The Stlyish Fossil Q Founder Gen 2 smartwatch is 25 percent off on Amazon

Smartwatches tend to turn out differently depending on who manufactures the product. Tech and electronic companies integrate advanced technology into their watches but they can miss the mark when it comes to creating something stylish enough that you want to wear it all day. On the other end of the spectrum, traditional watch companies jump into the smartwatch game and create beautiful pieces, yet they can fall short when it comes to functionality — which is a major reason to buy a smartwatch in the first place.

Fossil, however, tends to balance both sides of the equation pairing stylish looks with all the of technology you expect in a smartwatch, as can be seen in the Fossil Q Founder Gen 2 Touchscreen Two-Tone Gunmetal Stainless Steel Smartwatch, currently discounted 25 percent on Amazon, lowering the price to $236.

More: The Best Smartwatch You Can Buy

We reviewed the Gen 1 Fossil Q Founder in 2016, concluding the watch has high-class style, strong build quality, and an affordable price point, earning it an 8.0 editor’s review. As is to be expected, Fossil placed style above smarts in this watch, but overall we found it, “Performs the basic functions of an Android Wear smartwatch without issue, and looks fantastic on the right wrist.”

This Fossil Q Founder Gen 2 deal features the latest version of the product line, which was first available on Amazon on November 11. It displays notifications for texts, calls, emails, and app updates and allows you to control your music on your app of choice, like Spotify or iTunes. The smartwatch has a built-in activity tracker, which tracks the basics including steps, distance, and calories burned. Other tech specs include a built-in microphone and speaker that let you do a variety of tasks using just your voice, is both wireless and Bluetooth Smart Enabled. Finally, its magnetic wireless charger keeps the device charged for up to 24 hours based on usage.

On the style end, the smartwatch surpasses most basic smartwatches. It features refined steel and sleek silicone accents, and a bright, easy-to-read face that shows just the right amount of information without making you squint. What makes the style so unique in this Fossil Q is the level of customization it provides, letting you personalize both the watch face and strap to match your look each day.

The Fossil Q Founder Gen 2 Touchscreen Two-Tone Gunmetal Stainless Steel Smartwatch normally retails for $315 but is currently available on Amazon for only $236, giving you a 25 percent or $79 discount.

$236 on Amazon

Alexa Voice Service goes overseas, now available in the U.K. and Germany

Why it matters to you

After opening itself up to U.S.-based developers last year, AVS is now accessible to developers from Germany and the U.K. as well.

Alexa is getting multilingual. On Tuesday, the online retail giant responsible for the popular AI assistant announced that the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) has now become available for developers in both the United Kingdom and Germany. That means that any device that supports AVS (think the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, for starters), will be compatible with all Alexa services in both the British and German markets, and will understand British English and German.

“AVS localization provides you with language and region-specific services to expand your audience and delight new customers,” Amazon explained in its announcement. “With a few lines of code, you can upgrade any product with Alexa to access localized languages and skills in the U.K., Germany, and U.S. Now your end customers can speak with Alexa and receive responses and content in their preferred language and region.”

More: The best Amazon Kindle and Fire Tablet deals

This latest update builds upon previous improvements to AVS — just last year, Amazon opened up the service to all U.S. developers, which allowed them to integrate Alexa with any connected device featuring a microphone and speaker. Since then, AVS integrations have abounded — everything from smart home products to in-car experiences have emerged as a result of this new open platform.

Of course, we should point out that despite Alexa’s availability in these new markets, not all of its associated services will work internationally. As TechCrunch noted, iHeartRadio is only available in the United States, which means that it won’t work in Germany or the U.K. regardless of AVS. The same goes for Kindle book reading and traffic reports.

However, as the world grows ever more connected, it seems safe to assume that even these services will soon be readily available overseas.

So if you’re a German or British developer looking to stretch your development muscles, you can start today with AVS.

Dropbox snags former Googler to lead design team

Nicholas Jitkoff joins Dropbox team as VP of Design.

Dropbox has expanding its pool of design talent, announcing Nicholas Jitkoff has joined the company as the new VP of Design. Jitkoff previously led Google’s Material Design team, where he worked on top-level projects across Google’s product groups to create “a coherent design language for Google’s suite of products”. Also on Jitkoff’s resume is his notable work developing the first versions of Quicksilver, a popular productivity application for macOS.

From the blog:

Design has always been at the heart of Dropbox, tying our products together and solving fundamental problems that impact the lives of millions of people around the world. Working closely with our Engineering and Product teams, Nicholas will lead our Design team in defining their vision for Dropbox. He’ll also help us continue to grow our diverse and talented teams across Design Research, Product Design, Brand Design, and UX Writing.

This is a big get for Dropbox, considering how they’ve been positioning themselves to directly compete with Google not only for both cloud-based storage dominance, but more recently in the collaborative document-editing space with Dropbox Paper.

Sony’s new camera sensor can shoot 1080p video at 1000fps

Everything is cooler in slow motion.

While Sony’s smartphone division isn’t doing so hot on the sales front, Japanese company is continuing to innovate behind the scenes. Today, Sony they’ve developed the industry’s first 3-Layer stacked CMOS image sensor with DRAM for smartphones, which is capable of capturing images of faster moving object as well as shooting 1080p video at up to 1000 frames per second.

Currently, the best specs for slow motion video available on smartphones is 720p at 240fps, which you’ll find on the Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S7. Sony has more than quadrupled those figures — shooting at 1080p no less — which is quite frankly amazing.

Check out this sample footage of what this new sensor is capable of:

While the video capabilities are amazing, the new tech will also vastly improve the ability to shoot fast-moving objects with your smartphone while minimizing focal plane distortion. From the blog post:

With the stacked high-speed, low power consumption, high-capacity DRAM, the new sensor can read one still image of 19.3 million pixels in only 1/120 second (approximately 4x faster than conventional products), reducing the time lapse for reading each pixel line. This technology minimizes the focal plane distortion in still images that tends to occur when shooting fast-moving subjects on smartphones, which lack a mechanical shutter for controlling exposure time.

While Sony didn’t offer any timelines or info as to when we’ll see this new sensor implemented in a new phone, you can read the full nitty-gritty details behind the tech here and then start dreaming about the super cool footage you’ll be able to record when this, eventually, comes to future smartphones.

ZTE is making its first Android Wear watch called ZTE Quartz, reveals leak

ZTE is getting into the Android Wear game.

According to VentureBeat’s Evan Blass, ZTE is the latest smartphone maker to develop an Android Wear device. The company is reportedly working on something called ZTE Quartz, and while many manufacturers are already on their third-generation Android Wear watch, this will be ZTE’s first. However, it has worked on activity trackers in the past, such as the Venus 1 and Venus 2, both of which debuted at Mobile World Congress 2016.

Also, ZTE Quartz is different from the 5.5-inch, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean-powered smartphone ZTE launched in the past. As for the round-faced ZTE Quartz itself (pictured above), it was recently seen with the Bluetooth certification model number ZW10. The Bluetooth SIG revealed the smartwatch features UMTS 3G cellular connectivity and a Wi-Fi radio, both of which may allow it to make and receive calls on the wrist.

ZTE Quartz will be able to pair with Android versions 4.3 and up (or iOS 8.2 for iPhones). We may learn more tomorrow, 8 February, when Google unveils Android Wear 2.0, the next major update to the platform. Along with announcing its own smartwatches, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities to see Google mention other manufacturers coming out with their own Android Wear 2.0 hardware.

See Pocket-lint’s Android Wear 2.0 guide for more about the software.

Alexa comes to your car with Logitech ZeroTouch, but this might not be the experience you’re looking for

Alexa is marching across the world of tech, appearing in all sorts of devices looking to bring connectivity from all angles.

The latest announcement, appearing on the day that Amazon announced that Alexa Voice Service’s availability in the UK and Germany, comes from Logitech.

ZeroTouch is an in-car system designed to unlock many of the skills of your smartphone, wrapped into Logitech’s own interface paired with a car dock. It will offer music, navigation and messaging, but as the name suggests, it does so without using touch.

Looking to free drivers from the danger of fiddling with their phone while driving, you waken the phone with a wave or high five gesture in front of your mounted phone. You then speak your commands and the phone responds.

Pocket-lint

Generally, it’s a reasonable system. It’s simple in many regards in that it uses an app that’s free, but you need to be connected to one of the company’s docks to get it working. That’s a Bluetooth connection, meaning ZeroTouch only works when docked in the car.

We’ve used it, but the need to use a hand gesture to activate the phone sets it at a disadvantage compared to something like Android Auto’s app, which comes to life with a hotword – Ok Google. 

(There’s juncture for an admission here: we still use the ZeroTouch mount, but have been using it with the Android Auto app, because it’s a better overall experience.)

• Android Auto app: Bringing connectivity to all cars

Alexa’s simplicity comes from the fact that your Amazon Echo is always listening. You are shuffling around the kitchen with your hands full and you can tell Alexa to turn off the heating, set a timer for 10 minutes, play some experimental jazz and add flax seeds to your shopping list. 

Transport this friendly AI to your car and you’ve got much of that Alexa experience in the car. You can ask your weight from Fitbit, you can turn your home lights off and you can ask all manner of questions, but you still have to use the wake gesture.

The sort of takes the shine off one of the things that Alexa is good at: responding to a voice command.

So here’s ZeroTouch working with Alexa…. pic.twitter.com/YWL17aGjUD

— Chris Hall (@christhall) February 7, 2017

Alexa also doesn’t offer all the services you’ll get at home, for example, ask it to play music and you’ll be told it’s not supported on this device. Alexa doesn’t offer all your driving services – ask it to navigate you and it’ll say it doesn’t know how to do that. 

So you can be driving home and tell your Neato Botvac to clean the house, you can turn the Philips Hue lights on and set the heating to a comfortable temperature. (Anecdotally, we found that Alexa on ZeroTouch flipped to setting the temperature in Fahrenheit, like the 1950s.) You can check your weight with Fitbit and add something to your shopping list, windscreen washer perhaps, but you have to mix and match these services as you’re driving and you have do so with that wake gesture. 

Is this the Alexa experience we were looking for? Not really. It’s a useful range of skills that extends out of the Logitech ZeroTouch. Between them they do just about everything, but for motoring, we still find the (free) offering of Android Auto to be better suited, especially without the need for a wake gesture.

If you’re desperate for Alexa in the car then this will do it for you. If you’d like to give it a try, you can buy the ZeroTouch Air Vent Mount for £31.99 on Amazon.co.uk or for $58 Amazon.com.

Or, if you’re quick, it’s currently on a deal for £24.99 at Carphone Warehouse.

Google uses AI to sharpen low-res images

Deckard’s photo-enhancing gear in Blade Runner is still the stuff of fantasy. However, Google might just have a close-enough approximation before long. The Google Brain team has developed a system that uses neural networks to fill in the details on very low-resolution images. One of the networks is a “conditioning” element that maps the lower-res shot to similar higher-res examples to get a basic idea of what the image should look like. The other, the “prior” network, models sharper details to make the final result more plausible.

The results are far from perfect, but can frequently come close to the real deal. A virtually unusuable 8-pixel by 8-pixel portrait suddenly has recognizable facial features, for instance. And even in those moments where the AI system gets many details wrong, it’s frequently close enough that you’ll at least have an inkling of what’s there. An indistinguishable blob might become clear enough to tell that it’s a bedroom.

As for potential uses? Police wouldn’t want to use Google’s technology to definitively identify a suspect (not in its current state, at least), but it could help validate hunches that their suspect was present in the background of a shot. This might also be useful for cleaning up tiny details in photos when they’re blown up to larger sizes. It might not be strictly accurate, but it would be more presentable.

Via: The Verge, Ars Technica

Source: ArXiv.org (PDF)

Twitter’s diversity and HR heads are leaving the company

Twitter had a rough time in 2016, and it’s not starting the new year off very well, either. The company’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, Jeffrey Siminoff, is leaving at the end of the month, according to TechCrunch, while head of human resources Renee Atwood has already left. A Twitter spokesperson told Engadget that Atwood left for personal reasons, while TechCrunch’s sources say Siminoff is also departing of his own accord. This follows a string of high-profile exits from the company in recent months, fueling concerns that trouble is brewing at the social network.

In addition to battling its troll problem and struggling to make money, Twitter has had trouble diversifying its predominantly white and male workforce. Its recently released diversity report shows it met its goals for 2016, but Twitter still has work to do on that front. The company was criticised when it hired Siminoff, a white male, as its diversity chief back in 2015, and his exit after the report’s release seems like an interesting coincidence. However, Siminoff’s recent tweet indicates that it’s more likely he left to “pause for future change and loved ones.”

Regardless of the reasons, it’s evident that Twitter is having a difficult time retaining its top execs, which doesn’t bode well for the company going forward. Its efforts to use livestreaming to turn its large user base into advertising dollars may be hindered by its inability to address its problems in a timely manner. At least its remaining execs now appear to be aware of their failings, which could mean a better shot at success.

Source: TechCrunch, Jeffrey Siminoff (Twitter)

Facebook warns inauguration protesters over police data hunt

Protests on the day of President Trump’s inauguration were mostly peaceful, but over 230 people were arrested on allegations of rioting… and law enforcement appears bent on scouring their internet profiles for evidence. CityLab has learned that Washington, DC police have been asking Facebook for user account information as part of their investigations. And in at least one case, Facebook warned one of the targets — file a challenge to the data request or the company might have to comply within 10 days.

The police aren’t commenting on their investigative approach, and Facebook adds that it doesn’t comment on individual requests. With that said, Facebook’s disclosure doesn’t come out of the blue. Like other internet companies, it will notify users about law enforcement data requests when there isn’t a gag order in place.

The bigger concern is the scope of the information officers want from Facebook, and whether they’re above-board in handling data as a whole. If it’s a subpoena or court order, police may get relatively basic info like the user’s email or IP addresses from sign-ins. If there’s a search warrant, though, they could get more detailed location info as well as posts and photos that aren’t public. And that’s assuming they’re playing by the rules. CityLab understands that there has been activity on at least one phone after it was seized by police, suggesting that officers might have been hunting for information when the devices should have been tucked away in evidence bags. In that sense, the Facebook warning could be a sign of a far-reaching investigation that’s pushing the limits of what’s allowed.

Source: CityLab

New York City starts cracking down on illegal Airbnb listings

New York’s ban on short-term rentals has officially started cracking down. As the New York Post reports, a notorious Manhattan landlord and a Brooklyn real estate broker were hit with 17 total violations of the new law. Each violation carries a $1,000 fine.

Landlord Hank Freid received 12 of those violations related to his Upper West Side property the Marrakech Hotel. According to the Post, Freid was busted for allegedly listing SRO units in the building on various services like Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak and others. In Brooklyn, broker Tatiana Cames received the other five citations for posting five different Airbnb listings for her property in Bed-Stuy. According to Cames’s citations, the brownstone she was renting out had a variety of other violations including illegal subdivisions, insufficient fire alarms and “a confused bunch of French tourists in a rear unit.”

While short term rentals where the tenant is not present were already illegal in New York City, the new law passed in October made it a crime to even post a listing for such a situation. Airbnb initially sued the state of New York over the new regulations, so authorities held off on enforcing it until Airbnb eventually dropped its suit.

Source: New York Post