At the beginning of 2013, the stock price for US electric carmaker Tesla was $32. Now it’s sitting at around $150, after the company’s Model S sedan was named American automotive magazine Car and Driver’s car of the year. And really, that’s just the beginning; Tesla will be shipping 40,000 cars a year by the end of 2014, and it will roll out a cheaper Model X crossover vehicle.
“I don’t know if the world needs more technology,” says Bill Geiser, CEO of smartwatch company Metawatch. “I think the world needs friendlier technology,” he adds.
For the first time ever, in 2013 smartphones outsold feature phones, and the dean of Silicon Valley tech investing, Marc Andreessen, says that within three years you simply won’t be able to buy a non-smartphone. But what proportion of phones in use right now are smartphones?
Part 3 in a series.
2013 was a very Apple-y year, in that incremental improvements were pretty much all Apple rolled out. This kind of refinement and polish is one of the things the company does best. It’s easy to forget, for example, that Steve Jobs once unveiled a version of the Mac OS in which the only major difference was that most of its underlying code had been re-written in order to be faster and take advantage of new hardware.
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All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled—and for reasons outlined below, Google Glass doesn’t count. If it’s in the nature of progress to move in leaps, there are necessarily lulls in between. Here are all the reasons 2013 was a great big dud for technology as a whole.
Why would an entertainment and media company like Disney add a technologist like Jack Dorsey, one of the inventors of Twitter and the founder of Square, to its board? Disney chalked it up to Dorsey’s talent and ingenuity. But before getting all hand-wavey about this—every company needs a technologist in its highest ranks, after all—here are some of the potential reasons Disney thought Dorsey made sense.
Samsung’s new advertisement for its Galaxy Gear Watch is a late but strong contender for worst advertisement of the year. (Also in the running: previous work by Samsung.) Contained in its two-and-a-half minutes of terribleness are wooden acting, a pickup artist named Jack who introduces himself to his seatmate on a ski lift by saying “Hey, pretty lady,” and a Galaxy Gear smart watch that is way more responsive to touch input than all the reviews (and my own experience) indicate it should be.
Americans who love their jobs really love their jobs. Gallup asked “engaged” workers whether they would quit working if they won the lottery, and only 25% said they would. Another 12% said they would take another job, and 63% said they’d stick it out in their current position.
The latest revelation from Edward Snowden’s haul of documents from his time at the US National Security Agency is a surprisingly varied list of targets that the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, spied on from 2008 to 2011. The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel all ran their own articles on the data contained in the documents, so we thought we’d just put all the targets they mention in a list.
Full disclosure: Google loaned me a Nexus 7 in the hopes I’d say this.
Part III in a series.
Smart toilets: who even knew they were a thing? But perhaps it’s time. Aside from water-conservation and heated seats, there’s been little innovation in toilets since the debut of the original crapper. As long as we’re connecting every other thing we own to the internet, why not a toilet that monitors our health by analyzing our poo?
Smartphones: In the US, they’re everywhere, right? Not quite, suggests a new interactive map assembled by mapping company Esri, based on data from consumer research firm GfK MRI.
The second in a series.
The most comprehensive and rigorous meta-analysis of professional coaching ever conducted was just published in print, and the results are unambiguous: Coaching in a businesses context “has significant positive effects on performance and skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and goal-directed self-regulation.”
This three-minute video from designer Alex Cornell imagines a future San Francisco in which an autonomous (seemingly police or military) drone is set free to patrol the skies of the city by the bay, in order to keep its citizens “safe.”
Bloomberg surveyed a bunch of Americans and discovered that only 42% could correctly identify what bitcoin is. A small minority (12%) thought bitcoin was either an Xbox game or an iPhone app. (Scroll to the bottom of this Bloomberg page for an unintentionally hilarious pie chart depicting the results.)
Angad Daryani built his first robot at age eight. By 13, he was building his own versions of the open-source RepRap 3D printer. Now 15, he’s working on “SharkBot,” a modified version of the RepRap which he’ll sell to other “makers” in India, making it India’s first home-grown 3D printer. With teenage bravado, he told DNA India that it will be “the fastest and most robust desktop 3D printer that can print any material except metal.” One of his prototype 3D printers is being used at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.
This is how technology works: In 2007, the iPhone debuted at a carrier-subsidized price of $500. Seven years later, mobile rewards company Jana predicts that in 2014, Chinese-made, Android-powered smartphones of comparable functionality will be available for consumers to buy for $20 unsubsidized in China.
Some day we’ll take it for granted that all meat is grown in vats, our implanted gadgets are powered by our own fat and everything we own has been stitched together into a wirelessly-connected network of responsive stuff. But for now there’s still something quirky and novel about watching yet another object become part of the internet of things.
A new survey of Google+ users reveals that the earnest social media also-ran is inhabited by people who work in IT, people who are self-employed, and people who like to describe themselves as “decision makers.” In other words, If Facebook is for moms and Twitter is for journalists, Google+ is where the engineers hang out.
In a recent survey of e-commerce sites, web usability research firm Baymard Institute discovered that 68% of sites were doing it wrong. Specifically, 68% had failed to implement a kind of history that appears atop the site when you’re browsing for an item, known among web designers as a breadcrumb.
