Articles by Nick Kolakowski

• Bitcoin’s ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ Is… Satoshi Nakamoto?

  For years, Bitcoin users assumed that the name of the crypto-currency’s mysterious creator, “Satoshi Nakamoto,” was a pseudonym of some sort. But according to Newsweek’s Leah McGrath Goodman, “Sa…
• Ultra-Secure Smartphones: The Next Big Thing?

  [caption id="attachment_17928" align="aligncenter" width="587"] The "Privacy Phone."[/caption] Will ultra-secure smartphones soon become a commonplace item? In January, secure-communications prov…
• Yet Another Bitcoin 'Bank Robbery'

  [caption id="attachment_17895" align="aligncenter" width="618"] Robbed (reportedly)![/caption] Flexcoin, a Website that once billed itself as the “world’s first Bitcoin bank,” is reporting a mass…
• Kickstarter Passes the Billion-Dollar Pledge Mark

  [caption id="attachment_17889" align="aligncenter" width="618"] Kickstarter's visualization for the past five years of crowdfunding.[/caption] Kickstarter has passed $1 billion in crowdfunded ple…
• Using Google BigQuery for Geoip Geolocation

  Google’s BigQuery analytics platform allows developers to crunch massive amounts of data while providing secure SSL access and group- and user-based permissions via Google accounts. It’s one of G…
• 'Moneyball' and the Limits of Data

  [caption id="attachment_17871" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Cricket ball.[/caption] Over at ReadWrite, Matt Asay makes an interesting point about the limits of so-called “Big Data”: although…
• Stephen Wolfram Demonstrates New Programming Language

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik Stephen Wolfram, chief designer of the Mathematica software platform as well as the Wolfram Alpha “computation knowledge engine,” is showing off his ne…
• Code.org Resurrects ‘Flappy Bird’

  “Flappy Bird” might be kaput, but its hilariously awkward hero is serving another useful purpose in its afterlife: teaching people how to code. “Flappy Bird,” a free mobile game for Android and i…
• Farmers Suspicious of Monsanto Data Operations: Report

  In the “Shockingly Obvious But Someone Had to Say It” category, a subset of farmers are concerned that the world’s biggest agriculture companies could use data to intensify competition and increa…
• Oracle Buys Yet Another Marketing Analytics Firm

  [caption id="attachment_17702" align="aligncenter" width="602"] This is how BlueKai visualizes what it does.[/caption] Oracle has acquired BlueKai, a firm that specializes in marketing analytics,…