The Star Wars Day (May the forth...) pitches this week have been mercifully few, but one that did catch my eye was job site Indeed's revelation that the word "Jedi" has increasingly been showing up in job descriptions since the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuted in December.Indeed, which published a blog post today about the history of weird job titles/descriptions, claims to have seen a 328% growth in appearances of "Jedi" either in job titles or descriptions since the movie came out. Indeed
MORE: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day | 4 of the best and 4 of the worst Star Wars video gamesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It looks as though Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers is really getting into this commercial drone stuff.
We wrote in late March that the former longtime Cisco CEO had invested an undisclosed amount in a hot startup called Airware that promotes itself as providing "the operating system for commercial drones." Chambers, who also joined Airware's board, was quoted at the time saying: "The commercial drone industry is poised to throw many markets into transition."
Now we see that Chambers was among the speakers kicking off this week's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's big Xponential 2016 conference in New Orleans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google, Verizon and others are partnering with NASA on an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) traffic management scheme. Microsoft has been working with universities on drone-enabled mosquito traps in an effort to stall infectious diseases from spreading. Cisco has shown off drones whose cameras feed into the company’s collaboration technologies. And AT&T, IBM and Intel have all demonstrated advanced drone-based research.All of this activity by enterprise IT vendors in the commercial drone field is a far cry from what was being done -- or at least being publicly discussed -- back in late 2014, when our efforts to get such vendors to share their ambitions largely went unheeded. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google, Verizon and others are partnering with NASA on an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) traffic management scheme. Microsoft has been working with universities on drone-enabled mosquito traps in an effort to stall infectious diseases from spreading. Cisco has shown off drones whose cameras feed into the company’s collaboration technologies. And AT&T, IBM and Intel have all demonstrated advanced drone-based research.All of this activity by enterprise IT vendors in the commercial drone field is a far cry from what was being done -- or at least being publicly discussed -- back in late 2014, when our efforts to get such vendors to share their ambitions largely went unheeded. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Aviation Administration has granted approval for more than 5,000 so-called Section 333 exemptions to operate commercial drones over the past year, and among those getting the go ahead are familiar names in the enterprise IT and networking market. Apple, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Qualcomm are among those tech vendors we found in the approved petitions database, with stated operations/missions for commercial drones -- also known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) -- that include photography/videography, aerial mapping/surveying, research and development, and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
High flying ideas Drone-related projects by enterprise IT and networking vendors are all over the map, which isn’t surprising since unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are so useful for flying from here to there. Here’s a whirlwind tour of commercial drone-related projects discussed publicly by familiar enterprise IT and networking vendors.RELATED: Commercial drones gaining altitude with enterprise IT vendorsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s Biren Gandhi hasn’t played around with drones as much as he’d like to, but it looks as though he’s going to have lots of chances to do so given the company’s growing interest in these high-flying Internet of Things devices.
Cisco increasingly has made its presence felt within the commercial drone/unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)/unmanned aircraft system (UAS) community, with Gandhi and others speaking at and attending industry conferences such as InterDrone (see video below) and NASA events. The company is also working with startups, carriers and others making up the burgeoning commercial drone ecosystem, and of course has been pushing hard into the broader Internet of Everything, such as through its $1.4B purchase of Jasper Technologies. Gandhi, a distinguished engineer & strategist within Cisco’s Corporate Strategic Innovation Group who early in his career worked as an R&D engineer at the Indian Space Research Organization, has also blogged about Cisco’s beliefs about drones over the past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here are the latest numbers on commercial drones, including FAA Section 333 exemptions and venture funding. Thanks to CB Insights for its data.
MORE: Coolest drone projects from big enterprise IT players | Commercial drones gaining altitude with enterprise IT vendors | Meet Cisco's go-to guy on commercial dronesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Aviation Administration has granted approval for more than 5,000 so-called Section 333 exemptions to operate commercial drones over the past year, and among those getting the go ahead are familiar names in the enterprise IT and networking market. Apple, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Qualcomm are among those tech vendors we found in the approved petitions database, with stated operations/missions for commercial drones -- also known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) -- that include photography/videography, aerial mapping/surveying, research and development, and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The CBS legal and political drama The Good Wife ends its 7-season run on May 8, and if you’re not a regular viewer of the show it might surprise you to learn how clever the writers are at coming up with plots ripped from the day’s top technology news headlines.
Back in 2007 I documented “What ‘The Sopranos’ taught me about technology,” and here’s my rundown of what The Good Wife has taught its audience about tech and its influence on everything from politics to the law to sex. For the uninitiated, The Good Wife in the show title is Alicia Florrick, who had put aside her legal career during her husband Peter’s rise in politics, only to get back into it after he ruins their marriage by cheating on her. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The CBS legal and political drama The Good Wife ends its 7-season run on May 8, and if you’re not a regular viewer of the show it might surprise you to learn how clever the writers are at coming up with plots ripped from the day’s top technology news headlines. Back in 2007 I documented “What ‘The Sopranos’ taught me about technology,” and here’s my rundown of what The Good Wife has taught its audience about tech and its influence on everything from politics to the law to sex (yes, I confess this show is one of my guilty pleasures). For the uninitiated, The Good Wife in the show title is Alicia Florrick, who had put aside her legal career during her husband Peter’s rise in politics, only to get back into it after he ruins their marriage by cheating on her. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nearly 50 business leaders, including many enterprise IT company executives, have joined dozens of governors and educational system representatives in urging Congress to support the teaching of computer science in every K-12 school across the United States.
An open letter/petition, titled "Offer Computer Science in our public schools," had accumulated more than 1,000 signatures on Change.org as of Tuesday morning. The petition was launched by the CS Education Coalition in partnership with Code.org.
MORE: Top 25 computer science colleges, ranked by alumni earningsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Confirming that there really are no original ideas left, I had the thought that the Raspberry Pi Foundation might want to come out with Raspberry Pi berets to honor the musician Prince (and his song "Raspberry Beret") in the wake of his recent death. But sure enough, a Google search reveals that someone already came up with this idea a year ago.
MORE: RIP Prince, a legendary musician with a complicated Internet history
Albeit, the idea was actually a 2015 April Fool's joke on the website Hackaday. "Now, the partnership we’ve all been waiting for: the Raspberry Pi Foundation and [The Artist Formerly Known As... ] are teaming up to produce a line of Pi-based wearable electronics. The first product from this new, fashionable line of electronics is beyond anything you would expect. It’s called the Raspberry Beret, and it’s shaping up to be a Revolution in wearables."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A reminder not to put Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz on your A List if you plan to have an iPhone 7 party – though you might want to put him at the top of the list for the iPhone 8 in 2017.The market watcher has issued a note to investors this week, according to Fortune, in which he says the iPhone 7 smartphone that Apple will reportedly launch later this year will be devoid of “any must-have form factor changes” compared to the iPhone 6s.MORE: Best iPhone 7 Design Concepts of 2016To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I still recall where I first saw the late Prince's 1984 movie Purple Rain -- at a now-defunct bar called Play it Again Sam's in Boston's Allston/Brighton area where those of us who couldn't afford a fancy high-tech machine called a VCR would go to watch second-run movies while downing pitchers of beer and buckets of popcorn.Prince, who died today at the age of 57, probably would have frowned on such repurposing of his artistic output in light of his well-documented and uneasy relationship with the latest technology for distributing video and audio.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) here to stay, entrepreneurs are pouncing on the opportunity to safeguard people from having these flying machines drop in unexpectedly and venture capitalists are buying in. SkySafe, a San Diego startup formed last year by a team from MIT, UC San Diego, the Air Force Research Lab and more, says its goal is “to build safe, secure airspaces as a new wild west of drone development and innovation emerges.” The company this week announced it has raised seed funding, said to total $3 million, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SkySafe’s possible customers would include prisons, stadiums and airports looking to keep their airspace safe by, if need be, downing intrusive drones after spotting them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This year's IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, known as the most honored award for papers in the networking communications field, goes to a Korean team for its breakthrough research on offloading data traffic from cellular networks to Wi-Fi.The award recognizes the work of Professor Kyunghan Lee from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST); Prof. Yi Yung, Prof. Chong Song, and Dr. Joohyun Lee of Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAIST; and Executive Vice President Injong Rhee of Samsung Electronics, Mobile Division.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This year's IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, known as the most honored award for papers in the networking communications field, goes to a Korean team for its breakthrough research on offloading data traffic from cellular networks to Wi-Fi.The award recognizes the work of Professor Kyunghan Lee from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST); Prof. Yi Yung, Prof. Chong Song, and Dr. Joohyun Lee of Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAIST; and Executive Vice President Injong Rhee of Samsung Electronics, Mobile Division.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sure, online shopping is generally more convenient than going to the store for your purchases, but prices are pretty much the same three quarters of the time, according to a new MIT study.MIT Sloan Professor Alberto Cavallo cleverly went the crowdsourcing route to gather some of his data by having 370 recruits use a scanning app to check barcodes for prices on a random set of 10 to 50 products in physical stores in 10 countries. That information, along with online price data at multi-channel retailers (so no Amazon or eBay), was fed into the MIT Billion Prices Project database for analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Building the Internet of Things is a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.Researchers at the University of Bath have revealed a breakthrough -- cheekily dubbed "pee power" -- involving the use of urine to power electronic devices in remote locations.MORE: 10 Internet of Things companies to watchYou can read the details in their paper, titled "Towards effective small scale microbial fuel cells for energy generation from urine." But in a nutshell, they've figured out how to build one-inch-square fuel cells that cost a buck or two and that get their buzz from urine, which interacts with "electric" bacteria. So-called microbial fuel cells are seen as being a carbon-neutral source of power generation, and could be used to provide juice to devices such as smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bob Brown