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The 'Next iPhone' We Didn't See Coming

The next-iPhone news I wasn't expecting to see until weeks from now arrived as the 23rd headline in a PR round-up e-mail I usually ignore: "Cricket Wireless to Offer iPhone on June 22."

Cricket, for the uninitiated, is a subsidiary of San Diego-based Leap Wireless International that sells prepaid phone and data service to some 6.2 million customers. Cricket's coverage has greatly expanded since I first tried its mobile broadband in 2009 (and even then, I thought it and Virgin Mobile provided useful alternatives), but until now it's suffered from the same lack of flagship smartphones as other prepaid services.

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Now Cricket's become the first prepaid carrier in the United States to offer Apple's iPhone 4 and 4S. It will sell an 8-gigabyte version of the 4 for $399.99, with a 16-GB 4S going for $499.99. (Apple's site charges about $150 more for no-contract copies of those models.)

You can buy an iPhone for far less at AT&T, Sprint or Verizon Wireless, but at a much higher monthly cost than the $55 Cricket asks for a month of "unlimited" calling, texting and mobile broadband. Tethering, or sharing the phone's broadband with a computer, and visual-voicemail features will come later.

The quotes are necessary because Cricket's fine-print "fair use policy" may throttle your connection to 56 to 100 kilobits per second after you hit 2.3 gigabytes in a month.

The other catch to Cricket's offering, as brought up by spokesman Greg Lund in a phone call: You won't be able to buy its iPhone everywhere. Cricket will only sell it in the 59-and-counting markets where it offers service over PCS (Personal Communications Service) frequencies, leaving out the third of its network operating on AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) bands. Cross-hatching on its coverage maps identifies those areas, which include Discovery's home market of Washington, D.C.

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Cricket's network covers about 97 million people total, with extra coverage provided through roaming on Sprint and 30 other partner carriers, Lund said. (Update, 5/31: You may incur roaming fees--remember them?--outside those regions.) So if you pick up a Cricket iPhone in a PCS market and use it in an AWS area, it should still function properly.

Cricket only offers international roaming in Canada--and that's where this gets interesting. Lund said that while the microSIM card slot on Cricket's iPhone 4S won't permit using the phone on U.S. carriers selling GSM (Global System for Mobile) service, it will be unlocked for international use.

So unless Cricket later chooses to sign exclusive roaming deals with other carriers overseas (Lund said it's weighing that option), you can step off a plane, buy a prepaid microSIM card, and use a Cricket-purchased iPhone for far less than AT&T, Sprint or Verizon's roaming rates. You'd also spare yourself the extra steps required by Sprint and Verizon to get their iPhones internationally unlocked. (AT&T customers have to wait until their iPhones are out of contract, although "jailbreaking" and unlocking them remain an option for the technologically ambitious.)

This move represents another opening in the iPhone's exclusivity (or, as an Apple spokeswoman phrased it, "making the best smartphone more accessible to an even broader market") after its arrival on Verizon in early 2011 and on Sprint last fall. It may also provide an appealing option to one set of potential iPhone users: Tech journalists who already have a smartphone and don't want to pay for a second voice-plus-data plan, but could still use an iPhone for occasional research. Hmm...

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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Bra Designed for Sensitive Skin: DNews Nuggets

For breast cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy, wearing a bra can be painful, even months after a treatment. The radiation can cause the skin to become red, flaky, swell and result in open wounds. As you might imagine, the extreme discomfort affects a person's quality of life.

To that end, researchers at Hohenstein Institute in Germany developed a special brassiere that can be worn during and directly after radiation therapy. The bra was designed with non-instrusive seam lines and the fabric they used is soft and breathable, able to absorb sweat immediately and wick it away from the body quickly. The researchers hope to make the bra available to patients soon. via AlphaGalileo

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Photo: The anatomical values of breast cancer patients were determined using state-of-the-art 3D body scanners and used to derive the ideal cut for the special bra. Credit: Hohenstein

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Mind-Reading Robot Teachers Head To Class

Everyone had that one teacher in high school who you swore was a robot. Dull lectures delivered in a monotone voice all but invited you to snooze away the class, drooling on your desk.

On the other hand, we've all had those teachers we loved; ones who were engaging, creative and inspired us us to explore our creativity. They may not have stood on desks or demand we rip excremental introductions from our text books, but bottom line, they held our attention.

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While they're certainly not going to get a lot of thumbs up from those in the teaching profession, Bilge Mutlu and Dan Szafir from the University of Wisconsin have created this: a robot teacher that uses engaging techniques to help improve how much information a student retains.

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"We wanted to look at how learning happens in the real world," Mutlu told New Scientist. "What do human teachers do and how can we draw on that to build an educational robot that achieves something similar?"

So the duo programmed a Wakamaru humanoid robot to narrate a story to students, one-on-one, and test them to see how much they retained. Mutlu and Szafir used a $200 EEG sensor to monitor students' engagement levels. The sensors monitored the FP1 area of the brain that manages learning and concentration. If there was a dip in the student's attention level, the system signaled the robot and triggered a cue.

Such attention-regaining cues could be anything from the robot raising its voice, making arm gestures, to pointing at itself or listeners. For example, during the reading of the Japanese folk tale, My Lord Bag of Rice, the robot used its arms to indicate a high mountain.

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Two other groups were tested as controls. These listeners received either no cues or random ones sprinkled throughout the story.

As you'd expect, students who received cues from the robot were able to recall more of the story than those who weren't. Students who were given cues answered an average of 9 out of 14 questions correctly, compared to only 6.3 correct answers of those who weren't given cues.

While this technology is still a long way off from replacing human teachers, it could work on a smaller, more affordable scale -- for example, one-on-one tutoring.

Question is, would you send your kid to a robot tutor?

Credit: moodboard/Corbis

via New Scientist

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Garden Wheel Idea Came From Outer Space

Little pots in a kitchen window filled with growing herbs and vegetables look so quaint compared to an Italian design firm's wheel-shaped countertop garden. The idea for their stylish, compact hydroponic plant system originated with NASA.

Milan-based design firm DesignLibero's "Green Wheel" is essentially a plant-growing appliance that works with help from gravity. The wheel rotates plants potted inside around a light while a pump automatically irrigates them. Tiny vases containing coco fiber support more than eight feet of plants and its roots, according to DesignLibero.

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NASA originally came up with the rotary garden concept in the 1980s as a way to feed fresh produce to astronauts in space, but the agency never took it all the way. Instead, a number of similar rotary growing systems have been available commercially for a long time -- see the Canadian "Volksgarden" -- but none of them look quite this sharp. DesignLibero head Libero Rutilo described the object as "an iconic garden object for residential use, like a TV," to Fast Company Co.Design writer Mark Wilson.

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"It helps you to grow your own fresh herbs and vegetables without leaving home," the designer writes on the firm's site. He also argues that produce from the Green Wheel also reduces transportation and cuts packaging. In the winter, a rotary hydroponic system like this could prevent avid living lettuce buyers like me from having to take all those trips to the grocery store.

As much as a rotary garden solves problems, the components and energy required to run it do introduce new ones. Still, if you've got plenty of cash and want a sculptural element for your house that's also functional, this could be your ticket. Nobody is saying exactly how much the wheel costs or how you can get one, though.

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Poking around the DesignLibero site, I discovered that they also created an object called "Fluidity" that serves as both a stylish dish drainer and a plant container that catches all those drips from freshly rinsed plates. Preventing funky gunk under the dish rack while saving water: That's green design I can definitely roll with.

Photo: The Green Wheel hydroponic growing system. Credit: DesignLibero

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In Case of Cyber Attack...?

We've heard them all before: "Stop, drop and roll;" "Shelter in place;" "Duck and cover." Emergency response procedures in case of fire, earthquake, hurricane, tornado and other potential disasters are well known and rehearsed -- or at least they should be -- in places vulnerable to these kinds of hazards.

But what are you supposed to do in the event of a cyber attack? Although a large-scale cyber attack has yet to hit American shores in a publicly disruptive way, the news of yet another major cyber attack to hit Iran, dubbed "Flame," raises the question of how the United States might deal with such an attack, or one even more damaging, should it ever arrive on our shores.

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Information about what to do in the event of personal identity theft is readily available even if it's not entirely familiar. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) even has a document (PDF) outlining what to do in case you're identity is stolen, online or otherwise. They've even created their own shorthand for how to prevent it from happening at all: "Deter. Detect. Defend."

Flame is a different malware of a different stock, however. Flame is a data-mining virus, designed to collect information from a variety of sources, including hidden passwords, recorded audio from a connected microphone and screenshots of different communications applications, according to PC World.

The virus is considered a follow-up to the Stuxnet worm, which inflicted untold damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, though Flame is considered even more complex than its predecessor and might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon to date. According to computer security experts, both attacks could only have been possible with "nation-state support."

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In the case of an attack similar to if not more damaging than these known cyber weapons, what would an emergency response look like? If there were a cyber attack involving the nation's power grid, for example, who would be in charge? Last year, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse posed the same questions during a discussion on cyber security at the University of Rhode Island.

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These are the kinds of questions that cyber security experts concerned with safeguarding civilian infrastructure are still figuring out. During that same forum attended by Whitehouse, General Keith Alexander, director of the U.S. National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command (NSA/CSS), described high-risk targets like the power grid as "vulnerable."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has established a group, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), that is devoted to cyber security and incident response to major cyber attacks. The team also hosts a malware lab that attempts to simulate potential attackss.

The DHS also has other divisions with similar objectives, such as the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, which coordinates cyber and communications warning information, and Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Collaboration Program (CISCP), designed to share cyber information among critical infrastructure owners, among others.

Earlier this month, ICS-CERT released a notice about cyber attacks targeting the natural gas pipeline companies. These incidents were predominantely spear-fishing attacks, which include malicious attachments to targeted e-mail addresses. What the attacks were intended to accomplish, however, is still a mystery to the DHS.

Despite the fact that there is now a dedicated national security apparatus to prevent, analyze and if necessary respond to cyber attacks, a study commissioned by the Obama administration to analyze the nation's cyber-security readiness found that state and local officials are most concerned about the ability to respond to digital threats, as opposed to other disaster scenarios. Forty-five percent of officials who responded said they did not have a program in place to address these attacks should they occur, according to the National Preparedness Report. Furthermore, two-thirds of respondents claimed their security procedures and recovery plans hadn't been updated in at least two years, as reported by the New York Times. 

The number of cyber-attacks on government systems reported by federal agencies increased 650 percent between 2006 and 2010, with over 41,000 reported in that year, and the trend seems to indicate that this number will only continue to increase.

Current efforts in the public and private sector seem primarily to be aimed at preventing future incidents of cyber attacks from occurring. So far, this system has managed to keep a major disruptive attack at bay. How well prepared these same entities will be in terms of emergency management planning should cyber attackers ever succeed remains to be seen.

But were that ever to happen, should a cyber attack successfully disrupt a stock exchange, the power grid or the water supply, what can the average citizen do? So far the answer to that question has not coelesced.

Credit: Getty Images

The Tiniest Jubilee Trinket: DNews Nuggets

The Tiniest Jubilee Trinket: Among the flood of souvenirs that are being produced to mark Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years on the throne, one memento is remarkable for its miniscule size. Scientists at the University of Glasgow's James Watt Nanofabrication Center took a sliver of diamond and carved a likeness of Queen Elizabeth’s head on a coin-like shape. The coin measures 750 nanometers across and features an image of the Queen's profile 580 nanometers high. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. To give you a sense of how small that is, 2,600 billion of the coins would fill a volume equivalent to that of British pound coin.

The record-small diamond coin is a cool souvenir, but the feat was really a demonstration of the technology’s potential."Diamond is not just an attractive material for use in jewelry,” explained David Moran, lead of the nanoelectronic diamond devices and systems group, “it also has a range of unique physical properties which make it ideal for use in a range of advanced fields of engineering,” via Press Association

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Say Cheese! Facebook Camera Is Here

Just weeks after Facebook announced it was going to buy Instagram for a cool $1 billion, Zuckerberg and company rolled out a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Facebook Camera. 

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Why, might you ask, did Facebook fork out that cool bil and then turn around and launch a similar application? First off, the Facebook Camera app had been on the drawing board well before the company bought Instagram, suggesting they were planning to compete against the young startup.

Secondly, as Christina Warren points out at Mashable, the answer can be found in the rationale behind another major acquisition -- for example, when Google bought YouTube, despite Google Video being readily available. 

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"After the release of Facebook Camera, I’m even more convinced that Instagram could be Facebook’s YouTube — in other words, an acquisition that becomes monumentally important to its future, and helps it solve a problem it couldn’t solve on its own," Warren wrote.

Similar to Instagram's filters -- arguably its most popular feature -- Facebook Camera will include 15 filters, plus tools for cropping and straightening photos. However, as Warren points out, "the user controls for taking photos and applying filters could use some serious love." I can see why. Most of the Facebook Camera filters are difficult to tell apart.

While the new app lets users upload higher resolution photos than the standard Facebook app, it's hard to see it breaking Instagram's stride. Dirk Stoop, a Facebook product manager for photos, told The New York Times that Facebook Camera will create a more "immersive experience around your photos." Great that you're finally realizing that photos are the candy of social media of which many people have a sweet tooth for, but Stoop, you and your company are a little slow on the draw -- Instagram already beat you to the punch.

But Instagam has only 40 million users while Facebook has 900 million -- many of whom I'm willing to bet are unaware of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. What this new app does do is ensure brand loyalty by giving Facebook users a lesser need to seek a better photo sharing app, despite there being one.

"Let’s be clear," wrote Forbes' Karsten Strauss, "it’s not the quality of Facebook Camera that makes it such a compelling product, it’s the vast network behind it." Exactly.

Essentially, Facebook Camera is a tool for Facebook. Sure, so is Instagram, but it doesn't have the "Facebook" name, a name that's now become all but synonymous with social media. And I'm sure Zuckerberg and his minions want to keep it that way, even if it means releasing an inferior app.

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On the flip side of the question, why would Facebook buy Instagram if they were working on a photo app that "launches really fast" and "scrolls like butter"? As Warren mentioned, it all has to do with virility.

"People love, use and evangelize Instagram. It has the brand," she wrote. "It’s the same reason Google bought YouTube even though it had Google Video. Instagram became synonymous with 'photo app' and that’s not something you can just recreate.

"Moreover, Instagram was a truly mobile-first offering -- which only allows users to upload photos from a mobile interface -- and that zeroes in at the heart of Facebook’s issues with mobile," Warren said.

"You could fairly ask, 'why didn't Facebook fix its mobile apps first?'" my DNews colleague Rob Pegoraro mused. "I don't know why -- but, remember, this company took its sweet time to ship an iPad app, and its Android app only got to a position of feature parity with the iOS release relatively recently. I guess those are more complex creations than they seem," he said.

 via The New York Times

Credit: Facebook

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Salty Watermelon Pepsi's New Soda: DNews Nuggets

Pepsi Japan is launching a new taste sensation -- a ruby red soft drink called Salty Watermelon. Salted watermelons are a traditional Japanese summertime snack, and I suspect it's pretty tasty. It has that salty-sweet thing we all crave. And if you've ever eaten a watermelon and feta salad, you'll know what I'm taking about. This flavor is not new to Japanese consumers as a packaged good. In 2008, Nestle Japan started selling a “Watermelon and Salt” Kit Kat candy bar. The Pepsi drink will go on sale in July for 140 yen (about $1.75) per bottle.

Drink up!

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Colorful Radiation Detecting Phone

 

Pantone, makers of beautiful color palattes, covetable quirky items and now a radiation-detecting smartphone? Well, the Pantone 5 107SH is actually from Softbank, a Japanese cell phone carrier, but it’s designed and named after the popular color-matching supplier. 

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The phone has a built-in Geiger-like counter that measures radiation within 20-percent accuracy. It measures high frequency nuclear and gamma radiation through an integrated app. A button on the keypad prompts the app to open up and measure the number of microsieverts (radition measurement unit) in the air. While not as powerful as actual Geiger counters, it might be good for people who reside near the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster area.

All of the seriousness of the phone’s radiation detecting capabilities is softened by the fact that the phone is available in yellow, blue, pink and other Pantone hues. On the mobile side, the phone runs on Android 4.0, has a 3.7 inch screen, 4 MP camera and a 1.4 gigahertz processor and should be available in July.  

via Venture Beat

Credit: Softbank

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Mitt Romney Campaign's Epic Fail

Mitt Romney clinched the Republican nomination yesterday by winning the Texas primary. While it may have been a good day for Mr. Romney at the polls, in the digital world, his campaign failed.

An app for the presidential nominee called “With Mitt,” developed by his campaign team, caught attention on Twitter when a photo snapped with it showed a poster that read “A Better Amercia.” I’m going to wait for that to sink in ... there you go. Immediately the app went viral, going as far as earning a hash tag on Twitter. (search #ABetterAmercia) An update to fix the error was submitted, but as of this morning, it's still reading A-M-E-R-C-I-A.

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The gaffe was just a simple editorial oversight; it happens to everyone. President Obama had a similar issue by misspeaking while presenting the 2011 Medal of Freedom yesterday. The problem is that these days, Twitter rapid-fires these mistakes worldwide.

via Gizmodo

Credit: App Screencap by Christina Battisti Ortiz

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