Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re a photographer, professional or hobbyist, you probably know that you can accumulate gear costs quickly. All those costs can be hard to keep track of, making it imperative that you get your stuff insured and/or protected against theft somehow. New site Lenstag wants to help with that.

The website already has users in more than 80 countries and is free to use. Photographers can get in on it by signing up with a simple email and password combo, and then you just start adding gear. Enter a make and model, and suggestions will appear allowing you to be specific. You also enter in your serial code, which the site requires photographic evidence of to verify. An actual person does the final verification, which is why Lenstag isn’t your average possession database.

Lenstag having this information means you can give eBay buyers more peace of mind, and then actually transfer ownership to other Lenstag members. You can also report stolen gear, which allows people to look it up when they recover or find stolen gear, including police departments and private buyers shopping on Craigslist, for instance. Additionally, every piece of gear gets an auto-generate page designed to float up in search results, so that if someone is checking out a perspective search on a particular model of lens or camera with your serial number, they’ll see a notice that it’s stolen and get a form to submit a report.

The site introduced a new feature that lets you make a temporary verification link for their online sales of used camera goods, which is handy since you don’t want the listing hanging around once the gear is already sold. In general, it’s an amazing service and one that requires nothing more than a small amount of extra effort for a lot of extra peace of mind.

Lenstag founder Trevor Sehrer, whose day job is in mobile engineering with Google, told me that he plans on doing outreach to form official partnerships with police services soon, after first focusing on building out additional user-facing features. The Finnish Police have already endorsed Lenstag without any prompting, he notes, so it should make sense to start with them. When asked about revenue, however Sehrer demurred.

“I’m much more interested in solving the problem of camera and lens theft with Lenstag than making money,” he said. “The site doesn’t cost a lot of time or money to operate since users only need it when their set of gear changes and the verification system can scale quickly to as many verifiers as I need to get through any backlog.”

He is eventually looking at partnering with insurance providers, but the aim would be to pass on discounts to members of up to 20 percent, not necessarily to make revenue for the site itself.

As a photographer, I find this a very welcome resource, especially given its design and human-powered verification. I can imagine a time when asking for a Lenstag verification will be standard practice when buying and selling used gear, and I’m sure other photographers would appreciate the peace of mind that could come along with that.

The much-anticipated Leap Motion Controller began shipping to pre-order customers today, as reviews of the input device hit the web. The startup behind the controller has done an impressive job raising interest in the novel gadget, and sold an incredible amount of pre-orders to early adopters. But reviews so far have been mostly lukewarm, citing experiences that don’t necessarily live up to the hype.

The Leap Motion controller went back to the drawing board and put off its wide launch to spend more time in a wider beta in order to get the consumer experience right. It sounds like they were focusing on the right area with that effort, as most reviews say the Leap Motion experience is a little underwhelming, or at least something that’s an admirable distraction but not useful for truly productive usage.

Leap Motion has done a good job of getting a decent selection and range of apps in the Airspace dedicated software store for its device at launch, so it has that going for it. But the problem here appears to be that all of the apps leave reviewers feeling more like they’ve just experienced a gimmick, than the next generation of computer interaction.

What Leap Motion can do now (scrolling and paging through apps and virtual environments, completing next and back functions) is a far cry from what it will likely eventually be able to do, however. The Leap Motion and devices like it are a long bet, and I think the companies behind them understand this; we’ll see a bit of what they’re capable of shown off in tech demos and current generation software, but what they’re offering is an entirely new paradigm for thinking about digital interaction. That means it’ll take time before developers wrap their head around what kind of software experience fits this mould.

Adapting Fruit Ninja or Google Earth to something like 3D gesture control is a simple enough process, one that’s opportunistic without being truly innovative. Some might say Leap Motion should’ve stayed in beta until it could begin to bring about the change needed to show its controller off to its full potential, but someone had to get the tech to market. It’ll grow accordingly, though I’m curious to see if consumer interest will be enough to sustain it through its awkward adolescence based on these initial, hopeful but ultimately reserved consumer-oriented reviews.

The OUYA Android gaming console has been met with mixed reviews. The console blew up on Kickstarter, and in the months leading up to its recent release, the hype has turned into slight concern over whether or not developers will build out its game library.

To answer that question, OUYA today announces the $1 million Free The Games Fund, which will match the funding amount received by developers on Kickstarter. So, if a developer is building an OUYA game and launches that game on Kickstarter between August 9, 2013 and August 10, 2014, OUYA will match whatever funds are received on the crowd-funding platform between $50,000 and $250,000.

According to the press release, OUYA currently has over 20,000 registered game developers. That’s up from 12,000 in May, around the time that OUYA closed its $15 million funding round.

Here’s the official word from CEO Julie Uhrman in the release:

There are two reasons why OUYA is on retail store shelves today: we had an innovative idea to build an affordable and open game console for the television, and we found fans who supported our idea and provided the funds to make it happen. Since then, we’ve seen dozens of great games launch on Kickstarter, and now we are in the enviable position of being able to give back AND secure the best, exclusive games for OUYA.

OUYA reminds us that some of the console’s most popular games, like Fist of Awesome (I Fight Bears) and Saturday Morning: RPG (Mighty Rabbit Studios), enjoyed their inception on Kickstarter.

Hopefully, the Free The Games Fund will ensure a steady stream of awesome content for OUYA gamers.

The $99 OUYA gaming console is available for retail purchase now.

Smartphone selfies come in a very limited variety of flavors: the arms-length shots that make your head look distended and blurry mirror pics. There are several self-timer apps out there, but it’s still difficult to snap natural-looking self-portraits or spontaneous group photos, especially if you are also trying to wrangle small children and pets. Now on Kickstarter, Shuttr is a tiny Bluetooth remote shutter release for iOS and Android devices created by Hong Kong-based Muku Labs to give smartphone photographers more control. It’s already met its funding goal, but the remote control, which starts shipping in fall, is still available for pledges starting from $29.

Shuttr was created by Hong Kong engineer Kevin Leung. When Leung was a small child, his family couldn’t afford a camera and as a result he has no family photos taken before he was a toddler. Leung’s mother died when he was a teenager, which makes him even more determined to capture as many snapshots of his wife and young daughter as possible.

Leung was frustrated when he couldn’t find a smartphone remote shutter release that he liked. Talking to his friends made him realize that there were plenty of other people who want to take better group shots and selfies.

“I quit my job to build the remote shutter that I believed was missing in the market,” Leung told me by email. The Oxford MBA graduate teamed up with electronic engineer Sea Zheng, industrial designer Boge Chen, production engineer Tom Zhao and logistic expert Scott Moore, and spent a year developing Muku Shuttr.

At 6-mm thickness, Shuttr is small enough to hide in your hand while posing for photos and can be stored on a keychain. The remote’s range is around 30 feet and no line of sight is needed, which means you can use Shuttr while it’s in your pocket.

Shuttr differentiates itself from competing products by manufacturers such as Belkin and Satechi in several ways. It’s smaller, less expensive and usually doesn’t need an app to pair with smartphones (though a Shuttr app is available for older versions of iOS or certain Android devices such as the new HTC One). The remote control is compatible with all iOS devices, Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, Note 2 and Tab 10.1, LG Nexus 4 and many other Android 4.1+ devices with Bluetooth 3.0+. It also works with iOS apps Camera+ and 645 Pro so you can bypass the iPhone’s built-in camera.

“We did a lot of trial and error in testing almost all Bluetooth chipsets available to find the most compatible one, and fine-tune those firmware to maximize the compatibility and stability,” says Leung. “Shuttr is so rigorously tested in our approved modes we are confident that we can launch.”

Shuttr is the first product developed by Muku Labs, which Leung says will continue to create items that enhance the process of taking smartphone photos. The team is currently planning a line of snap-on lenses.

“We know that there are already lots of them in the market,” says Leung. “But we know that we can beat them by quality.”

Looks like we have a final chapter for Better Place, the Israel-based electric car tech startup that raised $786 million plus $50 million in debt, only to then file for bankruptcy in May: it has now been acquired by a group called Sunrise, headed by green-technology entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz and the Association for the Promotion of the Electric Car in Israel.

According to court filings, Sunrise is paying 18 million Israeli shekels ($5 million) for Better Place’s assets in Israel, and another 25 million shekels ($7 million) for its intellectual property, held by Better Place Switzerland. Sunrise was one of two bidders for the company, the other being a consortium including Success Parking Ltd. and U.S. electric car charging company Car Charging Group Inc.

It’s a whimper of an ending for a company that raised hundreds of millions, and many hopes, for its core business: a system that relied on smartgrid technology to create a network of battery swapping stations and other charging points for users of electric cars.

Speeding up battery charging, which typically can take anywhere from between 4 and 12 hours to charge on electric cars, could significantly spur the convenience factor of these vehicles, and help with consumer adoption. Better Place also had other ideas about how, with the rise of electric cars, power usage overall needed to be better managed.

But it seems that even if the vision was big, business was not. Creating a breakthrough technology that relies on industrial-scale overhauls is capital intensive. And there is the question of critical mass for electric car technology: apparently only 950 cars fitted with Better Place’s replaceable battery technology — the core of the business — were sold since 2012 (it looks like the only carmaker to sign on with Better Place was Renault).

Meanwhile, individual car companies like Tesla working on proprietary solutions are a sign that the space is perhaps still too fragmented and nascent for what Better Place had in mind.

Although the downward spiral from bankruptcy to bidding to eventual sale was swift, the writing was on the wall months before, when founder Shai Agassi was removed as CEO in October 2012.

New owners Sunrise are keeping 50 out of Better Place’s 85 remaining employees, and will operate 15 of its charging stations for a period of at least two years. It may not be complete curtains for all of Better Place’s efforts, depending on how Sunrise chooses to use the IP it purchased as well, but it’s not a great day for the wider ambition to move us away from fossil fuel consumption and towards more sustainable progress.