A Very Bad Selfie on a Very Great Topic
Our T-shirt says Don’t Mess With Bitcoin and as soon as we know who we bought the shirt from, we will tell you. We bought it at the Tuesday Bitcoin Meet-Up in Sunnyvale, CA at Plug and Play Tech Center. Had a wonderful night with 2 great presenters and lots of help with finding out where my Bitcoin went. THANK YOU. My missing bitcoin went to Coupa Cafe and we’ll tell you how we figured this out. (Actually we didn’t, our Meet Up People did).
UPDATE: Bitcoin Meetup Found Our Bitcoins
I lost $12.00 (approx) in Bitcoin. I want to know where it went.
The only place I use Bitcoin is at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. I have my coinbase wallet hooked up to my bank account and transfer tiny amounts of cash. I have had a fairly good experience at Coupa using bitcoin. Only once was a transaction unable to go through but I lost no money on it. But not last night.
I sent the .014 for my small spicy mocha and a biscotti. They didn’t get it and I never received the receipt I always get immediately from coinbase. I sent it again – should not have done that.
Both transactions were pending and never moved out of that mode. Coupa never got the transaction and I never got the receipt. By the time I finished nothing had changed and I paid cash. Both transactions were still pending and Coupa said they would not accept either should they arrive. Today I check my Coinbase wallet and see that both transactions were complete. But I have no receipt from Coinbase.
This is my mini Mt. Gox. Where are my .014 bitcoin transactions? (Two of them).I have now paid three times for my spicy mocha and a biscotti.
Bitcoiners, help? Coinbase, help? (Thank you Coinbase for the answer to my other question of a week ago, that was helpful.)
An article from WIRED had this to say about bitcoin potential problems:
But I believe bitcoin-the-currency contains a fatal flaw, one that ensures that bitcoin won’t ever achieve widespread adoption as a currency.
The flaw? That bitcoin transactions are irreversible. That is, they can never be undone: Once committed, there is no “oops”, no “takeback”, no “control-Z”. Combined with bitcoin’s independence — it is a separate currency with a floating exchange rate — this flaw is arguably lethal to money systems.
I like the idea of Bitcoin, I go to some Meetups at Sunnyvale Plug and Play Tech Center, I try and understand it, and we accept it here on The Silicon Valley Story. It’s not ready for prime time retail the IRS is making life difficult and there is far to go. But I’m trying it out, now I need an explanation and also, if you want to help buy us a mocha at Coupa in Bitcoin, we accept donations.
Thanks.. HELP US KEEP THE CAFFEINE FLOWING
See TOUCH-VOICE
We are so impressed that med tech apps are moving forward for specific needs. This is a truly heartwarming and utilitarian one we want to share with you.
Counting calories and watching heart rate is fine, but real niche med tech for the underserved population such as sick kids (or adults), the autistic, the voiceless, the speech impaired is impressive. And now an app is here for them.
Imagine that your ideas , thoughts, feelings, needs and your plans , whether for a start up or taking a shower, could only be communicated through writing everything on a note pad. Or pointing. You cannot speak. You are voiceless. You are without a voice to navigate the world of everyday needs or the world of everyday relationships. Your frustration level rises. You are literally not understood.
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What is left unsaid that Dostoyevsky was thinking about may not have been about everyday, mundane, pedestrian needs. But the unhappiness is just as real. Do not compare the metrics of unhappiness, they are unique and each misery is personal. Imagine you are 4 and cannot speak. Ever. Or 45 and suddenly voiceless from illness or surgery. Are you going to look at your Pebble Watch or Fitbit or other wearable med tech to help you? Do you need to know your heart rate, blood sugar or how many calories you had today if the one and only thing you want to do is tell someone, “I love you” or “I want to take a shower”
The quantified self is everywhere in med tech apps. Good, but here’s one we really love because it stands out and fills an unseen yet compelling need. This is Mike McAnally’s impressive Touch-Voice. For the voiceless for whatever reason, Mike brings them a way to communicate in the here and now. This reduces stress which enhances healing and creativity.
Give the kids and voiceless a voice! Go watch Mike and Touch-Voice here and give someone a way to say, Thank You.
Here’s ours:
It used to be a home for low income. I suspect it was built with federal monies with the proviso that for a certain number of years it must be occupied by the marginalized. After those years are gone the building may revert to market rate. It’s a very good deal for developers..
Not so for the woman I met outside Whole Foods who fell in love with my dog and watched him while I shopped. She was sad along with me when Chico died. She lived in the building and was distraught when she had to move. Scared was what she said.
Here’s to Chico’s friend, wherever you are. I wish you could have stayed, but Palo Alto is upscaling itself everywhere. Even dear Philz coffee is loving us to death with waaay overpriced food.
Here’s to the dispossessed – you are not forgotten.
@The Epiphany. Why a backwards ‘e’ in The?
Crypto currency in action. A spicy mocha at Palo Alto’s Coupa Cafe. Thank you to the wonderful staff at Coupa that knows more about this than I do and walked me through my first bitcoin mocha.
Feeling lucky? Play Great selection of bitcoin casinos and games and win real money
Disruptive innovation, women who stand up and lean in, and engaging in creative change is not new to Silicon Valley of 2014. We just don’t know about many of the early pioneers. Let’s get in the Wayback Machine and bring back Juana Briones and celebrate this early resident of Palo Alto and amazing single mom of 7, victim of domestic violence who fought a male dominated system to win a divorce and bought 4400 acres of land in Palo Alto and ran a ranch. . She lived in Palo Alto….are we surprised? I think if she were here today, Sheryl and Juana would be doing coffee at Cafe Venetia or Coupa, planning the next start up. I like to think we’re all channeling Juana’s spirit.
Here is a guest post on this awesome woman, from another amazing local woman, a pioneer herself in tech. This is from Hilda Sendyk, M.S., a Silicon Valley Learning & Development and Workforce Professional who also multi-tasks by providing information and insights into the history of early California. You can find more about Hilda on the Homebrew Computing Pages.
A Gala Opening for the Juana Briones Exhibit
Juana Briones Y Su California: Pionera, Fundadora, Curandera
Juana Briones de Miranda (1802 – 1889)
Juana Briones: rancher, land owner, savvy businesswoman, humanitarian, and healer. This amazing woman lived in the 1800’s in the Alta California settlements of both Palo Alto and San Francisco.
Kudos to the California Historical Society, the Historical Museum, and its Executive Director, Anthea Hartig, and her team for producing an artistic, intelligent, and culturally-forward exhibit of Juana Briones (opened January 26th and continuing through June 8th). The exhibit, bilingual throughout, offers us a window into her life, the prevailing culture, art, activities, and daily challenges facing this multi-faceted Californio woman during that era.
Juana had seven children who she supported without much assistance from her physically abusive husband. She was known as a “curandera”, always available to her neighbors as a healer using herbs and medications she learned about from her mother and the local indigenous people. Although she had no formal education and lived during a time when women had few societal rights, she was one of only a small number of Californios to keep their land grants after California became part of the United States.
The California Historical Museum’s fully Spanish-English exhibit celebrates Juana’s life and times with paintings, maps, ranchero artifacts, photos, and a display of a wall segment salvaged from her house In Palo Alto. (The house was demolished in 2011, after the Friends of the Juana Briones House organization was unsuccessful in saving the historic site.) The Museum’s exhibit brochure is filled with remarkable information – a historical timeline, a glossary of terms, and a detailed list of historical members of Juana’s world.
The exhibit speaks personally to Director Hartig because “As a third generation Californian, this exhibit really resonates for me since it celebrates the story of a remarkable, hard-working, pioneering woman local to our Bay Area.”
Albert Camarillo, Professor of American History at Stanford University and Guest Curator of the exhibit commented, “The Juana Briones exhibit represents the life of an amazing woman who expertly handled the essentials of a full life well-lived in her ability to earn a living and sustain a large family essentially on her own, in her defense of human rights, and in the care and healing she provided to her neighbors.”
Jeanne Farr McDonnell, author of the definitive biography Juana Briones of Nineteenth-Century California, commented: “This exhibit opens a window into an era of drastic changes: California during the 1800’s. Juana’s successful negotiation of these changes for herself, her family, and others who she helped is told strongly by the exhibit’s artifacts and documents that describe her life and times from 1802 to 1889. These are the years during which California originated under Spain, passed to Mexican ownership, and then midway through those years, became one of the United States.” McDonnell’s book is available through University of Arizona Press:
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1986.htm
For a full description of the Juana Briones exhibit and associated events, go to:
The Internet of Things is here. IoT as it is referred to, is things, connected to the Internet. These things have sensors thus they can communicate. Communication leads to data and data leads to interpretation, reading, information, and stories. That’s the quick and dirty explanation.
I met with Jeremy Walker, CEO of Palo Alto based Internet of Things Architecture or IOTA COMPUTING . Here is how he describes Internet of Things: “The Internet of Things (or IoT) is about connecting billions of objects to the Internet—each accessible from anywhere on the planet. We’re talking Carl Sagan numbers here—CISCO predicts 50 billion IoT devices by 2020.”
Our talk was a fascinating glimpse into the future as Jeremy is a fascinating man with wit and intelligence and who better to guide the Internet of Things into the future than a man who formerly guided yachts around the world. Navigating new and strange and rough waters is best accomplished with experience. Jeremy brings that ten fold. I’ll sail with him.
The Internet of Things is your future. It might upset some when it arrives head on with barely any warning. But we can prepare for it. Here is your future: your world is going to change, so understand and you can embrace and use to your advantage. The operative word from Jeremy Walker is trust: if trustworthiness is embedded along with the sensors, IoT will be embraced as easily as a disruptive change can be.
I’m the glass half full person so I think IoT can make EACH INDIVIDUAL RELEVANT. It happens by the data they generate by simply being them. There, or here, or 10 lbs heavier or on statins. Male or female or somewhere else on the gender continuum. I thought of how each person experiences an earthquake differently because of location. 1989: my son and I are in Santa Cruz during the Loma Prieta Earthquake. We had a difference experience than those even 3 miles from our location. Our ground heaved up. We heard the quake arrive – it sounded like a train. This can be VERY useful. (yes, data is being sold, a profit is being made, but TELL people why and how they can individually be important.)
And, I have always talked about the biological terrain each person has. You take a pill and get better. I take it and get stomach cramps (true for me w Vicodin. I can’t take it.) I take lecithin and my rash goes away. Up to now, this has been dismissed as anecdotal evidence.
Well, it is time to stop dissing this. Think of it this way – When you go to a doctor and say, “This drug isn’t working” he doesn’t quote clinical trial results. He changes it or changes the dosage. You, as an N of 1 are anecdotal and that is all that matters. Not the “statistically significant” ‘designed from the beginning to get that finding’ trial from Roche or Merck.
The takeaway is that each individual can be made to feel important and will have to be if the wholesale collection and sale of data is not going to upset people. If it is presented as an opportunity to be seen as unique and important and HEARD – listened to…it will be much easier to gain trust.
Travis Dirks, co-founder of Rotary Gallop, was also at the meeting with Jeremy Walker. This is Travis on IOTA:
The computing industry has spent years looking for a way around the brick wall that used to be the super highway known as Moore’s Law and it is doing everything it can to ignore the fact that Moore’s Law died a triple death starting at least 9 years ago.
The smaller form factors of tablets and phones are the fruits of an industry forced to think about something besides More Power Scotty! With the industry slowly feeling its way along the wall – smart phones, smart watches, and soon smart rings – IOTA is jumping straight to the punch line. It bring us smart grit and soon smart dust. I’m talking wirelessly communicating computers so small it looks like I could fit 100 of them on my fingernail. They are so energy efficient they can run off ambient energy like heat and vibration and so cheap that what I spent on my new iPhone could buy hundreds of them.
This is where the Internet of Things gets real. To accomplish this incredible feat IOTA went back in time to brilliant ideas of the 60’s that were lost as people grew addicted to Moore’s ever doubling computing power. In the 60’s computing power was small and rare; to be used sparingly and programed cleverly.
Now these same ideas dusted off are bringing to life a new generation of computers not so much more powerful than their ancestors from the 60’s, but thousands of times smaller, cheaper, and energy efficient. When computers shrunk to fit in our pockets, the world changed. What happens when they shrink to fit on the head of a pin? And this time the cost and energy requirements shrinks with it. What does it mean when you have a computer you couldn’t find if you dropped that doesn’t need a battery, charge, or plug? What businesses will be completely changed? What parts of life? How does the world change when it becomes affordable to put sensing computers everywhere and figure out how to use them later?
Founder and CEO of IOTA Jeremy Walker offers a glimpse: In the 1980’s Jeremy was captain of a yacht with a crew of 66 and 4 $10million engines. The state of the art engines sent performance data to a team of engineers in Germany monitoring them as the yacht sailed. One day Jeremy received a fax that “The 4th piston on right rear engine shows signs of carbon build up. Estimated time to failure 500 miles. Please meet dispatched team of engineers for repair at nearest port. Estimated time in port 1 week.” In the 1980’s this oversight made sense for a $10 million engine. With IOTA it will be economical to monitor the spark plugs in a 20 year old Chevy via a smartphone app. By 2020 I expect to be getting an unsolicited package of light bulbs dropped off by quad copter from Amazon with a note to replace the light in the second bedroom closet. For those who not only imagine the quadcopter dropping off the light, but following you in the house to make sure you actually replace it – take heart that IOTA is the first startup in some time to begin with the premise that your data is…yours. They are building in encryption, security, and the premise of user owned data from the transistor layout up. With recent history, the Internet of things can sound like the start of a distopian future, but IOTA gives me hope that like the Internet before it, the internet of things might actually be a tool to make individual people more powerful.
The nicer side of Silicon Valley is Friday afternoon wine and appetizers at Cafe Venetia on University Ave. in Palo Alto.
Update: It’s 2 years into the Apple Watch now. Research Kit has been collecting data and an update is expected soon. It’s interesting to read this from the perspective of today…. and know that Tim Cook is dedicated to more deeply going into medicine with apps. I’m sure something surprising is coming – Tim Cook loves to surprise us! Watch the med arena carefully. Here’s a recent post on Tim and health and Apple: Apple, The Future and Medicine
The iWatch will be a watch that watches you. It measures all the bodily data points the current med arena thinks you should have. Maybe it should be called iMed or ICU. Tim Cook has been doing more than yakking with Carl Icahn. But he was very smart to do the recent buyback. The iWatch/iMed/ICU is going to be a powerhouse and the stock price will reflect it. The buyback was the right thing.
Everyone knows to look at the recent hires and Tim Cook has everyone from biosensor people to sleep studies researcher. (Please dear Apple gods, cure my insomnia.) Collecting all sorts of data about your body, connecting to your iPhone, apps that coordinate. It will be its own ecosystem.
Yes, it will be huge. I read the posts calling for Apple’s funeral. With jabs at TC for doing nothing but meeting with Carl and not able to fit Steve’s shoes. Oh, so not true. He knows wearables, ingestibles, tracking and fitness and sensors the here and now (it’s the future only to those who don’t get it.) And he’s putting it all together, right now, with the right people.
And here’s the really, really big part. Sure, Apple is meeting with the FDA for this, but my prediction is that the government gets involved. Notice all the for profit “helpers” arising de novo to assist doctors, hospitals, and clinics get Obamacized? Assisting with insurance? There is a huge window here too. This is it: insurance companies will require doctors to collect this data. If the heart rate is not within parameters, insert pharmco and a drug. And for the big picture, we have BIG DATA companies (which are funded as soon as they pop up) ready to verbalize, visualize and skywrite if necessary an interpretation. Big data and digital health are going to be big partners.
The iWatch/iMed/ICU will be a source of massive data. Data needs analysis, a story, meaning and a reason. The individual pieces of information are important individually. But collectively, we have big, big data, showing many pictures, telling many tales. Suppose we know that on January 10th, 2015 37% of all males between 50 and 75 living in Los Gatos had something in common – perhaps we might learn the heart rate of that population group during a 3.9 earthquake.
The data received will be massaged every which way, needed or not, and it will be sold with a story that begins, “If you knew…..” “then you would/could/should…” The data analytics folks will fill in the blanks for you.
The monetization of the digital health revolution has begun long before you even knew your values had value.
Buy Apple? Why not? Apple buys Apple. A lot of it. And who knows better what this means than Apple?
Tech people: read this. Parents, pay attention.
I want the end of brain tumors from cell phones. Yes, it really is a problem and finally the scientific community is waking up to this fact.
Revolutionary disruptive and innovative are such ubiquitous descriptors right now they are becoming ignored or mocked when used.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking those words are always irrelevant. I have something for you that is all of that and more. It’s a game-changer, big time. Not a little innovative, not a little disruptive, but big, fireworks, look at this and OMG is it for real big.
It is an antenna for cell phones that radiates away from your head, use less energy and can now be used by those formerly marginalized people with hearing aids.
This cell phone antenna is dramatic, game-changing, healthy, fascinating, and coming soon to your brain and those you love.
PARENTS: Do you ever worry about the cell and your kid’s brain? Please do. I’m asking you to read this, pass it on, and get the word out. Vortis is so important, yes, that important.
It’s got all the legal and governmental official ok’s. This is way past development stage and all the ducks are in order. It’s been in use in Europe and now its coming here. Prototypes are about to be made and when that is done, sales will start.
How does it work? Here is Vortis on that:
Present technology are embedded antennas that radiate in all directions.Half of the energy is absorbed by the head.
Attempts to re-direct, shield or drop energy loss to the head result in poorer performance.
Vortis is a dual element printed circuit board (PCB) that is a dual band, end-fire array operating on US and EU frequencies providing immediate technical advantages to handsets and carrier market shares.
Originally designed to overcome the problem of interference with hearing aids, the “near field null” area safely cocoons the user’s head by redirecting RF radiation fields in the near field, while sending a stronger signal forward and rearward in the far fields.
Vortis’ capability to reshape RF Signals was originally designed to serve hard of hearing markets. We learned later of greater improvements such as energy saving, pattern enhancement, etc. in its earlier testing with Motorola where it was shown that Vortis was .07 SAR over the lowest of .7 (at the time); an order of magnitude less. This offers a distinct advantage in the cell phone industry’s increasing inability to meet SAR and saves energy loss that may double battery life depending on use profile. Sony Ericsson confirmed its ability to meet the highest Hearing Aid Compatibility Standards as well.
I talked with CEO James Johnson, and his new Sales Director, Tech Director and Marketing/Social Media and they are focused on moving quickly. With all the tests and oks and licensing issues completed all that is left is production. If you are a crowdfunding guru who wants to help, this is a good time to get involved – personally, I think this is going to be massive.