Hasta La Gadget!

When 20-year-old Oscar Rodriguez left Colombia for New York in 2000 – by himself – he didn’t speak a word of English.

But for Rodriguez and many other immigrants, the promise of the American dream was enough. “I was motivated by the notion that the U.S. offers opportunities if you are willing to work hard,” he says.

However his peers thought his dream of going to college and working at a top U.S. company was unrealistic. “They’d tell me, ‘there’s no way you’re going to get into a top business school; you’re crazy!’”

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More on Latino Prosperity

NEW YORK — A 911 call comes in about a possible bomb in lower Manhattan and an alert pops up on computer screens at the New York Police Department, instantly showing officers an interactive map of the neighborhood, footage from nearby security cameras, whether there are high radiation levels and whether any other threats have been made against the city.

In a click, police know exactly what they’re getting into.

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More on Microsoft

Have you ever heard of Highlight? I hope the answer is no, because incoherent “social” app has a logo that’s so horrible it will actually give you a headache. A physical headache, in your head. It’s dangerously bad. More »

Last Friday, we announced our semifinalist pics for Engadget’s first-ever Insert Coin: New Challengers competition. We’re incredibly excited about the projects we selected, but had a hard enough time whittling the list down to 10. That’s where you come in. As far as we’re concerned, they’re all winners, but we’ve got presentation time at next month’s Expand conference in San Francisco, and we need your help knocking the list down to five finalists. It’s a diverse array of entrants, including seafaring drones, bipedal robots, 3D scanners, futuristic radiators and more.

Jump in after the break for links to posts about each of the candidates, and when you’re done, please click here to vote on your favorite. Five winners will go on to present their projects at Expand in March, for a chance to win $25,000. You have until next Wednesday, February 27 at the same time (12:30pm PST / 3:30pm EST) to cast your vote!

The Candidates:

1. cSpring: Bipedal Robo

2. Hodu: Physical therapy hardware / software combo

3. Moedls: 3D scanning for smartphones

4. Make a Play: High-tech puppet stage

5. Observos: Environmentally-aware computers

6. Radiator Labs: Personal radiator temperature controller

7. Smart Knob: Keyless door lock

8. smARTPulse: Hackable Bluetooth oximeter

9. Snapzoom: Superzooming for smartphone cameras

10. Ziphius: RC aquatic drone

Now don’t forget to vote!

Filed under: Announcements

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Highlight, a location-based people discovery app that made a splash at last year’s SxSW Interactive in Austin, TX, just released a big 1.5 update that adds photo-sharing and event-creation to its set of features. Sharing snapshots has a whiff of the Color app to it: whenever you take a picture of something, that photo will automatically appear on your friends’ Highlight stream as long as they’re in the vicinity. You can add captions, tag it with a name of the place, your friends’ names, and share them to Facebook or Twitter. The pics will automatically be geotagged of course, but if you don’t like sharing that info, you can remove the lat-long information afterward. However, it appears that untagging is not yet available, which is why the tagging is limited to just friends for now.

Creating events, on the other hand, is entirely different from what you might imagine. As opposed to planned invitations that you would create on eVite or Facebook, Highlight’s Events are entirely spontaneous. You can only create an event “here and now” and the only people who are invited are those nearby (within a 250 meter radius or so). There isn’t even a dedicated events tab; instead, you create or attend an event by tapping the map marker in the new post window. After you’re done partying it up, the event will automatically end when people leave and stop posting due to the location and context-aware nature of the app.

At the announcement in San Francisco, CEO Paul Davison said that both photos and event features intend to create a “new way to hangout.” “They’re not for thousands of friends,” he said, “They’re for the people around you in the room.” Yet, all the photos and event information will be available publicly, so he emphasized the entirely opt-in nature of Highlight: “You’re in the service because you want it.” As the next SxSW Interactive is only weeks away, the company is keen to see how users will take to the new features in a high-density environment like the popular Austin conference. To give it a go yourself, you can download both iOS and Android versions right now from the App Store and Google Play.

Filed under: Software, Mobile

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Source: App Store, Google Play, Highlight Blog