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Friday, 9 August 2013
OK Glass, pew pew pew: developer creates alien shooter for Google Glass
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Betaworks Updates Instapaper's Web Reader, Browser Extensions And Mobile Updates To Come
Since Betaworks acquired read later service Instapaper from its creator Marco Arment, the startup studio has been pretty quiet. But the first major update is now right around the corner. The web reader was updated and a beta version is available. According to the blog post, the iOS and Android versions will receive some love as well, and many long standing feature requests will eventually come to the service.
Users will soon be able to sort and filter unread items in the mobile apps. Like competitor Pocket, Instapaper will have browser extensions to supplement the traditional bookmarklet on the desktop. RSS feeds will make a comeback as there used to be a way to subscribe to an RSS feed in Instapaper, but it was killed due to server charge and Arment’s design decision. Finally, Betaworks mentions new social integrations.
For those last two features, Betaworks may integrate Instapaper with its other services, such as Digg. Maybe the RSS feature will be a way to import your feeds from Digg Reader. Maybe the new social integrations will be Digg buttons.
Yet, Betaworks has been very careful with Instapaper. One of the reasons the company likes Instapaper is because the service is already profitable. There is no free version of Instapaper on iOS or Android — the app costs $3 on the App Store and Google Play. Moreover, there is an optional subscription fee of $1 a month to unlock a better search feature.
That’s why Betaworks doesn’t want to alienate Instapaper’s existing users. The new development team is always asking for feedback on Twitter and on the blog. Similarly, the new web reader currently coexists with the existing Instapaper.com website.
In today’s blog post, the Instapaper team mentions Arment’s ideas and to-dos for improving Instapaper. While it’s unclear whether he is still regularly giving advice for the product roadmap, Betaworks is taking into account the feedback he gave during the acquisition.
The web reader isn’t the most used component of the service but was clearly neglected until now. This first update is a good sign for the overall product direction and gives us hope for future iOS and Android app updates.
Love this. blog.instapaper.com/post/578175430…—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 09, 2013
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ITC bans imports of some Samsung devices pending presidential review
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OUYA's Free The Games Fund now live, offers $1 million toward crowdfunded titles
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Editor's Letter: Will LG get lucky with the G2?
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Judge denies Apple's request to suspend e-book antitrust ruling
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Google open sources two Web Lab experiments ahead of shutdown this Sunday (video)
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Ang Lee set to helm 3D boxing film, re-create classic fights from the '60s and '70s
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How Instagram Is Enhancing Summer's Biggest Music Festivals
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Tribesports Kickstarts A New Business Model By Raising £30K In 39.5 Hours For Its Community-Powered Sportswear
The premise of interest-based or vertical social networking is a no-brainer: offer a destination and feature-set to connect people around a specific interest or activity, so that they can converse online, and possibly offline, too. However, monetizing social networking isn’t quite so simple, with many sites relying largely on a mixture advertising and affiliate e-commerce, which in return requires scale.
In many ways, London-based Tribesports — a social network for people doing rather than watching various sports — follows along such lines. It’s amassed around 200,000 highly engaged users since it was founded in 2010, many of those drawn from the U.S., and offers all the requisite social networking features, along with specific sports-related features, such as the ability to set ‘challenges’ for other users, as well as track workouts, share training routines and log other sports-performance data. Revenue comes from selling advertising and an accompanying ‘social commerce’ online store that encourages users to log the equipment they own or are intending to buy, with the startup taking an affiliate cut if they do.
Earlier this week, however, Tribesports rebooted its business model with the headline-grabbing ambition to challenge the $250 billion global sportswear industry with what it’s calling the “world’s first community-powered sports brand”. The idea is to leverage the site’s existing community to become co-producers and co-marketers, helping to shape and evangelise the pending Tribesports sportswear brand — a brand the startup says will stand for high quality at up to 40% lower prices than the leading brands, precisely because it will shun large marketing budgets and celebrity endorsements, instead relying on the Tribesports community, and be sold directly online.
To do so, the company took to Kickstarter on Wednesday with a goal to raise £30,000 to finance its first run of product — a target that it’s already reached less than 40 hours in. That’s not bad going, and provides exactly the sort of early-stage validation that was hard to come by before crowd-funding. It’s also worth noting that Tribesports, having raised over $3 million in investment, probably doesn’t need the cash, but the use of Kickstarter fits perfectly with the “community-powered model” that it’s attempting to pull off.
Lofty goals aside, after meeting with two of Tribesports’ co-founders yesterday — Jenna Anians and Andrew Andrew McDonough — I came away far less skeptical and with a much better understanding of how the team plans to execute what I promised I wouldn’t call a pivot. And while it certainly isn’t a pivot per se, the move to produce and sell products of its own certainly flips the existing Tribesports revenue model on its head: rather than punting third-party sportswear and equipment to its existing social networking community, the company is in effect asking that community to help sell Tribesports’ own sportswear brand outside of the site. In other words, long term, this isn’t about converting a percentage of the site’s 200,000 users into customers, it’s about involving those 200,000 users in every stage of the Tribesports sportswear process to help it become a global sportswear player.
A big part of that brand building process isn’t just involving the community in making product decisions, but is also based on being a lot more transparent than other industry players, from the manufacturing process, sharing pre-production designs, and showing where each dollar goes in relation to the final retail price (see diagram below).
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Samsung Wallet hits Google Play for select Galaxy devices
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Tráiler de la adaptación al cómic de The Star Wars
La primera versión de Star Wars que escribió George Lucas se llamaba The Star Wars y ni la historia ni los personajes que hoy conocemos eran exactamente iguales, incluido el general Skywalker.
Dark Horse va a publicar a partir del 4 de septiembre de 2013 una adaptación de aquel primer borrador en una serie de ocho cómics que saldrán en una edición limitada, aunque también se pueden adquirir en formato electrónico.
Lo de arriba es el tráiler, y en la web de Dark Horse se puede echar un ojo a un previo de cuatro páginas.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/comics/trailer-adaptacion-comic-the-star-wars.html
Users report new Nexus 7 suffering from GPS issues
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ASUS roadmap reveals bold smartphone ambitions with 5-inch 'MeMOFone'
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ASUS pulls out of Windows RT due to financial losses and 'industry sentiment'
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Tame Wants To Help Hacks, Flacks, And Other Social Media Types Tame The Noise On Twitter
Twitter has become a boon to journalists wanting to break news. It’s also great for surfacing content relevant to niche topics or specific industries if you follow the right users. However, the realtime and unfiltered nature of those constant updates means that if you follow too many sources it soon becomes impossible for relevant information not to get lost in the noise. In fact, I’d argue that Twitter doesn’t really scale from a user point of view, once you follow more than a few hundred people.
Setting out to solve this problem is Berlin-based startup Tame. Described as a “context search engine” for Twitter, the mobile and tablet-friendly web app analyses content from your Twitter followers or based on a specific search to algorithmically surface the top hashtags, the Twitter users most mentioned, and the top links shared over the past 24 hours. The idea is to give you an at-a-glance overview of content populated on Twitter via your own Twitter feed or topics that you explicitly wish to delve into, without having to do much upfront work.
The company says the service is targeting journalists, public relations consultants, marketers and politicians — two of Tame’s three co-founders have a background in journalism — and follows a successful fundraising campaign earlier this year via the German crowd-investing platform Companisto that saw the startup raise €250,000. In addition, Tame received €94.000 from the German Ministry of Economics and Technology and the EU in 2012.
At peak times, more than 300,000 tweets are sent out per minute, apparently, hence it’s easy to see how important content can be missed. It’s this information overload, says co-founder and CEO Frederik Fischer, that Tame is attempting to “tame” (get it?). “Nearly every user follows more people than they can manage… Professionals working with social media need to identify relevant topics, users and content quickly”.
In practice, Tame appears to work quite well out the gate. The UI offers a simple three column view consisting of Links, Topics, and People. These are either based on your Twitter timeline — the users you follow — or specific searches that you enter. A slider lets you adjust the time span from 1-24 hours. Clicking on a link, topic or person opens up a panel displaying the originating tweet (or tweets)
One thing they need to fix, however, is that the title — or headline — of each link is truncated, sort of defeating the point of a service that’s supposed to provide a quick overview.
In addition, Tame has a few other tricks, such as the ability to compose a tweet, add a hashtag and have the system auto-suggest other related hashtags.
Monetization-wise, for consumers Tame is a typical freemium play, with a monthly subscription providing premium features such as infinite global searches, a tweet editor, and multiple account management. Pricing starts at €5 per month. Meanwhile, I’m told that a further revenue stream will come from providing B2B customers with company accounts, “exclusive” product workshops and support.
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Researchers' robotic face expresses the needs of yellow slime mold (video)
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Details of Civilization-based MMORPG emerge, but you might not get to play it
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Researchers exploring twisted magnetic fields for miniature hard drives
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Las cuatro estaciones vistas desde el espacio en un vÃdeo
Hemos comentado unas cuantas veces que las estaciones en nuestro planeta tienen bastante menos que ver con la distancia que separa a la Tierra del Sol, que cambia en unos 5 millones de kilómetros entre el punto en el que están más cerca (perihelio) y en el que están más lejos (afelio), que con la inclinación de la Tierra respecto al Sol en cada momento.
De hecho, cuando en el hemisferio norte es verano es cuando la Tierra está más lejos del Sol pero lo que sucede es que el Sol cae entonces más a plomo sobre nosotros, haciendo que las temperaturas suban más.
En este vÃdeo, creado por SayJabberwocky a partir de imágenes obtenidas por el satélite ruso Elektro-L 1 entre mayo de 2013 y mayo de 2013 se aprecia perfectamente este efecto, ya que el Elektro-L 1 ocupa una órbita geoestacionaria, por lo que no se mueve entre toma y toma.
(VÃa Universe Today, en un anotación con un montón de vÃdeos que merece la pena ver).
- La Tierra al completo (o en realidad media tierra) desde el satélite Elektro-L, La Tierra a 121 megapÃxeles, vista desde el espacio, y Mirando a la Tierra desde el espacio, para variar un poco, más imágenes obtenidas gracias al Elektro-L 1.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/las-cuatro-estaciones-vistas-desde-el-espacio-en-un-video.html
Wuaki.tv video service gets Android, iPad app support in UK
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Google Wallet dropping NFC loyalty points and gift cards
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Dev's CyanogenMod tweak sends content from most apps to Chromecast (video)
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Evolución de la eficiencia de las células fotovoltaicas
Récords de eficiencia de las células fotovoltaicas - clic para ver en grande [jpeg 4.056×2.424 pÃxeles]
A todos los efectos la energÃa del Sol es inagotable, y nuestro único problema al respecto es ser capaces de aprovecharla.
El National Center for Photovoltaics (Centro Nacional para {EnergÃa} Fotovoltaica), que es parte del National Renewable Energy Lab (Laboratorio Nacional de EnergÃas Renovables) de los Estados Unidos lleva recogiendo desde mediados de los años 70, cuando por fin las células fotovoltaicas alcanzaron un precio que las empezó a hacer económicamente viables, datos acerca de su eficiencia, datos que se pueden ver en un gráfico.
Lo que hay arriba es la esquina superior derecha –el gráfico original es muy grande– es su edición más reciente, en la que se puede ver que algunas de las tecnologÃas que se están experimentando están acercándose ya al 50 por ciento de efectividad.
Y es una cifra que no está nada mal teniendo en cuenta que el gráfico parte prácticamente de cero.
(Desenchufados vÃa @txemacg)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/evolucion-eficiencia-celulas-fotovoltaicas.html
inWatch One smartwatch has GSM connectivity and a heavily skinned version of Android
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Startups From New Zealand Accelerator Lightning Lab's First Intake Close $2M Total In Angel Funding
Wellington-based accelerator program Lightning Lab, which launched in February, announced today that four of the nine startups in its inaugural class have raised a total of $2 million in angel funding. The startup teams from New Zealand and Australia pitched 150 investors during Lightning Lab’s first Demo Day on May 15. The four companies that have closed investment since then are:
LearnKo, an on-demand language tutoring platform that matches students with native English speakers. Co-founder David Cameron is currently focused on developing the startup’s sales pipe and finding opportunities in China, where LearnKo has a full-time staff.
Wipster, a Wellington-based video-sharing platform that allows filmmakers to collaborate and solicit feedback on works-in-progress. The startup is currently adding features that allow users to upload reference images, videos and sound bites, further simplifying the editing process.
Expander, which helps ensure product authenticity with verification technology that protects against counterfeiting. The startup’s tech also allows consumers to track items to their source, an especially valuable tool for food companies that want to reassure buyers in export markets of their products’ safety.
Publons, a platform for open-access, crowdsourced peer reviews of academic papers. Co-founder Andrew Preston says the startup’s current goal is to build its platform so it can continue to assist peer reviewers, with a focus on helping editors at traditional academic journals.
“Traditionally many people keep hands off this early stage due to too much risk. Lightning Lab has really pulled together investors, mentors, and entrepreneurs to get involved up front,” said program director Dan Khan. “We have had over 1000 mentor sessions from over 100 local, national, and international mentors this program, and the interest for 2014 is already strong.”
Lightning Lab launched earlier this year with the goal of supporting entrepreneurs within New Zealand’s startup ecosystem. The program, which funds about 10 companies each year, is a member of the Global Accelerator Network, which was founded by TechStars.
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KeyMe iOS app photographs your keys and stores them in the cloud
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Reuters: BlackBerry leadership is open to the idea of going private
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Silent Circle follows Lavabit's example, shuts down its secure email service
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Smart Watch Turns Your Wrist Into a Phone
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Textbooks now available through Google Play Books in US, iOS app updated to match
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