This week in tech news: Harvard medical school rakes in a cool $1 million to study NFL injuries and Foodspotting app is acquired for $10 million. But nothing beats the priceless price of putting your head on a PEZ dispenser.
Boston: Harvard Medical School Awarded 100mil by NFL Players Association to Study football injuries. The program’s goal is to “improve the health and well-being of NFL players, while further elucidating the risks of participation in American football.” – the research to improve players’ health will include studying concussions, treatment for ACL injuries, and heart function.
NYC: New York Times launches its digital incubator, TimeSpace.
Aims to bring young entrepreneurs to the old Grey Lady to grow, teach, and learn for 4 months.
Google Maps Adds North Korea. For years, NK was barely more than an outline on Google Maps. Now, three weeks after Eric Schmidt’s visit, the country is more fleshed out.
Microsoft launches Office 365 Home Premium. Buy on a subscription basis – month-to-month or over a year, can install on up to five devices, plus 20GB of skydrive storage and 1hr/mth free skype, can stream the software (your files) across the internet. Is not the same as Office 365.
OpenTable Buys FoodSpotting for $10M
BlackBerry 10 launches with Alicia Keys as Creative Director. Kind of launches, anyways. There’s no firm release date, which, coupled with the high price, helped send BlackBerry’s shares down 20% in the next 24 hours.
Quora’s new blogging platform. Per Quora, blogs on Quora are great for people who (1) don’t have a big, established online presence already and (2) don’t want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience. Your blog will be discovered quickly without you having to do any work besides writing.
Watson headed to RPI. Researchers’ goals include finding ways to “improve Watson’s mathematical ability and help it quickly figure out the meaning of new or made-up words.” A college campus should be good for the latter—though a high school campus might be better.
App of the Week: Print a PEZ dispenser with your own head on it. Pop Factory uses an Xbox Kinect to scan your head, and then uses a 3D printer to churn out the final product.
References:
http://bostinno.com/2013/01/29/harvard-medical-school-awarded-100-million-by-…
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/new-york-times-launches-incubator-progr…
http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/01/29/the-ny-times-announces-timespace-a-4-m…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578271201719130798.htm…
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-launch-the-new-office-commercially-on-janua…
http://gizmodo.com/5979766/the-new-microsoft-office-is-hereand-you-rent-it?ut…
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/29/opentable-buys-foodspotting/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-31/blackberry-10-debut-fizzles-as-u-s-c…
http://blog.quora.com/Introducing-Blogs-on-Quora
http://betabeat.com/2013/01/watson-ibm-supercomputer-rensselaer-polytechnic-i…
http://www.geekologie.com/2013/01/your-own-3d-printed-head-on-top-of-a-pez.ph…)
http://www.hotpopfactory.com/blog/2013/01/22/3d-scanning-and-pez-hacking/
Follow