vendredi 20 décembre 2013

A Google Glass-style display add-on for motorbike helmets : Ride:HUD

The Internet of Things is gradually transforming households into smart spaces and we’ve even previously seen the same concept applied to vehicles, with models such as the Xkuty scooter enabling owners to take advantage of smartphone control. However, separate devices can take drivers’ attention from the road. That’s where the NUVIZ Ride:HUD comes in, offering a head up display that overlays pertinent, real-time data onto motorcycle riders’ helmet visors.
Developed through a collaboration between HOLOEYE Systems and APX Labs, the innovation uses technology similar to Google Glass, whereby a small transparent display is located in the user’s peripheral vision. The NUVIS Ride:HUD itself clips onto the chinstrap of any motorcycle helmet and syncs with the rider’s smartphone. The display is controlled through a companion app, which offers the capability of showing GPS-enabled maps and directions, local weather and driving stats such as speed and distance. The HUD can also show who’s calling and what music is playing, as well as toggling between photo and video capture. Rather than refocus their attention away from the road to access this information, the device is calibrated to allow riders to keep the road in their vision. The video below shows the device in action:
The Ride:HUD does have some competition from Skully Helmets, a company currently beta testing its own motorcycle HUDs, but NUVIZ could beat it to the market through its current Kickstarter, which it is using to launch the Ride:HUD. The device can be secured with a backing of USD 499 or more. Are there ways that similar HUD technology could be developed for vehicle drivers of all kinds?
Spotted by Murray Orange, written by Springwise

mardi 17 décembre 2013

As Software Eats The World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups

Netscape founder and VC titan Marc Andreessen famously wrote back in 2011 that software is steadily eating the world, disrupting industries like music, retail and more. Now large corporations in these industries are starting to eat startups.
Over the past year or two, non-tech corporations have begun to actually open their wallets to arm themselves with talent and technology that can help them enter the digital and data-focused world we now live and work in. It’s no longer Google, Facebook and Yahoo that are competing to acquire the best and the brightest startups in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of corporations in retail, health, agriculture, financial services and other industries that are sending their corp-dev talent to scout out possible acquisitions in the Bay Area and beyond.
Let’s take a look at some of the examples. Earlier this year, Monsanto, a multinational chemical, and agricultural biotechnology corporation, bought big data weather tech company Climate Corporation for $1.1 billion. Insurer UnitedHealth Group bought health data analytics company Humedica for hundreds of millions of dollars. A few weeks ago, fitness clothing retailer Under Armour bought fitness tracking app developer MapMyFitness for $150 million. Office supply retailer Staples bought e-commerce personalization company Runa. Payments processing giant First Data has acquired mobile loyalty startup Perka and mobile payments startup Clover in the past year. Retail giant Target has picked up a number of e-commerce companies. Ford Motors bought in-car music app startup Livio. The list goes on.
Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world.
Exitround, the website that launched earlier this year and lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, has been seeing a strong uptick in non-tech, corporate acquirers joining the marketplace to find potential talent and startups.
“Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world, and they have to add software talent and technologies to their products,” explained Exitround founderJacob Mullins. On the marketplace, Mullins says that 10 percent of buyers are Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of acquirers are publicly traded, with a good percentage of the group being non-tech companies.
For many non-tech companies, Exitround is providing a compelling service by which to find startups early. Mullins says that there are increasingly more and more corp-dev execs joining the marketplace to scout for talent. But traditionally the mechanism by which acquirers found acquirees was done either through word of mouth and networking or through investment banks. But Silicon Valley is seeing more and more executives from corporations and non-tech companies visit the region and VC firms to potentially network with startups. Many Sand Hill VC firms are now holding regular events with representatives from some of these non-tech acquirers in the areas of health, retail, financial services and more.
“Walmart was the earliest traditional non-tech company to figure this out,” says Jon SakodaNEA Partner and VC. Walmart famously bought Kosmix in 2011 and set up a Labs group in Silicon Valley, far away from the retailer’s Arkansas headquarters. The retailer has steadily acquired more companies and technologies in its fight to compete with Amazon, including four startups this year alone.
Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures and Partner at Kleiner Perkins, believes that retail will continue to be an industry where you are seeing large companies eat software.
“A lot of physical retailers saw soft foot traffic in their stores in Q3 and they are more nervous about how e-commerce is eating into their sales,” she explains. Companies like TJ Maxx, Urban Outfitters and others can easily make a $100 million to $400 million acquisition in the current market, she adds. In fact, earlier this year, Urban Outfittersreportedly did try to buy NastyGal, a fast-growing e-commerce site for young women.
“Lots of these retailers have no commerce strategy, but startups have the potential to expand consumer reach to a younger demographic,” says Lee.
David Blumenfeld, SVP of Westfield Labs, the innovation arm of shopping mall developer Westfield, tells us that the company is definitely evaluating potential acquisitions that they can bring into their Labs groups.
“While Westfield itself is not a tech company, we believe that there is not a delineation between online and offline shopping, and we have to be a part of that,” he says. “We believe tech is core to the future of how products are bought even in malls.”
He adds that with the company’s malls, they have the distribution (to potentially 1.1 billion people, he says), and they are actively looking for technologies they can integrate into their malls.
Hunter Walk, the co-founder of VC firm Homebrew, explains that developing a deeper relationship with the customer online is a strategy that more corporations realize they need to be working on. Part of this is actually being able to connect with a potential customer where they are interacting and spending time. “Movie theaters have no idea what their customers are watching at home, and there is no personalization,” he says. He adds that he sees many of these acquisitions being under $200 million.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a mattress company may buy a sleep app.
In Under Armour’s case, the company didn’t have much of a direct relationship with the customer beyond purchase. And as a wholesaler, the clothing manufacturer needed a better way to engage with their customers. MapMyFitness is now going to be the foundation on which it plans to build a new digital training experience and mobile fitness platform.
The other benefit to buying platforms where there is engagement is the data collected, which can help potentially boost sales and personalize experiences. “It shouldn’t be surprising that a mattress company may buy a sleep app,” Lee says.
Sakoda agrees that data, and the technologies behind mining this data, are big tipping points for acquisitions from non-tech companies. “These companies have fallen so far behind when it comes to data collection and analysis and seeing how customers think and what pricing should be,” he adds. In the case of Monsanto buying Climate Corporation, the large agricultural giant was accessing massive weather data processing and collecting technology that could help in optimizing farming globally.
“Big companies are finally waking up to fact that they needed to embrace big data yesterday,” says Zach Bogue, the founder of Data Collective, a fund devoted to backing startups in the big data space. “Now every single large company has massive amounts of data, and figuring out how to use that is complex.” This is why many non-tech companies are sniffing around big data startups.
Data is a key area for content owners and publishers as well. Barin Nahvi, who works with emerging tech and new product development at Hearst Corp., says the company is looking to make more acquisitions in core technologies around data. “We’re thinking about how do we resemble a technology company more, and part of this is building platform and core capabilities,” she explains. “How to use data as a driver of content is something we are evaluating.”
Big companies are finally waking up to fact that they needed to embrace big data yesterday.
Nahvi says that video technologies and mobile are other key areas for a potential strategic acquisition for Hearst. E.W. Scripps, the storied owner of 19 local television stations and daily newspapers in 13 markets across the U.S., just bought Newsy to give the media company access to an audience that consumes their news (and video) on devices like tablets.
Of course buying startups in Silicon Valley is just one part of the challenge for non-tech corporations. The next is actually being able to keep talent happy. The cultures of these companies are vastly different from Google, Facebook and the startup culture in Silicon Valley. The true test is being able to retain talent and ensure that they feel they are part of an innovative team.
To that point, many of these companies have created “Labs” groups to house these acquisitions. As mentioned above, Walmart founded its own Labs group,WalmartLabs – which has grown to over 1,200 engineers and staff – when it acquired Kosmix. Live music giant Live Nation, which just bought mobile startup Meexo and acquired two others in the past year, has also set up a Labs group for technology acquisitions.
Walk explains that these companies are not just buying technologies, but also talent, and they have to be mindful of how to manage and foster that talent. “Just adding small pieces of technology doesn’t commit an organization to a new path,” he says. Adding to that, Halle Tecco, founder of health-focused seed fund Rock Health, says that many challenges come from not being able to actually deploy the technologies successfully.
Just adding small pieces of technology doesn’t commit an organization to a new path.
Ethan Kaplan, the VP of product and technology for Live Nation Labs, explains that the labs group was created to house technical talent and acquisitions. He says that the labs group itself was structured to make it feel like less of a conglomerate and more of a startup. There isn’t a deep hierarchy, and Kaplan and others at the group have worked to make the engineers and other staff feel unencumbered, fast-paced and not beholden to a strict road map.
Mullins says that retaining talent is now at the top of mind for most non-tech acquirers. “Most of these companies want to make sure the transition is successful and are talking with potential acquirees early on where a startup will live and who will own the technology once it is placed in-house.”
At the end of the day, non-tech companies infiltrating Silicon Valley gives many startup founders additional exit options beyond a potential acq-hire from Google, Yahoo or Facebook. But the continued success of these acquisitions (and founder interest in being acquired by an outsider) will depend on how these companies pursue and view innovation and culture. And that’s easier said than done.

Source : Techcrunch

lundi 16 décembre 2013

List of Indian innovations that exhibit frugality and inclusiveness

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http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-07-28/news/32906719_1_indian-innovations-frugality-incubator

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Renault will remotely lock down electric cars — Karsten on Free Software

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https://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2013/10/31/renault-will-remotely-lock-down-electric-cars/

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Visa pushes digital wallet service into Europe

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"Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops," written by Jerzy J. Gangi

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» The Top 10 Future Predictions by Michio Kaku FUTUREPREDICTIONS.COM Source of Likely and Preferable Futures ™

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http://futurepredictions.com/2013/12/the-top-10-future-predictions-by-michio-kaku/

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Underground drone economy takes flight

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/12/02/underground-drone-economy/3805387/

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DRONENET The next BIG thing. - Global Guerrillas

DRONENET The next BIG thing. - Global Guerrillas
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Toshiba Just Became Germany’s Newest Solar Utility : Greentech Media

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Why computers of the next digital age will be invisible

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http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131204-why-computers-will-be-invisible?utm_content=buffer38b62&

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The iWallet Is Coming

Smart city, smart planet: Sensity is creating a billion-node network of global sensors -- in street lights

Smart city, smart planet: Sensity is creating a billion-node network of global sensors -- in street lights
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/30/smart-city-smart-planet-sensity-is-creating-a-billion-node-network-of-global-sensors-in-street-lights/

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The Robots Are Coming

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http://www.newsweek.com/robots-are-coming-224297

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Norway Decided to Digitize All the Norwegian Books

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Google's Latest Robot Acquisition is the Smartest Yet | MIT Technology Review

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http://internetactu.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/12/13/big-data-pourquoi-nos-metadonnees-sont-elles-plus-personnelles-que-nos-empreintes-digitales/

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Non-biological brains could become reality by the 2050s

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http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pelletier20131216

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3-D printer used to manufacture car body

  • The Urbee's plastic body is made with a 3-D printer. A cross-country trip in the lightweight vehicle is expected to require less than 10 gallons of fuel. Photo: Kor Ecologic
    The Urbee's plastic body is made with a 3-D printer. A cross-country trip in the lightweight vehicle is expected to require less than 10 gallons of fuel. Photo: Kor Ecologic

If Jim Kor gets his way, building a fuel-efficient car may one day be as simple as pressing "print." Well, almost as simple.
Kor heads a team of Canadian engineers designing a car whose plastic body can be manufactured with a 3-D printer. They've already made a prototype of their car, dubbed the Urbee, and are working on a second, more advanced version.
"What we like about 3-D printing is it can print anything," Kor said Tuesday during a presentation at the Verge technology and sustainability conference in San Francisco. "And when you can print anything, you can think of everything."
Kor's presentation, sadly, included just a small model of the Urbee, rather than the real thing. But San Franciscans may get a close look at the car in another year or so. Kor and employees of his startup company, Kor Ecologic, plan to drive the second prototype from New York to San Francisco in 2015.
And if their ideas pan out, the entire trip in the small, lightweight and aerodynamic Urbee 2 - equipped with an advanced hybrid engine - will take less than 10 gallons of fuel. That works out to roughly 290 miles per gallon, given the route that Kor plans.
He doesn't consider it a pipe dream. Kor and his colleagues, whose past work includes designing buses and farm equipment, have created a car whose every feature is designed to reduce the horsepower needed for travel at freeway speed.
It's low to the ground, shaped like a lozenge and almost as small. It seats two and runs on three wheels. And its body - basically one elongated bubble - is smooth enough to make most mass-market cars look like bricks.
"I tell people there are no square fish in the ocean," Kor said Tuesday. "There probably were, but they were eaten."
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kor and his team came up with the basic concept for the car, built a metal chassis and sculpted the body in clay.
They scanned the clay model into a computer, refined the dimensions after doing some virtual wind-tunnel testing, and fed all the specs into 3-D printing equipment from Stratasys at a facility in Minnesota.
The first body panels were ready within weeks, far less time than would have been required to make them from fiberglass. And the nature of 3-D printing, which builds objects by depositing ultrathin layers of material on top of each other, created panels with no wasted plastic - and therefore, no wasted weight.
The 2015 drive - assuming it happens - will largely follow in reverse the route of America's first cross-country road trip in a car. In 1903, Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker drove from San Francisco to New York, accompanied by Jackson's dog, Bud. The trip took two months and nine days. Kor wants his sons, Tyler and Cody, to drive the Urbee 2, along with their dog, Cupid.

Source : SFgate.com

mercredi 4 décembre 2013

Three Problems Stopping Bezos’ Army Of Amazon Delivery Drones


Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos isn't the only one who wants to take to the skies. Most of Hollywood wants drones for making films, police want them to patrol the skies, the National Guard needs rescue bots, journalists want cheap aerial footage, farmers would love unmanned crop dusters, and every college stoner glued to their couch would trade a vital organ for the Tacocopter. In short, everybody wants drones! But there are forces at work that could prevent all that sweet, sweet taco-dropping.
Back when Congress used to actually pass laws, they directed the Federal Aviation Administration to figure out how America could safely deal with an estimated 30,000 humming drones by 2020, through the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2012. There are a few technical, social, and straight-up bat-sh*t crazy problems stopping the FAA from legalizing commercial drones [PDF].
1. Technical Limitations
As cities become increasingly dense, the probability increases of a delivery drone crashing into another and dropping a birthday bowling ball on the windshield of a commuter. Researchers, including a number of folks at Cornell, are putting their considerable talents into crash-avoidance software (video below). But we still don't fully understand the mathematical foundations of how groups of flying objects (like birds) avoid an air pile-up of cascading doom.
MIT researchers suspect there's a critical speed limit that all flying objects might need to abide by, no matter how good their senses are. These theoretical limits may seriously narrow the radius at which Krispy Kream could deliver a doughnut that is truly “hot and now.”


2. Privacy Concerns
The ever-vigilant privacy hawks (pun intended) at the Electronic Frontier Foundationare concerned that drones could turn America into a surveillance wonderland. Virginia has already proposed a two-year moratorium on drones.
Drones necessarily record their surroundings to navigate jagged city terrain. Even beyond the necessities, the incidental footage they scrape of retail foot traffic and consumer behavior would be advertising gold to a commercial analytics team. Moreover, in the case of something like the Boston bombing, it's easy to see why law enforcement would want to sequester the video footage of every drone in the area.
“Before countless commercial drones begin to fly overhead, we must ground their operation in strong rules to protect privacy and promote transparency," said Senator Edward Markey, in a statement related to his prescient bill on commercial drone privacy.
3. People Are Cray-Cray
Watch this video of a camera man ruining a precious moment between a wife and her groom and you'll understand why humans could be the biggest barrier to a functional drone system.

Because people are crazy, spiteful, and clumsy, the FAA plans some type of pilot certification of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which could become the driver's license of the 21st century.
In addition to bad piloting, the FAA is worried about both violence to and from drones. Drones have already been perfected for war, so Mexican drug lords are probably already dreaming about little domestic assassinators that can cross the border. On the nuttier side of things, Stephen Colbert profiled a liberty-loving patriot who hunts down law enforcement drones (and tried to pass local legislation to legalize it).
 So, as you can see, the ban on drones isn't a clear-cut case of government stonewalling. We don't really know how to handle tens of thousands of potentially lethal experimental robotic pilots buzzing around dense cities. Before consumers can get an order of Xanax from an Amazon delivery drone, we might want to make sure it gets to the destination without harming anyone in the process.
Source : Techcrunch