StoreDot demos EV battery that reaches a full charge in 5 minutes
StoreDot, an Israeli startup known for making fast-charging batteries, announced its model for EVs in 2015. The company claims that its EV battery can reach a full charge within only five minutes and can keep the car running for 300 miles. Now, to prove that its technology works, StoreDot has demonstrated its product’s charging capability on stage at the CUBE Tech Fair in Berlin. The presenters didn’t exactly have the chance to show the battery get to 100 percent, since they had to pack up before the process was done. But you can still see how fast it inhales electricity in this Periscope video taken by Gruendermetropole.
While charging an EV doesn’t take a whole night these days — Tesla’s Supercharger only needs around two hours to fully charge one of the brand’s cars — a rapid-charging battery could convince new customers to make the switch. You don’t have to be worried about running out of power while in the middle of time-sensitive tasks anymore. Not when you can be in and out of a charging station in the blink of an eye.
StoreDot’s FlashBattery technology uses layers of nanomaterials and proprietary organic compounds, which it says have never been used on batteries before. The company also claims FlashBattery is safer than lithium-ion, since it’s not flammable and has a higher combustion temp. We might be able to see the first EVs using the technology within three years — we’ll just have to wait and see whether it can help the industry grow.
StoreDot CEO Dr. Doron Myersdorf said in a statement:
“Fast Charging is the critical missing link needed to make electric vehicles ubiquitous. The currently available battery technology dictates long charging times which makes the EV form of transportation inadequate for the public at large. We’re exploring options with a few strategic partners in the auto space to help us boost the production process in Asia and reach mass production as soon as possible.”
Source: StoreDot, Gruendermetropole (Periscope)
How to Create a Safer Community with Wireless Broadband Technology
Setting up wireless broadband in your area is not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about safety. After all, simply having this network to provide internet access won’t necessarily prevent burglars from breaking into your home or business.
However, having wireless broadband in a community can improve the capabilities of different institutions to provide safety. Here’s how.
Understanding Threats to Safety
First, let’s outline the many threats to safety in one’s community: crime, accidents, and natural disasters. While these are all intrinsically different, they’re the same in one thing—they can cause the loss of life or property. And that’s what we’re trying to prevent with the aid of technologies and tools like wireless broadband.
Crime
While a wireless broadband network won’t prevent crime, this network is needed to ensure deterrents work properly—and an example of such deterrents are security cameras. These cameras need to be hooked up to a wireless broadband network to transmit live video footage of the area they’re covering back to the home base. That way, security forces can easily keep tabs on what’s happening out there, without needing to physically patrol the area.
Wireless broadband can also help track or recover stolen vehicles, especially when it comes to cargo. Many trucks and container vans nowadays come equipped with GPS trackers, which, as the name suggests, record the path of specific vehicles. While these trackers can work without an internet connection, tracing a location is faster when a network is available. With these implements, police would have an easier time finding a missing vehicle and may even catch the perpetrators in the act.
Accidents
When an accident occurs, emergency response units need a way to communicate more efficiently with both the patient and their home base. That’s where wireless broadband technology comes in. By staying connected to a network, first responders eliminate the need to look for a stable cellular signal, especially in some rural areas.
Paramedics can also easily enlist the assistance of physicians when online using wireless broadband. This enables them to provide better care for the survivors of an accident, even before they arrive at the hospital.
Natural Disasters
Unlike crime or accidents, which can only affect a small number of individuals or only a specific area, natural disasters are harder to deal with. These occurrences, which include hurricanes or earthquakes, can cause widespread damage.
That’s where wireless broadband solutions come in. These kinds of networks are easy to set up even in the aftermath of a disaster. As such, emergency services tend to deploy this solution in calamity-stricken areas, allowing both relief workers and survivors to communicate better with one another and with the outside world. With these solutions in place, it will be easier for local governments, aid agencies, and other organizations to coordinate rescue and relief efforts. This enables survivors of a calamity to get the kind of help they actually need, easier and faster.
As these situations show, setting up wireless broadband doesn’t automatically create safety in one’s community. However, this technology makes existing solutions work faster and more efficiently, helping to minimize the loss of life and property.
YouTuber sentenced for playing Pokémon Go in a church
Why it matters to you
Just like people keep telling you, there’s a time and a place for playing smartphone games.
Playing Pokémon Go inside a church in Russia got local YouTube star Ruslan Sokolovsky into a whole lot of trouble.
Sokolovsky was arrested last September after he posted a video online of him playing Pokémon Go in an Orthodox church in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg about 900 miles east of Moscow.
The 22-year-old blogger was accused of “offending religious sensibilities” by playing the monster-catching game on a religious site, and using some rather colorful language while comparing Jesus to a character from the hit mobile game. However, at the end of his trial this week he escaped the maximum punishment of five years in jail and was instead handed a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence.
The judge told Sokolovsky he had had insulted the feelings of believers by “attributing to Jesus Christ the qualities of a reanimated zombie,” the Washington Post reported.
Before his arrest, the Russian authorities had already warned its Go-playing citizens that trying to catch ’em all inside places of religious worship could land them in serious bother.
In the YouTube video at the center of the case, the Pokémon Go player, on his way into the church, describes the ban as “complete nonsense,” adding, “Who could get offended if you’re just walking around with your smartphone in a church?” He soon found out.
A later search of Sokolovsky’s home turned up “evidence of incitement to hatred and attacks on the liberty of faith,” according to an AFP report at the time.
Following Thursday’s verdict, the blogger told the BBC he’d already made an apology to those he’d offended and said his video was “too cynical for Russian society.”
As for the game at the center of the controversy, Sokolovksy said he won’t be playing it anymore because “it’s already out of fashion.”
‘Coding Jam’ uses musical blocks to teach kids programming concepts
Last year, Osmo expanded its iPad-based children’s learning system with a program that teaches kids to code by linking tangible tiles with on-screen commands. Now the company’s expanded its platform with Coding Jam, an add-on that assigns musical tones to a new set of blocks, allowing young learners to tap out tunes in a sequence just like a series of code elements.
Like the main Osmo system, Coding Jam uses a mirror peripheral over the user’s docked iPad so its camera can track kids interacting with the music tiles. These correlate with particular tones, and snapping modifiers (like “loop” or “play twice”) on them introduces concepts analogous to coding instructions.
Kids can layer these elements to create musical sequences, as well as watch the jams other Osmo users make through the app. The Coding Jam expansion kit costs $60 and requires the full Osmo base set to build off of.
Via: 9to5Mac
Source: Osmo
D-Link would like you to forget about its lax security
Back in January, the US Federal Trade Commission accused D-Link of putting customers in harm’s way with its extremely negligent approach to security. According to the FTC, the company left hundreds of thousands of customers vulnerable to attack by failing to secure their routers and cameras against critical vulnerabilities. At the time, the company denied the allegations, claiming no one had been affected by an actual breach, but that didn’t change the fact that D-Link left crucial security information out in the open for months. Now the company is trying to have the case thrown out of court on the grounds that the US government has no jurisdiction over the company.
A federal judge in San Francisco agreed with that argument today and dismissed the Taiwan-based D-Link Corporation from the case, but the company isn’t quite off the hook yet. In a carefully worded press release written by small government, anti-regulation nonprofit Cause of Action Institute, the case is still proceeding against D-Link Systems, Inc. — the company’s California-based US subsidiary. It’s a minor legal matter, but D-Link and Cause of Action are using the opportunity to drum up some good PR and reiterate that the FTC has yet to show that anyone was actually harmed when the company left a painfully obvious backdoor in its router firmware and exposed devices to potential malware attacks.
The Cause of Action Institute, which is defending D-Link in court, also claimed the FTC’s allegations are “vague and unsubstantiated” even though the company sold IP cameras with hard-coded login credentials that anyone could use to view streams and couldn’t be changed by the user. In fact, D-Link’s security flaws are something of a running joke among hackers and security researchers. While the parent company is dodging a bullet here, the US-based subsidiary will still have to contest the complaint in court.
Source: PR Newswire
Judge sends Uber/Waymo case to DOJ for investigation
In the latest bad news for Uber, the judge presiding over its trade secrets lawsuit with Google self-driving car unit Waymo has asked federal prosecutors to investigate the case. Reuters and Bloomberg report that US District Judge William Alsup said he is not taking a position on whether or not charges are warranted, but this is the second investigation into Uber, along with an inquiry into its “greyballing” scheme. At the same time, he denied a request by Uber to take the case to private arbitration, opting to keep things in the public eye, and also partially granted Waymo’s request for an injunction.
That ruling is under seal, for now, but Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of the case, has said he’s recusing himself from LiDAR-related work while the case is ongoing. That technology, which allows self-driving vehicles to see where they’re going, is what Waymo claims he took, and if Uber has to start over it could cost the company years of time.
Source: Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times
Square off against a digital version of yourself at Nike’s Unlimited Stadium in Manila
Why it matters to you
If you’re obsessed with setting personal records, Nike’s Unlimited Stadium gives you a new and unique way to race against yourself.
Every runner wants to beat their best time. So, who better to race against than yourself? Nike answers that question with its recently unveiled Nike Unlimited Stadium installation in Manila, Philippines, where runners race against a digital avatar of themselves that runs as fast as the regular human runner.
To race against your digital self, you place a radio frequency identification sensor on your sneaker and then run a lap on the track. After the initial lap time records, a digital avatar appears on several large LED screens placed around the track. Fortunately, the avatar doesn’t speak to you, so don’t worry about being berated by a digital copy of yourself for not keeping up. Only 30 runners are allowed on the track at any given time.
Bartle Bogle Hegarty
The 200-meter installation was built by global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s (BBH) Singapore division and takes over an entire city block in Manila. The track was purposely designed to look like the sole of Nike’s new LunarEpic running shoe and illuminates a multitude of colors while featuring the same circular drawings found at the bottom of the shoe. As of now, there’s no information regarding how long the installation plans to remain open or if Nike expects to bring it to more locations around the globe.
BBH’s Nike Unlimited Stadium isn’t its first foray into the world of Nike as the agency’s created a number of technologically impressive installations for the brand over the last few years. For a race in Jakarta, Indonesia, the agency hacked a building to display real-time data such as speed and place on the outside of the building. To promote the Nike Hypervenom shoe, BBH allowed people in Bangkok to participate in an interactive soccer match where they tried to avoid virtual defenders as they tested their agility and scoring ability.
The next time you are in Manila and want to run with someone as good as you, Nike Unlimited Stadium may have the right track.
Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 review
Research Center:
Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2
It’s 2017, and the market for ebook readers isn’t what it once was. There have always been only a handful of major players, but Amazon has widened its gap and still reigns king. Kobo is reaching back to its well-reviewed 2014 Aura H2O to offer an alternative to the widely-popular Kindle.
Unlike the ebook reader market, the newly-refreshed 2017 Aura H20 hasn’t changed much at all. It’s still waterproof, and it has the same backlit 6.8-inch screen, with the same resolution. The major change? It loses the MicroSD card slot present on the original in favor of double the internal storage.
That’s not a bad thing, though. The new H2O’s design and features aren’t any less impressive than they were the first time around. But on some level, the H2O feels like a missed opportunity. Kobo had a chance to disrupt a stagnant market, but decidedly played it safe. The result is a competent ebook reader that delivers on its promises, but does nothing more.
Comfortable and light
The Kobo Aura H2O won’t be mistaken for a Kindle. It has a distinct, angular design that’s slightly feels more rugged than its competitors. Thick bezels border its 6.8-inch E Ink screen, and a rubberized dimpled material stretches the length of its ergonomic back cover. It’s comfortable in the palm, and exceptionally light.
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
The bezels provide ample room to rest your thumbs, but we would’ve liked to see Kobo trim them a bit.
The Aura H2O is minimalist. Kobo has taken care to conceal the Aura H2O’s ports and buttons, going so far as to recess the power button and move it from ebook reader’s top to its back cover. It’s not as indented as we’d like, making it a little tough to find — the more you use the device, the more you’ll get used to it.
Testing the H2O with H2O
What hasn’t changed about the Aura H2O (thankfully) is its water resistance. Just like the 2014 model, Kobo’s new ebook reader is waterproof — it ships with the company’s patented HZO Protection, which should provide up to 30 minutes of protection at a depth of three feet.
It’s comfortable in the palm, and exceptionally light.
We put Kobo’s waterproofing claims to the test by submerging the Aura H2O in a large bowl of water for five minutes. After we thoroughly dried it off with paper towels, it was good as new — the power button and the IR touchscreen worked as well as they had before, and we didn’t note any signs of damage on the charging port.
You should note the screen does become a little unresponsive, and the device has trouble registering touches until it’s completely dry. Regardless, water resistance is always a welcome feature because it increases a device’s longevity and durability. Feel free to read with the Kobo Aura H2O in the bath — something you need to be a lot more careful with when using Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers.
A crisp and sharp screen
We’re pleased to see the Aura H2O’s screen is just as crisp and sharp as the original. The resolution and pixel density is unchanged at 1,430 x 1,080 pixels and 265ppi (pixels per inch), and we found text and book covers to be sharp — sharper than the cheaper 6-inch Kindle, which has 167ppi, but not as sharp as the Kindle Oasis, which packs 300ppi (and has a higher, slightly more comparable price point).
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
All Kindles come with a 6-inch screen size, so it’s nice to see Kobo offering a larger size for big-screen lovers who want more screen real estate.
The device features Kobo’s ComfortLight technology, which produces a bright, tonally-consistent light across the Aura H2O’s entire screen. It also boasts a Natural Light feature, which adjusts the screen’s hue (from bluish-white to orangish-grey) to minimize eye strain. We found the “bedtime” feature, which automatically switches the screen to warmer, non-blue hues at a specific time, a nice touch.
The Aura H2O performs just as well outside. Thanks to Kobo’s proprietary glare-reducing technology, it’s easy to read in direct sunlight.
Middling performance
Powering the Aura H2O is a 1GHz processor like last year’s Kobo Aura One, and it packs 512MB of RAM. That puts it more or less on par with Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers.
Feel free to read with the Kobo Aura H2O in the bath.
Despite the upgrades from the original 2014 device, the Aura H2O isn’t as snappy as we hoped. It took up to a full second longer to load books than Amazon’s 6-inch Kindle, for example, and it sometimes stuttered in menus — especially the search screen. In ebooks, the E Ink screen refreshed a little too frequently for our liking — about every six pages. For comparison, the $80, 6-inch Kindle refreshes every five pages, and the $200 Kindle Voyage refreshes every 14 pages. The Kobo Aura H2O is $180, and it’s disappointing to see it doesn’t have a page refresh rate more comparable to the competition.
One appreciable improvement is the internal storage. The new Aura H2O can store twice as many books as the original, up to 8GB worth. That translates to about 6,000 ebooks, which is more than enough for the average reader. The original did have a MicroSD card slot, which meant you could hold even more, but it’s highly unlikely anyone would ever go above 6,000 — we’re not complaining about the omission.
One-month battery life
One of the most appealing features of ebook readers is their fantastic battery life, and the new Aura H2O doesn’t disappoint. Kobo says it should last up to one month off a charger, which works out to about thirty minutes of reading each day (if you turn the page once per minute).
The battery life estimate seems spot on. We tested the Aura H2O for about a week, using it for thirty minutes to an hour each evening with the brightness set to 50 percent and Wi-Fi enabled. By day five, the battery life had dipped to about 56 percent.
Intuitive software
The easiest way to load books onto the Aura H2O is over Wi-Fi via Kobo’s store. It boasts about five million titles, the company says — about a million short of the the Kindle store’s roughly six million. It’s organized logically by section, and features curated collections (e.g., “great reads under $5”) that make narrowing down new titles easy.
The Aura H2O has the added advantage of robust support for third-party ebook formats. If you connect it to a computer via the MicroUSB cord, you can transfer ebooks in EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, and MOBI from your computer’s hard drive to the device’s internal memory.
Adam Balkin/Digital Trends
Free ebook resources like Project Gutenberg and MobileRead will work just fine. But it’s important to note that Digital Rights Management (DRM) software will prevent you from transferring most books from third-party ebook stores. Some can be converted using Calibre, a free ebook management program, but if you download an ebook from the Barnes and Noble store that’s formatted for a Nook ebook reader, for example, you’ll have trouble getting it to a format the Aura H2O can use. Sadly, ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle library are also not supported.
The Aura H2O’s software is intuitive, for the most part. We especially like the universal search feature, which trawls through the Kobo’s online store, offline downloads, saved annotations, and the built-in dictionary for book titles, authors, series, and ISBN numbers. It helpfully provides autocomplete suggestions as you type too, which comes in handy for lengthy titles like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
Kobo’s TypeGenius software, which powers the Aura H2O’s font-rendering engine, is impressively robust. It offers 11 fonts in 50 sizes, different weight and sharpness settings, margin and justification adjustments, in-book search, and note-taking tools. A preview window makes it easy to see changes before they’re applied, and TypeGenius’ page navigation tools make flipping back a few chapters a breeze.
The Aura H2O isn’t as snappy as we hoped.
An energy-saving feature automatically turns off the Aura H2O after a few minutes. Reading controls let you fine-tune the appearance of pages. A web browser — currently in beta — lets you peruse sites on the H2O’s screen, thought we wouldn’t recommend it — the slow refresh rate will test the limits of your patience.
The Aura H2O’s Activity feature gamifies your reading. You can see stats like how many minutes you spent reading each day of the week, how many pages you average a minute, and how much progress you’ve made in your current book. An “Awards” tab offers badges unlocked by completing tasks like creating a Kobo account, using the built-in dictionary, and reading Proust.
Warranty information, price, and availability
Kobo offers a standard limited warranty for the Aura H2O. If a defect arises one year from the date you purchased it, the company will replace it with a new or refurbished model of equal or greater value, or repair it using new or refurbished parts. You’ll have to contact Kobo to make a warranty claim and provide a proof of purchase, and ship the Aura H2O to Kobo’s repair facility.
Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 Compared To
Kobo Aura One
Kindle Oasis
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2015
Kindle Voyage
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2013)
Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight
Kobo Aura HD
Kobo Mini
Sony Reader PRS-T2
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet
Amazon Kindle Fire
Spring Design Alex
Barnes & Noble Nook
Sony PRS-700
The Kobo Aura H2O costs $180, and you can pre-order it now. It will be available on May 22 in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, and Turkey. It will come to more countries later this year.
Our Take
The Aura H2O is every bit as good as the original, but we would have liked to see better performance. It’s a great option for people who prefer large-screen ebook readers.
How long will it last?
The Aura H2O’s build quality is exceptional – and the body’s waterproof. If the first-generation Aura H2O is any indication, we expect it to last more than three years.
The DT Accessory Pack
Huasiru PU leather case
$10
Mexxprotect Ultra-Clear screen protector
$8.49
Mulbess – Kobo Aura H2O 2014 eReader eBook stand case
$15
On the software side, Kobo’s devices tend to improve over time. The company introduces experimental new features via the beta menu, and just in February rolled out a revamped home screen interface to the entire lineup of Aura devices.
Is there a better alternative?
Yes. The Aura H2O is a great ebook reader, but there are less expensive alternatives.
Take Amazon’s Kindle lineup, for example. The entry-level Kindle has a smaller display and a lower resolution than the Aura H2O, but it boasts built-in Bluetooth, and starts at $80. The next step up, the $120 Kindle Paperwhite 3, bumps screen sharpness to 212ppi and adds 3G connectivity. The larger $200 Kindle Voyage packs haptic sensors, and there’s the $290 Kindle Oasis with a two-month battery life.
The $120 Nook Touch Glowlight, another Aura H2O competitor, has a screen with 212ppi and a battery that lasts between three to eight weeks on a charge.
The biggest advantage of the Kobo, though? It’s waterproof. Other ebook readers also do not have built-in blue light filters, either.
Should you buy it?
Yes. The Aura H2O is a great ebook reader — it’s waterproof, has a blue-light filter, a large, sharp screen, and it supports a number of ebook file formats. If those features interest you, the Kobo Aura H2O is a great fit. It is a lot more expensive than the entry-level Kindle, though, so you may want to take a look at Amazon’s offerings first.
Forget Bitmoji: Allo uses neural networks to personalise emoji
Google really wants people to use its Allo chat app.
The company has just introduced a new feature that’s super reminicscent of Bitmoji, the personalised emoji service that Snap bought and integrated into Snapchat. Google’s feature is a little different, though. It uses computer vision and neural networks to build an emoji sticker that’s supposed to be based on – and look just like – your selfie. In other words, it uses algorithms to emojify your face.
- What is Google Allo, how does it work, and why would you
- Google Allo: How to set up and use it
- Google is making a desktop version of its Allo chat app
All you have to do is snap a selfie, and it’ll return an automatically generated illustrated version of you, while also providing you with customisation options to help you personalise the stickers. Jennifer Daniel, Allo’s expressions creative director, revealed in a blog post that the Allo team explored how it could enable an algorithm to pick out qualitative features in a manner similar to the way people do.
Here’s how it works: humans use context clues to determine a person’s eye colour in different lighting conditions, but computers can’t do that, so Allo relies on neural networks in order to interpret every permutation of lighting condition, eye colour, etc. The Allo team discovered that a few neurons among the millions in these networks could focus on things humans weren’t “explicitly trained to look at”.
So, because Allo uses this technology to in a sense “notice more”, it is able to create a realistic illustration of you that captures the exact qualities your friends can recognise. But rather than replicate a person’s appearance exactly, the Allo app develops a lower resolution model in the form of emoji stickers. It’s less about reproducing reality and more about breaking the rules of representation, Allo said.
So, now, you can use Allo to generate personalised emojis that truly represent you, rather than relying on Snapchat’s Bitmoji, which only offers the ability to swipe through and pick characteristics like skin colour, outfit choice, and hair style.
This new feature is starting to roll out in Allo now for Android, and it will come soon to Allo on iOS.
Lighthouse home security camera uses AI to ID people and pets
Security cameras are getting more and more advanced these days, they might put a few security companies out of business. Take Lighthouse, for instance. The device, backed by an accelerator created byAndroid co-founder Andy Rubin, can figure out who’s at home or who entered the house, and whether it’s a human or the family dog/cat. When The Verge took it for a spin, the Lighthouse team showed how it responds to your questions and voice commands. Say, you want to know if anybody took the dog for a walk. You can just ask the camera, and it will send the latest video it took of your dog to its accompanying iOS and Android app.
The Lighthouse setup is composed of an RGB camera that captures 1080p videos and has night vision, a speaker, a microphone, a siren and a 3D sensor. It needs the last one, because unlike Netatmo Welcome that uses facial recognition, this one relies on 3D-sensing technology. When you first set it up, you’ll need to manually identify the shapes it sees around the house. If it detects a family member, you’ll have to tell the machine that it’s your partner, roommate, child or pet. That way, it can recognize them the next time they enter the house.
Over time, the camera also learns when to expect every family member to be around. If it detects an unknown presence at an unexpected time, it’ll send you a notification, and you can watch what’s going on through its app. It’s unclear how accurately it can identify each family member, but the company said it trained its system to be good at recognizing shapes and patterns by feeding it over a million samples. Lighthouse plans to introduce facial recognition before it officially becomes available, though.
When it comes to your privacy, the company said its system can protect your data with bank-level encryption. You’re the only one who can access your info, and the system deletes whatever your camera records within 30 days. The camera is now available for pre-order bundled with the company’s “Intelligence AI Service,” starting at $399 for one device and a year of access to the AI. Lighthouse expects to start shipping in September 2017.
Source: The Verge, Lighthouse
AIVAnet 