eBay is winning at gender diversity in technology
Online auction service eBay has followed in the footsteps of other tech companies and published a diversity report of its own — one that indicates that it’s winning at gender diversity in the workplace. According to the report, 42 percent of its 33,000 employees all over the globe are women. Among those firms that shared their diversity percentages recently, Pinterest comes the closest with a 40 percent female workforce, and then Yahoo whose female employees make up 37 percent of the total. Google and Twitter tie for the last place, as women make up 30 percent of all employees in both companies (though to be fair, Google has projects to encourage more women to take up careers in technology).
More female employees also hold leadership roles at eBay (28 percent) compared to Pinterest (19 percent), most likely because of the company’s Women’s Initiative Network. WIN was formed three years ago to entice more women to stay with the company for the long haul and thereby hold leadership roles in time. In addition to nurturing a healthy male-to-female ratio in the office, eBay also says that it actively recruits from the LGBT community and advocate for the equal rights of same-sex couples. If you’re wondering where Apple’s statistics are, well, it hasn’t published a diversity report yet, though Tim Cook promised to do so back in early July.
Filed under: Misc
Source: eBay, The Wall Street Journal
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Poochi the robot dog can talk with your 3DS (and play rock-paper-scissors)
You can count on Japan to perpetually push the idea of robot pets — and some of us are okay with that. Poochi is the latest effort from Sega Toys, and it can interact with with a downloadable app / mini-game on Nintendo’s 3DS. This particular robot pet series has been on sale in Japan (and the US) for several years, but this is a notable evolution: the blue and pink pet substitutes communicate with 3DSes wirelessly, translating yips and barks into, well, Japanese. It sings (the way a cartoon robot dog should), and can even play rock-paper-scissors with you if you’re feeling particularly lonely. Courtesy of the 3DS connection, there’s several more mini-games and even a Nintendogs-ish interaction screen — which is kind of confusing when the dog’s right in front of you in real life. Poochi has sensors on its back, nose and tail, and there’s handy color indicators on its face to indicate how it’s feeling. The robot (and companion app) launches today, priced at 6,000 yen — around $58. We’ve added the (surprisingly intense) TV ad after the break. We’re still waiting on an alpha-male version.
Filed under: Robots
Source: Nintendo (Japanese)
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New malware can live inside any USB device undetected
It turns out that the stalwart USB thumbstick, or any universal serial bus device, isn’t as trustworthy as once thought. A pair of security researchers has found we need to worry about more than just malware-infected files that are stored portable drives, and now need to guard against hacks built into our geek-stick’s firmware according to Wired. The proof-of-concept malware Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell have created is invisible and installable on a USB device and can do everything from taking over a user’s PC to hijacking the DNS settings for your browser. Or, if it’s installed on a mobile device it can spy on your communications and send them to a remote location, similar to the NSA’s Cottonmouth gadgets. If those don’t worry you, perhaps that the “BadUSB” malware can infect any USB device — including keyboards — and wreak havoc, will. What’s more, a simple reformat isn’t enough to disinfect either, and the solution that Lell and Nohl suggest goes against the core of what many of us are used to doing.
The duo says that the only way around BadUSB is to more or less treat devices like hypodermic needles; trusting only those that have been used within our personal ecosystem and throwing away any that’ve come in contact with other computers. Hopefully you don’t have a ton of untrustworthy Porsche sticks laying around.
[Image credit: Getty Images]
Filed under: Internet, Software
Via: Gizmodo Australia
Source: Wired
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Mars 2020 rover will give us a way to know the red planet better
NASA’s been planning for the Mars 2020 rover for a long time now, back when Curiosity was just making its way to the red planet. Now, the agency has finally chosen seven scientific instruments that’ll be equipped on the new rover out of the 58 proposals submitted by researchers from all over the globe. These instruments were chosen based on their potential to discover how humans can live off the extraterrestrial land by using the natural resources available, and also by their capacity to unearth any danger posed by Martian dust to future human explorers.
One of the scientific payloads is called Mastcam-Z, a camera with panoramic, stereoscopic and zoom abilities. Another called SuperCam can analyze the chemical and mineral composition of rocks, while the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) can determine the elemental composition of surface minerals. The third one called Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) uses UV light to detect organic compounds, while Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) will attempt to produce oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide. Then there’s the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) that will monitor the environmental conditions on the planet, and finally, the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Exploration (RIMFAX) equipped with a ground-penetrating radar that’ll give us a glimpse of what’s beneath the planet’s surface.
All these equipment will cost $130 million to develop and will be the main difference between the upcoming rover and Curiosity, as Mars 2020′s designed to look similar to the latter. Before NASA sends off Mars 2020, though, it still has to go through the InSight mission, which will explore Mars’ interior in 2016. The agency still also has to find a way to keep communication between the planets going if it wants the new rover to be able to transmit data back home.
Filed under: Science
Source: NASA
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Find and review with Yelp [App of the Day]
Similar to Around Me, Yelp allows you to find restaurants, bars, movie theaters and more. But only Yelp will provide you with quality reviews from people like you looking for the best place. Not only can you find reviews for places, you can write the reviews yourself and post photos of your experience there for… Read more »
The post Find and review with Yelp [App of the Day] appeared first on AndroidGuys.
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Wikipedia iOS app relaunches with mobile editing and a new design
Wikipedia recently revamped its app for Android, bringing the ability to edit articles and view random articles in the process. Starting today, those features are also available on iOS, with a new version of the official app available for download in the App Store. In addition to adding new functionality, the Wikimedia Foundation’s overhauled the design, and it promises a better, faster navigation experience. Check it out for yourself via the source link below.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Source: Wikimedia Blog, Wikipedia Mobile (iTunes Preview)
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Apple decal sellers saw a tremendous spike in sales following ‘Stickers’ ad
Your worst fear, confirmed: Engadget‘s staff laptop of choice is the MacBook Air. Other than the massive checks we each personally receive from Apple (har har), it’s our go-to laptop because it’s light, fast, and great for the kind of work we do. It doesn’t hurt that it looks sweet with stickers as well, of course. And after Apple highlighted users’ proclivity for decking out their MBAs in a recent video (seen below), the world of laptop decal sellers was suddenly cast in the spotlight. That spotlight resulted in a lot of new buyers, according to a report on MacStories. Quite a few more, actually. One of the venders MacStories spoke with saw orders increase by 400 percent since the ad aired, and page views jumped from a typical 500 per day all the way up to a peak of some 4,500 last week. If you dug any of those stickers, well, our sister site TUAW searched out links for where to buy those 74 decals. And while a majority of those depicted are easily found online, for those that aren’t, the site scoured Etsy and other places for suitable stand-ins. Now for the hard part: picking out the perfect decal.
Ben Gilbert contributed to this report
Filed under: Laptops, Internet, Apple
Source: MacStories, TUAW
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Samsung Q2 2014 earnings show reduced profits as smartphone demand remains flat
Samsung Q2 2014 earnings were revealed in South Korea on Thursday, and though the company made a net profit 6.25 trillion Korean Won ($6.1 billion), the numbers also represented a stark decline of 19.6 percent from last year’s yield.
In a statement, Samsung said that the weak quarter was an indirect result of stagnant demand for smartphones and tablets, which in turn led to increased marketing expenditures to reduce inventory. “Amid low seasonality, smartphone demand remained flat [quarter-over-quarter] while [it] declined slightly QoQ for Tablet,” a Samsung presentation read (PDF). Samsung is a smartphone giant and it ships endless phones all over the world, and the company wrote that “slower demand for mobile devices also impacted Samsung’s logic chip business or System LSI.”
In addition to the turtle market growth, Samsung also said that the appreciation of Korean Won played a vital part in causing loss to some of the company’s profit. As the Korean won strengthened, Samsung was able to bring back less of the revenue it made off consumers in foreign markets.
Samsung’s second quarter results press release was wary about the future, stating that “the second half of 2014 will remain a challenge,” and “prospects for growth remain unclear as competition over global market share intensifies in the mobile industry.” Still, the company does expect to see growth in consumer electronics next quarter, potentially spurred “by shipments of premium TVs with curved and UHD features.”
Samsung also mentioned that in the second half of the year it would “focus on releasing new premium mobile devices and a new flagship model in the large screen category, along with new mid-to-low-end models with more advanced features and competitive pricing.” Analysts told that Samsung may have to focus on creating more sub-$200 devices, as well as focus on ways to decrease the costs of making its further high-end phones. In its press release, Samsung also promised “a more diverse product portfolio” of wearables in its Galaxy Gear line.
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Motorola Moto G price slashed by INR 2,000 in India
It looks like Motorola is feeling the heat from increasing popularity of Chinese smartphones in India. Consequently, it has reduced the Moto G price by INR 2,000 for a limited time. The 16GB variant is now available on Indian e-commerce site Flipkart for INR 11,999 while the 8GB version can be bought for INR 10,499.
Motorola Moto G has a 4.5-inch HD IPS display, 1.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 chipset, 1GB of RAM and either 8GB or 16GB of internal storage space. There is a 5MP rear-facing primary camera and a 1.3MP front-facing secondary camera. The device offers Android KitKat and solid battery life, thanks to its 2,070mAh battery. Motorola has also promised Android L update for the Moto G.
Although Motorola had been running exchange offers for Moto X and Moto G devices for quite some time, it is the first instance where they had to drop the price. So far, Motorola has sold over a million Moto G smartphones in India in partnership with Flipkart.
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The post Motorola Moto G price slashed by INR 2,000 in India appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
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Sony’s new Action Cam arrives stateside with SteadyShot and more for $200
Sony’s stable of action cams just got a new option for thrill seekers in the US. The HDR-AS20 joins the outfit’s HDR-AS100V and HDR-AS30V in capturing daring feats of whatever you fancy. This new model packs the company’s SteadyShot image stabilization tech, Zeiss Tessar lens and 170-degree wide-angle views. As you might expect, built-in WiFi allows for control via iOS or Android device in additon to Sony’s own live-view remote. In terms of detailed specs, there’s a 16.8-megapixel Exmor R CMOS sensor capable of 1080/60p, 1080/30p and 720/30p footage and 11.9-megapixel stills. The usual USB, HDMI and microphone jacks are included, along with an on-board memory card slot for storage. As with previous releases, a waterproof case outfits the HDR-AS20 for expeditions at sea and a smattering of mounts can position the unit for the best footage — up to 130 minutes between charges. Looking to take the plunge? $200 allows you to do just that when the compact gadget hits shelves in August.
Source: Sony
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AIVAnet 