Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight dev platform lifts off in drone reference
Qualcomm may best be known to smartphone phone fans for their processors powering so many devices. However, the company does get into other areas, sometimes on the back of the same technology powering smartphones. Today they revealed their latest robotics project, the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight development platform. Qualcomm says the technology will enable manufacturers to build consumer class robots and drones, which they showed off with a reference design for a new 4K flying camera.
Hugo Swart, senior director of product management, announced the new platform and demonstrated Snapdragon Flight with a reference drone at the Qualcomm: Accelerating Robotics event. The event was the culmination of an accelerator program Qualcomm put in place to try to help robotics start-up companies.
Qualcomm Research, one of the company’s many divisions, has been building a variety of robots over the years, some flying and some rolling. These started with the Snapdragon Micro Rover that used a smartphone for its brains. The next step after that was the Snapdragon Rover that incorporated computer vision and machine learning for sorting purposes. That robot was expanded to include facial recognition capabilities so it could follow a person. Earlier this year at CES 2015, the Snapdragon Cargo was revealed, a device that added in a “depth-from-stereo” computer vision technique so that the robot could roll up to an object, pick it up, then fly away.
The Snapdragon Flight makes use of a Snapdragon 801 processor, which Qualcomm says is “‘smart’ enough to be the brains of a robot.” Qualcomm added in 4K Ultra HD video capabilities and technologies like computer vision, communication, navigation and real-time flight assistance. Qualcomm says they tried to engineer the drone to “reduce the size, weight, and power consumption leading to longer flight times and additional safety.”
source: Qualcomm
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OnePlus delays invites for the OnePlus 2 worldwide
Just like with the OnePlus 1, OnePlus is still using an invite system in order to buy one of their OnePlus 2’s. They originally promised that an invite would be much easier to get than before, but of course, in typical OnePlus fashion, that isn’t the case.
There was originally a delay just in North America of 2-3 weeks, but OnePlus says that delay will now be for other regions too.
The reasons for the delay are slightly odd. OnePlus list that due to the word of mouth marketing, they have more money to spend on the product. Also, because of this, it makes it easier to ship phones directly to customers. To me, that sounds more like reasons to ship them out sooner and not delay invites, but whatever.
“At OnePlus, we focus on creating the best product, and then letting it spread on its own through word of mouth. Word of mouth is extremely important for OnePlus. This allows us to have a very low marketing overhead, and distribute products direct to consumer in a more efficient manner.”
The second reason why makes much more sense. Their operating system, OxygenOS, is not fully complete and their USB Type-C cables currently suck. They don’t want to start shipping out phones and have everyone complain about them. Basically, the OnePlus 2 is clearly not ready to ship yet, and anyone who may have one is a tester, reporting back their findings.
“While early reviews have been favorable, we still think we can do much better. There is continuous work being done on OxygenOS to improve the overall product experience.” And “In addition, we’ve seen a few cases where the material of the new USB Type-C cable is not holding up to our standards. This is being resolved upstream.”
At the end of the day, if you really want a OnePlus 2, you are going to have to wait a while.
Source: OnePlus
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Tim Cook to Speak at 2015 WSJ.D Conference in October
The Wall Street Journal today revealed that Apple CEO Tim Cook will speak at the WSJ.D conference in October. The conference brings together tech CEOs, founders and pioneers to “explore the most exciting tech opportunities emerging around the world.”
This marks the second consecutive year Cook has spoken at the conference. Last year, Cook commented on an array of topics, including Apple Watch, Apple Pay, the discontinuation of the iPod Classic and more. Last year’s highlights included the revelation that the Apple Watch only needed to be charged daily and that the iPod Classic was discontinued because the Cupertino company couldn’t get the parts any longer.
Earlier today, Re/code also announced that Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey will speak at the Code/Mobile conference, which takes place October 7 – 8 in Half Moon Bay, California.
This year’s WSJ.D conference takes place October 19 – 21 at The Montage in Laguna Beach, California and will also feature CBS CEO Les Moonves, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai and more.
The future of Apple starts with ‘Hey Siri’
“Hey Siri.”
It was a cutesy tag line for the Apple event invitation. The company even pre-loaded its digital assistant with canned answers to questions about what the company was going to unveil. But by the end of the never-ending shindig it became abundantly clear that Siri has become an important part of the entire Apple ecosystem. It’s the UI that begs not to be touched and Apple is going all in with Apple TV, iOS 9, HomeKit and iPhone 6s. But will users stop tapping and start talking?
“Voice has the power to cut through all that noise of platforms and services to get to quickly what you want. Who loves hunting and pecking a multi-tiered menu?” Jared Benson, co-founder and executive creative director of interface design company Punchcut, told Engadget. Benson would know; he’s worked with Toyota on implementing a next-generation voice-activated system and partnered with “a major technology company” on voice control home automation. While we’ve come to expect devices like new cars to support voice controls, for many the first time they interacted with a system like this was with Siri.
Siri made its debut at an iPhone event in 2011. The digital assistant answered questions about the weather and sports, gave directions and queried Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha. If you weren’t embarrassed to talk to your phone in public and it understood what you were saying, it was sort of useful. It ended up being more of a party trick seeing if Siri could answer a question or unravel your localized accent than a feature people actually used.
Siri did get better over the years at understanding folks while adding a few more tasks it could handle. But it was still relegated to primarily answering questions and giving you directions. Then HomeKit appeared.
Apple’s answer to the IoT fragmentation mess relies heavily on Siri to make your home easier to manage. Any device that supports HomeKit can be controlled via the virtual assistant. Plus, in your house you’re less likely to feel self-conscious talking to your phone. It also helps that the iPhone 6s supports voice activation of Siri without it being plugged in. Just say, “Hey Siri,” to launch and you can start turning lights on and off from across the room.
For any developers wanting to be part of HomeKit or CarPlay, Siri is now an incredibly important platform. Both of those systems are almost entirely run by voice commands. While the Siri integration on tvOS is currently limited to partners like Hulu, Netflix and HBO, there’s the potential for developers to create new and interesting ways for users to interact with apps that include voice. If you’re a developer, you should be thinking about Siri as a platform, because your competitors are.
CarPlay vehicles are making their way to showrooms and you can finally buy HomeKit devices. But it’s been slow going and it’ll be a while before a lot of people are driving those cars and using Apple’s system in their homes. For now, the company went ahead and launched its own voice-powered in-home device: the new Apple TV.
Like the Amazon Fire TV, you access the new Apple TV’s voice feature via the remote. Just press and hold the mic button to enable Siri and tell it what you want to watch. It’s the end of using the remote to navigate the onscreen keyboard. But it’s about more than just searching Netflix; ask, “What did he say?” and Siri will back up and replay the last 10 seconds with closed captioning on. It’s like having a friend sitting next to you (one that isn’t completely useless).
Nuance has spent the past 10 years enabling voice control in devices. Recently it’s noticed that its fastest-growing segment is the TV. “Using text on your TV is painful,” said Mike Thompson, executive vice president of Nuance’s mobile division. He notes that it’s much easier to say, “Movies by Harrison Ford,” than to try to type into the horrible onscreen keyboard.
As for a world controlled by your voice, it’s already here according to Thompson: “I think that’s upon us now actually. The phenomenon of voice-enabled capabilities and accuracy and its usefulness has crossed the threshold of mainstream popularity.”
Apple isn’t breaking any new ground with Siri. All the companies in this space are feeding off each other. After Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that apps are the future of TV, a representative from Amazon told Engadget, “We’ve thought that apps and voice are the future of TV since we launched Amazon Fire TV 16 months ago. We’re flattered that Apple agrees with us.”
Still when people think voice-controlled assistant, they think Siri. That marketing gives Apple a leg up and helps train users. It also pushes other companies, according to Punchcut’s Benson. “I certainly think Apple has done a really good job bringing people up to a certain standard,” he said. “Once Apple has come out with a technology, that sets the bar for others.”
And voice isn’t going away. Nuance told Engadget that its mobile cloud service processed 4.07 billion voice transactions in Q2 2015. That’s a roughly 49 percent increase from the 2.74 billion transactions during the same period in 2014.
So get ready for a future where you’re spending more time talking to Siri. Apple’s actual voice-assistant roadmap (in typical Apple fashion) is a bit of a mystery. But in the home, expect the voice assistant to take on an increasingly larger role as HomeKit and the Apple TV evolve and gain traction. CarPlay vehicles will become increasingly available to new car buyers and the iPhone will still tell you what the weather is outside.
Your voice is the new user interface and Apple is building a platform just to hear what you have to say. It was a cute tag line for an invitation, but the future of Apple could very well be distilled to the two words that will be uttered by the owners of almost all future Apple products: “Hey Siri.”
Filed under:
Misc, Household, Peripherals, Internet, Software, Mobile, Apple
Tags: apple, CarPlay, HomeKit, iOS9, mobilepostcross, Siri
DJI unveils world’s first commercial aerial Micro Four Thirds camera
Drone manufacturer DJI has announced its response to news that GoPro is working on a UAV. DJI announced two new cameras for its own flagship drone, the Inspire 1. Dubbed the Zenmuse X5 and X5R, respectively, these cameras are the only aerial cameras on the market featuring Micro Four Thirds sensors. Each camera captures 16MP stills and up to 4K/30fps video. Additionally, the X5R is capable of capturing images and video (including lossless 4K CinemaDNG) on either an onboard microSD card or a 512GB SSD mounted just above the gimbal. What’s more, each 0.75-pound camera body accommodates four interchangeable lenses (ranging from 12mm to 17mm). The pilot can even adjust the aperture and focus of the lenses from the ground while the Inspire 1 is in flight.
Granted, other UAV platforms like the eye3 and MikroKopter hexadrones the have been able to handle interchangeable lens cameras for a while. However none of them offer as many flight modes and control mechanisms as the Inspire 1. “In order to achieve the quality of video produced by Zenmuse X5 and X5R, pilots used to have to spend many thousands of dollars for large, complicated aerial equipment,” Frank Wang, DJI CEO and founder, said in a statement. “Now, pilots can simply mount the Zenmuse X5 series cameras to their Inspire 1, put on their props, get up in the air and have full control of their shot while in flight. This saves valuable time on film sets and makes high-quality imaging for industrial applications smaller, lighter and easier to manage.”
Don’t expect these cameras to come cheap though. The X5 body and a 15mm f/1.7 ASPH lens will set you back $4,499 (if you pre-order) when it begins shipping at the end of the month. The X5R is expected to hit store shelves by the end of the year and will cost $7,999.
Filed under:
Cameras
Tags: aerial, Digital single-lens reflex camera, DJI, drones, DSLR, GoPro, Inspire, Inspire-1, micro four thirds, MicroSD, MP3, photography, uav, x5, X5R, Zenmuse
Rovio side steps Angry Birds with new Nibblers! matching game
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When you think about Rovio Entertainment your brain probably defaults to any number of Angry Birds titles that they have been behind over the years. The company hasn’t branched out much over the years, there have been a couple, but the main focus has always seemed to be bird themed variants of pop culture classics. The legacy has worked for them by landing tv shows, toys and all sorts of other Angry Bird themed items. Yesterday they launched a new game to the Play Store that wasn’t bird or pig related though, Nibblers!.
Nibblers! is a match 3 style puzzle game that requires you to move a bit beyond and match 4 instead. It utilizes colorful fruit as your game pieces and a variety of characters, called Nibblers, that each have their own special ability to help you clear the board. As you progress through the 200+ levels you will be faced with some challenges, like taking out evil lizards that are there to take you down. You will also find yourself matching for your life against some boss type battles.
Nibblers! is a social game too. Well, as long as you have Facebook still and want to connect your account.
Nibblers! is a free title, with some in-app purchased mixed in to give you a leg up if you feel like spending some of those hard-earned Google Opinion Rewards credits. Give it a go and let us know if Rovio knocked it our of the park, or forgot to even step up to the plate.
Pick up Nibblers! in the Play Store.
The post Rovio side steps Angry Birds with new Nibblers! matching game appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Notifications, alarms and more with the IF notification tool – Android customization
Last week we kind of went overboard on our Android customization, building a personal favorite project of mine, using IF, Pushbullet, Tasker and Zooper Widget all together in one. The project was pretty simple, we were creating our own custom widget-based notification to remind us when the latest Android Authority Podcast goes live.
This week we will tame things down a little, our goal last week was to use all of the apps, no matter how complicated it got. This time, we want to use IF, but keep it simple, looking at just one of its output functions, the notification.
Before we begin
IF in the Play StoreYou will need a copy of IF installed on your modern Android device to follow along this week. We were able to use the free web interface for last week, no worries, the Android app of IF by IFTTT is also free in the Google Play Store.
All of the IF recipes we’ll look at today can be created on the web interface, but you will need the app installed on your Android device to actually receive the notifications.
IF notifications
If you recall how IF works, you head into it, create a trigger, or ‘If This’ action, then create an output action, or ‘Then That.’ Hence the original name of the service, IFTTT or If This Then That. The triggers for IF are many, run by what they call channels.
Many of your favorite apps and services have IF channels – email, some social media, RSS feeds, dates and times and so much more. More recently, IF integrated right into Android, so that things like a low battery, incoming call or SMS or more than a dozen other things can trigger an IF recipe.
As for output, the ‘then that’ portion of an IF recipe, there is plenty that can be done with nearly the same set of available resources. You can have IF publish to your social media, upload images to the cloud, send you email or SMS, or just have a simple notification pop up.
This is what we will be working with today, a simple IF notification, triggered by a few sample ideas.
Daily reminder notification
While you may not want to rely on this as an alarm clock, IF can be used as an excellent reminder for your regularly scheduled routines. Let’s say, as an example, you take a multi-vitamin in the mornings, but you often just plain forget to take it, IF can be configured to remind you to stay healthy.
Start a new IF recipe.
For This, select Date & Time. Then choose a specific recurring schedule. For our example, we are going to choose Every day at…
Finishing up the trigger, we enter an appropriate time in our morning to receive the reminder, 7:00 AM should work.
Now, for That, select IF Notification.
Enter a relevant message to yourself. Note the place holder CheckTime, it will auto fill with the exact time that the message is sent to you. I’ll leave it to you to imagine when this might be of value.
Hit that continue button.
Review your recipe and click the Finish button when you are ready to move forward.
That is all there is to it, the recipe is live and will fire off the next time your specified time rolls around.
That said, the reason I say that you should not rely on this setup as an alarm clock is that I find the exact timing unreliable. I have a similar recipe that has been up for a while now, it almost always fires anywhere between 3 and 8 minutes late, but never more than 12. See what I mean, it works great for a general task, but it’s not perfect.
Notification of fitness goal
Let’s step it up a notch (pun intended,) having a notification pop up when you reach your goal on your connected fitness tracker or at a certain time of the day if you have not yet reached your goal. I’ll be using a FitBit for today.
Fire up a new IF recipe.
Choose FitBit, or your chosen fitness tracker, if supported.
Now choose the type of trigger you would like. The process, aside from this very option, is exactly the same to receive notification when you reach your goal or to receive a reminder that you have not yet reached your goal for the day.
Choose one of the Daily __ goal achieved options, or choose the Daily goal not achieved by __:__ option. Remember, just repeat this entire process to create extra recipes based on the other options.
If you chose the Daily goal not achieved by __:__ entry, you will be asked to select which goal you are shooting for, then a time to check your status. Watch your time formatting, it is very picky.
Hit Next to continue.
As before, for your That entry, select IF notification.
Fill out the notification message. Remember to hit that science flask icon to see the available place holders, to add value to your message.
Hit next, review things and hit Finish to complete another recipe.
We’re on a roll. If only completing these projects counted toward my fitness goals, I’d be in much better shape.
What’s next
As you see, we’ve created some very simple projects here today. IF can do so much more, connecting to a ton of different resources and triggers from within Android itself. A few other projects using the IF notification you might consider:
Let’s say you want to remotely monitor the battery level of another Android device, create an IF recipe that sends out a SMS or Pushbullet note, or some other message over the internet, to your device in hand.
Maybe you are tracking your battery life, incoming SMS and phone calls on a spreadsheet or calendar, create the IF recipe to collect the info from those triggers and send them to your calendar, spreadsheet and more. Of course, the point of today’s project is the IF notification, which can also be used to display the info of your battery life, SMS or incoming phone call, but that’s a little redundant unless you are, again, tracking a remote device.
Instead of focusing on things that are happening here on your Android device, remember that you can get notifications for many things that happen on the internet as well. I use a number of IF recipes to receive IF notifications when my favorite blogs or social media personalities publish an article, track items on Best Buy and eBay, when email comes in from accounts that I do not sync to my phone, when my team on TabTimes creates posts in WordPress for me to review or when my GE oven turns on. I’m kidding, I don’t have a connected GE oven, but if I did, IF has the tools for it.
Next week
We took a look at one simple action in IF today, the Android notification. I hope that one of the many ideas we threw at you for things to be notified about make up a great Android customization for your needs. Next week we’ll continue with IF, it is very powerful and we want to push it a little harder for your benefit.
Have you already been using IF for notifications of things in your world? Any great ideas or recipes to share?
Latest Twitch update brings push notifications for broadcasters you follow
If Twitch for Android is your go-to game streaming app of choice, there should be a pretty nice update heading your way any minute now. Twitch is being updated to version 4.4 today, which brings support for push notifications for broadcasters you follow, a new landscape chatting option on tablets and a few other new features.
The big news with this update, though, is that you’ll now have the ability to receive push notifications from any broadcasters you follow. To enable this feature, you’ll need to navigate to Settings from within the app, then toggle the Live Notifications switch to on. If you’re a new user, you don’t need to do anything to get push notifications – this feature will already be live when you install the application.
If you happen to change your mind about getting live notifications from a specific channel, you can turn off this feature on a per-channel basis by tapping on the Options cog from within the video player.
But that’s not all! The Twitch app will now allow you to chat with other users in landscape mode if you’re on an Android tablet. Also, the search bar is now visible across devices of all sizes. If you have yet to grab the latest update, Twitch version 4.4 should now be live in the Play Store. Follow the link below for the download!
Former Ashley Madison CTO sues security researcher over hacked emails
While it appears the hackers who stole a treasure trove of data from adultery-focused “dating” site Ashley Madison are done embarrassing the company, that doesn’t mean the fallout from the attack has stopped. The latest drama involves noted security researcher Brian Krebbs, who says he’s facing a libel lawsuit from former Ashley Madison CTO Raja Bhatia. The lawsuit stems from a report Krebs posted in late August in which he claimed that the leaked emails of now-former CEO Noel Biderman revealed a plot to hack Ashley Madison’s competitors. Bhatia apparently took issue with a number of Krebs’ claims in the article and asked for a retraction and correction, which thus far Krebs has been unwilling to do.
The report specifically claims that Bhatia send Biderman an email in late 2012 concerning a security hole he discovered on the site Nerve.com, a site dedicated to a variety of sexual topics. At the time, Nerve.com was working on its own dating service, and Bhatia allegedly said in his emails to Bidderman that he found a way to access and manipulate Nerve.com’s database of users.
According to Krebs report, Bhatia said the following to Biderman over email: “They did a very lousy job building their platform. I got their entire user base. Also, I can turn any non paying user into a paying user, vice versa, compose messages between users, check unread stats, etc.”
In his lawsuit, Bhatia takes issue with the claim that he “hacked” Nerve.com; instead, he says he “noticed a readily apparent inadequacy in the site’s security and remarked on that observation to Mr. Biderman without attempting to bypass its security or to exploit the gap by downloading or manipulating Nerve.com’s database.” Bhatia also says its important to note that at the time he sent Biderman the email, he was not acting as CTO of Ashley Madison; it seems he left the company at some point in 2009.
For now, Krebs says he has no intentions of changing or retracting his story — instead, he published the letter he received from Bhatia’s lawyers “in the likely event that other publications have also received libel and defamation threats from Ashley Madison and/or its current and former employees.” Whether the lawsuit has much merit remains to be seen, but at the very least it sounds like Krebs doesn’t plan on acquiescing to the lawsuit’s demands.
[Image credit: Getty Images / Carl Court]
Source:
Krebs on Security
Tags: ashleymadison, ashleymadisonhack, briankrebs, lawsuit, libel, RajaBhatia
Keurig goes beyond beverages to make you a cup of soup
We all know what happens when you try to make ramen in the coffee pot (hint: it breaks everything) but making soup in a Keurig is now possible. Thanks to a partnership with Campbell’s, the popular coffee-machine company has developed “Fresh-Brewed Soup” kits, which can be made in any Keurig Hot brewer that accepts K-Cup pods.
The kits contain a noodle packet and broth pod; noodles are emptied into a 12-ounce cup while the Keurig machine brews the liquid. Combine the two, let the mixture sit for two to three minutes (to allow the noodles to soften) and it’s lunch time. Fresh-Brewed Soup kits are available for sale on Keurig’s site, on Amazon, and soon in grocery and club stores. Currently there are only two flavors: a chicken broth and noodle mix and a southwest style chicken broth and noodle mix. (Sorry, vegetarians.)
Each kit contains 70 calories or less, is made in the US without artificial colors or flavors and comes in an eight pack for about $12. Keurig does recommend running a “hot water brew cycle without a K-Cup pod before and after making a soup” which makes the process a bit more onerous than, say, microwaving a Cup-a-Soup. The soup pods took more than two years to develop; the original partnership between the companies was announced back in September 2013. No word yet on if the soup pods are as environmentally unfriendly as the coffee pods, which won’t be fully recyclable until 2020.
Source:
Keurig
Tags: CampbellsSoup, keurig, keurig coffeemakers, Keurig Green Mountain
AIVAnet 