Posts Tagged ‘smartphone’
Video: Squishy Larval Human From Japan Could Be Your Next Cellphone
The Elfoid, a pocket-sized version of the , is the latest bizarre creation of roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who also brought us a doppelganger version of himself and a of a Japanese model. It was unveiled Thursday at a Japanese press conference.
Talk into its belly and use a motion-capture system to transmit your face and head movements to the Elfoid, which will act them out, conveying your presence in a way that voices just can’t. And probably shouldn’t. It apparently has a “soft, pleasant-to-the-touch exterior,” according to IEEE’s .
Elfoid and Telenoid are meant to be minimalist humanoids, with just enough human-like features to evoke a person’s presence. Users are supposed to let their imaginations fill in the details. Its eyes and face are creepily realistic, but the body is limited to flipper-like arms and a mermaid-like tapered torso, making it look like a tadpole, Casper the Friendly Ghost or a male reproductive cell, depending on your frame of mind. Check out the 360-degree view in the video below. Yes, it has a derriere.
The Elfoid apparently can’t move its limbs or face as much as its larger kin, according to IEEE, but Ishiguro and colleagues plan to use microactuators to give it more movement.
Please don't, guys.
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Looking for perfect event pic? CrowdOptic says: Look no further
A new smartphone app that allows marketers and event organizers to enlist the crowd in pinning down the best photos during an event is garnering a lot of attention from marquee-name companies, co-founder and chief executive Jon Fisher of told me today.
CrowdOptic lets marketers and event organizers harness amateur photographers in finding that “perfect” picture from just the right place at the right time.
The app then sends a broadcast out to cell phone users in the immediate area during a live event asking them to take and submit pictures.
The company is currently testing the app on Apple’s iPhone, with plans to run similar tests in Google Android and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry during the first quarter. At that point, he said, “The whole enchilada will exit out of beta.”
Thus far, CrowdOptic has caught the attention of large customers, including a Fortune 100 company, a national political party, a national media outlet and a professional sports franchise. — though Fisher declined to name them.
Each of those organizations would use the app differently, he said, with the company initially using it at its annual conference; the political party deploying it at polling places; and the media outlet using it during breaking news events.
Fisher said the new app is different from competitors such as , , and , because “we’re looking to attract enterprises by paid subscription to work with end users to solve real problems.”
CrowdOptic’s chief operating officer Jeff Broderick has a deep payments background, which will help the startup “quickly layer a payments platform so enterprises can pay/bid on images from end users.”
Fisher said the technology behind CrowdOptic is what is most likely to make it equally attractive to both users and hardcore app “techies”. Images will be tied to metadata, including GPS-determined location and timestamps. CrowdOptic will then separate that data from the image at the time the image is snapped.
“We can do this because our app sits on top of the iPhone camera so it’s our app controlling things and not just facilitating the posting of an image. We immediately send the metadata to our database where enterprise queries for it are waiting,” Fisher said. “Then we reattach the metadata with the image so the image itself can be queried.”
All of this is just the very tip of a much larger wave of the future, said Fisher, who is . He previously sold his company Bharosa to Oracle.
“I have built startups for the enterprise for nearly 20 years and it’s amusing how many in that space are confirming web 2.0 versus enterprise is the place to be,” said Fisher. “Web 2.0 companies are television shows that briefly attract audiences and then are canceled. Photo sharing, just like most apps, will be used for many years in the future when embraced by the enterprise.”
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Nokia begins shipping its flagship N8 smartphone
Nokia announced today that it’s begun shipping its N8 smartphone to retail stores and customers who have pre-ordered the device.
The news follows an announcement from the company last week that it had to to take care of a software issue. Nokia initially planned to ship the devices in late September, so with the news today it has technically lived up to its promise.
Nokia . At the time, it was notable for its powerful 12-megapixel camera, 720p high-definition video recording capabilities, as well as the fact that it was running Nokia’s new Symbian^3 operating system. Since then, the iPhone 4, and high-end Android phones like the Evo 4G and Droid X, have been released — making Nokia’s new high-end darling less appealing for anything but hardcore Nokia fans.
As I’ve written previously, the N8 will be Nokia’s flagship device until its more ambitious — a joint open-source operating system developed in conjunction with Intel — launches, starting with . But it’s going to be some time before Meego devices are released. For now, Nokia’s Symbian^3 devices — which also include the E7, — are the closest the company comes to competing with iPhone/Android phones.
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Sony Ericsson has no plans for more Symbian OS devices, focusing on Android
In another stab against the Symbian mobile operating system, Sony Ericsson representative Aldo Liguori confirmed today that the company has no plans to develop future devices running Symbian, .
Sony Ericsson currently uses Symbian in its Vivaz line of phones, but the company has been shifting to Google’s Android operating system for some time. The Xperia X10, Sony Ericsson’s latest flagship device, runs Android — and now we know it won’t be the last device to do so.
The company will remain a member of the Symbian Foundation — a non-profit organization that focuses on evangelizing and cross-manufacturer compatibility for Symbian. Sony Ericsson’s Android support is “not exclusive, but it will certainly continue to be an important platform for us,” Liguori said.
Symbian remains the biggest-selling smartphone OS worldwide because it’s heavily used by Nokia. All of Nokia’s latest devices, including , run the Symbian^3 OS. The company is also working together with Intel to develop an open-source operating system called . Sources also tell VentureBeat that .
Once Nokia begins to shift to Meego for its higher-end devices, and the iPhone and Android become even more entrenched, Symbian’s market dominance will likely suffer. Symbian’s global market share has already declined to 41.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, down from 51 percent a year earlier, according to market research firm Gartner.
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Apple expected to build 3M Verizon-ready CDMA iPhones in December
A week can’t go by without another Verizon-iPhone rumor, fueled by dissatisfaction with Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T and that carrier’s strained network in media-saturated big cities like New York and San Francisco. Now there’s word that Apple is gearing up to build its first 3 million CDMA iPhones, which would work on Verizon’s network, this December, .
Fidacaro sent out a note to investors yesterday based on checks with overseas suppliers, a common way Wall Street analysts obtain information on the secretive company. If his research proves accurate, the move to CDMA technology would put Apple in a good position to release a Verizon iPhone early next year.
CDMA, a less common cell-phone technology than the GSM standard AT&T and most carriers worldwide use, runs Verizon and Sprint’s networks. It is also the dominant standard in South Korea.
Apple is hardly abandoning GSM. Fidacaro expects Apple to build between 21 million and 22 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011, up from about 18.3 million iPhones this quarter. Apple was able to ramp up production this quarter because display-panel issues with LG have been resolved, he told investors. He expects Apple to sell 11.6 million iPhones this quarter — a 39 percent increase from the 8.4 million sold last quarter.
The news coincides with an earlier report from Bloomberg that . According to Credit Suisse, in early 2011. A survey found that 23 percent of iPhone users would switch to Verizon when it’s available, and 18 percent said they would wait for their AT&T contract to end.
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DEMO: Fox-backed Bitbop brings mobile TV streaming to Android
Bitbop is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.
Streaming mobile video startup was dubbed when it launched back in March. Bitbop offers access to a hefty selection of popular TV shows for $9.99 a month. It’s adding movies to its library soon, but those will only be available on a pay-per-view basis. Thus far, the company has only supported certain BlackBerrys, but today at DEMO, Bitbop is officially launching its app on a slew of Android devices.
The services works over 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi, so you don’t have to be worried about being tied down to a wireless network. It comes from Fox Mobile Group, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
The service competes with Hulu’s own mobile offering, which also requires a $9.99-a-month Hulu Plus membership but so far is only available on the iPhone. BitBop offers a handful of shows, like the überpopular “Jersey Shore”, that Hulu doesn’t have access to on its site — so it may be able to attract hardcore fans on that fact alone. (The conflict is curious, though, since News Corp. is an investor in Hulu and provides it with online versions of its TV shows and movies.)
Bitbop also allows users to download episodes, instead of just streaming — an advantage that may put it ahead of Hulu and Netflix for many.
Like any mobile video offering worth its salt, BitBop’s platform uses variable bitrate streaming to automatically adjust video quality depending on available bandwidth. The platform also offers social media integration (Facebook and Twitter), and carrier billing, among other features.
Bitbop has its roots in Jamba, a company founded in 2000. VeriSign and Fox turned that company into a joint venture in 2006, and Fox , turning the unit into Fox Mobile.
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Google’s Android beats RIM BlackBerry in mobile-OS race
Google’s Android has surpassed Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS and others to become the second most-used mobile operating system behind Nokia’s ubiquitous Symbian, according to a by Gartner. Android and Symbian will together account for about 60 percent of all mobile operating systems sold with phones by 2014, when Android will likely take on Symbian for the top-seller title.
Symbian, the software that helped push Nokia to the top of the heap in the previous generation of mobile phones, has been on a sharp slide down since the smartphone exploded in both popularity and affordability — led largely by the efforts of Apple’s iPhone operating system, iOS, and Google’s Android mobile operating system.
Nokia still maintains a commanding lead in terms of market share from the sheer volume of phones they produce, but Gartner predicts its market share will fall to 30.2 percent by 2014. The company recently rolled out a few changes to challenge the upstart Android, including its new and a new CEO, Microsoft’s .
Meanwhile, adoption of the Android device exploded between 2009 and 2010, with Android’s market share growing by a whopping 13.8 percentage points to capture 17.7 percent of users based on current sales and projected sales for the remainder of the year.
Research in Motion continued to slip after an launch of its iPhone-killing BlackBerry Torch last month. Sales of phones equipped with the BlackBerry operating system still accounted for 17.5 percent of all sales, though down 2.4 percentage points from last year.
Adoption of Apple’s iOS also continued to grow, with Apple acquiring 15.4 percent of the market share in 2010, up a percentage point from a year earlier. Predictions from Gartner, however, show Apple’s market share dipping to 14.9 percent by 2014 as Android continues to gain momentum.
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