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Friday, February 7, 2014
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gameframe

Displaying pixel art at larger sizes in your house can be as simple as making a large print, but that means you’re stuck with a single image. San Francisco’s Jeremy Williams wants to make something a little more dynamic, so he has created the Game Frame, a square box with 256 LED lights that’s designed to make it easy to show off pixel art and OG video game art.


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The Game Frame calls to mind a simpler time, when we used graph paper to create most digital art, and if you could assemble colored squares, you could help build a AAA video game title. It’s also a modern interpretation, however, and a way to display either your own original creations or those that live in your fondest memories.


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Pre-installed on the Game Frame are 40 new animations from pixelart legend eBoy, but you can easily move your own over via SD storage using BMP files with a maximum resolution of 256 pixels (or 16×16, though larger images are supported via panning). The SD card can potentially store thousands of images, according to Williams, and the frame itself is Arduino-based and works with all existing Adafruit libraries, plus it’s fully modable, and has a playable Breakout clone pre-loaded, so it’s not just for showing off pretty art.


imagesBackers can pre-order a unit at $210 fully assembled, or less if you want to supply some of your own parts plus some elbow grease. They’re going to ship in June, according to the project page, in batches of 300 per month. Ideally, someone buys a bulk order and opens a gallery using these things, because they’re pretty awesome.





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Displaying pixel art at larger sizes in your house can be as simple as making a large print, but that means you’re stuck with a single image...

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Somewhere between Snapchat’s rise and the NSA spying revelations, it became en vogue not to have our daily adventures and thoughts etched in stone on a timeline or profile page.


Capitalizing on this trend were Whisper, Confide and then Secret.


Now there’s Wut, from one member of Square’s founding team, Paul McKellar.


It’s a very, very, very simple app. Just a text screen with a fluorescent background. You type in what you want to say, and then it shoots out as a push notification to all of your friends. You never reveal who you are. (But people might be able to guess because they’re your friends, after all.)


“It’s an ambient pulse of what your friends are doing and using,” said McKellar, who quietly launched the app a few weeks ago with Beamer Wilkins.


Like Secret, it riffs off Frank Warren’s PostSecret project.


But Wut’s updates are even more transient than Secret’s. They live on the lockscreen, and then they disappear. You can’t go into the app to find them.


“Wut’s messages don’t build up over time. You don’t have to go back and read 47,000 tweets. The most you can see at any time is five messages,” McKellar said.


The app’s deceptively simple design — no content in a feed and nothing to look at inside — made it difficult for Apple’s app store reviewers to understand Wut’s purpose. They kept sending it back to McKellar until he had to literally record a video of himself using two phones for it to make sense.


The messages I get on Wut are pretty frivolous (see the attached screenshot where I asked a bunch of people to send me messages. Wut wut?!).


Occasionally, memes run through the community. Last week, it was about saying who you were having dinner or coffee with that day or night.


Wut’s push notifications are also silent, meaning the app won’t interrupt you if you aren’t looking at the screen.


“You’d never get woken up in the middle of the night by this,” said McKellar, who was most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at SV Angel after leaving Square.


The hope is that this might take off amongst teens, who are used to being bombarded with messages all day long and get the idea of self-destructing content from products like Snapchat. Wut is currently bootstrapped.





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With great power comes great responsibility, and as Snapchat continues to grow rapidly, security researchers grow increasingly interested in the security of the platform.


Security researcher Jamie Sanchez has today exposed a vulnerability within Snapchat that opens up the app to a denial-of-service attack. By overloading an inbox with messages, hackers can freeze and crash the iPhone, requiring the user to reset their device. For Android devices, the attack doesn’t crash the device, but does make it noticeably slower, according to the Los Angeles Times.


“We are working to resolve the issue and will be reaching out to the security researcher who publicized the attack to learn more,” said Snapchat in a statement.


The original report explains that hackers can reuse tokens (that are generated by the app to verify user identity) to send hundreds of messages within seconds, which could be used by spammers to take down large groups of Snapchat users, or individual accounts.


Sanchez notified the Los Angeles Times of the vulnerability before notifying Snapchat, claiming that Snapchat “has no respect for the cyber security research community.”


And he kind of has a point.


Over the holidays, Snapchat was notified by security researchers that a security hole opened up the app to hackers who might want to expose user data. When the notification was ignored, hackers proceeded to publish the phone numbers of 4.6 million users to prove their point.


If you want to see the DoS go down, the LATimes has a demo video of the attack right here.


We’ve reached out to Sanchez for clarity, and will update the post as soon as we know more.





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Indian travel booking site, MakeMyTrip, has acquired EasyToBook, an Amsterdam-based hotel booking portal for around $5 million. With this acquisition, MakeMyTrip is hoping to increase its proportion of revenue earned through online hotel bookings, and also target inbound customers traveling to Asia.


“With the ETB acquisition, we are expanding our presence beyond South East Asia,” MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra told me.


“One of our key company objectives is to continue growing the share of the hotels and packages business in our overall revenue mix,” he added.


MakeMyTrip is among the early online businesses in India. It became the poster child for the country’s growing Internet population after raising $70 million in a Nasdaq public offering in August 2010. Since then, MakeMyTrip has experienced a roller coaster ride. In the year ending March 2013, it even posted loss of $1.9 million.


The company has been pushing to go beyond just online travel, and even explore markets outside India. In 2011 for instance, MakeMyTrip acquired two companies — Singapore-based Luxury Tours & Travels and travel search engine Ixigo.com. In November of that year, it also bought Delhi-based MyGuesthouse Accommodations for $1 million.


As this Businessweek story highlighted, the Indian online businesses are facing challenges in growing the base of people who actually transact online.


MakeMyTrip’s biggest challenge will be to not only grow its business in India by acquiring new customers, but also identify opportunities to expand beyond the country.


“We have been open to inorganic growth and acqua-hiring. Other than niche travel tech firms and specialist travel firms, we also look for opportunities in ‘supplier disintermediation’,” Kalra said.





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Indian travel booking site, MakeMyTrip , has acquired EasyToBook , an Amsterdam-based hotel booking portal for around $5 million. With this ...

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Google is rolling out an update to its Google Search for Android app today, and with this, it is introducing a number of new features for Google Now as well.


Google Now already tells you to leave for work so you can arrive on time, and it will now do the same thing for your trips to the airport, event and dinner reservations. Basically, any Google Now card that used to only remind you when you needed to be somewhere can now also tell you when you should leave to get there on time. You’ll be able to specify whether you’re taking public transport or driving, and how early you would like to arrive (which comes in pretty handy when you’re driving to the airport).


Time To LeaveIn addition to this, Google’s voice recognition feature now lets you make calls and send texts. Just say “call John” or “send text to my brother” and the app will pull the right contact up for you. If you have a few John’s in your contacts, it will check who you want to call and if you have multiple numbers, it will ask you about that, too.


As Google has previously said, it wants to be your personal assistant. And just like some of its other voice features, these new features allow you to have a relatively complex interaction with your device without ever touching the keyboard.


Other new features in this release include a new Google Now card for the Sochi Olympics, with easy access to medal standings, news and upcoming events.


The team has also increased the number of languages users can use to set reminders by voice in Google Now. The app now supports, French, German, Japanese or Korean, so if you feel inclined to do so (and you are in Germany), you can now say “Erinnere mich daran um 12 Uhr Rolf anzurufen” and Google will indeed remind you of your call at noon.





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Google is rolling out an update to its Google Search for Android app today, and with this, it is introducing a number of new features for G...

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Paris-based startup accelerator and fellowship TheFamily recently unveiled a side-project called Koudetat+. From March to July, anyone can pay and attend a day-long class targeted specifically towards aspiring entrepreneurs.


As TheFamily’s baseline suggests, it “nurtures entrepreneurs with education, unfair advantages & capital.” According to the team, entrepreneurs are made, not born — and that’s why creating this special program makes sense for those who are not quite ready to make the jump to the startup world.


Every saturday from 10am to 6pm, participants will attend very practical classes about fundraising, legal, business models, design and more. There will be pitching sessions, cases and more general classes as well to teach attendants the right mindset to become an entrepreneur.


For $680 or $820 a month (€500 and €600, respectively, depending if you pay upfront or monthly), you can attend the classes in person. For $270 a month (€200), you get access to the live stream.


TheFamily itself is a sort of accelerator that selects and takes a one percent stake in its startups in exchange for access to events, classes, contacts, mentors and more. Startups like Mindie, Bunkr and Algolia come from TheFamily.


In other words, it tries to provide a stimulating environment so that entrepreneurs can make the right decisions for their startup. With Koudetat+ you can get a taste of this environment.





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Paris-based startup accelerator and fellowship TheFamily recently unveiled a side-project called Koudetat+ . From March to July, anyone can...

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Not quite content with pushing the boundaries on the level of screen clarity with the vaunted Retina display, Apple apparently is investigating new ways of advancing screen technology. The USPTO on Thursday published three patent applications that detail Apple's interest in improving the Retina display through the use of quantum dots. The technology would enhance colors and give them a greater degree of accuracy. One way to judge a display quality is through the uniformity of color that's generated by the display on various brightness levels.


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Not quite content with pushing the boundaries on the level of screen clarity with the vaunted Retina display, Apple apparently is investig...

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