Group items tagged

Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility

With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.

Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.

A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google's search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo

a portable speaker with voice assistant tech

voice search and intelligent personal assistance will occupy center stage at the company's splash show

OpenBCI, a Kickstarter project by Conor Russomanno and Joel Murphy, aims to fill this need by offering makers, hobbyists, and other geeky tinkerers a fully open-source prototyping platform for designing whatever mind-control UIs they can dream up

100 Famous Movie Quotes, Visualized

The only thing that will lead to the tipping point of BCI practicality is simultaneous and rapid hardware and software iteration; Joel and I both believe that this type of rapid technological innovation cannot take place behind closed doors, hence our unfaltering mission to keep OpenBCI totally open source and include as many people of varying disciplines as possible

Microsoft unveiled a new hologram platform today as part of its new operating system

The holographic software is built into Windows 10 already, the company said. Though Microsoft is working on its own hardware, the platform will also work for other virtual reality software like Oculus Rift and Google Glass

Microsoft executive built a virtual flying drone, which the company then showed could be 3D printed. Alex Kipman, who helped lead the project, called it “print preview for 3D printing”.

M-Pesa’s success has been phenomenal. Recent statistics show that fully one-quarter of the Kenyan economy flows through M-Pesa.

Other countries are taking a crack at a similar mobile digital currency. Vodacom

has launched M-Pesa in other African nations, as well as India and parts of Eastern Europe. In Latin America, Ecuador recently announced it would launch a nationwide digital currency, residing largely on people’s smartphones

Tesla founder Elon Musk, big-name venture capitalist Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several other notable tech names have launched a new artificial intelligence startup called OpenAI,

OpenAI has the talent to compete with the industry’s top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook—but the company has been setup as a non-profit.

The apparent aim is to build systems based on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has proven extremely adept in recent years at identifying images, recognizing spoken words, translating from one language to another, and, to a certain extent, understanding the natural way that we humans talk.

"There's a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there's a good way to compensate content owners for that,"

"We've recently rolled out the business model for this. We'll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners

To grasp the scope of change unraveling in content creation, which is increasingly fragmented, consider all the mobile apps on your smartphone.

lets you work with your hands in a more intuitive way

Gest is a new way of working with your computer

AirConsole is a recently launched browser-based games platform that repurposes players’ smartphones as controllers

For a local multiplayer gaming session AirConsole is super simple to use

your phone becomes the touch pad to control the goings-on on the other screen

The service will let you play all manner of computer games streamed from Google‘s data centers to your devices running the Chrome browser or ChromeOS platform, or even your TV with a Chromecast Ultra plugged in. You won’t need any additional hardware to run Stadia, and you won’t need to install anything to play games. As Google VP Phil Harrison noted in an interview with Eurogamer, “Anywhere where YouTube runs well, Stadia can run.”

Rather than treat Stadia as an entirely standalone service, Google sees people using it from and with YouTube. That means your starting point with Stadia could be a game trailer on the video platform, or a live stream of a tournament; you could simply hit Play on either video stream and start playing – solo or with others – within a few seconds.