Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to guarding their products jealously before an official announcement, Apple is one of the companies with a pretty impressive track record. Basically, whatever Apple wants you to see or hear about, you will. That’s how the perception has been, more or less, in recent times, and Sonny Dickson happens to be one of those folks who has made a name for being a regular leaker when it comes to exposing upcoming and future Apple products. It does look as though Apple might want to put a stop to any more leaks, and it has been rumored that Cupertino has looked to a Chinese task force in order to prevent insiders from carting away with company secrets at the end of the day.

This alleged Chinese task force was revealed by Sonny Dickson over Twitter, where he warned basically the world about this development. Apart from that, Sonny Dickson also did tweet earlier in the day that Apple is going to approach the Chinese authorities for assistance in this matter.

In the past, Sonny Dickson’s claim to fame happened to be his leaks concerning the iPhone 5, where he managed to get hold of photos of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, in addition to parading their fingerprint sensor feature. He has also mentioned about iPhone 6 specifications this year, although his activity has been a whole lot more discreet in 2014 than before. Do you think that an elite Chinese task force is going to stop unwanted Apple leaks in the future?

Apple Wants To Prevent Leaks With Chinese Task Force (Rumor)

, original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Apple, Rumors, leak,

Now here is a question for the ages – has Amazon overstepped the unspoken line by patenting what many deem to be one of the most basic photography set-ups? I am referring to the patent that was discovered earlier this May by the DIY Photography blog which claimed that Amazon had already applied for the patent known as “Studio Arrangement”, which is to shoot an object using your camera while said object is in front of a white background. That’s going to affect just like, every single photo studio, ever.

The details of the patent is not all that complicated, really, as it seemed to be rather straight to the point as well as unoriginal, sporting a ‘workflow’ diagram as you can see above which depicts the entire process in just four simple steps. “Start -> Activate rear light source -> Activate front light source -> Position subject on elevated platform -> Initiate capture -> End.” You can’t get any more complex than that, can you?

Petitions have begun to mushroom all over the place on sites such as WatchDog and MoveOn in an attempt to draw attention to this seemingly brazen move by Amazon, where in the future should you actually snap a photo against a white background, there is a possibility that Amazon is going to make money off you then. Or at least, this is the gist of what the general sentiment is at the moment.

Photographer Ken Rockwell, however, did mention that this process is “very clever and particular” and “saves loads of time making studio shots.” He continued, “Brilliant! Amazon didn’t patent the […] white background as the ignorati have claimed; they only patented a clever method to get the reflecting floor to blend seamlessly into the background.” What do you think of the situation?

Amazon Patents Basic Photography Technique?

, original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in General, Amazon, Patent,

When people ask what motivated me, as a mother of two toddlers and part-time English teacher, to found a company developing kids mobile educational games, I talk about my observation of the huge impact mobile games had on my toddlers and how I couldn’t find quality games so I decided to create them myself.

While this is true, my personal motivation was borne out stopping full-time work to care for my first son. Two and a half years later my second son was born, and though I continued working on a freelance basis, I was out of the full-time workforce for more than five years.

It was the most natural thing to stay close to my babies. I, like so many career women, had waited a long time to meet ‘Mr. Right father of my kids,’ so when our much-anticipated son arrived, I wanted to be with him. We were fortunate to have the means to be able to. Given the most important growth of a baby’s brain occurs in the first five years, I also wanted to be their main caregiver.

Even though I loved being a mom, I have to confess my self-esteem suffered at times when asked what I did for a living. And I felt inadequate when I met other mothers who seemed to be able to juggle a busy career with parenting toddlers.

When my second son reached 2 and started daycare, I was motivated to build a business that would contribute something meaningful to the world (which now revolved around toddlers), reinvigorate my brain and give me a sense of purpose as the kids grew up.

But I didn’t know how to start or where to find team members; motherhood isolates you from the workforce. I had spent five years making contacts with pediatricians, swimming instructors and nursery school teachers. Where would I meet a digital generation programmer geek or a groovy digital artist?

It took me a couple of years to build the team of five that I now have. For moms that have an entrepreneurial idea, here are the ways I learnt to find team members and get my business started:

1. Join a professional association for women. I joined PWA in Italy (Professional Womens Association) and attended their events. PWA is represented througout Europe. My marketing consultant and a potential investor in my company are both contacts I made at PWA events.

2. Get in contact with a professor of the course you need skills from at a leading university. I rang a professor in their Masters program in computer engineering at Politecnico University in Milan and had lunch with him. A few months later, he found me my current partner and CTO (Chief Technical Officer)

3. Find out what Facebook groups for startups there are in your city or region and become an active member. You can post on their site the skills you are looking for in a team member.

4. Find out what startup events there are in your city or region for budding entrepreneurs to present their ideas in front of an audience. I presented Colto to the Milan Chamber of Commerce and made valuable contacts, one of whom is still my lawyer.

5. Draft a business plan for your idea and enter it in a business plan competition which offers assistance and development workshops for your idea.

6. Research all the seed funding/accelerator programs for startups. Don’t limit yourself to those in your country as most programs offer seed funding to cover the cost of travel and accommodation. I was selected by GameFounders to attend their 3 month accelerator program in Estonia and it moved my business to an entirely different level.

7. Research crowdsourcing websites such as fidalo.eu where you can put your idea online and find the resources you need to get started.

If you have any other tips on how you started your business, please let me know by leaving a comment.

When it is unveiled in the coming weeks, the Social Security Trustees report will no doubt prompt the program’s critics to call for change, as it does each year. And one of their suggestions will likely be to raise the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare benefits.

It sounds so reasonable. Isn’t everybody living longer? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The truth is that gains in life expectancy are not shared evenly at all, and it would be a mistake to reduce benefits based on this false assumption. The big winners in longevity are affluent and educated. The less-fortunate among us have gained much less, and in some cases their longevity is actually declining.

Men in the upper half of the income distribution now live roughly 6 years longer than they did in the 1970s, while men in the lower half are living just 1.3 years longer, the New York Times reported. And recent work by S. Jay Olshansky has found that white women without a high school diploma LOST five years of life between 1990 and 2008. That is a shocking decline, which highlights the danger of raising the eligibility age for essential benefits on assumptions that everyone is living longer.

It may surprise you that your zip code is one of the best predictors of how long you will survive. Life expectancy is 7 years longer where I live in the suburbs than it is where I work in the city. But even that gap pales when compared to the disparities in the Chicago area, where there is a 33-year difference in life expectancy inside Cook County alone.

It is not clear what is causing these vast differences. But researchers suspect it may be due to higher levels of stress, obesity and smoking that are more prevalent among society’s have-nots, along with lower access to healthy foods or health care.

Most people know there are differences in life expectancy based on gender, race and ethnicity. In 2010 the average white man could expect to live to 82 if he reached age 65. This was almost three years less than the average white woman, but two years longer than the average African-American male. Black women on average live longer than black or white men, but not as long as white women.

But the public has heard less about differences in longevity linked directly to the underlying factors of wealth and education. These disparities should be made loud and clear in any debate about hiking the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare.

After all, reasonable-sounding suggestions to raise the age for these benefits usually come from white, educated, high-income individuals whose life expectancy, and that of their family members, has increased sharply over time.

They need a reminder: Not everyone is so fortunate.

Chinese artist Liu Bolin can disappear into everything from famous landmarks to the rows of instant noodles at the supermarket. The question is: Why? By going invisible, what does he help you see?

We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.
.ted-headline { clear:both;}