The internet has become a massive, all-encompassing place for people from all walks of life to gather and share everything they’re passionate about. It can be a place to bond over hobbies like books, movies, music, and TV series. It could also be a tool for earning money. Stocks, cryptocurrency, forex, and other investment options have become more accessible to the people on the ground in this exciting new digital age.
That’s why it’s no surprise to us, as Jason mentions, that creativity will soon run on the blockchain. The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has allowed content creators and artists to publicize their work and create an unbreakable chain of ownership of their output.
Imagine we ask you for your phone and you give it to us. If you need to call, text, or access the internet, we’ll do it for you—all you need to do is tell us. We’ll type in your passwords, messages, and personal information. We’ll be your conduit to the internet.
Sounds uncomfortable, right? But that’s what you’re letting big tech get away with today.
With TARTLE, we turn that around. You get your phone back. We leave the room and give you the key to the door. That way, you can lock it from the inside whenever you want some time alone. We’ll knock to let you know if we’re coming in and if we do, we’ll give you the space and dignity you need as a fellow human being. Your rights are respected in our community.
According to Alexander, one of the most beneficial AI algorithms for a human being is one where people are allowed to say this: I made these choices. This is my outcome. And this outcome was not good for me.
This gives us the power to analyze the course of our life, instead of just following where outside forces take us. On a wider scale, we could apply this concept of a digital ledger to government policy and trace the outcomes of its implementation.
Alexander adds that humanity is bad at remembering. If we aren’t careful, we end up rehashing and slowing down our evolution. It’s time we endorse tools that help us pay attention, recognize patterns, and grow.
Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.
Daniel Burrus is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. He has started six businesses and written seven books, two of them bestsellers. He is also one of the leading tech forecasters on the planet. Daniel has been right in his predictions of where we are going in regards to technology so often that he has acquired the status of a prophet in the field.
Given his area of expertise, it seems logical to ask Daniel his opinion on the way technology has been developing in recent years. It seems that as the pace of technological development accelerates that it is no longer doing so in a way that benefits people but rather in a way that simply leads to more technology. Does he see this trend continuing or will the technology in the end actually bring people up so that we really can benefit from all of our hard work?
Daniel’s response is that the answer is really up to us. Technology is merely a tool. In and of itself, it is not necessarily good or bad. We can use radiation to give cancer or to cure it depending on how we use the tools at hand. That means that we are in control if we want to be. We can be lazy and let technology shape our future for us or we can be proactive and use it to build the future we want.
That means you can’t just coast. Unless you are content with going downhill. As my football coach said, you are either getting better or you’re getting worse. You never stay the same. It’s the same with everything. You can either work to make the change you want or you just wind up getting swept along by the change someone else wants. It really is that simple. Work for what you want or be content with what someone else gives you.
The good news is that there are literal mountains of opportunity available for the proactive. It may not seem that way, but that’s because you are probably watching too much news and letting it turn you into a pessimist. If we could send people to the moon with slide rules while fighting the Vietnam War, what couldn’t we accomplish now if we just put our minds and resources to it? This kind of optimism is usually met with a chorus of ‘buts’ and ‘what ifs’. However, it is the optimist who gets things done, the pessimist usually does very little because he is sure it will fail. Don’t be that guy.
The truth is, there is a lot we take for granted today that would not have been possible just a few years ago and that trend is likely to continue. How likely it is depends on which trend you are talking about. One of the things that has made Daniel so successful at predicting technological development is that he has realized that there are hard trends and soft trends. Hard trends are things that will develop in a predictable pattern so long as we don’t get hit by a stray comet. Think of cellphone technology. We went from 3G to now 5G on a predictable path, a path that will continue through 6G and beyond. A soft trend is one that depends on a variety of variables and can be directed or stopped. Here, think of health care costs. The trend has been a sharp increase but a number of variables can be changed to alter that trend.
All of those trends, all of that change is disruptive to some degree. And it will happen. The question then is not whether or not there will be disruption but what will you do with it? Will you ignore it and allow it to shape you? Will you be a negative disruptor and harness it for your own gain at the expense of others? Or will you be a positive disruptor and harness it to benefit others and bring about needed change? The choice is yours.
What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.
TARTLE may be a young company but it already stretches around the world with users in many countries. One of the many countries you can find us in is the Philippines. So it’s time we gave a little shout out to the amazing people of that small nation and their culture.
If you aren’t familiar with this little country, it’s a collection of islands in the Pacific, far off the eastern coast of Asia. It was ravaged by WWII and is covered in jungle with a volcano or two thrown in just to make things exciting.
The culture there is an interesting one. On one hand, there are tent and shanty cities built right next to railroad tracks. On the other, everyone there has a smartphone and is constantly sending texts or scrolling Facebook. It’s a deeply religious and developing culture with one foot in the past and the other in the future. As such, it’s kept many of its older qualities like a strong and cheerful work ethic and generosity while showing a significant aptitude for learning new technologies to keep them connected across the islands and with friends and family who move to the USA.
One of those people who made the journey across the deep blue sea is married to one of the people who work for us here at TARTLE. Alex (our co-founder for those just tuning in) went over there for dinner and was talking with everyone when he realized the wife was missing. Well, it turns out she was in the kitchen working on dinner, even after working all day. When it was time to eat, a veritable feast was laid out with mountains upon mountains of food. And yes, this is normal for them. It’s one of the admirable things about Filipino culture, the work never stops. Men and women are both constantly in motion, accomplishing something that needs to be done, yet few ever complain about it. That’s because they do it all out of a sense of service, a desire to care for others that leads them to really put themselves into their work.
It’s exactly these kinds of people that TARTLE is striving to bring into the fold. Anyone who puts that kind of spirit and effort into just normal, daily life deserves to be rewarded for it. That’s true of their data use as well. When they are spending time on their phones, checking out the news, shopping or keeping up with people via Facebook, they are just generating profit for that company. The people of the Philippines deserve a little something back for that. After all, when you’re working on getting out of the tent by the railroad tracks and into something a little nicer, every little bit counts. By working through us, they have the chance to take that data they are generating and turn into a good subsidy for their lives and use it however they want. Though if Alex’s recent dinner is any indication, it just might go into helping make another mountain of food, which is no bad thing either.
TARTLE welcomes everyone, wherever you are from to sign up with us. We want to help you, whether you are driving a cab in Moscow, roaming the desert in Libya, working in a cubicle in Des Moines, Iowa, or running a fishing boat in the Philippines to take control of your data. Whether you just want to be able to generate some extra income by selling your data or share your data to specifically help causes you care about, TARTLE is there to make it all possible.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
The global data cloud is growing and doing so at an ever-increasing rate. In fact, it’s being predicted that the “global datasphere” is going to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. How much is that? Enough for a few lifetimes of HD movies.
Naturally, as the datasphere gets larger, so does the task of managing and securing it all. We’ve remarked a few times in this space how cloud computing, while already growing before COVID, has exploded, driving the construction of new servers all over the country and the increased adoption of new cloud-based programs like Zoom, which has gone from obscurity to a household name nearly overnight.
The rise of the cloud has also created opportunities for those with an entrepreneurial spirit. Without the need to develop and maintain massive server racks themselves, a startup with access to a desk and a laptop can compete in a number of different spaces that would have been impossible before. Now someone in a developing country can access cloud computing resources to develop a new program and use another resource to develop an app that will allow anyone anywhere with a data connection to make use of that program. This fact has led to the rise of many of these kinds of startups which in turn have been one of the major factors driving the increase in data usage.
While this has created certain challenges, the benefits have been clear. Cloud computing allows companies to scale up or down quickly as needed. Rather than having tons of electricity-sucking servers stored in the basement that may be too much or not enough from one week to the next depending on the projects going on at the time they can easily scale up or down based on demand. That saves a lot of money since you only have to pay for the server space you actually need at any given time. You need less, you pay less. You need more, you pay more for only as long as you will actually make use of it, instead of buying all that equipment for what is only a temporary need.
In terms of the challenges, security is probably the most significant. Yet, elegant solutions have been developed in that realm. Private companies and even individuals are able to access encryption that would give the NSA a hard time. Yet, a simple password can decrypt it so that you and whoever you want to share it with can access your information with ease.
That’s the basic model that TARTLE uses. Our data marketplace is hosted in the cloud, using encryption that protects your data in such a way that only you and whomever you sell it to (or choose to share it with, whichever you choose) can access it easily. This creates a balance between security and fluidity that everyone can benefit from.
Normally, we talk about how our system is something that individuals can financially benefit from. However, there is no reason companies can’t benefit from selling or sharing data in the TARTLE data marketplace as well. After all, it is guaranteed that someone out there would benefit from incorporating your data into their models, and vice versa. Companies that join TARTLE as sellers and buyers could arrange a mutual exchange of data that would allow both of them to improve their operations, which they could then learn to better interact with the individual sellers of TARTLE to further refine their data sets.
This creates a snowball effect in which data begets more data. However, rather than just piling up uselessly in a server somewhere it is constantly getting analyzed and refined and used ever more efficiently to drive more efficient businesses which in turn can lead to better lives for their employees and their customers.
What’s your data worth?
Voice and language recognition software is getting better and better. Once upon a time, it was something that was extremely clunky and unreliable and even the best systems required you to spend far too much time training them while speaking extremely slowly and enunciating like…well…like a computer. However, at last the systems have improved to the point where it’s possible to at least accurately convey meaning through talk to text features without having to clarify every other word. In fact, I know a trucker who does most of his communication using talk to text on his phone. It makes a few mistakes here and there but its accuracy is still pretty impressive considering he’s speaking normally while in a large moving vehicle.
Then there are the voice assistants on our phones. Whether you talk to Siri, Alexa, or Cortana (all four of you, you know who you are) that voice recognition starts out needing a little training but nothing like it used to. And the more you use it to look up local restaurants, find a factoid to settle an argument or to book a hotel room, the more accurate it gets. Now, they are even in the homes of many, listening constantly for you to need their assistance with something – everything from dimming the lights to spinning up your favorite playlist on Spotify.
The improvements in this software hold a lot of potential. It has already been used for years in business to accommodate certain employees who may not be able to speak clearly or who lose the use of their arms. It is also a much more efficient way to record information than the increasingly dated keyboard. Typing is inherently inefficient, creating the possibility for misspellings that need to be corrected lest they convey an unintended meaning. It also requires a keyboard, which adds space, weight and money to your computer. As voice recognition software improves, the keyboard can be replaced with a simple microphone, probably the one on your phone. Imagine being able to compose reliable messages for business, a book, notes on a law case and have them all transcribed without having to take the time to proofread them. The time savings would be impressive. Or perhaps a more mundane situation in which you’re sitting at home and have a craving for pizza, but you can’t quite remember the name of the place you got it from last month. You throw the question out into the air and your device reminds you of the name, the price and asks you if you’d like it to order a pizza for you. If you think about it, Alexa and other smart devices are only a step or two away from that level of functionality.
Another use would be in hospitals. Embedded microphones would record conversations with your doctor, highlighting the important points and recording all of the important information. This would save time and increase efficiency in a number of ways. No more would nurses and admins have to spend hours on data entry, with all the potential transcription errors that entail. Incidentally, that would also save you having to answer the same questions three times every time you go in for a checkup. It also means no one, or at least very few people have to come in contact with the Petri dishes known as keyboards in an environment that should be kept as sterile as possible.
Lectures and presentations could be recorded and transcribed instantly, making information readily available in real time. The possibilities are enormous.
Yet, there are potential problems that arise, namely, who owns all that data getting generated and recorded? Is it the place where the recording happens? The place where they are stored? Some other party? At TARTLE, we believe all the data you generate is yours. So if it’s your information and your data that is being recorded, then you deserve to be the primary beneficiary of sharing it, or of deciding whether you want to share that data or not. These are questions that will be addressed sooner or later in the legislative realm which is why we are encouraging people to sign up at tartle.co to join the TARTLE movement. Together we can help steer that eventual legislation in a direction that will benefit not just a few, but each person who works to generate that data in the first place.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
At TARTLE we talk a lot about how our business model – a data marketplace centered on the sovereign individual – can help improve a number of fields. We’ve mentioned how it can help businesses with their marketing and their product development. We’ve spent more time talking about how TARTLE’s data marketplace can be of use in the medical field by directly tracking the habits of individuals and the effects of different foods, medicines, and treatments on them. What about other fields though? Can TARTLE be of use even in the hard sciences?
Before we answer that question, let’s back up a bit, in fact, let’s back up all the way to the peaks of the Andes Mountains in Chile. This mountain range, one of the longest and most imposing in the world, is home to a number of observatories. There are few lights to drown out the stars, little local pollution, and due to the height the air is remarkably thin which means there are fewer obstructions, especially thermal distortions between the telescope and the vacuum of space. These observatories take in tons of data, so much data that teraflops barely begin to cover it. Unfortunately, a lot of that data doesn’t get shared for a long time. It gets locked into the servers at the observatory for later study. Often, images from the telescope can sit for months or years before anyone sees them.
Fortunately, there are those who are working on changing that. The Rubin Observatory and Google have recently entered into a partnership that will get data from the telescope uploaded to the cloud in real time. For the first time, all of that data will be getting put into the cloud where it can be accessed by researchers around the world, as it is gathered. Image after image after image, from the depths of space to the cloud for study. That saves a lot of time, money, and space for the observatory since they don’t have to worry about all the server equipment and its upkeep. Researchers benefit by getting faster access to the latest data. That helps by being able to amend existing theories or even formulate new ones based on the incoming information faster than ever before.
How does all of this relate to TARTLE? After all, we don’t have the servers that Rubin will be uploading to. However, anyone from around the world can sign up to TARTLE and that includes amateur astronomers. That brings us back to our question, how can TARTLE help with the hard sciences?
Let’s just look at the example of amateur astronomy. It’s well known that amateur astronomers discover the majority of comets every year. What if all amateur astronomers were uploading their photos to TARTLE and then sharing them with observatories and universities around the world? How many more discoveries could be made by integrating and comparing them with each other and with the photos taken by the larger observatories? How many comets could be discovered? We would be more likely to pick up a near earth asteroid before it gets too close to act. Study of the sun would also be advanced as amateur scopes can track sunspots.
There are a number of other sciences that could be benefited as well. Geology could benefit from data gathered by rock hounds, marine biology from deep sea fishermen, paleontologists from amateur fossil hunters, meteorologists from tornado chasers, all uploading and sharing their data in real time. The possibilities are endless.
All of these are just further examples of the democratization of data and how individuals can benefit themselves and others through the simple act of signing up with TARTLE and sharing their data. TARTLE is part of a movement that is making it possible for individuals to take part in new and exciting scientific discoveries that will improve the knowledge base of humanity as a whole.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
The world is awash in data. There is data coming in from research, phone calls, satellites, phones, fitbits and even your Bluetooth connected fridge. Collecting data isn’t our problem, being able to process it is. Before you can process it though, it needs to get transported. In that sense it’s like any other raw product. Like a piece of iron ore, it needs to be transported to a foundry and dumped into a furnace to be refined so it can be turned into something useful. Data needs to make it from your IOT device to a server where it can be processed and analyzed. Too often, transportation and processing are bottlenecks in the transformation of raw data into useful information.
Think about a highway, you can only increase the volume of cars on the road so much before it descends into chaos. Yet there may still be a need to get even more vehicles, or at least people and products from point A to point B. So you need to come up with new ways to handle the traffic. Data is similar. Most data is still transferred over some kind of copper wire. That wire can handle only so many electrons moving through it, just like a highway only being able to accommodate so many vehicles. For years though, those older copper cables have been getting replaced with fiber optics. Basically long pieces of very thin, flexible glass, fiber optics use photons instead of electrons to transfer data. Immediately, there is a gain since the medium allows for faster movement of data. There are also new fiber optics being developed that allow for speeds up to a 100 times faster than what is currently available. How fast is that? Just for a point of reference, imagine walking at 100 times the pace you do now. Instead of power walking at around 3-4 mph, you would suddenly be able to walk from Chicago to Washington D.C. in less than three hours.
Yet, that presents its own problems. Fiber optics have a massive capacity for data because of their ability to send many signals simultaneously. However, when you get too many signals going through at once it becomes a jumbled mess. It’s similar to how one person’s echo is easy to understand but the echo of a choir singing is indecipherable to the human ear. Thankfully, there are clever software writers out there who can write the necessary algorithms to untangle that mess. In fact, with the new fiber optics that will be coming out soon, the bottleneck won’t be the data transportation, it’ll be the ability to untangle that data into discernable bits of information so it can be analyzed. Essentially, the physical technology is already here, we are just working to bring the software side of things up to the same level.
In a sense the kind of data analytics and processing that TARTLE works with is similar. The standard way of aggregating data from second and third parties has a lot of noise embedded in those signals, even after it has been processed. That is because there is a lot of circumstance and context mixed into the kind of data that is gleaned off monitoring your devices and internet activity. And as it turns out, there is no mere algorithm that can filter out that noise. The only way to get a clearer signal is by doing something the big companies rarely do, go to the source, to you the individual. The answer to “why” you did one thing instead of another is the only algorithm that can truly help decipher that data. It gives the context that is missed when companies only look at your data and never to you as a person. TARTLE provides an avenue to get the answer to “why”, making our system the most efficient way to get clear and accurate data about people and why they do what they do.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
