You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Japanese security firm Secom is preparing to launch a new service that will let home and small business owners rent a quadcopter drone that the company claims will launch automatically in the event of a burglary, taking pictures of the burglars and even capturing live video of them as the crime is in progress. Sounds pretty awesome if you want the latest in home security.
When a breach is detected by motion detectors or other security methods, the quadcopter activates and is dispatched to the precise location of the break-in to get a firsthand, eye-in-the-sky look at things.
If it really works like they say it will, this could catch more criminals and keep your home extra safe. The company is also touting the drones as a cost-effective way to monitor large areas like warehouses and industrial parks without having to mount video cameras everywhere. You can check out a video demo of the (incredibly noisy) drone prototype in action here (skip to 1:54, unless you speak Japanese.)
Secom hopes to launch this new rent-a-drone business in Japanese markets in early 2014 for about ¥5000 (~$58 USD).
[via Japan Daily Press via Geekosystem]
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Walmart has prevailed again in the continuing battle against its controversial proposed store in downtown LA’s Chinatown.
A Los Angeles zoning official denied an appeal of the retailer’s building permits. The appeal had been filed by the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and by the Los Angeles Alliance for New Economy, which have concerns about the store impacting the historic neighborhood’s identity, traffic, small businesses, and living wage.
However, Associate Zoning Administrator Maya Zaitzevsky issued a report Dec. 20 finding the Department of Building and Safety did not err or abuse its discretion when it issued the permits, the LA Weekly reports.
Read More…
More on Walmart Comes To Los Angeles
Wind developers around the country are racing to get their wind farms tested and running before the federal wind production tax credit expires Tuesday, a shot to the industry that will leave the nation’s wind farm construction projects at a standstill.
For Eddy Huffman, who’s worked assembling wind turbine controls at a General Electrics plant in Salem, Va., for more than a decade, it’s deja vu.
“Every time the tax credit expires, some of us have layoffs,” said Huffman, 62, who lives with his wife in Roanoke County. “We don’t have layoffs here locally this time, but that’s just our plant.”
If you’ve been having issues retrieving your Xbox 360 saves from the cloud, you’re not alone. As it turns out, Microsoft is experiencing some problem with Xbox Live at the moment, which is causing a couple of different headaches. The first (obviously) is that Xbox Live cloud storage is currently inaccessible, while the second involves Xbox.com going down for some users.
The Xbox service status page shows that all systems are go except for Xbox Live Service itself. Microsoft has put a little alert on the status page, telling affected users that it has engineers working on the issue. The big M doesn’t disclose what kind of problems its specifically having, but assures that a fix should be implemented soon.
There’s no workaround for this issue – Microsoft simply instructs those who are experiencing problems to check back with the status page for updated support messages, which should be coming in every 30 minutes. It sounds like Microsoft isn’t anticipating that Xbox Live cloud storage will be down for very long, which is good news for people trying to get a little gaming in on this Friday afternoon.
After all, if your saves are all stored in the cloud, this outage means that you can’t continue any of your games. We’ll be watching the Xbox Live status page and will update you if anything changes. In the meantime, are any of you having problems retrieving saves from the cloud?
Xbox Live cloud storage currently down, Microsoft working on a fix is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
There’s a brand new wedding inspiration app in town by the name of OneWed and it’s about to take the iPad by storm. Not because it’s the most amazing app ever written, not because it does anything one function better than apps like Pinterest or Tumblr, but because it’s a non-stop one-stop-shop for wedding-related photos. And that’s it.
Back when the OneWed team formed their website for the desktop-based internet, they made it to be a blog, and they had honest-to-god bloggers writing for them on the daily. Speaking with TechCrunch about the history of the OneWed ecosystem, CEO John Scrofano noted this week that “We built [OneWed] on the back of this blogger model and the content we had produced…but what we were hearing our customers say is ‘we really love the pictures. Bloggers were writing all these articles for us, but really [users] just wanted the pictures.” Imagine that, right at the dawn of the tablet, too!
This company was originally called Nearlyweds, if you’re an old-school fan and remember such a thing, and is being re-launched as both OneWed.com and an iPad app that takes on the always lovely Massive Photo layout that you’ll be familiar with if you’re a fan of any number of photo blogging websites / apps. Here each product, wedding idea, and everything in-between is given its own page and links to relevant websites, details, and even connections to local retailers that have what you’re looking for in stock.
This app is completely free from the iTunes App Store right this minute and is currently available for iPad only. At the moment there’s no word of expansion to Android or the iPhone, but they’ve only just launched this month! Have a peek at let us know if you’re all about the wedding planning, even if you’ve already been wed, won’t get wed for a long number of years, or won’t get traditionally hitched ever!
OneWed wedding inspiration photos app heads to iPad is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Despite New York City virtually revolving around its mass transit system, local subway riders haven’t had a way to check the next arrival in real-time, even though some smaller cities already take live transit details for granted. At least some harried commuters can assuage their minds now that the MTA has posted its Subway Time app for iOS users. The title does exactly what it says on the tin, taking advantage of MTA’s signalling installations on the 1 through 6 lines (and the 42nd Street Shuttle) to determine train arrival times down to the minute. Subway Time won’t satisfy certain travelers as-is: it doesn’t provide directions, and the earliest expansion to additional routes won’t happen until the L line’s information is linked up in six to 12 months. Passengers running Android and Windows Phone will likewise have to wait for outside developers to finish their own projects. For those of us living in the right areas, however, Subway Time might take away some uncertainty — even if it’s just to confirm that we’ll be late.
Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation
Via: Wall Street Journal
Source: App Store
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