Found This Week #20

Photo Of The Week

Returning from honeymoon and getting back into the swing of normal life has been tougher than I had expected. Thankfully the weather has been good and a nice walk around Langland Bay Cliffs in Swansea feels like being on holiday :-p

Uber Launch Self Driving Cars in Pittsburg

Complete with a safety driver upfront to intervene when needed, like in bad weather. Interestingly, the Uber press release goes on the defence off the bat stating that the advent of ATMs cut costs for banks allowing more branches to be open and more people to be employed. They state the cars will operate 24 hours a day, thus needing more human maintenance. Irregardless of the spin, this is a great step in the adoption of self-driving cars.

The image of the self driving rig on top of the car reminds me of my university degree final year project. On the left is a picture of my Jornada 545 Pocket PC from 2003, with an external compact flash receiver attached.

Back then, the devices didn’t have built in GPS, they didn’t even have Wifi :-p. I built a mapping and navigation app for the pocket pc and needed to stick the GPS receiver on top for it to work, much like the self driving cars of today, but obviously much less complicated and dangerous!

Hopefully it won’t take 13 years for cars to come with everything that is needed for self-driving built in :-)

Learn AR & VR

Here’s a great list of free online courses that you can use to upskill in everything AR & VR.

Apple’s Success In One Graph

To coincide with the launch of the new iPhone I suspect, Seth Godin released this great graph and post about defining value in your product and differentiating from the cheapest alternative. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs but for product adoption.

Merging Physical & Virtual

This interesting article includes case studies of businesses that successfully combine their physical and virtual presences to drive growth. One example is of Thomas Cook’s “Try Before You Fly” campaign which allows would-be holidaymakers to virtually experience New York before visiting, which led to a 190% increase in bookings.

Everything About Our World Is About To Change

In the world of VR, Robert Scoble is at the forefront of keeping up to date with the latest innovations. The upcoming AR & VR revolution is a tough sell without actually experiencing each of the new offerings. Robert Scoble has made it his job to test everything and this is a short video of him (with accompanying article) describing how VR and AR are going to change our world. From the outside I think AR/VR workspaces & screens is going to be disruptive. I’m not too convinced yet about the other other stuff, they may be novelty or they may be groundbreaking, the proof will be in experiencing them I suppose :-)

Robo-Accountants Will Make Money For You

This is an interesting speculative article about how AI could be used to optimise the return on spare cash in your current account by predicting your cash requirements and micro-investing any surplus at a per day or sub-day frequency.

Seen This Week #5

I’m slowly getting through my vlog footage. Seen This Week #5 features another short visit to Dublin.

European Cities — The Graphs

The Guardian have some nice graphs visualising the Eurostat Urban Europe 2016 report. Topics such as satisfaction, housing, expenses, attitude to foreigners, public transport and infrastructure are all graphed out. Apparently less than 19% of people in Dublin or London agree that it is easy to find good affordable housing :-p

Movie Review: KUBO and the Two Strings

I saw Kubo and the Two Strings this week. It’s a great film, the story is engaging with funny dialogue, it has some scary scenes and is visually beautiful, everything you want in a animated movie :-) I was extremely impressed with the fact that it was shot using stop animation. I didn’t know this beforehand, I partly guessed during the film due to the different style of animation and my guess was confirmed towards the end of the initial credit sequence. Looking back now it’s obvious but I wasn’t 100% sure if it was made to look like stop animation or actually was stop animation. The scale of the work involved to do this is mind blowing to me. Check out the behind the scenes video below that shows some of the stop animation work involved (beware spoilers though).

Starting Something New? — Read This List

A second appearance for Seth Godin in the blog this week. If you are starting a new business, job, project, process or whatever, I recommend reading his value creation checklist. There is no hiding from the spotlight of his questions. Some will cut deep but you and your enterprise will be the better for it.

Is The Top Gun Canopy To Canopy Photo Possible?

Photographer Blair Bunting and The Patriots Jet Team decided to find out, as you do :-)

Whoopi Goldberg

Did you know this about Whoopi Goldberg? I didn’t!

A Place In The Storm

My wife Jenn wrote this music piece specifically for her artistic collaborator Hiromi Okumura, who created some awesome interactive visuals and an amazing dance performance for the project. This is my video of that project’s performance.

Cool Thing Of The Week: Architectural Desserts

Desserts created by an architectural designer. It would almost be a shame to eat them! :-p

See you next week :-)