Microsoft is replacing Wunderlist with a new To-Do app

Wunderlist is evolving. At least, that’s how the Microsoft-bought team is putting the news that the list and task management app is headed for retirement. Not yet, though. In its place, Microsoft is announcing To-Do Preview, its early version of Wunderlist’s spiritual successor that’s already packing some improvements. It’s available on iPhones, Android and web browsers now.

“My Day” will offer you a clean slate every… day. You can then attach unfinished list items by tapping on a lightbulb in the corner. To-Do’s “intelligent suggestions” will pull tasks from your old, existing and future lists, automagically prioritising those it deems most important.

To-Do will also include flexible reminders that you can bake in to recur on weekdays, Monday mornings, whenever you need ’em. While Wunderlist won’t be getting any new features and will eventually be sunsetted later this year, the team plans to incorporate users’ suggestions and feedback before Microsoft switches to To-Do. (It’s already built an importer tool to move your tasks across from Wunderlist and Todoist.)

It’s not a complete substitute for Wunderlist just yet: sharing lists is a feature that’s apparently in the works, and the app will also eventually land in Mac, iPad and Android tablet editions too. For now, you can play on the mostly phone-based preview starting today.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Wunderlist

MasterCard Reveals Credit Card With Built-In Fingerprint Sensor

MasterCard today unveiled a biometric chip-and-pin credit card featuring a built-in fingerprint sensor that takes cues from mobile payment systems such as Apple Pay.

The card can be used to make purchases like any other, except rather than keying in a PIN number, card holders can choose to place their finger over the square sensor to approve the transaction.

Alternatively, users can take a two-tier authentication approach and use both their PIN and fingerprint to approve the purchase. However, users of the card won’t have the convenience or security that comes with registering their print with their smartphone.

With Apple Pay, fingerprint data is encrypted and protected with a key available only to the Secure Enclave on the user’s iPhone. The Secure Enclave is walled off from the rest of the hardware and the OS, meaning iOS and other apps never have access to user fingerprint data, it’s never stored on Apple servers, and never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else.

The biometric credit card has no such protections. Instead, the user must register their print with the bank or financial institution that issued the card, and while the fingerprint is encrypted on the card itself, it’s still unclear what security and privacy measures are in place to deal with the registration process.

Despite those concerns, Mastercard’s chief of safety and security, Ajay Bhalla, said that the fingerprint technology was “not something that can be taken or replicated”, and that the biometric card would help “to deliver additional convenience and security”.

MasterCard plans to roll out the cards in Europe and the Asia Pacific region soon, following successful tests in South Africa through Barclays subsidiary Absa and supermarket Pick n Pay.

Tags: Touch ID, MasterCard
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Aircharge Announces Wireless iPhone Charging Case for BMW iDrive Ecosystem

Aircharge and BMW have teamed up to offer a customized wireless charging case for iPhones to take advantage of the new in-car wireless system that debuted in the BMW 5 Series Sedan earlier this year.

The BMW 5 Series Sedan was one of the first cars to include wireless CarPlay support, allowing iPhones to integrate with the BMW iDrive ecosystem over Bluetooth instead of a Lightning cable. In-car phone wireless charging is also standard in the 6 and 7 series and available as an option on the rest of the range.

Integrating the smartphone into the vehicle’s system allows the iPhone to be operated directly via the screen in the car, the iDrive Touch Controller, voice commands or gestures, avoiding potential distractions whilst at the wheel.

Given that heavy usage of apps, navigation and music can drain a battery at the end of a drive, the addition of wireless charging solves this issue by keeping the device fully powered while in operation.

With Apple yet to launch a smartphone with the wireless charging function integrated into its hardware, the German carmaker worked with Aircharge to design the case to add on the capabilities and bring the convenience of wireless charging to BMW owners.

The case features a hard shell to protect the phone and a tactile finish, along with a total black look, and has engraved the BMW Group’s branding on the front and back.

All Aircharge case models carry the official ‘Made for iPhone’ MFi certification by Apple and are also certified to the global wireless charging standard Qi. The Aircharge case is currently available for iPhone 6, 6s, 6 Plus, 6s Plus, 5, 5s and SE models and can be purchased through BMW’s online retail stores as well as high street shops.

Related Roundup: CarPlay
Tag: BMW
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CarPlay Scores 85% Customer Satisfaction Rate in Limited Study

iPhone owners are largely satisfied with Apple’s CarPlay, according to a new report from market research firm Strategy Analytics.

The report is available to Strategy Analytics clients only, but author Chris Schreiner shared some of his findings with MacRumors.

31 percent of users said they were “very satisfied” with CarPlay, while 54 percent said they were “satisfied,” for an overall customer satisfaction rate of 85 percent. However, the report only looked at 70 owners of 2016-2017 vehicles with CarPlay installed in the United States, which is a rather small sample size.

43 percent of those users are “very likely” to recommend CarPlay to others, while 37 percent are “likely” to recommend it, said Strategy Analytics. Those with CarPlay were likely to use it for “all or most” of their in-car infotainment needs, often in favor of their vehicle’s standard system, according to the report.

70 percent of participants with both CarPlay and a built-in navigation system in their car said they choose CarPlay with Apple Maps most or all of the time over their vehicle’s standard system. 59 percent of the people said they use CarPlay for audio needs most or all of the time over their vehicle’s radio.

“Given Apple’s continued updates to CarPlay enhancing the experience further, and car-makers’ inability to do the same along with their long development times, CarPlay is poised to handle the vast majority of consumers’ in-vehicle needs,” said Schreiner, Director of Syndicated Research at Strategy Analytics.

While customer satisfaction with CarPlay might be strong, Apple’s in-car software platform is far from perfect.

Last month, a side-by-side test of CarPlay and Android Auto showed Siri was often unable to properly interpret what the driver was saying, which in one case led Apple Maps to incorrectly navigate him to an address in Tennessee rather than Toronto. Android Auto, meanwhile, interpreted voice commands correctly.

Video courtesy of YouTube channel The Straight Pipes via Daring Fireball
CarPlay continues to improve in other areas. In iOS 10.3, for example, Apple provided drivers with a quicker and safer way to switch between apps without having to take their eyes off the road for long periods of time. Wireless CarPlay is also now available in select BMW models, or with Alpine’s aftermarket system.

Apple is also rumored to be working on “enhanced” Siri capabilities for the iPhone, and those improvements would likely extend to CarPlay.

CarPlay is now available in over 200 vehicle models in the United States, enabling drivers to make and receive calls, access text messages, play music, get directions, check traffic conditions, and more with Siri voice commands and on-screen controls. The platform requires an iPhone 5 or newer.

Aftermarket systems are available from brands such as Alpine, Kenwood, and Pioneer for do-it-yourself CarPlay installations.

Related Roundup: CarPlay
Tag: Strategy Analytics
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R.I.P. PINs, your credit cards could soon have fingerprint sensors built in

With new credit and debit cards more featuring contactless payment chips more often than not these days, you might not have used your PIN code for purchases for a while. However, a large number of retailers still require a PIN for payments over £30 so you still need to use your number at times and there are still plenty of stores that don’t accept contactless payments at all.

Mastercard may have come up with a solution. It has added a fingerprint sensor to a concept card it is currently trialling in South Africa.

Not only could it abolish PIN codes, but it should also improve security – after all, nobody can peek over your shoulder and copy your fingerprint. Illegal card replication would also be far harder considering the user would need your fingerprint to use a copied card – even if such a thing was possible.

Mastercard

The card itself works like a chip card, so can be used in existing card terminals in stores. You enter the card into the terminal, press your finger on the sensor and the payment is approved.

It will also help those who forget PIN codes easily.

The card currently being trialled does not come with contactless payment technology, but a further model with NFC is also in the works.

Further trials are planned for Europe and Asia in the coming months and, if successful, we could even see consumer versions starting to appear later this year.

Amazon Video is the first to support Samsung’s HDR10 Plus standard

Samsung has announced that Amazon Video is the first content partner to deliver HDR10 Plus content to Samsung TVs, with content set to arrive on Amazon Prime later this year.

HDR10 Plus is an evolution of HDR10 TV technology, and has been developed by Samsung. The South Korean tech giant made it available for use by third parties in March.

• What is HDR, what TVs and devices support HDR, and what HDR content can I watch?

HDR10 Plus improves upon HDR10 by incorporating dynamic metadata instead of static metadata that’s used in HDR10. Static metadata keeps the same brightness level throughout a TV show or movie, so some scenes that were meant to be bright, may be darker than originally intended because there will be other darker scenes that bring the overall brightness level down.

Dynamic metadata eliminates this effect, and allows the TV to adjust the brightness level on a scene-by-scene or frame-by-frame basis, meaning content can be shown just as the director intended.

Samsung has said all of its 2017 4K Ultra HD TVs, including the top-of-the-range QLED series support HDR10 Plus, but if you’ve got yourself a 2016 4K Ultra HD model, you don’t need to throw it out as it will receive a firmware update later in 2017 that will bring HDR10 Plus with it.

Kyoungwon Lim, Vice President of Visual Display Division at Samsung Electronics said: “As an advanced HDR10 technology, HDR10+ offers an unparalleled HDR viewing experience — vivid picture, better contrast and accurate colors — that brings HDR video to life”.

“We’re excited to work with world-class industry partners, including Amazon Video, to bring more amazing HDR content directly to our 2017 UHD TVs, including our QLED TV lineup”.

Greg Hart, Vice President of Amazon Video, worldwide added: “At Amazon, we are constantly innovating on behalf of customers and are thrilled to be the first streaming service provider to work with Samsung to make HDR10+ available on Prime Video globally later this year”.

• What is Dolby Vision? Dolby’s very own HDR TV tech explained
• Samsung 4K HDR TV choices for 2017: QLED Q9F, Q8C, Q7C and Q7F compared
• Mobile HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Mobile HDR Premium explained 

The update to HDR10+ makes HDR10 content a greater rival to Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision already uses dynamic metadata to adjust brightness on a scene-by-scene basis, and can deliver accurate colours thanks to 12-bit colour depth which gives access to over 68 billion colours. 

David Attenborough’s hologram will help you study fossils in VR

Sir David Attenborough is no stranger to VR. The beloved naturalist and TV presenter has worked on immersive, look-where-you-like films for the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, the American Museum of Natural History and Google. Now, the documentarian is teaming up with Sky and the NHM for a new experience called Hold the World, which allows you to pick up fossils and other rate objects. As you turn them over, a “hologram” of Attenborough will pop up and explain their importance.

Sky is working with VR and “immersive content production studio” Factory 42 on the project, as well as Dream Reality Interactive and Talesmith. A teaser image released by Sky (above) shows Attenborough with an Oculus Rift and Touch controller, however Dan Smith, cofounder and creative director at Factory 42, said it could work on “several” different headsets.

Attenborough will be shot using ‘volumetric capture,’ a VR filmmaking technique that uses over 100 cameras, pointing inwards, to record a person and their movement in 3D space. The approach allows developers to blend an actor’s likeness with video game-style environments other visual effects. Smith said Hold the World will take place in the NHM’s “beautiful backrooms,” which will be captured using photogrammetry, a combination of LIDAR (a laser-based equivalent of radar) and 360-degree photography. The objects, which include bones and skulls, will be recreated in a similar fashion, combining photogrammetry with some 3D modelling work.

Hold the World will go into production later this year, and there’s no word on when the experience will be ready for the public. “We are always looking for innovative ways to share our collection, and Hold the World offers the chance to explore it as never before,” Sir Michael Dixon, director of the NHM said. “Objects in the museum collection offer invaluable insight about the origins of life, the Earth and our solar system – stories that are key to understanding how we can best protect our planet’s future.”

Source: Sky

Amazon Opens Alexa’s Deep Learning and Voice Recognition Smarts to Chat Bot Developers

Amazon on Wednesday made the AI and voice-recognition software that powers the company’s Alexa virtual assistant available to all its cloud-computing customers.

Called Amazon Lex, the service will allow developers to make chat bot applications using Alexa’s voice recognition technology and leverage the AI’s deep learning abilities to enable their apps to understand more text and speech queries.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said that Amazon’s cloud-based work in processing how humans write and speak would make chat bots more helpful than the clunky tools they’ve been in the past.

“There’s massive acceleration happening here,” said Vogels, speaking to Reuters at the company’s cloud-computing summit in San Francisco. “The cool thing about having this running as a service in the cloud instead of in your own data center or on your own desktop is that we can make Lex better continuously by the millions of customers that are using it.”

Similar to how it operates its other cloud-based services, Amazon will charge developers based on how many text or voice requests Lex processes. The company’s hope is that its Alexa technology will take center stage in the current e-commerce boom based around chatbots. This week, Facebook announced its own virtual assistant called M, which can help users order food, while MasterCard also launched its own Messenger merchant bots for food deliveries.

Amazon’s move comes fast on the heels of similar announcements by the company, as it aims to head off competition in the virtual assistant space by rivals Apple and Google. Just last week Amazon opened up access to the far-field voice recognition technology found in its Echo smart speakers so that third-party manufacturers can make their own versions.

Alexa support is also increasingly cropping up in smart home devices, with chip vendors hoping to start shipping their own Alexa-like devices this year. Alexa is even set to appear as a built-in feature in some third-party smart products, like Ecobee thermostats.

Tags: Amazon, Alexa
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You can squeeze Juicero bags with your bare hands, no $400 machine needed

Why it matters to you

At least you know you can still grab a drink from a Juicero pack should the machine ever break down.

It probably looks kinda cool sitting there on your kitchen counter, but the Juicero may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

The high-tech juicer had Silicon Valley investors drooling with delight when they first set eyes on it in 2016, though its wallet-busting launch price of $700 left many consumers opting to stick with their regular order of Tropicana.

A cut to $400 this year, however, prompted renewed interest among fresh-juice fans and helped to boost sales of the machine, which squeezes fruit (or veg) mulch from a pack into a cup for a healthy eight-ounce drink.

Well, it turns out you can squeeze the juice out of the pack using your bare hands in the same time as it takes the pack-pressing Juicero.

While Juicero founder Doug Evans has declared that the juice press is capable of four tons of force — “enough to lift two Teslas,” he said — reporters from Bloomberg recently managed to extract the juice by squeezing the packs using only their hands.

“Hands did the job quicker, but the device was slightly more thorough,” the report said. “Reporters were able to wring 7.5 ounces of juice in a minute and a half. The machine yielded 8 ounces in about two minutes.”

Juicero’s specially designed juice packs cost between $5 and $8, and you can only purchase them if you have the machine.

The startup has so far declined to comment on Bloomberg’s report, though a person “close to the company” told the news outlet that the machine is mess-free, whereas using your hands might not be. Also, the Juicero machine automatically checks via a barcode on the pack that its contents are still fresh, although a date is also printed on the back if you want to check for yourself.

The news that the Juicero may in fact be little more than a pricey piece of counter candy comes in the same week that the startup expanded sales of the device from 3 states to 17. But at least owners now know that they can still grab a drink from a Juicero pack should their machine ever stop working.

If you have one, how do you feel about the fact that your bare hands are just as effective as the $400 Juicero when it comes to pumping the juicy mulch out of the pack?

A French presidential candidate is using his ‘hologram’ to reach more voters

Why it matters to you

The technology provides another way for politicians and other communicators to get their message across.

We’ve heard plenty of stories about famous musicians “returning from the dead” for performances using hologram-like effects, but now politicians — living ones — are turning to the same technology to reach more voters in a bid to boost their popularity ahead of elections.

Take French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. Just a few days before the first round of nationwide voting on April 23, the left-wing politician appeared simultaneously at seven different rallies across France — six of them as a “holographic” projection.

Also very active on social media, tech-savvy Melenchon addressed supporters at a rally in Dijon in the east of the country, while his “3D” image appeared in real time in six other cities, including one on Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean.

The politician, who sits four percentage points behind front-runner Emmanuel Macron in the latest opinion poll, spoke to a combined audience of 35,000 people, many of whom seemed impressed by the technical wizardry.

“It was great, very lively,” one supporter told France 24, adding, “It seemed like he was here with us.” Another said it was “cool and crazy to imagine Jean-Luc Melenchon was in Dijon and six other cities at the same time. It’s incredible he can spread his ideas in such a widespread and original way.”

Organized by London-based Musion 3D, Melenchon’s image required a custom-made lighting rig to obtain the most realistic effect, with the set-up replicated on all of the other stages. The signal was beamed live by satellite to the other French cities, presenting audiences with an extremely life-like version of the presidential candidate on the stage.

In Musion’s own words, its “holographic projection system takes advantage of the most innovative 21st century technologies, transforming the Victorian-age Pepper’s Ghost optical illusion into a state-of-the-art multimedia platform that enables 3D holographic projection … Unlike traditional 3D, viewing Musion does not require 3D glasses because holographic projection is not a stereographic effect. Instead, the hologram illusion is created by using projection to provide the viewer’s eyes with other visual cues – reflection, light, shadow, movement, and contrast – that fool the brain into thinking it is seeing a 3D image.”

It’s certainly a neat idea for helping Melenchon to reach more voters in the most realistic way possible besides being physically present, and the candidate has enjoyed a surge in the polls in recent weeks. You never know, maybe a few more simultaneous rallies in multiple cities — with the help of his trusty hologram — might help see him over the line.