Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, co-founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor.
Being one of the first cyborgs in the world has meant that I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences. Experiences that lead to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology.
TechCrunch
Users in the U.K. and France will have to wait a bit longer to get their hands on the HTC First. The first smartphone to come preinstalled with Facebook Home has been delayed in those countries while Facebook updates the software to address some negative user feedback.
Computerworld News
A new study has determined for the first time just how quickly frogs and other amphibians are disappearing around the United States, and the news is not good.
FOX News
More signs today the HTC First might also be the last smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed: UK carrier EE confirmed today that the first Facebook Home phone won’t be launching in the UK soon as planned, as Facebook has decided to concentrate its efforts on making improvements to the Home software before looking to add international markets. EE says it will soon be contacting customers who already used its pre-order system to express interest in the First to let them know about the delay, which is indefinite in length.
TechCrunch
Mobile payment platform Square has announced that it is now publicly available in Japan, its first country outside of North America. The iPhone is very popular in Japan, making it a potentially strong crossover market for Square, which first launched on iOS before also becoming available on Android.
TechCrunch
In recent years, Sony’s state of the union report has made for wince-inducing reading, but one year into Kaz Hirai’s “One Sony” strategy we seem to be seeing hints of a turnaround. The company is trumpeting its return to profitability after several loss-making quarters, thanks to boosts in its film and financial services units — not to mention some aggressive asset sales. Unfortunately, Sony still has the weak heart of its consumer electronics business to nurse, but promises that aggressive cost-cutting in its TV department will see it back in the black shortly.
Sony has also announced plans to “significantly expand” its business model around the PlayStation 4 and promises to speed up smartphone development to incorporate the company’s hardware and imaging know-how. With one eye on those dwindling PC market figures, Sony will look to make profitable machines rather than chasing market share. The company has also said that, aside from its successful Mirrorless ILC division, will shift focus on its imaging business from consumer electronics to medical and security. With all of this change, let’s just hope that no-one forgets to buy someone in the PR department a wider camera lens.
Filed under: Sony
Source: Sony
Last week we had lab-grown burgers; this week it’s powdered pizza. NASA’s gotten in on the synthesized food action by awarding a $ 125,000 grant to Anjan Contractor, head of Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to develop a 3D food printer. The first device Contractor plans to build under the six-month grant is based on RepRap’s open-source hardware and will be designed to print a pizza comprised of three layers of nutritional powders mixed with water and oil. As the final frontier gets further and further away, NASA’s need for a nutritious, long-lasting food supply suitable for space travel grows. Since the powders used in Contractor’s design — potentially sourced from insects, grass and algae — have a shelf life of about 30 years, his 3D food printer would be well-suited to the task. If your appetite’s survived the idea of snacks made from pulverized insects, you can watch the grant-winning prototype print some synthesized chocolate after the break.
Via: Business Insider
Jolla’s heavily teased launch day in Finland has already spilled some major news: pricing and specs for the first Sailfish OS handset. The phone seems to be called “The Other Half” — or at least that’s the working title for now — and judging from Jolla’s Facebook page it consists of a colorful plastic case, available in various shades including orange or green, which hooks onto the main chassis containing a 4.5-inch display (of unknown resolution), dual-core processor, microSD expansion with 16GB onboard, a “4G” modem, user replaceable battery and an 8MP rear camera. The chassis recognizes which case is attached and adapts the visual theme of the OS to match, creating “your other half, exactly as you want it to be.”
Perhaps more usefully, the Sailfish operating system will also be Android app compliant out of the box, and we’re currently on the ground in Helsinki trying to discover exactly how developers and users will be able to put that feature to work (while also chasing down the rest of the specs). Meanwhile, there’s an emphatic video message from Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon after the break, seeking the world’s assistance in taking the heritage of MeeGo into a new era.
Update: We now hear that the phone will simply be called the “Jolla.”
Update #2: Jolla has just clarified that 4G means LTE.
[Thanks, Toni]
Gallery: Jolla unites the halves
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: Jolla
Jolla, the Finnish MeeGo startup comprised of ex-Nokians building their own mobile hardware and Sailfish OS, has finally taken the wraps off its first handset, revealing what the hardware will look like on its website. The design is a clean looking, elegant slab, with the most stand-out feature being the coloured shell on the back that wraps around half the sides of the phone. The shell colours, which appear to be user-customisable, can also influence the theme colours of the Sailfish UI. This is a feature Jolla is calling “the Other Half”. “Attach the Other Half and your Jolla becomes alive and unique,” the text notes. “Magically, the software changes to match your selected colour and design. Your Ambience. Your Jolla.” The removable, customisable shells bring to mind Nokia’s Lumia 820 — a device for which Nokia has released the 3D print files so owners of 3D printers can design and print their own custom shell. The Lumia 820 shells, however, do not have any link to the Windows Phone software. Jolla’s handset will cost €399 ($ 513) and is slated to ship at the end of the year. Jolla notes: Expected availability by end of 2013 subject to demand in your local market. Sales will start in European countries with more countries to follow. If you join the Movement and get the pre-order number to buy the phone when available, you’ll pay no more than 399€; including applicable VAT in Europe, but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes. Specs wise, the device has a 4.5″ Estrade display, a dual-core chip, 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, a user-replaceable battery. The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up. Jolla is also encouraging developers to build native Sailfish apps too. The hardware reveal is also the start of Jolla’s pre-order sales campaign, announced last month. Jolla is due to hold an event in Helsinki today — dubbed the Jolla LoveDay — to promote the handset and encourage fans to pre-oder the device, having kept the design tightly under wraps up to now.
TechCrunch
For a while, it looked like ASUS’ Transformer Book would turn out to be vaporware: after debuting to much fanfare a year ago, it encountered numerous delays, and even missed the crucial holiday shopping season. Now it’s finally here, priced at $ 1,499 with a Core i7 processor, a 13.3-inch (1080p) screen and a detachable keyboard dock housing both a spare battery and a 500GB hard drive. The problem is the timing: Intel is about to launch its new Haswell chips, and here’s the Transformer Book, arriving on the scene with a lofty price and a year-old CPU.
It’d be easy enough to tell you just wait for a refresh, which is how we’ve been ending all of our PC reviews in the weeks leading up to this year’s Computex. But it’s still worth investigating whether the Transformer Book (aka the TX300) is a compelling idea. Though we’ve seen many tablet hybrids (the Surface Pro, etc.), they’ve mostly had smaller 11-inch screens. So what happens when you take that form factor and stretch it to accommodate a bigger screen — and a more spacious keyboard? And how does it compare to all those convertible options out there, like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 or the Dell XPS 12? Let’s have a look.
Gallery: ASUS Transformer Book review
Bitcoin is growing up. The virtual currency that caught the public's attention last month when its value zoomed briefly past US$ 200 kicked off its first Silicon Valley conference Friday evening and shows no sign of losing momentum.
Computerworld News
Computer viruses are on the rise worldwide for the first time in years, according to Microsoft security expert Tim Rains.
FOX News
Sebastian Rodriguez waited in line 90 minutes to be the first person at Google I/O to get the Google Chromebook Pixel, the premium laptop given to all conference attendees today. Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the event but he said the Pixel will be fine around the house. We caught up with a few other people today at the Moscone Center who were happily walking out with their new machines. One woman plans to give the Pixel to her six-year-old daughter. A man from the Philippines said he was hoping for an Android. Another attendee said he wants to use the Pixel to develop apps. Nonetheless, these attendees are pretty lucky to get such a sleek machine. Here’s Frederic Lardinois’ review from earlier this year.
TechCrunch
NEC’s just broken some new ground with the Medias X, the world’s first liquid-cooled smartphone that was launched as part of DoCoMo’s summer lineup. Rather than being aimed at the propeller-heads usually associated with that tech, though, NEC and DoCoMo are marketing it towards women in the same patronizing manner as the infamous HTC Rhyme and Fujitsu Arows Kiss F-03D. That aside, cooling for the quad-core Snapdragon 600 CPU works via a liquid-charged tube from the processor to a graphite “radiator” along the system board that disperses heat. We’re not exactly sure why the phone needs it, though, as the rest of the specs aren’t exactly flagship material: Android 4.2, a 4.7-inch 720p display, LTE and a 13.1-megapixel Exmor RS camera. Though NEC claims the phone runs much cooler than a standard model (see the graphic after the break), we haven’t heard too many complaints about hot phones lately — but perhaps we’re hanging with the wrong crowd.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: The Verge
Source: NEC
cylonlover writes “Due to their relative faintness compared to their parent stars, most known exoplanets have been discovered using indirect detection methods – that is, detecting the effects they have rather than observing them directly. There are numerous indirect methods that have proven useful in the detection of exoplanets and now yet another, which relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity (abstract), has joined the list with the discovery of an exoplanet known as Kepler-76b.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finnish MeeGo startup Jolla has been trailing the launch of its first handset ever since it started work on its Sailfish UI back in 2012. Since then, Jolla has shown off its MeeGo-based Sailfish software and released an SDK but kept its hardware plans tightly under wraps. That’s set to change very soon though, judging by a press invite sent out today.
TechCrunch
After her 14-year-old son was shot, a mom goes to WebMD and searches “gunshot wounds” to try to solve the problem, police say. It is seven hours before she takes him to hospital. [Read more]
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AchilleTalon writes “As the US continues to grapple with the idea of letting drones fly through the country’s airspace, our neighbors to the north have reported a new milestone for unmanned aerial technology: the first life saved using a drone. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the province of Saskatchewan announced yesterday that they successfully used the small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone to locate and treat an injured man whose car had flipped over in a remote, wooded area in near-freezing temperatures. Zenon Dragan, president and founder of the Draganfly company that makes the drone, said in a statement: ‘to our knowledge, this is the first time that a life may have been saved with the use of a sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) helicopter.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An impromptu spacewalk triggered by the sight of ammonia flakes drifting past a window of the International Space Station wraps up with a replaced pump and a plan for “additional detective work.” [Read more]
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hypnosec writes “World of Warcarft, the gaming industry’s most popular franchise and one of Blizzard’s cash cows, is bleeding subscribers with 1.3 million defecting from the game in the first quarter of 2013 alone. Blizzard revealed a subscriber decline of over 14%, the total now standing at 8.3 million in their earnings call press release (PDF).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Electronics giant swings profit on sale of assets while demand continues to deteriorate for products in its core electronics business. [Read more]
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The first refresh of the iPad Mini is coming in the third quarter, NPD DisplaySearch said Sunday, in an update. [Read more]
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On Friday, we mentioned that Defense Distributed had created a (near-enough-to) fully 3-D printed pistol. Sparrowvsrevolution now writes that “Last week, the Liberator was fired for the first time at a firing range and successfully shot a .380 caliber bullet using a remote firing setup. Over the weekend, Defense Distributed’s founder, the anarchist and radical libertarian Cody Wilson, was bold enough to try firing it by hand. The results of that test, witnessed by a reporter, indicate that the era of the 3D-printed firearm may be upon us, for better or for worse.” Predictably, certain politicians are — so to speak — up in arms about it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $ 700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes.
TechCrunch
Details of what could be the first smaller Windows 8 tablet leaked Friday when Amazon briefly published a listing for an 8.1-in. Acer Iconia tablet.
Computerworld News
Eternal Darkness, a popular survival horror game released for the GameCube, will have a “spiritual successor” soon if finances are in order. Precursor Games will be developing the game and it plans on generating $ 1.5 million through crowdfunding in order to create Eternal Darkness’s sequel. The game will be called Shadow of the Eternals, and
As we see Google Glass’ first YouTube app join the first Reddit app, first blink-to-photograph app, and an ever-growing ecosystem software expand, it’s become clear: this device is currently embroiled in a Wild West atmosphere. What this means for developers is that if the opportunity is open, an basic app for every purpose can and
An anonymous reader writes “Frédéric Wang, an engineer at the MathJax project, reports that the latest nightly build of Firefox now passes the MathML Acid2 test. Screenshots in his post show a comparison with the latest nightly Chrome Canary, and it’s not pretty. He writes ‘Google developers forked Webkit and decided to remove from Blink all the code (including MathML) on which they don’t plan to work in the short term.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
They’re a source of fascination for some and paranoia for others – robot insects, which are about the size of your standard house fly and capable of flying in mostly the same fashion. This week the first flight of robotic insects in a Harvard lab was detailed in the journal Science, along with an image
This week the folks at Hoptroff have introduced a pocket watch they suggest will tell time better and more accurately than any other watch in existence. This watch has been claimed by the company to be more accurate than any luxury quartz or mechanical watch yet produced, and will be the first to be atomically
HTC put its faith in the One to restore its position in high-end smartphones; now, leaks suggest, the company may be sticking closely to the same pattern with the HTC M4 for the midrange. Expected to be visually near-identical to the HTC One, according to phoneArena‘s sources, the M4 (a codename, of course; the One
CERN may be best known for its hunt for the Higgs Boson, but a team at the organization are also tracking down internet history, working to restore the first ever website to its original URL and server. The project, which will see the European Organisation for Nuclear Research restore World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee’s first page
A hurricane is an impressive display of the power of nature, an unfortunate reality that sometimes causes more than its fair share of damage and grief. While we’re all familiar with what a hurricane on our own planet looks like, hurricanes on other planets have been something of a mystery. That changed this month when
Nervous flyer? If so, it’s probably best you weren’t heading from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on business recently. If you were, you might have found yourself onboard the first commercial 787 Dreamliner flight since the global fleet was grounded due to concerns over battery failures. The flight comes just days after the FAA approved Boeing’s fix, prompting deliveries of the new craft to resume. With Japan already having cleared the 787 for takeoff, we can expect to see a few more of them in our skies soon. We’re more interested in joining the mile-high Android club.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Reuters
Six years after the sale of the first iPhone and 14 years after the first BlackBerry email pager was unveiled, smartphone shipments have outnumbered sales of other types of mobile phones.
Computerworld News
Noted Blackmagic Design shooter John Brawley has released the first footage from the company’s upcoming $ 995 Pocket Cinema Camera that might leave your DSLR green with envy. Though it’s always tough to judge compressed web footage, to our eyes it looks completely untouched by the moire, aliasing and compression artifacts that tends to plague other digital cameras. While not specifying whether he used the compressed RAW setting or not, Brawley said he shot it using a Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 Micro Four Thirds lens with image stabilization turned on, meaning that feature’s likely to be enabled on the camera when it arrives in late July. He also said he was “literally grabbing shots whilst I was shopping,” which bodes well for serious filmmakers with a bit more time to spare. Head past the break to admire the video.
Filed under: Cameras
Via: DVXUser
Source: John Brawley
LG plans to launch a flexible OLED smartphone before the end of the year, the company’s VP of mobile has confirmed, though it’s unclear to what extent the work-in-progress handset will actually flex. The OLED panel in question is the handiwork of LG Display according to VP of LG mobile Yoon Bu-hyun, the WSJ reports, with
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