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Monday, 27 May 2013
SkyRanger Drone Can Outmaneuver Extreme Weather
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The After Math: An Xbox One special
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Foxconn and Mozilla join hands over Firefox OS, new devices expected next week
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Vídeo: LOAD, de vuelta a la retroinformática de los 80
Ambientado en los pseudo-80 (sublime definición) este impresionante trabajo gráfico de Brian Sørensen aprovecha para insertar algunos equipos e iconos de la infancia de la informática: un Commodore 64 tan real como es posible, un IBM PC, un datassette… Indispensable revivirlo.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/arte-y-diseno/load-informatica-80.html
El entrañable cuadricóptero mascota que te sigue y graba tu día a día
El software modificado de este cuadricóptero convierte al juguete en una especie de mascota inteligente. Lo han llamado Pet AR.Drone y utiliza diversos algoritmos para seguir a su «dueño» a distancia, cual perrillo faldero, grabando una película de su vida cotidiana.
El sistema de seguimiento no emplea hardware especial, tan solo software de reconocimiento de imágenes a través de la cámara incorporada en el robot volador.
(Vía Popular Science.)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/entranable-cuadricoptero.html
Apple CEO Tim Cook's interview at D11 is tomorrow, get your liveblog here!
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IRL: iPod Classic and the WhoSounds TARDIS Bluetooth Speaker
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10 Lovely Floral iPhone 5 Cases for Spring
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Chromium browser cops reset feature to clean up malware messes
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Ticketea Raises $4 Million To Beat Ticketmaster And Eventbrite At The Spanish Box Office
Spanish startup Ticketea, the leading DIY ticketing platform in Spain, has raised $4 million in a Series B round of funding. The investment is being led by newly-established Spanish VC Seaya Ventures, and will be used by the company to consolidate its position in Spain through new m-commerce products, as well as for International expansion with a specific focus on emerging markets. Latin America is name-checked, which makes sense given Ticketea’s Spanish roots.
The startup previously raised $250,000 in Seed funding in 2009, followed by a Series A round of $1.25 million at the end of 2010, which means today’s investment brings the total raised by Ticketea to $5.5 million. Meanwhile, the company says that it’s “cash-flow positive” (read: profitable), having shifted $26 million worth of tickets through its platform since launching in 2010, issuing more than 1.5 million tickets and managing over 31,000 events in over 10 Spanish speaking countries. That doesn’t sound too shabby and, accordingly, has seen the startup grow 150% in 2012, though predictably it isn’t breaking out its financials any further.
What we can infer, however, is that today’s new capital is really about stepping on the gas rather than continuing to grow at its current, though respectable, pace. This will come in the form of improved event discovery and innovating around the tools it provides for event organisers. Specifically, in the pipeline are new mobile applications and sites that aim to exploit the rise in m-commerce, which is seeing more than 20% of the ticketing market go mobile, according to the company.
Competing with market leader Ticketmaster for big events, or something like Eventbrite at the DIY ticketing Long Tail, Ticketea’s platform solves the problem of both event discovery for consumers and a way to sell tickets for event organisers. “We try to simplify the way everybody can promote, manage and sell their tickets online,” co-founder and CEO Javier Andres tells TechCrunch. “But this is not just about selling tickets, it is about bringing people together to share their passion”.
Features that Andres says give Ticketea a competitive edge include support for Apple’s Passbook, deep integration with Facebook, a free access control tool for event organizers called “Ticketea checkpoint”, reserved seating functionality, including the ability for event organizers to create their own seating chart, and full localisation (language, currency and payments) for the countries it’s targeting.
Ticketea operates a freemium model: It’s free to publish and promote an event, and if tickets are free, using this part of the service is free, also. For events that charge for tickets, the startup takes a commission of 10% (taxes and fees included) for every ticket sold. It’s not just catering for selling tickets online, either. A new POS iOS app dubbed “Box Office” lets venues sell tickets on the spot. In return they either pay a fixed fee for every ticket sold or a monthly fee depending on volume.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/SV4TAh7X9Vo/
Nextpeer, Which Has Added Multiplayer Mode To 1,000 Mobile Games, Comes to Android
Nextpeer, the mobile gaming network that adds multi-player mode to indie titles, is entering private beta on the Android platform.
Although the platform launched about two years ago, it only started picking up momentum in the last few months, growing to 1,000 live games from 100 back in January. They’ve also 10X-ed the number of monthly active users in the network, reaching 8 million from 800,000 at the beginning of the year.
Those 8 million users have actually used Nextpeer’s tournaments; the actual reach of the games in the company’s network is much larger at somewhere between 20 to 30 million monthly actives, according to CEO Shai Magizmof.
Nextpeer adds multiplayer mode to mobile games. When gamers launch an app, they can tap an online tournaments or multi-player button inside the game, sign in directly or through Facebook, and then join a live table. You can see an example in the video above.
The idea is that multiplayer makes games much stickier and more engaging as players actually compete with each other in real-time. The platform offers both asynchronous multi-player and synchronous multi-player modes. So you can either play with people in real-time, or with different people even if they’re not playing at the same time as you.
The company will also give developers the ability to customize the multi-player screen, so that it feels more native and natural to the game. Nextpeer has raised almost $2 million in funding from investors including OurCrowd and Wolfson Group, along with other private individuals.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/9PlGGbFtk1w/
Wikipad's 7-inch gaming tablet flashes its insides at the FCC
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ASUS Computex teaser claims new hardware will 'move you'
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How Will Wearable Tech Impact the Startup World?
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Apple's Subliminal Messages and Other News You Need to Know
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The Engadget Interview: Lixin Cheng on ZTE's US future at CTIA 2013
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Next On Deck For Khan Academy: Better Diagnostics And Internationalization
Even though Sal Khan is now running a platform that serves 6 million students and people a month, he’s still churning out a couple videos a week.
What’s been most recently on deck? World War I.
To make a video, Khan says he’ll front-load several books worth of reading on everything from the Armistice Day to the sinking of the Lusitania. Then he’ll start to make videos once he feels he has a decent grasp on the subject material.
“If I’m hanging out waiting for the dentist, I’ll just start reading something about World War I,” he said in a recent interview.
From the original tutoring calls he’d arrange to help out relatives, to the initial YouTube channel he started, Khan Academy has grown to reach 75 million users to date, with 230 million lessons delivered and 1 billion problems answered in 30,000 classrooms throughout the world.
Naturally, there’s been quite a bit of hype (with both its good and bad consequences). Khan Academy has the reach but it’s still proving out the data to show that its lessons measurably affect learning outcomes beyond the handful of pilots the non-profit has tried.
“Teachers are rightfully skeptical, I think. They’re overworked. They have a million things to do,” Khan said. “It’s an incredibly tiring job and you’re throwing a new thing at them, even if they intellectually recognize the benefit of it.”
Two of the top things on Khan’s priority list for the next fall are internationalization and diagnostics. The Khan Academy has pioneered ways of measuring progress, to help ensure that students don’t develop a “Swiss Cheese”-like base of knowledge with different weak areas.
But he acknowledged the site isn’t as good at telling students where they should begin. What if they’re competent at certain things like logarithms but terribly behind in trigonometry?
“One of the biggest complaints we get is that people don’t know where to start. By this August, we should have good diagnostics where people can figure out where they stand,” he said.
He’s personally interested in Carol Dweck’s theories around fostering a growth-centered mentality in children and students. Her research is the basis for a series of media stories and discussions around how much you should praise children and whether you should attribute their success to persistence or innate capabilities. She’s found that children who internalize not innate talent, but rather diligence, tend to do better one the longer-run. He also said that the Khan Academy will be re-architecting some of the game mechanics and rewards to help with retention.
While he thinks that more traditional forms of diagnostics like standardized tests aren’t all bad, they’re limited.
“Standardized testing by itself isn’t a horrible thing. They’re not going to be testing every dimension though,” he said.
He envisions a future where an admissions officer might not only look at grades and SAT tests, but also whether students have a record of trying over and over again even when they don’t get it right away.
“If I was an admissions officer in the not too far off future, you’d look at the narrative of data: Who showed a strong degree of perseverance?” he said.
He also said that it’s going to be increasingly important to have a body of creative work beyond demonstrating raw academic performance. The Academy’s platform for teaching computer science lets students create a body of programs they’ve written. (So far, students have made about 100,000 programs.)
Likewise, if they were going to expand to other things like writing or music composition, they’d also encourage students to create their own portfolios.
As for the growing wave of for-profit and venture-backed companies like Coursera, Khan says he’s still believes his academy should attack education problems with a non-profit-based approach. His only hesitation about going the non-profit route had to do with attracting technical talent, but the big-name hires they’ve been able to get like Google’s first employee Craig Silverstein, have tempered his original worries.
“My gut tells me that education — it has to be done with the best of both worlds. When I talk to investors, I ask them, where do your kids go? How many of them are willing to send their kids to a for-profit school? It’s not that for-profit schools can’t be good and I don’t want to be self-righteous about it, but considering the sensitive stuff like the students’ data and the credentialing, my guess is that’s going to have to be in the not-for-profit realm.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Vp7PsIRmnZI/
Samsung teases new Galaxy and ATIV devices for upcoming London event
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Samsung to Unveil New Galaxy and ATIV Devices on June 20
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A la caza de caras en Google Maps
«Caras» en el extremo oriental de Rusia
La pareidolia es ese fenómeno que nos lleva a reconocer formas reconocibles en sitios donde no las hay y ver, en especial caras.
Pero lo bueno es que si se le aplica un algoritmo de reconocimiento de caras a las imágenes de Google Maps este también termina por encontrar caras donde no las hay, lo que es perfectamente lógico porque a fin de cuentas el algoritmo ha sido escrito por una persona para buscar aquello que nosotros consideramos una cara.
Ese es precisamente el objetivo de Google Faces , que está recorriendo las imágenes de Google Maps una a una y cada vez en mayor resolución a la caza de estas pareidolias.
Discrepo con los creadores del proyecto cuando dicen que intentan ver si estas pareidolias pueden ser generadas por una máquina, pues al fin y al cabo la máquina sólo responde a la programación que está ejecutando, en este caso la librería de reconocimiento de caras de Jason Saragih, pero me parece cuando menos curioso.
A tenor de todo esto, un par de libros que vienen al caso sobre el papel fundamental que juega nuestro wetware, nuestro cerebro, en como percibimos el mundo: El hombre que confundió a su mujer con un sombrero, de Oliver Saks, y Neurociencia para Julia, de Xurxo Mariño, ambos altamente recomendables.
(Vía @LAhacksScience).
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ordenadores/a-la-caza-de-caras-en-google-maps.html
¡Feliz cumpleaños, Wordpress!
Tal día como hoy, un 27 de mayo, pero de hace exactamente diez años (en 2003) un chaval por aquel entonces de 19 años llamado Matt Mullenweg anunciaba públicamente a todo el mundo la primera versión «oficial» de WordPress (0.71-gold).
Esa primera versión de WordPress creada por Mullenweg y Mike Little se numeró así para continuar la tradición de su predecesor B2/Cafelog, de Michel Valdrighi. Desde sus inicios WordPress se ofreció con una licencia libre GPL y cualquiera podía instalarla en su servidor de forma gratuita, modificándola como considerara conveniente. De ahí surgió también WordPress.com, donde la gente puede hospedar su blog de forma gratuita o con opciones extra como servicio de pago.
A día de hoy la versión 3.5 ha sido descargada 18 millones de veces y tiene aproximadamente un 60 por ciento de cuota de mercado de los sistemas de gestión de contenidos y webglogs mundiales. En WordPress.com se hospedan unos 60 millones de blogs que publican un millón de artículos y un millón de nuevos comentarios cada día; en total todos esos blogs generan unos 3.000 millones de páginas vistas al mes.
{Foto: Matt Mullenweg en Le Webm, 2010 (CC) Magnus Höij @ Flickr}
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/feliz-10-aniv-wordpress.html
Un coche teledirigido que también es un cuadricóptero y vuela. O al revés
De momento B es un proyecto en Kickstarter , se trata de un vehículo teledirigido híbrido entre un cuadricoptero (un helicóptero con cuatro hélices) y un coche con cuatro ruedas, de modo que puede circular por el terreno y, si se topa con un obstáculo, levantar el vuelo.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/gadgets/coche-teledirigido-cuadricoptero-vuela.html
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