A six-step methodology for innovation called design thinking emerged in the 1990s and soon took the business world by storm. But in recent years, the MIT Technology Review reports, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics contend that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they say that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them.
What if the next big thing never quite becomes the next big thing? Fast Company lists six reasons why excitement over the metaverse is already fading (No. 1: Generative AI just stole its thunder)—before adding a note of optimism at the end.
Choosing the right top-level domain can be crucial to a brand's success, and for many tech startups these days, .io domains offer an opportunity to generate a URL that nobody else has. HubSpot looks at what exactly an .io domain is, and the pros and cons of using one.
GitHub has a lot of code to search—more than 200 million repositories—and says last November's beta version of a search engine optimized for source code has caused a "flurry of innovation," The Register reports. In a recent blog post, Timothy Clem delved into the technology behind the code search engine built in Rust called Blackbird. Blackbird currently provides access to almost 45 million GitHub repositories, which together amount to 115TB of code and 15.5 billion documents.
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ClimateOS, an integrated platform developed by Stockholm-based startup ClimateView, aims to help cities plan and manage their transition to zero carbon by breaking it down into distinct but interconnected “building blocks," the Guardian reports. The online tool is being used in eight countries by a rapidly lengthening list of cities.
After years of rapid growth, podcasting is facing an identity crisis, Axios reports. Podcast search engine Listen Notes’ updated 2022 stats showed an 80 percent drop in new podcasts created last year. And the podcast ad market, which totaled $1.5 billion in 2022, remains minuscule compared to the nearly $70 billion spent on TV ads last year.
Many people in the U.S. want to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a recent report from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the New York Times reports.
The tech company Appy Pie has launched a free app development training program for K-12 and university students to learn how to create their own mobile applications, Government Technology reports. Appy Pie says its free no-code app development workshop will provide hands-on training to introduce students to the basics of application development, such as creating a demo app and publishing it in mobile app stores.
Empowered by artificial intelligence technologies, computers today can engage in convincing conversations with people, compose songs, paint paintings, play chess and go, and diagnose diseases, to name just a few examples of their technological prowess. But computational hurdles remain, writes computer science professor Jie Wang in The Conversation, due to the limits of algorithms—including some problems that are impossible for computers to solve.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot powered by machine learning, is absolutely everywhere lately—including the Pentagon, Vice reports. The Pentagon used ChatGPT to write an Feb. 8 article about the launch of a new counter-drone task force. A note attached to the article said “the use of AI to generate this story emphasizes U.S. Army Central's commitment to using emerging technologies and innovation in a challenging and ever-changing operational environment.”