2017 October | AIVAnet

8

Oct

Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Treepods, robot cutters, Firefly flints

At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the Web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there – alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the Pebble clones and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. That said, keep in mind that any crowdfunding project — even the best intentioned — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.

Colorspike — dynamic set lighting

A few years ago, a small NYC-based startup called BitBanger Labs released a gizmo called the PixelStick: a programmable LED rail designed to take light painting photography to the next level. It was a huge hit with the crowdfunding community, quickly gathering up over $620,000 from more than 2,000 backers. It’s been nearly four years since the project went live on Kickstarter, and now the creators are back with yet another device aimed at photographers and videographers.

The Colorspike is a lot like the PixelStick in terms of operation, but is intended for a completely different purpose. Just like the PixelStick, ColorSpike is essentially just a row of programmable LEDs. The difference, however, is that ColorSpike’s lights are more powerful and customizable, since they’re meant to light up sets with a splash of color during video shoots.

The idea is that, rather than swapping out films and gels on their set lights, filmmakers can just change the color (or brightness, or pattern) of the ColorSpike through an accompanying smartphone app. If you’re an indie filmmaker, this is for you.

Treepod — hanging lounge tent

You know those suspended tents from companies like Tentsile and Treez? They not only provide a super-comfortable platform to sleep on while you’re in the great outdoors, but also a superior view of your surroundings. The only downside is that they’re a bit cumbersome to transport, and their multi-strap setup is far more laborious than erecting your average ground tent. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enjoy all the benefits of a hanging shelter, but without all the extra effort and setup they generally require?

Enter the Treepod. It’s a suspended tent that’s not only durable and easy to transport, but also outrageously easy to set up. The key here is that the Treepod is suspended by only a single line, rather than multiple tension straps like you’ll find on most other hanging shelters. On top of that, Treepod tents also break down and pack up into reasonably-sized packages for easy transport.

That means you don’t need a six-man crew and a flock of pack mules just to haul it out into the woods. You can easily toss it over your shoulder and bring it along on a solo adventure.

Firefly — fire-starting accessory for Swiss Army Knives

It’s tough to improve on an outdoor product as revered as the Swiss army knife. After all, this iconic multitool has been around for more than 120 years, and has achieved legendary status due to its simple, utilitarian design. But a new product called the Firefly, which recently launched on Kickstarter, delivers a handy new feature that does the impossible: it improves your Swiss army knife in a big way. How? By giving it the ability to start a fire! It’s a sparking tool that fits neatly into your existing pocketknife, so you’ll always have it handy when you need it.

Made from a custom sparking material developed by Tortoise Gear, the Firefly is essentially a flint/steel rod that fits snugly into the toothpick slot of your Swiss army knife. Unfortunately, that means you’ll have to ditch that flimsy plastic toothpick that you use so much in the backcountry — but we’re willing to bet that if you had to choose between freezing to death or having an annoying piece of beef jerky stuck between your molars, you’d probably choose the latter. Really, if you think about it, couldn’t you just use the corkscrew as a toothpick anyway? It’s a wonder that Victorinox didn’t think of this decades ago.

Goliath CNC — robotic milling machine

3D printers may hog the limelight, but CNC mills, which cut materials with extreme precision, have also come a long way in the past few years. It used to be that these devices could only be found in machine shops, but over the course of the past decade or so, the technology has largely been democratized. You can now get your hands on a user-friendly desktop CNC mill for less than $1,000, but size remains a major restraint. Unless you shell out a lot of money, you can’t really find a machine that will mill parts larger than a foot in any dimension, so you’re fairly limited in terms of what you can create.

Goliath CNC is one attempt to change that. This beast can mill shapes up to four feet wide and eight feet long — and it only costs a hair over $1,400. The machine’s creators at LA-based startup Springa designed it from the ground up to be simple and affordable, so it’s a complete reimagining of the concept of a CNC milling machine.

In place of rails, the Goliath CNC uses multidirectional wheels and sensor pylons that tell the robot precisely where it is on the cutting surface. Plus, since it’s really no bigger than a fat Roomba, Goliath won’t take up a ton of space in your garage like a traditional CNC machine would.

WT2 — real-time in-ear language translator

In the iconic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, author Douglas Adams introduced the world to the Babel Fish: a “small, yellow, leech-like” creature that lives inside the ear of a host and “feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.”

A Babel Fish allows the user to understand anything anyone says to them, no matter the language. While Adams’s creation was somewhat whimsical and far-flung when the book was released in 1979, the real world might soon be filled with devices that function much like the fictional creature. Case in point? The WT2 in-ear translator. Promising natural, hands-free communication, the WT2 seeks to enable conversations in two different languages via two earphone translators and one app.

Simply remove the earphones from their charging case, done one of them and give the other one to your friend. Speak in your language, and your interlocutor will hear it in their language. The earbuds will automatically pair with an iOS app, and begin listening for your communication. If you’re speaking in Spanish to an English speaker, your friend will hear your Spanish words in their native tongue after a short delay. And when your friend replies in English, you’ll hear said response in Spanish. Pretty cool, right?

8

Oct

Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Treepods, robot cutters, Firefly flints

At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the Web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there – alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the Pebble clones and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting new crowdfunding projects out there this week. That said, keep in mind that any crowdfunding project — even the best intentioned — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.

Colorspike — dynamic set lighting

A few years ago, a small NYC-based startup called BitBanger Labs released a gizmo called the PixelStick: a programmable LED rail designed to take light painting photography to the next level. It was a huge hit with the crowdfunding community, quickly gathering up over $620,000 from more than 2,000 backers. It’s been nearly four years since the project went live on Kickstarter, and now the creators are back with yet another device aimed at photographers and videographers.

The Colorspike is a lot like the PixelStick in terms of operation, but is intended for a completely different purpose. Just like the PixelStick, ColorSpike is essentially just a row of programmable LEDs. The difference, however, is that ColorSpike’s lights are more powerful and customizable, since they’re meant to light up sets with a splash of color during video shoots.

The idea is that, rather than swapping out films and gels on their set lights, filmmakers can just change the color (or brightness, or pattern) of the ColorSpike through an accompanying smartphone app. If you’re an indie filmmaker, this is for you.

Treepod — hanging lounge tent

You know those suspended tents from companies like Tentsile and Treez? They not only provide a super-comfortable platform to sleep on while you’re in the great outdoors, but also a superior view of your surroundings. The only downside is that they’re a bit cumbersome to transport, and their multi-strap setup is far more laborious than erecting your average ground tent. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enjoy all the benefits of a hanging shelter, but without all the extra effort and setup they generally require?

Enter the Treepod. It’s a suspended tent that’s not only durable and easy to transport, but also outrageously easy to set up. The key here is that the Treepod is suspended by only a single line, rather than multiple tension straps like you’ll find on most other hanging shelters. On top of that, Treepod tents also break down and pack up into reasonably-sized packages for easy transport.

That means you don’t need a six-man crew and a flock of pack mules just to haul it out into the woods. You can easily toss it over your shoulder and bring it along on a solo adventure.

Firefly — fire-starting accessory for Swiss Army Knives

It’s tough to improve on an outdoor product as revered as the Swiss army knife. After all, this iconic multitool has been around for more than 120 years, and has achieved legendary status due to its simple, utilitarian design. But a new product called the Firefly, which recently launched on Kickstarter, delivers a handy new feature that does the impossible: it improves your Swiss army knife in a big way. How? By giving it the ability to start a fire! It’s a sparking tool that fits neatly into your existing pocketknife, so you’ll always have it handy when you need it.

Made from a custom sparking material developed by Tortoise Gear, the Firefly is essentially a flint/steel rod that fits snugly into the toothpick slot of your Swiss army knife. Unfortunately, that means you’ll have to ditch that flimsy plastic toothpick that you use so much in the backcountry — but we’re willing to bet that if you had to choose between freezing to death or having an annoying piece of beef jerky stuck between your molars, you’d probably choose the latter. Really, if you think about it, couldn’t you just use the corkscrew as a toothpick anyway? It’s a wonder that Victorinox didn’t think of this decades ago.

Goliath CNC — robotic milling machine

3D printers may hog the limelight, but CNC mills, which cut materials with extreme precision, have also come a long way in the past few years. It used to be that these devices could only be found in machine shops, but over the course of the past decade or so, the technology has largely been democratized. You can now get your hands on a user-friendly desktop CNC mill for less than $1,000, but size remains a major restraint. Unless you shell out a lot of money, you can’t really find a machine that will mill parts larger than a foot in any dimension, so you’re fairly limited in terms of what you can create.

Goliath CNC is one attempt to change that. This beast can mill shapes up to four feet wide and eight feet long — and it only costs a hair over $1,400. The machine’s creators at LA-based startup Springa designed it from the ground up to be simple and affordable, so it’s a complete reimagining of the concept of a CNC milling machine.

In place of rails, the Goliath CNC uses multidirectional wheels and sensor pylons that tell the robot precisely where it is on the cutting surface. Plus, since it’s really no bigger than a fat Roomba, Goliath won’t take up a ton of space in your garage like a traditional CNC machine would.

WT2 — real-time in-ear language translator

In the iconic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, author Douglas Adams introduced the world to the Babel Fish: a “small, yellow, leech-like” creature that lives inside the ear of a host and “feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.”

A Babel Fish allows the user to understand anything anyone says to them, no matter the language. While Adams’s creation was somewhat whimsical and far-flung when the book was released in 1979, the real world might soon be filled with devices that function much like the fictional creature. Case in point? The WT2 in-ear translator. Promising natural, hands-free communication, the WT2 seeks to enable conversations in two different languages via two earphone translators and one app.

Simply remove the earphones from their charging case, done one of them and give the other one to your friend. Speak in your language, and your interlocutor will hear it in their language. The earbuds will automatically pair with an iOS app, and begin listening for your communication. If you’re speaking in Spanish to an English speaker, your friend will hear your Spanish words in their native tongue after a short delay. And when your friend replies in English, you’ll hear said response in Spanish. Pretty cool, right?

8

Oct

Google’s Pixel 2 phones fight distracted driving

You don’t have to own an iPhone or Samsung phone to get a modern handset that keeps your eyes on the road. The 9to5Google team has discovered that the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL include a buried feature in their software (namely, Ambient Services) that automatically invokes a Do Not Disturb mode when it detects that you’re moving at high speed, much like what you see in iOS 11. You’ll want to turn this off if you’re only a passenger, but it could be very helpful if you’re behind the wheel and don’t want your phone pinging you every time there’s an Instagram like or Twitter mention.

This isn’t the only understated Pixel 2 feature we’ve seen. Their support for electronic SIMs caught some by surprise. However, the anti-distracted driving mode is a good representation of what Google is trying to achieve. Where it used to stick to pure Android in the Nexus line, the Pixel line is increasingly defined by features that help them either stand out or compete against other flagship devices.

Via: 9to5Google

Source: Google Play

8

Oct

Apple CEO Tim Cook to Meet French President Macron on Monday

Apple CEO Tim Cook will meet French president Emmanuel Macron on Monday, according to the Élysée Palace’s official published agenda. Cook has been invited to the head of state’s Paris residence for an afternoon meeting, but the reasons for the visit have not yet been made public.

Topics up for discussion could include Apple’s code-learning drive in schools, or perhaps more likely, the issue of corporate tax law in the country.

France has called for an aggressive overhaul of how tech companies like Apple pay tax across the European Union, and President Macron is one of the leaders behind the tax crackdown, which has a goal of bringing a more unified corporate tax system across the euro states.

EU officials recently gathered to look at existing loopholes which are said to have allowed tech companies to minimize taxes and grab market share at the expense of Europe-based companies, and Macron has personally been unhappy with the way French firms struggle to compete with countries where taxes and social security payments are lower.

Cook was last in France back in February when he toured the country, dropping in at local Apple Stores and meeting with French creatives and businesses.

(Via MacGeneration.)

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, France
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8

Oct

1Password extension is finally available for Microsoft Edge

You don’t have to make do with LastPass on Edge anymore if you like 1Password better. The password manager’s Edge extension is finally available on Windows 10 a year after a preview came out for Insiders. Based on its developers’ posts on their forum, Redmond approved the extension on October 3rd and it popped up on the Microsoft Store a short while later.

Like the 1Password extension for other browsers, it shows up as an icon somewhere on the upper right-hand part of Edge. It saves your existing passwords and credit card info so it can auto-fill forms, and it also generates complex and unique passwords you can use for each application and website. As the note the Microsoft Store said, you’ll need to install 1Password for Windows 6.7+ before you can add its extension. But once that’s done, all you need to do is download it on your computer.

Via: Windows Central, Windows Blog Italia

Source: Microsoft Store, AgileBits

8

Oct

Facebook aims to balance its fact-checking with a right-wing magazine

Facebook made much ado about bringing on third-party fact-checkers to curb fake news. However, it has faced accusations that the fact-checkers themselves are biased — allegedly, too many of them skew to the left. And it appears that Facebook wants to alter this perception. Quartz sources claim that Facebook has signed on conservative magazine Weekly Standard as one of its fact-checking partners. Reportedly, this is a bid to “appease all sides” by picking a publication that combines a right-wing bent with an attention to accuracy.

The Standard isn’t a shoe-in. Experts at Poynter still have to verify that the publication meets guidelines for not just fact-checking, but its transparency about sources and willingness to accept corrections if it ever makes a mistake. This could take several weeks. We’ve asked Facebook for comment on what’s happening and will let you know if it has something to add.

It’s easy to see some complaining that Facebook is including a different point of view for its own sake, aiming for perceived neutrality above all else. After all, existing partners tend to be sites dedicated to fact-checking (like PolitiFact or Snopes) while the Standard is a magazine that uses fact-checking to serve an agenda it wears on its sleeve.

With that said, the Standard may be one of Facebook’s better choices. It hired a new fact-checker in September, and Quartz’s industry contacts understand the recruit was brought on with the Facebook partnership in mind. The magazine also tends to defy the party line when it doesn’t believe the facts line up, such as when it refuses to deny climate science (although it downplays doom-and-gloom predictions). In other words, this doesn’t appear to be an arbitrary pick — Facebook wants to be sure its media outlet choices can survive scrutiny, wherever they fall on the political spectrum.

Source: Quartz

8

Oct

Remember GeoCities? 9 tech titans that fell from grace

Why it matters to you

Not every tech company can be a winner, and not all of those that become winners can stay that way forever.

Whether you’re talking about Facebook, Google or Apple, there’s no doubt that Silicon Valley is capable of producing some big winners. It’s also capable of producing plenty of companies you’ll never hear about, which fizzle out without ever making much of an impact — or a return for their investors.

There’s also a third category: the companies that appear to be set for superstardom, only to plummet back down to earth. Reasons can vary from bad management to failing to deliver on promises to, sadly, just being way ahead of their time. Here are eight failed tech companies that rose to power and fell from grace — in a big way.

AOL

Remember when we spent hours chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, AOL’s once groundbreaking instant messenger service that, for many of us, was the first experience we had of speaking to folks over the internet? Remember when having an AOL email wasn’t something to be horribly embarrassed about? That time was the late 1990s.

Then AOL merged with Time Warner for $164 billion, in what is possibly the worst ever business merger. A few years later, the “declining value of [the] America Online property” led to a giant $100 billionr yearly loss, more and more people moved away from AOL’s dated service, and services like WhatsApp and Messenger stole AIM’s audience — leading to this week’s announcement that the AIM service is being shuttered.

Our biggest question in all this: what happened the gazillions of AOL trial CD-ROMs that are still presumably floating around somewhere?

Pets.com

If there’s a posterchild for the stratospheric rise and meteoric fall of would-be dot-com giants in the late 1990s, Pets.com has to be it. With the idea of selling pet food and accessories online, Pets.com would today make for a very healthy eBay business. Of course, back in the decade of Bill Clinton, Nirvana and the first PlayStation, venture capitalists decided it could be a whole lot more than that, and pumped in upwards of $100 million worth of funding.

The company went public in February 2000, had its own (well-received) Super Bowl ad, bought out its main competitor and then rapidly deflated as the dot-com bubble burst. Within a year, its share price fell from $14 to under a dollar. Losing money with every sale it made, Pets.com was eventually put down in November 2000.

Flooz

In its early days, Bitcoins were worth a quarter of a cent each. Today, they’re worth $4,300. Great deal, right? Quite possibly, but if you’d have had that same early adopter mentality for online currency in the 1990s, you may well have sunk all your savings into Flooz.

A voucher-like alternative to regular money for online purchases, Flooz was widely publicized during the dot-com era of tech exuberance — with none other than Whoopi Goldberg acting as its spokesperson. It collapsed in 2001 after allegations that it was being exploited by Russian criminals, who stole credit cards and used Flooz’s currency to launder their ill-gotten gains.

GeoCities

If you’re old enough to remember the connecting sound of 56K modems and seemingly every website having a constantly-looping MIDI track playing in the background, you’ll probably remember GeoCities. In a time before we all had social media profiles, blogs, and eschewed local storage for keeping our files in the cloud, GeoCities’ novel promise was giving everyone their own personal part of the internet.

Sensing that GeoCities was tapping into something that appealed to large numbers of users, Yahoo bought it for a massive $3.5 billion in 1999. Unfortunately, it was quickly supplanted by early social networks like MySpace. Before long, having a GeoCities page looked more like an embarrassing admission than a sign that you were ahead of the curve.

It was eventually closed down in the United States in 2009, although continues to live on in Japan. And speaking of MySpace…

MySpace

Consider this crazy statistic: back in June 2006, more people visited the social network MySpace than visited the Google homepage. Jump forward today and, well, frankly we had to visit MySpace’s website to remind ourselves of whether or not it’s still going. (It is, but in much the same way that we might consider the undead zombie version of a person you once loved to be still going.)

For a short time, however, MySpace was brilliant. Then it began to flood its page with ads, while reminding us with every garish homepage that 99.9 percent of people are not supposed to be designers and should never be given the ability to skin their profile by combining leopard skin backdrops with barely-visible neon writing. Facebook took what worked about MySpace, tweaked it, and found the winning formula.

eToys

People love toys. People love ordering things over the internet. Put the two things together and what do you get? Well, yet another dot-com bust, to be perfectly honest.

Before that, however, eToys.com was one of the world’s most visited websites, and a genuine disruptor which challenged the might of existing toy retailers like Toys R Us. Unfortunately, it grew way too quickly, while continuing to lose a whole lot of money. It eventually died a death in February 2001.

Jawbone

Jawbone, a company which made everything from Bluetooth speakers to fitness wearable devices, announced that it was throwing in the towel earlier this year. Despite having some success with its UP series of wearables, Jawbone struggled to keep pace with the competition — especially the heavy hitters like Fitbit and Apple.

Its owners are now in the process of setting up a software platform company, but the days of Jawbone wearables is, it seems, over.

Netscape

The Netscape Navigator browser was the Google Chrome of its day. Created by Marc Andreessen and Silicon Graphics’ Jim Clark, it quickly established itself as the primary portal for accessing the internet in the mid-1990s. It was also one of the first big dot-com era IPOs, when it went public in August 1995.

Unfortunately, Microsoft had a Netscape-killing ace up its sleeve with Internet Explorer, which shipped with Windows 95. The two companies went back and forth over market share for some time, before Netscape seemingly dropped off the map by failing to launch a new updated Netscape refresh in a timely manner.

Internet Explorer overtook it in popularity, and things gradually fizzled until new parent company AOL put it out of its misery in 2008.

Theranos

You’ll notice that most of the names on this list come from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. After that bubble burst, venture capitalists assured us they would never again fall for companies buoyed by massive amounts of hype with few tangible results. Theranos was a reminder that this isn’t true.

A health tech company which claimed to have created blood tests which required only a tiny blood sample, Theranos carried an estimated $9 billion valuation within its first decade. It also made a celebrity out of its youthful founder Elizabeth Holmes.

The problem? A series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal, which revealed the technology didn’t actually work as described. The company is still going, but it’s a shadow of its former self. CEO Elizabeth Holmes also had her personal fortune downgraded from $4.5 billion to $0 by Forbes. Ouch!

8

Oct