value the company at around $1.23 billion. That would value Twilio above its previous $1 billion valuation from its last financing round. With the pricing, the company expects to raise around $150 million, with an option for another 1.5 million shares to be purchased. It’s also a higher price than… Read More

Get ready to approve or deny expense reports and other basic functions directly in Slack.

Slack, the office workplace messaging app used by about three million people a day, took another step in its quest to become the app where you spend most of your working life. It added buttons.

They’re called message buttons, and they link to tasks in third-party applications. A common example: The boss sees "approve" and "deny" buttons in an automated message in their Slack feed for dealing with expense reports. In that instance, the buttons are connected to Abacus, a corporate expense reporting app.

Abacus is only one of a dozen third-party apps with buttons enabled in Slack. Others include Trello for managing projects; Kayak for travel; PagerDuty, an app for tracking and resolving unexpected problems; and Greenhouse, for approving new hires. Slack users who have those apps enabled can start using the buttons right away.

Slack also said the number of third-party apps it works with has grown to 500 since it launched its app directory in December.

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Interview with Slack's Stewart Butterfield and other CEOs

“Unless very small, most enterprises will continue to have an on-premises (or hosted) data center capability,” said Thomas Bittman, Gartner VP.

Microsoft's Office 365 cloud software has become a wildly popular alternative to Microsoft Office. Read more.

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NOW WATCH: People with these personality traits have more and better sex

The new era of the tech supermerger is upon us.

In fall 2015, Dell bought EMC for $67 billion — the biggest pure-technology merger and the second-biggest tech deal ever.

In June, Microsoft shelled out a whopping $26 billion for LinkedIn, making it the priciest company the tech titan has ever bought.

Silicon Valley figures like investor Marc Andreessen and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff think it's a sign of things to come.

But while LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner might be enjoying his champagne, it might be time to take a walk down memory lane and remember the ghosts of mergers past. Only a few were winners. The rest resulted in depressed share prices, corporate confusion, and layoffs.

SEE ALSO: How to buy a home in San Francisco's completely insane housing market

11. Oracle-BEA. Oracle is actually pretty good at acquisitions. When it acquired BEA for $7.9 billion in January 2008, Oracle got the WebLogic software that still powers its Fusion Middleware product for developers.

10. Compaq-DEC. Compaq snapped up Digital Equipment Corp., a company that had been making computer servers since the 1960s, for $9.6 billion in 1998. DEC was slow to recognize that the PC industry was taking off.

By the time of the acquisition, DEC was a stagnating company with high operating costs and few desirable products — problems that Compaq inherited after the merger.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The autonomous car industry is quickly becoming one of the most valuable emerging technology markets, but it will be hard, if not impossible, for manufacturers of hardware and software to reach a global audience without extensive partnerships.

That’s according to research firm Vision Systems Intelligence, which says that manufacturers will have to build relations with chip, sensor, mapping, and development tool firms to make its autonomous car functional on all fronts.

See Also: Rolls-Royce unveils an autonomous car for the 1%

“No one company owns all the expertise necessary to build an autonomous vehicle. From low-level component suppliers to modules or systems, each domain is a highly complex field in itself,” say Phil Magney, founder and principal of Vision Systems Intelligence.

In the infographic above, Vision Systems Intelligence shows the various sectors of the autonomous car market. What it doesn’t show is the partnerships already established, like Google and Uber’s mapping partnership on Android, or General Motors acquisition of Cruise Automation for $1 billion and $500 million partnership with Lyft.

Other partnerships between ‘autonomous solution’ firms and suppliers are most likely active, though we doubt many are disclosed.

It is interesting to see what blocks companies are active in. Intel is apparently active in processing, connectivity, and security/safety, while Nvidia works on autonomous solutions, processing, and algorithms. Google is only active in autonomous solutions and mapping according to the infographic, though we suspect the search giant is working on its own development tools and sensors for the autonomous car prototype.

Partnerships are always important for emerging technologies to gain traction, but the autonomous car market will require a vast amount of interoperability between software, hardware, and services, similar to the smartphone or computer but on a larger scale.

Some manufacturers are showing a willingness to work together, Fiat Chrysler was reportedly in talks with Uber and Amazon, on top of its Google deal and General Motors has once again hinted at a possible partnership with Google.

The post For autonomous vehicles, no tech is an island appeared first on ReadWrite.

For Millennials, towels are not technology. Neither are computers, the Internet or smartphones. For Boomers, all that stuff often remains “technology.”

Technology has enabled us to automate many of the day-to-day tasks we used to struggle over. Compiling data, handling email, and even networking has become a largely automated process for many professionals. A recent survey conducted by Wakefield Research in coordination with Built.io found that the modern worker is hungry for automation.

Services like IFTTT connect different devices and services together enabling you to automate just about anything. You can have your air conditioner turn on when you’re five miles from home, send new business contacts an introductory email when they’re added to your contact list, or generate a spreadsheet that logs your company’s social media activity.

Password managers like LastPass and 1Password will even fill in your username and password for virtually website and app for you. Many email services will even schedule meetings on your calendar for you based on the content of your email.

Indeed we are becoming a culture of automation. But is it enough?

Giving up personal data for the convenience of automation

When you sign up to have things automated either at work or at home, you are trusting the service that handles that information with your personal data. Companies that automate tasks have to be able to see that data and have some ability to control whatever it is you’re trying to automate.

If you want a pizza ordered and delivered upon meeting your weight loss goal, a service will need access to information about your weight either through manually handing it over or enabling it to see your logged entries in Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, or one of any number of other fitness services. Then, it will need the ability to order a pizza on your behalf. This means giving that service a lot of insight into your life.

The study found that people are willing to give up personal information to a company online or through a mobile app in order to automate everyday household chores. And….

• 57% of respondents indicated that they would willingly hand this information over.
• Among Millennials, this number surged to 70%.
• 8% of the study’s participants indicated that they would hand over financial information such as their credit card number or bank account number for a little more convenience at home.
• Perhaps more surprisingly, the percentage that indicated they would share their current weight, diet, and health goals was 22%.

First busy-work, then maybe we work getting busy

When it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks, the workplace is king. Just about everyone has had to spend time during their day doing something that they would much rather have automated. In fact, an incredible 37% of working study participants indicated that they would prefer more automation in the workplace than a better sex life.

With such a large interest in automation, it’s no surprise that even the cars we drive are beginning to drive themselves. Tesla made a huge statement when its first general consumer automobile received hundreds of thousands of preorders, many of which happened before the car had even been unveiled.

One of Tesla’s biggest selling points? Its autonomous driving capability.

According to the study, 92% of participants believed that at least some aspect of their driving experience would become autonomous in the next 10 years. 21% believed that over half of their driving experience would be taken over by the car in that time. That is, if we even need to be driving by then.

Drone delivery services are being developed and tested already. Amazon, Google, and Alibaba, for example, have all expressed interest in and are developing technologies for drone delivery.

Dispatch, an autonomous delivery startup, is already delivering packages door-to-door at college campuses.

We are undeniably heading in a more autonomous direction. Our lives are being changed by these technologies, and while many of us will still want to go to the grocery store to pick out the right oranges ourselves, the shopper standing next to us doing the same with the avocados may soon be a robot.

The post Over one third of Americans prefer better tech over better sex appeared first on ReadWrite.

The ubiquitous Google Chrome web browser is great, but it's long been known to be a battery hog. Now, Microsoft is taking aim at Chrome's weak spot.

In a blog entry posted today, Microsoft is boasting that the Edge browser that comes with every copy of the new Windows 10 operating system gets you as much as 70% more battery life than Google Chrome and 43% as much battery than Firefox on a laptop.

Previously, Microsoft had claimed that Edge was 112% faster than Chrome.

To prove its battery life claims, Microsoft did browser battery tests with Surface Book laptops under laboratory conditions. There's a time-lapse video:

"We used the same websites you spend your time on – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and more," Microsoft writes of the lab test. Here are the results of its more scientific lab tests, in graph form:

And then, to drive it home, Microsoft measured the battery life on real-world Windows 10 computers and tablets, using anonymized information gleaned from users:

Microsoft may be winning the battery life battle, per these results which were independently corroborated by The Wall Street Journal. And the company promises that Edge is getting even more battery efficiency improvements with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, coming later this summer. That update also adds browser extension support for tools like password management app LastPass to Edge.

But Edge is still losing the browser war: Despite the fact that it comes with all of the 300-plus million Windows 10 installations out there, the latest data from tracking authority W3Counter places the combined marketshare of Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers at a meager 10.3% — versus Chrome's 58.7%. 

Meanwhile, the race for better batteries goes on: Microsoft itself has an ambitious plan to build batteries that last much longer than the laptops we're used to.

SEE ALSO: Bill Gates says a Microsoft-owned LinkedIn could be as valuable as the Facebook news feed

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NOW WATCH: Meet 'Edge,' Microsoft's bold answer to Google Chrome

Ericsson, a world leader in communications technology and services, recently released a report naming Stockholm as the highest-ranking city in the Networked Society City Index for 2016.

The index studies the performance of 41 cities all around the globe, focusing on two perspectives: ICT Maturity, which studies ICT infrastructure, affordability and usage, and Sustainable Urban Development, which is based on social, economic and environmental sustainability.

See also:  Ericsson sees a wearable future that’s easy to swallow

Next in line after Stockholm are London, Copenhagen, Singapore and Paris. However, London ranks at the top in the ICT part of the index, beating Stockholm, which drops to second in that area, before Singapore.

The index notes some major improvements for Barcelona, Istanbul and Jakarta, while Hong Kong, Moscow and Dubai have all been dropped in their rankings.

In general, the report notes that cities with low ICT maturity seem to develop faster than cities with higher ICT maturity, indicating an overall catch-up effect.

From the report, it looks as though ICT is not only vital to socioeconomic improvement, but can also help remove this progress from an increased environmental footprint, in favor of more sustainable development.

Is Stockholm the future of sustainable smart cities?

With the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, smart city planning will be vital. For example, cities will be instrumental for the improvement of poverty reduction, climate action, better health and education, as well as advanced social and financial inclusion.

Erik Kruse, head of Ericsson’s Networked Society Lab, states, “UN-Habitat estimates that 70 percent of the world’s population will reside in urban areas by 2050. Many smart city initiatives to date have mainly used ICT to optimize existing systems and behaviors, for example, intelligent transport.”

“Instead, cities need to rethink existing structures to fully grasp the potential of ICT to make sure that “smart” is in fact sustainable. The future Networked Society city is characterized by resiliency, collaboration, participation and mobility, which are essential for ensuring our cities are attractive, sustainable and vibrant places.”

For smart cities to continue to improve and become more sustainable, a number of important steps need to occur. These include, making ICT a basic infrastructure in investment plans, creating regulatory environments that encourage the adoption of ICT, a holistic approach to integrating ICT across various sector planning that includes transport, energy and public safety, and more collaboration between cities.

 

The post Is Stockholm the world’s smartest city? appeared first on ReadWrite.

European technology companies valued at over $1 billion (unicorns) are starting to outperform their US counterparts, according to research from investment bank GP Bullhound.

The continent's unicorns generated an average of $315 million (£215 million) in revenue over the last 12 months, while America's generated just $129 million (£88 million).

Manish Madhvani, managing partner at GP Bullhound, said in a statement: "Europe has yet to reach the dizzying heights of American giants such as Facebook and Google, but when you look at businesses in the $1 billion (£683 million) to $3 billion (£2 billion) range, what we lack in quantity we more than make up for in terms of quality.

"All the data points towards a stable, maturing market that has avoided the excesses of the US in favour of sustainable growth. We are seeing a remarkable resilience in European technology markets."

The investment bank also claimed that Europe's unicorns are "healthier" than US unicorns when it comes to valuations. US unicorns, which have raised twice as much capital than European unicorns on average, are valued at 46x the size of revenue generated, while Europe's are valued at 18x.

Further, European unicorns are more likely to be profitable than US unicorns, with 60% of the continent's billion dollar tech firms in the positive. This is "well above" industry standards according to GP Bullhound.

There are a total of 47 unicorns in Europe, according to GP Bullhound, with 18 in the UK, seven in Sweden, six in Germany, three in France and three in Israel. Unicorns can also be found in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Denmark.

Speaking at the NOAH Berlin tech conference earlier this month, Oliver Samwer the founder and CEO of German unicorn Rocket Internet, described Europe as a collection of "mini Silicon Valleys" that the continent should be proud of.

Europe's most valuable technology company is Spotify, which was valued at over $8.5 billion (£5.8 billion) in a funding round that was closed in June 2015.

Madhvani added: "There has never been a better time to operate within the European market. I firmly believe that the right ecosystem exists for one of the companies highlighted in this report to push forward and reach a $10 billion (£6.8 billion) valuation in the next few years, and over time a $100 billion (£68.3 billion) valuation."

The report — titled "European Unicorns 2016: Survival of the Fittest" — focuses on European technology companies with an equity valuation of $1 billion that were founded in 2000 or after.

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China also boasts the largest number of supercomputers on the latest top 500 list

A new world champion in the realm of supercomputing has unseated the juggernaut that has held it since 2013.

Sunway TaihuLight is three times more powerful than the previous champ, Tianhe-2, according to the latest edition of the twice-a-year list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers put out by researchers in the U.S. and Germany.

The new machine can perform more than 93 petaflops per second, besting Tianhe-2, which maxed out at about 34 petaflops. A flop is short for a “floating point operation,” a type of math problem, and the prefix “peta” refers to a quadrillion of them. The system is running at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, about two hours west of Shanghai.

Sunway TaihuLight’s other claim to fame: Its chips are also made in China. Its primary computing engine is a chip called ShenWei that boasts 16 cores and can produce 140 gigaflops per second (or billions of flops). Tianhe-2 was built primarily using chips made by Intel, the U.S.-based semiconductor giant. The U.S. government has imposed an embargo on the sale of high-end processors like high-end versions of Intel’s Xeon chips to China’s supercomputing organizations, arguing that they might be used in nuclear weapons research.

The most powerful system in the U.S., and the third most-powerful system in the world, is Titan, a machine built by the supercomputing company Cray that is running at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It’s capable of nearly 18 petaflops per second. It topped the list back in 2012.

Overall, the U.S. still dominated the top 10 positions on the list, with four. American-made chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices were used in more than 93 percent of the the systems on the list. And U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard Enterprise built 127 of them.

The top 500 list has been compiled twice a year since 1993 by a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and ISC Group, a research firm in Germany.

Snapchat has been secretly hard at work on what has been described as a competitor to Google Glass. A source has tipped Business Insider off, however, that Snapchat's supposedly top-secret project may have been hiding in plain sight.

In August, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was pictured wearing a very different pair of sunglasses from his usual ones while on vacation in Corsica with his girlfriend, the model Miranda Kerr.

The paparazzi photos taken of Spiegel show him looking straight at a camera with a very circular pair of frames and what appears to be two cameras on either side of them.

Compared with Spiegel's normal aviator style, the sunglasses photographed in August appear to have thicker frames and the attached cameras. They're similar to but aren't exactly clones of the glasses made by Vergence Labs, a company Snapchat acquired in 2014.

The source told Business Insider of being "shocked" that Spiegel had apparently worn the early prototype on vacations and that nobody noticed, though the CEO might have not been expecting to be photographed at the secluded beach. The photo was also taken months before news of Snapchat's hardware efforts surfaced, which may explain why it went unnoticed at the time.

Snapchat is "very serious" about a hardware play, a different source with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider, and the company has been on a hiring spree to build up its team for it. The company is regularly sending teams to China to work with contract manufacturers for the project, according to another source.

Snapchat's hardware ambitions first came to light in March, when CNET pointed to an earlier string of notable hardware hires, including eyewear designer Lauryn Morries and a former employee who listed his experience as working on highly miniaturized and very low-power electronics.

CNET speculated that Snapchat could be working on a Google Glass-like device, which would mark a major expansion for the social-networking startup, which is valued at more than $18 billion.

The photos of Spiegel wearing the alleged early prototype appeared six months before the report, meaning the company could be further along in development than previously thought.

Yet it's still ramping up production. In the past six months, the company has brought on two more hardware specialists from GoPro and a handful of specialists in low-powered electronics. Snapchat also hired the technical recruiter for Google's Project Aura, the group responsible for Glass, and the technical recruiter for Microsoft's HoloLens project.

Snapchat didn't immediately respond to request for comment.

SEE ALSO: Here's more evidence that Snapchat is working on a secret hardware product

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These days, if you are in the market for a fully electric, long-range vehicle, your options are pretty limited. 

In fact, Tesla vehicles are currently the only cars that have an official range of more than 200 miles per charge. 

But it won't be long before there's an influx of long-range electric cars hitting the market. 

Most major automakers, including GM and Volkswagen, have vowed to roll out more than one fully electric car by 2020. 

Here's a look at some of the vehicles coming to market in the next few years.  

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Tesla unveiled its Model 3 this year and aims to begin production by the end of 2017.

Tesla revealed its first mass market, long-range vehicle on March 31, but the car won't go into production until 2017. 

The car has a starting range of more than 200 miles per charge and can go form zero to 60 miles per hour in just six seconds. 

The car will cost $35,000 before incentives and will be about 20% smaller than the company's Model S. However, it can still seat five people pretty comfortably. 

Tesla's also has plans to introduce a next-generation Roadster in 2019.

Tesla will reveal a new Roadster in 2019, according to a statement by CEO Elon Musk in July of last year. 

Almost no details have been revealed about the new car, except for the fact that it will be built for speed. Musk said in the statement that the new car will be capable of going from zero to 60 in less than 2.8 seconds, which is faster than its cars can go in "Ludicrous Mode."

The Bolt EV is going into production this year.

General Motors revealed the production model of its first affordable, long-range car called the Chevrolet Bolt EV. The car will become available before the end of 2016, have a range of about 200 miles per charge, and will cost around $30,000 after tax incentives. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The company has chosen not to fund or otherwise support the GOP convention, sources told Politico.

Apple will be one of the few major tech companies to take a stand against Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments on women, Mexicans, Muslims and other minorities. The company privately told GOP leaders that it would not provide funding or other support for the GOP convention, Recode has confirmed.

It’s a move that stands in stark contrast to that of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all of which have publicly stated they would aid the convention through donations of either cash or technology. Google’s unwillingness to "dump trump" was met with protests at the company’s Mountainview headquarters.

The company isn’t entirely alone in its stance: Apple joins HP Inc. in refusing to fund or otherwise aid the GOP convention, according to Politico which first reported the private talks between Apple and the GOP.

It’s not the first time Apple would be going toe-to-toe with the presumptive Republican nominee. In January, Trump called on Apple to start manufacturing its products in the U.S. (Here’s why that statement was completely misinformed.)

I was saying make America great again, and I actually think we can say now, and I really believe this, we’re gonna get things coming … we’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.

A month later, Trump called for a boycott of Apple products because the company did not unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone at the request of the FBI.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

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Amazon's Jeff Bezos on Donald Trump and the media

Greenland just hit a big new record, and it isn't a good one.

Temperatures soared to 75 degrees Fahrenheit in mid-June, smashing previous temperature logs for as long as people have been keeping them.

Greenland's continent-wide ice sheet is also at its tiniest in recorded history — and the annual summer melt season has only just begun.

Some argue that Greenland's balmy new climate will spur its economy. But these photos show why that trade-off isn't worth the calamitous costs to the planet.

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April 2016 brought alarming news to climatologists: Greenland's annual melt season started two months early.

Source: Tech Insider

Weather stations recorded local temperatures as high as 38 degrees Fahrenheit, which is well above the melting point of ice.

"That would be a warm day in July, never mind April," climatologist Robert Fausto said in a statement to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider