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Sunday, 12 January 2014
Mophie Team Explains Why It’s Expanding From Power To Storage
Mophie said earlier this week that it’s expanding beyond its popular smartphone battery products with the upcoming launch of the Mophie Space Pack. Shortly after the announcement, I stopped by the Mophie booth at the Consumer Electronics Show to get a demo of the new product.
The company’s PR manager Kevin Malinowski told that from Mophie’s perspective, the company has “almost perfected” its battery products, so the team was looking for “the next pain point,” and it settled on storage.
People often feel like they don’t have enough storage space on their phone, he said, so they have to start deleting things to make room. Malinowski added that solutions like cloud storage may have their place, but they fall short in some respects — for example, you could store files in the cloud and want to access them while on a flight, but then find that you can’t get to them because the plane doesn’t have reliable WiFi (or any WiFi at all).
Mophie’s approach to the problem, he said, wasn’t to create “something brand new,” but instead something that’s “very familiar feeling.”
On the hardware side, that means creating a device looks almost identical to Mophie’s existing products. In fact, while it’s storing your files, it’s also providing battery power to your phone. Charlie Quong, the company’s senior director of product management, laid the Mophie Space Pack down next to the Juice Pack Air and they were virtually identical, aside from a silver button on the back of the Space Pack that’s used for turning it on and off.
On the software side, the interface should feel fairly intuitive to iOS users. You access the files through an app on your phone, which allows you to browse them based on type, i.e., videos, music, documents, and so on. Quong was also able to play a movie file (Night of the Living Dead, if I’m not mistaken) from the Space Pack without any significant lag time.
Mophie has taken advantage of the various APIs that Apple provides, so the Space Pack should work with any file type that’s “natively supported by the iPhone,” Quong said, though its capabilities will be limited if a file is protected by DRM.
As for getting those files onto the Space Pack, the storage unit can be connected to your computer via USB. Or if someone sends a file via email, when you select it, saving the file to Mophie will show up as an option. Quong also showed me several settings for automatically saving your camera roll — there’s even a special camera feature within the app that allows you to take photos that are saved directly into the Space Pack.
Mophie plans to start shipping the Space Pack (which is available for pre-order now) on March 14 — it offers a 16 gigabyte model for $149.95 and a 32 gigabyte model for $179.95. And although the current version only works with the iPhone 5 and 5s, Quong said the company is interested in supporting other devices as well, particularly other iOS devices.
The new product, he said, “actually opens the door up to a whole new base of users.”
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Tell-all explores the Wii U's development problems
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La primera cápsula de carga Cygnus de serie llega a la Estación Espacial Internacional
La G. Gordon Fullerton a punto de ser acoplada a la EEI
Tras una primera misión de prueba en octubre de 2013 la primera cápsula de carga Cygnus en un lanzamiento regular era capturada por el brazo robot de la Estación Espacial Internacional y acoplada al módulo Harmony a las 13:05 UTC del 12 de enero de 2013, tal y como se puede leer en Orbital's Cygnus Spacecraft Successfully Berths With International Space Station .
Con esto los Estados Unidos ya disponen de dos naves de carga propias además del espacio que puedan reservar en las Progress rusas, los ATV europeos, o los HTV japoneses; las dos han sido diseñadas por empresas privadas, aunque con ayuda financiera de la NASA.
Esta ha contratado ocho lanzamientos de cápsulas Cygnus con Orbital Sciences, que hasta 2016 tendrán que llevar 20.000 kilos de carga a la EEI. SpaceX tendrá que levar la misma cantidad de carga en los lanzamientos que tiene contratados de su cápsula Dragon.
En la misión Orbital-1, además de suministros para los tripulantes y la Estación propiamente dicha, hasta un tercio de los 1.261 kilos de carga útil que van a bordo son carga científica, incluyendo 33 cubesats.
Lanzada el pasado día 9, el desacople de esta primera Cygnus, bautizada C. Gordon Fullerton en honor a un astronauta de la NASA fallecido en 2013, se producirá el próximo día 18 de febrero con materiales de desecho a bordo que se destruirán junto con la cápsula en su reentrada en la atmósfera, ya que a diferencia de la Dragon las Cygnus no están diseñadas para ser reutilizables.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/primera-capsula-carga-cygnus-de-serie-llega-estacion-espacial-internacional.html
Tercer vuelo con motor de la nave espacial para tusitstas SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic comienza el año con un nuevo vuelo de prueba de su SpaceShipTwo en el que un encendido de su motor cohete lo llevó a 71.000 pies de altura con una velocidad máxima de Mach 1,4 antes de aterrizar más tarde sin problemas en el espaciopuerto de Mojave.
Los objetivos del vuelo eran probar el sistema de control de actitud que permitirá a los pilotos orientarlo cuando esté en el espacio para que los pasajeros disfruten de las mejores vistas posibles y un nuevo recubrimiento térmico en el fuselaje para protegerlo del calor generado por el motor.
Los detalles están en Virgin Galactic reaches new heights in third supersonic test flight ; también hay fotos y vídeos.
Aunque tanto la altura como la velocidad son nuevos récords para la nave aún le falta mucho para llegar al espacio: 71.000 pies son algo más de 23,5 kilómetros de altura y el límite del espacio está en los 100 kilómetros de la línea de Kármán.
Aún así desde Virgin Galactic insisten en que planean empezar los vuelos tripulados en 2014, algo en lo que quizás pecan de un excesivo optimismo.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/tercer-vuelo-con-motor-nave-espacial-para-tusitstas-spaceshiptwo.html
French Custom Travel Startup Evaneos Raises $6M To Continue Competing With European Tour Operators
Evaneos, a French startup that competes with traditional tour operators by providing a marketplace for tailored travel experiences, has raised $6 million in Series B funding. The round is being led by XAnge Private Equity, with participation from previous investor ISAI.
This brings total funding for the four year old company to around $7 million, having raised a little over $1 million in two previous rounds from various angels and ISAI.
Meanwhile, Paris-headquartered Evaneos says the new capital will be used for European growth, specifically to launch in new countries beyond France, Spain, Italy and Germany where it currently operates. It says the investment will also enable it to triple its workforce in the coming years. In 2012 it grew staff to 20 employees, up from 12 employees the previous year.
Furthermore, additional features are being planned to enable its community of active travelers to exchange and share information, such as opinions or photos, taking the company’s proposition beyond discovery and booking.
Competing with tour operators, Evaneos — founded by Eric La Bonnardière (CEO) and Yvan Wibaux (CTO) — provides an online platform to help travellers design, estimate the cost, and book a personalised trip by connecting them with local agents in each destination country, who then offer advice and assistance. These local agents are tourism professionals, also known as Destination Management Companies, who traditionally provide services to major tour operators. In that sense, it’s a classic online play that serves to remove the intermediary.
“Our competitors are the tour-operators that offer discovery and adventure tours. We revolutionize their business model by cutting out the middle-men,” Evaneos CEO Eric La Bonnardière tells TechCrunch. “We are a marketplace that connects travelers with selected local agencies all around the world. Travelers customize trips directly with local experts who give the best of their countries and save money.”
Local agencies therefore work directly for travellers, offering a fully customized service, specialized expertise and assistance on site (pick-up at the airport, assistance number 24/7, etc.) with a price that Evaneos claims is 20% to 30% cheaper due to the absence of an intermediary.
To that end, sales appear to have been growing at a decent clip, at least doubling year-on-year: €2 million in 2010, €7 million in 2011, and €14 million in 2012.
Evaneos makes money by charging a fee for each transaction on its website. It says the fee is much less than the margin typical of a tour operator and is transparent for customers — it’s paid by local agencies without increasing the end-customer price.
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Levitación magnética a cámara lenta
Si el efecto de la levitación magnética por sí impresora, a cámara lenta… el doble. En este vídeo de la Universidad de Bath se puede observa claramente y con todo detalle cómo actúan los superconductores a muy baja temperatura sobre un pequeño objeto que flota en el aire. Este mismo concepto pero a gran escala es similar al que se utiliza con los trenes bala de alta velocidad.
(Vía Geeks Are Sexy.)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/levitacion-magnetica-camara-lenta.html
Better Than a Segway: Test Driving InMotion SCV R1EX
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CES 2014: Mobile roundup
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Albatross One: flying Row 44's amphibious in-flight WiFi test plane
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Inhabitat's Week in Green: Navia, $100 prosthetic limbs and a controlled nuclear meltdown
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Following Attack On Target, Neiman Marcus Breach Could Be The Tip Of The Iceberg
In the weeks following Thanksgiving, Target became the unlucky victim of a massive attack and data hack, which reportedly affected as many as 110 million people and exposed an array of personal data, including names, addresses and credit card information. With a second retail giant beginning to notify customers that it, too, has been hacked, it seems that we may just be scratching the surface of a larger cyberattack that took place during the holiday season.
This morning, Krebs On Security reported that upscale retailer Neiman Marcus has teamed up with the U.S. Secret Service to investigate its own data breach which led to the theft of credit card and personal information. The company reportedly discovered the cyberattack in December from its credit card processor but has still yet to disclose how many shoppers have been affected by the hack.
However, the company said via its Twitter account that it is beginning to notify customers whose credit card information has been “used fraudulently” since the breach in December. The company said that the forensics team it has been working with had discovered that customer personal information had been compromised, but that it has “begun to contain the intrusion and have taken significant steps to further enhance information security,” it said in a statement about the breach.
Beyond how many of its customers were exposed to the attack, the company has yet to share details on how the breach occurred. Furthermore, as of now, there is no concrete evidence that the two attacks on Neiman Marcus and Target were linked, as, at least according to Krebs, Target has yet to publicly share details on its investigation — which might help other retailers discover whether or not the attacks were perpetrated by the same hackers.
However, Reuters has since reported that Neiman Marcus and Target were not the only victims of the Holiday Hack Attack Of 2013, as I’m calling it. According to Reuters, at least three other “well-known U.S. retailers” were subject to data breaches, which used “similar techniques” to the attack on Target. Not only that, but those investigating the events indicated that similar breaches may also have “occurred earlier last year.”
The report claims that hackers used “malicious software” to infiltrate the retailers’ databases and steal credit card information. Reuters’ sources indicated that one of the Trojan horses used by hackers was a “RAM scraper,” which allows the burglar to snatch encrypted data at a moment of vulnerability. This happens at a point at which it appears in plain text as it moves through the live memory of the customer’s computer, according to Reuters.
Visa apparently warned of a series of attacks using this method that had been attempted on its network earlier last year, but while this kind of “RAM scraping” attack has been around for years, the report said that the attacks on Target and others were much more sophisticated. While cyber security itself has increased dramatically and become more sophisticated over the last few years, it appears there’s still headway to be made.
But what is perhaps more noteworthy: While the attacks reportedly took place during the holiday season, the major retailers affected have delayed any public announcement about the cyberattack. The reason is that many credit card companies and banks are “forbidden” from naming merchants affected by attacks unless “they disclose that information themselves.” Naturally, big brand merchants would rather protect their image and business, rather than publicly announcing a breach.
It’s an understandable move to protect their business and prevent mass hysteria, but it’s also frustrating to customers, banks and many others who may not become aware of their exposure until days, weeks or months after the attacks occur. Many states require companies to contact customers when their information is exposed, and usually its payment processors who bear that responsibility. But that’s not the case everywhere.
As more information on this comes to light, we may learn that the hackers ran a series of test-runs of their new methods involving RAM scraping and other techniques, which could have been a harbinger of things to come. We also may learn that a host of companies have been exposed to these sorts of attacks, even though those companies may resolve try to prevent that information from coming to light.
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Jelly Bean claims 59.1 percent of Android device share as KitKat inches forward
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Smartphone concept incorporates LiFi sensor for receiving light-based data
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CES 2014: Laptops roundup
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Hands-on with Sennheiser's HD6, HD7 and HD8 DJ series headsets
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