#YC-Backed Bluesmart Raises $2 Million For Its Self-Tracking Suitcase magine a world where you never lose your luggagesays CEO of Bluesmart Diego Saez-Gil.
and weigh your belongings from an app on your smartphone. It operates on a detachable Bluetooth-enabled motherboard with a built-in GPS.
Weight sensors embedded within the handle let you know if your suitcase meets international travel guidelines.
There even a built-in 37-watt lithium-ion battery and a USB plug so you can power your smartphone up to six times while on the go.
The app tracks which airports the case has been to how many miles traveled and how much time was spent in each country.
But should the battery lose power it comes with a TSA-approved master key that will help you
It also comes with an easy-to-access laptop compartment so you can pull out your computer right before the security line.
Gil and his four cofounders Tomi Pierucci Alejo Verlini Brian Chen and Martin Diz are in Y Combinator current batch of companies
The majority of that money comes from an Indiegogo campaign that went 3860 percent over the original goal of $50000.
He says he was just building something he thought could have saved him some trouble one time on a trip home to Argentina. was trying to bring a bunch of electronics some ipads home to my family for Christmas.
What he needed now was understood someone who hardware. His friend and fellow Argentinian Pierucci was his guy.
He had hardware experience and a Phd in aerospace engineering. Saez-Gil figured he be a good person to spit-ball ideas with
He credits Pierucci for helping him hatch the idea for connected luggage. The two brought in three other founders to the team to help with the logistics it would take to combine both hardware and software.
A prototype was made and Bluesmart was born. The suitcase costs $280 right now. However Gil says the price will be going up in a week
and that the carry on luggage item will eventually reach $400. see this as eventually becoming a lifestyle brand like Goprohe tells me. amsonite is a $4 billion company.
or Samsonite so the price will reflect that. luesmart now employs eight people including the five founders.
but says he doesn need more money for current operations thanks to the money from YC and the Indiegogo campaign.
#Google Joins Apple Others Cutting off Crimea Blocks Adwords Adsense Google Play Yet more developments around how U s. sanctions on Crimea in retaliation against Russia annexation by Russia are being adopted by tech companies:
Google is the latest to start complying with the orders to block import and export of tech products and services among other things.
According to multiple reports out of Russia Google has started now to block Adsense and Adwords accounts in the region
and from February 1 it will also cease Google Play services but it will continue to allow access to free Web-based services like Google search Google+Gmail
and Maps. anctions have recently been imposed on Crimea by the US and the EU. We are complying with thema Google spokesperson confirmed to Techcrunch.
The move comes after Apple expanded its own implementation of the sanctions from developers to products
and services this week and Paypal also added its name to the list yesterday. Other tech companies have included Valve cutting off Steam services in the country.
In a way the Google block is a bigger deal than Apple considering that Android devices are far more prevalent among users
and Google is a key player in other web services. It also come up more than once against authorities in restrictive countries concerned about
While Google has yet to specify to us which services are impacted Russian press reports that Google is paid initially cutting off services specifically B2b products like Adsense and Adwords.
And even if Google did decide to circumvent U s. laws (which it is not) it wouldn be able to collect money for services
since most international banks have stopped now payments into and out of the country. oogle prohibited from providing paid services in the Crimeaa source at Google told Lenta. ru. n addition Google cannot make payments to anyone in the Crimea.
It is now technically impossible as almost all international banks have ceased to make payments. ater the block will extend to apps via Google Play
but search maps and Gmail will not be affected. The Russian agency ITAR-TASS reports that Google will be ending Google Play services both paid and free in the region from February 1 as they fall under the restrictions on the import
and export of services. rom February 1 we will start to limit access to apps in Google Play
since loading applications can be considered exports. Access will continue to free services Google such as search Gmail
and Google Mapsa Google source told the agency. The backstory here is that Crimea a peninsula with less than 2 million residents is effectively a pawn in a chess game between much bigger powers the U s. and Russia.
Tech companies are cutting off business with Crimea as a result of sanctions that the U s. first published on December 19 2014 in line with a similar move from the European union.
or technology to the Crimea region of Ukraine Other areas covered in the order include investments and immigration.
but the people in Crimea who have otherwise been trying to tap into the rush for engineering talent from Eastern europe by building their own fledgling tech ecosystem
#GIF Camera App Camoji Adds Keyboard Integration Ability To Instantly Share With Reddit In an age in
and also send messages via wireless data transfer opened the doors for a new type of expression.
and even then those images were stuck mostly on the walls within their homes. This new technology meant portraits displaying a person current emotion were immediate
With decades of moving images available from film and television, people began scouring that media for snippets that could illustrate the everyday struggles and triumphs they felt.
the appearance of actors on a screen could in no way substitute for one inner conflicts. That brings us to Camoji
The app enables users to quickly capture and share moving images (i e. IFS of ourselves and overlay them with additional text and symbols (i e. moji.
and shared amongst its users. According to founder Carlos Whitt, Camoji has mostly found a place in the hearts of teens,
Camoji has imagined new ways for its users to save and share. The app can now be used directly from the smartphone keyboard,
thanks to the progressive thought leadership of Apple and its recent opening up to third parties. Whitt says this was requested Camoji most feature,
and users will most likely squeal with delight when they are made aware of this innovation.
Its users can also now send their GIFS directly to Reddit, which is a communication platform frequented by those in the age group that most frequently uses Camoji.
and rewarded via social currency called pvotes. While giving users new ways to share the innovators behind Camoji have ushered also in a new way of discovering GIFS that are of most interest to those who use it.
Users now have profiles which are like portrait galleries of their moving images, and the service has curated collections of GIFS that feature common themes.
As with all new forms of human expression, it too early to tell the full impact Camoji will have on our society.
a gadget that lets you record your notes and doodles to the cloud and even convert them to text.
Out of the box, the two most important gadgets are the plastic body that holds your marker
and the base station that records your work. It can eewhat youe working on for eight feet to the left and to the right
giving you plenty of space to work in knowing itl all be saved for later. Writing with the Smartmarker feels like working with any other erasable marker
most of the work is handled by the base station. It got storage for somewhere around 1
and connects to your phone, tablet, or laptop over Bluetooth. With that said, there are some nifty functions on the marker itself.
Towards the non-writing end of each marker case, there a small ring of blue, red or black.
This is actually an interchangeable piece of plastic that determines the color nkused for the digital notes,
there also a smart eraser cap for the marker that wipes your work away from both the physical surface and the file in the Equil Note app.
you can now have the app send recordings of notes to other Equil users in near real-time.
This allows for conference calls with whiteboarding for drawing out concepts without requiring everyone to use a teleconferencing app that looks like it was made by a mediocre Java engineer with a long checklist of features to include and no real grasp on UX.
you can sync all of those notes to the team Dropbox or Google Drive for easy record keeping D
#Scientists Make Energy-Generating Keyboard That Knows Who#s Typing On it Passwords continue to be a glaring weakness in digital security.
And while biometric alternatives such as fingerprint readers are finding their way onto more consumer electronics devices they are not without their limitations either.
So what about tightening the security screw further by applying a continuous biometric such as a keyboard that knows who typing on it in real-time
and typing style the nonmechanical keyboard is able to generate energy to power itself and self cleans thanks to a dirt repellent coating
and crafty composition hin layers of plastic topped and tailed with conductive film so there no mechanical gullies to harvest the crumbs of your lunch.
The low profile keys have a top electrification layer that allows them to generate charge from typing friction (aka contact electrification) so the keyboard is able to register individual keystroke data
or to harness typing friction to generate electrical charge for powering other devices he keyboard identify the force and speed at which the typer input characters.
The keyboard can identify personality in information input so that it is a high level of securityzhong Lin Wang one of the scientists involved in the research told Techcrunch. he power generated can automatically send signals to the computer
so that no power is needed for the keyboard. n a paper detailing the research project called Personalized Keystroke Dynamics for Self-Powered Humanachine Interfacing published in the ACSNANO journal the scientists argue that algorithms which can identify who is typing by analyzing keystroke timing are limited more than their hardware-based
approach of yping-induced electric signalsas the latter is also able to sense pressure as well as speed
No external power source is required for the keyboard to function thanks to its self-powering abilities.
So it is evidently a more energy-efficient alternative to tracking typing via capacitive data that could be harvested from typing on a touchscreen keyboard.
How much energy can be generated by typing on the smart keyboard? Enough to charge mall electronics at arbitrary typing speed greater than 100 characters per minaccording to the team
which they characterize as giant leap compared to previous reportsthe U s. Department of energy contributed funding to the research.
For more details of the research read the full paper in ACSNANO. he technology is ready for commercialization within a couple of years
#Amazon Invests In 150mw Indiana Wind farm To Power Its Data centers Amazon today announced that it is working with the Pattern Energy Group to construct
and operate a 150 megawatt wind farm in Benton County, Indiana. The new wind farm will go online in about a year
and the expectation is that it will supply at least 500,000 megawatt hours of wind power annually.
but the mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) that the full name of what was called previously the owler Ridge IV Wind Projectwill only be used to power Amazon AWS data centers.
but Pattern Energy notes that this is a 13-year agreement. As Amazon announced last November, its long-term goal is o achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.
That a noble goal, but given that there is no date associated with these plans, it a bit hard to hold Amazon accountable for it.
For now, Amazon offers its users three carbon-neutral regions: US WEST (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and its AWS Govcloud. mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters
and have ongoing expansion plans to support our growing customer base, said Jerry Hunter, Vice president of Infrastructure at Amazon web services,
in today announcement. his power purchase agreement helps to increase the renewable energy used to power our infrastructure in the US
and is one of many sustainability activities and renewable energy projects for powering our datacenters that we currently have in the works.
While Google has made various wind energy investments over the last few years this is Amazon first (or at least the first one it is publicly talking about) s
#Cheaper Sensors Will Fuel The Age Of Smart Everything For better or worse, we are about the enter the age of smart everything.
Whatever you think of that proposition, the fact is that sensors, the tiny devices that fuel the Internet of things are getting smaller and cheaper all the time.
As they do, we will start to see them transmitting data from some highly unlikely intelligent devices,
while tracking everything from road conditions to building health to cars to industrial equipment. The Internet of things is a term that being bandied about with increasing frequency these days.
You could think of it as the loudof 2015 that buzzword that marketers put in absolutely everything
The Internet of things in actuality involves a network of smart sensors collecting data. As the sensors grow ever cheaper,
and the network grows ever larger, the more data we can collect to make ever more intelligent decisions (at least in theory).
On The Edge Of A major Shift Nils Herzberg, global co-lead for Iot at SAP says the beauty of sensors that they bring real-time data to applications. ustomers run applications for business critical processes,
which could run better with real-time awareness, Herzberg said. He says when sensors provide real-time information,
customers can make better decisions, rather than using guess work. The reason why wee seeing more talk about the Internet of things is the diminishing size
and cost of sensor technologies, says James Bailey, managing director of the mobility practice at Accenture. ur perspective is that cost of both the sensors
and devices is approaching free and the size is approaching invisible. Our perspective is literally everything will have IOT technology at some point,
he said. James Bailey, Accenture Bailey believes that we are not there yet, but as these devices get smaller and cheaper,
What he means that the same sensor data may used differently, depending on the industry. t driven by the business case,
Making Use Of The Data But once, we collect the data, we have to do something.
We have to use it to take actions to improve our business processes, or it doesn really help us at all.
Sensors can feed a company data to make highly inefficient processes much more efficient, but SAP Herzberg says the proliferation of that data has become so massive that companies are overwhelmed
and humans can keep up with it. Then software takes over the task of finding correlation,
and a step beyond that companies may turn to prediction capabilities that will tune themselves. That evolution takes a certain critical mass of sensors in the network
and software that can begin to make better use of the data the sensors are collecting.
For now he says SAP is one of a number of companies including IBM, Microsoft and countless startups working on making better predictions.
As Herzberg says, once you have been able to collect the data from a sensors, you can begin to build increasingly complex sets of predictions. ou can start modeling
and create a more complex system and modeling dependencies between things, he explained. SAP is working with the Port of Hamburg to help reduce traffic congestion around the port.
It found that 70 percent of trucks arrive too early, whether the ship is ready to receive the cargo or not.
Sensors could let the system know a ship hadn docked yet and communicate this to truckers before they drive into the port area.
This could reduce congestion and pollution around the port. Moving To Smart Everything Sensors are not just the domain of industry though.
Our phones are full of sensors from the GPS to the accelerometer to the compass, all of them feeding data to apps and to the cloud.
So is that Apple Watch, Apple announced yesterday. I recently wrote about Humanyze, a new startup that has created a smart employee badge to help track employee movements and social interactions throughout the day and correlate the data to company goals.
As I wrote about the badge hey developed a smart employee badge with a microphone, accelerometer,
bluetooth connection and other tools typically found in a smart phone. If you want further proof that we are entering the age of smart everything,
consider that Oral B has a smart toothbrush. The toothbrush uses Bluetooth and a mobile app to capture data about your tooth brushing habits.
It includes a timer to make sure youe brushing for a full two minutes, and it maps your brushing
so if you concentrate really hard on your bottom front and give short shrift to your upper molars,
the app lets you know and gives you feedback. You can even share your toothbrushing data with your dentist
or hygienist and an Oral B spokesperson told me me at an event at Mobile World Congress last week,
that you own your toothbrushing data, so youe not even sharing it with the company.
how about the Johnny walker smart scotch bottle that protects the product along the supply chain ensuring that nobody has opened it along the journey or how about a smart car?
I wrote last week about a new Volvo that uses sensors to detect black ice
and transmits data to the cloud, where it can warn other drivers coming down the same road about the impending danger.
There are companies using sensors to track shipments; to warn when perishables in warehouses might be going bad;
that tell you when a piece of equipment is about to fail; when to heat
or cool our houses or office buildings; track school busses and use cases we probably haven even imagined.
These sensors will add information to an ever-growing network of connected devices producing mountains of data.
The trick will be harnessing all of this information instead of drowning in it. But if you consider what Tim Oeilly once said, he guy with the most data wins,
then wee about to make the race a whole lot more interesting
#Microsoft Outlook Hacked In China New Report Finds Only a few weeks after Google Gmail service was blocked in China a new report from online censorship monitoring organization Greatfire. org released this morning
states that Microsoft email system Outlook was subjected recently to a an-in-the-middleattack in China.
This is a form of eavesdropping where the attacker inserts himself in between the victimsconnections relaying messages between them
and SMTP for Outlook were affected but the web interfaces for Microsoft webmail services were not.
That is Outlook. com and Login. live. com were affected not. The attack continued for a about a day
and has stopped since the report states. Affected users were shown warning messages in their email clients that weren as immediately worrisome as those web browsers display which means that some users may not have been aware that an attack was taking place.
For example in an example screenshot Greatfire. org posted an iphone warning message says annot Verify Server Identitybut asks
if the user wants to continue anyway. However when Greatfire. org reproduced the same result via the Firefox web browser the message the browser offers is far more detailed saying also that the error could means hat someone is trying to impersonate the site
and you shouldn continue. uring this attack users would only see the pop-up warning when their email client tried to automatically retrieve new messages.
In most cases they would simply hit ontinueto dismiss the message likely thinking that a network problem was to blame.
But by doing so their emails contacts and passwords were able to be logged by the hacker.
The self-signed certificate is suspected to be from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information center) which is governed by the Cyberspace Administration of China as this would be consistent with previous man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in China. iven the dangerous nature of this attack on Outlook we again strongly encourage organizations including Microsoft
and Apple to immediately revoke trust for the CNNIC certificate authoritysays Greatfire. org. Below: What happens when a Chinese user accesses Outlook in their email client:
The attack comes within a month of China blocking Gmail which despite a slight recovery is still inaccessible in China.
It also one of many recent MITM attacks in China including those affecting services from Google Yahoo
and Apple in the past. e once again suspect that Lu Wei and the Cyberspace Administration of China have orchestrated this attack
or have allowed willingly the attack to happenwrites Greatfire. org in its report. f our accusation is correct this new attack signals that the Chinese authorities are intent on further cracking down on communication methods that they cannot readily monitor. ee reached out to Microsoft for comment on this attack
and will update if they offer a response n
#Apple Introduces Researchkit, Turning iphones Into Medical Diagnostic Devices Medical research is plagued by small sample sizes and inconsistent data collection.
So Apple is stepping up to help health innovation with Research Kit, a new ios software framework that lets people volunteer to join medical research studies.
Researchkit lets people take tests like saying hhhto detect vocal variations, walking in a line,
or tapping in rhythm to test for Parkinson Disease. Users will decide how to share their data
and Apple won see it. And to advance its evolution, Researchkit will be open source. Researchkit will be available next month,
and the first five tests built with it will become available today. They help people participate in tests for Parkinson, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and breast cancer.
Apple Jeff Williams came out on stage today at the Apple Watch event to show off Researchkit.
including University Of Oxford and Stanford. Apple learned about some of the biggest obstacles to scientific research in medicine.
Finding and recruiting subjects can be tough. Paper flyers on college campuses are one of the few ways labs sign up human guinea pigs.
This obstacle can lead to small sample sizes more vulnerable to inaccuracy and less diverse samples that might not be generalizable to the world population.
With Researchkit, researchers can build out a medical testing app for ios that accessible to people far from their physical lab. Users can signup with a digital signature,
and instantly start recording data. Tests designed with Researchkit use the iphone sensors to record data.
The touch screen can feel people tapping in rhythm to detect inconsistencies that may signal a disease.
The accelerometer can compare the gait and balance of someone walk against a healthy person speed and posture.
And the microphone can notice minute fluctuations in someone voice that may indicate Parkinson or another health problem.
Williams stressed the immediate benefit to users because theye learn about their health even before a researcher study concludes
and they publish the results. If a user notices they are having trouble balancing while walking a line,
they can talk to their doctor about it. Since medical data is obviously sensitive, Apple won see anything you put into Researchkit apps
and you can give permissions for how data is used by researchers. The question will be how many developers jump aboard the Researchkit.
While it obviously holds potential improvements, it also takes time to develop traditional lab studies into an app.
Researchkit is a valiant effort by Apple, and if its a hit with scientists, it could make mass medical research easier than ever r
#Purelifi Raises £1. 5m For Tech That Uses Pulsating LED Light To Create Wifi Alternative Purelifi,
a spin out of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, is developing what it calls ifitechnology,
an alternative to wireless networking, such as Wifi or 5g, based on visible light communication (VLC). Specifically, the tech uses pulsating LED light, imperceptible to the human eye,
as a way of sending data from one Lifi-equipped device to another. Today the startup is disclosing that it raised £1. 5 million in a new round of funding led by Scottish-based angel group London & Scottish Investment Partners (LSIP), with additional funding from the Scottish
Investment bank (SIB) and Old College Capital, the venture investment arm of the University of Edinburgh.
This, I told, values the 2012-founded company at over £14 million, while Purelifi is currently in the process of raising a full VC round,
which it aims to close sometime in the second half of this year. Meanwhile, today funding will be used to support the evelopment and roll-outof Purelifi product roadmap,
as well as for various marketing initiatives. Li-Flameillustration-1024x926interestingly, Lifi tech has some advantages over Wifi networks,
such as greater security due to its ine of sightrequirements (no snooping on a network from outside a building
or the other side of a wall) or being able to use existing lighting infrastructure think LED street lamps to double up as Lifi access points.
When a constant current is applied to an LED light bulb a constant stream of photons are emitted from the bulb
high speed information can be transmitted from an LED light bulb. The company has begun already shipping actual product in the form of
coupled with a battery powered Lifi mobile unit attached to a laptop screen, allows users to roam within a room,
or potentially an entire building, while being connected u
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