- A Photo Service That Understands the Contents of Your Images
Everpix organizes photos after analyzing them with software that can detect things such as animals, outdoor scenes, and people.
Browsing digital photos usually means scrolling through them chronologically, unless they have been sorted into folders and collections. This week a startup company called Everpix began offering an alternative: a system that uses machine vision software to analyze each photo for its content so that photos can be browsed using categories such as “city,” “animals,” “people,” and “nature.”
- Japan's Economic Troubles Spur a Return to Nuclear
Some of the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster could restart soon.
As the second anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima nears, Japan is considering restarting nuclear reactors across the country in an effort to ease a recession that began at the end of 2012 after years of economic stagnation.
- A Shrinking Garmin Navigates the Smartphone Storm
Smartphones are digital “Swiss Army knives” that do just about everything. Can the world’s leading GPS company survive?
Garmin was once one of the world’s hottest growth companies—“the next Apple,” according to some stock pickers. In 2007 the company, the world’s top seller of GPS devices for car dashboards and boat cockpits, doubled its sales on what seemed like unquenchable consumer demand for its location-finding gadgets.
- Facebook Gets More Visual to Keep Its Users Engaged
The social network is adapting to the popularity of image sharing and mobile devices.
The world’s biggest social network has a problem. As the Web becomes increasingly mobile and image-centric, it must figure out how to keep users on a site that wasn’t originally built with these two trends in mind.
- Does Apple Maps Deserve Another Chance?
Test in California shows edge over Google Maps and Waze
Back in September we wondered whether Apple’s launch of a disastrously bad mapping application was a shark-jumping moment for the much-loved company less than one year after Steve Jobs’s death (see “Is Apple Losing Its Way?”). We were hardly the only ones baffled by the misstep.
- Why Environmentalists Oppose One of the Best Ways to Cut Carbon Emissions
Humans may be wired to respond more to immediate issues like fracking than longer term ones like global warming.
An interesting post at The Breakthough Institute website makes a case that environmentalists should rethink their opposition to fracking.
- The Gamification of Education?
Tablets have a place in the classroom, but are far from a panacea.
Yesterday, at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Amplify, the education division of News Corporation, debuted a new tablet computer. The tablet was presented by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools who is now the CEO of Amplify, report the New York Times and others.
- The Brain Activity Map
Researchers explain the goals and structure of a new brain-mapping project.
A proposed effort to map brain activity on a large scale, expected to be announced by the White House later this month, could help neuroscientists understand the origins of cognition, perception, and other phenomena. These brain activities haven’t been well understood to date, in part because they arise from the interaction of large sets of neurons whose coördinated efforts scientists cannot currently track.
- Facebook Unveils a New-Look News Feed
Live updates from the launch event at Facebook headquarters.
1:45 p.m. And we’re out! Zuckerberg has left the front of the room. I’m running over to join the Zuck scrum … thanks for tuning in!
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