This year at Grio, we decided to explore how we could reduce or offset our carbon footprint. Going carbon neutral means considering the carbon emitted as a result of all our company actions, and finding ways to reduce or offset those emissions. For small technology companies, carbon emission sources are things like running servers, the manufacturing and transportation involved in ordering supplies, and transportation to and from offices.
We are not strangers to the unprecedented ways that new technological devices can reshape society. In the last decade, we have witnessed how things like smart phones and social media have dramatically altered how we, as humans, interact.
One of the major technological advances that will likely continue to shape our human interactions is brain computer interface (BCI) technology. In this post, I am going to delve into the history of the BCI and look at some of the current developments happening in the realm of BCI technology.
Your company needs a mobile app and you want to save money (of course). You want the app live last week, and you’d really like to avoid hiring Android and iOS devs on top of your existing web team.
In light of these considerations, going the hybrid route looks like a pretty good option. Hybrid mobile apps promise to be cheaper and faster to develop, and they’re built with tried and true technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The hybrid sales pitch can be summarized as “one codebase for multiple platforms”. Hybrid platforms include React Native, PhoneGap, Ionic, Titanium, and others.
Healthcare in the United States costs far more than in any other country in the world, and yet the quality of the care Americans receive is rated 11th among first world countries. The high price of healthcare burdens employers, increases the national debt, and historically has left many without access to healthcare. We all want cheaper, better healthcare, but it is difficult to agree on specifics of how to get there. Why is healthcare so expensive?
Thus far, IoT technology has had a minimal impact on the healthcare, consumer goods, and transportation sectors. Healthcare in particular is rife with opportunities to take advantage of IoT. Of the many classes of connected devices, beacons hold the most promise to have an immediate impact on hospitals and care centers in the coming years.
Over the weekend I made performance optimizations to an internal web app that we use for time tracking and invoicing. The app runs on tomcat and is built using grails 2.4.2. Grails 2.4 included some major changes including asset pipelining. This is the first time I’ve tuned a grails app, and I had to do quite a bit of web crawling in order to find my way. I thought I would share some of the helpful tips I encountered, parts of the configuration I used, as well as some dead ends that could waste your time.
Rapid evolution of technology have many of us wondering what’s next. In the past 20 years, we have seen enormous changes to the way we socialize, work, learn, and relax. In witnessing this acceleration of technology, there is no reason to believe that it will slow, barring cataclysm.
Today we launched a new productivity app for Mac OS called Filedart (filedart.com). Filedart allows users to share files and screenshots in seconds. Drag a file or take a screenshot and your file is on the cloud. A URL is instantly in your clipboard, ready to be pasted into chat windows, emails, or sharing tools. On the receiving end, users click on the URL link to access the file or image in their browser. No sign in or registration is required.
This isn’t a new concept, but we think we’ve done it better. We intentionally kept the feature set minimal, focusing on design and usability. As we developed the tool, we made frequent use of Filedart for collaboration. We darted screenshots of the product page, various iterations, of the logo, nightly builds, and marketing strategies. It quickly became apparent that we were settling into a new way of working. After a few tosses, using Filedart becomes as intuitive and natural as Copy/Paste. While you don’t need Copy/Paste to work on a Mac, most of us would hate to go without. Filedart starts to feel the same way.
In terms of privacy, we don’t request user data and promise not to peek at your files. We don’t know who you are, and we are not interested in snooping. Ultimately we hope that the tool we created is useful, reliable, and secure.
We would love to hear your feedback on how to make Filedart better – just email us at feedback@filedart.com. Happy darting!
Brad
Agile project management software. Neat little colored digital cards moving left to right. To do, in progress, done. Backlogs, teams, and burndown charts. Flurries of emails – sometimes useful, sometimes not, often routed to folders and never read.
Up until recently, most of us made exclusive use of feature rich tools like Jira, Pivotal Tracker, or Assembla. If you are a developer, tester, pm, or stakeholder in today’s world, you probably still use one of these tools every day. In fact, you are probably so familiar with your particular task management tool that it seems like a natural extension of your work. A job doesn’t feel done until it’s corresponding card is marked, reassigned, and/or dragged and dropped.