Hasta La Gadget!

Tagstand, the Y Combinator-backed startup intent on taking NFC mainstream, is announcing a partnership with mobile accessories maker TYLT in advance of this year’s CES in Las Vegas. The deal involves three new products, manufactured by TYLT, which use Tagstand’s NFC technology: TUNZ, a portable Bluetooth speaker; CAPIO, a universal smartphone mount for the car; and TAGZ, which are the NFC stickers you can program and place anywhere.

The products are designed to work with Tagstand’s Android application, NFC Task Launcher, which previously was made to work with NFC tags, like those Tagstand offers in its tag store. Users configure their NFC tags to perform particular tasks when tapped – like automatically activating Bluetooth, launching their navigation app or music app on their phone, connect to Wi-Fi networks, change ringer volumes, check-in on social networks, and more. The Task Launcher app has now been downloaded over 250,000 times, according to Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar.

With the new products from TYLT, however, some of those use cases are now available built into the hardware devices themselves. For example, the CAPIO phone dock can now be configured to turn on your Bluetooth connection to sync with your car, launch your favorite mapping app or start playing music just by placing the phone in the mount.

The TUNZ speaker can be tapped to start playing music, and perform other tasks, like connecting to Wi-Fi, for example. So hopefully, a better alternative to the poorly received Nexus Q? (At least it looks like a speaker, not a ball.) The speaker includes a built-in noise canceling microphone that lets you switch from music to hands-free calling, and offers up to 20 hours of battery life. You can get 30 hours if you play the volume at half status, the company claims.

Although NFC doesn’t have widespread adoption in the U.S. at this point in terms of mobile payments – the technology it is often most associated with – Tagstand has been betting big that its integration into new Android phones will pave the way for startups that take advantage of the technology in other ways. TYLT is also investing in NFC, with plans to ship at least 100,000 NFC chips in six products in 2013. (In addition to the speaker and smartphone dock, they have four others on the roadmap. Some of the products were previously announced, but Tagstand’s partnership was not.)

Taggar adds that Tagstand’s NFC Task Launcher app has now seen over 10 million actions executed, which is up from the 1 million it was reporting back in June 2012. At the time, the company had just transitioned the app from a $2 paid version to a free offering, so the drop in price (to zero), has likely helped increase adoption.

As have Samsung’s spicy and snarky marketing of its own NFC implementation, S-Beam, I might add.

The new NFC-enabled products will debut at CES, and TUNZ will be available for purchase immediately. CAPIO and TAGZ will launch next month.

Amazon has inked another content licensing deal to beef up its Prime Instant Video streaming and download service for members of its pay monthly Prime service. The deal is with A+E Networks and means Amazon Prime members will be able to access prior seasons of “popular series” from the A&E, bio, HISTORY and Lifetime channels — including Pawn Stars, Storage Wars and Dance Moms.

The ecommerce behemoth said it plans to continue to beef up the Prime Instant Video service by adding more content, noting that it has more than doubled the content offering in a year. Back in August Amazon added ESPN’s 30 for 30 series – and at that time said the total number of movies and TV episodes available via Prime Instant Video was 22,000. That figure has now risen to more than 33,000.

Prime Instant Video content can be streamed on Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD tablet — or any of the “hundreds of compatible devices” also supported, including Apple’s iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Roku, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii U.

Amazon’s release follows below:

Previous Seasons of Popular Shows from A&E, bio, HISTORY and Lifetime now available on Prime Instant Video — all Prime Instant Videos can be viewed by Prime members on Kindle Fire and hundreds of other connected devices

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon.com, Inc. today announced a content licensing agreement with A+E Networks to add prior seasons of popular series from A&E, bio, HISTORY and Lifetime to the Prime Instant Video service. Prime Instant Video now features more than 33,000 movies and TV episodes for Amazon Prime members to stream instantly, at no additional cost, on Kindle Fire HD or any of the hundreds of compatible Amazon Instant Video devices, including iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Roku, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii U. To start watching Prime Instant Video, visit www.amazon.com/PIV.

“In a year we have more than doubled the Prime Instant Video selection for our Prime members,” said Brad Beale, Director of Digital Video Content Acquisition for Amazon. “We remain focused on adding TV episodes and movies to Prime Instant Video that we think our customers will enjoy. A+E Networks has some of the most popular shows on television and we know our customers will love streaming the A+E content with Prime Instant Video.”

The deal with A+E Networks will bring Prime customers more TV episodes from some of their highest rated television programming including Pawn Stars, Storage Wars and Dance Moms, which are also available for purchase through Amazon Instant Video.

About Amazon Instant Video

Amazon Instant Video is a digital video streaming and download service that offers Amazon customers the ability to rent, purchase or subscribe to a huge catalog of videos. Customers can choose from more than 145,000 titles to purchase or rent and content ranges from new release movies to classic favorites, major television shows, entire seasons, or even day after air TV. Prime Instant Video is Amazon’s video subscription offer—it includes more than 33,000 movies and TV episodes selected from the full assortment available at Amazon Instant Video. This subscription offer allows US Prime customers to stream as many titles from Prime Instant Video as they like, at no additional cost.

About Prime

Amazon Prime is an annual membership program for $79 a year that offers customers unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of items including books, home and garden products, electronics, video games, clothing, and much more. Amazon Prime members also get access to unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes and access to hundreds of thousands of books to borrow for free, as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates from a Kindle device. Customers who receive free Prime shipping benefits through our Amazon Student or Amazon Mom programs can upgrade to an annual paid membership to receive Amazon Prime’s digital benefits.

About A+E Networks™

Looking backwards, the automobile of today looks almost superintelligent. While some of us may have expected (read: hoped for) the flying car by 2013 and, sure, the internal combustion engine still reigns, the majority of vehicles today are basically computers on wheels. The average car today has around 50 microprocessors, give or take. But, given how quickly automotive technology is advancing, it’s clear that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Hell, California recently legalized road-testing of autonomous cars, and Sergey Brin thinks self-driving cars will be on public roads in the next five years.

Today, Cisco and NXP Semiconductors announced their intention to join the smart car bandwagon and help push automotive technology forward. The companies this morning announced a dual investment in Cohda Wireless, an Australian developer of hardware and software solutions for connected vehicles that allow cars to wirelessly communicate with one another (and with infrastructure) to prevent collisions — among other things.

The investment and strategic partnership essentially aims to bring the “Internet of Everything” to the automotive industry in the hopes of building a safer driving experience, reducing traffic congestion, collisions, runaway Priuses, curbing bad drivers and so on. By making car communication systems faster and more responsive — in a word, smarter — Cohda believes it can potentially prevent over 80 percent of crash scenarios, reducing injuries and fatalities on the road along the way.

In turn, Cohda is also enabling so-called “car-to-infrastructure” communication, which, in conjunction with in-car apps, attempt lower greenhouse gas emissions by changing traffic patterns, alerting drivers of hazards, like oncoming collisions, nearby out-of-control vehicles and by re-routing them to avoid traffic congestion. Via radio technology and smart sensors, car-to-infrastructure comms can enable cars to communicate with smart devices, allowing traffic signals to alert cars that the upcoming light is about to change, for example. Saving you from embarrassment and from causing a 10-car pileup because you were scanning your playlist and didn’t notice the change.

Of course, to work at scale these types of connected-car communications require sophisticated and secure data exchange between moving vehicles, whether in the city or in Podunk — in other words, in a variety of conditions. Yet, while the technology has an array of potential applications and implications, these inter-communications systems are naturally more effective the more vehicles (and anything else for that matter) integrate the technology.

So, to help get the tech on the roads, Cohda has enlisted a dozen European carmakers which have agreed to install its solutions into various lines beginning in 2015 and is currently testing integration in Detroit with eight U.S. carmakers.

While the companies remained silent on the size of their investment in Cohda, it likely isn’t chump change and was enough to bring three mature companies (and two giants) together in a strategic partnership with plans to collaborate in an effort to bring the solutions to market.

While NXP brings its semiconductor and chip tech that’s used in smart automotive, industrial, mobile and wireless applications (it’s also the co-inventor of NFC, along with Sony) and Cohda brings the software and hardware that make advanced radio communication possible, Cisco is leveraging its networking prowess to help supply the Internet. Over the last few years, Cisco has become increasingly interested in enabling the wired car, even creating a separate division dedicated to investing in and developing connected vehicle technologies.

In conversation with the WSJ, NXP’s general manager of car entertainment Torsten Lehmann said that NXP and Cisco put in a lot of due diligence and both concluded that “Cohda’s technology is by far the best.” Throwing their weight behind Cohda, the networking and semiconductor giants are on a mission to help the startup bring its technology to market. And for drivers, that should be great news — even if they have to wait.

More in the announcement here.

Top image source: U.S. Department of Transportation

Nokia’s been awfully fond of slapping its high-end hardware into polycarbonate bodies, but that trend may soon come to an end if a new report from The Verge holds true. According to unnamed sources within Nokia, one of the Finnish phone company’s new top-tier Windows Phones (codenamed “Catwalk”) will be clad in lightweight aluminum instead of the usual colorful plastics.

Of course, the key words there are “one of” — The Verge’s Tom Warren points out that two Windows Phones are being prepped for a launch sometime in 2013. At this point there’s still little in the way of hardware specifics, though the so-called Catwalk isn’t expected to be a great leap over the existing 920.

That Nokia would consider a shift in design isn’t a huge shock — aluminum bodies could help Nokia keep the weight of future smartphones down — but it does fly in the face of some of the company’s earlier crowing. Shortly before Nokia’s most recent Lumia launches, it posted a neat little piece on the effort that went into crafting the devices on its Conversations blog where it noted that the polycarbonate gave its phones “a human touch.” What’s more, Nokia has noted more than once that those eye-popping colors that have become a hallmark of its Lumia Windows Phones were only really possible by using plastics instead of metal, so it remains to see how (if at all) Nokia’s colorful design language will be tweaked as a result.

As a long-time runner and a recent recipient of a Nike+ SportWatch GPS I can safely say I’ve been bitten by the exercise data bug. The satisfaction of uploading your latest round of physical exertion and transforming it into digital bits and bytes that can be analysed and compared against past performance is pretty darn cool. But the Nike+ SportWatch is far from perfect. The biggest issue I have encountered so far is patchy and/or sluggish GPS linking (a problem flagged up by my TC colleague John Biggs in his 2011 review).

If the GPS sensor takes its time to connect it keeps you grounded in your running shoes waiting for the digital hook-up in the sky to get on with it. And if the connection fails entirely (which has happened to me on a run in a rural part of Wales), far from motivating you to get moving the SportWatch makes you feel there’s no point in working out since your effort will go unrecorded and therefore wasted (this is not, I should add, an attitude I used to have before owning the watch — so it’s a perfect example of the double-edged nature of technology).

Enter Leikr: a sports watch that wants to do things better — including by making the GPS link process faster, thanks to “a snapping fast custom made GPS system” which includes downloading GPS almanac data to the watch to help it “fix on the satellites faster” and a custom GPS antenna that is “fine tuned” for Leikr, rather than using a standard ceramic GPS antenna module.

I can’t testify to its speed, since I haven’t had a chance to test it, but speedy GPS linking is one of the advantages being touted as part of the Leikr Kickstarter pitch. Other sports watch annoyances the team behind Leikr want to overcome include overly bulky devices, irritatingly counterintuitive interfaces, and small, non-colour screens.  They are undoubtedly aiming for the pro, endurance end of the sports watch market, rather than the Fitbit/Jawbone UP casual activity tracker masses but don’t let that put you off. You are serious about your running right?

“During our training we have tried different GPS watches and we have never been completely satisfied with them: too bulky, too difficult to operate, slow in getting the GPS signal, small screens and little to show:  honestly quite boring stuff,” the team writes. ”We were looking for the perfect device to support our training and we could not find it. Last year we decided to take the chance and realize our long wanted dream of a training GPS watch that every athlete would desire.”

Leikr — which incidentally means ”game, sport, play” in old Nordic (the company being founded in Denmark) – has a two inch colour display (with a resolution of 320×240 pixels) — meaning there’s enough space on screen to display multiple data points simultaneously, such as time, speed, distance, calories, heart rate etc, or to show a map view that allows you to track your position as you run and see where the route is taking you. While the face of the watch is much larger than the average sports watch display, the thickness has been squeezed to 10.65mm to keep the overall bulk down. Gorilla Glass toughens it up, weight is around 55 grams, and run data syncs automatically over Wi-Fi when you’re back at your desk. There’s 8GB of on board storage for your maps and runs, and a 500Mhz engine inside. Battery life is reportedly up to 6 hours of active (GPS) use — long enough for an average runner to complete a marathon and still have juice to spare.  

Leikr’s maps are powered by OpenStreetMap, which the team claims is a first for this kind of gizmo (Nike+’s SportWatch GPS is powered by TomTom, for instance), while the watch integrates with social fitness tracker community Endomondo for analysing training, sharing and comparing with friends. The Leikr team isn’t just concerned with making the hardware though. On the software side, they will offer a portal where workouts and programs can be downloaded to the device — customised to your appropriate fitness level — and the team’s pitch talks about wanting to be there at every step of your training, from planning to executing to analysing.

So who’s building Leikr? No, it’s not Apple. But the core team does include some mobile expertise — specifically ex-Nokia talent, from Nokia’s now shuttered Copenhagen R&D lab, such as Lars Moeller, Director, R&D Management, who spent 12 years at Nokia R&D – bringing, in their words, “years of experience making the best in mobile devices” to the GPS watch space. The Leikr is Linux-based (the watch will be upgradeable via the Leikr portal as the software evolves) and also uses the (formerly Nokia owned) Qt application framework. “This solution allows us flexibility and reduced power consumption,” the team writes. “Our development team has years of experience developing on this framework.”

The Leikr Kickstarter goal is $250,000 — to bring the watch to the U.S. market initially. Currently the project has raised more than $23,500 with 29 days left to get funded. The first batch of 50 Leikrs offered at the lowest pledge rate to receive a watch ($149) has already sold out.