Month: April 2014

Culture

High as balls: live from the Cannabis Cup

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As reported on The Verge. By Trent Wolbe Here’s a fact: humans love to get wasted. Long before there were laws, long before there was beer, there was marijuana — a drug that had fallen out of legal favor in America completely by the 1930s. Alcohol had a similar falling-out with the Federal Government in 1920, but by 1933 legislators realized that the benefits of legalization and taxation would far outweigh the consequences of continued prohibition. It’s taking…

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Google Security

Google is working on end-to-end encryption for Gmail

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As reported on The Verge. By Russell Brandom Google wants to make it easier for Gmail users to encrypt their emails, according to a report in VentureBeat. PGP has been an open-source encryption standard for nearly 20 years, but the protocol has been dogged with usability issues that many claim have kept it from broader use. As a result, engineers at Google are working on ways to make PGP easier for users, as part of a larger push…

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Application Automotive

Google Maps Rival Mapbox Adds Smart Directions, A Navigation Service For Any App

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Ingrid Lunden Mapbox, the OpenStreetMap-based mapping platform that lets app developers incorporate maps into any app, is adding another feature to better compete against the likes of Google Maps, ESRI and Nokia Maps: Smart Directions, a navigation service that developers can customise with extra details such type of terrain, specific places of interest, and current traffic conditions. Its first partner, getting announced today alongside Smart Directions, is Scoot, the electric vehicle-sharing startup live in San…

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Apple Environmental

Apple extends free recycling to all used products – and you might get a gift card

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As reported on Engadget. BY MAT SMITH Reiterating what the Apple CEO said at last month’s shareholder meeting, Tim Cook still wants to “leave the world better than we found it”, and nows he’s trying harder to deliver on that. Starting today, all of the company’s stores will accept any Apple product for recycling at no charge. Better still, if it looks resalable, the company will offer some store credit (read Apple gift card) to sweeten…

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Internet

Your internet is probably slower than advertised

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As reported on Engadget. BY TIMOTHY J. SEPPALA When it comes to internet speeds, “you get what you pay for” is pretty far from the truth a majority of the time. The Wall Street Journal used Ookla’s speed-testing data to survey some 800 US cities and 27 ISPs in terms of advertised transfer rates and what customers are actually getting, and the results are pretty surprising. A vast majority of providers give their customers the short shrift on speed (Verizon Internet Services and…

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Business

Weed greenhouses are so hot right now

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As reported on The Verge. By Lessley Anderson They’re cost-effective, eco-friendly, and produce mass quantities of chronic RiverRock is a marijuana company in Denver, CO, that was founded in 2009 by an enterprising medical malpractice attorney some four years before recreational weed become legal in the state. Today, RiverRock operates two dispensaries, grows its own, and makes edibles, extracts, and concentrates. It used to cultivate all its cannabis indoors — a quantity John Kocer, RiverRock’s CEO, wouldn’t…

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Business Cloud Google

The Dawn Of Cloud 2.0 And Why Google Started A Price War

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Peter Relan Editor’s note: Peter Relan is serial entrepreneur-turned-founder of two incubators: YouWeb(focused on gaming), and Studio 9+ (focused on big data, IoT, wearables, and P2P marketplaces). His incubations include OpenFeint, Crowdstar, Hammer and Chisel, Spaceport, and Agawi. Prior to founding his incubators, Peter held founding roles at Webvan and Business Signatures, as well as executive roles at Oracle and HP. Google recently announced up to 85 percent reduction in pricing for its PaaS and BigQuery services. Soon…

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Entertainment Film Tech

AI Experts On The Reality Behind The Sci-Fi Thriller “Transcendence”

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Peter Barnum, Brad Neuman An ambitious blend of fact and fiction, “Transcendence” is Hollywood’s latest dystopian-edged take on the implications of artificial intelligence. The movie presents the tale of the wildly brilliant researcher, Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), and his team as they perform a radical experiment in uploading a human mind to a computer. It’s set in the near future and, as otherworldly as the plot may seem, director Wally Pfister and writer Jack…

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Culture

50 years ago today, the public got its first taste of video calls

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As reported on Engadget. BY TERRENCE O’BRIEN It seemed like the inevitable future at the time, we’re sure. On April 20th in 1964, Bell Telephone showed off the Mod 1 Picturephone — a precursor to the Skype and Hangouts video calls that have become a standard but under-utilized feature of modern communications. The demonstration was part of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, visitors were able to step into a booth and have a conversation with a person thousands of miles away…

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Internet Tech

This onesie turns you into a walking WiFi hotspot

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As reported on Engadget. BY JON FINGAS Forget carrying a separate hotspot router to have a local network wherever you go — what if you were the hotspot? Fashion designer Borre Akkersdijk has come very, very close to making that vision a reality with his experimental BB.Suit. The goofy-looking cotton onesie is knitted using a special 3D technique that leaves space for WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and NFC connections, turning the owner into an access point. Akkersdijk showed off the potential of…

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