Markman Capital Insight

Another Apple Design Flub, Cruz Campaign Is Tech-Savvy

To learn how to improve your results in the market dramatically by buying options on stocks like Ford and Tesla, take a two-week trial to my special service, Tactical Options: Click here. Members have made more than 5x their money this year.This is Change Log — my semi-weekly observations and links on the intersection of tech, commerce,...

To learn how to improve your results in the market dramatically by buying options on stocks like Ford and Tesla, take a two-week trial to my special service, Tactical Options: Click here. Members have made more than 5x their money this year.


This is Change Log — my semi-weekly observations and links on the intersection of tech, commerce, health, culture and markets


Secom’s Internet of Things security drone has a neat twist: it not only records images of intruders but it will actually chase them to get better pictures of faces or license plates. There is one unfortunate catch. The drone has a maximum speed of just 6 mph… As if parenting teens wasn’t tough enough, Microsoft might build a life size hologram of virtual assistant Cortana for its augmented reality headset … Apple’s new battery case is ugly, like Quasimodo ugly but it’s still just a battery case. Given the response online you would think Cupertino did something truly terrible like insert popup ads in the App Store or something. Oh, wait, it did do that… If you’ll just ignore the politics of it all, the Cruz for President campaign is a technological marvel complete with state of the art data and behavioral science research and even “geo-fencing” for clever micro targeting campaigns. Think of the possibilities if Cruz actually believed in science … Some guy spent two years of his life painstakingly screen-scraping every single episode of the campy 1966 TV show ‘Batman’ so he could catalog all of the weird labels. C’mon, of course Catwoman straddling a shiny purple rocket pointed at an open window is a ‘getaway rocket’…

Self-Driving Cars: Lidar, the $75k gadget that allows Google’s self-driving cars to see the road – it’s the goofy looking bump on the roof above – is getting a big price cut. New $250 units could mean autonomy for almost every car. Read at Washington Post here

Blockchain: According to economist/raconteur John Mauldin, Bitcoin 2.0 has a better chance of becoming the world reserve currency than the Chinese yuan. Read at Business Insider here

Biotech: Imagine a world where scientists create engineered organisms to clean-up oil spills or remove the acidity from soil. That world is entirely possible with gene-editing. Read at Dezeen here

Machine Learning: A new type of artificial intelligence eschews deep neural networks for Bayesian Programming Language to help machines learn like humans, fast. Read at New York Times here

Augmented Reality: Magic Leap has put out some very impressive demos but it still doesn’t have a product and now it’s raising another $827 million in funding. Read at Fortune here

Biotech: A startup wants to turn red blood cells into drug delivery vehicles to target hard-to-treat diseases. The genetic modification could open up many new therapies. Read at MIT Tech Review here

Health Sciences: Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and Google will build cost effective surgical robots that will use machine learning to tell surgeons where they should make incisions. Read Reuters here