Tom Raftery's weekly newsletter - Issue #4

Hi all, and welcome to the 4th edition of this newsletter. We're maintaining a greater than 36% open rate on the newsletter, which is a sign we're curating the content reasonably well 

There were some fascinating stories rise to the surface this week, as well as some hugely important ones - I'll let you decide which is which :)

And with that, on with the newsletter. Enjoy

The Internet of Things (IoT)

IBM teamed up with Pfizer to launch an experiment this week to test whether they could jointly use the Internet of Things and analytics to test the effectiveness of medications for Parkinson's

And this week also saw the (limited) launch of Thington! an IoT platform which uses AI and the conversational communication format which is rapidly becoming common, to 'talk' to, and hear from items in your home or office

IBM, Pfizer launch joint experiment to help measure Parkinson’s symptoms using IoT and analytics — techcrunch.com What happens when you put a technology company together with a drug company and try to come up with unique new ways to understand Parkinson's disease? You end..

We’d like to introduce you to Thington! — Welcome to Thington — medium.com Today we want to show you a new product that we’ve been working on for the last year. It’s called Thington and it’s here…

Energy

The first story in the energy section comes from Bloomberg, and this well researched piece has lots of data showing just how well renewable energy is doing in the world markets, and why fossil fuel's days are numbered. But from a purely economic perspective

While several of the larger tech companies (with the curious exception of Facebook) rowed in behind President Obama's Clean Power Plan which is currently being contested in the US courts

Wind and Solar Are Crushing Fossil Fuels - Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com Record clean energy investment outpaces gas and coal 2 to 1.

Government subsidies have helped wind and solar get a foothold in global power markets, but economies of scale are the true driver of falling prices: The cost of solar power has fallen to 1/150th of its level in the 1970s, while the total amount of installed solar has soared 115,000-fold. 

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon back EPA in challenge of clean energy rules | The Verge — www.theverge.com Tech giants are gathering in support of the Obama administration's contested plan to shift the US toward clean energy. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon joined together to file a court brief on...

CleanTech (catch-all term so I can include other stories I liked!)

Our first link in this section marks an historic day - the day WhatsApp made all communications on its service (voice, text, files) end-to-end encrypted. With over a billion users on its platform, in one fell swoop WhatsApp have delivered a huge blow to the efforts those who wanted to weaken access to encryption, as it will be extremely hard to roll this back

And the second story is about a rising star in the blockchain world - a company called Ethereum, a company who have developed a highly regarded, programmable blockchain

Forget Apple vs. the FBI: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People | WIRED — www.wired.com This morning, WhatsApp made the scope of the Apple-FBI encryption battle look kinda small.

Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer – Silicon Valley Data Science — www.svds.com The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new currency like Bitcoin. There’s been a lot of attention on Ethereum recently as its market capitalization has risen 500% since the beginning of the year to reach $400m (at the time of this writing). Some of this increase might be attributed to Microsoft’s tacit approval of the technology with their release of the “Ethereum Blockchain as a Service” platform on Azure.

Climate

Finally, it would seem that scientists have been overestimating the reflectivity of clouds, and their ability to shield us from global warming. We could be in for a warmer world than was previously anticipated

Global warming may be far worse than thought, cloud analysis suggests | Environment | The Guardian — www.theguardian.com Researchers find clouds contain more liquid – as opposed to ice – than was previously believed, threatening far greater increase in temperatures

In conclusion

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