New Technology News

Monday, February 10, 2014

Robot eyes. That’s a terrifying sentence. But robotics vision is an immense area of research interest, and a key technological field in terms of building the future of a wide variety of devices. That’s why it’s very interesting that Dyson is putting a sizeable investment into robotics vision via a joint robotics lab being launched in collaboration with Imperial College London.

The investment is worth £5 million (or around $8 million U.S.) and covers a five-year period. The lab will be working on robotics vision systems that are designed to help the next-gen of robots not only see things the way that humans do, but also process that visual information in a manner that better approximates human understanding.

For those unfamiliar with the field, it covers a broad range of potential uses: A friend with a graduate degree in robotics vision engineering helps design systems for production lines that inspect the products being built for quality assurance purposes. Typically, these offer up margins of error that are tiny compared to the standards established by human inspectors.

Dyson is no stranger to conducting robotics research – the company has been exploring that area of interest for the past 15 years, according to the company. With Imperial College London specifically, it’s been working on developing systems that can view, interpret and “logically navigate” their surroundings. This applies to robotic vacuums in terms of Dyson’s business interest (the company mentions this product category specifically, so watch out Roomba) but it’s not their only goal in terms of applied robotics.

What this signals for Dyson is a graduation of sorts, as the company moves from thinking about robotics as an area of sustained but relatively light interest, into something it would like to ramp up on the production side. Hopefully at the end of these next five years, we’ll all be living with an army of Dyson home cleaning automatons, but at the very least we should see some advancements in terms of the ocular powers of our robotic friends.

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Dyson Puts £5M Into Robotics Vision Research With Imperial College London

10:38 AM

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Robot eyes. That’s a terrifying sentence. But robotics vision is an immense area of research interest, and a key technological field in term...

France's top administrative court ruled that Google must display a notice on its French search page saying that the company was fined by a local privacy watchdog. Google plans to fight the fine, but will have to adorn its Google.fr page with the humiliating message in the meantime. In January, French privacy regulators followed through on previous threats by fining Google roughly $200,000. France's privacy watchdog, CNIL, is miffed with Google's collection and storage of data across various Google platforms, such as YouTube, Google+ and Gmail.

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Unable to Dent Wallet, France Attacks Google's Pride

9:39 AM

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France's top administrative court ruled that Google must display a notice on its French search page saying that the company was fined ...

Headliner.fm, a site where users promote each other’s content, is taking on a new name, CoPromote, and announcing that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding.

If you’re a CoPromote user, the site recommends content that’s relevant to your interests, which you can then share on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. You can enter your own content into the system too, where it’s promoted in a similar fashion by other users. The system uses a virtual currency called Karma Cash, which you receive for promoting other people’s content and pay to promote your own.

Founder and CEO Mike More said the site was originally designed for musicians, but it now serves a variety of creators and marketers, such as bloggers, charities, app developers, small businesses, and online video producers. The “fm” in the company name continues to confuse some people, making them think it’s still limited to musicians, which is why the company is now rebranding as CoPromote.

More acknowledged that there are other services, such as Klout, trying to sell businesses on getting posts and tweets from social “influencers”, but he said they’re mostly focused on large brand advertisers, not the smaller content creators and content marketers that CoPromote is targeting. He added that advertising on a site like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube doesn’t make sense for these marketers, because “they do not deliver the one action which content marketers value the most: shares or retweets in a manner which [makes] economic sense.”

The worry, I suppose, is that people feel incentivized to just spam their followers with random links, but that’s why More emphasized CoPromote’s ability to match relevant content with the right users, as well as the effectiveness of the company’s campaigns. The product is supposedly used by 45,000 people daily, and that it leads to 26 times more sharing of a post.

You can use the service for free, but you have to pay for features like the ability to run more than one campaign at once.

The funding was led by ff Venture Capital (which recently raised a new fund of its own) with participation from Correlation Ventures, AlphaPrime Ventures, The Social Internet Fund, and Greg Raifman, president of Rubicon Project.

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Social Promotion Network CoPromote (Formerly Headliner.fm) Raises $1.8M

9:10 AM

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Headliner.fm, a site where users promote each other’s content, is taking on a new name, CoPromote , and announcing that it has raised $1.8 m...

Back at CES in January, among all the fun and interesting new projects we investigated, one gadget stood out among the rest. That gadget was Urb-E.

And today, almost a month later, the Urb-E scooter is live on Indiegogo. As part of the campaign, the company is launching two separate models to consumers.

The first is the Urb-E commuter, which has three wheels instead of two, making for a more reliable and smooth ride. The Urb-E GP, on the other hand, only has two wheels and can thus make sharper turns, though both models have the same speed and power specifications.

The Urb-E folds up to the size of a rollerboard suitcase for easy handling, and weighs just under 30 pounds making it an easy last-leg vehicle for urban commuters.

Topping out at 15mph, the Urb-E can last up to 20 miles on a single charge. And to top it all off, the Urb-E is easily customizable thanks to inserts that fit within the frame, giving the Urb-E a nice accent color alongside the metal.

Plus, Urb-E comes with a compartment to charge your phone and check in on the charge of your Urb-E through a dedicated Urb-E app.

According to creator Grant Delgatti, Indiegogo felt like a better fit than Kickstarter for this type of product, which he believes will be highly appreciated by the Indiegogo community.

The Urb-E campaign has just begun, with a goal of $150k in 40 days. The lowest price point to secure an actual Urb-E is $1,599, for ultra-early adopters. However, Delgatti says that the final price will be closer to $1,799, with shipments expected to go out at the end of this summer.

If you’re interested in participating in the e-vehicle revolution, head on over to the Indiegogo campaign and check it out.

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Urb-E, The Fold-Up Electric Scooter, Goes Live On Indiegogo

6:09 AM

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Back at CES in January , among all the fun and interesting new projects we investigated, one gadget stood out among the rest. That gadget w...

PlaceIQ, a startup that uses location data for mobile advertising, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series C funding.

The company was founded in 2010, back when most of the interest in location-based ads was focused on geofencing — i.e., if you’re close to a store, you get an ad for that store. CEO Duncan McCall told me that PlaceIQ’s approach is more about “a proprietary understanding of the world,” where location data is used to build a broader profile of user behavior, which in turn can be used for targeting ads and tracking their success.

In 2013, PlaceIQ says its headcount grew by more than 70 employees (543 percent). It claims to have achieved profitability as well, and it raised a $6.75 million round of funding.

So why does it need more money? McCall said that he told investors, “We’re not raising any money,” but VCs continued to show interest, and eventually he looked at the offers and decided that there was an opportunity to expand. He argued that location data can be used for more than mobile ads: “It’s sort of the next frontier for understanding consumer behavior.”

The round was led by Harmony Partners. New investor Iris Capital also participated, as did previous backers from the Series B, including US Venture Partners, IA Ventures, and Valhalla Partners.

PlaceIQ is also expanding its relationship with Publicis Group. The company was already working with Publicis’ agency SMG, but now it’s partnering with the ad giant’s innovation-focused group VivaKi to bring PlaceIQ technology to all Publicis agencies.

One of the big draws of PlaceIQ for agencies and brand advertisers, McCall said, is the fact that it offers them the aforementioned tracking and attribution. For example, if a travel company is running a campaign to convince people to visit a given state, PlaceIQ can tell them if how many people actually came after they saw the ad, and if they’d been to the state before.

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Location-Focused Ad Startup PlaceIQ Raises $15M More

6:09 AM

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PlaceIQ , a startup that uses location data for mobile advertising, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series C funding. The co...

There has been a lot of discussion on the differences between Steve Jobs' Apple and Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, with a common argument being that Apple innovated and Microsoft didn't. I don't think the facts support that. I'd argue that Microsoft out-innovated Apple during Ballmer's tenure, but Apple out-executed Microsoft. During the last decade, Bill Gates proved to be more of a liability than an asset to Microsoft. Now, new CEO Satya Nadella has moved to change Bill Gates from a problem to part of the solution.

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Innovation vs. Execution: Nadella's Brilliant Stroke

5:10 AM

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There has been a lot of discussion on the differences between Steve Jobs' Apple and Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, with a common argum...

Imagine that you are a teenager and the most annoying person in your class has a massive crush on you. No matter what you do, your would-be paramour keeps following you around like a lovesick puppy. What do you do? Well, if you have a particularly sadistic streak, you send your object of disaffection a message through Amazing Cupid. The twist? In order to see your note, he or she has to earn a certain number of points within a time limit, set by you, by playing a Flappy Bird clone. Otherwise the message disappears forever.

Amazing Cupid is currently available only in the Google Play store, but the iOS build has already been submitted to the App Store and its developer, Indonesia-based startup TouchTen, hopes it will be available for download by Valentine’s Day.

There are already tons of Flappy Bird knockoffs (in fact, one even took its #1 spot on the iOS charts after developer Dong Nguyen pulled the game out of the App Store) out there. But TouchTen CEO Anton Soeharyo is careful to point out that he got permission from Nguyen to copy Flappy Bird’s annoyingly addictive game mechanic before releasing Amazing Cupid, which Nguyen confirmed to me by email.

Soeharyo also says that TouchTen has not monetized Amazing Cupid and the only ads inside the app are for the studio’s other games. Instead, he made Amazing Cupid to test out the messaging feature. If it proves successful, Soeharyo plans to insert it into other TouchTen releases as the Jakarta-based studio, which is backed by CyberAgent Ventures, builds its mobile gaming platform.

Instead of a flappy bird, the game features a blue-haired cupid. Your goal is to keep him from crashing into a never-ending series of Doric columns. If you fail, Amazing Cupid treats you to tidbits of verbal abuse like “No wonder you’re alone.” or “Why am I grumpy? You are my only friend.” If you succeed, you eventually gain access to your secret message.

Amazing Cupid 2

Amazing Cupid also has a game-only mode, in case you really don’t have any friends. To make the game more difficult (and addicting), TouchTen added a few features that weren’t in Flappy Bird. For example, there are three levels: normal, hard, and “impossibro.”

I told Soeharyo that Amazing Cupid is funny but evil.

“That’s kind of the idea,” he said. Soeharyo first thought about self-destructing secret messages after realizing that many teenagers use Snapchat to send silly and obnoxious photos to their friends. “But Snapchat is just too easy. You send something and it disappears. So I thought, what if I add some gamification?”

If the messaging feature proves popular, Soeharyo thinks companies and celebrities can use TouchTen’s games as a marketing tool. For example, they can hold contests with a special prize for the first person who sees their message or have it be a promo code.

Soeharyo hopes to meet up with Nguyen one day. On his Twitter account, Nguyen, who runs indie game studio .GEARS, declared that he now “hates” Flappy Bird the game’s popularity ruined his “simple life.”

“I feel for Dong. He is overwhelmed. I was surprised that he was really friendly to me even though we hadn’t met before. It turns out that he’s a good guy and a good person,” Soeharyo said. “He mentioned on Twitter that he’s coming to Jakarta, so I hope to see him. I don’t want to force him, but if he wants to then maybe we can work on something together.”