Vespa’s creators just unveiled a personal cargo robot

The Vespa brand’s owner, the Piaggio Group, doesn’t have a reputation for cutting edge tech (it only just started making an electric scooter). However, it’s making up for that in style. It’s establishing a robot-focused company, Piaggio Fast Forward, and has unveiled that company’s first product: meet Gita, a personal cargo robot. 

The machine can haul up to 40 pounds of supplies either autonomously (if there are maps) or by following a human operator. It’s fast enough to keep up with you on a bike (22MPH), and its zero turning radius promises the “human agility” needed to navigate sidewalks. If you don’t like the idea of driving a car or pushing a dolly just to get your groceries home, this might be just what you were looking for.

Gita will first show up in business-to-business test programs, but Piaggio intends to release something you can buy for individual use.

A grander announcement is expected on February 2nd, and it might address some lingering questions about Gita. Will it be inexpensive enough that you can realistically buy the eventual consumer version? And is the range good enough that the robot can accompany you across town, or will it be limited to neighborhood jaunts? Those kinds of questions are important — while Gita looks good at first blush, it has to be both affordable and practical to be more than a novelty.

6 Digital Marketing Tricks to Get People to Read Your Blog

Do you want more people to read your blog, but are unsure how to go about doing it? Being a great writer is half the battle. But if you want your blog to be successful, you should know some basic digital marketing tricks to help promote it.

So what are you waiting for? Consider using these 6 simple digital marketing tricks below to increase your blog’s readership now!

1. Use social media influencers

Don’t have a lot of social media followers? Don’t worry! Get a social media influencer to share/retweet your post to exponentially expand your audience.

Influencers are active on social media and have many followers. The best way to get an influencer to share your post is to include them in the article. I experienced this firsthand when British comedian Ricky Gervais retweeted my tweet -which was a link to my blog post covering his social media activity -to his millions of followers. That single retweet by Gervais flooded my website with traffic. Yes!

2. Create search-friendly content

You should always strive to create content that will rank high in popular search engines like Google. Getting ranked in the search engines takes time, but doing so will provide your blog with a steady stream of traffic in the long run.

You don’t need to be an SEO specialist to create search-friendly content. Just keep your blog post’s subject matter specific, not general, to avoid competition with major content-producing websites.

3. Write clickable headlines

If people are not reading your blog posts, chance are it’s because your headlines are weak. Having attention-grabbing headlines is especially important if you’re promoting your blog through email and social media marketing.

Creating a great headline is as much a science as it is an art. You can create a more clickable headline by incorporating one or more of the following:

  • Add a number to your headline, which indicates a listicle is coming.
  • Start your headline with one of the 5 Ws (“when”, “which”, “what”, “where” and “who”) or “how”.
  • Include a popular or trending term. (P.S. make sure this popular term [e.g. Justin Bieber] is included in the blog post; you don’t want to piss people off.)

4. Social media advertising

If you have the resources, social media advertising is a very effective way to immediately expand your blog’s reach. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, advertising on social networks like Facebook and Twitter is relatively cheap. You can also target your advertising to a reach a particular demographic group (e.g. men in Toronto, etc.).

5. Express an opinion about a trending topic

Passionate about something in the news that’s relevant to your blog? Then be sure to highlight your unique opinion and perspective. If your post is well-presented -and possibly controversial -then it should be able to generate comments, especially if you promote your post on social media.

6. Create how-to, instructional content

How-to posts are the bread and butter of blogging and should be a part of your blog’s content mix. A good how-to post will answer your readers’ questions while also positioning you as a leader in your field.

Though how-to posts aren’t as effective as they once were, I like them for their utility. For example, how-to posts are easier to transform into different content forms, such as SlideShare, ebooks, videos, infographics, images, quotes, tips, podcasts… the list goes on!

Posted on May 28, 2016 June 17, 2016 by John Gilson

This article originally appeared at: http://www.john-gilson.com/6-content-marketing-tricks-get-people-read-blog/.

Mind-reading machine allows completely paralyzed patients to say if they want to live

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and speechless, with only the ability to blink his left eyelid. Using just that eye, he silently dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, later adapted into a film.

Bauby suffered from “locked-in syndrome,” in which patients are completely paralyzed except for some eye movement. Some patients eventually lose even the ability to blink, cutting off all contact with the world and raising questions of whether they are still fully conscious and, if so, whether they still wish to live.

Now researchers in Europe say they’ve found out the answer after using a brain-computer interface to communicate with four people completely locked in after losing all voluntary movement due to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

In response to the statement “I love to live” three of the four replied yes. They also said yes when asked “Are you happy?” The fourth patient, a 23-year-old woman, wasn’t asked open-ended questions because her parents feared she was in a fragile emotional state.

Designed by neuroscientist Niels Birbaumer, now at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, the brain-computer interface fits on a person’s head like a swimming cap and measures changes in electrical waves emanating from the brain and also blood flow using a technique known as near-infrared spectroscopy.

To verify the four could communicate, Birbaumer’s team asked patients, over the course of about 10 days of testing, to respond yes or no to statements such as “You were born in Berlin” or “Paris is the capital of Germany” by modulating their thoughts and altering the blood-flow pattern. The answers relayed through the system were consistent about 70 percent of the time, substantially better than chance. 

Birbaumer says “the relief was enormous” for family members who were able to communicate with their loved ones after as many as four years of total silence, and to learn they wished to remain alive on ventilators. They detail their experiments in a study appearing today in the journal PLOS Biology.

In 2010, British neuroscientist Adrian Owen first reported that changes in blood flow in certain parts of the brain showed that a patient previously written off as being in a vegetative state was actually conscious.

No one has a clear idea of how many locked-in patients there are, says Jane Huggins, who runs the Direct Brain Interface Laboratory at the University of Michigan, although an estimate by Dutch researchers puts it at less than one in 150,000 in that country.

Some may be misdiagnosed as being comatose because they lack eye movement or it’s so subtle. Birbaumer and his team say their system could be used as a diagnostic to determine who actually remains conscious and aware, and he hopes to develop a technology to allow people with complete locked-in syndrome to select letters so they can communicate beyond answering yes-or-no questions.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603512/reached-via-a-mind-reading-device-deeply-paralyzed-patients-say-they-want-to-live/.

Introducing the New Privacy Basics | Facebook Newsroom

Facebook updates its Privacy Basics page, adding 32 interactive guides; explains how information is used, who can see it, how to delete posts and more. 

32 more basics?  Doesn’t sound too basic to me.

Introducing the New Privacy Basics

Today we’re introducing a new Privacy Basics to make it easier for people to find tools for controlling their information on Facebook.

Privacy Basics features improved functionality and top topics based on your most frequently asked questions about privacy and security. Built using your feedback, everything is organized so that information about protecting your privacy is easy to find. Privacy Basics puts you in the driver’s seat with 32 interactive guides available in 44 languages. See a quick overview in the video below.

People share their most valued moments on Facebook, and we want to make tips and tools clear and accessible whenever you need them. Privacy Basics gives you tips for things like securing your account, understanding who can see posts and knowing what your profile looks like to others. This is part of Facebook’s overall effort to make sure you have all the information you need to share what you want with only the people you want to see it.

We’re making these improvements as part of Data Privacy Day, held each year on January 28. We’re joining state attorneys general and other policymakers who are sharing their own privacy information on Facebook, along with organizations around the world like National Cyber Security Alliance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, who are working to raise awareness of how to take charge of your information online. In addition to visiting Privacy Basics, we encourage you to take the time to:

  • Take the Privacy Checkup. You’ll walk through a few quick steps to make sure only the people you want to see your stuff can see it. You can review who you’re posting to, which apps you’re using, and the privacy of key pieces of information on your profile.
  • Choose who sees what you post. On Facebook, you can use the audience selector to choose who will see each of your posts — just your friends, everyone, or specific people you select.
  • Increase your account security by turning on login approvals. You’ll get a unique security code each time you access your Facebook account from a new device.

We hope you find these tips and tools useful. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback to update and improve Facebook’s privacy resources.

Poland, Ireland, Latvia and Sweden Have the Lowest Mobile Broadband Usage Prices.

Across the OECD countries there is a 14:1 range from highest to lowest MBB price per GB.

Mobile Broadband price data shows that the price per GB of post-paid MBB services is declining at an average rate of 10% per year. However, there is still a huge variation in prices from USD $1 per GB in Poland to well over $13 per GB in Colombia, Germany and Chile.

Strategy Analytics has released the latest update of the OECD Mobile Broadband Price Benchmarking System which analyses over 100 providers across 36 countries, and includes over 2,600 SIM-only, modem, laptop and tablet plans. Other key findings from the report include:

  • SIM-only plans account for 38% of all plans in this update, and 80% of the plans are post-paid.

  • Over 84% of all plans are now 4G/LTE.

  • Since 2011, the size of the largest post-paid data allowances for MBB has increased five times, from a maximum of 200 GB in 2011 to a maximum of 1000 GB in 2016.

  •  Data value has improved over the last 6 years with the average price per GB falling 39% against the 2011 index of 100.

The cost of data varies significantly by country, however. The figure below shows both the average and the lowest price per GB across 36 countries, as of December 2016, taking into account all relevant post-paid offers from the three most prominent providers in each country.

 

Apple Campus 2 February 2017 Construction Update 4K

$3 billion can buy a pretty incredible corporate office! One of the more amazing projects ever. Hope to tour it someday. Seems like Apple is thinking of everything. We will keep posting the progress as it nears completion.
This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvkh5udzKds.