v.19 n. 15 – Released April 6, 2015
As technology evolves and startups jump on these advancements, a few industries are fundamentally changing. And as these industries push forward, they create even greater advancements of their tech.
Curious what market sector is most likely to be disrupted in the next few years, we asked a group of startup founders the following question:
“What industry do you believe is going to have the biggest advancements in technology in the next five years, and why?”
Here’s what YEC community members had to say:
A number of supplements marketed for weight loss and improved athletic performance contain a synthetic compound that is similar to the drug amphetamine, and that compound has not been tested in people, according to a new study.
What’s more, the Food and Drug Administration has known about the presence of this drug in supplements for two years, but still has not warned consumers about the issue or acted to take the supplements off the market, according to the study.
The FDA “did a lot of hard work to figure out this brand-new designer stimulant was in supplements … and then failed to inform the public,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study. “It’s inexplicable and inexcusable,” Cohen said.
If you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right?
Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station!
Sound a bit funny?
Well, for about 500 towns across the northern United States , that’s where the best watches were found.
Why were the best watches found at the train station?
The railroad company wasn’t selling the watches, not at all.
The telegraph operator was.
Continue reading “Buying a watch in 1880 — history you probably didn’t know! | Author Unknown”
During the last quarter of 2014, we were approached by a funded startup based in Boston to identify an app development company to build an app for their European launch. The skill sets were quite niche, and the yearly spend would cross $100K, so we had to approach platform evangelists to identify some development studios that they’d recommend based on first-hand experience.
We picked the Australia and Indonesia markets because we knew we had to provide some choice at both ends of the spectrum, and the startup had an Australian connection.
The platform company’s Australian and Singaporean offices recommended their preferred teams in the above markets, based on first-hand experience of launching some very popular apps. While we did expect price differences for comparable quality, we did not expect a 15x difference between geographically close markets with identical skills.
THE LEARN-TO-CODE MOVEMENT has expanded well beyond the realm of hobbyists. As President Obama acknowledged just last month, the many coding bootcamps that speckle the country are becoming important economic drivers, helping train American workers in the skills they need to fill an ever expanding pool of tech jobs and in a fraction of the time it would take them to pursue a four-year degree.
But just who are these daring folks who drop their day jobs in pursuit of a career in tech, and what, if anything, do they get for the $10,000 price of admission that most of these bootcamps charge?
A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond reveals that the number of community banks dropped by a whopping 41 percent between 2007 and 2013. That’s bad news for small business owners, who rely heavily on financing from small, local banks.
Even more troubling is the potential culprit. Analysis by the Fed suggests that the Dodd-Frank Act is at least partially responsible.
A Harvard University study shows that the rate of decline in the community bank share of commercial banking assets has doubled since the passage of the law in 2010. Moreover, almost all of the decline in the number of community banks in recent years has resulted from a cessation in bank formation during the current economic recovery, the Richmond Fed reports.
v.19 n. 14 – Released April 1, 2015
It is a common complaint that most mobile phones look the same these days.
But designer Sean Miles has created one that should stand out from the crowd.
It is the first mobile phone made entirely from recycled and natural products, he says.
The phone’s casing – which is integrated into the phone – is made from recycled resin and specially treated grass clippings.
On a cold Denver night in 2010, Steve Katsaros walked past a building under construction that was lit up like a Christmas tree by incandescent bulbs strung along each floor, all powered by a diesel generator. “I wondered about all the fuel being used and the pollution caused by keeping those lights on,” he recalls. The next morning, Katsaros, then a patent agent at a law firm and a trained mechanical engineer, woke up and sketched a design for a solar-powered light bulb. Four days later, he filed for a patent.
