Three winners from the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) will be chosen at CES 2015. All ten finalists will appear on stage at the Venetian in Las Vegas to vie for the opportunity to present their product later to Sir Richard Branson.

Finalists have been helped towards their goal with a boost from such companies as Amazon who provides web service. Rackspace offers no-fee hosting. Back-up and recovery services come from Axcient.  Helpful tools were additional perks, such as app development from Progress and from Spotfire data analytics from TIBCO.

Entrants came from more than 100 countries and were whittled down to the final ten. Only three will be chosen at the CES showdown to go to Branson’s Necker island to meet with him. Kym McNicholas, Executive Director of Extreme Tech Challenge said: It was truly a tough call as we had an incredible set of high quality candidates that I believe will be the next billion dollar wave.

Contestants range from a graphics app thru medical equipment, a publishing platform, travel booking, drones, facial recognition to a high end motorcycle helmet just to name a few. Judges have experience in many of the industries represented. Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline, should be able to evaluate Wanderu that is geared to making bookings, not for planes or hotels, but a different segment of the travel industry – intercity buses and trains.

Howard Leonhardt, XTC judge, holds 21 U.S. patents for products for treating cardiovascular disease.

BioHeart founder Howard Leonhardt another of the XTC judges is steeped in the medical environment. The company works with cell technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases. Robert Scoble will also sit on the panel. A well-known tech blogger who once worked at Microsoft, Scoble is now with Rackspace’s Small Teams, Big Impact (previously Building 43). This division, a new content and social networking website, is geared to help new startups and encourage groundbreaking technology. The Extreme Tech Challenge is right up their alley.

New fangled stethoscope from Eko Designs.

One entrant is by Eko Designs founded last year at UC Berkeley. Eko Designs’ Core is a digital stethoscope attachment that allows clinicians to switch between analog and digital information. It helps visualize, record, playback, share, and analyze heart sounds. The added device standardizes the recording of heart sounds, attaches them to medical records, and provides better coordination of care between professionals. It attempts to address the misdiagnoses and unnecessary referrals that occur in heart-related cases.

The device’s integrated Bluetooth links the Core to Eko’s smartphone app and its HIPAA compliant  web portal. These digital tools provide heartbeat analysis, audio visualization, and secure data storage. You can sign up for one of the beta units coming in 2015 and see for yourself if you can amplify, record, analyze and securely share heart sounds which identify heart murmurs more accurately than ever before.

Ghost is an open source publishing platform for bloggers. Its tools make you look professional while it adds in a few rules to live by when blogging. The Ghost Foundation is a small nonprofit organization that runs the project. As with any open source, the public, people from all around the world, contribute to its structure and features.

Ghost has a set of rules for users to follow.

Although the software is free, as with any open source application, with free comes “basic.” Beyond that, a fee is attached. Ghost sustains itself by renting space for, or hosting, your blog for $10 a month. Their marketplace contains a directory of themes, apps, and resources which have been created specifically for Ghost. Some are free; some are premium, meaning you pay a fee to use them. For $10/month you get unlimited transfer and storage with automatic updates and backups and worldwide CDN & security protection. For a team of ten bloggers you pay $100/month and receive priority support. You can sign up and try it out for free.

Wanderu, unfortunately is only currently covering the US and Canada. If you have ever tried to get around Europe which has a better public transport system than most of the US, you’ll appreciate this new app. They have City Travel Guides for prominent East Coast cities. Bus and train schedules for Boston make your visit to one of the important sites of the American Revolution easy. Wanderu connects you with 10 different bus companies within the Boston area.

Their bus routes are short hauls on each coast. No nationwide trips are available yet. If you want to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and see scenery along the way, Wanderu is the ticket. Want to take a look at Florida, then after seeing Disneyworld in Orlando, hop a bus to Miami to sun yourself on the beaches using Wanderu’s routing and ticket app. The company selects only the safest and most trusted brands in ground travel. It provides mobile information on Apple, Android or Blackberry.

All ten finalists will appear at CES 2015. Look for the contest to take place January 8 in the Marco Polo room at 2PM.

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The title of the latest book by Andrew Keen, “The Internet is Not the Answer” raises some serious questions. Keen is one of the authors who will be at CES 2015 as part of Gary’s Book Club exhibit. Several authors will discuss their works, answer questions, and autograph books purchased on site during the Las Vegas Convention.

Andrew Keen is himself a disruptive influence in the tech industry with his sharp opinions. Among other positions, he is Executive Director of Futurecast which since 1996 has held up a crystal ball looking to the future with an historical perspective across industries, including consumer electronics, the Internet, education, science, employment, and telecommunications.

Andrew Keen presents his disruptive views in his latest book.

Keen’s new book will be released in hardback January 2015 through Barnes and Noble, and other mainstream outlets. Indie Bound, Powell, and Books a Million  will also offer Keen’s eye opening take on technology.

His views do not flatter high tech society, saying that the Web rather than being a force for good has effectively been more harmful, favoring a small group of privileged white youngsters who have become multi-millionaires in a cloistered tech environment. His opinion is that contrary to its promise of promoting democracy, the Internet has empowered mob rule.

Keen’s book is filled with footnotes supporting his facts. He states: “The Internet is a winner-take-all economy. It’s creating a two-tiered society … with economic inequality between tech workers and everyone else.” As an example, he notes that in Santa Clara County California, home of Silicon Valley, poverty rose from 8 percent in 2001 to 14 percent in 2013 with food stamp recipients growing from 25,000 to 125,000 over the same time period.

Homes are priced out of the reach of most as Silicon Valley’s impact is felt in Santa Clara County California.

Now one could argue that it is the economy in general that has produced such gaps, but his examples continue. Inequality exists within the tech companies themselves. Silicon Valley is charged with bias against older workers and women. Women fare worse in Silicon Valley than the already acknowledged disparity elsewhere. Here they earn less than half what their male contemporaries do. Beyond wages, Keen points to “a persistent sexist culture among many of the young male programmers … who openly treat women as sexual objects and unashamedly develop pornographic products … designed to humiliate their female colleagues.”

He calls the San Francisco Bay Area the most important social experiment of our age where technology is beginning to usurp government. It represents a “libertarian fantasy about how Internet companies can somehow detach themselves from their wider responsibilities in society and how networked technology can replace government.”

Keen notes such troubling trends as Web service platforms like TaskRabbit which he takes to task. He opines that such endeavors provide “no role for unions, no place for anything protecting the rights of the laborer, no collective sense of identity, no dignity of work.”

Google’s Googleplex is called a medieval-style walled city, with entirely self-enclosed offices, restaurants, gyms, laundries, and dormitories …”that will, in good feudal fashion, cut off its privileged workers from everything around them” physically detaching themselves from increasingly impoverished communities around them. Businesses that have traditionally relied on the business patronage of local workers are suffering. For example, Twitter’s free food service while benefiting its employees has destroyed the business of local restaurants and cafés. Paraphrasing Weekly Standard’s Charlotte Allen, Keen claims: “The digital overlords have seceded from the analog peasants.”

Keen’s scathing analysis of what the Internet and Silicon Valley success bodes for society continues in his book “The Internet is Not the Answer”. He is scheduled to appear 12:30pm – 2:00pm at the CEA Stage, in the LVCC, Grand Lobby.

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Personally, I am interested in 3D Vision the most. Then again, you already know I am a bit quirk when it comes to IT, since I also game a lot using OCZ NIA, steering wheels and so on. Ever since I remember, 3D was a big thing for me. I remember buying comic books that came with glasses and becoming hooked on seeing Phantom, Mister No, Transformers, Superman and all “hovering” above the pages. Almost a decade later, I watched Freedie’s Dead using the same red/blue paper glasses. Anaglyph technology was far from perfect, could cause hellish headaches and overall, was not a good technology. But it was Cheap with capital C. Watching movies such as Superman Returns in IMAX 3D (all too short 20 minutes) only begged for decent 3D technology. Dolby 3D provides just that, but the technology is not usable in the world of computers. Big from me.

Nvidia’s 3D Vision promised all that, but using active shutter technology meant only one thing – it will be expensive to make. My ex-colleague from The INQ already made his take on how expensive this technology will be, but he didn’t mention the price, and wrote some inaccuracies (one emitter can play host to 1000 glasses if they’re in range – nV demonstrated 3D tech to press using a single emitter for the 50 of us in Munich). I managed to get the price from some sources, and all that I can say, I really hope it won’t be so high. The price I am hearing is $199 for one box. If this really is the future price in e-tail and retail, there is not much to be said besides – you screwed up. Badly.

I would have understanding if Nvidia teamed up with Oakley and brought top notch quality looks, offered customization (for prescription lenses), or something like that, but a cheap plastic-looking part (they actually use an expensive material to ensure durability, but it does look… cheap) costing more than $99 is just something that will not work. I am waiting to see the final product before I bring the judgment upon it, but unless the part comes at acceptable price point, I am sad to see that 3D will probably stay away from mainstream audience. Even OCZ NIA now is in sub-100 bracket, and yes, I would recommend that you go out and buy the part. Playing around with Nvidia’s 3D glasses was a blast on both Nvision and GeForce Plus event in Munich, but the key part is availability to the market. Pricing it out of the range is not something that will speed up the adoption of technology…

Thus, maybe 3D Vision will be a cool product in 2010, when the company will be forced to cut the price down to $99. Until then, this is an expensive gimmick. A gimmick that really works and offers great experience (in my opinion), but a gimmick nevertheless.

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