New Technology News

Friday, January 17, 2014

Image (2) sanwa_robots2.jpg for post 346777

What’s a little biomimetics between friends? Today’s edition of TIDWRTWHUFOO we present a few exciting projects from MIT’s Biomimetics Lab where they’re copying animal motion in order to create more efficient robotic hunter/killers.

First up we have a charming cheetah that runs 2.3 meters per second and looks like a skeletonized cat that is looking to scrounge up a little skin for itself. Perhaps your skin?

Below we see a hopping, squirming lizard leg that can swim through water and, presumably, take to land for a bit of fun with you and the kids. These robots use high torque-density motors as well as a bio-like bone structures to copy what real animals do on their days off.

Finally there’s there’s this rollerskating robot. If I were still in a Roller Derby team (Go Rebel Scumz!) I’d maybe be afraid of this guy but really? Who’s afraid of a skating robot? Nobody, that’s who. Stay warm, humans, because the robots will be able to withstand cold that will freeze our bones!

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Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs

3:41 PM

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What’s a little biomimetics between friends? Today’s edition of TIDWRTWHUFOO we present a few exciting projects from MIT’s Biomimetics Lab ...

Ready for your semi-regular reminder that technology is freakin’ amazing?

FaceSubstitute is a tech demo that lets you use your webcam to try on someone else’s face (god, that was a weird sentence to type), and it’s just as creepy/awesome as it sounds. Want to be Walter White? Sure! Want to be a terrfying psuedo-Kardashian? Okay! Want to be Bieber for a day? No problem, weirdo!

The app currently has 17 different faces for you to “wear”, from celebs like Nicolas Cage and Brian Cranston to stranger, cartoony masks like “Picasso”, or “Abstract” that intentionally distort your face in the freakiest of ways.

The whole thing is liiiittle bit “It puts the lotion in the basket”, but as a tech demo it’s just too damned neat. Doubly impressive is that it’s all browser based, through the magic of WebGL and ClmTracker, a Javascript library built specifically for facial feature tracking. The app was built by Norwegian developer Audun Mathias Øygard to show his library in action.

Is it perfect? Nah. It glitches out fairly frequently and it tried to render a face on my wall for some reason (Ghosts!). But when it all lines up, it’ll drop your jaw. Or Walter White’s jaw, or Bieber’s jaw, or whoever’s jaw it is you might be wearing.

Here’s the link.

How to make it work:

Open up Chrome (it works best there) and go to the app

Give the web app permission to use your webcam through the dropdown dialog box

Hit the start button, wait a few seconds for it to map out your face, then pick a new look.

Laugh at yourself for the next half hour.

A few pro tips:

Make sure you’re in an evenly and well lit room. The first room I tried it in was too dark, so it didn’t work at all.

The tracking isn’t perfect, so move slowly and try to keep your face relatively straight to the camera.

If it things start getting way off (it’ll do that after a while) just move your face out of frame and then bring it back in to reset the map.

The next obvious step for the devs, if they’re listening: make it so that people can easily record themselves wearing these freaky flesh masks, then charge’m a buck a pop to send the video to their friends.

[Shout out to Wilson over at Fast Co. for spotting this]

one who knocks

You think I just turn on my webcam and some dude is there creepin’ me out? No, Skylar. I AM the one who creeps.

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FaceSubstitute Is The Coolest (And Creepiest) Thing You’ll See This Week

3:10 PM

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Ready for your semi-regular reminder that technology is freakin’ amazing ? FaceSubstitute is a tech demo that lets you use your webcam to tr...

The 5th Annual Crunchies Awards - Ceremony

Dropbox has raised a massive $250 million funding round, valuing the company at $10 billion according to the Wall Street Journal today. The funding is led by a BlackRock fund, according to the WSJ, which cites “two people familiar with the deal” as the source of the report.

This is actually the second time that Dropbox has raised $250 million: It did so before in 2011 in a round including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia, Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Back in November, a rumor about an additional $250 million raise put the valuation of the company at a supposed $8 billion, which our own Alex Wilhelm called a “bargain” at the time.

When news of the raise was first circulating last year, revenue for the cloud storage company was rumored to be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” range according to BusinessWeek, which helps justify the huge valuation. Other companies in the same ball park in terms of worth pre-IPO include Twitter, which was valued at $10 billion back in May, 2013; Google, which went public with a $2.7 billion valuation; and Box, which is a direct Dropbox competitor and had a valuation of $2 billion when it raised $100 million late last year.

Also included in this round are existing investment partners, the WSJ says, but it’s unclear who exactly was involved at this stage. We’ve reached out to Dropbox to find out more about the reported funding and the backers in the round, and will update if we find out more.

More to come…

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Dropbox Closes Roughly $250M Round At $10B Valuation, WSJ Says

2:24 PM

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Dropbox has raised a massive $250 million funding round, valuing the company at $10 billion according to the Wall Street Journal today . The...

Facebook on Thursday announced Trending, a new product designed to surface relevant and timely conversations occurring on the network. Trending, displayed to the right of the user's News Feed, will feature a list of topics that have recently spiked in popularity, personalized according to subjects of interest to the user. It will include topics that are trending across Facebook in general, as well. Each topic will be accompanied by a headline explaining why it is trending.

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Facebook Gets More Topical

1:39 PM

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Facebook on Thursday announced Trending, a new product designed to surface relevant and timely conversations occurring on the network. Tre...

Twitter’s Vice President of Product Michael Sippey just announced that he’s stepping into an advisory role at the company, then moving on to, well, something else.

In a company email that Sippey also posted on his blog, he said he realized that “it was time to move on” after discussions with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and COO Ali Rowghani. Sippey doesn’t go into too much detail, but he hints that he wants to be at a smaller company again: “I’ve spent most of my career working at startups, helping them scale and having a direct hand on the product.”

It sounds like team members at Twitter have been frustrated with the product leadership, at least according to AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac and our own Matthew Panzarino. Isaac described the problem as a lack of a clear path for moving product changes “up the ladder at an efficient pace,” while Panzarino suggested that there was an overreliance on user testing.

Sippey’s post says that said that as an advisor, he will be “helping with product strategy, providing input on the great work the team has lined up for 2014, and helping [COO] Ali [Rowghani] find a new head of product.” It sounds like that’s mostly a transitional role, because afterward, he’s “excited to go figure out what’s next.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Sippey has been at Twitter since 2012, having joined from online media and advertising company Say Media.

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VP Of Product Michael Sippey Is Leaving Twitter

12:26 PM

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Twitter’s Vice President of Product Michael Sippey just announced that he’s stepping into an advisory role at the company, then moving on t...

Google is taking the wearable tech trend to a new level. The company has announced it is working on smart contact lenses that measure the level of glucose in one's body. Diabetes affects around one in 19 people in the world, many of whom struggle to control the levels of blood sugar in their bodies, Google said. Blood sugar imbalances can lead to issues with eyes, kidneys and hearts. Most diabetics need to prick their finger and test blood during the day. Many check their glucose levels less often than they should, due to the discomfort and disruption associated with those tests.

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Google's Smart Contacts Could Save Diabetics a Lot of Pricks

12:26 PM

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Google is taking the wearable tech trend to a new level. The company has announced it is working on smart contact lenses that measure the ...

It’s been a big week for smart things.

Coming off the heels of CES, this week we learned that Lockitron hasn’t been shipping the majority of their smart lock pre-orders, Nintendo hasn’t been selling many Wii Us, that Google has been building smart contact lenses and buying smart thermostat companies, and that our dear Chris Velazco is leaving us.

It may not be the happiest Gadgets Podcast you’ve ever heard, but at least it’s honest.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.