Deep in a rural village in India outside the city of Jhansi, children play on dirt roads where goats and cows roam. The humble and colorful homes have mud..
Deep in a rural village in India outside the city of Jhansi, children play on dirt roads where goats and cows roam. The humble and colorful homes have mud floors, and women collect drinking water from wells.
All the sights and sounds are quintessential aspects of the region, with the exception of one feature — the use of smartphones to save lives. In this village, women healthcare workers, known as accredited social health activists (ASHAs), use a mobile application called mSaki to help them educate expecting mothers about maternal and neonatal danger signs.
Funded by Qualcomm Wireless Reach and developed by IntraHealth International , mSaki is currently being used by 329 ASHAs to benefit 16,000 mothers. A mobile broadband initiative accomplishing such a task in rural India is no small feat.
According to the national health ministry, India’s newborn mortality rate stands at 29 per 1,000 live births. The country is aiming to get the number down to a single digit. Additionally, the literacy rate among females in India is low. A background paper done by the New York-based International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity revealed in October of last year that only 48 percent of India girls studying up to the fifth grade are literate.
As for internet connectivity, according to a Pew Research Center poll, a mere 22 percent of India’s adults could get online in 2015. That being said, there are nationwide efforts being made to get people connected. The county’s Digital India program aims to digitally empower citizens and provide broadband in remote areas. As part of this plan, the government wants to make mobile connectivity available in more than 40,000 villages by 2018.
In the meantime, mSaki is still able to have an impact, because the application is designed to manage low connectivity. The data that’s fed into mobile devices is stored offline. When there’s a network that’s available, the data is then uploaded to a server.
Frontline health worker Ram Kumari Sharma travels to villages across India. Using mSaki, she registers the details of pregnant women, new mothers and newborn babies, and gives them medical examinations. Through text and animated images the tool assists her in describing the day-to-day symptoms patients should look out for and how they should address them.
The mSaki app also supports auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) working in the field. Anita VT is an ANM who has worked in the village health center for the last 20 years, registering patients, delivering babies and vaccinating children. While the facility she works in is no more than a small room with a few manual tools, the mobile technology she uses brings an aspect of the process into the 21st century.
“I can do everything on this,” says VT, pointing to her tablet. “Why should I do it on paper?”
Meenakshi Jain, IntraHealth senior advisor of programs, says mSaki as a whole is enabling a more cost-effective and efficient health registration process.
“The government of India has a program across the county where every pregnant mother has to go into an online system,” she explains. “It’s the duty of frontline workers like ASHAs and midwives to make this happen. So they have the job of identifying and registering pregnant women. The catch is that they have to fill out forms, and then travel 10-20 km, sit with a data entry operator at a community health center, and then get the data fed into the computer. What mSaki does is it saves a lot of paper time.”
To get the funding needed to scale the mSaki program, IntraHealth is generating evidence to share with stakeholders — the federal government, state government and donors — that mSaki is improving the health and well-bring of mothers and children. Jain says she would like the government to implement mSaki or any similar application, as long as it empowers frontline health workers to do their jobs better and uses the most recent technology. If IntraHealth is able to bring in more funding, mSaki will continue to evolve and include technical areas such as family planning and literacy.
About 450 kilometers from Jhansi, the nonprofit Planned Social Concern (PSC) is providing micro-finance opportunities to women in a village outside the city of Jaipur.
A number of PSC’s micro-finance participants are able to build their own small businesses. One of the women in the program says she was able to build a new home and send her kids to school, thanks to PSC.
This economic empowerment is being enhanced through the power of mobile broadband. Through a partnership with Qualcomm Wireless Reach, PSC was able to digitize its entire loan-making process in 2014. The program is now 100 percent paperless.
Ravi Gupta, COO of PSC, says that through using 3G-connected tablets and a mobile application called MicroLekha, the organization is able to function faster and be more transparent.
“When we were doing it [making loans] manually it used to take 17 to 18 days to process a loan,” says Gupta. “Now with MicroLekha we can place a loan in three to four days.”
Because all the documents are stored digitally, there’s no need for customers to submit paperwork each time they apply for loans. When customers pay back their loans they get receipts and account updates via SMS.
This is just the beginning. When Digital India is able to fully penetrate the rural parts of the country, hopefully even more mobile tech designed to assist health workers, educate families and facilitate small business opportunities will be implemented.
My wish is that large tech firms will take cues from these mobile for impact programs, and create similar initiatives for poor parts in the Western world, as well.

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While the iPhone 8 isn’t going to be announced until September, this week has been packed with rumors on the upcoming device. And it looks like the display..
While the iPhone 8 isn’t going to be announced until September, this week has been packed with rumors on the upcoming device. And it looks like the display is going to be the main star of the show.
Rumor has it that Apple is going to announce three new devices — two new versions of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, and a new high-end device that could cost more than $1,000. And it looks like the rumors around the display are for this mysterious “iPhone Pro” model.
According to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (who is usually pretty reliable), the next iPhone could feature a 5.8-inch OLED display, but in a phone that is going to be roughly the size of the current iPhone 7. In order to do this, Apple is going to eliminate the bezel around the screen so that the surface of the device is just a giant screen. Here’s what it’ll look like according to this image from MacRumors :
As you can see, Apple is going to keep some space at the bottom for virtual buttons. Think about it as a sort of Touch Bar , but for the iPhone. You’ll see a virtual home button, but also buttons that are relevant to the app you’re currently using. Imagine having media playback buttons in the Music app, or a button to pick photos in the Messages app.
What about Touch ID? AppleInsider spotted that Apple patented a way to embed a fingerprint sensor into a screen. I guess Apple doesn’t want to put the fingerprint sensor at the back of the device like most Android phones.
Also worth noting, it looks like the screen is going to be taller than before. This way, Apple can ship a narrow device, which would be easier to hold with one hand than other big phones.
The screen would no longer be 16:9. It means that if you’re watching a video on YouTube in full screen, there will be black rectangles on the left and right of the video. If you’re watching a 21:9 movie in full screen, there will only be tiny black bars of 49 pixels on each side.
Also, can you see that the main 5.15-inch display area is a bit narrower than the 5.8-inch physical OLED? I’m not sure what it means exactly. Maybe the OLED display could be curved on each side like on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge — and you don’t want to display text on a curved display.
This display is going to pack a ton of pixels as well. With a pixel density of 528 PPI, it’s a much higher quality display than the current iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus display (respectively 326 ppi and 401 ppi).
Like on the iPhone 7 Plus, Apple could provide different levels of “zoom”, with 3x renderng as the default setting. Remember that the iPhone 7 Plus renders everything at 2208 by 1242 pixels then scale it down to 1920 by 1080. If the main display area has a width of 1242 pixels, it would make a lot of sense.
Essentially, this rumored iPhone would display as much content as the iPhone 7 Plus display, but with a few extra lines of text as the display is taller. Everything would appear a bit smaller though, so Apple could also let you choose 2x rendering by scaling it down to the phone’s display in real time.
But bigger screens in tiny phones usually lead to worse battery life. According to KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has found a way to pack more battery into the same footprint. Apple could be adopting a stacked PCB mainboard, piling up all those transistors on top of one another. Here’s an image from 9to5mac :
If the main PCB board is smaller, it could leave more space for the battery. Finally, the next iPhone could feature wireless charging. So you should be able to charge your phone more easily throughout the day.

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Money doesn’t necessarily mean freedom. Yet the ability to maneuver in response to business challenges is the one thing a startup founder needs most. Some..
“I was thinking, actually, what if you had asked for less?” Pied Piper’s Richard Hendricks asks a fictional founder in a bar scene in the season 2 premiere of HBO’s Silicon Valley .
The other founder, Javeed, of “Googlibib,” reflects. “It might have been easier to hit more benchmarks… we wouldn’t have faced that down round.” Growing increasingly despondent and loud, he continues, “We wouldn’t have had to settle for acquisition… We could have done a legit series B… I’d still be CEO… I’d probably still have my girlfriend… Why the f*** didn’t anyone tell me I could take less? ”
It plays pretty funny on the screen, but this fictional interchange illustrates a very real challenge entrepreneurs face: Money doesn’t necessarily mean freedom. Yet the ability to maneuver in response to business challenges is the one thing a startup founder needs most. Some of these decisions are minor: Should we give an early customer a big discount in order to close the deal? Others are existential: Is it time to sell the company?
As grueling as it can be to make a call on the hard decisions, it’s much worse to be unable to make a key decision at all — to be forced to take an action due to financial restrictions or other constraints.
When you’re building a company, you need to maximize your degrees of freedom — you need to have the widest set of options available to you for key strategic decisions.
Conventional (and even fictional!) startup wisdom says that the best way to maintain your degrees of freedom is to raise more money than you need so that you have a large war chest of capital on hand. I’m here to tell you that, based on my experience working with hundreds of startups, that one of the best ways to improve your optionality is to ignore that conventional wisdom and instead stay extremely efficient in both your operations and your fundraising strategy. You can actually increase your degrees of freedom not only by not spending money you have, but by not having too much to begin with. The best move for many startups is to raise just enough money to achieve key milestones.
We call this “just-enough” approach the capital-efficient path. Companies that follow this practice maintain tight, resourceful operations throughout their early stages and only add capital when there are proof points and processes to support it. The resourcefulness required of capital efficiency can dramatically improve your odds of building a successful startup.
In fact, capital-efficient founders can enable heroic success for themselves and their companies, while at the same time lowering the risk of startup failure.
Let’s explore why having just enough funding is actually better for your business.
The “less is more” approach seems counter-intuitive to many new entrepreneurs. But it is the path that many, many successful companies have taken, and, from the perspective of founders, it is arguably a less-risky path to success than the path of raising large amounts of venture capital.
Why? Because it lets you keep your options open. Here’s how:
You can choose how to grow your company
More companies die of drowning in opportunities than of starvation. Focusing your company on a very specific target market, finding a way to dominate that constrained market and then expanding from there is a well-documented approach to significantly reducing the risk of a startup’s failure.
But companies that raise a lot of money are often priced out of that model. They need to grow their top line at all costs, and one of the non-obvious costs can be losing the discipline of focus. When you choose to stay capital efficient, you can choose less-risky, more-focused paths, while still retaining the optionality to go much bigger once your product and sales repeatability are well-established.
Even Amazon — which has a market cap on the order of $400 billion — raised only $8 million of venture capital money as a private company before going public. It started with a very limited model of selling just books before it expanded to become the Everything Store.
You can weather storms
But, you say, what about market downturns? What if it becomes harder to raise money? Won’t a big cache of cash ensure survivability through hard times?
Not necessarily. The single largest determinant of whether you can survive a downturn in the funding market is your burn rate. You can weather storms better if you are capital efficient. If your cash burn is low — or even better, if you can get to cash-flow break-even — you can get through hard times.
But if your burn rate is high, even a significant pile of cash won’t save you unless you are ready to make tough, morale-crushing decisions blindingly fast — such as laying off a large portion of your workforce or abandoning whole sectors of your business. And the unfortunate truth is that the bigger your cash reserves are, the higher your cash burn rate is likely to be.
Keep this mantra in mind: less burn, more options.
You can choose your exit strategy
Choosing an exit path is the greatest startup existential question of all. It’s also where raising too much capital limits your optionality the most. Venture capitalists don’t like to talk about this — shooting for the moon is expected.
But most exits are not billion-dollar IPOs or even $200 million acquisitions. Raising big money — even at a very high valuation, in fact especially at a very high valuation — forces you to a big exit.
If you don’t make that exit bogey, the portfolio effect might force you into an uncomfortable position: Venture capitalists aiming for a 10x return can torpedo smaller exits in pursuit of a “go-big-or-go-home” approach. Investors have a portfolio to manage, but you do not: You’re all-in on this hand. You can limit the risk of misaligned interests, and increase your flexibility, by raising only the money you need and managing the post-money valuation to better balance dilution against upside.
There’s a lot more room available to make everyone happy, founders and investors alike, if the last round’s post-money valuation is $25 million versus $250 million. In the latter case, your investors are likely to expect you to hit a billion dollars — or die trying.
Everyone wants a gigantic success and a big exit. But taking excess capital to achieve that outcome leads to a brittle, inflexible company. There is such a thing as too much money.
To keep your company open to multiple kinds of success, you need to decisively govern the amount and character of the money coming in. You might still end up growing a unicorn (like Atlassian did, with its $0 in venture funding on its cap table). But if a unicorn is not in the cards, the decision of where to drive your company is much more likely to remain in your hands, and the return you’ll get is more likely to be something with which you’ll be happy.
Capital efficiency can help create better optionality for your startup. Furthermore, the constraints of capital efficiency can actually help your company grow in a rapid, healthy, controllable way.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giNhaEzv_PI Update: Success all around for today’s SpaceX mission! Sunday seems like a fine day to launch a rocket into..
Update: Success all around for today’s SpaceX mission!
Sunday seems like a fine day to launch a rocket into space. Yesterday, SpaceX rescheduled the CRS-10 mission. There was an issue with the positioning of an engine nozzle that’s responsible for steering the rocket. At 9:39 AM ET (6:30 AM PT), SpaceX is set to launch its Falcon 9 rocket for good this time.
The company just tweeted that weather conditions are 70 percent favorable with a few clouds. Today’s Falcon 9 is going to carry a Dragon spacecraft that is set to dock into the International Space Station with 5,500 pounds of supplies.
And you can watch the launch live right here — SpaceX usually starts the live stream 20 minutes before the actual launch. The Falcon 9 is set to take off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This is SpaceX’s tenth mission for the ISS. But this launch is particularly interesting as it is the second Falcon 9 launch since the impressive explosion that destroyed a rocket on the launchpad back in September 2016. The company successfully launched a Falcon 9 last month , but all eyes are still on SpaceX.
The company will try to recover the first stage from the Falcon 9 rocket used today. This time, it is supposed to land at Cape Canaveral instead of on a drone ship. Sit back, grab some popcorn and let’s watch humans launch stuff into space.

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About twice a year, I get involved in a project that requires me to do some Android development; so, about twice a year, I re-launch Google’s so-called..
About twice a year, I get involved in a project that requires me to do some Android development; so, about twice a year, I re-launch Google’s so-called integrated development environment, Android Studio, with fingers crossed; …and twice a year I find myself wincing with bitter disappointment, as I rediscover that it still has all the elegant, intuitive simplicity of a Rube Goldberg machine.
Let me hasten to stress that I’m not an OS partisan, or, to the extent that I am, I’m inclined towards Google. All my own smartphones have been Androids. I’ve been writing Android apps, both professionally and for fun, since 2009, when I first bought an HTC Magic. All my phones since have also been Android: Galaxy S2, Nexus 4, Moto X, and my shiny new Pixel.
But I also write iOS and tvOS apps; and despite my abstract disapproval of Apple’s hegemonic attitude towards software, whenever I launch its IDE XCode, I breathe a little easier. It’s fast. It’s slick. And even when it fails to be helpful, it rarely actually gets in my way — something which, as far as I can tell, is Android Studio’s fundamental core competency.
For instance: I have never actually succeeded at using its visual tools to lay out elements on a screen. I’m sure it’s theoretically possible; but every time I’ve tried, I have gotten so frustrated that I have just given up and written raw XML layout files instead. I have it on good authority that I am not alone in this. In XCode, conversely, I drag and drop with abandon and glee.
Out of the box, Studio doesn’t auto-import Java classes for me; the setting for doing so is buried deep within its impenetrable labyrinth of menus. Out of the box, Studio doesn’t tell me how to load any of the zillion support libraries I probably need, nor how to get Android’s (still painfully slow) emulator running. The secrets to both of these things are buried, believe it or not, in the “Android” submenu under the “Tools” menu. Think about that for a moment. Why does Google’s flagship Android development tool have a “Tools / Android” menu? Isn’t the whole thing an Android tool? Shouldn’t these key elements be first-class citizens?
…One problem, of course, is that Android Studio was not built from scratch; it’s based on the long-in-the-tooth IntelliJ IDEA platform, a Java IDE … and, well, you can tell. It feels like fifteen-year-old software, and it’s all too apparent that it was adapted to, rather than built for, Android development. (Again: “Tools / Android.”) And, of course, it’s written in Java, which makes it multiplatform … but slow.
It’s true that the Android ecosystem itself is clumsy and complex, fragmented into a dizzying plethora of versions of various libraries and SDKs. It’s true that, for instance, the Gradle build tool is famously developer-hostile. (Although building is just hard; Apple’s build tools don’t exactly hold your hand either.) But a better-designed IDE could at least mitigate this. It’s true that XCode only has to run on one operating system, Apple’s, whereas Android Studio must be multiplatform. But surely Google, of all companies, has the resources to support native code on multiple platforms.
It is truly remarkable that a hypermonied behemoth the size of Google decided to go this slow, kludged, ugly route for a flagship development environment for its mobile platform with well over a billion active installs. The negative effects are numerous. Better tooling is one reason iOS development is faster and more efficient. Developers comfortable in both ecosystems prefer iOS to Android because it’s easier to work with, and so we help influence much smartphone software to be iOS-first, with Android as a second-class after thought. Android apps famously tend to be buggier than iOS, and it’s hard to believe that the IDE has nothing to do with that.
Most of all, though, albeit most selfishly, if Google’s IDE were better, it would push Apple’s to improve. XCode is far from perfect. It crashes. It hangs. But even with those flaws, iOS development is so much less painful than Android development that there is really no comparison. (Well, until you try to deploy. Then, Android is painless; Apple’s improved-but-still-all-too-often-Kafkaesque process for building, signing, uploading, submitting, and waiting for approval for even beta test builds is one that frequently inspires deep rancor and resentment in every iOS developer I know.)
Of late, though, I say with a kind of skeptical anticipation, for the first time in years, there is some real competition. This has long been true for. NET programmers, courtesy of Xamarin , recently acquired by Microsoft, which lets you write. NET code and build native apps for both Android and iOS. But nowadays Facebook’s React Native is becoming a realistic solution for building cross-platform native apps without having to write (much) native code … and therefore without having to use either Android Studio or XCode.
I’m not saying either will go away. But it’s nice to see somebody at least trying to elbow their way past Apple and Google’s de facto developer gatekeepers. They, especially the latter, have grown complacent for lack of competition. Let’s see how they react to React.

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According to a new report, Microsoft is scrapping its plans for the second version of HoloLens in favor of the third, but unfortunately, this means that we won’t see it until 2019.
Last March, Microsoft began shipping its HoloLens Development Edition headsets at a price of $3,000 per unit. Obviously, these were and are meant for developers, but fans have still been waiting for a cheaper ‘consumer’ model.
Unfortunately, it appears that they’ll be waiting for a while. According to a new report from Brad Sams of Thurrott.com , the third version of the product won’t arrive until 2019.
The obvious question to ask here is what happened to the second-generation model, and the answer is that it’s been scrapped. With any new technology, a first-generation device is pretty much a proof of concept, while the second generation refines it. In the case of HoloLens, it would be cheaper, and likely smaller and lighter.
The third generation is where there are more major changes. It’s a standard tick-tock model. A good example of this from Microsoft is the Surface Pro, where the Pro 2 had better chips that improved battery and more configuration options, the Pro 3 was thinner, lighter, and bigger.
Cancelling the second generation allows Microsoft to accelerate its plans for the third. In other words, if the firm was still planning to iterate with the second model, we’d be waiting even longer than 2019 for version three.
As for what we might see from the next HoloLens, we still don’t know. If Microsoft is really planning on giving the product a major upgrade, it seems like the obvious problem to fix would be the small field of view that exists on the current model.
Of course, this is all subject to change, as is any rumor about an unannounced product. Microsoft could accelerate its plans even further, or it could postpone them.

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