Kategoria: Blog

European Union’s law provides unique, in global scale, support against unfair business practices. #monopolies #EU #spotify

That’s why Spotify has filed a complaint with the European Commission accusing Apple of violating antitrust laws. Its CEO wrote “Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store—and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine. But in Apple’s case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.” It must be underlined that Apple charges 30% app store commission, which could be perceived as unfair. And access to Apple environment does not only limit to AppStore, but also other Apple services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch.

If European Commision would initiate antitrust trial it would probably mark Apple as 100% monopoly in Appstore (Android is more democratic in this case). This would change their business and makes more easier access to other producers for Apple products users.

What is important here, is the fact that Spotify decided to chase the Apple  in Europe, but not in USA, where it has bigger market. Considering this fact, someone could ask whether USA is a market for “fair” business…,  and whether it is not favoring monopolies to much that it should ….

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/06/apple-eu-investigation-spotify-iphone-app-store

John Hancock  is an insurance company. #wearable #insurance

Now it offers interactive life insurance policies based on its clients’ fitness and health data through wearable devices.  They provide discounts for clients if they reach targets of physical excercises.  In addition, clients can be also granted with personalized rewards for their activity. Above all,  company is more tightly connected with its clients. In conclusion, results have shown that they are engaged up to 500 times a year (than 1-2 in traditional insurance companies).

“Perpetuum mobile” is not technically possible, but…

#perpetuum #mobile #energy #harvesting

Perpetuum mobile is a hypothetic machine that can work without energy source. Its idea was grabbing attention of ancient and medieval scholars almost as much as lead transmutation into gold. However, without success. Both phenomenon are against physics and cannot take place. People tried to mimic perpetuum mobile by using up energy sources that seems to be vast and surrounding us.

Energy harvesting becomes a key element of modern economy

A good example of this approach are photovoltaic cells, which use solar irradiation given us for free. So far,  there are such solutions as thermoelectrics, piezoelectrics or dynamo like electromagnetic systems. All of them, could serve as stand alone small energy harvesting systems and (semi #perpetuum #mobile). For their operation they require only presence of heat transfer (temperature differences, force or vibrations) for #energy #harvesting.

Electromagnetic waves of GSM network – another energy source for free

Nowadays, we can spot another pseudo perpetuum mobile that utilizes all kind of electromagnetic waves like GSM networks. At the beginning, the development of cellular networks was oriented on covering whole inhabited areas. In fact, this trend was driven by commercial need to address all potential users. Increasing in time  need for higher data transfer and better quality of calls push market forward. As a result, the GSM networks come with denser structures and higher levels of the radiated energy. These levels are sufficient to run small electrical devices only with the energy  harvesting of electromagnetic waves.  In fact, we are witnessing the eruption of youtube movies showing this generator concept in practice.

link

Commercial use of GSM energy harvesting

However, some of them wrap it up and started to offer a commercial product, like Wiliot offering “first battery-free Bluetooth sticker”. As a first battery-free sticker, I doubt, but the idea makes possible to utilize broadly the vast source of electromagnetic energy around us for free. Wiliot proposes to use those stickers for positioning purposes and also as temperature or pressure (weight) sensing devices that do not require any supply of energy to operate. With these stickers beacons can be easily placed (without the need of remembering to take care of them) wherever there is a need with one limit – in the area where electromagnetic irradiation is present.

link

#satellite #imageanalysis
Imagine, that You have a cloud based system collecting real time images of Earth from satellites, and the data is analyzed from completely various business perspective to answer such questions (as an example):

– did ore mining increase in specific region or decreased?

– how these changes affect commodity prices – do the price of iron or ore increased/decreased or should?

– did the supply and demand of steel change over the last period?

– did the amount of roads in china increased, how fast, and where?

You would get plenty of data useful to spot the trend or get valuable information about your competitors, clients, contractors, etc…

Interesting, isn’t it?

You can find it at Orbital Insight.

source: Orbital Insight

Privacy startups will be more popular in 2019

In digital landscape, passing year characterizes high intensity of the events related to the data safety.  Top news mostly concentrated on unprecedent abuse of social networks in public election and voting systems in USA and in other European countries. Accusations raised toward Russian government has elevated global awareness on safety initially mostly in country,  but also simple user perspective as well. #privacy #security

Business problems with privacy

Documented ease of access and abuse of Facebook users personal information has initiated one of the serious crisis in the history of this company and started ongoing debate effecting in increasing demand on proper private data management.  Various authorities started to pay deeper attention to potential dangerous threat for data privacy threats like warnings against logging in Russian gsm systems during Fifa 2018 World Cup, or usage of unsafe electronic devices like Huawei systems.

Security startups gains more financing

As a result, according to the Crunchbase statistics there is growing interest in privacy related investments. Comparing to 2017, this year shows 30% increase in the number of funding rounds raised by privacy startups, i.e. with value proposition concentrated on security, privacy and anonymity. Popularity of such investments is stimulated by end-users increasing  concerns of their data security accompanied by more aggresive actions of governments planning to regulate technology companies in this area. Thus, upcoming year should provide more potential investments in privacy startups and VCs would be more interested to invest as a response to market driven need, which evidence is quite obvious and takes the form of security oriented linux versions like PureOs or cloud based solutions trying to meet the stringent requlations like WireWheel.io,  or BigId present on Angellist.