Jon Bruner
Jon Bruner is a data journalist who approaches questions that interest him by writing and coding. Before coming to O'Reilly, where he is editor-at-large, he was data editor at Forbes Magazine. He lives in New York, where he can occasionally be found at the console of a pipe organ.
Where will software and hardware meet?
Software is adding more and more value to machines. Could it completely commoditize them?
I’m a sucker for a good plant tour, and I had a really good one last week when Jim Stogdill and I visited K. Venkatesh Prasad at Ford Motor in Dearborn, Mich. I gave a seminar and we talked at length about Ford’s OpenXC program and its approach to building software platforms.
The highlight of the visit was seeing…
An IPO by any other name
Going public with a special ticker symbol, and the companies that went before.
When Tableau goes public this summer, its shares will trade on NASDAQ under the apt ticker symbol “DATA.” Tickers are arguably less important now than they’ve ever been, since computers have removed much of the ambiguity they’re meant to resolve, but an…
The coming of the industrial internet
Our new research report outlines our vision for the coming-together of software and big machines.
Download this free report(PDF, Mobi, EPUB)
The big machines that define modern life — cars, airplanes, furnaces, and so forth — have become exquisitely efficient, safe, and responsive…
New vision in old industry
A software startup builds itself to work with Michigan's manufacturers.
Nathan Oostendorp thought he’d chosen a good name for his new startup: “Ingenuitas,” derived from Latin meaning “freely born” — appropriate, he thought, for a company that would be built on his own commitment to open-source software.
But Oostendorp, earlier a co-founder of Slashdot, was aiming to bring modern computer vision systems to heavy industry, where the Latinate name…
Masking the complexity of the machine
The industrial Internet will bring abstraction and modularity to the physical world.
The Internet has thrived on abstraction and modularity. Web services hide their complexity behind APIs and standardized protocols, and these clean interfaces make it easy to turn them into modules of larger systems that can take advantage of the most intelligent solution to each of many problems.
The Internet revolutionized the software-software interface; the industrial Internet will revolutionize the software-machine…
DIY robotic hands and wells that text (industrial Internet links)
Plus, politicians and business talking about tomorrow's manufacturing landscape, and a new source for more than 400,000 electricity-data series
Two makers come together to make a robotic hand for a boy in South Africa (TechCrunch) — The maker movement is adjacent to the industrial Internet, and it’s growing fast as a rich source of innovative thinking wherever machines and software meet. In this case, Ivan Owen and Richard Van As built a robotic hand for a South African five-year-old…
Go to Washington, build the industrial Internet
The next class of Presidential Innovation Fellows will include two people who will help define standards for the industrial Internet.
The White House has issued its call for the second round of Presidential Innovation Fellows, and it includes an invitation to spend a 6- to 12-month “tour of duty” in Washington, building the industrial Internet — or, more precisely, helping the National Institute of Standards and Technology find ways to connect proprietary intelligent machines to each other securely…
Hacking robotic arms, predicting flight arrival times, manufacturing in America, tracking Disney customers (industrial Internet links)
The next wave of manufacturing will be highly automated--and American. Also, a hardware hacking collective rehabilitated a pair of cast-off industrial robots.
Flight Quest (GE, powered by Kaggle) — Last November GE, Alaska Airlines, and Kaggle announced the Flight Quest competition, which invites data scientists to build models that can accurately predict when a commercial airline flight touches down and reaches its gate. Since the leaderboard for the competition was activated on December 18, 2012, entrants have already beaten the…
The driverless-car liability question gets ahead of itself
Who will pay damages when a driverless car gets into an accident?
Megan McArdle has taken on the question of how liability might work in the bold new world of driverless cars. Here’s her framing scenario:
Imagine a not-implausible situation: you are driving down a brisk road at 30 mph with a car heading towards you in the other lane at approximately the same speed. A large ball rolls out into the…
