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A Kenyan Startup is Showing Global Businesses How to Talk to Their Customers
A florist chain in Argentina, a food delivery service in Hong Kong, and a Singaporean travel agency—these are a few of the companies relying on a Kenyan startup to help them talk to their customers on WhatsApp, WeChat, and other messaging apps. Ongair, a Nairobi-based startup, says instant messaging could and should replace the traditional channels of customer service—frustrating phone calls, inefficient e-mail exchanges, online chats that don’t work well on a smartphone, or SMS messages that costs businesses per text...
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Americans Focus On Responding To Earthquake Damage, Not Preventing It, Because They Are Unaware Of Their Risk
On July 4 and 5, two major earthquakes, followed by several thousand smaller ones, struck Southern California. Their size and the damage they caused captured attention around the country. What tends to get much less notice from the public is what can be done to prevent catastrophic damage from big quakes. Had the epicenter of these latest large California earthquakes been closer to downtown Los Angeles, tens of thousands of apartment buildings could have been damaged or collapsed. Consequently, structural engineers are calling on legislators to prepare for and prevent earthquake damage by crafting new and improved building codes...
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Appallicious Joins With SF To Launch Park And Rec iPhone App
Later today, as part of Innovation Month, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee will unveil SF Recreation & Park’s official iPhone App, SFRECPARK, developed for San Francisco by mobile commerce company Appallicious. Read More »
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Controversial: The Future is Data Integrity, Not Confidentiality
The key to the digital future is about data integrity, not data confidentiality. So says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, who flew into San Francisco Thursday morning to address an internet summit hosted by CloudFlare."I have AB blood," he said by way of example. "I don't particularly care that people know that. But if somehow that information was changed, well then I could end up dead..."
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Data Scientists Need Their Own GitHub. Here are Four of the Best Options
Imagine if a company’s three highly valued data scientists can happily work together without duplicating each other’s efforts and can easily call up the ingredients and results of each other’s previous work.That day has come. As the data scientist arms race continues, data scientists might want to join forces. Crazy idea, right?...
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For $149 a Month, the Doctor Will See You as Often as You Want
Forward’s rethinking of the doctor’s office includes lots of touch screens, white walls, and wood accents. Imagine if your doctor’s office was more like an Apple Store mashed up with a fancy gym: a modern white-and-wood aesthetic, replete with fancy gadgets and gleaming touch screens, for which you paid a monthly fee to visit as often as you wished. That’s the environment I stepped into last week upon entering the new medical clinic belonging to San Francisco health startup Forward, which opened to the public on Tuesday in the city’s Financial District...
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GENIVI Alliance Announces New Open Source Vehicle Simulator Project
The GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit alliance focused on developing an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and connectivity software platform for the transportation industry, today announced the GENIVI Vehicle Simulator (GVS) open source project has launched, with both developer and end-user code available immediately. The GVS project and initial source code, developed by Elements Design Group, San Francisco and the Jaguar Land Rover Open Software Technology Center in Portland, Ore., provide an open source, extensible driving simulator that assists adopters to safely develop and test the user interface of an IVI system under simulated driving conditions...
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How A Low-Income San Francisco Neighborhood Is Building A Culture Of Disaster Preparedness
...During the last big quake to rattle the San Francisco Bay area in 1989, Hodge was the manager of a local Kmart store across the bay in the town of Fremont. He made sure that his store was one of the first in the area to re-open after the quake, distributing much-needed supplies to the community...
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Innovators vs. The Establishment Extends to Digital Health
Just like in the presidential campaign, a new guard is rising up against the establishment in digital health — and healthcare in general. Entrenched interests, of course, are fighting back any way they can to retain their grip on the industry. At the American Telemedicine Association annual conference in Minneapolis this week, lots of telehealth and digital health companies, as always, were showing off their wares in the exhibit hall. Presenters in the 100 or so breakout sessions discussed practical applications of their technology...
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Internet Archive Turns 20, Gives Birthday Gifts to the World
On May 12, 1996, like a benevolent mad scientist, Brewster Kahle brought the Internet Archive to life. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and the Archive was there to capture its growing pains. Inspired by and emulating the Library at Alexandria, the Internet Archive began its mission to preserve and provide universal access to all knowledge. On October 27, 2016, the Internet Archive celebrated its 20th birthday with a party at its beautiful headquarters in San Francisco. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, over 600 people gathered to pay their respects and hear about the latest projects and features of the Archive...
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Mobile Apps Enable Citizen Engagement And Better Services
Innovative apps and portals help localities transform service delivery.
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Navigation, It’s Not Just For Cars: Mapbox And Scoot Optimize The Nav System For 2 Wheels
Navigation may have found its initial home in the car dashboard, but there are many different modes of transportation we use from feet to bikes to skis that can all benefit from some turn-by-turn directions. San Francisco’s scooter-sharing startup Scoot is a good case in point.
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Pharma and Tech Giants Team Up to Design Devices That Can Hack Your Body’s Electrical Signals
Electrical signals from the brain govern much of what goes on in the human body. Pharma and tech giants are spending big money to figure out how to hack these signals, a burgeoning field known as “bioelectronics.” GlaxoSmithKline and Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet subsidiary, are investing more than $700 million over seven years to create a new company, Galvani Bioelectronics. The firm, 55 percent owned by GSK, will have one lab in Stevenage, U.K., and another in San Francisco...
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Pharma, Data Veteran Stephen Friend Bites At Apple’s Health Offer
Consumer tech giant Apple, which has spent considerable effort positioning its products as health and fitness helpers, has just hired someone who knows Big Pharma and Big Data. Stephen Friend, a veteran of drug R&D and, more recently, a nonprofit effort to foster more collaborative biomedical research and more data sharing, is joining Apple in an unspecified capacity. The news emerged today from Sage Bionetworks, the Seattle nonprofit that Friend founded after leaving drug giant Merck, where he was a senior research executive for eight years...
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Recovering from Disasters: Social Networks Matter More than Bottled Water and Batteries
Standard advice about preparing for disasters focuses on building shelters and stockpiling things like food, water and batteries. But resilience - the ability to recover from shocks, including natural disasters - comes from our connections to others, and not from physical infrastructure or disaster kits. Almost six years ago, Japan faced a paralyzing triple disaster: a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns that forced 470,000 people to evacuate from more than 80 towns, villages and cities. My colleagues and I investigated how communities in the hardest-hit areas reacted to these shocks, and found that social networks - the horizontal and vertical ties that connect us to others - are our most important defense against disasters...
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