#Secret Media Makes Ad Blockers Useless To Display Those Sweet, Sweet Pre-Roll Video Ads Chances are installed that you an ad blocking extension to skip Youtube pre-roll video ads.
But now, many media companies suffer from these ad blockers and have no choice but to switch to a freemium model
or find a way to shove some ads down your throat. Meet Secret Media, an advertising technology startup specialized in advertising encryption
so that even the most sophisticated ad blocking software can block your ads. e only work with top premium publishers,
cofounder and CEO Frédéric Montagnon told me in a phone interview. very time a publisher distributes a page,
we deliver a different advertising tag. There are a bunch of redirections, re-encryptions and anonymizations.
-and-mouse game between ad blocking contributors and Secret Media. Montagnon, Julien Romanetto and the rest of the team have been flying under the radar for the past few months not to raise awareness.
But, according to an Adobe study, 26 percent of U s.-based Internet users installed an ad blocker.
While hardcore ad blocking users might complain, advertising is the necessary evil of the web.
So get ready to see some pre-roll video ads again s
#Elemental Path Debuts The First Toys Powered By IBM Watson A company called Elemental Path is developing a new line of smart toys for children
which will be powered by the super computing system IBM Watson, enabling the toys to engage in real and personalized conversations with kids,
and evolve with the child as he or she grows. Cognitoys, as the toy line is being called,
with a smart dinosaur toy that supports full speech recognition and can chat with kids, tell them jokes
Co-founded by Donald Coolidge and JP Benini, previously of software development shop Majestyk Apps,
which allowed them access to the IBM Watson technology, making them the first toy company to be able to tap into the system.
explains Coolidge. ids are using iphones and tablets much more than most parents would like them to,
when the benefits are not very clear, he says. With Cognitoys, the technology is instead inside the device and the toy gets to know the child,
texturized rubber similar to that of a Leapfrog tablet. On the toy front, there a big button that,
and a small piece of hardware that connects to the cloud. s a connected device,
With the IBM Watson-powered system, the toy is able to listen and respond to questions and return its answers quickly within a second or much less,
For the toy younger users, the system offers activities like jokes and storytelling, while older kids can ask it more specific questions,
The software could be used in other applications as well including kidsapps. Based in Manhattan, the startup has a small amount of funding from friends and family,
#Clinicloud's Bluetooth-Enabled Stethoscope And Thermometer Lets Doctors Check Your Vitals From The Cloud We are getting that much closer to building the doctor office of the future right within our homes today.
Digital health diagnostic tools startup Clinicloud has launched a line of Bluetooth-connected stethoscopes and thermometers that enable consumers to check their own vitals
says Clinicloud cofounder Dr. Andrew Lin. e are putting these powerful tools into the hands of everyday users,
The startup plans to add more hardware devices in the future and is working on a series of partnerships with major retail brands to sell the devices to consumers That could possibly save the American consumer a lot of time and money.
The Clinicloud website is now open for pre-orders and the kits are expected to ship in July t
what they call data lake or data hub. They were hearing not every company wanted to take that long
Business users don want to wait 12 months. We started seeing a rush of interest from lines of business, where the conversation changes to business value,
and eventually move that sale to IT to build a centralized data hub to bring all of the data together,
#Apple's Activation Lock Leads To Big Drops In Smartphone Theft Worldwide The temptation of a smartphone for a thief is dropping,
thanks to Apple decision to implement a remote kill switch via Find My Phone that can erase
and disable a phone once it been stolen or gone missing. A new report from Reuters found that iphone theft dropped by 50 percent in London,
40 percent in San francisco and 25 percent in New york. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013
as part of ios 7. With ios 8, Apple made its so-called said ill switchactive by default, in accordance with California regulation,
Apple Activation Lock requires a user to authorize a wipe or fresh install using the existing icloud credentials on record,
Apple is one of the first major manufacturers to switch to implementing the system by default, rather than through user opt-in,
All new iphone 6 and 6 Plus units for instance, will have it on be given default that they shipped with ios 8 pre-installed.
Stats from last year indicated that Apple implementation of the Activation Lock were having a significant effect,
but Apple combined ios 8 adoption rate (currently at over 70 percent) and the fact that it now on by default means that the risk associated with stealing a modern ios device is even greater.
The aim is to make smartphone theft ultimately as futile as stealing a credit card, whereby a user ancellingtheir hardware renders it ultimately useless.
Smartphone theft is often theft of opportunity meaning a thief weighs reward vs. risk, including factors like how difficult it is to recoup an investment on something theye taken.
Activation Lock doesn automatically render smartphones using it worthless to thieves, but it skews the value proposition considerably,
and reduces reward (an iphone sold for parts is worth far less than a fully functional unity, for instance).
Apple seems committed to coming up with new ways to protect user devices and data when it comes to theft,
given its early pioneering of phone tracking tech via Find My iphone. Patents awarded Apple have described also systems
whereby the phone requires positive ID of the user to even display an unlock prompt,
and tech which can monitor and report on unidentified users in the background
#Bittorrent Teams Up With Rapid Eye Studios To Make Young Adult Original Content Last November,
Bittorrent made a move into Netflix and Amazon territory with the news that it would be releasing its first original piece of video content, Children of the Machine.
Today, the peer-to-peer networking platform, which has 170 million active users, is kicking that strategy up another notch:
it is entering a bigger partnership with Rapid Eye Studios the production house that is behind Children of the Machine to identify,
produce and distribute more original video content for a new initiative called Bittorrent Originals, aimed initially at the 14-25 age bracket.
including a video game i
#Apple Will Spend $848 Million Building A Massive Solar Farm In Monterey Tim cook dropped a bit of news in a conversation at the Goldman sachs Technology and Internet conference today:
Apple is putting a massive $848 million into solar energy. According to Cook, Apple is putting $848 million into building a 1, 300-acre solar farm in Monterey, Calif,
#Rakuten To Put Its Bitnet Investment To Work And Accept Bitcoin Worldwide Rakuten, Japan largest online retail firm, has announced that it will soon accept bitcoin across its global marketplaces.
The company is putting its investment in Bitnet a startup that raised $14. 5 million last October to work with this development.
Bitnet, which was founded by ex-Visa execs and is rivaled by Coinbase and Bitpay, will initially be integrated into Rakuten U s. marketplace to allow customers to pay in BTC.
Interestingly, there no specific mention of when Bitnet will be integrated into Rakuten Japan, which is the most prominent of its 12 country-specific services.
Overstock and even Microsoft, hopped onto the cryptocurrency to give customers an alternative avenue for payments. he integration with Bitnet platform will make Rakuten one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world to begin accepting bitcoin,
Rakuten said in a statement with no uncertain pride. Nonetheless, this news is notable because it not only continues the momentum for bitcoin among retailers,
but it could help position Bitnet as a credible alternative to the increasingly dominant duopoly that is Coinbase and Bitpay both
Part of the plan to increase trade with Cuba included provisions aimed at allowing U s. telecommunications companies to provide better access to communication and internet services
#The Case That Turns Your Phone Into A Polaroid camera Is Now On Kickstarter The Prynt case,
which lets you print photos directly from your phone, is now available for pre-order on Kickstarter.
They demonstrated their new mount for phones, which will allow the case to support larger phablets like the iphone 6 Plus and Galaxy Note line down the road.
They weren showing a case with a direct connection to your phone over Lightning or USB
so print times still haven quite hit the 30 seconds the team is aiming for.
the Prynt will support the iphone 5/s/c/6 and the Samsung galaxy S4/S5.
Along with printing photos as you take them or from your camera roll, itl also come with an app that brings a nifty augmented reality feature,
When you hold up the physical photo to your phone camera with the app open, it is overlaid with a Play button that shows that video in place of the picture itself.
the company is looking into tricks like hiding pixels in images that would prevent them from being copied,
#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.
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.
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.
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,
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