#The Internet Applied To Things And The Third Industrial revolution Editor Note: John B. Rogers is chief executive and cofounder of Local Motors,
If we bring manufacturing of big hardware (home appliances, vehicles) within 100 miles of the most densely populated areas in the world,
I spent three years in China where companies like Foxconn built huge cities that can make any small hardware device anything that fits in a shoebox.
I call a product of the very recent Internet-applied-to-things (not the overused phrase Internet of things).
and download an STL file of a door grommet, send it to a 3d printer and within hours it printed
Our community has users who upload and exchange ideas on vehicle innovations. GE Appliances is building a microfactory called Firstbuild with the goal of speeding appliance innovations to market by opening up the process to the brightest minds from around the globe.
and the private sector together and provide access to super computers and the ORNL Manufacturing Demonstration Facility to solve the most pressing challenges facing manufacturing today.
because you can bring hardware and software to market at unprecedented rates with a much smaller amount of capital through crowdsourcing,
Meaningful Legal Protections Today, in the U s.,we have legal protections for user-generated content that now mean something.
GNU and other open-source licenses that grant users more free rein to modify and sometimes market software while protecting attribution and creators wishes.
#Facebook Censors Blasphemous Page To Comply With Turkey#s Demand But Won t Publish It When Google and Twitter receive legal threats from countries to censor controversial content
or have their services shut down locally, they often publish them on Chillingeffects. org for transparency.
But today when Facebook followed Turkey legal order to block a Page that defamed the Prophet Muhammad from Turkish users,
Mark Zuckerberg has said it Facebook duty to comply with censorship so it can keep operating
Google and Twitter both have large archives of notices theye shared on Chilling Effects. But Facebook abstains from this transparency practice.
Instead, the company has been beefing up its transparency reports with an interactive map the shows
Some claim that Facebook is wrong to comply with censorship, and that it should accept bans.
Facebook growth and advertising objectives are cited often as supposed reasons it complies. However, Mark Zuckerberg recently commented on the censorship issue in a public Q&a saying one more country doesn add much extra ad money or growth.
Facebook declined to comment on this specific issue. Regardless it seems obvious that Facebook could maintain its current position
while also being more transparent and publishing the demands it receives in a timely fashion.
and is doing all it can to fight back without cutting off citizens from their social network i
Old well-established banks should be ashamed that they can provide the same level of user experience.
Now I also have a French bank account with a so-called mobile-first bank (BNP PARIBAS-owned Hello Bank)
and you will spend some time over the phone with a customer representative. When I signed up for Number26 cofounder
and CEO Valentin Stalf just told me to install the app on my phone and register with an invite code.
You enter an email address a password and some basic info. At some point Number26 will need to verify your identity.
Number26 already makes money from Mastercard cut on every transaction it transparent for the user.
After graduating from university with a degree in computer science Izak created an ipad app that was inspired by his younger brother Oriel who has autism.
Autismate now has 10000 users on its classic platform as well as another 15000 on its lite version. Like Autismate Teachmate365 is focused on visual learning.
Students can access lessons and visual exercises through their own tablets or smartphones. urrently what you will find is that the special education market is fragmented extremely
While the growing affordability of tablets and platforms like Teachmate365 have provided new tools for students with special needs
#Malaysia Airlines Site Hacked By Lizard Squad Hacker group Lizard Squad which took down Xbox Live
The site currently displays a picture of a lizard in a top hat and monocle as well as the text 04-Plane Not Found (a reference to flight MH370 which disappeared in March) and acked by LIZARD SQUAD-OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE.
Some users may see a lite version of Malaysia Airlineswebsite as the air carrier restores access to its site.
It unclear whether or not Lizard Squad is linked actually to Cyber Caliphate a hacker group that claims to be associated with ISIS. Last month Cyber Caliphate took control of the U s. central military command Twitter and Youtube accounts.
Malaysia Airlines confirmed the attack on its Facebook page: In a tweet however Lizard Squad (which itself was hacked last week) claimed it had taken materials from Malaysia Airlinesservers.
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.
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
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
The two brought in three other founders to the team to help with the logistics it would take to combine both hardware and software.
#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
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
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
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
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
As Amazon announced last November, its long-term goal is o achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.
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
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
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 in actuality involves a network of smart sensors collecting data. As the sensors grow ever cheaper,
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,
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.
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.
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,
The toothbrush uses Bluetooth and a mobile app to capture data about your tooth brushing habits.
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.
and transmits data to the cloud, where it can warn other drivers coming down the same road about the impending danger.
These sensors will add information to an ever-growing network of connected devices producing mountains of data.
But if you consider what Tim Oeilly once said, he guy with the most data wins,
#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.
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,
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.
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.
Williams stressed the immediate benefit to users because theye learn about their health even before a researcher study concludes
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,
#Purelifi Raises £1. 5m For Tech That Uses Pulsating LED Light To Create Wifi Alternative Purelifi,
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
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
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
#Xiaomi Buys 3%Of Chinese Games And Software Giant Kingsoft For $68m Xiaomi became the world third largest smartphone company based on sales last year
but it also invested in a number of companies in 2014. Its early deals have largely been in hardware
but today it announced PDF plans to put money into games and software by buying 2. 98 percent of Kingsoft for HK$527 million ($68 million).
Kingsoft started out developing PC games but today the company which is listed in Hong kong and valued at over $2 billion produces security entertainment and enterprise products too.
It already has strong links to Xiaomi whose CEO and cofounder Lei Jun is also founder and chairman of Kingsoft.
because it is a sign of Xiaomi intention to increase its focus on software and services.
Its deals to date have circled around hardware including a $200 million investment in appliance maker Midea
Xiaomi sold more than 60 million devices last year a feat that saw it overtake Samsung as China top smartphone company
and become the third biggest seller of smartphones worldwide in Q3 2014. With a burgeoning family of hardware
and smart home products including an air purifier blood test device smart TV and streaming box Xiaomi could look to construct a network of services to further monetize its user base in the future.
Xiaomi hasn revealed its hand as yet but Hugo Barra the company VP of international did tell Techcrunch last week that it is in the market for investments
and acquisitions in India with a particular focus on startups that offer mobile services and e-commerce.
The company bought its shares from internet giant Tencent which reduced its stake in Kingsoft to 9. 6 percent.
Apple note which has been reproduced in more than one place online (including here on Russian-language tech site Habrahabr
and requires the developers to cease all use of Apple software and destroy related materials.
Putin government has put in place measures for tracking data on websites and restrictions on certain types of content.
This has resulted in some sites like Github getting blocked and others like Intel shutting down some of their online operations u
The HIPAA compliant Saas software has been rolled out to several paying customers in the U s. healthcare sector so far
machine learning prediction engine at the core of their platform, say cofounders Brent Newhouse and Mudit Garg.
This ingests spectrumof real-time data signals from electronic medical records, to staffing systems and outpatient numbers,
and emergency call button data, to external factors gleaned by scraping public data such as weather info, disease seasonality and even local events
which might have an impact on hospital admissions looking for patterns to generate its demand predictions.
feed the machine enough data and the learning algorithms will find the patterns, or at least be able to predict likelihoods with decent accuracy.
So that what Analyticsmd says its platform can do and with a high degree of accuracy. In testing of its algorithms it says it has measured measured id-step accuracyin the 90%range of predicting volume a day ahead,
or predicting census of a unit a day ahead, although Garg stresses it not putting those test figures in front of customers.)
The software weighs up demand probabilities and considers the various costs involved, meaning financial costs such as staffing and beds but also care costs, so crucial factors such as quality of service and patient satisfaction,
a little bit there are, based on how this algorithm has performed in the past. If you have a sense of what that distribution looks like you can make your decision based on the relative costs,
More than a dashboard This predictive core they argue sets the product apart from rival software products
which just plug multiple data signals into a dashboard view for hospital staff to interpret themselves.
The problem with the dashboard approach in healthcare operations is staff simply don have time to be triaging all this data themselves.
Whatever device and medium is most appropriate for reaching that particular healthcare providersstaff. hese users are ones that are constantly battling fires that are happening in the hospital and taking care of patients,
and then decide what the best data-driven decision, based on that is really hard, says Garg. e started with a real-time dashboard at firstand realized that,
based on analyzing a combination of data signals such as when a patient presses a call button for help,
and used that combination to be able to say who are the patients who are likely to fall. e do use a whole bunch of machine learning algorithms that help take out any unknowns in the equation,
because the platform provides the data overlap as human staff come and go. But what about the other humans in this equation the patients?
In its current rollouts Garg says is only utilizing data elements that hospitals were already capturing,
if a hospital started asking for additional decisions that maybe required additional data elements to be captured then the team would efinitely want to have a conversation with the patients to make sure they are comfortable with that Newhouse also points out that Analyticsmd makes a point of not capturing personal data such as patientsnames
The team third cofounder, Ian Christopher, brings the algorithmic expertise having worked on predictive software while at Stanford.
which have silos of data derive benefit from each other as well. m
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