Pebble brings text replies to iOS users on Verizon

Back in November, Pebble unveiled a Text Reply feature for iOS, finally letting iPhone users respond to incoming text messages on their Pebble smartwatch with a voice note or a canned text response (Custom messages were enabled in February). Unfortunately, the feature was only available for those on AT&T. Now, however, iPhone users on Verizon can enjoy the same benefit as well, thanks to a new Version 3.11 update. The Text Reply feature is available for all Pebble watches, though voice reply is restricted to just the Time models.

The update brings a number of other improvements as well. Sleep-tracking now promises to be more accurate, with added support for daytime naps that are longer than an hour. There’s also a new snooze feature that’ll bring up timeline alerts a little closer to the start time of an event. Those aforementioned Time-series smartwatches will also get more vibration patterns to choose from.

Last but not least, the Pebble app itself is getting a name change. The “Pebble Time” app is now “Pebble” while the old Pebble app will now be “Pebble OLD VERSION.” According to the company, this is to indicate that all Pebble smartwatches will be able to run firmware 3.0 and up, not just the latest Time models. To get the latest update, head on over to the Google Play or the Apple App Store; it should be there starting today.

Outlook Premium gives you custom email addresses for $3.99 per month

News of a planned premium version of Microsoft’s Outlook email platform broke a couple of months back, but at the time it was merely described as a pilot program. Thanks to a landing page discovered by Paul Thurrott, we know now Microsoft’s subscription-based service will cost users $3.99 per month. For the price, Outlook.com Premium will give users an ad-free inbox, better calendar sharing and the ability to choose up to five custom email address domains. So if you’re a fan of Outlook, but not so down with an outlook.com or hotmail.com email address, this could cure what ails you.

Microsoft’s making the first year of the service, which is invite-only for now (you can sign-up here), free for users. Though, it’s worth noting that any personalized email domains you create will not be automatically be renewed along with your Premium or Office 365 subscription. To maintain those addresses after that trial period, you’ll have to visit GoDaddy.com, Microsoft’s official partner for Outlook Premium.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Thurrott

Court awards $20 million in YouTube channel dispute

YouTube channels can be tremendous things when everything goes according to plan, but things can get really, truly ugly when their creators disagree with each other. Brandon Keating and David “Ty” Moss have won both a $20 million award and controlling interest in a YouTube channel (VideoGames) after suing their former partners in the project, Brian Martin and Marko Princip. Allegedly, Martin and Princip committed fraud by reneging on a 2012 agreement that gave Keating and Moss partial control over and revenue from VideoGames’ videos. The defendants not only avoided making payments, according to the lawsuit, but kept the plaintiffs entirely out of the loop — at one point, Princip even handed control of the channel to a child without telling Keating or Moss what happened.

The lawsuit is unsurprisingly one-sided and should be taken with a grain of salt, but neither of the defendants have sterling online reputations. Princip has seen multiple channels banned for violating YouTube’s guidelines, and appears to have stopped producing for the site altogether. Martin, meanwhile, has been accused of paying for bots (to frame critics for cheating on video views) and creating channels after getting the boot.

One thing’s for sure: as YouTube has grown to include more professionally produced content, it’s also inheriting the bitter legal action that’s all too common in conventional media. There’s enough money at stake (VideoGames has over 3.3 million subscribers as of this post) that producers can get into fights over sums of money that would have been unthinkable several years ago.

Source: PacerMonitor, Victor Vital (Twitter)

Nest kills integration with Revolv’s smart devices

Google-owned Nest has announced that it will shut down all support for the Revolv smart home hub in May and many customers are up in arms over the news. That’s because, come middle of next month, Revolv’s $300 smart hubs will stop functioning completely. It’s not just that their API will no longer operate, the physical devices themselves will brick, according to a report from Business Insider.

Back in 2014, just nine months after Google purchased Nest, Nest itself bought out smart home hub maker Revolv in an acqui-hire deal. That is, they bought Revolv more for their employees than their products. The Revolv team was assigned to work on the “Works with Nest” API and it appears that they simply can no longer swing supporting the Revolv hub and developing the API at the same time. What’s more, Nest immediately stopped selling Revolv products as soon as it acquired the smaller company.

“We’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making,” Revolv founders Tim Enwall and Mike Soucie wrote on the company’s website. “Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.”

Nest has confirmed the shutdown. “Revolv was a great first step toward the connected home, but we believe that Works with Nest is a better solution and are allocating resources toward that program,” Nest rep Ivy Choi told Engadget. There’s no word on precisely how many customers will be affected by the shutdown, though a 2014 report from Re/Code suggests that only a “relatively small” number of people even bothered to download the Revolv app in the first place.

Via: Business Insider

Source: Revolv

Toyota’s data-focused company aims to make cars smarter

A few weeks ago, Ford announced its Smart Mobility subsidiary that will focus on autonomous vehicles, in-car tech and more. Today, Toyota made a similar move with Toyota Connected, Inc. The new data-driven arm has a pretty vague mission for now, described as “a data science hub for Toyota’s global operations.” What does that mean exactly? Well, Toyota Connected will expand the company’s partnership with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud tech to make the connected driving experience smarter. To put it another way, the automaker plans to develop “predictive, contextual, and intuitive services” that aim to making the technology you use while driving less intrusive.

In addition to those new services, Toyota’s new company will also provide data analytics to other companies and governments to boost their own product development. On top of its own in-car projects, the Texas-based subsidiary will also tackle home/IoT connectivity, safety features, smart city integration and more. Again, details are pretty scarce, but Toyota did offer a few broad examples of what to expect. Toyota Connected will be tasked with things like developing a navigation system that learns your habits, auto insurance pricing that responds to your driving patterns and connected vehicle systems that share info on road conditions and traffic in real time.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology,” said Zack Hicks, newly appointed CEO of Toyota Connected. “It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity.”

Toyota also made big moves in the last few months in regards to autonomous vehicles and robotics as the future of driving continues to shift. While the company likely already has some items in the works, it will still have to catch up to other automakers in the services department. Ford, as an example, already has GoPass, GoDrive and FordPass to tackle parking, ride sharing, maintenance and more.

Via: Roadshow

Source: Toyota

Google Play apps are getting more unified logo designs

The new logo and wordmark that Google unveiled last fall marked probably the biggest visual revamp in the company’s history, and now Google Play’s logos are getting a bit of a facelift. The logos for Google Play and the Play Store have been tweaked slightly, but the rest of the icons for Play stores and services (like movies / TV, music, books and games) all have been radically redesigned. Now, every icon has a silhouette of the “play” button as well as a visual indicator of the media type in question.
It looks like Google Play Music is getting the biggest change — the headphones that have been closely tied to the service since it launched way back in 2011 are gone, replaced by a simple music note inside of the service’s trademark orange color. While these new logos make it a little harder to see exactly which service is represented by each, the “play” badge in the background definitely ties the family of apps together. Google says you’ll start seeing these new icons across various apps and on the web “in the coming weeks.”

Source: Official Android Blog

The internet of ratings: How makers became hip enough for reality TV

Technology wasn’t always hip, and neither was Intel. The company, known for most of its 48-year history as the leader in PC chips, has in recent years branched out into more cutting-edge areas. That includes mobile, drones, robots and an assortment of wearables running the gamut from a high-tech paintball helmet to an augmented-reality hard hat.

Now, in a sign of the times, Intel is joining forces with Mark Burnett, the man behind Survivor, Celebrity Apprentice and The Voice, to bring you a reality show about inventors. America’s Greatest Makers, which premieres April 5th on TBS, follows 24 teams competing for a $1 million prize. Though the show follows a similar format as other reality contests, complete with auditions (pitches), guest judges and elimination rounds, the panelists are generally friendlier. Think: the NBA’s Kenny Smith and celebrity dealmaker Carol Roth, not a Simon Cowell or Gordon Ramsay.

As for the projects themselves, the entries are as diverse as a Bluetooth toothbrush and smart dog collar, and some are further along in the development process. The one thing they have in common: They all use Intel’s Curie module, a button-sized computer whose small size allows it to fit inside various wearables and household objects. If it wasn’t already clear, Intel is betting big on the Internet of Things, and is hoping its Curie chips are one day as ubiquitous as its computer processor already are. We caught up with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, also one the show’s judges, to talk about how tinkerers finally found their way to the mainstream, and why smart objects are the next big thing.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

When I started out as a journalist 10 years ago, tech was a niche coverage area, catering mainly to nerds. Today we have a reality show about makers. How did we get here?

That’s a deep question. You could separate that out into two parts. One is: why are more people comfortable with technology and interested in technology today than before? Then, secondly, why the TV show? As things get smarter and smaller and battery life get longer and the technology becomes more complete, they become more user friendly.

I believe that there’s a next generation of this same virtuous circle: this technology is becoming so small and so easy to use and the battery lives are becoming so good that a product like Curie in the hands of almost anybody can start to create things that everyday people will want to use. That’s why when we introduced Curie. We introduced it at CES 2015, and I literally just pulled off the button off my suit coat and said here it is. It was inside my suit button the whole time. It had been measuring my steps and doing some simple things. It was really to exemplify that this is going to put computing, something that was in a personal computer level of computing 10 years ago, in a button on your jacket.

This TV show, then, is to show that there’s all these technologies coming together — 3D printing and the Curie module — that allow everyday people to solve their problems with technology. You don’t have to be a research lab person anymore. You don’t have to be a PhD scientist. You just have to have a desire to go solve a problem, and go get access to the technology.

That was really the inception of the show and why we wanted to do it. We went and got TBS and Mark Burnett and sat them down and showed them all of this. They got really excited as well and said, “Oh my gosh, we see what you see and where things are headed and how the breakthroughs have occurred. This could be really interesting.”

Team Collarator pitch their idea to the judges on the opening episode of America’s Greatest Makers.

The show combines the suspense of any other reality show with themes about entrepreneurship and tech. Tell me more about that meeting of minds and how the show came to be.

I’ll tell you, what happened was Mark Burnett. It was easy for me to sit and explain to somebody what the technology could do; what was going on in the maker community. That there were these people out there already making these inventions every day. If you go to a maker fair, it’s an exciting, innovative space with all kinds of people making these things. My marketing manager knew Mark Burnett and said, “That’s the person you want. You explain that passion to him and that vision. If he gets it, he’ll figure out how to do exactly what you described.”

He’ll figure out how to define what the TV show looks like, what’s the culture of the TV show that we’re going to create. I got to give credit to Mark Burnett. Once he got the vision of what was occurring in this community and this ecosystem, he’s the one who said, “I know how to build a TV show and I’ll get you the right panelists and build the team around this.”

Mark brings this phenomenal team, his depth of knowledge of television and really just the creative genius that allows me to say, “OK, I’ll tell you what Mark. I’m going to trust you 100 percent there. Trust that I’ll bring all the technology and engineering to this. Together this will work.”

Team Grush receive mentoring during TechCamp from Intel’s James Jackson.

In addition to Mark’s experience, you as a viewer probably had spent years watching reality television. What did you want to do differently from other competitions on the air?

I will admit that I do probably watch more reality TV than I care to. One of my favorite shows is Shark Tank. People love that show. I think what we wanted to do was have it be not as win/lose as Shark Tank. In Shark Tank, it’s pass/fail right at the start. We wanted to see the progression of these teams. We want to see people take their products and move them along and allow people to see the engineering that gets done. As you go and look at the follow-on shows, you’ll see some of the teams make phenomenal progress in a week’s time. I was impressed with the level of engineering some of the teams were able to do in just a week.

We wanted a show that showed that progression, that allowed people to grow as they went through the season. I think that was again, Mark’s genius, that people would see that and become endeared with some of those teams: rooting for them to continue to grow their product and to continue to develop. That was a real big part of what we wanted. We wanted it to have an entrepreneurial aspect to it, so we really tried to connect these teams up, give them coaching about not only the technology side, but how were they thinking about the audience they were trying to approach. Who were their customers? What problem were they trying to solve? Did they have that clear? Did they understand how much people would be willing to pay to solve that and how much this was costing them to build?

All of that we wanted to draw out so that people saw how you make a product. Some people wouldn’t in a couple of cases. That was OK, but we didn’t ever want it to be a big negative if they didn’t succeed at the end.

I was thinking as I watched the pilot that a lot of time must have gone into screening contestants. It’s not like American Idol where someone could just show up and start singing.

Yeah. We had well over a thousand applications that came in. There wasn’t an existing TV show and we didn’t run ads or anything. We simply did it at CES and a couple of other tech forums where we knew people would be watching. Then we had a group from Turner and MGM to help us vet them. Could they be on TV and have good behavior on there? [They] Vetted them to make sure they were sound people, and then a group of engineers actually looked at their capabilities and just the technical viability of their invention. Could this be built with today’s technology?

We vetted those down in that methodology, down to the 24 teams that you saw. None of the judges that are on the show, including myself, got to be a part of that vetting process. What you see there, that judging and that first-time experience and observation is real.

So the surprise that we’re seeing on your faces is real.

Yes. None of us saw those devices prior to those people literally walking out there.

How did that feel?

I’ll be honest with you. I’m a detail engineer at heart so it was hard for me to hand over to my team and say, “Sure, go ahead. You make the decisions on what to do,” because I love to see this technology. I love to see what people are inventing. It was hard for me to do. It was fun, though. In the end, I actually told [my colleague], who works for me and has been the lead on all of this, that that was the best decision we made because it truly allowed me to just experience it at the same time and same moment as Kenny and Carol. You got both my emotional response [and] also, my technical response. You got both responses of my left brain and right brain at the same time, which I thought was much better.

Carol Roth and Kevin Pereira put Herddogg through its paces.

I’m curious to how your own background as a maker ties into the show.

I have 34 years as an engineer here at Intel. Almost all but about the last, I don’t know, four or five has been mainly on the manufacturing side; all of our silicon manufacturing. Which, in many ways makes you a maker because you’re producing a million chips a day. When I look at a 3D printer, I look at it as not only what can I build with it, but I understand exactly how that machine works. I could take it apart and put it back together. My interest in making is as much about what other technologies are coming; to make it easy for makers to do things as it is the making itself.

I have my own [3D printer] at home. I have my own CNC machine for milling and making parts. I enjoy the software and how that machine works probably even more than whatever I make with it. My wife wanted a bunch of cabinets so I made a bunch of cabinets at home using the CNC machine. It was, “How does the machine work? How do I program this into the software?” All of that. Then I made the cabinets and I was like, “That was kind of fun, but what could I do to modify this machine?”

What do you think are the biggest steps required in bringing a product to market, and was it important that the contestants be in more or less the same place?

No. If you take a look at where they were when they submitted the thousand applications from what I was told, we got everything from people who just came on screen and talked about what they wanted to build, to people who had drawings of what they wanted to build, to people who had maybe 3D printed versions, but it didn’t function, all the way to people who had semi-functioning systems.

We built a whole program then that once it got taken down to the 24 [teams], we assigned an engineer to each of the teams and they got access to people at UC Berkeley to help with the business side and to think about customers and what’s their target audience. What kind of bill of materials price can they afford against a sales price target. Then we gave them access to an area called Tech Shop which gave them access to all of the tools that they would need, from CNC machines to 3D printers to people who understood how to build circuit boards and things like that.

Team NWTN finessing their idea at TechCamp.

So it’s really about the viability and the ingenuity and less about proven track record.

Yes. We would never do the work for them. If somebody said, “I want to make a robot that can open a door,” we go, “OK. Here’s the things you need to think about and bring us back your design and we’ll tell you what’s good and bad about your design. As you start to build it, you run into problems, let us know what the problems are. We’ll give suggestions, but we always made them do the engineering and the actual work.

Intel seems to be making more of an effort lately to be a part of pop culture, like its collaboration with Lady Gaga at the Grammys. What does this approach mean for the company?

When I sit in front of my board and explain why are we doing this, it’s not marketing. It’s that there’s a revolution going on with the way computing is getting into all of our lives. What you are seeing is us trying to show people that we can basically put a computer into just about everything you do in your life. As a result, we can add value, we can add experience to that event.

Whether it’s something like the Grammys and we use digital technology to put David Bowie’s face on Lady Gaga and build a robotic piano. It’s showing people that computing is infiltrating that space. We did the X Games in Aspen, where we put the same module that we gave all of the makers for America’s Greatest Makers.

What we wanted to show people is that basically computers are going to go into your snowboards over the next year or two. You’re going to be able to go out onto the slopes and know how fast you were going and how many feet you went. If you like to go into the half pipe and do tricks, you can compare and share it with your friends. You can compare it against professionals. People will probably build a software coach that actually gives you suggestions. You should have gone a little faster, you should rotate a little bit more to help you get better at your tricks. All that’s coming. As we go out and do these things, it’s not just a marketing ploy. It’s showing people that these experiences are going to change and that this computing is going to go in there and that it makes it a more enjoyable and fulfilling experience.

Other than ratings, is there anything else that would make you feel that the show was a success?

Mark will probably be the one who looks at the numbers of viewers and be more analytical about was it good or bad. For me, it’ll be more, is the response from the audience that they saw how products get made, that they saw that you can do really amazing technologies now using the available technologies to the average person? If the response from people is, “Wow, this is something I could do too.” And if the response from the people who do it is, “This is a good representation of how we do it.” Then for me, I’ll be very satisfied.

[All photos: Tommy Baynard]

The 3D-printed eggs that could save vultures from extinction

It’s hard to drum up sympathy for vultures. They do, after all, feast on the carcasses of dead (and diseased) animals. But at the International Centre for Birds of Prey in the UK, conservationists are hoping to keep extinction at bay for one African species by 3D printing vulture eggs. The replicas, which are made to simulate the same shape, weight and feel of actual vulture eggs, pack sensors inside (kinda like a Kinder surprise egg, except not at all) to gather data on the complicated incubation process. Wired reports that researchers at the ICBP have already begun testing these faux eggs on captive vultures to cull temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, carbon dioxide, light and rotation data — all transmitted wirelessly — for its captive breeding program.

The effort, while beneficial to the selected African species, could also be extended to help maintain other vulture populations living in different geographic climates, as well as other egg-laying species. The project’s also open source. So if you have a soft spot for vultures (there have to be some of you out there, right?), you can check out the eggduino site for instructions on how to 3D print the smart eggs, build the sensor and do some good.

Source: Wired, Eggduino

Backup MMS: an easy way to save your MMS attachments [Review]

Overview –

Backup MMS allows you to easily save those attachments that you have sent to, or received from, your contacts.

Developer: Devmon

Highlights:

• Works as designed
• Free to download (Pro version $0.99)

Setup –

Setup is a breeze, simply download the app from Google Play and launch the application. The app automatically searches your messages for attachments that it can grab.

Impression –

Backups MMS is not the most intuitive name for this app. While there are a lot of apps that will backup your SMS and MMS messages so that you can install a new ROM or transfer them to a new phone, I have not seen a lot of apps that will actually allow you to easily save the attachments to those messages directly to your internal storage.

Once you have launched the app it automatically searches your MMS messages for all attachments and puts them into three categories for you: Image, Audio, Video. Simply press the floppy button at the bottom right of the screen to save everything to your phone’s storage. Unfortunately, you are not able to specify where you would like to save these files.

The app is limited to backing up all items unless you would like to upgrade to the pro version. This unlocks features like selection of items you would like to backup, renaming of files, removal of ads, and it allows you to save higher quality images (saves them as .PNG, .JPG is the default).

The app also allows you to see statistics about how many items it found and how many of each category were found in your messages.

Likes:

• Does what it sets out to do
• User-friendly GUI

Dislikes:

• More customization would be nice
• No app integration (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.)

Conclusion –

Despite a confusing name, Backup MMS is an app that completes what it sets out to do; backup those attachments in your MMS messages, and with the Pro version only costing $0.99 for those extra features, it’s not a bad price to pay. With the addition of some storage customization and app integration for things like Google Drive or Dropbox this app would be a real winner.

You can now sign up for the BlackBerry Priv Marshmallow beta

As rumored, BlackBerry has announced the Marshmallow beta test for the BlackBerry Priv. You can now sign up to join the program, and the company will accept registrations for two weeks. The first wave will only be available to those who purchased their devices from Amazon, ShopBlackBerry or Carphone Warehouse.

Spaces will be limited, and BlackBerry will begin pushing the beta out in the second week of April. If you want to sign up to test, you can do so at the link below. The program may show as full, but be sure to sign up for the waitlist so that when more spots open next week you may be able to get one.

Sign up for the Marshmallow beta test