9 Amazing New Technologies That Will Change Your World

For 91 years, subscribers have relied on The Kiplinger Letter for insights into emerging technologies that will change the way Americans live and do business. Examples of "you read it first in Kiplinger" include the rise of commercial air routes in 1927, the early development of television in the 1930s, electronic office machines in 1953 and “smartphones” in 1979.

Now on the horizon: controlling your computer, or other devices, with only your thoughts. Furniture that assembles itself. And medical testing at home that could save you a trip to the doctor. Take a look.

Crystal-Clear Screens, No Glasses Required

Recent advances in computer software make images that would otherwise be blurry appear clear to folks with vision impairments including nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, working with backing from the National Science Foundation, have developed a prototype that works with a special sheet of plastic mounted over a computer screen and software that adjusts the picture to users' specific needs, so that they can watch without glasses or contacts.

They even anticipate the ability to adjust for multiple viewers, so that grandma and grandson could watch the same screen despite having completely different prescriptions. But the first place where this technology will be adopted is the workplace, since 60% of Americans need corrective lenses, and computers are the top cause of vision complaints at work.

Thought Control

No, we’re not talking about controlling other people’s thoughts (though folks are still working on that). But you can control devices with brain waves, picked up via EEG sensors. Already, the technology can be harnessed to pilot a toy plane, control action in a video game, and make prosthetic devices move.

Laboratory devices with scalp-mounted sensors now cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. But cheap, reliable headsets are coming. In fact,NeuroSky offers an EEG headset and video games you can play with it for $200.

Clinicians are seeing promising results for patients with hyperactive disorder, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and sleep disorders by letting them see in real time whether treatments like meditation are working effectively. Another potential user base: truck drivers and others who operate heavy machinery where fatigue is a risk. The headsets could send an alert to a smartphone or other device when brain activity falls below a certain level.

Bringing the Doctor Home

The next phase of health monitoring? At-home tests that take minutes. Health gizmos will tell whether you have the flu, need vitamin D, or have low testosterone. Small versions will use advances in microfluidics and biosensors to spit out readings on the molecular level, giving users detailed analysis of blood, saliva or nose swabs.

The devices will gain popularity with the elderly, athletes and people with chronic diseases. One device, called Cue, will cost a few hundred dollars and test for fertility, testosterone, influenza, vitamin D or inflammation through blood, saliva or nasal samples. Each test will cost about $4.

Though a range of health diagnostics will see strong growth in coming years, doctors will be concerned about patients drawing incorrect conclusions from tests. Many services will also provide oversight from doctors and other health professionals via videoconferencing.

Holograms, at Last

You probably have a hologram in your pocket — it’s that little security feature on your credit card, the one with the prismatic colors. But a new leap forward for these three-dimensional images is coming in the next three to five years: Your tablet, smartphone or similar device will be able to project them.

Being able to manipulate an image in three dimensions will have practical business applications for remote mechanical and medical work. Think of a worker on an oil & gas drilling rig manipulating a robot arm from a safe distance, or a doctor looking at a 3-D image of a heart to consult at a surgery being performed thousands of miles away. In the office setting, holograms will make video conferences much more realistic. At home, more helpful online shopping.

HVAC With a Brain

Thanks to new sensors and connectivity, heating and cooling systems will see advances that will make the much-ballyhooed Nest thermostat look like an old Honeywell dial. For instance, with facial recognition cameras, HVAC systems will be able to know how many people are in a room and adjust accordingly. (Each human adds roughly as much heat as a 60-watt incandescent light bulb.)

In larger buildings, systems will use weather forecasts — for example, anticipating a heat wave and precooling a building at night, when electric rates are lower. LED lighting systems will automatically adjust to sunlight and time of day so that rooms aren’t over- or underlit. And windows will filter out sunlight automatically with LCD glass.

Supertight Inventory

Retailers have made much use of electronic tags to track inventory and reduce losses, but the technology is about to take a leap forward.

For stores, the tumbling price of small radio-frequency ID devices (down to as little as a nickel each) means that even small businesses can take advantage. And the cumbersome handheld scanners now used will go away, as stores add hundreds of antennas in the ceiling to track each item’s location. Stores will know if shoppers aren’t touching certain items, so that a discount can be automatically added to a computer system if an item is catching dust. And if an item is picked up, it could be made unavailable for online sale for a certain period of time to avoid duplicate sales. This feature would be of most interest to luxury retailers keeping a very close eye on their pricey inventory.

Out in the loading dock and in warehouses, sensors will monitor temperature, humidity, pressure, light exposure and more. The continuous monitoring data will be sent wirelessly via a cellular network. It will be useful for expensive or sensitive items shipped via plane, such as pharmaceuticals, auto parts and high-end art. Sellers of emerging systems, including FedEx and AT&T, hope to garner interest among firms with complicated supply chains.

Catching Power From the Sky

As people wearing tinfoil hats can tell you, the air around us is full of signals. In the future, we’ll be able to capture some of that energy — in the form of Wi-Fi signals, vibration, heat and sound — and convert it to usable electric power. The principle here is as old as the very first radios, which ran on nothing but the power that came from the transmitter tower, but changes in materials have made it more efficient.

Early applications will be for low-power sensors in remote locations that can collect power all day long, then send out information about what they’re monitoring (temperature, location, structural integrity) in a quick burst once they’ve accumulated enough power. Highway departments could get updates on sensors mounted all over bridges, checking for sag and other defects, without the need to replace batteries or rely on access to daylight for solar power.

But the idea of finding power in the air for consumer devices such as mobile phones is the Holy Grail for vendors of this equipment. Currently, power demands of phones and the like are too high, and the amount of energy that can currently be captured is too low.

No More "Some Assembly Required"

Frustrated by putting together flat-pack furniture (you know, like from that big Swedish company)? Imagine furniture that assembles itself, with pieces that can attach through magnets or through tension (elastic cords, for example). It can be boxed up, then assembled with minimal effort from the new owner, who might only have to toss it on the floor or flip it around.

Another nascent technology from Belgian designer Carl de Smet would allow a flat piece of foam to become a chair, once plugged into an electric outlet so that heating elements buried inside would activate the polymers to take shape.

More shape-shifting elements could be found on your feet: shoes that have flat soles for walking on paved surfaces but pop out cleats when you run on grass.

Naval Research Laboratory is teaching drones to use thermals to soar like birds

Naval Research Laboratory is teaching drones to use thermals to soar like birds.

Everyone reading this has likely seen birds soaring at some point or other, effortlessly moving through the air without flapping their wings. Unlike regular gliding, which gradually results in a bird losing altitude, soaring represents a special type of gliding in which birds fly on rising air currents, known as thermals.

Dr. Dan Edwards of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is also familiar with this type of energy-efficient locomotion. He has been fascinated by it since he was in college.

“I was studying autopilots and was hanging out with some of my friends from the robotics club,” Edwards told Digital Trends. “I can’t remember who said it, but someone raised the question of whether it would be possible to catch thermals using an autopilot. That got me thinking.”

Jump forward in time, Edwards and a team of researchers are the brains behind some smart software called ALOFT, short for Autonomous Locator of Thermals. Its goal is to allow unmanned sailplanes to fly for longer than previously thought possible by using algorithms to locate thermals to surf.

“What they’re doing is finding updrafts to keep these autopilots aloft,” Edwards said. “It’s solving the question of how you program an autopilot to be able to emulate a soaring bird’s behavior to increase the endurance of unmanned vehicles.”

The ALOFT system uses sensors already built into aircraft for measuring information related to airspeed, altitude, GPS and other data. It then logs data whenever it senses the plane getting a lift from rising air currents and based on what is called a “nonlinear curve fit,” figures out the GPS points for where it thinks thermals are located. The autopilot then attempts to hitch a ride on these thermals.

“For autonomous soaring, the goal is to be able to fly for longer while using the same amount of battery or fuel — or to be able to redirect that power to do something else instead,” Edwards said.

While early flights using the ALOFT software proved a success, what is even more exciting is the current direction of the project, which aims to get multiple unmanned aerial vehicles sharing information with one another.

“We’ve created cooperative soaring, during which a number of aircraft all do their own localized sensing and then share their data with the others,” Edwards said. “Just like a flock of birds, each bird is independent, but they will also look at their neighbors to find the best thermals for soaring.”

Going forward, Edwards told us he hoped ALOFT may be incorporated into a growing number of autopilot systems. “What we’re doing at the Naval Research Lab is carrying out research that can then transition out to the wider world,” he said. “I think it would be really interesting to get this technology out to industry for both civilian and military uses.”

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/teaching-drones-to-soar-like-birds/

Netflix shakes off weak subscriber growth and its stock is skyrocketing

Netflix is finally breaking off from its slowing subscriber growth trend as it posted a huge quarter that beat both its own, and Wall Street’s, expectations.

Here’s the money chart:

Shares of Netflix are absolutely blowing up, now up more than 20% in extended trading after the earnings report came out. With today’s crazy jump in its stock, the company added nearly $10 billion to its market cap.

And here’s the chart including the company’s fourth-quarter estimates:

So, it looks like the company is not only stepping up its own expectations, but it’s looking at a huge holiday quarter for potential subscriber additions.

Last quarter, the company not only posted a soft gain on its subscribers — including international — but it also dropped back its outlook for the third quarter. By going that conservative, it raised a lot of concerns in Wall Street that the company would be able to keep tempo with its international growth as it rapidly expanded to new countries. But it looks like that target was conservative for Netflix itself (the company could have totally been sandbagging Wall Street, of course) and the current strategy in place may be working for the company.

Netflix added 3.2 million international subscribers, and 370,000 domestic subscribers. Total subscribers were up to 86.7 million. Wall Street was looking for the company to add 304,000 U.S. subscribers and around 2 million international subscribers. Analysts were looking for earnings of 6 cents per share on revenue of $2.28 billion.

The culprit was pretty much what we’d expected: people are getting excited about its new original content — and that might be enough to entice international consumers eagerly waiting to watch it and catching up on everything else int he mean time.

“Our over-performance against forecast was driven primarily by stronger than expected acquisition due to excitement around Netflix original content,” the company said in a statement.

However, there’s another point that’s interesting in the report: its cost of revenue exploded year-over-year:

The company also posted a very wide beat on earnings, recording 12 cents per share. With today’s report, the company has reversed most of the losses the stock has incurred since January.

Slower-than-expected subscriber growth has recently dogged Netflix recently, as it’s made a huge push to try to expand internationally but has run into a series of hiccups. In particular, last quarter Netflix noted China’s regulations would be a significant issue as it continued to expand beyond the U.S. That’s put a heavy drain on optimism around the company as it missed its own expectations and had to pare back future expectations as a result earlier this year.

There’s also the issue of enough content being available abroad. Over the weekend, CBC reported that several un-blocker services that would allow international customers to view U.S.-based content — which is a big push for Netflix — were running into a lot of issues. While Netflix continues to deliver a lot of hits in the United States, particularly with its Marvel original series and over the summer, Stranger Things, it is still trying to get that content internationally.

Without that, despite expanding widely into new countries, it’s going to have trouble convincing people to shell out money for the service. It’s going to have to also figure out how to get the right local content available in those countries.

Netflix has had an extremely bumpy year to say the least. Since January this year, Netflix shares were down around 13% before the earnings report, while in the full year things were largely unchanged. Long-term, Netflix’s strategy seems to be working, but it still appears that there are some tweaks that need to be made in the near term as the company rolls out its expansion plans and places a focus on acquiring new subscribers.

With today’s report, however, the company has reversed pretty much all of the losses it’s incurred in the past 10 months.

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IBM revenue beats estimates on cloud, analytics growth

nternational Business Machines Corp reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue, helped by continued growth in the company's cloud and analytics businesses.

Under Chief Executive Ginni Rometty, the company has shifted towards more profitable areas such as cloud services, analytics, and security.

Revenue from those areas, which the company calls "strategic imperatives", rose 16 percent to $8 billion in the third quarter.

Cloud revenue jumped 44 percent, compared with a 30 percent rise in the second quarter.

The company also maintained its full-year adjusted earnings forecast of at least $13.50 per share.

Shares of IBM were marginally lower at $153.50 in after-market trading on Monday.

IBM reported its smallest drop in quarterly revenue in more than four years.

The company's revenue marginally fell to $19.23 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30 from a year earlier, but beat the average analyst estimate of $19 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Net income fell to $2.85 billion, or $2.98 per share, from $2.95 billion, or $3.01 per share

Samsung used internal lab to test Note 7 battery instead of third-party

Samsung is still reeling from the recent cancellation of the Galaxy Note 7, following a second recall due to a high risk of battery fires. As the company tries to pick up the pieces and regain consumer trust, it is still unable to identify the root cause of the battery fires. A new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals Samsung used an internal lab to test the battery in the Note 7. That sets it apart from all other smartphone makers, which use independent third-party labs for such testing.

Samsung released the Note 7 scarcely two months ago, and within a few weeks it had become apparent the phone was bursting into flames at a higher rate than any other device. The company began an investigation and determined batteries produced by a Samsung subsidiary were the cause. It initiated a fast recall to get the devices swapped out for new, non-explosive units. However, the replacement units seemed to be blowing up at the same unacceptable rate.

At that point, Samsung had little recourse but to kill the phone permanently and accept returns and exchanges. The company has been trying to figure out the cause of the fires without success ever since. It has reportedly been unable to even get a phone to catch fire under laboratory conditions.

There’s no guarantee that Samsung’s use of an internal testing lab has anything to do with the Note 7 defect, but it is very unusual. In order to sell a phone in the US, OEMs must have the battery tested at one of the 28 labs certified by the CTIA mobile trade group, ensuring compliance with standards set by the IEEE. Samsung managed to get CTIA’s okay to use its own testing lab to certify the Note 7’s battery, which may have contributed to the issues with the phone, as well as the confusion around how to fix it.

Industry watchers suspect that Samsung was pushing hard to get the Note 7 out in advance of the iPhone 7 launch. It’s possible its internal testing was hurried along for business reasons—something that would not have been possible with outside testing.

Samsung is currently stuck with a multi-billion dollar bungle and no good answers yet. If it’s going to convince consumers to buy a Galaxy S8, it needs to come up with a full explanation for the Note 7’s issues. Considering how long it takes to design phones, the timing of the Galaxy S8 could be impacted by the Note 7 fiasco.

Fake News Taints Facebook's Trending Topi

Fake News Taints Facebook's Trending Topi

Facebook's Trending Topics section recently has carried a number of trending stories that were either "indisputably fake" or "profoundly inaccurate," The Washington Post reported this week.

The news feed six weeks ago ran a false story claiming Fox News had fired anchor Megyn Kelly for being a closet liberal who supported Hillary Clinton. Facebook removed the story, apologized, and promised to do better.

It appears that despite that commitment, the Trending Topics section is not yet problem free.

Trending Tall Tales

In an experiment conducted over several weeks following Facebook's promotion of the fake Megyn Kelly story, thePost recorded which topics were trending for it every day, on the hour, across four accounts.

That turned up five trending stories that were "indisputably fake" and three that were "profoundly inaccurate," Caitlyn Dewey reported.

There's no way to know whether those were the only false or highly inaccurate articles that made the Trending Topics feed during the experiment's run.

"If anything, we've underestimated how often" Facebook trends fake news, Dewey wrote.

Further, news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium, and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended, the experiment revealed.

"The issue which has long bedeviled journalism is speed versus accuracy," noted David Abrahamson, a professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

"In the brave new social media world, speed is everything, and veracity seems to not be regarded as too important," he told TechNewsWorld.

In the Fake News Pot

On Aug. 31, a story about an administrator at Clemson University kicking a praying man off campus trended, The Washington Post noted. The university debunked that story.

On Sept. 8, Facebook promoted "a breathless account" of the iPhone's "new and literally magical features," sourced from the real news site Firstpost's satirical Faking News Page.

On Sept. 9, a story claiming the Sept. 11 attacks were a controlled demolition trended.

Several days later, Facebook promoted a story about the Buffalo Bills from the satirical site SportsPickle.

Facebook's Responsibility

Facebook's role in distributing news and information is unclear.

The pivotal issue is whether Facebook is a common carrier, suggested Michael Jude, a program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

Facebook will have to ensure the stories it carries are factual only "if they represent themselves as an objective news site, which they don't," he told TechNewsWorld.

The company "makes it very clear that there are things they'll decide shouldn't be carried and that they'll take off their site," Jude said. "Likewise, they don't have to ensure what they carry is accurate. They haven't guaranteed that they'd be objective."

On the other hand, Facebook should be held to the same standards as other news organizations, given that an increasing number of people are getting their news from its site, contended Medill's Abrahamson.

"But who will judge when the number of eyeballs is the holy grail?" he asked.

Humans vs. Algorithms

Human editors in Facebook's Trending Topics department recently came under fire for applying an anticonservative bias to the feed's content. Facebook denied the allegations, but also took some steps to reassure critics, replacing its human editorial team with a process that relied on algorithms.

"When you take human judgment out of the loop, even though it's flawed and can be biased, you can't guarantee the veracity of any of the sources," Frost's Jude remarked. "That's why newspapers traditionally had editorial boards whose members had a wide range of philosophies and political persuasions."

Further, people are better than machines at adapting to situations in which others are trying to game them, suggested Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

To make adjustments in algorithms, systems "have to be rewritten," he told TechNewsWorld.

Machines "can't inherently learn yet that they're being tricked," Enderle pointed out.

"No one, to my knowledge, has ever deeply studied the accuracy of human editors," Medill's Abrahamson said, "but they do traditionally take their evaluative function seriously, which Facebook News apparently does not."

Possible Fixes for Facebook

Facebook should "bring back people until they can apply deep learning to their automated solution or otherwise make it far harder to trick," said Enderle.

Deep learning "could catch fake sites and those running malware -- and, based on user behavior, could downrate sites that are likely fake," he added. It also could "scan sites like Snopes to identify recurring fake stories early."

The first thing Facebook should do is care, declared Medill's Abrahamson. "Instead, the firehose meme seems to apply."

Samsung issues 'formal' recall of 1.9 million Galaxy Note 7s

The company has permanently halted production of the smartphone and provided users with 'fireproof' boxes to return the devices in

Customers are returning Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phones after a battery issue has caused the phones to set on fire

Samsung and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission have 'formally' recalled the Galaxy Note 7 meaning that every unit needs to be returned immediately.

An official investigation has revealed reports of 13 burns and 47 reports of property damage directly related to the recall. Figures suggest a total of 1.9 million phones will be affected by the recall including the initial 1 million original Note 7s, and 900,000 “replacement” handsets.

Samsung recently sent Galaxy Note 7 owners fireproof boxes and special gloves to return its now obsolete device in. This was the culmination of weeks of reports, complaints and incidents involving "exploding" phones setting themselves on fire.

The saga began with a "small number" of reports and quickly escalated into an all-out ban, with the phones being removed from sale. So how did this begin, what can existing customers do about their phones, and what does this mean for Samsung as a company? WIRED explains.

How did the Galaxy Note 7 crisis start?

In September, Samsung was forced to suspend sales of the new phablet after reports batteries were "exploding" and catching fire while in the hands of users, just days before the phone’s UK release.

At the time, Samsung said the devices were burning up due to an“isolated battery cell issue”. An official told the Yonhap News Agency in South Korea that a "problematic battery" had been installed in "less than 0.1 per cent of the entire volume sold."

https://youtu.be/HQQOiilJwJ0

Customers who had already bought the phones posted videos online showing the badly scorched devices, including YouTubeuser Ariel Gonzalez.

"Came home from work, put it on to charge for a little bit before I had class," Gonzalez said. “Went to put it on my waist and it caught fire. Yup. Brand new phone, not even two weeks old. Be careful out there, everyone rocking the new Note 7, might catch fire."

The tech giant ordered a global recall of at least 2.5 million devices, with hopes this would be the end of the crisis. It assured customers the fixed devices were safe.

So things were fine after the recall?

It was assumed the smartphone's troubles were behind Samsung, but last week a replacement Note 7 began emitting smoke on a US plane. A Southwest Airlines flight to Baltimore was evacuated on Wednesday after smoke was spotted while the plane was at the boarding gate. The plane was evacuated and no injuries were reported.

The wife of the owner of the phone, Sarah Green, told Reuters her husband had replaced the device about two weeks ago, after getting a text message from Samsung.

What did Samsung do next?

On October 10, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap, the company decided to temporarily halt production of the Galaxy Note 7 following talks with safety regulators as the replacement handsets also pose a significant fire risk and health and safety issue. This decision has now been made permanent.

In a statement released by the company, it simply said it will move quickly to investigate the reported case and work with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

“We remain in close contact with the CPSC throughout this process. If we conclude a safety issue exists, we will work with the CPSC to take immediate steps to address the situation,” said Samsung.

Youtuber Ariel Gonzalez shares images of his Galaxy Note 7 phone after it set on fire

What does this mean for current Note 7 smartphone owners?

Samsung has advised customers to contact the network operator or shop where they purchased the original device. It has put in place a policy so that owners can exchange the device for a different Samsung smartphone, such as the Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge, and customers should receive a $25 (£20) giftcard or bill credit as well as the new device.

Alternatively, owners should be able to receive a full refund at their point of purchase.

When returning the devices, users should power down their device and Samsung has been sending out "fireproof" packing to ensure the safe return of the phones.

Can customers return the phone by mail?

Royal Mail, which also owns Parcelforce, has said it will not be able to accept the posting of the faulty phones in light of recent concerns.

A spokesperson for the company told WIRED: "For several years, there have been Government restrictions in place around the transport of lithium batteries, which are also present in the Galaxy Note 7. All customers are asked to detail what is in each package so that we can make sure that we are not carrying items that are hazardous. Faulty lithium batteries are prohibited in the mail by transport regulations to all destinations."

Yodel added that is bound by the same regulations as Royal Mail and "have advised consumers and clients that we are unable to handle returns of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. This is to protect our workforce and the other parcels that we carry.”

What are the implications for Samsung as a company?

Samsung’s reputation as an innovative tech company has suffered since the first announcements of the faulty batteries. This comes at a particularly crucial time in the smartphone market as Applerecently announced its new iPhone 7 range and Google has revealed it is making its own smartphones, the Google Pixel, in-house for the first time. Samsung’s credibility as a smartphone pioneer will be adversely affected in this increasingly competitive market.

"This is one of their flagship products, one of the areas that motors brand values. Phones exploding in plane holds is going to leave a lasting impression, whatever Samsung does to fix the situation," Vijay Michalik, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, told WIRED.

The battery problem in the Note 7 may be down to wider competition in the smartphone market.

"When you look at pushing the boundaries of battery technology, when you're putting more power inside a smaller area there's more room for error," added Michalik. "But in the future, we will be evolving to new types of battery technology that potentially won't be susceptible to the same extreme failures.

For Samsung to recover its reputation, Michalik believes it needs to underscore this current episode and move on.

"They need to move forward with the S8 and to continue to display some of their more innovative products. We consider VR to be one of the next big emerging areas and Samsung has a strong position there, which puts them far above the competition in that space," said Michalik.

It’s not only reputations that have been affected at Samsung. Analysts have estimated the first recall may have cost the company between $1billion (£805million) and $2bn (£1.61bn), due to the cost of replacing the phones and falls in the South Korean company’s share price.

This week, the company filed a revised operating profit estimate of 5.2 trillion won (£4bn), compared to the 7.8 trillion won it announced only a week before. Samsung also slashed its third-quarter sales estimate by four per cent.

When the markets closed in Seoul on Tuesday, Samsung's share price fell 0.65 per cent, following an 8.0 per cent plunge the day before.