Infotrade

With a new crop of Internet IPOs including household names like Groupon – and possibly Facebook – set to trade publicly at enormous valuations, many pundits are starting to make comparisons to the heady days we saw at the turn of the century. Will investors’ interest in these social media startups usher in a new bull market or are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of 1999-2000 with a new tech bubble? It seems as though overvalued Internet stocks are a bit like horror movies for investors… they’re always followed by a sequel. At least that’s what those in the “Bubble 2.0” crowd think. The belief here is that the same sequence of events that fueled the first dot com bubble is reoccurring now; that the new class of Internet IPOs, from Linkedin, Pandora and Zillow plus the upcoming Groupon and Zynga offerings, and the massive $100 billion valuation of Facebook, are stirring a mania that will result in a market crash like the horror story of 2000-2002. But before we paint the current market...

Part1: Looking Glass Concept This is what I wish the internet search will be able to do with a mobile device in the NEAR future. Touch screen, built in camera, scanner, WiFi, google map (hopefully google earth), google search, image search… all in one device. Like this way, when you can see a building through it, it gives you the image search result right on the spot. Part2: Future of Mobile Internet Search: Applications Many applications like these will be developed that have never been possible.Indoor guide Works in a building, airport, station, hospital, etc. Automatic simultaneous translation Search keyword Helpful when you want to find out a word from a lot of text Part3: Look at What You Don’t See Through Glass You can even see flowers that are not actually blooming. There are a lot more ideas drawn in my Moleskine, so I’ll introduce them later. Also visit other posts of this gadget. ...

What will we be making shoes out of in 2080? And will our clothes come from fruit? One college course studies exactly that. Biolace … the strawberry plant that could grow lace from its roots. Photograph: Carole Collet "We tend to work in the year 2050," says  Carole Collet , who founded the Textile Futures  course at  Central Saint Martins  10 years ago. "But for some students, that's not enough – they prefer to speculate up to 2080 and beyond." Sitting in the cafe at the college's new King's Cross campus, it seems that all Collet and her colleague, course leader Caroline Till, are missing is a crystal ball. The work they and their students have been quietly pursuing for the last decade focuses on futuristic scenarios that many would find hard to comprehend – let alone relate to the conventional understanding of the word "textiles". Last year one student,  Shamees Aden , investigated the emerging science  of  protocells , experime...

It's never easy to predict the future. But as PM's 110th anniversary celebration draws to a close, we've decided to try. Here are 110 ambitious ideas for the decades ahead. (For more about PopMech's brain trust and methodology, read  Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs' introduction . And if you want to try your hand at predicting the future,  take our Facebook survey , and see when other readers think the most important events of the next 110 years will happen.) BY THE EDITORS Christopher Griffith/Megan Caponetto 2012—2022 · People will be fluent in every language. With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation, it won't be long until your cellphone speaks Swahili on your behalf. · Software will predict traffic jams before they occur.  Using archived data, roadside sensors, and GPS, IBM has come up with a modeling program that anticipates bumper-to-bumper congestion a full hour before it begins. Better yet, the idea proved successful in ea...

Being a software developer working in the US can net you a salary in the six-figure range. But that doesn’t stop there being some very lazy developers out there earning such high sums of money. A case in point is a developer called Bob, who  Verizon  just exposed as a lazy genius. The real identity of the company and developer have not been released, but the details have. The developer, referred to as Bob, works for a “US-based critical infrastructure company.” Bob is a guy who lists 7+ programming languages on his resume and is in his mid-40s, meaning he’s an experienced developer. He’s also been duping his employer for months. The company he worked for contacted Verizon when it discovered a  VPN  connection it couldn’t explain on its network. The connection was from Shenyang,  China , which set alarm bells ringing. Verizon investigated and discovered the login being used to access the network from China belonged to Bob who sat at his desk every day in...

Nearly every technique I’ve used was designed to set myself up with what you would call a “lifestyle business”. I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought a business was a business, but I can see now that what type of business you decide to build very much dictates what kind of  life you will lead. A lifestyle business is, as the name suggests, a business created to facilitate the kind of lifestyle you desire. In my case, and I suspect for many of the current solo-internet marketers out there, the kind of business you want is one that requires little time to manage , yet makes enough for you to live a comfortable life, not have a job and travel if you desire so. Passive income, low labour or easily outsourced income streams are perfect for a lifestyle business, and are exactly what I went after during the first 10 or so years online. Although I knew the outcome I wanted, I didn’t really understand how to get it, so for a long time I focused more on just “making money” th...