DNews is at CES -- all week! Anthony is posting an update a day on all of the coolest ... stuff he's seeing at the biggest consumer electronics show only on Earth.
CES 2013: Annie and Anthony's Favorite Things So Far
Then, Laci Green explains how obsessing over Facebook updates might actually be GOOD for you. Whaaaaa?
Don't forget to check out all the other excellent videos we've got on the DNews YouTube channel.
Obsessive Facebook Updates Are Good for You?!
In the last year, I've locked myself out of my home no less than three times. Consequentially, that's resulted in me having to shimmy through open windows like a burglar. I'm surprised my neighbors never called the cops on me.
If only I had ShareKey, a near field communication (NFC) app for a smartphone, I could have avoided all the breaking and entering.
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Developed by Dr. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT), the Android app communicates with smartlocks on one's door via NFC, which allows data to be exchanged wirelessly over a short range. To lock or unlock the door, simply wave the phone near the lock.
Unlike systems such as Lockitron and UniKey that use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to send instructions remotely, ShareKey requires that a phone be physically waved in front of their locks, making it more difficult for hackers to steal the signal.
Better yet, the system allows for any smartphone to be granted access to the doors for a specified amount of time, be it a few hours or a few weeks. House guests, dog walkers and plant waterers all know what a three-ring circus it can be swapping keys and getting them made, so this feature is an added bonus. ShareKey can send these "electronic keys" directly to the recipient's smartphone as a QR code via email or a multimedia text message.
"For instance, I can grant the building superintendent access to my apartment for a short period so that he can open the door for the gas meter to be read while I'm at work," explains Alexandra Dmitrienko from the SIT. “The solution is built around modern security technologies and can be easily integrated into existing access control systems."
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At this year's CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, Germany, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt will demo ShareKey in an attempt to drum up interest in hopes that it will be on the market soon.
Credit: Fraunhofer SIT
Smart appliances are evolving from sci-fi concept to retail offering this year, with new showroom models that can send a text message when your clothes are dry or notify you when a power outage knocks out your fridge.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, appliance manufacturers Whirlpool and LG are unveiling new washers, dryers and refrigerators that connect with their owner's smartphones or tablets through home-based wi-fi networks, letting them know when to change filters, schedule maintenance or the cheapest time of day to wash a load of clothes.
"We’re not looking at having the fridge tweet to you, but it can send e-mails or SMS," said Warwick Stirling, Whirlpool global director of energy and sustainability. “We’re trying to focus on ways to make tasks easier and simpler, making processes more efficient rather than more gadget-y or gizmo-y.”
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Stirling said the devices will be available for sale in March under its "Sixth Sense Live" brand. Whirlpool’s new Bluetooth-capable CoolVox refrigerator lets consumers play music through the fridge using an app.
Meanwhile, Korean electronics giant LG is introducing a new line at CES that will let users control their washer, vacuum or range by voice command via smartphone, even offering the ability to check what kind of food is inside the refrigerator remotely.
This convenience comes at a price. A Whirlpool washer/dryer combo with smart connectivity costs $3,600, compared to under $1,000 for entry-level models. While appliance and electronics makers believe consumers will go for convenience over cost, some analysts are skeptical that the public is ready for tweeting fridges or remote controlled vacuums.
"From an appliance standpoint, they are getting there, but it’s still pretty early," said Neil Strother, a senior analyst at Boulder-based Pike Research.
He says there are several big obstacles to consumers jumping from smartphones to smart appliances. They are still 50 to 100 percent more costly that "non-smart" appliances and manufacturers still haven’t agreed on a common household communications platform that would help integrate stereo/TV/computer systems with kitchens and laundries, for example.
Last week, Microsoft purchased R2, a company that makes a Xbox-like controller that attempts to do just that.
But perhaps most importantly, Strother says, overall energy prices are predicted to remain stable or go down in the next few decades. That means a too-expensive, energy-miser appliance may not pay off over the long run (see electric cars).
Despite a relative glut of inexpensive energy in the United States, some utilities are hoping new smart appliances will play a role in a bigger goal of reducing overall energy demand and the carbon footprint that accompanies it.
Ratepayers in Chicago, California, Texas and other parts of the country are already seeing electricity prices change hourly, meaning that a high-tech washer, for example, could clean clothes more cheaply at night than during the afternoon. Some utilities are developing smartphone apps to help ratepayers regulate their heating and cooling systems remotely as well.
"Everybody in the utility industry seems to be looking at more technology which will help the customer understand their energy use and modify it," said Ron Bilodeau, project manager at NV Energy in Nevada.
Retail analysts like Strother expect that smart appliances, such as the ones debuting at CES, will be purchased by high-end luxury consumers and tech geeks, the usual early adopters of technologically advanced consumer products.
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Even Whirlpool’s Warwick admits that he doesn't expect to be selling lots of these appliances until the per unit price comes down and there’s greater integration among the power utilities, appliance makers and consumers themselves.
"The connected appliance market will be small for now as all the manufacturers try to understand how to deliver it to the consumer," Stirling said. "We are moving from lots of concepts to real products. There will be lots of challenges with the connected home. But consumers do like it."
Photo: iStockPhoto
In one of the older "Treehouse of Horror" episodes from The Simpsons, Pierce Brosnan voiced a murderous home automation system. Back then, the idea of home automation was practically a dream (or a nightmare) to average folks, but now it's becoming an attainable reality. This set of Wi-Fi-controlled lightbulbs from Greenwave Reality will give homeowners control over their home's entire lighting system with a remote control.
The wireless LED lighting kit consists of four 40-watt equivalent bulbs, a remote control and a gateway box that connects to any home router. They won't be readily available at your local home improvement store -- instead the company plans to sell the sets through utility and lighting companies for around $200, with each new bulb costing under $20.
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Each bulb has its own IP address and once installed, automatically pairs with the gateway. Once all of the bulbs are paired and the gateway is connected to the router, lighting in the home can be controlled through the remote, which will be able to control up to 500 bulbs at one time.
An app downloaded to a smartphone or tablet controls brightness, timers or a large section of lights. Controlling lights through your mobile device might just seem like a novelty but it does serve a purpose. Setting up schedules and timers for when the lights need to come on, or setting dimmers is pretty easy and provides the same piece of mind that persnickety timers do.
Credit: Greenwave Reality
Does the world need yet another video-chat service, yet another app to share footage from your phone, and yet another site to find out where to go tonight? Most likely not, but that didn't stop many of the 78 startups making six-minute presentations at the DEMO Fall conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.
Fortunately, DEMO -- the fall's other big launchpad for startups after TechCrunch Disrupt SF -- offered more substantive fare. These four in particular caught my eye.
Ube: This Austin firm won the conference's prize of a million dollars in free advertising on tech publisher IDG's sites for its smartphone-controlled home-automation system. Instead of you running wires through the house and attaching controller modules to existing appliances, Ube will sell $55 replacement power outlets, plugs and $60 light switches and plans a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds.
Each includes a small Android computer and all can talk to each other and an elegant-looking mobile app via WiFi for easy remote control and monitoring. They say their system will also talk to Internet-linked appliances like "connected" TVs and Blu-ray players, which sets this apart from Belkin's less-ambitious, but already available WeMo.
bandu: Boston-based Neumitra introduced this stress-monitoring system, which links a chunky-looking watch that measure's your galvanic skin response for anxiety with an iPhone app that tracks these measurements and indexes them on the map (presumably, TSA security checkpoints rank high). When you start to freak out, the app tries to put you at ease by sending reminders to the watch's screen to do things like practice breathing exercises, call your mom or look at photos or listen to songs that make you happy.
The company's taking pre-orders on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo at $189 a pop, but its target market is health care for veterans and other high-stress populations.
MoveEye: Twin Cities-based Tarsier had the conference's strangest eyewear: a set of glasses that use two off-the-shelf Logitech webcams to track the movements of your hands and fingers (and make the wearer look like a complete dork). Tarsier's software allows those gestures to control the action on a computer or TV screen.
I gave it a test drive by playing a racing game with my hands held out as if they were gripping a steering wheel. It worked, although the system got confused when I tilted my head as the car went around a turn. Tarsier says this is two years from shipping (when the glasses will be lighter and smaller than the prototype I donned). By then, though, connected TVs with webcams for living-room video chats may get smart enough to use them for the kind of no-remote control I saw Oblong Industries show off last month.
Passboard: Passwords can look awfully frail as a way to secure our important accounts, but what can we use instead of them? The San Francisco startup Passban takes an all-of-the-above approach, allowing you to choose and combine different forms of authentication on an Android or iOS device: recognizing your voice, recognizing your face, checking to see if you're in a designated location, or entering an old-fashioned password, among others. This flexible setup also gets around the problem of you being in a place that's too noisy or too dark for voice or facial recognition.
Or people may be content to continue wrestling with passwords, with only a minority opting to augment them with measures like Google's two-step verification.
Magic carpets aren't just for flying; they're now for falling. A team of researchers at the University of Manchester in England has developed a carpet embedded with optical fibers that can sense and map walking patterns in real time. The fibers send the information to a tiny electronics at the edge of the carpet that analyze the movement of the walker, identifying changes that may indicate a sudden fall or trip.
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But the computer can monitor the walking pattern over time, too, and recognize if a person's gait is unsteady. That information could be send to a healthcare aid as a warning that the person may fall.
Falls among older people are fairly common. As many as 30 percent to 40 percent of elderly people who live in community housing fall each year. And 50 percent of hospital admissions of people over age 65 are due to injuries from falls.
Smart carpets such as this one could be used in homes to help monitor the mobility of an elderly person or could be used by therapists to improve a patient's balance.
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In a press release, one of the researchers, Dr. Patricia Sully of the University of Manchester’s Photon Science Institute said, “The carpet can be retrofitted at low cost, to allow living space to adapt as the occupiers’ needs evolve – particularly relevant with an aging population and for those with long term disabilities – and incorporated non-intrusively into any living space or furniture surface such as a mattress or wall that a patient interacts with.”
The team presented their magic carpet innovation at this year's Photon 12 conference in Durham, U.K.
Credits: Andrew Bret Wallis (top); University of Manchester (bottom)
A model village in Mayalsia is changing the way communities tackle poverty. Rimbunan Kaseh, a rural village sitting on 30 acres of land near Kuala Lumpur, was built to serve as an example of how to address rural poverty issues by promoting environmental sustainability with technology. The project was detailed at this year's Global Science and Innovation Advisory Council meeting in San Jose, Calif. The GSIAC is made up of international leaders from several countries to find ways to build sustainability and a stronger economy for the Asian country.
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The community offers education, training and recreational facilities, as well as 100 affordable post- consumer material built homes, selling from $16,000 to $20,000. A closed-loop agriculture system is a big part of the community, providing food and income for its residents. ‘Closed loop’ means that everything in the community is inter-connected, for example: An aqua-culture system raises fish for a protein-rich food supply, waste from the fishtanks is then used to irrigate plants to grow fresh produce. The produce is grown in hydroponic pots that can detect soil moisture, which makes it easer to water plants accurately without wasting water. All of these processes come together to provide reliable food supply and augment resident’s income by $400 to $650 a month. Sustainability is also supported with the communities solar power capabilities, biomass energy and mini-hydro electricity.
Ribunan Kaseh offers everything typical communities do like schools, playgrounds and places of worship, with a high-tech twist. Educational facilities are equipped with 4G Internet service that supports e-learning and e-health services. Ellis Rubenstein, President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, said at the GSIAC meeting, “Integrated smart communities could transform services available to Malaysia's citizenry while creating thousands of jobs, complementing GSIAC's unprecedented alliance to improve education in that country at every level from cradle to career.”
More “smart villages” are planned for the area, with up to 12 sites in the near future. While it’s centralized to Malaysia for now, this example could set a new precedent in creating change for people experiencing poverty all over the world.
Credit: MiGHT
Wednesday's spectactular "Project Glass" skydive was the biggest surprise at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco, but not the only one. Google also introduced a round of humbler products and services.
Android Jelly Bean: This 4.1 update to the 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" version of Android introduced last fall brings a performance tune-up and three noticable new features. Its voice recognition will work offline, unlike Apple's Siri. A Google Now personal-assistant app can provide personalized answers and tips based on your calendar and contacts (if you don't mind Google peering that closely into your life). And you'll be able to respond to, not just acknowledge, the notifications that appear at the top of the screen--say, sending a "running late" e-mail when Android reminds you of an imminent meeting.
But unlike Apple's iOS upgrades, you won't get Jelly Bean until your phone's manufacturer and carrier ship an update. (The only exceptions: the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus "pure Google" phones.) I asked all four carriers when they'd ship "JB"; only Sprint replied, with an odd suggestion that I ask Google.
Nexus 7: This tablet seems aimed not at Apple's iPad but Amazon's Kindle Fire, the only Android tablet to win many buyers. Like the Fire, the Asus-built Nexus 7 features a seven-inch screen, gives prominent home-screen play to a media catalog (Google's Play Store) and will sell for $199 when it ships in mid-July.
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The 7, however, features a sharper 1280-by-800 pixel screen than the somewhat plain Fire, can run far more apps than the limited catalogue in Amazon's Appstore, and sports a front camera. After trying one this morning (I'll have a full review later), it makes the Fire look old.
How can the company make money on this device? It isn't. Google's Andy Rubin told AllThingsD's Ina Fried that it's selling the Nexus 7 at cost.
Nexus Q: This $299 spherical gadget, due mid-July, puts YouTube clips and Play Store music, TV shows and movies on your stereo and TV. You control the Q (unlike most gadgets, made in the United States) with an app on an Android devices, which makes it easy for visitors to guest-DJ if you wish.
But the Q doesn't run regular Android apps, so there's no Netflix. It costs three times as much as an Apple TV, six times the cheapest Roku player. Plus, the review unit I set up this morning vanished from a home network before I could play anything on it.
Google+ Events: For years, I've wondered if Google would take on Evite by shipping its own invitations app. Now it has. Google+ Events lets you craft artsy invites like Pingg but also allows guests to share photos on your event's site in real time.
But event hosts must use Google+, and that year-old social network hasn't exactly been making a dent in Facebook's dominance. And the first version allowed complete strangers to stuff your calendar with spammed invites, freaking out high-profile G+ users like Wil Wheaton and Robert Scoble.
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Google Docs offline: Google Docs is a fine little word processor, but you've needed an Internet connection for it. Now you can work on a document offline, if you run Google's Chrome (just shipped for Apple's iOS) and enable this feature from the gear-icon menu on your Google Drive page. This feature will come to Google's spreadsheet and presentations apps later.
This overdue addition makes Google's "Chromebook" laptops running Google's Chrome OS more relevant. It's also a minor godsend to reporters dealing with flaky Wi-Fi at tech events.
Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery
Would knowing just how much energy you use in a day change the way you live? The creators of Leafully, Nathan Jhaveri and Tim Edgar seem to think so, and so does the U.S. Department of Energy. The Seattle start up won the federal agency’s “Apps for Energy” contest this week with their app.
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The application monitors home energy use by accessing information from a user’s utility provider. The homepage shows a person's estimated carbon footprint (indicated by the number of trees it would take to offset the carbon footprint), where the energy use is coming front and what can be done to lower that usage. Carbon emissions from vehicles are also included in the footprint using national averages, but can be modified according to a person's specific use.
One interesting chart shows the amount of “sleeping energy” a home uses. Sleeping energy is the amount of electricity appliances use when they're plugged in, but not necessarily being used. For example, a printer draws energy from an outlet when it's plugged in, even when it's not printing.
The goal is to provide an incentive for people to change their consumption habits or buy higher efficiency appliances whose initial costs may be higher, but even out after a few years.
Check out the demo video below, and if you think this is a good idea vote for it (or others) at the Apps For Energy website.
via GeekWire
Credit: Leafully
A new electronic card promises to give mere mortals superhuman powers. One of these little suckers could let you start brewing coffee from bed, get a text when the laundry is done washing and even wait until electric rates are cheapest to start recharging a laptop. No astronomical "smart home" investment needed.
The tiny cards come from a startup called Electric Imp co-founded by engineers Hugo Fiennes, Kevin Fox and Peter Hartley, whose creds include working on Gmail and the iPhone. They named their company after ARPANET's classic 1960s "interface message processor," or "IMP," used to communicate with other computers.
Housed in an SD card shape, each Imp contains a processor, standard Wi-Fi, an antenna and encryption. In the near-term, users can attach the cards to any electronic device using some of the company's circuit boards, according to Gizmodo's Max Honan. DIYers are invited to geek out with several different development kits, available for purchase next month.
Adding connectivity to appliances means the potential for all sorts of helpful applications, including many that used to be limited to prototypes or expensive appliance upgrades. Mashable's Erik Shute (video) rattled off theoreticals: starting a coffee maker with a text, opening sprinklers only in ideal weather, having Christmas tree lights automatically go off when the tree needs more water.
Users can let their imaginations run wild, creating new programs through an Electric Imp browser to control newly connected devices securely. According to the company, the card will retail at $25 in late June.
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The startup also said it's working with vendors to create Imp-enabled products. "The premise is that hardware makers are not great at making cloud services, so they can just add an Imp slot and let Imp take care of the Web interface, Liz Gannes of AllThingsD pointed out.
As much as I can't wait to have more options for glorious remote-controlled laziness, the potential for these things to get hacked does freak me out a little. Mischevious minds could make "Poltergeist" look like a day at the park.
Photo: This Electric Imp card promises to let users control electronic devices and appliances remotely. Credit: Electric Imp/Gizmodo.
