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.
Back in May, Motorola won an injunction against the sale of several Microsoft products in Germany, but it appears it won’t be going into effect after all. Reuters reports that a US appeals court has upheld a judge’s decision to prevent the company from enacting the sales ban. The conflict traces back to standards essential patents covering H.264 video encoding. Motorola claims that Microsoft infringed on several of its standards essential patents with numerous products, including Windows 7 and the Xbox 360.
The German courts agreed with Google-owned Motorola, granting an injunction against the offending products, but the company was unable to pursue any sales ban at that time. Motorola had already been shackled with a restraining order…
After Friday’s $ 1.05 billion verdict in favor of Apple, Samsung is now trying everything to reverse the trend while Apple is charging foward at full speed. Even though the injunction hearing will take place on September 20, some Samsung devices, such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, were subject to preliminary injunctions. The jury decided that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 did not infringe the iPad D’889 design patent — Apple’s trade dress — and therefore invalidated the prior injunction.
Samsung requests a dissolution of the sales ban, the $ 2.6 million bond from Apple that protected Samsung if it was determined that the injunction was unnecessary, and probably damages for lost sales.
Apple, fresh off of its court victory last week, just informed the court the products it is going after for a U.S. sales ban on the basis of patent infringement. Thankfully, at least for Samsung, most of these products are no longer available. But Samsung will no doubt fight Apple on this as well.
- Droid Charge
- Galaxy S Showcase
- Galaxy Prevail
- Galaxy S 4G
- Galaxy S2 (AT&T)
- Galaxy S2 (Skyrocket)
- Galaxy S2 (T-Mobile)
- Galaxy S2 Epic 4G
Samsung is trying not to lose ground in the legal battle against Apple. On June 26, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ordered a preliminary sales ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 based on the fact that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was hurting Apple’s sales due to trade dress and design patent infringement. At that time, Koh seemed convinced because she did not even wait for an Apple hearing to issue the injunction.
That’s why it is important to note that Koh can overrule the jury’s decision and state that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 does infringe Apple’s D’889 design patent.
In addition to the importance of Koh’s next move, the device was part of the list of Samsung devices that infringed several Apple software patents — at least ’381, ’915 and ’163 patents, respectively for “bounce back” scrolling, pinching to zoom and tapping to zoom. Apple might be asking for another review of that verdict on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the appeals court.
As long as the final injunction process is not over, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still not out of danger. Yet, Samsung’s argument seems valid. It is worth trying to obtain damages from Apple. As the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is already out, reparations and brand reputation could certainly be the main motivation behind Samsung’s court filing.
Follow me here. The Droid X360 has the mind of Android, a body of a Vita, and branding of Verizon’s Android phones and Microsoft’s gaming system. Plus, the thing ships with 9 different emulators, allowing the owner to play games from Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, Game boy Color, NES/FC, SNES, SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Game Gear. The only way it could infringe on more trademarks would be if there was a Mercedes-Benz logo on the backside.
A 1.5Ghz CPU powers the Android 4.0.4 install. There’s a 5-inch display up front, dual cameras, HDMI-out and a microSD card slot. The best part, at least to me, is the sad-looking 8GB sticker on the bottom of the device.
Never mind that the device is essentially bursting with trademark infringements, the device seems to run rather well. And, as a PS Vita owner myself, I appreciate the form factor. No word on pricing but there really isn’t any reason to buy it. Just download an emulator to your smartphone and enjoy a little Kirby on the go.
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield just published a letter on the company’s website announcing that Apple has reversed its decision to remove EPEAT environmental certification from its products.
“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system,” Mansfield writes. “I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”
Apple reportedly asked the EPEAT standards group to pull its 39 eligible products (including desktop computers, laptops, and monitors) from the EPEAT green products list earlier this month. A few days after the news broke, a company spokesperson defended the decision, saying, “Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2.”
The company may have been counting on consumers like me, who own lots of Apple products but have very little idea what EPEAT is. (Products receive EPEAT ratings based on factors like energy conservation, use of environmentally sensitive materials, and recyclability.) However, as with pretty much everything else Apple does, the decision got a lot of coverage. It may also have threatened the company’s ability to sell to schools and governmental agencies — San Francisco officials, for example, said they would be blocking purchases of Apple products.
Despite backing off its earlier decision, and also claiming that the company’s relationship with EPEAT “has become stronger as a result of this experience,” most of Mansfield’s letter restates the argument that Apple had been making earlier, that its environmental success shouldn’t be measured by older standards:
“It’s important to know that our commitment to protecting the environment has never changed, and today it is as strong as ever. Apple makes the most environmentally responsible products in our industry. In fact, our engineering teams have worked incredibly hard over the years to make our products even more environmentally friendly, and much of our progress has come in areas not yet measured by EPEAT.”
EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee has published on open letter of his on the EPEAT website, hinting (albeit in fairly convoluted language) that Apple’s move may be spurring the group to update its standards (or to work more quickly on already-planned updates):
“An interesting question for EPEAT is how to reward innovations that are not yet envisioned with standards that are fixed at a point in time. Diverse goals, optional points awarded for innovations not yet described, and flexibility within specified parameters to make this happen are all on the table in EPEAT stakeholder discussions. …
“Answers to these questions support all our subscribers, and lead to mutual benefit for all our purchasers. And they led us to the path to our strengthened relationship with Apple.”
Been wondering when the next big leap in high performance computing would hit? Well, Intel would like you to believe the time is now and the name of that revolution is the Xeon Phi. Formerly codenamed Knights Corner, the Many Integrated Core product is pushing the field of supercomputers into the era of the exaflop by squeezing a teraflop of performance into a package small enough to plug into a PCIe slot. The Phi brand will, at first at least, be applied to specialized coprocessors designed for highly parallel tasks. The chips are built using Intel’s 22nm manufacturing process and 3-D TriGate transistors, piling in more that 50 cores in an effort to combat the inroads made by GPU companies like NVIDIA in the supercomputing space. For more info check out the presentation (PDF) and blog post at the source links.
Intel christens its ‘Many Integrated Core’ products Xeon Phi, eyes exascale milestone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A federal judge in Seattle issued a ruling today preventing Motorola, at least for now, from enforcing a ban in Germany on the sales of Windows, Internet Explorer, the Xbox and other Microsoft products implementing the H.264 codec standard. The judge’s decision is in response to a motion Microsoft filed at the end of March asking the US court to issue a a temporary restraining order to prevent Motorola from enforcing a potential, future German injunction. If you think that’s confusing, don’t feel bad — it is.
There are a couple of unusual things going on here: a US court is attempting to control Motorola’s actions outside of the US, relating to the enforcement of a German sales ban that hasn’t yet been issued by a German court….
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Sony’s push for three dimensional entertainment has inspired it to launch a series of product-loaning machines in the land of Oz. These “3D Library” kiosks, as the manufacturer is simply dubbing ‘em, will let Aussies checkout a variety of Sony’s 3D-capable products at no cost and for up to three days. Folks itching to create some 3D content for free can choose from the Handycam HDR-TD10, NEX C3 and Bloggie cameras. And, as if hardware wasn’t enough, you’ll be surprised to hear the company’s also throwing in its own flicks and PlayStation games as part of its loaner campaign. The program is underway now, so all you Australians willing to take Sony up on its offer can hit up the PR below to find the nearest freeloading location.
Continue reading Sony’s 3D Library lets Aussies borrow products free of charge
Sony’s 3D Library lets Aussies borrow products free of charge originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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