Bad news: if you were still hoping to get one of the $400 juicers from Juicero, you may be out of luck. Juicero announced that they were suspending sales while they seek an acquirer. They'd already dropped the juicer's price from its initial $700 earlier this year and had hoped to find ways to drop it further, but ran out of time. I keep thinking: if they'd been a health care company, they not only might still be in business but also would probably be looking to raise their prices. Juicero once was the darling of investors. It raised $120 million from a variety of respected funding sources, including Kleiner Perkins, Alphabet and Campbell Soup. They weren't a juice company, or even an appliance company. They were a technology company! They had an Internet-of-Things product! They had an ongoing base of customers...
Internet-of-Things (IoT)
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10 of Today's Really Cool Network & IT Research Projects
University at Buffalo and Northeastern University researchers are developing hardware and software to enable underwater telecommunications to catch up with over-the-air networks. This advancement could be a boon for search-and-rescue operations, tsunami detection, environmental monitoring and more. Sound waves used underwater are just no match for the radio waves used in over-the-air communications, but the researchers are putting smart software-defined radio technology to work in combination with underwater acoustic modems...
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Health Care's Juicero Problem
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How Laboratories and their Systems can Weather Natural Disasters and Pandemics
We are currently experiencing a global pandemic - which, while perhaps included in disaster preparedness Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) by many labs as a possible disaster, still has caught most the infrastructure and health systems of most nations largely unprepared, and is causing major disruption because it was arguably not seen as one of the most likely events. Disaster preparedness has typically tended to focus on IT and data management risks and/or natural disasters. SOPs center around standard, daily lab safety. The truth is that whatever the odds of a particular disaster, they become 100% once they happen. It's important to have sufficient risk-reduction SOPs in play, and a good Continuity Of Operations Plan (COOP) for each potential scenario to ensure the best chance of coping during the event and recovering afterwards.
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We Don't Need No Stinking Batteries
The problem with many IoT devices, though, is similar to with our other devices: what happens when the battery runs low? It's not easy to get a charger into our gut to repower smart pills, and for anyone worried about the ecological risks posed by computer or smartphone batteries, well, imagine tiny versions of those toxic batteries floating around in your body. We'll need sensors to track the damage done by our other sensors' dead batteries. Not with rectennas. Rectennas are powered by Wi-Fi signals, like the kind you use in your house or at Starbucks to get internet access. This is not a new concept, but what is new is that MIT researchers have been able to harvest enough power to make them useful, in a device only a few atoms thick.
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Open Invention Network Expands Open-Source Patent Protection Beyond Linux
Today, everyone and their uncle -- yes, even Microsoft-- use Linux and open-source. A decade ago, Linux was under attack by SCO for imaginary copyright violations, and then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was claiming that Linux violated more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. So Open Invention Network (OIN) patent consortium was formed to defend Linux against intellectual property (IP) attacks. The stakes may not be so high today, but Linux and open-source software is still under attack from patent trolls and other attackers...
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