Misfit now lets you fully customise your wearable before you buy it

Remember Moto Maker? Well, Misfit has a similar tool for its devices.

Motorola launched an online tool in 2013 that allowed customers to customise the look of their Moto X phones. We reviewed it and loved the experience. Now, taking a page from Motorola’s playbook, Misfit’s My Misfit tool lets you you personalise a Misfit device. You can change the colour, strap style, and material of a variety of Misfit products. There’s a total of “600 unique possible combinations”, Misfit said.

Colours include Jet, Rose Tone, Silver, Midnight, and Champagne, while strap styles range from paracode to leather to silicone. But the new tool only works with select Misfit products. You can use it to customise the Shine 2, which has the original Misfit design, Ray, which is a minimalist movement tracker, Phase, a simple analog watch with tracking features, and Vapor, a touchscreen smartwatch.

• Misfit Phase is the company’s first smartwatch
• Misfit Shine 2 gets Speedo swim tracker upgrade
• Misfit Ray review: Design over delivery

Here’s how it works: go to the tool, pick your device, choose a colour, select a strap, and that’s it. Misfit said it will build it and ship it straight to your door, and it’ll even cover shipping. It of course has visualisations of anything you want to buy, so you can check it out completely before you cash out. Will it help Misfit to beat Fitbit and other companies making affordable trackers? Who knows.

But it’s still a nice addition nevertheless.

Facebook Albums will store any kind of status update

Next time you create a Facebook album for a trip or an event, you can toss everything in there for posterity, not just photos and videos. That means if you posted a text-only status update or checked-into a hotel, a theme park, a resto, a tourist spot or anywhere else, you can add them all to the album for that specific outing. According to TechCrunch, Facebook has already begun rolling out the changes to the web and to Android devices. We have no exact date for iOS, but the new features will apparently be available for iPhones and iPads “soon.”

In addition to being able to compile and categorize pretty much every kind of status update, you can now choose a “featured” album to display on your profile. If you have friends who go on crazy adventures, you can follow theirs to get notified about their latest escapades. But if you went with them on those adventures, you can all collaborate on a single album now that Facebook has made the process easier — all you have to do is toggle the option on when you create a new one.

With these changes, you can tell a fuller and more compelling story with each and every folder in your collection. The social network is clearly aiming to turn creating and maintaining albums a more interactive and personal experience, probably as a way to compete with its youth-focused rivals like Snapchat.

Source: TechCrunch

All-new Skype: What’s changed and why is it better?

Microsoft bought Skype nearly six years ago, and to be honest, it feels like the service hasn’t changed much since.

Sure, it’s moved from a peer-to-peer service to the cloud, and it’s rolled out some design changes and features, such as free group video calling and Skype for Web, but in a world that is now dominated with messaging challengers like Slack, FaceTime, iMessage, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more, it somehow feels a bit antiquated. We at Pocket-lint even ditched Skype for Slack.

In attempt to stop more users from fleeing the service, and perhaps inject a little excitement into it as well, Microsoft is redesigning Skype. The new update, which is touted as “the next generation of Skype”, is all about messaging – even though Skype is known for video and audio calls. Here’s everything you need to know about the all-new Skype, including what’s changed and whether it is better now.

• 5 apps that give you free voice calling
• 5 best alternatives to Skype

What is Skype?

Skype is a communications service owned by Microsoft. It offers text, voice, and video calling. You can use it on your phone, computer, or even a TV. It is free to start using Skype, and you can can even try out group video, but if you pay to upgrade, you can do more things, like call phones. Check out Skype’s website to learn more information. Pocket-lint also has an entire Skype hub with related articles.

What’s changed in Skype?

Find and Chat

Microsoft said it rebuilt Skype from “the ground up” – with chatting features finally front and center. The new Skype messaging interface now shows three sections in a conversation: find, chat, and capture. Find lets you search in a conversation, whether you want to find images, restaurants, or tie-ins like Giphy, while Chat is the basic conversation view with options for emoji and images, etc.

Capture

Capture is the newest and most interesting section. It’s kind of like Snapchat, but it’s inside Skype. It opens the camera to let you take pictures or video. If you’re shooting a video, you’ll see a curvy line that shows the amount of time for a recording. You’ll also see this line when calling or when contacts are typing. After you’ve captured a video or picture, you can add effects like stickers and text and more.

Highlights

There’s also a new Highlights feature, which reminds us of Snapchat stories. With it, you can share a stream of photos and videos that others can see and react with emoticons. Skype also lets you react to text and video conversations. During calls, for instance, you can drag and drop people around and then just tap on the reaction icon next to any message or video call to express how you feel.

To post a Highlight, swipe to access your camera, then take a photo or video, and post it to your Highlights or send it directly to your contacts or groups. Check out Skype’s FAQ page here for more information on how to post a Highlight.

Is Skype better now?

Microsoft has been tweaking Skype here and there over the years, trying different ways to get people to use Skype instead of the growing list competitors. Skype Qik, for instance, was a way to conquer mobile video messaging, but that didn’t work out. Nevertheless, people all over still use Skype for video and audio calls. Microsoft has the users and brand, it just needs to make Skype cool again.

That’s where this redesign comes in – but, unfortunately, it just copies Snapchat, which is something Facebook has been trying to do for years, and seems to be failing at, to be frank. Still, we think universal search, a simple user interface, fresh design, and new features are exciting. It made us re-open the app after a long while, but will we drop Snapchat or Messenger for it? Probably not.

When will the new Skype roll out?

Microsoft is rolling out the new Skype to Android mobile devices first, followed by iOS, Windows, and Mac.

Want to know more?

Check out Skype’s blog post or visit the Skype.com feature page and FAQ hub to learn more.

US is now asking for visa applicants’ social media names 

Last month, the Trump administration formally proposed tougher vetting for visa applicants that would require more social media scrutiny. Today, the State Department formally enacted the expanded questionnaire, which will force applicants to disclose their social media handles from the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years.

The additional questions also include email addresses, phone numbers, past addresses, previous employment and travel history. A State Department official told Reuters that officials will be able to request additional information “to confirm identity or conduct more rigorous national security vetting.” Previously, the department claimed that only about 0.5 percent of applicants worldwide would receive the extended questionnaire.

The questions are technically voluntary, but the form notes that failing to answer could delay or outright prevent the visa’s processing. During the public comment period following the proposed questionnaire expansion, critics attacked the effort for likely increasing the already-slow process and potentially discouraging international students and scientists from attempting to enter the country. Immigration lawyers noted that tracking personal history back so far might open up applicants to innocent mistakes, which could also delay visa processing.

Asking for social media information didn’t start with the Trump administration: Last June, the Department of Homeland Security requested that such questions go on visa applications. They were approved in December, but only for those applying for visa waivers.

Source: Reuters

Nintendo Switch’s online features will cost just $20 a year

When Nintendo announced that the Switch would feature a paid online subscription model like Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus, it was vauge on the details. We knew the service would cost less than the competition and offer some kind of subscription bonus, but the specifics werne’t clear. Today, Nintendo filled in some of those details: starting in 2018, online services for Nintendo Switch will cost just $20 a year — a fee that buys online play, voice chat and access to a “compilation” of classic Nintendo titles that have been modded for online multiplayer.

Developing…

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Paris Accord ‘Was Wrong for Our Planet’

Apple CEO Tim Cook this afternoon sent an email to Apple employees expressing his disappointment with U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal.

In the email, which was shared by BuzzFeed, Cook says that while he tried to persuade Trump to keep the United States in the agreement, “it wasn’t enough.” Cook goes on to reiterate Apple’s commitment to reducing its environmental impact through renewable energy and an eventual closed-loop supply chain.

Team,

I know many of you share my disappointment with the White House’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. I spoke with President Trump on Tuesday and tried to persuade him to keep the U.S. in the agreement. But it wasn’t enough.

Climate change is real and we all share a responsibility to fight it. I want to reassure you that today’s developments will have no impact on Apple’s efforts to protect the environment. We power nearly all of our operations with renewable energy, which we believe is an example of something that’s good for our planet and makes good business sense as well.

We will keep working toward the ambitious goals of a closed-loop supply chain, and to eventually stop mining new materials altogether. Of course, we’re going to keep working with our suppliers to help them do more to power their businesses with clean energy. And we will keep challenging ourselves to do even more. Knowing the good work that we and countless others around the world are doing, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about our planet’s future.

Our mission has always been to leave the world better than we found it. We will never waver, because we know that future generations depend on us.

Your work is as important today as it has ever been. Thank you for your commitment to making a difference every single day.

Tim

Cook, who also shared his disappointment in a tweet, was one of many tech leaders who attempted to persuade Trump not to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement earlier this week, but on Thursday, the president announced that the United States will indeed withdraw from the accord. Since the announcement, tech company CEOs have been speaking out against the decision while pledging to continue to fight climate change.

Decision to withdraw from the #ParisAgreeement was wrong for our planet. Apple is committed to fight climate change and we will never waver.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 2, 2017

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said leaving the accord “puts our children’s future at risk,” while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he was disappointed with the decision. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said yesterday he had done all he could to advise the president to remain in the accord, made good on a promise to leave the advisory councils he served on.

Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2017

Disney CEO Bob Iger also announced that he’s resigned from the President’s Council following the decision, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company would double its efforts to fight climate change. Many other major companies, including IBM, GE, Microsoft, and Intel have also spoken out against the move.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tags: Tim Cook, Donald Trump
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Bebop Sensors creates motion-sensing gloves for VR that tickle your fingertips

Why it matters to you

Benop Sensors wants to do away with controllers and bring accurate hand and finger tracking to virtual reality through gloves.

Although the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and now the Samsung Gear VR ship with motion controllers, they do not fully emulate the movements of the hands and fingers. Instead, our physical hands and digits are wrapped around hardware and pressing buttons while simultaneously rendered as stationary models in the virtual world. Bebop Sensors wants to change that by selling special gloves to virtual reality headset makers that accurately track your digits.

According to Bebop Sensors, it designed a pair of gloves, dubbed as the Marcel Modular Data Gloves, capable of real-time control of games and environments in virtual reality and augmented reality applications. These gloves will be sold in three versions: With five sensors, 10 sensors, and 14 sensors. Obviously, the more sensors Bebop packs into these gloves, the more detailed the user’s hand and finger movements will be pronounced in the virtual environment.

Each sensor packed into these gloves support six or nine degrees of freedom via inertial measurement units. These are small electronic devices that will track and report the angular rate and force generated by the hands and fingers. They are backed by a sub-frame latency of 120Hz, meaning the sensors will provide physical input information during and sometimes in-between each rendered frame.

In addition to fast, accurate tracking of the user’s hands and fingers, the gloves also provide haptic feedback. For instance, if the user is turning a virtual wheel, the gloves will provide a slight sensation so that the hands and fingers can feel “movement.” Gamepads, smartphones, and even PC gaming mice provide this type of physical feedback. Why not gloves for VR?

“Haptics built into the fingertips provide a four-octave range for complex stimuli that can convey surface quality and object contact,” Bebop Sensors said on Thursday. “These non-resonant haptic actuators help close the loop of interaction between humans and virtual devices with contact and continuous surface sounds that drive the actuators, communicating a more realistic touch experience.”

The sensors within the gloves are sensitive enough to track knuckle movement and “abduction motion” in the wearer’s hands. For instance, if the user raises a hand, waves, and moves/bends all five fingers at the same time, the same movements will be accurately rendered in the virtual/augmented environment. A haptic audio creation kit is available for headset makers too for generating sounds when fingers touch a virtual surface, such as playing a piano or scraping fingers across a rough surface.

As the name states, these gloves are modular, meaning headset makers can customize the gloves to offer unique capabilities for their VR/AR systems. The company did not say how much the gloves will cost these headset makers, but simply stated that they are an “affordable and robust solution” for virtual reality and augmented reality applications. They target “gaming environments” as well.

No signal? No problem — this drone acts as a mobile cellular base station

Why it matters to you

This flying cellular base station drone promises to help in disaster relief situations when regular communications are down.

Imagine that you are stuck under debris following an earthquake and are wondering why your phone is not getting any signal and no one is coming to your rescue. The most likely reason is that your nearest cell tower is damaged or has lost power.

What if a drone could bring you the necessary cellular service, courtesy of a mobile cellular base station so that you can make a phone call successfully? That is what a research project at the University of North Texas has demonstrated in a first-of-its-kind field test.

“The system we developed at UNT through public, private, and government partnerships, is a deployable communication system,” Kamesh Namuduri, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, told Digital Trends. “It is a flying cell tower, meaning a drone carrying the cellular base station as a payload. The system is portable enough to be carried by a drone and flown to any location, and then providing cellular service the instant it is deployed.”

In the team’s demonstration, the communications device was attached to a drone and launched 400 feet in the air. With just 250 milli-watt transmit power, it was capable of providing cellular coverage up to two kilometers. Scaled up to a 10 watt transmit power, the researchers claim it could provide cellular coverage to a city with a population of more than 100,000.

“What we demonstrated is just the beginning,” Namuduri continued. “The technology needs to mature before it can be rolled out in the real world. For example, small drones cannot fly longer than an hour without battery replacement, while larger drones are too expensive. The communication systems needs to be more efficient so that the quality of service is reliable and dependable enough to carry out relief operations. We also need to develop IoT services around the technology to enable the first responders to share situational awareness information among themselves.”

No signal? No problem — this drone acts as a mobile cellular base station

Why it matters to you

This flying cellular base station drone promises to help in disaster relief situations when regular communications are down.

Imagine that you are stuck under debris following an earthquake and are wondering why your phone is not getting any signal and no one is coming to your rescue. The most likely reason is that your nearest cell tower is damaged or has lost power.

What if a drone could bring you the necessary cellular service, courtesy of a mobile cellular base station so that you can make a phone call successfully? That is what a research project at the University of North Texas has demonstrated in a first-of-its-kind field test.

“The system we developed at UNT through public, private, and government partnerships, is a deployable communication system,” Kamesh Namuduri, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, told Digital Trends. “It is a flying cell tower, meaning a drone carrying the cellular base station as a payload. The system is portable enough to be carried by a drone and flown to any location, and then providing cellular service the instant it is deployed.”

In the team’s demonstration, the communications device was attached to a drone and launched 400 feet in the air. With just 250 milli-watt transmit power, it was capable of providing cellular coverage up to two kilometers. Scaled up to a 10 watt transmit power, the researchers claim it could provide cellular coverage to a city with a population of more than 100,000.

“What we demonstrated is just the beginning,” Namuduri continued. “The technology needs to mature before it can be rolled out in the real world. For example, small drones cannot fly longer than an hour without battery replacement, while larger drones are too expensive. The communication systems needs to be more efficient so that the quality of service is reliable and dependable enough to carry out relief operations. We also need to develop IoT services around the technology to enable the first responders to share situational awareness information among themselves.”

Nuance’s Nina assistant asks a human for help when it can’t answer a question

Why it matters to you

The next time you dial customer support, you might get Nuance’s Nina assistant — and that is a good thing.

You might know Nuance, the natural voice and AI lab headquartered on the outskirts of Boston, from its popular Dragon NautrallySpeaking transcription software for PC. But what you might not know is that the firm’s conversational AI, which powers the customer service platforms of 6,500 companies around the globe, handles billions of transactions every year. And it is now capable of more.

On Thursday, Nuance launched a new version of Nina, its AI-powered, cross-platform assistant melding of machine smarts and human intelligence. From a customer perspective, it is just like any other AI-powered voice assistant — Nina can respond to questions (think the status of a pizza order, for example) and walk you through a conscripted list of choices. But unlike Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, Nina is sharp enough to know when it can’t answer a question — and to throw it to a human specialist who can.

“The advantage of AI is, they’re always available,” Robert Weiderman, Nuance’s executive vice president and general manager, told Digital Trends. “Unlike a human, they never have a bad night — you can self-service 24/7.”

Here’s how it works: Nuance’s data engineers use Nina Coach, an automated learning tool, to train it on a business’ ins and outs. Once it has gotten a handle on the basics, it goes to work, fielding between 80 to 90 percent of customer calls, SMS messages, and texts from chat platforms like Facebook Messenger.

“General-purpose assistants like Alexa and Siri know a little about a lot,” Weiderman said. “Nina can go deep.”

When Nina is unsure about a question, it will consult help — human help. In those rare cases, Nuance’s AI tries to match customers to reps with relevant expertise. Then, it provides those reps with a transcript and history of the conversation, and a list of likely answers in order of confidence. The call center staffer’s choice is recorded, analyzed, and folded back into what Weiderman calls the “semantic brain” — Nina’s collective intelligence.

“It’s just like people,” Weiderman said. “Kids learn to have conversations, go to high school and college, get a doctorate, and become an expert in something. Nina’s the same way — it has a learning loop will eventually create 100 percent confident answers.”

Weiderman sees it as a way to free up hands in customer support centers, and to help businesses prioritize the most important — and difficult — requests without impacting other customers’ experience. With Nuance’s infrastructure up and running, call center agents can service three to six customers at a time, Weiderman said.

“You can turn on support for messaging, but you can’t control the volume that’s going to come at you,” he said. “The days when company’s could control how consumers spoke with them is going away. First the web came along, and you could call or go to the website. And now there’s chat apps like Facebook Messenger, Line, and Kik, and Internet of Things devices like Amazon’s Echo.”

“Nina’s able to support a growing number of channels, including voice, mobile and Internet of Things devices like Alexa,” he said.

Human-augmented intelligence is just the tip of Nina’s iceberg. Nuance also announced asynchronous messaging, which lets customers start a conversation with a business’s assistant on one platform and pick it up later, on another. You can text a credit card company about an erroneous charge via Facebook Messenger, for example, and get status updates via SMS every hour until the problem is resolved.

kantver/123RF

Nina’s also gaining the ability to transition customers to digital channels. If you call a company’s support center and Nuance’s automated system can’t find the answer to your question, you’ll get two options: Wait for a human agent, or continue the conversation on a digital channel like Facebook Messenger.

“We don’t expect text message conversations to be instantaneous,” Weiderman said. “And when you’re dealing with something like an insurance claim, it can take days of back and forth to get the paperwork in order.”

Nuance rolled out the new Nina features to ICBC Bank, one of the largest in China, in 2012. More than a billion users interact with its support via messaging app WeChat, Weiderman said, accounting for 85 percent of all customer service requests.

“We’re adding cognitive, data-driven machine learning to our products,” Weiderman said. “We’re the only vendor combining the tooling, intelligence, and analytics of natural language processing and cognitive technologies […] to deliver automated and assisted solutions targeted to enterprise needs.