How close to reality are some of our most futuristic fantasies? Consider that going to the moon was once a giant step for mankind, but in the near future you’ll be able to purchase a two week vacation to the International Space Station (if you’ve got a few million bucks to spare, of course). Here’s our list of ten incredible technological innovations that are poised to change our lives within the next decade.
Category Archives: Tech
San Francisco Can Do More to Lure, Keep College Grads
A Brookings Institution study shows the gap is widening between metro areas that boast a large number of college-educated residents and those that increasingly have fewer. Yahoo! News asked contributors from cities around the nation to propose solutions on how their cities can attract and keep college graduates – and what they’re doing well.
SAN FRANCISCO
With more than 43 percent of its adult population holding a college degree, San Francisco’s residents are among the most highly educated of U.S. cities. Still, more could be done to keep them here once that degree, or advanced degree, is in hand. Here’s how:
Further tout that we’re at Silicon Valley’s doorstep: Home to UCSF’s highly-acclaimed medical hothouse, the San Francisco Bay Area encompasses the University of California, Berkeley andStanford University in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. Home to Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn,Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, Intuit, Cisco and hundreds more internet and hi-tech brands…
Come for university, stay for a job in San Francisco
and see if you agree…What could San Francisco do better?
Genome entrepreneurs say their data will help you live longer
The cost of sequencing the human genome continues to fall, reaching a low of $1,000 this year due to a new microchip and machine designed by genetics company Life Technologies Corp. And unleashed by those lower costs, a small cadre of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is exploring ways to harness this data to enable us to live longer and healthier lives.
Dr. Dietrich Stephan, a human geneticist, has spent the better part of a decade trying to achieve that goal. Until recently, it has been costly and time-consuming to map the 3 billion units of DNA, known as base-pairs, which make up the human genetic code. But now, he said, with the low cost of gene sequencing technologies, we are on the brink of banishing a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.
“Every disease has a genetic component, and yet largely none of the available genetic information is being used today to treat patients,” he said.
Interesting stuff…read on, as published in VentureBeat
.
Filed under Silicon Valley, Startups, Tech
Entrepreneurs use game dynamics to tackle climate change and obesity
Game developers get a lot of flack for building time-sucking products that don’t add much value. They usually deserve it. To the folks at Draw Something: I’d like my Thursday afternoon Game developers get a lot of flack for building time-sucking products that don’t add much value. They usually deserve it. To the folks at Draw Something: I’d like my Thursday afternoon back.
Hoping to change that, entrepreneurs at DEMO Spring in Silicon Valley launched games that make it fun and engaging to do good. By playing a game on Facebook, I received an education on my fatty foods intake and helped to conserve trees in Madagascar.
FriendsLearn, a social game, was developed to help young adults get smarter about their diet and health. At DEMO, the startup launched the alpha test for a food-fight game, Fooya.back.
Hoping to change that, entrepreneurs at DEMO Spring in Silicon Valley launched games that make it fun and engaging to do good. By playing a game on Facebook, I received an education on my fatty foods intake and helped to conserve trees in Madagascar.
FriendsLearn, a social game, was developed to help young adults get smarter about their diet and health. At DEMO, the startup launched the alpha test for a food-fight game, Fooya.
Read full story published on thenextweb.
Filed under Silicon Valley, Startups, Tech
Meet the startups that are giving everyone affordable access to justice | VentureBeat
For all the talk of innovation in Silicon Valley, there is one industry that has remained largely untouched by technology. The few entrepreneurs ushering the law into the 21st century say the discipline is on the brink of major disruption.
“We’re all going at it from a different perspective,” said Ari Hershowitz, founder of Tabulaw, a startup that aims to make legal information more accessible to lawyers and the public, starting with the multi-billion dollar tax compliance industry. Hershowitz is one of the few entrepreneurs that are using technology to push the boundaries of legal practice.
“If any of us succeeds, we’re all better off,” he said.
Filed under Careers & Networking, Silicon Valley, Tech
Social entrepreneurs use startups to change the world
Entrepreneur Corner:
Muhammed Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, sparked a movement with the simple question:
“If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?”
Today’s young tech entrepreneurs have inherited Yunus’ vision, and are changing the way we do business. Their space, “social business,”
is nothing new, but these under-35s are attempting to alleviate global poverty, climate change, and even armed conflict through commercial enterprise.
Leila Janah, cofounder of Samasource
From startups to Twitter, San Francisco offices are trending
550 15th Street, Showplace Square, popular with tech firms and startups, San Francisco office space
They call it the “Tweets of San Francisco” on the Twitter blog. As you may have heard, Twitter is moving into an huge historic property in San Francisco’s Central Market district, projected for mid-2012. And Twitter are not the only ones.
Twitter sets the trend
Commercial space of all sizes in and around SOMA, the acronym for the area south of Market Street, is trending – just like Twitter itself.
Where are they moving to?
Filed under Careers & Networking, San Francisco & California, Tech
‘Adapt or die’: Meet the PR pros building the next generation of startups
Publicists and entrepreneurs are kindred spirits.
There are only a handful of occupations in which networking is considered an art form, pitching complete strangers is a regular occurrence, and it’s acceptable to make last-minute alterations to a slide deck while friends roll their eyes at the dinner table.
Amanda MacNaughton, co-founder of social marketing platform Promojam, sees many overlaps between the agency life and the startup life.
“I would not have been able to start a company had I not worked in the PR industry,” said the Los Angeles native. “I learned in PR—an industry that was, and still is, rapidly changing—that if you don’t adapt, you die.”
Filed under Careers & Networking, San Francisco & California, Tech
100 best companies to work for
Click to see more about Bay Area brilliance
Fortune’s cover story (February 6, 2012) is out, featuring the 15th annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list and, no surprise, the San Francisco Bay Area is top of the charts, best of the bunch.
Fifty-Nifty United States
California is home to 18 of the top 100 on the 2012 list, Texas claims 12 and New York 10. No other state comes into the double digits. Drill down into the Bay Area where Mountain View’s own Google is nothing less than number one.
Apple? LinkedIn? Facebook?
Shiny Bay Area brilliance
Google, not Apple nor Facebook, is best company to work for
Filed under Careers & Networking, San Francisco & California, Tech
Can PR pros practice objective journalism?
By Christina Farr in PR Daily | Posted: December 19, 2011
Objectivity and journalism today
As the fifth rejection hit my inbox, I began to fear that my journalism career was over. Editors tersely informed me that my graduate degree from a top U.S. university meant squat. How had I lost my editorial integrity?
I had recently taken a job in public relations, but should that matter?
In 2006, John Lloyd proposed in his Financial Times column that journalism and PR do not inhabit separate worlds. He wrote that the “murky and grubby relationship” must be resolved—that is, both disciplines can contribute journalistic content to benefit citizens who “should be told something like the truth.”
However, with such a strong pressure to secure coverage for clients, experts are not convinced that PR professionals can be objective.
“Can, then, PR practitioners write good journalism?” pondered Ted Glasser, professor of communications at Stanford University. “I suppose they could.”
Glasser questions whether readers would trust the reporting. “How would we know whose interests are being advanced—the client’s or the public’s?’
Filed under Careers & Networking, Education, Tech
