A bunch of students at Stanford University have come up with a miniature type of robot that’s so strong it can haul nearly 2,000 times its own weight. It uses “gecko” feet to accomplish the feat, and it has the potential to revolutionize industry.
Posts in Category: industry
Aside from phones, web browsers are perhaps our most personal tools. A browser needs to be 100% customizable if you want to make it truly yours, but sadly that’s not the case with the ones available today. Many people sometimes resort to using two browsers to get the best of all worlds. But there is one new contender that promises to live up to everyone’s expectations for the first time in browser history.
Promoted with the tagline, “a browser for our friends,” Vivaldi is the brainchild of former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. Along with a dedicated engineering team, he achieved what can be considered the most customizable and usable browser yet.
Despite being decades old, games and computer entertainment in general never seems to fade away. In fact, if the latest developments are any indication, demand for complex interactive virtual worlds is on the rise, and we may soon find ourselves spending much of our time in simulated environments.
But let’s talk present day. To draw a clearer picture of the computer and video game industry as a whole, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) conducted a study on more than 4,000 American households to determine things like who plays video games, who buys the hardware and the content, what types of games are played most often, how interacting with games affects our brains, etc.
Facebook has announced new changes to the way it maintains your news feed. If you’re a regular folk with a moderate social activity online, the changes are for the best. If you’re a business that heavily relies on referral traffic, buckle up.
The announcement says the changes are meant to better display the content that matters to you. The changes were necessary because people keep posting more and more stuff, and as this content expands, its reach gobbles up under its own heft.
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
The fine gents at IDC recently crunched some numbers and concluded that smartphone growth is poised to remain strong through 2019, chipping away at the PCs dwindling market-share. In just a few years from now, our pocket computers will reportedly make up 77.8% of the total smart connected device (SCD) shipments.
The IDC report says that the combined total market of connected devices – smartphones, tablets & 2-in-1s, and and PCs – is set to balloon from 1.8 billion units in 2014 to 2.5 billion units in 2019. Smartphones for their part will grow to represent the majority of total smart connected device (SCD) shipments by quite a margin, according to the metrics firm.
Going green usually translates into extra spending, but there’s one particular field where taking the eco-friendly route can actually become profitable – cloud computing. Plus, you get that warm fuzzy feeling deep down inside that you’re doing the right thing.
In light of Earth Day, I’d like to talk about protecting Mother Nature by moving server-dependent operations to the cloud – as opposed to maintaining an on-premise server in a dark room of your establishment.
Photo by Luca Micheli on Unsplash
For quite a while here at 4PSA we’ve been playing with 3D printing. Why? Because it’s cool and because there are a lot of applications for 3D printing, even in the cloud. We don’t claim to be 3D printing experts, but we took a power user (read engineering) approach to 3D printing which may be interesting to some of you. So we decided to share some stuff with you in a series of articles dedicated to 3D printing.
In today’s article, we want to answer a pretty interesting question – just what level of precision can you expect from a FDM printer? Fused deposition modeling is the most popular and accessible printing technology. The market is already full of printers and even kits you can use to build your own printer that cost as little as a few hundred bucks. For the test, we used one of the best printers available – Ultimaker 2. And yes, Ultimaker 2 may be worth more than a few hundreds, but it’s still an affordable piece of engineering.
On April 19th, 1965, Gordon Moore wrote a technical paper that predicted the increase of computing power. He initially observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since ICs had been invented, and he later perfected the law doubling time to two years.
This month, Moore’s Law turned 50. To this day his prediction holds true, but it might not reflect reality in a few years from now. The reason? Our need for ever-smarter computers requires that we rethink the way we build them, and perhaps even the way we operate them.
As cloud components gain more and more acceptance in IT architectures, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes than ever before. Storage is the primary usage scenario (59%), followed by business continuity/disaster recovery (48%), and security (44%), according to CompTIA, a technology research and market intelligence company.
Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash
If you could pick any place on Earth to kick-start a venture, what would it be? Startups are almost synonymous with Silicon Valley, but that’s the media’s fault. In reality, startup companies aren’t typical to America at all. In fact, some of the most innovative ideas today are being brewed in Europe and Asia.
To give everyone justice, a community called Founded X offers this cool website where you pick a country and get instant stats about things that matter to a startup – ease of funding, expertise markets, internet coverage/speed, office rental, corporate income tax, etc. You also get some conventional info regarding the weather, the national dish, the average price of a beer (always a good lifestyle indicator), currency, and population density.