New Florence. New Renaissance.

Turn any smartphone into a satellite phone

For those who truly want to go off-grid, there's also a special package that includes not only the Iridium GO! base station and AC travel charger with international adapter, but also comes with a solar charger, two batteries additional, and a desktop charger. This is priced at a heftier $1,095.

ZDNet

 

 

Orbital Ads

Oh no, you may say, but they are headed our way. From Slate

"Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, satellites have been a mostly invisible part of our daily lives, allowing us to make phone calls, monitor the weather, and map our locations. We can sometimes catch them in the night sky, but they’re hard to spot, even if you’re looking for them. Satellites like StartRocket’s Orbital Display are meant to be watched, and as satellites are becoming easier to launch, our skies could become the biggest screen of all.

StartRocket isn’t alone in the for-profit entertainment satellite game. ALE is the Japanese startup behind Sky Canvas, a project to launch a series of satellites that release shooting stars on demand—“a whole new level of entertainment,” its website boasts. Its first show will take place over Hiroshima in spring 2020."

 

Amazon's flock of sateliites

Amazon has plans to establish a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to patch up areas with poor or no internet connectivity.

Amazon's planned push into satellite-delivered broadband is taking shape under Project Kuiper, details of which appear in three documents filed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the existence of Amazon's satellite broadband ambitions, noting that it was a "long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet

ZDNet

 

 

 

Smart Boot

Jimmy Choo teamed up with ZhorTech to create the Voyager Boot, a smart boot that currently allows the wearer to control temperature from an app. ZhorTech’s newest insole, which debuted at CES in Las Vegas this month, will also measure cadence, speed, impact force, pronation and other metrics as the person walks to detect diseases. A date has not yet been set for new insole’s addition to the Jimmy Choo smart boot.

“There are more than 7,000 nerve endings in each foot directly connected to the brain,” said Karim Oumnia, chief executive and founder of ZhorTech and Digitsole. And medical studies show a direct relation between gait analysis and neurological diseases, he said. “We can even detect the severity level of the diseases” and track progression over time, he said. 

New York Times

 

 

 

Promising IoT startups

Louis Columbus writes at Enterprise Irregulars

• 26,792 startups are relying on IoT as one of their main technologies to launch new products and services and support platform-based business models according to Crunchbase.
• 78.4% of IoT startups Crunchbase tracks have had two funding rounds or less with seed, angel and early-stage rounds being the most common.
• IoT startup funding reached $16.7B in Q4, 2018, with last years’ funding levels 94% over 2017 according to Venture Scanner.
• By 2020, 50% of IoT spending will be driven by discrete manufacturing, transportation and logistics, and utilities according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Louis then identifies 25 promising startups

Plex had a slide in a recent presentation which classified the market differently but showed even more IoT startups.

Time to redefine True North

“We know from old ships’ logs that in the past 400 years, the north magnetic pole has hung around northern Canada. Until the 1900s, it moved perhaps tens of kilometres, back and forth,” said Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.

“But in the past 50 years it started to move north, and in the past 30 years it started to accelerate away,” he said. “It went from moving at about five to 10km [ six miles] a year to 50 or 60km a year today. It’s now moving rapidly towards Siberia.”

The World Magnetic Model (WMM) tracks the positions of Earth’s magnetic poles. Funded by the US and UK military, the model is normally updated every five years. But the next update, scheduled for next year, has brought forward because of north magnetic pole’s recent movements.

The wandering pole mostly affects those navigating in the Arctic. If GPS systems fail, pilots on planes and ships fall back on compass navigation and so need up-to-date maps on their onboard computers. At high latitudes, the US military has named airport runways after their direction in relation to magnetic north, and changes them whenever the poles move. For example, the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska, renamed the 1L-19R runway 2L-20R in 2009.

The Guardian

The future of insurance

One of the most profitable in the world, the insurance industry exceeded $1.2 trillion in annual revenue since 2011 in the U.S. alone.

But risk is becoming predictable. And insurance is getting disrupted fast.

By 2025, we’ll be living in a trillion-sensor economy, projected to generate bronto-bytes (1000 trillion trillion) of data, as explained by TSensors Summit co-founder Janusz Bryzek. And as we enter a world where everything is measured all the time, we’ll start to transition from protecting against damages to preventing them in the first place.

But what happens to health insurance when Big Brother is always watching? Do rates go up when you sneak a cigarette? Do they go down when you eat your vegetables?

And what happens to auto insurance when most cars are autonomous? Or life insurance when the human lifespan doubles?

For that matter, what happens to insurance brokers when blockchain makes them irrelevant?

Read about in in Peter Diamandis’ blog post

Video below has another perspective on the industry

 

Fending off GPS spoofing

Vehicles that rely on GPS navigation are vulnerable to spoofing, the sending of phony signals to lead them off their intended course. The palm-size Pyramid GPS SP from Regulus Cyber Ltd. uses a bundle of antennas and receivers to make sure the signals it’s reading are legit.

Bloomberg

A road trip. From your couch.

Matthew Muspratt traveled 3,700 miles across the US, entirely in Google Street View. He clicked from West Quoddy Head, Maine, all the way to Ozette, Washington—a near-Odyssean journey through 16 states that he began while living in Kigali, Rwanda.

He stopped constantly, whether to search Wikipedia for clues about his surroundings or simply snap a photo—in the form of a screenshot. He captured scenes reflecting local color, like signs in Maine advertising corn or a vintage car winding through the green mountains of Vermont

Wired

Image from his regular posts about the trip on Medium

The beauty of hurricanes

I flew into the path of Hurricane Charley in 2004 to evacuate our dogs. We grudgingly evacuated last year to escape the wrath of Irma. I wrote a case study about The National Hurricane Center in The New Polymath. I visited the NHC in Miami earlier this year to get an update. I am in awe of hurricanes.

While folks in the Carolinas probably think I am nuts as they batten their hatches for the devastation Hurricane Florence portends, how can a blog which celebrates Florence not admire the beauty in its namesake and her friends Gordon, Helene and Isaac?

Hurricanes are all about data visualization and satellites, Hurricane Hunters, dropsondes, buoy sensors and countless other capture devices generate tons of data we can then admire in their vibrant colors and shapes.

The first 4 below are from the computers at NHC, 5 from Weather Underground, 6 from satellites courtesy of MarketWatch and 7 from a Hurricane Hunter courtesy of CNN