Tag: Science & Technology

How about brushing your teeth and seeing Google Now cards on your restroom mirror? No, this is not a tease, well, at least for one Googler.

Google software engineer Max Braun has designed such a ‘smart mirror’ powered by Android which shows him time, date, current weather, a 24-hour forecast and news headlines.

Braun, who showcased his smart mirror in a blog post, had always wanted a smart mirror but he didn’t find one in the market thus leading him to make one for himself. The engineer used a two-way mirror, display panel, controller board and other components to design the mirror of his dreams just like the one from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie The 6th Day.

The code behind the user interface leverages some simple Android APIs like TextClock for the date and time, as well as Forecast for the weather and the Associated Press for news. Braun is also trying to add traffic and reminders to the interface.

“The idea is that you don’t need to interact with this UI,” he wrote. “Instead, it updates automatically and there’s an open-ended voice search interface for anything else,” he said adding that his prototype mirror was still a work in progress.

Currently, the mirror is powered by an Amazon Fire TV Stick, which runs an Android API that drives the UI. The Googler had also experimented with Chromecast and Nexus Player before putting together his prototype.

WhatsApp has just bumped the user limit in chat groups on its platform to 256 members from 100 irrespective of the mobile platform -Android and iOS.

The popular messaging app, which just crossed a billion users globally, had initially raised the number to 100 from 50 in November 2014. Currently, over 70 million people use the popular instant messaging platform in the country.

Since February 2014 when Facebook acquired WhatsApp, several changes have been made to the messaging app. In April 2015, the messaging app officially added voice calling, a long-teased feature that was previously available only by invitation. Users now call their contacts worldwide for free over a WiFi or 3G/4G connection.

Also, the app might soon get a video calling feature and a multi-tab user interface. A German website named Macerkopf had revealed screenshots that shows an ongoing video call in WhatsApp on iOS. If the screen shots are real, WhatsApp’s video calling interface is somewhat similar to its voice-calling one. Users would be able to mute calls and also switch between the front and back cameras.

The app has also waived off the 99 cents yearly subscription charge but founder Jan Koum has however said that the company will be experimenting with different revenue models.

Source: HT

NEW DELHI (TIP): Charles Bombardier, the man behind the concept aircraft Skreemr which could travel at Mach 10, has now unveiled the Antipode, a hypersonic jet that he claims will cover the distance between London and New York in a mind-boggling 11 minutes.

Bombardier, who is affiliated with the Canadian aircraft company Bombardier Inc, says the Antipode can reach Mach 24, twice the speed of the Skreemr and 12 times faster than the Concorde. In theory, he claims it can carry 10 people for a distance of up to 20,000km in less than an hour.

Last year, the Canadian engineer designed the Skreemr, a four-winged scramjet that he claimed could carry 75 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 10.

One Mach averages 1195km/hour, a speed equal to that of sound. An aircraft flying at Mach 2 is flying at twice the speed of sound, in the air.

On his website, Bombardier says the Antipode can be an ideal business or military aircraft to fly senior officers anywhere in the world in almost no time.

Antipode, he says, will be an aircraft with rocket boosters attached to its wings, which would propel the plane to 40,000 feet and help it reach Mach 5, before they separate and fly back to base.

After that, the supersonic combustion engine will be ignited, shooting the jet up to a speed of Mach 24.

To avoid overheating at such speeds, the jet will use NASA’s Long Penetration Mode concept, by which nozzles on the nose and wings would use the air flowing through to cool down the surface temperature of the plane.

Interestingly, the images of the Antipode concept have been created by Abhishek Roy, the founder of Lunatic Koncepts, a design lab based in India. Roy has also created the renderings for the Subrocket car and the Korbiyor autonomous electric hearse concept.

LONDON (TIP): Scientists expect that, for the first time, the internet traffic could travel at the speed of light, while being completely open and programmable courtesy of revolutionary internet technologies.

The current internet infrastructure is unable to support independent development and innovation at physical and network layer functionalities, protocols and services, while at the same time supporting the increasing bandwidth demands of changing and diverse applications.

The research introduces new concepts of open source optical internet enabled by optical white box and software defined network technologies.

“These technologies will hide complexity of optical networks and open them up for traditional programmers and application developers to create new type of internet applications taking advantages of speed of light,” said Reza Nejabati, from University of Bristol in UK.

“New internet technologies frequently emerge, but most of them rarely result in new and revolutionary internet applications,” he said.

“The technologies suggested could pave the way for the creation of new internet services and applications not previously possible or disruptive,” Nejabati said.

“The technologies could also potentially change the balance of power from vendors and operators that are monopolising the current internet infrastructure to wider users and service providers,” he said.

Source: PTI

NEW DELHI (TIP): TomTom, the Amesterdam-based technology company, is all set to return to India with another set of its smartwatches after exactly a year.

The company had launched its GPS fitness watches with heart-rate monitors on January 21 last year at a starting price of Rs. 12,999. The company had justified its launches stating that the wearables category was growing in India with people becoming more concerned about their health. The company didn’t break out any specific sales figure of its previously launched devices in India.

The watches were sold in exclusive partnership with e-tailer Flipkart.

The new series showcased in IFA Berlin last year, called Spark and also to be sold at Flipkart, will be priced between Rs.13,999 and Rs.25,999. The Spark watches will come with music playback ability, GPS and heart rate monitors.

The first of the three variants to be launched on Thursday will not come with the music playback option while the other variants will house all the three with the top end coming with a HP smartwatch bundle.

The Spark will be the first of its kind smartwatch to have independent music playback letting users forget the smartphone at home. Although it cannot stream music, users can feed songs to the memory of the watch via a software bundle available separately for iOS and Windows.

It will also be interesting to see how the company copes up with the rapidly changing market in India. While wearables like that of TomTom (which helps excercise, track activity and lets you read notifications) are getting cheaper and smaller, TomTom’s last launches were a little heavy and were impossible to be worn throughout the day without getting a numb wrist.

Recently, foreign top players like Fitbit and Jawbone have entered India inspite of the world market making a shift towards smartwatches rather than simple activity trackers. Gartner’s research director Vishal Tripathi also had an interesting take about the wearables market.

“Although the market is growing, it is still at a nascent stage. TomTom has lesser brand value than Apple or a Fitbit and hence will be tough for them to capture the market here. The high price of the product and the music playback feature can be the best differentiator,” he said adding that a lot of people are still depending on apps to measure their runs and fitness activities.

Source: HT

NEW DELHI (TIP): Google Search has been including a lot of features to make its search engine easier, intuitive and fun to use.

After launching the image search option, now the California-based Internet major is bringing animal sounds to its search engine. Under the new ‘animal sounds’ search, users can now ask, by either talking to the Google app on their phone or typing “What sound does the duck make?” And the search will throw back a picture of a duck and play a recording of the sound they make.

According to Google, there are 19 animal sounds —ape, cat, cow, dog, duck, elephant, horse, lion, moose, owl, pig, raccoon, rooster, sheep, tiger, turkey, turtle, bowhead whale, humpback whale and zebra. The company also said that these sounds were all recorded from live animals.

“The animals included are a combination of the top searched for animals in Google and animals with some of the most iconic sounds,” it said in a statement adding that the Search will work for Android, iOS and the Web.

Next time you wan to talk to someone in Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, just call them on Skype.

Or text in 50 different languages and the recipient will receive the texts in their default languages even if it’s Hindi or Urdu.

The feature first caught our attention in 2014 when it was beta. But now, anyone using Skype on a Windows PC can use it. This is Skype’s attempt to break the language barrier by making multi-lingual conversations not just possible but as seamless as they can be. Voice and Text translations work in real time with the app acting as a translator. Without a third person involved, the conversations can stay as natural as possible.

While other messaging apps are busy adding features like bots, Gadgets360 reports that company has already seen a 400% increase in calls since the feature launched, with English and French being the most popular pair.

There was a time when hoverboards and robots were popularised by sci-fi movies as the technology of the future. Well, that future has now arrived. From robots taking over the world to bots akin to Samantha from the film Her (2013) in the offing, 2016 has enough to keep technology buffs excited.

Internet bots gain popularity 

Internet bots are software applications that run automated tasks. Lately, companies have begun experimenting with more creative variants that help boost productivity and keep track of what others are doing. There is buzz on the web about Microsoft’s experimental Mandarin-language bot, Xiaolce, much like Samantha from Her. Experts also believe that 2016 is when bots will enter newsrooms to tag articles in real time, help users manipulate social media to their benefit, and even come to the aid of HR managers looking to train new recruits.

Modular phone hits shelves

Google’s Ara project aims to create a smartphone made up of several pieces, each corresponding to one of the components of the phone: processor, memory, camera, microphone, 3G chip. In early 2015, a prototype, referred to as Spiral 2, was presented that was supposed to be sold in several test markets. However, the heads of the project ultimately pushed its launch to 2016, explaining via Twitter that it required more tests and simulations than expected. The phone in expected to finally see the light of day this year.

Homing in

From shopping malls and hotels to museums and airports, Bluetooth-powered beacons have slowly gained popularity in the real world. These devices track the location of a
smartphone or a smartwatch, and send real-time notifications. Experimental in 2015,
these beacons are all set to go mainstream in 2016, offering tailored deals and personalised messages to the user as well as the next level of marketing and promotions to companies.

RIP password

The transition started in 2015, and this could be the year when the world finally does away with the password. With biometrics catching on with the makers of smartphones, laptops and tablets as well as the buyer, eye scans and fingerprint sensors are set to become the norm. So, the time to remember multiple passwords for various digital accounts could soon be a thing of the past.

Bio-ware

After years of discussion on whether or not they will make a mark, wearables finally arrived on the technology scene in 2015, with sales growing phenomenally. Experts believe that biosensing wearables, the next generation that will be used to track heart-rates, fitness levels, body temperature and a whole lot more, could slowly start gaining momentum in 2016. Research and experimentation has already started for smaller, lighter, and more efficient devices. The emerging concept has already attracted many major companies: Chaotic Moon is developing a temporary tattoo called Tech Tats. Containing electronic components, including a microcontroller and LED lights, it can detect if you’re stressed and monitor blood pressure, and then transmit all that data through electroconductive paint.

Print run

Last year was a turning point for 3D printers, with the biggest growth in printers that retail for under USD 1,000 (approx. Rs 66319.95). High-quality products, like the Dremel Idea Builder, became available at competitive prices. Manufacturers like the German 3D Freesculpt or the American XYZprinting launched inexpensive models, and brands like Discovery 200 even cut their prices. But in 2016, according to research company Gartner, around 4,96,475 3D printers are projected to be sold globally, which is more than double the forecast for 2015.

So smart

Virtual assistants on today’s smartphones are smarter than ever before. But the Siris, Cortonas and Google Nows of the mobile world still have to be told what to do before they start working on a task. However, research has already started on AI
(artificial intelligence) advances that will allow virtual assistants to understand tasks we’re working on. In fact, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research Asia, has said that 2016 will see “significant adoption of artificial intelligence for personal assistant services”.

Robots take over the world

Task-oriented robots assigned to take over household chores, such as lawn mowing or vacuum cleaning, are set to become increasingly popular over the next few years, according to figures from Juniper Research. And with Softbank’s Pepper, Buddy from Blue Frog Robotics and other robots set to become more widely available in 2016, more consumers could be open to welcoming robots into their homes.

Twitter Inc is building a new feature that will allow users to post tweets as long as 10,000 characters, technology news website Re/code reported on Tuesday.

Twitter, which currently has a 140-character limit, may launch the service toward the end of the first quarter but has not set an official date, Re/code reported, citing sources familiar with the plans.

The sources said the character limit could change before the final version of the product is unveiled.

The micro-blogging website, in an attempt to keep the current look for the Twitter timeline, is testing a version of the product which displays 140-character long tweets but expands to reveal more content when users click on the tweet, Re/code said.

Twitter has been experimenting under Jack Dorsey – the company’s co-founder who returned as chief executive in October – to make the service more engaging.

In the few months under Dorsey, Twitter introduced the ‘Moments’ feature, added polls to tweets, rolled out a “buy” button and replaced its star-shaped “favourite” icon with a heart-shaped icon called “like”.

Twitter has come under increasing pressure to boost user growth and ad revenue. It faced its slowest user growth in 2015 – it now boasts just over 300 million users -and was eclipsed by photo-sharing app Instagram, owned by Facebook Inc, which surpassed 400 million users last year.

However, some users took to Twitter to express their opposition to the new feature with the hashtag #beyond140.

Chinese electronics and content giant Letv, after delaying its entry into India for almost over a year, debuted their first products on Monday without letting know about their prices.

The company showcased a 3D Helmet or a virtual reality headset (VR), a smart bicycle and LeMe bluetooth headphones at an event held here on Monday and said that it would launch their first smartphone –LeMax — in the country on January 20.

“We wanted to dissociate as a brand which only sells smartphones. Hence, we brought the ecosystem first so as to show how serious we are about the country,” a Letv spokesperson said on the condition of anonymity.

Letv’s 3D helmet, essentially a VR device, comes equipped with a 5.5-inch sharp 2K LCD display and a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. The VR headset weighs around 450 grammes and comes with a Type C port.

The company also launched a smart bicycle called the Super Cycle which is the first of its kind internet enabled urban bicycle. The cycle comes with a fingerprint sensor to avoid theft. It also has built-in walkie talkie, bluetooth and the user can control the cycle through an app.

“At Letv, it is constant endeavour to provide consumers with the most innovative products that offer best in class experiences,” Dickson Lee, general manager for Asia Pacific smar devices division, Letv, said adding that the company was dedicated to offer Indians with lifestyle enabling products.

The company also launched a LeMe bluetooth headphones that supports playback uptp 10 hours while getting charged in just two.

Source: HT

New Delhi – India notched up its billionth mobile phone subscriber in October, the country’s telecoms regulator said, underscoring the importance of its fast-growing mobile market, the world’s second largest after China.

Mobile phone subscriptions have boomed in India in recent years as aggressive cost-cutting by its 12 hyper-competitive operators has driven down prices, leading to some of the cheapest tariffs in the world.

The number of mobile subscribers rose by nearly 7 million in October from the previous month to surpass one billion, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said Wednesday, hitting a milestone that China reached in 2012.

“It is a matter of great pride for us. It shows an empowered India and an engaged India and a tech-savvy India,” Communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told the Times of India newspaper.

“It will mean more data, more government-to-government connectivity, more broadband,” he said.

The figures do not indicate that India has one billion individual mobile phone users, however, as many people have more than one connection.

“Dual sim” phones are particularly popular, allowing the country’s cost-conscious consumers to use two different mobile plans to get the cheapest rates for local or national calls, for example.

In poorer Indian states such as Bihar, “teledensity” — the penetration of telephone connections for every hundred people — is as low as 54 percent, with a stark urban-rural divide.

But it still represents remarkable growth in the market since 2000, when there were just two million mobile subscribers in the country, according to research firm Ipsos.

“India is adding 10 to 15 million mobile subscribers every quarter — that’s big,” Bhasker Canagaradjou, head of business consulting at Ipsos in Mumbai, told AFP.

“It is the fastest-growing market globally — even China is not growing as fast,” he said.

With more than 200 million Indians mostly in rural areas yet to get their first phone and others rushing to trade up to smartphones, growth is unlikely to slow down dramatically, Canagaradjou said.

For many people in India, a mobile phone represents their sole means of accessing the Internet, with smartphones leapfrogging desktops as the most common way of getting online.

Cheap, mostly Chinese-made smartphone handsets are available from as little as around 1,000 rupees ($15), with many people waiting for free wifi connections to get online instead of buying expensive data plans.

Seeking to capitalise on this, Google recently announced a plan to install free wifi at 400 Indian railway stations across the country over the next three years.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Scientists, including those of Indian-origin, have proposed a new “hydricity” concept for round-the-clock power by not only generating electricity from solar energy but also producing and storing hydrogen from superheated water.

“The proposed hydricity concept represents a potential breakthrough solution for continuous and efficient power generation,” said Rakesh Agrawal from Purdue University in US. “The concept provides an exciting opportunity to envision and cre ate
a sustainable economy to meet all the human needs in cluding food, chemicals transportation, heating and electricity,” he said.

Hydrogen can be combined with carbon from agricultural biomass to produce fuel, fertiliser and other pro ducts. “If you can borrow carbon from sustainably available biomass you can produce anything: electricity chemicals, heating, food and fuel,” said Agrawal.

Hydricity uses solar con centrators to focus sunlight producing high temperatures and superheating water to operate a series of electricitygenerating steam turbines and reactors for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The hydrogen would be stored for use overnight to superheat water and run the steam turbines, or it could be used for other applications, producing zero greenhouse-gas emissions, researchers said.

In superheating, water is heated well beyond its boiling point – in this case from 1,000 to 1,300 degrees Celsius -producing high-temperature steam to run turbines and also to operate solar reactors to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

“In the round-the-clock process we produce hydrogen and electricity during daylight, store hydrogen and oxygen, and then when solar energy is not available we use hydrogen to produce electricity using a turbine-based hydrogenpower cycle,” said Mohit Tawarmalani, professor at Purdue. “Because we could operate around the clock, the steam turbines run continuously and shutdowns and restarts are not required.

BEIJING (TIP): For the first time, a Chinese news channel has employed an artificial intelligence robot as a weather reporter on its live breakfast show, raising concerns among the country’s journalists as it could threaten their jobs.

“I’m happy to start my new work on the winter solstice,” robot XiaoIce said during her debut on Tuesday morning. Xiao-Ice is actually a piece of software developed by Microsoft using smart cloud and big data. In the first two days of her work, XiaoIce impressed many with her cute voice.

She also comments on big news events on Shanghai Dragon TV.

According to Microsoft, breakthroughs in text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI) have helped Xiao-Ice score high points for linguistic naturalness, with hers being closer to the human voice than other speech synthesisers. Through unique emotional technology, she can make comments instantly based on weather data.

After her successful debut, people are worried that XiaoIce could cause traditional TV anchors and weather reporters to lose their jobs. Song Jiongming, director of TV news for the Shanghai Media Group, pointed out that human anchors will not be completely replaced by XiaoIce in the near term, but the robot will supplement humans with big data analysis capability.

Robot reporters could easily replace a lot of Chinese reporters like this nationwide, a Chinese journalist said. “I’ve heard about robot reporters for a long time, but thought they only operated in the United States and Europe,” Li Wei said, adding that “I’m not ready to compete with them yet.”

In September this year, Chinese social and gaming giant Tencent published its first business report written by a robot this, stroking fears among journalists.

The “flawless” 916 -word article, completed in just one minute by Dream writer, was released via the company’s online portal.