Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Friday, 11 May 2012
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Bloomberg Summit to Focus on Future of Enterprise Technology - EON: Enhanced Online News (press release)
Line-Up Features Juniper Co-Founder Pradeep Sindh; Google CIO Ben Fried; Goldman Sachs Global Co-COO Don Duet; and Facebook Hardware Design and Supply Chain Director Frank Frankovsky
NEW YORK--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--In today’s dynamic financial marketplace, enterprise technology fuels everything from automated trading strategies to accounting and risk management platforms. As the volume and richness of data feeding the financial markets grows and new challenges emerge, Bloomberg will gather leading technology decision-makers, including chief technology officers and chief information officers from top companies for the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit on May 10, 2012.
“We’re excited to be hosting our second Enterprise Technology Summit in New York and to convene some of the most influential in technology to weigh in on how enterprise technology practices are evolving in tandem with a number of industries.”
The Summit, which will take place at the Apella at the Alexandria Center in New York, will convene the biggest procurers of enterprise technology from across the public and private sectors – with a focus on financial services companies – to hear experts discuss how corporations and governments are leveraging the cloud, handling data storage challenges and securing enterprise operations.
Speakers will also advise on low-latency strategies for equity, option and ETF trading; discuss solutions for mobilizing enterprise and the outlook for mobile security; and debate the impact of Dodd-Frank and the new regulatory environment for technology.
“From trade execution to complex event processing to big data, an understanding of where enterprise technology is heading is key for today’s businesses, both in the private and public sector,” said Robert Bierman, head of Bloomberg LINK. “We’re excited to be hosting our second Enterprise Technology Summit in New York and to convene some of the most influential in technology to weigh in on how enterprise technology practices are evolving in tandem with a number of industries.”
Bloomberg CEO and President Dan Doctoroff will kick off the Summit. Additional key speakers include:
Donal Byrne, Chief Executive Officer, Corvil Richard Falkenrath, Principal, Chertoff Group; Former Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism, New York City Police Department Leonid Frants, President and Founder, OneMarketData Pat Gelsinger, President and COO, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, EMC Corporation Christian Gheorghe, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tidemark Richard Hochron, Chief Technology Officer, Direct Edge Ned Hooper, SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Colonel Cedric Leighton, Founder and President, Cedric Leighton Associates; United States Air Force Colonel (USAF, retired); Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency Allan Leinwand, Chief Technology Officer, Infrastructure, Zynga Elias Mendoza, Partner, Union Square Advisors LLC Stephen Norman, Chief Information Officer, Markets, Royal Bank of Scotland Matthew Quinn, Chief Technology Officer, TIBCO Software Inc. D. Keith Ross Jr., Chief Executive Officer, PDQ ATS; Former Chief Executive Officer, Getco Ted Schlein, Managing Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Lauren C. States, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Cloud Computing and Growth Initiatives, IBM Corporate StrategyThe Summit is being sponsored by Juniper Networks, JNK Securities Corp., The Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (Brasscom), Gravitas, Grant Thornton LLP and Insigma.
For more information on the program and speakers, please visit: http://www.bloomberglink.com/tech-2012.
Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (@BBGLINK). The hashtag for this event is #BBtech.
For more information on Bloomberg, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/about.
About Bloomberg LINK
Bringing the power of Bloomberg to the executive conference business, Bloomberg LINK produces invitation-only, in-person gatherings that combine world-class editorial programming with peer-to-peer networking amongst the who’s who in influential communities. In this environment, participants engage in open discussions that lead to learning from each other’s expertise and experience. For more information, please visit www.bloomberglink.com.
About Bloomberg
Bloomberg, the global business and financial information and news leader, gives influential decision makers a critical edge by connecting them to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas. The company’s strength – delivering data, news and analytics through innovative technology, quickly and accurately – is at the core of the Bloomberg Professional service, which provides real time financial information to more than 310,000 subscribers globally. Bloomberg’s enterprise solutions build on the company’s core strength, leveraging technology to allow customers to access, integrate, distribute and manage data and information across organizations more efficiently and effectively. Through Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Bloomberg BNA, the company provides data, news and analytics to decision makers in industries beyond finance. And Bloomberg News, delivered through the Bloomberg Professional service, television, radio, mobile, the Internet and two magazines, Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Markets, covers the world with more than 2,300 news and multimedia professionals at 146 bureaus in 72 countries. Headquartered in New York, Bloomberg employs more than 15,000 people in 192 locations around the world.
Mobile apps and technology change the way consumers look at cash - Chicago Tribune
If cash is still king, the dethronement has begun.
Tech companies from heavyweights like PayPal to scrappy young startups are tripping over themselves to help you pay bills, transfer funds and manage your investments using websites or mobile apps, with nary a soiled, crumpled dollar bill in sight.
"We are changing the way people think about money," says French-born entrepreneur Marc Rochman. His startup for paying online with gift cards, Openbucks, was one of dozens that presented their latest tech tools at the recent Future of Money & Technology Summit in San Francisco. "You can't squeeze a $20 bill through your smartphone screen, so we digitize it for you."
Mobile payment is a huge business that's about to get even bigger. By this time next year, according to a Juniper Research study, the combined market for all types of mobile payments could reach more than $600 billion worldwide, which would make it twice as large as it was a year ago. That's an awful lot of clicks-to-pay.
Here are three companies that shared their products at the summit:
Want to shop online but hate the idea of getting a credit card billï»? three weeks later? Don't even have a credit card in the first place? Or for privacy reasons, you don't want your purchase to show up on a statement? Openbucks may be your solution.
Rochman calls his 2-year-old Mountain View startupï»? "The Gift Card Payment Network."
"We're like the Visa of the
prepaid market," says Rochman, originally from the city of Lille in northern France. "Like Visa, we connect retailers, including Subway and CVS, with online merchants."
Here's how it works: You buy a prepaid card worth, say $20, when you're having lunch at Subway. When you're ready to pay later for something online at a participating site, including games, you click "Pay with Gift Card" and enter the code on the back. Because it's so simple, says Rochman, it's lightning fast. "You can complete your transaction in five seconds or less.
"It's great for teens who might not have credit cards, or people who want to stay confidential and not spread their credit card information all over the Internet, or people who are concerned about online safety."
Rochman says cards for the VC-funded Openbucks network are available at more than 50,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada and can be spent at thousands of online sites, all listed on the Openbucks website. Retailers are happy, he says, because more than half of the people who buy or reload their gift cards end up making an additional purchase. And he says merchants, who pay a small fee to Openbucks each time a card is redeemed, get an inflow of first-time customers.
Leo Rocco, the fast-talking pitchman behind Gopago, says his payment app is "re-imagining the way consumers and brick-and-mortar businesses use smartphones for mobile commerce." A 34-year-old New Yorker with a mechanical engineering degree, Rocco first got interested in mobile payments one day in 2007 when he went to grab beers at a Giants game just as Barry Bonds stepped up to home plate.
"I was waiting 10 minutes in the concession line and missed his home run," he says. There had to be some way to speed up the process and avoid waiting in a queue, he thought, by using a cellphone to order in advance. Two years later, he started Gopago, now a free download on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. Recently, after an investment by JPMorgan Chase, Rocco says, things took off. "In the past two months, we've signed up 550 merchants in San Francisco alone."
It's easy: Fire up the app, choose a nearby participating merchant, peruse the menu, choose your selection (medium pizza with olives and sausage, a Coke, and a small salad, for example), click to add a gratuity of 15, 18 or 20 percent, then place your order using the credit card you'd previously entered into your profile. A message comes back from the pizzeria, telling you exactly when you can pick up the order.
The transaction moves like a hot knife through butter, with only five or six quick clicks from start to finish. Rocco says the app "gives you, the consumer, VIP service and you own the ordering and payment steps, not some guy running your credit card in the backroom. You're basically getting into a virtual queue, so you can order something at Starbucks as you're walking down the street, then walk right pass the line and your order's waiting for you."
Like other mobile-payment apps, Gopago reduces "friction" in the ordering process. "No more need to use the telephone to order ahead," Rocco says. "Gopago lets you use your smartphone to communicate and in the process, to optimize people's time and make the ordering process more efficient."
Clover is another free app trying to provide iPhone and Android users with that cashless, ï»?lickety-split commercial experience. Billing itself as "the one-tap payment app," Clover promises to "take the pain out of payment."
CEO Bryan Lamkin uses the word "frictionless" a lot, too. The former Adobe (ADBE) executive is all about speed, starting the moment you first get wind of Clover. "It's built to download fast," he says. "Within 60 seconds, you're up and running."
The cool thing about Clover is its ability to send and receive digitized payments to and from other people. It's all smooth as silk: You deposit, say, $25, from a credit card into your Clover account. On a clean and simple home screen, you tap "Pay $" and enter a friend's name, phone number or email address. Enter an amount and short explanation and click Pay. The recipient gets a text or email. They click the URL and if they've downloaded the Clover app, the payment pops into their account.
Friday, 4 May 2012
China's agriculture future adopts US technology - UkrAgroConsult
As the most populous nation on Earth, China has intermittently been seen as the solution to the problem created by the ability of US farmers to produce more than they can sell at a profitable price. Sometimes the discussion is focused on cotton; at other times it is corn or soybeans. Today, it is pork—on the hoof that is.
A recent Reuters article, provides an explanation for the surge in the import of live pigs into China. From 2002 to 2007, China imported a total of 13,000 head of swine, while from 2008-2011, live swine imports totaled 39,000 head—15,000 in 2011 alone.
According to Reuters, China is importing breeding swine, “capitalizing on decades of cutting-edge US agricultural research.” Presently, “the focus on livestock genetics also represents an emerging economic bonanza for two of the most powerful American industries: technology and agriculture. Worldwide, the United States exported a record $664 million worth of breeding stock and genetic material like semen.” Depending on the species, the advanced genetics provides farmers worldwide with better daily rates of gain, better feed conversion rates, and larger litters.
While this market is lucrative for farmers who specialize in producing breeding sows and supplying semen from productive animals, it has long-term implications for US meat and grain producers.
As US per capita consumption of red meat has declined over the last decade, exports of pork have nearly quadrupled, and beef exports have recovered from the BSE event. This increase in exports has provided a bright spot in an otherwise stagnating market.
With potential major markets like China purchasing, not animals for slaughter, but animals with all of the best genetics the US has developed, the future potential of that market begins to look somewhat limited as the Chinese begin to gear up to move hog production out of the backyards of millions of farmers and into modern high-production facilities like those used across much of the US.
A separate Reuters article “China’s voracious appetite spurs farm expansion,” lists 10 firm in China, some with links to the US meat industry, that are gearing up to use the imported genetics to increase their production and slaughter capacity to meet the growing Chinese demand for meat which has increased by 10 percent over the last five years. These 10 firms represent both producers of hogs and large-scale meat processors.
Even if the US can continue to increase its meat exports to China in the near future, this all-out emphasis on domestic production by the Chinese has to put a damper on the potential for US meat exports. And there is no guarantee that with this genetic jump-start from the US, the Chinese will not develop their own genetic research teams, reducing the need for imports of this valuable material.
The Reuters article points out that all of the chickens and hogs in China will need corn, providing a potential boon for corn and soybean farmers. As Mike Phillips, president of US Livestock Genetics Export in Salem, IL is quoted in the first Reuters article, “‘Genetics and nutrition go hand-in-hand…. The more they use our genetics, the more they’re going to need to import corn from the US and elsewhere.’”
The usual assumption on the part of US grain producers is that they will be the major beneficiary of such developments. While there may be some benefit to US grain farmers in the increase in Chinese demand and production of meat there is more to the story.
Between 2001 and 2011, the increase in the US corn yield was a paltry 6.6 percent due to weather-related yield loss over the last 2 years. China on the other hand has seen yields increase by 22 percent over the same period. In addition while total US corn production has increased by 30 percent over that same period, Chinese production has increased by 68 percent. Clearly the Chinese are going to be grudging importers of corn but, as applicable, eager importers of US corn genetics.
But competition for supplying Chinese corn demands is not limited to just Chinese farmers. Farmers outside the US and China have increased their production of corn by 46 percent over the 2001-2011 period. At the same time the farmers outside the US and China have seen their corn exports triple. Where their corn exports were once (in 2001) just a third the size of US exports, in 2011 they were 23 percent higher than US corn exports.
As US corn farmers have hustled to meet the demands of a growing domestic corn ethanol market, farmers outside the US and China have gained a dominant position in the export marketplace.
The agricultural technology that gave US farmers a competitive advantage for many years is now spreading worldwide. And while the sale of that technology may continue to benefit a small numbers of farmers and agribusinesses, it also means that most US producers of meat and grain face an increasingly competitive worldwide agricultural marketplace.
westernfarmpress
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Rice Technology Park to be launched in Koppal - Economic Times
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Monday, 23 April 2012
LA Times Taliban photos and mobile technology in the battlefield, drones and ... - Washington Post (blog)
Following the photos in the LA Times of soldiers in Afghanistan with dead Taliban members, CNAS’ Andrew Exum writes about how the U.S. military will be forced to deal with mobile technology on the battlefield. (Bloomberg)
“In February, President Obama signed into law a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that requires the agency — on a fairly rapid schedule — to write rules opening U.S. airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles. This puts the FAA at the center of a potentially dramatic set of policy changes that stand to usher in a long list of direct and indirect benefits. But the FAA is not a privacy agency. And although real privacy concerns have arisen about these aircraft, asking the agency to take on the role of privacy czar for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would be a mistake,” write Ben Wittes and John Villasenor. (Washington Post)
“TARP and related interventions by the Federal Reserve helped reactivate credit markets long before they would have recovered on their own, helped to stabilize the housing market, helped save the U.S. auto industry and helped prevent recession from morphing into something worse. And they did so for far less than early estimates and prior rescues had suggested were possible,” writes Center on Budget and Policy Priorities scholar Jared Bernstein. (Washington Post)
AEI’s Jonah Goldberg on the art of the political distraction. (National Review)
Politico’s Arena asks: Can presidential dog taunts be brought to heel? Brookings’ Darrell West answers.
Room for Debate asks: Is prostitution safer when it’s legal? (New York Times)
Spring cleaning: Tom Ricks says to throw out the all-volunteer military. (Washington Post)
Mobile technology may help curb nicotine addiction, new study shows - Chicago Tribune
Quitting smoking is an inside job, but mobile technology may help, say researchers at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh, who recently published a nicotine-addiction study.
Their findings, which used mobile technology and new software to track smokers as they tried to quit, offered insights into why some tobacco smokers quit the habit on the first try while others have to quit repeatedly, or never succeed.
The study, published this month in Prevention Science, "demonstrates the potential for technology to help us figure out the processes involved in withdrawal," said Stephanie Lanza, scientific director of The Methodology Center at Penn State and a lead author on the study.Researchers tracked 304 participants, all of whom were all long-time smokers and consumed at least a pack a day on average. During the six-week study, subjects used handheld computers and smart phones to reply to surveys sent to them randomly five times a day. They answered questions about their emotional state, urge to smoke and whether they were smoking.
New software helped scientists analyze several variables that fluctuated over time, such as intensity of urge and emotional state. "Without software like this, we would have no idea how to look at these data," said Lanza.
The results of the study, which was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, mirror how tough nicotine addiction is to break, said Lanza, who describes the process of nicotine withdrawal and addiction as a complex stew of biological, social and psychological factors.
One finding was that those smokers who relapsed quickly did not have their cravings drop the way they did in the group that was successful, she said. In the successful group, she said, cravings dropped by half in the first two weeks.
"Our hope is that this kind of software paired with data gathered through mobile devices will give tobacco researchers new information on how to create interventions that are personally tailored, since everyone's withdrawal is different," said Lanza, adding that the technology methods could be used to study other addictions.
"The bright spot to me is that research is shifting to help us understand how to break this addiction," said Lanza.
mjameson@tribune.com or 407-420-5158
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