Ducati's new bike jacket turns you into a human airbag

We love using motorcycle gear with built-in airbags, but not the extra heft of carrying the sensors that make the thing work. Ducati knows this, and has teamed up with Dainese to develop a system that spares our shoulders the added burden. The new Ducati Multistrada D-Air has sensors attached through the bike's electronic system that monitor the vehicle's acceleration, breaking and orientation. If it detects that you're about to crash, it'll send a signal over WiFi to your jacket, so that the internal airbags will deploy before you hit the asphalt. The first version of both bike and outfit will launch in Europe from May, just in time for a safe summer jaunt through the Transfagarasan Highway.

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Via: Gizmag, Wired

Source: Ducati

Tags: Dainese, Ducati, Motorcycle, Multistrada D-Air Next: Apple's latest experiment makes finding apps easier .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Apple turns to animated ads for the Apple iPhone 5c

With one recent report showing inventories of the Apple iPhone 5c at over 3 million units and rising, Apple has decided to turn to an animated ad campaign for the handset that was seen on the landing pages of both the New York Times and Yahoo websites. On the latter site, the ad stays inside a box, while on the former's web page, the ad takes over the entire screen with dots before returning to the normal size for a web ad.

The ads, which are interactive, show the Apple iPhone 5c screen covered with the same 35 dot pattern that appears on the phone when it is safely nestled into one of Apple's silicone cases made for the device. Eventually, the ad shows 6 video clips with popular tunes playing in the background. In one clip, Nena's "99 Luftballons" play as images of balloons turn into the dot pattern.

Apple normally doesn't resort to using this style of advertising, but some desperation might be settling in at Cupertino. With a huge number of units taking up space at Pegatron, and retailers and carriers still holding a large number of unsold units, Apple will soon need to clear some room for its new models. Speculation has Apple delivering a 4.7 inch Apple iPhone 6 and a 5.5 inch phablet sized version of the device. Soon, Apple might be forced to turn from pretty animated ads to drastic price cuts as a way to get buyers to remove the iPhone 5c from the shelves.



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SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day

A number of startups over the years have tried to reinvent PowerPoint with services that made it easier or quicker to create a slideshow presentation. Newly launched SketchDeck is taking a different approach: Instead of providing an alternative to PowerPoint or similar software applications, it’s offering a service that enables individuals or businesses to have their slides made beautiful by a team of designers who can turn around assignments within 24 hours.

Explains SketchDeck co-founder and CEO Chris Finneral, this kind of service actually already exists, but only within larger organizations, like banks or consultancies. He would know, as Finneral himself used to work as a business analyst at McKinsey in London where he made thousands of slideshows himself.

McKinsey used a service called Visual Graphics India (VGI) which allowed staff to send out their roughly drawn slides to an overseas team that would, overnight, turn those into high-quality, well-designed presentations, then email them back to you.

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Lineshark Turns Your iOS Or Android Device Into An XLR Recorder/Effects Rig

Connecting your guitar to your iPhone should be fairly simple. With the right adapter you can blow a line in through a standard headphone jack and get some tinny audio. But what if you really want to kick out the jams, as it were? For that you need something that will manage and amplify the signal as it comes out of your guitar and mic.

Lineshark acts as a sort of bridge between your XLR mics (the ones with the three massive pins), guitar line, and your phone. You can play through the Lineshark and manage power and gain using a dial on the front. Similar to the Puc by Zivix, this is some pretty geeky stuff but is a godsend for mobile musicians.

Jed Eaton and Jonathan Mayer created the project and they’re looking for $60,000 on Kickstarter. Eaton has a BSEE from Georgia Tech and works at Cisco while Mayer works at Virtual Graffiti

“Both of us are musicians – we’ve played together since middle school,” said Mayer. “In our day jobs, Jed builds consumer hardware devices and I market and sell enterprise technology. Between the two of us, we have a complete picture of design, logistics, marketing and sales. Jed plays in several local Knoxville bands, and in fact the concept and early prototypes for Lineshark came out of the ‘Band Room,’ a converted garage rehearsal space in Jed’s backyard where local musicians come to rehearse and jam. It’s loaded with mics, amps, keyboards and instruments, and we were always grumbling about having to search for converters and cables to patch instruments and effects boxes together.”

The key to Lineshark is the ability to bring audio back out of a mobile device once it’s been recorded or effects have been added. “Everything on the market was aimed at recording, not jamming or playing together,” said Mayer.

“Our project is an all-in-one audio interface for mobile devices. We connect any instrument, mobile device, and stage setup together in a single interface so musicians can use mobile devices to create new sounds in live performances.”

If you don’t know how this would work for you you probably don’t need it, but if you wanted to use your iPhone as something like an effects pedal, this would be perfect. The team is very close to manufacturing the devices and, given their skills and pedigree, it looks like these guys have what it takes to deliver. Early bird units cost $100 and you can grab one for $150 when those are gone. They plan to ship in July.

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Raspberry Pi Chalks Up Sales Of 2.5M+ As It Turns Two — $10K Bounty Offered For Opening Its Blob

Happy Birthday Raspberry Pi! The low-cost Linux microcomputer has just turned two years old. And boy how it’s grown.

The Cambridge, U.K.-based creators of the $25/$35 credit-card sized computer thought they would only ever sell a few thousand units when they started their project. In the event, they sold 100,000 units of the Model B Pi on the very first day. Global sales of all Pi models have now pushed passed 2.5 million, up from 1.75 million back in October.

The Pi continues to be used in all manner of creative ways — including as a learning platform for teaching kids about computers and coding, which was actually the original mission of the Pi Foundation. And also as a plaything for adults, with makers and fully-fledged startup businesses using it to power all manner of cool stuff.  Long may it continue. 

As Pi continues to grow, the not-for-profit Pi Foundation has just kicked off a competition — offering a $10,000 bounty — to help open source the graphics drivers running on Pi.

Currently the Pi required a block of closed-source binary driver code (aka a blob) to talk to the hardware — but the chipmaker, Broadcom, has just released the source code for another similar chip. And the Pi Foundation is looking for help porting this to Pi so users can bypass its blob and get proper access to the graphics core.

Full details below. If you’re interested in taking part in the global competition (which has no end date — continuing, presumably, until someone is able to do the deed), the competition rules can be found here.

In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a “blob”) which talks to the hardware. In our case, this blob runs on the VPU vector processor of the BCM2835 (the SOC or System On a Chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi); our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing.

Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, we will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers. This competition is open worldwide, and you can find competition rules here which describe what you have to do, and how to enter.

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SoundHound's music search app turns its focus to the Grammys with real-time updates and more

Awards nights tend to give rise to slews of app tie-ins, and for this year's Grammys, SoundHound's tossing its hat in the ring. In addition to being able to recognize songs by "listening" to them, the refreshed app comes with a dedicated page for the event that currently lists performers and nominees. Anyone who clicks SoundHound's orange button during the live broadcast on Sunday night, though, will see real-time info, the list of winners and relevant Twitter posts instead. Chances are, music lovers don't exactly need SoundHound to identify "Just Give Me A Reason" and other nominated songs. Those who find these special features useful, however, can download the app from the source links below.

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Source: Google Play, iTunes, BlackBerry World, Windows Phone Marketplace

Tags: android, app, BlackBerry, grammys, hdpostcross, IOS, mobilepostcross, music, soundhound, WindowsPhone Next: Easter egg-filled panorama of Seattle is Microsoft's latest Photosynth art project
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Zimperium Raises $8M For Mobile Security That Turns The Tables On Attackers

Let’s say you’re at the airport, checking your email on your iPhone over the wifi. Well, you’ve already made your first mistake. You’ve trusted the airport network to be secure enough to protect you from hacker attacks.

Zimperium announced today it has raised $8 million from Sierra Ventures to build out its mobile technology designed to protect you from those attacks at the airport or wherever else you might be.

The company also has a tool for IT administrators to monitor all those devices registered to the network. The company now has a super secret project in the works to turn the tables on the hackers. To do that, they are going to hire more hackers, which obviously makes sense. That should not be too difficult, considering Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers in the world, sits on the company’s board of advisors.

Zimperium has a mobile app called “zAnti” that is meant to give the every day user the ability to test networks to see if they have vulnerabilities such as the danger of “man in the middle,” attacks. These attacks hijack a user’s session and then act as a silent eavesdropper masquerading as a trusted participant.

For example, Frank and Veronica know and trust each other. But their network has gotten hacked and this dude, Lester, has put himself in the middle, pretending to be Veronica. Frank is so happy to check out the link from Veronica, and that’s all it takes. Lester has succeeded in taking over the conversation and gaining access to Veronica’s network of taco truck apps — or whatever the info she has that Lester now seeks to exploit. Lester has convinced Frank to give access to his network as well by sending him a link that he knows Frank will be enticed to open.

The people behind Zimperium are no joke. CEO Itzhak “Zuk” Avraham spent three years with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). So you can just imagine what he worked on while there.

It’s no surprise then that Avraham would boast that this new top-secret project will be able to stop attacks such as Stuxnet, the computer worm designed to attack nuclear operations.

Mobile — the next frontier — is a gold mine for the security pros. Angel List has 108 companies listed that specialize in mobile security. But Zimperium has already proven it has the chops. Now it has to show it can be a bad-ass business, too.

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Google Turns On Desktop-Based Web Streaming Of Google Play Content For Chromecast

Google Chromecast owners can now stream Google Play music and movie content direct from the web, as well as from smartphones and tablets, thanks to the Google Cast extension for the Chrome desktop browser. Oddly, Google’s own media store isn’t the first to do this, as Netflix on the web can play nice with the Chromecast extension, as can YouTube. But Play media access means Google’s $35 wonder device is everything the Nexus Q was not, and a device only limited by software and time.

When the Chromecast first launched, it was sort of like a knock-off designer handbag: Not the thing you really want, but close enough and so cheap it didn’t matter. Slowly but surely, however, Google has been improving its streaming dongle to the point where it’s quickly becoming a true competitor for Apple’s AirPlay and Apple TV devices, which is a much-needed ingredient currently missing from Google’s ecosystem.

Web-based streaming is also something that AirPlay can handle, thanks to the ability to connect an AirPlay display in the latest version of OS X. Chromecast also still can’t mirror a display entirely, which is something AirPlay can handle that’s incredibly useful for presenters, educators and many others. AirPlay has also been used by many developers as a way to program experiences designed to take advantage of using both a small and a big screen at one time, which is likewise something Google hasn’t really implemented with Chromecast just yet.

Earlier this week, Google added a good list of new content partners to Chromecast’s stable of supported software, and each drove up the value of owning one considerably in my opinion. In the same way that Apple keeps improving the Apple TV via content partnerships and service improvements, Google keeps doing the same with Chromecast, but the short-term potential here is even greater, I think, at least in terms of immediate impact for a huge group of Chrome and Android users.

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