Source: Hardware Freedom Day
Tags: hacks, hardware, hardwarefreedomday, hfd Next: LG Lucid 3 leaks with updated design, no doubts on the carrier .fyre .fyre-comment-dividerView the Original article
Source: Hardware Freedom Day
Tags: hacks, hardware, hardwarefreedomday, hfd Next: LG Lucid 3 leaks with updated design, no doubts on the carrier .fyre .fyre-comment-dividerWish you could easily craft a musical instrument out of whatever you have lying around the house? You'll get that opportunity if Yuri Suzuki's team at Dentaku brings its crowdfunded Ototo kit to market. The synthesizer turns any conductive material into an instrument, changing its sound based on the nature of the object. An eggplant will carry a different tune than tinfoil, for instance. You can take greater control of your performance through optional light-, touch- and even breath-sensitive sensors; the gadget also connects to computers through USB if you'd like to use it as a MIDI controller. It will take a minimum £45 pledge ($74 plus $8 in shipping) to reserve Ototo ahead of its planned launch in June, but it may be worth the expense if you're tired of conventional music-making.
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Tags: crowdfunding, dentaku, instrument, midi, music, MusicalInstruments, ototo, Synthesizer, video, YuriSuzuki Next: US Cellular offers $50 unlimited plan with throttled data as a catch .fyre .fyre-comment-dividerMarketing startup BrightFunnel is announcing that it has raised a small “advisory round” of slightly less than $1 million from some big-name investors.
Co-founder and CEO Nadim Hossain served most recently as the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews (which was acquired by Bazaarvoice). In that role, and in other jobs as a marketing executive, Hossain said that with his background in economics and econometrics he expected to be “swimming in CMO insights,” but that turned out not to be the case.
Instead, Hossain said he found “production tools” with limited analytics, at least on the level of what a CMO would want to know.
“I remember being at a board meeting in May of 2011, and they asked me questions where I didn’t know the answers,” he said. ” My self identity is as someone who can get at the numbers and get at the truth, and I had to make guesses. It just made me feel not authentic and wonder, why don’t I have the answers? These are knowable questions.”
So at BrightFunnel, he’s trying to build tools that will given him the answers that he was looking for. The eventual goal, Hossain said, is to create “the Google self-driving car for marketers.” In other words, customers should be able to identify how much money they want to spend on a campaign and what their revenue targets are, and with BrightFunnel’s recommendations, the marketing plan should basically run itself.
The company isn’t quite there yet. Instead, Hossain said, it’s more like navigation app Waze. Its current features include identifying the marketing “levers” that can lead to increased revenue, as well as analyzing performance trends by campaign and channel. BrightFunnel also integrates with marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Hubspot.
And yes, it offers predictions about the revenue impact of marketing campaigns. Hossain estimated that those projections are within 10 to 20 percent accuracy — not just on the conversion rate but also how long it will take to close the sale, which is particularly important for the business-to-business marketers that BrightFunnel is targeting.
One of Hossain goals is to improve that accuracy, which he said is “blows
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Citing anonymous sources, the report says that Apple is exploring moving beyond the realm of digital goods and letting users pay for physical goods and services -- such as clothes or a taxi ride -- with an iTunes account. The Journal says that Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of iTunes and the App Store, has already met with industry executives to discuss the topic.
Related postsApple has the Mac to thank for its next generation of devices Facebook bites backDOJ: Court didn't abuse power by appointing Apple monitorSamsung's smartphone momentum takes a hit People buy iPads, get floor tiles The company has also moved Jennifer Bailey, a long-time executive who is running the company's online store, into a new role building the payments business, the article said.Expanding into a mobile payments business would leverage the hundreds of millions of credit cards Apple already has on file thanks to iTunes. The move would put the company in direct competition with services like Stripe and eBay's PayPal.
The space especially been heating up of late. Stripe recently raised $80 million in funding, at a valuation of $1.75 billion. And activist investor Carl Icahn has also called for eBay to spin off PayPal. Later, he said Apple would make a good suitor for the mobile payments service.
Apple did not immediately return a request for comment. We'll update this post if we hear back.
Topics: Apple Corporate, iTunes Tags: Apple, Carl Icahn, PayPal, StripeValve Steam Machine's big moment arrived atop the Palms Casino at CES 2014.
"This has been a great year for the PC," declared Valve Co-Founder Gabe Newell at an intimate press event here.
Indeed, 2013-2014 has seen the unveiling of Valve's Steam Machine console concept and prototype, SteamOS beta and the Steam Controller. Tonight, Newell officially unveiled 13 hardware manufacturers that are building their very own Steam Machines.
"Today we're taking the next step," Newell said. "The next step is to say there are another bunch of hardware manufacturers who are also going to be introducing Steam Machines."
Who is making a Steam Machine?Newell noted that the specs of all the Steam Machines varied greatly from the low to high end, something Valve said would be the case when the initiative was first announced in September.
Alienware was a late addition to Valve's Steam Machine party, and one of the few devices not to have a price.
Alternate, CyberpowerPC, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, Next Spa, Scan, Digital Storm, Gigabyte, Materiel.net, Origin PC, Webhallen and Zotac rounded out the dozen other hardware makers building devices that plug into Steam OS.
Webhallen's Steam Machine proves the devices are coming in all sizes
The price ranges from $499 - $6,000 (about £304/AU$559 - £3,658/AU$6,724), with a few TBDs thrown in. Webhallen's white-box machine occupies the top of the spectrum, while CyberpowerPC will have Machines from $499 and up.
Most house an Intel Core i7 or Core i5 CPU, though the Falcon Northwest Tiki has a customizable chip and iBuyPower will run with either a quad-core AMD or Intel chip.
It was Nvidia across the board for graphics, except for Gigabyte's Brix Pro, which is opting for an Intel Iris Pro 5200. RAM ran from 2 x 4GB to 16GB, while storage floated in the 1TB SSD range. Falcon Northwest, clearly the monster of the bunch, will have a storage option up to 6TB.
The Brix Pro Steam Machine by Gigabyte
Valve currently has 300 of its own Steam Machine prototypes in the hands of beta tests, but Newell said the company will continue to evaluate if it makes sense to manufacture its own commercial machine.
"We're going to continue to make that decision as we go along," he conceded. "We've been happy with the results of doing the hardware development. We had plans to build more Machines as our customers demand. We also expect people to be really happy with the range of offerings coming in from the range of hardware manufacturers."
The company is certainly doing some evaluation. Newell said beta testers haven't been forking over the critical feedback needed to improve the device, controller and overall experience.
"Beta users have been super happy," he said about what the feedback has been like so far. "We actually kind of want them to tell us what's wrong, so we're kind of poking at them a little harder. Right now they're just saying this is the best thing since the beginning of time, or something. We're trying to get them to give us sort of more, how can we iterate on this and what are the steps that we need to solve next."
In addition to its Steam Machine partners, Newell left the crowd with one more revelation; that Valve plans to sell its Steam Controllers separately, though manufacturers will be able to produce their own.
Read on for what else is happening at CES 2014!Join TechRadar and get our weekly newsletterGet the week's hottest news stories, our most popular reviews, and fantastic competitions straight to your inbox with our free weekly newsletter.
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The National Security Agency wants to build a futuristic super computer that can break most types of encryption, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden by the Washington Post. No reason to worry yet, however, as the Agency is not even close to figuring out how to build the space-age technology necessary to crack most security procedures.
According to the documents, the computer project is part of a $79.7 million research program, “Penetrating Hard Targets”, suspected to be under classified contracts in a lab in College Park, Maryland.
Encryption, has, since at least the Ancient Greeks, been a method of scrambling information with the noise of arbitrary character strings; only someone with a rubric could determine what is the noise and what is the message. The more noise, or bits, the more difficult it is to crack the code by trial and error. A 1,024-bit encryption could take years (or much longer) to decode.
Quantum mechanics exploits the rather unintuitive concept that matter can exist in multiple states. Quantum computers could calculate problems where bits are both a 1 and 0, or multiple 1s and 0s, potentially increasing the speed of calculations exponentially.
Potentially then, the NSA could build a computer that could decode the most advanced encryption much faster.
Generally speaking, allowing even one organization to have the capability to break encryption is potentially threatening to all security on the web. Though, advances in quantum computing could also have benefits to science and health. So, at this point, the benefits and harms are pretty theoretical.
Either way, according to The Washington Post, such computers are extremely fragile and the NSA is close to only a few of the basic building blocks. “That’s a great step, but it’s a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer,” explained MIT mechanical engineer, Lloyd Seth.
This is why the NSA is also pressuring and paying security experts to create backdoors and exploits.
Read The Post’s full story here.
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John Stelmach is the President and CFO of Contentverse, a virtual document management system used by parts of the US Government and small to large businesses all over the world.
For every desk-bound cubicle-dweller, the dream is to work from home. No physical demands. No need to look over your shoulder. No need for pants. The glorious green grass of the work-from-home employee is a goal for many successful people (and not-so-successful people) and a great way to hire the best talent without having to pay to relocate them.
The truth, for those of you demanding your boss lets you do it, is that it’s one of the more intensely hard-to-manage business processes. You go to work in an office because you at times do need to be near people. Or you won’t feel quite as part of the team if you’re not there.
Contrary to that belief, you can successfully run a well-cultured company with many parts located across a state, a country or even the world. It’s just challenging and requires even more discipline than might be necessary for a normal employee.
While companies like Google instill a company culture through a giant, all-encompassing campus, that’s not so practical when you need to hire a designer in the Czech Republic and a social media expert in Chicago. They may be
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Earlier this year I attended Startup AddVenture 2013 in Kiev. Normally tech startup conferences consist of speeches, pitches, panels and networking events. This time, however, there was an added element – major social upheaval just around the corner.
In nearby Independence Square, there was a massive protest in favour of the Ukraine joining the European Union. It was ironic. Only a couple of hours away by plane Greeks had been rioting to get OUT of the European Union, with its heavy austerity measures. But what was happening in Kiev was different, and closely affected by the politics surrounding Russia in the 21st century. The Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had, at the last minute, reneged on negotiations for the Ukraine to strengthen commercial and political integration with the European Union, to opt instead for closer ties with the Moscow-dominated Russian trading block. That brought thousands of protesters onto the streets.
It certainly charged the atmosphere of the conference, and many of us went down to see the protests on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) to take in the atmosphere. Technology has become an intimate part of social movements, and already the #EuroMaidan hashtag on Twitter had sparked international interest and media coverage of the movement.
Since then the protests have continued, and the waves of social media around the protests have exposed police beatings of protesters and journalists alike.
Involved from the beginning, now technology people are rallying. Today, hackers from across Ukraine have gathered for the “IT Hamet” Hackathon being organised by the “IT tent” based at the Euromaidan protest, the Kiev co-working space Chasopys, and the startup community in Kiev.
You can tune into the live tweets, in English, on
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Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company’s love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman presented a pretty compelling overview of the direction Google is taking in search.
Here’s the gist of it: Google knows our expectations of what a search engine should be able to do is quickly changing. The old “ten blue links” search results page is quickly going away for something far smarter that, according to Huffman, will resemble a personal assistant more than the search tool Google that launched over fifteen years ago. Indeed, that’s what Huffman considers Google’s goal: creating the ultimate personal assistant. The next generation of search, he said, is all about making “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.”
That also means that in a large number of cases, you will interact with Google on something that may not even have a screen. The car, he believes, is prime real estate for the Google Search of the future, where you simply interact with the search engine and then engage in a conversation with Google. The living room, too, he believes is a place where Google should just work. That may be on a large screen, but maybe also just through microphones and speakers that wait for your “ok Google” command.
That interaction with Google will be in the form of a back-and-forth conversation, something the company has been working on for a while now. Thanks to its Knowledge Graph, Google has become significantly better at understanding its users intends and it is already able to use voice recognition for at least a limited amount of conversation that is able to work with pronouns (and that’s really the first step in making conversations with computers seem natural). It’s not exactly the Star Trek computer, but it’s a clear first step in the direction Google is taking. Google Know currently handles 38 languages and knows about more than 18 billion facts and their connections. That – more than its search index alone – is what will create the Google of the future.
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In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we had GGV Capital’s Glenn Solomon in the studio to talk about the developing technology market in China, and his predictions for 2014.
Solomon, who has taken 32 trips to China in the past eight years, tells me in our interview that developing for the Chinese market is completely different than developing for the Western markets. And any U.S. company that wants to expand to China has to be aware of this, and take into account these differences when introducing a product in China.
Solomon explains, “Several years ago, VCs thought they would create the blank of China, and a company that was successful here would work in China. But China is unique and the way you grow and start companies there has to be local.”
Solomon also made his predictions for the IPO market in 2014, investing changes and more.
Ever wanted to pilot a X-wing fighter or a TIE Interceptor? Well, you soon can with Disney Interactive's new Star Wars: Attack Squadrons online game.
The entertainment giant announced Tuesday that it's releasing a closed beta version of this new combat game in early 2014 and fans can sign up to test it.
Star Wars: Attack Squadrons will be a multiplayer battle game that will be free to play online when out of beta. Part of the idea of the game is to let players customize and make special modifications to their "Star Wars" starships.
Related stories'Star Wars' auditions: Yoda-worthy advice from the pros'Star Wars Episode VII' to open December 2015Netflix cloaks itself in Marvel superheroesApple TV adds Major League Soccer, Disney Junior channelsNo Pixar film in 2014 due to reported production issues "In Star Wars: Attack Squadrons, players will enter exciting dogfighting action with up to 16 players at a time as they maneuver through iconic 'Star Wars' locations," Starwars.com said.Disney Interactive announced the upcoming release of another "Star Wars" game called Star Wars: Tiny Death Star in October. This game was developed to be played on mobile devices.
In April, Disney shut down LucasArts, the video game arm of the Lucas entertainment empire, by laying off staff and ceasing development of two forthcoming "Star Wars" games. At the time, LucasFilm agreed that "Star Wars" games should be developed either by third-party studios or Disney Interactive.
Here's a trailer for the upcoming Star Wars: Attack Squadrons:
Topics: Games, Virtual Worlds Tags: Star Wars: Attack Squadrons, Disney Interactive, Star Wars, LucasArts, multiplayer, starship, video game, online game