Friday, 23 May 2014
Crave giveaway: Bracketron SmartLantern portable battery pack
This little go-anywhere gadget charger also works as a lantern and a flashlight. Toss it in your bag for travel or camping and get a boost of power and light.
The device measures just 4 inches high and 1.75 inches wide and contains eight LEDs (64 lumens). One charge on the rechargeable 7,800mAh battery offers 48 hours of illumination or up to five full charges to your mobile device. Last year, CNET reviewer Dong Ngo named the SmartLantern his favorite portable battery pack for travel.
Normally, a Bracketron SmartLantern would run you $79.99, but this one will cost you a mere $0. So what do you have to do to win it? There are a few rules, so please read carefully.
- Register as a CNET user. Go to the top of this page and hit the "Join CNET" link to start the registration process. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again.
- Leave a comment below. You can leave whatever comment you want. If it's funny or insightful, it won't help you win, but we're trying to have fun here, so anything entertaining is appreciated.
- Leave only one comment. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than one comment, you will be automatically disqualified.
- The winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) Bracketron SmartLantern, with a retail value of $79.99.
- If you are chosen, you will be notified via email. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
- Entries can be submitted until Monday, May 26, 12 p.m. ET.
NO PURCHASE OR WIRELESS DEVICE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR D.C., 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS, AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes ends at 12 p.m. ET on Monday, May 26, 2014. See official rules for details.
Uber reportedly in talks to raise $500M for $12B valuation
The 4-year-old on-demand car service's valuation would nearly triple if it were to secure the new funding.
The 4-year-old company, whose app allows customers to request rides in private cars, is in discussions with a group of fund managers to raise about $500 million, financing that would give the startup a valuation of about $12 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Investors are expected to make commitments by the end of this week, the Journal reported, with deal closure coming by the end of the quarter.
CNET has contacted Uber for comment and will update this report when we learn more.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Uber was in talks with private equity investors on financing that would give it a valuation of about $10 billion, although it was suggested that the size and value of the possible funding could change.
It appears one of Uber's recent hires could be leading the charge for this reported new round of funding. According to Bloomberg, Uber hired Cameron Poetzscher from Goldman Sachs Group in March to be in charge of its corporate development.
A $12 billion valuation would be triple the current value of the company. Last August, Uber racked up roughly $350 million in funding, which gave it a $3.5 billion valuation. Such funding would make the company one of the most valuable venture-backed startups and allow it to pull ahead of rival on-demand car service Lyft, which announced in April that it had raised $250 million in Series D funding.
Despite earlier roadblocks from government regulators and taxi commissions, Uber appears to now be on a roll, with a presence in 115 cities worldwide. The company also has snagged deals with PayPal and the NFL
New Google tablet said to have advanced 3D imaging
Expected to go into production next month, the slate will incorporate dual cameras and infrared depth sensors, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Sporting a 7-inch display, the tablet will come equipped with two rear-facing cameras, infrared depth sensors, and advanced imaging software, unidentified sources told the Journal. The company plans to begin manufacturing the tablet next month, producing 4,000 prototype slates, the sources said.
CNET has contacted Google for comment and will update this report when we learn more.
The tablet is reportedly part of Google's Project Tango, which is supervised by Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, a skunkworks division that Google inherited with its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
The ambitious goal of Project Tango, as Google demonstrated in February, is to give smartphones the ability to do realistic 3D mapping and create virtual experiences as the phone's owner moves through the real world. The phone's sensors make more than 250 million 3D measurements every second to build a 3D model of the device's surroundings.
The project's suggested applications range from the mundane, such as capturing the dimensions of a home before furniture shopping simply by waving the phone around a room, to the helpful, such as aiding the visually impaired inside unfamiliar buildings, to the frivolous, such as turning a hallway into a virtual-reality game space.
Rival Facebook is also exploring advanced computer vision technology with its planned $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, the maker of virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. The headset was originally intended for use with gaming devices, but Facebook has said it plans to extend its virtual reality capabilities beyond gaming into areas such as communications, media, entertainment, and education.
Twitter blocks 'blasphemous' tweets in Pakistan
The company has complied with requests from a Pakistani "bureaucrat" to hide specific content, says the New York Times.
Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority had asked the microblogging site to remove a series of tweets from view across his country, The New York Times reported on Thursday. The tweets in question offered crude drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, photos of burning Qurans, and messages from anti-Islam bloggers and an American porn star, according to the Times.
As detailed by the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a collaboration among law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first request was dated May 5 and the most recent May 14. The five requests in total mark the first time that Twitter has agreed to take down content in Pakistan.
Twitter has maintained that blocking certain tweets in possible violation of local law is better than having its entire site taken down in specific countries, the Times said. The company has wrestled with the latter, most recently as Turkey banned the entire site over a few tweets.
But based on the source of the Pakistani takedown requests, Twitter's actions have triggered criticism on at least two fronts.
Pakistani advocacy group Bolo Bhi has questioned the right of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority to request a block on Twitter content, arguring that such power is beyond its scope. The EFF echoed that criticism, saying that "it is even more alarming to see Twitter comply with Pakistani requests based on what Bolo Bhi describes as 'little in the way of due process.'"
Origami unfolds a new world of shape-shifting electronics
Researchers are using the geometry of paper folding to come up with futuristic antennas that can retract and compress.
"It's absolutely true. If we became engineers and we stuck always to the book, there wouldn't be new breakthroughs," said Georgakopoulos, an electromagnetics specialist and assistant professor in Florida International University's department of electrical and computer engineering.
"Where does imagination come from? Art. Artists don't have any laws, or limits," he added.
It's from this line of thinking that Georgakopoulos is helping transform the field of electrical engineering and electronics design using the mathematical properties of a paper crane.
The art of origami, he says, is the key to unlocking whole new conceptual modes of thought for scientists.
While folding smartphones into your jacket pocket like the front page of a newspaper is still a futurist fantasy, electronics that compress and change shape are now possible if designed the right way. They're currently in development, aided by Japan's centuries-old paper-folding techniques, an art form that spread worldwide around the mid-1900s.
The immediate benefit would be in putting electronics into orbit -- or into soldiers' cargo pockets -- that are smaller and lighter than ever before. Yet they also would be multipurpose, designed to reconfigure themselves both to optimize for space and to access various technical functionalities through morphing form factors. The unforeseen applications are as limitless as the geometry of origami structures themselves.
"What happens is that we have an origami structure that can change," Georgakopoulos said. "For example, if I look at the accordion -- it can change its height, it can collapse, or it can expand, and have a large height. We can control the geometric configuration."
Origami antennas: The next generation of electronics design
Of course, we're still a ways off from introducing roll-up tablets and smartphones that can pleat like a pair of jeans. But the underpinning geometric techniques of paper folding are becoming increasingly important for achieving breakthroughs in scientific device design and manufacturing processes.The newest avenue of development in this respect is antenna design, one of a series of specialities for which Georgakopoulos received both his master's degree and his doctorate, studying under Constantine Bolanis, the prolific antenna and electromagnetics pioneer.
Now Georgakopoulos is part of a joint research team spanning Georgia Tech University and FIU that is working on origami-influenced antennas. The team has a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Origami Design for Integration of Self-assembling Systems for Engineering Innovation.
"Where does imagination come from? Art. Artists don't have any laws, or limits."A mouthful for sure, but the program is an entirely origami-based initiative that is extending beyond antenna design into work on DNA folding and mechanical structure design.Stavros Georgakopoulos
"When we think of origami, its nature is perfect for this type of thing," Georgakopoulos said of antennas. "Origami really helps to miniaturize the antenna during launch, and when it's up in space, it can become very large."
Besides space shifting, an unfolding antenna will be able to move beyond linear functionality. "Even though I have the same structure, I can achieve different performance for the antenna, work at two different frequencies for instance," the Florida scientist added.
Paper prototypes are already in use now. Designs with ascending diagonal folds and pancake-like discs that flower outward with the mathematical motion of an accordion are early-stage ideas. And the researchers used special ink-jet techniques to deposit conductive materials onto the paper including copper and silver.
Thanks to advancements in simulation software, namely the industry-standard high-frequency structural simulator (HFSS) from a company called Ansys, the extent to which the team can conceptualize new antenna models is limited only by their imagination. That's a fitting parameter for the Einstein-quoting Georgakopoulos.
"The software has been really instrumental in doing this. You can't just build these geometries one at a time," he explained. Antenna design was changed forever in the early '90s when simulation software like HFSS made expensive and serial physical prototyping unnecessary, he added.
However, that's one aspect central to the artistic aesthetic of origami -- paper cranes cannot and should not be mass-produced, but hand-crafted, the logic goes -- that doesn't translate to the world of component design.
The science behind the art of paper folding
Origami, from the Japanese words for "folding" and "paper," was confined to the island nation since its inception as an art form in the 17th century, until it expanded to other countries during and after World War II. Though it's mostly associated with the surprising serenity found in complex transformation, it has always been an inherently mathematical pursuit.After all, the crafting of structures from paper with only a basic series of folds and, with few exceptions, no cutting or use of adhesives, involves understanding the geometric limitations of lines and space and how the two properties interact. There are subsets of origami that address the various schools of thought, both from a conceptual and technical standpoint.
Scientists like Lang, who have contributed greatly to understanding the mathematics of origami and helped create computational origami simulators, have pushed the boundaries of the field in the last few decades, yielding stunning real-world applications in the world of engineering.
This technical origami, known in Japan as "origami sekkei," has descended deep into the study of theoretical geometry. And it has manifested itself practically in everything, from packaging design and airbags to medical devices, like stent implants that unfold within the body and prevent collapse of certain areas during surgery.
When it came to antennas, however, Georgakopoulos and his team had little precedent when designing working structures that were electromagnetically sound.
"Origami started with satellite dishes. But this type of work we're doing is breakthrough work. That started about a year ago," he said. "We [FIU] were working on wireless power transfer, and what we were doing there was folding, and Georgia Tech was doing antenna work without thinking of origami."
The two research teams had, in Georgakopoulos' words, an aha moment. "We said, 'What about origami?' We realized it is very well-suited and could really help us create a completely new area in antennas. Antennas are actually driven by geometry," he said.
Now the team is beginning to rope in dedicated origami masters to inform the research, grabbing prominent artists featured in "Between the Folds," like Chris Palmer of Berkeley, Calif.
Palmer is the manager of UC Berkeley's computer-aided design workspace, the Digital Fabrication Lab. But in the origami world, he is well-known for taking the techniques of modular origami master Shuzo Fujimoto -- a teacher of Palmer's for the last two decades whose credits include popularization of origami tessellation techniques and his hydrangea sculpture -- and applying them to textile art.
"The engineers can find some little examples of how they want something to function, but they won't have before them the full breadth of folded structures to choose them," Palmer said. That's where the origami artists come in. "The artist and the engineer can both work together."
For Georgakopoulos, it's not only an iconic bringing together of artists and scientists under the same roof, but also a teachable moment for future generations of engineers.
"The more we pursue engineering, we realize that engineering is actually similar to what Einstein said. We're telling our students it's OK to work with artists," he said. "It's a very exciting program when students realize that engineering can be very creative."
How to fix Apple's iMessage bug
Switching from an iPhone to an Android device or Windows Phone? Read this first.
Apple said in a statement this morning that it recently "fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users." The company also revealed that it has plans for an "additional bug fix in a future software update."
There's no need to wait for Apple to issue a patch. Here's how you can fix the problem right now:
Method 1: Disable iMessage
The easiest way to fix the problem is to disable iMessage on your iPhone before making the switch to another mobile platform. To disable iMessage, open the Settings app, scroll down to Messages, and toggle the iMessage switch from 'on' to 'off.' Afterward, I suggest sending a normal text message to one of your friends to ensure that iMessage was switched off properly
Method 2: Reset your Apple ID password
What if you have already sold or traded in your old iPhone for another device? If you are unable to perform the first method or if it was unsuccessful for you, Jack Wallen over at TechRepublic suggests you try resetting your Apple ID password.
Method 3: Call AppleCare
If you have tried one or both of the above methods and still aren't receiving text messages, don't panic -- there is still hope. The last thing I suggest you do is try calling 1-800-MY-APPLE and having a technician manually deregister your phone number from Apple's servers.Friday, 28 March 2014
The embattled smartphone maker posted a fiscal fourth-quarter loss of $423 million, or 80 cents a share, swinging from a profit of 98 million, or 19 cents a share, from a year ago. On an adjusted basis, or excluding one-time items, it posted a loss of $42 million, or 8 cents a share.
Revenue fell 64 percent to $976 million.
Analysts, on average, forecast a loss of 55 cents a share and revenue of $1.1 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
The narrower loss has shares of BlackBerry up 6.2 percent to $9.61 in pre-marketing trading.
BlackBerry is in the midst of a transformation it hopes will pull it back from the brink, which includes a new management team and lots of cost cuts. The company is also redoubling its focus on selling phones and services to corporate and government clients, while also looking to protect its base of low-end customers in emerging markets.
Chen previously said he expects the company to be cash flow positive within the next four quarters and profitable by fiscal 2016. On Friday, he reiterated that goal, noting that the company is a quarter ahead in cutting its operational costs.
"I'm pleased the company is back in execution mode," Chen said during a conference call on Friday. He added the company is about a quarter ahead of its plan in lower operating expenses.
All the while, BlackBerry continues to see sales of its smartphones tumble as its market share has deteriorated.
The company sold 3.4 million BlackBerry phones to customers, but only 1.1 million ran on its newer BlackBerry 10 operating system. Its older BlackBerry 7-based devics remain popular in emerging markets. It added it recognized hardware revenue on 1.3 million BlackBerry phones, down from 1.9 million in the fiscal third quarter.
The company is focusing on some of pockets of life remaining in its business, including its BBM messaging service, its QNX embedded software business, and its enterprise server services. Chen reaffirmed BBM's 85 million monthly active users and said a priority would be to grow the user base. BlackBerry unveiled plans for an update to start generating revenue from BBM, initially through stickers and sponsored posts.
In late February, BlackBerry showed a bit of life with a tease of two new products made by Foxconn: the low-end Z3 destined to hit Indonesia first, and the more traditional enterprise-friendly Q20, which CEO John Chen half-seriously coined the "BlackBerry Classic."
Still, it's unclear whether there are enough takers for either phone. Both Android and Windows Phone have made a play with more affordable products, while its high-end market share has eroded to all but the most secure companies and government agencies.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
