According to WHO data, 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide. Whether totally blind or with low vision, they face daily challenges in moving around and interacting with their immediate environment. 

It was in 2014, after a chance encounter with a blind person, that the idea of Horus was born. It's a wearable device aimed at describing the physical world to those who cannot see it. 

"I was with my co-founder Saverio Murgia in Genova, close to the train station," Horus Technology CTO Luca Nardelli says. "We saw a blind person trying to get around following the corners of the buildings. Unfortunately, on that day, there were some works on the street, and he couldn't recognize the landscape." 

Murgia and Nardelli, two biomedical engineers, were both studying how to help robots detect and avoid obstacles using artificial vision. "We stopped and thought: why not apply our knowledge to help people instead?" Nardelli says. 

After two years and some small and not-so-small prizes, Horus is gradually coming closer to having a commercial product. 

Externally, it looks a bit like an old Sony Walkman: a rectangular box, which contains the battery and the GPU, to be worn using a belt hook or kept in the pocket, linked to a headset. 

But the headset, unlike that found on a Walkman or an iPod, does not only emit sounds. Two cameras film the environment, and the information is then sent to the GPU, where the processing is done in real-time, and the visual inputs are converted to verbal messages that help the user detect obstacles, describing pictures and scenes, identifying objects and people, and reading text. 

The presence and location of obstacles is reported using differently modulated sounds. Horus divides the space in front of the user into sectors: lateral obstacles generate high-pitched sounds in one of the two speakers, while central obstacles generate low-pitched centered sounds. 

Just as with intelligent parking systems on cars and trucks, the sounds grow more frequent and more alarming as the obstacle gets closer. It's generally up to the user to decide which of Horus' features to activate through a vocal menu, although some are automatically launched. 

For instance, when the person is walking, the accelerometer detects the movement, and Horus starts giving instructions. The messages are not sent using headphones but with bone conduction, which leaves the ears of the person free to hear the noise of the street as well. 

It sounds great on paper -- but whether Horus will be successful depends mainly on how well the company manages its execution. 

"So far, we're still prototyping, testing the first versions of our electronic components," Nardelli says. "Our goal is to have the device ready for launch by the end of this year." 

The device will be launched initially in Italy, as a first test market, and by spring 2017, it should also reach the UK and other English-speaking countries. 
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The initial price of the device hasn't been set, but it should be in the €1,000 to €2,000 ($1,060 - $2,120) range.

The next time someone asks you for your cell phone number, you may want to think twice about giving it. 
The cell phone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television. 

It has become "kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you," said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator. 

Yet the cell phone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep secret. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don't hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know. 

That is a growing issue for young people, since two sets of digits may well be with them for life: their Social Security number and their cell phone number. 

Among people ages 25 to 29, the share of homes that have only wireless phone service stands at 73%. 

Investigators find that a cell phone number is often even more useful than a Social Security number because it is tied to so many databases and is connected to a device you almost always have with you, said Austin Berglas, a former F.B.I. agent who is senior managing director of K2 Intelligence, a private investigator. 

"The point is the cellphone number can be a gateway to all sorts of other information," said Robert Schoshinski, the assistant director for privacy and identity protection at the Federal Trade Commission. "People should think about it." 

But if a cell phone number and the private computer behind it open the door to new risks, technology, as is so often the case, can also be employed to combat those risks.

 "What you can do with the cell phone number and mobile technology represents a pretty substantial advantage in the ongoing war against fraud and identity theft," said Rajeev Date, a venture investor and former banker, who was previously deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

But a cell-phone-only life presents problems for many independent professionals and workers at start-ups and small businesses, who make business calls on their personal cellphones. But now, professionals and other mobile business people can turn to a new app Sideline to add a second number to their cellphones so their personal number remains personal.
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The service is free for individuals and $10 a month a number for groups of workers in a business, who get extra features like a company directory and voice mail transcription. One of Sideline’s ad mottos is: “Keep your personal number private. Add a second number to your smartphone.”

At a recent Cisco Live conference, the company previewed a new digital assistant, currently named Monica. Digital assistants have moved into the mainstream, with attractive offers including Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Now, and Amazon Alexa. Each service is a bit different but follows a similar model: a local device for mic and speaker, and a powerful back-end cloud to interpret and process requests.

Cisco doesn't make personal devices like PCs, smartphones, or residential canisters (Amazon Echo), so Monica lives in Spark – which the company believes will soon be everywhere (desktops, smartphones, and meeting rooms).

Cisco does not believe that the world needs another personal digital assistant, and so Monica is intended as a work, or team-oriented, collaboration assistant. Monica isn't for shopping lists or reminders, but rather, to improve team productivity.

Speech has only become reasonable as a user interface (UI) in the past decade. Even now, it's limited and typically requires a nearby microphone. The break-through with Amazon's successful Echo device was its miniature seven-mic array that enabled room-based or far-field communications.

Cisco realized that it could also do far-field communications with its installed base of telepresence rooms, which are already equipped with microphone arrays. The WebEx and Spark clouds are already in place, so the only thing missing, until now, was the artificial intelligence to drive it. Cisco is evaluating several AI services to power Monica, and will likely also consider IBM's Watson, given its announced partnership last summer.
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Cisco provided few details on what Monica will do, when it will become available, and what its released product name will be. The product name "Monica" is unlikely to survive.

​Two CEOs share the same vision of what personalization will mean to the enterprise in the near future. At a conference sponsored by cloud storage giant Box, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple said his company was starting to focus on the enterprise.

“We want to make tools to help people change the world, and that means being in the enterprise,” Mr. Cook said to the conference. It is, he said, “a huge opportunity for us.”

Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, endorsed that view when he addressed the conference. “Industrial companies have yet to feel the benefit of the Internet the way consumers have,” he said in an interview. “We’re just getting started.”

Each man takes his stand relative to where he sits. Mr. Cook talked about the prospects for the kind of mobile Internet services delivered on iPhones and iPads and developed on Macs. Mr. Immelt is building a system of sensors and so-called predictive data analytics that he hopes will deliver to GE $10 billion in revenue by 2020.

But what does it mean for business technology to be like consumer tech? Looking at consumer tech today, the answer is personalization.

For example, Tesla cars and Nest thermostats are designed to watch what you do with them and adjust themselves to better serve you.

Remarkably, mass-produced goods increasingly personalize into something unique because of a lot of snooping on you. Few consumers turn personalizing features off, adjust use or boycott the products. In a conflict of personalization and privacy, personalization has triumphed.

Mr. Immelt foresaw much the same kind of thing happening with machines. “We can now track every jet engine separately throughout its life,” he said, giving each one the machine equivalent of a Facebook page, which states where it is and how it is “feeling,” making maintenance more efficient.

There will be benefits from this move to personalization like buying a used car and knowing how it was driven and what is likely to go wrong with it in the future.

“There is a huge opportunity for efficiency gains, but there will be side effects from taking out all the opacity around how things last and behave,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT. “A product that is 30%, or even 0.3% better will get ordered more.”
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Within a few years, we’ll know whether or not the personalization that has made the consumer Internet will provide the same benefits to the enterprise. If it does, the corporate community will be delighted with the rewards of being spied on, even if they don’t know all of the ramifications.