Engadget giveaway: win one of two Acer Chromebooks courtesy of Karma!
Sure, you share your heart out in food photos and selfies, but providing WiFi to those less fortunate might be more magnanimous. That’s where Karma comes in, with its portable WiFi hotspot that pays you back in data for a bit of bandwidth benevolence. The company has provided two Acer C720 Chromebooks and a pair of its Karma WiFi hotspots (1GB bundles) so that two lucky Engadget readers can join in spreading the connectivity. Those in need can hop onto the shared hotspot using their own Karma account, earning both them and their host a cool 100MB in data. Accounts dictate usage, so you get to keep your own pay-as-you-go data safe, while doing your part in opening up the interwebs to those around you. Just head on down to the Rafflecopter widget for up to three chances at winning. To keep the good vibes flowing, the company is also offering 20 percent off to all Engadget readers for the duration of this giveaway.
- Entries are handled through the Rafflecopter widget above. Comments are no longer accepted as valid methods of entry. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win, but it will not be given to third parties.
- Contest is open to all residents of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so direct your anger at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
- Winners will be chosen randomly. Two (2) winners will each receive one (1) Acer C720 Chromebook (C720-2848) and one (1) Karma Hotspot 1GB bundle (201212196301).
- If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of being contacted. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email or Facebook login. We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes.
- This unit is purely for promotional giveaway. Acer, Karma and Engadget / AOL are not held liable to honor warranties, exchanges or customer service.
- The full list of rules, in all its legalese glory, can be found here.
- Entries can be submitted until February 26th at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
Filed under: Announcements, HD, Mobile, Alt, Acer
TiVo’s co-founders want you to use internet video for your own TV network
When TiVo co-founders Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay reunited a couple of years ago to come up with a new venture, they knew internet video was the next big frontier they wanted to conquer. To their dismay, they found it to be a mess. “There are all these different sources of video, and it’s search is just a mess,” says Ramsay in an interview with us. They also discovered that the social aspect of recommendation and sharing doesn’t seem to be as prevalent for videos as it is with music services like Spotify and Rdio.
After some trial and error, the two finally came up with the idea of QPlay, a streaming video service that launches today. According to Ramsay, the driving force behind QPlay is entirely focused on making sure there’s always content you want to watch. At the core of QPlay are “Qs,” which is the company’s term for personalized video streams. Think of them as playlists, but ones that you curate and share with friends. You can create these fancified queues with videos from a variety of sources such as Vimeo, YouTube, Vine, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It’s not just limited to adding individual videos either; for example with YouTube, you can create a Q of just your channel subscriptions, and that Q will update automatically each time there’s new content. Right now you can add videos to your Q via a browser bookmarklet, though there might be additional ways to do so in the future.
But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. QPlay itself is composed of three parts: the cloud service that hosts the Qs, an iPad app and an optional TV adapter. As QPlay does not have a web interface at launch, the app is absolutely integral to the service. Aside from watching your own curated Qs on the app, it also offers a set of Qs that are curated by the service itself. These Q categories include News, Sports, Comedy, Photography, Popular (what’s trending on the service) and What’s New, which should be self-explanatory. These particular collections are completely automated and cobbled together from sources such as CNN, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera and CBS. As these categories are automated, the Qs are theoretically infinite — they’re constantly updated with the latest videos.
The real value of the iPad app, however, is the other key idea behind QPlay: Social. With the app, not only can you share your curated Qs (either with the public or just your friends), you can also discover the hand-picked selections of others. You can either select one from your friends, or choose one from the public at large. Simply enter a keyword like “Winter Olympics” or “Stand-up comedy” to find appropriate Qs that others have curated. If you like them, you can drag and drop those Qs right into your own feed so you’ll always know when they’re updated. If only one video in a lineup strikes your fancy, just drag that single clip into a Q of your own.
“These Qs are more sophisticated than a playlist,” says Ramsay. “They can be curated for a specific need, and can be overlaid on anything. The videos can come from anywhere, be assembled by a person or a machine… We’re essentially letting you assemble your own TV network on the fly.”
The third and final component is the tiny TV adapter teased late last year. No larger than a deck of cards, the adapter lets you stream whatever it is on the iPad app over to your television. Simply plug it into a power source, hook it up to your TV via an HDMI cable, set it up over WiFi to recognize your iPad, and away you go. In TV mode, the slate acts solely as a second screen remote. As the Qs and video content are stored in the cloud, you can even shut down your iPad and the stream will continue to be played on your television, so there’s no fear of draining your tablet’s battery.
And that’s not all. At a private meeting in San Francisco, Ramsay gave us a sneak peek at a Netflix application that they’re beta-testing. Yes, you read that right: Netflix. He did a keyword search for “The Hunt for Red October” on the app, and, lo and behold, a result came up with a Netflix logo beside it. He tapped it, and after a few seconds of buffering, the movie came up on the TV. This is what Ramsay calls a premium service, and it’s one of many that’s in the works — he name-dropped Hulu and HBO Go as other possibilities.
Further, the company says it doesn’t need any special relationships with these providers since their architecture uses the same access to metadata as other apps in the wild. “We have the ability to scale this as far as we need to go,” he says. With both the Qs and the premium providers, the goal is that the end-user no longer needs to find the source of what they want to watch. Just as with TiVo, they can just search for it in QPlay, and it’ll be there.
The road to QPlay’s launch has been a long one. On the software side, the team had to figure out how to automatically curate queues. Going out to different sources, placing the newest videos in front of the queue and finding just which social sources to trust has been challenging. The hardware side was even more of an issue. Ramsay didn’t want to get into hardware initially, but after fact-finding missions at Google and other set-top providers, they couldn’t find anything that did what they wanted.
“We concluded we needed something that would work particularly with our Qs,” Ramsay says. “You see, the TV adapter is aware of the Q, the tablet is aware of the Q, and they’re kept in sync with our cloud service — there’s no other device out there that works with queues like we do […] We also wanted the videos to play across multiple applications. It was a thing that nobody else did, that we had to invent on our own.” The end result is a TV adapter whose WiFi design and antenna placement is tailored specifically to their needs. For example, it’s made so that the device needs to be placed in front of the TV for the best possible reception.
All that said, it’s still early days yet for QPlay. In addition to the premium services mentioned earlier, it wants to let you upload home videos eventually. Even live events are on the feature wish list, which would certainly make QPlay stand out amongst the competition. Until then, though, the outfit needs to see if it can muster enough support to grow.
That’s why, as part of its launch, QPlay is offering the iPad app and the TV adapter in an introductory bundle for $49 each, which is being sold immediately on the company’s website on a limited, first-come first-served basis. If you feel like being an early adopter and want to take a chance on a young startup like QPlay, go ahead and hit the source link, or take a quick tour of it with the video demo below. Who knows, this might be viable alternative to those who think the Chromecast is just a touch too simple.
Filed under: HD
Source: QPlay
PlayStation 4 moves just shy of 350K units in first two days at Japanese retail
By Japanese game console launch standards, the PlayStation 4 is off to a great start. In the first 48 hours of availability, Japanese console buyers snapped up just under 350,000 PlayStation 4 systems (322,083 to be exact, according to Famitsu). That’s roughly four times what the PlayStation 3 moved at launch back in 2006 and about six times what Xbox 360 sold in 2005 — not too shabby!
That’s just a drop in the bucket for PS4′s worldwide sales thus far, which crested 5 million last week (well ahead of Sony’s sales estimate for its current financial quarter). It also inches the PS4 ever closer to 6 million units sold worldwide, putting it well over the competition’s (admittedly not recently updated) numbers.
You might be wondering, “Why does this matter to me?” It might not! But it certainly doesn’t hurt your chance of playing more great games if the console makers are doing well and facing stiff competition. It’s like the opposite of the slogan for Aliens vs. Predator: Whoever loses, we win!
Source: Famitsu
Amazon bolsters UK streaming library ahead of tomorrow’s relaunch
Tomorrow, Lovefilm becomes Amazon Prime Instant Video, and unless you take advantage of the various early adopter discounts, it’ll cost you an up-front annual fee of £79. On the upside, the company is pushing to add more TV shows to the service in the hope of clawing back some of Netflix’s lost ground. First up, Amazon has signed a deal with Warner Bros. that’ll see the first seasons of Arrow, The Following and Revolution appear on UK Prime within the next few days. The agreement will also see Hostages and The 100 appear in 2015, with subsequent seasons of all five shows added afterward. At the same time, the retailer has confirmed that UK users will be able to watch its original TV comedy Alpha House, which is a bit like House of Cards, but with more jokes.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Amazon
Huawei’s flagship phablet is only $300 in China, and its CMO explains why
Huawei’s recently announced MediaPad X1 has caused quite a stir — it’s the lightest and smallest-ever 7-inch tablet (let alone a phablet), while also packing decent features like a 1,920 x 1,200 display, 5,000mAh battery and 150 Mbps LTE. The retail price quoted at the launch event was €399 or about $550 for the LTE model, but back in China, it appears that Huawei’s slapped an insane discount on the same quad-core tablet, albeit under a slightly different name. Dubbed the Honor X1, the 3G model will retail for just CN¥1,799 or about $290, and the 4G version will go for just CN¥1,999 or $330. That’s a $220 drop for the LTE model! So when we caught up with Huawei Device’s CMO Shao Yang at MWC, we had to ask him: What was he thinking? Well, it’s all about the way consumers perceive this device in different regions.
The exec explained that his company conducted different tests in four countries: China, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Russia. For the China tests, many people identified the X1 as a phone, which isn’t surprising given the increasing popularity of phablets in Asia. Folks from other countries, however, saw the X1 as a tablet that can be used as a phone.
“As Honor is our online brand, we’re saving channel costs and can therefore offer a further deal.”
“Under these circumstances, we priced the device according to the way it’s perceived in each region,” said Yang. “In Europe, the iPad mini with LTE costs about €499 to €599, so our partners are still extremely happy with our €399 price point over there. In China, it’s a special case: the X1 is sold under the Honor brand. As Honor is our online brand, we’re saving channel costs and can therefore offer a further deal.”
Of course, it’s no coincidence that the Honor X1 is priced the same as the Xiaomi Phone 3 — which doesn’t even have LTE, nor storage expansion — and other flagship phones from similar Chinese online brands. It’s apparent that Huawei’s willing to drastically squeeze its margins just to starve its local online competitors, in order to hold or even leap from its number four position in China. But at the same time, you have to also admire Huawei for innovating in the wearable space to reach this goal, and Yang told us to stay tuned for more later this year.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
Freescale makes the world’s smallest ARM controller chip even tinier
Apparently, Freescale didn’t think the diminutive Kinetis KL02 was tiny enough — it just unveiled the KL03, the new world’s smallest ARM microcontroller. At 1.6mm by 2mm, the Cortex-M0+ chip is 15 percent smaller than its ancestor. That’s miniscule enough to comfortably fit inside the dimple of a golf ball, folks. Despite the shrunken profile, it’s both easier to program and more energy-efficient. The size isn’t just for bragging rights, of course. Freescale sees the KL03 helping out the internet of things, where a fraction of a millimeter can make a big difference. Companies can’t start using the chip in earnest until it enters full production this June, but it may lead to very compact smart appliances and wearables once it arrives.
Filed under: Household, Wearables
Via: CNET
Source: Freescale
‘SunSprite’ Solar-Powered Bluetooth Device Measures Optimal Sun Exposure [iOS Blog]
With Apple hiring numerous medical professionals for its rumored iWatch project, and many new fitness and other types of health-related devices coming to market, wearable health-data tracking devices are proving extremely popular.
A new device launching today on IndieGogo is SunSprite, a wearable device that measures the amount of visible and UV light that the wearer is exposed to in order to help users avoid health issues related to a lack of exposure to sunlight, such as seasonal affective disorder or winter depression.
The solar-powered SunSprite tracks the amount of visible and UV light the wearer is exposed to. Because of its built-in solar sensors, it never needs recharging, using ambient light to gather electricity to power its Bluetooth LE connection to the iPhone. The company is planning to manufacturer the SunSprite at a factory in the United States, as well.
The company behind the SunSprite says that proper exposure to sunlight improves energy, sleep, mood, focus, stress, and more, with Harvard Medical School professors on staff to back up the science [PDF].
Getting bright light at the right time of day is clinically proven to boost your energy and help you sleep better. See Bright Light & the Human Brain below for more information on the science behind SunSprite and bright light.
SunSprite’s dual sensors measure the brightness of both visible and UV light so you can make sure you’re getting the right amount of light — enough visible light to be healthy while avoiding too many harmful UV rays. SunSprite’s LED display (as well as its smartphone app) can tell you if the light you’re in is bright enough to be beneficial.
The SunSprite is available for preorder through IndieGoGo for $99, a 33 percent discount off its estimated $149 final retail price. The company estimates it will to ship to backers in June of this year.
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Apple Sapphire Deal with GT to Hit Full Production Beginning in 2H 2014
GT Advanced Technologies, Apple’s partner in a new sapphire plant in Arizona, today announced earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013 while also providing a forward look at what will be a “transformational” year for the company. The company’s comments help put into perspective just how large the deal with Apple is, with significant ramping heading into the second half of this year and into 2015.
“Our arrangement to supply sapphire materials to Apple is progressing well and we started to build out the facility in Arizona and staff the operation during the quarter,” said Gutierrez. “We are pleased to have Apple as a sapphire customer and to be in a position to leverage our proprietary know-how to enable the supply of this versatile material. While our primary focus during the balance of the year is to continue to execute on our commitments in Arizona, our aim is to position GT not only as an exceptional sapphire supplier to Apple but also as an unparalleled world-class supplier of sapphire material and equipment to a variety of customers.
As part of the deal with Apple, GT halted sales of its sapphire production furnaces in order to focus on building out capacity for Apple, a move that resulted in a drastic reduction in GT’s revenue for the latter half of 2013 and saw the company’s full-year revenue drop to $299 million in 2013 from $733.5 million in 2012.
GT projects that company revenue will remain low during the first half of 2014 as it continues to ramp up production for Apple, with revenue of just $20-30 million for the first quarter. But the company forecasts a massive increase in revenue for the latter half of the year, which should represent 85% of the company’s full-year revenue of $600-800 million. That timing would appear to be in line with an Apple product launch such as an iPhone 6 with sapphire-covered display in the usual September-October timeframe.
The company expects that 2014 will be a transformational year, one in which it builds a sapphire materials business while continuing to invest in the new technologies that will drive its equipment business in 2015 and beyond.
The company expects that revenue and profitability will be back end loaded, with its sapphire materials business ramping as the year progresses, and with improving financial performance during the second half of 2014.
On an annualized basis, during 2014, the company expects revenues to range from $600 million to $800 million, with approximately 15% of total revenues occurring in the first half of the year. The company expects that its sapphire segment will account for more than 80% of total revenue in 2014. The sapphire segment includes the company’s equipment and materials businesses in the LED, industrial and consumer electronics markets.
With sapphire estimated to account for 80% of GT’s revenue for the year and Apple undoubtedly representing the lion’s share of that segment, the deal with Apple could be generating in the range of $400-500 million for GT this year. Looking further ahead, GT sees even more growth with estimates of over $1 billion in total revenue for 2015.
Apple has been looking to rush its new sapphire plant into production this month to “create a critical new sub-component of Apple Products”. Given the number of sapphire furnaces delivered to the facility and on order, the partnership between Apple and GT could be sufficient to produce 100-200 million sapphire-covered iPhone displays per year.
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Grovemade Introduces Walnut and Maple iPhone Cases and Docks [iOS Blog]
Portland, Oregon-based Grovemade today launched a pair of new domestically-sourced woods for its line of iPhone cases and docks. New Walnut and Maple options are available, going along with the Bamboo cases that the company has been making for years.
Grovemade also introduced a new iPhone dock with a three-pound steel base to hold the dock in place and allow one-handed removal and docking of phones. The base is available in black or steel, with Maple, Walnut or Bamboo wooden tops. The company also introduced a Walnut edition of its iPad Air and iPad mini cases.
“The addition of these new domestic woods and the debut of our new website underscores Grovemade’s commitment to innovation, providing our customers with our signature craftsmanship and belief in superior quality,” says Ken Tomita, Grovemade’s co-founder. “These new case, dock, and cover options are just the beginning of the new product lines to be released in the coming months.”
The Grovemade Walnut and Maple iPhone 5/5s cases are available from the company’s website for $99, with the Maple and Walnut iPhone docks also priced at $99. The new Walnut iPad Air and Mini cases are $129 and $109 respectively.
Buyers can use the discount code Walnut+Maple2014 to get 20% off the new collection at Grovemade’s online store.
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Apple Asks EU to Limit Injunctions in Patent Infringement Cases [Mac Blog]
Apple, Samsung and 19 other technology companies sent a letter to the European Union asking for limits on injunctions in patent infringement cases, reports Bloomberg. These limits would be incorporated into the future European Unitary Patent system and Unified Patent Court.
The letter requests that judges in the new EU patent court be given guidance on when to issue an injunction in cases where the validity of a patent is questionable. The guidelines would make it harder for patent holding companies to block the import and sales of devices by filing infringement lawsuits.
“Without this guidance, the potential exists for a court to order an injunction prohibiting the importation and sale of goods even though the patent may ultimately be found invalid.”
These rules would be incorporated into the proposed Unitary Patent system and Unified Patent Court, which establishes one patent system and a single jurisdiction court for all participating European Union member states.
A similar group of technology companies are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to collect legal fees when patent holding companies lose an infringement case. This change in the allocation of fees would cut down on the number of frivolous suits, argues the group.
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AIVAnet 