When I can’t think about what to talk about, I talk about how I figure out what to talk about. When I’m really stuck, I put off the project and watch Chris Brogan.
Seriously. I could listen to Chris for hours, and have. Always entertaining, full of good stories and informative. My go to source when I want to think more.
Amazon doesn’t charge any extra penny from customers for delivering products via Prime Air. In simple word, Amazon delivers products to its customers via Prime Air for absolutely”free’. So, here’s the contradiction between”fee’ and”free’.
I know the law gets insane sometimes but does anyone really believe that Prime Air is not commercial?
Apparently many do. (read my tweet stream).
I included that one example and the risk that someone will believe that I’m part of a conspiracy to keep the world from knowing the government is out to get them. (trust me. I’m predisposed to not trust anything out of ‘the government’ but this is just so silly). There are several more but I’m gong to just cite my guidelines that serve to see red flags:
For the record. Ochen.com does share all or part of videos, article and shares from sites on the internet without a full time fact checker calling all the sources. We use common sense and comment on things based on our contributors general knowledge.
We do make mistakes and a thorough review of our site will no doubt show errors and omissions. If you find one, leave a comment, send us an email, call us out on it. We will respond as best we can.
That response will be from a human being. (That might be #7 for this list).
I did some more research. The FAA has not issued a policy announcement of intent to set policy on the subject of drones since they got told they could require licenses on some. I did see some interesting talk about refund for people who bought drone licenses though. Seems they have plenty to do there.
The last news about “delivery by drones” I found was a Bloomberg report. Bloomberg wants you to watch their video, so I’ll put there little thumbnail here and you can go watch two talking heads by clicking on it (or just look at the photo of the President and a drone and imagine)
It’s interesting to me that in my search for another video report of this I didn’t see any other mentions of this mundane meeting. I was expecting to find footage of an awkward camera shot or an official calling a drone a spaceship.
So it goes.
By Ryan Beene
The bipartisan Senate legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration directs the Department of Transportation to create a carrier certificate allowing for package deliveries by drones, according to a summary. That provision is one of several in the bill aimed at boosting regulatory approval and oversight for drones.
Companies including Amazon and Google parent Alphabet Inc. are racing to develop drones capable of delivering parcels to customers in spite of restrictions on where drones can fly. Amazon in December made its first-ever drone delivery — a television streaming device and a bag of popcorn — to a customer in the U.K., where the company is testing drone deliveries in part because of the strict U.S. regulations.
Establishing an air carrier certificate for drone deliveries would clear one hurdle for package delivery, while others remain. Current FAA regulations restrict most drone flights directly over people, although the agency is working on rules to broaden such flights.
In a statement on its website, the Commercial Drone Alliance said it was “pleased that provisions intended to expand commercial drone operations have been included” in the FAA authorization bill, adding it was reviewing details of the legislation. The group represents companies that want to use drones commercially, including Time Warner Inc.’s CNN.
Rarely is the appearance of Godzilla-like beasts accompanied by applause instead of screams of terror, but over the past weekend, 750,000 people cheered on towering robotic monsters duking it out in downtown Ottawa.
French street theatre company La Machine created the two mechanical marvels and designed the four-day public performance called “The Spirit of the Dragon-Horse, With Stolen Wings.” La Machine derives all its inspiration from machination and movement, saying it chose public space because “when we make big things, we inspire larger emotions from the public, and you can see more movement in a larger machine.”
Long Ma, the half-dragon / half-horse creature, stands at 36 feet high, weighs 45 tons, breathes smoke and fire, and can trot, gallop, rear up, and lie down. Kumo, the spider, weighs 40 tons, sprays water, and takes 16 people to control all its intricate movements. The Ottawa performance was La Machine’s debut in North America.
Over the course of four days, an elaborate story unfolded, with Long Ma and Kumo “awakening” and performing three battles, with the final one occurring at the Canadian War Museum (a decidedly apropos move). The beasts don’t just roam streets, the team storyboarded the events so they would interact with and around things like traffic lights, bridges, and art pieces to make it feel like “they are in a different universe.” Check out Kumo and Long Ma battling, below. To see more, visit CBC News’ full recap with videos from each day.
After 10 days as the White House’s communications director, Anthony Scaramucci is out. His downfall? A particularly candid late-night phone conversation with New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza. Like mosts journalists, Lizza recorded his call not just for posterity but for proof. After all, it’s hard to argue with audio evidence.
Recording a call used to require an external gadget that connected a digital recorder to a desk phone’s base and handset. It’s still one of the most reliable ways to capture a conversation, but it’s not exactly convenient. These days, smartphone apps and cloud services make recording conversations easy and convenient – whether you’re chatting with White House officials or not.
One major disclaimer: State laws vary considerably when it comes to recording phone calls. Some require both parties to consent to having the conversation recorded, so check your state’s laws to see if you need permission before you hit Record. (The Digital Media Law Project has a good resource.) Then, try these three ways to record your next conversation.
Neither the iPhone nor Android devices come with a built-in call recorder, but their respective app stores are full of options to download.
TapeACall Pro has long been a favorite among journalists. Why? The $10 app, available on both iOS and Android, makes recording as simple as setting up a three-way call. Dial the TapeACall line, then dial the person you want to talk to, and merge the two calls into a conference. Boom, you’re done. Recordings are saved inside the app, and you can share them via Dropbox, Google Drive, or Evernote. TapeACall puts out a free version, too, but you can only access the first 60 seconds of your recording. If you plan on talking for more than a minute, it’s worth splurging for the Pro version. (Since the app uses three-way calling to capture the conversation, you need to have a service plan that supports three-way calls.)
For cheapskates, plenty of apps will let you record for free – like Another Call Recorder for Android. Google Voice also offers free recording, though the process is a little fussy: You have to first enable call recording on your Google Voice account, and you can only record during incoming calls to your Google Voice number. The service also announces when the recording has begun, so don’t plan on tricking anyone here. When you hang up, Google saves the recording directly to your inbox.
Want to go all old school with your call recording? Get yourself some cheap hardware, like this $14 Olympus Telephone Recording Device. Plug it into the microphone jack on a digital recorder and the earpiece picks up both sides of the conversation.
Other gadgets plug directly into your headphone jack to record audio, but they cost more. If, for some reason, you’re still using a landline, an old-fashioned telephone tap like this one will connect your handset to your recorder.
This documentary film is about nuclear energy and other energy sources. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming.
The film emphasize that more deaths is caused by coal powered power plants than nuclear power plants.
We’re moving towards the idea that it’s okay to autoplay video, push preroll type content and use the users intent to give him what he wants.
Creepy? Minority Report?
More likely we reject that and Google finds place where it helps the experience.
I’ve been watching new interfaces on TV apps (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon..) and autostart gave me a bit of a shock when I first saw it and thought of years gone by when that meant a delay if I dumped it. Now that I’m getting used to it, seems quite natural to ease into a program I want.
If you’ve searched for the name of a movie on Google recently, you may have seen and heard something you didn’t expect: a trailer for that film automatically playing on the search result page.
Google has begun embedding autoplaying videos in the search results of a small number of its users, as first reported by Search Engine Land. “We are constantly experimenting with ways to improve the Search experience for our users,” the company explained in a statement. But even if it is just an experiment, it’s a weird experiment, given that Google plans to block autoplaying videos in its Chrome browser because their research has shown that consumers really, really hate ads that automatically play audio or video.
Whether this is actually about improving user experience or squeezing more revenue out of video ads is a bit of a mystery – Google declined to comment for this article – but the fact that it would toy with doing something that it already knows will annoy users is an uncomfortable reminder of how much power the company wields over the search experience. It’s dominated the market for years, and no matter how big Google got, both users and U.S. regulators have been willing to let it be. If you’re like me, you’ve tried searching through Microsoft Bing or the privacy-centric DuckDuckGo. For many searches, the results are about the same. For some, the competitors surface a useful link that Google somehow buried. Overall, though, it’s always seemed that the Google algorithm is better at finding what I’m actually looking for.
Now that more and more ads are crowding its result pages, though, Google search just isn’t what it used to be. The main results may still be better than the competition, but those results keep getting pushed further down the page. Today, for some search terms, you might not see a single search result that isn’t either an ad or a link to one of Google’s own services without having to scroll down. It’s a minor hassle, but one that makes using the search engine feel a bit like browsing one of the spammy sites the company has long tried to combat. You know, the ones with a mountain of Adsense ads towering above all the actual content.
Google’s revenue keeps growing, but the cost it makes per ad keeps slipping. It only makes sense to make up for it by plastering its pages with more ads. Bing does much the same thing. But the growing number of ads runs counter to the way Google used to run its business – principles that put the user first and that are largely responsible for making it the seemingly unstoppable force it is today.
Years ago, when a team of engineers pitched the ideas of putting ads on Google Image Search results, co-founder Sergey Brin rejected the idea. “I don’t see how it enhances the experience of our users,” he told the team, according to a 2006 profile by Time.
Google reversed that decision last year. “People who search and shop on their smartphones at least once a week say that product images are the shopping feature they turn to most,” Google marketing lead Rob Newton wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “And it turns out, the top questions Google Images users ask us are ‘What’s the price of this?’ and”Where can I buy it?’ That’s why we are introducing Shopping ads on image search.”
It was an understandable change. The team estimated that the ads would rake in $80 million in 2006. That was a lot of money to leave on the table even then, and today that number is surely much larger. Showing a few ads in the image search system isn’t a bad thing. But it shows just how much Google’s thinking has changed. Google’s not a scrappy startup anymore. It’s the world’s most valuable company, and its investors want results. And without much serious competition, the risk of customers bolting for another search engine is pretty low.
Autoplaying the occasional movie trailer and forcing users to slog through a page of ads might be slight annoyances, at least compared to the worst offenders on the web. But it’s hard to say the experience of searching the web through Google has gotten better in recent years. That’s why I’m giving DuckDuckGo another chance. It’s worth seeing if it’s improved, and at least it’s not saddled with as many ads. Perhaps the changes at Google aren’t enough to send you into the arms of a competitor quite yet, or to get regulators to take a second look at Google’s search dominance. But it means that the time is ripe for more competition.
I was just talking with my team working on developing marketing for franchise groups about persistence and quoting Calvin Coolidge.
Thought I’d share this clip about the great franchisor Ray Kroc, as depicted by so well by Michael Keaton in The Founder
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.
As America’s 30th President (1923-1929), Calvin Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts of frugality amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying during the 1920s era.
A quiet and somber man whose sour expression masked a dry wit, Calvin Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal.” After learning of his ascendancy to the presidency following the death of Warren Harding in 1923, Coolidge was sworn in by his father, a justice of the peace, in the middle of the night and, displaying his famous “cool,” promptly went back to bed.
On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using
