#With Skyspecs#Guardians The Drones Have Become Self-Aware Skyspecs has solved the biggest problem with drones:
With the company first product launching today at Techcrunch Hardware Battlefield 2015 drones become aware of their surroundings
If a person walks towards the spinning blades of death the drone will casually back out of the way.
If there is a tree in the way the drone will avoid it. Best of all this system works with existing drone platforms.
Skyspecsteam has been building drones for six years and and individuals in the company come from teams that won the 2012 international aerial competition
and the prestigious DARPA sponsored AGICCOMPETITION. These guys know drones. Guardian is the company initial product
and they tell me it the first product to offer this sort of capability. It works as advertised
While demoing in Hardware Battlefield at CES 2015 the drone swiftly moved out of the way of a person walking towards the blades.
Skyspec envisions its technology for both commercial and industrial uses. Guardian drones will be able to avoid say spinning blades on windmills or utility lines.
Cofounder Thomas Brady tells me that the founders of the company were previously part of both volunteer and doctoral research in ground sea and air robotics.
After graduating from the University of Michigan with backgrounds in autonomous vehicle research the founders went on to found Skyspecs.
As members of Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicles the APRIL laboratory and the autonomous boat team at the university of Michigan Skyspecs founding team met.
#Square Cash Integrates Touch ID To Send Money Using Your Fingerprint Square Cash Square Venmo competitor that lets you use the app to transfer money to other people has added a new feature to its ios app that some might say is long overdue:
users can now authenticate money transfers using the Touch ID feature in later versions of the iphone (5s
Apple has been making a lot of use of the Touch ID feature as a security authentication layer on its phone for things like unlocking the device authenticating app payments and so on
and Apple itself has used the Touch ID for its own payment ambitions speaks to how Square which reportedly shelved plans last year for an IPO has perhaps been needing to rethink
but money transferring apps are generally have been some of the more popular payment services on smartphones.
Prior to today updates to Square Cash had other updates including the ability to send money via Bluetooth and email
and a cloud-based database of items to quickly scan and identify items based on their molecular structure.
#Tencent Launches China#s First Private Online Bank Tencent one of the top Internet companies in China launched the country first private online bank today.
Called Webank after Tencent popular messaging app Wechat the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet.
Tencent and rival Alibaba were among ten private investors that were approved by the Chinese government last year to launch five private banks.
The goal of the pilot program is to make credit more available to small businesses which are often at a disadvantage
when it comes to securing loans from state-owned banks despite being integral to China economic development.
while forcing traditional financial institutions to accelerate reforms. According to the Financial times Webank first loan (made when Li pressed a button) was 35000 RMB (about $5600) to a truck driver.
While Alibaba and Tencent already compete in e-commerce messaging and big data the financial sector is a relatively new battleground for the two companies.
Tencent first financial services product a fund called Licaitong was launched in January 2014 while Alibaba Baidu and electronics seller Suning Commerce Group also got government licenses to offer mutual funds loans and insurance.
The pilot program Tencent is taking part in is part of the Chinese government efforts to reduce the amount of control state-owned banks have on its economy and further its ongoing efforts at financial reform.
Companies seeking to launch private banking services in China hope to take advantage of waning confidence in the country state-owned banks
which have seen recently an increase in bad loans thanks to slowing economic growth
#Automatic Launches Its SDK, Turning The Car Into An App Platform Automatic, a startup whose sensor-and-software combo has been described as itbit for your car,
is today rolling out a software development kit and new hardware that turn your car into a platform for apps.
The company has partnered with more than 20 third-party app developers for the first wave of applications pulling information from its adapter,
which has been updated to accommodate streaming real-time data from a car computer and sensors to apps running on your phone.
The apps draw relevant data from a car computer via the OBD port letting you do things like feed the exact mileage from a particular drive into Concur to expense a work trip
or to a consumer-centric app like Unmooch to split the cost of fuel with friends.
There are also apps for those looking to get peak performance from their cars, offering up stats on engine output
and lap times. Drivers for on-demand services like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates will be happy to hear that Sherpashare is one of the first apps to makes it into Automatic App Gallery,
which points to corresponding apps on ios and Android respective app stores. The app is designed to help drivers determine their actual income taking fuel costs
and time spent waiting around into account. Estimating those things with the app on your smartphone was a boon before,
but now with data from Automatic, drivers will have exact numbers on the fuel burning while waiting for another fare.
Owners of the existing Automatic adapter will have access to most of the apps available in the App Gallery,
though the few apps that offer real-time data to your phone will require the new model,
which is up for sale today for the same $99 as the last generation. After a demo last week, Automatic CEO Thejo Kote told Techcrunch that the new adapter is shipping today
so we should have a video review of the new hardware and apps shortly o
#Rentecarlo Launches U k. Peer-to-peer Car rental Marketplace Rentecarlo, the U k. startup and graduate of accelerator Ignite100, is officially launching today with a peer-to-peer car rental marketplace that lets anybody rent out their own car.
The idea, which the company three Danish founders have been toiling with since mid-2013 before quitting their jobs
is that car owners can make money on their car inactivity while providing car renters with a more convenient option. here is a growing tendency in our society,
which is need the for on-demand services that allow for access rather than ownership, says Rentecarlo cofounder
and CEO Jacob Aleksander. e want to be at the intersection of car sharing, car ownership and car rental,
by giving access to a wide selection of cars rather than ownership and thereby making better use of cars.
At the same time, sharing your car can take 10 cars off the streets, which counteracts the increasingly crowded roads, traffic and pollution.
In other words, this is a classic (and, dare I say, credible) haring economyplay. Anybody can apply to list their car for rental,
although Rentecarlo vets all car renters listed on its platform. The car owner then determines the rental price
describes the car and uploads photos of the vehicle. All bookings are made through the site,
with the startup handling the required insurance and offering 24/7 road assistance cover in the event of a breakdown. ur insurance setup allows car owners to list their cars in less than a minute
and renters to instantly sign up, provide their information on our website and rent a car as soon as the car owner approves the request,
explains Aleksander. urthermore, we also allow citizens from all EU and Commonwealth countries to use the service for hiring cars when on vacation in the U k. or similar.
Of course car pooling in its many forms from taxi-style services like Uber to ridesharing are a plenty.
Rentecarlo cites easycar Club in the U k, . and Drivy and Gomore in Europe, as competitors with the closest business model.
There are also pay-as-you-go car clubs like Zipcar. And we shouldn forget traditional car hire companies, which Rentecarlo and similar startups in the U s,
. such as Getaround and Relayrides, are surely going up against. Not so fast, according to Ignite100 Paul Smith, citing a supply side problem in the car rental industry that sees 15 per cent of car rental requests go unfulfilled because of problems with supply
or out-of-hours access. hat means there a real opportunity for Rentecarlo to tap into an established market without cannibalising existing players.
What made Rentecarlo interesting is validated that they a market of individuals willing to provide supply
and offer their personal cars for hire, he says. To that end, Aleksander says weekly traffic
and signups have tripled since leaving Ignite, although he doesn give specifics. The startup launches with more than 1, 000 signups and almost 300 cars ready to be hired, the majority
of which are located in London where Rentecarlo will be focusing for the time being. e see that on-demand services are becoming a bigger part of people lives
and are seeing a shift in ownership behaviour. There is a growing interest in having access to assets
products and services rather than owning them, and we think things will start to really take off the next coming years,
#The Bank of Facebook Technology is changing one of the most fundamental mediums that touch every person on the planet:
money. Bitcoin rise showed us how much demand there is for a globally accepted digital currency. However, all the things holding bitcoin backerchant acceptance, instant transactions (bitcoin takes about an hour),
and securityare actively being created by the world social network. This past March, Facebook rolled out free peer-to-peer payments and set the company down a path to becoming one of the world most powerful financial institutions.
Last year foreign workers sent $583 billion to individuals in their home countries, also known as remittances. Remittances are one of the largest financial inflows to the developing world.
In some countries remittances are responsible for as much as 30 percent of GDP. However sending money is expensive.
The market is controlled by two companiesestern Union and Moneygramwhich hold a duopoly over the global industry.
The average transfer fee is more than 8 percent, but fees of up to 29 percent are still being charged on money transfers between some countries.
In a recent report, The World bank concluded: orcing migrant workers to pay as much as $50 to send $200 is wrong,
especially when they are sending salaries they have earned in the hope of supporting their families back home. or its part,
Facebook isn charging fees on transfers. While the company does incur charges from banks on the back end,
Facebook says it will not pass these on to the consumer. At the moment Facebook transfers are limited to users within the United states,
but sources inside the company have confirmed it will expand beyond U s. borders in the near future.
It remains to be seen if Facebook will charge users a nominal fee on cross-border transfers and currency conversions,
but it will likely be next to nothing. According to Steve Davis, product manager at Facebook:
ee not trying to make a profit out of payments. acebook is already well on its way to becoming a global financial institution.
Last summer, Financial times discovered that Facebook is close to receiving approval from the Central bank of Ireland to become an electronic money institution throughout Europe.
This would allow users the ability to store money with the social network, transfer money to others,
or buy items online. Long term, Facebook payments has the power to completely destroy Western union and Money Gram (good riddance) and massively benefit millions of people in the developing world with billions of dollars more freely flowing into those countries.
Facebook is in a position to control the lion share of remittances sent globally by offering below market-rate transfers and the best experience on mobile.
It couldn come at a better time for the social network, which desperately needs the rest of the world to sign up
in order to grow. The last couple of years have been especially rough for Facebook with North america and European markets reaching saturation.
There is no better way for Facebook to add new users in the developing world than by becoming the de facto app for how they receive their income from abroad.
While remittances open the door for growth, that possibility pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook offering a way for people who don use banks now to do e-commerce.
According to Mckinsey there are 2. 5 billion people globally who do not use formal banks or finance institutions.
Their economies are almost entirely cash-based and suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem:
Since no one is willing to convert cash into digital form, there is no incentive for merchants to accept electronic payments.
With nothing to sustain a system of electronic money, the cycle continues. But, the world is changing.
In the next five years, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet.
By 2019, Ericsson predicts there will be 5. 9 billion smartphone users worldwide. When every family on the planet has access to a smartphone with fast Internet, the paradigm changes.
The idea that we still need physical banks, plastic cards, and paper money fades away. It already starting to occur.
Over the Chinese New Year holiday in February Wechat users sent over 1 billion ed envelopesfilled with e-money to other users.
It easy to imagine a world where workers in developing countries are paid through Facebook via peer-to-peer payments,
store their money on Facebook, purchase local goods through transfers, and have the ability to pay for items using Facebook.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
So why would Facebook facilitate millions of transfers and online purchases for next to nothing?
For one, it puts them closer to attaining the holy grail of datahow users spend their money.
Let not forget that at the end of the day Facebook is most definitely an ad network at its core.
Just because a user ikesa brand, doesn mean he or she is a customer. For example, how many of Lamborghini 11 million Facebook fans could actually afford that car?
While Facebook could make an educated guess, it can answer that question with certainty. However, in a world where Facebook could combine financial transactions and social graphs,
advertisers would be given near-perfect information on their audience. No other ad network in the world would be able to match Facebook targeting capabilitiespurchase behavior, income, savings, etc.
Despite the doomsayers, the world future has looked never so bright. Wee currently undergoing a period of massive socioeconomic growth.
In 2009 there were 1. 9 billion people in the middle class and over the next 15 years that number will rise to 4. 9 billion people.
As billions of people rise up out of poverty to become consumers the question presents itselfow will the new economies of the future operate?
Will they still cling to the coins and paper that society has used for the last 3, 500 years?
Or can mobile and the Internet change all that? I like to believe the latter. While many of these ideas will take decades to come to fruition,
I believe wel see many occur in my lifetime. Facebook has an incredible opportunity in front of itselfo use technology to change the way the world thinks about money.
I quit using Facebook years ago but maybe, hopefully, Mark Zuckerberg will give me a compelling reason to sign back up b
#Push For Greater State Surveillance Powers Could Have Chilling Effect On U k. Tech Sector The U k. government is lining up a new piece of legislation to expand the state digital data capture powers.
The incoming bill, the Investigatory Powers Bill, was announced in the Queen speech this week. It has not yet been published in draft form so specific details of
what is being planned remains unclear, but in recent times the Conservative party has been banging the drum to expand the type
and volume of captured comms data. The U k. Prime minister has appeared even to suggest that strong encryption should be outlawed.
The Telegraph newspaper this week suggested new powers to be outlined in the Bill will require companies like Google
and Facebook to give U k. intelligence agencies access to the encrypted conversations of suspected terrorists and criminals.
That scenario presupposes Internet companies have the ability to access their usersencrypted messages. While that is certainly true for some digital services with a sloppy attitude to security (or with business models that rely on data mining their users), others,
such as Apple, claim they intentionally do not hold encryption keys which presumably sets up a legal clash with security-and privacy-conscious tech companies and the U k. government.
Does the Tory government intend to make imessage illegal? That really will be a*gets popcorn*momenthe Tory prior attempt to expand the state data capture powers,
the Communications Data Bill widely criticized as a nooperscharter on the grounds that it would have required ISPS to retain detailed data on web usage failed to pass through Parliament owing to the lack of support from the Conservative Lib dem coalition partners.
The new Tory majority government has no such limitation. Former Lib dem MP Julian Huppert, who lost his seat in the election this month
but was a prominent critic of the Communications Data Bill, tells Techcrunch he has concerns about the surveillance powers that the government will be pushing for. el have to see how much theyl try
and throw in to it. When they were trying to push the Communications Data Bill, initially,
the first version was incredibly broadbrush and afforded powers to do any data collection. They then admitted, during the process of our parliamentary committee enquiry,
that actually there were only three things they particularly wanted. One of which was IP addressing matching,
which there was good evidence for and we agreed to doone was about requiring ISPS to keep track of web logs, effectively.
So a list of every website you go to, and things like that. And the third thing was to have a power to require ISPS to keep track of third party information so
what you do on Facebook, what you do on any other site, says Huppert. hose were the three things they said they wanted.
The IP ADDRESS matching basically was the only thing they had any evidence for. And it doesn involve any significant privacy intrusions
but has huge advantages. Whereas I think the concept of keeping track of every website everybody ever goes to,
or of requiring ISPS to keep track of what you do on Facebook all the time are deeply intrusive.
And actually they couldn come up with any significant evidence of why it was useful.?There should be a clear piece of legislation that sets out
what is ok, what is not ok, what the processes are for changing it. And it needs to be written with an acceptance of the need for accountability.
And the need to have as much transparency as is consistent with the genuine requirements for operational work.
But that not the approach that been taken before. It not the approach that the Home secretary has urged previously.
Maybe she will change her mind this time but I sceptical, he adds. worry that the Home secretary will largely try to simply procure more powers for the state without justifying it
and privacy intrusion of having the state require systematic logging of citizensweb browsing habits and social media activity,
another reason to oppose more expansive state data retention is that it makes the intelligence agenciesjob harder given it increases the noise to signal ration,
if you demand more things you have more data, and if you believe that the problem the intelligence services face at the moment is a shortage of data then it would address the problem.
I think the problem is they don know what to do with all the data that they have.
If you look at the killing of U k. soldier Lee Rigby for example the problem isn that they have no idea.
The problem is they have so much data they couldn prioritize it properly, he argues. o unlike IP ADDRESS matching where there really was a strong case,
there isn a clear case here. Beyond e can think of some situations where it might be useful And
I think one of the things that people should look very very carefully at this is
I think the word we used was isleadinge also notes that the Joint Committee report on the draft Communications Data bill was hugely critical about the lack of data ministers were able to provide to support assertions that expanding data capture powers for counter-terrorism purposes would save lives.
e need more data but we can tell you whyand where the U k. Parliament Intelligence and security committee should be playing a robust role in holding the government to account in such a sensitive area,
and ensure it is fit for purposeripa has been criticized for years for eroding press freedoms and sanctioning disproportionate surveillance by, for instance, enabling police and local councils to spy on journalists.
but also if you look at some of the things that Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance David Omand has argued saidhe for full public
or stated publicly, was that to get this balance there would be a joint committee set up between both houses to consider how to redo RIPA.
me that they are jumping the gun somewhat on it. uppert is not alone in his concerns either.
Speaking at an Internet festival taking place in London this week he asked of politicians:
where when the security services take the ability to look at private data, they do it in a way where it goes through a court,
so my personal data is not going to be snooped on and when people do have snooped their data on it only used in a very serious process of tracking down organised crime and terrorism?
he Investigatory Powers Bill is one of a series of initial bills announced in the Queen speech,
so shoring up and expanding state surveillance and data capture powers is evidently front of mind and a clear priority for the new U k. government.
of which will ripple out to affect both U k. web users and their online behavior, and global companies doing business in the U k. The U k. is referred often to as the most surveilled country in the world typically a reference to the pervasive use of CCTV.
So U k. police and intelligence agencies obtain whatever CCTV footage theye after from the private operator funding a camera in their shop or carpark or driveway or, hey, even that in-home Dropcam or the lens on that life-logging wearable
Imagine the power of state surveillance tapping into an expansive Internet of things infrastructure that ceaselessly gathers real-time data on every point of human intersection public
and rivatewhen it comes to surveillance of digital comms data, this same outsourcing modus operandi used with CCTV is being applied by governments to Internet companies with the U k. government now preparing to push one of the most hawkish data retention agendas in the Western world,
and that despite the censure that has been directed at systematic digital dragnets in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
where their user data is then subject to systematic mining by the state as a byproduct of citizensdigital participation,
a bill already passed in the House that would reform National security agency (NSA), in a rare Sunday session.
It will likely take until the middle of the week for the Senate to pass the House bill,
Passage of the bill would mark the first time lawmakers have reined in the surveillance powers of the intelligence community in the two years since Snowden first revealed the controversial intelligence gathering programs.
the phone companies, not government agencies, would hold American phone records. The NSA could only access these records after receiving permission from a Foreign Intelligence surveillance act court.
It only addresses the bulk collection of American phone records and does nothing to rein in many of the gross oversteps we have seen from the Snowden revelations.
but when it passed the House, it said significant changes should be made to strengthen privacy rights. he Senate should not make the same mistake
But today vote remains a victory for the advocates that have been fighting for two years to limit the scope of the NSA surveillance.
what telephone and Internet data the government can collect. Today was a step in the right direction
but the fight isn over
#The 3d printed Peek Camera Helps Diagnose Eye disease In Developing Areas The Peek, or Portable Eye Examination Kit app, is based a smartphone system for diagnosing eye problems.
It uses a 3d printed add-on that can allow ophthalmologists to give detailed and complete eye exams in the field using an app and a small camera overlay.
Created by British ophthalmologists, the system recently hit £130, 475 on Indiegogo and is now up for pre-order by doctors.
The Peek can view the retina using a smart phones high-quality camera, see cataracts, and offer visual acuity tests as well as color
and contrast tests. The project is led by Dr. Andrew Bastawrous and Stewart Jordan and was designed by Kate Tarling and Dr Mario Giardini.
It aimed at helping the 39 million people around the world who don have access to basic optical healthcare.
In a TED Talk, Dr. Bastawrous described his research into helping developing areas receive better eye care including the restoration of sight through cataract removal and prescription lenses.
Medical images taken by Peek can be sent to doctors remotely to diagnose and suggest treatments for patients.
The creators note that 80 percent of blindness worldwide is preventable but the tools necessary to address eye problems in the field are heavy, clumsy,
and difficult to operate. By pairing a piece of plastic with an inexpensive smartphone ophthalmologists are able to address eye care problems anywhere in the world.
Interestingly, the system also allows you to give eye tests by showing increasingly smaller letters and figures on the screen.
It also addresses color blindness through similar means. This is obviously not for consumers, but it will enable doctors
and trained personnel to give real and usable eye tests in the field. By bringing the tools of an ophthalmology office into your pocket
and offering a very simple and inexpensive way to take great pictures inside the eye doctors can visit locations in need
and help people on the fly-fly. The project is funded fully and should begin shipping the app and 3d printed add-on shortly r
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