#Microsoft granted patent for glasses that detect wearer's emotions Put this one in the WTF file.
The United states Patent and Trademark Office granted Microsoft a patent today for a pair of glasses that can detect a wearer emotional response to what theye looking at.
In patent talk, the thing is called a wearable emotion detection and feedback system. If you are watching TV
and suddenly soccer comes on, your posture may change and you may smile. The system will be able to identify a change in your emotional state. uring interactions,
the device, recognizes emotional states in subjects by comparing detected sensor input against a database of human/primate gestures/expressions,
posture, and speech, the patent reads. eedback is provided to the wearer after interpretation of the sensor input.
Once the database determines the emotional response, various kinds of corresponding content can be pushed into the user view.
It can work the other way, too. If the wearer is looking at a person through the glasses,
the emotional state of that person can be detected, either by their posture or facial expression. So if the wearer is giving a speech,
say, and the glasses detect that audience members look bored, the specs my suggest a joke for the speaker to insert into the speech
#Stratos starts shipping its all-in-one smart credit card Today, Stratos announced it has begun shipping its smart credit card to those who preordered it.
The announcement comes just after competitor Coin has started to ship its connected card. Though Coin was the first to ship,
it encountered delays along the way and is already fielding issues with its card. Of course, Coin isn the only competition in town.
The connected-card arena features a slew of alternatives from players like Plastc, Dynamic, and Swyp.
Stratos will also have to contend with digital wallets like Google Wallet Apple Passbook, and Paypal,
which increasingly have a physical presence. Stratos enables you to compile all your credit cards on a single Bluetooth connected credit card that links up to a mobile app.
To select a card, tap your Stratos card to your mobile phone screen twice to see options appear
while your phone is locked still. The idea is connected that one credit card is easier to manage and safer than a wallet full of credit cards.
Stratos doesn display credit card numbers and you can remotely lock your card in the event that you ever lose it.
The company raised $5. 8 million back in October 2014 in order to fuel production c
#EU annual scorecard paints bleak picture of innovation efforts across Europe Whatever Europe plans to do to reboot its innovation economy,
it better do it fast. According to the latest EU Innovation Scorecard released today, the European commission found that he number of innovative firms is in declineacross a continent hungry for job growth and an economic boost.
The watch, until now, had been known as the Samsung Gear A. The new watch will probably not run on Android Wear,
but rather run Samsung own Tizen operating system. The time is nigh for smartwatch makers to come up with some kind of answer to the Apple Watch.
The rumor mill says the new Tizen watch will ship with an Exynos 3472 dual-core chip, a 360 x 360 pixel display resolution, 768mb of RAM, 4gb of storage,
#Google Alphabet: Where the brand vision? This week, Google grew up. Taking many in the business world by surprise,
the tech giant restructured itself under a new holding company, Alphabet. The shake-up means many of the oonshotprojects Google picked up over the years have been spun off into separate and independent companies,
while Google retains the most profitable side: search and advertising. To many, Alphabet will make a lot of sense.
Google had started to seem like a mega-conglomerate that was too powerful for its own good
and this will help change that. But there is a problem. Google is an exciting and innovative brand.
The company has spawned belief statements learned by heart by brand strategists and copied by businesses across the world.
more accountable and more management scalemakes Google sound more like a financial services firm than the innovative tech company we know and love.
Finally, Google vision, or the way it sees its position in the world, has always been core to its brand,
but what is the vision for Alphabet, and what does the new company actually stand for?
and increased Google market cap by $20 billion overnight, but how will Google employees, some of the brightest,
most creative people in the world, react to this new, corporate focus? After all, these are the same software engineers who are encouraged to design their own desks
and express themselves by scribbling on walls. People work for Google because it exciting, but the messaging wee heard this week has been anything but.
Although the Alphabet announcement plays well to the markets, I concerned that the move indicates a shift from innovation and creativity to the bottom line.
and could be a brilliant way of bringing order to Google complexity, the language surrounding the announcement also hints at new limitations,
Alphabet must still include the spirit of Google brand values within the new company and concede less to the financial markets
#Hackers dump data from cheating website Ashley Madison online: reports (Reuters) Hackers have followed through on a threat to release online a huge cache of data,
including customer information, that was stolen a month ago from cheating spouses website Ashleymadison. com, several tech websites reported on Tuesday.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the authenticity of the posting. The data was posted onto the dark web,
meaning it is only accessible using a specialized browser, although lists of email addresses have sprouted
since up on other sites. A group calling itself Impact Team had leaked snippets of the compromised data in July
and threatened to publish names and salacious details about clients unless Ashley Madison and Establishedmen. com,
another site owned by Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, were taken down. Tech website Wired said 9. 7 gigabytes of data was posted,
and appeared to include member account and credit card details. vid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men,
Wired quoted Impact Team as saying in a statement accompanying the online dump. e have explained the fraud, deceit,
and stupidity of ALM (Avid Life Media) and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data,
the hackers said, according to Wired. Avid Life, which uses the slogan ife is short. have did an affair not immediately respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment s
#Google becomes part of a new company, Alphabet Google chief executive Larry page on Monday announced that the tech giant is undergoing a major restructuring
and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of a new conglomerate known as Alphabet. The move, Page said,
will allow Google to focus more on its core products, including its search engine, while Alphabet manages a variety of different businesses,
including driverless cars and drones.""What is Alphabet?""Page wrote.""Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies.
The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is slimmed a bit down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead."
"Other companies within Alphabet will include Calico and Life sciences, the parts of Google that focus on health products.
Page said the company's X lab, which focuses on moon-shot projects such as Google's drone delivery service,
also will be part of Alphabet, as will its investment arms, Ventures and Capital. The move comes as Google struggles to maintain focus as its portfolio grows
and its interests spread across various industries. That sprawl has attracted recently criticism from investors, who wondered whether the company could remain innovative with so many distractions.
Page will be chief executive of Alphabet while Google cofounder Sergey Brin will become president. Sundar Pichai, who is Google's senior vice president of Android,
Chrome and Apps, will become Google's chief executive. Page said, "Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity
and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights."
"The company's two classes of shares will continue to trade on the Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG,
he said. So what stays a part of the core Google business? According to the company's Securities and exchange commission filing, the main Google business will include"search, ads, maps, apps, Youtube and Android,
"as well as the technical infrastructure for those departments. Most of the top Google executives will become Alphabet executives,
the filing said. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Chief Financial officer Ruth Porat and chief legal officer David Drummond will take up corresponding positions within Alphabet.
Porat will also remain the CFO of Google. Google, one of the few companies to actually become a verb, hardly needs introduction.
The firm was started by Larry page and Sergey Brin in 1997 after the two met as students at Stanford university.
Before Google, the two worked together on a search engine called Backrub, which they operated on the servers at Stanford for more than a year.
The pair registered the domain name"Google. com"on Sept. 17,1998, with the mission to organize all of the world's information.
The company went public in 2004. It is worth $443. 9 billion and handles an estimated 67 percent of the country's desktop searches and 83 percent of its mobile searches, according to Comscore.
Internationally, Netmarketshare puts Google's global desktop search share at 70 percent. While the company has held always search at its core
it has expanded into several different areas. Investors and analysts have criticized Google in recent years for spending so much on these"side projects
"and have called repeatedly on Page to streamline Google's purpose. Google shares were up more than 5 percent in after-hours trading on the news, at $665. 99 per share. p
#Verizon new, experimental Fios service is 10 times faster than Google Fiber Verizon's Fios network is already capable of top speeds of 500 megabits per second,
which lets you download an HD movie in about 15 seconds. But the Fios of tomorrow could be as much as 20 times faster than even those blazing speeds.
Verizon has just finished testing a next-generation fiber-optic Internet technology that allows the company to transfer data at rates of 10 gigabits per second.
For those keeping track, that's 10 times faster than even Google Fiber, which offers some of the speediest fiber you can buy today.
Verizon believes its new technology called NG-PON2 hort for"next-generation passive optical network"ould eventually grow to support speeds of 80 Gbps. That's thousands of times faster than
what most average U s. households get today. Fiber-optic cables work by sending data that's been encoded as packets of light.
NG-PON2 transmits the data using certain wavelengths of light that can handle 10 Gbps of capacity each, according to a company release.
The company tested NG-PON2 at a customer's house three miles away from Verizon's central office in Framingham, Mass.
It also tried it out with a business customer. A burgeoning arms race is occurring in the broadband industry.
Comcast for instance, has been working on a 2 Gbps service that it recently said will cost $300 a month.
While this version of Fios probably won't be coming to your area anytime soon and would be insanely expensive
even if it did the demonstration shows just how fast the Internet will someday become. That capacity will be used to accommodate new technologies like driverless cars,
smart appliances and a host of other emerging products we haven't even invented yet.
Read more: Here how much Comcast is charging for its answer to Google Fibercharlottesville is about to get oogle Fiber lite,
thanks to this small wireless carriergoogle ultra-fast Internet service expands to San Antoni p
#MIT researchers create X-ray vision to protect the elderly It all started in 2012, with
what MIT grad student Fadel Adib called a crazy idea. What if Wifi could see through walls?
Adib posed the question to his adviser, professor Dina Katabi. It set them on a journey to today.
In a new paper they describe a sensor that sends radio signals through a wall and can identify people.
The team plans to launch a start-up in 2016 to commercialize the technology. The most appealing initial use is to determine
if a senior citizen has fallen in his or her home. The team expects the sensor to be able to see through multiple walls and look as far as 40 feet.
such as for video games, and smart-home sensors. Nest, for example, monitors the movements of residents so that it can adjust temperatures and keep utility bills low.
The system works by sending a radio signal that will bounce off a person and back to the device.
These signals travel through walls just as Wireless internet signals do. Data from body parts that curve away from the device won be recognized
because the signals deflect away from the device. But the device stitches together what data points return to it as the person moves,
to create a generally identifiable silhouette. Their system, however, isn eagled-eyed. The images of humans look like heat maps,
but in their tests that was enough data for the system to distinguish between five people with 95.7 percent accuracy,
What if Wifi could see through walls? Adib posed the question to his adviser, professor Dina Katabi.
In a new paper out of MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Lab, the researchers describe a sensor that sends radio signals through a wall
such as for video games, and smart-home sensors. Nest, for example, monitors the movements of residents so that it can adjust temperatures and keep utility bills low.
The system works by sending a radio signal that will bounce off a person and back to the device.
These signals travel through walls just as Wireless internet signals do. Data from body parts that curve away from the device won be recognized
because the signals deflect away from the device. But the device stitches together what data points return to it as the person moves,
to create a generally identifiable silhouette. Their system, however, isn eagled-eyed. The images of humans look like heat maps,
but in their tests that was enough data for the system to distinguish between five people with 95.7 percent accuracy,
Alexandria University agricultural and biosystems engineering associate professor Ahmed El-Shafei was quoted by Yahoo News as saying:"
while giving energy users access to all the familiar technology they want and need. How can it achieve this promise?
Already being used in LED light bulbs, television and computer displays, and mobile phones, Gan has efficient light emission capability,
something silicon cannot duplicate. But silicon remains the defacto material of choice semidconductors and transistors found in all the computing devices of our modern world.
CEI, through Gan, hopes to change because not only is the material more efficient in light emission,
faster computers, and smaller form factors. For example a Gan power adapter can be integrated into a laptop
and other electronic devices eliminating the clunky brick that is commonly comes with a device's power cord.
Massachusetts institute of technology, the brain trust from which CEI was hatched believes using Gan in data servers, electric vehicle inverters
The app lets users choose from some 30 types of investments a move Ronick says offers them choice without becoming overwhelming.
Users can buy fractional shares, which lets folks get started with just $5. Cofounder Brandon Krieg says Stash buys whole shares from the market,
which screens potential investments so they only see things they can reasonably take on. he user can override their risk profile,
Stash will also show users how others with similar risk profiles are investing through the app
its app is available on ios with Android to follow in a couple of months. Ronick says the team interviewed more than 100 other people who largely believed investing was confusing
#Amazon wants you to stick Dash wi-fi'buy'buttons all over your home Amazon has released new wi-fi-connected Dash buttons for people who never want to run out of laundry detergent, coffee,
Once connected to the home wi-fi network, the buttons allow the user to click to order from a range of around 200 items supplied by Amazon.
Currently the Dash button is an invite-only offer to members of Amazon Prime, the two-day delivery service that in future Amazon wants to be powered by drones.
Amazon is also working with a handful of manufacturers to integrate Dash functionality into the hardware.
and printer firm Brother. The company is also on the hunt for all sorts of device makers that have goods to sell alongside their own devices.
an alert is delivered to the home owner's smartphone, which they can then cancel if needed.
and in which internet penetration while still low (46 percent) compared to Western europe standards (though ahead of many other countries in the MENA region)."
Initially, in the first two or three years, a higher percentage of the applications were for launching ecommerce companies."
then, was following the footsteps of ebay and Amazon, with the hope of sooner or later being acquired by an established company.
In 2011, ebay bought auction marketplace Gittigidiyor, essentially a clone of the American multinational, for $22m.
a flower delivery service. window. console && console. log && console. log("ADS: queuing sharethrough-top-552658eaec1d7 for display";
"var cbsigptdivids=cbsigptdivids; cbsigptdivids. push("sharethrough-top-552658eaec1d7";"With time, the scene started to become more and more professional and diversified."
and innovation is confined longer to auction sites, the wave of online retail websites is still rampant:
recently, celebrity-endorsed fashion shopping site Lydiana. com now serves over 90,000 customers per day,
while Yemeksepeti (also known as foodonclick), an online food delivery platform which employs more than 200 staff serving over 1. 2 million registered users in eight countries.
But nowadays, there are many companies and startups that are focusing on other sectors: from gaming to software development and mobile applications."
"Most common companies we see are based internet ones that do need not to much initial funding to thrive.
A real issue in Turkey is having access to capital at an early stage. Seed money is almost nonexistent:
Not to mention the effect that bans on sites such as Twitter and Youtube have, like those repeatedly ensued by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
have to rely on social media for their marketing efforts. Other common complaints concern the difficulties of securing work visas for international employees and some negative cultural aspects
#Every company now a software company, continued In this space, we've talked about the great shift that has been taking place across the business landscape--that is, every company,
no matter how far from tech they may seem--is evolving into a software company, and by extension, a data company.
That widget manufacturer down the street likely has a data center and has developed and maintains a portfolio of its own custom software that keep evolving.
Now, it also may be employing services, with a layer of analytics on top, that extends out to its networks of supply chain vendors,
business partners, and customers. The company may even be renting out its software-based online services to others in its industry.
Gil Press, managing Partner at gpress, a marketing, publishing, research and education consultancy, talks extensively about this great shift in his latest Forbes post, in
Press observes that while a few large vendors--IBM, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, HP, and a reinvigorated Dell--still dominate the IT sector,
Google, Facebook, Amazon) Large, IT-intensive enterprises (e g.,, financial services companies) The emergence of financial services companies as IT providers is something that has been brewing for some time.
Press cites some interesting examples--such as Santander being the first global bank"to offer cloud data storage services to corporate customers"
and Bank of america planning"to have 80%of its workloads running on software-defined infrastructure inspired by Web companies."
the lines between software providers and software consumers have blurred, almost to the point in which they are indistinguishable from one another.
#Europe to slug Google with antitrust charges and open Android probe The European commission today formally charged Google with violating EU competition law by abusing its dominance in search to gain an edge over specialist rivals.
The charges could force Google to change the way it does business and pay fines of up to $6. 4bn,
or approximately 10 percent of its global revenues last year. On Wednesday the European commission commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the EC had sent formally a statement of objections to Google.
The statement says Google"abused its dominant position in the markets for general internet search services in the European Economic Area (EEA) by systematically favouring its own comparison shopping product in its general search results pages"
breaching antitrust law, according to the EC.""In the case of Google I am concerned that the company has given an unfair advantage to its own comparison shopping service, in breach of EU antitrust rules.
Google now has the opportunity to convince the Commission to the contrary. However, if the investigation confirmed our concerns,
Google would have to face the legal consequences and change the way it does business in Europe,
"Vestager said in a statement. A fortnight ago, Vestager sought permission from complainants to publish their claims,
Past complainants include Microsoft, Tripadvisor, and Yelp, as well several German and French publishers. The charges will bring to a head the EC's five-year investigation into Google's business practices in Europe
where it has a market share of over 90 percent share for search. The investigation has focused previously on
whether Google used its dominance to give its own specialised searches in shopping, travel and other categories an edge over rivals,
'as well as claims Google reused content from rivals without authorisation, and forced publishers to use Google ads.
According to the FT, some of the 28 commissioners that will be shown the charges today are concerned that Vestager has narrowed the scope of the claims against Google.
ZDNET has sought also comment from Google and will update the story if it receives one.
Google has acknowledged however the charges in a letter to staff yesterday reprinted by Recode, noting that it was"obviously very disappointing news,
"warning staff to expect"tough"criticism. As Google points out though, the statement of objections is not a final finding
and it has the opportunity to respond and have modified the claims-a process that could take two years.
One of the key reference points for the EC's actions against Microsoft in 2007, which ultimately saw the company fined hundreds of millions of euros.
in its memo, Google told staff it has a"very strong case, "that competition was alive and well,
and noted that mobile and apps"has changed everything, "offering consumers a way to get information directly from a mobile app rather than via search."
People can use Bing, Yahoo, Quora, Duckduckgo, and a new wave of search assistants like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana,
as well as more specialized services like Amazon, Idealo, Le Guide, Expedia, or ebay. In addition, users increasingly turn to social networks like Facebook
and Twitter to find news and suggestions-where to eat or which movies to watch,
"Google said. The EC on Wednesday confirmed it was opening a probe into Android and whether Google has been breached antitrust law here too."
"The Commission will assess if, by entering into anticompetitive agreements and/or by abusing a possible dominant position,
Google has hindered illegally the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems, mobile communication applications and services in the European Economic Area,
"the EC said. There are three areas the Commission will investigate -whether Google hampered rivals by forcing OEMS to only use Google services;
whether it stopped those OEMS from using and marketing non-Google-controlled versions of Android;
and whether bundling its services with Android has hurt competition. Google also acknowledged the EC's investigation into Android in its memo.
Google has faced a number of complaints from rivals, including over its bundling of Google apps like Youtube
and Maps as well as complaints Google has blocked third-party app stores on Android. Here too, Google says it has a strong case,
since Android had lowered prices and increased choice for consumers and pointed out that Samsung's new Galaxy S6 included pre-installed apps from rivals."
"Consumers decide which apps they use and download on Android devices. Apps that compete directly with Google such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft office,
and Expedia are easily available to Android users; and"Many of these apps come pre-loaded onto Android devices.
Google apps, like Search, Maps, Gmail, and Google Play, are also available out of the box on many handsets.
The recent Samsung S6 is a great example of this-there are pre-installed Facebook, Microsoft,
and Google apps
#Samsung to launch fingerprint mobile payment service Samsung SDS, the IT service affiliate of Samsung Group, has announced that it is launching a new fingerprint mobile payment service with local payment gateway firms KG
Mobilians and KG Inicis within South korea, with global expansion planned for later. The South korean tech giant has signed also a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Korea Information Certificate Authority (KICA), a government-backed certificate licenser,
and will later launch other authentication services based on biometrics, the company said.""Going forward, we plan to not target hardware manufacturers that make smartphones,
but to instead provide our biometric solutions to online service and security companies,"said a Samsung SDS spokesperson."
"We plan to offer clients that need biometrics solution with various business models and offer differentiated authentication services."
"Samsung's self-developed biometrics authentication solution has received certification from the Fast IDENTITY Online (FIDO) Alliance, an international standard setter for online authentication,
the company said, which will allow it to expand the business globally. The certification is called FIDO Ready.
The FIDO Alliance has around 190 members, including Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Visa, and Paypal.""We expected previous authentication technology such as passwords, certificates,
and OTP will be replaced by FIDO-approved methods. FIDO-backed biometric authentications will become the de facto standard of the future,
"said the spokesman. The firm is forming a global integrated certification center, which it will start test running on its in-house intranet.
It will later expand it to Samsung affiliates and clients, so that all clients can use a unified certification platform.
Samsung SDS did not elaborate on how its biometrics solutions work, but said it includes the use of fingerprint-,iris,
-and voice-recognition technology for authentication. Security will be boosted by using biological information as a key
the company said. Meanwhile, Samsung last week announced that it aims to become one of the top 10 global IT service companies in the world,
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