Hasta La Gadget!

As more 3D printers fire up and start chewing through plastic filament to extrude the objects of your dreams, more and more spools of PVC are going to be required to build our DIY future. And that means more plastic waste. Which, let’s face it, we have more than enough of already.

But perhaps there is a better way. U.K. charity techfortrade reckons there’s room to connect up the growing demand for 3D printing, with the surfeit of waste plastic in developing countries. The core aim: less waste and better jobs – that’s better jobs for humans, as well as more ethical 3D print jobs.

The tech-focused charity has today launched an initiative called The Ethical Filament Foundation which will aim to partner with organisations to encourage the manufacture of “ethically produced” 3D printing filament, made from recycled plastic waste – as an alternative to the standard virgin plastic spools.

The ethical element extends not just to feeding recycled waste plastic back in the 3D printer ecosystem, but to providing income stability for waste pickers in developing countries.

The Foundation is working to develop a standard for this ethical filament that can be used to certify producers, who will be able to license and display its accreditation mark. A draft of the Foundation’s guidelines can be be viewed on its website.

The Foundation notes:

This standard will ensure that social, economic and environmental requirements are met in the production of 3D printer filament. It is also hoped that this will contribute towards a general improvement in wider trading relationships with waste pickers by influencing plastic industry standards. The Ethical Filament Foundation mark will act as a quality guarantee for those companies and individual consumers wishing to purchase recycled filament.

The initiative is a welcome one – that could help instigate a wider shift in 3D printer practices. We’ve seen individual upcycling gizmos before, such as the Filabot, but as 3D printing moves from being the pastime of the maker community to something more mainstream it’s going to need more ambitious efforts to keep its dirty underbelly in check.

“After realising a gap in the market for 3D printer filament made from recycled plastic, we immediately recognised the opportunity this presents to the developing world where plastic waste is in abundance,” said William Hoyle, CEO of techfortrade, in a statement.  ”The 3D printing market is growing exponentially and by making the first move into ethical filament, we hope to raise awareness about the importance of this technology and the benefits it can provide to some of the poorest people in the world. Our first step is to garner support from the 3D printing community.”

The Foundation has been founded by techfortrade in partnership with Dreambox Emergence which provides 3D printing units for community based manufacturing in Guatemala, and Michigan Technological University. Protoprint, which provides waste plastic recycling services in India – detailed in the below video – has signed up as the Foundation’s first licensed organisation.

You walk up to your apartment building, arms overflowing with groceries, maybe your dog on a leash, backpacks, etc. Then you have to fumble for your key fob (or worse, an actual hardware key) just to open the door and get inside your own home. Disrupt Europe 2013 Battlefield Finalist Kiwi.ki wants to bring the same convenience that’s available to car owners via keyless entry to residential multi-unit complexes, making it possible for anyone who lives at one to just walk up to the door and open it, thanks to an RFID device carried in their pocket.

For a few years now, it’s been remarkably easy for car owners to gain access to their vehicles. More and more manufacturers are designing key fobs that let drivers simply approach their car door, and have them open instantly when you reach out to pull the handle. Yet no one has really built the same thing for residential housing. Kiwi.ki is doing that, and has already partnered with Deutsche Post in Germany to make it easy for mail carriers to gain access to apartments for simpler delivery of letters and packages. Long-term, the vision is to have keyless entry systems built into the entries of a majority of Berlin’s many residential complexes, and then to expand internationally, as well.

“We are the exclusive partner of Deutsche Post to install our system in these multi-storey buildings, and there about 3 million of those buildings in Germany alone,” Kiwi.ki co-founder Dr. Christian Bogatu explained in an interview. “Obviously, we are not stopping in Germany – we are also going to launch in other countries soon.”

It’s not only a solution that makes sense for apartment buildings; Already, Kiwi.ki has some corporate clients, including Allianz, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, and Factory Berlin, a campus and shared workspace for startups here in Germany. Bogatu says that despite those clients and a few others in the business world, the focus for the startup is firmly on residential customers – they don’t want to spread themselves too thin chasing multiple markets at once.

I asked Bogatu why there’s even a need for Kiwi.ki, when others like Lockitron are already offering connected home lock hardware, and companies like Schlage seem pretty well-poised to introduce their own similar solution and crush the market. He said that in fact, they’re partnering with Lockitron, and want to work with them to deliver a complete solution to users that offers both main door entry and individual unit locks. And big companies like Schlage are potential partners, too; Kiwi.ki doesn’t make the locks, just the hands-free wireless entry technology for existing installs. Offering Kiwi.ki services alongside its products would actually be an additional selling opportunity for Schlage and others, Bogatu says.

The technology itself doesn’t seem all that difficult on the surface, but it’s actually very hard to get it right and still preserve privacy and security. Bogatu says that Kiwi.ki has recruited the very hackers who would normally exploit a system like this to build it, charging them with making it resistant to their own attempts. They’ve done so, he says, and have also made it so that there’s no way to use a Kiwi Ki (the official branding for their RFID ‘keys’) as an identifier; each time it communicates with a lock, it sends a randomly generated number, meaning you can’t track it reliably from one moment to the next.

“In our system, because our hackers were really proud to develop a system that’s really anonymous, you don’t even have to take our word for it,” Bogatu says. “We’re making our source code open, so any part that is security and privacy-relevant, we’ll put up on the Internet and make it available for hackers around the world to really prove its level of security.”

The security aspect, combined with Kiwi.ki’s distribution model through mutually-benefited partners like the Deutsche Post, and a flexible direct-to-consumer sales model that Bogatu says will offer some customers a large, one-time lump sum payment, or charge others a small monthly fee, are all what he says set the startup apart from the competition.

Since they’re working with Deutsche Post to do the roll-out of their initial system and defray the cost for users, that’s going to roll out starting in Berlin along mail routes. They also want to make it available direct to home owners and renters, and plan to launch that within a couple of weeks.

Q&A

1. Why isn’t this the same as a thousand other things on the market?

A: We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just making this far more convenient, adapting technology already used in automobiles.

2. Do you have paying partners? You need partners to pay for this because end users won’t.

A: Yes, we have partners in residential housing management and Deutsche Post, etc.

3. How much time to recoup the cost invested?

A: Two to three years to recoup the cost of setting up a system, but it differs depending on the situation.

The UK has set some very ambitious carbon reduction goals for itself—including the overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 80 percent by 2050, but this goal is proving more challenging than anticipated. At this rate, the UK will have to go fully-carbon free by 2030. So to meet its environmental deadline, they’re building the biggest, safest—and first—nuclear power plant on the British Isles in nearly 25 years.

Read more…

Can you smell a symphony? If Le Laboratoire has its way, you soon will. The contemporary art and design sensor founded by academic and scientists David Edwards in 2007 was at Wired’s 2013 event in London this week, showing their latest creation: an olfactory experience unlike any other, delivered digitally like an email or instant message.

Edwards and his former student Rachel Field revealed the second, and much more polished prototype of the Ophone at the show, which is a cylindrical device that rests atop a base supplied with a number of chemicals. It’s a “phone” in some respects, as its name implies, but it doesn’t transmit sound or receive sounds like your iPhone: It can receive encoded transmissions that tell it what kind of smells to play.

No, that’s not a typo. Here’s how the prototype works: First, you go to a website and enter in a number of ‘movements’ for a ‘symphony,’ choosing a type of coffee, then a chocolate, then a caramel and a nut variety. Then, you can send this off to the Ophone’s servers, and it’s received by a smartphone that controls the device, which transmits the recipes via bluetooth. The Ophone combines its materials in the required complication to render those smells.

The experience is the latest from the collective around scent and taste, as Edwards continues to try to explore the nature of olfactory processes as another type of communication on par with music, writing or anything else we might hope to offer up. Already, the company offers up capsules that spritz small serving doses of things like coffee, reduced to a fine dust, which can be brought on planes and are completely travel and customs safe.

The more interesting possibility for the future, according to Edwards, is a vision where delivery mechanisms for the olfactory units are built-into every device, making it possible for your cell phone, TV remote control or anything else to offer up a scent shot. That’s what the company hopes to accomplish, given more time to refine the product and work out a final production Ophone-type device.

“In the next few years we’re absolutely moving towards a world where you have these little chips, they’re universal, and you have any number of objects they work with,” he said. “It could be the holder of your phone, your desk or something in your clothing, so that any communication, whether it’s on the phone, or an email, or an Internet site or a James Bond movie, that has an inherent olfactory dimension, if you turn this on, you’re going to be smelling it.”

The Ophone is currently the most advanced iteration of that vision. It’s much, much better than the typical smell-o-vision type inventions you’ll see trotted out at trade shows, as I learned via a nose-on. That’s because it’s remarkably subtle, and remarkably personal. There’s no haze of smell you have to walk through, for instance; and when you want the experience to end, you just draw you head back and the smell quickly fades.

Currently, the Ophone prototype can produce up to 320 different smells, and working out the UI for that experience is its own challenge. Field says that they came up with the idea of symphonies, and the basic set scent selection as a way of making it more digestible, but in fact its extremely flexible, and they’re interested to see what people are able to come up with to interact with it once its more generally available. You can easily imagine a situation where people come up with various “scent recipes” and “scent apps” like they do now for lighting with the Philips Hue.

The concept of a smell-based media device isn’t new, and it’s been applied to everything from TV to gaming, but the Ophone and the larger vision behind Le Laboratoire envision a much more expansive application of olfactory sense tech. It’s still pretty sci-fi, but it’s a lot more palatable (and eligible for consumerization) in this form than having a fog machine shoot a foul-smelling cloud in your direction, which is how others’ efforts have come off in the past.

A press release announcing that Samsung had acquired a Swedish fingerprint biometrics company was distributed on Business Wire and elsewhere earlier this morning. Samsung has since confirmed that the release was false and that it is not acquiring Fingerprint Cards. Fingerprint Cards has also since issued a denial of the report.   

Despite the acquisition having been denied by both companies, at the time of writing Business Wire is still carrying the bogus release.  

Update 5: Multiple attempts to contact Cision by telephone to ascertain how the false press release was distributed have not been successful — the number for its Swedish customer operative, Helén Rigamonti, is ringing out. However Business Insider managed to speak to her earlier, and was told it is investigating what happened.

“We are looking into our procedures, but we followed all of our security procedures and we can’t exactly tell you what happened as of now,” Rigamonti is quoted as saying.

She also told Business Insider that a “contact person” at Fingerprint Cards had sent the release to Cision.

Update 4: Multiple attempts to get through to Fingerprint Cards’ CEO via telephone have been blocked by a Fingerprint Cards’ employee who answered the phone but refused point-blank to discuss the acquisition report. On asking to speak to anyone else in the company she claimed “everyone is in a meeting”, and on asking specifically to speak to (CEO) Carlstrom she said “he’s busy all day, back on Monday”.

Update 3: Fingerprints Cards has now issued a statement, posted on its website, denying it has been acquired:

The news in today’s media that Fingerprint Cards AB has been acquired by Samsung is incorrect.
The previous press release was not sent by Fingerprint Cards AB
Trading in the share has been suspended.
What has happened will be reported to the police and to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.

Fingerprint Cards is a publicly traded company, so whoever distributed the false release was presumably hoping to benefit from a spike in the share price on talk of a bogus multi-million dollar acquisition.

Update 2: Samsung has now confirmed the acquisition report is false. “It’s not true, it’s a groundless rumour,” a company spokeswoman told TechCrunch, after initially describing it as a “market rumour” and declining to comment further. The spokeswoman said the company did not know how the release was distributed, adding “it did not come from us”.

At the time of writing, attempts to contact Fingerprint Cards by telephone have been unsuccessful, but according to Reuters the company has denied the acquisition. ”A false press release has gone out,” Fingerprint Cards CEO Johan Carlstrom told the news agency, adding that the company has not had any discussions with Samsung.

Update 1: After the press release announcing this acquisition went out Cision recalled it, saying it had been released in error. We’ve spoken to Samsung and are awaiting their confirmation. This is a developing story so please check for more updates.

Original report below.

Apple’s iPhone 5s has a fingerprint sensor embedded in the home button. HTC is rumoured to be sticking a fingerprint sensor on the rear of the forthcoming HTC One Max. And now Samsung is next in line to add biometrics to its mobile hardware: the company has today announced it’s acquiring Swedish biometrics company Fingerprint Cards AB – which makes a range of fingerprint sensor modules — for $650 million in cash.

Samsung said today that the acquisition will ”increase the accessibility of swipe sensor technology”. The Korean mobile maker made no mention of Apple’s new flagship fingerprint sensor feature — Touch ID — but that’s the clear driver here.

At the launch of its new iPhone last month, the iPhone 5s, Apple replaced its flagship smartphone’s home button with a fingerprint sensor that allows users to unlock their phone with their fingerprint, and verify purchases on iTunes without having to input a password. As well as offering users the convenience of not having to keep inputting a passcode/password, Touch ID differentiates Apple’s flagship hardware from rivals — at least for the moment. It’s now a race for Samsung to launch Galaxy-branded devices with a own fingerprint sensor to neutralise Apple’s first mover advantage here.

“Swipe sensor technology is phenomenal in every way and are going to be loved by millions of people around the world,” said Samsung CEO Kwon Oh-hyun in a statement announcing the acquisition. “Together we will create the future.”

The acquisition tallies with earlier rumours that Samsung is planning to add a fingerprint sensor to the next generation of its Galaxy Note phablet.

The acquisition has been approved by both boards, and Fingerprint Cards will become a new business division within Samsung, the pair said today. Fingerprint Cards CEO Johan Carlström joins Samsung, becoming president of the Samsung Fingerprint Cards Division, and reporting directly to Kwon Oh-hyun.

Developing story. More to come. Full release follows below…

Fingerprint Cards AB and Samsung Electronics today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Samsung will acquire Fingerprint Cards, the leading fingerprint verification company, for $650 million in cash. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Fingerprint Cards and Samsung. The acquisition will increase the accessibility of swipe sensor technology. The combination will extend Fingerprint Cards world class technology.

Swipe sensor technology is phenomenal in every way and are going to be loved by millions of people around the world,” said Samsung CEO Kwon Oh-hyun. “Together we will create the future.

Fingerprint Cards will become a new business division within Samsung, and Fingerprint Cards CEO Johan Carlström will assume the title of president of the Samsung Fingerprint Cards Division, reporting directly to Kwon Oh-hyun.

Fingerprints Cards and Samsung share the vision of bringing products to our customers,” said Johan Carlström. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Samsung’s plans,” Johan Carlström said.

About Fingerprint Cards AB (publ)

Fingerprint Cards AB (FPC) markets, develops and produces biometric components and technologies that through the analysis and matching of an individual’s unique fingerprint verify the person’s identity. The technology consists of biometric sensors, processors, algorithms and modules that can be used separately or in combination with each other. The competitive advantages offered by the FPC’s technology include unique image quality, extreme robustness, low power consumption and complete biometric systems. With these advantages and the ability to achieve extremely low manufacturing costs, the technology can be implemented in volume products such as smart cards and mobile phones, where extremely rigorous demands are placed on such characteristics. The company’s technology can also be used in IT and Internet security, access control, etc.

Fingerprint Cards AB (publ) discloses this information pursuant to the Swedish Securities Market Act (2007:528) and the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act (1991:980). The information was issued for publication on October 11, 2013 at 10.00 CET.

Important information Issuance, publication or distribution of this press release in certain jurisdictions could be subject to restrictions. The recipient of this press release is responsible for using this press release and the constituent information in accordance with the rules and regulations prevailing in the particular jurisdiction. This press release does not constitute an offer or an offering to acquire or subscribe for any of the company’s securities in any jurisdiction.

Important information Issuance, publication or distribution of this press release in certain jurisdictions could be subject to restrictions. The recipient of this press release is responsible for using this press release and the constituent information in accordance with the rules and regulations prevailing in the particular jurisdiction. This press release does not constitute an offer or an offering to acquire or subscribe for any of the company’s securities in any jurisdiction.

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