Doesn’t seem to be any audio available at Soundcloud from last week’s show, but Drex and I talked about the Next BC showcase of tech companies taking place this week at Science World, and wondered why the B.C. government isn’t doing a better job of promoting and tech sector.

We also talked about recent improvements to “Flickr”: as a photo storage service, and ended off with the telling statistic that seven of the 11 accidents that Google’s self-driving cars have been involved in in the last six years were caused by people rear ending the autonomous vehicle.

This week, a glimpse at the 25 companies being showcased at the next celebration of innovative B.C. companies, NextBC. Also: what makes Flickr the best option for your photos and why you don’t need to worry about driverless cars.

Get tickets for NextBC, at Science World on May 21

Despite the fact that Christie Clark is hell-bent on staking the future of B.C. on liquid natural gas, the truth is that our province’s technology sector generates more revenues than all resource sectors combined.

Celebrating the innovation that is happening right under our noses is why the NextBC event began. Produced by DigiBC, an industry association representing new media and wireless companies, the second NextBC takes place next Thursday, at Science World.

At the inaugural event last year, quantum computers and fusion reactors were among the innovations being celebrated.

This year, there are five categories being showcased:

• Innovative business solutions
• Innovative digital media companies
• Innovative entertainment companies
• Innovative start-ups
• Disruptive innovations

Five companies from each category will be on hand showing off their technology during a casual, catered convention-like setting. The awards portion of the program will see a top company in each field being announced, after which representatives from each company will participate in a fun, question-and-answer session with a judging panel deciding on a “most innovative company of the year”.

Tickets for students are only $35 (they are $40 for employees of DigiBC member companies and $65 for the general public). Get your tickets for NEXTBC 2.

Flickr becomes the best choice for your photos online, and elsewhere

I’m currently struggling to get my iPhoto library to migrate to the new Photos application that Apple has made the new default for computers running on the Yosemite version of the OS X operating system.

So I’ve begun investigating options for my more than 70,000 photos.

Adobe’s Lightroom is one, but it costs US$120 a year, and does way more than I really need.

Plex, which I talked about a couple of weeks ago, also manages image files. But it requires that I do a bunch of file renaming, something I can’t do because I can’t access my photo library.

Dropbox can do photos, too, but with the number of images I need to manage, I’d use up all my storage space with pictures of my kids.

And then I remembered that a couple of years ago Flickr gave users 1 TB of cloud-based storage. That’s more than enough space for me to store my numerous photos (it’s enough for up to half a million images, actually, depending on the specific image sizes). But the problem was how to get the images out of the iPhoto library and uploaded to Flickr?

They must have been reading my mind.

Last week, Flickr released apps for both OS X and WIndows that will scour your computer hard drives, identify existing photo libraries, and automatically upload them to your online Flickr account. Any photo uploaded this way is automatically labelled “private” so you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing them, unless you choose to share.

And Flickr is using “advanced recognition technology” to help you organize, sort, and manage your photo library.

Another benefit is that Flickr is effectively a backup for your photo library.

It won’t be an option for serious amateurs or pros who are working with RAW image files and manipulating images with tools such as Photoshop. But for the average person, Flickr has become an ideal choice for your photos.

You should be mindful that using a cloud-based service like Flickr will impact your mobile and home internet data plans. Keep an eye on your bandwidth.

The accident record of Google’s self-driving cars

An Associated Press report published on Monday got people all in a tizzy about Google’s autonomous cars having been in some fender benders.

And that’s all they were. Fender benders.

Google took the opportunity to reveal that, in fact, the self-driving cars have been in 11 accidents in the past six years.

Seven of those accidents were caused by human drivers rear ending the Google car.

Chris Urmson, the director of the program for Google, wrote about what his group is doing, and showed some great examples of how the self-driving cars are preventing more accidents than they are involved in.

I’m ready for cars to do all the driving for me. As soon as all the other humans, that are the real causes of accidents, agree to do the same.

Last week, Drex and I talked about “How old do I look?”, the web experience from Microsoft that aims to guess your age based on a photograph. We also discussed how your DNA can be used to come up with a photograph, or even a sculpture, of you. And more about Elon Musk and Tesla, which is disrupting the energy sector with a new battery pack for homes and businesses.

This week in tech, everyone wants to find out how well machines can guess their age (and gender!). Also, some amazing things that can be done with DNA, and the latest endeavour from Elon Musk and Tesla.

Microsoft’s machine learning demo goes viral

The How old do I look? website, which detects faces in photographs and then guesses the gender and age of those faces, went viral last week.

It started out as a simple demo that was going to be used during a keynote at Microsoft’s Build2015 conference for programmers. In a blog post written by the two software engineers who created the app, they confess that they were “expecting perhaps 50 users for a test”. They got over 35,000. And the popularity hasn’t died down yet.

If you want to know more about the code that went into it all, the tutorial is over here.

Look what other people can do with your DNA

A clever anti-litter campaign in Hong Kong aims to shame people into disposing of trash properly by posting photos of the culprits.

The images are generated from the DNA sampled from garbage picked up off the ground. The images aren’t perfect representations of the litterers, but instead provide a more general likeness, something along the line of a family resemblance.

The process of DNA phenotyping, where genetic information is used to predict a person’s appearance, was also used by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who created sculptures of faces based on DNA she collected from public spaces in New York City.

Based on information from the DNA, Dewey-Hagborg wrote a computer program to “take all these values which code for physical genetic traits and parameterizes a 3-D model of a face to represent them.”

She’s able to determine gender and ancestry fairly accurately, as well as hair and eye colour. But like the portraits of Hong Kong litterers, her sculptures are not identical to their unwitting models.

Makes you wonder what else can be done with your DNA.

Tesla’s batteries for the home

I seem to keep writing about Elon Musk and Tesla, but that’s because the man and the company are doing so many interesting and disruptive things.

The latest initiative is Tesla Energy, which leverages the battery technology used by the car company to help power homes and businesses. Powerwall is a wall-mounted battery system that can integrate with an existing electrical system, including those that are tapped into solar panels.

It comes in a 10 kWh model for US$3,500 and a smaller 7 kWh model for $3,000. (For context, one kWh can power a 40-watt incandescent light bulb for 25 hours.)

While it’s unlikely that the Powerwall will be available, or certified, for use in Canada right away, the existence of the technology and the service sets the stage for the future.

Because in addition to the home-based option, Tesla Energy also has Powerpack, which is an “infinitely scalable” system that can even be used by utilities and can scale up to 10 MWh.

Just watch Tony Stark, I mean Elon Musk, make the Powerwall announcement.

Drex and I are both very excited about the Inspiration Lab, a full digital production facility being made available for free by the Vancouver Public Library.

We also talked about the free photography conventions being held at London Drugs stores in B.C. and Alberta in the next month.

And we talked about dildos, in two contexts:

1. Lelo, the company that designs and sells “intimate lifestyle products,” has produced a short film and a smartphone app that can only be used by two people in close proximity
2. 21 Grams, a design that incorporates the cremated ashes of a deceased lover