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.
and control things remotely with the Apple TV component. It starts shipping later this month,
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
You can also control things remotely provided you have that late-generation Apple TV. Lutron Homekit-enabled Caséta Smart Bridge is part of the Lighting Starter Kit that also includes two dimmers
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 to use multiple isp5 plugs to create ceneswhich turn on or off multiple gadgets at once.
and are running ios 8. 1 or later. Set up and discovery is handled automatically just by tapping,
If you also have an Apple TV (generation 3 or later) you can also control Homekit-enabled devices remotely,
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
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.
but also includes data on medical conditions that a user can pre-populate into the app.
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.
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
#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 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.
This is how Compelation is flipping the concept of ecommerce and giving consumers the power. Normally, a merchant sets a sale price,
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.
This type of asynchronous, buyer-priced shopping couldn happen before the rise of ecommerce, but it holds a ton of advantages over traditional discounting.
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,
so merchants have to deal with offers one by one, which doesn scale. Compelation offers merchants a dashboard where they can track 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
Literally piggybacking on Google could let Aclima produce the data necessary to make urban areas easier on the lungs.
Google has agreed now to purchase more of Aclima outdoor sensors for a bigger rollout to map air quality.
The first project it announced was using indoor sensors to help Google measure air quality in its offices to optimize productivity.
by tracking conference rooms throughout the day, Google could determine if CO2 levels climbed high enough to degrade brain function.
With productivity of its huge elite workforce translating into billions in earned or lost revenue for Google,
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.
he and others at Google have begun already to think about how it could be used to enhance image search
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 in preparation for identifying objects.
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:#
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
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:#
But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.
and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds.
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
and combine it with their knowledge of television radio billboard and print campaigns to tailor marketing messages and ultimately improve return on investment (ROI).
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.
and machine learning says Madan Bharadwaj product marketing chief of Visual IQ an analytics firm based in Needham Massachusetts.
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.
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