Sunday, February 22, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
With Beam you can watch TV on your bedroom ceiling, play games using your phone or a Bluetooth controller, project recipes on your kitchen counter, stream content from your network drive, listen to music through its speakers, play projected board-games on your dining table, show a presentation or even use it in a restaurant to show the menu and turn the walls into digital paintings.
If you aren’t sold on this idea yet, Beam also runs Android. You can download any app from the Google Play Store to use on the projector, and it can all be controlled by your Android or iOS device. The projector is also borrowing a few functionality traits from the popular IFTTT service, allowing you to set up certain rules for the projector to follow. Take a look at the examples shown below:
Beam is an Android-powered projector that fits into a light socket
Friday, February 20, 2015
YouTube to launch kid-friendly Android app on Feb. 23
Flurry has a deep understanding of the mobile developer’s needs and the mobile ecosystem, and Yahoo is a place with an enormous audience across devices and sophisticated technology. Since our investment in Flurry, we have been hard at work integrating the best of both companies, and now BrightRoll, to create comprehensive suite of solutions for developers.
Here’s an explanation into what each of the products can do, from the press release:
Yahoo Launches Mobile Developer Suite
Microsoft recently launched a deal that would give users a crazy 100GB of OneDrive storage for free, for two years. All you had to do was register yourself for a Bing Rewards account, and that was it. The only problem with the deal is that it initially was only available for US users. If you were left out in the cold with this deal, Microsoft has decided to change the rules of the game and expand the deal across the globe to a certain degree. The reason why there is a limitation is either because there’s some sort of glitch in the service, or the service is only available where Bing allows you to create a Rewards account. To give you an example, I’m currently in Guatemala City and the link didn’t work for me.
100GB of free OneDrive storage goes international, sort of
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Multi Organ-on-a-chip
So-called organs-on-a-chip have become an important way to test the effects of chemicals or radiation on different kinds of cells. The military, in particular, has been interested to use them to study how poisonous agents like ricin, botulinum toxin, or anthrax attack different organs. Ideally, there would be a way to integrate individual subunits into a single body-on-a-chip where all the different elements could interact in a more realistic way.
Donald Ingber, an FDA-supported researcher from Harvard’s Wyss Institute, has developed a “bone marrow on a chip” device. Bone marrow, among other things, is where blood cells get made. The effects of radiation, and many toxic chemicals, are most acutely absorbed there. These kinds of nasties often lead to the “liquid tumor” class of cancers — the leukemias and lymphomas where out of control cells proliferate and then circulate as single entities in the blood or lymph. Many viruses which go on to infect individual organs to various degrees, hang out in white blood cell reservoirs where they can continually gain infective passage to the entire body.
A recent article mentioned that the EPA is planning to announce a new $18 million war chest to combine livers on chips with other devices that simulate fetal membranes, mammary glands, and developing limbs. These regions have been shown to be particularly susceptible to environmental pollutants like dioxin and bisphenol A. Like many harmful chemicals, their metabolite products generated by the action of various enzymatic systems of the liver are often what does the real damage.
Sometimes the fastest way to find out what chemical, bacteria, virus could be causing your problem is not to try to positively ID the invader but rather to analyse their metabolic effects on the body. As it happens, different organs have come to exert their wills upon each other in many idiosyncratic ways. Gross physiologic observables like heart rate, blood pressure, and blood composition are in part controlled by rare peptides or hormones often made by just a single organ. In quirky yet predictable feats of evolution, via myriad migrations from salt water to fresh water and back, ultimately through mud to air, our lungs, kidneys and guts have had their mutual allegiances repurposed and honed for the benefit of the whole.
The plan for the integrated organ on a chip is to have working devices in researchers hands in five years. On the other diagnostic front, there are new gene or antigen array chips that can potentially sequence or otherwise capture any villian as fast as you can feel it. No doubt both approaches with by of value in keeping our military, and hopefully our civilians healthy.
Whole organs on a chip coming to diagnostic centers near you
New vanadium-flow battery
Imergy Power Systems announced a new, mega-sized version of their vanadium flow battery technology today. The EPS250 series will deliver up to 250kW of power with a 1MWh capacity. We’ve talked about a number of different battery chemistries and designs at ET, from nanobatteries to metal-air, to various lithium-ion approaches, but we’ve not said much about flow batteries — and since this new announcement is a major expansion for the company (their previous battery was a 30kW unit) it’s an opportunity to take a look at the underlying technology.
Feel the flow
A flow battery can be thought of as a type of rechargeable fuel cell. The electrolyte fuel, in this case, is kept in large external tanks that can be pumped through a reactor. One of the characteristics of a flow battery is that the energy storage can be decoupled from the energy output. The size of the reactor determines how much power can be released at once, while the size of the storage tanks determines how much total power can be stored.This, in turn, makes it theoretically much easier to expand the size of a flow battery installation as compared to a lithium-ion battery. Doubling your battery life is theoretically as simple as doubling the size of the storage tank. Flow batteries can charge and discharge rapidly — refilling the tank with “charged” electrolyte can be as simple as opening a nozzle and pumping in the replacement fluid while the original electrolyte is recharged in a separate container.
There are different types of flow batteries and multiple compatible battery chemistries, but Imergy’s designs all use vanadium for both electroactive elements. The ability to fill both ‘sides’ of the equation is an unusual property of vanadium and it simplifies certain aspects of the reactor design. Vanadium flow batteries are extremely stable — leaving the battery in a discharged state causes no damage, and the battery has an estimated lifespan of 30-50 years and supports thousands to tens of thousands of discharge cycles — far more than lithium-ion can manage.
The disadvantage of flow batteries is that the total energy density of the solution is rather low energy density and the complexity of the storage and pumping mechanisms. Research into improving vanadium’s energy density is underway, a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found a way to boost the energy density of vanadium batteries by up to 70% by switching to a different electrolyte formulation.
The long-term market
Much of the debate over the long-term usefulness of battery technology in the US centers around whether or not batteries can be combined with solar and wind power while still matching the cost of our existing natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants. What’s often ignored is that these equations look very different in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa or Indonesia where import costs are high, infrastructure limited (or nonexistent) and natural deposits of fossil fuels are low.
Africa also has enormous renewable energy potential — it receives huge amounts of solar power, its hydropower generating capability is largely untapped, and its geothermal and wave power are both abundant. The East African Rift in particular has high potential as a long-term geothermal power source.
Vanadium flow batteries could potentially augment renewable power in many areas across the continent, and Imergy is focusing its efforts on both the developing and the developed world. The company claims it can deliver power for a levelized cost as low as $300 per kWh, which would put it in competition with lithium-ion costs — including, possibly, in competition with Tesla as that company scales up its own industrial battery efforts.
New vanadium-flow battery delivers 250kW of liquid energy storage
Free – Up to 5 social profiles, up to 2 RSS
$8.99/month – Up to 100 social profiles, up to 9 team members, advanced message scheduling and more
Enterprise (custom pricing) – Unlimited
$39 per user/month – Manage up to 10 profiles, real-time brand monitoring, comprehensive reporting tools, and more
$59 per user/month – Manage up to 20 profiles, Helpdesk and Google Analytics integration, deluxe reporting and more
$99 per user/month – Manage up to 50 profiles, ViralPost time optimization, custom interface, and more
$9/month – 1 Facebook page, 1 Twitter, 1 User and more
$49/month – 10 social media accounts, 8 users and more
$119/month – 30 social media accounts, 30 users and more
Free – EdgeRank score, EdgeRank score over time graph
$15 per page/month – Real-time analysis, post grades, recommendations, negative feedback analyzer
Free service – allows for 2 profiles and 10 updates in the queue for each profile
$10/month – unlimited updates and up to 12 profiles
Free 15-day trial
$13.95/month – Up to 20,000 social contacts across 5 Twitter accounts and more
$39/month – Up to 50,000 social contacts across 15 Twitter accounts and more
$149/month – Up to 200,000 social contacts across 40 Twitter accounts and more
Enterprise – On demand
$1 first 30 days – unlimited usage
$10/month after 30 days – manage up to 5 social media accounts/ additional accounts cost $3/month each
Free – Limited profile and domain trends
$29/month – 90-day history archive, track 2 competitors, invite 2 collaborators, basic audience IQ and more
$99/month – 1-year history archive, track 5 competitors, invite 5 collaborators, advanced audience IQ and more
Enterprise (custom pricing) – Unlimited history archive, track unlimited competitors and more
Free
$99/month – Ideal for small teams and content campaigns
$299/month – Designed for Agency teams to support multiple SEO and content marketing campaigns
$499+/month – Bespoke plans for brands and large agencies
$9/month – Getting started with social marketing
$49/month – All the basics for social media marketing
$119/month – A comprehensive tool for social media marketers
$249/month – The definitive tool for social businesses
16 Tools Every Social Media Manager Should Use
This updated protocol will use new techniques to make pages load faster.–PC Pitstop.
By Damien for MakeTechEasier
Almost everything you visit on the web at one point or another uses a special protocol known as the Hyptertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Ever since the year 1999, you’ve been using HTTP version 1.1. This has been the ongoing standard for many years until Google made an announcement on February 10, 2015 that its browser will be adding full support of what is now known as HTTP/2. This sounds like utter gibberish to some, but that’s because there’s no description of what HTTP/2 does differently. To understand this, we need to explore exactly what this new protocol version does, and how it is similar to the version of HTTP we’ve been using for nearly two decades.
What Does HTTP/2 Achieve?
Whenever a new protocol version is developed, it needs actual concrete goals. The most obvious goal is backward compatible with its predecessor, HTTP 1.1. Without that ability, every server in the world will have to switch to HTTP/2 for you to be able to browse their websites.
While maintaining compatibility with the older version, this new protocol will make use of advanced techniques as measures against latency, making pages load faster. This is the primary goal, the problem that HTTP/2 plans to address most aggressively.
Other improvements include added security and compatibility with reverse proxies.
In the big scheme of things, HTTP/2 is not going to be that much different from HTTP 1.1. As you surf the internet, the strongest effect you will feel is that webpages will load significantly faster as long as they support the new version.
How HTTP 2.0 Will Speed Up the Internet
Rumors of Samsung launching their own mobile payments system have finally been confirmed. Well, for the most part. Instead of developing their own system, the South Korean company announced today that they’ve reached a deal to acquire contactless mobile payments company LoopPay. Competing with both Google Wallet and Apple Pay, LoopPay uses existing magnetic strip readers on pay terminals via Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) — not NFC.
This ensures that, even if a retailer hasn’t yet upgraded their terminals to accept NFC-based payments, you can almost always pay using your smartphone with just a tap. Samsung EVP of Global Innovation Center David Eun had this to say about the deal:
“We are excited to take our relationship with LoopPay to the next level, by bringing consumers a mobile wallet solution that is not just safe and reliable, but also widely accepted at more locations than any competing service.”
A specific dollar amount wasn’t disclosed, but you can expect LoopPay’s technology — which currently requires a bulky case or key fob — to come bundled inside the upcoming









