As people around the world wonder if innovation at Apple stopped with Steve Jobs, we wanted to share with you a snapshot of the genius’s life.
Source: Funders and Founders
How Bill Gates Started – Infographic
Bill Gates’s father was a lawyer. A very successful one. His mother a teacher. Reading business magazines in middle school, Bill Jr. had a different dream – to open a company. You could say that’s how he started – with a childish dream. Many kids have dreams, though. How was he different?
Source: Funders and Founders
7 Tips On How To Be More Productive from Elon Musk
Elon Musk gets a lot done.
The 46-year-old entrepreneur and CEO is revolutionizing the spaceflight industry with SpaceX, transforming the world of the electric car at Tesla, and pushing neuroscience and transportation forward at Neuralink and the Boring Company.
As SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said at the 2018 TED Conference, Musk’s goals are a lot to keep up with.
“When Elon says something, you have to pause and not blurt out ‘Well, that’s impossible,'” she said. “You zip it, you think about it, and you find ways to get it done.”
Recently, Musk reportedly announced to Tesla employees that he wants to adopt a 24/7 shift schedule to get production for Tesla’s Model 3 electric car on track. In an email obtained by Jalopnik, Musk explained a number of changes in the works for Tesla.
He’s asking for quite a lot, so at the end of that email, he offered employees a list of his own productivity recommendations. From those tips, it’s clear that Musk is clearly not a fan of meetings, bureaucracy, hierarchy, or any system that impedes immediate communication. He prefers people apply common sense to the task at hand.
He also told employees that if they had any ideas for making work at Tesla better and more efficient, they should let him know.
Here are the seven productivity tips Musk offered in the letter, in his own words.
1. Large-format meetings waste people’s time.
“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [rid] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.”
2. Meetings should be infrequent unless a matter is urgent.
“Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”
3. If you don’t need to be in a meeting, leave.
“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
4. Avoid confusing jargon.
“Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.”
5. Don’t let hierarchical structures make things less efficient.
“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command’. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”
6. If you need to get in touch with someone, do so directly.
“A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”
7. Don’t waste time following silly rules.
“In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a ‘company rule’ is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”
Written By: Kevin Loria
Source: Business Insider
How Mark Zuckerberg Started – Infographic
At the young age of 10, Mark was already bored with school. His father noticed and introduced him to the computer. Together they wrote a program that connected the computer at home with the computer at his father’s office. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Source: Funders and Founders
How Jeff Bezos Started – Infographic
Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s wealthiest people. But he was born poor. He wanted to start a business right after college, but didn’t. So how did he start?
Source: Funders and Founders
Are fitness trackers a waste of money?
Want to lose weight? Improve your cardio? Lower your blood pressure? Then don’t buy a fitness tracker. In fact, some experts claim they can “do more harm than good”. Wondering why you might have wasted money on yours? Read on…
Now let’s just get one thing straight before we continue. I actually use a variety of wearable devices. I have an Apple watch which measures my daily activity, I use the Nike+ app when I go running and I use a Garmin & Strava for cycling. And it seems that I’m not alone with an estimated 20% of Americans wearing some form of tracker and around 3 million being sold in the UK each year. People use them in different ways and for a variety of reasons. Personally I want to monitor my performance and am fascinated with the data that they produce (I know, I’m a nerd). Consequently I love them all, so before you launch into a tirade along the lines of ‘this guy hates Fitbits’ in the comments section please remember not to shoot the messenger…
Now then, why have the boffins got such a downer on trackers? Well firstly, they pour scorn on the whole notion of the 10,000 steps. It seems that this has no basis in any robust scientific research. According to Dr Greg Hager who is a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University:
“Turns out in 1960 in Japan they figured out that the average Japanese man, when he walked 10,000 steps a day, burned something like 3,000 calories and that is what they thought the average person should consume. So they picked 10,000 steps as a number”
In fairness, that hardly seems very scientific. Unless you are an average Japanese man who is still living in 1960. A relatively small sample size, I’m guessing.
Just last week Prof. Hager pointed out that we we cannot have a ‘one size fits all’ solution and every individual needs a bespoke fitness plan which caters specifically for their needs. He goes on to say:
“I think apps could definitely be doing more harm than good. I am sure that these apps are causing problems. Without any scientific evidence base, how do you know that any of these apps are good for you? They may even be harmful”
Harmful? Seriously? Isn’t that pushing it a tad too far? Well in support of his claim, Hager states that someone with an underlying medical condition may not necessarily be capable of achieving the 10,000 steps and it could be detrimental to their health to try.
So, is Hager out there on his own in his thinking? Well, it seems not. A 2016 study of 800 people with activity trackers was conducted in Singapore which discovered that there were no health benefits to the research subjects when compared to a control group who didn’t use a tracker. What’s more, they even added a cash incentive to increase the number of steps they took. It made absolutely no difference.
In the UK, Hager also has support from Simon Leigh, a senior health economist at Nexus Clinical Analytics who has published several studies on fitness trackers in the British Medical Journal. He said:
“Dr Hager is spot on. A GP, endocrinologist or other fitness specialist would unlikely recommend 10,000 steps for most people. Especially given that the majority of those who download these apps are likely to be unfit and in need of improvement in the first place”
I understand what these guys are saying but surely in a population with rising rates of obesity, we need to encourage people to do some form of exercise and activity trackers can be a strong motivator in the right hands (or should that be on the right arm?). After all, surely it is better to do 10,000 steps a day than none at all? It beats lying on the sofa eating double cheese deep pan pizza and watching The Kardashians.
Surely it also depends on what you are doing on your journey of 10,000 steps. If you are having a brisk walk around the park with your Cockerpoo then that must have some health benefits. For you and the dog. However, if it’s a pub crawl around town on a Friday night followed by a stagger down to the kebab shop then I don’t think that counts. It’s really all a matter of balance.
Depending upon the type of tracker you use valuable personal information can be measured and monitored over time including heart rate, calorie consumption and sleep patterns. The aggregation of all this big / smart data can be of use to a medical practitioner, an insurance company or even the advertising industry. The implications of this are not only fascinating but have huge business potential.
A doctor could offer a prognosis on potential medical conditions saving both money and lives. Your insurance company could use your data to offer you improved premiums on health insurance in the same way that they use trackers for safe drivers on car insurance. And the ad industry can use programmatic to specifically target you with dynamic creative to offer you goods / services that are highly relevant to the individual (e.g. new running shoes in your size and favorite colors).
Dr John Jakicic from the University of Pittsburgh, seems to be of the same opinion as myself. In his studies, he found that fitness trackers could form part of a series of behaviours to encourage people to lose weight or improve fitness:
“we need to be careful about relying solely on these devices. However, there is a place for these, and so we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in my opinion”
So are these trackers going end up gathering dust in the garage along with other defunct fitness gadgets such as the Ab-Cruncher and Thigh-Master? Well don’t be too hasty in ditching your Fitbit just yet. Accept it for what it is and use it accordingly. Figure out an optimum level of activity for your age, size and fitness level (if you are unsure, consult an expert or just Google it). Then simply incorporate it into your weekly workout schedule.
What do you think? Are these trackers really useless or do they have some merit? Do you own one and now feel cheated or does the technology really work for you? As ever, I am interested in your viewpoint.
Written By: Steve Blakeman
Source: LinkedIn
5 Amazing Tech Advances in Healthcare
In the healthcare industry, innovation is more than a buzzword. The right innovations in the right hands at the right time can, in fact, ensure life triumphs over death. From high-tech sensors and drones to bacteria-quashing light bulbs, technological advances are pushing healthcare into new, exciting directions, providing heightened levels of care and improving quality of life.
Consider these promising developments:
1. Ingestible Sensors
While wearable sensors continue to gain mainstream appeal, ingestible sensors could have a sizeable impact on healthcare and digital medicine.
Health systems are starting to implement ingestible sensors in patients to record medication adherence, which is one of the key components of improved health.1 The sensor—powered by gastric fluids and about the size of a grain of sand—communicates with a skin patch, which captures the medication and the time it was ingested along with personalized data such as heart rate, activity, and rest. This information is then relayed to a mobile app, where the data can be shared with healthcare professionals to help drive medication compliance and personalized treatment.
2. Telehealth
For individuals in remote locations or underserved communities, easy access to healthcare providers can be scarce or nonexistent. However, continued advances in telehealth are making remote point-of-care more accessible, more dynamic, and more personable than ever. Telehealth services, for example, offer video conferencing for live consultations, built-in dashboards for in-field data capture and analysis, and hardware to ensure orderly, coherent interaction between patients and healthcare providers.
3. Drones
While drones are known for delivering frozen yogurt and burritos, their most meaningful impact could come in the healthcare space. Consider these very real possibilities:
- In remote areas, drones can deliver critical medical supplies such as blood or vaccines to enable treatment.
- Following a natural disaster, drones can distribute in-demand medical supplies to first responders or victims.
- On a medical campus, drones can transport medicine, blood, lab samples, or even organs from one unit to another to expedite care.
- A researcher at the University of Illinois, meanwhile, aims to help elderly patients age in place by testing the use of small drones with manipulator arms to complete simple daily tasks such as bringing medication or cleaning a spill.2
4. Bacteria-killing Light
Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are the most frequent adverse event in healthcare delivery worldwide.3 Tech innovation is minimizing this problem.
Light fixtures providing continuous environmental disinfection technology are helping hospitals improve their infection-prevention efforts. One solution uses safe, 405nm visible light that reflects off walls as well as hard and soft surfaces to penetrate harmful bacteria in a given area and reduce bacteria up to 70 percent.4
5. Remote Patient Monitoring
With remote monitoring programs, digital technologies collect key patient health data such as vital signs, heart rate, and blood pressure, and communicate the information to healthcare professionals.
With such key data in professionals’ hands, health problems can be detected earlier, which can reduce hospitalizations and prevent manageable problems from becoming more severe ailments. Remote monitoring can improve patient outcomes and access to care, while also reducing costs—a key concern among the U.S. populace and healthcare systems alike.
Source: HP
[1] Forbes, Barton Health First To Offer New Digital Medicine Developed By Proteus Digital Health
[2] Inside Unmanned Systems, Drones Deliver Healthcare
[3] World Health Organization, Health Care-Associated Infections Fact Sheet
[4] Kenosha News, Bacteria-killing lights show promise
The Growth Of The Autonomous Car Market – Infographic
The autonomous car market is currently growing at an existential rate and many driverless vehicles are expected to be on our roads this year, and in large numbers. Let’s take a look at the growth of the autonomous car market.
Source: Get Off Road
How to Stop Social Media From Taking Over Your Life
In this day and age, it’s hard to live a full life without logging onto Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram every now and then. The problem is that they can become a huge waste of time.
There are a couple of easy ways to prevent yourself from squandering hours looking at cat photos. Here’s how you can tighten up your social networking by several notches. There’s also one surefire way to prevent social media from ruining your life: delete everything. More on that in a second.
Turn Off Push Notifications (or uninstall your mobile apps)
You might be surprised at how much control you have over the notifications pushed out by the social media apps on your phone. Take Facebook, for example. Head to notification settings and you can turn alerts on or off for wall posts, comments, friend requests, photo tags, photo invitations, messages, and more.
The next time you’ve got five minutes spare at lunchtime, rather than aimlessly scrolling through your feeds, cut down on the notifications these apps are allowed to send, which should cut down on the number of times they pull you into their reach.
You can adjust notifications at the system level too—on Android or iOS, head to Settings then tap Notifications to make changes to specific apps. The available options vary between the mobile OSes of Google and Apple, but you can silence notifications (if you still want to know when something happens) or turn them off altogether.
If you want to take a really drastic step then you can uninstall these apps from your phone, but that might be a step too far for some, especially if you get important messages through Facebook or Twitter.
Be Ruthless With Who You’re Following
Based on our experiences, severely limiting the number of people you follow on social media makes a real difference to how often you’re tempted to dip in and out of your feeds. If those feeds are updating much less regularly, you can leave them for a day or more without a nagging doubt that you’re missing out on something.
Every social network makes it easy to unfollow or unfriend people from the web or through the official apps, so take some time to cull your friends list every time you open up the app. On Twitter you can probably ditch a few celebrities and company accounts too and not notice any difference.
There are various utilities around promising to help you mass unfollow a bunch of people at once but we’d be wary of connecting anything to your accounts that doesn’t come with a substantial user base or a personal recommendation from someone you trust.
Remember a lot of networks—from Twitter to Tumblr—come with very effective search tools, so you can always join in on the action if something new is happening online, whether it’s a political scandal or a new episode of Game of Thrones. You don’t necessarily have to be following huge numbers of people to stay involved.
Get Alerts Over Email, Not On Your Phone
Despite the rise of the smartphone, email clings on as a means of communication method that pretty much everyone has access to. If you’re simply logging into your social media apps to see if anything’s happened, get email alerts instead, then you can simply glance over the highlights at the end of the day to check for anything vital.
For example, open up Facebook Settings on the web and click Edit next to Email under the Notifications heading. From here you can specify what type of email alerts you want (and unsubscribe from the ones you don’t). On the Twitter Settings page on the web, click Email notifications and you can configure alerts in a similar way.
Of course this isn’t going to work for everyone. There’s not much point in switching to email alerts if you waste even more time browsing your inbox than you actually would on Facebook or Twitter. But it’s one way of making sure you’re not missing anything urgent, like a tweet from your favorite movie star, while you stay off the platforms in question. Just flick through your emails at the end of the day and if there’s nothing of note then you don’t need to hit any social media sites at all.
You can use the always-helpful IFTTT (If This Then That), too. It lets you create applets that activate when specific users tweet, or when you’re tagged in a photo, for example, so you can customize your alerts outside of Facebook and Twitter without having to log in and check for updates every fifteen minutes.
Don’t Rely On Willpower Alone
Judging by the number of applications and utilities around to help you limit your time on sites like Facebook and Twitter, there are a lot of people who feel it’s a problem. If you’re having trouble staying away from the pull of your social media feeds, then you can get help from a variety of sources.
Some of them are simple: TomatoTimer is a twist on the Pomodoro approach and splits your time into chunks so you can stay productive. Other options, such as StayFocusd for Chrome or LeechBlock for Firefox, let you specify certain sites you want to avoid at certain times. Of course you can easily uninstall these restrictions, but they might help you stay away from social media a little longer.
Cold Turkey (free for basic use) and Freedom (which will cost you but offers a free trial) run at the desktop level on macOS and Windows to give you even more control over which sites you do and do not want to be able to visit, and at which times. We also like KeepMeOut!, which is basic but effective, and works in your web browser by replacing your regular social network bookmarks with newly guarded ones.
There will be plenty of you who can get by fine without a browser extension but some people will appreciate the extra help, even if it’s just in measuring the time devoted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest throughout the day. The good news is, when you do log back in, there’ll probably be a backlog of interesting stuff to check through.
For The Love Of God: Delete Your Accounts
If all else fails, there’s one really easy step you can take to ensure that you’re no longer distracted by these sites: Delete your social media accounts. All of them.
The only issue with this route is that the social networks don’t make it easy to leave their services. The option is usually tucked away deep in the account settings. For example on Facebook, you’ll need to go to Settings > Security > Deactivate Your Account. On Twitter, visit to the Account Settings page. At the bottom you’ll see an option: Deactivate my account. Click the tiny link, and it should walk you through the deletion process. Then, throw your laptop or phone out of the highest window you can find and get back to living a normal, productive life.
Written By: David Nield
Source: Gizmodo
How Elon Musk Started – Infographic
Elon Musk is now Earth’s most future-oriented person. How did such a person come to be?
Source: Funders and Founders
