#Liquidity Launches To Bring Clean water To Everyone Liquidity Nanotech is trying to change the world.
Liquidity doesn look like an average startup. Built on over 15 years of patented university research,
the team is a who who from the biggest and most respected names in the water business.
the process that makes desalination possible. At a glance, the Naked Filter looks like any other camping water bottle.
Liquidity core technology was developed and patented out of Stony Brook University. It a membrane with pores of. 2 microns in width, small enough to eliminate microbial contaminants that make up the vast majority of water quality incidents.
This includes issues that are common in both developed and emerging markets from E coli and Salmonella to SARS and even the norovirus.
Of course water purification methods and filters are available today but often force users to choose between effectiveness and convenience,
which has made adoption extremely difficult. On the effective side, chemicals like iodine and chlorine change the taste of the water
or a high level of pressure provided by the user the latter which is especially challenging for children.
Recognizing this, the Liquidity team designed their first product, Naked Filter, to showcase their membrane in a way that fit into existing consumer habits.
Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 7. 29.15 AM To create the nanofiber thin membrane that could be produced at scale,
Liquidity had to invent their own manufacturing process. Over the past 10 years, Liquidity has done just that,
perfecting its patented electro-spinning 3d printing technology. The process begins with liquid polymer and a collector plate.
Voltage is applied to the polymer and plate, which creates a pull to draw the liquid polymer out of its container toward the plate.
As the polymer travels, it becomes increasingly thin. So thin, in fact, that at some point
air resistance actually begins to influence the flow of the liquid, causing the now-thin polymer to become convoluted as it falls onto the collector plate.
During the trip, the polymer solution also converts to a solid. The resulting pattern is a 3d mat of a seemingly random, extremely thin fiber array.
Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 7. 24.11 AM This filtration membrane is highly flexible and durable
and can be produced in a variety of sizes. Electro-spinning is not a new process.
However, the Liquidity team developed a multi-nozzle system allowing for membranes to be manufactured at scale.
Previously existing materials and production techniques limited the ability of a filter to only capture microbes that were larger than 1 micron.
With their newly minted method of fiber formation, Liquidity pore size is down around. 2 microns.
Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 7. 24.34 AM Liquidity tech has been verified third-party by Biovir Laboratories, a microbiological testing facility, that it meets the EPA standard of 99.9999
percent bacterial removal for safe drinking water. Though the tech is strong, the challenge of adoption still remains.
By creating a bottle that is extremely easy to use Liquidity hopes first to tackle the outdoor enthusiasm of Western countries.
As of today, you can pre-order the Naked Filter bottle on their website; it ships this summer.
The company is also looking to provide in-home and in-office filtration systems. A larger market opportunity is in the emerging middle class of countries like Brazil and India.
though, Liquidity sees its strength as a technology player and aims to become the ntel Insideof the water industry.
#Nikola Labs Launches iphone 6 Case Which Harvests Electricity From The Air Nikola Tesla pioneered the transmission of electricity over wires.
and the audience as the Wild Card choice from Startup Alley launched a device that converts radio frequencies into DC power,
a case for an iphone 6. It converts the wasted 90 percent of energy the phone produces trying to pump out a cellphone signal,
and puts it back into the phone, thus powering it for up to 30 percent longer.
This is not an extra battery; it simply works passively. Essentially it is harvesting back the ambient RF energy already being produced by the phone.
They aim to bring the product to market within one year, in partnership with Ohio State university,
where the technology was developed originally, and from there they have licensed the technology and patents. They could also put this into many different devices, such as wearable technology, embedded sensors,
medical devices and Internet of things devices anything that doesn require massive amounts of electricity. It will be launching on Kickstarter in one month for $99,
and they hope to ship it inside the following four months. Appropriately Nikola Labs launched its product in the very building Tesla himself lived
Today, the lower house of The french Parliament overwhelmingly voted for this new law, making it highly likely to be implemented definitely in a couple of months.
One of the most controversial part of this law is the so-called black boxes. French Internet service providers and hosting companies will have to install a new system in their infrastructure to filter all traffic.
An algorithm will detect suspicious activity, like if someone is watching videos related to terrorism, and then record everything you do online.
The only problem is that nobody will see this algorithm source code and know what happening, except a new institution in charge of the technical control of intelligence systems.
In addition to the black boxes, there will be a new database of dangerous persons, new devices to record phone calls, FISA-like metadata collection and more.
But 438 out of 566 members of the lower house from all parties voted for the law.
#Google Launches Cloud Bigtable, A Highly Scalable And Performant Nosql Database With Cloud Bigtable, Google is launching a new Nosql database offering today that,
is powered by the company Bigtable data storage system, but with the added twist that it compatible with the Apache HBASE API which itself is based on Google Bigtable project.
Bigtable powers the likes of Gmail, Google search and Google analytics, so this is definitely a battle-tested service Google promises that Cloud Bigtable will offer single-digit millisecond latency
and 2x the performance per dollar when compared to the likes of HBASE and Cassandra. Because it supports the HBASE API
Cloud Bigtable can be integrated with all the existing applications in the Hadoop ecosystem, but it also supports Google Cloud Dataflow.
Setting up a Cloud Bigtable cluster should only take a few seconds, and the storage automatically scales according to the user needs.
It worth noting that this is not Google first cloud-based Nosql database product. With Cloud Datastore, Google already offers a high-availability Nosql datastore for developers on its App Engine platform.
That service, too, is based on Bigtable. Cory Oonnor, a Google Cloud platform product manager, tells me Cloud Datastore focuses on read-heavy workload for web apps
and mobile apps. loud Bigtable is much the opposite is designed for larger companies and enterprises where extensive data processing is required,
and where workloads are more complex, Oonner tells me. or example, if an organization needs to stream data into,
run analytics on and serve data out of a single database at scale Cloud Bigtable is the right system.
Many of our customers will start out on Cloud Datastore to build prototypes and get moving quickly,
and then evolve towards services like Cloud Bigtable as they grow and their data processing needs become more complex.
#Voxiebox Displays 3d Images Just Like R2d2's Message From Princess Leia Voxon, chosen out of the Hardware Alley to do the ildcardpitch during Techcrunch Disrupt NY, demonstrated a truly amazing
Its unique combination of hardware and software, developed over 30 years of tinkering in a New york garage, literally rints lightin three dimensions,
thus tricking the human eye into thinking it seeing a 3d image, thanks to their proprietary algorithm.
meaning it extremely user friendly. Because you can display any image (moving or still), you can thus move
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.
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,
#LOT Polish airlines Now Accepting Bitcoin I not a big fan of the accepts bitcointype of post
LOT Polish airlines, the official Polish air carrier, is now accepting bitcoin. What does that mean?
Interestingly, Poland is a leader in payments with a number of clever smaller banks offering more NFC and bitcoin payment options than anywhere else in Europe.
It just the matter of time when payments with the online currency will become as popular as using credit cards today.
which is why we are one of the first airlines in the world to give its passengers the possibility of paying with Bitcoins as early as today. airbaltic
and Air Lituanica are also accepting bitcoin but LOT is the first major carrier to do so in Europa Centralna.
who previously spent ten years researching digital health and holding clinical trials at Columbia University Medical center.
Through a disease management and doctor communication platform, Microhealth is attempting to crowdsource the management of rare, chronic conditions, starting with hemophilia.
The updates are shared with the patient doctor who can use the data to regulate dosage
or recommend a different type of medication, and family, especially when the patient is a child.
If a patient with hemophilia gets a cut, he won stop bleeding until he intravenously injects enough of this protein.
And treatment is incredibly expensive around $300, 000 per patient per year, Miguel says. sually patients will infuse all of the time
Currently, 10 percent of hemophilia patients in the U s. nearly 3, 000 people) are using Microhealth,
and right now doctors don know that. y simply prompting patients to log the exact amount of medication that theye injecting,
doctors can personalize treatment to match the metabolism and the daily activity of each patient.
Doctors can also request pictures and additional information from patients, who often live hundreds of miles from hemophilia treatment centers,
And hemophilia is just the first chronic disease that the company will tackle. The team has started already working with rheumatoid arthritis patients,
and plan to launch versions of the app for multiple sclerosis and high cholesterol patients in the future. magine a patient has cancer,
and only so much time to live, so choosing the right medication is saving his life,
Miguel says. y analyzing data at a macro level, wee going to be able to tell what works
and what doesn work
#Biometric Security: From Selfies To Walking Gaits Oren Levy is CEO of Zooz. The payments industry, facing the risk of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks
and various types of credit card fraud, has begun incorporating various types of biometric technology to enhance security
and prevent breaches. As recently reported, Mastercard is launching a facial recognition payment service based on elfiestaken on a smartphone.
This new technology features a photo scanner that creates a map of the shopper face,
which is translated then into a code for confirmation of future payments. For now, Mastercard customers must still use a password
when making purchases via the ecurecodeservice, but soon a elfiefrom a smartphone will be enough to close transactions.
This program is to be tested initially on 500 card users in the coming months. Mastercard stated that it also is working on a payment program based on voice recognition.
Mastercard imminent transition to biometrics was preceded by Apple Pay launching in October 2014 of a biometric payment technology based on fingerprint ID. The newest iphone models are equipped with Apple Touch
ID fingerprint reader. And then there is Paypal, which has boosted security on its mobile app by using fingerprint sensors that are installed on some Samsung Electronics devices.
All in all the stage seems to be set for the large-scale adoption of biometric technology. While the payments industry is currently working full steam on various forms of biometric technology aimed at thwarting ever-increasing security breaches in payments technologies,
biometrics have been around for quite a while, and the technologies take different forms. Back in 1665, Marcello Malphighi was credited with the discovery of the unique patterns of fingerprints.
In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon, published a paper on how fingerprints can be used for identification.
In 1994, John Daugman developed and patented the first algorithms for iris scanning and recognition.
The iris is known to display a network of random patterns which are unique to each individual.
Special scanners are used to match these patterns to a database. A few years later, Christoph von der Malsburg from the University of Bochum in Germany developed a system known as ZN-Face that was capable of making facial matches on imperfect images.
Today, most mainstream biometric recognition is based on fingerprint, palm, iris, facial and voice recognition. Alongside these physiological recognition methods come behavioral biometrics that can recognize a person based on his
or her typing rhythm (called keystroke dynamics) or walking gait (which is based on an individual movement patterns).
Behavioral biometrics are considered currently less reliable than the physiological system, but as this technology is still in its early stages,
this premise could change. Many law enforcement agencies and governments are already using biometric technology because it affords a higher level of security against cyber attacks than other protection methods.
The newfound availability of biometric technology for mobile and cloud-based platforms raises the security bar further.
Nevertheless, while there are many who hail biometrics as a game changer, others believe that in its current form it does not provide the necessary level of security to prevent identity theft.
The fact is that hackers have succeeded in using photographs to lift fingerprints and access personal accounts.
The notorious hacking group called the Chaos Computer Club even replicated the fingerprint of the German Defense Minister.
A lot is happening these days in the field of identification technology to increase security. Qualcomm Technologies recently announced the development of the first comprehensive mobile biometric solution based on ultrasonic technology.
While traditional fingerprint authentication relies on capacitive touch-based sensors, the new Snapdragon solution features ultrasonic-based technology,
which captures three-dimensional acoustic detail within the outer layers of skin. Stephanie Schuckers, an expert in identification technology research, is quoted by PHYS ORG as saying that current research is focusing on iveness detection,
which would prevent hackers from replicating fingerprints or other biometric methods. This type of technology would have the ability to detect
if the real biometric is physically present. Researchers are seeking to create an optimal arrangement of biometrics
and tokenization layers that will ensure high-level security. The ultimate solution technology may involve using a mixture of several forms of biometric authentication,
such as skin temperature, palm veins and voice recognition. Increased security is not the only consideration
when discussing the advantages of biometrics. Imagine a world in which there is no need to remember a slew of passwords and PINS for various sites.
According to a survey released by Visa Europe, 69 percent of Europeans aged 16-24 believe that their lives will be aster and easierwithout passwords.
Contactless payments would be the next natural step enabling shoppers to complete transactions far more quickly. Taking this concept a step further,
biometrics could enable merchants to identify valued customers, as well as known shoplifters, as soon as they enter a brick-and-mortar store.
Theoretically, in the new era of NFC payments, customers would be able to choose whatever items they wish
and leave the premises without ever approaching a cashier. Charges would automatically be referred to the customer biometric-based records.
This type of technology could merge with the personalized omni-channel shopping experience that merchants are currently striving to create for their customers.
Shopping patterns as we now know them would cease to exist. The mobile cloud, banking and payments industries must prepare themselves for the shift from traditional authentication methods to the new biometric systems.
Once biometric technology is perfected and becomes cost-effective, its widespread deployment could save merchants and banks millions of dollars and provide high-level protection against cyber attacks.
However, when it comes to the extensive use of biometrics in the payments industry, the biggest hurdle to overcome is widespread adoption.
Retailers and consumers will need to concur on the best form of biometric payments before passwords can become obsolete s
#New System Lets Designers And Researchers rawin 3d Space A new 3d interactive system created by researchers at the University of Montreal allows designers and builders to rawin scenes in real time.
By projecting images on a thin material, the system, called Hyve-3d, allows you to swipe through scenes
and make colors and shapes appear on walls and floors. It also allows for multi-user interaction one designer can sketch some furniture
while another can move it around. The system is a bit complex. From the release:##What does control plane mean?
e use a Butterfly-net analogy to explain how the cursor selects objects in space the users simply sweep the 3d cursors through,
Dorta said. or the manipulations of objects, the users can use gestures and movements such as pinching and orientation.
The cursor is in fact being demonstrated within the researchershyve-3d design system, a full scale immersive 3d environment that enables users to create drawings on hand-held tablets,
which can then be manipulated on the tablets to create a 3d design within the space.
As the designers are immersed in their work, for example designing a living room, they can test different furniture options according to the scale
and even work on the interior detailing. The immersive images are the result of an optical illusion created by a high-resolution projector,
a specially designed 5m-diameter spherically concave fabric screen and a dome mirror projecting the image onto the screen.
Specialized techniques render the 3d scene onto a spherical projection in real-time In other words, the tablets act as 3d cursors.
Your finger can slide through various objects and select them or you can draw right into the scene.
While it not true 3d the system does allow for some optical illusions. The researchers will show off the new technology at the SIGGRAPH 2015 Conference in Los angeles. No word on
whether we will be able to drape a concave fabric screen over our living rooms so we can move IKEA furniture around in real-time in 3d a
#Y Combinator, Tim cook Back Nebia, A Shower That Uses 70%Less Water As a health spa owner in Mexico city, Carlos Gomez Andonaegui often fretted about the cost of water.
Mexico capital city, with more than 20 million people in the metropolitan region, sits at an altitude of more than 7,
000 feet in the heart of the country where it is near no major natural water sources.
Two enormous systems dating back to the 1940s and 1970s elevate water by more than 3,
000 feet to reach the residents of the city. Gomez Andonaegui found that the price fluctuated so much that it was major stress in running his business.
He dreamed about ways to manage it better. That was nearly five years ago. Today, Gomez Andonaegui and his cofounder Philip Winter are unveiling the fruits of their work with a new shower head that uses 70 percent less water.
Called the Nebia, the shower creates millions of tinier water droplets with a surface area that is 100 times larger than the drops that normal shower heads produce.
Because of that, Nebia shower head has a flow of 0. 75 gallons per minute, compared to the standard 2. 5 gallons per minute under EPA standards. howers have been the same for 100 years.
There the overhead spigot. Now youe got rain showers. But there no meaningful innovation here, Winter said. t dominated by a handful of players like Kohler that are mostly private multi-generational companies.
Theye launching the Nebia shower head on Kickstarter with an initial price of $299. The goal is to create a direct-to-consumer brand (like Nest initial strategy with thermostats and then smoke detectors.
e think we can have a very cool brand with the idea of conserving the world water,
Nebia flat, circular shower head is made of a high-density polymer with nozzles that spray out micro droplets.
For now, it not connected to any kinds of software. However the team thinks there are long-term possibilities to build an Internet-of-Things model that could tell consumers how much water
and energy theye using or later down the line, a smart water heater. So far though, the startup has focused on getting an initial version right by modeling droplet sizes
and temperatures to make sure Nebia water flow hits the body at the right level of heat. he actual physics behind atomization are said pretty complex
A lot of this work was originally done for the jet propulsion industry. The six-person company has some test units that theye used at the Equinox gym chain
and at Google and Apple campuses. Theye racked up some impressive investors including Tim cook and Eric Schmidt.
because it has no cashiers. You order on an ipad, your name comes up on a transparent LCD screen box,
and you pull out a bowl of quinoa. Opening today in San francisco at 121 Spear St,
Eatsa is a new restaurant designed around technology. Eatsa only serves quinoa, a couscous-like grain that high in protein
who sold his farming insurance startup The Climate Corporation for around $1 billion. Eventually Eatsa hopes its combination of tech
Since you always pay by credit card or mobile, he hopes to create discounts for regulars that increase every time you dine at Eatsa.
The edict that Microsoft has enterprise on lockdown is dissipating. Huge enterprise player Cisco and Apple announced a ast Lanefor ios enterprise users,
which promises a more streamlined and optimized experience for those enterprise customers using Cisco networks and products.
as the release merely states that the companies are dedicated to roviding unique collaboration on iphone
and ipad. few tweaks will also be put in place to make the hop between a Cisco desk phone
and iphone more seamless than it is today. Tim cook had this to say about the tieup:
ios is the world best mobile platform, and nearly every Fortune 500 and Global 500 company today has put ios at the center of their mobile strategy. iphone
and ipad have become essential tools for the modern workforce and are changing the way work gets done.
Together with Cisco, we believe we can give businesses the tools to maximize the potential of ios
and help employees become even more productive using the devices they already love. There a lot of words here and not a lot of meat,
but what it seems like Apple and Cisco is working on is an environment to enable easier onboarding for enterprise users.
There no reason for a corporate customer to use phones that aren good for their employees simply
because it easy to get your software onto it. Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers calls it an ngineering
and go-to-market partnershipwhich again doesn say much other than the two companies probably have a few projects going on
and are spending quite a bit of time together. The areas that should see streamlining are Cisco mobile, cloud,
and premises-based collaboration tools like Webex. Which we all love. Well not really. Someone fix that thing,
#Mobile devices Will Either Have 3d Sensors Or Suffer Flat Sales When Apple hot on iphone 6ad campaign covered billboards and posters in 24 cities around the world,
it proved two things: The quality of mobile camera technology is astronomical, and mobile device manufacturers badly want you to know about it.
Moves like these are smart in a world where 1. 8 billion digital photos are shared on a daily basis
A well-built 8 megapixel camera is plenty for all nonprofessional uses. More has stopped being better.
At least when confined to the flat images smartphone cameras provide today. But Intel new Realsense/Project Tango phone concept shows there is still more valuable data to be captured:
Depth. Small, inexpensive sensors can now see our world in all three dimensions, for which consumer applications no amount of megapixels alone could achieve.
Exploiting depth is the only logical choice mobile device manufacturers have if they are to keep their products competitive.
And I not the only one who thinks so. Breaking 3d Out Of Hollywood Intel isn the only one at the party.
Apple recently confirmed acquiring 3d-sensor manufacturer Linx for $20 million. They didn say why,
but it not hard to figure out when Allied Market research predicts 80 percent of smartphones will carry 3d sensors by 2018,
earning a total of $2. 02 billion by 2020. With depth, a computer can understand the size,
shape and distance of all objects within its field of view. This means way more use cases than ever possible with flat images even without a pair of 3d glasses.
The simplest examples are for image and video editing. An image with depth information would allow you to change things like focus
or lighting after it been taken. Apps could go so far as to add or remove entire objects from a scene, with lighting,
Depth will bring eye-catching special effects to everybody the way high-resolution smartphone cameras made everyone a photographer.
Allied Market research predicts 80 percent of smartphones will carry 3d sensors by 2018. And that just the start.
Full-sized 3d sensors are already being used for 3d scanning, a process that maps the exact size, shape and colors of a given object anything from a human face to priceless works of art.
The IDF15 keynote had Intel CEO Brian Krzanich quickly calculating storage space needed for objects by scanning them with a 3d sensor.
where depth could capture a real environment (like an apartment for sale or a teleconferencing room)
and stick them on a 3d avatar for use in teleconferencing or even video games Further applications exist for 3d printing, design, mapping, object recognition, facial recognition, gesture-based control and more.
But How Will They Work? Intel Realsense, like Microsoft more famous Kinect cameras, work by projecting a signal (a laser
or infrared light) and measuring how it bounces or otherwise interacts with the environment. They work well for indoor situations and benefit from an existing base of software designed for this technique,
and the high-consumer awareness makes it an attractive choice for vendors. Another technique is stereovision,
a method used by Apple new company Linx. Based on human depth perception, this kind of sensor takes in feeds from two cameras (eyes)
and compares the difference in horizontal placement of each object to calculate how far away it is.
comparing the feeds in real time takes lots of computing power, and calibrating multiple cameras gets complicated. However, recent advances in mobile chipsets are beginning to remedy these issues.
Not Another Flash In The Pan Memories of the not-so-memorable attempts at 3d smartphones a few years ago may stir up doubts of this trend.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft are pouring billions into VR/AR research and acquisitions, and dominate headlines with each new build.
Real-time environment maps provided by depth sensors are being used to test self-driving taxis and autonomous delivery drones.
wee sure to see loads of apps that make use of 3d sensors in ways even experts can predict.
So when you take your first selfie with the next generation of mobile devices, put on your best smile:
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