Forging a strong future never seemed to bright as when President Snow's Panem Addresses came down this past month - but today that all changes. The second Hunger Games Mocking Jay Part 1 trailer appears today, complete with the addition of another player. Watch prepare yourself for battle. In addition to seeing Peeta Mellark at Snow's side, you'll find Johanna … Continue reading
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Hunger Games Mocking Jay trailer 2 brings the heat
Forging a strong future never seemed to bright as when President Snow's Panem Addresses came down this past month - but today that all changes. The second Hunger Games Mocking Jay Part 1 trailer appears today, complete with the addition of another player. Watch prepare yourself for battle. In addition to seeing Peeta Mellark at Snow's side, you'll find Johanna … Continue reading
FAA looking into “several incidents” of drones and fireworks
The greatest fireworks video you've ever seen has drawn the attention of the FAA. The federal agency is now looking into whether or not flying a drone into a fireworks display is within their regulations. As it turns out, the rules governing the practice might hinge on who is running the display — and where. After the video surfaced just … Continue reading
These three iOS apps make life-logging fun and easy
Keeping track of your life by journaling sounds pretty fun, but also seems like a lot of work. Between snapping photos and committing thoughts to a document, you could end up spending as much time life-logging as you do — well, doing. To ease the burden, we've found three apps that might help you along the way. Day One First … Continue reading
Chromecast now mirrors your smartphone’s screen
Google's Chromecast now has the ability to mirror your smartphone or tablet's display instantly. First announced earlier this year at Google I/O 2014, Screen Mirroring will allow you to show whatever you've got on your small device on the screen of your television. Though we've not gotten the opportunity to test it out ourselves quite yet, it would appear that … Continue reading
Aereo to judge: actually, we’re a cable company after all
Aereo isn’t ready to give up, and just revealed its plan B in a court filing: The company wants to get access to broadcast networks through compulsory licenses, arguing that now that the Supreme Court found it to be like a cable system, it wants to be treated as such (hat tip to the Hollywood Reporter.) That’s a stark contrast from Aereo’s previous stance, but it’s also a maneuver unlikely to succeed, as my colleague Jeff John Roberts recently explained.
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Can a market where consumers sell their data actually work?
Two news stories from Wednesday — one about a startup trying to play data broker between user and website and another about a study into what people would charge for their personal data — offer more evidence that there’s an appetite for a market where consumers sell their data to advertisers and website. The idea isn’t new (we wrote about its traction back in 2012) and actually has merit because it puts money in consumers’ pockets and higher-quality data in advertisers’ databases. But monetizing the idea might be easier said than done: Enliken, one of the startups we covered in that 2012 piece, appears to have closed its doors.
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Data journalism could use a jolt of data science, too
Data journalism is supposed to change the way we think about journalism, so it might want to start by changing the way we think about data.
Albert Cairo wrote a thoughtful piece on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog Wednesday explaining how data journalism efforts such as FiveThirtyEight, Vox and the Upshot have over-promised and under-delivered on the quality of their content. I agree with much of what he wrote, but would add one more suggestion: Data journalism needs to embrace data science.
The ideal data scientist, it’s often said, should have foundational skills in statistics/math, processing unstructured data, querying data using SQL and programming. These are requirements born of the web, of course, where data often takes different shapes than just numbers in a table, and so takes some legwork before it can be analyzed using traditional methods. Lacking express or firsthand data about the users or behaviors they wish to analyze, data scientists have become adept at combining disparate data points to builder better user models or infer certain traits.
These methods aren’t always conducive to the often fact-based world of journalism, but there’s a place for them. For example, I don’t need to see seven different articles or blog posts every month breaking down the same jobs-report numbers using different types of charts. There are plenty of data sources that might provide a different angle on the economy, including social media, real estate websites, and large public datasets from cities, countries and government agencies.
A collection of recent data on food prices from Premise Data.
One startup I really admire, Premise Data, decided traditional reports on the global economy were too slow and often lacked a view into what’s happening on the ground in many areas, so it decided to to start generating its own forecasts. A network of citizens in various cities around the world take photos of specific things at specific times (e.g., the milk shelf at a local market) and Premise mines those photos for information on prices, supply and other things.
The point is, there’s a whole web of data out there for journalists willing to find it and do something creative with it. There are large geosocial datasets such as GDELT and Yahoo’s Flickr corpus for images. There are APIs from various sites, social media platforms and even music specialist the Echo Nest (which is now part of Spotify). There are untold numbers of web pages, posts and other text content, as well as hundreds of millions or even billions of photos, all waiting to be scraped and analyzed.
If there’s nothing good readily available, it’s not inconceivable that news organizations could create their own data stockpiles. Like what Premise does, or like what this entomologist did in order to get quality data about the sounds of insect wings and the bugs’ activity cycles.
Google Correlate and other Google tools aren’t scientific, but they’re an easy source of data about what’s on people’s minds.
Despite the cliche that numbers don’t lie, they often do. Or, as Cairo points out in his Nieman Journalism Lab post, they’re at least open to interpretation and mischaracterization. So why not strive for fuller analysis by looking beyond the official numbers and those in widely publicized studies, and start thinking about what dots can be connected using social media, what text can be analyzed for themes and sentiment and, generally, what additional data can be pulled in to build a stronger argument or more accurate prediction?
Quantifying the topics that matter and trying to enlighten readers is a noble goal, but it’s hard to do so using the same data that has been around forever and hasn’t yet really served to accomplish those goals. I say get creative or risk reproducing the same old results in a newer, prettier package.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user ramcreations.
Android screen sizes aren’t as big a challenge for developers as you might think
For years we’ve heard horror stories about mobile app developers trying to support the many screen sizes found on Android. As the story goes, it’s a far more complicated scenario than developing for iOS since there’s only a handful of different screens on Apple devices. Or is it? According to one developer, who writes apps for both platforms, Android screen fragmentation is a myth.
Russel Ivanovic from Shifty Jelly, maker of the popular Pocket Casts app for iOS and Android, shared his thoughts on this perception in a blog post, starting with this infamous and daunting graphic from 2013 that illustrates the many screens supported by Android:
Simply looking at the graphic, it’s easy to believe that supporting Android has to be more difficult for this reason. Not so, says Ivanovic:
“It's not that hard, and honestly causes us less headaches than most people imagine. Firstly, the tools Google give us to lay out interfaces have supported this from day one. You've been able to define one or more layouts that scale to various sizes, and if you want to get everything perfect, you can have as many of these layouts as you like, while still keeping the one codebase. The layouts are XML, and don't live in your code. If you're an iOS developer they are pretty much the equivalent of XIB files with size classes like iOS 8. The other part people don't realise is that Android has standardised on screen resolutions for a long time now.”
Along with scaling layouts, Ivanovic said, developers can include higher resolution assets to be used as needed based on the screen size and pixel density of a device. To illustrate his points, he chose the top 10 Android phones that use Pocket Casts to see the basic interface layout differences among them. The range of screen resolutions for the 10 devices included:
- 720 x 1280
- 768 x 1280
- 800 x 1280
- 1080 x 1920
- 1440 x 2560
After breaking all of these down to base layouts, Ivanovic said the true picture of different screens to develop for turns out to look far less complicated:
Granted, this is solely for the 10 most popular phones for a single app. Ivanovic is ignoring tablets, which represent a fraction of Android devices when compared to phones. So the situation for other developers will surely vary.
But for Shifty Jelly, there doesn’t seem to be much of an Android screen fragmentation issue. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, as the company can now focus on more recent Android devices and still have a wider audience than for Apple device owners:
“For modern apps like ours though, which support Android 4.0 and above, the landscape is much nicer. That's the beauty of Android's massive market share, we can ignore all the people with phones running Android 2.3, those with odd and rare screen sizes, and target only 4.0 and above. The resulting group of people is comparable, if not bigger, than the users we target by being iOS 7 only in our iOS apps.”
To be sure, developers have to do more to support a wider range of devices when it comes to Android. However, the tools to do so are clearly available and now that only 14.2 percent of Android devices are running a version lower than Android 4.0, the screen fragmentation issue doesn’t seem so bad from Ivanovic’s point of view.
If you’re an Android developer, I’d love to hear if you agree with his experiences.
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The new Adidas fitness tracker isn’t a smartwatch, it’s a modern heart rate monitor
Adidas’ miCoach smartwatch line might not be as well-known as Nike’s Fuelband, but at least Adidas is still producing new hardware. On Wednesday, the company announced its latest wrist-based fitness tracker, the miCoach Fit Smart. It’s not strictly a smartwatch: it’s more like an old-school heart rate monitor with a bit of modern flair.
Unlike devices such as Android Wear and the Fitbit, the Fit Smart isn’t supposed to be worn all day. It’s a pure fitness tracker with a 10-hour battery life: You put it on when you start working out, and you take it off afterwards, like a piece of gear. It measures heart rate, as well as a number of non-biometric metrics, such as calories burned, distance covered, and stride rate.
It connects to phones over a Bluetooth Low Energy connection through Adidas’ miCoach apps, which includes training plans and semi-personalized coaching. Adidas was mentioned as a Google Fit partner at I/O, so this device could eventually contribute data to Google’s health platform, especially with its “fit” moniker. It’s important to note there isn’t an LCD screen on this device. Adidas opted instead for a matrix of little LEDs that should be more appropriate for simple stats such as calories burned or lap splits. Hopefully it’s easier to read at a glance, and it draws less power.
The Fit Smart will be available in two colors and sports a rubberized design with a lot of soft-touch silicon that looks pretty good and fairly durable, even if it gets drenched in sweat. It will cost $200 when it launches in late August, half the price of the Adidas running-focused smartwatch launched last year.
Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.
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PayPal, Braintree combine dev programs, creating a single shop for mobile, online payments
eBay scooped up behind-the-scenes payments company Braintree last year for $800 million, but in the ensuing ten months Braintree has continued to operate separately from eBay's big money-moving arm PayPal. That changes today, however, as PayPal and Braintree are officially joining forces. They're launching a one-stop payments shop targeting a broad range of developers from the smallest collaborative consumption startup to the established e-commerce portal.
The new program is called Braintree v.zero, and its key component is a modular software development kit that lets developers easily add any of PayPal or Braintree's payment services to a website or mobile app. That means a developer could do something as simple as plugging in a "Pay with PayPal" button into their website, said Braintree CEO Bill Ready, or they can sign up for more sophisticated features like Braintree's foreign currency conversion or multiparty transaction processing (i.e. when you split the fare on an Uber ride).
Braintree has always focused on startups, powering the back-end payments for companies like Uber and Airbnb since their formative stages. But Ready said v.zero and PayPal's broad reach is going to put it front of a lot more companies. As part of v.zero's attempts to go small, the SDK comes with a drop-in user interface, which will let tiny startups bring payments online after 15 minutes of work, Ready said.
"If you're a startup going after your first dollar of revenue, we're going to give you access to world class tools and save you weeks of work building your payments interface," Ready said. "There's also a big issue across the e-commerce industry. Many big sites don't have any experience in mobile. We can help them launch over mobile."
After the acquisition, Braintree and Ready took over PayPal's developer operations, but with the launch of v.zero will the two companies have officially merged their programs. Braintree customer Uber, for instance, recently made PayPal a fare option in the U.S. and several European countries, but Uber had to separately integrate with PayPal's APIs. One likely result of those move is that more Braintree merchants will start adding "Pay with Paypal" buttons to their websites and apps, Ready said.
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White House pulls plug on controversial Patent Office nominee after tech sector backlash
The Obama Administration has changed its mind over a plan to name pharmaceutical executive Phil Johnson as head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to multiple sources. The reversal is a victory for the technology industry and other proponents of patent reform.
The plan to appoint Johnson surfaced in late June, and was met with outrage on social media, where critics claimed the choice reflected hypocrisy on the part of President Obama, who had called for fixes to the patent system in his January State of the Union address.
Johnson, a longtime attorney for Johnson & Johnson, was a controversial nominee in part because he helped lead opposition to a bipartisan bill, which died in May, that would have made it easier for companies to challenge bad patents and to seek legal fees from so-called “patent trolls.” He has also publicly scorned previous attempts to reform the patent system.
News of the White House’s decision to backtrack on the appointment came via a person close to the Administration, and was confirmed by several industry sources. The final decision to pull the plug may have occurred after Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vocally declared his opposition to Johnson. Schumer, who was one of the authors of the failed reform bill, has regularly blasted the harm the current patent system is inflicting on start-ups and young companies.
For now, it’s unclear who the White House will name instead of Johnson. The office of Director of the Patent Office has been vacant since out-going director David Kappos stepped down in early 2013, and has been led in the meantime by former Googler, Michelle Lee. Lee would appear to be a logical choice to take the top job, but it’s not apparent that she’s in the running. One source speculated that the Administration could appoint a figurehead, which would let Lee continue to be the de facto leader on policy issues. The White House did not immediately reply a request for comment.
When the incoming Director is appointed, she or he will confront a large backlog of unprocessed patent applications, and will also have to decide how to address the issue of patent quality. In the last two decades, the Patent Office has issued a flood of questionable patents like one issued to a child for “swinging on a swing.” The proliferation of patents has arisen in part because examiners can only expend a given amount of time on each application, while those seeking patents can repeatedly challenge rejections.
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Tycoon Carlos Slim breaks up his Mexican telecom empire under regulatory pressure
You may think the U.S. fell short on telecom competition, but in Mexico a single company has long dominated the communications landscape: América Móvil. It services 70 percent of all mobile connections and 80 percent of all landline phone links in the country. But billionaire Carlos Slim, the carrier’s controlling owner, is bowing to regulator pressure and is divesting substantial portions of Slim’s empire, according to Bloomberg. The sales and spin offs will reduce América Móvil’s market share in mobile and wireline to below 50 percent, as well as remove it from the communications tower and satellite TV businesses. It doesn’t look as if América Móvil’s substantial operations in Latin America or the U.S. (where it owns prepaid giant TracFone) will be affected.
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What if the Big Bang was really the “Big Bounce”?
The BICEP telescope and some of the data it has generated.
Not so long ago, our very own Matthew Francis attended the press conference in which results were announced from Antarctic observatory BICEP 2. Researchers claimed that the instruments there had located the unmistakable signature of gravitational waves during primordial inflation—a period of time during which the Universe expanded at a furious rate.
But our initial article also hinted at trouble to come.
The BICEP 2 experiment measures the ratio between light scattered by gravitational waves and light scattered by everything else, which shows up in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. BICEP 2, however, is not the only instrument that can measure the properties of the CMB. Scientists have used the Planck satellite to measure the same ratio of light scatters—and guess what? The value obtained from BICEP 2 data doesn't agree with the value obtained from the Planck data.
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Hands on: Structure Sensor turns your iPad into a 3D scanning machine
Peering through the Stucture Scanner's lens at our loaner DJI quadcopter.
Lee Hutchinson
Last year, California-based Occipital closed out a wildly successful Kickstarter for its Structure Sensor, an iPad-mountable structured light scanner that can perceive the world in three dimensions by projecting infrared dots on things. The company is nearly done shipping the $399 devices to its crowdfunding backers (non-backers who buy one now can expect delivery in about a month), but we managed to finagle a couple of days with an early production version of the Structure Sensor to get a peek at how it performs in the real world. We learned a lot about what the Structure Sensor is—and we learned even more about what it isn't.
We received a pair of boxes from Occipital: one contained the Structure Sensor and its dedicated Lightning cable, and the other contained the bracket necessary to attach the Structure to our iPad mini (the Structure works with any iPad with a Lightning connector, but you need the correct bracket to mount it). The device itself feels agreeably solid—it's wrapped in an anodized aluminum housing with a glass front, through which are visible two infrared LEDs, the infrared structured light projector, and the infrared camera. It screws into the provided mounting bracket, then slips onto your iPad and is secured in place with a clamp. Once attached, you then connect a custom Lightning cable from the Structure to the iPad's port on its base. The entire assembly of sensor, bracket, and cable add about 124 grams of weight onto the back of the iPad.
Lee Hutchinson
Our review kit: one Structure Sensor, one iPad mini-sized mounting bracket.
8 more images in gallery
The Structure, though, isn't so much a scanner as it is a platform. There are mobile and desktop apps you can use to make it work, but at least at this stage in the product's development those apps are still a bit sketchy. They function more as demonstrations of the scanner's potential uses than actual apps you'd want to use. The biggest draw about the Structure is its openness: the iOS SDK is available right now, which can be used to create Structure-compatible iOS apps immediately. Other platforms (Windows, OS X, and Android) will be getting open source drivers in the near future, though creating Structure apps for anything other than iOS will require the use of a special "hacker cable" to connect to the Structure.
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Bell Labs pushes 10Gbps over copper telephone lines
Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs claims to have "set a new broadband speed record of 10Gbps using traditional copper telephone lines" in a research project that could ultimately bring gigabit speed to broadband networks that combine fiber with copper.
Those 10Gbps speeds can only be achieved over 30 meters; at 70 meters, top speeds drop to 1Gbps, according to today's announcement. Alcatel-Lucent says that 1Gbps upload and download speeds may be possible in the real world over networks that bring fiber to the curbside and rely on copper for the final few meters. Such a setup would be similar to AT&T's U-verse fiber-to-the-node service, although U-verse places the fiber about 600 to 900 meters away from homes and currently tops out at 45Mbps.
To reach the higher speeds, Bell Labs (which became famous when it was still part of AT&T) is relying on a new DSL standard known as G.fast, which promises up to 1Gbps over copper phone lines. Alcatel-Lucent says that Bell Labs has developed an extension of G.fast called XG-FAST.
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Update: Google posts DRM workaround for paid Android Wear apps
Free apps only!
Andrew Cunningham
With smartwatches running Android Wear slowly starting to trickle out into the world, developers are coming to grips with Google's new wearable platform. In doing so, they have found one of its first big bugs: paid apps don't work.
Currently, there's no such thing as a "standalone Wear app." Watch apps must be downloaded by a phone using the Play Store and include an Android Wear component. After installing the phone app locally, the phone sends the Wear component to the watch over a Bluetooth connection.
Paid Android apps are encrypted, with the encryption key obtained from the Play Store and passed to the phone. But according to a report from Android Police, the key does not currently get passed to the watch. With no way to decrypt the packages, the watch fails to install encrypted wearable apps. The only current workaround is not to charge for the app, which removes the Play Store's encryption.
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The Audi A8 is the perfect car for the tech-obsessed plutocrat
Jonathan Gitlin
A car company's flagship model is usually a very special thing. And when that company is known for advanced technology and competes in the luxury market, like Audi does, that's doubly true. In contrast to most of the cars on our roads, Audi's flagship A8 is packed to the gunwales with technology: advanced driver assists and active safety systems made possible thanks to networked steering, suspension, engine, and driveline, aided by a host of sensors and cameras around the vehicle.
Most of the tech in the car will eventually trickle down into lesser models, but until that happens, you'll need relatively deep pockets to experience the best Audi has to offer. We spent some time with a pair of Audi's latest A8s (one diesel, one gasoline) and the faster, more expensive S8 on some of Colorado's finer highways and byways recently, and we think they might be the ultimate Ars car.
Do all auto-addicts have their own gateway cars? In my case, it was the early 1990s, and it was the super sedans that did it. I wasn't wowed by the mid-engined exotic or muscle car; no, it was the technology and gadget-laden uberbarges. Cars like Mercedes-Benz's 600S or BMW's 750i were often seen competing in car magazines of the time for the title of world's best car. These were four-seaters with big engines and the ability to cruise for hours at 155 mph—in Germany, of course.
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