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Monday, 2 December 2013
Microsoft warns against 'unusable' Xbox One with dev kit trick
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Apple stepping into social with acquisition of Twitter analytics firm Topsy
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El cometa ISON no lo consiguió
NASA Investigating the Life of Comet ISON: ISON en el coronógrafo LASCO 3 de SOHO; la imagen central es del Solar Dynamics Observatory
Aunque el cometa C/2012 S1 (ISON) pareció retomar fuerzas después de haber pasado por el perihelio de su órbita, el punto de esta más cercano al Sol, las últimas imágenes indican que se está apagando rápidamente.
De hecho en los últimos cuadros de esta imagen compuesta por varias tomas del coronógrafo LASCO 3 del SOHO, el Solar and Heliospheric Observatory de la NASA y la ESA, se puede ver a través de sus restos, en especial el último, de las 20:42 UTC del 30 de noviembre.
Así que aunque puede que con telescopios se pueda seguir observando, todo el mundo da ya por hecho que de ningún modo será ese cometa visible a simple vista que muchos esperábamos poder ver estos días.
Otra vez será.
En cualquier caso, en @ISONUpdates siguen publicándose enlaces e imágenes sobre este cometa.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/cometa-ison-no-lo-consiguio.html
FAA Rules Could Ground Amazon's Drone Plans
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Volvo to conduct large-scale autonomous car tests by 2017
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Microsoft launches Student Advantage program, brings free Office access to 35,000 schools around the world
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AppHero Acquired By Mobile App Publishing Firm Fuse Powered, Will Turn Its Attention To Ads
App discovery startup AppHero has been acquired by fellow Toronto-based company Fuse Powered, the company announced today, in a deal that will see the entire AppHero team including 19-year old founder Jordan Satok join Fuse Powered and develop its products for app publishing, marketing and distribution. AppHero, founded in 2011, was a pure play discovery network that developed sophisticated algorithms for suggesting mobile software to users, but now it's crossing the line into territory it stayed specifically out of when it was operating under that guise: paid placement.
The recommendation platform built by Satok and AppHero was designed to survey what kinds of apps a user already has and then make intelligent predictions about what else they might be inclined to download – taking into account that if you already have an excellent grocery list app, for instance, you're not likely to want to get another one. But Satok says that some months ago they started to realize that more and more users are downloading new apps based on what they find through advertisements, rather than through suggestion networks like the one he and his team had built.
“[Fuse Powered] has a monetization product that they offer to their monetization partners, so what we're looking at doing, and this is something we've been working on the last few months, is we recognized that people are discovering a lot of apps via ads,” Satok explained in an interview. “So Facebook ads, etc. The difficulty is that most mobile app ads today are really impersonal and not at all relevant to what people are really interested in. So we started using the same processes we'd developed to find apps that people would really like, and then show them ads for those apps.”
Satok says it's a much more straightforward business model than any they'd created for AppHero, and also really well-aligned with their goals and technological development. He says that they were always worried about doing the same thing in AppHero itself, for fear of compromising the user experience, but notes that now there's nothing stopping them from using that tech in that way, as it'll be clear to any and all that this is an advertising product.
The terms of the deal aren't being disclosed, but AppHero has raised some $1.8 million in funding from OMERS Ventures and others, and Satok says that all investors and stakeholders are more than happy with the deal.
App discovery is a dangerous market to operate in, as Apple has proven time and time again with its ability to shut out companies who do similar things from the App Store entirely. An exit here for AppHero actually manages to help Satok and the company he built mitigate that risk entirely, while giving both them and new parent Fuse Powered a way to quickly chart a relatively uncomplicated path to monetization. I asked Satok, who started AppHero when he was just 17, if he's feeling entrepreneurial again, but he said he sees the this as the chance to build something more long-term with his new partners at Fuse Powered.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/3we1vX419YM/
Mario and Luigi get a Nintendo 3DS XL bundle in silver, shipping now for $200
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Peripheral Vision 013: Robert Howe on why simplicity is the key to building a better robot hand
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NVIDIA's Shield now streams PC games to your TV in 1080p, has new control mapping capabilities
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With the DOJ's approval, Microsoft-Nokia deal is one step closer to reality
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Misfit Wearables Finally Launches An Android App For Its Activity Tracker, The Shine
Misfit Wearables, the Khosla and Founders Fund-backed startup that builds elegant activity tracking hardware, is patching up a weak spot with the launch of its new Android app today.
It was something that prospective customers balked at when the company launched back in the summer.
Misfit makes the Shine, a quarter-sized activity tracker that's popular among women and costs about $99.95. The team behind the product is an experienced one that built the first medical device that was approved for use with the iPhone - a glucose meter. Those relationships helped them secure key distribution partnerships with all Apple stores worldwide, Best Buy and some Target locations.
It has a paired app that syncs through Bluetooth with a cool animation, and pulls in all of your activity data in day-by-day graphs.
They're bringing the Android version to market today, at least a month earlier than they had promised. They had pledged to have a live Android version “early next year.” Early reviews show that it's crashing on some devices, though Misfit says it has fixes coming in the next version.
Earlier this week, they also released an update to the app that brings some social features - users can see when their friends are passing them in points and get regular alerts. Jawbone has a similar feature where you can compare yourself against friends.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/cNsBDYRgLo0/
German police may use a song recognition app to fight neo-Nazi music
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Seis mundos, seis horizontes, seis superficies
Distant Horizons - Different Surfaces es una composición hecha por Mike Malaska en la que se ven las superficies de cinco mundos que hemos visitado, además del nuestro.
De izquierda a derecha son el asteroide Itokawa, visitado por la sonda Hayabusa, la Luna, en una imagen de la misión Apolo 17, la última en la que dos seres humanos pisaron su superficie, Venus, en una imagen de la sonda Venera 14, Marte por Spirit, Titán visto por la Huygens, y la Tierra, aunque lo que salga es el mar, ya que cubre el 71 por ciento de su superficie.
Los créditos de la imagen son:
Itokawa: ISAS / JAXA / Gordan Ugarkovic
Luna: NASA
Venus: IKI / Don Mitchell / Ted Stryk / Mike Malaska
Marte: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Mike Malaska
Titán: ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona
Tierra: Mike Malaska
(Vía @Tokaidin y @LuisMendoTomas; localicé el origen vía Zemiorka).
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/seis-mundos-seis-horizontes-seis-superficies.html
Yahoo Acquires Natural Language Processing Company Skyphrase To Help Drive Intent Identification
Yahoo has acquired SkyPhrase, a startup that builds natural language processing technology, the company revealed today in a blog post. SkyPhrase will join Yahoo's New York office, according to that company's site, and will work with Yahoo to help continue its goal of “making computers deeply understand people's natural language and intentions.”
Back in October, we covered SkyPhrase, and noted specifically that its NLP tech could be used to advance fantasy sports, which is of course an area where Yahoo excels and has a considerable investment already. The company has created an app that makes it easy for fantasy football players to search through stats and find only those relevant to making picks and monitoring their team, which would be very handy integrated directly into Yahoo's fantasy sports products.
Back when Rip spoke to SkyPhrase founder and CEO Nick Cassimatis in October, the entrepreneur and cognitive scientist said that what he really hoped to accomplish with the company was to make NLP tech useful to as much of the world as possible via tailoring it to specific verticals in a way that's easy for everyday users to access, and to make it easier for third-party partners to build NLP-powered interfaces for their own products, data and services.
Developing…
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Next Windows release reportedly codenamed 'Threshold,' set to further unify Microsoft operating systems
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Dell's UltraSharp 32 and new UltraSharp 24 4K monitors are available now, 28-inch model on the way
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BenQ rejoins the smartphone market with two tepid Android models
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Y Combinator Alum Strikingly Launches Its Super Easy ‘One-Click' Site Builder
Y Combinator alum Strikingly launched earlier this year with the mission of enabling people to build Web sites in just a few minutes. With the launch of its new one-click site builder, the startup has now reduced that time to seconds.
The one-click site builder, which Strikingly bills as “the world's fastest Web site builder,” automatically fills in a mobile-optimized site with information from your Facebook account, including your profile picture, work experience, hometown, current city and contact information. You then have the option of customizing your site with new content, photos or additional slides.
Strikingly's goal is to appeal to customers who want the legitimacy of their own site but have little or no coding and design experience. The startup competes with other site building and hosting services like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace, which also advertise their ease-of-use.
The one-click builder stands out from competing products because it is a site builder that is comfortable to use even on a smartphone (an important selling point for regions such as Southeast Asia, one of Strikingly's target markets and a place where many people access the Internet solely through their mobile devices). One of the ideas behind the product is that once customers enjoy the satisfaction of completing a site in seconds, they will be motivated to move onto Strikingly's other services when they want to create something more elaborate.
“What [Strikingly] has done so far is bring the time spent on site building down to minutes, but even that is still too high a barrier of entry for regular users who have only a couple minutes in which to learn how to use a product and then put something up,” says Chen.
Chen says Strikingly wants to make building a Web site even easier than filling out a social media profile. The one-click builder is “not the end of our simplifying process, but a very important step,” he adds. The startup's users have included Walter Tsui, a blind man who used his iPad and Strikingly's templates to create a site with information about his professional experience and volunteer work with an advocacy organization.
The one-click builder is aimed at individuals and very small businesses. In addition to other site-building platforms, Strikingly's one-click builder also competes for those customers with products like Facebook Pages, LinkedIn profiles and About.me, all easy ways for a person or business to establish a Web presence.
Chen says Strikingly's advantage over social media is that a Web site helps establish credibility.
“Anyone can set up a social media account, but if you have a domain name associated with a Web site that is beautifully designed, you immediately have a statement of legitimacy,” says Chen. “People see your site on your resume, look it up and can see that you spent some time building up a personal brand and storyline.”
Strikingly's one-click builder seek to differentiate from About.me by giving users more control over how content is presented on their sites. About.me sites, which have one page with a background image and links to social media profiles, function like online business cards. Strikingly wants to take a more flexible and creative approach, says Chen. For example, the one-click slide builder automatically includes a slide titled “what I believe in” which users can fill in with a quote.
“People want to tell a story about themselves,” says Chen. “Instead of saying ‘hey, check out my Facebook,' our Web sites say ‘let me walk you through my philosophy.'”
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Steam sets a new record as over 7 million gamers log in at once
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15 Stocking Stuffer Gadgets Under $15
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Engadget's Cyber Monday 2013 roundup
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After 20 Months Google's Campus London Hub Has 22,000 Members, So Where Next?
Opened in April 2012, Campus London, Google's East London ‘startup hub' was something of a new departure for Google. It was taking out a ten year lease of a building which would be populated by co-working spaces, hackers and startups that Google had nothing to do with and Google would not have a stake it in. In part it might be construed to have been a political move. The search giant was under pressure from the UK government to show it was prepared to back its efforts to drive technology entrepreneurialism. But funding one building – no where near as big as it's usually vast offices – is effectively spare change to Google, and 20 months on it's released data assessing whether Campus was a ‘success' or not.
Its second members survey released today shows what appears to be doing a pretty good job of being a centre for tech tech people and entrepreneurs to gather and spin things up. Before I get into this I'm bound to mention a disclosure, which is that I'm a cofounder of TechHub, a co-working space in Campus which has space in the building. That said, it's pretty plain to anyone who visits or works there that Campus has done a lot to act as a locus for startups in London.
Campus says it now has more than 22,000 members (hailing from more than 60 countries) and has hosted more than 1,100 events and 1,000 mentoring sessions in the past 12 months, for more than 70,000 visitors. To be a member has proved pretty easy – it's free to apply and join and you simply have to be ‘in tech'. You can apply online, or just turn up at their front door and ask. Google has also very low rates for its event hosting costs as a venue. It's proved to be a shot in the arm for many struggling hacker meetups and the like.
With all that said, by pre-populating Campus with co-working spaces and accelerators (members include TechHub, Central Working, Seedcamp, and most recently Tech Stars London) it kind've ended up with a ready-made ecosystem, which is then doubled-down on with it's own events, and with events and organisations from the wider ecosystem. The model has clearly worked.
The report's key findings are:
• Job Creation: It is estimated that at least 576 jobs have been created within the Campus community in the past 18 months. Now, that doesn't really sound quite high enough to be honest, and I really doubt that includes the companies that may have spun out a few months ago, got their offices, funding and then staffed up. It also seems paltry, given the 22,000 member base and suggests that it's quite hard to track what is really going on out there.
• Fundraising: This is where there appears to be more ‘success'. Campus ‘members' – anyone from one-person startups to full-blown, staffed companies – have raised at least £34m in the 12 months to October 2013. The median amount raised from formal sources (VC funds, accelerator programmes, government grants and angel investors) is approximately £75,000. Remember, most of these are super early stage companies. Given they include the members of the accelerators Seedcamp and, latterly, Tech Stars London, this would probably account for the bulk of the fundings.
• Gender Equality: Campus says it is is helping to address the gender imbalance in the tech startup industry. The presence of women at Campus continues to grow, now at 22% of residents and 20% of the overall member base – compared to the 9% industry average. Campus is continuing programmes like ‘Campus for Mums' and ‘Women at Campus' to help move the needle.
• Growth: Anyone wandering in (and that includes me, as I am there plenty) would see Campus as a key place to interact with the London tech startup community. Campus says 78% of survey respondents have been working at Campus for less than 6 months. Campus membership has grown almost 300% since January 2013 (8,000 to 22,500). It says the ‘outlook' of startups at Campus remains very positive with 84% reporting a “positive outlook”.
Google's Head of Campus, Eze Vidra said in a statement: "Campus is less than two years old, but, through building a vibrant community, offering mentoring, educational programming, and, crucially, a place for serendipity, we're already seeing rapid growth, job-creation and significant investment. We're proud of the role Campus is playing in building this ecosystem, and eager to continue to grow London as one of the world's most exciting technology centres."
Vidra has also become known as a key proponent of the scene and its wider activities, including organising the charity event TechBikers. He's now added the head of Google for Entrepreneurs Europe to his job title.
Critics of Campus – and there are some – say Campus has let to too many paper-thin ‘app' startups being developed, rather than truly big, disruptive one and that might well be the case. BUt that may be to misconstrue it's role in the super early boot-strapping, seed stage startups it's largely aimed at – the ones that, hopefully, mature and get bigger on their own two feet.
Certainly the model has proved to be high profile for Google, and the fact they are rolling them out to other centres, suggest they like the results so far.
Disclosure (again): As stated above Mike Butcher is co-founder of TechHub, a resident company of Campus London.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/x2epeFDIos0/
2013's Top Winners and Losers in Tech
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Samsung adds red and 'rose gold' colors to its Galaxy Note 3 lineup
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Panasonic adding Haswell and LTE to its Toughbook CF-C2 convertible
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