Jet Airways launches its official app for Windows Phone In what is the first of its kind app, Jet Airways in association with Nokia launched its official mobile app for the Windows Phone platform. The app essentially allows users to books tickets, check flight status, and also manage their JetPrivilege … Read more on BGR India
Huawei's Windows Phone 8 W1 Coming to Wal-Mart U.S. consumers will be able to purchase the first Huawei smartphone running Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT ) Windows Phone 8 operating system later this month from Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT ) . Microsoft said in a blog post today that the new Huawei W1 … Read more on Motley Fool
AT&T Lumia 900 finally gets Windows Phone 7.8 update With Nokia set to unveil a new Lumia lineup next week, you could be forgiven for forgetting about the company's flagship phone from last year. However, AT&T customers still holding on to their Lumia 900s have cause for celebration in the shape of the … Read more on The Verge
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Disrupt NY 2013′s Startup Battlefield competition is underway, and now New York native Keen Home is taking the stage to present its first-round pitch. Keen Home is a home automation startup, which aims to follow in Nest’s footsteps by building remote vents for your central air conditioning and heating systems that can be controlled from your smartphone to optimally direct air where you actually need it — and away from places you don’t. Keen just launched its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.
Keen Home is the brainchild of Ryan Fant and Nayeem Hussain, both of whom have experience founding companies in the home real estate and property-management space. The two believe their startup can appeal to consumers who want both more convenience in managing their home’s HVAC systems, and who want to save money and conserve energy. Keen Home’s debut product, the Keen Vent, accomplishes both.
The idea came from Fant noticing that when vents were closed in other rooms, heating and cooling the one he was currently in became much easier. The problem is that those vents generally operate separately, and manually, in most homes. Even with some systems that provide a remote, like Activent, they aren’t centrally controlled in a way that makes them individually manageable from an existing device like a smartphone.
“We found that just by closing four vents in an average-sized home, we’ve reduced the run time of the furnace by about 30 percent,” Fant explained in an interview. “So not only were we redirecting air to rooms that were actually in use by intelligently closing vents, we were increasing efficiency, as well.”
Keen believes that the focus is always on the thermostat when it comes to home heating and cooling efficiency solutions, which is good but it ignores other parts of the problem. The Keen Vent solves that, by providing both a user-guided and automated way of opening and closing vents to change how air flows through a home. A homeowner can set a schedule for individual vents, too, and it can plug into weather data to respond intelligently to changing conditions.
Fant says the Keen Vent can provide up to 32 percent reduction in run time for HVAC systems, which means lower monthly bills and less toll on the environment. Most heating and cooling vents in households are around 60 years old, Keen Home said on stage during their Disrupt Battlefield presentation on Monday.
Individual vent covers will cost around $ 40 per vent, Keen predicts, with a $ 150 charge for the system in total. There’s also a recurring fee of around $ 4 per month for access to the cloud-based management platform, which also provides monthly reports. But Fant and Hussain plan to partner with utility companies and homebuilders to try to offer the tech initially at a discount price, perhaps with, say, six months of service rolled into a new construction. It’s the same model that satellite radio provider Sirius/XM uses to sell subscriptions with new cars.
Keen Home is launching its Keen Vent product on Indiegogo today, and believes that seeking crowdfunding, as well as traditional investment, will help it get the word out and prove product viability. Its biggest challenges will be proving to users that a recurring subscription around centralized vent control is worth the cost, and in making sure that legacy players like Honeywell don’t swoop in and simply build their own similar systems. The team says that being aggressive with partnerships with big utility companies, the way others like Nest and thinkeco have done in the past, will be the key to making sure it can overcome both.
Keen said on stage that the majority of its audience would be people who don’t know what a smart home is, so they tried to make sure it was as easy to install as possible. That’s why they’ve made the install process as simple as possible, and setting up the online dashboard involves only entering a code and then doing a roughly 15 question survey. In addition, they’re planning to partner with HVAC contractors to take care of more complicated installs. Battery life is expected to be around a year for the vents, so it’d be roughly equivalent to changing the power source on devices like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
Recent moves by LinkedIn — including its acquisition of Pulse — suggested its eye was towards becoming a center of its users universe for much more than simple networking or job hunting, and its latest mobile updates continue on that path. Updates arriving today on the iOS and Android platforms are redesigned for more “delightful interactions” throughout the app. That means a shift of focus to the news stream, including conversations, updates from your network and of course, advertisements. Check after the break for a quick video demo of the new features or hit the blog for a description — whether it’s enough to overtake Twitter, Facebook or something else for your social dashboard remains to be decided.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: LinkedIn, iTunes, Google Play
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Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is finally getting Temple Run. After promising it would launch in time for the holidays, Temple Run arrives a few months late into the Windows Phone Store this week alongside some other new additions. However, this is isn’t the latest Temple Run 2 game. Instead, it’s the original version that launched on iOS 18 months ago and it doesn’t take advantage of Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform. If Temple Run had managed to launch ahead of the second version then it would have been seen as a triumph, but now the wait continues for Windows Phone to catch up again.
Despite this, there’s some other good gaming additions to Windows Phone today too. Gravity Guy 2 is launching as an Xbox Live-enabled game, and it’s…
BitTorrent announced last month that it was working on a file-syncing dubbed Sync, and it’s now debuted a public beta of a somewhat complimentary file-sharing service called SoShare (previously announced in an alpha state as simply Share). The hook with SoShare is that it will lend you send huge files (up to 1TB) for free in a single data transfer, which is handled through the BitTorrent browser plug-in. What’s more, while you’ll of course have to sign up for an account to send the files, the recipients of the file don’t necessarily need an account themselves; you can simply make a public link available or send an email notification (they will need the browser plug-in though). Those files will remain active for 30 days unless you choose to have them expire sooner. Hit the source link to sign up for the beta if you’re interested in trying it yourself.
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Next Web
Source: SoShare, BitTorrent Blog
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If you own a Wii, you were probably a little bummed out to hear that Amazon would be serving up Instant Video to the Wii U and not to your older console.
But fret no longer, as Amazon has just announced that its library of streaming video content is now available to Wii owners.
Amazon’s Instant Video library is home to over 145,000 titles, and if you’re a Prime member you have automatic access to over 33,000 titles right off the bat.
Other features you may have grown accustomed to on Amazon’s media streaming platform are also present, including Whispersync, which lets users pick up right where they left off on another device. Like, say, a Kindle Fire.
Navigation is relatively simple, giving users categories like Recently Watched, Watchlist, Genre Recommendations and Your TV Shows.
Users will also have access to Parental Controls and Kid Zone title lists to make sure kids aren’t wandering into treacherous territory.
The service is available now to all Wii owners and can be found in the Wii Shop Channel.
The humble personal music player has seen many iterations over the last few decades. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t still giving the area some love, and HiFiMAN is definitely flying the flag with its HM-901 Reference Music Player. The unit incorporates dual Saber ES9018 32-bit DAC chips, with upsampling 20 24-bit / 96kHz. It claims to be able to play most lossless audio formats, including Apple lossless. Of course, it’ll still play your regular MP3s too, should you so desire. One neat trick is a removable amplifier card which means — at a future date — you could be able to swap them out for other amp cards that bestow a different sound, much like different guitar amps etc. Other forthcoming features include gapless playback, and the ability to use it as a WiFi music server. If you want some hard numbers, then HiFiMAN states that the distortion is less than 0.003 percent, with a signal to noise ratio of 107dB. Want to know the stereo cross talk? That’d be 86 db (line) and 76 db (headphone). Head past the break for our impressions.
Gallery: HiFiMAN launches HM-901 ‘high resolution’ audio player, we go ears and hands on
Continue reading HiFiMAN launches HM-901 ‘high resolution’ audio player, we go ears and hands on
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Wearables
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It was almost a year ago that we first heard about Kno‘s smart textbook metrics system “Kno Me.” Now the software is set to actually launch, and find its way into students’ (and parents’) hands. As a refresher, the system provides analytics on your (or your children’s) study patterns, letting you see how long you have studied for, amount of time interacting with the subject matter, percentage of pages that have been annotated and more. Kno Me is available for all of the firm’s interactive textbooks and launches tomorrow on the iPad, Windows 8 and browser platforms, with Android and Windows 7 coming by the end of the month. Kno Me is free, and will be pushed out via the existing app.
Continue reading Kno launches ‘Kno Me’ interactive textbook metrics, lets you study your studying
Filed under: Misc
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Gallic Bluetooth audio house SuperTooth wants you to buy its Disco speakers in pairs to better show off its stereo prowess, not to mention make a little more cash. That’s why it’s outing the Disco Twin here at CES, a $ 199 pair of noisyboxes that offer discrete left and right stereo — each pumping out 16 watts of RMS power. You’ll be able to squeeze up to four hours of juice out of each one if you use them to host a (short) rave, or up to 10 hours in more serene circumstances. At the same time, it’s also releasing the HD Voice, an $ 89 hands-free car kit that clips to your sun visor and will even pair with your phone using voice commands. The company isn’t ready to say when the pair will be available, but we can’t imagine it’ll be a long wait.
Continue reading SuperTooth launches the $ 199 Disco Twin and $ 89 HD Voice at CES (video)
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video
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Flipboard has just launched its social magazine app to support Android tablets, including the Nexus 10, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy Tab line.
Flipboard is an app that aggregates your RSS info, social networks, etc. to create a beautiful, flippable magazine. In fact, the app won Best Touch Interface at the 2011 Crunchies. But making sure that interface creates the same experience across all platforms has proven tough, as Flipboard didn’t migrate over to Android at all until June of this year.
Since then, the app’s been available across the entire iOS ecosystem and Android smartphones, and the Kindle Fire and Nook tablets. But today marks a complete expansion into Android.
This is as big as Flipboard’s ever had to go in terms of optimization. But according to the release, Flipboard worked directly with Samsung to optimize page layouts for the wider screen of some Android devices. Users of these larger Android tablets will see larger story excerpts.
It’s unclear whether or not Flipboard will head to Windows Phone next. That seems the logical next step in terms of platform expansion, though there’s no indication that the company has any such plans. Then again, anything can happen. Flipboard may even throw a curve ball and hit BB10 when it finally launches.
