Quick links

What has caught my attention recently:

• Netflix says the value of its recommendations algorithms is $500M/year ([1])
  
  
• Details on the internals of LinkedIn's recommender system ([1])
  
  
• Fantastic list of some hard and interesting big data problems at Facebook ([1] [2])
  
  
• Google Glass may target "'superhero vision', like seeing in the dark, or magnifying subtle motion or changes" ([1] [2])
  
  
• A claim that Amazon's cloud revenue is $4.7B this year, supposedly x30 bigger than Microsoft ($156M) and x70 Google's ($66M) ([1])
  
  
• "We have a 10 petabyte data warehouse on S3" ([1])
  
  
• Google's Eric Schmidt says, "Our biggest search competitor is Amazon" ([1])
  
  
• Apple was and still is almost entirely an iPhone company ([1])
  
  
• Tablet sales are projected to be flat now, and the growth boom for tablets appears to be done ([1])
  
  
• But, it's interesting that specialized, expensive, and often poorly done custom hardware is getting replaced with a cheap touchscreen tablet ([1])
  
  
• So far, it doesn't look like Windows 10 is going to fix what was wrong with Windows 8 ([1])
  
  
• What? "Microsoft loves Linux" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Delivery startups are back: "Silicon Valley wants to save you from ever having to leave your couch. Will it work this time around?" ([1])
  
  
• Despite the difficulty older adults have with tiny mobile keyboards, older adults and seniors don't use voice search much ([1])
  
  
• Speculation that hardware to enable gesture control on mobile phones will be widespread on new phones next year ([1])
  
  
• A claim that "solar will soon reach price parity with conventional electricity in well over half the nation: 36 states" ([1])
  
  
• "HP’s Multi Jet Fusion printer can crank out objects 10 times faster than any machine that’s on the market today ... 3D print heads that can operate 10,000 nozzles at once, while tracking designs to a five-micron precision." ([1] [2])
  
  
• Is biology about to be transformed by the use of many drones to gather lots of data? ([1] [2])
  
  
• More evidence that some of the best innovations come from combining ideas from two very separate fields ([1])
  
  
• "Every success in AI redefines it. But we haven't just been redefining what we mean by AI-we've been redefining what it means to be human [and intelligent]." ([1])
  
  
• "China is merely regaining a title that it has held for much of recorded history" ([1])
  
  
• Funny Dilbert comic on multitasking and checking e-mail too often ([1])
  
  
• The Onion: "This already vanishing glimmer of pleasure is exactly what we've come to expect from Apple" ([1])
  
  
• Great SMBC comic: "The humans aren't doing what the math says. The humans must be broken." ([1])