All-seeing eye: the throwable camera that could save victims’ lives

On Tuesday, January 12 2010, the world watched in horror as Haiti was struck by a catastrophic earthquake. At least 100,000 people lost their lives in the devastation. In the aftermath, many people around the world sent financial aid to help support survivors. FULL STORY

 

By Arion McNicoll and Stefanie Blendis, CNN
Filed under: Innovation

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Why Chinese smartphone clones may not be a good deal after all

CNET’s Marguerite Reardon explains in this edition of Ask Maggie why those too-good-to-be-true deals on cheap smartphones from China should be avoided.

 

Your smartphone PIN isn’t as safe as you’d think

In Depth There’s always someone out to get you

We all know the dangers. The smartphone is the portal to online shopping, our bank accounts and all manner of social network profiling – for many, it is our digital identity.

We know what we have to do: make sure it has a lock code, and never share it with anyone.

But…what if even that isn’t enough?

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Facebook Messenger app expands phone number integration to iOS, Android

Social media company telling its WhatsApp competition what’s up

                                                                               By Matt Swider

Facebook has announced that the Android beta testing of its refreshed Messenger app has come to a close and the new version is available to download on iOS and Android devices.

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WhatsUp, Facebook? WhatsApp new king of smartphone IM, survey claims

Leads Twitter, BBM and Skype

                                                                                             WhatsApp

 

Facebook has lost its mobile messaging lead to the upstart WhatsApp platform, according to new research published this weekend.

OnDevice surveyed almost 4,000 smartphone users in five countries and found that a whopping 44 per cent of them were using WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends.

35 per cent of those folks – in US, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and China – were using Facebook Messenger in November.

Despite eliminating BlackBerry users, the reborn BBM platform was down in 5th place with a respectable 15 per cent of those surveyed using the service, behind WeChat (28 per cent) and Twitter (16 per cent).

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How an eye-tracker can make Google Glass less creepy (Q&A)

A Google Glass developer with a clear vision of what Glass can be, Brandyn White sees how Glass can be a force for good with a feature that Glass doesn’t even have yet.

Brandyn White’s eye tracking peripheral could become part of the next generation of Google Glass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brandyn White’s adventures hacking on Google Glass began not in a fancy Silicon Valley lab, but in a St. Petersburg, Fla., car repair shop in the mid-1990s.

His dad gave him a Tandy personal computer. The classic DOS desktop tower, “which was old then,” White said with a laugh, was part of a payment his dad had received for fixing a customer’s car. Limited in what he could do with the Tandy, White soon picked up a programming book from his school library. He was 10.

By the time he was a teenager, White had started a company called ConnerSoftware, which involved him “knocking off” — his words — other software and giving it away for free.

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techonology news Microsoft, bored of bashing Apple, bashes Samsung

Look how substandard the Galaxy Tab is.

If you’re in business, you have to get used to criticism.

If you’re in the gadget business, however, you’re nobody unless Microsoft criticizes you.

What other conclusion can one reach after Redmond’s assault on its various rivals?

There’s the constant poking at the iPad’s foibles. Then there’s the sublimely gauche Scroogled campaign, which accuses Google of being little more than a malevolent dictatorship.

 

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techonology News:First iPad Mini vs. Retina

iPad Mini Retina.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The iPad Mini Retina’s speed seals the deal.

A lot has been written about the Mini Retina’s display. For good reason, of course. Take a display with 786,432 pixels (iPad Mini original) and put it up against one with over 3 million (iPad Retina) and you notice the difference.

But I have been more impressed with the performance of the Mini Retina. After using it for two weeks, the speed is what has sold me.

The best analogy I can think of is going from a circa 2009 MacBook Air to today’s fastest Haswell-based MacBook.

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From Bordeaux to Warhol: Amazon goes high-brow

Tucked somewhere in the Amazon campus in Seattle, there is a room that has holds some very important racks of wine.

The bottles are handled carefully. With gloved hands, an Amazon photographer pulls each one off a wire rack and then photographs it so that online shoppers can see each bottle in a clean setting. An image of each bottle’s label and description will be uploaded to site so shoppers can look at them in detail. This has happened thousands of times, for each type of wine Amazon sells. It is decidedly not how Amazon sells DVDs or books.

Rather, this is part of the online retail giant’s push into new categories of high-brow products — including a $700 bottle of Montrose Bordeaux and a $200,000 Andy Warhol original depicting China’s Chairman Mao — all in an effort to create a new revenue stream and meet the demands of a more elite base of clientele.

It’s doing so through it’s third-party marketplace. The site already dabbles in some pricey products, like $9,000 diamond rings, but its latest categories, art and wine, show a whole other level of commitment.

“Everything we do at Amazon starts with the customer and works itself backwards,” said Peter Faricy, vice president of marketplace for the company. “Those are all categories customers have given us the feedback that they would love to get.”

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