Apple's iBook Initiative to Revolutionize Technology

The core focus of business is to address a problem. And the problem in education when it comes to the digital space isn’t a lack of content or publishing solutions; the problem is discovering quality. Education has enough content. There is more generic content out there for any individual subject than is possible to know. There are digitally proficient teachers who customize and repackage that content and those tools in ways that are appropriate for the students in their classes — from kindergartens and high schools into colleges and universities. Anyone in education knows there is a fast-growing community of teachers online doing their best to share the best tools, the best content and the best news ideas that they can. The problem is how we determine what is the best-quality content. Essentially, the problem is not access to educational content, but rather sifting through all the available content out there for the best quality products that you need. 


Apple is only adding to the problem by offering more tools to create and share content. In doing so, it will contribute to the feeling many have of being overwhelmed and overloaded with content, which they are struggling to sort through and are left to their own devices to sort, rate and organize. 


Apple relies heavily on the crowd to do this. But for many areas, the crowd is not enough.

Areas such as education and health that the whole population is interested in and has an investment in, but which they don’t all have an in-depth knowledge of, require more than just the crowd to make decisions about what constitutes the best-quality content and tools. Education is not the type of activity you want directed by a popularity contest.

But for Apple to continue to ignore the importance of helping parents and educators sort through and make sense of the tens of thousands of apps in the education section of the iTunes App Store is a missed opportunity to lead another revolution.

Jobs rendered obsolete?

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Due to rise in the technology sector, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms. 


People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps. And this change isn't only being seen in the postal service industry, but is affecting countless other domains as well. Shortly, technology will be replacing all the manual and menial jobs that once belonged to workers. 

Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and labourers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. 

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, you have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful? 

Study finds that 30% of Americans still do not use the internet.

According to to the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), approximately 30% of registered US citizens still do not use the internet for anything, whether it be shopping, taxes, surfing, or social media. Given roughly 300 million US citizens at the date of the study, there's roughly 91 million people who still do not use the commodity we find so common. Among these 91 million people, around 40% of them say that they simply do not think they need it. In a society that so heavily depends upon the internet for communication, the fact that so many people still do not see the use of internet is quite baffling. For others, internet access is simply too expensive to afford. However, in February 2010, the FCC announced their "100 Squared Initiative" where they planned to provide 100 million American households with 100 Mbps downstream internet connections.

Regardless of the reasons, in this day and age, not having internet access is almost like being illiterate. Without the internet, many doors are closed and so many facets of the world are off limit. Yet a large portion of American citizens still don't see the importance of an internet connection.

IBM drills holes into optical chips for terabit-per-second speed

IBM researchers have built a prototype optical chip that can transfer a terabit of data per second, using an innovative design requiring 48 tiny holes drilled into a standard CMOS chip, facilitating the movement of light. This new technology is much faster and much more power-efficient than today's optics. 


Optical chips, which move data with light instead of electrons, are commonly used for interconnects in today's supercomputers and can be found in IBM systems such as Power 775 and Blue Gene. Optical technology is favored over electrical for transmitting high-bandwidth data over longer distances, which is why it's used for telecommunications networks.


The Holey Optochip uses 4.7 watts in delivering nearly one trillion bits per second, enough to download 500 HD movies. At 5.2 mm by 5.8 mm, it's about one-eighth the size of a dime.


IBM researches have recently said that: "We're in a group within IBM Research, looking at communications technologies we'll need for future computers, particularly for crunching big data, and analytics applications when you have to have tons of bandwidth in the system," he said. "Our mission is to prototype technologies and show what's possible, to drive the industry to commercial solutions that we can then procure and put into our systems."


IBM researchers also recently made a breakthrough in quantum computing, which could eventually lead to computers exponentially more powerful than today's.

Walmart working on their own mobile device payment services

Many large retailers have incorporated the new method of mobile payment systems, as opposed to the traditional methods of cash, credit, or debit cards. Target, another large retailer has announced the following information:  “We are exploring potential solutions that would help us to deliver the fastest, most secure mobile-payment experience possible for our customers.” As of now, over 300 000 terminals allow payment from Android smartphones with the appropriate applications.

Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident

torrentfreak.com — A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.