Category: Tech News

• Heart Implants, 3-D-Printed to Order

  Tailor-made medical devices could give a more detailed picture of cardiac health and may be better at predicting and preventing problems.

  It’s a poetic fact of biology that everyone’s heart is a slightly different size and shape. And yet today’s cardiac implants—medical devices like pacemakers and defibrillators—are basically one size fits all. Among other things, this means these devices, though lifesaving for many patients, are limited in the information they can gather.

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• Intel Designs a Safe Meeting Place for Private Data

  A super-secure place for sensitive data to mingle could free companies to get the benefits of sharing it without risking leaks.

  As companies from the financial sector to the health industry amass ever larger, more detailed databases of information about people, it is clear that combining different data sets can offer powerful insights. But to protect users’ privacy, many of these data sets stay locked up inside corporate firewalls.

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• Putting Crowdsourcing on the Map

  Mapillary is trying to build a community-generated version of Google Street View.

  Even in San Francisco, where Google’s roving Street View cars have mapped nearly every paved surface, there are still places that have remained untouched, such as the flights of stairs that serve as pathways between streets in some of the city’s hilliest neighborhoods.

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• A $629 Ultrasecure Phone Aims to Protect Personal Data

  With a heavy emphasis on encryption and strong controls over all data from your phone, Blackphone launches amid intense interest at Mobile World Congress.

  A phone touted as the first to put privacy and security ahead of all other considerations launched at a packed event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, today.

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• Augmented Reality Gets to Work

  Augmented reality hasn’t yet lived up to its promise, but it could catch on in situations where it makes employees more efficient.

   

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• Why Illumina is No. 1

  After outflanking and outlasting competitors, it is on top of the genome-sequencing business—just as that market is about to soar in importance.

  Almost 25 years after the Human Genome Project launched, and a little over a decade after it reached its goal of reading all three billion base pairs in human DNA, genome sequencing for the masses is finally arriving. It will no longer be just a research tool; reading all of your DNA (rather than looking at just certain genes) will soon be cheap enough to be used regularly for pinpointing medical problems and identifying treatments. This will be an enormous business, and one company dominates it: Illumina. The San Diego–based company sells everything from sequencing machines that identify each nucleotide in DNA to software and services that analyze the data. In the coming age of genomic medicine, Illumina is poised to be what Intel was to the PC era—the dominant supplier of the fundamental technology.

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• 50 Smartest Companies 2014

  These businesses are setting the pace of innovation. They’re shaking up markets or creating new ones.

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• Glass, Darkly

  For its wearable computer to be accepted, Google must convince people that the device isn’t creepy.

  Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it’s a very different machine.

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• Show Me the Bitcoins

  Though still volatile, Bitcoin is surging in value and being spent more freely; it’s also inspired a legion of competitors.

• The World’s Most Powerful 3-D Laser Imager

  A new military LIDAR chip shows promise for faster and more precise aerial mapping—doing in minutes what used to take days.

  Airborne laser scanning has produced stunning maps and insights in the last few years. Among others, it revealed the faint outlines of a vanished medieval city street grid obscured by the jungle surrounding Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (see “Laser Scanning Reveals New Parts of an Ancient Cambodian City”), a feat that required 20 hours of helicopter flight time to map 370 square kilometers to a resolution of one meter.

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• Samsung’s Tizen Will Hit the Ground Running with Android Apps

  As the world’s leading smartphone maker prepares to launch its own OS, new software will allow it to run as many as “hundreds of thousands” of Android apps.

  If app availability is the make-or-break factor in the success of any smartphone operating system, then Tizen—the secrecy-cloaked OS that Samsung is expected to unveil on a new device this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—could leap from the gate fairly strongly.

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