Hasta La Gadget!

I suppose that it was only a matter of time before the mailbox ended up getting some kind of “smart” technology incorporated, and that proved to be true with Danby Appliances coming up with their Parcel Guard smart mailbox. The Canadian appliance manufacturer has been in business for the past seven decades, and their latest innovation is more than just a place for the delivery man or postman to drop by your mail or parcel, it will also revolutionize the way parcels and mail are received.

According to Jim Estill, CEO of Danby Appliances and the innovator behind Parcel Guard, “Last year over 25 million households in the United States reported stolen packages. I anticipate that in 10 years, all households will have some sort of parcel mailbox simply because of the way our shopping habits are evolving.” Such statistics mentioned are surprising and yet what is even more surprising is the fact that it took so long for someone to do something about the situation.

With Parcel Guard, your online deliveries will remain safe no matter where you are, at least until you arrive home and pick it up yourself. No longer do you have to be unduly worried about the likes of “Porch Pirates” or missed deliveries. All that your delivery driver needs to do is to open up Parcel Guard’s anti-theft drop slot or scans the package in order to open the safe, where the secure bottom door will then house the mail and packages within. Once Parcel Guard locks itself, you will be instantly notified via an app that your package has arrived safe and sound.

In addition, Parcel Guard boasts of wireless connectivity, a motion-activated IP camera, a tamper alarm and a weight monitor so that it is able to keep track of any hanky panky that occurs. The Parcel Guard will be accompanied by an asking price of $399 and is ready for pre-order as at press time.

Press Release
[ Parcel Guard smart mailbox copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Machine learning and all its related forms of “AI” are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it’s a great application for the technology and may help both bees and beekeepers keep hives healthy.

The latest threat to our precious honeybees is the Varroa mite, a parasite that infests hives and sucks the blood from both bees and their young. While it rarely kills a bee outright, it can weaken it and cause young to be born similarly weak or deformed. Over time this can lead to colony collapse.

The worst part is that unless you’re looking closely, you might not even see the mites — being mites, they’re tiny: a millimeter or so across. So infestations often go on for some time without being discovered.

Beekeepers, caring folk at heart obviously, want to avoid this. But the solution has been to put a flat surface beneath a hive and pull it out every few days, inspecting all the waste, dirt and other hive junk for the tiny bodies of the mites. It’s painstaking and time-consuming work, and of course if you miss a few, you might think the infestation is getting better instead of worse.

Machine learning to the rescue!

As I’ve had occasion to mention about a billion times before this, one of the things machine learning models are really good at is sorting through noisy data, like a surface covered in random tiny shapes, and finding targets, like the shape of a dead Varroa mite.

Students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland created an image recognition agent called ApiZoom trained on images of mites that can sort through a photo and identify any visible mite bodies in seconds. All the beekeeper needs to do is take a regular smartphone photo and upload it to the EPFL system.

The project started back in 2017, and since then the model has been trained with tens of thousands of images and achieved a success rate of detection of about 90 percent, which the project’s Alain Bugnon told me is about at parity with humans. The plan now is to distribute the app as widely as possible.

“We envisage two phases: a web solution, then a smartphone solution. These two solutions allow to estimate the rate of infestation of a hive, but if the application is used on a large scale, of a region,” Bugnon said. “By collecting automatic and comprehensive data, it is not impossible to make new findings about a region or atypical practices of a beekeeper, and also possible mutations of the Varroa mites.”

That kind of systematic data collection would be a major help for coordinating infestation response at a national level. ApiZoom is being spun out as a separate company by Bugnon; hopefully this will help get the software to beekeepers as soon as possible. The bees will thank them later.

Welcome, dear readers, to Engadget’s newest series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we’ve done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought-provoking books o…

If there is one thing that everyone loves about concepts, it would be the very idea that you can basically think of everything that you would like to include without having to worry about whether it is feasible or possible or not just yet. Enter Vivo’s APEX 2019 concept smartphone that was recently announced. The APEX 2019 is the first 5G smartphone from Vivo that arrives in an elegantly simple and uniquely recognizable design, boasting of a curved surface waterdrop glass without any openings, seams or bezels whatsoever in order to present a minimalist concept.

Aiming to offer consumers a glimpse into the future of smartphone design and development with its super unibody design and Full-Display Fingerprint Scanning technology, such ideas that is possible to be implemented has certainly shown just how far Vivo has come as a smartphone manufacturer. The bezel will soon be a thing of the past with the FullView design, and without a single physical button, it is truly a unique user experience. How then does one turn it on? Well, there is Touch Sense technology that will merge capacitive touch and pressure-sensing capabilities together. Using well designed programming logic and software, the pressure sensors will be able to figure out whenever a user is pressing the frame while the capacitive touch determines its position for added accuracy.

There will no longer be any more USB ports but a MagPort will replace it instead. The MagPort is a magnetic power connector which will enable both charging and data transfer functions, offering a more streamlined user experience. The display itself can also be transformed into a speaker via Body SoundCasting technology, courtesy of its screen vibration function, hence doing away with the need for a speaker grill.

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal memory, this 5G handset is certainly drool-worthy. Now we can only sit tight and wait for word of an official release as the concept is realized as well as pricing details when it is officially revealed at MWC later this month.

Press Release
[ Vivo APEX 2019 concept smartphone copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

In the last several years, AT&T has made two huge acquisitions: DirecTV in 2015, and Time Warner in 2018. With these mergers — which were clearly anti-consumer — AT&T thought it turn itself from a telecom giant into a cable TV giant, with a near monopoly on the US’s media industry. But instead of just buying itself an undeniable advantage, … Continue reading