Flying cars have always been a representation of what the future has to come. Now the future may be the present. SkyTran has come up with a “sky taxi” system for the past 5 years that they are getting ready to test out in Israel. They are going to start out with only one car traveling about 900 feet, 20 to 30 feet above the ground following an elevated track. Each car can hold 4 people and hit a max speed of 60 mph. After this test, if they see that is is successful, they hope to move these cars to more Israeli cities and possibly some US cities by 2018.

The impact of these Sky Taxis would not only be for the purpose of faster travel. The prototype shows that they are environmentally safer, cheaper, and easier to make than a normal car. The system is made from steel and aluminum and can be assembled in a short matter of days and uses electromagnetic levitation technology to propel the car forward, also making the system energy efficient.

I think that after extensive testing of this product, it would be a great investment to bring it large cities. Creating a better and environmentally safer way to travel is better for the overall population. If the cars were able to be expanded more to fit more people like a bus or train it could be even more efficient and taking more people than having multiple smaller cars. This could be a giant break through in new technology and I’m curious to see if the US will be calling a for a sky taxi in 2018.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/23/smallbusiness/skytran-air-taxis/index.html?iid=SF_River

As all of this new technology is rising, it is becoming multiple purposed and finding new ways to help people to do more than socialize.A new app for the Apple Watch can be downloaded to sense and measure the duration and severity of epileptic seizures. EpiWatch app records the information from these situations and is sent to John Hopkins University for educational research and to gather more information behind epilepsy. The main purpose behind the creation of this app was to try and gain as much data about seizures as possible to try and take a more preventative measures. This is part of a three part ResearchKit apps that are testing to see if Apple products could be beneficial as a medical diagnostic device.

A big benefit to using Apple as a tester for ResearchKits is the vast amount of people that use Apple products, giving a larger testing pool to collect as much data as possible. These products are still being highly tested and are deeply in the works, but they are looking to create other apps that can track moles for Melanoma, and even test if a child has autism or anxiety. These apps would be a great way for people to personally take control of their health and be able to track what is going on personally, but also allowing the data behind them to help other people and further research. It would be amazing to see how all of these different apps would be able to further research and help as many people as possible.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/19/technology/researchkit-seizure/index.html?iid=Lead

The Internet of Things was a big topic of discussion for the beginning of this course and is a huge evolving topic in general. Most of the ideas that are thought of for the sensors that go into the IoT are focused around how to help people, but what about the big leap to really help people? If there was a form of technology that was able to predict and furthermore prevent crime, how would this impact America, or the world in general?

Hitachi’s Predictive Crime Analytics system is a process being worked on with algorithms and artificial intelligence programed into software and hardware to track, collect, and analyze data found on the internet to try and pick up on threatening behaviors and notify the authorities. Other factors also play a role in this prediction process, like the weather and historical crime data.

To further predict where crimes may unfold the program is using location data from a variety of social media platforms and public surveillance networks, to better narrow down where crimes are more likely to occur. All of these predictions are presented in real time and displayed for law enforcement to see and keep a higher watch in areas that seem to have more activity than others.

The main goal of this software would be to help law enforcement and give them a better prospective to things that they may not be able to see when they are trying to keep people safe. It would not be able to prevent all crimes, but with future enhancements they are trying to make it as accurate as possible to efficiently help as many people as possible. Some cities have already signed up to test and use this software and collect data to see the accuracy and helpfulness of the program.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/02/technology/hitachi-predict-crime/index.html

E-books are becoming a huge part of the new era of learning. This new app, Hooked, takes it to a completely different level by trying to appeal the fast and short attention span of teens and young adults today. The design of these books allows them to be read more like text messages than actual novels and are being kept to a 5 minute time frame, allowing for a quick and entertaining experience. The stories are broken down by different genres and you can subscribe from anywhere from weekly to yearly, and uploading new stories daily.

This is an extremely creative and great idea to capture a specific demographic based off of their other technological preferences, like Snapchat. I don’t think that this would be a good tool for educational purposes, but I do think it would be a unique form of entertainment. This is a great way to make e-books or e-stories more common and allow teens that are i constantly glued to their phones to actually do something more than checking Facebook and Twitter.

I actually got the chance to download and try the app for myself and it was very interesting. It was easy to use and very easy to read and kept your attention the entire time. I really think that app entails all that it says it would do and does a great job diverging from other common apps today.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/19/technology/hooked-reading-app-prerna-gupta/index.html

When shopping in some stores, it seems like the loud music is hindering from your ability to focus on shopping and making purchases and making you think more about running out of the store before you lose your hearing. But with some new technology, stores are finding a way to use music to their advantage to encourage customers, rather than scare them away.

Several clothing stores in Singapore attached RFID (radio frequency identification) tags onto their clothing items and when a person enters the changing room with each specific item it scans the data in the RFID chip to see the clothing style and type that is matched up with a certain song or genre. This music will start playing when they enter the changing room to try on the clothing they picked out. Also, the song was then sent to them via text message so they were able to decide if they wanted to download it as well.

This reminds me a lot of the user experience that designers use to make people enjoy their websites and games. By making the shopping experience simple, fun, and easy, the user (the shopper) is going to enjoy it so much more and continue to keep using it (or coming back to your store and shopping there).

Past research has showed that music can boost retail sales and the personalization should benefit this even more. This is creating a better customer experience and should be tried out more in the US and other nations. This is a great way to subtly mix in different aspects of interest to make people not even notice the advanced technology that is being used on them. This would also allow for a lot of data on how many people are actually influenced by the music or if they didn’t actually like the song at all, or even if they liked it so much they downloaded it. During the trial 84% of the shoppers downloaded the free music that was sent to them via text, which leads to the other question, did they download it because they liked it, or because it was free?

http://www.musicworksforyou.com/news-and-charts/news/44-changing-rooms-match-the-music-to-the-customer