#Bringing Eye Exams To The Palm Of A Doctor Hand, Smart Vision Raises $6. 1 Million Commercializing a new tool to bring the basic eye exam into the palm of a doctor hand
could save the eyesight of nearly 1 billion people worldwide. That the goal that Zhou Yaopeng and Marc Albanese, two former photonics researchers who met at Boston University nearly a decade ago,
It a piece of hardware that attaches to an iphone to provide mobile vision exams.
the technology is impressive in that it opens up yet more avenues for mobile devices. Everyone talks about the phenomenal computing power available in mobile devices,
but Smart Vision tech is one of the few that harnesses mobile computing in a novel way that make the device a new technology platform for healthcare.
It been two years since Albanese and Zhou first concocted the idea that would become Smart Vision Labs. The two former colleagues reconnected at NYU where Zhou was studying business at Albanese alma mater.
from Verizon (the new owner of Aol, which is the parent company of Techcrunch. Hi bosses!.
#Google New Health Wearable Delivers Constant Patient Monitoring Often when we think of the wearable tech category,
Google has unveiled a new niche device that designed to do serious work in a specific setting,
is the product of Google X, the experimental group within the search giant that is responsible for some of its more noteworthy oon shotprojects,
The health wristband can monitor pulse, heart rhythm, skin temperature, light exposure and noise levels, providing valuable data not just about a patient,
the readings it takes are more scientifically rigorous than those achieved by the current crop of Android Wear-powered devices,
and the dedicated medical wearable unveiled today also monitors and reports information continuously, for better delivery of real-time actionable info to researchers and medical professionals.
Testing for the medical band begins this summer, according to Google, and it going to pursue regulatory approval for its use in medical contexts in partnership with academic institutions and drug companies, per Bloomberg.
This isn Google first move in building medical hardware; Google X is also creating contact lenses that can monitor blood glucose level to help in managing conditions like diabetes.
The competition is also eager to contribute to the medical research community pple has introduced Researchkit,
which allows studies to use iphones and ipads to gather participant data from a wider potential user pool, for instance o
#A Look at The Tech That Could Mean We Never Have To Charge Our Phones Again Technology that can wirelessly power our devices on the go could change our world.
and other battery-enabled devices on the go using something that is already abundantly flowing all around us radio waves.
Nikola Labs presented at Techcrunch Disrupt a couple years back with the same idea turning radio frequency signals into battery power.
while scoring data on price sensitivity for businesses. And with a preset demand curve, merchants can choose exactly how much revenue they want to earn
Compelation ios app beta is normally invite-only, but it opening signups for the next 24 hours to let Techcrunch readers give it a try.
or incentivize users to wait rather than purchase. Worst of all, these public discounts decrease the perceived worth of the products.
like on their site or in retail stores. Other attempts at name-your-price ecommerce typically don aggregate demand,
while being the CMO of paper invitations site Storkie. In 2014 after seeing no true evolution from in the janky Groupon model
Gudai began to work full-time on bootstrapping Compelation, and recruited dev shop Cybergroup Nicholas Babb as CTO.
It will need smart ways to alert users when great items that match their taste are added.
All you need is a computer, smartphone, Wi-fi and 25 minutes to take its test about
which lines look blurrier. Within 24 hours, Opternative will review your results and send you back a prescription you can use to get glasses or contacts anywhere,
With enough awareness and the partnerships its working on with big Internet retailers, it could earn a fortune undercutting standard $50 to $100 ophthalmologist visits
Opternative Test Software Eats The Eye Exam After graduating optometry school, Dr. Steven Lee was sure that computers
and mobile phones had to offer an alternative to traditional autorefractor machines used for vision tests.
He teamed up with serial entrepreneur Aaron Dallek to start Opternative out of Chicago. With a $1 million seed from Tribeca Venture Partners
you just go to Opternative website and answer some eligibility questions regarding when you were last tested
You calibrate your screen by measuring a credit card and sync your phone as a remote control for your computer over Wi-fi and an SMS confirmation.
The test takes about 25 minutes. You follow the dictated and written instructions to cover one eye at a time,
look at your computer screen, and answer corresponding visual acuity questions on your phone. How many lines are in a symbol?
Which of these symbols is a different shape from the rest? What colored number is in the surrounding dots?
and be told to walk a certain number of heel-to-toe steps away from your computer before answering.
While Opternative reviews the results before issuing a prescription through its HIPAA-compliant site, it takes more faith that the test won be botched by some bad answers.
Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 2. 13.15 PM Vision For The Future Until now the only ways to get eye exams were the doctor office,
or expensive smartphone dongles like one made by Smart Vision Labs. Eyenetra is working on a VR headset-based test,
so if a glasses site potential customers haven been to an eye doctor lately, they can get the right specs.
It also building out a touch screen kiosk that could fit inside physical eyewear stores. Seeing clearly can help people learn,
#Google Straps Aclima Sensors To Street view Cars To Map Air pollution If a city knows what intersections are full of smog,
Google earth Outreach program that equips nonprofits and public-benefit organizations with data wants to give the world these insights.
So today, Google revealed that it been working with SF startup Aclima for the last year
-and-a-half to attach air-quality sensors to its Street view cars. e designed our cities without data,
Aclima founder Davida Herzl tells me. Literally piggybacking on Google could let Aclima produce the data necessary to make urban areas easier on the lungs.
In the first pilot three Street view cars collected 150 million air quality data points over a month of driving around Denver, Colo.
The goal is to make data like this available to citizens so they and their local governments can see pollution on their own streets.
Independent scientific analysis confirmed that the mobile sensor system worked for collecting street-by-street data
Google has agreed now to purchase more of Aclima outdoor sensors for a bigger rollout to map air quality.
manages the network as they collect data, processes the data on its cloud backend, and produces analytics and visualizations.
The first project it announced was using indoor sensors to help Google measure air quality in its offices to optimize productivity.
For example by tracking conference rooms throughout the day, Google could determine if CO2 levels climbed high enough to degrade brain function.
If youe ever felt suffocated in a cramped meeting, youe not crazy. With productivity of its huge elite workforce translating into billions in earned or lost revenue for Google,
it has plenty of incentive to join up with Aclima. For now, its Street view partnership is more charitable.
Google earth Outreach will help organizations use the data to visualize air-quality problems in cities,
The Google partnership will allow it to rapidly scale the deployment of its sensors. This way, Aclima can pursue its mission to make a business out of improving human health through environmental protection.
There plenty more Google could potentially do with the data, though. It could allow Google maps to route cars
or pedestrians away from high-pollution areas to avoid exacerbating condensed pollution or breathing it in.
Ie asked Google for a comment on these possibilities and am waiting to hear back.
which is thought often of as just equipping homes with Wi-fi-connected appliances. She tells me,
#Subway Teams Up With Paypal On Mobile payments Ordering your food or beverages by smartphone and then paying for it via an app is quickly becoming the new normal.
however though that will change later this year as Subway begins to advertise its mobile ordering and payments app for ios and Android.
The app will allow Subway customers to build their sandwiches using their smartphones pay ahead of time (or while in line), then pick up their bag
it moving to integrate Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout into the Subway application as another checkout option, alongside the app support for Apple Pay and Android Pay.
This means end users only have to sign in one time in a supported app and then can skip logging in to Paypal the next time they check out in that same app or any other one.
and the online ordering function on Subway website. e do anticipate this hockey stick will continue to happen as we put more resources to it,
including Apple Pay and Android Pay, that the businesses themselves will want to support. t the end of the day,
#Google Loon To Cover Entire Country Of Sri lanka With Internet Google is working on many things,
and that includes balloons that fly high in the sky to bring Internet infrastructure to locations that can be wired for it easily.
Today, Sri lanka announced that it the first country to ever get universal Internet access from Google Project Loon.
Thanks to a partnership with Google, the country promises ffordable high-speed Internetfor all of its residents.
Google Loon was announced in 2013, with only incremental and anecdotal information hitting the presses up until now.
#Google s Brain-Inspired Software Describes What It Sees in Complex Images Experimental Google software that can describe a complex scene could lead to better image search
Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately describe scenes shown in photos significant advance in the field of computer vision.
the software responded with the description group of young people playing a game of frisbee.
The software can even count, giving answers such as wo pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.
most efforts to create software that understands images have focused on the easier task of identifying single objects. t very exciting,
a research scientist at Google. sure there are going to be some potential applications coming out of this.
The new software is the latest product of Google research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2013:
No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret scenes. Instead, its networks earnedby consuming data.
Though it just a research project for now, Vinyals says, he and others at Google have begun already to think about how it could be used to enhance image search
or help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world. Google researchers created the software through a kind of digital brain surgery,
plugging together two neural networks developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to process images into a mathematical representation of their contents
The other had been trained to generate full English sentences as part of automated translation software. When the networks are combined,
After that training process, the software was set loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr
The accuracy of its descriptions was judged then with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software.
Google software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the test typically score in 70s,
That result suggests Google is far ahead of other researchers working to create scene-describing software.
However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create
and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its software descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4
it averaged only 2. 5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.
though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to train software to recognize individual objects,
Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research,
but it is still relatively small. hope other parties will chip in and make it better, says Vinyals
By 2015##next year##at least 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using health-related apps says Tighe who recently spoke#at MIT Technology Review s Emtech conference in Cambridge Massachusetts.
By 2017 the app market is projected to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers:
Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew Sagentia s Vice president of Connected Health sums up the advantages:#
and data capabilities and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and released draft guidance proposing deregulation of medical data aggregation systems. This clarification she says significantly reduces the risks of these opportunities for medical technology companies.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
However with the clearer regulatory pathway emerging concepts are now starting to push the boundaries
and are moving towards using the smartphone/tablet hardware and software to perform more advanced functions.
An emerging example of this is Setpoint Medical s implantable neurostimulation device (currently in development) configured via an ipad app.
This device is aimed at treating patients with debilitating inflammatory diseases. It consists of an implantable microregulator a wireless charger and the ipad prescription-pad application.
Addressing Two Critical Questionssagentia believes there are two critical questions for medical device companies entering this space:
It s not just a software tool he says. MMAS should be treated like any other medical device.
You then need to map your core user requirements so that you understand what information is needed how it should be presented
Verihaler uses wireless acoustic monitoring to provide valuable feedback to users physicians or other health-care providers promoting correct inhaler use
By 2015##next year##at least 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using health-related apps says Tighe who recently spoke#at MIT Technology Review s Emtech conference in Cambridge Massachusetts.
By 2017 the app market is projected to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers:
Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew Sagentia s Vice president of Connected Health sums up the advantages:#
and data capabilities and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and released draft guidance proposing deregulation of medical data aggregation systems. This clarification she says significantly reduces the risks of these opportunities for medical technology companies.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
However with the clearer regulatory pathway emerging concepts are now starting to push the boundaries
and are moving towards using the smartphone/tablet hardware and software to perform more advanced functions.
An emerging example of this is Setpoint Medical s implantable neurostimulation device (currently in development) configured via an ipad app.
This device is aimed at treating patients with debilitating inflammatory diseases. It consists of an implantable microregulator a wireless charger and the ipad prescription-pad application.
Addressing Two Critical Questionssagentia believes there are two critical questions for medical device companies entering this space:
It s not just a software tool he says. MMAS should be treated like any other medical device.
You then need to map your core user requirements so that you understand what information is needed how it should be presented
Verihaler uses wireless acoustic monitoring to provide valuable feedback to users physicians or other health-care providers promoting correct inhaler use
With that data marketers can make better decisions about how to allocate their ad budgets. Indeed the analytics themselves will identify the smart choices.
A key challenge for any marketer is deciding what mix of media TV Internet direct mail radio print will best promote a product or service.
Thanks to technologies such as cookies and browser pixels marketers can now tell exactly where a specific buyer saw their ads.
The data even shows how long that buyer watched a video or lingered on a page carrying the ad.
Paying search engines for stimulating clicks that led to purchases was fine but most consumers take a more circuitous route to their final decisions.
Then the same algorithms can find similar audiences on other websites and present the ads to them.
With enough data and a good algorithm the analytics companies say they can determine just which ads made a difference.
A favorable product review in Consumer Reports or a celebrity endorsement at the Oscars falls outside the algorithm.
Sometimes though such events will cause a spike in discussion on social media here they are monitored
or impressions) to avoid fraud David Perez Convertro s chief marketing officer wrote in a recent blog post.
In theory the algorithms should be able to allocate budget to advertising networks that police their inventory to avoid phony ads.
#Laser-Radio links Upgrade the Internet The rise of Wi-fi and cellular data services made Internet access more convenient and ubiquitous.
Now some of the high-speed backhaul data that powers Internet services looks set to go wireless, too.
Technology that uses parallel radio and laser links to move data through the air at high speeds,
in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in trials with three of the largest U s. Internet carriers.
It is also being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria,
a country that was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last year. AOPTIX, the company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables.
Efforts to dig trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic and physical challenges.
says Chandra Pusarla, senior vice president of products and technology at AOPTIX. He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his company wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per second.
Pusarla says the service is particularly attractive to wireless carriers whose customers have growing appetites for mobile data.
Many U s. providers are currently scrambling to install fiber to replace the copper cables that still link up around half of all cellular towers,
AOPTIX technology takes the form of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser peering out of a small window on the front,
AOPTIX teamed up the laser and radio links to compensate for weaknesses with either technology used alone.
while millimeter wave radio signals are absorbed by rain. Routing data over both simultaneously provides redundancy that allows an AOPTIX link to guarantee a rate of two gigabits per second with only five minutes or less downtime in a year,
whatever the weather conditions, says Pusarla. A typical fiber connection might be 10 or more times faster than that, due to the limitations of the radio frequency link.
But AOPTIX says the convenience of its technology makes up for that and it could be increased to four gigabits or more in the future.
The radio and laser equipment inside an AOPTIX device move automatically to compensate for the swaying of a cell tower caused by wind.
AOPTIX originally developed its laser technology for the Pentagon, designing systems that actively steer laser beams to keep data moving between ground stations, drones, and fighter jets.
Pursala declined to identify the three U s. carriers that have been testing AOPTIX technology over the past year or so,
or its Nigerian customer. Other early customers are being more open. The Mexican telecommunications company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans to use to link up cellular towers
and provide Internet to corporate customers. And before the end of the year, Anova Technologies, a networking company that specializes in the financial industry,
will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e
#A Battery to Prop up Renewable Power Hits the Market A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar
and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large,
or she often doesn have an opportunity to radio for backup. Yardarm, a California-based company, is building technology that will automatically alert headquarters in such situations.
and transmits data over a cellphone network connection. The data transmitted includes the location of a gun
and whether it has been discharged unholstered or. The company is also working to track the direction in
The data can be fed to a police dispatch system or viewed on a smartphone. Founded in 2013
Yardarm started out making a consumer product for monitoring a firearm location. But since many American gun owners object to technology or policies aimed at regulating firearms,
and officers realize that the data can help clear them of wrongdoing and save litigation costs.
and devices to come with Internet connectivity. The gun industry is gradually taking notice of these trends.
a sensor that goes on the front of the gun and captures data on the weapon use.
says Santa cruz sheriff Phil Wowak. he product brings so much data that wee going to have to figure out how to respond to every element.
Yardarm plans to start selling the hardware and tracking service in mid-2015. The next goal is to capture the direction in
and imaging technologies assembled into a single workstation. It combines a touch screen camera, infrared depth sensors, projector, touch-sensitive whiteboard,
and a conventional printer and scanner. Youe encouraged to hook it up to a 3-D printer,
like the one HP launched alongside the Sprout. All that is supposed to make Sprout into a powerful new tool for designers and other creatives.
You might use the device to scan, say, a Buddha statuette in 3-D, and then use a stylus to modify the digital scan once it is projected onto the workstation touch-sensitive surface.
After you made your change, you could print the new design out in 3-D. Sprout shows signs of HP history of making PCS and printers,
with matte grey casing and the bulbous contours of a Ford taurus. But it is clearly the product of some very clever engineering and an ambitious product strategy.
While computer processers and memory have advanced over the decades, we have continued to interface with them via monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
More recently, tools for making things in the physical world have changed a lot too, with the advent of maker spaces and affordable, computer-controlled lathes, mills,
and 3-D printers. But in neither of these cases do you have the opportunity to take control of the world of physical outputs
and software-based design and computing together. Sprout is a clunky device to gaze upon,
but it dreaming in a big way about the very nature of work. You can do things with Sprout that had previously only had been possible by piecing together at least a half dozen different devices.
The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen. It mounted on a thick steel post,
#Google's Secretive Deepmind Startup Unveils a Neural Turing Machine""One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.
At the same time computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico. Today Google s secretive Deepmind startup which it bought for $400 million earlier this year unveils a prototype computer that attempts to mimic some of the properties of the human brain s short-term working memory.
The new computer is a type of neural network that has been adapted to work with an external memory.
The result is a computer that learns as it stores memories and can later retrieve them to perform logical tasks beyond those it has been trained to do.
Deepmind s breakthrough follows a long history of work on short-term memory. In the 1950s the American cognitive psychologist George Miller carried out one of the more famous experiments in the history of brain science.
This is the ability to take a piece of data and assign it to a slot in the memory and to do this repeatedly with data of different length like chunks.
During the 1990s and 2000s computer scientists repeatedly attempted to design algorithms circuits and neural networks that could perform this trick.
Such a computer should be able to parse a simple sentence like Mary spoke to John by dividing it into its component parts of actor action and the receiver of the action.
So in this case it would assign the role of actor to Mary the role of action to the words spoke to
But the fundamental process of computing contains an important additional element. This is an external memory
and read from during the course of a computation. In Turing s famous description of a computer the memory is the tickertape that passes back and forth through the computer and which stores symbols of various kinds for later processing.
This kind of readable and writable memory is absent in a conventional neural network . So Graves and co have added simply one.
This is similar to the way an ordinary computer might put the number 3 and the number 4 inside registers and later add them to make 7. The difference is that the neural network might store more complex patterns of variables representing for example the word Mary
. Since this form of computing differs in an important way from a conventional neural network Graves
But when it comes to sequences that are longer than the training data errors immediately become significant.
Our experiments demonstrate that our Neural Turing Machine is capable of learning simple algorithms from example data
and of using these algorithms to generalize well outside its training regime say Graves and co. That is an important step forward that has the potential to make computing machines much more brainlike than ever before.
But there is significant work ahead. In particular the human brain performs a clever trick to make sense of complex arguments.
He believed that until a computer could reproduce this ability it could never match the performance of the human brain.
Google s Deepmind has stated that its goal is solving intelligence. If this solution is anything like human intelligence a good test would be to see
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