according to an Uber blog post. Uber said that the service is ideal for ferrying any kind of item around:
and scored a $10 million investment from Chinese social network Renren in 2014. Lalamove and Gogovan are based both in Hong kong,
and add Baidu as a strategic investor in China Uber Cargo is another reminder that new Uber initiatives can
Uber Cargo looks like it is primarily targeting business users, but Lalamove executive Blake Larson told Techcrunch earlier this week that he believes there is also a strong market for consumers.
And it can power all your mobile devices for weeks. kraftwerk which translates to ower stationin German is the product of ezelleron an engineering team that spun out of German research firm Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
since the 1950 (Wikipedia says the first reference to it was in 1838) but gas and other fossil fuels have eclipsed it as a preferred energy source.
and your cellphone can get instant clean power for a long period of time. There have been a few other fuel cell Kickstarters for powering cellphones but none look as slick as kraftwerk.
The Devotec Micro Fuel Charger a key ring sized fuel cell cellphone charger added about 20-30 minutes of extra talk time
if plugged in. There was also the unsuccessfully funded HALO fuel cell charger. Touted as emergency preparedness for the outdoorsy type with an ipad it was a bit clunky looking.
But you could charge two devices at the same time on it. The kraftwerk units come in three different colors rbanutdoorand lamand run on a short spray of camping gas or standard lighter fluid.
It will charge anything that can be plugged into a USB cable such as your iphone tablet or even a Gopro.
One illingsupplies power for up to 11 iphones. Once depleted the unit will recharge itself in the aforementioned 3 seconds w
#Hardware Battlefield 2015 The majority of home climate control systems in the world just won work with Nest,
Sensibo is a small IR-compatible blaster that also connects to an app on your smartphone,
timer settings and a learning algorithm that the company claims can save you up to 40 percent on your home heating and cooling bills over time,
and while it still conceivable that the Google-owned company could build a Sensibo-style device,
With the company first product launching today at Techcrunch Hardware Battlefield 2015 drones become aware of their surroundings
While demoing in Hardware Battlefield at CES 2015 the drone swiftly moved out of the way of a person walking towards the blades.
#Square Cash Integrates Touch ID To Send Money Using Your Fingerprint Square Cash Square Venmo competitor that lets you use the app to transfer money to other people has added a new feature to its ios app that some might say is long overdue:
users can now authenticate money transfers using the Touch ID feature in later versions of the iphone (5s
but money transferring apps are generally have been some of the more popular payment services on smartphones.
Prior to today updates to Square Cash had other updates including the ability to send money via Bluetooth and email
and a cloud-based database of items to quickly scan and identify items based on their molecular structure.
#Tencent Launches China#s First Private Online Bank Tencent one of the top Internet companies in China launched the country first private online bank today.
Called Webank after Tencent popular messaging app Wechat the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet.
while Alibaba Baidu and electronics seller Suning Commerce Group also got government licenses to offer mutual funds loans and insurance.
#Automatic Launches Its SDK, Turning The Car Into An App Platform Automatic, a startup whose sensor-and-software combo has been described as itbit for your car,
is today rolling out a software development kit and new hardware that turn your car into a platform for apps.
which has been updated to accommodate streaming real-time data from a car computer and sensors to apps running on your phone.
The apps draw relevant data from a car computer via the OBD port letting you do things like feed the exact mileage from a particular drive into Concur to expense a work trip
which points to corresponding apps on ios and Android respective app stores. The app is designed to help drivers determine their actual income taking fuel costs
Estimating those things with the app on your smartphone was a boon before, but now with data from Automatic, drivers will have exact numbers on the fuel burning
while waiting for another fare. Owners of the existing Automatic adapter will have access to most of the apps available in the App Gallery,
though the few apps that offer real-time data to your phone will require the new model,
so we should have a video review of the new hardware and apps shortly o
All bookings are made through the site, with the startup handling the required insurance and offering 24/7 road assistance cover in the event of a breakdown. ur insurance setup allows car owners to list their cars in less than a minute
provide their information on our website and rent a car as soon as the car owner approves the request,
#The Bank of Facebook Technology is changing one of the most fundamental mediums that touch every person on the planet:
and securityare actively being created by the world social network. This past March, Facebook rolled out free peer-to-peer payments and set the company down a path to becoming one of the world most powerful financial institutions.
Last year foreign workers sent $583 billion to individuals in their home countries, also known as remittances. Remittances are one of the largest financial inflows to the developing world.
Facebook isn charging fees on transfers. While the company does incur charges from banks on the back end,
Facebook says it will not pass these on to the consumer. At the moment Facebook transfers are limited to users within the United states,
but sources inside the company have confirmed it will expand beyond U s. borders in the near future.
if Facebook will charge users a nominal fee on cross-border transfers and currency conversions,
According to Steve Davis, product manager at Facebook: ee not trying to make a profit out of payments. acebook is already well on its way to becoming a global financial institution.
Last summer, Financial times discovered that Facebook is close to receiving approval from the Central bank of Ireland to become an electronic money institution throughout Europe.
This would allow users the ability to store money with the social network, transfer money to others,
Long term, Facebook payments has the power to completely destroy Western union and Money Gram (good riddance) and massively benefit millions of people in the developing world with billions of dollars more freely flowing into those countries.
Facebook is in a position to control the lion share of remittances sent globally by offering below market-rate transfers and the best experience on mobile.
It couldn come at a better time for the social network, which desperately needs the rest of the world to sign up
The last couple of years have been especially rough for Facebook with North america and European markets reaching saturation.
There is no better way for Facebook to add new users in the developing world than by becoming the de facto app for how they receive their income from abroad.
that possibility pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook offering a way for people who don use banks now to do e-commerce.
In the next five years, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet.
By 2019, Ericsson predicts there will be 5. 9 billion smartphone users worldwide. When every family on the planet has access to a smartphone with fast Internet, the paradigm changes.
The idea that we still need physical banks, plastic cards, and paper money fades away. It already starting to occur.
Wechat users sent over 1 billion ed envelopesfilled with e-money to other users. It easy to imagine a world where workers in developing countries are paid through Facebook via peer-to-peer payments,
store their money on Facebook, purchase local goods through transfers, and have the ability to pay for items using Facebook.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
So why would Facebook facilitate millions of transfers and online purchases for next to nothing?
For one, it puts them closer to attaining the holy grail of datahow users spend their money.
Let not forget that at the end of the day Facebook is most definitely an ad network at its core.
Just because a user ikesa brand, doesn mean he or she is a customer. For example, how many of Lamborghini 11 million Facebook fans could actually afford that car?
While Facebook could make an educated guess, it can answer that question with certainty. However, in a world where Facebook could combine financial transactions and social graphs,
advertisers would be given near-perfect information on their audience. No other ad network in the world would be able to match Facebook targeting capabilitiespurchase behavior, income, savings, etc.
Despite the doomsayers, the world future has looked never so bright. Wee currently undergoing a period of massive socioeconomic growth.
In 2009 there were 1. 9 billion people in the middle class and over the next 15 years that number will rise to 4. 9 billion people.
As billions of people rise up out of poverty to become consumers the question presents itselfow will the new economies of the future operate?
Will they still cling to the coins and paper that society has used for the last 3, 500 years?
Or can mobile and the Internet change all that? I like to believe the latter. While many of these ideas will take decades to come to fruition,
Facebook has an incredible opportunity in front of itselfo use technology to change the way the world thinks about money.
I quit using Facebook years ago but maybe, hopefully, Mark Zuckerberg will give me a compelling reason to sign back up b
#Push For Greater State Surveillance Powers Could Have Chilling Effect On U k. Tech Sector The U k. government is lining up a new piece of legislation to expand the state digital data capture powers.
and volume of captured comms data. The U k. Prime minister has appeared even to suggest that strong encryption should be outlawed.
The Telegraph newspaper this week suggested new powers to be outlined in the Bill will require companies like Google
and Facebook to give U k. intelligence agencies access to the encrypted conversations of suspected terrorists and criminals.
That scenario presupposes Internet companies have the ability to access their usersencrypted messages. While that is certainly true for some digital services with a sloppy attitude to security (or with business models that rely on data mining their users), others,
such as Apple, claim they intentionally do not hold encryption keys which presumably sets up a legal clash with security-and privacy-conscious tech companies and the U k. government.
That really will be a*gets popcorn*momenthe Tory prior attempt to expand the state data capture powers,
the Communications Data Bill widely criticized as a nooperscharter on the grounds that it would have required ISPS to retain detailed data on web usage failed to pass through Parliament owing to the lack of support from the Conservative Lib dem coalition partners.
but was a prominent critic of the Communications Data Bill, tells Techcrunch he has concerns about the surveillance powers that the government will be pushing for. el have to see how much theyl try
When they were trying to push the Communications Data Bill, initially, the first version was incredibly broadbrush
and afforded powers to do any data collection. They then admitted, during the process of our parliamentary committee enquiry,
and we agreed to doone was about requiring ISPS to keep track of web logs, effectively.
So a list of every website you go to, and things like that. And the third thing was to have a power to require ISPS to keep track of third party information so
what you do on Facebook, what you do on any other site, says Huppert. hose were the three things they said they wanted.
The IP ADDRESS matching basically was the only thing they had any evidence for. And it doesn involve any significant privacy intrusions
but has huge advantages. Whereas I think the concept of keeping track of every website everybody ever goes to,
or of requiring ISPS to keep track of what you do on Facebook all the time are deeply intrusive.
And actually they couldn come up with any significant evidence of why it was useful.?There should be a clear piece of legislation that sets out
and privacy intrusion of having the state require systematic logging of citizensweb browsing habits and social media activity,
another reason to oppose more expansive state data retention is that it makes the intelligence agenciesjob harder given it increases the noise to signal ration,
if you demand more things you have more data, and if you believe that the problem the intelligence services face at the moment is a shortage of data then it would address the problem.
I think the problem is they don know what to do with all the data that they have.
If you look at the killing of U k. soldier Lee Rigby for example the problem isn that they have no idea.
The problem is they have so much data they couldn prioritize it properly, he argues. o unlike IP ADDRESS matching where there really was a strong case,
there isn a clear case here. Beyond e can think of some situations where it might be useful And
I think the word we used was isleadinge also notes that the Joint Committee report on the draft Communications Data bill was hugely critical about the lack of data ministers were able to provide to support assertions that expanding data capture powers for counter-terrorism purposes would save lives.
e need more data but we can tell you whyand where the U k. Parliament Intelligence and security committee should be playing a robust role in holding the government to account in such a sensitive area,
but also if you look at some of the things that Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance David Omand has argued saidhe for full public
Speaking at an Internet festival taking place in London this week he asked of politicians:
where when the security services take the ability to look at private data, they do it in a way where it goes through a court,
and when people do have snooped their data on it only used in a very serious process of tracking down organised crime and terrorism?
so shoring up and expanding state surveillance and data capture powers is evidently front of mind and a clear priority for the new U k. government.
of which will ripple out to affect both U k. web users and their online behavior, and global companies doing business in the U k. The U k. is referred often to as the most surveilled country in the world typically a reference to the pervasive use of CCTV.
Imagine the power of state surveillance tapping into an expansive Internet of things infrastructure that ceaselessly gathers real-time data on every point of human intersection public
and rivatewhen it comes to surveillance of digital comms data, this same outsourcing modus operandi used with CCTV is being applied by governments to Internet companies with the U k. government now preparing to push one of the most hawkish data retention agendas in the Western world,
and that despite the censure that has been directed at systematic digital dragnets in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
where their user data is then subject to systematic mining by the state as a byproduct of citizensdigital participation,
the phone companies, not government agencies, would hold American phone records. The NSA could only access these records after receiving permission from a Foreign Intelligence surveillance act court.
It only addresses the bulk collection of American phone records and does nothing to rein in many of the gross oversteps we have seen from the Snowden revelations.
what telephone and Internet data the government can collect. Today was a step in the right direction
or Portable Eye Examination Kit app, is based a smartphone system for diagnosing eye problems. It uses a 3d printed add-on that can allow ophthalmologists to give detailed and complete eye exams in the field using an app and a small camera overlay.
The Peek can view the retina using a smart phones high-quality camera, see cataracts, and offer visual acuity tests as well as color
By pairing a piece of plastic with an inexpensive smartphone ophthalmologists are able to address eye care problems anywhere in the world.
Interestingly, the system also allows you to give eye tests by showing increasingly smaller letters and figures on the screen.
This means youl soon be able to get your hands on a range of products for the connected home that work with Siri on your ios device,
with a practical lineup to get your home connected to your ios ecosystem in an essential way.
The Elgato Eve is a set of connected wireless sensors that monitor key factors like indoor air quality, temperature, humidity as well as conditions outside, like temperature, humidity and air pressure.
ios device users with 8. 1 or above can check on all the stats gathered by the Eve from their devices,
when theye away from home using Apple TV (generation 3 or later with OS version 7. 0 or later),
Connected thermostat maker ecobee is adding Homekit to its ecobee3 hardware, which is designed for houses that have multiple rooms in need of climate control.
Remote sensors help it monitor temperature in multiple rooms at the same time, letting you save energy and maximize comfort in every area.
The Caséta Smart Bridge is a wireless lighting hub that makes up a core part of the Caséta Wireless Lighting Starter Kit from the company.
This Homekit version lets users control lights in specific areas, as well as check with Siri to see
The Insteon Hub with Homekit allows users to control the whole range of Insteon connected devices from the company
the company is also now offering up a brand new version of its Insteon+app for ios 8. 1 or later,
Insteon is clearly looking to be a one-stop shop for users looking to create an Apple-friendly connected home,
The new Hub is available at Amazon com and Smarthome. com right now for $149. 99
and are running ios 8. 1 or later. Set up and discovery is handled automatically just by tapping,
when youe outside of your home Wi-fi network. Apple had told us the first Homekit accessories were coming in June,
#Hands-On With Thync Mood-Altering Headset Thync is launching its mood-altering headset today,
or boost your energy with controls on your smartphone. As we reported back in October, the Los Gatos-based startup has raised $13 million to change your mood using electrical stimulation.
Unfortunately, we weren able to try on the headset (or even see it) when the startup was ready to talk about its financing.
Thync gadget is more of a module than a headset. It small, plastic, and contains a Bluetooth radio for connecting to your phone.
You attach it to a disposable adhesive strip, which you apply to your temple and neck.
but if it works as effectively as the Calm mode, it should make users wired.
and the Borg-like visage of having the module strapped to one forehead might turn potential users away for now s
plagued by an infrastructure that can handle cell phone location data and that can repeatedly drop emergency calls.
The system was developed by AT&T in the late 1960s to centralize access to public safety services such as fire, police,
Given AT&T monopoly then, it developed a system compatible with its network of landline phones.
Unfortunately, telecom technology has grown far more complex than when our 911 infrastructure was deployed first. The rise of mobile phones has posed a massive challenge to the 911 dispatch system,
since physical location can no longer be derived from the network topology of the landline PSTN network.
Since most 911 calls today are from mobile phones location data that could be crucial for saving a life
or finding a kidnap victim is often unavailable to the emergency operator. In one test in Texas, for example, two-thirds of calls lacked such data.
The problems don end there. Due to peculiarities with the 911 system calls may not even be routed to those who can most help.
In Oakland, 911 calls from a cell phone will end up in Vallejo, so the city recommends storing a special city emergency number.
For consumers, the company has an app that allows users to immediately connect with emergency services no matter where they are through ne touch.
That one touch will immediately send location data to 911, but also includes data on medical conditions that a user can pre-populate into the app.
Thus, if you have a medical emergency and press the button, it will automatically send potential allergies
This data is compatible with all U s. dispatch centers although international compatibility for data transfer is not yet fully ready.
For institutions like universities and corporate campuses, Rapidsos offers a product it calls Geoalert that allows public safety officers to send out mass alerts to precisely the people they need to go to,
Today, such alerts are broadcasted often without regard to a user location, which can greatly increase the risk of misunderstanding police instructions.
video, and microphone capabilities of smartphones. Compared to a simple voice call, that greater context can provide an operator with the information needed to properly direct first responders.
The consumer product is free for users, but the startup charges institutions a fee for its Geoalert product.
Longer term, Martin expects that the company data around emergencies will allow it to offer a predictive analytics platform that might be of interest to Wall street investment funds and insurance companies.
It can either be plugged into the Square Stand USB hub, or merchants can charge the reader battery
or plug it into the Square Stand USB hub. The partnership announcement came during Apple WWDC conference keynote,
either tap their phone to the new Square reader, dip the chip on their credit card,
or even beads and shells, the only way to get them to pay for anything is through their smartphone.
Add in a text-to-pay service like Rhombus and youe got Williamsburg catnip. This new app allows people to pay you via a special contact number.
Oyeniyi has a Masters in Computer science and Elodimuor one in Economics. The system is live
Instead, users simply text a special business number and all of the transactions are performed between the customer
and customers. he system works with any phone and requires no hardware. The system can also text you a list of Rhombus-enabled businesses. ustomers don have to signup to chat with businesses, it like texting anyone on your contact list.
#Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team up To Launch Webassembly, A New Binary Format For The Web Google, Microsoft,
Mozilla and the engineers on the Webkit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch Webassembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web.
The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, Javascript is its programming language. Over the years,
however, wee seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of Javascript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to Javascript.
Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft Typescript) or speeding up Javascript (like Mozilla asm. js project.
Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of Webassmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++,
with other languages to follow), where it is executed then inside the Javascript engine. Instead of having to parse the full code,
though, which can often take quite a while (especially on mobile), Webassembly can be decoded significantly faster The idea is that Webassembly will provide developers with a single compilation target for the web that will,
eventually, become a web standard that implemented in all browsers. By default Javascript files are simple text files that are downloaded from the server
and then parsed and compiled by the Javascript engine in the browser. The Webassembly team decided to go with a binary format
because that code can be compressed even more than the standard Javascript text files and because it much faster for the engine to decode the binary format (up to 23x faster in the current prototype) than parsing asm. js code, for example.
Mozilla asm. js has aimed long to bring near-native speeds to the web. Google Native Client project for running native code in the browser had similar aims
but got relatively little traction. It looks like Webassemly may be able to bring the best of these projects to the browser now.
As a first step, the Webassembly team aims to offer about the same functionality as asm. js
(and developers will be able to use the same Emscripten tool for Webassembly as they use for compiling asm. js code today).
In this early stage, the team also plans to launch a so-called polyfill library that will translate Webassembly code into Javascript
Over time then, the teams will build more tools (compilers, debuggers, etc. and add support for more languages (Rust,
Go and C# ,for example). As Javascript inventor (and short-term Mozilla CEO) Brendan Eich points out today,
once the main browsers support the new format natively, Javascript and Webassembly will be able to diverge again.
The team notes that the idea here is not to replace Javascript, by the way, but to allow many more languages to be compiled for the Web.
Indeed, chances are that both Javascript and Webassembly will be used side-by-side and some parts of the application may use Webassembly modules (animation, visualization, compression, etc.),
while the user interface will still be written mostly in Javascript, for example. It not often that we see all the major browser vendors work together on a project like this,
so this is definitely something worth watching in the months and years ahead s
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011