It can be tough to shake the notion that art and technology are conflicting forces — that is, until you’re confronted by a concept that lives at the crossroads of these seemingly dissonant concepts. For this latest episode of the Engadget Show, we set up shop right there, in order to explore what it means when technology itself is a work of art. We’re starting things off at the New Museum on the Bowery in Manhattan, where Tim and Brian will be diving deep into the “Ghosts in the Machine” exhibition, to check out pieces like Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, a dome dreamed up in the mid-60s that foresaw a world in which the viewer is bombarded by visual stimuli. We’ll also discuss how the museum is harnessing the power of the web to open its offerings up well beyond its gallery doors.
We speak to the founder and principle players of comedy performance art group Improv Everywhere about the role technology has played in the rise of the group and some of its most famous (and infamous) pranks. As ever, we’re breaking out the Gadget Table to discuss the month’s latest and greatest (and not-so-greatest), including the iPhone 5, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, before Brian heads out to the private (annex) library of comedian-turned-deranged-billionaire John Hodgman to discuss how technology is impacting the publishing industry.
While we’re at it, we’ll be speaking with the producer and director of the classic film Baraka and its newly released spiritual sequel, Samsara and paying a visit to the gang at Breakfast New York, who have worked with the likes of Google and Conan O’Brien to turn advertising into art. All that and the introduction of our latest feature “Ask @hodgman.” Welcome to the new Engadget Show.
The Engadget Show 36: John Hodgman, iPhone 5, Improv Everywhere, Samsara and the New Museum originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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BEHIND THE SCENES w/ JOHN LEGUIZAMO: bit.ly Orange has an encounter with the bounciest character yet! FREE version of my video game Kitchen Carnage: iTunes: bit.ly Android: bit.ly MERCH: AO TOYS! bit.ly T-SHIRTS: jcp.is iPHONE/iPOD GAME: bit.ly iPAD GAME: bit.ly ANDROID GAME: bit.ly MUSIC: bit.ly FOLLOW ME: TWITTER: twitter.com FACEBOOK: facebook.com GOOGLE+: bit.ly MY WEBSITE: annoyingorange.com WATCH MY EPISODES! http CREATED BY: DANEBOE: youtube.com DANEBOE GAMING CHANNEL: youtube.com DANEBOE 2ND CHANNEL: youtube.com Video Rating: 4 / 5
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Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.
Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $ 7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.
Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.
“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.
The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.
“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.
The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”
The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.
Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $ 50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.
Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.
So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!
Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)
“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”
If you live in the UK, and were thinking “If only I could get my broadband from the same place I get my crystal tumbler set” then maybe now you can. Department store John Lewis, a favorite for wedding lists, furniture and homeware is branching out into the British ISP game. The standard package will be £11 a month (not including line rental,) offering “up to” 16Mb speeds and a 20GB data cap. More eager users can pay and extra £7 to remove that download limit. Both bundles benefit from a free phone support, no activation fee and, of course, wireless router. Sound like your kind of deal? Head down to the source link, or past the haberdashery section to find out more.
UK department store John Lewis launches broadband service, get in on the ground floor originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Apr 2012 06:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cut the Rope Guide, free on Android: bit.ly www.facebook.com www.mahalo.com Check out our other Smackdown Vs. Raw 2011 videos: www.youtube.com Mahalo Video Games Team Episode 1: www.youtube.com Check out these related Mahalo Video Game Walkthroughs: Call of Duty: Black Ops Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Kirby’s Epic Yarn Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Fallout: New Vegas Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com DJ Hero 2 Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Medal of Honor Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Fifa 2011: www.mahalo.com Amnesia: The Dark Descent Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Castlevania: Lord of Shadows Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Front Mission Evolved Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Dead Rising 2 Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Halo: Reach Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Metroid: Other M Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Red Dead Redemption Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com StarCraft 2 Walkthrough: www.mahalo.com Check out these Mahalo Video Games Specialty Videos: Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies First Attempt: www.youtube.com Kirby’s Epic Bleep: www.youtube.com Enslaved Journey to the West Review: www.youtube.com Sonic 4 Review: www.youtube.com Fallout New Vegas: Failout: www.youtube.com DJ Hero 2 Beginner Mode with John Mahalo: www.youtube.com Dead Rising 2 Review: www.youtube.com Halo Bleep: www.youtube.com Dead Rising 2 Blanka Compilation Montage: www.youtube.com LOTR Aragorn’s Quest Review: www.youtube.com Check out these Mahalo How-To Playlists: How To … Video Rating: 4 / 5
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Diggin’ the hair, bro.
This is a statue spotted in a mall in Seoul, South Korea (of course it was) of Hulk about to pop every blood vessel in his big, green body straining on the can. I’m honestly surprised to see he wipes with something as soft as newspaper, I would have guessed he used sandpaper or just a handful of broken glass. “Jesus — he’s not The Thing!” Good point. So, who else sees the glaring problem with this picture? “He chose a shitter with no toilet tank?” Exaaaaaaactly. That turd is going NOWHERE.
Incredible Hulk on the Toilet Statue Smashing an O-Ring [obviouswinner]
Thanks to khz, who’s far more disgusting on the can if you can even believe that.
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“About three years,” says AppNinjas CEO John Waldron, when I asked him how long his group of companies have been providing mobile payments solutions to merchants. Three years. That makes them tribal elders when it comes to the nascent arena of mobile payment acceptance. When I say group of companies, I mean the conglomerate of AppNinjas and MerchantFocus whose services work together to enable Swipe—yet another solution out there that lets you accept credit cards with a mobile device. See my video demo and interview with John below for more details.
We first let you know about Swipe last year during the acquisition of AppNinjas by MerchantFocus and Inner Fence. Since then their iOS app—which now uses a provided card reader to enable merchants to accept credit card payment via mobile devices—has picked up some steam. It will invariably invite comparisons to systems developed by Square, Intuit and AprivaPay among others. Truth be told, there are many companies out there doing this kind of thing. Within retail environments, Apple is the early and most visible leader at accepting credit cards via mobile devices, however even traditional brick and mortar stores like Nordstrom and The Gap are piloting their own scenarios using hardware like the Linea Pro by Infinite Peripherals and others. Apart from the in-store retail experience, Square still seems to have captured the most name recognition for being able to enable “in-the-field” credit card transactions (mostly because of their fast account set-up, which eliminates the need for a traditional merchant account) however small businesses that already have merchant accounts and their slightly better transaction rates still have other options like the previously mentioned Intuit GoPayment solution, AprivaPay and now Swipe by AppNinjas, based right here in beautiful Columbus, OH.
Swipe works as you might expect; you plug a free mag stripe reader into the bottom of your iPhone or iPod Touch (Android coming soon) and use their $ 0.99 app to accept credit cards, sign and email receipts. Easy-peasy.
Things to consider:
Customer Service – John characterized one of the company’s biggest benefits to merchants as customer service. In our video interview, he indicatated that AppNinjas strive to provide a high level of customer service with regard to transactional needs.
Rate – You get a low rate for your interchange fees at around 1.7%. Therefore, the more volume you are doing, the more this scenario might make sense.
Fees – While there are no setup fees there are monthly fees to have a merchant account with AppNinjas. This is not unusual for merchant account providers and again, depending on your volume, could be a really small price to pay for the Customer Service.
Set Up – You fill out a few forms online and should be up and running in two days (or whenever your reader gets to you in the mail). There will be at least one phone call that takes place for security purposes.
NFC – This is an obvious question and John and I discussed this a bit offline. As a processor, he says they are planning for integration when it makes sense to do so (probably whenever enough issuers are on board to cause a demand). He sees small merchant adoption of NFC being 3-5 years out. I tend to agree with this. Even though there have been many “announcements” lately within the sphere of large retailers considering NFC for enabling mobile transactions—Google Wallet, ISIS, etc—anyone in the payments industry will tell you there are still many practical features and value propositions missing from this ideal scenario. It’s still a few years out.
Seeing another processing service like Swipe come to market…what means to me, systemically, is that mobile payments systems are becoming part of the norm. Companies already in the payment processing business are seeing and meeting consumer and merchant desire for a solution. I think we will see more variations of this from other companies and will begin to think of it less as fringe or even the vanguard and more as a capability channel required for doing business.
Senior iOS product manager John Herbold leaves Apple A senior iOS product manager at Apple, John Herbold, has left the company to become a product VP at a company called HealthTeacher. According to the latter firm Herbold played a “key role” in developing and launching iCloud, and led efforts in developing and marketing iCloud’s Photo Stream image sync technology. Prior to those efforts Herbold was a senior product manager on MobileMe, and was … Read more on MacNN
Final Cut Pro X woes include App Store issues, support gaps The Mac App Store is actively blocking some Mac Pro users from downloading Final Cut Pro X, according to complaints. One person notes that his two-year-old Mac Pro is being blocked based on system requirements, even though it has a 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon processor and 6GB of RAM. The weak link may be video, in this case an ATI Radeon HD 2600 card…. Read more on MacNN
Apple, Samsung executives in talks on patent lawsuits Executives “at the highest levels” of Apple Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd are in talks about patent litigation between the two companies, a lawyer for Apple said in court. Read more on InterAksyon
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Well, we already know that a certain tractor manufacturer isn’t particularly fond of LightSquared and its GPS-bustin’ LTE technology, but other companies with yellow logos apparently harbor a much different sentiment. Really, though, who wouldn’t be smiling when there’s a supposed $ 20 billion in it for you? According to the ever-familiar “people familiar” with the story, as quoted by Businessweek, LightSquared is getting closer to a long-rumored 15-year deal that would pay Sprint $ 20 billion in exchange for piggy-backing on its aggressive network expansion. This would help LightSquared get up to speed much more quickly, get Sprint access to some lovely LTE, and together completely revitalize the paper maps industry.
LightSquared and Sprint reportedly close to $ 20 billion LTE agreement, John Deere watching closely originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 23:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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