Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs are a new and radical way to raise money for companies and blockchain-based financial systems. And the method is exploding. Tezos recently raised a stunning $232 million, and eight times more money this year has already been raised than in all of 2016. So what is it? Where is the money going? And what does it all mean? More
Passwords are one of tech's biggest problems--too hard to remember and still insecure. Now that many of us use fingerprints to unlock a phone, why can't we use biometrics to replace passwords? Soon it should happen, once we deploy artificial intelligence alongside biometrics. It's still hard to know if the biometric data is from a real person and not a "spoof." More
Analytics & Data Arts & Culture From the Magazine
R. Luke DuBois is a man of many talents: musician, visual artist, and data scientist. In a recent interview with Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick, he spoke about his inspirations and gave a behind-the-scenes look at his unique dual video portrait of Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (From the latest issue of Techonomy Magazine) More
Analytics & Data Cities Community Insights
Michigan's leaders want it to become a tech hub. But low-wage work is increasingly the norm, and Detroit still has very far to go. Policymakers aim to leverage the considerable tech resources of existing industries, and plan to use the Internet of Things as another key element for a leap forward. Smart traffic lights are going in now. More
Analytics & Data Articles We Like Government Security & Privacy
Do you want your photo flashed on a sign at an intersection? If not, don't jaywalk in China. Leave aside what happens if you're a dissident traveling in a new region. Here's a headline the WSJ used for this must-read article: "The All-Seeing Surveillance State Feared in the West is a Reality in China." More
For American healthcare to improve, institutions must be able to share data. But they can’t. HIPAA and restrictive consent forms are among the challenges to data accessibility. But new approaches are emerging, and it may usher a new open data era. More
Analytics & Data Community Insights Startup Culture
The sharing economy is stagnant. Rides may still be going up, but rooms, crowdfunding, and other services are flat or declining. The reason can be summed up in a word: trust. Millennials are the sharing economy's best hope--but will it be enough? More
Analytics & Data Community Insights
In the 21st century brace yourself for algorithms made by algorithms. AI has suddenly become able to equal and soon to surpass homo sapiens in what we thought were unique human faculties that required consciousness: vision and language. More
Analytics & Data Finance Security & Privacy
The coming world of the Internet of Everything means driverless cars making per-minute toll payments, lightbulbs that pick an energy vendor, IP royalties paid by devices themselves in real time, and investment decisions made by robo-advisors. This more efficient world will mean changes for banks, investment, and the way all of us live. More
Analytics & Data Community Insights
A growing number of companies are finding ways to become "corporate data philanthropists." Your company may have data that can be released for public benefit. Data donation leverages the power of the crowd: more people to analyze it, test hypotheses, create new knowledge, detect patterns, and use it for social innovation. More
Who determines the values behind artificial intelligence? Complicated decisions, even life and death ones, will soon be made by software. This groundbreaking article explores the complex choices facing society, business, and technologists. “We should not let Silicon Valley be the mission control for humanity,” argues one futurist. More
Analytics & Data Jobs Techonomy Events
Are we headed towards a world where machines do everything? Are jobs drying up because of AI and automation? It's a growing theme in our work at Techonomy. Discussions at our recent conference and a variety of stories and encounters with experts have underscored for us how hard it is to draw a firm conclusion about whether to be excited or scared. More
Analytics & Data Jobs Partner Insights
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the single most disruptive technology the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution. Accenture research suggests it could double economic growth rates in the U.S. and other developed countries. And while many believe AI will supplant humans, we think it will instead mostly enable people to do more exceptional work. More
Dinesh could read a Bloomberg terminal like a radiologist reads an x-ray. He had learned the arcane tools that were supposed to assure his indispensability. Now it turns out he’d taught some damned machine to do his job better than he could. “WHAT THE F**K AM I GOING TO DO?!!” he shouted at the empty office. More
Boston and Barcelona, Spain have something in common with Yelp and Zillow–they’re taking advantage of open data. Along with all the ways it’s reshaping business, opening up data to the use of outsiders is beginning also to reshape how city, state, and federal agencies work. Socrata, a privately-held government-data platform provider based in Seattle, is making a business out of facilitating this trend. More
Analytics & Data Business Community Insights
Technology innovation is disrupting industries and enabling new business models at an accelerating pace, writes Ciena's CEO. The internet's ubiquity is converging with other trends including virtualized computing power and storage plus open source software to create a “utility platform” that facilitates rapid change in a wide range of businesses. So embrace it. The velocity of industry transformation is about to go to hyper speed. More
As the Zika virus begins a worrisome spread in Florida, cloud-based healthcare services company athenahealth is using big data to seek out those in danger and then reach out. Working with local healthcare providers and a rich database of individuals, it has winnowed out 1850 people at serious risk and provided preventive information. More
Analytics & Data Community Insights Jobs
The media is latching onto AI as the next big technology trend. But the hype around AI has led to misguided expectations about what’s actually possible. While we are steadily making progress in various sorts of machine learning, the reality is that today’s AI solutions are still critically dependent on humans. More
Analytics & Data Business Internet of Things
There’s a big gap between today's smart virtual assistants and the futuristic robot-butlers of fiction that anticipate our every need. For the foreseeable future, it will still take a human touch to understand how people assess value and solve problems creatively. Still, in the context of IoT, on-demand everything, and ubiquitous analytics, tech and humans are coming closer to jointly becoming “trusted advisors.” More
Analytics & Data Business Society
How big an impact will artificial intelligence have on business and society? Should we fear it? What will it mean for jobs? At a recent Techonomy salon dinner discussion on AI, top leaders from Accenture, IBM, SAP, and Verizon, among others, gave some fascinating answers. More
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