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Wednesday, 28 August 2013
Nokia announces the 515, an aluminum Series 40 phone for $150
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Shopify's integrated retail platform merges online and in-store sales (video)
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Sony teases flexible VAIO PC origami-style (video)
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Mixamo's Facial Expression Capturing Technology Helps Indie Developers Speed Up Character Animation
Mixamo, a startup that helps game developers animate 3D characters in their games and apps, is launching something pretty neat today.
It’s a service that lets developers animate characters simply by recording their facial expressions through a Webcam. Basically, you can just sit in front of a Webcam, make faces, and your character will make those exact same faces back at you.
The video best explains it below. While they are just targeting this at developers, I could imagine a lot of consumer-facing games or apps that would appeal to kids based on this.
Called Face Plus, the tool cuts out the hassle of having to painstakingly animate each facial expression. And it comes at a time when developers are migrating from simple 2-dimensional games to richer 3-D ones as production costs for hit mobile games continue to rise. To use Face Plus, developers need a Webcam, the Unity editor, plus a subscription to Mixamo’s service, which costs $1,500 per year per developer seat.
“We were using a Webcam like the kind you can find for $20 at Best Buy,” said Stefano Corazza, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “It doesn’t require any calibration.”
The service was built with the help of AMD, the semi-conductor company which is also a strategic investor in Mixamo. They say AMD helped Mixamo with development of the tool through OpenCL, an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
To develop it, they had to train their software with hundreds of images and videos of people from different ethnic backgrounds, ages and genders all with many different facial expressions.
The company has raised about $11 million to date and has clients including Microsoft, EA, Sony, Blizzard and Gameloft.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/4zN4jbKYqFU/
Dual-SIM HTC One Max for China Unicom leaked, may pack a fingerprint reader
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Google+ Hangouts moving to HD video soon, going plugin-free within months
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Google Working on Hangouts for Enterprise
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Nintendo dropping Wii U price by $50 on September 21st, ahead of PS4 and Xbox One launch
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Sony teases flexible VAIO Flip PC origami-style (video)
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Engadget's back to school guide 2013: portable audio
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Nintendo announces 2DS handheld gaming system, $129 on October 12
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Foursquare now available for Windows 8
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Material aims to outdo Flipboard by adapting to your changing interests
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This Flying Car Could Soon Be Yours for $279,000
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App Curates YouTube Videos Based on Your Tastes
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BBC iPlayer for iOS updated with AirPlay streaming for downloads, simpler searching
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Nighttime Urban Parkour Enthusiast? Stay Safe With The Fos
It’s only a matter of time before fashion and tech fully collide. It’s not enough that we now like to buy our clothes on the internet — companies like Google and Nike and Fitbit are determined to make us strap technology onto our faces and arms.
But it stretches beyond even that.
A new phenomenon I’ve noticed lately is the idea of LED-lit clothing, including Adafruit’s build-your-own ties and shoes and ThinkGeek’s Wifi Shirt.
A new Kickstarter project, Fos, is looking for funding to do the same thing with a focus on athletes.
Fos is an LED-illuminated patch of cloth that can be stuck onto other items of clothing, like a jacket or shirt.
Users can program their Fos to display calories burned, how close you are to your goal, etc. Users can even use Fos’ demo application to choose specific graphics or video to display on the 60fps LED patch with 64,000 shades of light. According to the creators, it weighs less than a golf ball.
The idea is not only to look super cool (and trust me, nothing is cooler than electronic clothing), but to stay safe when working out in urban areas. However, founder Anders Nelson admits in his Kickstarter video that it’s not only for the Urban athlete.
The Fos is also for the party animal raver inside all of us. In fact, DJs can even decide to push out custom-tailored graphics to all the Fos bodies in the room to make one giant human light installation. But first, of course, the Fos needs to hit the mainstream.
And before that can happen, Fos needs to reach its $200,000 funding goal on Kickstarter in the next four weeks.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/c3g-xy6svnw/
SMI launches Eye Tracking Glasses 2.0 with smartphone-based recorder (video)
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Nexus 4 Discounts and Other News You Need to Know
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Foursquare for Windows 8 Is a Powerful Discovery Engine
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Dell trots out some new touchscreen monitors, prices start at $250
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Apple reportedly buys mobile data compression startup AlgoTrim
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Flutter: A $20 wireless Arduino with a long reach
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Panasonic refreshes Let's Note lineup, says LX is world's lightest 14-inch notebook
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Microfactory adds milling and etching to its 3D printer (video)
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Urbita, The Pinterest For Cities, Blows Past 10M Unique Visitors In August With Mobile Site Launch
FounderFuel Fall 2012 cohort grad Urbita, a startup based in LA and Buenos Aires, has managed to quietly amass a huge consumer following, having topped 8 million monthly unique visitors in July, and then managing a 25 percent increase over the course of August to more than 10 million monthly unique visitors. The site allows its users to create and curate “boards” for difference cities and towns, making it essentially a more travel-focused and feature-rich version of Pinterest for places.
Urbita isn’t alone in drawing that comparison; Everplaces is similar, and Urbantag is another that could be described as a place-based Pinterest. But Urbita is perhaps the most similar to the online collection website, combining a Yelp-style collection of reviews with each location found on its site. It’s more useful than Yelp for travel planning, however, since Urbita provides a category based browsing experience that’s better suited for advance planning than is Yelp’s model.
What’s perhaps most surprising about Urbita is that until August, it didn’t have any kind of built-for-mobile presence. The site launched its mobile-optimized website in August, with native app versions planned to follow soon, complete with “best of” offerings for each town and city in its roster of over 180,000 curated places around the world.
Urbita also launched a separate sub-site with a focus on video back in June called Travel Videos, which itself has around 3.5 million monthly unique views. The video site is essentially Urbita but with video content only, collecting the best from YouTube in an organized fashion arranged by geography. The curated videos are a natural complement to what Urbita builds on its main site, but make sense housed separately as they’re consumed in a different manner to restaurant and sightseeing venue reviews.
So far, Urbita has raised $650,000 in seed funding, and its traction is among the most impressive in the industry. Its continued growth depends on growing engagement from storytellers willing to dish about their own hometowns to would-be visitors, but if it can manage to continue to encourage that, Urbita stands a good chance of eventually catching the attention of travel industry giants as a ripe acquisition target, or of becoming on of those giants itself, despite its mostly under-the-radar progress to date.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/IISAhDMQCgQ/
Metro: Last Light's nuclear horror creeps to Mac in September, Linux later this year
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Sony's Honami model exposed again, this time at China's FCC equivalent
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Ubimo, A Location-Based Mobile Audience Targeting Startup Founded By Ex-Googlers, Raises $2M Seed Round
Ubimo, a startup that focuses on location-based mobile audience targeting, has raised a $2 million seed round led by Pitango Venture Capital with the participation of serial entrepreneur and angel investor Eyal Gura. Based in Tel Aviv, Ubimo was founded by the team behind Web widget developer LabPixies, which was acquired by Google for $25 million in 2010. Its executives are CEO Ran Ben-Yair, CTO Oded Poncz, Creative Director Udi Graff and COO Gilad Amitai. Ubimo will use its new funding to scale up its product offerings and grow its sales presence in the U.S.
Unlike desktop and Web search, mobile devices lack the benefit of cookies, which makes it very difficult for sites to track and store each user’s activity. This means that advertisers need to determine the right time and place to deliver content without the benefit of browsing histories. Ubimo’s platform helps advertisers by providing location data that enables them to target ads to specific mobile audiences. Instead of relying on geofencing, which sends content to mobile devices based on their current geographic area and is used by many location-based services, Ubimo’s patent-pending TRANSLOCAL targeting technology focuses on helping advertisers figure out the right audience, context and timing for different campaigns.
“With many years of experience on mobile both from the publisher and the advertiser perspective, we identified a gap between the amount of time user spend on mobile and the quality of advertising solutions. We thought that the key factor missing in this field is the understanding of the user context, which is very different in mobile,” Ben-Yair explained in an email. “Unlike web, mobile context is about where you are and what you are doing. We believe that by using these location signals, we can help advertisers to effectively deliver better ads that are more relevant to the current user experience.”
Ubimo’s platform processes signals such as venue information, ongoing events, weather, demographic data and area type (office, residential or commercial). It allows clients to set distances as small as 10 meters. For example, a tennis equipment company can tailor different ads to send to shoppers inside a sporting goods store, fans watching a match or players at a country club.
“There has been a lot of activity recently in the location-tech field and many great startups saw the value in location. I think companies such as PlaceIQ and Placed are good examples. At Ubimo we focus on helping advertisers find the right context for their message (which is not always so intuitive) and doing this using very accurate location signals. Understanding the real context of locations and events enables us to match the most effective campaign in a privacy-friendly way,” said Ben-Yair.
In a statement Rami Beracha, a Managing General Partner at Pitango who will join Ubimo’s board, said: “Mobile is changing the paradigm. Mobile context has changed dramatically over the past few years, calling for new, location-based advertising methods, to keep up with it. Ubimo’s platform pivots around the user’s real-time context and changes the game. Ubimo’s founders have proved they know how to build exceptional products and we are thrilled to welcome them to our portfolio family.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/dJ_7nRGerqo/
5 Steps to Take Before Recycling Your Phone
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PSA: New Nexus 7 launches today in UK and Europe, O2 to sell LTE model starting September 12th
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Google's Nexus 7 Comes to Europe, Australia and Japan
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WSJ: HTC working on China-specific mobile OS
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Wikipad's 7-inch gaming tablet coming to the UK on September 27th for 300 euros
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Logitech's Ultrathin Touch Mouse compliments your Ultrabook for $70
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Hackeando el cerebro: usa su cerebro para mover el cuerpo de otra persona
Esto es bastante extraño y el vÃdeo no es nada espectacular, pero aquà queda: Un investigador controla los movimiento de su colega con la primera interfaz entre cerebros humanos ,
Utilizando un detector de los impulsos eléctricos del cerebro y un estimulador el investigador Rajesh Rao envió [a través de Internet] una señal de su cerebro a Andrea Stocco, situado en el otro extremo del campus [de la Universidad de Washington] haciendo que el dedo de Stocco se moviera pulsando un teclado.
Según los investigadores de momento esta tecnologÃa sólo es capaz de registrar ciertos tipos simples de señales del cerebro y no puede leer los pensamientos de una persona. Y tampoco cede el control del cuerpo de uno al cerebro de otro contra su voluntad, hay que dejarse hacer. Al menos por ahora.
El público se pregunta si no era más fácil mandar un whatsapp.
Más en Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans.
VÃa Slashdot.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/hackeando-cerebro-usa-cerebro-mover-cuerpo-otra-persona.html
EA's Peter Moore clarifies stance on online games, says not every title will require your console to be online
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Remember the YouTube video responses you never clicked on? They're going away
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Mini classic Macintosh created with Raspberry Pi, runs System 6 (video)
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