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Friday, 31 May 2013
Engadget Podcast 346 - 05.31.13
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Zoho announces Zoho Vault, provides a hub for businesses to manage passwords
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Toda la superficie de Mercurio disponible en imágenes de la Messenger
Toda la superficie de Mercurio - NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
La NASA acaba de hacer pública la imagen que recoge toda la superficie de Mercurio a la luz del Sol después de que la Messenger consiguiera la última imagen que faltaba a finales de 2012.
La verdad es que esta última imagen sólo llevó la cobertura de imágenes del 99,999993% al 100%, pero las cosas son como son, así que antes no se podía decir que la cobertura fuera completa.
Las imágenes se pueden descargar en distintas resoluciones en Global Mosaics of Mercury , incluyendo las que 250 metros por pixel de resolución, cada una de ellas de 300 MB.
El tiempo que han tardado en publicarlas ha sido debido a la necesidad de procesar varios miles de imágenes para formar estos mosaicos.
La Messenger, @MESSENGER2011 en Twitter, ha captado más de 150.000 imágenes en los algo más de dos años que lleva en órbita alrededor de Mercurio, y los responsables de la misión creen que podrá seguir operando al menos hasta 2015.
También ha conseguido nuevas evidencias de la existencia de agua helada en lo más profundo de alguno de los cráteres de Mercurio.
La Messenger es la primera sonda de la historia en entrar en órbita alrededor de Mercurio, por lo que es la primera vez que disponemos de imágenes como estas.
- Así es la superficie de Mercurio, un vídeo en el que se puede ver esta a grandes rasgos.
- Llévate la sonda Messenger en tu iPhone o iPad, para no perderte detalle de esta misión.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/toda-superficie-mercurio-disponible-en-imagenes-de-la-messenger.html
DirecTV reportedly bidding $1 billion for Hulu
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Rdio intros new social features and redesigned player
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ASRock announces M8 compact gaming rig in collaboration with BMW
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Editor's Letter: Windows 8 gets its start back
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The Wheelharp delivers string-orchestra sounds via a mechanical keyboard
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Watch ABC app with live TV streaming comes to Kindle Fire, but not Google Play
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Google's Nutrition Search and Other News You Need to Know
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Distro Issue 93: The minds behind XPRIZE
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Google Pays Tribute to Julius Richard Petri With Animated Doodle
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SUNY partners with Coursera for massively open online course experiment
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NHK flaunts 8K Ultra HD compact broadcast camera
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Graphene camera sensors said to be 1,000 times more sensitive to light
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Ubuntu team closes its original 'bug:' Microsoft's majority of PC market share
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Sony will use eyeIO's video compression tech to deliver 4K movies
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Housebites Runs Out Of Runway For Its Airbnb For Take-Out, Reduces Staff As It Prepares Fresh Pivot
Housebites, the London, UK-based startup that enables independent chefs to sell home-cooked meals as an alternative to a take-out, has shuttered in its current form as it gears up to pivot — once again.
Its website has been replaced by a holding page that apologises for the withdrawal of the service and thanks “loyal and valued” customers for their support, while also promising a new website and food offering in a couple of weeks. “We had a great product for a while and couldn’t have done it without you”, notes the statement.
In an email to TechCrunch, Housebites CEO and co-founder Simon Prockter confirmed that its take-out business is indeed no more: “Is Housebites dead-pooled? Yes,” he says. “Is Housebites gone? No. We just closed the takeaway part. Admittedly the larger part of our business and the product that we were best known for.”
Instead the company plans to focus on a new product, internally known as Project Fresh, although specifically what that new offering is, Prockter isn’t saying. “Housebites is not going anywhere and we’ll be back soon doing something that keeps us more of an Internet rather than restaurant business,” he says.
We’ve also heard from sources that the startup has made a number of redundancies as it looks to restructure its business, which Prockter partially confirms. “Rumours of people being laid off are going around that are a little exaggerated so let’s put that straight,” he says. “We laid-off three people and we postponed hiring in place of a further three that had recently left of their own accord. Of the three laid-off one has already been offered an alternative position in the company. There are still seven remaining people working here now. I spent last night with all thirteen”.
Housebites, whose backers include EC1 Capital, Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), and Steve Pankhurst (founder of FriendsReunited), started life in 2010 as a “peer-to-peer dining platform”, before pivoting to become an “Airbnb for takeout“, letting people order food prepared and cooked by vetted home chefs as a better alternative to traditional takeout services. The service appeared to prove popular amongst users and the chefs that powered the platform, though we were always a little skeptical about its ability to scale, even as the collaborative consumption hype fuelled by the likes of Airbnb began to take hold. The cost of vetting chefs and dealing with the customer service side of something like Housebites presumably doesn’t come cheap.
And indeed Prockter seems to confirm that scale was an issue. Or at least the length of runway needed to reach scale. In addition, as disruptive as Housebites was setting out to be, VCs didn’t view the startup as technology-based enough, making raising the required funds difficult. “Our version of takeaway was always a difficult model and we know many outsiders were always curious how it could scale,” says Prockter. “A fact that not too many people realised is that Housebites was a franchise not a marketplace. This meant that each chef was a mini restaurant and our goal was to make each a £100k business. We have no doubt that over time we could have got there”.
Prockter says that chef income rose from £35 a day on average on month 1 to “almost £200 a day last month”, which he claims is higher than they’d earn working in a restaurant. In addition, the franchise model avoided the legal, conveyancing and kitting out costs that most takeaways incur. “On paper it always stacked,” he says.
“Unfortunately we had a long slog ahead. A few more years to breakeven at a cost of a couple of million. We’d become more of a restaurant rather than tech business so venture capital was not an option for us. We weren’t viable for private equity and we’d over-valued ourselves for most Angels.”
To that end, in July 2012, Housebites soft launched a parallel offering called Housebites Fresh. The recipe kit service, which is similar to HelloFresh, saw subscribers sent a box of freshly chopped ingredients accompanied by a recipe card so that they can prepare a freshly cooked meal at home, inspired by the professional chef-standard take-outs already delivered as part of the main Housebites service. TechCrunch understands that it’s this model, in some form or another, that points to the future of the business, which would tally with the “Project Fresh” name. Its launch is pegged for July this year.
Meanwhile, the deadpooling of Housebites in its current form hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed by users, not least the chefs who powered and made a living off its platform. A Twitter/Facebook group — HungryChefsClub — has sprung up to help find a new home for the orphaned cooks.
Full statement from Housebites’ website, which is accepting pre-registrations for whatever is next, follows below:
From 28th May 2013 we will no longer be offering our standard takeaway service.
We are currently building a brand new website that, we think, will offer even better customer value.
We know we have a lot of loyal and valued customers and we want to apologise sincerely for withdrawing this service. We also want to thank you for your support. We had a great product for a while and couldn’t have done it without you.
The new food offering will be ready in a couple of weeks. If you’d like more details then please leave your email address on the form below and we’ll notify you as it’s ready.
Thanks to everyone for helping us make takeaway better.
The Housebites Team
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Nokia launches Music with Mix Radio app on Asha, starting in Russia
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Asus' New 31.5-inch 4K Beast Makes 30-Inch Monitors Look Puny
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ASUS unveils 31.5-inch 4K monitor ahead of Computex
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Scientists capture images of molecules forming atomic bonds
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El asteroide 1998 QE2 pasa de visita
A las 20:59 UTC del 31 de mayo de 2013 el asteroide (285263) 1998 QE2 pasará a «tan sólo» 5,8 millones de kilómetros de la Tierra, su aproximación más cercana durante lo que queda de este siglo, tal y como se puede leer en Un asteroide de gran tamaño pasa cerca de la Tierra .
Con un diámetro de 2,7 kilómetros –unos nueve Queen Elizabeth 2– su tamaño es similar al del asteroide que suponemos que acabó con los dinosaurios, aunque en nuestro caso no tenemos nada que temer, ya que su órbita, de 3,77 años, no lo colocará nunca en rumbo de colisión con nuestro planeta.
Eso sí, los científicos de todo el mundo aprovecharán su paso por nuestro vecindario cósmico para averiguar todo lo que puedan sobre él, tanto mediante observaciones con radares como observaciones con telescopios.
Y es que 1998 QE2 tiene dos características que les llaman la atención: una, que es muy oscuro, tanto que absorbe el 94 por ciento de la luz que recibe, lo que apunta a que pueda estar compuesto sobre todo de carbono, quizás con algunos aminoácidos y otras moléculas orgánicas.
La otra es que se acaba de descubrir que tiene una luna, algo que pasa con aproximadamente el 16 por ciento de los asteroides, lo que lo hace aún más interesante.
1998 QE2 y su luna - NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR
Verlo a simple vista es imposible, ya que aún en el punto más próximo de su trayectoria es unas cien veces más tenue de lo que podemos ver, aunque con la guía de David Dickinson y un telescopio puedes intentar cazarlo.
Otra opción es aprovechar las retransmisiones del Virtual Telescope o la de la SLOOH Space Camera. La primera comienza a las 20:00 UTC, la segunda a las 20:30.
Por cierto que el nombre del asteroide no tiene nada que ver con el Queen Elizabeth 2, sino que se corresponde con el año y orden en el que fue descubierto, aunque claro, habiéndole correspondido el QE2 las comparaciones de tamaño con el barco son casi inevitables.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/asteroide-1998-qe2-pasa-de-visita.html
Oppo Ulike 2S coming soon with improved 5MP front camera, larger 5.5-inch 720p display
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Samsung's next Galaxy Tab will have Intel inside, says Reuters
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CNET: Acer will release a $400 Android AIO PC running Intel's Haswell CPU
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Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Captured on Video
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Curiosity rover discovers dangerous levels of radiation during Mars transit
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Clearwire shareholder meeting rescheduled after Dish improves its offer
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Samsung's Galaxy S 4 mini stars in Three UK's new video
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DARPA developing muscle-controlled prosthetic limbs that can feel (video)
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Samsung's 65- and 55-inch 4K TVs launch next month in Korea for less than $8,000
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Top 5 iOS Travel Apps for Your Summer Vacation
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EA plans to scrap Online Pass from existing games, enable access without a code
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IK Multimedia intros AmpliTube 3.0 with timeline editing, ships iRig HD
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Use Your Phone to Open Your Door with the August Smart Lock
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With $200K In New Funding, Photo-Centric Rental App RadPad Comes To Austin
RadPad is one of those startups that come from a founder’s real-world experience — specifically, Jonathan Eppers (a former product manager at eHarmony and MySpace) said that he was trying to find a new apartment in Los Angeles, and he was frustrated to discover that the process is still more complicated and painful that it needs to be.
That was last summer. Fast forward a year and RadPad is getting ready to launch into its Austin, Texas, its fourth market, and it has also raised $200,000 in funding. And while it launched as an iOS app, it just released the web version of its product too.
But before we get to the new stuff, you may be wondering how RadPad actually fixed the issues that Eppers was complaining about. He said that his goal is to make the process as simple as possible on both sides. One of RadPad’s big differentiators is its emphasis on photos. (The site has been described as “a hybrid of Craigslist and Instagram.”) Other sites certainly have photos too, but RadPad really puts them front-and-center when it shows users listings, and it even requires that landlords include three photos to be listed at all. Users search the listings using a few simple dropdown menus, and it’s all location-based, so you can always open the app and see a map of available apartments nearby. And it’s easy to upload those photos from mobile — Eppers said 35 percent of listings are posted directly from smartphones.
The RadPad app has been downloaded 24,000 times, and around 2,500 LA renters open the app every day. College students are one of the big user groups, so it makes sense that RadPad is launching in Austin too (its other markets are Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco).
Here’s another reason for the Austin launch: One of RadPad’s investors is real estate company Post Investment Group, which Eppers said owns thousands of units in Austin. When they first met to discuss the investment, Eppers said he was told, “Jon, you’ve got to look at Austin.” And indeed, he found a growing rental market with a hot tech scene and relatively little competition.
The other investors include angel Tom McInerney, Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz, and Los Angeles accelerator Amplify. The company is looking to raise a larger round now, Eppers said.
As for how RadPad plans to make money, Eppers said the service is currently free for both renters and landlords. Eventually, he wants to start charging for some premium landlord services. For example, they could start delivering push notifications to RadPad users who are near an available apartment.
“We want to use use technology to enhance the experience on both sides,” he said.
You can download the RadPad iOS app here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/POaHr4sIBdE/
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