FUNKY GREEN: 04/18/13

Thursday, 18 April 2013

Archos Launches Android Smartphone Line

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Google Play Services code peek fuels rumors of a game framework

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Private airport terminal for Google's jets approved by city of San Jose

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Sony's dog harness action cam mount coming to Japan, countless YouTube clips to follow

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Archos dips into smartphones with the 35 Carbon, 50 Platinum and 53 Platnium

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Google+ extends its reach into Blogger comments

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How to Protect Your WordPress From Attack

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Storify Aims For Marketers With its New ‘Storify Business' Plan, Redesigns Free Version Too

Last month, social media curation service Storify revealed its first paid plan, Storify VIP. It sounds like VIP is designed for large media organizations (the first announced customer was the BBC), but today, Storify is announcing that it created a more accessible, less journalism-focused option called Storify Business.

“The new features will broaden our user base beyond journalism to these other types of customers who are reporting on social media for their clients and telling stories about products,” Herman told me.

Storify’s usefulness to journalists is pretty clear — it helps them turn disparate social media updates into a coherent story. (The Denver Post used Storify in its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Aurora, Colo. shootings.) At the same time, Herman said it can be used by brands, PR agencies, and ad agencies, too.

“Current corporate reporting methods for social media — like pasting screenshots into Powerpoint — are cumbersome and lose links to the original data,” he said. “One of the main new Storify Business features is private stories, which are only visible to others who have the secret story link. Brands and PR and advertising agencies need to record customer sentiment and conversations from social networks to report on what they are doing.”

Herman added that this isn’t a replacement for more algorithmically driven social listening tools, but rather a complement.

In addition to the private sharing feature, Storify Business also includes customized story embeds (so that they can match a company’s branding or the design of its blog) and increased customer support. The company is currently offering introductory pricing of $59 a month (the regular price will be $99).

And even though the company has been expanding its paid options, it’s making improvements for free users too, with the launch of a new design, as well new features that allow users to edit the URL of a story, search Instagram by username or location, and delete items from a saved collection.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/SENKSrWdUhE/

This is the Modem World: Who's driving this thing?

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Evil Controllers' Vision line adds customization and lengthy battery life, we go hands-on

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Sky Go for Android now streams to the HTC One, Galaxy S 4 and Xperia Z

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Firefox OS dev units coming to Geeksphone next week: Keon and Peak priced from €91

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Twitter #Music app hands-on (iOS and web)

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Engadget Eurocast 023 - 04.18.13

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Facebook Expands Developer Tools With Open Graph for Mobile

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Facebook unleashes new SDK for iOS with improved Open Graph and login support

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Google Plus Hangouts update mutes your mic while you type

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Skitch Update Brings New Features and Faster Perfomance

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Skitch 2.5 for Mac and iOS lets you mark up PDFs with notes and stamps

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Alleged budget iPhone shows off polycarbonate body, brings back good memories

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Yahoo! Weather arrives on iPhone with Flickr integration, Mail comes to iPad and Android tablets

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Galaxy S 4 Mini surfaces in Samsung web profile code

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Yahoo Mail For Tablets Will Redefine How You Read Email

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Yahoo's Weather App Uses Flickr To Show You Weather Conditions

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Verizon sold 2 million iPhone 5s, 4 million iPhones in total during 2013 Q1

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Twitter launching #Music app for iPhone alongside new service today

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Bump's photo-sharing Flock app now supports 15 languages

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Volio Users Can Now Share Their Conversational Videos As Voliocasts

Volio, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (among others) and led by Nuance founder Ron Croen, launched last month with the promise of allowing apps to create a conversational experience with their users. Now it’s adding a social dimension with the launch of Voliocasts.

Founder and CEO Ron Croen laid out his vision for me earlier this week: “If you put a real human image on a computer, you can deliver something that feels real to the user, like an actual interactive experience. You get a lot of the engagement that you have with the human being.”

The first app to use Volio’s technology is Talk To Esquire, which allows the magazine’s readers to engage with Esquire columnists. What users are really seeing is a set of prerecorded videos, but they can actually talk to the, and received advice that’s customized based on their answers — for example, fashion director Nick Sullivan can walk you through what you should wear on a given evening, based on things like who you’re going out with and your affinity for formal versus casual clothes.

When I tried it out, I definitely got the feeling that I was being guided through a conversation, because you’re usually presented with very specific options in terms of answers, but on the bright side you’re not likely to say something that the app can’t handle.

With a Voliocast, apps can now record both sides of the interaction and edit them into a single video, which users can share on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

I tried it out using a demo version of the Esquire app, and given my monosyllabic answers, I’m not sure the results were terribly entertaining. It seems that if app developers want users to create Voliocasts, they’ll want to design experiences with more interaction in mind.

Croen said many of these videos could be entertaining: “There will be user generated content that’s creative, sort of on the order of karaoke, even though it’s not karaoke as such.” On the other hand, the videos could have a significant business or advertising purpose, like recording customer testimonials. (Nuance, another company that Croen founded, recently announced its own initiative in conversational advertising.)

He also emphasized that apps will only record users with their permission. He also said it’s too early to announce any of the publishers who will be using Voliocasts, but when the company announces its next set of partners, “You can expect that they’ll take advantage of the Voliocast capability.”

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/s40JpHOYoTo/

Disconnect 2 Brings More Privacy To Your Browser, Lets You Block 2K+ Sites From Tracking Your Activity Online

With the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. Facebook Connect, as it was called then, disabled traffic from third-party sites to Facebook, while still allowing Average Internet Surfers like you and me to access Facebook.

Thanks to the near-immediate success of the extension, Kennish left Google to focus on the project full-time, and soon launched Disconnect — to apply the same concept to other popular platforms like Google, Yahoo, Digg and Twitter. Disconnect quickly turned into a full-blown company, and Kennish recruited the help of another former Google engineer, Austin Chau, along with consumer rights advocate, Casey Oppenheim.

The driving principle behind Disconnect, Kennish told us at the time, was to ensure that personal data remains under our own control and not that of corporations and to allow users “to control who does what with their data online.” With cybersecurity becoming a hot topic, CIPSA, the reintroduction of the Do Not Track Online Act, and the seemingly ever-present outrage over Facebook (and others) using our online data to target ads (even offline), the concern over privacy and security has only increased since Disconnect’s launch.

So, this week, the startup released version 2.0 of its Chrome extension, significantly expanding its coverage of the sites we use most frequently (and its speed), in an effort to keep up with the increasing complexity and pervasiveness of the variety of stuff that can potentially infringe on our online privacy.

Again, ask the founders and they’ll tell you that the Web today is littered with analytics, advertising, social widgets and the like that gum up the gears that make page load speeds hum, while quietly redirecting your personal browsing data to tracking companies. They believe that this stuff, in turn, increases your exposure to malware and other nefarious, Web-born attacks. And they’re not alone.

Disconnect 2 updates the privacy extension so that it now allows users to visualize and block over 2,000 third-party sites and track what they do on the Web, which they claim is twice the number of tracking sites covered by other, similar apps. The founders have also optimized Disconnect for speed and, based on benchmarks of the 1,000 most popular sites, pages use “an average of 17 percent less bandwidth and load 27 percent faster” with the app, they tell us.

This has increasing application today with the proliferation of digital advertising strategies like re-targeting, which companies like Facebook continue to refine to allow them to serve more relevant, personalized ads based not only on what you do on Facebook, but your activity outside of it. Besides the creepiness factor, the tools these companies use to track our behavior slows down our experience of these sites. Plus, advertisers are naturally inclined to resist standards that would limit their ability to tap into our data.

So, unfortunately, even though most browsers allow you to flip some kind of switch to go “Incognito” or limit tracking, most people fail to recognize that this isn’t a failsafe and advertisers don’t have to oblige them.

Disconnect 2 attempts to limit advertisers’ ability to use tools like re-targeting and put a stopper on the flow of your data into their databases. So, the new version not only allows users to block potential sources of malware, but encrypt the data they do exchange with third-party sites so companies can’t steal their data or hack their accounts over public WiFi.

This kind of functionality puts Disconnect (broadly) in competition with site optimizers like Cloudflare and Torbit, among many others, along with a host of security apps and services, particularly with personal data protection tools like Ghostery.

Disconnect 2 offers a toolbar button to let user view the number of tracking requests they receive on each page and choose which ones they want to block, along with a browser dropdown that shows you tracking requests by company, with green meaning they’re blocked and gray meaning they’re unblocked. As it always has, Disconnect still allows you to block popular sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter, but now allows you to view other sites by category (like “Social,” “Advertising,” etc) and pick and choose what you block via check marks.

But, unlike many other services, Disconnect is taking a pay-what-you-want approach to its new service. Users can choose from four standard pricing options, or enter how much they want to pay for the service. They can also choose, via sliding scale, how much of that payment they want to go to Disconnect and how much they want to go to charity.

At this point, Disconnect supports four different charities, like ProPublica, The Center for Democracy & Technology and The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, with plans to support more going forward. Users can pay by credit card or test the service out for themselves before paying. All in all, this a la carte, flexible pricing model gives the startup a better chance and monetizing without detracting from the user experience, making it, I’d argue, that much more appealing for those who might be on the fence about using it in the first place.

Disconnect 2 is currently available as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, while the company’s other apps (like Facebook Disconnect) are available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

For more, find the startup at home here.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/IuhRJTE9mtY/

Verizon added 677,000 subscribers, made a $4.8 billion profit in Q1 2013

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Circle Pad Pro accessory will ruin your Nintendo 3DS XL's silhouette for $20

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Sigma announces 18-35mm f/1.8 DC HSM zoom, breaks the elusive f/2.0 barrier

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Electron showers could create the nano-spacesuit of the future

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Nokia hits $7.7 billion in revenue for Q1 2013 with 5.8 million Lumias sold

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Pantech Vega Iron brings 1080p on a 5-inch 'zero bezel' display, where zero equals 2.4mm

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Wunderlist Pro to bring collaboration in a $45 per year subscription model (video)

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WordPress 2.3 for Android gains Holo interface and menu drawer

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Tastebuds Scores $600K To Help You Meet People Who Share Your Musical Taste, U.S. Launch Imminent

Tastebuds, the London-based startup that matches people based on their musical tastes, has been kicking around for a while now. A graduate of the accelerator Springboard (now TechStars London) back in 2011, the company has ploughed along bootstrapped ever since — garnering a not-too-shabby 100,000 registered users along the way. Now the company looks like it’s finally set to step on the gas. Today it’s announcing a $600,000 seed round from Black Ocean, which will be used to launch mobile apps, grow its developer team, as well as formally launching in the U.S.

In addition, Tastebuds is currently developing features to connect members offline through gigs, festivals and music meetups, thus building on its existing online-to-offline social networking proposition.

Originally positioned as a dating site that focused on music as a way of matching prospective dates, Tastebuds appeared to have hit onto something, gaining a reputation for its ability to reach users who wouldn’t normally consider doing the online dating thing. Accordingly, it says that almost half of its users haven’t used a dating website before. However, that appears to have only taken it so far. Online dating is one of the most competitive spaces with very high user acquisition costs and high user churn. So, perhaps smartly, the startup has since broadened out slightly and can now be thought of as a competitor to services like Badoo, along with the usual online dating suspects.

“We first launched as a dating service but we’ve grown way beyond the dating use case,” says co-founder Alex Parish. “The site is designed to make it as easy as possible for people to meet others who share their tastes, in whatever capacity. It’s obviously working in a dating respect as we’ve had numerous weddings off the site.”

To build your profile on Tastebuds, you search for and select your favourite bands/artists. Alternatively, you can import data from your Last.fm account or import your Facebook music-related “Likes”. In addition, you add the usual demographic information required for social networking, along with, crucially, your location — the end goal is to meet people offline, after all. You also get to state if you’re looking for a date or just want to meet like-minded people. Tastebuds then begins displaying potential matches, including which artists you have in common, so that you can start conversing.

You can also “Like” users so that their Tastebuds status updates show up in your news feed, such as what they’ve recently listened to. You can also see any gigs they are planning to attend if they’ve linked their SongKick account.

Finally, last May Tastebuds launched a Spotify app, which essentially embeds the service inside of the streaming music site. As one of the first apps on the platform, around half of its users have come via Spotify, although this has petered out somewhat. “When we launched we were registering thousands of users per day from the app,” says Parish. “This has dropped since the number of apps [on Spotify] has ballooned but the app is still significant for us, making up around a quarter of daily registrations.”

Tastebuds is free to join, although the company has experimented with a number of premium micro-features, such as “Incognito mode”, which hides your online status and enables you to browse profiles anonymously. However, it isn’t ruling out a more standard recurring subscription model in the future. “We’re also going to investigate the possibility afforded by offline events and live music,” says Parish. “The focus until now has mostly been on growth and achieving the right product-market fit.”

As for what’s immediately around the corner for Tastebuds now that it has money in the bank, Parish says that, along with much-needed mobile apps and growing the team, the company is busy “building technology to help people meet offline at live music events which we’re really excited about.”

via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/33HWF8I2XDs/

Fíate de este camión con sistema de frenado de emergencia inteligente

¿Confiarías tu suerte en una colisión contra un 40 toneladas de camión a que su conductor pudiera frenar adecuadamente? Este monstruo de Volvo cargado hasta los topes incorpora un sistema de frenado emergencia para situaciones límites con una particularidad: no reemplaza al conductor excepto en situaciones de emergencia en las que la persona no hace nada.

Los sensores detectan si va a producirse una colisión inevitable por la velocidad relativa de los vehículos, hasta 70 kilómetros por hora. En ese caso se enciende una luz roja de aviso. Después la luz roja parpadea. Si todo sigue igual, aplica una ligera frenada. Y si el conductor humano sigue sin hacer nada, entonces el camión intenta frenar y detener completamente el vehículo por todos los medios posibles.

Es una decisión complicada pero se diría que inteligente: si quien conduce lo hace bien, no será necesario que intervenga el ordenador. Pero si quien va al volante está despistado, dormido o incapacitado se activarán los diversos avisos de emergencia gradualmente con el objetivo de salvar la situación. Un avance más de la tecnología aplicada a la conducción.

# Enlace Permanente

via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/camion-frenado-emergencia.html

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Thursday, 18 April 2013

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