News & Blog
Welcome to the JBK Blog & News page where we discuss the latest news and trends in information technology,
our construction, insurance, and risk management IT services, and our products, SmartBidNet and SmartCompliance.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 9:59AM Forget touch screen, how about a screen you manipulate with a wave of your hand? The video below shows the many applications in which touchless interfaces and gesture control could prove incredibly useful and just plain fun. And "Unleash your inner jedi" may be the best tagline we've heard in years.
Learn more about this handsfree technology here
Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 6:02PM Don't try to tell us human technology doesn't count! Just watch as South Korea shows off the "greenest" LCD monitor we've ever seen.
Monday, January 21, 2013 at 8:32AM A restaurant opened in June in China, and the 20 robots that work there, are quickly becoming a marketing piece for the town and a model for robotics replacing humans in the services industry.
"Upon arrival, Usher Robot welcomes customers to the restaurant and directs them to the seating area. Patrons can then place their order, which is relayed by humans to one of the four the robot chefs who are able to cook various styles of dumplings and noodles. The robot chefs even determine the temperature and ingredients for each dish and usually take about 3 minutes to prepare the average order. These robot chefs are no slouches either. The kitchen staff is able to prepare a menu of over 30 dishes--perfect for a family dinner."
How many more of these restaurants will we see in the coming years? How does such technology lessen or improve the experience of the consumer?
Click here to learn more about China's robot restaurant in Harbin
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 5:54PM We love end-user focused technology; it's Software as a Service for not only clients but also their clients. A new customer engagement platform for the utility industry called Opower is redefining the way utility companies, not usually known for intuitive, graphic interface design, interact with their customers. And they've taken their industry's goal of energy efficiency to heart.
"Opower is probably best known for pioneering the Home Energy Report. Think of it as a more interesting incarnation of your gas or electric bill. More than 4 million homes receive our reports today, and they’re on track to save hundreds of millions of dollars on their energy bills."
We like that utility companies are their clients, but their software design and development (and even language of their website) is driven by the end-user. Maybe your utilities provider has or will be adopting such a platform soon. We always preach that demand starts with the end user - let your providers know what will make your experience with them most useful. If they are worth your business, like Opower, they will listen.
In the meantime, check out why we like Opower's design and functionality here
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 11:16AM "'The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven't necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones,' Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii told AFP. 'The possibility of losing information may actually have increased,' he said, pointing out that CDs and tape storage are predicted to last less than a few decades at best, and in many cases fail within years."
Hitachi has therefore proposed a new storage medium: quartz glass. They argue that data lasered in binary formatted dots on the glass in four layers can be stored at 40MB per square inch. And unless the glass is broken, the data will last hundreds of millions of years in the glass. In addition, since the dots can be read using a simple microscope, future readers of the data should be able to decipher it even if technology has changed drastically.
We like being reminded that no matter how advanced technology gets, some of the core problems, like physical materials to store data in, can still be solved by 'basic' glass and dots.
Click here to learn more about Hitachi's glass data storage
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 9:56AM We'll let HP explain why the cloud is the latest and greatest technology in the best video spoof we've seen all month. Not as applicable as our usual Tech of the Week posts, but much more entertaining.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 4:24PM Published in Construction Executive
July 2012
By James Benham, President of JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc., Maker of SmartBidNet
Twenty years ago, the preconstruction process involved stacks of paper, trails of phone calls and nothing more high tech than a filing cabinet. Thanks to the cloud, everything from prequalification to proposal review has become paperless, automated and centralized—cutting administrative costs and boosting project efficiency from subcontractors, estimators and construction managers.
Which technologies are transforming the bid process for today’s general contractors, and what’s in the works to enhance their future operations? Let’s take a look.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 11:06AM Makers of SmartBidNet Construction Bid Software, JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc. is ahead of the game with its innovative and collaborative approach to construction technology.
College Station, TX (PRWEB) July 10, 2012
Constructech Magazine announced the much anticipated Constructech 50, on July 5, 2012. This is a listing of the most influential construction-technology providers with a strong and ongoing market presence, as determined by Constructech’s editorial team. As a part of this listing, Constructech also announced 5 Up and Comers, including JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc. The Constructech editors believe that the 5 companies listed as such are primed and ready to take the next step to penetrate the construction industry, leveraging the latest technology and looking to fill specific gaps in the market.
Click here to read the full article
Friday, July 6, 2012 at 10:33AM The only thing better than an automated personal assistant programmed into your phone that recognizes your voice? One that's also integrated with the neverending universe of possibilities that is Google search. Android has just seriously stepped their game up with Google Now, Siri's latest challenger.
Steve Jobs said from the beginning that Siri is not an attempt to enter the search business, but rather an application built to customize user experience and avoid the ambiguity of search. But Google Now incorporates all of the customization of Siri (minus the witty jokes...for now) and enhances that customization with the power of Google search.
"I was in San Francisco last week to cover Google I/O and meet with some other companies in the area. I had a meeting in Mountain View on Friday morning. Google Now sent me a notification about 45 minutes before my meeting that said I should leave if I wanted to make it on time. It even took traffic into account. Incredible."
Google Now will be released in Android's upcoming version Jelly Bean, but one glaring problem remains. Android devices are infamously not equipped to handle operating system updates. According to this article, only 7% of Android users are even using the most current version of the OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, that launched seven months ago.
Click here to learn more about Google Now
Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 10:48AM So it may not be as business related as what we normally post, but it's quite a step up in mobile computing. iPieces essentially turns your iPad into a variety of board games, from air hockey to Snakes & Ladders, you can install the app and even buy the additional pieces to have a mobile suite of board games.
"Players can represent a country of their choice to compete in a variety of fun and exciting tournaments when they download the Air Hockey App. iPieces Air Hockey is suitable for 2 players and contains 2 iPieces Air Hockey Strikers and the downloadable app."
We imagine this "tablet as a workable, 3D surface" technology will only keep spreading to more practical, business-related ventures. However, I don't know about you guys but I bet we can find a way to make this essential to our work day...
Click here to read more about the iPieces iPad board games
Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 4:39PM Published on the Construction Today Blog
June 15, 2012
By James Benham, President of JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc.
Who doesn’t enjoy a good tennis match on the Wii? And the Kinect/XBox combination is also pretty cool (even if the voice recognition software could use a little fine-tuning.) But a recent development announced by San Francisco startup Leap Motion has officially made both the Wii and Kinect look as technologically advanced as Lincoln Logs in comparison.
The newly announced Leap 3-D Motion Control system is accurate to a hundredth of a millimeter. It’s “200 times more sensitive than anything on the market” and “creates a ‘three-dimensional interaction space’ of four cubic feet and is more precise and responsive than a touchscreen or a mouse,” reported CNET.
Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 11:20AM No need for explanation today. Just a photo. 
Click here to learn more about Google's self-driving car technology
Thursday, April 5, 2012 at 9:13AM Anything we try to write or summarize about this technology won't do it justice. So we'll just direct you straight to the source.
Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 6:25AM Not only does MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits have an awesome name, he also has an awesome vision, shared this past September at TED. He points out that while skyscrapers take an average of 2.5 years to complete, DNA can replicate rougly 3 billion base pairs in about an hour. Skylar believes the future is in our learning to manufacture such replication and self-guidance, so instead of building things, like DNA, we let them build themselves.
"There’s new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. … Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute."
He explains that by decoding the complexity of our assembly processes, learning to program those sequences into materials, linking this system to an energy source for continuous operation, and having a feedback system for error detection - we can create materials that construct themselves. In the video at the link below, he even shows some of the reconfigurable, programmable robots they've already managed to have do just that.
His explanation of gates and sequencing may make your brain hurt, but the implications of "self-assembly" are staggering to think about...
Click here to learn more about this self-assembling technology
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 11:58AM This is pretty nerdtastic. Researches at the Israel Institute of Technology have developed an organic computer that can encrypt and decipher images and is made of...wait for it... biomolecules and runs off of...DNA molecules. The four key components to any computer, they stated, hardware, software, input, and output are entirely constructed of molecules.
"For example, all biological systems and even entire living organisms are such computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular computer, a machine in which all four components are molecules that 'talk' to one another logically."
"The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, predetermined changes, following a specific set of rules -software - and the output is another molecule."
Even if we can't completely understand the details of how it functions, the implications are huge. Being organic, such devices can interact with living organisms and biological system much more easily than electronic computers that require an interface. Though its commercial use is a long way off, it's pretty incredible to think about how this could be put to use medically, environmentally, and for all those Californians whose MacBooks are preventing them from going completely organic...
Click here to learn more about biological computers
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