Friday, 25 October 2013
Ouya will begin shipping with a redesigned controller, but you won't know until you open the box
Obama Wants to Bring High-Speed Internet to 99% of U.S. Students
This week on gdgt: Surface Pro 2, Nintendo 2DS, and software updates
Processing trick turns off-the-shelf earphones into pulse rate monitors
Engadget Podcast 366 - 10.24.13
Japan Display joins the Quad HD phone screen party with two new LCDs
India's biggest smartphone maker has designs on Europe with its 5-inch, full HD smartphone
We have a winner in our Gogo High Above sweepstakes and more tickets to give away
At Coworking Space Runway, Allan Young Says He's Trying To ‘Kill The Idea Of The Garage Startup'
When I've visited San Francisco coworking space Runway, it doesn't quite feel like other shared offices and incubators. Yes, there are still conference rooms, rows of people bent over their laptops, and so on. But there are fewer desks than usual, and true to the name, everything's organized a wide central walkway. There's even an igloo-style private space for calls and meetings, which is a pretty cool place to conduct an interview.
Founder Allan Young took TechCrunch TV on a tour, and he said that less than half of Runway's square footage is devoted to traditional desk space. Everything is laid out in a way that encourages startups to connect and work together, he said:
We don't talk about, ‘Oh, there's a shared receptionist or shared printing.'… Those things aren't conducive, or aren't critical, to building awesome startups and awesome companies, and we just focused on some of the most basic things. You need to be part of a community. We're trying to kill the idea of the garage startup, which is a cherished myth in Silicon Valley, right? Jobs and Wozniak and Hewlett and Packard. But those were different days.
(It's not mentioned in the video, but Young has said that he wants Runway to be a break-even operation, not a big moneymaker. His eventual goal is to cover expenses through corporate partnerships and sponsorships, so he can offer the desk space for free.)
Runway, which is located in the same building as Twitter and Yammer headquarters, opened earlier this year, and Young said the space is completely full. He also that four companies hosted there have already been acquired.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Pukai_gq2fw/
LG Google TV update drops Flash but delivers more Play Store apps
PathSource Wants To Flip The Job Search And Help Students Bridge The Gap Between Class And Career
Part of the reason that higher education exists, besides accumulating habits, diets and debts that will haunt you for years to come, is to prepare you for the “real world” - and for the workforce. Of course, with graduation rates around 60 percent and rampant undermployment among recent grads casting a long shadow over college campuses, it's clear that something is wrong.
The workforce and job market are undergoing significant changes, and there is a pervading sense, whether misguided or not, that college isn't preparing students for this Brave New Working World. With the Obama Administration considering a plan that would (among other things) tie federal assistance for higher ed institutions to graduates' outcomes in the job market, it's clear that many believe that higher education needs to shift to a more open and career-focused model - one that prioritizes career readiness.
While reform is desperately needed, Aaron Michel believes that this shift in priorities comes with a caveat. As the system becomes increasingly focused on the “back-end” of the career search process (helping find you a job), he tells us, it tends to overshadow the “front-end” - or finding the right industry and function for your passion. While finding a job means the ability to put food on the table, the cost of ending up in the wrong job or field can be devastating. Over the long term, it's a net loss.
Of course, navigating the “front-end” of the career search and finding the “right” job isn't easy; it takes time. Plus, to have any real shot at success, students need to start the process early. In 2009, Michel and fellow education entrepreneur Alex Li founded PathSource as a way to help students navigate the overwhelming array of career options and reduce a “front-end” search process that usually takes years to something more manageable.
Combining the good will of the public with technology, Pathsource aims to give students direct access to first-hand information about professional opportunities that are available to them based on their skills, interests and background. To do this, the Burlingame-headquartered startup built its career-readiness solutions on top of a data analytics layer, which uses student demographic data to power its recommendation engine.
Similar to how Amazon combines one's browsing history and interests with purchases made by people who have similar taste profiles to improve the recommendations it makes for say, books, PathSource makes career recommendations for students based on the paths chosen by like-minded people. To enhance its recommendations, the engine incorporates the student's location, gender, ethnicity, career assessment results and a handful of other signals, while taking into account the industries that are most prominent in the student's region and which jobs are actually available.
But to separate PathSource from existing services, once its data layer was in place, the team also wanted to address the other half of the career funnel: What to do once they decide which path they want to pursue. Knowing that the questions of how to get hired and how to hold a job or internship once they choose a direction can be just as frustrating, the founders decided to build out a video library, career database and curricular tools that could help them frame and answer these questions.
The library and database also act as an additional source of data that can be used to feed its career engine and help improve recommendations, like pointing students towards educational tracks, majors and programs that can help them move towards their ideal jobs.
The co-founders tell us that PathSource's video library is now composed of over 1,100 videos, which are made by two Emmy-winning producers and shot in high-definition - so that teachers can project the videos on a large screen in class and students can actually see them. Each video is three minutes long, and contains a short informational interview and is available on the Web so that they can be accessed via desktop, tablet or smartphone.
Altogether, the library is divided into “16 federally-designed career clusters,” the CEO says, as well as 58 “career pathways” or sub-topics, which align with the system of categorization most schools use in their career technical education classes (CTEs).
Career paths are broken down into multiple videos so that students interested in a particular area, like, say teaching, can watch 20-plus videos of teachers talking about their jobs and what they do on a daily basis. The idea is to give students a more accurate picture and understanding of what their experience of being a real, live, human teacher would be like were they to pursue this path.
Students can then add to a crowdsourced rating of each video based on how helpful or informative they found it, which helps PathSource curate the library and helps students identify content that other students have found helpful. The co-founders also built the platform with diversity in mind, the goal being to bring technology and resources to K-12 schools that lack them, rather than gearing product development towards wealthy private schools, as many others do. The library's videos, for example, are available in dozens of languages, the CEO says, and all come with subtitles and transcripts.
The third arm of PathSource's platform is its database, which aims to act as a repository for additional information about each particular job. This includes key statistics about these positions, a written description, educational paths that lead there, related majors, related careers, information about the interviewee and so on.
To help users get started down the right track with its video library and database, PathSource requires students to fill out a 5-minute interest inventory and career assessment, which evaluates their career interests and perceived aptitudes for a range of subjects.
“The assessment really intends to serve as a jumping off point,” Michel explains, “and get students exploring and discovering jobs that they might not have discovered or even knew existed.”
In terms of use cases for its library and database, the CEO tells us that the platform has been designed to be used to inform curriculum, school or district policy. In other words, teachers can use it for reporting, showing the videos in class and then assign one or more assessments to be completed in class or for homework. PathSource can then turn the results of those assessments into a report which they can view or send to the school's admins or to the district.
On the other hand, teachers can also use the videos as “bell ringers,” Michel says, to help students connect what they're learning with real world applications, allowing a biology teacher to show a video of a marine biologist talking about her experience of an oil spill and its effects on tidal zones while students are studying “Human Impacts On The Ocean,” for example.
Lastly, the videos can be used by guidance counselors to help students think through their career options and actually envision what working as a professional in that field would be like. For anyone who's been disappointed by their school-assigned guidance counselor - and there are many - now at least crappy guidance counselors have something to give their students when they ask about a given job and whether it would be right for them. Now these guidance counselors can just refer them to PathSource's video library and get back to focusing on your classmate who got all “A+'s.”
Then, once students discover what they want to do using the video library and career database, PathSource funnels them into the aforementioned second funnel - or figuring out what to do after they identify their ideal career path. The startup's curricular tools provide students with an online, modular curriculum for modern jobs and job skills. According the founders, the modules focus on both modern skills and soft skills, like networking, team-working and entrepreneurship, for example, so that they can learn the basics skills they need to find an internship or a job, and keep it.
The modules are also Common Core-aligned, interactive and include writing assignments, team-based activities and presentations and are designed to be flexible and customizable, so that teachers can assemble the modules into a semester-long curriculum or whatever they want.
Today, the founders believe that they're finally starting to get close to the kind of end-to-end platform that they envisioned when they set out. Over the last three years or so, PathSource has been flying under the radar trying to get the right pieces in place before ramping up sales. And, since its now largely competing with established, big-budged educational IT companies, it's worth taking the time.
As of now, PathSource is working with 10 K-12 customers, which include San Francisco Public Schools and Alameda County, Youngstown City School District in Ohio, Brooklyn Bridge Academy in New York, Henderson County Schools in Kentucky and Chicago Public Schools (which includes the third largest school district in the country), among a few others.
With its tools in place, and the amount of inbound interest among districts beginning to increase, the CEO tells us, PathSource recently took on its first outside capital, closing a $500K-plus round of seed capital. The contributing investors include Ironfire Capital, Chris Yeh and Wasabi Ventures, Yat Sen Foundation, the Innovation Foundation, Pierre Leroy (who also sits on the board of Capital One) and Boston education accelerator LearnLaunch co-founder, Eileen Rudden, among others.
The new capital in tow, PathSource is looking to expand its team and, in particular, to begin building a more robust sales staff to help raise awareness among K-12 districts and administrators. To do that, the startup has stolen Christine Higgins, Houghton-Mifflin's VP of Sales, who will be joining the startup as its first Chief Sales Officer.
Looking ahead, the PathSource co-founders see plenty of opportunity in a career navigation and services market that really hasn't changed much over the last few decades. It's part of what has led to the disappointing engagement, graduation rates, outcomes and debt default rates that have a chokehold on the American educational system.
The government and the system itself has begun to recognize the extent of the problem and has begun to fund a solution (or the former has, at least). According to Michel, the market that PathSource is looking to tap into is upwards of $5 billion, based on annual recurring recurring funds from sources like the Perkins Act and English Language Learning funding, among others.
The founders also believe that, down the road, the company's video library, career database and analytics engine can be applied in B2C verticals and a handful of other industry niches as well. How much carryover value it can have remains to be seen, but for now, the startup is showing signs that it has started to crack the K-12 nut, which, thanks to its long sales cycles, archaic infrastructure and shallow pockets, is a (capital-intensive) market that has played grim reaper to many a plucky startup. But maybe PathSource is starting to find the answer. After all, it's made it this far and without an Edmodo-sized bank account, to boot.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/0Vmh4vkrdq4/
Why have normal smartphone notifications when you can use the smell of bacon? (hands-on)
Sony's PlayStation 4 will require a Day One update, mobile app to be released pre-launch
How to Get Started With Vine Sessions and Time Travel
Moto X price drops to $100 at Moto Maker, Sprint and US Cellular
Apple's New Retina MacBook Pros Are Nearly Impossible to Repair
Nintendo Wii's last holdout is the United States as European shipments end
Bluetooth certification hints LTE Nexus 4 may live alongside the Nexus 5
Mozilla Lightbeam Shows Who's Watching You Online
Hacia los 1.000 planetas extrasolares
La tabla periódica de los planetas extrasolares según los datos del Planetary Habitability Laboratory, que a 22 de octubre de 2013 contaba 1.010 confirmados
Depende de a quién le preguntes, porque por ejemplo la NASA no añade un planeta extrasolar –un planeta de fuera de nuestro sistema solar– a su base de datos hasta que su descubrimiento es publicado en una revista cientÃfica, mientras que en La Enciclopedia de los Planetas Extrasolares lo hacen en cuanto se publica su descubrimiento.
Asà que en PlanetQuest a dÃa de hoy el contador marca 919 exoplanetas confirmados, mientras que en el catálogo de la Enciclopedia van ya por los 1.028.
Pero parece claro que, por muy estrictos que seamos, la cuenta de planetas extrasolares pronto pasará de los mil, y más si tenemos en cuenta que sólo con los datos obtenidos por el telescopio Kepler de la NASA, que recientemente terminó su misión, hay 3.859 candidatos a la espera de ser confirmados con el análisis de los datos existentes o con nuevas observaciones de otros instrumentos.
Y no hay duda de que los datos de CoRoT, el cazador de exoplanetas de la Agencia Espacial Europea, también ya fuera de servicio, ocultan con seguridad más planetas.
La cifra de 1.000 planetas extrasolares, planeta arriba o planeta abajo, no está nada mal, en especial si tenemos en cuenta que sólo hace 21 años que pudimos confirmar la existencia del primero de estos planetas aún cuando sospechábamos que existÃan desde hacÃa siglos.
Todos estos planetas han ido además poniendo un poco patas arriba nuestra concepción acerca de cómo se forman los planetas, ya que de una muestra de nueve luego reducida a ocho ahora tenemos varios miles de los que aprender y con los que refinar nuestros modelos y teorÃas.
Y eso por no hablar de los planetas errantes que hemos descubierto por ahÃ.
Resulta también poco menos que increÃble que hayamos aprendido a poder averiguar el color de sus atmósferas o incluso la distribución de las nubes en la atmósfera de uno de ellos.
Además, según vayamos mejorando las técnicas de procesado de datos y los instrumentos dedicados a encontrar más planetas extrasolares, e incluso sus lunas, iremos aprendiendo con toda seguridad que nuestro universo es aún más sorprendente de lo que pensábamos.
(VÃa BBC News).
- Exoplanet, un catálogo de planetas extrasolares para iOS que te avisa en cuanto se confirma la existencia de uno nuevo.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/hacia-los-1000-planetas-extrasolares.html
iPhone 5s and 5c now on sale in 35 more countries
Making 'the best driver's car in the world': A closer look at McLaren's P1 hypercar
Carphone Warehouse discounts budget tablet to £49, which is probably all it's worth
Firefox plugin reveals how your internet browsing is being monitored
Fab.com Updates Site To Give Better Recommendations As It Pursues Global Growth
Lifestyle focused e-commerce company Fab has unveiled a new design for its website in time for the holiday shopping season. The core of Fab.com's new user interface is its ‘Personalization' feature, which leverages collaborative filtering technology developed by Fab to make product recommendations more relevant to each shopper's interests. Fab will also update its iOS and Android apps within the next few days. The company is offering a $10 credit today at this link.
Fab.com's collaborative filtering tech, which it claims is more powerful than that of any other e-commerce site, evaluates the items each visitor has viewed, faved or shared on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, past purchases, and activity by other shoppers Fab believes have similar tastes. The site's recommendation engine takes advantage of data points accumulated from its members, which numbered 14 million in June.
Fab and other sites that use collaborative filtering (including Pinterest) constantly try to refine their algorithms so they can provide the most accurate recommendations based on the smallest amount of data. This is important to hook users as early as possible, even if they have clicked on only a few items. Fab's collaborative filtering technology uses Apache Mahout's machine learning libraries, which also includes support for user and item based recommendations.
The company says its next step is working on singular value decomposition, or the factorization of a real or complex matrix in linear algebra. This helps Fab because collaborative filtering may become slower as the amount of data it has to evaluate increases. Singular value decomposition, on the other hand, offers more scalability and potentially make more accurate predictions using data sets with less dimensionality.
Fab's redesign (which also includes a new user interface that follows the recent trend for flat design among tech companies and larger product photos) comes as the company focuses on expansion in Asia, part of its goal to join a roster of e-commerce companies that are valued at more than $10 billion: Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and Rakuten.
But Fab's growth strategy has not come without its share of headaches. Earlier this year, Fab made the latest in a series of pivots by moving its business model away from flash sales to focus on its “lifestyle shop,” including home goods, which account for 50 percent of sales. The company said it abandoned its flash sales model because it is difficult to scale globally if Fab wants to be able to sell the same products around the world.
Then July, it was sued for trademark infringement and unfair competition by shoes and apparel site Just Fab. Around the same time, Fab.com laid off about 150 employees from its Berlin offices in what it said was an effort to reduce redundancies.
The lay-offs came just one month after Fab announced the close of $150 million in Series D funding, with plans to raise another $100 million. Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg said the company started down the fundraising route in March to raise enough capital to have several years of runway, at least until 2015. The funds will be used to invest in additional enhancements to its supply chain, logistics, customer service, technology and merchandising.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/wkwcjCrE9C0/
Mobile Payments Startup Flint Raises $6M Series B Led By Digicel Group
Mobile payments startup Flint has been keeping a low profile for much of this year, but it's looking like that quiet period is finally over. The company just recently launched support for Android in a bid to widen its reach, and today the startup has confirmed that it's raised a $6 million Series B round led by Digicel Group with SVG Partners, Storm Ventures, and True Ventures also participating.
Wait, Digicel Group? Who? They're not exactly a known quantity around these parts, but their oeuvre may just offer a glimpse at where the mobile payments startup goes next - it's best known as a wireless service provider with networks peppering the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
“They're kind of renegades in the mobile operator space,” CEO Jason Goldfarb told me. “Which is fine by us, we're kinda the new kid on the block too.”
He isn't kidding. If you haven't been keeping tabs on the Flint odyssey, the startup launched in May 2012 to bring yet another perspective to the booming mobile payments space. In a nutshell, Flint wants to get a new generation of entrepreneurs and business owners processing payments on the fly without having to be tethered to a traditional countertop POS system.And I know what you're thinking: I've heard that before too.
Where Flint aims to set itself apart is no-nonsense approach to getting mobile entrepreneurs up and running. There's no additional hardware needed to get started for one - after a brief setup process merchants can simply scan their customers' credit cards using the Flint app and the iDevice's camera. That data is then encrypted and passed along to the backend payment processor (nothing remains on that device), and a quick signature with a finger seals the deal.
Flint also offers more competitive transaction fees than players like Square, especially when debit cards come into play - debit card swipes essentially cost 1.95% plus $0.20 while those with credit cards pay 2.95% plus an additional $0.20.
Now that the team is suddenly flush with some extra capital, what's next? Goldfarb is definitely content to keep the Flint roadmap closely guarded, though he did note that he planned to flesh out the 16-person team considerably and that Flint is working on backend tools focused on driving repeat business and referrals for small business owners. He wouldn't confirm how many users now tap into the service these days, though he did note that the company has seen “strong engagement” off the 150,000 iOS app installs since launch May 2012 and a 10x surge in transaction volume.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/oTfKI1pLQT8/
Microsoft puts the focus back on gaming with Xbox One 'Invitation' ad
Apples to BlackBerrys: John Sculley reportedly considering bid for failing phone maker
