Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » applications

Wall Street Survivor Gamifies Financial Education With Help From Bunchball

Administrator — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:00:02 +0000

If you’re someone who thinks gamification is just a fad, you may want to look away now. To be clear, Bunchball isn’t just jumping on the latest buzzword. The company was founded to deliver gamification tools all the way back in 2005 — founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia has told me that he probably came to the market too early, and has had to keep the company alive while the industry caught up. Now it’s focused largely on enterprise customers who want to use game mechanics to turn employees into better workers . There are, however, other applications. For example: Bunchball just announced that it’s partnering with financial literacy site Wall Street Survivor . The site already offers a virtual stock market simulator, but apparently that wasn’t game enough, so it has been redesigned using Bunchball’s Nitro platform. On the new version of Wall Street Survivor ( viewable on the beta site ), there are now “missions” where users learn about stock market concepts. They receive badges for completing those missions and making trades. They can also receive rewards if they have some of the best returns among the virtual portfolios in the Wall Street Survivor database. The change is being touted as a way for the site to appeal specifically to millennial, who may be intimidated by investing and the financial world, but will enjoy the gamified approach.

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Wall Street Survivor Gamifies Financial Education With Help From Bunchball

Never Mind The Servers: AngelPad Start-Up ElasticBox Makes It Easy To Set Up Web Apps

bestcbstore — Sat, 12 May 2012 21:35:20 +0000

If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive “Boring, Sidney, booring” then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn’t for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy loved heroin, I think you may be in luck. ElasticBox, founded by former Microsofies Ravi Srivatsav, Alberto Arias Maestro, and Amadeo Casas Cuadrado, is a service that makes setting up and running a cloud-based service quick and easy. With the service you don’t have to set up the environment in order to run an app. Instead, you can focus on the actual functionality and far less on server maintenance. Ravi wrote us saying: While most of our competition focusses on the deployment and management of servers, ElasticBox focusses on the application level. ElasticBox provides you with everything that is needed to deploy your applications where it makes more sense, whether your criteria is cost, performance or location all under a tight control of an enterprise grade policy management system The company is currently bringing in a few hundred in revenue from actual paying customers, a surprising feat considering they launched on May 8. The service requires some onboarding right now but that will soon change. “We plan to open up for a self serve model in the coming weeks,” said Ravi. “With the increased adoption of infrastructure as a service, enterprises are demanding software solutions that allows them to manage the execution of their applications in the cloud without having to deal with the challenges associated with server configuration and management. The ElasticBox team has seen this problems from the front line, at Microsoft, DynamicOps and MySpace,” he said. The service supports multiple infrastructures including AWS and Microsoft servers. The goal, in short, is to allow folks to deploy their applications onto a clean, ready-to-run (dare I say “elastic”) box and let the company do all the IT maintenance and performance tweaks. The service is open to customers right now although there is a waiting list of about 50 customers in the queue right now, making it a hot commodity. However, if you’d rather live at the quick and easy Chelsea Hotel of cloud computing environments rather than the staid estates of Lewisham, South East London, ElasticBox may be an interesting choice.

Yahoo: Facebook Bought Patents Just To Countersue, They Lack Good Faith, Should Be Disregarded

jos — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:29:01 +0000

Counter-countersuit! Yahoo today claimed that the patents Facebook is countering its original patent infringement lawsuit against the social network with “were acquired by Facebook for purposes of retaliation”, and therefore violate the U.S. Patent Office’s “Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith” and should be diregarded by the court. Yahoo also claims Facebook couldn’t legally know enough about its business to know if it was violating Facebook’s patents, that several of Facebook’s new patents were illegally filed, and Yahoo also filed two more advertising patent infringement claims against Facebook. Facebook responds that “We remain perplexed by Yahoo’s erratic actions. We disagree with these latest claims and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.” If a court agrees that Facebook can’t countersue with patents bought specifically for the countersuit, Facebook could be left wide-open in settlement negotiations, and might have to pay Yahoo a hefty sum of cash and/or stock. A statement from Yahoo details its position, while also using the word “innovation” to try to seem less troll-like: “Today’s filing underscores the breadth of Facebook’s violation of Yahoo!’s intellectual property. As we have stated previously, Yahoo!’s technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. We intend to vigorously protect these technologies for our customers and shareholders.” Oddly, when Facebook bought AOL patents from Microsoft last week, Yahoo said “ Companies who purchase patents are often working from a position of weakness and take these actions to strengthen their portfolio.” However, the two new patent infringement lawsuits it filed today and several of the original ten are based on patents Yahoo itself had purchased in the acquisition of Overture. Here are Yahoo’s counter-counterclaims and what they mean for the case: Facebook’s Patent Countersuit Not In Good Faith Yahoo says of the ten patents Facebook countersued with: “Eight of these patents were purchased by Facebook in the past five months, and several of these patents were purchased (independent of any separate technology acquisition or merger) after Yahoo! filed its complaint in this action. On information and belief, many, if not all, of these patents were acquired by Facebook for purposes of retaliation against Yahoo! in this case. No employee or officer of Facebook or any affiliated company conceived of, reduced to practice, or developed the alleged inventions claimed in the eight patents acquired from non-practicing entities. In fact, the applications for many of these patents predate Facebook itself. These could therefore be ruled to lack “good faith”, be thrown out, leaving Facebook nothing to offset Yahoo’s infringement claims with. Facebook Failed To Inform Yahoo Of IP Issues Before Countersuing Yahoo Says: Contrary to an agreement between in-house counsel for Facebook and in-house counsel for Yahoo! to raise intellectual property issues with each other in the first instance, Facebook provided no notice to Yahoo! of any alleged infringement, and Facebook never attempted to resolve any alleged infringement of any of its patents by Yahoo! prior to asserting them in litigation. Indeed, the PTO did not even issue U.S. Patent No. 8,150,913 until April 3, 2012—the day Facebook asserted it. This break in the agreement, and that fact that Facebook countersued with patents issued and that it had bought that day could lend weight to Yahoo’s previous claim that Facebook’s countersuit lacks “good faith”. View this document on Scribd

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Yahoo: Facebook Bought Patents Just To Countersue, They Lack Good Faith, Should Be Disregarded

Barely 3 Months Post-Launch, Loyalty App Punchcard Is Live In 15M Locations, Nears Profitability

Administrator — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:22:42 +0000

The mobile apps from stealthy loyalty startup Punchcard have only been on the market since February, but the company is now reporting it’s close to being cash-flow positive. Like a digital version of paper punchcards which reward repeat customers for their business, Punchcard’s app lets customers snap photos of their receipts in exchange for cash payouts or other rewards directly from the merchant. While not a new concept in and of itself, what’s interesting about Punchcard is how it’s been acquiring its business: it just switched on loyalty programs for millions of locations across the U.S., even if they didn’t ask for it. “We’re looking at this as seeding the market, essentially,” explains Punchcard CEO and serial entrepreneur Andy Steuer of why the company has seemingly put the cart before the horse. In other words, usage and rewards first, paying customers (i.e., businesses signing up) second. “If you look at other location-based apps, they’ve turned on the ability to check in anywhere,” says Steuer, “and we’ve turned on the ability to check-out anywhere.” Consumers use the app, which now works at 15 million (!) locations in the U.S., to verify their purchases by snapping a photo of their receipt. As they collect punches on their virtual cards, they can earn their way to cash, freebies and other rewards. Generally (unless a merchant has specified otherwise), the rewards arrive after the 10th purchase, and, if cash-based, are the equivalent of the average order value up to $30. But how many of these businesses are actually paying for the system? Steuer declined to give exact numbers, only saying that Punchcard is “generating revenue from the sales of several thousand locations.” Nor is he sharing the download numbers or active users numbers associated with the mobile applications. He did note, however, that the company has paying customers , mostly in southern California where Punchcard got started, including a newly added Subway franchise. He also says that Punchcard is seeing a “huge conversion rate” from app download to usage and repeat usage, with transactions doubling every week. (But again, no exact numbers were provided.) However, Punchcard has just partnered with KDA Group , one of the largest local marketing agencies, which will begin selling Punchcard to their network, which includes major retailers and chains, operating at around some 300,000 locations nationwide. The company currently offers the service in two tiers (one for $29/month, another for $99/month), which provides businesses with access to an analytics view into who their customers are, and an automated re-marketing program that pushes offers back to customers to incent them to buy again. The solution works best for retailers, restaurants, grocery stores, coffee shops, and other local businesses that want to increase the frequency of their customers’ purchases. Punchcard isn’t the only startup trying to digitize the loyalty space. Facebook just acquired loyalty play Tagtile , for example, Google acquired Punchd , while others like Perka and Perkville are also working on similar programs, to name just a few. But Steuer says that Punchcard has some advantages over other efforts, as it doesn’t use QR codes, in-store hardware, nor does it require connecting a credit card to your account to use. Having to snap photos of receipts, though, does involve some friction, he admits, but he says the company is working on other solutions that would allow customers to earn rewards in other ways. (More on that later). Punchcard was founded in Q3 2011, but the mobile apps didn’t officially launch until February 8, 2012. You can try Punchcard on iPhone or Android by downloading it from here .

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Barely 3 Months Post-Launch, Loyalty App Punchcard Is Live In 15M Locations, Nears Profitability

Security Hole Spotted In Facebook Android SDK, Long Tail Apps May Still Be Unpatched

user — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:28:26 +0000

Mobile app platform provider Parse is reporting having discovered a major security hole in the Facebook Android SDK. The problem was quickly patched after being reported to Facebook, but that alone may not be enough to secure affected mobile applications, the company says. The security vulnerability affected all apps using the Facebook Android SDK, including major apps like Foursquare, and there’s no way for end users to know which app developers, outside the big ones, have implemented the fixes needed to secure users’ data. (Except for Foursquare, which we know to be patched – whew !) Parse , for those unfamiliar, offers a mobile platform that enables developers to add scalable backend services to their applications. One of the tools the company provides makes it easier to add Facebook support to their Android apps. When used, developers can show a Facebook authentication flow to users, allowing users to sign into an app with their Facebook credentials. To implement the feature, Parse uses Facebook’s Android SDK to get its authorized access token from the social network. This gives app developers the ability to perform common social actions on behalf of the app’s users, like posting to their Facebook Wall, for example, or accessing their Facebook profile data or friend list. Nothing malicious, of course, as the user is in control and can revoke the app’s permissions whenever they want. Parse engineer David Poll explains via blog post how he spotted the vulnerability. Android developers often use logcat , a diagnostic log that apps and system processes can write to, he says. This is actually an executable that can run on a developer’s PC and device. Applications can capture its log for debugging purposes, which, when combined with bug or crash reports, can help developers get to the meat of a problem in an app’s code. Again, nothing odd or malicious. However, when working on adding Facebook integration to Parse, Poll noticed something strange: a line appeared in the logcat viewer which basically showed the entire access token that had been just granted after logging in, encoded in a URL. But Poll’s first thought was that the token was only viewable to them, even though they knew that logcat was essentially a public diagnostic bulletin board for Android apps. But to be sure, Poll tested to see if he could discover other apps (like Foursquare) that also use the Facebook SDK to see if they showed the same thing. And they did. Next, Poll used an Android app called CatLog (it lets you view logcat files), which let him see the same line of code without first debugging the app. Uh-oh. For those that don’t follow the above dev speak, what this all means is that anyone could write a simple app that scraped the output from the Facebook SDK and steal access tokens from the user of the device. So Poll did that, too. And yep, his “FacebookThief” proof-of-concept app worked, running in the background, snagging user tokens. “In less than 20 lines of non-boilerplate code, I could masquerade as any Facebook user that logged into any app on the device that used the Facebook SDK,” explains Poll. “It wouldn’t even be clear that my app was the culprit. If my app posted to a user’s profile using the stolen access token, it would show up as though it came from the application from which it was stolen!” And why is this bad? Because with the access token, a malicious app developer could then access the Facebook API and pull down personal data for the Facebook user whose token they had grabbed. Parse was worried about what this meant for their own developer community. “By using an unmodified version of the Facebook SDK with Parse, we were exposing our developers and their apps’ users to the same vulnerability – something with potentially broad repercussions,” says Poll. As for Facebook’s response to the reported vulnerability – no complaints here. The issue was patched within 24 hours, and Parse quickly updated to use the new SDK with its platform. So maybe it sounds like this whole story is sort of a non-starter? Security hole gets patched in a day. Nothing to see here, move along? But it’s not really a story about Facebook security. Facebook handled the situation as professionally as possible. There’s a greater issue to be examined here about developers using SDKs and apps over-reaching when asking permissions to run. Facebook (or any SDK maker, really), doesn’t have a way to push updates into developers’ apps. Instead, developers have to be proactive and manually pull down the latest Facebook SDK, incorporate the new version into their apps, and then push out updates through the app store. Meanwhile, users are unknowingly exposed to security issues simply because they haven’t updated their apps, or worse, because a developer hasn’t yet addressed the issue on their end. This particular issue happened in February, and Parse was asked to wait to disclose the issue until Facebook could work with major app developers to get app updates pushed out. Foursquare, you’ll be glad to know, is fixed. However, Poll says ominously, “there are still some major apps out there that display this vulnerability.” Which ones, we asked? “I honestly don’t know,” says Poll. ”We worked with Facebook to make sure that the major apps had fixed this issue before disclosure, and I know Facebook has sent a broad email to all developers with Android apps on their platform asking them to update their Facebook SDKs. I’m not even sure if Facebook has a way of knowing how many apps are still out there with this issue…” Facebook, however, confirmed that it has reached out to all major app makers to get their code resolved, and it does have ways to tell that which apps are patched or not. But its response is being determined by how serious a problem this issue really is. Users are only vulnerable if they have a previously installed malicious application on their system that they have granted the “Read Sensitive Log Data” extended permission. Users can protect themselves by downloading the latest version of their applications and uninstalling any untrustworthy apps. Due to the responsible reporting of this issue to Facebook, no one within the security community has evidence of an application abusing this vulnerability. We have provided a bounty to the team to thank them for their contribution to Facebook Security. What should Android users do then? Poll suggests that, for starters, users should update their apps. But also be careful when granting an app permission which it doesn’t need. Applications that request the “Read Sensitive Log Data” permission have the potential to access private data, so only grant that permission to those you trust, he says. Frankly, while accurate, I worry about these suggestions. On platforms where apps auto-update, great, that part is handled. (Ahem, Apple – listening?) . However, asking users to read complicated and confusing dialog boxes and then make judgement calls based on what’s displayed sounds like a recipe for failure. Really, it’s up to the mobile ecosystem itself to figure out a safer way to manage issues like this on the developer side. For what it’s worth, that’s what Poll says Parse is working on (as, I would imagine, are their competitors). The company tries to future-proof its design by reviewing code for any area where there’s potential for information to be exposed, he says, and it continually adds new features to the SDK to push developers to upgrade. But at the end of the day, getting a developer to upgrade their SDK still involves a lot of manual outreach, it seems. Meanwhile, Android still need to think for themselves about every app they install by carefully reading the permissions. Depending on where you stand on things, that situation is either better or worse than Apple’s system, where apps just steal your data because users blindly trusted Apple to weed out the bad ones.

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Security Hole Spotted In Facebook Android SDK, Long Tail Apps May Still Be Unpatched

YouTube Live Turns One: Adds Pay-Per-View And Real-Time Analytics

A D M I N — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:24:18 +0000

YouTube Live , Google’s live streaming platform, celebrated its first birthday over the weekend. To mark this event, YouTube is adding a number of new features to Live today. Most of these (new production software, improved publishing flows and real-time analytics) are mostly of interest to video producers. The most important new feature, though, is the addition of pay-per-view as a monetization option for all publishers. Until now, pay-per-view was only an option for select publishers who worked directly with Google. Now, YouTube publishers in the U.S., Canada, France, Japan and Great Britain who have access to YouTube Live can set up this service in a few minutes and start monetizing their events this way. Publishers, of course, can also choose to display Google ads as well. Publishers will now also be able to see how many users are watching a live stream in real time. It’s worth noting that Ustream and a number of other live streaming services have offered pay-per-view as an option for a while now. Google today also announced that it will make a special YouTube Live version of Wirecast , a professional webcasting solution that generally retails for around $449, available to all of its partners. With this, YouTube’s partners should be able to produce more live events and make them look more professional. Wirecast for YouTube Live will enable producers to easily capture and switch between different sources and add live effects and overlays to their videos. Sadly, though, this first anniversary doesn’t mark the full rollout of YouTube Live to all publishers. As YouTube’s partner product manager Varun Talwar notes, the team “developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.”

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YouTube Live Turns One: Adds Pay-Per-View And Real-Time Analytics

Science Fiction

user — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:49:45 +0000

In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” two children play in their “nursery,” a sort of home holodeck where they can conjure up any scene in which to play. Bradbury always had a wonderfully clunky sort of technobabble; in this case, as the father tells the mother, “it’s all dimensional superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.” Naturally, the nursery never shipped. It’s not a real thing, and there’s no mental tape film in 3M’s labs. But Bradbury wasn’t an engineer, and his story isn’t a patent application. It was a work of imagination — yet still guided by a sense of the practical. Most concept devices, like last week’s eye-mounted display from Google, are works of imagination, and are usually good or bad concepts according to how well they manage the aspect of practicality. Sometimes they’re dead ends, pie in the sky. But often works of imagination are crystallizations of collective fear and desire: manifest destiny, in this case, for an industry. What was “The Veldt” about? It certainly wasn’t a techno-fantasy about how cool our entertainment devices would be in the future. It was an example of Bradbury’s most common theme, the loss of humanity through, in this case, a surrogate for parenting, as embodied by a sort of mega-TV. In this way, although it has been 60 years since the story was written, and the nursery has yet to appear, it’s still true in the most important way it was meant to be true. The story was a vessel for a feeling that is still relevant. There’s no reason to suggest that Google’s Project Glass video is any different from the many concept videos we’ve seen in the past. But like Bradbury’s story, the take-away isn’t the piece of technology, but the idea it embodies. People are quick to jump on Google as a company that, for one thing, doesn’t really make hardware, and for another, a company that has killed off half the projects it has started. Real artists ship, they say. But before the artists can do their part, the engineers have to do theirs. And what they create isn’t exactly art. How often does a product come out that didn’t have some ugly, bulky precursor? Somebody has to make one, after all. Devices don’t spring fully formed from their creators’ foreheads. We quickly forget the failures that preceded the glorious success because they aren’t something we want to think about. But they existed, and they were not without utility. They beat the path that their successors followed, then fell exhausted by the wayside. A brief tangent, if the reader will permit it. There’s a fallacy often used as an argument against evolution: “what good is half an eye?” That is to say: the complicated structure that is the eye and its supporting wetware doesn’t work if you only have part of it, so why and how would it evolve if it was no good until its final stage? People make that same mistake when looking at a device like this. What good is this video, this concept, if Google isn’t shipping it this year? What both arguments ignore or miss is that, in fact, the transitional forms of both the eye and the breakthrough device are necessary to the final product. They’re points on a path. Before the eye, the eyespot. Before the iPhone, the Palm Pilot. What Google is doing is positing the iPhone as they build the Palm Pilot. Remember, ten years ago, Apple was no more able to make the iPhone than Palm. Palm decided to make ugly, functional things and Apple deferred, looking ahead. Google is trying to do both. It’s a bit early to be calling the success or failure of what is essentially a fictional device (the real one, though we’ve seen it, has not been truly demonstrated), but it is at least an honest, compelling, and even realistic concept. Project Glass is a vessel for a vision, so to speak, as “The Veldt” was a vessel for a concern. It’s a vision of the connected internet, mobile and ubiquitous, and totally divorced from the handset-based ecosystem that Apple took by storm and molded to its own advantage. Google must have looked around at the crowded, tooth-and-nail spaces they’re in right now, and one imagines its lip curling in distaste. They feel they barely managed to ship Android in time. They’re struggling for relevance in social. Browsers, the soldiers that formed their invincible phalanx for a decade, are fundamentally changing. Can you blame them for averting their eyes, and directing them towards the horizon? It must be refreshing sight. A fantasy, maybe, but everything we have today started as a fantasy. But importantly, it’s not a mirage. Sergey Brin is actually wearing an early version of the things. They’re as ugly as sin and nowhere near the level of functionality shown in the video. Why should it be otherwise? Apple made the Newton. Was it a mistake? Intel has roadmaps looking forward a decade or more, roadmaps that assume their engineers will accomplish die shrinks and material research and nanolithography methods that aren’t even imaginable today. No one is calling them frauds because they are showing a product they won’t ship for years to come. They’re writing their own story because that’s something they can do. When you are on the forefront of technology, science fiction stops looking like science fiction and it starts looking more like a long-term business plan. Perhaps Google’s plan is overoptimistic. That’s not something you can tell at the outset, however, and it seems cynical to assume so. The prudent archer, says Machiavelli, aims for the horizon, knowing that the arrow will fall short of his mark — but hopefully on the target. So it is with those futurists who mix their imagination with knowledge. Ray Bradbury’s nursery has yet to appear, but the lesson it teaches is no less real. Google’s Project Glass is about as real as the 6nm transistors planned for production by Intel around 2020. Which is to say, imaginary — until it isn’t.

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Science Fiction

Windows Phone Marketplace Growth Keeps Up The Pace, Tops 80,000 Apps

A D M I N — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:38:21 +0000

Windows Phone 7 is an excellent new mobile operating system — there’s no doubt about that. But every rose has its thorn, and on Windows Phone it’s a lack of apps. Luckily, the Marketplace seems to be growing at a rapid pace, today topping 80,000 apps. The platform has been slowly but steadily picking up steam, topping 50,000 apps in December , 60,000 in January, and 70,000 in March . All About Windows Phone claims that the Marketplace is growing at a rate of 340 published apps per day. It’s only fair to note that the total number of published items (which would be that 80,000 figure) isn’t the same as the number of total apps available to users. This is because Microsoft removes some of the applications or the developer withdraws them, or simply because not all apps function across every market. The U.S., for example, only has access to about 69,123. Still, it would seem that the Windows Phone Marketplace is growing at a steady pace, which is good news for anyone considering the Lumia 900 , set to go on sale this weekend.

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Windows Phone Marketplace Growth Keeps Up The Pace, Tops 80,000 Apps

Before FamilyLeaf, Here’s The Sports Site Pitch That Got The Team Into Y Combinator

Achilles — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:17:59 +0000

Do you want to get a slot in the next batch of Y Combinator startups? Are you curious about what the founders chosen for the program did to get there? If your answer is yes to either of those questions, then read on. Today, FamilyLeaf — a kind of “Facebook for families — and one of the companies that presented earlier this week during the Demo Day, decided that they would make public the application that they submitted for the program. The reason, co-founder Wesley Zhao tells me, is two fold. One is to help other applications. “We’ve already shown some of our friends this to help them so we figure everyone else could benefit.” And some good old startup-style PR. “This will boost awareness for FamilyLeaf as well.” A few things stand out, and for founders might not come as a surprise: – The company originally had nothing to do with families, or a “Facebook of” anything . It was an idea called AthleteNet, and its aim was to help sports teams, and individual athletes, increase their online profiles. (“We worked on the sports idea (actually built and began selling it) but after a few more discussions with some executives at top sports software companies we began to see how small the market size actually was and how fragmented it was too,” Zhao says.) Not sure how many change so fundamentally but it does go some way to explaining the newest YC offering: applying without an idea . – These guys are grafters ( definition 3 in this case). Before this application, they ran a slightly kooky, ultimately successful, Twitter campaign to catch Y Combinator’s attention. And they’ve figured out a pretty simple way of getting free food. – They have a mini track record in startups already. In their case, a venture around gift cards. “Our business this summer was AvantCard , an exchangeable branded gift card that we billed as a better alternative to your everyday gift card for most gift card givers.” I wrote about FamilyLeaf the other day in more detail here . You might be interested to know that they are already talking to people for investment. “There is a lot of interest causing things to move a lot faster than expected. And we have been talking to a number of angels and firms,” says Zhao. So, you can see their YC application here . And a video of their Demo Day presentation here .

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Before FamilyLeaf, Here’s The Sports Site Pitch That Got The Team Into Y Combinator

A Chicken In Every Pot And An Open-Source Tricorder In Every Home

jos — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:15:41 +0000

The world of portable, general-purpose computing is moving along two parallel paths. First, and most popularly, you have devices like smartphones, which are focused on user interaction and connectivity, but are smart enough to be the “brain” for any number of more capable devices. Then there are purpose-built devices with one or a few specific functions: a high-precision range finder, or a pollutant detector, or a simple laser level. But in the middle somewhere, and perhaps a bit into the future, you have a middle way: the tricorder. Some might consider it the best of both worlds; some, the worst. But whether it’s the one or the other, tricorders are getting more real by the day. The Tricorder Project is just one among many, but the idea is sound and hell, the device even works. There are initiatives to create such devices already; there’s the Tricorder X-Prize , sponsored by Qualcomm, which hopes to create a handheld device capable of “capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases.” And we wrote a while back about a device that can check pulse and temperature from a distance using lasers. This particular project, though, began by Peter Jansen when he was a PhD candidate at McMasters University, isn’t about health care but rather science. Jansen is passionate about the invisible world of magnetism, radiation, temperature, and other things all around us, and wanted to build a single tool that could measure all of these things — while remaining usable and compact. In other words, the kind of thing you’d want to send down with an away team in Star Trek. Jansen explains: The idea is really to have something that’s useful both for a young student first being introduced to science, as well as being standard equipment for future planetary explorers. I think the difference here, and how that’s possible, is with an open source design philosophy. By having an open device folks can easily write apps that use and interface to the onboard sensor hardware. For kids, one might load up a software suite based on the OLPC suite and Alan Kay’s squeak e-toys, which is a great tool for teaching computer science concepts to even very young kids in a fun and intuitive way. The Mark II device has sensors for temperature (atmospheric and spot/IR), magnetism (3-axis magnetometer), distance (ultrasonic), GPS, pressure, color and brightness, and a few other things. it’s easy to think of numerous other measures it could add (non-visible radiation, pH, air and soil quality, auditory measurements) but as it is, it already acts as a powerful extension to our existing senses. It displays the info on two OLED touchscreens and folds up to fit in a pocket. And of course, it runs Linux. The obvious question many readers will ask is: why not do this on an iPhone? The reasons are both technical and philosophical. I asked Jansen about this. The main issues with this approach are standards and openness for connecting external devices. It’s challenging to design a device that will connect to some large subset of smartphones, and some manufactures (like Apple) complicate the process with proprietary interfaces. For kids and science education, which is a large part of the mission of the Tricorder project, I think having an extremely inexpensive standalone device is still a very good way to go. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and new Raspberry Pi have shown us that extremely sophisticated devices for learning can be produced inexpensively. The device at the top of the article is the Mark I; above is the Mark II with its improved casing, and a Mark III that was more modular ended up being scrapped. The Mark IV, Jansen says, has a focus in imaging and visualization — something that’s important for people who may not have an intuitive understanding of numbers and histograms. He hopes to include thermal imaging on it, among other things. The most important thing, perhaps, is the price. Keeping the cost down is the only way to even create the possibility of widespread use. Jansen hopes to bring the cost of the device down to around $200, and he has tried as much as possible to stay with off-the-shelf sensors and parts to control the cost. And as the software and blueprints are totally open and free, the device can be built by anyone with the resources to do so (which is to say, soldering and board-building skills as well as the money). But ideally, manufacturing would be democratized as well, and allow for home fabrication of the casing and perhaps pre-assembly of the more difficult parts of the device. Is the tricorder class of device something that we’ll be seeing more of or less of as time goes on? In a way it’s an uncomfortable compromise between the elegance of a single-purpose device and the versatility of a smartphone. But it’s also something different, purpose-built, powerful. The end game seems to favor modularity, but at the same time, there are many people and organizations that would love to have a few of these things lying around. Whatever the future holds for this sort of thing, the Tricorder Project is both admirable and impressive. You can learn more, or check out the specs and build instructions, over at the project’s page .

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A Chicken In Every Pot And An Open-Source Tricorder In Every Home