in SpaceX to support its plan to deliver hundreds or thousands of micro satellites into a low (750 mile) orbit around the globe to serve Internet to rural and developing areas of the world. The Information's sources indicated that Google was in the “final stages” of investing in SpaceX and valued the company at “north of $10 billion.” SpaceX is apparently courting other investors as well.
Elon Musk indeed has a Google-sponsored card up his sleeve.
Internet giants have found they need established specialist companies to turn their vast data into profit in areas such as medicine
"The chances that, in a few years’ time, people will be able to receive basic healthcare without interacting with a technology company became considerably smaller after recent announcements of two intriguing but not entirely unpredictable partnerships."
"One is between Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline. The two have agreed to form a $715m company to focus on the new field of bioelectronics, which involves developing miniature electrical implants capable of treating a number of chronic diseases."
"The other announcement was the results of a major new study of genetic markers associated with depression. It was the product of collaboration between 23andme, a Google-backed personal genetics company, and Pfizer, yet another pharmaceuticals giant. It was the largest study of its kind, drawing on DNA data from more than 450,000 23andMe customers, and this scale comes in handy for companies such as Pfizer."
"Technology firms are the seemingly innocent gateways through which that crony capitalism can penetrate those parts of our lives – and bodies – that were previously out of bounds, for ethical or political reasons." Evgeny Morozow
The tech giants thought they would beat old businesses but the health and finance industries are using data troves to become more, not less, resilient
Vivek Wadhwa: "My prediction is that 2015 will be the year in which tech takes baby steps in transforming medicine. The technologies that make this possible are advancing at exponential rates; their power and performance are increasing dramatically even as their prices fall and footprints shrink. The big leaps will start to happen at around the end of this decade."
"Vivek Wadhwa is a Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University. "
Sebastian Thrun har varit med och byggt Googles fantastiska förarlösa bil, motiverad av en personlig strävan att rädda liv och minska antalet trafikolyckor. Häpnadsväckande videos visar hur bilen som vann DARPA-tävlingen tar sig genom hektisk stadstrafik utan någon bakom ratten, och dramatiska bilder från testkörningar vid TED2011 visar hur fort den verkligen kan gå.
by Michael Kelley, editor-in-chief of Library Journal, on October 11, 2011 "...a recent report called "Paths of Discovery" by Andrew Asher of the Bertrand Library at Bucknell University (and others) notes that discovery systems exert "a form of epistemological power by virtue of their relevance ranking algorithms." ... "The critical question for librarians is therefore how to participate (or not to participate) in this process [the subject's process of discovery ?] and what level of this epistemological power to exercise," the report says" "The discussions revolve around whether the ILS should serve as the front end (bringing in the discovery results) or whether the discovery service should be the front end (interacting with traditional ILS functionalities, like holds lists)."
Publishers Weekly 17 May 2013: "Using a combination of voice commands (“take a photo”) and the touchpad, a user can do a google search and get answers or ask for turn-by-turn directions to your hotel, as van der Lingen outlined to our group during the demo. As we noted earlier, there are a lot of things Google Glass does not do. Indeed, it does not call up web pages like a computer (you can’t “click” hyperlinks—there are none), you cannot run “apps” on it and currently there is almost no content designed specifically for it, although the New York Times provides headlines and short abstracts of its daily issue though nothing with any detail. That said, Google Glass mostly works. Of course the notion of “reading” a book on the tiny hovering screen seems beyond possible at this point but this is the earliest iteration of Google Glass and who knows what further development will bring?"
David Talbot 7.6.: "Among other fallout, it’s reasonable now to expect E.U. regulators and customers to go nuclear–and U.S. companies to face tough sledding ahead." "I had a chance today to speak with Radu Sion, a computer scientist at Stony Brook University and a leading figure in cloud computing security. “Expect some interesting court battles in the E.U. based on this,” he said. “Any of these companies, if ever they were to admit this, that they allowed the government to have a tap inside their service, which according to the E.U. is not allowed, they probably could get shut down in Europe–specifically Facebook, which has a lot of users in Europe.”
T:\siirto\tep\vipu1-00\antero\teoleko.prn.pdf - Från Google Dokument -- "Teknisten tieteiden sisällä on viime vuosikymmeninä tapahtunut voimakas arvomurros. Sen on ennen kaikkea aiheuttanut ympäristökeskustelu. Tieto maailmanlaajuista ympäristöongelmista