A new Robot for Hospitals

Diligent Robotics, a Texas-based robotics company, unveiled a new robot for hospitals. The announcement was made on Tuesday. The robot is called as Moxi and in 2018, its pilot was carried out in four hospitals in Texas.

Designed to include mobile manipulation and social intelligence capabilities: Moxi

Fetch Robotics helped the company to create the robot on its mobile base and navigation software based on the Robot Operating System.

Other companies such as Velodyne, Intel, Kinova, and Robotiq contributed items such as a lidar sensor, a camera, an arm, and a gripper respectively. The robot has a humanoid face to communicate with the people around him. It can change its head and torso according to height.

Andrea Thomaz, one of the founders of Diligent Robotics, spoke exclusively to The Robot Report and shared few things about the new development. She told that during the beta trials of Moxi, the company was focused on learning as much as we could about clinical workflows and opportunities for automation to make the biggest impact.

The company gained so much knowledge from all of the 125 nurses that the robot worked alongside during the pilot and now the excitement is high to act on those learnings. The robot doesn’t carry out patient-facing tasks. It can do tasks such as transporting supplies to hospital and nursing units, and samples to laboratories.

Currently, Moxi is available as a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

How Do Social Media Apps Make Money?

Are you confused about whether you should create your own social network app or not? Not sure if it will be worth the time or effort? If yes, then don’t come to a decision before you go through this article. Because, over the course of this piece, we’ll tell you how the big-name social networks –  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – out there are making money, so you can also apply their methods. Let’s get started –

How Social Networks Actually Make Money

Social network sites are making money in various ways. Let’s break them down below –

Ads

Generally, if you aren’t paying for the social media app, then you are the payment. Yes, you’re the end consumer and advertisers are the source of money for social networks. By using these platforms, you’re selling them your time and attention, which advertisers are taking a cut off.

While you may think that’s an unethical way of raking in money, but it’s only fair for them to make money through ads as they’ve spent so much time building up their user base.

Online advertising is still a rising market. And because of the attention, these apps are holding, advertisers are willing to open their wallets further to get an ad there. The more the advertisers pay, the more prospects would see the ad.

Creative Products

Since monetizing a social media subtly ain’t a cakewalk, webmasters devise creative ways to make their revenue. One such creative way is Facebook Gifts. It lets you send virtual gifts to your friends that show up on your profile. They cost $1 and you can also personalize your message on them.

Premium Subscriptions

Would you pay money to use Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Probably not. Even if you decide yes, most people out there won’t. The only successful subscription social networks are the entertainment, media, and dating networks.  Free apps attract average users because there’s nothing to lose for them.

While most social networks are completely free, some offer premium versions to make some money in exchange for extra features. LinkedIn, for instance. They offer a premium subscription for job seekers. YouTube has also recently come up with their premium subscription, where they reduce hassle for the user.

But in all honesty, it’s hard to monetize social networks for the time being. Especially because there’s the risk of harming the user experience. Social networks that add applications and services into the community can make more revenue by charging a developer fee.

Venture Capital – If Everything Else Fails

Majority of the social networks start out with venture capital funds. Investors often take risks on companies if they see potential in them. So they write the check in hopes of getting a big return over the course of time.

Facebook is a prime example of this. They started out with venture capital. Same case for Twitter. They both had raised several million dollars as venture capital. The aim is to either monetize the network or sell it off to some large corporation to make a killing.

Last Words

Seeing from a consumer’s point of view, ads mainly were a way to enjoy the application at a far less cost. Without them, magazines and newspapers would have to double and triple their prices just to avoid losses. And the price increase would certainly reduce the number of pieces sold. Same applies for social networks. Doing so will make people quit social media. Because let’s face it – none of us would want to pay for it without having a taste of it first. It’s super crucial to make access easy, effortless, and free if social networks want to keep their growing up.

How to Handle Credit Card Debt?

Credit cards come with lots of benefits; that’s why a vast number of people use these cards for different purposes. But the customers should understand their responsibilities while taking advantage of the fantastic benefits of credit cards. You may start facing financial issues if you’re constantly transferring balances, missing the deadlines of your credit card bills, and using a supplementary card for paying your card debt.

A report shows that more than nine million credit cards were issued in Singapore in 2015. That’s the reason why the total debt of credit cards has reached over five billion dollars. Therefore, you must learn to handle your credit card debt and improve your credit score.

Here are a few tips you can use to keep on track.

1. Determine the Interest Rates and Balances If you are clear about the amount you owe on each of your cards, you will find it easier to take control of your debt. You need to create a list of interest rates and balances for each credit card. Consider transferring the balance to lowest “interest giving” account if the interest rate of a card is above 9%. Thus, you’d be able to repay off the remaining debt at an affordable interest rate.
2. Buy Your Credit Report You must carefully analyze the situation of your credit score by looking at the credit report. You can also use this report to determine the total amount you owe. The record of your late payments, credit facilities, defaults, payment history, and bankruptcies is usually available on the credit report. Make sure that you get in touch with relevant authorities to fix if there are any problems or inconsistencies found on your credit report. You can easily change any past errors that are found on your credit report.
3. Debt Consolidation Repayment Plan If you’re converting your unsecured loans and outstanding balances into a debt consolidation repayment plan, you must inform your bank about your situation. The debt repayment plan helps reduce the burden by allowing you to pay the card debt by installments. In the beginning, you must consider paying off the debts that have higher interest rates. Once these debts are paid off, you can move to the debts that have lower interest rates.
4. Pay more than the Minimum You’re supposed to pay more interest if you’re making the lowest possible payment. If you want to stay safe from these dilemmas, you must consider paying more than the minimum requirement. For example, if you have an outstanding balance of two thousand dollars on your card with an interest rate of 18%, you’re supposed to pay a minimum 2% of your balance every month. In this situation, it will take around five years to pay off your debt if you’re paying the minimum of forty dollars every month. And without even realizing, you’d be paying an additional four thousand dollars in interest during that time. If you want to pay off the debt fast, you must increase your payment.

5. Seek Professional Help

If you’re still feeling confused about paying off your debt, you may get help from debt counseling to solve this issue. Fortunately, many experts can help you with your financial problems in a smooth way.

Fastest Growing Healthcare Companies 2019 listed by The Silicon Review

Healthcare industry is getting a rapid makeover, from surgical robots to smart hospitals; the digital transformation is revolutionizing health care in new and exciting ways. Companies in the healthcare industry are all pumped up, and current trends promise further big changes for professionals in the healthcare business.

From small doctor’s offices to major hospitals, the healthcare IT environment is increasingly complex and, if not managed appropriately, can negatively impact patient care. What are the major technology challenges in healthcare industry in the modern environment? And how to overcome those challenges? Answer is right here!.

Here is the list, the answer for every healthcare technology challenge. The Silicon Review “10 Fastest Growing Healthcare Companies 2019.” These companies are not only the exceptional innovators, but are striving to make the society a better place to live. The companies that are enlisted are well-known for their ability to fight against healthcare complexities.

Planning to become IoT developer, then you should learn about these difficulties and know what you are going to deal with in the process

A relatively new area of IoT development is only gaining its popularity and relevance. People connect cars, portable devices at home, creating an entire ecosystem of data that developers need to work with. The pioneers of this development have already overcome some difficulties, some just discovered and are working on them. Before becoming an IoT developer, you should learn about these difficulties and know what you are going to deal with in the process.

What Does Await for IoT in the future?

The Internet of Things is a new stage in the development of the Internet when more things are connected to it than people. IoT connects the objects around us to a computer network. They exchange information with each other and work without human intervention and in real-time. In fact, it is the Internet, a new real world.

The Internet of Things promises to change the way whole industries approach their business. This innovation requires the business to both fully digitalize internal processes and change business models for better UX. IoT users are already becoming more and more all over the world, from China to the USA and analysts' forecasts call these processes only the beginning of the development of new technology. The concept itself takes the first place among the predictions of futurologists, but its peculiarity is that it has already begun to be realized.

To hire IoT application developer, you need the following points within the company:

Connected Products: A company can develop new IoT devices and services and combine them into one ecosystem (for example, Apple does this by creating iCloud to upload all the information from user devices there, thus linking them.)

Connected Business Processes: A company can use IoT to improve its business processes.

What are the IoT Applications in different industries? We can already name several areas that use IoT Applications in their business processes.

Smart Home

More and more companies are becoming involved in the creation of smart homes, as demand increases among consumers. Major market players such as Philips and Belkin are already actively occupying a niche, but the area still waits for new startups for further development.

Smart City

The explanation of the meaning is in the concept itself. The concept of a smart city consists of water distribution, waste management, traffic management, and environmental monitoring. Such industrial IoT will improve the quality of citizens’ life, get rid of old problems and make cities safer for life.

Wearables

Devices that can be interconnected are the most popular for potential buyers.

Connected Car

This application requires powerful networking, so this technology is closely related to the deployment of 5G technology.

Connected Health

Already, the development of new remote monitoring equipment has great potential and will certainly have its customers. The healthcare area in particular needs IoT applications.

Smart Farming

Most farming processes can be monitored using IoT, which would reduce the time and other resources spent on growing crops.

In the future, the business will have an even more serious approach to IoT. Predictive maintenance will be improved by several more levels, which will entail an increase in technology investment. Other predictions also include gaining voice by all IoT devices. Virtual assistants will become part of the smart device itself, as voice control will improve the technology. We must not lose sight of the impact of AI on the development and implementation of IoT technology. Internet of Things creates a huge amount of information. Analysis and outgoing data will be difficult to regulate by a human, therefore only the combination of these two technologies will raise them to the next level of development in the future.

5 pitfalls of IoT Developers that You Can Learn From

As the Internet of Things grows, so does the demand for programmers. This suggests what opportunities will open for them in the coming years. Let's talk about what you need to know before deciding to become an IoT developer.

Basic knowledge of languages

The Internet of Things is so widespread that a developer can choose a programming language to his liking. Low-level assembly or C / C ++ programming is needed for embedded systems.

High-level languages ​​such as Node.js and Java will be a great start for beginners in IoT programming. They have a low entry threshold and also, have useful features, such as automatic memory deallocation. It is also important to be able to understand the SoC directory and understand how the sensors interact with the DAC.

Security

This problem is raised every time it comes to IoT. With so many connected devices, it can be difficult for users to protect their personal data and application patterns. The more devices are connected, the more vulnerabilities and IoT security threats. Among them are attacks on cloud services that store large and often confidential amounts of data. This makes them an attractive target for hackers who are very inventive in their search for new attack vectors for centralized services. In the event of hacking of a cloud provider alone, the damage can range from 50 to 120 billion dollars.

Data validity

Data stored on IoT platforms cannot be completely trusted outside the scope of responsibility of one owner since it is not possible to verify that they have not been changed before being sent, sold or used by other parties.

Large companies such as Uber and Lyft do not have a solution that allows them to share reliable map data or travel data; they found another way: to collect and store such data sets independently of each other.

Privacy

Another topical issue of IoT is user privacy. And it's not only about the possible theft of data by hackers, but also about a violation of the privacy of the consumer. Enhanced corporate transparency is required to ensure the invulnerability of user data.

Lack of control system

Another problem is that the IoT industry faces is its insufficient scaling - if forecasts regarding the number of connected devices shortly come true, it is difficult to imagine a functioning network supported by existing inefficient and insecure centralized solutions.

These are the problems that IoT programmers have yet to figure out. Demand for specialists in this field is only growing now, and in particular, demand for those who understand the vulnerabilities of hardware and software used by devices connected to the network. It is on these 5 pitfalls that the best programming minds are now beating.

Conclusion

The Internet of Things is an area that is currently new. How the industry will develop in the future is already predicted by tech evangelists. Security and centralization problems are still open, but with the introduction of 5G and AI, IoT developers will be able to cope with them and thus transfer the technology to a new level of development.

5 Best Security Companies to Watch 2019 by The Silicon Review

Transforming cybersecurity with a cloud-native endpoint protection platform by Carbon Black 

Who is Responsible For Protecting Your Data Online?

In today’s data-driven world, there is no end to the number of individuals and organizations who are eager to get whatever data they can from you. Even the most privacy-conscious individual can quickly become overwhelmed by the onslaught of privacy-threats that we face on a near-daily basis. Knowing what someone can do with your IP address is enough to drive you crazy.

Ultimately, you need to take responsibility for the security of your own data. As we have all seen in recent years, even the biggest corporations can fall prey to data breaches. By following some simple best practices, you can massively reduce the chances of your data falling into the wrong hands.

Back-Up Your Data Often and at the First Opportunity

Many of us use cloud storage to back up our most important files, but it is important not to rely entirely on these services. Lots of online services seem like they will always be there - until they’re not. Google, for example, is one of the most popular cloud storage providers out there, but they have a long history of shutting down various services prematurely.

It’s therefore vital that you maintain your own backups of your most important data. Ideally, you should aim to keep offline backups of your most important cloud files so you aren’t entirely dependent on access to a particular service to get at them.

Set Appropriate Permissions

Whenever you hand over personal data to an online service or website, make sure that you understand exactly who is going to be able to view it. In the case of social media services and similar websites, you have a high degree of control over who has permission to access your data. If you need to send sensitive files or information to other people, consider password-protecting the files.

Reading privacy policies isn’t exactly fun for most people, but they will either give you a clear picture of how your data will be used or they will let you know that the service can’t be trusted.

If you are responsible for other people’s data, it is up to you to make sure that it is only available to those with a need to access it.

Use a VPN or Proxy

Both VPNs and proxies can significantly improve your online privacy and security, adding an extra layer of security between you and the internet. Both of these services work according to the same principle - by adding an intermediary server between the user and the website they want to connect to, it’s possible for users to both obscure their own IP address and use an IP address from a specific region.

When you normally connect to an online service, your device will hand over its IP address as part of the process of establishing a connection. By connecting via a VPN or proxy and sending all of your requests to the website via the service, you never have to directly communicate with the webserver, keeping your IP hidden.

If the server that you connect through is located in another country, you will be able to use it to browse the internet as if you are doing so from that country. This makes VPNs and proxies ideal for circumventing geo-blocking as well as obscuring your location.

Use Privacy-Focused Services

When it comes to looking after your sensitive personal data, some businesses are better than others. At one end of the spectrum, you have Facebook - a business who just can’t stop innovating when it comes to finding ways of invading your privacy. At the other, there are countless services like Mastodon that trade heavily on their reputations for maintaining user privacy and security in an open source structure.

For most common online services that you use, there will be a privacy-focused alternative. For example, instead of using Google for your online searches, you could switch to DuckDuckGo. Similarly, there is a growing number of Facebook alternatives that don’t trade their users’ data. Some of these ask users to pay instead, but others are seeking more novel approaches to making sustainable privacy-focused social media platforms.

It should be noted that no system is perfect. The only way of ensuring that your personal data can’t ever fall into the wrong hands is to never put it online, to begin with. There is always some level of risk and every time you submit personal information anywhere, there will be some kind of trade-off.

Use Ad Blockers

There are a whole host of free ad blocking add-ons available for all major internet browsers. These ad blockers do exactly what the name suggests - they prevent ads from loading on webpages. Malicious code can be embedded in online ads with relative ease. A silver lining of the highly-concentrated nature of the online advertising industry is that only a small number of providers need to be screening their ads to limit the proliferation of malicious ads.

However, malicious ads do slip through the net, especially as they become more sophisticated in nature. There will always be the occasional website or blog using custom ads, or one of the lesser-known providers. If you, or someone else on the same computer, use an out-of-date web browser that is missing recent security updates, browser exploits can be used to install keyloggers or access the file system.

You can go one step further and add the NoScript extension to your browser. This will disable all scripts and media until you add sites to your whitelist. It’s not as difficult as it sounds - when you first land on a site, you only need to click a few buttons and it will be trusted. However, if you do a lot of hopping around different websites, it will prevent scripts from executing without your permission.

Keeping your data safe online is more difficult today than it used to be, but it is still doable. Most data security is a case of common sense - as long as you remember that every piece of personal information that you hand over could potentially end up leaking and you take measures to minimize that potential, you will be safe from the most common breaches.