Black Friday deals in 2015 will lead to the biggest day of spending the internet has seen ever It's now only 71 days until Black Friday!
On Black Friday last year, websites crashed, sales records were smashed and shoppers ravenously scooped up deals on tech, games and clothing in
Adobe crunched the numbers and reported that on Black Friday in the US last year consumers spent a record-breaking $2. 4 billion-up an extraordinary 24%on the previous year.
while GAME's website was selling PS4 and Xbox One consoles to British gamers at a rate of 3, 600 per hour.
of which the internet had seen never before. So what's in store for Black Friday 2015? Well despite MPS having urged UK retailers to boycott Black Friday this year,
The numbers on Black Friday in 2014 were so big that websites fell over like Victorian ladies on a hot day, with HP, Best Buy, Currys, Tesco, Argos,
Boots and Game's websites all requiring smelling salts. The Currys website in the UK crashed
despite the company having implemented a system where users had to queue to use it,
a queue that was still over an hour long by lunchtime. The chaos isn't over, either.
And while Black Friday chaos online led to websites crashing, bedlam on the highstreet tends to be a lot more troublesome.
Clearly-it's much safer to stay at home and pick up your deals on the internet, and that's what the majority of people did on Black Friday 2014.
To give you an idea of just how busy the sites were, John Lewis and Currys-two of the UK's biggest retail websites-both saw their web traffic triple compared to Black Friday 2013.
Meanwhile, Techradar's own Black Friday pages attracted more than 1. 6 million page views. So it's no exaggeration to say that the pre-Christmas retail landscape was changed forever on November 28 last year.
they would lose out on footfall or website hits in a key spending weekend.""The upshot?
According to IBM, Black Friday sales were 63.5%higher than Thanksgiving day sales -but last year they were 70%.
and consoles had a negative effect on its bottom line. In the US, IBM reported that while overall sales were up,
the average order value was down across both Black Friday and Thanksgiving. That might explain why John Lewis boss Andy Street has poured cold water on the idea of Black Friday,
"Street predicts that Black Friday 2015 will still see lots of deals around electronics and computing,
One of the hottest products on Black Friday last year was the ipad mini and that will likely be the case again in 2015.
In the UK the ipad mini was going for under £150 practically everywhere. It's worth retailers offering us these headline products with big discounts
because they expect that we'll buy more than one item once we're on their site.
If you fancy buying your kids a console this Christmas, wait until November 27. We saw many amazing deals on TVS last year
so if you're interested in buying a 4k TV in time for Christmas, again you'd be wise to wait for the Black Friday deals madness to begin.
Last year in the we also saw amazing soundbar deals, Dualshock 4 game controllers for under half price, Google Chromecasts for under $23/£18, huge savings on iphones, amazing deals
#Sharp wants to sell you a little robot as your next smartphone Not taken by the Nexus 6p?
Turned off by the iphone 6s? A little cool on the Lumia 950 XL? If you remain to be convinced by any of the current handsets then Sharp
"a mixture of the Japanese words for"robot"and"phone")and it does everything from make phonecalls to project movies on your living room wall.
The underlying idea is to make the phone more personal: like Siri in a physical form.
a phone that you feel like talking to, a phone that also wants to know you".
"Or at least a phone that wants to know you until the robot revolution arrives. Standing 19. 5cm tall (a robot head taller than the iphone 6s Plus) and weighing 390g (almost three times the Samsung galaxy S6),
Robohon has a 2-inch QVGA screen and can connect to 3g, 4g and Wi-fi networks.
Inside there's a 1. 2ghz CPU keeping everything moving...quite literally. It can make calls,
send texts and manage your email, as well as respond to your questions and even recognise your face in a crowd.
Robohon is able to walk and move independently, so you can send it to the other end of the room to take a photo of you and your friends.
A modified version of Android runs the whole show. It's certainly something different if nothing else.
The humanoid robot is going on sale in 2016 but at the moment we don't have any details on pricing or international availability y
Sure enough, when the researchers spiked mouse serum with a dose of nicotine equivalent to one cigarette, then added Nica2 to the mix, the enzyme cut nicotine half-life from more than two hours to less than 15 minutes.
they may inject them into the mouse bloodstream. The bubbles should travel into the tiny blood vessels of the brain.
according to the in vitro mouse study published last week (October 15) in Science. reviously, with plastic material,
Bao and her colleagues demonstrated that the sensors could relay pressure signals to the mammalian nervous system by linking them to a blue LED light that in turn stimulated slices of mouse brain that had been engineered to respond to those wavelengths.
means that the high-density storage of computers could now be incorporated directly into the circuits that perform calculations.
and improving computer performance. o reduce the power draw and increase the speed, we want to be able to manufacture a computer chip that includes memory
so that it is close to the computational action, said Sayeef Salahuddin, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences,
and head of the research team at Berkley. owever, the physics needed to create long-term storage are not compatible with integrated circuits.
The researchers claim that the design details of which are published online in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters-could allow for crossbar array memories that store up to 162 gigabits (around 20 GB.
nonvolatile computer memory, said James Tour, professor of materials science, nanoengineering and computer science at Rice university. While current flash technology requires three electrodes per circuit,
This will be a real competitor for the growing memory demands in high-definition video storage and server arrays. uring development
After being stretched, the microcapsule is refilled by the drugs that continue to leak out of the nanoparticles. his can be used to apply drugs directly to sites on the skin
#Metamaterials assist in'cocktail party'voice recognition Engineers at Duke university have developed a new type of sensor that enhances a computer ability to identify individual sounds that are overlapping,
helping address the so-called ocktail partyproblem of voice recognition software. The device, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is shaped like a large honeycombed pie with dozens of interlocking slices.
professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. heepth of the cavitiesffects the pitch of the sound they make,
then transmitted to a computer that is able to separate the overlapping noises based on the unique distortion patterns.
a Phd student in electrical and computer engineering at Duke and lead author of the paper. e think this could improve the performance of voice-activated devices like smart phones
and game consoles while also reducing the complexity of the system. ith the extra information,
#Researchers demonstrate thought-controlled exoskeleton Scientists have developed a brain-computer control interface for a lower limb exoskeleton by decoding specific brain signals.
the system allows users to move forwards, turn left and right, sit and stand by staring at one of five flickering light emitting diodes (LEDS).
and when the user focusses their attention on a specific LED this frequency is reflected within the EEG readout.
with EEG caps and hardware now emerging on the consumer market. It only took volunteers a few minutes to be trained in how to operate the system
and researchers are now working to reduce the isual fatigueassociated with longer-term users of such systems. e were driven to assist disabled people,
it can sometimes be pointing in the wrong direction to provide a picture of a site of concern.
designed to hold a camera, LED light, an integrated circuit for receiving control instructions and transmitting data, antenna, 1. 5v button battery and, at the rear, the drive unit, to
#Algorithm helps prosthetic leg automatically adapt to user Researchers in the US have developed software that enables powered prosthetic legs to automatically adapt to individual users.
However, a special algorithm, developed by a group from North carolina State university and the University of North carolina, allows this process to happen automatically,
The automatic-tuning algorithm takes a similar approach, tracking the angle of the prosthetic joint while walking.
the software is also able to track changes in a patient physical condition and make adjustments accordingly. or example,
the algorithm could provide more power to a prosthesis when a patient carries a heavy suitcase through an airport,
Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Informatics at Sussex University and cofounder of Ultrahaptics, added: n our device we manipulate objects in mid-air
and then trapped at the core. Bristol University said that the third could be described as a high-intensity cage that surrounds the objects and holds them in place from all directions.
Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Informatics at Sussex University and cofounder of Ultrahaptics, added: n our device we manipulate objects in mid-air
and then trapped at the core. Bristol University said that the third could be described as a high-intensity cage that surrounds the objects and holds them in place from all directions.
Led by Hongrui Jiang, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison, the researchers designed lenses no larger than the head of a pin and embedded them within flexible plastic.
scientists say Scientists say they have invented a new battery that could fully charge a smartphone in just one minute.
which they hope could replace the lithium models commonly found in laptops and mobile phones. And as well as the nprecedented charging timesof their aluminium prototype,
physical sales of music as well as permanent downloads on sites such as itunes kept falling. The drops contributed to the overall picture for the global music industry revenue of $14. 97bn in 2014, down a modest 0. 4%from a year earlier.
Moore said that the IPFI planned a renewed campaign to press Youtube and other sites to license music consistently.
Youtube, owned by search engine giant Google, enjoys so-called afe harbourstatus under US law that lets it avoid liability for copyright infringement as it is considered an internet service provider.
The IFPI, in data released in the report, said that more than half of all internet users accessed music through video sites such as Youtube in the past six months.
The rule ompletely distortsthe market as ervices like Spotify and Deezer have to take proper licenses Moore said.
#Europe is targeting Google under antitrust laws but missing the bigger picture Google it today and youl see that the European commission has turned up the heat in its long-running probe into anti-competitive behaviour by the web most popular search engine.
EC competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, issued formal objections alleging that Google abuses its dominant position in the market of eneral internet search In particular,
the EC claims that Google artificially boosts its own products in returning Google comparison shopping results in its service oogle Shopping
even if those products aren the best or cheapest the ost relevant as the Commission puts it for consumers.
Since taking office in November 2014 Vestager has made the Google inquiry a top priority, signalling a willingness to consider court battles
and hefty fines if Google and other digital giants don fall into line with European competition law.
In this, she has displayed a distinct shift from her predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, whose multiple attempts to achieve private settlement with Google fell apart a year ago,
before descending into a political and economic boxing match. Vestager announcement comes amidst increasing restlessness by European policymakers that omething must be doneabout Google.
Identifying with precision the source of that anxiety, and the appropriate focus of action, is rather more challenging.
It focuses on the first and clearest of a number of complaints filed in 2009-10 by various Google competitors-from other giants, such as Microsoft, to small, struggling or defunct web businesses.
These complaints range from the EC current focus on Google prioritisation of its own products within vertical search services (currently,
to issues with Google scraping and fencing of datasets, often exclusively and at unmatched scale.
Advertisement It is this sheer volume of data matched with the self-reinforcing effect of Google market share (the more people search,
the better search becomes), that makes its de facto monopoly such a concern, but also such a challenge to combat.
and it accelerates Google towards addressing some real competitor concerns, even if some of those competitors are interested now more in backward compensation rather than forward innovation.
You can Google your way out of a power vacuum Let return to the market in
which Google is dominant: eneral internet search This is a market that didn exist 20 years ago.
And it is a market that cannot be underestimated. It is the marketplace of human knowledge, queries, anxieties, ideas, journeys, hopes, sorrows and dreams.
The sociopolitical problem with search engines and, in particular, the search engine, is worthy of deep Foucaultian analysis. Search engines are sanctioned not officially maps,
Google is our contemporary maker and breaker of truth, commerce and the stuff of life.
he writes. issing results are an nknown unknown users for whom certain information is suppressed do not even know that they do not know the information.
The irony of the situation is that Google knows so much about us, and we know so little about it.
The transparency conundrum The core of the problem with competition law is that it seems a poor and ill-adapted game of mudslinging
and it is only peripheral to the real problem: power. At best, the European commission initiative may require some marginal reconfiguration of Google algorithms and presentation of results,
and possibly some payouts, with no equivalent benefit in engendering the flourishing of new innovation.
The total opacity of search and its interventions make manipulation invisible from the point of view of users.
All users see is the supposedly objective final results, not the interventions by the gatekeeper.
one of the fiercest critics of mass surveillance and tech monopolies, have a proposal for Google to make its search algorithms
While Google will likely claim that its algorithms are so complex that even its own engineers do not understand their Heath Robinsonesque machinations,
the bold French proposal recognises that Google search did not simply emerge of its own accord.
Algorithms are human creations, and they need to serve human needs
#France launches major anti-racism and hate speech campaign The french government has launched a major campaign to contain the country steep rise in racism
and fight atred online assivity on the internet is said over, Hollande. Teacher training will be reinforced, headteachers will be encouraged to report incidents
and pupils will be taken to visit memorial sites. There will also be tougher penalties for crimes deemed to have been fuelled by racism and antisemitism.
the site of a brutal antisemitic attack last year in which a young Jewish couple were held hostage in their home,
which allow data about individual journeys, routes and vehicles to be monitored centrally, controlled and systematised.
Autonomous intersection management Once computers are in full control of our cars, do need we even traffic lights at intersections?
That the idea behind AIM autonomous intersection management at the artificial intelligence laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
and people grow to trust the software controllers, people will also get used to the idea of cars going through the intersections.
When a computer doing the driving, even with all the cars going through without stopping, it going to be a lot safer than it is today. re we there yet?
Computers aren driving our cars yet and won be for some time, but there are some connected car projects that already claim to be easing the flow of traffic.
Tomtom collects swaths of traffic data from its satnav devices but also used anonymised data from third party navigation apps, including smartphone maps. e have agreements with a number of smartphone manufacturers,
so they provide us with real time GPS feeds wherever their smartphones are, says Nick Cohn, senior traffic expert at Tomtom.
It also gathers data from telematics units installed in fleet vehicles as well as in-dash systems
giving Tomtom a comprehensive overview of traffic flows. The resulting information on near real-time congestion is shared with customers,
which includes road authorities who use it to plan traffic management as well as consumers. ost have camera data that doesn cover the whole network,
so they use our data to supplement that and for deciding whether they need to switch to a different traffic signal scheme,
When a driver hits a patch of congestion a red zone of a smartphone or satnav map it may be because of data that was collected,
As data improves, the numbers are merging, suggesting travel advice has become more accurate. As cars become more connected
whether it through satnav or simply the smartphones in our pockets better data in means we get better data out on the road.
Andy Stanford-Clark, distinguished engineer in IBM global internet of things team, pointed out that we can now pull in all sorts of data:
but also air quality sensor data and images from cameras. n its own, each is of low value,
but when merged together in the internet of thingscloud processing platform, we can make sense of them
which runs the National Traffic information service. ore data in and more data out can only be a good thing.
Unintended consequences Though traffic data makes it possible to see the movement of traffic in real time,
and traffic lights themselves are operated algorithmically, it is still not possible to engineer a way of turning the lights green as you pull up. t easy to change the traffic lights, ssays IBM Standford-Clark. ut...
you get this terrible interconnection of unintended consequences. Your main route into a city may be clear,
That why most light sequences are set via a longer term algorithm, taking into account other parts of the road network.
buses, etc-that a standard feature in some software and has been for years, says Stevens. owever,
and software migrates to the cloud and is configurable over-the-air then the number of ttack surfaces (to use the jargon) increase,
They have smartphones, so there otential to do something with that, said Tomtom Cohn. think it be great as a pedestrian and a cyclist if
says IBM Stanford-Clark. The best way to achieve it may not be via smart, reactive traffic lights,
Until computers take over driving, at least
#Instagram for doctors: how Figure 1 is crowdsourcing diagnoses Where do doctors turn when even they don know what wrong with you?
The internet? A Canadian startup wants to make the answer an Instagram for doctors. Figure 1 is an app that allows iphone
and Android-owning doctors to share images of diseases, injuries and everything in between. Launched in 2013,
the app was born from the idea that sharing images of what confounds doctors with other doctors across the world can help point them in the direction of the right answer.
Over 10,000 texts, Whatsapps and emails with images of curious and classic cases are being sent in the US each day
or phones, says Landy. ow we want to help people share images, enabling more eyes on more cases,
nurses or other medically trained personnel can become erified In the same way Twitter blue tick verifies that a user is who they say they are,
Figure 1 will verify someone is a medic by contacting their hospital or a suitable authority database.
000s of doctors a week across 40 countries and at some stage Landy expects to be verifying all users who join,
but in some countries such as India reliable databases of doctors are nonexistent, so we don want to keep them out,
Built-in image editing tools can be used to delete any pixels necessary before upload, ensuring patient privacy. ploaded images often look like a mess of black holes where things have been deleted,
The patient also has to sign a consent form either digitally on screen with their finger or via paper copies.
and forms part of their adoption of social media and the new smartphone and tablet tools that are increasingly being used in hospitals,
and computer programming to handbuild a machine which guides yarn in set patterns over layers to create the 3d shapes such as those used on the soles of the navy shoes he created.
Above those tubes is a mechanised eederwhich winds the fabric for example cotton around them in shapes dictated by a set pattern programmed into a computer.
I could press a button on a machine after an algorithm which runs over the ball of your foot and the underside of your foot
Wizard, which will now be available on ios (Apple operating system) as part of the Peak app,
with in-game tasks including users moving through rooms and identifying items in boxes and character locations.
Kepler says it will still undergo a rigorous environmental impact assessment during the planning process to ensure that it poses no significant risk to marine life and to other users of the sea.
#Google is now Alphabet (well, sort of: the internet reacts Google reign of terror is over! Well, not quite:
the preeminent search engine isn going to go the way of Askjeeves and Altavista, the company is simply rebranding itself with a new holding company called Alphabet,
whose largest and wholly owned subsidiary will be...Google. Desperately googling Alphabet? No need. Let Larry page and Sergey Brin,
Google cofounders, explain: e liked Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity most important inventions,
and is the core of how we index with Google search. s well as being ne ofhumanity most important inventions,
Alphabet is also a really great name for a sinister uber-corporation in a dystopian sci-fi novel,
an internet domain registry company that owns a range of suffices including. college. His latest client?
The new parent company of Google, which can be found at abc. xyz. Daniel reacted with the appropriate gravitas:
If youe Microsoft, you can at least reassure yourself that you now also have a funky new URL.
To give Google credit where credit is did due, they at least manage to mock the megalomaniacal nature of their own announcement,
throwing in a link to Hooli. xyz, clearly a reference to the Google-esque Hooli from HBO Silicon valley.
though, spare a thought for the owner of twitter. com/alphabet, who must have been having an interesting 24 hours.
The internet has been reacting with confusion, horror and mockery to the announcement, as you would expect.
One user managed to explain the complex ownership structure of the Alphabet/Google nexus in Simpsonian terms:
Finally, it worth mentioning that Google have announced also a radical shake-up to their corporate management structure,
handing control of its core search engine business to Sundar Pichai, pictured below
#Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman resigns after third leak of emails The chief executive of extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison has left the company after a third leak of emails
and suggestions that he had affairs despite earlier denials. ffective today, Noel Biderman, in mutual agreement with the company, is stepping down as Chief executive officer of Avid Life Media Inc (ALM)
said an unattributed statement on the Ashley Madison website. ntil the appointment of a new CEO,
In July details of more than 37m accounts were stolen from the website whose tagline is: ife is short.
and dedicated employeesand that it remained teadfast in our commitment to our customer base That customer base personal information was spread far and wide across the internet earlier this month,
a Twitter user (or, as Krebs speculates, users) called Thadeus Zu posted a link to the hack before anyone else
and appears to have had special knowledge of the data breach before anyone else did. The third and latest data dump, posted at the site that first released the user database,
appears to be a download of emails from Biderman personal Gmail account. The second torrent released by an entity calling itself the Impact Team contained emails that seemed to be from Biderman work account
and its release had done already damage to his personal reputation: the executive told the New york daily news in 2014 that he had cheated never on his wife,
but the hacked documents suggested otherwise e
#New San francisco restaurant replaces humans with ipads Those sick and tired of having to deal with their fellow humans all the time have a new respite a fully automated restaurant in San francisco. Customers at Eatsa in the Financial District will order from an ipad,
sending the order to the kitchen. When the meal is ready, it appears in a small glass compartment.
The food is prepared by real people, but the patrons never have to see them. The owners of Eatsa may have felt that San Franciscans needed to ease themselves into such a radical change
the Chinese have been experimenting with ordering via tablet for years in order to reduce labor costs and prices.
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