Hasta La Gadget!

Validity Sensors, the San Jose-based maker of fingerprint scanning sensors and authentication technology, announced today that it has closed $10 million of a $20 million series E financing round. (It will close the second half in the next month.) The investment was led by TeleSoft Partners, with participation from Validity’s previous investors, including Crossslink Capital, Panorama Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Venture Tech Associates. The round brings Validity’s total funding to $78.6 million.

While there are tons of security apps and password lockers that help keep mobile devices, computers and sensitive digital info secure, the prevailing form of authentication still comes in the form of good ole passwords and PINs. Of course, most people use the same password for multiple different accounts, or have a tendency to forget the complex ones login pages ask them to create.

As we’ve all learned, these forms of authentication are difficult to remember, ineffective and fairly easy to hack. With the exploding growth of mobile payment transactions and cloud-based services, new (or better) forms of security are needed to protect our data both in the cloud and on the go, especially considering the expected growth of mobile payments — and how frequently we’ll be using our phones to pay bills, receive coupons and coupons and location based offers etc in the next few years. That’s where Validity Sensors wants to enter the picture.

Validity and companies like it believe that, even with advances in multi-factor authentication technology (facial, voice, etc.), fingerprints are still the best and simplest way to verify identity. The company has developed fingerprint sensor tech that enables authentication, device login, access to digital and mobile wallets, password management, app launching and so on — for smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

In the future, this tech will move to allowing content control for home media usage and home automation and monitoring, and really access control to a wide range of things (namely robot butlers). Collectively, all these apps need a simple way to securely authenticate the user’s identity — that isn’t going away any time soon.

The company’s mobile fingerprint solution provides handset designers with a solution that can identify users, protect mobile payments and launch (and log user into) email, social networks, shopping and banking — just by swiping their finger. Partners can then integrate Validity’s technology in under-glass solutions or add it to home and power buttons on mobile devices and notebooks. Currently, Validity’s solutions support Android and Windows operating systems.

Since launching its products in 2008, Validity has shipped more than 30 million sensors to OEMs, focusing initially on PCs. More recently, it has turned its attention to the smartphone and tablet markets, and its new $20 million round will be used to support that push.

Another few potential up-sides for Validity? In May, the company nabbed the former head of PayPal’s mobile ecosystem, Sebastian Taveau, making him CTO.

Secondly, in July, Apple bought its largest competitor, AuthenTec, for $356 million. Among other things, AuthenTec is known for making fingerprint sensor chips that are embedded in computing devices to enhance security and identification — sounds familiar, right? Apple’s acquisition came about a month after the company had signed a deal with Samsung to become its security and device management partner for its Android devices.

By pushing more aggressively into the mobile space and bringing on capital from strategic, mobile and software investors, Validity is hoping for comparable outcome.

Depending on how you look at it, this is either the first floating four-wheeler, or the first jet ski with wheels. Either way, it’s awesome from just about any perspective.

The Quadski, as they say, comes from the same guy who created an amphibious car, called Aquada. His name is Alan Gibbs, and he was able to build himself a working prototype of the vehicle, but silly automotive laws in the U.S. (like, you know, required airbags) kept him from manufacturing the wheelie-boat on a large scale.

But the Quadski is different from the Aquada, as it functions more as a single-person vehicle — a hybrid between an ATV and a jet ski.

It can go 45mph on both land and water, which isn’t quite what you can see on some ATVs, but still respectable, and takes four seconds to switch between the sea and the earth. Oh, and pre-orders will open soon at the price of $40,000.

According to Gibbs, the company will move 1,000 units in the first year, high price point and all.

Click to view slideshow.

[via Core77]

Enough’s been said already about the iPhone 5′s purple flaring issue. It’s actually very common for modern-day optics systems, but long-time users aren’t really used to it.

So the folks at FotoDiox have brought a fix to the table: the CamHoodie case for iPhone 5.

The case greatly reduces the amount of purple lens flare both in stills and capturing video. It’s relatively simple in design, made of high-grade rubber and plastic.

Essentially, it’s a lens hood for the iPhone 5 camera lens, and it “provide[s] a little cocoon of protection from stray light rays entering the lens elements from the edges of the frame,” according to the product page.

Click to view slideshow.

That’s not to say it resolves the purple haze entirely, but it clearly makes a difference (just check out the videos below).

The CamHoodie is available for pre-order now for $24.95, with expected delivery date of October 30. Just in time for Halloween pics.

Take a look at the difference below:

Without:

With CamHoodie:

Just in case you aren’t caught up, Apple support responded to many purple flare complaints that this was normal and to angle the camera differently. Apple even gave an official response.

Hooray for the ecosystem!

It’s about that time. No longer just the source of hacking experiments for hobbyists, the Kinect is becoming a platform for real venture-backed companies.

3Gear Systems is a new startup among this wave of companies. The company is building a platform that uses the Kinect or other 3D cameras to detect hand movements and gestures for use with CAD software or in the medical industry.

“We can track the full expressiveness of your hands, your fingers and wrists and use it for applications,” said Robert Wang, who recently finished a PhD at MIT exploring computer vision and human computer interaction.

They have a set up, which costs about $330 to put together with parts off Amazon. It includes an aluminum frame that sits on top of your desk, plus two Kinect cameras for stereoscopic vision (you know, like how having two eyes is better for perceiving depth-of-field than one). Kinects aren’t necessary — other 3D cameras will do. But they’re popular and not that expensive.

With this set-up and 3Gear’s software platform, you can detect a person’s hand movements and either show them on screen or use them to manipulate 3D animations. 3Gear’s APIs take the raw 3D visual data from the Kinects and turns it into usable data about the movement of your hands. They’re available in C++ and Java, and C# and Python are coming.

Wang showed me a demo (which you can actually see below) where he put together some type of gun contraption on a computer screen with his hands. There are also medical applications where you can play with a human heart, turning it and going back and forth through it.

So 3Gear’s approach is to build a software platform instead of building one-off apps. They’re launching the company in the hope that other developers will play with 3Gear’s SDK and come up with interesting use cases. The SDK is in beta until the end of next month, and they plan to keep it free for hobbyists and researchers. If a larger company uses it (say one that makes more than $100,000 a year), they’ll have to work out a licensing fee on a case-by-case basis.

3Gear is backed by Manu Kumar’s K9 Ventures, Eric Chen at Uj Ventures, Sachin Rekhi, former Facebook engineering director and Dropbox VP of engineering Aditya Agarwal and Angellist’s Naval Ravikant.

There are a handful of other companies that are based off Microsoft’s Kinect including gaming company Zigfu, GestSure Technologies, which focuses on medical applications and YC’s Matterport, which lets people quickly scan indoor spaces. Microsoft also hosted a Kinect-themed accelerator.

Jolla, the plucky Finnish mobile startup that’s largely comprised of talent cast off by Nokia as it slimmed down its own software development operations (in favour of leaning on Microsoft’s), has announced it’s setting up an alliance that will back its forthcoming MeeGo-based OS — codenamed Sailfish and due to be ready for licensing in spring 2013 — and help speed the growth of an ecosystem around it.

Jolla’s release does not detail exactly who is involved in the alliance — beyond citing “leading players in the industry” — but we’ve asked for more details and will update if we hear back. The company also says it anticipates membership of the alliance growing — name-checking as possible partners “chipset vendors, OEM and ODM manufacturers, operators and retailers”.

The alliance will be contributing €200 million ($259 million) to expedite growth of the Sailfish ecosystem, according to Jolla — although it notes that this investment will come in gradually, rather than as immediate financial backing.

The alliance partners will be investing an estimated 200 million euros to ensure the success and rapid expansion of the new ecosystem. The 200M€ ecosystem financing will come in gradually from Jolla and as members join the alliance, which will include chipset vendors, OEM and ODM manufacturers, operators and retailers.

The alliance is being established in Hong Kong — which continues the nascent mobile-maker’s focus on China. Jolla hasn’t released any smartphones yet — or indeed other MeeGo-based devices — but back in July it signed a sales and distribution deal with Chinese mobile phone retailer D.Phone. It it is also establishing R&D operations in Hong Kong and elsewhere in China.

“China is a game changer in the technology industry,” said Jussi Hurmola, CEO of Jolla, in a statement. “The next big mobile change will come from China and Jolla wants to be enabling it. There are massive resources and competence to transport the whole industry.”

Jolla has chosen Cyberport Hong Kong to host the Sailfish alliance data centre — noting

The data centre is being established to host Sailfish’s infrastructure, data, productisation facilities and collaboration services. In addition, some of the upcoming ecosystem’s cloud services will be provided from there. The OS and UX are highly scalable and will support smartphones, tablets, televisions, automotive and other device classes.

MeeGo was formed back in 2010 by Nokia in partnership with Intel (merging their respective Maemo and Moblin Linux-based OS efforts) — but subsequently jettisoned by Nokia when it decided to focus on Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS as its primary smartphone platform.