April 2014

While dozens of startups pour time and money into developing mobile health devices for the young, hale and hearty, they might be better off going grayer.

The opportunity to sell technology to senior citizens is huge now and will only get bigger as more of us age into that segment. Which vendors will be best positioned to capitalize on this opportunity -- a handful of early movers that are already in the market, or vendors like Fitbit or Jawbone that focus on younguns?

“Developers making technologies for the 20- and 30-somethings are missing a huge opportunity to supply the 100-million-plus people aged 50 and over in this country,” Laurie Orlov, an analyst with Age In Place Technology, said in an interview.

She estimates that this market is worth $2 billion now and will hit $20 billion by 2020. Semico Research puts the number higher, forecasting that the market for gear like remote health monitors, oximeters, glucose monitors, medication reminders, heart rate monitors, safety alert bracelets, etc. will hit $30 billion by 2017.

You want more evidence? Research released in October conducted by Oxford Economics for the AARP said that Americans over 50 spend $4.6 trillion annually, with the ripple effect of that spending hitting $7.1 trillion per year.

Having taken pictures of more than 6 million miles’ worth of road, Google is more than doubling the amount of global Street View imagery by adding all of its archive photography.

The company’s Google Maps Web application will now include a time machine feature where users can move a slider to see all historical images of a place. As much as possible, pictures of the same place have been aligned so they have the same perspective as one another.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to move the slider back and forth to see historical images of Rome compared to the present day ruins -- Street View imagery only goes back eight years, at most. But it does mean you’ll be able to play with some recent history, like the building of the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan, the building of the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil, and the destruction left by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan.

Illiteracy isn't a major issue for much of the Western world, but it remains endemic in many developing countries, where incomes are low and books are scarce.

That may be changing, though, thanks to the spread of mobile technologies that have made books more accessible than ever before -- something that UNESCO, in a new report, describes as a veritable "reading revolution." The report examines the reading habits of nearly 5,000 mobile-phone users in seven countries -- Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe -- where the average illiteracy rate among children is 20 percent, and 34 percent among adults. (The US, by comparison, has an adult illiteracy rate of around three percent.)

UNESCO describes the survey as the largest ever undertaken on mobile reading in the developing world, and its results are encouraging: people are reading more, they're reading to their children, and they're hungry for more content.

The study was based on questionnaires and telephone interviews with people who use an app from Worldreader -- a San Francisco-based nonprofit that distributes e-books in low-income countries. The organization delivers Kindles to under-equipped classrooms, while its app allows users to choose from over 6,000 (mostly free) e-books on low-end feature phones. Today, the app has more than 300,000 monthly active users in developing countries, and Worldreader says it's delivered nearly 1.7 million e-books since its launch in 2010.

There is evidence to suggest that mobile technology can improve literacy test scores, though UNESCO's study focuses on the behaviors and demographics of users in developing countries, in the hopes of better understanding how and why they read. More than 62 percent of those surveyed said they enjoy reading more after they started reading on mobile devices, and one-third said they use their phones to read to their children (an additional third said they would do so if more child-friendly books were available).

The survey also shed light on important gender-based differences. Although the vast majority of mobile readers are male (77 percent), women actually devote far more time to reading: 277 minutes per month, on average, compared to just 33 minutes for men.

Google and NASA are developing smart robots designed to fly around the International Space Station and eventually take over some menial tasks from astronauts with the aid of custom-built smartphones.

Since 2006, three colorful, volleyball-sized robots have been slowly floating around a 10-foot by 10-foot by 10-foot space inside the ISS. Scientists used them for research projects such as a study on the movement of liquids inside containers in microgravity environments.

NASA now plans to attach smartphones to the flying robots to give them spatial awareness that would enable them to travel throughout the space station. The Android-based phones will track the 3D motion of the robotic spheres while mapping their surroundings.

“Our goal is to advance the state of 3D sensing for mobile devices in an effort to give mobile devices human-scale sense of space and motion,” says Johnny Chung Lee, a technical program lead at Google.