Lifeboat Foundation

You could say that Illumina is to DNA sequencing is what Google is to Internet search, but that would be underselling the San Diego-based biotech company. Illumina’s machines, the best and cheapest on the market, generate 90 percent of all DNA sequence data today. Illumina is, as they say, crushing it.

But as lucrative as that 90 percent slice is for Illumina now, the whole pie is likely to get even bigger in the future. Less than 0.01 percent of the world’s population has been sequenced so far. So recently, Illumina has made bold moves positioning itself for the future: The company is consolidating its core hardware business—this week, it sued an upstart competitor, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, for patent infringement—while moving into the genetic testing business with new ventures like the liquid cancer biopsy spinoff, Grail.

The company is a looking toward a future in which a lot more people gets genetic tests—and a lot more often. “Grail’s business will be very different than Illumina’s core business,” Eric Endicott, Illumina’s director of global public relations, said in an email. “We are at a tipping point in genomics, where a broad community of scientists and researchers continue to translate the potential of the genome from science to discoveries and applications.”

Continue reading “Illumina, the Google of Genetic Testing, Has Plans for World Domination” »

Interesting model when looking at AI around the net and search engines.

A new mathematical model sheds light on the nature of viral social trends.

Wifi distribution across this planet is patchwork of crazy: You can tweet from Mt. Fuji but lord help you if you want to send an email in Cuba. Thursday, Israeli company SkyFi announced it will be the one to finally soak the world in wifi from space.

In a press release announcing $3 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners and the Liberty Israel Venture Fund, the company said it would get around the problems preventing reliable wifi from traditional satellites by launching nano satellites whose 55-centimeter diameter antenna could be folded up to make launching cheaper, then expanding once in orbit.

Continue reading “Can SkyFi Really Give the Entire World Free Internet?” »

The promise of faster and more stable Internet access through our lights is really exciting. We got a demo of PureLiFi in action at MWC 2016 and talked with the COO about the future of this technology.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W0YgV1TgnF8

“We think the only way to effectively connect people all over the world is through satellites.”

Gedalyah Reback 23 hours ago.

Continue reading “Israel startup SkyFi gets $3M to spread internet globally” »

A rapidly widening cyber-vulnerability gap between the most and least internet-dependent Asia-Pacific nations threatens to encourage online attacks on critical infrastructure, a new report warns. The defence outlook paper, to be published on.

80 million cyber attacks per year — 400 every minute — but as many as 70 percent of them go undetected. And, these numbers are anticipated to go drastically higher now “Ransomware” is paying off for hackers.

Using the internet is a risk most businesses and individuals take for granted. But as more data is stored online, the world is becoming ever more vulnerable, the head of global internet security firm Symantec, Michael Brown, says.

China goes 5G.

China Mobile has launched its 5G Joint Innovation Center project, the company said.

The company has set a business target of reaching 1.40 million TD-LTE base stations, selling 330 million 4G devices and expanding the 4G subscriber base to over 500 million by the end of 2016.

According to Shang Bing, Chairman of China Mobile, the company has deployed 1.10 million TD-LTE base stations as of the end of 2015, covering over 1.2 billion population and has achieved 4G roaming with 114 countries and regions; China Mobile sold 300 million TD-LTE devices in 2015, indicating the addition of more than 400 TD-LTE users every minute; China Mobile´s 4G subscriber base reached 340 million, accounting for about 30% of global number. Moreover, China Mobile has completed the deployment of carrier aggregation (CA) in over 300 cities and has commercialized VoLTE services in 100 cities.

Continue reading “China Mobile readies for migration from 4G to 5G” »

Google Fiber is heading close to home for its next location: San Francisco. Google announced this morning that it intends to bring its fast gigabit internet to “a portion of San Francisco,” specifically to apartments, condos, and affordable housing units. Details on exactly where and when are nonexistent for now, and Google suggests that we may be waiting a while to hear more.

What Google Fiber does say is that it won’t be building out its own network in San Francisco, as it’s done in many other cities. Instead, it’ll rely on existing fiber networks to provide its service. That may limit what Google can do and where it can go, but it also means a much faster path to launch. “To date, we’ve focused mostly on building fiber-optic networks from scratch,” Michael Slinger, Google Fiber’s business operations director, writes in a blog post. “Now, as Google Fiber grows, we’re looking for more ways to serve cities of different shapes and sizes.” Google Fiber is already taking this approach in a couple other markets, including Huntsville, Alabama, where earlier this week it announced plans to launch using the city’s municipal network.

As it’s done elsewhere, Google Fiber plans to provide free gigabit internet service to “some public and affordable housing properties” in San Francisco. It’s also working with a nonprofit to teach people basic internet skills, like setting up an email account and applying for jobs.

Continue reading “Google Fiber is coming to San Francisco” »