Small Business Trends
was a start-up launched by founder and CEO Anita Campbell back in 2003.
Over the course of the last ten years, SMT as an online publisher
focusing on small business issues now serves over 6 million small
business owners, stakeholders and entrepreneurs annually throughout
North America.
Samsung never used to be a big name in film cameras but has become one of the leading brands in digital photography. Ironically, its popular Galaxy smartphones are helping to dig a grave for point-and-shoot cameras – including Samsung’s own. In response, the company is following an idustry trend by focusing on “compact-system cameras,” which feature interchangeable lenses and promise the performance of a grown-up SLR in a small and light-weight body.
The NX300 is Samsung’s flagship model of this kind, aiming at ambitious photographers who want more than just megapixels. Because sure, even smartphones snap pictures now that are big enough to print a real-life wallpaper – but if you want a good zoom, play with depth-of-field, and generally go beyond the simple “click!” you may still want to consider a real camera with extra talents.
Or so the makers hope. But they’re willing to meet you half-way: if you like to post your favorite shots on the Internet this very second, straight from the camera, the NX300 can play along. Wi-Fi Internet is built in, and Samsung claims that its camera’s specialty is to “shoot fast, share faster.” True? Well, let’s see… (more…)
Samsung NX300 Camera Review original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Dell has been manufacturing a number of ultrabooks and tablets over the past couple of years, with its hybrid tablet notebook announced, the XPS 12, this time last year. Several months passed since the Dell XPS 12 was first announced, but the notebook finally launched during this year’s Computex, although it just missed the Haswell bandwagon. Dell knows how important Intel’s Haswell processor is, which is why they refreshed the Dell XPS 12 to now feature it shortly after the notebook was released.
The Dell XPS 12 is the company’s latest hybrid tablet notebook offering as it now features Intel’s 4th generation Core processors, NFC ability as well as an improved battery life. These upgraded features come in addition to its 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, a 400-nit 12.5-inch 1920 x 1080 touch display as well as its unique flip-hinge design. The Dell XPS 12 certainly looks like an interesting hybrid on paper, so let’s get down to the business of seeing what this notebook is really made of. (more…)
Dell XPS 12 (2013) Review original content from Ubergizmo. 
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This news story is breaking so as soon as you read it, this issue may
have been resolved or might still be an ongoing "Chicken Little"
morality tale. Our blog will keep you posted with updates throughout the
day.
The Surface RT was Microsoft’s brassy if ultimately flawed attempt to do a cannonball into the placid, iPad and Kindle-dominated tablet pool. It didn’t quite work out. With the Surface 2, Microsoft is taking the opportunity to say "No guys, but really," with a blistering, scary sort of confidence.
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The original Surface Pro
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Google’s Chromebook line is often maligned as inexpensive but underpowered or, in the case of the Pixel
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Seriously, how big is this parking lot? You’ve been walking for a good five minutes and your company’s office building is still just a speck on the horizon. But with this self-propelled pintail, that hike through the car park will sail right by.
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I have something to get off my chest: I live in New Jersey, so by definition that makes me a “Jersey driver”. I’ve never thought of myself as the sort of manically aggressive road warrior that befits the stereotype (and I’d argue that Pennsylvania drivers are way worse), but Y Combinator-backed Automatic’s Link dongle begs to differ. It’s been plugged into my car for the better part of two weeks now, dutifully tracking all my hard stops, all my hasty starts at green lights, and all the times I’ve perhaps pushed the car a bit too hard.
And the verdict is in: I’m exactly what I thought I wasn’t. I’m a stereotypical New Jersey driver. As the old adage goes, the first step to recovering is admitting you have a problem, and Automatic’s neat little dongle + app combo has helped me to realize just that.
But let’s back up a moment — how does this all work? Since 1996, every car that’s been sold in the United States has what’s called an OBD-II port nestled in it somewhere. Odds are good you don’t even know what it looks like (it’s a little trapezoidal thing with 16 pins) or where it is. It’s there so mechanics and car dealers can troubleshoot automotive issues by connecting a computer to the thing, and the Automatic team has whipped up a consumer device that pops in there to monitor your car’s speed, fuel injection rate, and more.
There are a few extra bits in there that make the Link dongle more than your average diagnostics tool. The accelerometer means that it can detect sudden stops and starts, and there’s a tiny speaker built into the that audibly alerts you in those moments.
It sounds like sort of a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Consistently slamming your brakes isn’t doing your car any favors, but the dongle is much more sensitive than that — seemingly normal stops can trigger the alert which sort of forces you to reconsider how normal your driving really is. The dongle also beeps at you when you’re too quick off the line (something I’m apparently guilty of way too often), and when you push your car over 70 miles per hour. In the end, you’re left with a gadget that’s capable of giving you realtime driving feedback while you tool around town (and it’s much more pleasant than having a backseat driver bark at you).
Of course, the (currently iOS-only) app plays a big role in all this too as the Link connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. You can’t glance down at your phone in-the-moment for immediate status updates — the only feedback you’re getting while driving is those audio notifications — but it dutifully chews on all of that data post-drive to show you your route and how many of those driving faux pas you made on the road. It also displays a rough estimate of your fuel economy, and I do mean rough — some quick, back of the napkin calculations gave me figures that weren’t always as peachy as the ones the app displayed. Automatic says this is a known issue though, and they’re apparently working on improving accuracy.
All of those metrics get boiled down into a single weekly score so users can easily track their progress over time.
And thankfully, there are some features that I haven’t had to use yet. In the event that your car throws up a Check Engine light, the Automatic app is capable of showing some detailed information about what may be causing it and how to potentially fix it. And if you’ve got Crash Alert enabled, the Link will be on the lookout for the sort of incredibly hard stops that usually signify, well, a crash. In the event it detects one, it collects your location information using your phone’s GPS and attempts to send it along to the local authorities by way of Automatic’s backend servers. It’s exclusive to the U.S. and still very much in beta though — Automatic admits that at this point there’s no guarantee that any nearby police stations or fire departments will respond.
There are, as always, some caveats to be aware of. While years and years worth of cars physically have an OBD-II port somewhere, the Automatic Link can’t decipher the data from every single one of them (you can check your car’s compatibility here).
That crucial Bluetooth connection presents some problems of its own too — if you’re the type of person who relies on Bluetooth to stream your music through your car stereo or access your contact list on the go, you may to have to decide which of these experiences means more to you. Then again, there’s a fair to middling chance that if your car came with Bluetooth functionality out of the gate, it’s already going to replicate some of the Automatic Link’s more basic features.
And you know what? That’s just fine. My car rolled off an assembly line in 2006, which was apparently the model year just before the one when neato options like AUX inputs and in-dash fuel economy gauges became standard fare. A drill and a $15 gewgaw from Amazon fixed that first problem, and now a $99 gadget + app combination have taken care of the latter for me (and then some). On some level though, I just wish the Automatic system did more — I’d love a web view that lets me dig into all this information in aggregate, and some maintenance reminders every few thousand miles since I’m probably running a little behind on that too.
Now this is all well and good, but there’s a bigger question to tackle: am I actually a better driver?
Well, I’m getting there. The thing to remember about Automatic is that it isn’t going to magically make you a more conscientious driver — you have to work at it. The name of the game is behavior modification through better data. In that sense the Automatic dongle is a sort of Fitbit for your car, a reasonably inexpensive doodad that shines a little more light on what you put your car (and your wallet) through on a weekly basis. Exactly what you do with that data is entirely up to you.
In my case, I’ve slowly grown to be a bit more thoughtful on road in the two or so weeks since I first jammed the dongle in my ODB port. That’s not to say that I’ve given up my leadfoot tendencies completely — sometimes you just need to crank things up a bit — but I’m noticeably more cognizant of how fast I’m going at any given moment. It’s even gotten to the point where I finding myself driving as close to 70 MPH as possible without actually going over, even when the Automatic isn’t plugged in.
It’s also not meant to be a replacement for more robust, capable ODB scanners. Needless to say, dyed-in-the-wool car buffs may not find enough value here to warrant a purchase. The same goes for people who are more than happy putting pedals to the metal on a regular basis — chances are they’re not planning to change their behavior very soon. But for cost-conscious consumers? Or people like me who actively want to change their driving style? The Automatic experience is worth the asking price, and with any luck it’ll only get better with time.
Video production by Steve Long
When I was a kid I was amazed by advances in technology. I went to a friend’s house when I was in fifth grade and his father had a PC – an IBM PC, I believe – with a built-in hard drive. We loaded King’s Quest and Colossal Cavern in seconds and he even had a menu of apps that you could select by tapping a key. As a kid who grew up with tapes and later floppy disks, this was close to magic.
A few years later I got a dot-matrix printer and Print Shop. Up went the long, flowery banners (“Welcome home, Mom!”) and birthday cards. Fast-forward further and I was using a primitive desk top publishing app to make flyers for my “Acoustic Folk Poetry” band that I started with my buddy Rick. Then I mastered CDs, made DVDs of my wedding, and fired up a 3D printer that could churn out copies of my head. All of those were like making love outside Hogwarts – surprisingly close to magic. That changed over the past decade – I was probably most excited by the iPhone – but almost everything we see these days is an iteration of the old CPU/screen/input system paradigm. Nothing since has truly amazed me. Until now.
Now we have real magic. It’s here. It’s not always perfect nor is it quite consumer-ready but the $1,400 Makerbot Digitizer is one of the coolest things I’ve seen this decade.
The Digitizer is essentially a turntable, a webcam, and some lasers. It uses Makerbot’s conveyor app to control the motion of objects on the turntable and then scans the points generated by the laser during the rotation. It works best with light, matte objects like ceramics, clays, and non-glossy plastics but with a little glare-reducing baby powder you can scan just about everything as long as its taller than two inches and small enough to fit on the platform.
To scan you simply load up the Digitizer software – an excellent, intuitive system that should be a model for all 3D printer and scanner makers – and, once you calibrate the system using an included, laser-cut object, you press Digitize. Nine minutes later you have a scan. The system interpolates missing information which can be good or bad, depending on the lighting, and then asks if you want to take a photo of your object. You then slide away a filter over the camera to reveal the bare webcam, shoot your, photo, and then share or print your object.
The process is addicting. When you put one object on you want to put another and another. Sharing these objects is an amazing feeling – it’s essentially the equivalent of dot-matrix teleportation. It will be amazing, then, when we get to the laser printed version of object teleportation.
Are the scans perfect? No. Because of vagaries of materials, reflections, and ambient light a perfect scan is impossible. This scan, for example is far from a perfect replica of the original statute. The statue itself has tarnished to an even, matte finish but even with some effort I couldn’t get all of the detail. The Digitizer is like a mimeograph machine rather than a true scanner. It grabs only the important parts of an image and reproduces the rest the best it can. For example, the scanner couldn’t tell what to do with the lens on this OMO camera, below, and so essentially gave up, filling it in. I was able to scan the lens by turning the camera on its side.
Take a look at this statue scan. I printed it fairly small just as a test but it grabbed a certain amount of detail on the statue but elided quite a bit more. In the end I created an approximate, not an exact, copy of the statue. Or take this beer stein for example. The handle sort of disintegrated but I suspect I could have gotten a far better scan if I dusted it down in baby powder. Scanning requires work and trade-offs but, in the end, you get approximately what you’re looking for.
Is the system perfect? Yes and no. When it works it works wonderfully. However, I’ve had some minor hang-ups in OS X that the Makerbot team as seen and is working on fixing. That said, I got a good scan 95% of the time and most of the errors were my own fault caused by excitement or ignorance of good scanning technique. You can see more of my scans on Thingiverse.
At $1,400 the system is also expensive. While I didn’t take apart the case it’s clear that the R&D and engineering that went into this – plus the fact that it was made entirely in Brooklyn – add a premium price to what is essentially a solid webcam and some Class 1 lasers. The hardcore among you will scoff at the price but when you want your scanner to work the first time, right out of the box, this product can’t be beat. There are better, far more expensive scanners out there but this hits the sweet spot at the intersections affordability, usability, and utility.
Can you do this all yourself? Absolutely. A Kinect, a webcam, some lasers, and even your iPhone can create passable 3D models. But nothing I’ve seen can consistently produce quality results in a package that is nearly foolproof and surprisingly robust. I could imagine an archeologist taking this device to digs, an artist setting this up in a studio, or an engineer using this to model aerodynamics. It’s tough enough to withstand rough treatment by kids and adults and the quality, while in no way perfect, is close enough for the vast majority of uses.
What the Digitizer gets right is that it hides away all of the vagaries of 3D scanning and just leaves the magic. The system itself looks like something Jeff Bridges would use in Tron and the lasers, the ticking turntable, and the black case make it clear that this object is from the near future. This product leaves almost every other home computing advance in the dust and I feel like a kid again, amazed at hard drives, printers, and the ability to create things out of thin air.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
