Smart phones are the new cigarettes

I only smoked for a short period in my life - somewhere between the ages of 15 and 23. And really, I don't think I could ever call myself a proper smoker. Even at my most nicotine infused I probably smoked no more than 5 cigarettes a day.

Back then you could smoke everywhere of course. Not just in bars, but on tops of busses, in cinemas, even in airplanes. I always thought it was faintly ridiculous to have a smoking section on planes but hey...

The thing is though, I don't think I was ever really addicted to Nicotine.

So why did I smoke? Well…some of it was a desire to fit in…some of it was a desire to rebel. But I think more importantly it was the most incredible prop.

Standing alone at the bar? light a cigarette. It will give you something to lean on - something to do with your hands. And you'll feel less awkward, less embarrassed about standing there with no one to talk to.

Waiting for the bus? Light a cigarette. Pulling on the smoke will relive the boredom and give you a focus for your wandering mind.

And of course "needing a light" is THE best excuse for speaking to someone you find attractive. In fact, I’m convinced that a lot of my generation wouldn't have been born at all if our parents weren't puffing away like Serge Gainsbourg in his final years.

I’ve been a non smoker for 20 years now, and I’ve no intention of starting again. But it occurred to me the other day just how much the smart phone has become the modern version of the cigarette.

You’re at a conference sitting on your own. You don’t know anyone and you’re waiting for the next speaker to come on stage. You feel a bit awkward, a bit out of place. What do you do?

Well if you’re anything like me you’ll reach for your phone. Sure we need to check our emails from time to time, to tweet, to text…whatever. But isn’t a part of it just having something to do?

Something to make us feel a little less silly and a little less naked?

And I know I’m not alone. The other day I was waiting at the platform in a suburban station. Every single person I counted was looking at their smartphones. Were they just looking for distraction on the way home, something to make the time go quicker? Or is it more than that? Are we so afraid of being fully present in the moment that we reach for our favourite prop, our electronic security blanket?

In our culture, there is pressure to interact, to engage, to do…even if we are alone. To sit and just ‘be’ feels deeply alien…and faintly embarrassing.

And maybe a great prop, be it a smart phone or a cigarette, helps us avoid doing just that. Being naked, facing the world as it really is in all its boredom and mundaneness.

“You’re never alone with a Strand”, was one of the most famous strap lines in British advertising. It referred to a brand of cigarettes popular in the 1950s, advertised by a solitary man in a trench coat and trilby hat.

The trilby hat and the trench coat are long gone now of course, but maybe the cigarettes live on…in high resolution.

This Virtual-Reality Headset Will Change Everything

Earlier this year, Facebook bought a virtual reality company called Oculus for $2 billion.

Oculus came to BI's big conference, Ignition, this year. They bought the latest version of their VR headset.

I tried it and it was incredible.

It's very hard to describe what it's like to use Oculus.

You put the headset on (over your glasses, if, like me, you need t0), stick a pair of earbuds in your ears, and suddenly it feels as if you are in another place.

For example, you might find yourself standing against a rail at the top of a very tall building in a rainy city at night. Look over the rail below you, and cars are moving on the streets. You can walk around the platform, and the world changes relative to you just as it does in real life. If you are afraid of heights, your palms will start to sweat and you will become as uncomfortable as you would be in real life.

When I was wearing the Oculus headset, I kept thinking about a 1995 movie from producer James Cameron called "Strange Days." It features a technology people can use to "jack in" or "wire-trip." They put a bunch of wires on their heads, and suddenly it feels as if they are in someone else's body, someplace else.

Oculus almost feels as if you are "jacking in."

The experience is so incredible that I'm now certain that Oculus VR, or some other VR technology, is going to change the world in humongous ways.

Starting with the obvious stuff, and moving more abstract, Oculus will change:

Gaming. Plenty of immersive video games already exist in which you can move around entire cities and interact with hundreds of characters. The "Assassin's Creed" and "Grand Theft Auto" series are best known for this. Right now, you have to consume these worlds through a flat screen. The leap into virtual reality is a short one.

Commerce. There's already an Oculus program in which you can view your avatar in the mirror. Imagine dressing that avatar in clothes to see how they look before buying them. Or, instead of looking at pictures of a car's interior online, actually getting into it to see if you like the trim you've selected.

Education. You can already take classes at Harvard online. Sitting at a virtual desk instead of watching a video on a monitor will be nice. But education will change more radically than that. Imagine being able to travel with a Harvard professor inside the human body to see how cancer cells grow in the bloodstream.

Sports. The first way Oculus will change watching sports is in the creation of cameras that can take in 360-degree views and be placed courtside at NBA games. You'll be able to put on an Oculus headset, pay a fee, and watch LeBron James from what feels like just feet away. Rumor has it, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is already geeked about that possibility. Eventually, it's easy to imagine that Oculus cameras will become as wearable as GoPros. Then you'll be able to watch games from the referees' perspective — or LeBron's.

Narrative. The way we tell stories has never stopped evolving. First there were oral traditions. Then epic poems. Then novels. Then film. Then video games. Next, you'll put on Oculus headsets. Sometimes, the narratives will be first-person stories, and it will feel as if you are seeing the world through a character's eyes. Other times, you'll float through worlds omnipresent, knowing characters' thoughts. Whole industries will form around people who figure out how best to tell stories in the medium.

Sex. Oculus porn is going to be far more immersive than the static images people used to look at in magazines or even videos on the internet. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with how immersive.

Aging. In the real world, knees give out and you can't play tennis or basketball anymore. Imagine playing ball at 90. Also: How long can a human body live if all it needs to do is take input from VR? Could humans live for hundreds of years?

Sense of self. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, you will be able to put on a headset, a pair of gloves, and a body suit and feel as if you are a different person in a different place. Do that enough — substitute your five senses for virtual input enough times — and you may begin to shed aspects of your identity you once thought fixed: race, gender, age, nationality. On the bright side, people may become more empathetic and less tribal. On the negative side, people may abandon their flesh selves, leaving behind loved ones.

3D Printing: Now and the Future

Somewhere, over a mountain range, a failing airplane part needs to be replaced. What if, instead of waiting for someone to discover the problem during a routine safety check, the part could signal for its own replacement, create a record of its flaws and set into motion an evolution of its own stronger, future predecessor? Upon landing, the improved part, printed while the flight was still in the air, could be installed.

Is this is a fantasy, or a realistic picture of the future? Will flexible, one piece machines make today’s assemblages of rigid parts look like antiques? It’s one thing to imagine machines evolving, but what about people? The way we see ourselves and the world might soon seem ancient as well. As manufacturing and fabrication methods continue to evolve, inspired by biology itself, in an ever-closer relationship between the physical and digital, the distant future of what it means to be human might look as radically different as the distant past--only faster. What kind of world will this be when hermit crabs resembling famous landmarks are the new normal?

What Innovation Looks Like

The future seems less far away and more bespoke every day. And it will be filled with new characters, like these from the Bold Machines project, an animated film called Margo.

As with most advances that end up radically changing the world, 3D printing might seem like silly fun to those who haven’t been closely following the industry. Technology is improving at a rapid clip, however, and new methods for improving manufacturing techniques are constantly being announced.

Many of the jobs of the future don’t exist yet, but the Department of Energy is already focused on creating the skills that will fill the need with a program to train workers. Already, there are robots made entirely of 3D printed parts. The FDA recently approved 3D printing for facial implants, an economical way to create options for patients in developing nations or those with specific needs that can be best met with a customized prosthesis, and a 12-year-old Chinese boy with bone cancer has a 3D printed spine, which will enable him to walk again after spending two months lying flat in a hospital bed.

Random Mutations

Jordan Husney, Strategy Director at Undercurrent, does things like explore biorobotics through the creation of remote controlled Venus Flytraps and work onthis pen for a transformative museum visitor experience. He was instrumental in one of GE’s first forays into 3D printing, a Grabcad contest facilitated by Undercurrentthat offered the engineers and others who use the site a chance to optimize, through what is known as “additive manufacturing,” a heavy bracket similar to those in a jet engine. A winner was chosen from 659 entries. GE has continued to develop itscapacity for 3D printing engine parts. Husney’s conclusion? Hardware is beginning to act like software.

Husney told me something about one of the contest entries that grabbed my imagination. The bracket design came paired with an algorithm that generated random genetic mutations so the part could evolve in response to environmental pressures.

In Episode 2 of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s spectacular new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, genetic mutations and natural selection are explored in a way that brings the process to life. In addition to the random mutation that happens without our intervention, humans have long selected traits in order to guide transformation in animals and plants. The examples are many. We turned wolves into dogs, for example, and we’ve been genetically modifying agricultural products since the Sumerians and Babylonians. The creation of algorithms and machines capable of directing their own evolution is a radical new dimension unique to this period in human history. The earliest stage of genetic manufacturing, the creation of material that can assemble itself from a genetic blueprint, is underway.

“When things become digital, the pace of evolution rapidly increases,” Husney said. “Feedback loops become much tighter. As the pace increases, a much broader diversity of experimentation takes place.”

Additive manufacturing, he said, will rock your retail base.

The Arrival of a Mini-Me

Earlier this year, a box arrived at Science House with a very tiny version of me inside. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, the sandstone statue wore the lilac colored scarf, black boots and jeans I’d been wearing the day I was scanned byShapeways at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) to generate the 3D file that would be used to print a copy.

In the future, however, a replica won’t just be made of gypsum powder, dye and superglue, like the 5,000 tiny statues of people who attended the exhibit at MAD. We may get new organs printed, manufactured in a variety of ways, perhaps including dissolvable blood vessel networks printed in sugar to help those organs function.

Currently, 3D printers only create objects using a single material at a time. The world of 3D printing is going to change radically, Shapeways evangelist Duann Scott said, when machines can print using multiple materials simultaneously, enabling people to take ideas and turn them into products with time being the creators’ only investment. I use Shapeways to create my Treasure of the Sirens amphorae in precious metals including bronze, gold and platinum. The amphorae were pulled up from the sea. Ancient shipwrecks surround my ancestral island, where the mythological sirens once perched on black volcanic rocks to sing their songs about the future. Are the sirens real? Judge for yourself. I know for sure that the amphorae are, thanks to technology mixed with imagination.

Shapeways participated in the launch of Google’s #MadeWithCode project, during which girls heard from Mindy Kaling and Chelsea Clinton about coding and then created their own customized 3D printed bracelets. The company also just announced a partnership with Hasbro for printing copyrighted characters. Here’s hoping that this glimpse of the future will create an army of children who want to create the world they can imagine. Some of them are already well on their way.

Keep Management Happy (and Off Your Back!) In 2 Emails

All managers have expectations, and you need to keep your manager happy. In sales, this happiness is often measured daily or weekly. Some managers tell you right out what their expectations are. Others hint around it. Still others say nothing, and hope for good numbers. It is important to understand what the expectations are, because they will keep you from trying to reinvent the wheel. No matter what your manager's style is, get clear on the expectations, and adjust when they change.

Most management expectations are built on history in your market, and they’ve discovered which ratios and activities yield the desired results. Do as they ask. Eventually, you may discover that management isn’t as married to each activity as much as it is to hitting their numbers, and you can change tactics to get there. Maybe you’ll discover that the only thing that works is following their formula. The point is, the decisions you make about how to plan your work need to take management expectations into consideration, and meet their needs. If you don’t meet their needs, you will be replaced. It’s harsh, but it’s true.

A very effective tool for spending time efficiently is to keep management in the loop is to write the broad strokes of your plan for the week in a simple email, and send it to your manager. “I have follow ups with A, B, and C companies for sales calls. X, Y and Z have closing appointments scheduled. I’ll be cold-calling in Bergen County in the mid-week.” Send it on Friday night or Monday morning. No, telling her in a quick moment in the hallway isn’t enough! If your manager has specific expectations, you’ve told her the highlights of how you’re planning to meet them. If your manager has no expectations, she knows what you’re doing. And when your manager wants you to focus in a different area, she’ll write back or tell you. You’ll know before you blow your time on the wrong stuff.

This approach also seems to keep micro-managers off your back. Just remember to send a follow-up email at the end of the week explaining your accomplishments. If something went badly, admit it, and indicate how you plan to remedy the situation. This should not be in the same email as the “Plan” email! Identify each with the specific dates they cover so you can quickly reference them over time. Ex: “X and Y closed as expected. The contracts are in fulfillment. Z is shopping the competition, and has concerns about the sales agreement. Another meeting is scheduled next week. Cold calls yielded 6 follow-up calls in Bergen County. Company A was a one call close, and the contract is on your desk! B scheduled a presentation for Monday morning. C has a closing appointment with us Tuesday.” This simple summary shows your boss what your piece of her team is doing, and helps her make effective management decisions.

All of this communication creates a paper (email) trail that will be helpful to you at review time, as it will be easy for you and your manager to quantify your efforts and your results. You'll also be able to look back and see patterns emerge around certain sales approaches and subsequent success or failure. All this in two emails a week! Get writing!

Wearing Your #LifeHacks

If you were among the many who tuned into last week's Apple Live event you were probably excited by the announcement of the Apple Watch. It's interesting to see how technology is evolving into an ever more personable, wearable platform and is transforming beyond the smartphone, tablet and PC.

The interesting part of the entire announcement was how applications would morph and shape as a result of wearing something that has a monitor 85% less the surface size of a modern smartphone. Since it's impossible to type on the device: voice activation or one touch will be a huge factor in how the device works. It's also unlikely many will use it for heavier lifts like online banking or gaming. At least not yet. Those areas will come in time, however for now it does open up a whole new threshold: applications built around quick, simple efficiencies and areas of productivity. We are now entering the formalized era of wearing personalized utility.

Life hacking is nothing new. It's been around as long as others have used storytelling to share how to enhance one's life or work in many areas. From improved self-awareness, personal efficiency, weight loss, health improvements, exercise, memorization, nutrition, multitasking, removing red wine from a white carpet, getting stains out of clothing, moving from a server to the cloud, learning to play soccer, riding a bike while wearing a skirt, etc.

The first personal life hacking digital app I used was back in 2006 with Nike+. I affixed a sensor to my shoe which kept track of the mileage I ran synchronized with my iPod. The program helped me improve my art of running so that I could be harder, better, faster, stronger. Yet the first wearable life hack I really used that I recollect wasn't digital at all. In fact it was when a German professor who taught with my late father told me to don a pair of cleats in 1979 to properly play the sport of soccer. Up until that time I wore flat canvas sneakers with no traction. Cleats or "boots" as many call them in the U.K. helped me become a better player at an early age when the footwear was still uncommon in the youth game stateside. Boots helped with mobility, kicking the ball with more power and prevented injuries by being more sturdy than a canvas sneaker. Suggestions like this have been around us forever, it's just now they will be more digital and data driven based on our own personal metrics and how we want to integrate those metrics with others in the world at large.

This scalable wearable tech landscape now opens up a whole new economy of innovation. Just like how mobile app stores have altered commerce, many businesses will come to fruition to alter the entire business landscape in this new emerging area activated from your wrist, your ankle, around your neck or wherever else wearable technology ultimately can be affixed.

While I see many health and wellness programs being adopted heavily using this technology, there are also areas that may diffuse from early adopters to the late majority and laggards as a result. Some of these include:

• Professional life hacks: Time management, Personal brand building, Brainstorming, Note taking, Programmatic updates, Synchronized scheduling
• Educational life hacks: Quick learning, Translation, Efficiency variables, Visual reminder learning
• Disruptive life hacks: Repetition course correction, New ways to learn, Financial advisories

Many of the above noted functions exist in the world of the mobile web but don't have as much personalization metrics as a device worn on the body which can take repetition, heart rate, atmospheric conditions and time tracking of an activity into consideration. Nor do many have the ability to take into account what a person's daily calendar or work/life scheduling looks like and how all these various apps will speak to one another down the line to increase efficiency and wellness in the individual using them. This is where players like Cortana* and Google Now could really shake up things even further.

Like the goldmine rush in 2007 where new players have taken hold and become part of our digital lives (Foursquare, Uber, AirBnB, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, just to name a few), there are many entrepreneurs and companies now from Seattle to San Francisco to Bogota to Tel Aviv to Moscow to London to Beijing to Lagos, Nigeria to Bangalore, India to New York City to Detroit to Vancouver sitting down and mapping out how to reach more people via this personal conduit. How exciting it will be to see what these next companies and their services look like and what utility they provide for the population at large.

Apple iPhone 6 Review

Apple iPhone 6 Review Scoring Summary

Style & Handling
User Friendliness
Feature Set
Performance
Battery Power
Overall Score	Pros: Cons: + Beautiful build - Relatively low-res screen + Good size camera - Expensive + Great camera - Lacks innovation

Full Review and Specification for the Apple iPhone 6

The iPhone 6 is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated phone of the year and in just a few short days you’ll be able to buy one, but should you? There’s no doubt that it’s a great handset but for better or worse it’s also a big change over the iPhone 5s and on paper it doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t get elsewhere. So is it worth your hard earned money? Read on to find out.

Screen

After all the leaks and rumours in the run up to its announcement the iPhone 6 is a phone of few surprises and one of the biggest changes- its screen size, has been long expected. It’s gone from 4.0 inches as found on the iPhone 5s to 4.7 inches, which is the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Alpha or the original HTC One for example.

For our money that’s a good thing. 4.0 inches was starting to look distinctly on the small side and it’s about time Apple caught up, but we’d wager that a lot of people liked the compact design of iPhone’s past so for them it may not be such a welcome change.

But 4.7 inches is still far from the phablet territory of the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a size which means the iPhone 6 is still easily pocketable and can just about be used with one hand, while at the same time it makes it far better for typing, web browsing and watching videos than the iPhone 5S ever could be.

Whether you’re a fan of the screen size or not the actual quality is pretty impressive. At 750 x 1334 it’s higher resolution than the iPhone 5S but with the extra size it still has exactly the same pixel density, so if you were happy with how sharp the iPhone 5S’s screen is you’ll be happy with this too.

That said Apple could have done more, because that’s a pixel density which falls some way short of most Android rivals and the difference in sharpness is noticeable if you put them side by side.

Thankfully while Apple may have slightly dropped the ball on the resolution, its Retina HD display is about more than just packing in the pixels. It also delivers superior contrast and viewing angles to any previous iPhone and even has better colour reproduction and an improved polariser so that it’s easier to see when wearing sunglasses.

All of which leads to by far the best viewing experience we’ve yet seen on an iPhone and means the iPhone 6 has one of the best phone displays around, despite the slightly disappointing resolution.

Design

If there’s one thing Apple always gets right it’s design and the iPhone 6 is one of the company’s best looking products yet. With a metal and glass build it was always going to look premium but Apple hasn’t simply used expensive materials, it’s also thought about the construction.

You can see that in the way the curved edges glide almost seamlessly into the screen and in the fact that despite being bigger than before it’s also slimmer at just 6.9mm thin. It looks and feels great and while you won’t mistake this for an iPhone 5s you also won’t think it’s anything other than an Apple handset.

Being bigger at 138.1 x 67mm it’s naturally harder to use one-handed but Apple has thought of that too, by moving the power button to the side and elongating some buttons as well as working in clever features on the screen to ensure that whatever you’re interacting with can always be aligned with your thumb.

It should be a little more durable than past iPhone’s too, thanks to a supposedly stronger display. This isn’t sapphire but it is supposedly strong enough to survive drops and scratches. It’s a little disappointing that Apple didn’t go one step further and make its phone dust and water resistant like other companies are starting to do though.

Power

It’s never easy to directly compare the power of an iPhone to anything else because on paper its specs just don’t match up. But to make things even harder we don’t even know for sure what the specs of the iPhone 6 are, as Apple has simply said that it has a 64-bit A8 chip, though many sites claim that it’s a 1.4GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM.

Whatever the case though, in use the iPhone 6 feels as slick and smooth as you’d expect. Of course there’s nothing out there to really tax it yet, with all currently available apps and games designed to work smoothly on the iPhone 5s, so it’s hard to say how it will fare down the line but Apple promises that it’s substantially more powerful than last year’s phone.

Gamers can rest easy too, as the Cupertino company has included a new technology called ‘Metal’, which allows the CPU and GPU to work together to deliver console-style games.

Camera

We couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when we heard that Apple once again put an 8 megapixel camera in its phone, but this isn’t the same 8 megapixel camera as we got in the iPhone 5S.

Focus Pixels allow it to autofocus faster than ever, there’s improved face detection, exposure control, digital image stabilisation to counter motion blur and shaky hands and improved photo apps to let you quickly edit images.

The video camera has seen even more improvements. It can film in 1080p at 60fps or 720p in slow-motion at 240fps. There’s video stabilisation to keep shots steady, continuous autofocus and you can even shoot time-lapse videos.

Meanwhile the FaceTime HD camera can capture up to 81% more light than previously and features a new burst mode which can take 10 photos per second, making it better than ever for both selfies and video calls.

Features

The iPhone 6 is light on new features which don’t directly tie into something else such as the camera or the screen, all of which have been discussed above. The main new feature is Apple Pay which uses NFC to allow you to make contactless payments. It’s got the potential to be a hugely useful feature and with Apple backing it contactless payments might become a lot more common than they are now.

On the other hand Android phones have included NFC and contactless payment solutions for a long time, so while it’s a useful feature it seems more like Apple is playing catch-up here than truly innovating.

The two big features from the iPhone 5S have made a return too, specifically the motion co-processor which tracks your activity without killing your battery and Touch ID, which lets you unlock your phone and approve purchases with your fingerprint.

These features are just as good as ever and in combination with iOS 8 Touch ID is getting even better, as developers can now use it with third-party apps. While the M8 motion co-processor can now measure steps, distance and elevation changes.

Battery life, memory and connectivity

As usual Apple hasn't confirmed the size of the iPhone 6’s battery, so we’ll have to wait for someone to take it apart. But the company has said that it can last for up to 14 hours of talk time, 10 days of standby time, 11 hours of internet use or 11 hours of video.

All of which is pretty good and is down to a combination of the battery itself and a more efficient processor. It still doesn’t sound like quite a match for the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example though.

The iPhone 6 comes with a choice of 16, 64 or 128GB of storage, with 32GB MIA for some reason, so there’s the potential for a lot, but there’s no microSD card slot and with the 128GB model costing £699 Apple hasn’t made higher storage capacities all that affordable.

For connectivity you get Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G and NFC. It’s worth noting that the iPhone 6 also supports 4G LTE-A speeds of up to 150Mbps.

Early verdict

The iPhone 6 is a phone which has almost everything you could want all delivered in a stunning new design and with flagship power. It’s as expensive as always, the screen could be higher resolution and we can’t help but feel that it’s one of Apple’s less innovative offerings but the whole package has been put together so well that it hardly matters.

Apple iPhone 6 Specification

	iPhone 6
Colours	Available in silver, gold, and space gray,
Dimensions	138.1 mm x 67.0 mm x 6.9 mm
Weight	129 grams
Screen	4.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit widescreen Multi‑Touch display with IPS technology
Resolution	1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
Chips	A8 chip with 64-bit architecture
	M8 motion coprocessor
Memory	16GB,64GB and 128GB
iSight Camera	New 8-megapixel iSight camera with 1.5µ pixels
	Autofocus with Focus Pixels
Facetime Camera	1.2-megapixel photos (1280 by 960)
Video recording	1080p HD video recording (30 fps or 60 fps)
Touch ID	Fingerprint identity sensor built into the Home button
Battery	Talk time: Up to 14 hours on 3G
	Standby time: Up to 10 days (250 hours)
	Video playback: Up to 11 hours
Connectivity	NFC, VoLTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G LTE
SIM Card	Nano-SIM