Gadgets Technology News

May 12, 2015

Fly Or Die: Withings Activité

With the Apple Watch dominating the news cycle, it’s easy to forget about the smart(ish) watches that have come before it. But while intelligent time pieces will come and go, I’m still deeply attached to my Withings Activité.

The Activité is perhaps the only attractive smart watch. Apple Watch fans will blast me in the comments, but I maintain my stance: the Activité is a more stylish watch than the Apple Watch. That said, it has a fraction of the functionality.

The Activité tracks your activity (shocker, I know), including distance traveled throughout the day and calories burn. The watch is also equipped with sleep tracking capabilities, as well as a vibration system to wake you up in the morning. The watch pairs with the Withings app, which also tracks information from other Withings devices such as the Withings smart scale.

The Activité is a touch pricey ($400), but it’s a fine looking watch that has an old-school feel while still offering functionality you’ve come to expect out of an activity tracker.

John doesn’t like it, but he’s a fanboi. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oculus Confirms Gear VR Consumer Launch On Track For Later This Year

The Oculus Rift is heading to consumer hands in Q1 of 2016, but that won’t be the first official consumer VR hardware launch that Oculus takes part in: Oculus’ VP of Product Nate Mitchell told me backstage at Disrupt NY that it is indeed still on track to deliver a consumer Gear VR unit in conjunction with Samsung, timed for later this year.

Mitchell confirmed that those plans are still in place, as Oculus CTO John Carmack originally mentioned on stage back in March. He wouldn’t specify which device in particular is receiving the consumer-focused Gear VR, since Samsung clearly doesn’t want any of that spilling out early, but it’s very likely we’ll see it alongside the next Galaxy Note smartphone.

Combined with news that we’ll be able to start pre-ordering Oculus Rift headsets in the later half of this year, Oculus is moving into the consumer market in a strong way across all fronts, which could provide benefits in terms of public awareness and initial content availability from third-party partners.

Oculus and Samsung currently offer Gear VR Innovator Edition headsets for both the Samsung Galaxy S6 (which is launching Thursday) and the Galaxy Note 4, but these are described as devices aimed at developers and early adopter enthusiast customers. Presumably, the forthcoming hardware’s broader consumer focus will mean it brings performance improvements, as well as perhaps changes on the Oculus and Samsung first-party software side of the equation.

A Random Walk Down Hardware Alley

Every Disrupt I gather some of the coolest hardware startups in the world into one place – Hardware Alley. This cavalcade of gear is one of my favorite parts of Disrupt and I try to walk through the entire thing on video so you can meet some of the startups. Some of my favorites? The Parashoot, Supplyhog, and the kitten toy Kittyo – although everyone was great.

Take a gander and we’ll have the second half of the video up shortly.

Amazon’s Delivery Drones Could Find You Wherever You Are

Amazon’s delivery drone plans may have seemed more like a media stunt than a concrete vision back when it launched, but with active testing taking place in Canada and now, new details showing up in a patent application, things are getting real. The new proposed patent for an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Delivery System” (via BBC) contains some impressive revelations about Amazon’s proposed automated package transport plans.

For instance, the system would use location information shared by a package recipient’s smartphone to be able to zero in on their position and bring deliveries directly to them, regardless of whether they happen to be at home or somewhere else. You’d also be able to specific different locations as package destinations, giving you more flexibility about where to receive things depending on your schedule or needs at the exact time of delivery.

This would be a huge step up from the current situation in terms of convenience. At best, delivery services will call me the morning a package is set to arrive to provide a heads up, and let you modify your delivery day online. Being able to tweak it while the package is en route to match up with your exact plans hour-by-hour would take a lot of the unnecessary stress and worry out of the whole process.

Amazon’s patent also includes details around how it will use sensors, cameras, radar and more to guarantee the drones can land safely, and how it will monitor its path to avoid humans and other obstructions. But the key magic here, in terms of how the system would present an improvement for consumers as well as giving Amazon benefits vs. current old-school delivery methods, is that intelligent, adaptable route-shifting.

Of course, it also means Amazon will have to take extra precautions to ensure that it’s not easy for bad actors to manipulate drone routing to intercept packages. But if it does work, and work well, custom routing alone would change the face of ecommerce and consumer delivery.

VoxieBox Displays 3D Images Just Like R2D2’s Message From Princess Leia

Voxon, chosen out of the Hardware Alley to do the ‘wildcard’ pitch during TechCrunch Disrupt NY, demonstrated a truly amazing technology today. Imagine the scene from Star Wars where Princess Leia is projected in 3 dimensions recording a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, Voxon’s VoxieBox product does just that.

Its unique combination of hardware and software, developed over 30 years of tinkering in a New York garage, literally ‘prints light’ in three dimensions, not unlike the way a 3D printer would print in plastic. But this does it thousands of times a second, thus tricking the human eye into thinking it’s seeing a 3D image, thanks to their proprietary algorithm.

The VoxieBox does not require goggles or glasses to view the image, meaning it’s extremely user-friendly. Because you can display any image (moving or still), you can thus move and revolve around objects and see an object from many different angles, collaboratively.

Furthermore, the VoxieBox could be used in classrooms, allowing children to manipulate, for instance, a blood cell in biology classes without being exposed to dangerous materials.

The company has been bootstrapped since being part of the New York Tech Stars accelerator in 2012. The technology is expensive to build, but with investment, it could scale the production of the units.

Voxon is now talking to SpaceX regarding the potential of them using the VoxieBox to design satellite parts, and they are also taking to some movie companies in Hollywood.

The company claims no-one else has been able to produce a similar kind of technology and they’ve been working on this for 30 years, since co-founder Alan Jackson started in his garage.

They have an SDK available for developers. And today they are also launching an Indiegogo campaign to fund an art project. This will involve installing the VoxieBox in a space in New York and making it available to artists to create projects. The crowdfunding campaign is to sell tickets to this pop-up event.

Gate Tells You When The Postman Rings Once

The folks at Gate want you to know when the postman is coming. Their new product, available now on Kickstarter, is a smart mailbox sensor that tells you when someone is digging in your post box or dropping off letters.

The system, which mounts to both traditional “rural” mailboxes as well as in-door “flap” models, pings you when the mail is coming and can even estimate an ETA for your next delivery. While I can’t imagine wanting to know when my mail was coming with any degree of accuracy, there are plenty of people and places where the mail-person’s visit is an important part of their day.

Early adopters can grab it for $199 right now and it installs in a few minutes and charges via solar. It ships in December.

Samsung Gear VR For Galaxy S6 Now On Sale For $200

If you’d like to dip your toe into the virtual world ahead of the coming consumer launches of Gear VR, Valve and HTC’s Vive, and the Oculus Rift, the Gear VR Innovator Edition for Galaxy S6 is available today. You still need $200, and either a Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge, and a willingness to forgive bumps with a product designed specifically for techie early adopters, but it’s definitely a good way to jump the line if you’re impatient.

The Gear VR headset uses Samsung’s smartphone as part of the brains of the operation, as well as the display. Samsung says users should get better performance out of this VR experience vs. that created with the original Gear VR for the Galaxy Note 4, in part due to the use of the new Exynos Octacore mobile processor in the GS6. Continuous power via USB also means you can use this one for longer immersive sessions, if you find the real world is too lame.

It’s probably a good idea to pick one of these up if you’re a company thinking about developing for mobile VR environments, but most people are probably better off waiting – at least until Samsung and Oculus reveal what they have in store for a consumer Gear VR product later this year.

MysteryVibe Crescendo Is A Snake-Like Buzzy Thinger For Your Down-There Parts

Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear about another super-cool flexible vibrator for the ladies. Go on. Try this post. It’s pretty innocuous.

Everyone that’s left okay with a bit of the old fiddly diddly? Good.

So what happens when a bunch of friends from Deloitte decide they want to make a sex toy? I suppose they make this thing. It’s basically a bendy vibrator that can buzz in different configurations and at different positions along its length. Like a friendly inchworm, the MysteryVibe is usable in many different configurations – from the plain old upright “urgent message from a winded solider” to the U-shaped “super horseshoe” to everything in between (“the clever S” or “the lazy dilettante” come to mind).

“We wanted to solve a real pain point – the fact that as we get older, married, kids, work stress, the main thing that suffers is our sex lives. And it’s something that affected all of us universally. So we set out our company vision to applying the best in design and technology to enhance our sex lives and make it in a massively mainstream way,” said co-founder and CEO Soumyadip Rakshit. “We are creating enchanted objects – objects which merge with our lives and become an integral part of it. They enhance not hinder, add to our relationships and love lives, not act as replacements for them.”

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The company is crowdfunding the project on Born.com, but I saw some early prototypes and came away impressed, as it were.

How is this thing different? First it connects directly to your cellphone for fine-grained control of the vibratory system. This means you can configure each of the six motors to buzz at different speeds and you can even program little ripples along the length of the Crescendo. It charges wirelessly and is quiet enough for discreet bedroom use. Most of the designers are women and they are all working hard on new versions of the Crescendo as well as products for couples and men.

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I would like to note that, as I noted before, I’d like manufacturers to step up their guy game. While women receive specially articulated robo-snakes with 70 unique pleasure options, men still receive little more than a rubber glove full of vaseline. As an avid follower of the sex toy market (words I never thought I’d write) I feel that tools like the Crescendo are great and the things that make them unique should be available for the lads. End of rant.

Anyway, you can get your own for about $100 and enjoy many good futuristic snake vibrations.

UK Print Book Sales Fall As Ebooks Rise

Although U.S. print sales have been steady, the UK Publishers Association is reporting a very interesting trend. Generally, print revenues dropped 5 percent to £2.7 billion and ebook revenues rose by 11 percent to £563 million. While ebooks still make up just a fraction of the books sold, it’s clear that ebooks are creeping up on print in a very real way.

Most important, however, is the rise in children’s ebooks. Publishers have assumed that parents would be less willing to hand a tablet over to their kids than a board book or paperback, but that, too, is fast changing. In fact, digitial children’s books are up 36 percent – a change that should give printers pause.

“It is great to see digital growth continuing and developing in more sectors of publishing. The rise in children’s digital sales, while perhaps unsurprising given 71 percent of households now own a tablet, is testament to the innovation taking place in children’s publishing and the engaging content being produced,” said Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the UK Publishers Association in a release.

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There was also some growth in the textbook space with 20 percent more digital book purchases by schools. Interestingly, however, only 4 percent of the “total school book budget” is spent on digital, a fact that will become more important as we enter the era of the connected classroom. In short, however, ebooks are holding their own.

“The big debate for publishing is no longer about electronic – versus – print, because the clear answer is ‘both,'” said Mollet.

via TheDigitalReader