UPS is trialling electric bike trailers in London

In a bid to lower emissions in the capital and reduce the footprint of its vehicles on the road, global delivery firm UPS has begun trialling a new electric-powered bike trailer on the streets of London. The concept, built as part of the Low Impact City Logistics project, attaches to the back of a pedal cycle and utilises a “net-neutral” technology. This then allows couriers to transport up to 200 kilograms without requiring any additional effort on their part.

The project was formalised following a pitch process back in 2016. Innovate UK, the quango behind numerous self-driving car projects across Britain, stumped up £10 million for a new collaborative research and development project and five organizations answered the call. Product delivery consultancy Ferhay, technology developer Skotkonung, the University of Huddersfield and cycle courier specialist Outspoken Delivery all helped UPS design and test the final solution.

The trailer will be deployed from UPS’ London depot and be sent out to more densely-populated areas of the city, where trucks and vans may normally increase traffic. Couriers will then make deliveries to homes and businesses by bike or on foot. People living in or visiting Camden can also expect to see trailer throughout November and December.

China’s WeChat Pay comes to London

Walk around Camden Market this weekend and you’ll notice that many of the stalls now support WeChat Pay. The mobile payment platform — an extension of Tencent’s messaging app WeChat — is big in China but almost unheard of in the UK (at least outside of the Chinese community). So why bother? Well, the north London market is popular with Chinese tourists. SafeCharge, a company that helps businesses process payments, took notice and has updated its point-of-sale (POS) software accordingly. Now, stall owners can accept WeChat Pay with a tablet and compatible till.

Camden is the first place in the UK to accept WeChat Pay at the point of sale. It’s a small experiment, but one that could prove fruitful as Christmas draws near. SafeCharge has over 1,000 customers — many of which are based in the UK — and is now talking to other businesses, including department stores and luxury retailers, about similar support. That’s not to say WeChat Pay will soon rival Google or Apple’s platforms in the UK. But it could be a worthy rival for the Alibaba-owned Alipay, which recently launched a fresh marketing campaign on the London Underground.

Spotted. Alipay ad on the London underground. pic.twitter.com/HQKUCdWZrD

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) October 1, 2017

Via: FT

Source: SafeCharge

TiVo wins one of its patent fights with Comcast

TiVo has good news going into the holiday season: The International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that Comcast’s X1 set-top boxes violate two of TiVo’s patents related to setting recordings from a mobile device. As a result, there’s now an import ban on “certain” X1 boxes that violate the patents, but older models won’t be affected, Reuters reports. An import ban would mean that offending gadgets that’ve already been brought into the country can’t be sold. This ban could be overturned by the Trump administration during the presidential review period. Bloomberg writes that that sort of thing happening is a pretty rare occurrence.

As more people cut the cord or switch to on-demand options for watching their favorite shows, TiVo is becoming less relevant. It gets a good deal of its money from patents and licensing rights, and as such is keen to defend what it can to stay in business. Hence the patent infringement lawsuit with Comcast.

Naturally, Comcast has a chance to appeal and the telco has said that it plans to do so. Additionally, Comcast is going to fight the ruling in the US Patent and Trademark office, where these types of battles are easier to win. The ITC ruled that a quartet of other patents regarding how recording works in homes with multiple TVs and Comcast set-top boxes didn’t infringe on TiVo’s claims. The USPTO process can take up to a year to settle.

Source: Reuters, Bloomberg

TalkTalk TV will go multiscreen next year with new streaming app

Sky, Virgin Media and BT all offer their customers ways to watch TV beyond the living room. TalkTalk has an app for its rental and purchase store — formerly Blinkbox, you might recall — but otherwise it’s fallen behind the pack somewhat. The company is changing that sometime in the first few months of next year, though, when it’ll launch new apps that take TalkTalk TV truly multiscreen for the first time.

Quite simply, the new app for iOS and Android will put TalkTalk’s live TV and on-demand library on mobile devices. Subscribers will be able to watch Freeview and any of their paid channel bundles anywhere, so it’s not limited to devices on the same home network as the set-top box. The apps support Chromecast too, so you can push TV to another bigger screen elsewhere, and exactly the same experience will be available in browsers, should a laptop or PC be your second screen of choice.

There is one limitation. While you can be logged in to the TalkTalk app on up to 4 devices, you can only stream to one at a time — in addition to whatever’s playing on your home set-top box, of course. That won’t strictly be true for TalkTalk’s fibre broadband customers though, as next year they will also be able to add another set-top box to their package to create a multiroom situation at home. The one additional device rule will still apply here, though technically that means there can be three active screens at any one time, including the two set-top boxes. TalkTalk isn’t sharing how much an additional box will set you back just yet, but for everyone, the new multiscreen feature of the service will be free and not a paid perk.

To make multiscreen happen, TalkTalk built its new mobile apps and web interface from scratch so users can get at all their live and on-demand TV in the same way they can on their set-top boxes. It has a different look, of course, since navigation isn’t bound to a remote. The apps sport a more visual, card-like UI highlighting popular live and on-demand content, as well as the newest releases in the movie and boxset purchase and rental store. This is in addition to a traditional EPG view of live TV for quick-browsing. For anything that isn’t live — so, anything on a catch-up service or something you’ve rented, for example — you can pause on one device and pick up where you left off on another.

TalkTalk also throws some curation into the mix within the “My TV” section of the app, which is what the company calls a “safe space.” What’s meant by that is recommendations will only come from channels and such you already own, so it won’t suggest things you need to buy or sign up to another channel bundle in order to watch. Multiscreen is still a few months away for customers at this point, but when it does launch next year it’ll see TalkTalk close the distance on its main rivals with this important value-adding feature.

‘PUBG’ will be tweaked to add socialist-friendly messages in China

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been this year’s sleeper hit, and it’s about to officially be released in China. The rub is, it’ll have some pretty significant changes given the country’s strict state-mandated censorship. Local publisher Tencent will “make adjustment to content and make sure they accord with socialist core values, Chinese traditional culture and moral rules,” according to a statement obtained by Reuters. Last month, China said that the game was too violent and that the game’s sale would likely be blocked because it strongly goes against the country’s “socialist core values.”

South Korea’s PUBG Corp, nee Bluehole, says that the partnership with China’s Tencent will improve the game’s back-end infrastructure, enable work on anti-cheat software and “create a fair and sustainable ecosystem” by partnering with live-streaming platforms and internet cafes.

Tencent’s localization will provide “healthy, positive cultural and value guidance,” specifically for underage players. The game hasn’t been banned outright yet, but it exists in a weird gray area. PUBG Corp and Tencent would be kind of foolish to ignore the Chinese gaming market given that it’s the largest in the world, and, well, profits are more important to expansion than anything else for a growing company. To date, PUBG has sold more than 20 million copies; it will be released on Xbox One December 12th

Source: Reuters

How to find the best 4K TV for your space

There has never been a better time to buy a new TV. Huge 4K sets are cheaper and look finer than ever. Perhaps more important, there are finally a few new technologies that make upgrading from your old set worth it: HDR (high dynamic range) video and a wider color gamut. And if your budget allows, OLED TVs are well within reach. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with these new options, so let’s break down what you need to know before buying a new TV.

Sizing it up

The first thing you have to ask yourself is pretty straightforward: How large does your new TV need to be? Given how much prices have fallen, it might be tempting to go as big as your budget will allow. But that could easily lead to buying something that looks ridiculously oversized in your space.

A good way to figure out the best screen size is to measure the viewing distance from your couch to your TV stand. Once you’ve got that, just plug it into this tool from the TV review site Rtings.com, which uses viewing recommendations from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. A 50-inch set, for example, should sit 6.8 feet away for mixed-use viewing (basically, a combination of TV, movies and gaming). At that point, it’s taking up 30 degrees of your field of vision. If you’re a cinephile and want to truly immerse yourself, though, you’d need to sit five feet away so that it covers 40 degrees of what you’re seeing.

Most living rooms could easily fit a 50- to 55-inch set, but if you’ve got a large space to work with, then a 65-inch model might make more sense. Of course, your existing TV should give you an idea of what fits in your space. But keep in mind that newer TVs are thinner and have smaller bezels, so you might be able to fit something larger than your aging HD set. If you really can’t fit anything bigger than a 42-inch TV in your space, though, then you’re better off not upgrading. There’s just no point in getting a 4K set that small.

The 4K HDR basics

While 4K is the marketing term you’ll see attached to new TVs, it’s not an upgrade that you’ll immediately notice. Technically speaking, 4K sets have four times as many pixels as 1080p, or “Full HD,” TVs. But most people won’t see a significant difference from their couch.

Instead, the bigger benefit with this generation of TVs is the addition of HDR, which highlights bright and dark content better than we could ever see before. There’s also support for wide color gamut (WCG), which, as you’d expect, lets you see a larger variety of colors. Together, they add more detail and contrast to what you’re watching — in many cases, the image “pops” off the screen more than with older TVs.

In Daredevil, on Netflix, for example, you can see much more during the show’s many night fights. One scene in the first episode, where Matt Murdock is showing off the giant neon billboard right outside his apartment, demonstrates how HDR can juggle both extreme brightness and darkness in the same shot.

Currently, there are two competing HDR formats: HDR10, which is widely supported across the industry, and Dolby Vision, which works only with select TVs, players and content. When buying 4K equipment, just make sure it supports both formats. They each do everything we described above, but Dolby Vision technically looks better. It uses dynamic metadata, which allows it to adjust color levels and contrast settings for every scene. HDR10, on the other hand, relies on static metadata, which gives it only one set of instructions for every piece of content.

Unfortunately, we can’t demonstrate the impact of HDR and WCG with a screenshot or video; it’s visible only on displays that support the technology. You’d have to stop by an electronics store for an in-person demo. Once you do, though, you’ll notice the difference immediately. For the most part, HDR and WCG best serve newer films and TV shows, which were likely produced with the technology in mind. It’s a more contentious addition to classic films, since it effectively changes what the original director and cinematographer wanted you to see. HDR in the 4K version of Goodfellas, for example, actually makes the film look worse.

Choosing a TV: LCD or OLED?

The 55-inch TCL Roku TV in our holiday gift guide is one of the best deals we’ve ever seen. It supports both HDR formats, has great image quality and currently retails for a mere $650. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of TCL before. They’ve been making sets for years (including for Samsung), and as of 2013 they were the third-largest TV maker in the world. And if you’re looking for an upgrade, Vizio’s P-Series line is among the best we’ve ever seen. Reviewing and comparing TVs is time- (and space-) consuming work, so I’d also recommend following Wirecutter’s excellent breakdown of the best TVs on the market.

As I noted during CES in January, OLED TVs are finally getting their chance to shine. While LG’s B6 lineup started at $4,000 when it launched in 2016, it ended up as low as $1,800 by the end of the year. And the comparable 2017 model, the C7, is now selling for around $1,700. Sure, that’s a significant leap over the TCL set above, but it’s still a steal if you’ve been following OLED TVs over the past few years.

So what’s the big deal about OLED? Simply put, these panels look incredible. They can produce pure darker levels, wider viewing angles and a higher contrast than LCDs. Altogether, that makes OLED sets look brighter, though it’s worth noting that newer 4K LCDs are also much brighter than they used to be. Again, you’ll have to see them in person to truly grasp the benefits. But if you’re the sort of person who’s been holding out for a serious upgrade over your existing HDTV, OLED will likely be worth the extra cost. (Confession: I bought an LG OLED last year, and it still wows me every time I use it.)

When and where to buy?

There’s a reason we’re publishing this piece before Black Friday: Now is the best time to seriously look at a new TV. Plenty of retailers have discounts running all week long, while others will have deals ready on Friday. If you’re following the best prices, where you buy probably won’t matter to you. In general, though, I like ordering TVs from Amazon, since its delivery service will also set them up for you. (Installing a TV stand on your own isn’t fun.) Physical stores are also good options if you can transport a large set, and of course it’s easier to return large items on your own rather than shipping them back.

If you’re still on the fence about upgrading, though, there are advantages to waiting. For one, OLED prices will eventually drop even further. And you can be sure that next year’s TVs will offer minor improvements over the current models. I wouldn’t expect any significant upgrades, though. The 4K standard won’t be changing any time soon, and while Dolby Vision and HDR10 will see some revisions, they won’t change much. (And there’s a good chance those revisions will also trickle down to existing sets.)

What else do you need?

Since most TVs today have streaming apps built in, you don’t really need a set-top box. Still, the new 4K dongles from Roku and Amazon are great options if you prefer their interfaces. And if you rely on iTunes, then the new Apple TV 4K is worth considering (especially since it’ll upgrade your existing library to 4K). As for 4K Blu-ray, it’s not worth the investment for most consumers, since it requires a new player (or an Xbox One S or X). It’s best suited to cinephiles who want the best possible picture and audio quality and don’t mind the added expense.

A more essential upgrade: sound. Even the best TVs on the market typically have mediocre audio, so it’s worth snapping up a soundbar, at the very least. Vizio’s 36-inch 5.1 wireless system is a solid entry point for surround sound — especially at the current price of $179, when it typically retails for $250.

Wrap-up

If you’ve been anticipating a new TV for a while, now’s the time to pull the trigger. After years of sounding like marketing hype, 4K/HDR sets are finally here and cheap enough for most people to afford. While they won’t offer the night-and-day difference that HDTVs did, compared with older sets, they’re still a significant step forward. And they’ll make binge watching all the more worthwhile.

Walmart is testing a self-driving, floor-scrubbing robot

Walmart has been testing autonomous floor-cleaning robots in five of its stores, LinkedIn reports. The floor scrubber, developed by Brain Corp., is equipped with cameras, sensors and LiDAR to help it maneuver down aisles and around obstacles. And it can largely navigate itself after first being driven by a person in order to learn its path.

Phil Duffy, VP of innovation and marketing for Brain Corp., told Fox Business that the company’s technology is in approximately 50 malls and retailers nationwide. “We are also in airports, educational campuses, corporate campuses and industrial sites. In addition, we will be launching in Japan, through our partner, SoftBank Robotics, by summer 2018,” he said.

Of course, this type of technology leads some to wonder how many jobs will be on the line if it’s adopted more widely. Walmart is also testing shelf-scanning robots that can look for misplaced items, check prices and note inventory levels. However, the company insists that both are meant to complement its workforce, not replace it, and their use would allow Walmart staff to focus on other aspects of their jobs. A Walmart spokesperson told Fox, “The maintenance team is actually quite excited to work with new technology like this.” But that doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. As one Walmart employee told LinkedIn, “Nobody in my store likes it.”

Via: Fox Business

Source: LinkedIn

FCC releases the final draft of its proposal to kill net neutrality

The FCC has released the final draft of its proposal to rollback 2015 net neutrality protections. If enacted, the order would reclassify broadband internet service as an information service and Title II regulations would no longer apply. Additionally, blocking, throttling and fast-laning of content would no longer be banned and paid prioritization practices would be allowed as long as they’re explicitly laid out by internet service providers. Further, any state-level regulations that contradict the FCC’s order would be preempted.

The full document is over 200 pages long and you can check it out here. The FCC will vote on the proposal during its December 14th open meeting and it is largely expected to pass.

Source: FCC

Facebook will alert you if you liked a fake Russian account

As part of its ongoing transparency efforts on Russian activity, Facebook today revealed that it will soon let users find out if they liked or followed pages created by the Internet Research Agency between January 2015 and August 2017. The company said it plans to roll out the tool by the end of this year, which is going to live in the Facebook Help Center and will also include information about Instagram accounts.

“It is important that people understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 US election,” Facebook said in a blog post. “That’s why as we have discovered information, we have continually come forward to share it publicly and have provided it to congressional investigators.”

Last month, Facebook announced that Russian influence had reached 126 million people on its platform — and that doesn’t include the additional 20 million who were reportedly exposed on Instagram. The company’s General Counsel, Colin Stretch, has since testified before a US House of Representatives committee investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election and said that the social network is “deeply concerned about all these threats.”

Stretch added that the social network is doubling its engineering efforts, hiring more ad reviewers and requiring more information from political advertisers to crack down on these “bad actors.” Before the end of the year, you can find out whether or not you were fooled by one of them.

Source: Facebook

Surprise: This $20 home monitoring camera actually doesn’t suck

Most of the low-end connected cameras you’ll find on store shelves will run you at least $50, and more feature-rich options like Amazon’s Cloud Cam and Logitech’s Circle 2 are north of $100. The prospect of kitting out your house with connected cameras doesn’t need to be that expensive, though. On the opposite end of the price spectrum sits the WyzeCam, a super-cheap connected video camera ushered to market by — who else? — a handful of Amazon alums. Each camera will set you back a whopping $20, but don’t let the price tag fool you: the WyzeCam is a surprisingly capable bargain.

At first glance, the WyzeCam doesn’t look like much. It’s a tiny white cube with a big black eye that swivels on a base, and the whole thing is so light you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a you. The WyzeCam might look a little familiar to fans of cheap, foreign gadgets, too, since it’s actually based on another super-cheap camera system cooked up by a Chinese hardware maker and sold by Xiaomi. There have been plenty of cases where companies have rebranded existing products and sold them as their own, but this is a little different. Wyze Labs licensed the hardware, made some minor changes then built new, better software to power it.

That is Wyze’s shtick in a nutshell. As director of marketing Jessie Zhou put it, the company’s true value lies in “the ability to develop customer software for these products and sell them at an affordable price” rather than developing new hardware from scratch. “We consider hardware a commodity,” she added. “Why reinvent the wheel?”

A future based on building new software for hardware that already exists seems fraught with potential problems, but that’s the plan Wyze is sticking to for now. After a few weeks of testing, it seems the company might be onto something.

I set up two WyzeCams around the Engadget office: one was pointed at my desk to see if anyone alien wandered toward our growing pile of gadgets, and another pointed out the window to monitor the weather while I was putzing around in our studio. At $20 a pop, my expectations were basically subterranean. Despite their cheapness, though, the 1080p video feeds I tapped into from my phone looked surprisingly good — their wide, 110-degree field of view meant I could easily keep tabs on interlopers approaching Engadget’s corner of the office and with better picture quality than I expected.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

That a camera does a good job of capturing video shouldn’t be a surprise, but considering the minimal cost involved, there’s a lot to like here. The cameras pack a pair of infrared lights to help with night vision, along with a speaker and microphone to turn the camera into an intercom when needed. Ultimately though, the hardware is pretty rudimentary — what really shines is Wyze’s software. Getting a WyzeCam up and running took just a few minutes, and after that, the company’s no-nonsense app design made it easy to jump into live feeds, record footage and schedule time lapse recordings.

Even better, the WyzeCam records short videos whenever it detects sound or motion, and they’re stored in the cloud for two weeks so you can easily go back and check them. (The total cost of that cloud storage: $0.) Since I installed my cameras at work, I got alerts basically all the time. At first, I thought that was exactly what I wanted, but when the notifications got to be too much, the app easily let me dial down the motion tracker’s sensitivity. For now, I seem to have struck the right balance between “HEY, this stranger is getting to close to your stuff” and “Oh, Terrence just walked by again.”

Chris Velazco/Engadget

I admit it: I don’t really need connected cameras in my life, so my uses for the WyzeCams have been pretty trivial. In a way, that’s the beauty of the WyzeCam: it works better than expected, and since it’s so cheap, you won’t feel bad setting up a few just for kicks. What you probably shouldn’t do, however, is rely on this thing to be a full-fledged security camera. That’s definitely not what Wyze Labs had in mind when it put together the Wyze Cam, and it shows.

See, cheap hardware usually comes with a catch, and in this case there are a few. After about a week, the camera I pointed at my desk randomly disconnected from our WiFi network — it just sat there playing its “hang on, I’m refreshing!” animation without ever saying it couldn’t connect. I had to check the camera’s settings to figure out what was happening, and that’s just bad design. Having a camera decide to stop working correctly is mildly annoying when you’re just trying to check the weather outside, but it could such a failure could be tragic under the right (or wrong) circumstances. And while the camera can be made to work like an intercom, it isn’t particularly great at picking up what people were saying on the other end.

The other catch is more existential. Wyze Labs wouldn’t confirm how much money it makes off of each camera, but Zhou admitted that margins were “extremely low” — what else would you expect from something this cheap? The value is great for you and me, but carving out a niche as a purveyor of value-priced goods could make survival difficult in the long run. Then again, Wyze’s philosophy is nothing if not practical — internet storefronts are full of cheap, solid Chinese cameras, and some software finesse is all it would take to make them palatable to the rest of the world now. And for now, the company’s biggest problem is arguably a good one: it doesn’t have enough supply to meet all of the demand.