Starship’s self-driving robots to deliver Just Eat orders in London
In the coming weeks, six-wheeled robots developed by Starship Technologies will hit the streets of London to help deliver meals ordered from two of the UK’s biggest food delivery startups. The company, created by two of the founders of Skype, announced today that its autonomous vehicles will be utilised by Just Eat and Pronto across the capital. Tests will also be carried out in Düsseldorf, Bern and Hamburg by German delivery specialist Hermes and retail giant the Metro Group (owner of Makro).
The self-driving robots have already journeyed over 5,000 miles in tests across Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Glastonbury. The company says they have “met over 400,000 people without a single accident.”
When they’re deployed by Just Eat and Pronto, the 4mph robots will operate as a “last-mile” solution, delivering food to customers within a 2-3 mile radius with help from its on-board GPS system and various sensors. When a robot arrives at its destination, customers simply need to type in a code that has been sent to them via the mobile app to open the lid and collect their food.
“By launching partnerships with major companies we will enter the next phase in our development,” says Ahti Heinla, co-founder, CEO and CTO of Starship Technologies. “While Starship has been testing the robots in 12 countries in the last nine months, we will now develop know-how on running real robotic delivery services.”
Starship says that once it has begun its test programs in Europe — which includes trials at its R&D base in Tallinn, Estonia — it will expand to several other European cities and also make its way across the Atlantic to begin testing in the US. The company expects to announce US partnerships in the very near future.
Via: Sky News
Source: Starship Technologies
NASA’s scientific balloon test flight sets duration record
NASA’s humongous scientific balloon didn’t quite hit the agency’s ultimate goal, but it still set a flight duration record after flying for 46 days, 20 hours and 19 minutes. The agency launched the 18.8-million-cubic-foot super pressure balloon (SPB) on May 16th to test how tough it is and to see if it can carry a scientific payload with no issues. Clearly, the test flight was a success: the agency’s Balloon Program Office chief Debbie Fairbrother says it’s “far and away the longest mid-latitude flight of a NASA heavy-lift balloon to date.”
Fairbrother and her team were originally hoping that the flight would last for over a hundred days. However, they were forced to haul the balloon back to Earth after noticing some big altitude variations over the last few weeks. It was flying at 110,000 feet during daytime and was dropping to as low as 70,000 feet at night. While the program officials aren’t sure just yet, the altitude variations could have been a result of the balloon losing some helium while moving through a severe storm. Whatever the reason is, they’re applying everything they’ve learned from this flight to the next one in an effort to make it last for over a hundred days.
The balloon, by the way, was carrying a spectrometer and imager instrument from the University of California, Berkeley. It detected a gamma ray burst, which is commonly associated with supernovas and the formation of black holes, while flying through the air on May 30th. John Pullen, a VP at NASA’s project partner Orbital ATK, says “[t]his mission marked the most rigorous test yet of a super pressure balloon.” He added that “[a]ll of these accomplishments point to future growth for NASA’s scientific balloon program, which continues to offer reliable and affordable options for exploring the universe.”
Source: NASA
CloudPlayer now lets you take your playlists everywhere
Ever wanted to take your favorite playlists with you on the go but didn’t want to go to the trouble of creating them across multiple services? Now you can with doubleTwist’s CloudPlayer, which is now introducing special cloud playlists.
Cloud playlists will allow you to pull songs from multiple sources like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox to create mixes that you can take with you from place to place. You can also integrate songs already on your device. CloudPlayer works with these services to create setlists for you to enjoy no matter where you have your favorite tunes stored.
Anyone who checks out CloudPlayer can utilize this new feature, even if they don’t use the premium version of the app. You can also grab it today just in time for that summer road trip you’ve been meaning to go on as it hits the Play Store. You might spend more time curating the movie you want to add than actually getting it together.
Never forget about another paid subscription with these trackers – CNET
Taylor Martin/CNET
The idea of a subscription is nothing new. People have subscribed to newspapers and magazines for decades. And now, millions of people sign up for subscriptions for all sorts of digital and physical goods — monthly boxes with themed surprises, video or music streaming services, cloud storage, etc.
In most cases, the subscription model is one that is mutually beneficial for businesses and consumers. For the most part, it makes recurring revenue predictable for businesses, and services become more convenient and affordable for end users. That said, the benefits are skewed in favor of the businesses for one reason: they’re just as easy to sign up for as they are to forget about.
Fortunately, if you have the tendency to sign up for new subscriptions and constantly forget to cancel when you no longer need or want them, you have options. There is a growing number of applications and services specifically designed to help you track and manage subscription services and recurring bills.
Truebill
Taylor Martin/CNET
The first subscription manager I came across was Truebill, a web-based service that requires a bit of trust, as you need to link your bank accounts and credit cards to your account for it to work. It uses the Plaid API, meaning your banking or credit card credentials are never stored.
After you’ve added your accounts, Truebill will scan them for recurring transactions, all of which will be sorted into three different categories: Subscriptions, Bills & Utilities and Other Recurring Payments. You can manually change which category a recurring bill falls under or remove a subscription from the list, but you cannot manually add subscriptions if Truebill doesn’t automatically detect them.
For the most part, it found and properly categorized most of my subscriptions without a hitch.
Trim
Taylor Martin/CNET
Trim is a lot like Truebill in that you must create an account and add your bank accounts and credit cards for it to work.
However, Trim is a little more transparent with its security — it uses the same Plaid API to connect your bank account, but it also boasts the same 256-bit encryption used by leading financial technology firms. Also, if you don’t feel comfortable adding your bank accounts or credit cards, you can email the statements to bills@asktrim.com which, if you ask me, seems a bit more risky.
What sets Trim apart from Truebill is mobile access. While there is no application, you can setup text notifications so that you are notified every time it’s payday, you pay an overdraft or late fee and are charged over a set amount.
With the text alerts, you can also respond with specific commands for checking account balance, recent transactions and more. You can also text to cancel certain subscriptions through Trim, though some cancellations come at a cost of $6.00 (£4.61 or AU$8.04).
SubscriptMe
Taylor Martin/CNET
SubscriptMe is a mobile app for iOS. And instead of scanning your bank accounts and credit cards for recurring transactions, SubscriptMe uses Slice to scan your email inboxes for transaction receipts.
In the time I’ve used SubscriptMe, I’ve found that it doesn’t seem nearly as accurate as those with access to your bank. However, you can add subscriptions manually or from a list of popular services if they’re not automatically detected — something you can’t do with Truebill or Trim.
You can also edit the amounts of each subscription if they’re incorrectly input with an inbox scan, which is also something you won’t find with the aforementioned sites. Sadly, you’ll have to sift through categories to find specific subscription services, as there is oddly no search function.
Within the app, you are given a visual overview of all your subscriptions, divided into different categories, such as music, business services, cloud storage, etc. You can also view and enable reminders for upcoming bills.
SubscriptMe is easily the most flexible and fully-featured subscription manager of these four.
Bobby
Taylor Martin/CNET
My most recent discovery, however, is Bobby (previously called Billy). It’s an iOS application that allows you to track up to four subscriptions for free, making it the only paid option out of these four. After the fourth subscription, you’re met with an in-app purchase of $0.99 (£0.79 or AU$0.99) to unlock the ability to add unlimited subscriptions to your account.
Adding each subscription sounds like a chore, but Bobby has a very long (and searchable) list of popular services that allow you to quickly add the brunt of your subscriptions. Even additions you will need to add manually will only take a few seconds each, so long as you know how much they cost you each billing cycle.
Despite not having import features or notifications, Bobby is my go-to subscription tracker of them all, solely for its simplicity. It’s a very quick and easy way to look at what you’re paying monthly for subscription services, which is really all I need — a visual reminder of all the unnecessary things I’m throwing money at every month.
How to tell if your Android phone has the Hummingbad malware – CNET
Bad news: a malicious app has taken hold of about 10 million Android phones around the world, and it’s creepy. Calling it HummingBad, researchers at Check Point say the software can take root in your phone, collecting your personal data and making it look like you’ve clicked on ads that you haven’t.
If you’re worried it might be on your phone, there are steps you can take. You can give your phone a check-up and likely find out if HummingBad is tracking your phone use and selling your information to the highest bidder.
You can also get it off your phone, even if the solution is only a few steps removed from “kill it with fire.” Best of all, you can make a change to prevent this situation from repeating itself in the future.
How to find out if your phone has HummingBad
We live in an age of malicious mobile apps, and cybersecurity companies have taken note. They’ve produced apps that can detect bad actors on your phone and flag them for you. It works a little like antivirus software on your computer. What’s more, some of these services can tell just by what an app does that it’s up to no good.
You have a range of options when it comes to this protective phone software, from Check Point’s own Zone Alarm to apps created by Lookout, AVG and Avast.
The tools for catching HummingBad on mobile phones are now public information, so any service worth its salt will be able to detect the app running on your phone.
How to kill HummingBad
If you find you’re the owner of one of the 10 million infected phones (only 288,800 of which are in the US) well, that’s bad. You can get rid of it, but you’re not going to like the approach: factory reset.
You could painstakingly remove it, said Dan Wiley, head of incident response at Check Point, if you’re a cybersecurity black-belt with a specialty in malicious mobile apps. But if you have those skills, you probably haven’t read this far.
So backup your files and contacts, write down your favorite apps, and then reset your phone.
How to prevent this from happening again
If you’re now looking at the generic wallpaper on your freshly reset phone, probably the last thing you want is a lecture. But Wiley has some advice you just might heed to keep this bad dream from becoming a recurring nightmare.
“The biggest thing I could say is, don’t download apps from untrusted stores,” Wiley said. Most people in the US primarily buy their Android apps from the Google Play store, but in other countries, it’s more common to chance it by installing apps from other sources. These don’t have the same guarantees that apps that have gone through the Google vetting process come with, and can be shady.
That’s not enough to prevent this from ever happening again — hackers are clever like that — but it’s a good start.
JBL Clip 2 review – CNET
The Good The JBL Clip 2 Bluetooth speaker is a hockey-puck-size speaker with a built-in lithium ion rechargeable battery that offers decent sound for its size, improved battery life (eight hours), and is fully waterproof. It also has an integrated line-in cable that stows away in the bottom of the device, as well as speakerphone capabilities.
The Bad It doesn’t handle big bass well and distorts at higher volumes; should cost a little less.
The Bottom Line If it’s a tiny wireless speaker you’re after, the JBL Clip 2 is an appealing choice with some small but significant improvements over its predecessors.
JBL’s Clip speakers have been among our favorite micro Bluetooth speakers, and the new Clip 2, which comes in five color options and costs $60 (£50, AU$80), is also a winner.
The Clip 2 has couple of notable changes from its predecessor. For starters, it’s fully waterproof. It also comes equipped with a real metal carabiner instead the plastic “clip” mechanism found on the Clip and Clip+. And finally, battery life has been improved to eight hours from five.
Like those earlier models, this one has a nifty integrated audio cable for devices that don’t support Bluetooth, and there’s a built-in speakerphone that works reasonably well.
The fully waterproof speaker floats for a short period before sinking.
David Carnoy/CNET
As you can see from our video, the speaker initially floats when you put in water. But eventually it will sink. I gently put it in a pool and it played for about 10 seconds and then cut out as it dipped a little below the surface. It’s rated to be submerged in four feet of water for 30 minutes. But drop it in a deep lake or ocean and you’ll want to rescue it pretty quickly or you won’t see it again.
On the sound front, I didn’t notice a significant improvement, but the speaker still sounds relatively impressive for its tiny size. There’s some bass, just not a lot of it, and the speaker will distort at higher volumes with certain bass-heavy tracks, such as the American Authors’ “Best Day of My Life” (I tested this speaker with some of the same music as the Clip+). It’s strongest in the midrange, and it does best with acoustic music and speech.
Coin-sized device could lead to personalized cancer therapy
A form of cancer therapy that uses electric fields to stop malignant cells from spreading remains controversial, because it’s unclear how effective and safe it truly is. This coin-sized device developed by MIT’s research center in Singapore, however, could help scientists study its effects more closely. What’s more, it could eventually be used to personalize the treatment for each individual. Medical experts simply have to inject a mixture of hydrogels, healthy cells and different types of cancer cells taken directly from a patient into the device before subjecting it to electric fields at different frequencies. By doing so, they’ll be able to pinpoint the most effective electric field frequency to use to treat that particular patient.
“For personalized medicine, you can test if a recipe works for a specific person” says team member Giulia Adriani. “In three days, you can have an answer. And for many cancer patients who are dying of metastasis, time is everything.” That device is young, however, and it’ll most likely take a while before it’s used to personalize treatments for cancer patients.
The therapy is based on scientists’ findings that electric fields (at the right frequency) attack only the molecules that cause cancer cells to divide rapidly and grow into tumors. As team member Andrea Pavesi explained, “By tweaking the intensity and frequency, you can have an effect only on the cancer cells, leaving the other type of cells unaltered, without destroying them. That’s the key concept.”
The team proved that during their tests using the microfluidic device: the cancer cell samples they left untouched began to spread within a couple of days. However, the samples they subjected to three days of electric field stimulation didn’t spread, and the healthy cells weren’t affected. While personalized medicine is ultimate goal, the researchers believe their creation could help other scientists speed up the process of going from lab to animal and human testing. They can use the device to test thousands of variables — electric fields at various intensities and frequencies on different cancer cell types — after all. When they narrow it down to a smaller number, they can then move on to in vivo testing.
Source: MIT
‘Pokémon Go’ rolls out on Android and iOS
With all the news surrounding Pokémon Go’s beta test and wearable, you’d be forgiven for thinking the full game was already out. Until recently, it wasn’t, but that’s changing if you live in the United States and have an Android device, as spotted by 9to5 Google. Rocking a handset designed in Cupertino? Well, only iPhone owners in Australia have access at the moment so a measure of patience is in order.
The game that brings Pokémon collecting into the real world via developer Niantic Labs’ augmented reality and GPS tech has been gestating for quite a bit. The intent, Niantic CEP John Hanke told us back in June, is to make you feel like you’re venturing out into the world and capturing the pocket monsters for yourself. “You can live the story of being a Pokemon trainer,” he said. Now it’s time to discover how quickly can you catch ’em all.
Via: 9to5 Google
Source: iTunes (Australia), Google Play
‘Pokemon GO’ Begins Rolling Out in the App Store
Nintendo, The Pokemon Company and Niantic’s augmented reality game Pokemon GO is rolling out in the App Store now. The game is available in New Zealand, Australia and is propagating through the App Store around the world and in the U.S.
The game uses augmented reality and real-world maps to allow users to venture into the real world to look for Pokemon to capture. Once collected, Pokemon can be leveled up, traded and used for battle. They can also be assigned to defend Gyms from other players. Gyms, like Pokemon, can be found by wandering out into the real world.
When a player is wandering through their neighborhood and a Pokemon is nearby, the game will send the player a notification. Certain Pokemon and items are only available in select locations. For instance, water Pokemon are available near bodies of water while certain PokeBalls are located near museums and other points of interest.
Players can also purchase an optional accessory called Pokemon GO Plus, a wrist-worn device that syncs with the game and alerts users to events happening in the game within their physical vicinity, like the appearance of a new Pokemon.
Our sister site TouchArcade shared some thoughts on the app compared to its beefier, handheld cousins on Nintendo DS.
While the feedback from the beta hasn’t been entirely positive, and it’s questionable whether the game will live up to the hidden complexity of the Nintendo handheld titles, Pokemon GO will certainly fill a void for anyone looking for critter catching action on their smartphone.
Pokemon GO is Nintendo’s second game for iOS after Miitomo. Later this year, the company will launch two more games based on its Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing franchises.
Pokemon GO is available in the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Tag: Nintendo
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