Smartwatch Apple or Google needs to make

Why can't great smartwatches look like normal watches? Smartwatches, for the most part, can be divided into two categories: vague approximations of the future like the Pebble, Gear, and Gear Fit, or conventionally styled watches from companies like Citizen and Cookoo that offer far less functionality. While it's true the Pebble Steel is making inroads in the aesthetic department, its blocky construction and oversized buttons aren't likely to appeal to the masses.

Gábor Balogh is a freelance designer from Hungary who, like many of us, wants an attractive, watch-like watch that just happens to be smart. The difference between Balogh and the rest of us is he went ahead and designed an interface he believes could enable regular watch designs to include a full bevy of smart features.

After posting his concept for a smartwatch on Behance, Balogh took some time to talk through his interface ideas withThe Verge. The actual watch pictured in the mockups is almost incidental, as the concept simply takes the Swedish watchmaker Triwa's Havana timepiece (with the company's permission) and replaces its face with a circular display. This proposal is about interface paradigms, not product design. "In this concept the UI does not have a predefined style," says Balogh, "but it would match the housing. Only the navigational patterns have to be taken into consideration."

Although the interface itself will be down to watch and phone companies to decide, Balogh offers up some simple but polished ideas that go very well with Triwa's design. Pairing your smartphone to its watch will make the appropriate app icons appear on the display, with notifications, maps, and music information streamed from the device itself. When you don't want it to be a smartwatch, it mostly looks and behaves like a regular watch.

"I LIKE PRODUCTS WITH DISCREET TECHNOLOGY."

"I like products with discreet technology," explains Balogh, "when they serve me, my real needs, and make my life easier rather than simply changing my days." He calls out the Nest thermostat and Apple's Airport Express as prime examples of technology being applied discretely without obscuring functionality. "They're just ticking away in the background, making your life easier."

In an attempt to avoid obfuscation, Balogh's concept doesn't utilize a touchscreen or voice control. Instead, the interface uses the buttons and bezel found on most watches. The bezel is key to this interface. It can rotate to, for example, scroll through a long message or switch functions in an app, or be clicked to make a selection. The rotation element doesn't necessarily need to be physical — Balogh says he could imagine a more classical watch going with a physical dial, or a sporty design opting for an iPod-esque click wheel.

Using the bezel for controlling apps and other smartphone-related tasks frees up the three side-mounted buttons to control "native" functions like time, date, and alarms, as well as switching between modes. This clear separation of native and app functions should make the interface easily accessible to users familiar with how a regular watch works, while the lack of a touchscreen will stop the display from picking up smudges and grime from your fingers, and also stop your fingers from obscuring the display. "The size of the watch is a very limiting factor, so we don't have to make it very smart. I see the watch as a piece of jewelry, and wanted to add an interface that would be familiar on a classic watch."

Of course, Balogh is a designer, not an engineer, and there are technological issues that will need to be overcome before we can hope to wear something like his concept on our wrists. Circular screens, although not impossible, are a rarity, and squeezing a battery and the necessary circuitry into the tiny space that usually contains mechanical watchworks would be difficult. That said, the guts of a Pebble are actually fairly small, and larger watches may be able to contain them.

As a busy freelance designer, it's unlikely Balogh will be able to muster the time or funds to assemble a team and make his concept a reality. But as technology advances it's easy to see a future where tech giants like Samsung rein in their "futuristic" designs and attempt to take on the Breitlings and Tag Hauers of the world with something like Balogh's idea.

Hint: Use the 's' and 'd' keys to navigate

• ANALOG CLOCK AND CALL INTERFACE

  

• HEART RATE MONITOR AND MESSAGES

  

• STOPWATCH AND NAVIGATION

  

• WEATHER AND MUSIC

  

• COMPASS AND MEMOS

  

Source: http://vrge.co/1lENsu8

Apple CarPlay

Apple CarPlay Apple’s CarPlay is close to being available in the wild via partnerships with a handful of car manufacturers, and Volvo is already showing off what that will look like in practice. The car maker just posted a video to their YouTube account that provides a glimpse at how the system works.

CarPlay will work with a variety of different kinds of infotainment systems, including those with touchscreens, as displayed in the video, and those that use physical controls. Volvo’s integration also allows them to control features and services using steering wheel-mounted controls, and the first vehicle to sport the interface will be the XC90 SCUV, which is coming to market later this year.

Volvo offers up some interesting technical tidbits about how CarPlay works, too. The connection works via H.264 video streaming, that then gathers touch input from the console screen and relays it back to the connected device. The name ‘CarPlay’ is evocative of Apple’s AirPlay, and it sounds like the tech is similar in some ways between the two.

One final detail shared by Volvo in its press release: while currently CarPlay requires a physical Lightning cable connection, Volvo says Wi-Fi connectivity is coming in the “near future.” That could potentially open up access to devices like the iPhone 4S, which is still on sale but which uses a 30-pin connector, but Apple’s CarPlay site clearly states iPhone 5 and newer required for use, so it’s more likely this will just provide another connectivity option for owners of those devices.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/volvo-shows-apple-carplay-in-new-video-says-wi-fi-connectivity-is-coming-soon

RobinHood is about to let anyone buy and sell stocks for free instead of having to pay E*Trade or Scottrade $7 per transaction. Today RobinHood begins inviting the 160,000 people who’ve signed up to download its glossy new app where you can efficiently track and trade stocks. “It’s by far the most beautiful brokerage app, though that’s not saying much” co-founder Vlad Tenev jokes. But while RobinHood makes Wall Street look stylish in your pocket, what’s special is what it does, and does for free. That’s letting you trade stocks with zero commission. You might assume it would cost RobinHood money to execute trades, but in fact it can make money by moving yours around. We’ve just been conditioned to assume its something you have to pay for after decades of investors handing Scottrade, E*Trade and other brokerages $7 to $10 for each buy or sell.

Those who want their trading for free can sign up for RobinHood and expect an invitation email over the next few weeks to months. Since you’re trusting it with your savings, RobinHood wants to onboard people with extreme care rather than as fast as possible. But soon it expects to be holding hundreds of millions of dollars for its users so they can make instant trades from their phones.

RobinHood gave TechCrunch the first look at its new app, and its investor Google Ventures‘ attention to design is readily apparent. The whole app is themed white or black depending on if the stock market is open or closed. Meanwhile, the app’s chrome goes green or red depending on if the currently viewed stock is up or down that day. This trick tells you at a glance whether you can officially trade or not and how well you’re are doing.

Most finance apps only let you monitor stocks like Yahoo Finance or the first version of RobinHood, or charge you to trade them like those from the big retail brokerages. RobinHood co-founder Baiju Bhatt stresses that if you want to do deep financial research, you probably want to sit down at a desktop. But if you want to check your stocks whenever you have free moment and make some trades when the courage strikes you or whenever something shocks the market, RobinHood lets you do it in a few swipes. [Disclosure: I was friends with Vlad and Baiju in college.]

You can set alerts in case your stocks move a certain percentage, or place limit orders that are executed if the price hits a certain point. When you’re ready to make a live trade, just select how many shares of a stock you want to buy or sell. RobinHood previews how much that will cost or earn you, and you swipe to confirm the trade (which triggers some delightful animations and buzzes). And because security may be the biggest threat to RobinHood, it even lets you set up a special pin code that’s required to open the app.

RobinHood says it will never charge for trading. Right now, it’s supported by over $3 million in funding from Google Ventures, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Rothenberg Ventures and some angels. But it plans to quickly become self-sustained by charging other developers for API access, letting users trade on margin (money they’re owed but don’t own yet) for a fee, and through payment for order flow where stock exchanges pay the startup to bring its trading volume to their marketplaces.

For now, though, RobinHood could democratize stock trading. If you were a fat cat trading in the hundreds of thousands or millions, those little $10 fees didn’t mean much. But if you’re not rich and still want to invest, those commissions could add up to eat away at what you earn through smart trading. By replacing brick-and-mortar store fronts and legions of salespeople with an app and a lean engineering team, RobinHood can pass the savings on to its users.

Source:  http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/trade-stocks-free-robinhood

'Details Matter, It's Worth Waiting to Get It Right'

Today marks what would have been Steve Jobs' 59th birthday, and Apple fans around the world are once again remembering the Apple co-founder and CEO more than two years after his death. Apple CEO Tim Cook is unsurprisingly one of those remembering Jobs today, and Cook has acknowledged the day in a pair of Tweets honoring Jobs and vowing to continue "the work he loved so much".

While remembering Jobs' legacy, Cook may also be indirectly addressing Apple's lack of significant announcements so far in 2014, reminding his followers of Jobs' philosophy on making sure all details are taken care of.

Cook has promised that Apple is working on "some really great stuff" in new product categories, with a smart watch and new television-related products topping the list of rumors. With Apple rarely being a company to rush to market, Cook may be quietly asking for patience as the company continues work on its upcoming products and services.

Coincidentally, today also marks the 14th birthday of MacRumors. Founded in February 2000 before the introduction of the iPad, iPhone, and even the iPod and OS X, the site has grown enormously and fostered the creation of our sister sites TouchArcade andAppShopper. As always, we are grateful to our readers, contributors, sponsors, and all those for whom MacRumors is an online home or a regular stop.

Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/24/cook-honors-jobs-59th-birthday/

Mobile payments are finally everywhere you want to be...

NFC was supposed to be the future.

My next phone was going to include the technology, which would let me pay at any cash register by waving my phone instead of swiping my credit card. NFC would also let me touch phones with a friend to share a picture, tap my phone to a speaker to play music, and even unlock my phone with a ring or clip. NFC would someday even replace bar codes,according to Osama Bedier, the one-time head of Google Wallet and unofficial torchbearer of the NFC movement. Google’s contactless payments system was bound to take over the world. Until Google gave up on it.

Carriers blocked the company from deploying Wallet on phones, and retailers outside Mountain View didn’t feel much urgency to upgrade their cash registers with NFC capability. Eventually, Google transformed Wallet into a straightforward PayPal competitor. The best hopes for NFC payment adoption in the US lie with several programs created by carriers (Isis) and credit card companies (MasterCard MasterPass), which only work with a few banks and at select retailers. An NFC payments solution — in the US, at least — is effectively stuck in a stalemate. But a new startup called Loop thinks it has the answer: a wireless payments technology that does what NFC promised to do, all without forcing carriers or retailers to change anything.

Loop comes in two flavors, for now: a $39 key fob and a $99 Mophie-esque ChargeCase. Both devices hold virtual versions of your credit and debit cards, and work at over 90 percent of the country’s credit card machines without retailers having to change anything, according to Loop. The Fob and ChargeCase work only with the iPhone, for now, but they will be compatible with Android in April. In 2015, Loop expects its technology to be built into a variety of phones from its OEM partners.

It’s the NFC dream all over again, except this time it might actually come true.

Magnetic attraction

Loop co-founder George Wallner founded Hypercom in the late ‘70s. You probably haven’t heard of it, but Hypercom built the technology behind many of the credit card readers still used in grocery stores, coffee shops, and other retailers today. After making his millions and eventually selling to Verifone, the biggest player in the space, Wallner retired to his yacht. "I was not paying much attention to the payments industry," he says, at least until about a year and a half ago. A friend mentioned that NFC was being pushed as a new medium to transmit credit card information.

"I was surprised that NFC, which is a good technology, was being used in such a simple way," Wallner says. "The best way to do it is to work with the equipment [retailers] have today — not just something in between." Wallner, an engineer by trade, prototyped a new technology that would transmit magnetic-stripe credit card data, but do it wirelessly. It would effectively have the same impact and feature set as NFC payments, but would work at over 90 percent of credit card machines in the US. Wallner was about to come out of retirement.

He founded Loop with Will Graylin, an entrepreneur whosold a mobile payments company of his own to Verifone, and Damien Balsan, the former head of NFC business development at Nokia. Loop’s first products are the Loop Fob and the Loop ChargeCase. The Fob is essentially a Square-esque credit card reader, and the ChargeCase is a battery pack / case combination with small credit card reader dongle. The Fob connects to your phone via headphone jack, while the ChargeCase connects via Bluetooth. Both devices interface with the PIN-protectedLoopWallet app, which lets you scan in your cards; Loop stores your card data in an encrypted form on your phone, and inside a secure element on the Fob and ChargeCase.

You’ll need to be within a few inches of the actual reader head inside a credit card terminal for it to work, but Loop’s range is good enough that you don’t need to hit it on the nose. From there, pressing a button on the side transmits the magnetic signal for your most recently used card just as if you’d swiped it. If you’re using the ChargeCase, you can tap a card’s icon inside the LoopWallet app to transmit its signal. I tried both the Fob and ChargeCase at coffee shops, taxis, restaurants, and grocery stores, and every time, cashiers were skeptical and wanted to call their manager. Only when I was persistent ("Look, just press the button, trust me") would they do so. And to their surprise, Loop almost always worked on the first try.

The point of sale

I’m happy with Loop’s reliability, but less so with its initial product designs. The Loop Fob is a bit chunky, and only holds one card at a time. (Coin solved this problem with an onboard screen and card-switching button, but it remains to be seen how well it actually works in practice.) I ended up carrying around both the Fob and my wallet just in case, which defeats the purpose of the Fob. Perhaps if it were much smaller, like a Mobil Speedpass, I’d bring it with me everywhere.

TAPPING ON MY PHONE TO PAY FOR SOMETHING FEELS TRULY FUTURISTIC

The Loop ChargeCase is a more logical form factor that provides both backup power and payment capabilities. The ChargeCase is essentially a cheaper-feeling Mophie: it can be activated either with a quick button press on its side, or using the Loop Wallet app. Inside the app, you can flip through all the cards you’ve scanned in, then tap one to transmit its magnetic signal to a credit card reader. Tapping on my phone to pay for something feels truly futuristic, like the Google Wallet promotional videos of yore. This was the promise of Google Wallet, but it’s Loop that delivers. And Loop says it’s already working on a new version of the ChargeCase with a removable Loop card you can hand to waiters and bartenders.

Loop worked at most credit card machines I tried aside from subway-ticketing machines, gas pumps, and ATMs that require you to fully stick in a card for a scan to take place. Loop has hacked its own way to working at these kinds of terminals — it involves sticking another card into the reader slot, and then pressing a Loop device against it — but it’s not worth the trouble. Loop also didn’t work at Duane Reade, a popular chain of drugstores in New York, but Loop says this is only because Duane Reade hasn’t upgraded the software in its credit card readers. At Walgreen’s and Staples, the credit card readers accepted debit card transmissions via Loop, but not credit card transmissions. They require a software upgrade too, it seems. But despite the hiccups, Loop worked in far more places than any mobile payments app or hardware I’ve ever tried. The company solved a big piece of the payments puzzle — but in doing so, revealed another enormous obstacle blocking the path of any mobile payments startup.

In your pocket

Loop’s biggest problem is that it’s a waste of time. It feels magical to use, but isn’t worth the additional 10 or 15 seconds it takes to explain to each and every cashier. At a bar or restaurant, handing over my phone or Fob while yelling instructions over the chatter of other patrons was both awkward and impractical. And even if a friendly cashier doesn’t ask any questions before trying out Loop, they almost always ask questions afterwards. I felt like I was not only wasting my time, but the time of the people in line behind me, like the main character in that one VISA commercial.

Hardware ubiquity, as it turns out, is only half of NFC’s problem. The other half is that it requires cashiers to trust you aren’t trying to hack them by touching your gadget to their credit card reader. Even if Loop works at every register, it doesn’t compute for every cashier. Acceptance may come in time as more cashiers learn about Loop, but I have a feeling that true ubiquity would only come from corporate executives formally deploying new systems asStarbucks and Whole Foods have done with Square readers. Or perhaps even from Isis.

EVEN IF LOOP WORKS AT EVERY REGISTER, IT DOESN’T COMPUTE FOR EVERY CASHIER

Loop and others say they add value by offering retailers digital rewards and custom payment app experiences, but these perks are separate pieces of the payments puzzle that should come once mobile wallets are ubiquitous. Loop also offers the ability to take pictures of your ID and loyalty cards for storage inside the Loop Wallet app, but until I start sprouting gray hairs, no bouncer is going to accept a photo of a photo ID. So I’m stuck with two or three cards in my wallet, which is really no less convenient than carrying five or six cards.

Wallner does say that Loop’s hardware is more secure than a credit card since it can’t be skimmed, providing one more reason to use it. I haven’t been able to personally verify the truthfulness of this statement, but in a world where credit card companies are liable for all fraudulent purchases, Loop’s security isn’t a killer feature.

Source: http://vrge.co/1nNBPOr

Dear Car Makers: Please Hire People Like This

How touch screen controls in cars should work The interfaces in modern cars are, with rare exception, awful.

It’s almost absurd, really. The car is one of the most expensive things that people buy for themselves. It’s massive. It’s got a power supply that lasts for days… and yet, it’s one of the least “smart” devices in our lives. A three-year old tablet headed for the recycling bin puts the stock interface in most cars to shame.

The operating systems are slow, and often bug-riddled. If there’s a touchscreen, it’s almost certainly a crappy, low-res screen using yesteryear’s touch technology.

Worst of all, they’re dangerous. Over the last few years, touchscreens have become fairly standard in many new, mid-range lines. Which is great! The problem? Manufacturers didn’t really go about it right. Rather than seizing the opportunity to design something entirely new around touch, they just took all of the physical, oh-so-pressable buttons they once splayed across the dash and crammed them onto a touchscreen. Haptics? Sensible, spatial design? Whatever, we’ve got a touchscreen! Shiny!

As a result, actions that once required but a pinch of muscle memory (like, say, changing the station) now require you to take your eyes off the road entirely, lest you blindly jam your finger into the wrong button in that flat sea of glass.

Voice control is a strong contender here — perhaps more so than in any other space, really. But that’s yet another place where cars are lagging. As Google’s voice recognition approaches an almost terrifyingly accurate level, I’m still finding myself angrily shouting at my 2014 model car while it fails to figure out which of six possible commands I’m saying.

Thankfully, both Apple and Google have realized the massive space to be won here, and are actively working to take the manufacturers and their terrible design work out of the mix. It won’t happen overnight — but in just a few years, interacting with our cars should be a whole lot less awful.

In the meantime, let us all drool over this just-posted concept video by Matthaeus Krenn, whose LinkedIn profile lists his last job as being a product designer at Cue — the team behind the titular Cue personal assistant app that was acquired by Apple back in October.

Is it perfect? No. Amongst other things, it requires users to learn and memorize how to control an interface, rather than working in a way that they can discover naturally. Is three fingers A/C control or audio source control?

But we need more of this. We need more smart people thinking about how we interact with our cars, especially as touchscreens become more and more common. When we’re steering what is essentially a 2-ton metal missile down the street, skipping to the next song shouldn’t be a dangerous decision.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/dear-car-makers-please-hire-people-like-this

Will Our Computers Ever Be Real Friends?

Technology has grown increasingly personal over the years, but can it ever be a "friend" in the way we think about human friends? The movie Her, directed by Spike Jonze, envisions a future in which operating systems have evolved to learn from our behaviors and proactively look out for our best interests every day. They're our personal assistants, but they've become nuanced to the point that we have no problem calling them our friends. And when a person says they're in love with their operating system, it's not particularly weird.

The star of Her is OS1, a new operating system that, when you first launch it, creates a unique persona to best accommodate its user's personality and communication needs. For the film's lonely protagonist, OS1 takes on the name "Samantha" and acts as a personal assistant to control connected technologies like computers, smartphones and TVs. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, she is also the most human-sounding non-human ever built.

Samantha talks and responds naturally like a human, but she can also "like" things like colors, faces and stories. She can "see" her surroundings via webcam, laugh at jokes, make her own jokes, and even exhibit feelings of joy and sadness. She can also recognize and analyze patterns in its owner's recreational habits, relationships and career, and offer beneficial advice without the user needing to ask for it—just like a friend would.

If AI's goal is to emulate human behavior, OS1 might be the ultimate realization.

The closest modern approximation to the fantasy depicted in Her is the virtual personal assistant, which can be found in desktop clients like Nuance’s Dragon Assistant and smartphone apps like Apple's Siri or Google Now. While it's highly unlikely that any of these products will turn into anything like OS1, many natural language developers believe it won't be long before our AI assistants get much more personal than they are now.

More Than Human

Nuance CMO Peter Mahoney says his company’s been spending more time building out virtual assistant capabilities due to the “groundswell of interest in making more intelligent systems that can communicate with humans more fluidly.”

Since computing technology has reached the point where it can now access huge amounts of data in the cloud, sift through that data and make real-time decisions about it in just seconds, Nuance has worked hard to transition its solutions from solely transcribing audio to actually extracting meaning from the text.

“Dialogue is really important,” Mahoney told me. “In the original systems that came out, it operated like a search engine. You say something and something comes back, but it may or may not be the right thing. But that’s not how humans work. Humans disambiguate. We clarify.”

Creating “natural-sounding” systems that can dissect speech and read between the lines, though, is just as difficult as it sounds.

Martijn van der Spek is the co-founder of Sparkling Apps, a startup that owns nine different speech recognition services including Voice Answer, which the company calls its "next-generation personal assistant." According to van der Spek, virtual personal assistants require massive amounts of server power, and smaller startups with AI solutions—like Sparkling Apps’s Voice Answer and its virtual "assistant" Eve, who does the talking—simply can't afford to power a truly smart assistant with expertise across a broad number of domains, as opposed to just a few.

“The amount of data stored results in performance issues for our servers,” van der Spek told me. “This together with the concern of privacy has made us clear Eve’s database every 24 hours. So she suffers from acute amnesia and any long-term relationship is doomed to fail.”

Luke Muehlhauser, CEO of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also noted that AI is advancing more slowly than it might because many researchers aren't sharing their information. Large private companies like Google and Facebook are keeping their AI-related research under wraps, whereas academic researchers constantly publish their progress in journals.

Getting To Know You

Digital assistants may never evolve to love us like OS1 does in Her, but maybe they'll at least eventually remember what we've told them in previous conversations.

Today’s personal assistants are helpful with solving problems that are happening right now (“play a song,” “text Joe,” “launch Skype,” “find a Chinese restaurant nearby,” etc.). But if AI ever wants to approximate human behavior, its systems will need to be a little more thoughtful. And that means pushing intelligent systems to store more data and consider more contextual information when making decisions.

“A human who is thoughtful understands your needs, wants and desires—he or she understands you and can contextualize that,” Mahoney told me. “One of the things you talk about is having all the information. The more online information and the more great services out there that exist, the more we’ll be able to connect our intelligent systems that can understand everything that’s going on.”

What drives a recommendation engine isn't just information, but learned combinations of relationships, classifications and genres. “Structured content will happen first versus things that are less structured—those will be more complicated to figure out,” Mahoney said. In other words, today's personal assistants know a lot about what's playing in theatres, but those less-structured concepts—like remembering previous conversations about favorite movies to proactively recommend a new movie the user may like—are going to take more time to develop.

Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor and futurist currently working with Google on its X Lab projects, believes that Google will build a computer that can understand natural language and human emotion by 2029. But as he told tech blogger Jimi Disu in December, an amped up digital assistant could be in our pockets in as little as four years:

Right now, search is based mostly on looking for key words. What I’m working on is creating a search engine that understands the meaning of these billions of documents. It will be more like a human assistant that you can talk things over with, that you can express complicated, even personal concerns to. If you’re wearing something like Google Glass, it could annotate reality; it could even listen in to a conversation, giving helpful hints. It might suggest an anecdote that would fit into your conversation in real-time.

Making Friends In iPlaces

Over time, the intelligence of personal assistants will expand as the online catalogue of information grows deeper and better-connected. And lots of big companies are investing heavily to make the best use of those vast information stores.

Last October, Apple purchased a unique “personal cloud” company that can search deep into social networking accounts. And Google recently purchased AI firm DeepMind Technologies, which “uses general-purpose learning algorithms for applications such as simulations, e-commerce and games,” according to its website.

See also: Google's Game Of Moneyball In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

But collecting massive libraries of information isn't enough to power a true personal assistant. Companies like Apple and Google also need to perfect the "dialogue" factor, since there is all too often a noticeable lapse in time between the user's question and the personal assistant's answer.

The key might be to disconnect from the cloud entirely—or at least to minimize the number of times the system must connect to the cloud. But even though personal assistants would benefit from as much local processing as possible, the ideal personal assistant—think "best friend that knows everything about you"—needs access to the deep catalogues of online information. Companies are working on anticipating users' needs to have the most relevant information ready to deliver, but there's a lot of information to consider and many moving parts.

Google is experimenting with a few solutions to make personal assistants work faster, namely with offline voice recognition in Android, while Intel's new Edison computer might make it possible for voice recognition over mobile devices or even wearables to work near-instantaneously. The key, according to most companies, is to minimize the number of round trips over cellular-data signals to make processing—and in turn, conversations—more snappy.

See also: If AI Means The End Of Us, Maybe It's Okay

Intelligent personal assistants will become more valuable as they get better at understanding the subtleties in communication, but researchers and developers will eventually be forced to grapple with the issue of ethics. If we can program a computer to function like a brain in order to like or even love us, there’s nothing stopping developers from fine-tuning those powerful systems to personal or corporate interests as opposed to a true moral compass.

In other words, we want AI to drive our cars, manage traffic congestion, save energy in our homes, and better organize our daily lives—not to constantly nag us to visit Wal-Mart.

Movies like Her make us fantasize about personal assistants that can be true friends, but the state of today's AI technologies leads one to believe this won't be happening anytime soon. Personal assistants are nifty features, but they need to improve their listening skills, knowledge bases and memory banks before they can be our trusty sidekicks.

In time, AI assistants may grow smart enough to learn our habits and advocate for our best interests, but the odds are against personal assistants ever leaving the friend zone to become something "more." And there's nothing wrong with that.

Source: http://readwr.it/s19n

giant 3D selfies at Sochi Games

Visitors to the Sochi Winter Olympic Games are being given the opportunity to create giant self-portraits in a pavilion created by designer and architect Asif Khan and commissioned by Russian telecoms company MegaFon. The pavilion is situated at the entrance to the Olympic Park and judging by these photos and the video shown below, is pretty darn cool. The 2,000 metre-squared cube features a kinetic facade that can recreate the faces of visitors from 3D scans that are made in photo booths installed within the building.

The finished portraits appear three at a time, with each one displayed eight metres tall. Created by Khan in collaboration with Basel-based engineers iart, the portraits are formed by the use of 11,000 actuators.

"Each of the 11,000 actuators carries at its tip a translucent sphere that contains an RGB LED light," says Valentin Spiess, CEO at iart. "The actuators are connected in a bidirectional system which makes it possible to control each one individually, and at the same time also report back its exact position to the system. Each actuator acts as one pixel within the entire façade and can be extended by up to two metres as part of a three-dimensional shape or change colour as part of an image or video that is simultaneously displayed on the facade."

According to Spiess, the process of creating a selfie at the pavilion is as "fast and simple as using a commercial photo booth".

Khan has form with Olympic pavilions, having created the Coca-Cola Beatbox pavilion for the London 2012 Games. That piece featured a series of interlocking ETFE cushions with sound embedded within them, meaning that visitors could 'play' the pavilion like a musical instrument. Both the London and Sochi pavilions reflect Khan's general interest in creating transformative structures.

"For thousands of years people have used portraiture to record their history on the landscape, buildings and through public art," says Khan of the Sochi work. "I’m inspired by the way the world is changing around us and how architecture can respond to it. Selfies, emoticons, Facebook and FaceTime have become universal shorthand for communicating in the digital age. My instinct was to try and harness that immediacy in the form of sculpture; to turn the everyday moment into something epic. I’ve been thinking of this as a kind of digital platform to express emotion, at the scale of architecture."

Source: http://shar.es/QK706

DevArt: Google's ambitious project to program a new generation of artists

DevArt - Art Made with Code[metaslider id="156"]The exhibition is called Digital Revolution, and from July 3rd to September 14th it will explore the impact of technology on art over the past 40 years. It will feature artists, designers, musicians, architects, and developers to reveal the artistry that's all around us, from the films that we watch to the games that we play. DevArt, its final act, will showcase three large-scale, “magical” works of art from established artists, and one that's yet to be announced. That’s where you come in.

At the core of DevArt is a new website and competition from Google that hopes to inspire coders to get creative, and offers them the platform on which to do so. The winner of the eight-week competition will have the opportunity to exhibit their artwork in the DevArt area at the Barbican. In addition to the main prize, one project will be highlighted on the site’s front page each week — it’s a massive opportunity for some serious exposure.

"ART ISN'T JUST THE OUTPUT BUT THE ENTIRE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS."

The winning piece will be exhibited alongside artworks from three of the biggest names in digital art, and all of them will be developing their work in public through the DevArt site. “What we're trying to show,” explains Google Creative Lab’s Emma Turpin, “is that art isn't just the output, but the entire development process.” Anyone visiting DevArt will be able to follow the projects, look through each artist's code, and see that code slowly refined and developed into the final exhibit.

Zach Lieberman is one of the artists that will be developing his idea for DevArt. He’s been working in the field for over a decade, regularly creating new artworks, and he also co-authored openFrameworks, an open-source tool kit that helps others to code creatively. His work uses technology to create unexpected experiences, often incorporating gesture, sound, and more than a little showmanship.

Lieberman’s piece for DevArt is tentatively titled Play the world. It will allow visitors to play on a keyboard that samples sounds, in real-time, from hundreds of radio stations around the world. Play a "middle C" on the keyboard, for example, and it may pick up a matching note from a sports radio show in Nigeria, or a bossa nova station in Brazil. The keyboard is surrounded by a circle of speakers, and the sounds will be "geographically oriented" depending on where in the world they've come from. Like most of Lieberman's art, what's going on behind the scenes is highly complex — scanning hundreds of the world's radio stations while simultaneously analyzing pitch is no easy feat — but to the person playing that keyboard, it should feel effortless.

Taking a different approach are Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Carnet, better known as Vavara + Mar. They’ve covered a vast range of topics with their work, but the results are always clever, playful, and leave a lasting impression. In 2012 they turned a São Paulo skyscraper into a giant metronome that beat to the "rhythm of the city" based on social media activity. Their DevArt piece takes the now-everyday occurrence of speech recognition and injects a healthy dose of whimsy.

Titled Wishing Wall, it attempts to reimagine how we share our wishes with the world. Visitors will be invited to tell their wish to the wall, where the words will transform before them into a butterfly. These butterflies will be generated by analyzing speech and determining the sentiments behind the words used, and the result will be a giant wall of wishes represented by butterflies that visitors can then interact with.

The final commissioned piece will come from Karsten Schmidt, whose name will be familiar to many Londoners. His malleable, open source digital identity for the Decode exhibition at the city’s V&A museum captured the public imagination, and his new work will expand on the co-authorship ideas he first introduced years ago.

Co(de)factory (another tentative title) will play out like a performance, and, much like the DevArt competition itself, it gives the public a starring role. Schmidt has created a set of 3D-modeling tools and will invite the public to contribute a small section to a larger work either online or using computers in the DevArt area. When completed, these works will be printed live at the exhibition using a UV 3D printer, an almost theatrical machine that appears to "grow" objects from a photosensitive liquid using UV light. At least one of these collaborative artworks will be printed every day and exhibited in the space, and over 70 will be printed over the duration of the exhibition.

Taken at face value, the three projects couldn’t be more different, but all will be created much in the same way any piece of software is. The message is simple: all you need is an idea, and the ability to code it, and you can create amazing things. Anyone can sign up for the DevArt competition and start coding, regardless of experience; it even connects up with the popular software development site GitHub, so would-be art superstars just need to link up a GitHub project and updates will be pulled into their DevArt page automatically. Through the competition and exhibition, Google and the Barbican hope to encourage creative coding, but more importantly, they’re looking to show that code can be, and often is, art.

TECHNOLOGY IS EVERYWHERE, AND THE PEOPLE THAT CREATE IT AND CREATE WITH IT ARE, AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, ARTISTS

The Barbican has successfully showcased digital and interactive art for years, notably with2012's massively popular Rain Room, but Digital Revolution is more than that. It’s a dizzyingly ambitious show that will feature historic pieces like vintage arcade cabinets alongside contemporary work from the special effects teams behind Gravity and Inception; video games from small indies and larger developers like Harmonix, the team behind Rock Band and Dance Central; a multitude of audio exhibits from artists like Philip Glass; and what sounds like a rather special collaboration between Will.i.am and audio artist Yuri Suzuki, who’s currently crowdfunding a synthesizer that can turn anything into a musical instrument.

Through Digital Revolution, and perhaps no more so than with DevArt, the Barbican wants to tell the world that technology is everywhere, and the people that create it and create with it are, and always have been, artists. Digital art is art.

So what’s in it for Google? DevArt is the brainchild of Google Creative Lab, a free-thinking arm of the company that showcases why, before the data collection, and before the privacy scares, so many of us fell in love with the company. It’s an in-house design agency, a brand consultancy dedicated to just one company. It employs top-tier designers, developers, and technologists who are encouraged to create, innovate, and experiment for the good of Google. It was instrumental in the redesign of most of Google’s services that saw aesthetics and usability as equally important qualities, and it’s also quite unique in its willingness to work with other companies to show what’s possible with Google services. As you’d expect, DevArt showcases more than a few of these services, with all of the exhibits tapping into a couple of Google properties like its Cloud Platform or Maps API.

"DEVELOPERS AND CODERS ARE THE NEW CREATIVES."

Discussing DevArt with Conrad Bodman, guest curator at the Barbican, and Steve Vranakis, executive creative director at Creative Lab London, it’s clear that they’re far more enthusiastic about the exhibition than the opportunity to promote Google services. Both firmly believe in the idea developers and coders are "the new creatives," and technology is the canvas for that creativity. "What we really wanted to show," says Vranakis, "is that if you give the platform and the opportunity for coders to express themselves creatively they could make something incredible."

As Bodman talks through his plans for Digital Revolution, Vranakis’ face lights up in excitement over the who’s who of artists being name-dropped. Usman Haque, whose company Umbrellium creates massive, interactive urban installations is also involved, and he’s apparently working on a giant interactive exhibit involving lasers that everyone is looking forward to. They’re looking to transfer that excitement to a new generation that has yet to discover digital art, and coding in general.

The timing, in the UK at least, couldn’t be better. As the exhibition ends and begins to move its way across the world, computer programming will, for the first time, be taught to all children in England from elementary school through to high school. The children that come flocking to Digital Revolution this summer might be wowed by the lights and interactive elements, but what they take away to their new programming classes could be far more important. "If a 10-year-old girl [visits DevArt]" says Turpin, "we want her to understand that coding can make butterflies fly and land on her hand, and show her the magic behind what they see. And that magic’s code."

Source: http://vrge.co/1lApPnD

Pacemaker and Spotify cue up the iPad's simplest DJ app

Jonas Norberg built two great products that nobody used. The first was the award-winning Pacemaker, a wonderfully nerdy beatmaking gadget that cost $850. The second was a tablet app for DJing, but Norberg chose the wrong partner to launch with — the BlackBerry Playbook. After being booted out of his own company and then buying it back, Norberg is trying once again to make a dent in the world — but this time, he picked a better partner: Spotify. Pacemaker for iPad, a new DJ app, launches today with exclusive access to Spotify's massive streaming music library, and the ability to play two Spotify songs simultaneously for the first time.

Pacemaker is a free app entering a crowded market of premium DJ apps like Djay and Traktor. Most of these apps use clever touch interfaces and a laundry list of features to appease both pros and amateurs, but Pacemaker takes a different approach. "We want to do for music what FiftyThree did for drawing on the iPad," Norberg says. What he means is that anyone can pick up Pacemaker and use it, without having any prior DJ skills, and without needing to own a giant library of hot tracks to mix. If you plug in your Spotify credentials (or sign up for a free trial inside the app), you're instantly granted access to Spotify's 20 million-track library of songs.

I was nervous when Norberg handed over his iPad and asked me to play it, having no prior experience, but after a few minutes of tapping around I felt pretty comfortable scratching, adding loops, and setting cues in my mix. Pacemaker’s unique radial interface finds an excellent balance between simplicity and feature bloat, offering up to eight effects like Bass and Treble, as well as a few beat pads for looping and beat-skipping. Each of these effects and adjustments are operated the exact same way — using the spin of your finger on a circle, just like with the original Pacemaker gadget. Its color palette is friendly and inviting, while its Sync button made sure my tracks never stuttered when I switched between them. The app even manages a few power-user features of its own, like a memory that records cue points you’ve set up in your most-used tracks.

As I played around with the app, I quickly realized that it wasn’t really competing with the likes of Traktor and Djay, the two industry leaders for tablet DJ software. Pacemaker was instead offering up a new kind of DJing experience that most people could have fun with without getting tripped up in settings menus and synthesizers. Traktor and Djay offer an outstanding array of features, but to an amateur like myself, they can be stifling and sometimes overwhelming. Half the battle is also amassing a big library of great tracks — another problem that Pacemaker solves with its Spotify partnership.

PACEMAKER FOR IPAD SCREENSHOTS

Pacemaker worked directly with Spotify on its integration, which includes a number of tweaks to make playback and streaming as smooth as possible. Perhaps most importantly, Spotify allows Pacemaker to stream two tracks simultaneously — a first for Spotify. In my tests, songs loaded from Spotify as quickly as they did from local storage, and were just as responsive. You can’t, however, record mixes that include Spotify tracks for licensing reasons. This is pretty much what I would expect, but it’s a shame that Pacemaker didn’t work out some way to save your Spotify mixes — perhaps by requiring an internet connection for you to play them.

"DEMOCRATIZING DJING WAS SOMETHING WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN STRIVING FOR."

The app is reminiscent of iPhone mixer Figure in its approachability, and with the addition of Spotify integration and no price tag, Pacemaker is an easy recommendation to anyone interested in DJing. Pacemaker, like FiftyThree’s Paper, offers a set of effects to start you off, but also offers an array of upgrades in a "try before you buy" store that’s a near carbon copy of FiftyThree’s. But as with Paper, you can do a whole lot without buying any of the extra effects the app offers for $1.99 each, like Reverb, Roll, Echo, Loop, and Hi-Lo, and Beatskip. I wasn’t entirely sure what all of these effects did to my music, but they were all fun to play with — and thanks to the app’s consistent interface, it was easy to mess around with any of them and feel cool doing it. "Democratizing DJing was something we’ve always been striving for," says Norberg. "We have a free app that’s really easy to get into — and now the final barrier is removed by having Spotify integration."

Source: http://vrge.co/1fJ3vSS 

Ex-Ideo Designers Rethink The Calendar For Mobile Devices

Have you ever opened up a calendar app on your iPhone and wondered why almost the entire screen is taken up by a grid of tiny boxes, most of which represent the past, and all too small to contain any useful information? Amid Moradganjeh has, too. He and his team of ex-Ideo designers have created Peek, an app that throws out most of the assumptions we've attached to digital calendars and rethinks the experience from a minimal, mobile-first perspective. At first glimpse, Peek seems to have a lot in common with Clear, the influential gestural to-do list app. Like Clear, Peek has a flat, "chromeless" interface built around chromatic tiles and clean typography, with accordion-like animations that "unfold" information when you tap on the tiles. "Apps like Clear proved that simple tools that don’t try to do too much can sometimes be more useful," Moradganjeh tells Co.Design. "This is mainly the case for the group of people that are not necessarily that busy, and therefore, don't need an app that thinks for them."

According to Moradganjeh, Peek is aimed at this class of casual calendar users: people who aren't overscheduled CEOs or GTD geeks, but just folks who have stuff to take care of. "For this group, if using a calendar app is not easier than remembering things or writing them on a piece of paper, then they would not use it," he says.

That's why Peek looks more like a strip of brightly colored Post-It notes than a gridded database of appointments. The first things you see when you launch Peek aren't even dates; instead, the app displays large tiles simply labeled "TODAY" and "TOMORROW." Scrolling down further reveals more tiles labeled with forthcoming days of the week. "We learned that people don't perceive time in the form of grids and pages," Moradganjeh says. "So we explored the river model, in which a calendar is a unified timeline with the focus being on the near future." (Scrolling further down or up in this "river" does eventually display a more traditional grid of dates, which makes it easier to reach events further into the future.)

CASUAL CALENDAR USERS ONLY NEED THE INFORMATION THAT CAN HELP THEM REMEMBER THEIR SCHEDULE.

 Moradganjeh says that he based Peek's design on mobile interaction principles he investigated in Rimino, a student concept project he created two years ago (which we covered here). Rimino imagined a post-smartphone device built on lightweight, glanceable notifications rather than visual, highly focused interactions. Instead of displaying a dense thicket of appointment information, Peek surfaces simple, bold reminders that function less as an "outboard brain" for your schedule and more like a red string tied around your finger that helps visually trigger what you already know.

"We learned that most of the time, [casual calendar users] only need the information that can help them 'remember' their schedule," Moradganjeh explains. "This means that an event like 'Lunch with Adam at 12:00' is enough useful information for a user who knows already where she needs to meet Adam."

Peek contains some extra interactions that run the gamut from genuinely clever (covering the iPhone's ambient light sensor with your hand or thumb displays a large clock) to extraneously gimmicky (shaking the phone makes Peek cough up aspirational suggestions like "Take the time to relax!"). And the jury's still out on whether focusing an app's UI on gestural interactions isactually convenient or just a passing fad. But Peek's core concept--that most "normal people" don't need deep features and artificial intelligence to help them manage their time when simple, mnemonic microinteractions will do just fine--is a refreshing take on mobile design.

Source: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025671/ex-ideo-designers-rethink-the-calendar-for-mobile-devices

Paper from Facebook...

Paper radically re-imagines what Facebook is on a mobile device as a fluid river of cards featuring news articles, photos, status updates, and more, with no ads to sully the experience (yet). It's being released next week on February 3rd, just one day before Facebook's 10-year anniversary, and there's a reason for that: Paper is the opening sentence in Facebook's next 10-year plan. A beautiful app designed from the ground-up with the iPhone in mind, Paper owes its design lineage to a number of other apps. Paper presents the standard Facebook feed in the fluid, elegant style of Flipboard. It makes writing posts as easy as using Medium or Svbtle. Loren Brichter--designer of the original Twitter app, and the popular iPhone game Letterpress-- worked with Facebook to make the interface 99% invisible as possible, with news stories presented in Twitter-like cards, wide photos that pan as you tilt your phone, and UI elements that simply fade away when they aren't in use.

Although Paper isn't out yet, early previews are ecstatic. It's the first app out of Facebook's newly formed Creative Labs division, which is described as a way to allow teams within Facebook build standalone mobile experiences with the same dexterity as start-ups.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025755/paper-the-opening-sentence-in-facebooks-next-10-year-plan

Apple to Build Mobile-Payments

Eddy Cue, the company's senior vice-president of Internet software and services, has met with "industry executives" to discuss Apple's role in handling payments for physical goods and services, The Wall Street Journal reported. The mobile-payments space is hot, with companies such as Square, PayPal and Stripe all working to make it easier for users to pay for physical goods with their phones.

Apple sells billions of dollars worth of movies, music, books and apps through iTunes. Still, aside from allowing customers at Apple retail stores to scan and pay for physical items inside the store via an iPhone, Apple hasn't extended its payments ecosystem outside of the digital realm.

That doesn't mean the company could't instantly become a major player in the mobile-payments space overnight, thanks to its absolutely huge iTunes customer base.

http://mashable.com/2014/01/25/apple-mobile-payments-2/#:eyJzIjoidCIsImkiOiJfY28xbmQybjNnN2QzMXluNXZncDNwMl8ifQ

more human, way to manage your network of contacts

The contacts app that ships with iOS is a pretty straightforward affair that doesn’t offer much more than the handwritten address books we used to keep next to our landline phones. Humin is a new app that will be launching in beta this week that aims to be a smarter way for iPhone users to manage their contacts. Humin’s name doesn’t echo the word ‘human’ for nothing – co-founder and CEO Ankur Jain wants his startup’s product to understand relationships the way that you do. We don’t think of our network of contacts as an alphabetical list of names, our brains organise our contacts in more complex ways, but ways that make sense to us – where we met people, where they work, what they look like, who they know, and the like. Humin wants to tap into that subconscious human logic without you having to do anything differently.

http://tnw.to/stDX

HTML5 Vs. Native debate obscures the real challenges of mobility

The vitriol spews on a daily basis. HTML5 or native apps? Each side is well armed with arguments and data to prove their points. This fight, destined to go on for a long while, masks some of the real problems that enterprises are facing when it comes to mobile applications. Do you have the right backend architecture for a mobile world? The right business analytics? Enterprises, brands and developers need to put their houses well in order before even beginning to answer what type of code an app will be built in.  

http://readwr.it/q0zV

Smart Tennis Sensor

Sony showed off a prototype tennis racket sensor at CES 2014 that promised to track useful data about your technique and transmit it to your smartphone. That prototype has turned into reality faster than we thought it might — the final product now has a name, a price, and a release date for Japan...  

http://vrge.co/1iefefI

Blackphone: A Pro-Privacy Android-Based Smartphone

As the reality of the extent and invasiveness of the security services’ dragnet surveillance programs hits home, the pro-privacy movement has been cranking up its own ideas to counter spy-tech with pro-privacy tech. The Lavabit founder’s recent Kickstarter for a secure end-to-end open source encrypted email project called Dark Mail is one example. Today, here’s another: meet Blackphone, a smartphone that’s been designed to enable secure, encrypted communications, private browsing and secure file-sharing.

The project is a joint venture between Silent Circle — which shuttered its own encrypted email service last summer in order to preemptively avoid having to comply with government requests to provide data — and Spanish smartphone startup Geeksphone, which has previously made more standard Android handsets, and more recently has been building phone hardware for Mozilla’s open web standards HTML5-based Firefox OS.

https://www.blackphone.ch

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/blackphone

Introducing a brand new way to play music

Bang & Olufsen is aiming to take the music you listen to on a smartphone and put it on the wall. The BeoSound Essence is a hockey puck-shaped music controller that reduces the number of actions you need to perform to one: just tap, and the music will start playing. What music, you ask? That depends on what you were playing last. The dial on the wall is just the first part of the product. The second part is a hideaway box that is wired to your speakers and communicates wirelessly with music sources. Those sources can be smartphones, tablets or PCs — anything with Wi-Fi connection. The Essence is compatible with Apple AirPlay, Spotify Connect and standard DLNA connections.

7 Minute Workout' App

Last month, Apple offered a free holiday playlist through the Apple Store app for iPhone. This month, in the same manner, it's offering the 7 Minute Workout Challenge app for free, effectively encouraging users to "jump into the new year."  

http://mashable.com/2014/01/11/7-minute-workout-challenge-app-free/#:eyJzIjoidCIsImkiOiJfY28xbmQybjNnN2QzMXluNXZncDNwMl8ifQ

Apple Gets Serious About The iPad’s Creative Power In New Ad

Apple aired a new iPad advertisement during the NFL playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Carolina Panthers today, and it’s all about creativity. It’s no secret that Apple wants to push the creative aspect of its mobile devices, which are still seen largely as consumption gadgets, and this new ad embraces a grand vision of iOS as fertile ground for inspiration and creation. “What will your verse be?” is the tagline for the ad, and the idea is that each person gets to contribute one verse to the overall poem of human experience (which is a terrible poem by the way). The iPad in the commercial is used in a number of different creative capacities, including as a filming accessory, as a prototyping tool, as a means for writing, and as a way to 3D prototype and work in the depths of the ocean...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/12/apple-your-verse-ipad-ad/