The dog days during a hot and sunny summer are the best time to chill and learn. And boy are we lucky! Sebastian Thrun - former head of Google's self-driving car initiative and founder of Udacity - just announced two awesome online courses. Both can earn you an engineering nanodegree. One on self-driving cars, the other on machine learning. While they are paid courses and guarantee you your money back when you are not finding a job, there are also two older courses on the same topic that are for free.
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Soft versus Hard Factors
It's 2017 and still the gaping differences in how innovation in different countries is stunning. Europe has a rather technical approach with emphasis of frameworks and culture just as a side note. North America is focusing much more about attitude and mindset. Knowing both approaches, I think they need some balancing, but with a dominance of the soft factors as in atitude and mindset. Ramp up the soft factors.
if you play in the Internet of Things and electronics field, you must know about Shenzhen right beside Hong Kong. The amount of companies that you find clustered there makes it clear why this Chinese city is the world's electronic Mecca. And you certainly want to look closer, as this region is on the way establishing itself as one of the most innovative regions.
This hour-long documentary by Wired dives into Shenzhen with some interesting insights.
Silicon Valley startups that were
It's over for Yahoo! Once valued at $125bn they rejected an acquisition offer by Microsoft for $44bn a few years ago. And now they sold themselves to Verizon for a meek $4.8bn. Some say the reason why they lost out to Facebook and Google was the leadership by media-people instead of engineers, others just that it was a some really bad management and board over the years. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Anyways, a warning for every company - even the hottest on the planet at some point - to stay alert, not become complacent, and get their shit together.
August seems to be in demand for attending a tour and combining it with a few days of vacation. We got twice as many bookings as we had seats. So we split it and do it anyways. To experience yourself what the Silicon Valley does right about innovation and what the latest trends are, join our Silicon Valley Inspiration Tours that give you multi-day deep dives into the San Francisco Bay Area. See more tour details here. Here is also a list of preparatory steps for your visit.
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NSFW - Farmbot
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - goes green. Technology doesn't stop from touching agriculture either. This Farmbot plants seeds, waters them, and monitors their growth. You can now get your own Farmbot!
