Techno-News Blog

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Indoor location is the next big navigation problem, in part because GPS doesn’t work in buildings. Now that it’s easy to find your way in the real world with just a smartphone in hand, the next logical navigation frontier is indoors, where GPS doesn’t work and maps are often nonexistent. Australian startup Navisens says it has a plan to track everyone from firefighters searching through burning buildings to consumers wandering through shopping malls, without requiring any special wireless signals. Ashod Donikian, Navisens’s founder and CEO (and, for now, its sole employee), says the company’s technology will power a wearable gadget that can track first responders in emergencies; he hopes to start testing it shortly with firefighters in the United States. He also plans to offer his technology later this year to developers who want to add indoor positioning capabilities to smartphone apps or enhance existing navigation capabilities.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512661/no-map-no-gps-no-problem/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Yet that was what the cofounders of San Francisco startup Rabbit did in 2011, and it seems to have helped them dream up something original. The result, now in a free private beta as a Mac desktop application, seeks to make video chatting less like a scheduled event and more like an ongoing hangout session. Participants can even watch movies with an unlimited number of friends. Once you are inside a room with a few buddies, though, Rabbit’s aims become clearer. Everyone you chat with shows up in a circular frame, and the person currently speaking (or speaking loudest) is perched in a larger circle above the others. The bubble shape is intended to obscure the background and make you forget that everyone is in a different place, cofounder Stephanie Morgan says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512146/video-chat-thats-a-little-closer-to-hanging-out-in-real-life/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. We picked five. Mobile computing is the fastest-spreading consumer technology in history, but the real change for the technology business is only just beginning. Some 50 mobile-computing startup companies get funded by investors each month in the United States, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Around the world, tens of thousands more entrepreneurs are dreaming and coding and trying to invent something big. Here’s what we think are five large opportunities in mobile computing, and a startup company pursuing each.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511816/five-opportunities-for-mobile-computing/

By Miguel Guhlin, CIO Advisor

“It’s the economy, stupid!” is an exhortation that caught my ear. As one considers how leadership is handled in some school districts in regards to technology, it’s not an exaggeration to say to myself: “It’s the leadership, stupid!” Dr. Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) makes a point that has finally come home for me in the last few months, and, at a deeper level than I understood it before. “…most of the leadership problems we run into regarding school technology implementation and integration have less to do with the technologies and more to do with failure to enact good leadership practices. It’s likely that if school leaders aren’t facilitating appropriate training or time or funding or support or policy for technology initiatives, they probably aren’t for most other, non-technology initiatives either.”

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=5550

by School CIO

A recent Dell and Intel-commissioned Harris Interactive online survey of 203 US school system administrators and IT decision makers highlights the tablet management challenges faced by schools today. The results show that tablets are increasingly becoming a standard IT device (53 percent of IT decision makers surveyed have deployed them in their schools). However, other studies show some tablets can cost significantly more time and money to manage.

http://www.schoolcio.com/cio-back-office-business/0104/new-tablets-to-help-personalize-learning/53579

Brian Sin, SlashGear

When one door closes, another one opens, and that statement proves very true for Feedly. After Google’s shocking announcement that it’s going to shut down its Google Reader service, Feedly’s user base has increased phenomenally. The service has already gained over 500,000 new users in just 48 hours. Feedly has done a great job in enticing Google Reader users to convert to its service, and it has launched new servers and increased its bandwidth by 10 times in order to keep up with demand. Feedly announced that Google Reader users would be able to seamlessly migrate their RSS feeds over to its service. The service even offers similar features to Google Reader, alongside its own special features. The service allows you to view your RSS feed in a condensed style (Title View) for those of you who have so many updates in your Google Reader feed that you have no time to scan through them individually.

http://www.slashgear.com/500000-google-reader-users-convert-to-feedly-16274360/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

A $70 device will tell you how efficiently you’re driving, and can even call 911 for help in the event of an accident. You probably have a rough idea of how much you spend on gas each week, but chances are you don’t calculate the cost of each trip down to the penny. Unless you’re Ljuba Miljkovic, that is, who knows that in a recent week he spent $7.50 to drive over 47 miles. Miljkovic is a cofounder of Automatic, an automotive tech startup that offers a small gadget that connects to your car’s onboard computer and wirelessly transmits the data it collects to your smartphone. This can reveal how efficiently you’re driving, how much individual trips are costing you, and tips for solving potential engine troubles. It can also determine where you parked your car and, if its built-in accelerometer senses you’ve been in an accident, call 911 for help.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512211/gadget-gets-under-the-hood-to-bring-analytics-to-driving/

By Benedict Evans, Technology Review

Smartphones have created a bridge between two previously separate industries—wireless networks and personal computing. For Internet firms and device makers, this means access to the world’s largest network of people. As can be seen above, the wireless telephone business is large compared to personal computing. In 2012, the world’s mobile operators did $1.2 trillion in business and served around 3.2 billion people, versus perhaps 1.7 billion people who used PCs to access the Internet. By comparison, the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, and the entire global PC industry was $590 billion. Online advertising, the main driver of the consumer Internet, generated only $89 billion in revenue.

http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/511791/smartphones-are-eating-the-world/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

Would you follow your favorite basketball player’s shoes on Facebook or Twitter? That’s right: the player’s shoes, connected to the Web and posting status updates live from the basketball court. Bizarre as it sounds, this could happen in the not-so-distant future of digital advertising and marketing, if some of the ideas conceived by Google’s latest advertising experiment, Art Copy & Code, take flight. Project lead Aman Govil says Art Copy & Code, introduced this month, is meant to show how advertising and marketing can be more relevant in a technology-rich and highly connected world.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512401/google-searches-beyond-adwords/

by tom Simonite, Technology Review

Pierre-Oliver Latour, CEO and cofounder of Everpix, which is based in San Francisco, says “We’re building something to solve this big problem that is coming where people are going to have too many photos and they begin to miss out on them and neglect them.” Many people have already reached that point, says Latour. Since launching quietly in 2011, Everpix has attracted tens of thousands of users to its service, which until this week cost at least $49 a year. The average new user uploads more than 10,000 photos, from sources including Windows and Apple PCs, mobile devices, and Facebook accounts, says Latour. A new free tier of the service, launched this week, offers a user access to just the last 12 months’ worth of photos; paying $49 a year allows access to an unlimited number.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512251/a-photo-service-that-understands-the-contents-of-your-images/

By Nick Grantham, Fractus Learning

If you have not yet explored Udemy, I can’t urge you enough to just dive in and see what all the hype is about. With the the catchphrase of “Start Learning from the World’s Top Instructors“, the platform is a treasure trove for all life long learners. And with more than 350,000 students already enrolled in Udemy courses, it is a pretty big class to join. Why am I so enthusiastic you ask? Well, over the past week we have spent a lot of time in the platform, tweaking and perfecting our first Udemy course, “How to Use Online Video to Flip the Classroom“. What I really noticed once we started looking around is how many awesome Udemy courses are available on just about everything.

http://www.fractuslearning.com/2013/03/13/udemy-courses-for-teachers/

by Emma Rich and Andy Miah, the Guardian

At the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of around 500 followers. It may have been the first time Twitter was used to deliver higher education, and given recent debate about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education? Last month we put together an experiment that tested these limits, using a bespoke hashtag to bring together all of the content. Running a seminar in Twitter might sound like a relatively simple exercise: ensure students have devices through which to tweet, then position your visiting professor – aka Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland – in front of his computer and let rip, but there was a bit of prep time involved too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/mar/13/twitter-transform-learning-higher-education

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The world’s largest search engine is now experimenting with jewelry that would eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords. Passwords remain the standard method of protecting personal accounts, but people struggle to remember them, and they are often stored insecurely. As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account. The search and ad company first revealed its plans to put an end to passwords in an academic paper published online in January (see “Google’s Alternative to the Password”). The effort focused on having people plug a small USB key that provides their credentials into a computer. The possibility of using special jewelry in a similar manner was mentioned in that paper.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512051/google-wants-to-replace-all-your-passwords-with-a-ring/

by James Temple, Tech Chronicles

I certainly commiserate with those lamenting the demise of Google Reader, a well loved product that many relied on to capture the droplets of compelling information amid the fire hose of online content. But some commentators saw a far more ominous message in the news that the online giant is officially pulling the plug on Reader, which allowed people to track and scan multiple RSS feeds that update whenever a particular author or publication adds content. Many read the news as a kind of nail in the coffin for RSS and some fear that would amount to a victory for “silos” on the Internet, forcing people to navigate to particular sites (say the NYtimes.com or SFGate.com) to cobble together their daily reading.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/03/14/death-of-google-reader-%E2%89%A0-death-of-disaggregation/

By NICK BILTON, NY Times

People turned to Twitter to lambaste Google for its decision and ask other people for alternative feed readers. Blogs weighed in, noting that the company was making a mistake. A few Web sites that rely on Google Reader for their own products, including FeedDemon, seemed near tears over the decision. And the Hitler meme that usually circulates online during tough times, also appeared with a video about the closing. Outraged Google Reader fans put together a petition on the Web site Change.org to keep the RSS reader alive, and in a few hours had garnered more than 50,000 signatures.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/the-end-of-google-reader-sends-internet-into-an-uproar/

By Todd R. Weiss, eWeek

Google creates a new Website to let the users know what’s really happening when we type a query into the Google Search box. Google wants users to know how sesarch actually happens, from the moment they type a query into the Search box on Google.com until the instant the results appear, ready for curious users to find just the information they are pursuing. That’s the idea behind a new Website, How Search Works, created by the search giant to explain the unexplainable in the complex process that occurs when a user begins looking for answers using Google’s search engine.

http://www.eweek.com/search-engines/google-explains-how-search-actually-works/

By Darryl K. Taft, eWeek

IBM took its Watson cognitive computing system on the road to the West Coast to tap students at the University of Southern California for new ideas and innovation based on the supercomputer’s capabilities. Two years after seeing it beat human competitors on the game show “Jeopardy,” IBM is putting Watson to work in ways that will change how business and health care leaders solve problems. While IBM researchers are developing new commercial applications for Watson, IBM is also turning to brilliant young minds in academia for big ideas on where the system should work next.

http://www.eweek.com/database/slideshows/ibms-watson-cognitive-computing-system-spurs-competition-at-usc/

By Sharon Dunten, Gainsville Times

It can be difficult to live in the world of high technology.Remember the cartoon characters the Jetsons? We don’t live that far off from that fantasy world of robots, television telephones, high-in-the-sky apartment living and walking the dog on a treadmill. Just ask Cesar Millan of the TV show “Dog Whisperer. ”The Hall County Schools and the Gainesville City Schools are among the best places to see technology. A new science, technology, engineering and mathematics school will be opening in the fall of 2013 at North Hall High School. In the new STEM wing, walls will be removed and glass walls will be installed. This will allow students to view others working on robotics, metal fabrication and computer technology. Remember, it is about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/section/6/article/80926/

By Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine

Among the questions surrounding Google Glass is how it might work for those who currently wear glasses. Switch to contacts? Double up? Never fear. Google today said its glasses will be available in prescription form. “The Glass design is modular, so you will be able to add frames and lenses that match your prescription,” the Glass team said in a Google+ post. “We understand how important this is and we’ve been working hard on it. The post included a photo of Greg Priest-Dorman, a member of the Glass team and an early pioneer in wearable computing, wearing one of the prescription prototypes currently being tested by Google.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416526,00.asp

BY NATHAN OLIVAREZ-GILES, Wired

Samsung shared a shadowy image of its forthcoming Galaxy S IV handset on Twitter today. It looks a helluva lot like the Galaxy S III. The official sneak peek comes amid a bunch of photos and videos from China showing off what purportedly is the new Samsung flagship. The Galaxy S IV is set to make its debut on Thursday, and the yet-to-be-authenticated leaks depict a phone that, like Samsung’s teaser image, looks like a larger Galaxy S III. The sneak peek shows a phone with the same thin plastic cladding, sloped design and removable back plate and battery. The rumor mill has been churning for weeks, and speculation centers largely on a display as big as 5 inches, with a 1080p resolution. Such features make sense given that the S III had a 4.8-inch 720p display and new rivals, such as the HTC One, are adopting 1080p screens. Samsung, so far, has increased the size of its Galaxy S displays with each generation.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/samsung-teases-galaxy-s-iv-on-twitter/

By Jack Schofield, Jack’s Blog

Google’s Chrome browser generally consumes a lot of resources on today’s PCs, because users tend to open a lot of tabs, because it continues to run background processes, and in some cases, because users have installed numerous extensions. The OneTab extension solves the problem, at least temporarily, by converting all the open tabs to a single tab of bookmarks. This reduces Chrome’s memory use from a typical 1GB to 2GB to around 100MB. Individual links on the OneTab page can be restored by clicking on them, or they can all be restored by clicking “Restore All”. Sets of links can also be saved to disk or loaded using the Export/Import commands, or they can be shared by publishing them as a web page. Since the Export command produces a plain text file, it provides a simple way of copying a set of tabs from one PC to another.

http://www.zdnet.com/onetab-instantly-frees-up-to-95-percent-of-memory-in-google-chrome-7000012430/