Home Depot is looking to get you into the 3D printing game, adding MakerBot's Replicator 3D printers to its inventory. If you happen to live near one of the select stores carrying the machine, you can grab it in person, but otherwise it is available through the hardware store's website. Different MakerBot offerings have been made available. Both the Replicator … Continue reading
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MakerBot 3D printers arrive at select Home Depot stores
Home Depot is looking to get you into the 3D printing game, adding MakerBot's Replicator 3D printers to its inventory. If you happen to live near one of the select stores carrying the machine, you can grab it in person, but otherwise it is available through the hardware store's website. Different MakerBot offerings have been made available. Both the Replicator … Continue reading
Smart teases new tiny car, takes jab at big vehicles
Smart, maker of the tiny Fortwo cars, has a new model up its sleeve, and to tease its existence, the manufacturer has released a long promotional video for just the opposite: a giant Smart Car that towers amongst its road-bound brethren, offering such perks as "Eco Empathy" and the ability to drive everywhere backwards. The marketing ad kicks off with … Continue reading
BitTorrent reveals Bundle paygates: a bid to fund content creation
BitTorrent is expanding upon its Bundle efforts with "paygates", a newly announced paywall that will give creators the option to charge for their digital wares. To fuel this, Rapid Eye Studios will launch an original series on Bundle called Children of the Machine, which it hopes to fund solely through Bundle. The paygates will be added to BitTorrent Bundle some … Continue reading
Aether Cone connected speaker shipping date delayed
San Francisco-based IoT startup Aether Things is delaying the shipping date of its Cone connected loudspeaker. The Cone, which is supposed to learn from your listening habits and automatically mix music based on past preferences, was scheduled to ship by July 15. On Monday, the company informed prospective buyers via email that it won’t meet that deadline: “We've come across some delays in finalizing Cone, which means we are unfortunately postponing the ship date. We're very sorry to have to extend the wait,” the email reads, without providing an estimate for a new shipping date.
Dish can keep streaming TV anywhere after Fox’s Aereo argument fails
So much for clarity.
Three weeks after the Supreme Court shut down Aereo for streaming TV over the internet without permission, a court in California has given the green light for satellite TV company Dish to continue selling a service that does much the same thing.
In a short ruling issued on Monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request by Fox to shut down “Dish Anywhere,” which lets consumers record the broadcasters’ shows on a DVR and then beam them over the internet to a computer or mobile device.
In its ruling, the 9th Circuit upheld a lower court’s finding that Fox was unlikely to suffer serious harm if Dish Anywhere was not shut down pending a copyright trial. The four-page decision is highly technical and avoids entirely the Supreme Court’s Aereo ruling — which Fox had invoked to say that Dish was engaged in an unauthorized public performance.
The new ruling is likely to further muddy the water over what companies can do with content owned by the likes of Fox and ABC, which broadcast their shows for free over the airwaves but also collect retransmission fees from pay TV providers like Dish.
Services like Aereo and Dish Anywhere fall into a legal gray area because they provide cloud-based DVRs that are controlled by consumers, meaning they should (in theory) fall outside the law that restricts companies from retransmitting broadcast signals to the public.
The courts’ explanations, however, have failed to make it clear why one service is legal and the other is not. In the closely-watched Supreme Court case, a 6-3 majority ruled that Aereo’s internet streams were “public” but glossed over the reasons why this was the case — leading Justice Antonin Scalia to complain in dissent of "an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come."
In the Dish case, meanwhile, the company did have a license to retransmit signals via satellite, but did not have the broadcaster’s permission to offer a remote DVR tool, which is why Fox was seeking an injunction to shut down Dish Anywhere. And given the technical nature of the 9th Circuit ruling, it’s not clear why Dish Anywhere is legal and Aereo is not.
The new California ruling is another in a series of victories for Dish, which has also prevailed over ABC in court over its Hopper DVR, which lets users skip over commercials.
Here’s the 9th Circuit ruling via the Hollywood Reporter:
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One of my last hurdles to using Windows Phone is gone thanks to this Google+ app
Every time I test a new Windows Phone handset, I get an inch closer to using one on a long-term basis. Currently my SIM card is in a Lumia 930 that comes pre-installed with the much improved Windows Phone 8.1 software. It includes the new Action Center and Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Google Now and Siri, to name just a few new features.
So, why don’t I use Windows Phone 8.1 as a daily driver?
It typically comes down to missing apps that I need. Until recently, there was still one more work-related app that I use on iOS and Android all throughout the day. Lo and behold, it’s there and has been for nearly a year although I missed the memo: Socialcast arrived for Windows Phone last August. That leaves Google+ on Windows Phone as the lone holdout for me: I’m a heavy Google+ user seven days a week and the G+ experience on Windows Phone is dismal. At least it was until this weekend when I got a Twitter recommendation to try gPlus, a native Google+ app for Windows Phone.
@KevinCTofel have you tried a third party app for google+? metroappsauce.com/2014/05/12/gpl…—
Rahul Mathur (@weemundo) July 13, 2014
While not perfect, gPlus is a very capable client. Most of the other Google+ apps I’ve found in the Windows Phone store are simply web-based clients wrapped in an app and don’t offer any additional features than using Google+ in Internet Explorer. But gPlus is different: It’s a pure Metro-style app that works far better than using IE.
The software supports the main Google+ stream but you can also read posts from people in your Circles or in Communities, something I often do for various groups such as the Chromebook and Moto X communities. Posts can be created for public viewing or within a Community.
You can post links or photos — images already taken or use your Windows Phone camera for a new snapshot — with gPlus, and you can also view a user’s full profile.
Notifications are one area that still needs a little work. Yes, the gPlus app shows your notifications; tap the notification badge and you can view any unread items. But the gPlus notifications don’t yet appear in the Windows Phone Action Center, so you have to manually check the app for any outstanding comments or +1′s. Compared to the terrible in-browser experience of Google+ on Windows Phone, that’s a small price to pay for an otherwise excellent app.
The app is priced small, too. You can try it out free, but I opted to pay $0.99 for the full client within the first day of using it.
For me, gPlus is well worth the buck, and until a better Google+ client comes along for Windows Phone, I’ll be using it from now on. In fact, I can’t think of any more missing apps that might hold me back from using Windows Phone on a longer full-time basis.
That doesn’t mean Microsoft’s mobile platform has all the apps that you and others need, of course. We all have different requirements and “must-have” applications. But if you were to ask me why I haven’t switched to Windows Phone, I really don’t have a good answer now, thanks to gPlus. Thanks, Rahul, for the app recommendation.
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BitTorrent TV: Is this BitTorrent’s big push into mobile live streaming?
BitTorrent Inc. is looking to revive its live streaming efforts with a new product name and new staff, if job offers posted earlier this month are any indication. The company shut down its previous live streaming test, dubbed BitTorrent Live, in February, and said at the time that it would shift its focus to mobile live streaming. Now, it looks like it may rebrand these efforts as BitTorrent TV.
This is from a job listing for a senior product manager that was published two weeks ago:
"This position is for the PM leader of the new BitTorrent TV product, among BitTorrent's new initiatives that leverages the power of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol. This product aims to introduce to the world a scalable, inexpensive live streaming technology."
Another job listing, posted at about the same time, includes the following:
"We are looking for an advanced C++ engineer who will help develop a revolutionary new product that will bring peer-to-peer streaming to video broadcasting. You'll have a chance to work directly with our founder, Bram Cohen, on this new type of peer-to-peer technology. You will be pushing the processing and networking limits of (…) hardware on mobile/embedded platforms."
Cohen's work on live streaming has been a long time coming. Cohen, who invented the original BitTorrent protocol and now serves as BitTorrent Inc's Chief Scientist, started to develop a new P2P-powered live streaming protocol that was focused on low-latency video transmission in 2008. In late 2011, BitTorrent began to test the technology by streaming live music sessions out of a studio it built in its own office.
However, the problem with this approach was that it relied on a browser plug-in, which was too much of a hurdle for many users. In an email to testers, Cohen wrote in February:
"After invaluable experience in real deployments, we found that requiring a browser plug-in is daunting to our users. Because of this, we are refocusing the product on mobile platforms… "
BitTorrent's Chief Marketing Officer Matt Mason announced separately in February that the company would introduce "a new mobile streaming application" in alpha stage later this year. All signs now point to this being BitTorrent TV. It's still unclear what the app is actually going to offer, and a spokesperson quizzed about BitTorrent TV told me Monday that it is still "in an exploratory stage."
However, the job offers make it sound like BitTorrent Inc. is quite serious about finally turning Bram Cohen's live streaming work into a product. The job offer of the Product Manager for BitTorrent TV, who is going to be in charge of releasing the product, stated that the job will be "critically important to the company."
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BloomSky wants to put a personal weather station in your backyard
If you want to know the weather, you certainly have a lot of options these days. There are 24-hour cable weather stations. Local TV stations of make their love Doppler radar feeds available online or over a separate broadcast channel. Detailed weather stats and forecasts for any city in the world are only the tap of a mobile app or the typing of a URL away.
But an interesting new Bay Area startup called BloomSky wants to give you the most personalized weather report of all – one from your home. The company has designed a consumer weather probe that you can mount in your yard or on your roof. It tracks temperature, barometric pressure, rain, humidity and even ultraviolet light levels. It also has a high-definition camera that can record and share real-time images and time-lapse photography of the sky above your roof. It connects to your home network through a Wi-Fi radio, and can also connect to your smartphone.
BloomSky wants to sell its stations to consumers and businesses in hopes of creating a gigantic crowdsourced weather monitoring and prediction network. The concept of personal weather stations is certainly nothing new. Members of the Citizen Weather Observer Program have long collected data from personal weather stations and submitted to the National Weather Service using specialized sensor rigs. The Weather Underground also aggregates observational data from amateur meteorologists.
But BloomSky wants to take a time-intensive — and expensive — hobby, and make it accessible and useful to the general public, according to company founder and CEO J.T. Xiao. BloomSky wants to build a meteorological network around its probes that will it report local weather conditions down to the neighborhood level and allow its members to share their "personal weather" information on the internet and social networks.
BloomSky weather module comes with five sensors, an HD camera, and a Wi-Fi radio, and can be powered with a solar panel. (Source: BloomSky)
BloomSky is funding the initial manufacture of its modules through a Kickstarter campaign, but it plans next year to start selling them retail for $170. Next month, BloomSky plans to launch a consumer beta program in the San Francisco in which it will place a station in 80 Bay Area neighborhoods. Data and images collected from those beta probes will be used to generate a real time map of the San Francisco's different microclimates, Xiao said.
Instead of just providing a general temperature figure for the entire peninsula, BloomSky wants to show that while it’s raining in the Mission it might only be foggy in Parkside.
All of BloomSky's probes will contribute general data to the network — which will be accessible to the general public through an app — but individual probe owners can choose weather to share specific location data (so you can track conditions and see images at the address level). Individual probe owners can also choose to share a snapshot of their local weather conditions as well as photos with anyone via social networking tools, BloomSky said.
It's definitely a fascinating concept, but I'm still skeptical if ordinary consumers are interested in tracking and sharing the climate around their homes, or at least interested enough to pay $170 for a probe (though the Kickstarter campaign is offering pre-order devices at steep discounts). But only one or two people in any given neighborhood have to own a weather station for the network to be effective. Also, BloomSky is hoping businesses will pick up any consumer slack.
Any business which factors climate conditions into its business model could use the BloomSky module as a handy tool for planning and marketing purposes, Xiao and his team said. A surf shop could show its customers the height of the current waves, for example, while a bed & breakfast could post real-time temperature and rain data on its website.
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Microsoft acknowledges the Chromebook threat, plans to “redefine” the value category
Last year, I suggested Microsoft was feeling the heat from Chromebooks: Why else would the company invest in a Scroogled ad campaign to show how much better Windows is than Google’s Chrome OS? I received a fair share of criticism on my stance back then, but on Monday, Microsoft confirmed my thoughts, essentially admitting that Chromebooks need to be taken seriously.
Speaking at the Windows Partner Conference, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner had this to say according to The Verge:
“We are going to participate at the low-end. We've got a great value proposition against Chromebooks, we are not ceding the market to anyone.”
Along with the statement, Turner showed off the following slide that highlights how Windows computers will tackle Chromebooks head-on: Though low-cost laptops offering features that Chromebooks either can’t or don’t:
From a price perspective, these devices — as well as some new small Windows 8.1 tablets coming down the pike at or under $99 later this year along with $199 laptops – will surely give consumers pause before purchasing a Chromebook. Helping these prices is Microsoft’s reduction, and in some cases, elimination of the licensing fee for Windows 8.1.
However, the success of stemming Chromebook sales will have just as much to do with the overall experience these laptops and tablets actually provide. While Microsoft’s list of things a Chromebook can’t do is accurate — although I’m not sure consumers care about everything on that list — what a Chromebook does do, it does extremely well and without much of the overhead that comes with a Windows system. That’s one of the advantages to a “lighter” operating system.
The tricky part for Microsoft is that many of its key hardware partners don’t just make Windows devices; many have decided to jump into the Chromebook game as well. Think Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer and Asus to name a few.
It’s also telling that these Windows computer makers have broadened their products to include support for Chrome OS over the past two years. It’s as if they knew back then what Microsoft is only recently learning: Google’s Chromebook strategy to usurp computing experiences shouldn’t be taken lightly.
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Verizon’s FIOS Netflix speed tanks as finger-pointing by both companies continues
Verizon FIOS subscribers continue to see buffering Netflix streams, and the situation is apparently getting worse: Netflix's latest ISP speed index saw the average speed of Netflix streams watched by FIOS subscribers decline to 1.58 MBPS in June, down from 1.9 MBPS in May, and well below average speeds seen on other ISPs. The average speed of Netflix streams requested by Cablevision customers was 3.1MBPS in June, and Comcast customers got their Netflix fare with an average of 2.61 MBPS.
Verizon actually used to fare a lot better in Netflix's ISP speed index. Last fall, Netflix streams to FIOS customers were still averaging up to 2.22 MBPS, but speeds have been in freefall since January.
Both companies continue to blame each other for the reason behind the slow-down, with Verizon public policy VP David Young once again arguing last week that Netflix was deliberately choosing a transit route without enough capacity to serve FIOS customers.
Netflix executives have been countering this by saying that Verizon has chosen to limit interconnection capacity in order to get Netflix to pay for peering. Both parties reached a commercial agreement, which includes such payments, in April — but the results of that agreement have yet to be felt by Verizon customers.
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Secret nabs $25M in funding, opens up collections of secrets to the web
Anonymous sharing app Secret has raised $25 million in Series B funding, the company announced Monday, bringing its total haul just shy of $35 million.
Secret is also attempting to expand to a larger audience by making “collections” of its content — in categories like “Popular” and “Dating” — available on the web in “a daily digest into the very best of Secret…a sense of what people are really feeling.” You have to be a registered user to subscribe to those collections but you can see some examples here. There’s nothing to get too excited about so far — secrets like “I am notably more productive when I listen to Pitbull, which is my new least favorite thing about myself” seem like things that could just be tweeted, no privacy required.
The company also added Facebook login, so instead of just getting friends on Secret via the list of contacts on your phone, you can add them by (anonymously) logging into Facebook.
The round was led by Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, SV Angel, Fuel Capital, Ceyuan Ventures and some others.
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Sponsored post: Crunch your financial data for less time and cost on the AWS Cloud
High-performance computing (HPC) allows users to solve complex science, engineering and business problems using applications that require a large amount of computational resources,as well as high throughput and predictable latency networking. Most systems providing HPC platforms are shared among many users and constitute a significant capital investment to build, tune and maintain.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Intel® Xeon® processors, enables you to allocate compute capacity on demand without up-front planning of data center, network and server infrastructure. You have access to a broad range of cloud-based instance types to meet your demands for CPU, memory, local disk and network connectivity. Run infrastructure in any of a large number of global regions and avoid lead times for contract negotiation and a local presence.
Wear Mini Launcher puts an app launcher on your Android Wear smartwatch
It’s great that Android Wear apps are now available for Google-powered smartwatches. Getting to the actual apps on the small screen isn’t quite optimal, though. Opening apps through voice commands has been a hit-or-miss experience for me. That’s why I like the idea of Wear Mini Launcher: A free, third-party app launcher for Android Wear.
The app puts all of your installed Android Wear apps one swipe away. After installing it, you can access installed apps with a left-to-right screen gesture. Just tap on the app of your choice and Wear Mini Launcher fires it up. The relatively new software has quickly undergone several revisions: At time of writing, this is the fourth minor version.
With each iteration comes new features. Android Central notes that the latest adds haptic or vibrating feedback when the app drawer is opened and provides access to control the screen brightness of an Android Wear watch. That’s incredibly handy because neither the Samsung Gear Live nor the LG G Watch includes an ambient light sensor to automatically manage screen brightness. Instead, you have to manually set the brightness, a few menus deep into the watch’s settings.
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It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)
By your command.
Sean Gallagher
Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It's a platform that in the minds of many should've died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications.
All this labor of love begs one question: why? What is it about a single-tasking command-line driven operating system—one that is barely up to the most basic of network-driven tasks—that has kept people's talents engaged for two decades? Haven't most developers abandoned it for Windows (or, tragically, for IBM OS/2)? Who still uses DOS, and for what?
To find out, Ars reached out to two members of the FreeDOS core development team to learn more about who was behind this seemingly quixotic quest. These devs choose to keep an open-source DOS alive rather than working on something similar but more modern—like Linux. So, needless to say, the answers we got weren't necessarily expected.
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Overcome Your Fear Of Public Speaking By Making A Video Of Yourself
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