Opal ADAM Gets LED Starlight Sky Option: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Car

GM-owned automotive manufacturer Opel hasn’t sold cars in the United States in decades. However, in Europe, Opel has been selling vehicles continuously for quite a long time. One of the vehicles that Opel offers that I’ve never heard of is the subcompact Opel ADAM.

Today, word of an unusual new option for the car has surfaced. People who buy the Opel ADAM will be able to purchase an optional headliner and features LED lighting elements that look like stars.

starliner

The Starlight Sky headliner is said to be a unique option for the entry-level automotive segment in Europe.

starry headliner opel 2

The special headliner allows for five different textile cover options with a variety of headliner designs. The headliners can be single color, autumn foliage, a checkered flag, stylized clouds, and other things. The Starlight Sky option is the one that gets the 64 LEDs as can single colored versions. The headliner weighs 200 g and consumes only 4 watts of power, and the LEDs can actually twinkle like the night sky.

Of course you could just get a skylight, and look up at the actual stars.

EC says Motorola broke antitrust rules, abused its patent position

EC says Motorola broke antitrust rules, abused its patent position

It was almost a year ago to the day that the European Commission began investigating Motorola over reported abuse of its standard-essential patents (SEPs), and now the regulators have a little more to say on the matter. The Commission has issued Motorola Mobility a Statement of Objections, which doesn’t mean any judgment has been reached, but lets the company know its preliminary view, and it ain’t good news. According to these initial findings, Motorola wanting an injunction against Apple in Germany based on some of its GPRS-related SEPs — the particular legal encounter that was the catalyst for a complaint by Cupertino and ultimately, the EC’s investigation — “amounts to an abuse of a dominant position prohibited by EU antitrust rules.” Motorola originally said it would license these patents under FRAND terms when they became standard-essential, which Apple was happy to pay for. However, the company pursued an injunction nonetheless.

The Commission’s statement goes on to say that while injunctions can be necessary in certain disputes, where there is potential for an agreement under FRAND terms, companies with bulging SEP portfolios should not be allowed to request injunctions “in order to distort licensing negotiations and impose unjustified licensing terms on patent licensees.” Joaquín Almunia, the Commission Vice President who’s responsible for competition policy, echoed what we’ve heard from other important folks entrenched in the never-ending patent battlefield (such as Judge Koh), saying: “I think that companies should spend their time innovating and competing on the merits of the products they offer — not misusing their intellectual property rights to hold up competitors to the detriment of innovation and consumer choice.” So, what happens next? Motorola will first have its right to address the statement before the EC makes a final decision, but it’s looking like a fine is headed the company’s way. Hopefully, the outcome will also have a wider impact on patent cases of the future, so companies will spend more time making shiny things for us, and less on courtroom squabbles.

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Via: Reuters

Source: European Commission

Lumu Is A Digital Light Meter For Photographers That Plugs Into Your iPhone & Tells You What Camera Settings To Use

lumu-iphone

Meet Lumu: a digital light meter for photographers that plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack as a smaller and smarter replacement for traditional analogue light meters. It’s used in conjunction with Lumu’s app — being demoed in prototype here at hardware alley at Disrupt NY – to help photographers figure out the best camera settings for their current location.

Lumu is not going to help you take better photos on your iPhone — it’s a tool for standalone cameras that have ISO, aperture and shutter speed parameters that can be manually set. The startup, which hails from Slovenia in Europe, plans to kick off a Kickstarter funding campaign in about a month. The Lumu device will cost $99.

“It’s the world’s smartest light meter,” says co-founder Benjamin Polovic. “The existing light meters are large, bulky and very expensive. With Lumu, the main processing is done on the iPhone, so we use the iPhone’s power. It also doesn’t use any batteries, it’s powered from the iPhone.

“You take your iPhone or your iPod and plug it in and it’s going to recognise it, and it sets all of the parameters for your unique environment. So you put in your ISO that you use in your film or your digital camera, the aperture you want to use and then it calculates the time.”

The photographer then needs to manually input the suggested settings into their camera but Polovic says the group is thinking about making a Bluetooth dongle so settings can be wirelessly sent to a digital camera. “We’re excited to get some ideas from Kickstarter when the campaign launches,” he added.

As well as showing the light level and exposure value for the current lighting conditions, the app lets users store pre-sets for individual geotagged locations so they can easily revisit them later. It will also include an auto mode, and a filter-style feature that will tell users how to achieve effects such as bokeh (background blur). 

Polovic said Lumu’s hope is to inspire more people to start digging down into their camera settings. ”We love photography, we want to make it better, we want to introduce it to people who don’t necessarily know how to use cameras because they are quite complex. We want to make it simple,” he says.

The startup has been developing Lumu for about four to five months, according to Polovic. Down the line, it plans to launch an SDK so developers can create other apps using the light sensor — giving the example of an app that wakes the iPhone’s owner when it starts getting light, for instance.

Engadget Eurocast 025 – 05.02.13

Engadget Eurocast 025 - 05.01.13

This week’s show shows what happens when the unstoppable force of technology meets the immovable object of our team’s cynicism and stinginess. The gang continues its discussion on Google Glass, doesn’t think much of Illumiroom and gets weirdly philosophical when it comes to the latest words to come from Thorsten Heins’ mouth. Plus, the team get wistful for a Nokia phone launched in 2007 and try (and fail) to use voice communication to send smartphone messages to each other.

Hosts: Dan Cooper, Mat Smith, James Trew

Producer: James Trew

Hear the Podcast

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Best Buy will sell its half of Best Buy Europe to Carphone Warehouse for $775 million

As Best Buy attempts a return to financial well-being, it’s decided to sell the 50 percent share it still owns in Best Buy Europe to fellow joint venture partner Carphone Warehouse. The price is set at about 500 million GBP ($775 million, mostly in cash) and is expected to close by June. Best Buy paid $2.15 billion for its share of the business back in 2008 and the first branded store opened in 2010, but it was already looking for a way out by 2011. That’s when it closed its UK stores and paid Carphone Warehouse $1.3 billion for its share in the US Best Buy Mobile business. reporting the joint venture as discontinued operations for its next fiscal year will cause Best Buy to take a $200 million charge, and it’s tossing Carphone Warehouse another $45 million to satisfy outstanding obligations like closing the Global Connect JV the two started in 2011. There’s no word on any moves for its business in Mexico, Canada and China, and CEO Hubert Joly says this sale “should not suggest any similar action” elsewhere.

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Source: Best Buy

Best Buy will sell its half of European arm to Carphone Warehouse for $775 million

As Best Buy attempts a return to financial well-being, it’s decided to sell the 50 percent share it still owns in Best Buy Europe to fellow joint venture partner Carphone Warehouse. The price is set at about 500 million GBP ($775 million, mostly in cash) and is expected to close by June. Best Buy paid $2.15 billion for its share of the business back in 2008 and the first branded store opened in 2010, but it was already looking for a way out by 2011. That’s when it closed its UK stores and paid Carphone Warehouse $1.3 billion for its share in the US Best Buy Mobile business. Reporting the joint venture as discontinued operations for its next fiscal year will cause Best Buy to take a $200 million charge, and it’s tossing Carphone Warehouse another $45 million to satisfy outstanding obligations like closing the Global Connect JV the two started in 2011. There’s no word on any moves for its business in Mexico, Canada and China, and CEO Hubert Joly says this sale “should not suggest any similar action” elsewhere.

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Source: Best Buy

European M-Payments Startup SumUp Partners With Revel Systems, An iPad POS Provider, For Its Push Into Europe

sumup

SumUp, one of the many European mobile card reader startups targeting small businesses — and taking advantage of Square’s continued absence to acquire users and build out a business — has taken another step designed to expand its reach by announcing a partnership with Revel Systems, a maker of iPad POS software.

Revel Systems provides iPad-based tills to more than 400 chain stores and restaurants throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia but it’s aiming to expand into Europe, hence the tie-up with SumUp. After launching last August, SumUp has now rolled out to 10 European markets.

Revel Systems will be using SumUp’s API, which it made available in fall last year, to process debit and credit card and cash payments in Europe. In other markets the company uses payment gateway USAePay, and says it can also integrate directly into Mercury Payment Systems.

In Europe the SumUp mobile payments app will come pre-loaded on Revel Systems tills and users will also get SumUp’s black card reader — which plugs into the iPad to take card payments. The partnership won’t bear instant fruit for SumUp on the customer acquisition front but as and when Revel Systems builds up its customer base in the region, SumUp will also make gains.

Commenting on the tie-up in a statement, John Doe, CEO of Revel Systems, said it chose to partner with SumUp to offer flexibility to its retail customers — but did not specify what it offered over and above other European mobile payments startups such as iZettle and Rocket Internet’s Payleven.

“SumUp’s technology is aligned with ours because it’s lightweight, secure, and speedy. SumUp is a natural partner for us,” he said. “We’re always looking to forge new partnerships with those businesses that aim to enhance the overall customer experience. Our users are also certain to appreciate the easy SumUp sign-up process and pay-as-you-go billing. We’re looking forward to working with SumUp as we expand to new markets.”

As with the myriad mobile payments players targeting small businesses, SumUp does not charge a monthly fee to businesses using its system but rather takes a 2.75% per card reader transaction charge. SumUp accepts Visa, Mastercard and recently added support for Amex in the majority of its markets.

The Revel Systems tie-up is not SumUp’s first b2b partnership aimed at building out its business. The company has previously announced partnerships with German taxi hailing app Taxi.de and an odd job software platform provider.

KALQ Is A New Split-Screen Keyboard Layout Designed To Speed Up Thumb Typing On Tablets & Big Phones

KALQ keyboard by University of St Andrews

After the success of gesture-based keyboards such as Swype, the next obvious disruption to keyboard technology is optimisation of the legacy Qwerty layout that’s persisted since the typewriter era. Not that people haven’t tried alternatives to Qwerty already (e.g. Dvorak et al.) – and generally failed to make them stick. But that’s not stopping a group of academic researchers — including the co-inventor of the gesture IP behind Swype — from devising a new touchscreen keyboard layout in the hope that people can finally be persuaded to shift their typing habits.

KALQ, which is named, like Qwerty, after a string of its keys, is designed to speed up thumb typing on tablets and phablets (aka big phones). Its creators, who are from the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech, claim that once users have accustomed themselves to the non-Qwerty layout — with about eight hours practice required to be as fast as Qwerty and 13-19 hours to surpass your Qwerty typing speed — typing performance can be about a third (34 percent) more efficient than thumb typing on split-screen Qwerty layouts.

They are planning to release KALQ as a free Android app for tablets and phablets, which will also work on smaller screen smartphones but stress their research and performance claims relate specifically to larger devices, rather than phones. They are also not directly comparing the performance of the new layout against any of the gesture keyboard input methods (Swype, SwiftKey’s Flow etc) — their performance data is based on a direct comparison with thumb typing on a split Qwerty.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, who is one of the academics involved in the research, told TechCrunch they tested KALQ on a Galaxy Tab 7.7, adding that while the keyboard may also offer speed improvements on smartphones it’s not a claim they have tested. Kristensson is no stranger to keyboard disruption, being the man who wrote the pattern recognition algorithm underlying Swype, and co-founder of ShapeWriter, the startup that commercialised the gesture keyboard system in 2007 — before being acquired by Nuance in 2010 (the company that now owns Swype).

Kristensson said the KALQ researchers used a subset of publicly available emails from the Enron trial that were tagged ‘Sent from my BlackBerry’ as their data pool, analysing the mobile users’ use of language to figure out the best positions for the keys. As well as using computational optimisation techniques and looking at how devices behave when users are touch typing, they also modelled thumb movements with the aim of making a fast yet comfortable keyboard. KALQ is an English-language optimised letter layout, but the process that came up with its layout is “general,” said Kristensson: “You can feed it whatever language you want. So the layout may change, depending on your country.”

There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed… The problem with a lot of them is they are not fast enough.

For English speakers, KALQ’s split-screen layout repositions the alphabet into two unequal blocks of letters, with consonants in the left block (plus Y which can be classed as either) and vowels plus the remaining consonants (including K, L and Q) in the right. A space key is included towards the edge of each block for easy reach with either thumb. The letter order is specifically designed to minimise typing long sentences with just one thumb — which is cumbersome and slows touchscreen typists down — and also places frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other to minimise thumb movements. In addition, the layout generally aims to encourage typing on alternating sides of the keyboard — which Kristensson said is a more ergonomic and comfortable way to type.

As well as learning the new letter layout, KALQ typists need to learn to move both thumbs at once to get the fastest speeds. “Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one thumb is selecting a particular key, the other thumb is approaching its next target. From these insights we derived a predictive behavioural model we could use to optimise the keyboard,” noted Dr Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute, in a statement.

The researchers said trained KALQ users were able to reach speeds of 37 words per minute — which they said is the highest ever reported entry rate for two-thumb typing on touchscreen devices, and “significantly higher” than the approximately 20 words per minute entry rate users can normally reach on a regular split Qwerty layout. The group will  be presenting its research next month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris. The Android KALQ app will be available for download in due course.

Persuading users to adopt a new keyboard layout is likely to be a tough ask but Kristensson said the problem with most of the Qwerty layout challengers to-date has been that they are not disruptive enough — in terms of the performance bump they offer users who have to go through the pain of learning how to type quickly again.

“If you want to get people to change their layout you basically have to get people to invest, you have to get them to give up the assigned cost, their previous investment in Qwerty typing. And then we have to invest new time in learning KALQ,” he said. “There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed. Actually hundreds of them. Most of them have failed. I would say probably 99% of them have filed but the problem with a lot of them is actually they are not fast enough so why would people reinvest in learning a new text entry method if it doesn’t provide a substantial performance advantage so I think [KALQ] is one of the few keyboards that can provide that. So I’m hopeful.”

Asked whether the group might look to commercialise the research, he said the priority is to try to encourage people to adjust their typing behaviour and accept a Qwerty alternative but added that the group may look to monetise their algorithms in other ways — by, for example, using them to optimise other menu-based user interfaces.

“What I’m hoping here is that we will have impact,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get people away from thinking about the Qwerty keyboard. And I think impact here may mean that we will release [KALQ] for free — but remember we are the ones who have all the algorithms to come up with optimal keyboards so we learn a lot about how to optimise user interfaces in general. My co-investigator, Antti Oulasvirta, he’s completely passionate about optimising any sort of user interface. So the process we use here can also be used to optimise other user interfaces like menu structures for example so there is lots of potential for the underlying technology. This is just one instantiation of that. But I think trying to sell a new keyboard — that’s a risky proposition. I’m not sure a venture capitalist would go for it.”

HTC One gets camera update, improves HDR images and audio recording

Despite recent strong competition, several Engadget editors’ love affair with the HTC One continues unabated. We’ve mused plenty on its Ultrapixel camera, but we’re not going to refuse improvements, which is good, because that’s exactly what HTC’s offering its European customers. An incoming software update for existing handsets promises better noise reduction on slow-motion videos, improved dynamic range from HDR shots and enhanced audio recording on your Zoe clips. Naturally, there’s some performance and stability improvements included, if you’re not all about the imaging. According to SlashGear, the software refresh will arrive on European handsets this week, though we’re still waiting for it to land on our own UK device.

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Source: SlashGear

Engadget Eurocast 024 – 04.24.13

Engadget Eurocast 024 - 04.24.13

Take a look around you, what do you see? Walls? People? An office? Take it all in, suck it all up. Why? Because today all that changes forever. Jamie’s revelation that he’s a University Challenge nut flips everything we know on its head. Also, Mat drops “convincement” like it wasn’t even a thing. This madness is the Eurocast.

Hosts: Dan Cooper, Mat Smith, Jamie Rigg

Producer: James Trew

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