Take the Middle Man Out of More Transactions

Uber and AirBnB are in the vanguard of the P2P marketplace model -- their gradual but ultimately huge success of is opening up breakout growth, heralding an explosion in startups with similar models: Taskrabbit, Fivver and others. Marketplace startups are unique because they aren’t just serving one base of customers. These enterprises connect buyers and sellers, service providers and consumers. Their models work when they ensure users are having a good experience with each other, as well as with the respective companies.

Can you tell I am a big fan of P2P exchange-based marketplaces? Companies like AirBnB and Uber have their detractors — some very legitimate: there are some serious issues around discrimination, harassment and worse that these companies have to continue to address. But they also continue to battle against unfair regulations. Laws need to catch up to this new model, not hinder growth and progress.

Obviously, there is growing interest in services like ride-sharing and short-term rentals, where demand is not easily met by traditional means due to capital investment constraints. These new enterprises are simply too big and popular to be pressured to shut down. Nor should they — each new generation reveals in a new world order with new economic realities. Robot cars (and more disruptive, robot trucks) are *ahem* around the corner. Even money (in the form of crypto-currencies, traditionally controlled by governments, is throwing off the shackles of authoritarian overreach.

Why Service Containers are the Future of SOA

For many developers, using the cloud to design and test apps makes sense when they must develop a business application that reaches many via the internet. They need to host it somewhere. The cloud is a utility. If a developer finds that, today, Azure is the most useful, they will deploy with them. If AWS offers something they need or has better terms, they will switch over to them. If the cloud is a utility, then we all want that ability to switch between systems.

Containers offer that. With the benefits of agility, elasticity, and automation of container technology will provide new capabilities to developers supporting web and mobile apps. Containers enable developers to craft environments to spin up new instances, free of constraints and tool conflicts. Keeping web services in containers means developers can also collaborate with system administrators by sharing updates for changes, linking, and testing.

The nexus of container implementation is a cloud orchestration layer for provisioning the infrastructure required to support containers. This enables live migration and monitoring of service resources after the migration. Because containers reduce complexity via abstractions, they remove the underlying infrastructure dependencies. This ability to standardize service architecture with managed distribution and service orientation ensures that containers will lead the way to the uptake of SOA principles.

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Universal Basic Income Experiment in Finland

UBI is gaining test environments.

UBI advocates argue that many jobs don’t pay enough to even make rent and buy groceries: people can work full-time and still be below the poverty line. It’s easy to understand why people on the left would advocate for a guaranteed income, but a version of this concept is also popular among libertarians, who see UBI as a way to shrink the welfare state. For example, you could take away food stamps, medicare, and housing subsidies, and replace all of it with this one flat sum.

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It's not really a UBI experiment, it's more of an unemployment benefit experiment in disguise. Here's the NYT article referenced which essentially deconstructs the entire experiment...

Helo Drone Taxi Test in Dubai

A driverless flying drone has begun testing in Dubai, with hopes that the volocopter taxi two passengers on journeys of up to 30 minutes by air around the city.

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Just Get on the Streets already

Many experts agree —self-driving technology is already capable of making our roads significantly safer. A study from the RAND Corporation suggests self-driving technology be rolled out despite its imperfections.

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Crypto Currency Funds... Deleted. $300 million gone

A developer trigger a bug that locked up multi user wallets, then, deleted the contents...

Effectively, a user accidentally stole hundreds of wallets simultaneously, and then set them on fire in a panic while trying to give them back.

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Ban the Car... from Cities

With so many deaths that could be avoided, many wonder why we should allow cars into cities...

"More than 40,000 Americans were killed by cars in 2016 — the equivalent of a fully-loaded Boeing 747 falling out of the sky once every three days. It's more than the 33,000 annual gun deaths, and more than the 20,000-plus people killed by synthetic opioids that year. Half of those automobile fatalities occurred in urban areas; about 6,000 of them were pedestrians."

Read why cars should be banned from cities...