Category Archives: Technology

Professor Brian Cox, one of the curators of the new Tomorrows World. Photograph: Leili Farzaneh/BBC

A younger member of my family has been known to leave the room, wailing: Theyre talking about sweets again! when those of a certain age rhapsodise about the confectionery of yore; Spangles, Sherbet Fountains and Kola Kubes do not float his boat. Thus we are made to realise how tiresome group nostalgia is to youth, which immediately sparks a slew of memories of how irksome it was every time ones parents insisted that David Sylvian was all well and good, but they preferred songs where you could hear the lyrics.

So the first rule of writing about the BBCs (sort of) revival of Tomorrows World, the future technology programme that ran for nearly 40 years, is to avoid banging on about how back then we were all told wed be swallowing pills instead of roast dinners and be strapped into personal transporters. (The latter became so ingrained in the collective culture that there is a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks, formed in 2003, the year Tomorrows World last aired).

Tomorrows World 2.0 does not mark the return of Maggie Philbin, Judith Hann or Kieran Prendeville to our screens, alas; indeed, it is nothing so unsophisticated as a single TV programme, but an entire science strand (we didnt have strands in the olden days, kids; we had about three telly programmes a day, tinned peas, fresh air and skittles). The BBCs intention, in the words of one of the seasons curators, Professor Brian Cox, is to represent the institutions of Britain coming together to inspire current and future generations, to convince them to embrace the opportunities that science brings, to foster a spirit of curiosity and tolerance and to embrace the unknown not in fear but in wonder.

Nobody could argue with that and we must all hope that PBC follows through on his hint, earlier last week, that he might consider a career in politics; things, after all, can only get better.

But capturing the spirit that fuelled the original and the enthusiasm that greeted it might prove more complicated. Its not that the public isnt interested in scientific and technological innovation or blind to the benefits that it can bring; far from it. We pride ourselves, now, on being early adopters, captains of multiple screens, health and fitness self-quantifiers, remote heating controllers, online shoppers, streamers, downloaders. We eagerly monitor developments heralding the active involvement of robots in our everyday lives, of driverless cars whizzing us along motorways, of day trips to space and though many are wary of saying it, so primal a fear does it evoke increased dominion over death itself.

The landscape is radically altered from the 1960s and from Harold Wilsons celebrated speech at the Labour party conference in 1963, in which he exhorted his audience to embrace the white heat of technological revolution and use it to adapt and to further their Socialist principles. Labours new leader it had been only nine months since he had taken over from Hugh Gaitskell, his mission to restore the party to government after over a decade in opposition sought to align scientific progress with Labour values and to contrast it with the more resistant attitudes of the entrenched elites.

As Matthew Francis pointed out in a piece marking the 50th anniversary of the speech, Wilsons declaration of intent took place against the backdrop of a public argument between scientist CP Snow, who had accused the ruling classes of being natural Luddites and literary critic FR Leavis; in essence, it was science versus culture, a destructive polarisation whose effects can still be felt.

That was 1963; Tomorrows World launched two years later. Among the innovations that it showcased, often many years before their widespread introduction, were mobile phones, touchscreens, breathalysers, chip and pin. In the more modestly populated TV schedules of its heyday, it became something close to destination viewing.

Fast forward to the present day, and to the jewel in the new Tomorrows World crown Expedition New Earth, in which Professor Stephen Hawking will argue, as has been widely reported, that the human race needs to make alternative living arrangements in the next 100 years, as climate change, overpopulation and the threat of asteroid strikes make our home increasingly precarious.

This is decidedly postlapsarian talk; factor in more frequent mentions of nuclear war and it becomes terrifying, just as we were terrified by the apocalyptic TV drama Threads in 1984. But Tomorrows World was not Threads; it was more hopeful, more committed to believing that our ingenuity and endeavour would deliver progress to the benefit of all.

Vast advances have occurred; ask the parents of a premature baby, anyone waiting for breakthroughs in stem cell therapy or enhanced crop production, or those who communicate with faraway loved ones via Skype. But they have been accompanied by other, more ambiguous changes, chief among them the revolution in communications that has brought us, alongside an ability to break down barriers of space and time, a hyper-accelerated and atomised culture.

It is, surely, more rather than less likely that the internet will discover a cure for cancer. But although future discoveries and innovations are just as probable, they are also far less predictable. The fact that every step towards them is often more likely to be open to mass scrutiny has consequences. Take recent reports of the relatively imminent arrival of artificial wombs, of crucial importance in the care of aforementioned premature babies: wondering at this marvel is swiftly displaced by the battle for territory between feminists (and other sane people) and mens rights activists, who declare the obsolescence of women.

Its possible and certainly desirable that Brian Cox et al will prove a counterblast to such nonsense; that he chose to include the word tolerance alongside curiosity is itself telling. Science isnt something to be tolerated it is simply something that is. But we will need to take ourselves in hand, too, to acknowledge that much technology is no sooner birthed than put into the service of rampant consumerism.

A current TV advert shows a chap going home on the bus. He holds a large potato, his sustenance for the evening, presumably to be cooked and gussied up with a tin of tuna or beans or some grated cheese. Simple, nutritious, actually quite delicious. The ad, though, urges him to toss his spud for his hearts desire: pad thai, on his doorstep with just a click and a credit card. Im not sure technology as lubrication of instant gratification chimes with the spirit of Tomorrows World. Love, and use, the new technology, but dont improve your tea, improve yourself.

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Remember when technology felt fun and life-changing? - The Guardian

If machines are really getting smarter and threatening to replace human workers en masse, Canadians dont seem overly alarmed just yet.

Thats the upshot of a poll released Saturday by Abacus Data. The Ottawa polling firm found 89 per cent of Canadians agreed technological change has been good for the world, while 76 per cent agreed technological change has been good for my own economic well-being. While wealthier respondents were more likely to see technology change as good for their prosperity, two-thirds of respondents labelled working/lower class agreed.

The broad consensus that technological change has been good for the world crosses party lines, generations, and self-defined class status, Abacus said in a release. Majorities in every case are of the view that the impact has been positive for them personally. Only 18 per cent of adults were fearful about the impact of technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet, as well as globalization and immigration.

Those results came despite the fact 62 per cent of those polled agreed whether we like it or not, technology will continue to disrupt the economy and were evenly split on whether AI and automation helped or hurt Canadas future economic prospects. Respondents were relatively more negative on the potentially harmful impacts of technology on the Canadian economy than from immigration or globalization.

Recent breakthroughs in AI machine learning many pioneered by Canadian researchers have paved the way for technology to radically change how work is done and by whom, or by what. Self-teaching algorithms and robots are poised to perform tasks that machines have been unable to do on their own such as operating cars, detecting fraud, transcribing human speech, and sorting, selecting and packing goods. That has raised the spectre that millions of workers could be displaced by machines in years to come.

Technology proponents argue there will still be plenty of work for humans, but how they do their jobs and what they are paid could be transformed. The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction in a range of sectors, University of Toronto academics Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb wrote in a Harvard Business Review article titled The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence, published last November. As a result, we will start using prediction to perform tasks where we previously didnt [while] the value of other things that complement prediction will rise.

The question of technology is becoming more complex or nuanced, said Abacus chairman Bruce Anderson. On the whole, Canadians see big upsides to the technological revolution that has transformed world economies. However, there is already a fair bit of anxiety about the dislocation that may occur as a result of artificial intelligence and automation.

The findings mirror the results of a global survey by British research firm Vanson Bourne last year, commissioned by Dell Technologies, that suggested Canadian companies hadnt been as affected by digital disruption, nor had they transformed as much to compete in the digital economy as their peers elsewhere. Another poll, by the Angus Reid Institute last year, found 63 per cent of Canadians were seriously concerned new technology would likely eliminate more jobs than would be created.

Abacus surveyed 1,500 randomly selected Canadian adults online from April 21-24. The poll, weighted according to census data, is considered to have a margin of error of plus-minus 2.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Follow Sean Silcoff on Twitter: @SeanSilcoff

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Canadians unconcerned about technology's impact on the economy: poll - The Globe and Mail

TOM PULLAR-STRECKER

Last updated08:56, May 8 2017

STUFF.CO.NZ

Blockchain, the technology behind virtual currency Bitcoin, is a large focus at Techweek 2017.

Virtual currency Bitcoin has been "more of a curse" than a blessing for blockchain.

So says 3months.com director Mark Pascall, organiser of theBlockchain.nz a three-day conference featuring 30 international speakers that kicks off in Auckland today as part of Techweek.

It is thanks to blockchain technology that Bitcoins are impossible to counterfeit and hard to steal, despite only existing on computers.

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS

Blockchain technology is the reason bitcoin is impossible to counterfeit and hard to steal.

But Bitcoin has been a controversial poster boy for the technology, because the most obvious reason for using Bitcoin is to hide financial transactions from authorities.

READ MORE: *Blockchain could cut real estate costs by streamlining transactions *Mike O'Donnell: Volkswagen, Blockchain, and the fear of disruption

Regrettably, the most common reason most Kiwi "mums and dads" might want Bitcoin is to pay off a fraudster after a ransomware attack.

But Pascall says the applications of blockchaintechnology extend far beyond the financial world.

Examples of data that we frequently mistrust are more common than one might think, and this is where theblockchaincomes into its own.

It could help employers ensure foreign qualifications are legitimate, track diamonds to provide assurancethey come from ethical sources, and stamp out the falsification of car odometers.

Blockchain is notoriously difficult to explain, Pascallnotes.

But it involves distributing records of transactions such as Bitcoin payments across many interlinked computers, each of which keeps a complete history of past transactions.

The result is a distributed ledger that is less prone to errors and falsification than a traditional, centralised database.

If car yards entered vehicle odometer readings into a blockchain each time a vehicle was serviced or sold, for example, they would be nigh on impossible to doctor.

Blockchain could also allow a ride-sharing service "without Uber", or a trading platform that didn't require an intermediary such as Trade Me, Pascall says.

A clue to the breadth of the applications is that the speakers at Blockchain.nz include a former chief executive of Estonia's Nasdaq Tallin stock exchange, Kaidi Ruusalepp, and Professor John Halamka, innovation professor at Harvard Medical School.

Australian online travel agent Webjet is expected to explain at the conference how it has been working with blockchain technology to try to eliminate the mix-ups that can occur with hotel bookings.

It is not just data that can be stored in the form of "blocks". Instructions can also be embedded into the blockchain, Pascall explains.

"We can now cement in 'sets of rules' that might call for a will to be executed, or a bet or a mortgage, and no bank or government can stop that transaction happening. That will have huge implications for the way world commerce works."

Blockchain enthusiasts have been lobbying the Government to amend the Electronic Transaction Act, to make it explicit that contracts executed through blockchain are valid, he says.

Bell Gully says the Arizona state government "broke legal ground" by making that explicit in its equivalent legislation. It would remove uncertainty if the New Zealand government followed suit, the law firm said.

Pascall says blockchain has been through "a few hype cycles".

3months' sister company Blockchainlabs.nz has sometimes had to advise clients that a conventional database is sufficient for their needs.

"But there are really clear benefits when you might have an issue over who is trusted to run a database.

"The other thing is, the more centralised databases we have, the bigger the prize for hackers."

Pascall says New Zealand is lagging somewhat applying blockchain, but he hopes the conference will change that. Three hundred people will attend, including many from government.

Given the number of international speakers, the conference has been a big financial risk, he says.

Fairfax Media is the media partner for Techweek'17 which is a week of events bringing together New Zealand's brightest technology and innovation talent to tackle global issues with local ingenuity from May 6 to May 14, techweek.co.nz

-Stuff

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Blockchain technology could increase the trust in data that we never knew we'd lost - Stuff.co.nz

Im standing in the admissions line at a museum in New York when I overhear a surprising claim: Its like going to the dentist, a man declares. Id rather go the dentist than go to a museum.

We can go somewhere else if you want, his partner offers.

No, its fine. He pauses. I strongly believe that people arent interested in museums. They just go because its a must.

This man isnt alone in his skepticism. Recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts recorded an eight percent drop in the number of US adults who visited art museums in the past two decades, as well as a particularly sharp decline in museum-going rates among millennials in their twenties and thirties. In response to the findings, Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis at the NEA, told Pacific Standard in 2015 that theres no tidy answer as to why this is happening, but added that theres a lot of competition for leisure activities.

Museums must find new ways to engage and excite visitors. The growing slew of digital entertainment options wrestling for our attention may be part of the problem for museums, but for many institutions, digital technology also offers a potential solution. Charged with the crucial task of preserving our past, museums must now navigate the future.

Catherine Devine, chief digital officer at the American Museum of Natural History, sees the task at hand as keeping the museum relevant for a number of different audiences, and she has spent the past five years working to really get [the museum] into the 21st century. That means rethinking the way visitors experience museums to better match the way they lead their daily lives, where tasks as varied as ordering food or finding a date can be accomplished with just a click or a swipe.

Visitors expect their digital experiences to follow them into the museum

A lot of peoples expectations are framed in the rest of their lives, and then when they come to the museum, [] they expect that experience to continue, Devine says.

One step in that direction has been the launch and ensuing redesign of the museums smartphone app, called Explorer. Originally developed in 2010, the museum officially relaunched the app last November, filled with reimagined content like behind-the-scenes trivia and virtual games. When I open Explorer inside the Hall of Ocean Lifewhere the museums famous 94-foot-long model of a blue whale presidesthe app promptly informs me that a blue whale weighs as much as five subway cars, and lets me listen to an underwater recording of whale songs.

The app uses a network of 800 beacons placed throughout the museum to pinpoint visitors locations and show content related to your immediate surroundings, as well as provide relevant logistical information, like directions. According to Scott Rohan, the museums senior publicist, Explorer has been downloaded more than a million times since July 2010.

In nearly two decades working at the American Museum of Natural History, Vivian Trakinski, director of the museums Science Bulletins, has witnessed the evolution of visitor experiences firsthand. Originally hired to produce short science documentaries, Trakinski now spends most of her time working on data visualizations in a variety of digital formats.

When I came here [in 1999], we were focused on video, she says. She still produces videos, but says that now, we are focusing on more immersive and interactive platforms [...] People want to be able to curate their own content. People want to be engaged in the creation of it.

Trakinskis team is currently working on a number of augmented reality prototypes that will allow visitors to more actively engage with the museums specimens and datasets, including an immersive AR experience of what it would be like to play golf on Mars, using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters Context Camera. Her team also took a CT scan of a Mako shark and created an AR experience in which visitors can look through a Google Tango tablet or a stereoscopic AR headset, see the scanned skeleton overlaid on top of the museums actual shark model, and make the shark swim or bite.

Its not a passive experience where were telling you something, says Trakinski. [Visitors] are actually creating the learning through the interaction with this real artifact of science.

As the Museum of Natural History tests out its AR prototypes, just a few miles uptown at the Met Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has collaborated with the Canadian Film Centres Media Lab, Senecas School of Creative Arts and Animation, and the Art Gallery of Ontario to showcase their experiment with virtual reality. This spring, the Met launched an exhibit Small Wonders: The VR Experience, inviting visitors to don a VR headset and explore the detailing on a 16th century Gothic prayer bead up close. Lisa Ellis, a conservator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, spearheaded the original micro-CT scanning of the miniature beads. She recalls that her team was blown away when they saw the intricacies of the beads designs and wanted to share them with a wider audience. The immersive experience provided by the HTC Vive headset was the perfect vehicle for this object.

Immersion and interaction are also key elements in the visitor experience at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The museum reopened in late 2014 after a three-year renovation. (Check out The Verges 2015 interview with the museums former head of engineering here.) Technological upgrades included the introduction of an electronic Pen that allows visitors to draw on digital display tables and to download and save items throughout the museum to a personal web account linked to their Pen.

Caroline Baumann, the director of Cooper Hewitt, recalls that the museum confronted many skeptics when first floating the concept of the electronic stylus, with some critics assuming that no visitors would put down their smartphone for long enough to use the Pen. Today, she proudly notes that 97 percent of visitors actually take the Pen upon entering the gallery and that 21 million objects have been downloaded to visitors accounts using the gadget. Baumann hoped that the tool would be accessible to all and would cut across education, class, privilege, and she believes that the digital redesign of the museum has succeeded in drawing both museum connoisseurs and first-timers. Were seeing people that have never been to a museum, she says.

For many institutions, the digital revolution has required a complete rethinking of the museum model and a new digital mindset that filters through the entire operation.

I feel that digital is not something that sits to the side, says Devine. It has to be really integrated into the physical experience. It has to augment it and add a layer that you dont have with the physical space.

The shift to digital is beginning to permeate museum culture

Pamela Horn, acting director of digital and emerging media at Cooper Hewitt, acknowledges the pervasive change that has taken shape since the museums digital revamp. Something very interesting has been happening in the last three years since we have reopened, and thats that we've had an internal cultural shift of everybody adapting to this way of working, she reflects. Digital isn't just an appendage on top, it has infiltrated all of the departments.

And so far, museum leaders are pleased with the results.

Though Devine does not believe that the Explorer app on its own is responsible for attracting more visitors, she says that the museums research on the apps effectiveness revealed that visitors who used the app found the whole museum experience more thought-provoking, on average, than those who did not use the app.

Ellis similarly cites internal research which found that 90 percent of people who used the VR headset to explore the prayer bead at the Met thought it was highly successful (including a group of visiting nuns who reportedly got a big kick out of it). Perhaps most striking of all, Horn notes that Cooper Hewitts digital redesign has attracted younger visitors at a time when the coveted demographic seems to have reduced its museum attendance overall. Before the museum closed for renovations in 2011, the average age of Cooper Hewitt visitors hovered around 60 years old. After its reopening in December 2014, the average age has dropped precipitously to 27.

But success like this requires significant commitment.

The key is having a digital person as part of the senior management team and a digital team thats really, really strong, says Baumann. And a funder.

Financing these projects is a crucial challenge, and many of the museums have relied on outside donations to fund their experiments. Support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, for example, facilitated both the Cooper Hewitt renovations and the development of the Museum of Natural Historys Explorer app.

Museum staff also emphasized the necessary balance between embracing the digital and preserving the analog features of museums.

We are the museum of the future. Despite being in [Andrew] Carnegies mansion, which was built in 1899, finished in 1902, you come in and you know immediately that its a digital experience, Baumann explains. Still, her team had to be careful not to overdo it: We didnt want to put digital all over the walls, ceiling, ground. The fifteen new tables with touch-screen digital displays are scattered spaciously throughout the museums multiple floors.

Technology should serve to enhance a visitors understanding of a museums collection

For Ellis, the original artifacts must remain a priority, and technology should serve to enhance the visitors understanding of the physical objects. With the 16th century prayer beads, you get in [the VR headset] and youre just blown away, she says, leading many visitors to return for a second look at the art in person.

Our primary focus is bringing people to the art and giving them access to the art, so we would only use a technology that allowed us to do that, she adds. Were not in it for the bells and the whistles or to show off.

Museum leaders expect upcoming years to bring a number of changes, including deeper immersion, more communal creation, and greater personalization.

Devine predicts that in a few years we will see a shift away from smartphone-focused tech and towards more wearables and updated versions of smart glasses. Though museums like the Met have already experimented with forays into virtual reality, Devine says shes excited about future experiences that will likely immerse all of the senses.

Baumann cautions, however, that technologies like VR and AR are changing so rapidly that it is hard to know how museums will eventually take advantage of their capabilities. Where are we going to be six months from now? she asks. I dont want to unveil something unless its right-on.

For Trakinski and her work on data visualization, the future revolves around communal creativity, like open source projects that elicit involvement from partner institutions and outside developers. She cites the Museum of Natural Historys current involvement in the NASA-funded project OpenSpacean open source data visualization software to communicate space exploration to the general publicas an example of a growing movement.

I think sharing resources, sharing knowledge, open source software development, customization, [and] using common tools is something of a trend that I would see driving all of our work forward in a communal context, she says.

The Met has similarly chosen to share more of its resources and encourage communal creativity. In February, the museum released a collection of more than 375,000 images for public use under a Creative Commons license.

How can we take one physical space and present it differently to different people?

One element receives nearly unanimous support from museum leaders: personalizing the experiences of future museum-goers. Devine adds that such customization is one of the key opportunities of digital technology, allowing designers to ask, How can we take one physical space and present it differently to different people?

She expects that future iterations of the Explorer app will feature multiple languages and new capacities to promote relevant content based on the time of day, like where to find an afternoon coffee or how to exit the building after 5 p.m. The idea is to try and anticipate what you need in that momentand then thats different for different peopleand then provide that to you without you having to navigate to it, she explains.

She also envisions personalization of the museums website, where different visitors will see different content: Museum members wouldnt need to be shown information on how to become a member, mobile visitors in New York might see ticketing services first, and teachers would find educational materials upfront.

Baumann likewise reflects on her goals for a customizable future. She thinks about a group of visitors surrounding one of the digital tables, each drawing or researching individually with their Pens, and would love it if a 7-year-old can have his experience, and then the Pratt student studying industrial design can have a slightly more advanced experience.

The most popular spot in the Cooper Hewitt museum is the second-floor Immersion Room. Inside, two of the walls are covered by giant screens where a variety of patterns and wallpapers flash on rotation. Using the touch-screen table in the center of the room, visitors can choose their preferred wall dcor from among several hundred samples shown on the screen, or they can use their electronic pen to draw their own design and then project it all around them. The same space can be uniquely personalized based on individual taste.

The future of museums sounds a lot like the Immersion Room, as a single museum may eventually provide customized experiences for each person who enters. Knowing the digital platforms that exist out there, Baumann says, the opportunity is huge.

Excerpt from:

20000-year-old artifacts, 21st century technology - The Verge

Barron's

Facebook, Tesla Realize Technology Can't Solve Everything Barron's Silicon Valley companies tend to solve problems by improving their technology as opposed to hiring people to make hands-on repairs. But in recent days, two high-profile companies have announced major hiring efforts that seem to indicate a shift in that ... and more »

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Facebook, Tesla Realize Technology Can't Solve Everything - Barron's

On Sunday, French voters will choose between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron politicians with radically different visions. Macron is for globalization and European integration. Le Pen is a nationalist, representing the kind of discontent that led to Brexit and the Trump election.

Its a stark choice, but the outcome may actually be less important to the future of Western democracy than, well, the screen youre reading this on.

Thats because the epochal change created by technology is transforming societies more deeply than the political vibrations of 2017. Thats according to David Rothkopf, CEO of Foreign Policy and author of The Great Questions of Tomorrow. He says its easy to miss the bigger picture.

Facebooks goal is five billion members by 2030. That will be the biggest community ever, says Rothkopf. On a level of power, we have to acknowledge that Facebook is going to be significantly more influential in the world, and touch more lives, than all but a couple of nations.

Facebook now has 1.94 billion users, according to an earnings report released this week. The company also said it plans to hire 3,000 new employees to manage and screen all its content. That would bring its global team to 7,500 people. Getting to five billion users depends on people all over the world buying mobile devices.

Mark Zuckerberg may not be in public office, but he wields a lot of social and economic power, Rothkopf says. Not only does Facebook profit from its users, it also has the power to knit them together, and apply algorithms to decide the news they read. Facebook can also share information about them with governments, corporations and other non-state actors. Not to mention, decide what is acceptable speech and advertising.

And how does Facebooks power compare to, say, President Donald Trumps?

I would argue that the reason we have the president we do is that someone, somewhere, wrote an algorithm that said, Stories with the following characteristic will appear at the top of a news feed. Somewhere theres an algorithm writer with a heck of a lot of power who is not accountable to any public institution or been anticipated by any system of law, says Rothkopf.

Much was made of Trumps first 100 days. Its a classic, journalistic yardstick. And theres worthwhile debate about what the first months of the Trump Administration can tell us about the next four to eight years. But what about longer term? Rothkopf sayswe keep looking backwards.

Weve spent the last 20 to 30 years looking backward at the last threats of the 20th century ... instead of a change in the world on an epochal scale, like the fact that in the next 10 years or so every human being on the planet is going to be connected in a manmade system for the first time in history, which means anyone, anywhere can reach out and touch and communicate with anyone anywhere else, anytime. And that does change: Who am I? What is community? What is a government? What is an economy? What is money? What is war? What is peace? It changes the answer to all of those questions.

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's To The Point with Warren Olney.

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Technology is transforming societies more deeply than the political vibrations of 2017 - PRI

The fifth annual installment of the Inkjet Summit recently took place in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. I have been lucky enough to attend all five Summits, and once again, it did not disappoint. Each year, approximately 100 printing company owners and senior-level operations and sales executives attend this invitation-only event.

The Inkjet Summit is a one-of-a-kind event designed to educate industry leaders on the future of production inkjet printing technology and software solutions. Knowledge is shared through a combination of general sessions and case studies by both manufacturers and users of inkjet technology. I shared presentations on IWCO Directs new Screen Truepress 520 HD as well as our portfolio of Canon inkjet devices.

The Inkjet Summit is also unique in that it is not sponsored by a single manufacturer, nor is it a user group focused on a single technology. Instead, it provides a vendor-agnostic forum for both new inkjet users and those experienced in inkjet technology to network and share experiences. Another unique feature is one that many attendees jokingly refer to as the speed dating sessions. These sessions provide attendees up to 12 opportunities to have one-on-one, 25-minute interactions with the vendor partners that sponsor the event. This includes equipment manufacturers, software and technology providers, as well as paper manufacturers.

We spent a lot of time focused on new software workflow tools to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the increasingly complex effort to support dynamic content management, which drives one-to-one marketing with a digital press. I had several interesting conversations with a number of technology providers and will provide updates on these opportunities as we complete our due diligence and determine how we can incorporate the latest tools to enhance our service offerings.

The other area of focus this year was paper. There are several exciting advances in inkjet-compatible papers, such as heavier stocks at more market-competitive prices and more options for coated sheets with both matte and gloss finishes. Domtar, Mondi, and Finch all have upped their game in this area. Prices for these stocks continue to improve as demand grows and mills allocate more research and development dollars to this production segment.

Last but not least, all the major equipment manufacturers continue to improve their technologies. The overall print quality, color gamut of the inksets, and general reproduction on the latest generation of digital presses continue to make leaps forward. Of particular note, Screens new SC inkset and Canons ProStream press are taking inkjet print quality to new levels which is one reason IWCO Direct will be moving our Screen press to the new SC inkset this summer. We anticipate an improved color gamut and truer base hues that will drive even more precise color fidelity for our clients.

This past fall, we made a similar ink upgrade on our Canon ColorStreams with Canons new Chromera inkset. Canon also announced their new VarioPrint i200 sheetfed inkjet, which is the little brother of our i300. It provides smaller shops a lower cost entry to the color inkjet sheetfed market, broadening the accessibility of high-quality inkjet production technology.

Once again, the Inkjet Summit exceeded expectations and provided a great venue for learning, sharing, and networking with the top manufacturers of inkjet equipment, software, and paper, as well as networking with other leading service providers.

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Inkjet Summit Provided Opportunities To Share Advances In Technology - Printing Impressions

By Anna Hirtenstein

At a garbage dump about 80 miles west of London, Adrian Griffiths is testing an invention hes confident will save the worlds oceans from choking in plastic waste. And earn him millions.

His machine, about the size of a tennis court, churns all sorts of petroleum-based products -- cling wrap, polyester clothing, carpets, electronics -- back into oil. It takes less than a second and the resulting fuel, called Plaxx, can be used to make plastic again or power ship engines.

"We want to change the history of plastic in the world," said Griffiths, the chief executive officer of Recycling Technologies in Swindon, a town in southwest England where 2.4 tons of plastic waste can get transformed in this way daily as part of a pilot project.

For financial backers including the U.K. government and more than 100 private investors, the technology could mark a breakthrough in how plastic is managed globally. The machine uses a feedstock recycling technique developed at Warwick University to process plastic waste without the need for sorting, a major hurdle that has prevented economically viable recycling on a grand scale.

Griffiths project is unique in that it doesnt target a specific type of plastic, but rather seeks to find a solution for the so-called plastic soup inundating the worlds water bodies. By 2050, plastic will outweigh fish in the oceans, according to a study presented at this years World Economic Forum by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

"It could be a real game changer," said Patricia Vangheluwe, consumer & environmental affairs director at PlasticsEurope, a trade association representing more than 100 polymer producers, including BASF SE and Dow Chemical Co. "This is a great way of getting plastics that you would not be able to recycle with current technology, or do that in an economic way, back into the circular economy."

At the moment, only about 10 percent of plastic gets reprocessed because its cheaper to pump new oil for petrochemical feedstock, especially after crude prices collapsed in recent years. The rest is incinerated, disposed in landfills, or dumped into oceans, releasing toxic chemicals that harm coral reefs and get swallowed by the marine life humans eat.

Many projects fail because they dont offer a big enough margin to make them viable, according to Nick Cliffe, innovation lead in charge of resources efficiency at Innovate U.K., one of two government agencies thats provided 2.6 million pounds ($3.4 million) of grants to Recycling Technologies.

"Recovering raw materials from the waste stream is the future," said Cliffe, whose team also finances projects that recover platinum from old electronics and calcium from eggshells.

A former car assembly-line designer, Griffiths wants to mass produce his machine, called RT7000, and then lease them. It can fit into five shipping containers, a fraction of the size of standard recycling systems. The idea is for it to be transported to the site of the problem, like a beach in a developing country where garbage washes up regularly and local recycling is limited.

Plastic Waste Factoring in a cost of 3 million pounds to install and 500,000 pounds annually to operate, Recycling Technologies expects revenue of 1.7 million pounds per year per machine, thereby recovering its initial investment in 2-1/2 years, he says.

"That was always the objective, to make a machine that could pay for itself, because then people will make the investment decisions and it can scale very quickly," said Griffiths, 48, who aims to have 100 RT7000s up and running by 2025. The county of Perthshire, Scotland will start using one in 2018 to turn 7,000 tons of plastic waste annually into 5,000 tons of Plaxx.

One recent afternoon at the Swindon plant, workers heaped plastic onto a conveyor belt via a tube. The materials move through a series of units that separate out stuff like rocks, dirt and caked-on food. Once thats done, the plastic enters a furnace-like box and is heated at around 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit) using hot sand-like particles that melt it into vapor.

The technique is similar to thermal cracking, whereby crude is transformed into gasoline and jet fuel, only a different material is used in heating that Recycling Technologies is in the process of patenting, according to technical director Mike Keast, a former oil refinery designer.

"We have to create new technology so we can both live how we want and not destroy the planet," he said, shouting to be heard over the screech of Coke and Sprite cans being pressed into cubes at an aluminum-can crusher next door.

The vapor is cooled at different temperatures to create one of three materials, each emerging from separate taps at the bottom of the machine. Out of one, a straw-colored light fuel that can be sold to petrochemicals companies. A second pumps out a heavier substance reminiscent of candle wax, similar to whats burned in ship engines. From the third, a thick brown wax that can be used to make shoe polish or cosmetics.

Griffiths says hes in talks with about five petrochemical firms for supply agreements, although he wouldnt give details. German chemical maker BASF, for one, expects feedstock recycling technologies will be "important supplement" to waste-treatment options, according to spokeswoman Christine Haupt.

While he and his staff of 22 are driven by a desire to protect the oceans, they concede that with plastic consumption set to double in the next 20 years, recycling must be profitable to make a difference. Griffiths next goal is to build a manufacturing facility.

"Im not a tree hugger," he said. "I dont think that you can change environmental things without it actually making money."

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Turning plastic to oil, this startup has a game-changer technology - Economic Times

By Jon Oltsik, Network World | May 5, 2017 12:13 PM PT

Jon Oltsik is a principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group ESG and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the New York Times.

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A few years ago, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) came out of nowhere to become a network security staple. These devices combined traditional L3/L4 packet filtering with deep packet inspection, IPS, and other network security services along with knowledge about users and applications. This broad functionality packaging changed the network security paradigmeveryone needed, or at least wanted a NGFW at the perimeter or within the internal network.

Fast forward to 2017, and the bloom is coming off the NGFW rose for several reasons:

Some of the issues and use cases cited here are fairly limited to advanced organizations (which represent somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the overall enterprise market), so there is still a massive opportunity for NGFW players with mid-market organizations and most enterprises who lack the maturity and experience of more advanced cybersecurity firms. Nevertheless, these trends will persist, squeezing the NGFW market overtime.

Im not suggesting that NGFW vendors such as Check Point, Cisco, Forcepoint, Fortinet or Palo Alto Networks are in any imminent danger. As I mentioned, the market is in an early stage of transition, so bountiful opportunities remain. Over time, however, these organizations must alter their portfolio to offer software- and cloud-based network security alternatives to traditional firewall hardware.

Many are already doing so today. Cisco, Check Point and Fortinet have introduced network security architectures where services can live anywhere on the networksort of a modern-day network operating system (NOS) for network security. And, of course, a network security architecture should plug seamlessly into a security operations and analytics platform architecture (SOAPA).

The services that make up NGFWs are still necessary, and central management and operations is always worthwhile, but the thought of forcing all these things into some perimeter-based god box is looking more and more like a legacy solution. As Bob Dylan might say, "The times, they are a changin."

Jon Oltsik is an ESG senior principal analyst and the founder of the firms cybersecurity service.

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Are next-generation firewalls legacy technology? - Network World

Some companies post dramatic growth and wow investors with the pace of their gains. Yet much of the time, the most solid companies have less exciting but steady and dependable growth. That's been the case lately with Cognizant Technology Solutions (NASDAQ:CTSH), which is at the forefront of the shift toward digital IT services and has fought hard to maintain its competitive position in an increasingly cutthroat industry.

Coming into Friday's first-quarter financial report, Cognizant investors were looking for the company to keep improving its results bit by bit, and the company largely delivered on those expectations. Let's take a closer look at Cognizant and what its latest results say about its future.

Image source: Cognizant.

Cognizant's first-quarter results were consistent with its past performance. Revenue climbed 10.7% to $3.55 billion, which was slightly better than most of those following the stock had expected and was a higher pace from the fourth quarter of 2016. Adjusted net income came in at $669 million, up 5% from a year ago, and that produced adjusted earnings of $0.84 per share. That figure was $0.01 higher than the consensus forecast among investors.

Looking more closely at the report, Cognizant once again saw its best performance from its smallest business divisions. The communications, media, and technology segment enjoyed the fastest growth rate, seeing sales climb by nearly 17% compared to year-ago levels. The products and resources group almost matched that growth rate with 16% gain. Yet combined, the two segments make up just a third of Cognizant's overall revenue.

Growth rates for the rest of Cognizant's businesses were slower, but still strong. Healthcare enjoyed sales gains of nearly 10%, while the largest group, financial services, brought up the rear with a 7% growth rate. Healthcare saw sequential declines compared to the fourth quarter of 2016, but Cognizant's other units managed to keep their upward momentum.

From a geographical standpoint, Brexit once again made the U.K. Cognizant's weakest region, with sales falling 8%. But the rest of Europe made up for the U.K.'s shortfall, salvaging a nearly 7% revenue increase for the region as a whole. North America saw 11% gains in year-over-year revenue, while the rest-of-world region again saw the fastest growth, climbing by more than a quarter.

CEO Francisco D'Souza took the quarterly results as a milestone toward more important long-term goals. "We delivered solid results in the first quarter," D'Souza said, "and continued to build our digital solutions portfolio, expand our skills, and enhance our engagements with clients." The CEO is optimistic about the company's ability to move forward.

In particular, time is increasingly of the essence for the IT services provider to keep up with competitors. In D'Souza's words:

We're making good progress in accelerating Cognizant's shift to digital services and solutions to create value for clients and shareholders, positioning us well to achieve both our revenue and margin targets for this year.

Cognizant's guidance reflected some of that enthusiasm. For the second quarter, revenue should come in between $3.63 billion and $3.68 billion, with adjusted earnings of at least $0.89 per share. Cognizant kept its full-year guidance largely unchanged, with revenue still expected between $14.56 billion and $14.84 billion. The company boosted its adjusted earnings target by $0.01 and now believes it will earn at least $3.64 per share. The IT provider's estimates have generally been solid in the past, and they're consistent with what investors have expected from Cognizant.

Cognizant investors seemed reasonably happy with the report, and the stock climbed a bit more than 1% in pre-market trading following the announcement. Despite the importance of keeping pace in a fast-moving industry, Cognizant's steady growth is reassuring to many tech investors seeking more dependable long-term business models in which to invest.

Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Cognizant Technology Solutions. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Cognizant Technology Keeps Pushing Profits Higher - Motley Fool