Steven Max Patterson, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Steven Max Patterson

Author Archives: Steven Max Patterson

The time travel paradox of artificial intelligence

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five and J.K.Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels describe the time travel paradox. Traveling through time changes the future from the point in time where the traveler arrived. The personal assistant that will arrive at some time in the future will change humans from that point in time forward, but in a more impactful way than GPS.Artificially intelligent personal assistants will be part of our lives Google and Facebook have recruited the best artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning talent in the world to build personal assistants in small increments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reality, Virtually sets record for largest AR/VR hackathon

More than 400 participants, mentors, workshop speakers, judges and sponsors convened at the Reality, Virtually AR/VR hackathon sponsored by the MIT Media Lab last weekend, setting a hackathon record with 75 open-source project submissions.The winners were KidCity VR and Waypoint Rx.KidCity VR, built by Anish Dhesikan, Jacqueline Assar, Theji Jayaratne, Emily Pascual and Kachina Stude, is an HTC Vive educational application for children and parents to play together in virtual reality (VR). The team won $5,000 from Samsung’s Global Innovation Center for the best VR applicationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What #MadeByGoogle really means

Google announced some cool consumer electronics devices at its San Francisco event yesterday hashtagged #MadeByGoogle: Google Home personal digital assistant, two new flagship phones under the new Pixel brand, Chromecast Ultra (capable of 4K video), Google Wi-Fi, and a VR headset for the Pixel phones. The usual sales channels—Verizon, Best Buy and Google Play—will distribute them.It sounds like the consumer electronics business, but it is not.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You will be using mobile VR and AR in two years—even if you don’t believe it

Casual mobile virtual reality (VR) will eat the world when Google announces its Daydream VR platform with its six hardware partners in October. Within two years, millions of consumers will become accustomed to using augmented reality (AR) and VR, casually, like they use GPS and voice to text now because there will be a VR app for that—whatever that is. Extending VR into the mobile app ecosystem will produce VR use cases that haven’t dawned on the average consumer.+ Also on Network World: Google Daydream is a contrarian platform bet on mobile virtual reality +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT Twitter dashboard muffles election news echo chamber

The Twitter dashboard Electome project at MIT, which charts Twitter in unique detail for journalists, announced its collaboration with the Commission on Presidential Debates. Electome will give journalists covering the debates near real-time feedback about the sentiments of people in the Twitter-sphere. It is a feedback loop for journalists to measure public sentiment to balance the attention given to subjects that sometimes receive copy-cat coverage of a lead story by a major news outlet in which the public has little interest.Electome was produced by Deb Roy, director and chief scientist at the MIT Media Lab, Laboratory for Social Machines; William Powers, longtime journalist and author turned Media Lab Electome research scientist; and Russell Stevens, project leader. Roy is also Twitter’s chief media scientist. He came to Twitter through the acquisition of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company he co-founded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon’s shift into digital media is much bigger than Yahoo’s data breach

Yahoo will recover from the latest news about its email data breach that happened in 2014. Looming much larger than the breach is the post-merger challenge Yahoo faces as part of Verizon. It is what Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile calls the irrelevant challenge. Can Yahoo’s assets pose a relevant challenge to Google, Facebook and other digital media companies after the merger?+ Also on Network World: A requiem for Yahoo +In the mobile-first world, Yahoo repeatedly missed the opportunity to convert its fixed internet users to mobile. Windsor suspects that most of Yahoo’s 600 million mobile monthly active users (MAU) are Yahoo email users. Though this sized audience is not insignificant, Yahoo does not have relevant mobile engagement with multiple mobile apps. How can post-merger Verizon, Yahoo and AOL turn its billions of MAU mobile users into an ecosystem that prints money like Google with search, Gmail, Maps and Youtube and like Facebook with Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s Allo is an early personal assistant, not a late-to-market messaging app

Allo is a child that Google just sent to school to become your personal assistant. The first release looks like a messenger app because it is a common user interface (UI) that almost all smartphone users know, and it is conversational. Like a child learns to speak through conversation with adults, Allo will learn to be a personal assistant through quadrillions of messaging conversations if it succeeds as the next big platform.Google Now and Apple’s Siri are rudimentary compared to the personal assistant that Google Allo could become. Google Now’s and Siri’s voice to text is pretty accurate, but the user is limited to a fixed set of commands, navigate, play music, search, etc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Moto G4 Play: Solid budget phone with a removable battery and microSD card

Testing the Moto G4 Play during the past week was pleasant, if not nostalgic.In a way, the Moto G4 Play’s removable battery, microSD card and one-handed, light, sturdy plastic form factor has a retro-design and feel to it. A metal and glass premium exterior is not a reasonable expectation because at $149 it is a budget-priced phone. In the budget category, it is good option.The removable batteries and microSD cards that were designed out of smartphones a few years ago over consumers’ objections are nice features. microSD cards have started to reemerge in some phones, offering 128GB of ROM and promising to increase that to 1TB when compatible cards become available. Few phones, though, have a removable battery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple lost the autonomous car battle before it began

Apple faces major obstacles to becoming a car company—or even a supplier of navigation and infotainment systems voluntarily integrated into vehicles by auto manufacturers. Hopelessly addicted to rich margin, premium iPhones, Apple doesn’t have much to offer automakers, and what little it could offer will be rejected for good business reasons.Apple designs premium smartphones and consumer products, contracting their manufacture to a mature Chinese supply chain. Reports by Bloomberg and The New York Times about Apple’s shift in its autonomous car program missed this most fundamental point. But the shift from building an autonomous electric vehicle (EV) to building the software that guides self-driving vehicles will not earn Apple a leading position in the autonomous vehicle business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 announcement: Could Apple be the next Nokia?

If the next Apple announcement is like this, it should be broadcast on Cable TV so viewers can fast forward through the many boring parts. A GEICO insurance commercial would have been a relief from the tedium of watching Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Phil Schiller shoveling superlative adjectives on features copied from Android phone makers and other product companies.Apple isn’t selling innovation. It’s selling its annual iPhone annual upgrade plan, which costs users twice as much over a three-year period, in order to turn around declining sales. Apple’s innovation engine has stalled at producing features that drive users to upgrade, so Apple is resorting to a financial gimmick.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 reasons why Apple could announce a partnership with Oculus on Sept. 7

Apple’s absence in the virtual reality (VR) market could be lethal. Mobile VR is going to sell expensive top-tier phones. And without a dog in the fight, Apple will cede mobile VR to Google’s Android.Recent activity leads me to believe, however, that an Apple/Oculus partnership could be announced at Apple’s Sept. 7 media event. Here are 10 reasons why I think it could really happen:1. UploadVR reported that Apple filed a patent on a head-mounted display (HMD)Apple filed a patent on an HMD and hand trackers similar to what are being sold today. It’s likely a defensive patent to prevent a damages award in patent litigation with the innovators such as Oculus, HTC and their predecessors. Apple’s claim in its patent reads: “A head-mounted device that is worn on a user's head and configured to integrate with a cellular telephone…”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Moto Z Play with Hasselblad True Zoom: Finally a smartphone and camera worth talking about

Smartphone reviewers, including myself, write reviews that read more like Robert Parker’s reviews of expensive wines from great vineyards. Oenophiles and smartphone reviewers alike often meander through subtle differences that most consumers don’t have the palette to distinguish. The Moto Z with the Hasselblad True Zoom Moto Mod add-on module, however, allows smartphone reviewers, for the first time in a long time, to stop meandering with subtleties and gives them something tangible to write about.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 6s owners won’t care if the iPhone 7 is faster

iPhone 6s users won’t care that the iPhone 7 will be much faster. Its A10 SoC that will power the iPhone 7 will be much faster based on projecting the Geekbench3 benchmarks of the A10’s predecessors by Primate Labs. On average, the A10 could be 50% faster than the A9. But for most apps, iPhone 6s users won’t perceive the speed.Benchmarks don’t matter, Visual Reaction Time does Benchmarks like the one run by Primate Labs below are useful for comparing processors but not application performance. Benchmarks do not account for the user’s interaction with the device. The A10 performance projections were made based on the average incremental performance improvement of A6 through A9.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Moto Mods went from concept to product

The Moto Z and Moto Mods announcement last month caught the attention of everyone who has followed modular phone designs like Google Project ARA. The intriguing Moto Mods are the most viable modular design yet because consumers can add features to their phones, simply and cleanly without stressing them with a complex interconnection procedure or having to wait for the phone to reboot. The magnetic interface intuitively explains how it works and guides the user the first time a Mod is added to the Moto Z.I sat down with Paul Fordham, lead mechanical architect on the Moto Mods design team at Motorola, to talk about how Moto Mods were conceived and developed into a product. Interviewing software and electrical engineers can be tedious because of the high level of abstraction in their work. It was a pleasure to talk with Fordham, however, because mechanical engineers, like physicists, are tethered to the physical world, making for a very enjoyable and tangible conversation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT Media Lab sponsors hackathon pushing limits of VR and AR

The MIT Media Lab is backing a hackathon on the MIT campus to promote new applications for augmented reality (AR) and virtual Reality (VR). Students from MIT and other universities, developers, designers, and video and audio engineers are invited to apply to participate in the event being held Oct. 7-10, 2016. The Reality, Virtually, Hackathon will stretch the amazing VR and AR advancements made and expertise gained from building popular gaming and entertainment apps into new fields such as VR/AR “for good,” health/medicine, education, industry, productivity, advertising, social networking and other vertical applications about which participants feel passionate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Tango’s advancements raises questions about Apple’s innovation

I’m going to make a prediction. Within 18 months after the next circuit shrink and iteration of the Google Tango technology, at least 20 percent of Android Phones will include Tango features as a standard feature, maybe sooner.Google Tango, a technology platform that uses computer vision to allow mobile devices to detect their position relative to the world around them, will dramatically change augmented reality (AR). In doing so, it will leave the iPhone and iPad in its AR dust.+ Also on Network World: Lenovo wants consumers to take Google Tango for granted, so does Google +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZTE Zmax Pro: Solid-performing budget smartphone

Walking a mile in another man’s smartphone is the best way to review a smartphone. During the past 10 days, I walked the shoes of the ZTE Zmax Pro user. It was a challenging review to prepare and write because it is a great phone (priced at $99 with ZTE and Metro PCS subsidies). But how do I explain it? What follows are case study references for evaluating budget smartphones.Flagship, top tier $600 - $700 phones are easy to review. HTC, Samsung and Motorola rarely miss their mark. Every vendor in the supply chain cooperates with the phone maker—from System on a Chip (SoC) makers to plastic extrusion suppliers—to push past the specs and the build quality of the last, most recently announced flagship smartphone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rant: American broadband, what’s wrong with you?

During a typical week, I attend five to 10 video calls, typically using Google Hangouts or Skype. Frequently, these calls are international. Video collaboration is preferable because the other participants’ expression and attentiveness can be observed and data or code can be shared. Except in the United States, where often the group of video callers turns off the video stream due to bandwidth limitations.The high quality of international video calls compared to choppy domestic video calls has me wavering between anger and the verge of total despair. I admit that my story and data are personal and anecdotal, but I don’t think I’m alone because I’ve had many people turn down offers to connect with a video call in favor of plain old telephone service (POTS) calls.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prevent potential HTTPS URL hijacking

When a computer connects to a public Wi-Fi network or an untrusted LAN, a malicious actor could potentially compromise a browser’s HTTPS connection and eavesdrop on URLs such as Dropbox, Google Drive URLs or Password reset URLs.The fix is easy for a consumer: un-checking the automatic detect setting. But an enterprise user might need to ask the IT department to eliminate this risk. Windows, Mac and Linux computers are all at risk.Windows: How to reduce the risk of URL hijack To prevent this HTTPS URL hijack on a Windows computer, open the Control Panel and select Internet Properties. Then select the Connections Tab, and in it the LAN settings button. Un-check Automatically detect settings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prevent potential HTTPS URL hijacking

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