Monday, 12 August 2013
Microsoft: Xbox One will still function without Kinect sensor
TweetDeck for web and Chrome gets New Tweet panel with image previews, as-you-type suggestions
Sony's rumored QX10 and QX100 'lens cameras' pair with your smartphone or tablet, pictured ahead of release
Engadget's back to school guide 2013: smartphones
YC-Backed Casetext Takes a New Angle on Value Added Legal Research With Wikipedia-Style User Annotations
Why do law firms spend, collectively, billions of dollars on commercial legal research databases, when what they are looking up is law — which is in the public domain? How are these databases able to erect these enormously profitable paywalls? The answer is that they provide more than just the raw text of the law. They provide search tools and additional, value-added content on top of the law itself. The two legal research titans, Lexis and Westlaw, employ lawyers to read cases and other legal materials, categorize them, add commentary, and link them together. These services have legitimate value because they all save lawyers time, and time is money — especially in a profession that largely bills its clients in six-minute increments. That’s why these expensive tools exist, even in the Internet age. As one lawyer put it, after trying to get by on only free legal research tools, he tried Westlaw and was an immediate convert who now happily pays for the service.
Two young lawyers thinks they can disrupt the legal research giants by applying the lessons of Wikipedia and crowdsourcing their own comparable set of annotated law.
Joanna Huey attended Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Law Review, and Jacob Heller attended Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review. They later served together as clerks for Judge Michael Boudin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, and worked at law firms. Both were dissatisfied with the available research tools and their hefty price tags, which put the poor at a competitive disadvantage in the justice system.
Unlike many lawyers, neither Huey nor Heller are afraid of technology, so they decided to do something about it. Huey’s undergraduate degree is in physics, and Heller was a web developer before law school. They applied to Y Combinator, and were accepted. They’re now emerging from the program and ready to launch their company: Casetext.
The key idea behind Casetext is that the annotations that drive Lexis and Westlaw’s bottom lines can be crowdsourced. One obvious parallel is Wikipedia, with its hundred million man-hours of user contributed content, but Huey and Heller also point to Quora for its high quality answers by professionals and experts in various fields.
I asked Casetext’s founders why they thought they would be able to attract users to contribute. There are several aspects to their strategy. First, they focused on making contributing extra easy by concentrating heavily on UX. Users can very easily add tags to a case, or, more valuably, to paragraphs within a case. It’s also easy to link to other resources, including other cases or even outside materials like law review articles, which are the legal equivalent of scientific journal articles. Second, they’re hoping users will see some benefits in contributing content. Like Quora, users sign up with their real names, which incentivizes good behavior and means quality contributions can lead to real world reputational effects. Some early users — who the founders brought onboard by plain old hustling and tapping their networks — include well known law professors and lawyers. For example, Alexander Reinert, a law professor at Cardozo Law School, annotated Iqbal v. Ashcroft , a case he argued at the Supreme Court.
The core of Casetext – access to over a million cases, users’ annotations, and the ability to annotate – is free. So how will Casetext make money? Premium features. They’ve done some thinking and built features I haven’t seen in legal research before, like applying a heat map to show which parts of a case are most cited. (Ravel Law is another legal research startup that’s also innovating in search and display.) Even more basic planned premium features have value because the incumbent giants have simply missed them.
The one thing I could see holding Casetext back is its database, which is currently limited to the US Supreme Court, federal appellate courts, some federal District Court decisions, and Delaware. This is acceptable for some practice areas (such as patent litigation, which is exclusively in federal courts), but the great majority of lawyers practice in state courts, or at least have to deal with state law issues. The founders tell me California and New York are next, which makes sense because they’re the biggest legal markets, and more will follow.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/U1A71Vi5HnU/
SoundCloud embedding comes to Google+, lets you rock out without a pop-up
El 80 por ciento de quienes lean esto verán únicamente los primeros 550 píxeles verticales
Según un análisis sobre más de 25 millones de sesiones de navegación en todo el mundo, se sabe que no hay ninguna parte de una página web que realmente vea el cien por cien de los visitantes; muchos comienzan a desplazarse hacia abajo (scroll) antes de que termine de cargar. La zona más vista son los primeros 550 píxeles verticales, que ve el 80% de la gente; aproximadamente la mitad de las personas llegan hasta los 1.000 píxeles en las portadas o incluso 1.500 píxeles en las páginas de contenido. [Fuente: Chartbeat.]
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/zonas-mas-vistas-paginas-web.html
La Singularidad Tecnológica en un largometraje
Dentro de su humildad, I’s tiene una pinta estupenda: es una película sobre la Singularidad Tecnológica. En el trailer pueden verse algunos detalles buenísimos; la campaña de financiación en KickStarter ya ha alcanzado el objetivo, así que para después del verano puede que esté lista.
Me encanta la pregunta que plantean en Singularity HUB al respecto, y que define un poco la historia: ¿Qué sucederá cinco días antes de que llegue la Singularidad? Porque si alguna vez llegamos a verlo alguna vez habrá habido un «día antes» en el que las cosas eran totalmente diferentes.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/peliculas-tv/i-s-singularidad-tecnologica-pelicula.html
New iPad May Take Design Cues From iPad Mini
Engadget's back to school 2013 sweepstakes: Win one of 15 gadget-filled bags!
LG ships retro TV with rotary dials
Disconnect, The Anti-Ad Tracking Startup, Now Has A Privacy App Specifically For Children (Built By An Ex-NSA Engineer)
Disconnect, the anti-tracking, anti-ad targeting startup launched by ex-Googler Brian Kennish and consumer rights attorney Casey Oppenheim, has more than 1 million people each week using its apps and browser extensions to block how different third-party sites collect information about what you do online and then use it to serve ads. Now it’s taking its campaign to the next generation: today, the company is launching Disconnect Kids, a free iOS app designed specifically for children (and their parents) to help them control how their web and app browsing activity is used, and to educate them about online privacy in the process. It claims that it is the first, iOS app designed to “prevent data about your web-browsing and in-app activity from ever leaving your device.”
And, given the ongoing revelations about Prism, the National Security Administration and internet privacy, there is a kind of poetic justice in the app, too: the technology powering Disconnect Kids was built by Patrick Jackson, an engineer who previously worked for none other than the NSA and now heads up Disconnect’s mobile efforts (one of the company’s new hires after announcing a $3.5 million raise in June this year).
“We’re able to leverage the iOS platform to prevent invisible tracking services from collecting browsing history, in-app activity, location, and other info from a user’s iPhone or iPad,” he said in a statement. Casey Oppenheim, a co-founder at Disconnect, tells TechCrunch that both Android and desktop web versions of the app are also “in the works.”
The idea behind Disconnect Kids is to tap into the hundreds of mobile tracking companies that currently collect data about the browsing and app activity (usually to serve more targeted ads, but also for other purposes in the apps themselves). While a lot of controls have been put into place for apps aimed specifically at children, there is a whole swathe of apps and sites that are used by children as well as adults, which are not restricted in the same way.
“Disconnect Kids aims to close this loophole by letting you actively block major mobile tracking companies and the network connections they try to make to your family’s devices,” notes co-founder and ex-Googler Brian Kennish in a statement. “Until now, nobody had figured out how to stop personal data from leaving an iOS device.”
Disconnect Kids is not the first effort to make sites less tracking-invasive for younger users. There is the COPPA directive from the FTC that covers how apps and sites have to clearly state what information they use about minor users. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading is also scrutinizing and considering legislation over how freemium apps and games directed at kids are collecting information. There are also proprietary implementations like Zoodle’s Kid Mode, the Y-Combinator-backed Kytephone, KIDO’Z and Play Safe, and every mobile OS now has parental controls built in.
What Disconnect Kids does is take this one step further to cover all apps used on a device, regardless of what other controls may oversee some aspects of browsing behavior. For example, Oppenheim explains, “COPPA allows sites and apps not directed at children (think YouTube) to continue tracking and targeting unless the site has ‘actual knowledge’ that a child is using the device, which sites and apps often don’t know. So our app is actually aimed at empowering families to pro-actively block tracking and targeting of children even on COPPA compliant sites and apps.”
For now, all of Disconnect’s products remain free and “pay what you want,” a model afforded by the startup’s B Corporation, semi-charitable status, also picked up earlier this year. In future, this could evolve to a more concrete business model, Oppenheim tells us. “It’s possible we’ll make future features premium,” he says.
That stands in contrast to Reputation.com, another site that is banking its business on the increasing consumer demand (and awareness) of data tracking. Its solution is to put all of that information into a “data vault” that users can then better control — which could potentially mean handing over to third parties anyway, but at least getting better compensated for it, and doing so with full awareness of what’s happening. The company has raised over $68 million, and acquired a number of smaller properties, to make a business of this effort. “They raised a huge amount of money for that idea and I’m interested to see how it works out,” notes Oppenheim.
The Disconnect Kids app is designed with simplicity in mind — so in that regard, and considering that many adult consumers don’t think about or know much about how advertising tracking and targeting works, this could be useful for more than just children.
You can see the app in action in the video below:
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/gxnTQqdCnG8/
8 Energy-Saving Solutions for the Home
eBay UK teams up with Dressipi for personalized fashion searches
Fidelity Market Monitor app brings stock alerts, news and fanciful financials to Google Glass
Apple Applies for 'Audio Hyperlinking' Patent
Loverly Launches New Features To Help Brides Obsess Over Their Big Day
Loverly, the Pinterest-style wedding search engine for brides, has been busy this year. After launching a mobile app which has to date seen over 65,000 downloads, the company is now adding even more functionality to the site with the addition of a trending tab.
This lets users see exactly what’s popular on the site in real time, giving brides and grooms yet another way to discover their bridesmaids dresses, cake, or wedding location.
For those of you who haven’t discovered Loverly yet, think of it as a Pinterest for weddings. The site uses professional imagery from wedding bloggers, vendors and photographers and lets brides search by category, color, or just perform a basic search.
Brides can bundle items together based on category, like bouquets for example, and “love” various items as well.
Users can even purchase select products directly from the vendor within the site thanks to some solid brand partnerships in the wedding space.
Loverly recently launched a recommendations tab, which pulled in information from your bundles and likes to give you the best possible items based on your style. On the other side of the equation, the company also offered vendors their own brand pages with “My Portfolios.”
Now, taking discovery a step further and pulling from our habit of internet stalking, Loverly now lets you search through other users’ bundles for inspiration.
Loverly has come a long way since it originally landed a $500k seed round in early 2012. The company now has a robust wedding search engine and companion mobile app, as well as a strong following of brides and wedding planners.
To send you off:
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/cHh9aqn6h_I/
Acer Liquid E2 review: a budget phone with all the usual tradeoffs
Skype update brings HD video calls to fourth-generation iPads
Insert Coin: Choose Your Own Adventure launches interactive cartoon app on Kickstarter
BlackBerry confirms it's looking for 'strategic alternatives' such as sale or going private
Californians can now rent original arcade games like Streetfighter 2, Ms. Pac Man
7 Free Apps to Create Custom iPhone Wallpaper
3DS owners get tired of searching for StreetPasses, build their own Nintendo Zone relays
Quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger gets Google Doodle, is definitely dead
13 Best Weather Apps to Take Your Day by Storm
Refurbished 3DS XL handhelds available from Nintendo starting at $169
LG Korea launches G2 with ill-advised marketing stunt, injures 20 (video)
El Tetris de los contenedores
Un time-lapse de un buque de transporte de contenedores, el MS Renata, en su día a día en el puerto de Rotterdam.
Hipnotizante cual partida de Tetris.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/mundoreal/tetris-contenedores.html
Experimento: cómo fabricar nitrógeno sólido y ver sus curiosas propiedades
Aquí puede verse cómo crear nitrógeno sólido a partir de nitrógeno líquido. La cuestión es ¿cómo enfrías algo qua ya está tan sumamente frío?
El truco es usar una curiosa propiedad de estos elementos: a medida que se hace disminuir la presión sobre un líquido llega un punto en el que se evapora. En el vídeo puede verse una primera demostración con agua, a la que le sucede lo mismo si la presión es lo suficientemente baja. Curiosamente esto hace que el agua líquida restante se enfríe – una curiosa paradoja consistente en algo así como enfriar agua evaporándola.
Aquí se hace algo parecido empezando con nitrógeno líquido, que al bajar la presión comienza a evaporarse a unos -210 °C.
Los efectos a partir de 03:20 son especialmente divertidos. Aunque el «humo» resultante se parece al que se utiliza en espectáculos, discotecas y túneles del viento en realidad las máquinas de humo y niebla emplean glicerina que resulta más simple para trabajar con ella.
Recordatorio: el 78 por ciento de lo que respiras es nitrógeno, tan solo el 21 por ciento es oxígeno.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/fabricar-nitrogeno-solido.html