Todd’s Tech Report: September 10, 2015
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Smooth jazz is the new EDM.
Change Your Face For Anonymity
What’s going on?
Face recognition has gone Goliath and we are but Davids sans sling, rocks and a 2000 year old word of mouth campaign. Things it can now do:
- It knows who you are. FB, Googs, MS, Apple and others have billions of photos, social data and super computers. Toss with a dash of AI and there you go.
- It knows where you are. Once they create a “faceprint” of you, 3rd party firms can search photo and live video feeds all over the world for you.
- It knows how you feel. One firm has taken 11 billion data points (eye creases to lip quivers) from 3 million faces and translated emotion into information.
Why does it matter?
All of this is for sale. We are for sale. Sure some of it is a means to protect us or to hunt the unwashed masses of the criminal underbelly. A decade or more after we started the boner jam of sharing our lives online, we helped create an exploitable foundation of data available for the right price and for any reason. Good or bad. Swipe up!
Constant Contact Kills Uber
What’s going on?
What the fuck Constant Contact? I thought you were just a lame email marketing platform with 650,000 customers. Mostly small businesses who send out horrible emails promoting scented candles or artisanal, cage free, vegan, Platypus sausage. Wrong again. They done built an API that any developer can use to create an on-demand service and tap CC’s huge customer base. Well for fuck’s sake.
Why does it matter?
Typically new on-demand services have to build a network of local suppliers before releasing an app. That means most companies will roll out their service one city at a time. CC’s API will have hungry business at the ready to fulfill any on-demand need. You just pick what kind of service you want to build. Then plug and play.
Cough, Cough, Pass…out?
What’s going on?
Been to Beijing? Laid your eyes on the beauty of the skyline? Most likely not. You’d be smoking 4 packs of Pall Malls a day just by breathing. Air pollution problems abound and the Dutch want to help and keep it green. They’re creating a Smog Free Tower outdoor air purifier that creates zone of air around it that is 75% cleaner the area outside of said zone. This shit would have killed at bowling alleys in the Eighties.
Why does it matter?
This little ditty will take the carbon it pulls out of the air and compress it into little cubes. Goal is to sell these compressed carbon cubes by making them into useful objects. Sure. Well whatever…go green! Captain Planet and shit.
