Tech news outside the mainstream
Uncommon news and information with a technical twist and some topics that are a bit out there. Enjoy...
LinkedIn is a source of cutting edge tech news from fascinating people that make it. Get inspired.
LinkedIn has evolved from a job networking site to something much greater and I hope will continue to grow into more of a news and information platform. The traditional media outlets are dead they just don't know it yet. I get my weather from an app and I really only need to see the radar to know what's up. Waiting and wading through commercials and pop ups adverts is a waste and a desperate attempt to monetize a couple seconds of valid content. Investigative reporting is all but gone, journalism has become a joke, paid political influence and other content so watered down as not to offend, just lulls and pacifies. But, if your time is valuable and you're tired of misinformation and redirection from what's really going on, you've probably already found new sources of information.
For tech news and events there is probably no better place than LinkedIn. I follow groups and many fascinating people for their perspectives, bleeding new technologies and inspiration. And, although I hope to never have look to work for another organization again, I stay plugged in to events and people I would like to work with for any of the several projects I have at hand. For me, LinkedIn is a way to learn from the advice of accomplished professionals and shortcut some of the hard tuition you'd pay in real life.
LinkedIn has almost a billion users worldwide. Here are some other demographics from Kinsta.com about the user base. If you don't have an account, get one it's free and it's valuable, whether you're looking to work, grow or stay informed.
The Value of Personal Interactions
It's possible that AI could make human interactions more valuable, but it depends on how it's used. For example, AI-powered customer service chatbots can handle routine inquiries and free up human representatives to handle more complex issues. This could lead to more efficient and satisfying interactions for customers.
AI can also be used to personalize interactions, such as recommending products or services based on a customer's previous interactions or browsing history. This can lead to more relevant and valuable interactions.
AI can also be used to improve communication in areas such as education and healthcare. For example, AI tutors can provide personalized feedback and instruction to students, while AI-powered virtual assistants can help doctors and nurses with tasks such as scheduling and record-keeping.
However, if AI is used to replace human interactions entirely, it could lead to a loss of emotional connection and empathy. Additionally, if AI is not designed to be transparent and accountable, it could lead to mistrust and dissatisfaction.
Overall, AI has the potential to make human interactions more valuable, but it's important to use it in a way that complements and enhances human capabilities, rather than replacing them.
Dive into AI with OpenAI.com and see what you can build while AI is in its infancy and share it with real people while you can still tell them apart from the robots that will be coming soon.
Many online businesses have been thriving throughout the pandemic, some have had an unprecedented 2nd quarter. How? The answer is simple, they have mastered the art of the UX (user experience). Evaluate your sites whole UX and ask these 10 questions about your site from Medium.com. I'd add credibility to that list and that begins with your domain name. The article is from 2018 and is every bit as relevant then as it is today.
For the DNN platform there's an upgrade for the developer's UX too with Vanjaro.com from Mandeeps.com. When you design all day, what you experience matters. The new UX is comparable to Wix, SquareSpace, and Weebly. Featuring a Drag & Drop Live Editor, Responsive Editing, Automatic Revision History, Workflow Management, and in context, user aware, centralized site administration and it's open source. Vanjaro.com is compatible with custom DNN Modules, (including XMod Pro) and hundreds of existing solutions on the DNN Store.
The experience is the journey. Make it better and make more sales.
I have been talking about flying cars being the wave of the future. What will follow is highrises with parking for personal drones. Looks like Miami will be the first US city with a highrise built for parking personal aircraft at the Paramount World Center. As our population increases along with technology, so will new emerging opportunities for all aspects of this new mode of transportation. The future certainly involves every aspect of flying vehicles, from battery technology, to new condos, supermarket parking and heavy on the construction industry to retool it all. This shift in transportation could be the global industry that boosts the the whole world's economy as every country accommodates it's growing population and employment issues.
Theses are exciting times we are living in. Take a look at the video and article Bob Wiley wrote on the MiamiHerald.com.
It's getting harder to tell your kids to put away the video games and get a real job when stories like this are popping up in the news. How video games turn teenagers into millionaires. The point of interest in the article that caught my eye is the statement that these careers weren't available 5 to 10 years ago and that even in this flux that we are now seeing where AI (artificial intelligence) is taking jobs away from people, other career paths are emerging. Let's hope new careers can keep up with the ones being lost to AI. Realistically, it's a lopsided equation in favor of automation. But, learning to be an entrepreneur and riding the trends of a market in flux, you just may be able to make enough to last a lifetime.
Take a look through the BBC's Bright Sparks section and see what what the smart kids are doing.
Drones - The Evolution of Transportation
If you read my blog you know I'm into flying cars and with traffic being what it is, they can't come about soon enough. Doesn't matter what city you live in, it's not any better anywhere else. Either too many vehicles on the road or a failing infrastructure. In this article on DailyMail.co.uk mega drones are being tested with multiple passengers, pilot-less control and with the ability to take the helm in an emergency. The aircraft technology is producing a much needed benefit for air traffic control a well as other industries.
This is an epic shift in society, like going from horse and carriage to automobiles and entrepreneurs need to plan on this trend. In less than 5 years it will be at consumer price levels and in 10 years, common place. High rises and condos need to start being built with landing pads as the new garage. With growing populations, pollution, the need for the use of alternative energies, infrastructure issues, drones and personal aircraft are a great solution to easy all of these problems. And, aside from natural disasters and terrorism, one of the biggest problems our children will face in their life time that you can be certain of is population growth.
Handling and managing all the demands on resources that population growth will bring are where the opportunities lie. If you think traffic sucks now, don't do anything about it. Everyone knows it's gotten worse in the last few years, and that's everywhere. So, forget the race to Mars, let's race to be the first country ready for the 22nd century. Embrace it. This is what will make America great!
Brand Building is Web Development
When setting out to develop a new website for a client the first thing to consider is their brand. Defining a brand is a lot like writing a business plan for an organization. Who's their customer, what is their demographic, current corporate culture and visibility across all media along with consistency regarding these representations. Sometimes a client expects development of a website to be just stamping out code, but it's much more artistry and expertise than that going on to get it right. I wouldn't just start nailing boards together if I were a builder, the site, direction, watershed, parking, permits and a 100 other items need to be considered before breaking ground. The same holds true for web development and I would recommend reading up on these sites listed below about building your brand before developing the wrong site for your business.
First, have or get the right domain name. Brandgy.com can clue you in as to why that's so important. Learn about branding your business with these no nonsense guides available through HowToBuildABrand.org These folks out of the UK know what they are doing and it's explained in a way that you can see how it effects other facets of your business. SearchEngineJournal.com puts the technical edge on your brand strategy. Their site maybe a good read for the more technically inclined, but getting found is what it's all about going forward into 2018 and beyond.
While searching for tech trends and investments opportunities I discovered an article from Deloitte Insights about the technology growth in unstructured data. Unstructured data is essentially chaos, but if you're able to show relations between data elements, it's no longer unstructured and helps build a better picture of what's occurring. Commodities make a good example. Analyzing wheat yields without rain fall or soil erosion factored in, leaves a lot of questions when interpreting results. By adding more variables to the equation, the results are calculated with greater accuracy. Tapping into this vast amount of information that is becoming available from everywhere on the web, dark and deep web included, (data that is not currently included or information sitting idly), analytics experts can gain much greater insight into customer behavior and market movement.
The explosive growth of IoT (Internet of Things) is expected to surpass 44 Zettabytes in 2020. That's 44 trillion gb of information, which is 10 times more than today, and hopefully will be used to make better decisions (before the AI bots make them for us). Read the full article at Deloitte Insights for more information.
Three great domain names currently for sale related to analytics:
DatabaseTools.com
KeyInsight.com
XLMetrics.com
To make an offer on all four premium domain names as a package - contact.
There's a lot of talk about traffic and SEO and I wanted to mention a few key points on building volume. First, your sites needs to built correctly so search engines can read it. That's a technical discussion for a later date, but needs to be in place for other methods to work. Setup Google Analytics and a few others so you can triangulate and see what's actually working. Without a measure your're driving blind. If you don't have a blog, add one. It will be the most read page on your site and you can feed it directly to social media. The Post Viewed tag in the lower right corner of each article here is misleading, it's not how many times it's been viewed, it represents how many times the Read More tag has been clicked. For the record, the main page of this Tech Notes blog gets viewed between 3k to 7k times on any given day.
Dynamic content isn't just tailoring your site to your unique visitors, it's generating relevant and fresh new content for your site. Having this dynamic content is what is going to improve your SEO score and the quality of traffic you receive. There's no way to short cut this process. Some of the most intelligent minds at Google are continually working the algorithm to weed out the junk and click bait. If you write compelling articles and add epic content regularly, your numbers will begin to perk up. If you work it, expect about a 25% increase in qualified traffic and that will be significant to any business that you're in. Google has some great webmaster tools here. Give the PageSpeed Insights test a try and see how your site scores. Your site may need more work than you think. Keep it fresh and keep it growing, make a bigger target.
There's a insightful article on The Wall Street Journal about the continued closings of retail stores. The Business Insider had an article earlier about the same topic. It's all the more reason to get your business online or tune it up and expand your marketplaces, no matter what type of products you sell.
The article focuses on retail outlets declining and how more people are finding the convenience of online shopping. What the article doesn't say is that the shopping habits of retail are being carried over into all business classes. B2B (business to business) decisions are being made the same manor. If your business isn't found or engaging enough, customers are going elsewhere at light speed. To further that statement, the experience they find while using your site, is exactly how they perceive working with your organization to be. It's your corporate image. It's your credibility and it tells how well run your organization is, be it corporate, a government agency or a charitable organization.
Not many people will ever see your place of work, but chances are they will visit your website at all hours of the day. Just ask your analytics guy. People follow up in the evening, weekends and at all hours of the day outside of normal business hours. It's how research is done. The more advanced will employ secondary research groups to dig deeper, but generally what they see in the search results or after trying a few URL's (domain names) is it.
Two key points for making more money. Get a great domain name for your business and keeping acquiring them while they are inexpensive. Some businesses own hundreds of thousands of names. Disney has about 20k names, some pharmaceutical companies own even more. The internet isn't going anywhere and isn't going to be replaced anytime in the next 30 years. Names you could have bought 10 years ago for a few thousand will never be available for sale again for less. Buy words in English and .com extensions. These will always be the best most memorable search friendly names that bring affluent customers to your door.
Build a scalable and dynamic website. Keep adding relevant content and you'll keep driving targeted traffic. If you sell widgets, you want to attract people buying widgets. Your website needs to the best you can present for your market and dynamic. Dynamic is fresh, evolving content and interactive. Interactivity is how you listen to your customer's needs. This is how to communicate, make it easy and make it fun, gamify it.
Read more on web development and building your user engagement here.