There’s no doubt that on paper, the way Sony’s designed the PS4 and the AMD components it’s selected offer 50 per cent more power in the GPU department over the Xbox One. But does it really make any difference when you get down to playing a game?
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Everyone loves sitting down to a good movie, especially when you want to unwind after a particularly difficult day at work. The thing is, movies do seem to be missing something whenever it lacks some popcorn as well as fizzy drinks on the side. Should you have invested a fair amount of money into your home theater system already, why not go the extra mile and top it up with the £34.99 Mini Retro Popcorn Maker?
This is a popcorn maker that will definitely roll back the years with its form factor, making you feel like you were a little kid all over again. With it, you are able to churn out mountains of healthy air-popped popcorn, all with a touch of 50s nostalgia. Not only that, once you are done making your very own popcorn, cleaning it up is a snap, coming in a fuss-free and easy to clean design. Sporting sleek looks with a classic red, white and chrome finish, it is definitely one kitchen appliance that you would not mind displaying on your tabletop.
[ Mini Retro Popcorn Maker copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
The problem with all the hackneyed old sayings we all insist on using is just that: they’re old. They refer to things that are dead or dying. But hey, here’s a handy list of old clichéd sayings, updated for the modern world.
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The humble word processor is a pillar of continuity, in a maddening world of change. Or rather it was. Quip is a the latest app that hopes to drag the old-boy of DTP kicking and screaming into the mobile generation. If that sounds like potential hot-talk, then know that the project is a collaboration between former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and founder of Google App Engine, Kevin Gibbs. What happens when these two re-write the writing tool? You get docs that adapt to the screen you’re working on, a slew of collaboration tools (in app messaging, change notifications, image sharing and more,) plus all the usual cloud feature an app of the present day demands — such as work offline, sync when connected. If anything, perhaps it’s a little too modern, with one big lack: no support for Word docs in either direction. Quip can only export PDFs, but will preserve formatting, letting you cut-and-past your way around that minor bump in the road. How much for the word processing revolution? Free for personal use, or $12 per month if you’re in business. It’s iOS and desktop only at the minute, but the ink is just about to dry on an Android version any time now.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Quip blog
San Francisco-based video monitoring hardware and software startup Dropcam today announced the close of a new $30 million Series C funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and with participation by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing backers Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures. I spoke to Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the funding, which, by his own admission, the company wasn’t in a position to really need. It’s about staying two steps ahead of the game, is what he essentially told me.
Dropcam has raised a total of $47.8 million for its connected home monitoring solution, which pairs signature Dropcam HD hardware with a web-based platform for remotely monitoring, recording and playback of live video feeds. It’s ideal for a home or office security solution, with relatively inexpensive setup costs and extensibility, and features like off-site storage that get around limitations with locally-managed installations.
I asked Duffy why raise if Dropcam didn’t need the cash injection, and he said that in part it’s because the funding will help the four-year old company accomplish a lot of its goals for 2014 by the end of this year. It’s about anticipating the market and making sure that Dropcam insures itself against the kind of disruption it has itself accomplished in its chosen market.
“We had actually a ton of inbound interest on this round, and when this started happening I kind of said ‘What would be the amount that I would raise if I were competing against a radical, kind of Dropcam-like competitor? How could I use additional capital to beat them?” he said. “I used this from talking to friend of mine who are also running highly successful companies […] like Dropbox, for instance, they’re competing against a lot of great companies right now but back when they were going through periods of insane growth that wasn’t the case, and they had to imagine how best to compete with a theoretical Dropbox competitor.”
For Dropcam, that means investing heavily in product pipeline, and one of its key areas of its investment is in computer vision. This is about making the entire platform much more capable of taking advantage of the data it collects, according to Duffy.
“One of the things that we decided to invest a lot in, which has been a big project for us, is the computer vision side of things,” he said. “A lot of these guys [potential Dropcam competitors] are really focused on the hardware, and are offering basically just a camera you can access with your iPhone. You certainly can access Dropcam with your iPhone, but that’s about where the similarities end. We have started a computer vision team here, and since we take in more video than YouTube, we decided it would be a good way to figure out how to use that data to get better video analysis for users.”
Dropcam has been working on their computer vision system for just about a year now, and they plan to start releasing features around it and hiring more engineers to develop on top of it, and they can do both much sooner now than if they’d not taken more money. These are designed to leverage data gathered from Dropcam’s network, while preserving user anonymity and privacy, Duffy said.
Given the amazing volume of inbound video Dropcam’s servers parse, the big data aspect of this could be Dropcam’s most interesting achievement in a year’s time. And depending on how the startup attempts to monetize it, also a big revenue booster; already, Dropcam is seeing a 39 percent conversion rate in terms of users who opt in to its paid subscription services, and additional value-add features derived from data analytics should push that number higher.
While trademarks are sometimes filed to protect a particular name or brand, they are sometimes filed because it could be sign of a product that a company plans to launch. Well it looks like Samsung has recently trademarked a bunch of names, such as the Mobile Samsung 5G, Samsung Fit, Samsung Micro, Samsung Expo, Samsung Go, Samsung Pro, and the S MUSICIAN. While the rest of the names could pretty much hint at any type of device, two names do stand out and that is the Samsung Fit and the S MUSICIAN.
The Samsung Fit could indicate some kind of fitness accessory, and given that Samsung has attempted to include some health/fitness features in their products in the past, like S Health, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Samsung unveil more fitness-related products, like a smartphone or maybe an exercise watch or something to that extent. The S MUSICIAN is also pretty obvious as it is a piece of software that allows the user to create music on a Samsung device with the S Suite. The rest are pretty vague but we’ll definitely keep our eyes peeled for more info.
Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Samsung Files Trademarks For S MUSICIAN, Samsung Fit, And More original content from Ubergizmo. 
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LG attempted to beat Samsung at their own game with phablets by releasing the Optimus Vu, an oddly-shaped device. While we did not think it caught on too well, LG decided that it did and promptly released the Optimus Vu II, and now it seems that LG could be considering a successor. Given that Samsung is currently working on the Galaxy Note 3, we guess it wouldn’t be a complete shock if LG wanted to steal some of that spotlight for themselves.
While LG has obviously not confirmed any of this, according to recent rumors, the Optimus Vu III will feature a 4:3 display ratio (size of the screen was not mentioned) and will sport a resolution of 1280×960 which would definitely pale in comparison to the Galaxy Note 3 and its rumored 5.7” Full HD display. Other rumored specs remain unknown at this point. The reason behind the speculation that LG could be working on a Vu III is thanks to a photo which was taken by a device known as the LG-F300L, which some have taken to be the Vu III.
In any case take it with a grain of salt for now, but assuming it is true, the Vu III does not appear to be the powerhouse, at least as far as displays are concerned. Perhaps LG might be approaching this from a budget standpoint where it would be an affordable alternative to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3.
Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | LG Vu 3 Rumored To Be In The Works original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Most, if not all, smartphones are shaped like rectangles, although we guess the devil is in the details, but what about Samsung? So far we’ve seen Samsung’s devices designed using the company’s “nature inspired” language, but what does the future hold for them? Well thanks to a patent spotted by Patent Bolt, perhaps what we might be looking at is the future of Samsung’s smartphones. As you can see in the diagram above, this particular patent covers what appears to be a smartphone with slightly sharper edges, versus the softer, rounder edges found on the Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy S4.
In fact this design seems like it could have passed off as a Motorola design especially with the sharp and angled edges. The patent was applied back in 2011 in South Korea, and 2012 in the US, meaning that they are somewhat old. As is with the case with most patents, there’s really no telling if this is a sign that Samsung could be using these designs in the future, or if they are merely protecting their designs from copycats, but what do you guys think? Would this be a Samsung design you might be interested in?
Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Samsung Patent Hints At Past/Future Smartphone Design original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Rumor has it that Motorola’s new Moto X smartphone
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With the success that Samsung has had with the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note 2, we expect that the company would be gearing up for a release of the Galaxy Note 3. Well thanks to a leaked photo, the image you are looking at above could possibly be the innards of the device! Of course it’s hard to tell that it belongs to the Note 3, especially since it doesn’t really look like anything at the moment, but supposedly this a test unit whose photo was obtained by the folks at C Technology.
While the photo cannot be verified to see if it is actually the Galaxy Note 3, for those who might have missed the news and rumors, the Note 3 is rumored to sport a 5.7” Full HD display with a 2.3GHz quad-core processor, or maybe even Samsung’s own Exynos 5420, 3GB of RAM, a 13MP camera, and will run on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, although with Android 4.3 now out we’re not sure if that changes Samsung’s plans. In any case take it with a grain of salt for now, but with IFA 2013 coming up there is a good chance Samsung will share the official details then!
Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Alleged Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Hardware Internals Leaked original content from Ubergizmo. 
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