AshTech #7 - Pokemon Go

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:37:56 -0400

Pokemon Go, Story Arcs, Bitcoin Halving, AI photo coloring, China Fitness Boom

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go mania is upon us. Almost every person you encounter walking while looking into their phone is playing the game. Walking on NYC streets, on buses and restaurants that I visit Pokemons, poke-stops and poke-gyms are everywhere . I am glad that this game has got kids off the couch and exploring neighborhoods looking for Pokemon. Although 20 years in the making Pokemon is best suited to the Augmented reality experience and the game developers Niantic have done a very good job with it. This week it became the most downloaded app in a week on the ios app store. Gotta Catch em all !

Six basic Arcs of story telling

https://goo.gl/iOMJhW

Word sentiment analysis data mining of over 1700 stories has shown that they fall into 6 basic arcs. Vonnegut spoke about graphical shapes of stories in a lecture in 1995 and Aristotle spoke about similar arcs 2000 years ago. Its good to see that data mining is lending its voice to these theories.

Bitcoin Miner reward is cut in half

http://goo.gl/Srdihi

The reward miners get for sealing a block on the bitcoin ledger drops from 25 btc to 12.5 btc .Known as “the halving” this has been a programmed feature in bitcoin. It is only the second time that this has happened. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the bitcoin price for the next few weeks to see the impact if any.

Deep Learning to colorize your photos

https://goo.gl/MNOlPU

A deep learning algorithm developed by UC Berekley students is doing a decent job at colorizing photos. Click the link above to see some stunning results.

VCs are betting on a chinese fitness boom

https://goo.gl/E1MkcI