Blackphone, keep your personal data

Innovation: The foldable home

Kent Larson, architect and professor at the MIT Media Lab, introduced the latest innovation output laboratories Masschusetts Institute of Technology, the famous Boston University. This project, called CityHome aims to simplify the lives of young professionals seeking housing in cities under increasing gentrification, like New York or San Francisco. Home City is in the form of a module of 60 square meters which unfolds in an apartment of 256 square meters near a simple movement of the hand, like control commands of the Wii console.

This new model is based on a RoboWall technology: a module inside the device allows you to reconfigure the interior to the environment, and options include a guest room, a storage space or two workrooms . Furniture can thus unfold in a single movement of the hand, a table for 14 people can be stored to make room for a double bed, without the need for special physical efforts.

Several solutions have already been mentioned: thus, the former mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg supports the marketing of a flat scale model, while Kent Larson prefers to focus on space focusing on systems and functional storage offering a more affordable price. Larson wants to go beyond the conceptual proposal and hopes to commercialize the prototype already available in the premises of the Media Lab shortly.

Product: Blackphone protects the drift of the NSA and Google incursions

Faced with repeated misuse of personal data scandals, both by monitoring agencies state that the giants of Silicon Valley, a new phone co-produced by Silent Circle and Geekshpone provides comparable smartphones basic mobile experience but continuously protecting user information. Phil Zimmermann, Silent Circle and Javier Agüera in charge of the project Blackphone discussed various issues and technical devices that surround this new product, marketed a priori by the end of June.

Blackphone allows eg to browse the internet anonymously and encrypt messages and calls (audio and video) to prevent any form of data recovery. The first model to be sold for around 629 dollars and is based on Android operating system. Thus, by communicating a blackphone to another, the entire communication is encrypted and defies hacking attempt. This service also works when communicating with another type of phone.

More innovative still Blackphone protects data brewed applications and operators: Facebook or Google for example, be unable to monetize their applications with personal data of users. The company has announced several partnerships with operators from different continents, and plans to deliver several million models in the second half of 2014. Zimmermann has also announced that U.S. government agencies, Australian or Canadian would be interested in strategic partnerships. Silent Circle had conducted its first fundraiser in late May at Cain Capital LCC, totaling nearly $ 30 million.

Evolution: Vinod Khosla predicts the advent of a new personalized medicine

Keynote conference, one of the most respected business angels Valley, Vinod Khosla, took this opportunity to recall some of its key ideas about the future of medicine and the care industry. The co-founder of Sun Microsystems, whose tweets and articles are closely followed by investors and entrepreneurs in San Francisco, had already announced in late 2012 with a bang that within a decade, nearly 80% of doctors would replaced by machines. Alarming detail in his article "Do we need doctors or algorithms? "Under more eloquent, and in which Khosla will even compare the current practice of medicine to voodoo science or of medieval witchcraft, given the persistence of randomness in the development of diagnostics. His firm venture capital and focuses on medical innovations that capitalize on the mobile channel, and offer client-centered services.

Khosla Ventures has invested in AliveCor, an iPhone case that allows you to instantly measure your heart rate or CellScope, an application that turns a smartphone into a portable microscope used to detect ear infections. Late last week, Khosla had addressed a public directly affected by the evolution of medicine: the students of the School of Medicine, Stanford, on the occasion of a conference on Big Data and biomedicine. The goal of many start-ups and laboratories in Silicon Valley is to invest more in the "Data Science" that can bring more benefits to the evolution of medicine that all life science together. The growing wave of wearables as FitBit that Khosla also wore wrist is the first gateway to this new type of predictive medicine in the American public.