Transport for London is trialling a scheme where visually impaired passengers on the Underground can use NFC beacons to navigate the system reports the BBC.
Using beacons and smartphones to assist the disabled is exactly the sort of applications we can see being rolled out to help all members of the community.
These services are illustrations of how newer technologies are going to help level the workforce and make our cities more accessible for those who are less able bodied.
Staying private sucks if you’re a tech company writes Felix Salmon in Fusion magazine.
If you’re giving away stock in lieu of wages to employees or taking early stage funding for equity, then listing, or selling to a larger business, makes sense as staff and investors need to see a return. It’s the unspoken truth of the Silicon Valley funding model.
The Silicon Valley model though doesn’t come without risks, investor Mark Cuban warns a valuation bubble greater than that of the Dot Com Boom has developed as angel investors and early stage venture capital firms have thrown money at startups after Facebook’s massive buyouts of Instagram and WhatsApp.
While Silicon Valley and the US tech market might have plenty of opportunities for buyouts and IPOs, most other places around the world don’t have the deep financial markets and the cashed up software companies to make similar exits possible for local startup businesses.
Again that difficulty in successfully funding exits shows that simply trying to copy the US tech industry model is probably not going to work for most places tying to building their own Silicon Valleys, although it seems China is about to try.
The other message is that the IPO or buyout route is not necessarily the right path for every business, as Salmon says: “Maybe the best solution is not to take any outside funding at all, and not to try to grow too fast.”
“Some family companies have been around for hundreds of years: if you own your own business, and you don’t get greedy, you can build a very pleasant life for yourself. You just won’t end up on any list of young billionaires.”
Today Australian incumbent telco announced a scheme to give customers access to their personal metadata being stored by the company.
In a post on the company’s Telstra Exchange blog the company’s Chief Risk Officer, Kate Hughes described how the service will work with a standard enquiry being free through the web portal with more complex queries attracting of fee of $25 or more.
The program is a response to the Australian Parliament’s controversial intention to introduce a mandatory data retention regime which will force telcos and ISPs to retain a record of customer’s connection information.
We believe that if the police can ask for information relating to you, you should be able to as well.
At present the scheme is quite labor intensive, a request for information involves a great deal of manual processing under the company’s current systems however Hughes is optimistic they will be able to deal with the workload.
“We haven’t yet built the system that will enable us to quickly get that data,” Hughes told this website in an interview after the announcement. “If you came to us today and asked for that dataset it wouldn’t be a simple request.”
In some respects the metadata proposal is an opportunity for the company to comply with the requirement of the Australian Privacy Principles that were introduced last year where companies are obliged to disclose to their customers any personally identifiable information they hold.
For large organisations like Telstra this presents a problem as it’s difficult to know exactly what information every arm of the business has been collecting. Putting the data into a centralised web portal makes it easier to manage the requirements of various acts.
That Telstra is struggling with this task illustrates the problems the data retention proposals present to smaller companies with far fewer resources to gather, store and manage the information.
Another problem facing Hughes, Telstra and the entire Australian communications industry is no-one is quite clear exactly what data will be required under the act, the legislation proposed the minister can declare what information should be retained while the industry believes this should be hard coded into the act which will make it harder for governments to expand their powers.
What is clear is that regardless of what’s passed into law, technology is going to stay ahead of the legislators, “I do think though this will be very much a ‘point in time’ debate,” Hughes said. “Metadata will evolve more quickly than this legislation can probably keep pace with so I think we will find ourselves back here in two years.”
In many ways Australia’s metadata proposals illustrates the problems facing governments and businesses in managing data during an era where its growing exponentially, it may well turn out for telcos, consumers and government agencies that ultimately less is more.
Pebble have achieved the biggest Kickstarter fund raising in the service’s history with a $14 million fundraising for its latest smartwatch.
Over at competing crowdfunding service Indiegogo Flow Hives, a Tasmanian beekeeping invention, has raised nearly five million dollars for its innovative beehives that put honey on tap.
Crowdfunding is fast becoming the way for smaller manufacturers to secure preorders from the market and secure scarce capital for the business.
Pebble and Flow follow the success of Ninja Blocks who have had two successful crowdfunding ventures and their CEO Daniel Friedman spoke to Decoding The New Economy last year about raising money for hardware projects.
Not every hardware crowdfunding project works out well though as Mark Pesce described in relating his experience with the failed Moore’s Cloud fundraising. Mark said he’d “rather eat a bullet” than engage in another crowdsourcing campaign given the pressures upon manufacturers to deliver.
As Moore’s Cloud shows there are risks and complexities in looking to the crowd to raise project capital. Even a successful campaign faces potential problems in completing the project and delivering a product that meets the expectations of those who’ve contributed.
Crowdfunding has opened a new way for artists and entrepreneurs to raise funds for their projects, like all tools though it does have it’s risks and isn’t for everyone.
As the annual Mobile World Congress begins to wind down in Barcelona, Kantar Worldpanel decides to stir things up with its quarterly report on the market share of mobile phones.
The news is mixed; Apple continues its rampage in the Chinese market with a quarter of phones sold in the PRC being iPhones while Android slips in Europe but picks up market share in the US.
At the top end of the market it’s clear Apple is beating Samsung and the other manufacturers are deciding to avoid entering the battle of the market at all, instead focusing on lower and midrange devices.