Tag: PREDICTIONS

Wanna know where the stock market is headed? According to new research from Indiana University, Twitter may hold the answer. Indiana's Johan Bollen and his team of researchers recently investigated whether Twitter could be used as an accurate stock market weather vane, based on the presumption that the microblogging platform could give some insight into the mood of the country. To test their ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. This amazing video, which is called 'Magic Highway USA' and was produced by Disney in 1958, speaks of our future in glowing terms, but its eerie prescience caused ...

Facing rising crime rates, the Memphis Police Department turned to a predictive crime analytics program developed by IBM back in 2006, thus making the threat of 'Minority Report' one step closer to reality. According to GovTech, the CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) software, which puts crime data on a digital map of the city, has helped the MPD reduce crime by 31-percent ...

Telling us that you can predict a movie's box office success using Twitter isn't going to impress us. Tell us that you can use it to predict ticket sales even more accurately than market-based tools like the Hollywood Stock Exchange can, and our ears will perk up. Researchers at HP Labs discovered that by simply monitoring Twitter for mentions of particular films, and by then feeding those ...

Comparing today's video game graphics to those of vintage titles is like comparing a Picasso to a stick figure. In 10 or 15 years, we may be poking fun at current titles for being laughably unrealistic. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games , told Gamasutra that in that short amount of time, designers will gain the ability to create authentic, true-to-life graphics. Apparently, we are only a few ...

Millions of U.S. consumers have come to depend on GPS technology for a variety of daily activities, like avoiding traffic jams, finding the shortest route to a vacation destination, or for just finding the nearest movie theatre. Hopefully, those GPS-addicts haven't cleaned the maps out their glove compartments just yet -- according to a U.S. government report obtained by U.K. newspaper The ...

Victory! We can still claim superiority over the machines! And as long as we continue to be better at picking winners during the NCAA's March Madness, we should be safe from the emergence of Skynet. Computer scientists have been using statistics, databases, and computer models for years to try and predict the outcome of sports tournaments. Of particular interest is the NCAA's basketball ...

Internet pioneer and Google vice president Vint Cerf believes that downloaded TV shows will soon take the place of traditional broadcasts, reports the UK's Daily Mail. Referring to this potential transition as TV's "iPod moment," Cerf cites the increasing popularity of on-demand programming as evidence. While critics claim that the massive strain such high demand would place on the Internet ...

As you may have noticed, we're not ones to put much stock in analysts' predictions, especially when they involve the demise of something as entrenched as the mouse in as little as five years. Still, that's the limb Gartner analyst Steve Prentice has walked out on, sort of. While he first qualifies things a bit by saying that the mouse "works fine in the desktop environment but for home ...

Remember when you were a kid and you told your friends that you totally loved your new computer, and some little luddite looked at you and said, "So why don't you marry it?" There was that brief moment when you thought your Commodore 64 (C64) could, in fact, make a nice spouse. If not, move along. If so, David Levy told participants at a conference last week that we will all be having loving ...

Apparently unfazed by his recent egg attack, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has now gone out on a limb and made some pretty bold predictions in a recent discussion with Washington Post editors, the biggest of which, by far, is his proclamation that he thinks there'll be "no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network." So as not to leave any doubt about that, he also ...

Though it sounds like something straight out of 'The Jetsons,' this year the first consumer 3-D printers will begin making their way into homes. Capable of creating three-dimensional plastic objects from scratch, the technology paves the way for a future in which consumers will go online to buy things like toys, replacement parts or even toothbrushes, then simply print them out instead of ...