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Monday, 26 August 2013
Verizon Max plan goes live to entice unlimited data users to join Edge
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Intel's 3D camera technology detects emotions and eyes, gives Kinect some competition
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Moto X for Verizon officially available online August 29th, at stores in the coming weeks
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Facebook adds shared photo albums for collaborative memory making
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Sony Honami smartphone gets an official teaser, a few unofficial photos
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Chromecast update breaks local media streaming in third-party apps
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How to Make Your App More Engaging
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Nokia Windows RT tablet may resemble a Lumia, carry an iPad-like price
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IRL: Sony's NEX-5N interchangeable lens camera and Mailplane 3
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LG teases upcoming G Pad 8.3 tablet in YouTube video
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1 in 5 Americans Still Lacks Broadband Access
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Feedly Pro now available to everyone, offers a 'more powerful' reader for a fee
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Engadget's back to school guide 2013: accessories
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Sketch it out: hands-on with Wacom's Intuos Creative Stylus and retooled Bamboo Paper app
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New Xbox 360 update bids farewell to points, welcomes local currency
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BlackBerry Q10 coming to Sprint on August 30th for $199.99
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96% of Top-Grossing Google Play Apps Are Free
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OLPC XO Tablet review
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The Beginner's Guide to the Cloud
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9 Crucial Tips and Tricks for Skype
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San Diego's Vibrant Startup Community Shows Up For A Night Of Stellar Pitches
The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off in San Diego was a smashing success, with over 1,000 people in attendance, a few dozen sponsors and around 20 companies competing for the top prize.
But alas, the winner was Pharmly who walks away with a spot in the TC Disrupt Startup Alley. But Pharmly wasn’t the only one going home with a prize that night.
Out of the 22 companies that competed, three took home awards for excellent pitching skills.
The pharmaceutical marketplace liaison Pharmly took home first place prize, while Price Patrol got second place and Lecture Bin walked away with the audience choice award.
Price Patrol is an app that lets you mark down the products you want, how much you’re willing to pay, and how far you’re willing to travel and then automatically pings you when your criteria is met.
Meanwhile, Lecture Bin is a service that allows universities to record and stream lectures to the internet for free, while employers are charged to run highly targeted job postings alongside those lectures.
The San Diego startup scene is a growing one, with companies branching out of the bio-tech world and into brand new arenas, like social and peer-to-peer markets. We learned a lot from them, most notably that a healthy work/life balance can actually boost productivity and make for a much happier company culture.
The San Diego Meetup + Pitch-Off couldn’t have gone better, and we can’t wait to see these companies show their stuff at Disrupt SF in September.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/reWXitC1Xws/
New Leaked Photos Show the iPhone 5S in Graphite
via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/5yyqSNy-aoc/
Curious Brings Its “Learn Anything” Marketplace And Video Library To The iPad
Thanks to the steady march of technology into the world of education, it’s a great time to be a lifelong learner. Today, there are a growing number of platforms that allow us to search and discover (quality) learning content, across a wide variety of topics. Plus, thanks to the advance of technology that enables the speedy production and distribution of video at scale, the traditional barriers to learning are being torn down — learning is visual and it can happen anywhere. Sites like TED, Khan Academy, Skillshare, CreativeLive, Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy, Lynda.com are all great examples — and the list goes on.
But something is still missing. Perusing the Web, one quickly finds that th learning platforms lean toward more academic subjects and mastery — online classes and courses — but what about more practical learning content and instruction? Sure, YouTube is rife with “how-to” videos, but separating the signal from the noise can take a lot of time.
It’s this problem (or opportunity) that led Justin Kitch to launch Curious back in May. Having built and sold early website creation platform Homestead to Intuit, Kitch saw an opportunity to capitalize on the rise of video-based education and offer curious minds, hobbyists and lifelong learners a place to peruse and find how-to content on any subject.
Like a combination of Skillshare and Udemy, Curious essentially aims to be a marketplace of how-to videos, allowing those experts and those who want to teach with those eager to learn from them. However, the key, Kitch tells us, is to do so in a way that’s more targeted, navigable and interactive than YouTube. And, what’s more, to differentiate from the Skillshares and Courseras of the world by serving those practical, how-to lessons in a short, bite-sized format that makes it easier to engage with and consume — or so the thinking goes.
The content on Curious covers a wide swath of topics, from how to grow organic asparagus and brew beer to the best way to flirt in a foreign language and perfect one’s salsa dancing technique, ranging from five to fifteen minutes in duration. Since launching in May, Kitch says that Curious has posted over 2,000 lessons on 100 different topics, which have together have collected over 400K views.
Going forward, the goal, he says, is to continue to expand the scope of the platform horizontally and vertically — to both increase the range of subjects covered, while increasing the depth of popular subject areas by adding content that cover sub-topics and offers alternative methodologies.
Last week, however, with its foundation on the Web established, Curious took its first step into mobile with the launch of an iPad, allowing users to access its video library and learning platform while on the go. The app allows users to sync the lessons they watch on the Web with the app, pausing a video started at work to pick up and watch on the train home, for example. The key, really, is the very mobility that access to its video library on the iPad allows — in other words, if users are watching a how-to cooking video, now they can bring the lesson into the kitchen.
Furthermore, rather than rely on YouTube to beef up its catalog of lessons, Curious has built its own proprietary video platform that gives the startup a little defensibility in the ever-increasing world of video-based education. In practice, this sets the foundation for the other ways the platform wants to differentiate itself from YouTube and other educational sites, meaning that users can not only watch videos and leave comments, but film videos of themselves performing whatever task or lesson it may be and upload them to the site so that the teacher can give feedback on their technique.
Users can also ask teachers targeted questions — like what kind of barley to use in their beer or what kind of soil to use in growing their organic tomatoes — and tag their videos at the point in the lesson where they have questions. On the flip side, instructors will eventually be able to offer lessons for free or for a price, with Curious providing the tools that will allow them set the price and collect micropayments.
The platform puts a low ceiling on how much teachers can charge, keeping prices in the single-digits. On the one hand, this may mean less incentive for teachers, but it also keeps the barrier to entry low. Much lower, in fact, than YouTube, which is currently experimenting with paid subscriptions to channels and the like. For now, all of the content on Curious is free, but Kitch says paid lesson functionality is coming soon, along with apps for other platforms and devices — though those are a bit further off.
While the platform has taken big strides in just a few months — and it’s still early in the game — Curious could run into problems as its model forces it to make certain concessions. The key for Curious is to scale quickly, adding as much content as it can, across a wide variety of subjects as quickly as possible. Of course, this tends to happen at the detriment of quality and quality control.
As of now, Curious has a team that works individual instructors to help them optimize their videos (and how they teach) for the platform and only accepts teachers who meet a certain quality standard. But such a high-touch process could be difficult at scale, however, Kitch did tell us that the startup eventually wants to offer tools for teachers that will automate the video creation and uploading process — a la Udemy.
As of now, the overall quality of content across the site is fairly high, but it is true that some of its lessons could easily be found on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing, however, as simply having a dedicated destination for how-to videos is enough of a reward over having to tackle the colossus that is YouTube.
The Web is sorely in need of a platform that’s dedicated to easily-consumable how-to content and lessons, which immediately differentiates it from sites like Lynda.com. If you want to learn how to code, you’ll probably go to Lynda.com, Treehouse or another platform that offers dedicated instruction, video-based or not. Kitch also sees other video-based learning sites as potential collaborators rather than all-out competitors — a perspective that could benefit the company as incumbents continue to grow and new sites continue to emerge.
Going forward, feeling the need to be everything to everyone could become a handicap for the site — though it doesn’t have to be. Over time, Curious can collect data on what types of content people really want to consume, offering a little bit on everything, but really focusing on the most popular (and monetizable) subjects.
In the short term, Curious is helping itself stand out by building out features that allow collaboration and interaction around its content. For example, as of now, the platform enables learners to download attached files, view a list of (and purchase) related materials, reach out to and collaborate with other students and send teachers “Curious Cards” that contain those videos and photos of what they’ve learned.
It’s not quite disrupting higher education, but there’s a huge opportunity in continuing education, especially if it can convince people that it’s the go-to destination for life-long learning. The company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch himself.
To check out Curious for iPad, find it here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Q-6dXs3PfrI/
Latest iPhone 5S Rumors and Other News You Need to Know
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Blue HTC One shell gets snapped in the non-flesh
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Sony's rumored ILC-3000 E-mount camera flaunts anti-NEX form factor in leak
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250 millones de protestas ocurridas en todo el mundo visualizadas en una secuencia animada
John Beieler ha recopilado cuándo y dónde se han producido protestas en todo el mundo en los últimos 34 años, entre 1979 y 2013, y ha colocado esa información sobre un mapa que muestra 250 millones de esas protestas a lo largo del tiempo: Every Protest on the Planet Since 1979 .
Es interesante ver su evolución, especialmente cómo se dispara el número de protestas en todo el mundo primero a partir de finales de los noventa con los movimientos anti globalización y sobre todo a partir del año 2007, con el inicio de la crisis económica actual.
VÃa Ultraculture, vÃa el Santo Patrón, @DougCoupland.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/mundoreal/250-millones-protestas-mundo-visualizadas-secuencia-animada.html
Child-friendly Galaxy Tab 3 Kids listed in Korean brochure
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How to Photoshop People Into Pictures
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Las actualizaciones de la Wikipedia convertidas en música
Listen to Wikipedia emite el sonido de un instrumento instrumental según se modifica la wikipedia: de timbre cuando se añade una entrada o de cuerda cuando se borra. El tono de la nota varÃa según el volumen de la edición. Los colores de cada esfera representan ediciones anónimas (verde), automatizadas (púrpura) o efectuadas por usuarios registrados.
En la configuración se puede elegir que edición de la Wikipedia (por idioma) se quiere convertir en música. Pero sólo la edición en inglés tiene suficiente actividad para que la aplicación resulte en algo parecido a música acústica.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/actualizaciones-wikipedia-convertidas-musica.html
Lavabit alternative MyKolab offering lite version and cloud storage to help you dodge the NSA
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Con esta solución para la adicción a Facebook entenderás mejor al perro de Pávlov
Con el software adecuado, un poco de hardware Arduino y nos electrodos, unos estudiantes han creado Pavlov Poke , un cacharro que suelta descargas eléctricas al usuario cada vez que visita Facebook.
Es una forma un tanto bestiaja de crear un condicionamiento en el usuario pero como dice uno de los chavales, «después de usarlo una temporada comencé a notar que entraba menos en Facebook».
Otra versión más avanzada y menos dolosa –al menos fÃsicamente– consiste en que el sistema activa un script que crea una tarea en el Mechanical Turk de Amazon solicitando a personas extrañas que llamen al número de teléfono del usuario para recriminarle a gritos su actitud.
¡Todo sea por la ciencia!
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/adiccion-facebook-pavlov-poke.html
RPiCluster: un cluster fabricado con decenas de Raspberry Pi baratas
Este «cluster Beowulf» de Raspberry Pi es la solución que Joshua Kiepert encontró al desarrollar su trabajo en la universidad. Teniendo en cuenta que cada ordenador en miniatura cuesta unos 30 o 40 euros, las 33 cajitas que hay dentro de la caja suponen poco más de 1.000 euros.
Lo interesante es poder contar un entorno realista de computación distribuida aunque su potencia no lo sitúe a la altura de los superordenadores de verdad. En este montaje en concreto cada Raspberry Pi está overclockeada a 1 GHz. El sistema puede hacer un poco de todo, desde limitarse a controlar las lucecitas a cálculos más complejos.
Su creador calcula que con 32 nodos su capacidad de cálculo es de más de 10 GFLOPS. Un Xeon quad-core similar optimizado está alrededor de los 40 GFLOPS; un portátil moderno alcanza alrededor de los 5 GFLOPS por esos mismos 1.000 euros.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ordenadores/rpicluster-raspberry-pi.html
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