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So it’s a fluid conversation, versus the traditional coaching that’s a set session,” she says.
Traditional life coaching can clock in as high as $250-300 for an hour-long session, Hirabayashi adds, explaining how Shine aims to offer a lower cost competitor.
It should be interesting to see if Shine is actually able to convert its young users to this level of paid, on-demand coaching, however. | Mobile |
After all, there’s so much free support available online – ranging from blogs and websites to email newsletters to private Facebook support groups and more.
Shinevisor, meanwhile, falls somewhere in between those looking for free advice, and those who are committed to seriously tackling problems through therapy or real-world mentorship.
The new service, still in beta, is currently being pitched via text to select Shine users, but is also available via the company website, where you can sign up for a free trial.. | Mobile |
null | Augmented Reality |
Remember those old school chemistry sets that came in a cardboard box with a bunch of vials, plastic beakers, safety glasses and a booklet full of instructions for different experiments?
London startup MEL Science is putting a high-tech twist on them, with virtual reality and augmented reality content that takes kids on a virtual tour inside a chemical reaction, right after they conduct an experiment in the real world.
The startup has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Sistema Venture Capital to grow their subscription commerce and VR content business.
Subscribers to MEL Science get two new chemistry sets by snail mail each month for $49 each. | Augmented Reality |
The kits are now selling in the U.K., U.S. | Augmented Reality |
and Russia.
The MEL Science app shows a 3-D model of glucose.
The experiments in the kit work along with the MEL mobile app, available for iOS and Android devices, and a Google Cardboard VR headset that the company provides in its introductory kit.
The app was designed to enhance kids’ understanding of what’s happening in a given experiment, with 3D graphics, macro photos and videos of molecules up-close.
According to MEL Science CEO and founder Vassili Philippov, he decided to start the company after conducting science experiments to entertain and educate his own kids at home.
After they used tin chloride and zinc to grow a “crystal hedgehog,” his kids were clamoring for more information about what caused the crystals to grow so quickly. | Augmented Reality |
He turned to YouTube, and myriad educational sites, but couldn’t find good content that would show kids more about what was happening on the molecular level during this chemical reaction.
The entrepreneur said IT and physics were always dueling passions for him. | Augmented Reality |
MEL Science allows him to bring those together.
Philippov previously co-founded SPB Software, a developer of mobile games, apps and mobile OS shells, which was acquired by Yandex in 2011.
Sistema VC’s Dimitry Filatov said he expects MEL Science to use its new funding to develop more VR content, kits and curriculum for use both in schools and at home.
MEL Science is currently sold direct to consumers, and typically parents or grandparents are buying a subscription as a gift for science-curious kids. | Augmented Reality |
Subscriptions are also popular among families that homeschool their kids.
The CEO said, “It’s easy to teach history and literature at home, but most people do not have a lab in their homes, unless they happen to be scientists.”. | Augmented Reality |
Dropbox is still working its way through the enterprise world in order to show the world it isn’t just dumb online storage — which, given as simple as it was to use, was one of the tool’s original top selling points.
So it’s had to shift gears in order to focus on larger companies, and that means consistently rolling out new tools that companies need as they start to expand. | Apps |
And that also means that Dropbox has to keep pace with the rest of the market. | Apps |
So today, to do that, the company is updating its apps with a few new features that should help it continue to have a toehold within larger companies.
“I think overall our approach is, let’s work well extensively across all platforms,” Matt Pan, group product manager for Dropbox’s File Collaboration Product Group said. | Apps |
“We know workplaces increasingly have a set of heterogeneous tools, not just at a platform level like a bunch of people using Mac and Windows. A lot of people have very mixed environments where some people use Office, whether you’re Adobe users or the long tail. | Apps |
Dropbox making all those things tied together in a really simple way has been very much the key to success in the workplace.”
So, here’s a quick rundown of the things that Dropbox is rolling out today:
The first update is PDF signing, which allows users to open PDF files right from their mobile devices and insert signatures and text into them. | Apps |
It seems simple enough, but this is actually a pretty big pain point for a lot of companies that need to get approval for projects and want to keep the ball rolling quickly.
Another update Dropbox is getting today is an integration with iMessage. | Apps |
When Apple opened up iMessage to third-party developers, it became clear to the company that it would have to address the service’s usage within businesses, which was very common, Pan said. | Apps |
So the company is rolling out more rich file-sharing within iMessage that includes previews and the like for its users.
“For workplace communications in a meaningful way we’re seeing [a lot of iMessage use] with small or medium businesses, especially for medium companies — larger companies might be a little stricter with what kind of tools users use,” Pan said. | Apps |
“Within SMBs, we see iMessage used pretty significantly — especially desktop — and for people who have a primarily mobile workforce, like when you have kind of a big real estate team.”
The company is also rolling out a lock-screen widget that will give users the ability to do the most common actions you might find in a Dropbox app from the lock screen. | Apps |
Tapping on one of the functions will go straight to an operation within Dropbox. | Apps |
While this idea might seem useful, Dropbox is still going to have to deal with the constant uphill battle for real estate on that lock screen to ensure that users aren’t getting a cluttered screen and simply ignoring it.
Later this year, the company is adding split-screen usage on the iPad, so users can have the Dropbox app open while surfing through other services. | Apps |
The strongest use case likely still has to be determined here, but there are some natural ones — like viewing a video while still operating the Dropbox app.
The last one is that Dropbox is enabling a picture-in-picture environment on the iPad that allows users to have a video going while they continue to work, similar in the way to YouTube users having a video playing at the bottom-right corner while they are searching for a new video.
All these additions can at times seem incremental (though some, including a literal document scanner through your phone camera, less so), but they’re all an effort to essentially keep pace with the rest of the tools available in the market. | Apps |
Not only does Dropbox have to contend with Box, which started with enterprise customers in the first place, it has to deal with other services like Google Docs, as well. And it seems clear that Salesforce is looking to increasingly get into collaboration services after buying Quip for $750 million.
The company has around 500 million registered users and 200,000 paying customers, it says. | Apps |
While its previous valuation hit as high as $10 billion, there are certainly going to be questions as to whether the traditionally consumer product will be able to pick up steam in the corporate world. Dropbox is banking — including with this update today — that focusing on simplicity and ease of use will give it an edge over those other competitors.
. | Apps |
Apple has unveiled its own official measurements for iOS 10 adoption, which comes in at 54 percent. That means the majority of iOS device owners are running the new mobile operating system. | Mobile |
What’s interesting, however, is how different Apple’s official figures are from the third-party estimates released earlier this week, which saw much higher adoption among their install base – as high as two-thirds, in fact.
According to two different sources – Mixpanel and Fiksu – iOS 10 was installed on roughly 66 percent of devices, the firms found. | Mobile |
Both data sets are based on apps that use the company’s SDK. | Mobile |
In Fiksu’s case, the company reports data sampled hourly in batches of approximately 10 million events, filtered to count unique devices; Mixpanel, meanwhile, claims its reported is “generated from 300,083,243,931 records.” This equates to a sample size of hundreds of millions of unique users, Mixpanel tells us.
In Apple’s case, however, it calculates iOS adoption rates by App Store visits. | Mobile |
That’s a more accurate means of making a determination, as it doesn’t require that users have an app installed on their device running a specific SDK from a third-party.
According to Apple’s data, 54 percent are now on iOS 10, 38 percent remain on iOS 9, and only 8 percent are running an older version of the iOS mobile operating system.
Also of note, we’ve confirmed that Apple did not prompt users to upgrade their devices for the first two weeks the iOS update was available – a delay that was spotted in the charts from the third-party firms, as well. | Mobile |
Adoption rates spiked sharply toward the end of September, which is when the alert notifications started hitting users’ devices.
The decision to delay the upgrade notifications was made to ease the strain on Apple’s infrastructure and its Apple Care support teams, we understand. | Mobile |
This is the first time Apple has implemented a new policy of delaying the upgrade notifications in order to allow for a smoother, if slower, iOS rollout. | Mobile |
After the initial rush of upgrade activity died down, only then did the company begin to alert users who had not yet updated that an upgrade was available to them.
Despite this delay to notify users, now more than half the active user base moved to iOS 10. For comparison’s sake, Android 7.0 “Nougat,” which arrived several weeks ahead of iOS 10, is only installed on 0.1 percent of devices. | Mobile |
The prior release, Android 6.0 “Marshmallow,” is still present on 18.7 percent of devices, and other previous versions still have a good chunk of the overall pie as well.
In part, this is because Android updates are handled by the manufacturers and carriers, not Google directly, in most cases. | Mobile |
This has historically been a huge issue for Google, not only because of security reasons, but also because it fragments the ecosystem, and makes it difficult for Google to get its entire install base using the same features and tools. Even with its new flagship Pixel phones, Google is allowing Verizon to handle all system updates, except for security patches, the company says.. | Mobile |
VenueNext Inc. | Apps |
has raised $15 million in Series B funding to bring its venue management technology to Europe, and beyond the live entertainment industry.
Among other things, using VenueNext apps, people can wave their mobile tickets at the gate to get into a game or concert, order food, drinks or merchandise to be delivered to their seats, and get information and amenities that they need when they are in the venue.
The SAP Center in San Jose, home to the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, is the most recent major venue to adopt VenueNext for the 2016-2017 hockey season.
The Sharks join a long list of sports teams and venues to adapt VenueNext. | Apps |
The app will be familiar to anyone who has recently attended a game, concert or races at: Yankee Stadium, Churchill Downs, Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. | Apps |
Bank Stadium, Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, Belmont Park & Saratoga Springs, and the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium, where it debuted.
Founded in 2013, VenueNext originally spun out of the San Francisco 49ers Stadium Technology group at a time when stadiums were investing in improved wi-fi for attendees, and beginning to favor mobile over paper-based tickets.
Causeway Media Partners led the $15 million Series B round in VenueNext, joined by food service giants Compass Group Plc, and Sharks Sports & Entertainment, along with other unnamed investors. In 2015, the company raised a $9 million Series A round.
While VenueNext has found its early traction with stadiums and theme parks, the company’s founder, John Paul reports that hotels and hospitals are also signing up to use the app, at this point.
“In a venue, we want to improve your guest or fan experience, through your smartphone. | Apps |
For the venue operators, we’re helping them improve their business through real time data that we collect about who is in the building and what they are doing during an event or their visit,” he said.
One feature of VenueNext’s platform that sports organizations like, Paul said, is a ticket “forwarding” feature. | Apps |
This allows a ticketholder to easily give a ticket, via mobile, to friends or family when they can’t attend.
Venues can begin to know when, for example, season ticketholders attended games themselves or when they handed off tickets bringing new fans to the venue.
In some cases, VenueNext allows ticketholders to sell their unused tickets back to a team. The team can re-sell the ticket. | Apps |
And the original buyer gets credit to spend during their next visit to the stadium on things like a seat upgrade, a locker room tour, or food and beverages.
Sharks Sports & Entertainment COO John Tortora tells TechCrunch that his organization does not typically invest in tech startups but did so because of VenueNext’s potential, positive impact to the industry.
Tortora said, “VenueNext should help us drive greater revenue around ticket sales and food and beverage, and to deliver the best possible customer service. | Apps |
We also think ticket forwarding and mobile ticketing reduces the risk of ticket fraud. We faced that issue during the Stanley Cup finals.”
With the new round of venture funding, VenueNext aims to expand beyond the U.S., namely into Europe. Longer-term, it also intends to help venues and campuses make use of emerging technology from augmented reality to delivery drones.. | Apps |
It’s a funny thing: Smartwatches are supposed to be the more accessible alternative to your smartphone, but you can operate a phone with one hand, while the watch takes two. | Gadgets |
Luckily, Dartmouth researchers are on the case, and have engineered a way to use your wrist as a sort of joystick, allowing you to use your smartwatch one-handed.
It’s a very hacky project; this isn’t some custom app running on an Apple Watch. Xing-Dong Yang and his colleagues built their own smartwatch with a 2″ display, a wristband and a dozen infrared proximity sensors. | Gadgets |
The WristWhirl prototype is literally duct-taped together.
The proximity sensors monitor how far away the bits of your hand are, collating that information into a larger picture of the position of your wrist. This data is sent instantly to the watch, where it drives a virtual cursor. | Gadgets |
Tilting your hand down moves the cursor down, and so on.
Tilt in a pattern to launch or switch apps, scroll up and down and play games, all without using that second hand of yours. | Gadgets |
And it only detects gestures when you want it to: another sensor detects the sound made when you tap your thumb and index finger together (!), which turns the recognition software on and off.
There are already gyros and accelerometers in smart watches, but having to move the watch around when you want to zoom in on a map seems pretty weak, especially once you’ve seen WristWhirl in action.
Will you look insane flipping your wrist around while staring at your watch? Yes. | Gadgets |
But onlookers will soon know the convenience of this form of input and it will become mainstream. | Gadgets |
Remember how we used to look at people talking into Bluetooth headsets? (Actually, we still look at them that way.)
Now, I don’t think anyone was really hurting for lack of being able to use their smartwatch while carrying groceries (shades of Everything is Terrible in the video) — but this is still a clever solution. | Gadgets |
Of course, the thing looks like a bomb at present, so it’s not quite ready for deployment. But a future version could easily be much smaller, and, really, developers would have a field day. It’s very futuristic.
Yong and his co-author, Jun Gong, will be presenting their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology next week. You can read their paper here.. | Gadgets |
In the latest instalment of Samsung’s ongoing Note 7 saga, the U.S. Department of Transportation has issued an official, blanket ban against bringing the Galaxy Note 7 on airplanes. The ban applies to all Note 7 devices, and covers both carry-on and checked baggage, as well as prohibiting anyone from carrying the phone onto a plane on their person. | Gadgets |
The ban will go into effect beginning October 15 at 12 PM ET.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx issued the following statement in a press release announcing the ban:
The Galaxy Note 7 has been officially recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, so theoretically all Note 7 owners should be returning the phone anyway. | Gadgets |
But this new blanket ban means passengers can no longer even transport a Note 7 on a plane (perhaps to the place where they originally purchased it), and face the penalty of a potential fine if they attempt to do so, or even “criminal prosecution,” according to the DOT.
Samsung will be fielding requests about how best to return Note 7s, the release notes, and customs can look for more info on their recall support site, or contact them directly via their customer support number at 1-844-365-6197 if the flight ban leaves them in a lurch.
A flight ban is likely the only course of action that can guarantee incidents related to the Note 7 don’t occur in the future, given that the replacement Note 7 which caught fire on a Southwest Flight last week wasn’t even powered on when it began to smoke, and subsequently burned through the cabin’s carpeting. | Gadgets |
The blanket ban won’t do Samsung’s brand any favors, however, and it’s now more likely than ever that the Note sub-brand won’t survive this ongoing ordeal.
A Samsung spokesperson provided the following statement to TechCrunch regarding the ban:. | Gadgets |
Apple is on a research & development spree! The company has announced a bunch of new R&D centers over the past few months, and R&D spendings have skyrocketed. This time, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company plans to open a new center in Japan during a visit in Tokyo, according to Xinhua.
This isn’t the first time we’re hearing about a new R&D center in Japan. | Asia |
Previous reports have indicated that Apple was building a new R&D center for 2016 or 2017.
Cook met with Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe to discuss all things Apple and Japan. | Asia |
Later at a press conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga reported that Apple would complete its R&D center in December.
So what is this R&D center anyway? Located in Yokohama, the building used to be a Panasonic factory. Apple has taken over the building and transformed it into an R&D center.
This way, Apple can more easily hire talented Japanese engineers. | Asia |
It’s unclear what the Japanese team is going to work on.
Overall, in addition to existing R&D centers, Apple will soon have R&D centers in Shenzhen, Israel, the U.K., France, Japan and Sweden. Maybe it’s time to rethink Apple’s tagline on all of its products — “designed by Apple in Cupertino and many other countries.”
Via Apple Insider. | Asia |
Consumer virtual reality has a clear new leader today, and it’s the just-launched PlayStation VR. Unequivocally, this is the best VR experience currently available outside of the kinds of high-flying, super-secret test rigs that exist out there for army training or whatever that cost millions of dollars. | Gadgets |
That includes top-of-line hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as smartphone standouts like Samsung Gear VR.
I own the HTC Vive, and I’m not abandoning it by any means. I also have and use Gear VR, and I’m excited to explore Daydream VR further, after getting a small taste of it at Google’s Pixel launch event. | Gadgets |
And if you’re looking for an assessment of which VR hardware you, personally, should buy, Lucas has that covered with his roundup. | Gadgets |
But despite all of that, it’s clear to me that PlayStation VR is the new gold standard when it comes to consumer VR, and could go a long way to proving that the technology is accessible and viable for everyday users.
Is PSVR perfect? Not at all — the visual fidelity and room-scale VR are both better on my HTC Vive. Plus, it doesn’t have the wireless freedom you get from Gear VR. | Gadgets |
I’ve even noticed some tracking issues where the PlayStation camera seems to lose sight of the headset temporarily, leading to disorienting jitters in the immersive experience.
But what PlayStation VR offers is simplicity — from setup, to calibration, to actual use, the experience is very similar to what you’ve experienced before setting up any new console. | Gadgets |
It’s definitely due partly to having gone through the process of setting up much more complicated systems, including Vive, but unboxing and using PSVR consistently results in a “that’s it?” response from my brain, which is tuned to expect more hassle leading up to the actual VR stuff itself.
Simplicity alone isn’t enough, however, and the PSVR manages the right balance between simple and powerful, giving an end-user experience that’s as likely to wow the average person as is a high-end Vive or SteamVR game, but without the high-end technical requirements or comfort level with tech.
The other reason PlayStation VR wins is because of game selection. | Gadgets |
At launch, the game library is impressive already, and the best part of it is that all the experiences deserve to be there. Not all of them are necessarily amazing, but all the ones I’ve tried have impacted my overall opinion of VR for the better. | Gadgets |
That’s definitely not true of everything I’ve tried on the Vive, or on Gear VR.
If PSVR has a significant remaining issue, it’s that it’s still too expensive; despite not reaching the stratospheric pricing of Vive or Oculus, especially when you factor in the cost of the PC, PlayStation VR’s price tag is likely too high to attract much of a crowd beyond the core gamer group. | Gadgets |
But it’ll live in households where it’s much more likely to be exposed to a range of different kinds of users, which is exactly what VR needs right now.. | Gadgets |
“Index… ring… pinky… index… middle…”
Nathan Copeland is telling a researcher which of his fingers he feels a touch on. | Gadgets |
But the researcher is touching a robotic hand, not Copeland’s, whose hand hasn’t felt a thing in over a decade.
In this “proof of principle” experiment, a man whose spinal injury removed all sensation from his limbs was able to “feel” pressure on several robotic digits connected directly to his brain. | Gadgets |
It’s a long way from a cybernetic hand, but it opens the possibility of using one to even more of those who need it.
That said, this is still important research because it skips a step many other prosthetics rely on: the peripheral nervous system. If you need to send signals from a replacement hand, you can often plug in further up the arm, tapping in where those signals would have gone anyway. | Gadgets |
But with a spinal injury, those signals never reach the brain, so that approach doesn’t work.
What Robert Gaunt and his team at the University of Pittsburgh have done is essentially plug the robotic arm directly into the brain, bypassing the intermediary nerves and spinal cord altogether.
Copeland was in an accident 12 years ago that left him a quadriplegic. | Gadgets |
But 16 years of operating his limbs means he remembers what it feels like when his hand is touched — and that means his brain remembers, too.
So the researchers had Copeland concentrate on the feeling of having different fingers touched, and tracked the brain activity associated with that feeling. | Gadgets |
Then they surgically implanted four sets of fingertip-sized microelectrode arrays into Copeland’s sensory cortex, where those feelings were centered.
Over the next few months the team repeatedly stimulated those areas of the brain, finding the patterns and locations that produced the sensation of being touched on the index finger, ring finger and so on. | Gadgets |
Eventually, Copeland was hooked up to a robotic hand, each finger of which corresponded to the circuit in his brain.
He got 85 percent right at first, then later nearly 100 percent. This is highly validating, although everyone involved will tell you how early this is.
“The ultimate goal is to create a system which moves and feels just like a natural arm would,” Gaunt said in a UP news release. | Gadgets |
“We have a long way to go to get there, but this is a great start.”
For one thing, the sensation needs to be evened out — “sometimes it feels electrical and sometimes it’s pressure, but for the most part, I can tell most of the fingers with definite precision,” Copeland said. | Gadgets |
The many gradations and types of touch are miles off.
This is also a one-way street: No data is being passed from the brain to the arm. Control methods would rely on completely different neural circuitry, in the motor cortex; it’s a whole different field of research. | Gadgets |
But this kind of feedback, going straight from the prosthetic to the brain, is important for intuitive controls that allow a user to grip and manipulate things in a natural way.
The team’s work is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. It was funded through DARPA, the US Department of Veteran’s affairs and several other grants.. | Gadgets |
Samsung is on the ropes. It pains me to say it but the Note 7 fiasco is probably going to hurt them more deeply than they’ll admit and I suspect we’ll see two or three quarters of slow growth thanks to Explode-gate.
It’s bad.
Consider the damage done to the brand. Pilots were telling users not to turn on their Note 7 phones as they taxied for takeoff. | Gadgets |
A total recall is now making everyone think their Samsung phones can explode at any time. The damage these exploding batteries did is complete. | Gadgets |
I’ve never seen so many burnt phones in one news cycle and, as evidenced by the plethora of Note 7 posts that followed the phone from fan darling to Public Enemy Number One, Samsung’s sales this quarter are going to take a hit.
The bottom line? Samsung lost a lot of money and a lot of brand loyalty. | Gadgets |
As Natasha Lomas writes, “analysts [are] estimating that a permanent end to Note 7 sales could cost the company up to $17 billion.” They’re even thinking of retiring the arguably clever Note name. This mess could mean the end of the dual Samsung/Apple rivalry, opening the market to new devices like the Google Pixel.
To be clear, it will be hard to knock Samsung off its perch. | Gadgets |
According to Statista Samsung sold 77 million phones in Q2 2016. This is a strong showing but down from their peak in Q1 2014 of 88 million. In Q1 2016 they owned 27.8% market share compared to Apple’s 14.4%.
The problem is that Samsung left the door open to other Android competitors. | Gadgets |
While there are few that can match its manufacturing and marketing might I assure you that none of them will ignore this opportunity to try to push cheaper and ostensibly better phones to Samsung consumers. | Gadgets |
Manufacturers like OnePlus and Xiaomi can easily step in and take over chunks of the market until Samsung is as popular or, more correctly, as unpopular, as Motorola or HTC.
The exploding Notes were a fluke. All told there was the potential for about 1,000 fiery phones out of the millions Samsung sold. But even one fiery phone on a bed stand or Jeep or plane is enough to scare consumers. | Gadgets |
Look what faulty batteries did to the hoverboard craze.
Samsung’s competitors are scrambling. Apple has just refreshed its iPhone line and we can expect an event later this month. In short, the deck is stacked against Seoul and it now has lots of explaining to do. | Gadgets |
Imagine the marketing problem: rather than crowing about being the best phone in the business now Samsung has to convince the world that their next phone (and their next and their next) won’t explode in your hand.. | Gadgets |
Samsung is hoping to keep its customers with incentives, including a $100 credit for Note 7 owners who stick with a Samsung device as their replacement hardware. But carriers are leaving the door open for buyers to pick whatever kind of smartphone they want instead. | Gadgets |
A new survey conducted by e-commerce agency Branding Brand suggests that a decent number may end up moving to other brands, and Google’s new Pixel phones could get a sizeable early bump for its new premium approach to in-house designed hardware.
Of those surveyed, which include 1,000 Samsung smartphone owners (of any devices, not just the Note 7), has found that 40 percent of respondents won’t buy another device from the manufacturers, which represents a 6 percent increase in the number of buyers looking elsewhere compared to the first time Branding Brand ran this survey just after the first Note 7 recall.
Of that group, 8 percent of those planning a switch will buy a new Google Pixel (which wasn’t yet announced when the first survey was conducted), and 30 percent will switch to iPhone, with the remaining 62 percent saying they plan to go to another Android maker. | Gadgets |
Compared to the original survey, those considering iPhone dropped 4 percentage points, which means Pixel is looking like a legitimate premium competitor to some at least, alongside iPhone and Samsung’s top-tier hardware.
Pixel still represents a very small percentage of buyer choices in the survey, of course, but the fact that it’s tipping the scales at all already represents a kind of victory for Google and its marketing efforts around the device. | Gadgets |
I still don’t think Pixel will make a sizeable dent in the premium smartphone market this year, but Note 7 woes could help it make a stronger showing than it would have otherwise.. | Gadgets |
Want Google Assistant, but don’t want to spend your allowance on a Pixel? I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is you can get it with two tiny tweaks to a single config file — the bad news is you’ll need root access, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work on your phone in particular.
⚠️ Warning! Danger! ⚠️Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing. | Artificial Intelligence |
Fiddling around in root and bootloaders can and does brick phones. Make a backup first — lots of users are reporting problems.
With that said… XDA user and shiba inu brianelv runs the thread with details and a growing compatible-phones list, and Lifehacker has step-by-step instructions.
Save and reboot, then go to Settings>Apps, select Google, and clear its data and cache. | Artificial Intelligence |
It should reload with Assistant built in, which you can call up with a long home button press.
Don’t have root? You may still be able to get the feature if you have an unlocked bootloader; you’ll need to go through a custom recovery image or the built-in fastboot. | Artificial Intelligence |
Even more problems are being reported with this method, though, possibly due to mismatched build.prop files.
Mit Panchani runs you through the process below.
Uninstall the Google app entirely to start. Then download the files from here (thanks FaserF) and flash them, GoogleAssistantVelvet.zip first and then GoogleAssistantBuildProp.zip second. | Artificial Intelligence |
Reboot, OK the extra permissions Google now wants and you should be off to the races.
Sound like too much trouble? It might be! It’s risky! You probably shouldn’t. This Assistant doesn’t sound like all that much fun anyway. You’re going to anyway? Well, I tried.. | Artificial Intelligence |
The DJI is a fantastic all-purpose drone, but with the EXO 1 exoskeleton, it becomes a dedicated search and rescue tool. | Gadgets |
The 3D-printed add-on quickly attaches to the drone and adds a host of features key to making the drone a valuable tool for first responders.
There are GoPro mounting points at various locations around the exoskeleton that can be used for cameras, lights and any number of the various devices and accessories that have adopted the mounting design. | Gadgets |
Plastic zip-ties are used to connect the kit to the drone.
The designer points out that the mounting points work well with Knog Qudos lights because of their small, but powerful, lights and GoPro mounting ports.
The EXO 1 can be equipped with a novel but simple payload system. | Gadgets |
Using carabiners and neodinyum magnetics, the drone can lift a small payload and deliver it to a person without landing — just pull to release the payload from the magnet.
This exoskeleton was part of a design contest sponsored by DJI and Shapeways, no doubt to show the versatility of the Phantom 4 and Shapeways 3D-printing service. | Gadgets |
The EXO 1 won the contest, netting the designer $1,000 and a Phantom 4 drone.
The EXO 1 is currently available for ordering from Shapeways for $113.. | Gadgets |
Robotic exoskeletons are one of those technologies that tend to be associated with warfare or at least the industrial sector, but soft robotics and artificial muscles like these ones created by Swiss researchers make them suitable for more delicate operations as well.
Alone, they look like weird little worms. | Gadgets |