Innit finds a link in digitizing the food chain with acquisition of ShopWell app

Why it matters to you

Right now, the onus is often on you to keep tabs on your food with manual entry, but Innit wants to make tracking nutrition more automated.

Let’s say you have a smart scale that gives you the nutritional breakdown of your breakfast. Chances are, you’ll have to use an app to tell the scale you’re about to weigh Cheerios, so it can give you an accurate picture of the sugar, fat, and carbs contained within. If you’ve just bought a bunch of groceries, there are apps that will let you scan your receipt to put all the nutrition information in one place. Innit, which aims to “digitize” food, wants to put these two functions together to make shopping and cooking easier.

Innit recently acquired ShopWell, makers of an app that helps you avoid certain foods and find healthier options. If the app knows you’re avoiding sugar and want to lose weight, it will send up a red flag when you scan a carton of ice cream and suggest fruit pops instead. “That whole food journey of plan, shop, prep, and cook, today there’s no one that has stepped up to really help users through that journey and to use the power of food information, so it’s sort of like driving with a paper map,” Kevin Brown, Innit’s CEO, told Digital Trends. He sees ShopWell as a bit like a GPS, guiding people to healthier choices.

More: Stop bouncing between other food apps, check out all your options with FeedMe

While Innit isn’t ready to announce other partners at the moment, ShopWell is just one piece of the puzzle. Innit’s not trying to change what the app does at the moment, but once the platform is in place, it will play one role in that plan, shop, prep, cook journey. If you snap a picture of your receipt with ShopWell’s app, it could then provide recipes based on what you’ve bought. But what if your fitness tracker pings in to say you’ve been slacking on exercise? The app could use the information and automatically recommend only low-calorie recipes. Eventually, once you pick what you’re making for dinner, your connected oven will set itself to the proper temperature.

These other steps are expected to roll out later in 2017, said Brown. By digitizing food, you’ll not only be able to keep track of what’s in your pantry and what you’ve made for dinner the past week, but you could get an alert to your phone if, say, you bought frozen vegetables that were recalled because of a listeria outbreak. “We’re really excited about a bunch of use cases like that,” said Brown. “Even the name of our company is Innit, like, what’s in it.”

The success of all this depends on what companies Innit manages to partner with, and it’s already working with Whirlpool to make its smart appliances a link in the digitized food chain. But it also depends on people giving up their data to the company, their grocery stores, and so on. Grocery stores already know how many boxes of cookies they sell a month, but apps such as ShopWell also let them know just how many of those boxes go to you.

Korean media says LG G6 will launch on March 10, Galaxy S8 debuting globally April 21

We now have launch dates for this year’s biggest flagships.

A report out of Korea’s ET News suggests Samsung and LG have finalized the launch dates for their upcoming flagships. The publication states that the Galaxy S8 — which is rumored to be unveiled in New York on March 29 — will be launching globally on April 21, while the LG G6 is slated to become available on March 10 following an unveil at Mobile World Congress later this week.

An earlier report said that the LG G6 will launch on March 9 in South Korea, with a U.S. debut planned for April 7. With Samsung skipping MWC this year and launching the Galaxy S8 at a later date, LG has a 42-day head start, and the potential to steal much-needed market share away from its fiercest rival.

ET News also states that Samsung originally intended to launch the Galaxy S8 on April 14 in its home market following a week of pre-orders, but ultimately moved the date to April 21 to ensure adequate stock of the device is available at launch. The latest estimates suggest the Galaxy S8 will be going up for pre-order in Korea on April 13.

Both handsets have leaked extensively in recent weeks, giving us a detailed look at what to expect from the South Korean manufacturers this year. The LG G6 will feature a 5.7-inch QHD+ 2:1 display, 13MP dual cameras, water resistance, 32-bit Quad DAC, and a Snapdragon 821 SoC.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy S8 is likely to be offered in two variants: a standard 5.8-inch model and an S8+ with a 6.2-inch display. The phones will feature thin bezels up front, with Samsung getting rid of the home button to make room for the “infinity” display. The phones will instead sport on-screen navigation buttons, a 12MP dual pixel camera at the back, IP68 dust and water resistance, and will be the first to run Qualcomm’s latest 10nm Snapdragon 835

Samsung’s 10nm Exynos 8895 chipset is now official

Samsung’s high-end SoC for 2017 gets detailed.

Samsung announced last year that it was partnering with Qualcomm to build the Snapdragon 835 on its new 10nm FinFET manufacturing process. The company is now introducing its own chipset based on the new node, the Exynos 8895. The SoC falls under the Exynos 9 Series, and the node shift along with an improved 3D transistor structure means that the Exynos 8895 delivers 27% more performance while consuming 40% less energy when compared to 14nm chipsets.

The Exynos 8895 offers an octa-core CPU with four Samsung’s second-gen custom cores taking care of the performance, with four energy-efficient Cortex A53 cores handling low-power tasks. The SoC has an ARM Mali-G71 GPU that offers “next level 3D graphic performance” while minimizing VR latency. The chipset also features a Gigabit LTE modem with 5CA (five carrier aggregation), delivering download speeds of 1Gbps and uploads of 150Mbps.

Samsung is also touting improved video capabilities with the Exynos 8895, which include 4K video recording and playback at 120fps as well as a video processing technology that upscales images for immersive VR experiences in 4K. Other highlights include a dedicated processing unit for iris and fingerprint recognition, and a Vision Processing Unit that recognizes objects for better video tracking and improved panoramas.

The chipset supports 28MP front and rear cameras, as well as 28MP+16MP dual-camera setups. The Exynos 8895 is currently in mass production, and is likely to make its way into the global variants of the Galaxy S8.

How to set up Kodi profiles

Your family can have their Kodi their way. It’s as easy as setting up some new Kodi profiles.

Your kids want to watch something on your Kodi system, but you’re not so keen on filling up your add-ons list with child-friendly channels. That’s fine, because just as you can with popular services like Netflix, you can create profiles for your kids to keep their stuff separate.

The process for creating Kodi profiles is not immediately obvious, because it’s not exactly user-facing. But it’s also not very difficult, as long as you know where to look.

For this guide we’re using Kodi 17 with the stock skin. If you’re on a different build, things might be slightly different.

Select the settings cog on your home screen.

Click on the box labelled profile settings.

Select add profile.

Give your profile a name and hit OK.

Each profiles set up on your Kodi system can now have its own individual settings and add-ons. You can set up the new profiles to transfer everything from the main profile, just select “yes” instead of “no” when you’re given this option after creating a new one.

To switch between profiles you need to log off the current one. To do so, hit the power icon and select log off. You’re then taken to a screen that presents all of your profiles, and it’s as easy as selecting the one you want and going in to enjoy your content.

Kodi is already a terrific media center, but little touches like this one make it your media center.

Download Kodi 17 (free)

Sony’s 1,000fps camera touted for new Xperia XZs and XZ Premium smartphones

Earlier this month, Sony revealed details about a new camera sensor that it had been developing. It’s a new CMOS sensor, but has an extra third layer of DRAM built into it, as opposed to the two-layer construction of conventional smartphone CMOS cameras.

• Next Sony Xperia flagship: What’s the story?

It means Sony’s new sensor will be capable of shooting 1080p video at a maximum of 1,000fps, far quicker than anything else on the market.

XperiaBlog

Because of the announcement, many analysts expected the sensor to make its way into Sony’s 2017 flagship, and that’s now thought to be the case. The new camera is being called Motion Eye, according to an alleged official Sony presentation slide, and according to the source, it’s expected to be fitted to two Sony smartphones, the Xperia XZs and Xperia XZ Premium.

This is the first time we’ve heard about possible names for Sony’s flagship phones. For some time, we went with the name Xperia X2, because Sony’s naming convention isn’t the easiest to predict. However, considering last year’s flagship was called the Xperia XZ, XZs and XZ Premium do at least make sense.

The Xperia XZs will likely be successor the XZ, while the XZ Premium will fill the shoes of the Z5 Premium, and as such should come with a 4K HDR display. The Z5 Premium will be two years old this year, as it was unveiled at IFA 2015, so it’s due for a refresh, and the Xperia XZ was unveiled last year, also at IFA.

• New Sony smartphone camera comes with built-in DRAM, promises 1,000fps slow-mo
• Sony could go all out at MWC with five new smartphones
• Mobile World Congress 2017: Nokia, Sony, Huawei, smartphones and more

Because of these unveilings, it’s likely they’ll show up in September at the Berlin-based show, so we may just have to make do with the five mid-range phones predicted to be launched this weekend at Mobile World Congress.

Qualcomm and Leap Motion partner to bring natural interaction to mobile VR devices

Qualcomm and Leap Motion have announced that they are partnering, bringing the advantage of bare hands interaction to VR worlds. 

There’s a lot happening in VR at the moment and on the cusp of Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference, there’s a lot of talk about VR coming from Qualcomm. A big part of this comes from the company pushing its new Snapdragon 835 chipset as a natural choice for standalone VR headsets. 

VR is only as good as the interaction, however. The days of being a static observer in a virtual world are gone and the pairing with Leap Motion is designed to bring natural user interaction with worlds, using bare hands, rather than having to rely on a controller, tracked gloves or other hand-held devices. 

Leap Motion has been in the hand-tracking game for some time, demonstrating and integrating the technology into a number of different devices, allowing you to use your hands to manipulate content. That translates naturally into a VR world where you’re fully immersed so this pairing makes plenty of sense.

We’ve seen Leap Motion working with tethered VR headsets before – like HTC Vive – however Qualcomm’s VR vision is slightly different. Qualcomm’s approach is to provide an untethered solution, rather than being connected to a super computer in a room full of sensors.

• Best VR headsets to buy in 2017, whatever your budget

“Technology works best when technology disappears,” said David Holz, chief technology officer at Leap Motion. 

“Untethered, mobile VR headsets with intuitive, hand-based interaction and position tracking bring a level of quality, immersion, and accessibility to VR unlike anything that’s been seen before.”

We’ll be looking to get our bare hands on this new VR experience at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned for more information.

Qualcomm doubles-down on VR with Snapdragon 835 dev kit and accelerator program

Qualcomm is serious about positioning the Snapdragon 835 as a platform for VR, providing the power needed to have an immersive virtual environment without the need to be tethered to a computer like HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. 

With Snapdragon 835 due to power 2017’s leading smartphones, the company is also announcing a new VR development kit, designed to help manufacturers develop and launch VR products.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 VR head mounted display packs in impressive specs:

• 2560 x 1440 pixel AMOLED display, split between both eyes
• Stereo fisheye cameras for motion tracking
• Gyroscope, accelerometer, compass for motion tracking
• Two cameras for eye tracking
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB for power
• Trackpad on right-hand side

That’s the spec for a pretty hardcore smartphone right there, now all packed into a headset to give you an untethered VR experience. Qualcomm says that some of the magic comes from the Snapdragon Sensor Core that can process all this information to give you natural and linked physical movements within the virtual world. 

Qualcomm has also announced that it is partnering with Leap Motion, leading to the development of bare hands virtual world interaction without the need for a physical controller.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 VR dev kit will be available to developers from Q2 2017, with an aim to seeing products hitting the market in the second half of 2017 based on the platform. 

Supporting that aim, Qualcomm has also announced the Qualcomm Technologies HMD Accelerator Program. This will provide OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) with the tools they need to quickly bring VR products to market, by providing not only reference hardware, but all the component parts needed, as well as access to the experience they need to transform the reference design into a final product.

The result could be more VR device hitting the market later in 2017, but they might not all be in the consumer arena – VR is also being put to use in a number of technical, medical and educational sectors.

• Best VR headsets to buy in 2017, whatever your budget

The Morning After: Thursday, 23 February 2017

Good Morning After. NASA’s big announcement could offer us a future among the stars, Apple’s own ‘spaceship’ gets a boring name and another Instagram feature you might never notice.

And they’re relatively close
NASA discovers multiple, possibly inhabitable, Earth-sized planets

At a news conference in Washington, DC, NASA revealed that, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they’ve found seven new Earth-sized planets orbiting a star just 40 light years away from us. What’s more, three of those exist within the “Goldilocks zone,” which means they could be habitable. This news comes at an exciting time in the search for planets beyond our own solar system. Since the start of just this year, researchers have discovered the presence of water on a planet just 50 light years away, the Keck Observatory’s exoplanet imager has come online and a team of researchers from a compendium of universities has released a trove of observational data from the Keck’s HiRES imager spanning more than two decades.

‘Apple Park’Apple’s spaceship campus will open in April

Steve Jobs announced plans for a second Cupertino campus way back in 2006, and in April, the building will finally open for business. Dubbed Apple Park, the company’s new 175-acre HQ features a 2.8 million-square-foot ring-shaped main building powered entirely by renewable energy. The campus also features the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater, a 20-foot tall glass cylinder with a carbon fiber roof. Employees will move in over the next six months, while the rest of us can plan a stop by the visitor’s center and its requisite Apple Store.

Spoiler: The answer is money
Why YouTube and PewDiePie are stuck with each other

After YouTuber Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie) posted videos with anti-Semitic “jokes,” he quickly lost deals with Maker Studios and YouTube itself. Of course, his channel is still on the service, and serving up ads, just without new episodes of his YouTube Red show or Google Preferred’s promotional push.

So does this mean their relationship will come to an end entirely? Probably not. Without a bigger or more profitable platform to jump to, Kjellberg has carried on uploading videos, and as they continue to pull in millions of views, YouTube will keep letting him do it — for now.

At least it’s not ripping off Snapchat this time?

Instagram’s new feature: slideshows

The latest update for Facebook’s photo service recognizes that sometime it takes more than one picture to properly crush the ‘gram. Seriously, sometimes users want to post everything from an event without spreading photos across their followers’ (algorithmically-sorted) feeds, and the new carousel-style photo sets make that easy, holding up to 10 photos or videos per post.

5G or 5GHz
T-Mobile pushes forward with LTE-U and Verizon plans 5G wireless tests

Faster wireless service is coming one way or another. While we wait for 5G to become a reality, carriers like T-Mobile are planning to roll out LTE-U as a way to get gigabit wireless connections cracking. The FCC just approved the first devices that can tap into the 5GHz frequency band for extra capacity and speed, which T-Mobile plans to launch this spring. Looking further out, Verizon will follow AT&T with next-gen 5G wireless tests in 11 cities by mid-2017.

But wait, there’s more…

• AMD returns to high-end gaming CPUs with Ryzen 7
• Emails obtained by court order show close ties between the oil industry and EPA chief Scott Pruitt
• Apple buys and shuts down Asian social network iCloud.net
• ‘Overwatch’ streamer Kephrii destroys his in-game imposter
• IBM, U of Maryland quantum computers engage in an algorithm-crunching battle
• Tesla: Model 3 production is on track to start in July

Terror threat posted on Whisper leads to arrest

A man from North Carolina was arrested by federal authorities shortly after he submitted a post that sounded like a threat to the anonymous secret-sharing app Whisper. According to the feds’ affidavit, Garrett Grimsley from Cary posted the words “Salam, some of you are alright, don’t go to Cary tomorrow” written on a photo of a bearded man carrying a red flag with a black star in the center. Another user who asked for a clarification through private message contacted authorities after receiving his response:

“For too long the kuffar (non-Muslims) have spit in our faces and trampled our rights. This cannot continue. I cannot speak of anything. Say your dua (prayers), sleep, and watch the news tomorrow. It will only be the beginning, insha’Allah.”

Authorities were able to track Grimsley down and arrest him on the same day he posted by asking Whisper for his IP address and GPS coordinates. After feds got his IP address from Whisper, they were able to get Time Warner Cable to match it with a name, a physical address and a phone number.

The app is supposed to be completely anonymous, but you’ll have to opt out of location services if you don’t want it to receive your geographical coordinates — Grimsley might have left his active. It’s worth noting, however, that a 2014 report by The Guardian accused the company of retaining posts and user information in a searchable database. Whisper CEO Michael Heyward denied those accusations.

Cops found an AK-47, four 30-round magazines and about 340 rounds of ammo in a search of his home. But they also found a Facebook conversation on his laptop that makes his true intentions unclear. In it, he said he “yell(s) all the time about jihad” due to “too much CSGO [Counter Strike: Global Offensive] and nasheeds [Islamic videos of vocal music].” He even jokingly asked the other person: “the FBI will understand I was only reading [an ISIS magazine] for the pictures, right?” Authorities couldn’t connect him with a terror group.

Feds have charged Grimsley with “transmitting a threat to injure a person” as well as with cyberstalking. If he’s convicted, he could end up spending up to five years in prison and paying up to $250,000.

Source: CBS News, ABC 11, WNCN

BT Sport to air ‘FIFA’ eSports tournaments in the UK

One of the top FIFA eSports competitions is going to be shown on BT Sport in the UK. Today, the broadcaster has announced “exclusive” coverage of the FIFA 17 Ultimate Team Championship Series, an EA organised tournament built around ‘FUT Champions,’ a fantasy mode where players build and compete with custom teams. BT will start with the North American regional final in Vancouver on April 8th, followed by the Asia-Pacific heats in Singapore on April 22nd. The channel will then televise the European regional final in Madrid on May 6th, before tackling the all-important Championship Final in Berlin on May 20th and 21st.

FIFA is hugely popular in the UK and should, therefore, tie in nicely with BT’s regular football coverage, which includes Premier League, Champions League and Europa League fixtures. ESPN struck a similar deal with EA earlier this month, grabbing permission to show the Championship Series on ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPN Deportes. The demand for live, televised FIFA coverage is unclear, however. The game has its audience, of course, with professional tournaments held all around the world, but it’s not on the same level as Dota or League of Legends. On a sports channel, however, the game stands a better chance of attracting a large, mainstream audience.

The competition could be buoyed by traditional football clubs too. Many professional sides — Manchester City, PSG, Roma, Ajax, Monaco and Wolfsburg, to name just a few — have signed their own FIFA stars. If casual fans see a team they recognise (eSports players typically wear their club’s jersey to tournaments), that could help to win them over. Watching a virtual Messi dance his way through a Sevilla defence will, of course, never match the real deal — but for those who love the beautiful game, seeing the best FIFA players duke it out could serve as a pretty close substitute.