On this week’s Between the Bytes, we’re going to be discussing some robotics news with Boston Dynamics, a smart city, a smart drug, and much more. Stay tuned.
Welcomes to Between the Bytes where we’re not as smart as your average nerd. My name is Arash Bakhshandehpour and I’m Gary Arnold.
Our first headline this week is about Microsoft and LinkedIn. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for twenty-six billion dollars last year. The immigration is finally coming to fruition. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, when using Word, you can create a resume that can now integrate with LinkedIn. You will be able to pull job descriptions that are similar to your own and compare and hopefully write a better job description, pull in skills that may be relevant to your industry, as well as see job matches directly in Word. To be honest, not a super useful integration. But hey, if that’s what you need to create your resume go for it.
Boston Dynamics-a company that we’ve previously discussed here on Between the Bytes, (which was purchased by Softbank out in China) are known for their robotics and mechanics and AIS and they have now released their newest robot the soft mini. If you guys recall, the old Boston Dynamics robots we’re a little more terrifying and intimidating where the soft mini is not as much. Some reviewers actually read it’s slightly less terrifying than its predecessors. It can slouch over and it’s a lot more adorable, some would say. Killing us softly as they say.
DJI, the most popular drone maker in America, which makes over 65% of the drills throughout the market, recently demoed a new product that they’re going to be offering but not for consumers. This product is designed for airports and other high-security areas to detect drones. They demoed it at a California Airport where they turn on the system and they were able to detect private drone fliers up to ten miles out and beyond. The system will be used to keep track of who is flying illegally, it’s a very controversial industry and a lot of change going on right now. Right now they’re just able to see the drone and if it’s a DJI drone as they can only detect DJI drones. They can pull up an email account and send a nice email saying, “hey maybe don’t fly here anymore.” There’s obviously a lot more things to work out in the system but it’s interesting to see how drones will progress in our technology.
Bill Gates investment group is investing over 80 million dollars to create a smart city worth with over 24,000 acres of land and over 80,000 homes. The goal of this city is to have automated vehicles, highest speed data, and facilities, as well as industrial and residential areas in general. We previously discussed stuff like this with Facebook building their Facebook village but that was strictly for employees and it’s planned to be just in Belmont, Arizona.
Mozilla just announced their latest version of their web browser Firefox. Firefox 57. This browser is bigger better and faster than ever. The new browser is using new ways to load up scripts and load up the information for web pages so that it’s even faster. It also features a new user interface so it’s a little bit easier to use and it’s nice-looking. If you’re into Firefox or looking for an alternative browser, be sure to check it out.
Next, we have some FDA breaking news. The FDA has now approved the first smart drug. It’s called a Abilify and it’s used for bipolar disorders. Basically, you can add a chip that is incorporated in the drug called My Site and it’s about the size of a grain of sand. While being digested, there is a patch on the side of the rib cage that can process if it was taken, when it was taken, the diagnostics of the body, the regular vitals, and you can actually volunteer this information to your doctor as well so they can monitor how well you are doing or if you aren’t taking your medication at all. This is groundbreaking medical advancements that were looking at.
In this week’s Tech History 11 years ago Microsoft created the Zune which they released to compete with the Apple iPod and we all know how that went. They were a little behind the times on that. On November 13th, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars and they haven’t looked back since.
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