Networking super week in Vegas

Connecting with people online is fast, easy and fun but nothing compares to getting face to face with people excited about the same things as you.

We just finished CES week here in Vegas. I was able to attend 5 annual events in a few days, met dozens of people that I will follow up with in the next couple of weeks and built relationships with friends and influencers that already have made 2018 plans expand exponentially for business.

I started off with Affiliate Summit where I intended to limit myself to 3 new contacts. The Meet Market, an innovation that set Affiliate Summit apart from all others, with rows of limited sized booths and not much else can introduce you to 50 good contacts in an afternoon. 

I’ve been many times before so I thought I’d seen it all. 4 hours later, I had 25 contact to follow up with on profitable business ideas, and I’d only see half of the booths. Affiliate Summit is a must for January in Vegas!

Here’s a few thoughts that can help you regardless of what events, location or industry you want to network with.

1. Plan to meet beforehand

I remember when thought attending seminar sessions and keynotes was a great opportunitiy.

Education is still a big reason to go to shows like CES but now that I learned the power of networking, I realize the best education can come from a one to one conversation

Before I go to CES, or any major show, I look up speakers, exhibitors and attendees I’d like to meet. I use Nimble.com to expand on any social information and then connect wherever I can. 

Anyone with an active online presence has interests beyond the cat pictures and family photos that dominate social. Look for their passions, business or hobbies to comment or share where appropriate. Every blogger likes comments (HINT: I do too :)). 

When you see that they are mentioning the event you have in common, you can reply with “see you at…”

If a meeting is important, set it up before hand and send a reminder before the appointment. Personally, I limit fixed time meetings and allow serendipity to work. I don’t like to waste an hour getting to a spot when I can meet 3 people at the place I’m at. 

2. Allow Serendipity to Happen

Following people who connect and share can be quite rewarding

One night, I went to a bad party because my friend Adryenn Ashley was going to be there. After a long 45 minutes trying to talk while she waited for a friend who never got in, a group of us decided to get dinner at a place I’d never been here in my own city. I met 2 more people and then followed them to an exclusive event I could not get into. 

I did get in with the help of another influencer, seeing new technology and meeting 3 founders to follow up with. Followed the group to an empty bar (during CES? Yes. it happened!) where a couple of other people joined us. 

I missed two events I had planned but made priceless connections. 

And this was the night before CES opened.

3. Plan Something Special

Thanks to my sponsor Frontier Business, I stepped up my influencer outreach with a private dinner for 10 well known influencers that I’m introducing to their program. 

Some of these people were already friends. Others were invited specifically for the 2018 outreach and one tagged along and got added to my network. 

I’d missed the last two days or CES due to illness, but could not miss seeing friends. (reports later tell me that I didn’t infect anyone, thank goodness). There were dozens of social media posts and the group went on to at least two more locations before calling it a night. 

Thanks Frontier. 

4. Share What Happens

This post is one obvious example of how I share what happens. It’s not much, but links out to friends, and sharing it on various social media outlets, will strengthen the web of connections I have in this community. 

I’ve left of a lot of information I’d usually add. The names of companies I met, most of the individuals, and even most of the event names. Each of those will get reported elsewhere. 

This is where the serendipity really kicks in. You are reading this, and a connection between you and me might be one that changes the world! Do reach out with a comment, a tweet, connection or share. That’s where the magic happens. 

E-Commerce share of retail could be double the official reports

E-commerce sales may be twice as high as generally reported, according to a new calculation by Thomas Paulson, who runs Minneapolis-based Inflection Capital Management.

Buzz: Rather than 9% of retail sales — as reported by the Fed and other sources — Paulson says Amazon and other e-commerce companies grabbed 21% of total U.S. retail sales last year. In 2016, it was 18.7% and the last time the rate was still at 9% was in 2010, he added.

What’s happening: Few people buy cars or gasoline online and there are not many who buy groceries or restaurant meals on the internet. Yet, when analysts, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, measure the bite that e-commerce outfits are taking from brick-and-mortar retail, they generally include such purchases.

Why it matters: The impact, Paulson tells Axios, is to vastly understate the scale of the U.S. e-commerce industry, and to overstate the devastation in traditional shops.

“Amazon’s gross margin rate is up substantially over the last six years because it has been raising prices and gotten into higher-priced products,” Paulson said.

 Chris Canipe / Axios.

ALL TIME GREATEST AIRPLANE SEAT – Emirates First Class Suite

Casey is milking his social super powers – and rightly so. Here he gets to test out the best first class cabin in the industry and let us all experience once again, what none of us ever will. Thanks for letting us escape. Who knew Youtube could make free trips like this possible just because of social stardom. Keep hustling everyone.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7NJ6Gek9v4.

First Tesla Model 3: 1st Regular Customer Delivery and Detailed Walkthrough

Woohoo! Model 3 was delivered yesterday morning! Tesla let us know that we had the honor of being the very first regular customers to take delivery. Folks on Reddit asked for a video, so here it is!

With Model 3, Tesla has made a masterpiece. The Model 3 is the car that just put every other car manufacturer on notice.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h_zriVw8uc.

New “Ultrasound on a Chip” Tool Could Revolutionize Medical Imaging

Need an ultrasound? We got an app for that!

Phone attachment and AI does the trick

Jonathan Rothberg, a entrepreneur who prides himself on drastically disrupting the biomedical industry every so often, has typically big claims for his new product. The Butterfly iQ, a cheap handheld ultrasound tool with AI smarts tucked inside, will 1) revolutionize medical imaging in hospitals and clinics, 2) change the game in global health, and 3) eventually become a consumer product that will be as ubiquitous as the household thermometer, he says. 

Today, Rothberg’s startup Butterfly Network unveiled the tool and announced its FDA clearance for 13 clinical applications, including cardiac scans, fetal and obstetric exams, and musculoskeletal checks. Rather than using a dedicated piece of hardware for the controls and image display, the iQ works with the user’s iPhone. The company says it will start shipping units in 2018 at an initial price of about $2,000.

But that’s just the beginning, Rothberg tells IEEE Spectrum. He expects to bring the price down on the handheld gadget, and is already looking ahead to radically new products. “In the next two years we’ll release a patch that uses ultrasound to monitor patients, and a pill you can swallow to look at cancer from within the body,” he says.

All these form factors are possible because Butterfly uses a very different technology than conventional ultrasound. Its “ultrasound on a chip” takes advantage of the mass-market fabrication techniques perfected for computer chips, Rothberg says. “We put all the elements onto a semiconductor wafer, then we can dice up the wafer to make 48 ultra low-cost ultrasound machines,” he says.

Today’s ultrasound systems use piezoelectric crystals, which convert electrical energy into vibrations in the form of ultrasonic waves. A typical system has a display screen on a bulky cart with several wands for imaging at different depths within the body. These machines can cost upwards of $100,000. While a few smaller and cheaper devices exist, such as GE’s handheld Vscan products, they still use pricey piezoelectric technology and require multiple probes, bringing the price to something between $8,000 and $20,000.

Developing the iQ’s chip-based technology was a two-step process. First, Butterfly’s engineers replaced the piezoelectrics with a micromachine that acts like a tiny drum to generate vibrations. Inside this “capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer” (CMUT), an applied voltage moves a membrane to send ultrasonic waves into the body. The waves that bounce back from various body tissues move the membrane and are registered as an electric signal, which creates the image. Butterfly based its technology on research done by Stanford professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub, who serves on Butterfly’s scientific advisory board.

Rothberg explains that typical ultrasound systems require separate probes for different clinical applications because the crystals have to be tuned at the time of manufacture to produce the right type of ultrasonic wave for imaging at a particular depth. But the Butterfly iQ can be tuned on the fly. “We have 10,000 of these micromachine transducers on a probe, and that gives us a monster dynamic range,” he says. “We can make them buzz at 1 megahertz if we want to go deep, or 5 megahertz if we want to go shallow.”

The second innovation was to do away with the wiring that connects a typical piezoelectric probe to the electronic controls and displays. Butterfly’s micromachines are attached directly to a semiconductor layer that contains all the necessary amplifiers, signal processors, and so on.

Independent experts say the technology sounds promising, but they’ll wait to see if the Butterfly iQ can live up to Rothberg’s claims. “People in medicine tend to be conservative, and I’m skeptical when someone claims to have found a wonderdrug or cure,” says Torben Becker, an emergency room physician at the University of Florida hospital who has researched the use of portable ultrasound tools by paramedics and in the developing world. 

When the Getting is Good: Using Amazon Prime to Help the Homeless

Ever wonder how you can use your insta-purchase Amazon app for something more necessary than a new gadget you saw on Instagram? 

How about sending some socks to someone who really needs them, like a homeless person on the streets near where you live?

Rob Bliss, this story’s “good samaritan,” hacked how to deliver kindness for the homeless using apps. Because Amazon Prime can deliver some goods within hours, Rob has taken the act of seeing a need and actually filling it to a new, digital level.

Say you’re on your way to work and you find someone who could really use a sleeping bag. One, where are you going to find one of those. And two, even if you find it, buy it, and deliver it aren’t you now gonna be late? So you end up with thousands of people walking by a guy with no socks on in the middle of December.

The cold and nearly possession-less need warmth and humanity this time of year. Whether you give to the homeless or the needy, someone else’s generosity can serve as as a good reminder of how many creative ways there are to reach out and help someone. 

The Neuroscience of Autism

Vaccines don’t cause autism. But what even is autism? What causes it? And what’s the difference between an autistic brain and a “neurotypical” brain? We’ve recruited our friend Cory from 12Tone to hear about his own experience as an autistic person and to discuss the neuroscience of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Huge, huge thank you to Cory for all of his time and help in creating this video. We recognize that this is a complex and difficult topic to cover and we really appreciate all of the effort he put into helping us do it well.

Check out Cory’s channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTUt…
Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/12tonevideos

Watch our other collaboration on his channel: https://youtu.be/zRlqkXkMM_Q

Sources:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/scr…
http://www.autism-society.org/what-is/
http://www.autism-society.org/what-is…
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topi…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa…
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/2…
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10…
https://www.academia.edu/13626914/The…

Autism advocacy resources:
http://autisticadvocacy.org/about-asa…

Support us on Patreon –
https://www.patreon.com/neurotransmis…

Ryan M. Shaver and Carrie McKenzie are two of our Patreon Producers that really keep this show going. Thanks you two! Also, big shoutout to our newest patrons, PlayTheMind and Eric Earley.

Neuro Transmissions is a channel on a mission to bring neuroscience to everyone.  It’s not rocket surgery, it’s brain science!  Learn all sorts of fun and interesting things with Alie Astrocyte and Micah Psych every other Sunday by subscribing to the channel. Have a topic you want covered? Let us know in the comments. Share, like, and subscribe for more videos to come! Over and out.

Not so awesome: the FCC just killed net neutrality

Even with 14.5 million legitimate comments against the potential new net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission approved to repeal their only two-year-old rules that prevented internet providers from blocking and throttling traffic and offering what is referred to as paid “fast lanes.” 

The new rules largely don’t prevent internet providers from doing anything. They can block, throttle, and prioritize content if they wish to. The only real rule is that they have to publicly state that they’re going to do it. 

Advocates say internet providers will prioritize their own content over their competitors.

Net neutrality advocates believe that without these rules, internet providers will be able to control traffic in many ways, including prioritizing their own content companies (e.g. Comcast and NBCUniversal) to get more views, thereby making their content more valuable. They can also incentivize certain behaviors by consumers, like giving away certain services for free, while upcharging for streaming another brand’s services. 

So what can you expect to change now that net neutrality is over? Not all that much — not overnight, at least. Rather than large swaths of the internet suddenly becoming unavailable or only offered for a fee, internet providers will likely continue to explore subtler methods of advantaging themselves and their partners, like offering data to use certain services for free or speeding up delivery of their own content.

These are things that may initially sound good. But in the long run, they disadvantage upstarts that don’t have the money to pay up. The problem is that, eventually, we may not know what products and services we missed out on because they never made it through the mess.

Excerpts from Jacob Kastrenakes‘ article for The Verge.