Tech Briefing: Qualcomm Biometric Patches

Recently, Qualcomm released new biometric patches for the healthcare industry. With these new patches, they can capture real-time data from motions or temperature. Qualcomm is also partnering with Benchmark Electronics to manufacture the patches according to FDA standards. Also, according to the article, these patches are “low-power, cost-effective, and single-use”, which will make healthcare more “proactive” and “intelligent” care.

The patches were developed using Qualcomm’s 2Net Design platform. This platform helps create the electronic modules for health systems and devices such as disposable medical diagnostic and drug delivery devices. It also helps push innovation in the healthcare industry.

Overall, the idea of these biometric patches is interesting, considering the single-use aspect of them. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Article: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2017/09/27/qualcomm-invents-new-smart-single-use-biometric-patches

Disaster Relief Technology - Hackathon Style

Although this article is bit in the past, I think it's worth sharing to learn about. During a natural disaster, the effected areas infrastructure is uprooted making rescue efforts difficult and sometimes near impossible. The recent hurricanes Harvey and Irma devastated Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico. First responders found themselves overwhelmed, under staffed, and under resourced. This lead the startup community in Houston to connect, volunteer, and create over 20 different apps and information hubs for Harvey relief. Many apps were built by veteran hackathoners connecting over slack to develop 36 projects in total. Examples of such apps built by the Houston Tech Startup community include an app which maps shelters in need of volunteers and supplies, an alerts chat bot, and a website with digitized forms for volunteers to receive reimbursement by FEMA. Harvey hit first and hit hard, but thanks to efforts of Houston's coders and developers the relief effort was greatly improved. Before Irma hit Florida, many of Houston's developers began re-working their apps and projects to make them adaptable and ready to use for Florida.

With Harvey, Irma, and Maria now gone, many developers are moving towards developing longer term projects to help in the cleanup. This includes working closely with city planners and investors such as Mercury Fund (a local venture capital firm). The relief effort is far from over and it could take years before Houston returns back to the city it was before Harvey hit.

What are your guys thoughts on Hackathons now that you've learned a bit about how impacted the Harvey relief efforts? Would you ever participant in a hackathon in the future?

Article link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/09/06/houston-techies-build-apps-for-harvey-and-irma/#5fe291316001

Additional Read: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/tech-companies-harvey-houston-fundraising/

Tech Briefing: Censorship and Top Level Domain Seizures

I read two article about Top Level Domain Seizures. In Spain, recently, the Catalonia region, which contains Barcelona, has been trying to secede. The Spanish Federal Government has declared this secession illegal, and has been taking steps to crack down on the secession. As part of this, the Spanish government has raided the .cat top-level domain registry, and took down over 140 domains. 

The top-level domain registry is essentially the service that resolves your website to where it is hosted. You can have a server hosting your content, but unless you use a top-level domain registrar to register your site, nobody can access your content. You could potentially just give the IP address of your server, but giving the direct address opens up a whole host of problems.

Taking down sites at the domain level has happened due to government action and court orders before, but something that is newly occurring is the domain registrars themselves taking down content. This is something that has traditionally never happened in the past, because domain registrars were not seen as being responsible for the content that they registered. It was typically seen as if an ink manufacturer was responsible for what someone used their ink to write.

However, recently, domain registrars have made the move of dropping sites based on the content. The first example was that of The Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi website. It got kicked off by GoDaddy's domain register service, and then Google's as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this new method of shutting down websites due to their content is dangerous, as it consolidates the power of controlling speech into a very limited number of internet infrastructure providers. Essentially, if all of this small group of providers agreed to censor somebody, they could keep them from hosting any content on the internet.

Do you think that domain registrars should be able to censor content, or should they take a neutral approach to all content hosts?

Links:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/cat-domain-casualty-catalonian-independence-crackdown

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/no-justification-spanish-internet-censorship-during-catalonian-referendum

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/fighting-neo-nazis-future-free-expression

Tech Briefing: The Deloitte Breach Was Worse Than We Thought

Deloitte, a large accounting, tax work, audits, and other types of consulting service, was breached in October or November 2016. It wasn’t discovered by Deloitte until March, however. According to many sources, six clients have been “impacted.” Further investigation is continuing, but a source with knowledge of the breach says the damage may be worse than Deloitte has initially led on.

Attackers gained access to extensive control and sensitive data through an administrator account of the email service. The account was not protected by two-factor authentication but rather a single password. Deloitte had $37 billion in revenue in 2016. Therefore, the breached contents are extremely valuable. A source indicates that the attack exposed IP addresses, health data, usernames, passwords, emails and other sensitive file attachments.

In addition, the food industry has been under attack by hackers. Sonic and Whole Foods are the most recent victims. The fast food chain Sonic Drive-In and Whole Food’s payment systems were attacked in mid-September, which held credit and debit card numbers. Sources say new card numbers started flooding digital black markets near the same time as the breaches. Neither company has announced the damages yet.

Should companies be held accountable for privacy breaches?

https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-of-the-week-deloitte-sonic-whole-foods-breach/

Tech Briefing: Cloud Computing Demand a "Gentler" Oracle

Over the past several years, Oracle has had to transition into a more customer-centric company from its previous more "bombastic" persona. In the 1990's and early 2000's Oracle was known for charging customers high rates for enterprise database usage and maintenance contracts. This kept customers paying long after the initial sale was made. Now that Oracle has started shifting to the cloud, they have had to play by a different set of rules.

Oracle is shifting to focusing more on the customers. To start testing customer preferences they interestingly started testing different cloud products on their own internal users. This was done to "reduce the time to value for customers." Oracle is trying to reduce the deployment time of their cloud services and need of hiring data scientists and data engineers.

I think it's interesting how Oracle is trying to make the shift to cloud computing. I think they need to make the shift to keep up with competitors like IBM and AWS, but it'll be interesting to see how they actually grow their cloud computing side of the business. This is a company that was built off licencing and cloud services take a bit of time to understand and implement.

Do you think that Oracle is taking the right move and making the shift to cloud services and focusing more on their customers?

Do you think it's possible for a company to make this kind of shift successfully?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/cloud-computing-has-demanded-a-kinder-gentler-oracle/

Introduction to TopCoder

Here is a link to the TopCoder website, which we will explore in some detail to give you an idea of the many types of competitions, as well as communities. TopCoder is now about app development and less about big software.

How can crowdsourcing fit into your current app dev strategy? Let us explain the process when you crowdsource through Topcoder. See for yourself how uncomplicated the process really is and why everyone is moving towards this model.

 Remember to post your TopCoder comments on the Page link above.

Tech Briefing: Mira Reality

Mira Reality is a cutting edge Augmented Reality start up from the USC Lovine and Young Academy, which is a special program that focuses on arts, technology and the business of innovation. Founded by Ben Taft, Matt Stern, and Montana Reed, they have already secured funding for their smartphone headset from Sequoia Capital, Salesforce CEO Marc Benoiff, Jaunt VR founder Jens Christensen, and music artist will.i.am. I chose to highlight this young start up because I share a mutual friend with Matt Stern and I think it is really exciting that our generation is creating the technology of the future.

A short video of their product can be found here (found video on youtube - dr.w):

 

As we all know, augmented and virtual reality are the newest tech trends. This headset is compatible with both iPhone and Android products and only costs $99, which a lot of other products on the market can’t do. They have already sold out of their first batch, and have gotten press coverage from various news outlets such as Mashable, Variety, Business Insider, TechCrunch, the Los Angeles Times, MIT Technology Review, and VR Scout.

If interested, check out the Mira Reality website.

AR and VR are both revolutionizing the way we practice medicine, interact with technology, and these headsets enhance the way we view the world. It will be exciting to see where this technology takes us in the future.