Hardware is becoming a big deal, and now it’s easier than ever to start building your hardware startup, thanks to the proliferation of crowdfunding and easier access to materials. One particular startup incubator, called Haxlr8r, is looking to accelerate that trend, with a program that embeds startups right in the thick of China’s booming electronic and manufacturing industry.

Today in San Francisco, Haxlr8r had its second demo day, introducing 10 new hardware-based startups which just spent the last two-and-a-half months building hardware in Shenzhen, China. Part of the appeal of HAXLR8R is that startups looking to build something new can move from idea stage to rapid prototyping thanks to the program’s proximity to all the electronics and factories that are necessary to build the hardware products they want to create.

“As a maker, and as someone who likes building things, it is the best place in the word to build products,” Haxlr8r program director Zach Smith said. Unlike software, where you can build and prototype in the same day, hardware makers need a way to iterate more quickly. “In Shenzhen you have access to high-end prototyping tools.”

Today’s demo day had a diverse group of companies, with everything from WiFi-connected lights to air robots to brain-scanning headbands to, um, mobile phone-controlled sex toys. But these are the three startups were our favorites:

Spark

Spark is designing the WiFi brain which will power the next generation of connected products. It’s created the Spark Core, a small electronic circuit that can be embedded directly into hardware devices, to cost-effectively integrate wireless connectivity into them. In addition to selling its own components, for big OEMs, Spark will enable them to integrate Spark’s design into the core of their own circuit boards.

Along with the Spark Core, the company is launching a cloud platform with an API to enable OEMs to connect their products to services and apps online. Unlike some platforms, which operate a platform as a service, Spark Core is pitched as a “platform as a component.” Instead of paying monthly for a service for a product that OEMs only sell once, the Spark Cloud has a one-time fee associated with each product that connects.

Spark has raised a seed round, and gotten about $250,000 through a campaign on Kickstarter for hobbyists who want to try out its Core and embed it into their own products. That said, it’s raising a Series A round of funding to extend its functionality to more devices.

Vibease

How can you not love the idea of a sex toy that is controlled by your mobile phone? Vibease has not only built a $99, waterproof vibrator, but it’s added built-in Bluetooth connectivity. That allows users to hook up with an app that has a whole bunch of “fantasies” — that is, audio-erotic scenarios that can be listened to and are designed to match the movements and intensity of the device itself.

“Sex is part of our human basic needs, and the reason we love sex so much is because of orgasms,” said founder Dema Tio. “The problem is that not everyone can have an orgasm. Half of all women don’t have orgasms during sex.” Vibease, he believes, gives women the best orgasm experience ever.

The idea is not just to have a vibrator, but also to provide a marketplace for fantasies which sell for $0.99 each. The U.S. sex toy industry is a $15 billion business, and the erotic novel market is a $1.5 billion business. Vibease straddles both of those markets. It sees the fantasy market also as a way to sell more vibrators.

While Vibease is coming to market with its own vibrators at first, the company hopes to open up to other manufacturers by letting them add connectivity with its chip. By licensing their technology to others, it could add the same functionality to other sex toys in the future.

Helios

I’m a sucker for bike startups, especially those who make my ride more safe. As someone who bikes everywhere everyday, I have a bit of a bias on this point, but Helios has built something awesome: The startup has created handlebars that have integrated lights, bluetooth, and GPS connectivity to fundamentally change the way you get around.

Helios handlebars are available in bullhorn or drop bars, with a 50 lumen front light, as well as side lights that have a range of functionality. With Bluetooth built in, the handlebars connect to your mobile phone and provide a number of things you can do with them. For instance, you can set the lights to act as turn signals, or as a visual speedometer so that you know how fast or slow you’re moving, or as ambient lighting that you can set with your phone.

The handlebars also work to deter theft by acting as a tracking device. With GPS built in and a 15-day backup battery, they can enable you to track your bike if it’s been stolen and fure out where it is. For those of us who are paranoid about having our bikes stolen, the setup provides a little piece of mind.

Honorable Mention

Honorable mention goes out Hex Air Robots, which is creating not only an awesome little drone, but also a cool brain and mobile app to easily control it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Glympse has been in the news for its deals with the likes of Ford, Mercedes Benz and BMW/Mini to integrate its location-sharing and tracking technology into in-car systems on connected automobiles. Today it’s taking its expansion strategy one step further, with the release of a new software development kit, giving app developers and others the ability to include Glympse-powered location-sharing technology into their services with a few lines of code.

The news comes during a time when social-mapping technology is in the news, with Facebook reportedly in the process of acquiring Waze for up to $1 billion, and Alibaba investing nearly $300 million into AutoNavi in a strategic alliance to develop location-based commerce and other mobile navigation and mapping services.

While Waze has developed a way to collate crowdsourced mapping and traffic data, Glympse doesn’t create the maps themselves — as you can see in the example below, the map data can come from Google, but also Microsoft’s Bing, Open Streetmap and others — but its location-tracking technology effectively lets you create a real-time trail showing your route to a particular location.

The resulting maps are animated routes tracking your movements and other data like the speed at which you’re travelling, travel time, and expected arrival time. A person can also make the data ephemeral (like Snapchat!) by giving it an expiration date for how long it can be accessed look something like this:

Bryan Trussel, CEO and co-founder of Glympse, says that already there are a number of companies approaching Glympse for ways to integrate its technology into new applications — areas that the company itself just doesn’t have the resources to tackle itself right now. One of these involves integration into apps around air travel: tracking where a person is as his plane flies from point A to B, useful for someone waiting to pick up that person from the airport.

Trussel says that the SDK will effectively be a version of the private APIs that Glympse already provides to partners like the car companies and others like Garmin.

It comes at a time when Glympse will continue to expand that partner list, and expand out to other verticals. “We’ve done a major partnership every six months, and we plan more, at the rate of one every couple of months,” he said in an interview. “Some car partners but the majority will be outside the automotive space.” This could also extend to licensing deals for the Glympse technology to start appearing on mobile devices as well. And in fact, there are already a number of companies in non-automotive using Glympse’s technology already. They include Gripwire (app development), PetHub (pet protection) and Runtriz (for hospitality solutions).

Glympse will be offering use of the API free of charge to implementations of 300,000 users or less, in the form of a Lite SDK. That free SDK will include the ability to add Glympse functionality to a mobile app as well as a Map Tool, for developers to create and host a custom Glympse Map. The SDK will let users add GPS and location management, contact integration and viewer permissions as well as the coding for a user interface for users to share location from within the third-party app.

Glympse says that a further, paid commercial SDK is designed for developers and enterprises that expect more than 300,000 monthly active users, or need more support, flexibility with user experience flow, or the ability to create more custom features.

So why the delay of offering an API only now? Trussel says that Glympse has had a lot of incoming requests to use the platform from the beginning, but “we decided not to lead with the platform because we wanted to have it stable and documented. Having an SDK means dealing with support and questions, and we spent our resources working with customers directly and refining platform. Now we are at the point where our partners are using the platform in identical ways so we can handle a variation of people using in a lot of different ways. The timing will be right for us.”

Glympse has to date raised $7.5 million from investors that include Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s hard to say with any conviction where we are in the process of, shall we say, crowd-sourcing justice. Like most things, it is a process, not something achieved, and while some question its utility, it’s no good to question its existence.

Some will see the events this week in Boston as the moment digilantism (convenient portmanteau!) went from undercurrent to cresting wave. But I’m not quite in agreement: This week marked a significant point, not because of the act itself, but because of the consumption of that act (a necessary portion of justice, some would argue). As I watched the streaming video of (absurdly) a police scanner in some stranger’s living room with a quarter million other people, I was struck by how crude the process was and that demand had reached that magical point where something that was always there is suddenly “discovered” by the world at large. The result is usually astronomic growth.

By that measure, we’re near the beginning of the digilante phenomenon — much as we were near the beginning of the digital music movement in the early 2000s. But we await both breakthrough and opposition.

I don’t mean to downplay the versatility and importance of services like Ustream, Twitter, Reddit, and so on for the proliferation of information. But then again, I wouldn’t have downplayed the importance of things like FTP, BBSes, Download.com, and their like towards the end of the 90s.

Think about how strange and inadequate everything about the Internet-at-large response to Boston was! A video of a police scanner was the best source of information to millions! The police were asking listeners not to post information like streets and names — asking, on a publicly accessible broadcast! Reddit and a dozen other major social sites bent under the torrent of information, necessitating meta services to sort and stream it. Even then the level of noise and redundancy was almost intolerable.

Think about the scrutiny of imagery being done by masses of people immediately following the explosions. How admirable, and yet how rudimentary everything about it was! We have powerful and elegant tools for solving the most trivial of everyday problems — apps to organize our apps, for god’s sake — but when it comes to leveraging human ingenuity for the purposes of the highest urgency, it’s posts on 4chan and slapdash pop-up sites?

And yet, despite this, the level of interest was incredible — almost embarrassingly so, considering how the manhunt eclipsed other major disasters and attacks. But this was a demonstration not of supply side of the equation. Important information tends, like liquid, to find its way down from the source to its destination, no matter how tortuous the route. In this case, there were millions (perhaps hundreds of millions, but at any rate more than ever before), who were unsatisfied with the stage at which they were permitted to partake. A few years ago they might have been happy to wait for the morning paper. Now, even people to whom Twitter is still just the noise that birds make are finding an insatiable appetite for real-time data.

That is why we are at what amounts to the beginning of a transformative period, by the middle of which the way we experienced Boston will remind us of how we listened to music before the Walkman.

The other shoe

But it’s not as simple as all that. While one pendulum swings toward the future, another passes it, returning in the other direction.

Part of what made Boston exciting was the fact that we were tapping into something that was, in a way, forbidden. I’m not really sure if I broke any laws yesterday, but I suspect I did. I had no fear, however, because I was clearly beyond the reach of the law. Is the law as happy with the situation as I?

How long do you think it will be until, just as a very basic example, police communicate only on encrypted channels, and relaying information or rebroadcasting it is a serious crime? How long before a law like SOPA or CISPA enables a quick legal takedown of, say, Ustream, which could be said to be complicit in violations of national security if someone were to use it to stream the movements of an FBI team down the street, or the surrender of the user’s real name and location? Ditto Pastebin for hosting bomb-making instructions? Or Thingiverse for proliferation of easily replicable firearms?

The extent of the information to which we have access, and the means with which we communicate it, may be reaching the end of their progressive pendulum swing, and the next few years could bring them crashing backwards, as more restrictive security policies, harsher penalties, and newly granted powers make the process of finding and sharing that information more difficult and more risky.

Ambuscade

It’s ironic that the word “vigilante” has come to refer to people who take the law literally into their own hands, although the word itself has its root not in touching, but merely watching. These digilantes, in contrast, are empowered as never before to watch, but not to touch — despite the (admittedly made-up) word’s root lying closer to the latter. But like their street-level counterparts (Vigilantum vulgaris), all it takes is one serious misstep and they raise their own obstruction. Let us suppose, hypothetically, that the broadcast on the Internet of the streets to which police were being deployed in Boston allowed the bomber to slip through the cordon and get away. It’s not so hard to imagine, given the level of access onlookers had.

Can you imagine the outrage that would be erupting now against the tools that are being lionized in bars and on forums everywhere, as a democratization of surveillance (as another column on this website described it) that allowed millions not just to watch, but to aid? If it had not aided but disastrously impeded, we would be witnessing pundits, members of Congress, and perhaps even the president himself inveighing furiously against these “weapons of mass proliferation” with which irresponsible “cyber-hackers” had cheated justice.

The opponents of crowd-sourcing the process of justice are not merely senseless or ignorant — they have legitimate objections (which I will not tire the reader with here, but can be readily imagined). But many of these objections stem from the crudity of the tools and the process, the inescapable fact that foolish rabble and bad actors are at least as common and active as the well-intentioned and insightful, for instance, or that there is no central authority over privileged information, as there has been for much of history.

They have the advantage: Laws, policies, tools ready to deploy, hanging like the sword of Damocles and awaiting only that critical failure. A similar thing happened after September 11th, as we have had ample time to reflect on, and it will happen again. It is not a conspiracy theory that a state of war is conducive to laws that restrict freedom — and as both real life and rhetoric show, these days, the Internet is just another theater of operations. CISPA passed the House on the back of perception of an invisible cyber-war that we are, naturally, losing.

And, as always, the pendulums are in continuous action and the conscientious columnist does not comment too explicitly, for want of complete information. But of this you may be sure: The demand for this kind of information is about to skyrocket, while the liberty of that same information is at severe risk of declining. This tension will brook conflict, as it ever has, though in all likelihood a fragile equilibrium will be struck, as it ever has, like the frontier between battling nations during a holiday.

There will always be a way, of course — of that you can be sure. But when the stakes are raised, the way is not always easy, especially when it is the object of those in positions of power to make it difficult. We live in interesting times, but not charmed ones. Be ready for the backlash.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile malware remains a small and nascent issue, especially when compared to the scale of threats crowding around desktop OSes, but the threat that is out there continues to mostly affect Google’s Android platform. This despite Apple’s iOS technically having more vulnerabilities, according to a new report by security software firm Symantec. The difference in threat level is a natural consequence of the two differing mobile ecosystem approaches: Apple’s walled garden vs Android’s open playground.

Symantec identified just 108 new unique threats to all mobile platforms in 2012, 103 of which targeted the Android platform vs one targeting iOS. Symbian was second after Android, with three unique threats identified, while Windows Mobile had one. But when looking at platform vulnerabilities Symantec said there were 387 documented vulnerabilities for iOS vs just 13 for Android. Elsewhere, BlackBerry also had 13, and Windows Mobile had two.

Symantec’s report notes:

Today, mobile vulnerabilities have little or no correlation to mobile malware. In fact, while Apple’s iOS had the most documented vulnerabilities in 2012, there was only one threat created for the platform. Compare this to the Android OS; although only thirteen vulnerabilities were reported, it led all mobile operating systems in the amount of malware written for the platform. Vulnerabilities likely will become a factor in mobile malware, but today Android’s market share, the openness of the platform, and the multiple distribution methods available to applications embedded with malware make it the go-to platform of malware authors.

The root cause of the (small) threat level for Android is typically downloads from third party app stores (i.e. not Google Play) or users directly side-loading apps — something the Android platform allows, via a user-enabled setting, while iOS users wanting to sideload apps or use third party app stores have to jailbreak their device. It’s that open vs closed approach that explains the differing threat level, says Symantec, noting: “Android users are vulnerable to a whole host of threats; however, very few have utilized vulnerabilities to spread threats.”

Symantec does flag up one example in its report of “rogue software masquerading as popular games on the Google Play market, having bypassed Google’s automated screening process” last year. But clearly the vast majority of Android malware lands on devices via the unofficial routes cited above.

In terms of location, Android threats are ”more commonly” found in Eastern Europe and Asia, according to the report. China has a thriving market of Android-based devices that dispense with Google’s Play store, which likely explains some of the Asian distribution of Android threats.

Another security issue affecting Android is platform fragmentation, with multiple older versions of the OS potentially creating a risk, says Symantec, along with carrier additions and Android skins — since these can delay the progress of OS updates. So while Google has made changes to Android 4.x to help bolster security, the vast majority of users (circa 90% last year) are stuck using older versions of the platform.

Symantec notes security-focused tweaks made by Google in Android 4.x include adding a feature to allow users to block any particular app from pushing notifications into the status bar (to combat adware); and in Android 4.2 adding a feature to prompt the user to confirm sending a premium text (to combat premium SMS threats).

The report adds:

…at around 10 percent market penetration at the end of 2012, Android 4.2 devices account only for a small percentage of the total devices out there. The Android ecosystem makes it harder to keep everyone up to date…

For most exploits in the OS, Google released quick fixes; however, users still had long waits before they received the fix from their network operators. Some exploits are not in the original OS itself but in the custom modifications made by manufacturers, such as the exploit for Samsung models that appeared in 2012. Samsung was quick to fix it, but the fix still had to propagate through network operators to reach users.

As you’d expect, Symantec is predicting continued growth in levels of mobile malware this year, as tablet and smartphone use continues to grow and attract more malware writers. Specifically it is expecting to see “ransomware and drive-by website infections on these new platforms in the coming year”.

Security companies been charting ‘rising levels of mobile malware’ for years but overall relative threat levels remain low. Still, Symantec said 2012 saw a 58 per cent increase in mobile malware vs 2011, and said the year’s total accounts for 59 per cent of all mobile malware discovered to-date — so while the threat is still small it is now more than doubling year-on-year.

Here’s Symantec’s breakdown of the types of mobile threat it identified last year, with information theft being the most common threat. Add in user tracking and more than fifty per cent of the mobile malware identified was trying to steal user info or track their movements:

On Sunday Forbes covered a McAfee report that claimed it had identified 36,699 pieces of mobile malware, 95% of which cropped up last year — a hugely higher figure compared to Symantec’s figure of 108 new unique threats. In its report, Symantec says its figure is smaller than “other estimates on the scope of the mobile threat landscape” owing to other companies’ estimates counting overall threats (rather than new unique threats).

Many estimates are larger because they provide a count of overall variants, as opposed to new, unique threats. While many of these variants simply undergone minor changes in an attempt to avoid antivirus scanners detecting them, Symantec counted at least 3,906 different mobile variants for the year.

But even Symantec’s variant figure — 3,906 — is orders of magnitude smaller than McAfee’s count. Differing approaches to counting malware variants and threats presumably explains the discrepancy. We’ve reached out to Symantec to ask what specifically it includes in its mobile malware count and will update this story with any response.

Yesterday another report into mobile malware, conducted by mobile security software provider NQ Mobile, apparently identified more than 65,000 distinct forms of mobile malware, such as app repackaging, malicious URLs and SMS phishing.

Security companies of course have a vested interest in hyping malware threats, since they are in the business of selling security software, so it’s worth taking the highest figures with a big pinch of salt.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yesterday, Andrew “weev” Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison, three years of probation, and restitution of $73,000 after being convicted on conspiracy and fraud charges. His actions had revealed a security flaw in AT&T’s user data base.

In essence, weev added a number to the end of a URL on AT&T’s public database and realized that he was moving from one user’s information to another. He aggregated the data and gave it to Gawker, making 114,000 iPad 3G owners data public.

Before his sentencing, however, Auernheimer took the opportunity to address some members of the media with a mini ad-hoc press conference. If you’ve ever yearned to live during the American Revolution, you’ll most certainly want to watch this act of angry patriotism.

“America is in a cultural decline,” he begins. “In my country, there’s a problem and that problem is the feds. They take all your freedom and never give it back.”

He talks about all of the helpful, commercial implementations of drones, yet rebukes the government that there are no licensing routes to use this technology for peace or a healthier planet.

He explains that there are engineers “working tirelessly” in this country who try to build something useful for humanity, before finding out it’s against U.S. code.

“I look at all this, and think, ‘I’m going to prison for arithmetic?’I added one to a number on a URL on a public server, and I aggregated that data, and gave it to a fucking journalist at that man’s (points) publication!” he screamed. “And this is why I’m going to prison!”

I look at all this, and think, “I’m going to prison for arithmetic?”

“And if they have any soul, any soul in their whole body. If they understood what they were doing to the rule of law, to the fucking Bill of Rights and to the free and open Internet, they would die in their own goddamn shame.”

Though the “AT&T hack” wasn’t necessarily an act of “innovation,” Auernheimer most certainly sees himself as a political and cultural hacktivist. He is seen as responsible for disrupting Amazon’s web services in 2009 when the service excluded a number of gay and lesbian books, and he’s published a number of podcasts, and shown support for Occupy Wall Street as well as a number of other movements. In fact, you might even consider the AT&T hack to be a public service. Who knows when AT&T would have gotten around to protecting our data?

“I hope innovation will make a wakeful returns as soon as possible,” he said. “We don’t have much time. I think we have a short window until the currency collapses and this place becomes some third world country. There are new Detroits and Birminghams and St. Louises every year, and we have very little time to manufacture again and bring this country back to its greatness.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

It seems that the United States may be becoming more open to the idea of real-money online gaming. Real-money gaming has been very successful in certain areas, and among investors it tends to be contrasted against trends like social games in very positive terms. The average lifetime value of a real-money player is generally thought to be far higher than a social gamer, for example, and the expected ARPUs can get pretty crazy. The smell of cha-ching is in the air.

In particular, the U.S. has long been considered a kind of El Dorado because of its size and potential. A variety of companies used to providing gambling in the UK, Europe and Asia, as well as domestic suppliers in the physical casino business and social game companies like Zynga are hovering. Legislation is going through the warren-like process of being passed in several states and some people are forecasting that real-money will be the next big thing for the games industry. And yet, for me at least, the news that real-money online gaming might come to downtown Des Moines, Columbus or Omaha is totally uninteresting. Like, so what?

Professionally speaking, the world of casino, slot, bingo and poker is just as valid as any other sector of the gaming universe. I know several people who work within that sector, and have consulted on a couple of projects over the years – which were as much an education for me as for them. They are busy solving problems of player satisfaction, retention and technical issues just like anyone else, and they take pride in their work.

Several parts of the online gambling universe host cultures of players who behave just like any other gamer. The sector is no more dark or seedy than any other kind of game, and it has its fans and whales just as every other kind does. There are debates within its various communities over who are the best providers, and as a whole the sector has its hardcore genres (sports betting, poker, etc.) and its more casual (bingo, slots) counterparts, too. Even the whole addiction thing is largely handled with the same levels of responsibility as any social game, massive multiplayer game or other provider.

And yet, meh. It’s hard to want to write about it.

My reason is that, although it may have an active subculture all its own much like sports, online gambling is probably the least innovative sector of the games industry. It’s always the same few games repackaged endlessly and the movements within that space tend to be very narrow. Unlike, say, indie games where cool weird stuff like Space Team bubbles up on a regular basis to teach us all the meaning of play all over again, there’s really very little to say when all you have is poker, slots, bingo and so on.

That’s why online gambling remains largely a margin- and customer-acquisition business, and why it rarely generates any real enthusiasm among the gaming press. Games are an entertainment business like TV where the fiction and the mechanic are just as important as one another, but online gambling comes across as about as genuinely exciting as watching QVC. They are so un-innovative largely because of the philosophy that drives them.

I don’t just mean a focus on the bottom line. I mean that gambling companies are behaviorist. They think of games in terms of predictable outcomes and measured rewards, guided user experiences and some degree of manipulation.

Behaviorist game design is very popular among investors these days. The prospect of being able to measure everything is perceived to reduce the guesswork of what is fun, but – as I wrote previously – it doesn’t really. Instead, metrics tend to be good at helping to maximize the effectiveness of a game dynamic which is already fun, but is no good for invention. Successful game dynamics always come from that weird creative place that method can’t quite access, and – not really trusting in that sort of thinking - that’s why gambling companies tend to stick to what they know.

So they are timid, and timidity encourages incrementalism like “inventing” a variant on slots, or a slightly turned-around version of bingo. Sure, fine, but that makes for some incredibly dull product. Bingo with extra numbers and a daily reward schedule may be exciting within certain frames of reference. But outside those walls it’s all very whatevs and the most important consequence of that is that the race to win online gambling is only about marketing spend and distribution. As a sector it’s fundamentally unlikely to lead to a Minecraft equivalent, or even a FarmVille equivalent.

So I find it boring because it feels like it’s over already. Online gambling is already clogged with undifferentiated products competing over small incremental differences, so – if/when the laws do pass in various states – the gold rush will quickly go to whoever can afford to compete. It’s just not the sort of thing that sparks marketing stories and causes revolutions. It’s just too small-minded.

That’s why I’d rather check out The Room because it seems kooky and weird, or play Eufloria. These are games that carry the potential of a marketing story, of gathering attention and excitement based on what they are and what they represent. A game like Minecraft is the sort of thing that spawns a revolution because it becomes a passionate game that folks talk about.

Exciting games marry both creative and business requirements in novel ways. Whether it’s an app, an online game like Spry Fox’s Leap Day or an old-school Steam game, genuine interest comes from taking big risks over little ones. In all philosophies there are conservative game makers who tend to try and increment their way to success (and largely fail to do so), but behaviorists are more conservative than most. That’s why they got dull and the San Francisco revolution came to an apathetic halt a while ago.

I’m still waiting to hear the story about a gambling company that invented a whole new game. Not some adaptation of an existing game, some recasting or re-theming of stuff we already know, but something brand-spanking new. Whether your business is in selling single-shot games, virtual goods or cash payouts, the demand to invent and be weird is one that never goes away because the future of games is all about surprise. So if you want to get me excited, don’t just show me something that’s 1 percent different from everything I’ve seen before.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today’s watch porn comes courtesy of Roger Dubuis, a manufacturer of odd timepieces. Their latest, the Quatour (which kind of sounds like a character from Total Recall), is a watch with four separate escapements that average each other out as the watch is worn. It’s very weird.

The watch is absolutely massive – about 48mm from stem to stern – and the weird escapement system is designed to ostensibly improve accuracy. The theory is that when a watch is worn gravity tends to pull down different parts differently. The escapement is the part of the watch that flips back and forth to drive the watch hands forward one tick at a time (check this out to understand it better). To account for gravity, tourbillon watches spin the escapement 360 degrees. This watch, on the other hand, just has four escapements and a differential gear to “average” their movements. It basically “ticks” four times, making an oddly pleasing, organic sound.

You can read a full hands on over here or just marvel that this thing costs about $400,000 and is limited to 88 pieces. An all-silicon version costs a cool $2 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As someone who devours way too much science fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that I’ll be wearing giant VR goggles at some point in the future. (I’m patiently waiting for my jetpack, too.) Now it looks like I might not be crazy after all — Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, is hoping to take VR goggles out of the lab and put them into the hands of gamers at an affordable price.

The company held a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for its Oculus Rift headset  last year, raising $2.4 million (nearly 10 times the original goal) from 9,522 backers. The company plans to ship its first developer kits in a couple of months, and Luckey dropped by the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show with an early version of the goggles.

He compared the experience to “having an enormous screen suspended in front of you,” which is true enough, but doesn’t quite do justice to what’s it’s like to put the headset on, watch the game respond to your movements, and feel like you’re moving through a real space. I’m eager to try it out in a real game — but it sounds like I might have still have a while to wait on that front.

“It wouldn’t be really responsible for us to go out and say, ‘This is when we think it’s going to be done,’ when we haven’t gotten any developer feedback on what they think should be in the consumer version,” Luckey said.

The developer kits are still available for pre-order for a price of $300 on the Oculus site. When the consumer version is released, Luckey said he’s aiming to deliver it at the same price or lower.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Internet search engines are still amazing tools for finding facts and figures — with a little effort, and a few carefully worded search queries you can soon track down the capital of Turkmenistan or the world’s oldest lake. For real-time information, such as breaking news, Twitter is better — again, you need to do some filtering, and accept that most of what you’re reading is unverified so is potentially nonsense, but for unfolding news events it’s hard to beat.

But what if you want to find very specific answers to ephemeral questions about particular local areas and businesses — such as what’s on the specials menu at my local independent coffee house today? Or what’s the Wi-Fi password at such-and-such hotel? Stuff that isn’t exactly big news so is unlikely to have found its way onto Twitter, and may be too ephemeral and time-specific to be easily unearthed on Google et al without resorting to sifting through local forums. Your need for the info is generally pretty timely too — so spending hours trying to track it down online isn’t generally worth the effort. You could ask your Twitter followers in the hope that someone who knows the answer sees your question and gets back to you — but unless you have a @ladygaga-sized following that’s pretty unlikely.

Step forward LocalUncle, an iPhone app made by a Swiss startup that wants to apply the power of crowdsourced, location-specific information — harnessed using its proprietary mobile technology — to crack real-time questions & answers. The app is actually a relaunch — the original LocalUncle launched in November 2011 but despite a promising start, being featured by Apple in the ‘new & noteworthy’ section of the App Store which saw it getting “thousands” of downloads per day at points, it didn’t achieve enough user traction — something the app makers blame on bad timing and clunky version-one technology, among other things. Q&A services stand and fall on the size and engagement of their user-base so the team behind LocalUncle decided they needed a slicker, speedier app and that’s what they’re relaunching today.

“We rewrote pretty much all of our code, from scratch. We also redesigned everything, from the app icon to the actual interface,” says LocalUncle CEO Philip Estrada Reichen. He won’t say how many users the first version of the app has, but does say the userbase has been “in aggregate” to more than 600,000 unique places — i.e. one user has checked in to each place at least once — and also to more than 3,000 “areas” in the world (again: one user, at least once).

Here’s how LocalUncle works: the app presents the user with a map view with locations of text-based questions and answers pinned on it (if there are any). As you pan and zoom around the map the app automatically identifies the name of the particular district you’re looking at — London, say, or as you zoom in, Soho or Notting hill — giving you the option to ask a question that relates to that area. ‘What is the best stall for woollen scarves in Portobello market?’ perhaps — or subjective queries such as ‘what’s the best restaurant in Soho?’ 

Once you’ve typed your question, the app routes it to the user who it thinks is most likely to be able to answer it — pushing it as a push notification to the app on their phone. How does the app know who to route each question to? This is based on Foursquare location check-in data — the first version of LocalUncle sat on Foursquare’s API — plus location data gathered from tracking the movements of users’ phones. So its “intelligent routing algorithms” look at about both past and current location before deciding who can best answer a question.

“Our [first] version is Foursquare-connect only. This means that 100% of our userbase has connected their Foursquare accounts to our system which means that we already have tons of location-data from our users,” says Reichen.

If that user knows the answer they can respond in the app and you’ll get the answer pushed to your iPhone. If they don’t respond, the app tries another user who might know the answer — until, hopefully, your Q gets an A. Using push notifications — rather than email — is designed to ensure questions get answered as quickly as possible, says Reichen. If users don’t respond to any of the questions pushed at them they’ll get asked fewer questions, and vice versa — although the algorithm is designed so that users can only get a set amount of questions pushed to them in a fixed time-frame so they won’t ever get swamped.

LocalUncle’s automatic place detection feature is proprietary tech built by the app makers to improve the user experience — meaning that place names appear automatically as you pan around the map. They have also built proprietary geo-fencing technology that maps a Foursquare check-in/iPhone user’s location to an exact point on the map (and its related district/city/country etc). This allows them to create a location-history profile of their user-base so they can route questions to “the most appropriate experts” — or at least, the people who have been to that place the most.

“We built all this tech, because the way to win this space is by offering a superior user experience. We reduced local search to its minimum viable state: a split-screen map/conversation view and ONE always visible text-bar to input your question. It’s as simple as any location-based Q&A app can possibly get,” argues Reichen.

Asked about competitors in this space he name-checks LocalMind as its main competitor — a location-based Q&A startup that raised a total of $650,000 and has just been acquired by Airbnb (Reichen calls this an acqui-hire — adding: “LocalMind failed”).

According to Reichen, the main differences between LocalUncle and LocalMind are: simplicity of interface, with minimal screens and a text bar present to ask questions on every screen; clean, uncluttered design with no need to navigate between multiple screens and simple swipes to transition between the few views that are on offer; and auto-detection of the user’s area. Taken together, he argues this makes LocalUncle faster and easier to use than rivals — thereby giving it the edge in a space that isn’t perhaps as crowded as you might imagine, unless you compare the service to — in Reichen’s words — “web 1.0″ review-style offerings like Yelp that were not designed to function in real-time. “Just like Google back in the days, we are the simple, clean, fast app on the market. The one you can use to ask a question while crossing the street,” he adds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Barry Eggers is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on information technology infrastructure, with a specific interest in cloud computing, big data, storage, consumerization of IT, and networking. Follow him on Twitter.

Baseball, more so than other sports, is known for its massive data collection, complex statistics and informed managerial decisions. So it should be no surprise that, just as corporate enterprises are going through a big data revolution, so will baseball. While the technology that enables big data is quite technical and designed to operate behind the scenes, the direct impact of big data on the average consumer will be quite visible over time. Hadoop, with its ability to manage massive data sets, is about to change the game of baseball.

Evolution Of Data Collection In Baseball

In the late 1800s, baseball was about measuring balls, strikes, hits, runs, and wins. By the mid-1900s, percentages became all the rage: We saw the emergence of batting average (BA), earned run average (ERA), on-base percentage (OBP), slugging percentage (SLG), and fielding percentage (FLD). Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, Bill James wrote a series of Baseball Abstract books that provided a new perspective on evaluating players and measuring the true impact on their teams’ chances of winning.

James’ innovations include such formulas as runs created (Total Bases x [Hits+Walks])/(Plate Appearances), range factor (Assists + Put Outs)/(Games Played), and the “Temperature Gauge” to measure how “hot” a player is. James’ original metrics have been refined over time. For example, runs created has been replaced by weighted runs created-plus (wRC+), which compares a player’s on-base plus slugging percentage with the rest of the league and accounts for ballpark factors and run-scoring environments. These abstracts played a leading role in Michael Lewis’ best-selling novel, and later Hollywood film, Moneyball. Clearly, there’s a lot more than spitting chew and emptying Gatorade coolers going on in the dugout.

Today’s Game

In the modern game of baseball, everything is measured. The trajectory and location of every pitch are tracked in all 30 stadiums and the movements of every fielder are now being tracked in certain stadiums.  The San Francisco Giants are early adopters; major league hitters now have a batted-ball spray chart and an associated heat map, which measures the effectiveness of each hit ball as it relates to every ballpark. The Oakland A’s have also earned recognition for their use of data – not only for in-game strategy but also to build their roster. Wondering why Billy Beane traded for Arizona’s Chris Young last month – this might provide some clues. Soon, the trajectory of every hit ball will be recorded by video cameras in major league ballparks. Big brother is watching the Panda.

Welcome To The “Big Data Era Of Baseball”

This, of course, is where things get interesting. Until now, baseball teams have been focused on measuring finite events, crunching complex statistics, and performing a basic type of tactical decision analysis. But now teams are beginning to gather unstructured data. So just as corporate enterprises have moved from structured to unstructured data to provide new insights and give them an advantage over the competition, so will baseball teams.

At least one major league team, and likely more, is evaluating a small Hadoop cluster. Hadoop is a programming framework that supports the processing of very large data sets. To give you an example, companies like Google and Yahoo use it to give you the best search results quickly by analyzing data from all over the web to determine the best result.

So why would a baseball organization need a Hadoop cluster? Because unstructured data may unlock insights that are not apparent from the structured event data that is available to every team. Baseball managers, like CEOs, believe that the past is a great predictor of the future. By having his data scientist run a Hadoop job before every game, Bruce Bochy can not only make an informed decision about where to locate a 3-1 Matt Cain pitch to Prince Fielder, but he can also predict how and where the ball might be hit, how much ground his infielders and outfielders can cover on such a hit, and thus determine where to shift his defense.
Taken one step further, it’s not hard to imagine a day where managers like Bochy have their locker room data scientist run real-time, in-game analytics using technologies like Cassandra, Hbase, Drill, and Impala.

Will Big Data Ruin Baseball?

This raises the question, will big data ruin baseball? Will tracking and analyzing this mountain of data take the enjoyment out of the game? I don’t think so. Our national pastime has survived the Black Sox scandal, the designated hitter, pull over uniforms, free agency, night games, multiple players’ strikes, the dead ball era, the live ball era, and of course steroids. Big Data is not nearly as threatening.

In fact, big data might be the great neutralizer between large market and small market teams. Teams with the most advanced predictive algorithms would have an advantage. Bay Area teams should have an even larger advantage since it is the epicenter of big data. If you are an avid Giants fan and a data scientist, your dream job may soon be available. But move quickly, because the team across the Bay may already have a head start – they do, after all, have a Hadoop-like elephant for a mascot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch