There are plenty of places to seek answers to questions, including search engines like Google and Q&A sites like Quora.
Most recently, Jelly, a new startup created by Twitter cofounder Biz
Stone, is squishing its way into the fray with a free smartphone app
that lets you ask questions appended with images, and give answers to
people in your extended social network.
Like Twitter, which faced
much skepticism early on, plenty of folks are raising an eyebrow in
Jelly’s direction while trying to figure out what it’s good for. The
answer, at least partly, could be shopping. Imagine getting your closest
friends’ opinions on a new pair of shoes before actually buying them.
Or getting second opinions on whether the gadget in front of you is as
good as the salesperson claims.
When I interviewed Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod and now CEO of Nest,
two years ago, he told me that he started the company, which sells
smart thermostats and alarms, because existing products for taking
control of your home over the Internet were clunky and appealed only to
the technically minded (see “Nest’s Control Freaks”). “Home automation is for single geeky guys. It’s not for families,” he said.
The
devices on show at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show
(CES) in Las Vegas suggest that Fadell’s assessment no longer holds
true. A deluge of Internet-ready home devices and appliances launched at
the event. Many appear to be easy to use, and can be combined into
larger systems that let someone take command of his home using a single
phone app.
For all the hype around smart glasses, none of them actually look like normal glasses. But Vuzix,
which develops wearable display technology for military and industrial
applications, plans to change that this summer by releasing a pair of
sleek wraparound shades that will let users see colorful images
projected over objects in the real world.
Vuzix CEO Paul Travers says his company’s sunglasses will not only be
less bulky and obtrusive than Google Glass, they’ll also provide an
augmented reality experience that actually resembles the one portrayed
in Google’s first promotional video for Glass,
in which useful bits of information like navigational cues are
displayed in the middle of the wearer’s field of vision. This isn’t
possible today with Glass, whose display sits off to the side, above the
right eye, and is the visual equivalent of a 25-inch high-definition
television seen from eight feet away.
Hybrid watch: The Cogito smart watch has a
circular display inside the dial of an analog watch. Its designers say
that’s just enough space to deliver useful notifications from a person’s
phone without compromising on the style and compactness of conventional
watches.
When Intel CEO Brian Krzanich unveiled a smart watch during his
keynote speech at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in
Las Vegas on Monday, he brought his company level with Samsung and
Qualcomm, both of which sell watches with sizeable color touch screens
that are capable of running apps (see “Samsung’s Galaxy Gear” and “Review: Qualcomm’s Toq”).
Yet
Krzanich was running against the trend at CES, where companies large
and small have shown smart watches intentionally less packed with
features and less reminiscent of wrist-mounted smartphones than those
developed by Intel and its competitors. Like MIT Technology Review,
many in the electronics industry seem to have concluded that for this
new species of gadget to earn mass appeal it must be significantly
simpler and more thoughtfully designed (see “Smart Watches Are Dumb”).
Digital key: The YubiKey Neo can log you in to
online services if you plug it into a computer’s USB port or tap it
against a contactless-capable mobile device.
Typing in passwords—and worrying about data breaches at online
services—could soon occupy less of your time. This week at the
International Consumer Electronics Show, several companies launched
technologies that get around passwords with authentication technologies
that rely on fingerprints, eyes, or other tricks. Some of these
technologies will be available this year on existing gadgets, while
others are set to be integrated into future PCs, tablets, and phones.
One has the backing of Google, which has said it hopes passwords will
eventually be used only rarely (see “Google Experiments with Ring as Password”).
Security
experts have long said passwords are a poor way of keeping devices and
online accounts private. But with few alternatives, they have come to
dominate digital life. The primary drawbacks to relying on passwords are
that people struggle to remember them and often reuse them, and
companies must store them in central databases that are targeted by
criminals. Some 150 million usernames and passwords were taken from
Adobe servers in October 2013. Evernote, LinkedIn, and other companies
have suffered similar breaches.
It’s easy to imagine that being blind or visually impaired more
or less excludes people from using smartphones or tablets. But nothing
could be further from the truth. App stores have a dizzying variety of
products that help the visually impaired access all kinds of information
much more easily than would otherwise be possible.
These apps offer audio books, match clothes by colour and even offer
games played by hearing and touch alone. But the apps designed to give
directions all suffer from the same drawbacks—audio directions are
helpful but also screen out other audio such as conversations or the
sound of traffic nearby. What’s more, GPS does not work indoors so these
kinds of systems are of little use in homes and other buildings
Now Pierluigi Gallo and buddies at the University of Palermo in Italy
have come up with an alternative which offers the blind navigational
help without any form of audio distraction or the need for GPS.
Beyond the glitz of the International Consumer Electronics Show,
the wireless industry faces a fundamental problem: more features and
faster data transmission are draining phones’ batteries faster than
ever.
Fortunately, there’s room for improvement inside the devices, in
parts known as power amplifiers that turn electricity into radio energy.
In phones, they typically consume more power than any other component
but waste half of it along the way, as lots of people can attest if
they’ve watched their battery die (and their phone get warm) after an
hour of streaming video. The same problem bedevils wireless networks’
base stations, which send and receive signals to and from individual
phones.
Carmaker Audi showed off a book-sized circuit board capable of
driving a car on Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show
(CES). Audi claims the computer, called zFAS, represents a significant
advance in automation technology because it is compact enough to fit
into existing vehicles without compromising design.
Several
different Audi vehicles equipped with zFAS drove themselves onto the
stage during the presentation, and a new concept car designed to
showcase it was also introduced.
