THE ODD COUPLES - SCREENTOYS - Celebrity Mash-up Things I Carry: A Pebble (Not In My Shoe) Apple Acquires Indoor GPS Startup WiFiSlam For $20M The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple has acquired WiFiSlam, an indoor GPS startup that enables a smartphone to pinpoint its location — along with that of your friends — in realtime up to 2.5 meters in accuracy. Apple paid $20 million to acquire WiFiSlam, although the specific terms of the deal have not been shared as of yet. However, Apple has confirmed the acquisition, telling Macrumors: The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. WiFiSlam seems to be part of Apple’s continued plan to build up its location capabilities, and is likely a sign that indoor GPS is just starting to get hot. For its part, WiFiSlam says that it wants to “engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place” and foresees its future use cases as “step-by-step indoor navigation to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based social networking.”
PaaS, SaaS, Platform, Nervous System, Risk Management, Incident Management The human body is an awe-inspiring feat of a responsive global system. Cut your finger and a cascade of message systems are actioned within nanoseconds to protect from the initial threat (drop the knife), to start to resolution of the impact on multiple levels (immune initiation, pain reduction, bleed reduction), triggering a global response (you put a plaster on it), and enabling future mitigation (the cognitive ability to think to stop watching the TV while cutting your onion). This all happens in moments. Local signals release natural pain killers and anti-inflammatories. In the time it takes for you to react to the cut, multiple systems have been put to work in perfect synchronicity. For a second imagine that you can get close to this ultra-low latency signalling, high-fidelity system in your organisation. Governments attempt to get better at this year on year. Government and armed forces apply huge budgets to make this happen.