There is a huge array of wireless routers on the market today that have different features depending on your specific needs. A lot of those routers have administration panels that you can log into to see how many devices are connected to your wireless network at any given time. Some more feature packed routers also allow you to add websites that you don’t want people visiting to a blacklist. That feature is particularly effective in the office.
A new router has turned up on Kickstarter seeking funding called Skydog. This router gives an incredibly detailed review of what your network is being used for and which computers are accessing websites and for how long. If you have a large number of people in an office using a wireless network or you have kids that you want to monitor Internet usage on, this might be the perfect thing.
Rather than simply telling you six computers are on your network and Facebook has been accessed, the supporting applications for the Skydog router will tell you which specific computer accessed which specific website and how long they spend there. The router can even send you alerts to tell you when a child has spent all the time allotted on a particular website or online gaming.
Parents can use the included applications to schedule the amount of time kids can use the Internet for homework and for entertainment. Limits can be set for the amount of time spent on social media or gaming and the app can optimize the router for online gaming when needed. The app will also send you a notification if your broadband service is down or a guest connects to your home network. Skydog is seeking $75,000 and has 34 days to go. So far, the project has raised over $29,000. A pledge of $99 will get you one of the routers and the application with no monthly fees with delivery expected in August.
This week the folks at LenovoEMC have revealed their next-generation move for the networked device universe – Network Video Recorders. With their new NVR family they’ll be joining up with Milestone Arcus, a video management software platform, to bring you some real security installations – of less than 20 Internet Protocol Cameras, of course. This futuristic system will be aimed at small to midsize businesses and the whole lot will begin to be available this May.
What you’re seeing above and below are several examples of the software and hardware you’ll be using when you team up with LenovoEMC. The hardware you’ll be picking up will be using the fabulous Milestone Arcus software you’re getting a glimpse of here. You’ll be able to roll out with a one-year software update plan for prices starting at $1,100 USD.
With your brand new network-connected video surveillance system you’ll be working with both automated configuration and setup. You’ll also have motion detection in each of the cameras that you’re picking up as well as mobile live viewing, alerts and playback, and evidence exporting. You can go as mobile as you like!
Several setups are being prepared for you right this minute:
• Double-drive px2-300d with 4TB of storage and four camera licenses (starting at $1,100) • Four-drive px4-300d with 4TB and eight camera licenses. • Four-drive px4-300d with 8TB and 16 camera license.
Have a peek at another update from LenovoEMC for more network storage from Iomega – they’re working hand-in-hand to keep you up-to-date no matter what you’re storing!
AT&T has been forging partnerships that give its roaming customers free WiFi while abroad, and it just struck one of the more logical networking deals that we’ve seen to date, if also the most lopsided. A pact with Boingo will let AT&T subscribers have 1GB of free data each month on Boingo’s airport hotspots — but, as with previous arrangements, only if they’re subscribed to AT&T’s $60 or $120 international data plans. Boingo subscribers, meanwhile, get a much better deal. They can use AT&T hotspots anywhere in the US as part of their existing rate, which could see them paying as little as $10 per month. Either arrangement will keep us online during a layover, and for that we’re thankful — but there’s only one that’s likely to have us pulling out our credit cards.
The Google Fiber rollout for Austin has been spoiledtwice, but today it’s officially official: the music-centric city will become a gigabit city… eventually, that is. Google now says that it will start wiring Austinite homes for super-fast internet access by mid-2014 — we wouldn’t cancel that cable or DSL service just yet, sadly. At least the pricing should be familiar. Google still plans to offer both stand-alone internet access and internet-plus-TV bundles, both at rates within the ballpark of what it offers for Kansas City, and there will still be a near-free 5Mbps plan that only requires a one-off construction fee. Institutions will get free gigabit access, of course. While we’d like Google Fiber as soon as possible, we’re just happy to realize that our next SXSW crash pad may have a lot more bandwidth on tap.
Update: During a formal announcement call, Google and the city of Austin provided a few minor details. They revealed that Google didn’t get any incentives to land a deal, and that engineering work is only beginning in earnest on April 10th. As for AT&T’s me-too initiative? Kevin Lo from Google Fiber says that it’s “great” to see AT&T aware that the demand exists for gigabit access. No hard feelings, then.
Xerox PARC spinout company PowerCloud Systems is debuting a new kind of home networking solution today on Kickstarter, one that in some ways resembles the very successful Almond router, but one that also offers tremendous flexibility and granularity of control over home network access. The Skydog is a home networking tool that allows you complete control over who has access to your network, how much access they have, and what they’re allowed to access, and it can all be controlled remotely, too.
The Skydog consists of a router with 802.11n networking capabilities and simultaneous dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) operation. But the hardware is just one small part of the equation: it’s the software side that makes things really interesting, thanks to a powerful web-based dashboard that’s designed to be accessed from any Internet-connected PC, smartphone or tablet. The dashboard, unlike the firmware access panels of most routers, is actually a cloud-based service layer that provides simple, easy-to-understand controls for various network settings.
For instance, using Skydog, you can receive a text-based notification whenever a new device joins your network, complete with that device’s name. Skydog also shows you exactly how much bandwidth is being used by what device, and even lets you meter access by device or group, so you could allocate more bandwidth to a living room TV for video streaming, for instance, or limit the access of guests to prevent them running up your monthly traffic totals.
Skydog also has extensive parental controls, which allow for content filtering (you can tell it to block websites that fall into broad categories) and time limits on access to specific sites. Lock down Facebook during exam time, for instance, and have Skydog send you a notification when the user with the limit imposed hits their maximum allotted time. And if you need to diagnose a problem, there’s real-time monitoring, complete with remote outage alerts and remote router cycling, so you can spend less time on the phone with your ISP’s tech support department.
“In general, you can think about what we’ve done as taking enterprise-grade technology and making it usable for consumers,” PowerCloud CEO Jeff Abramowitz explained in an interview. “The idea for Skydog really came from employees of the company, friends and family of the company and even our investors taking our business products home, using them and realizing that they gave a level of visibility and control that no existing products really had.”
PowerCloud has been providing its CloudCommand technology for businesses, schools, hotels and other enterprise clients for a couple of years now, and the leap to the consumer market made sense in that it addressed a need that wasn’t really being filled by any competing products. Sure, Almond had simplified home networking by making its a process independent of computers, but in general home networking is still just about connecting devices to the Internet; there’s been very little innovation in terms of giving people more control over how and when they connect, which definitely seems like a missed opportunity given the explosion of the number of connected devices in any given home, and the changed role of the web in the lives of both children and adults.
Skydog is available as a $79 pre-order on Kickstarter, and will retail for $99 when it hits stores. The service it offers will be available free to users, though since it is a cloud service Abramowitz didn’t rule out the possibility of introducing paid premium tiers and features down the road. Asked why they went the Kickstarter route, he said that Skydog was looking for a new way to access the consumer market for this kind of product.
“Obviously Kickstarter is common for earlier startups, but not necessarily for a company that’s been around for a while,” Abramowitz said. “What we realized is that we’ve got a very disruptive and exciting product, but it really is a very large and mature space, and the existing paths to market are pretty well owned by the incumbents. Getting product on the retail sense is a very resource-intensive proposition.”
Going the Kickstarter route isn’t just about getting consumer backing, he said, but about promoting the Skydog community. The Skydog platform features a forum and is intended to promote sharing of network management strategies, so that people can exchange templates, tips and tricks for running their own household wireless. Kickstarter not only helps with funding, but gets that seeded early.
Skydog also works with your existing setup, as you can just plug in an AirPort Express, for instance, and get it running through the dashboard. The intended ship date is May 2013, so early backers won’t have to wait long for the device, which has already been extensively beta tested. If you’ve been looking for a way to make your home network easier to control and monitor, or you want to set your parents up with a networking solution you can manage completely even from across the country, this is a little project that could have a big impact on your lives.
We’re all about the future of the internet here at Engadget, so you can imagine our excitement when HP today announced that it’s shooting for the moon with its latest server system, the HP Moonshot. Promising significantly reduced energy consumption and space requirements, the Moonshot is HP’s “second generation” server tech, and it’s intended for use with “social, cloud, mobile, and big data,” according to the company. In so many words, this is HP’s attempt to get out ahead of where it sees internet use going — it was first unveiled in concept form last summer, but now it’s apparently ready for primetime. A video of the new tech getting introduced is just beyond the break.
Said servers are rolling out in 2013’s latter half, and can be tailored to a clients’ needs with specs from a variety of internals providers (AMD, AppliedMicro, Calxeda, Intel, and Texas Instruments are all specifically named by HP). All of this amounts to one thing: the information superhighway of tomorrow is being paved today, and we can’t wait to take a spin. Here’s hoping there’ll still be plenty of stupid gifs.
We first noted it back in 2008: the possibility of using LED light bulbs for secure and directional wireless internet access. Well, the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute is claiming that speedy data rates of up 3Gbps have proven feasible in its labs. The boost comes from its latest enhancements, allowing the 180Mhz frequency to be used over the usual 30MHz, which apparently leaves extra room for moving data. If you’ll recall, that’s a significant leap over the 800Mbps top speed it achieved back in 2011 mixing various light colors. While this IR-like take on wireless internet access gains steam, remember that it’s more likely to be used in areas where WiFi radios cause interruptions (hospitals, trade shows like CES, etc.) — rather than a strip of mini spot lights from IKEA for the casa. (We can dream, can’t we?) FHHI plans to show off the new gear at FOE ’13, but for now you’ll find the full press release after the break.
LinkedIn is now rolling out a new feature very similar to a feature already offered by Facebook. When you begin typing out a person’s name or a company’s name in your status update, a drop-down menu will pop up that will allow you to “mention” the person or company you’re discussing. The other party will be notified about your mention in real-time, providing much more engaging conversations.
LinkedIn states that its starting to roll out the new feature to English-speaking users at first, however, it plans on rolling out the feature to its global members soon. You can also utilize the new “mentions” feature in the comments section on your LinkedIn pages as well. You will be able to hold much more organized conversations with individuals in a community, enabling convenient one-on-one conversations.
This new rollout works seamlessly with Twitter as well, despite the two companies severing ties with each other back in July of 2012. If your Twitter account is linked with your LinkedIn account, the mentions in your status updates will transfer over to Twitter seamlessly. The mentions, while appaering as a full name on your LinkedIn status update, will change itself to the mentioned person’s Twitter username.
LinkedIn provides professionals with an easy way to connect to other professionals in their fields, as well as search for new and better jobs. Speaking of jobs, LinkedIn also rolled out a revamp to its jobs page back in February that made it even easier for people to find jobs relevant to their interests and work experience. LinkedIn says that “there’s more to come”, but we should expect no less from a network whose members “are some of the most engaged professionals online.”
WiFi used to be the only somewhat reliable way for a carrier to plug up holes in its network coverage. It’s a tactic AT&T’sused to great effect in many metropolitan areas where it offers wireless service. But short of acquiring more spectrum — a costly and time-consuming process littered with legal roadblocks — the operator’s been exploring an alternative solution: small cells. Testing for these stopgap signal boosters (pictured above) has already been underway since late 2012, with a trial case study in Crystal Lake Park, MO that proved outdoor reception could improve by almost 100-percent. And that test site is just the start of a greater small cell rollout that should place over 40,000 of these units throughout AT&T’s nationwide footprint by 2015. So if you’re tethered to the operator’s network and sick of spotty coverage, help is most definitely on the way.
If you hadn’t heard, South Korea’s under a lot of pressure lately, including a spate of internet-based attacks against banks and broadcasters on March 20th that some worry (though can’t confirm) was the result of a large-scale hacking campaign. The country won’t simply stand idle and brace for another hit, according to the Yonhap News Agency. It understands from an unnamed senior official that South Korea’s Ministry of Defense is complementing its Cyber Command division with a policy group, not unlike a UK equivalent, that would coordinate online security across different military sections, including the refinement of a defensive cyberwarfare strategy and recruiting more people to bulk up the digital front lines. Provided the claim is accurate, the division would be up and running before the first half of the year is over — and likely not a moment too soon.
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