Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Welcome to 2014, a brand new year to look forward to and you know what this means, another list about tech companies. This time we look at another batch West Coast startups that we believe could be big news in the next twelve months. The names on this list are not constrained to just Silicon Valley — they can be based in any part of the region, including Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.

Practically every day, a new company sprouts up to tackle one of countless problems and while some hold promise, it’s impossible for us to list them all. We’ve tried to focus on the few that cover a variety of industries, including those that are doing something really cool, whether it’s in healthcare, 3D motion control, enterprise computing, or even those focused on behind-the-scenes services.

Here are our picks for 2014, presented in no particular order. These aren’t all necessarily brand new companies, but ones we think will make a significant breakthroughs in 2014. If you want to look at our list from 2013, you can view it here....

The Lead Teaser: Roughly eighteen months after the iPad 1 was first introduced, tablets have been described as the fastest-growing new technology ever. How has this new device influenced news consumption habits?

Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology....

'Deep learning' clusters crack coding problems their top engineers can't...

Google no longer understands how its "deep learning" decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos.

This means the internet giant may need fewer experts in future as it can instead rely on its semi-autonomous, semi-smart machines to solve problems all on their own.

The claims were made at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco on Friday by Google software engineer Quoc V. Le in a talk in which he outlined some of the ways the content-slurper is putting "deep learning" systems to work.

"Deep learning" involves large clusters of computers ingesting and automatically classifying data, such as pictures. Google uses the technology for services like Android voice-controlled search, image recognition, and Google translate, among others....

I know plenty of people of all generations, including my parents, who are actively embracing the latest digital platforms and technologies (and having a good time doing so).

Things are at a point tech is democratized and doesn’t require any specialized knowledge to use. It’s nearly all common sense.

So when I saw Dave Winer’s post this morning sharing how a journalist has sadly “given up” trying to learn new things, I had to share it. I’ve summarized the key bits...