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Tuesday 23 April 2013

BlackBerry awarded design patent for portrait QWERTY slider, could be a BB10 Torch



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BlackBerry Q10 coming to Canadian carriers May 1st for $199 on contract



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Sony posts its first AOSP build for the Xperia Z (video)



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The First Ever Synthetic Biology Kickstarter Is About Growing ‘Glowing Plants'

Screen Shot 2013-04-23 at 11.08.18 AM

Kickstarter might be better-known for funding films and hardware projects, but it’s now getting its first synthetic biology proposal. A Singularity University alum, a Stanford post-doc and a Stanford Ph.D. are looking to use synthetic biology and software from startup Genome Compiler to creating plants that glow.


While the first several generations of plants might be weaker at emitting light, the long-term idea is to replace electric or gas lighting with natural lighting from plants.


“We live in a world that is generating too much carbon dioxide,” said Antony Evans, who is one of the three people behind the project. “Nature has figured out ways of creating energy that don’t require so much CO2 use and what we really want to do is awaken people to the potential of that. Instead of having all these expensive street lights, why don’t we get plants?”


With the project, they’re inserting bioluminescence genes into a small flowering plant called Arabidopsis that’s part of the mustard family.


They’re looking for $65,000 in funding to print DNA sequences they’ve designed using the Genome Compiler software and then to create rewards for backers like “Maker” kits that let you create your own glowing plants. The startup associated with the project, Genome Compiler, lets people easily design genetic sequences and order them online.




The project comes at a time when costs around both genome sequencing and DNA printing are falling precipitously. Printing DNA at this points costs at least 25 cents per base pair. So for an 8,000 character long sequence, they’re looking at least $2,000 per unique sequence.


They’ll test a number of experimental sequences, and print them with partner and Silicon Valley startup Cambrian Genomics, which has made a DNA laser printing system that cuts the cost of DNA synthesis dramatically. Then they’ll use bacteria as a vector to insert the new DNA into the plant.


Evans, who doesn’t have a background in biology at all, got into the field through Singularity University and Biocurious, a bio-hacking space down in Sunnyvale.


His bet is that the next decade will usher in a new era where it’s as easy to hack on animal or plant genomes as it is to build software with Python or Rails. The cost of sequencing a full human genome is falling even faster than Moore’s law would suggest at a current rate $8,000 down from $100 million in 2001. Not only that, DNA printing is getting cheaper as well with companies like Genscript.


They’ve also gone through the regulatory process to ensure that the project is compliant with U.S. law. Regulators from the USDA and EPA are naturally concerned that synthetic plants could become pests and crowd out or compete with natural plants for resources. They check for whether newly designed life forms have genes associated with pests; Evans has cleared this. The third agency that regulates synthetic biology experiments, the FDA, isn’t really involved here because these “Glowing Plants” are inedible.









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Galaxy S 4, future Samsung devices to use DigitalOptics tech for face tracking



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Hacked AP Twitter reports White House bombing, causes brief dip in Dow



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Kobo Aura HD review: a high-end e-reader with 'niche' written all over it



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New York Times videos now exempt from paywall, free 'for the foreseeable future'



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Google Fiber for iPad hits the App Store



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Be awed by Skyrim on the Oculus Rift, then let down by its limitations



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Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface RT now shipping in more countries



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Pantech Perception official for Verizon, delivers motion-aware Android on April 25th



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How Much Would It Cost to Be Iron Man 3 in Real Life?



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Lenovo ThinkPad Helix starts shipping, Seton Hall University gets early units



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Windows Phone gets an official Tumblr app



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BitTorrent Takes Its File-Syncing Service Public



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BitTorrent Sync Alpha now open to all, adds one-way sync and one-time sharing



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Engadget Giveaway: win a diskless ioSafe N2!



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Sush.io Raises $325K Led By Kima Ventures For Its Smart Dashboard To Help Track Online/SaaS Expenditure

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Sush.io, a yet-to-launch “smart” dashboard to help individuals and small businesses track online/SaaS expenditure, has raised $325,000 in seed funding led by France-based Kima Ventures. Also participating in the round is Venteprivee.com founder, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, French Accelerator 50 Partners, and Mediastay co-founder Jonathan Zisermann.


The problem that Seedcamp alumni Sush.io is setting out to solve is that individuals and businesses are relying on an increasing number of online services/SaaS, but tracking these expenses can still involve a lot of manual data extraction and entry when it really shouldn’t need to, and it certainly isn’t good use of anybody’s time — not least a founder of a small business/startup or a larger company’s CFO.


Instead, Sush.io’s “smart” financial dashboard will somewhat automate this process. By connecting your various online accounts, the service automatically retrieves all of your bills, invoices and associated data into “a single Cloud/App experience”. It sounds like a Mac OSX app will be first out of the gate, with iOS versions to follow. There will also be a Pro (presumably, paid-for) version of the service.


Asked how Sush.io works its magic behind the scenes, this is how co-founder and CEO Thomas Guillaumin explains the technology: “Our technology has PDF Parsing to extract vendor, amount, date within native e-invoices & PDF documents. Like Zapier, we [also] connect through a service’s API (Freshbooks, AdWords, Recurly etc.). But also by scrapping and crawling online accounts like Mint/Yodlee, to get your T-Mobile, Github or Heroku bills for instance.”


Or to quote the official pitch, Sush.io is like “Mint.com & IFTTT in a single Cloud/App.” Screen shot below.








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Chartboost Is Building The Next Mobile Ad Network To Watch, And They're Expanding To Europe

chartboost-logo

Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre and her husband Pepe Agell used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what they heard, they picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney.


Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of the fastest-growing mobile ad networks in Silicon Valley (one that we’ve heard from three separate sources grossed about $50 million last year). Her company Chartboost is quietly sucking in talent from an older generation of mobile ad networks and gaming studios like Google’s AdMob, DeNA’s Ngmoco and EA’s Popcap. They also picked up $19 million in funding led by storied VC firm Sequoia earlier this year.


“It’s kind of crazy. This all happened in four years,” she said. “Anyone can do it. People running these companies are not super humans. They are just people like you and me.”


Today Chartboost is opening its first office abroad in Europe, led by Ilja Goossens, who founded Gamundo and Virtual Fairground. The new location in Amsterdam is meant to strengthen the company’s relationships with the biggest game developers across the continent. Europe is having something of a Renaissance in mobile gaming right now with players like Finland’s Supercell (which made $104 million in profit with just 100 people last quarter), Berlin’s Wooga and London’s King.


While other newer mobile ad networks were less focused, Chartboost wedged itself into the gaming world where it built an early platform for developers to trade advertising inventory. Because games are the biggest category for apps in terms of time spent on iOS and Android, it was the ideal place to build a focused business. Chartboost earns revenue through excess inventory, which can be sold in an exchange.


Chartboost now has 16,000 games in its network, 8 billion ad impressions per month and has grown 30 percent since January. Instead of the old banner ads, which had poor clickthrough rates, Chartboost instead focused on creating interstitials that looked and felt like they belonged in a game.


At first, it wasn’t easy, however. Alegre said that when she and her co-founder Sean Fannan were starting out, they did 30 phone pitches to potential investors in a week. In late 2011, they picked up a small round from TransLink Capital, SK Telecom Ventures and XG Ventures.


But after the business starting gaining momentum, it was very different with the second round. Jim Goetz, the Sequoia partner who led the firm’s investment in earlier mobile advertising network AdMob, got Chartboost’s model right away and invested quickly in the company.


“We were more picky with who to talk to,” she said. “The numbers don’t lie.”








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Logitech's FabricSkin keyboard folio for iPad will shrug off spills for $149 (video)



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PSA: Twitter is down for some, as is iCloud and the iTunes Store



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Google patent details augmented reality overlay for sat nav



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Second-gen Nest teardown reveals high degree of repairability, fun with curved glass



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Lettrs App Lets You Send Snail Mail From Your iPhone



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Aereo headed to Boston in next major city expansion on May 15, open access on May 30



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DirecTV adding voice search to its iOS and Android phone apps, beta coming this summer



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Global Malware Hackers Use Social Media to Escape Cyber Sleuths



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EE lured 318,000 customers to 4G in Q1 2013



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El ordenador está vivito y coleando

En TechCrunch , sobre «la muerte del PC» que tanto se ha nombrado tras las últimas cifras de ventas de ordenadores en el mundo,


Muchos tratan de hacernos creer que la disminución de las ventas de ordenadores nuevos significa que éstos están siendo arrojados por la ventana a la vez que la gente grita obscenidades sobre Windows 8 y hace el amor con su nuevo teléfono o tableta.



La realidad es que en el mundo post PC el ordenador ya no es el rey y tiene que compartir protagonismo con el teléfono móvil, la tableta y el televisor. Las personas compran y utilizan el dispositivo que mejor se adapta a sus necesidades, pero al PC le queda mucho para llegar a estar obsoleto.

Al usar menos el ordenador y al dedicar dinero y atención a otros dispositivos nos hemos vuelto menos exigentes con el ordenadores.


El ciclo de sustitución de los ordenadores ha disminuido. El hecho es que un ordenador viejo (PC o Mac) con 4 ó 6 años sigue siendo válido. No es culpa de Windows 8 ni de los dispositivos móviles.




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WD ships 5mm Blue UltraSlim drive, enables thinner budget Ultrabooks



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Nokia's co-developed high-amplitude mics retain 10-month exclusivity, HTC has to look elsewhere



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Study suggests voice-to-text 'just as dangerous' as texting while driving



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¡Mira mamá, un Predator en moto!


Con el casco de motocicleta Predator se puede pedir como opción (119 dólares) un apuntador láser de tres rayos. Pena que es bastante improbable que esté homologado, aunque una pena aún mayor es no poder pedirlo con el cañón de plasma para el hombro.


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Google Street View adds Hungary and Lesotho, hits 50 country milestone



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El Seabreacher X es una embarcación con forma de tiburón que pinta bastante divertida


Pesa 600 kg, tiene 300 CV de potencia y puede navegar a 80 km/h, girar casi instantáneamente y desplazarse semisumergido a uno o dos metros de profundidad. Igual su aspecto te resulta familiar.


Vía Gizmag.


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