There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.

Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put the onus on the citizens. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.

“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in L.A. — and it’s not getting any better.

The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.

It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.

“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”

As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor-tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.

Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing, too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft has rolled out a notable update to its Kinect for Windows SDK today, while also announcing the availability of the Kinect for Windows sensor in China. The new version of the SDK introduces a number of improvements which allow developers greater access to sensor data, plus it adds support for Windows 8, and offers improvement to the Kinect Studio developer tools.

The Kinect for Windows platform allows for more commercial implementations of the Kinect technology, and has been designed specifically for use with Windows PCs, as opposed to the Xbox 360. The sensor connects with the PC via a USB cable, and is now available in 32 markets worldwide where it’s sold for $249 USD. The SDK is free, however, and Microsoft doesn’t charge fees for runtime licenses.

For developers building on the Kinect platform, the updated SDK now opens up API access to a wider range of sensor data, including the sensor’s 3-axis accelerometer (for detecting orientation), the infrared stream, and it provides extended-range depth data details beyond 4 meters. Developers can also build applications that set the color camera settings, like the brightness and exposure, and the SDK now allows for faster toggling of the IR to support overlapping sensors, says Microsoft.

What this means, for those who don’t speak developer, is that the Kinect commercial ecosystem can now expand to support a broader number of applications, including those meant for use in manufacturing (this one, thanks to its new ability to access extended-range depth data), as well as apps that could run in low-light settings. Microsoft hints that movie theaters and museums might take advantage of some of these latter changes, specifically.

In addition to the SDK update, Kinect Studio, which allows developers to work with the sensor SDK has been updated as well, and it includes samples that show how to use all the new SDK features, among other things.

Also new today is Windows 8 support, meaning developers can build a Kinect for Windows solution for Windows 8 desktop apps. The SDK supports development with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, and now works on Windows running in a virtual machine.Microsoft Hyper -V, VMWare, and Parallels has been tested. (Previously, Windows 8′s “Consumer Preview” was supported, but not the final release.)

The Kinect for Windows Sensor is now available in China, as noted above, and is soon rolling out to Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Puerto Rico.

The Kinect for Windows platform is being used to develop several interesting experiments in motion detection, like a virtual dressing room which lets consumers try on clothes via Kinect, for example. It has also been used in education, in hospitals, and Nissan used Kinect to build buzz around the Pathfinder pre-launch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Japan-based UC Technology Corp. [JP] has developed a wireless sensor that can automatically post data like temperature, humidity, illuminance, or radiation levels to Twitter. The so-called “Tsubuyaku Sensor” [JP, PDF] is mainly designed for use in food warehouses, plants, or wine cellars.

The data can be checked remotely on Twitter (the account can be set to private or public). UC Technology says that the sensor has a battery life of a year when it posts data once per minute.

The company explains:

You connect this device to the Internet and plug in the AC adapter. You can also connect a slave unit, so you have a wireless sensor that measures temperature, humidity, and sunshine. This sensor makes the wireless connection automatically, and sends its data each time. The connection range is about 40 m, but if you want to make measurements even further away, there’s a relay unit as well. That’s used by plugging it into a wall socket and it extends the range to 60 m.

This video, shot by Diginfo TV in Tokyo, provides more insight (in English):

UC Technology plans to start selling the sensor in Japan this month (prices: US560 for the base unit, US$286 for each sensor).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kodak, let us admit, is doomed. Founded over a century ago, it has dominated film for as long as film has existed, but now that film is on the verge of ceasing to exist, they have very little to dominate. They’re short on cash and while they deny plans to file for bankruptcy, many question whether they will have the luxury of choice a few years from now.

My first preference for the preservation of this company would be for them to sell off their patents and focus on film until they’re buried by progress. That’d be Kodak going out with its boots on, so to speak. But I doubt that’s going to happen.

What needs to happen instead is Kodak needs to abandon any pretense of being a household word. They’ve had a good run — for an entire century their name has been synonymous with film. But it will never be as recognizable again. So why throw money away on an entire division creating low-margin, unoriginal devices that are going to be obsolete in a few months and duplicated by pirate OEMs anyway? No, Kodak needs to go invisible.

For a long time Kodak was the leader in photographic innovation. They even invented their own destroyer, a la Oedipus Rex: they were among the first producing digital cameras. Why aren’t they now? Why is the sensor inside the iPhone 4S a Sony instead of a Kodak?

Listen, Kodak. I like a couple of your cameras. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you’re selling a product that everyone gets for free when they buy a smartphone, digital picture frames are a joke, and printing is becoming more and more something that happens in a ShutterFly facility, not at home — if it happens at all. Producing products is for companies like Apple and Canon. You don’t want to compete with them.

And you don’t have to. You’ve got top-notch research facilities churning out patents and inventions all over the place. Pick a few niches and become indispensible. I’m not quite saying be a patent troll. I’m saying you should be the ones HTC goes to when they want to get an edge over the rest in the camera department. What will you make? Low-noise sensors? Image compression algorithms? Lens coatings? High-speed imaging interface? I don’t know. Just pick something other than a heap of consumer products in the process of being eliminated by the march of progress. You don’t see IBM trying to compete with Dell.

One thing: in order to keep the Kodak brand alive, you should always be in the business of making real things. But make the printer head, not the printer. Make the sensor, not the camera. Make it clear that if it’s not powered by Kodak, it’s a piece of junk. You’ve already been half-forced to this position, so just go all the way. You don’t need the trappings of a consumer tech company weighing you down. You’re Kodak, for god’s sake. Act like it.

If all goes well, you’ll emerge from these hard times a leaner, more focused company, with a sack full of amazing patents and a stable of clients who wouldn’t be able to compete without your technology. Is it a fantasy? Sure. But it’s better than the dreary, prosaic reality you’re living in now. At least strike out swinging.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It may be that the most compelling new feature of the iPhone 4S isn’t iOS 5 or the A5 processor, but the new camera. I’ve given phone cameras a lot of guff for the generally poor image quality that results from a small sensor and bad glass, but this really is a problem that camera-makers have been trying to alleviate. And the iPhone 4S is looking like the best effort yet.

Why should you care about the iPhone’s new camera? Let’s go down the list and make sense of the new features.

8 megapixels. Well. This one is self-explanatory, but really the least important. Other phones and small cameras have high megapixel counts, and really, you don’t want or need that many. The thing is all those tiny pixel wells have to be packed into such a small place that you end up with image quality problems. In this case your best photos will look better and it probably won’t affect other shots negatively.

1080p. As above, not really amazing in itself; other devices this size and smaller shoot 1080p. We’ll have to see how it looks in action, but I’m guessing you’ll be seeing a lot of distortion during camera movement due to the rolling-shutter effect on smaller sensors. 1080p resolution doesn’t mean 1080p quality, but if the sensor supports it, there’s no reason not to enable it. I’m just hoping there will be hacks to enable some better framerates.

“73% more light“. The new sensor features “next-generation backside illumination,” an upgrade to the upgrade that made the original iPhone 4 camera much better. We won’t know for sure who makes the camera until the teardown comes, but Omnivision did the last one and they have a newer version (the OV8812 pictured) with the exact resolution specified. It’s in the EVO 4G as well. The improved sensitivity probably isn’t the jump from 3GS to iPhone 4, but better low light performance is always welcome. Backside illumination essentially flips the sensor over so light strikes the light sensitive bits without having to navigate a forest of circuitry.

Faster picture-taking. The new sensor was described by Schiller as being “1/3rd faster,” which is a phenomenally vague description, but I’m guessing the onboard electronics are able to offload the image data 30% faster. But with these small sensors, what matters isn’t getting the image off the sensor but getting it processed, encoded, and displayed to the user. The A5 processor is still something of a mystery, but it’s no secret that a major focus was on graphics enhancement. As I suggested in that link, having a chunk of the CPU entirely dedicated to JPEG processing is a given. Chances are the next iPad will have similarly enhanced photo-taking abilities. So the combination of a faster sensor and an expedited pipeline for that image data to go through makes the iPhone 4S camera twice as fast as the competition (i.e. about a second faster by their measure, your mileage may vary) at making the shot happen. It also allows for more accurate white balancing and color tweaking, so your shots won’t look like they were taken next to a bunch of lava or under a blue sun.

Improved lens. The most important part of a camera is… the photographer — but right after that is the lens. And the lens of the iPhone 4 was already pretty solid for a camera phone: F/2.8 (apparently limited to F/3) at about 30mm equivalent focal length. The new one is f/2.4, about half a stop better, which doesn’t sound like much but at this point of the aperture scale counts for a lot. It’s a pretty big increase in the total amount of light hitting the sensor. The focal length wasn’t specified but Schiller mentioned it was “super wide,” which if wider than 30mm equivalent starts putting the iPhone into true wide-angle territory (starts around 24mm equivalent if you ask me) — but he may have been referring to the aperture. At any rate the half-stop improvement is real enough.

Real-time stabilization. This is a nice feature for small cameras, since, lacking heft, they tend to wiggle around a lot. I’m assuming it’s not optical stabilization, since that would require more space than they’ve got, so it must be electronic stabilization based on live image analysis. Again this is the A5 at work. By designing the camera’s image processor around the hardware (and vice versa), they can do this kind of heavy graphical analysis without taxing the battery too much.

Overall it’s probably the best camera system attached to a phone on the market right now. The changes aren’t superficial, and the camera should be on the short list of reasons to consider upgrading.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch