But fine, a tech startup does not sound very specific, so let’s narrow down this broad topic. If your tech startup idea has something to do with tracking, counting, or monitoring some activity, it’s probably in the realm of IoT and this article is meant to guide you with your first steps. Why am I giving advice? Since I’ve been in an IoT business for almost a decade, I’ve seen many IoT startups come and go over the years....
So suggests Dr. Floyd Toole, one of the most influential researchers of acoustics and loudspeakers, in the introduction to his book, Sound Reproduction. The quote reads like a tautology at first, but the more speakers I test, the more I see — or rather, hear — what Dr. Toole meant. It’s hard to meaningfully evaluate high-end speakers just by the things they do right. After all, there’s only so good an instrument or voice can sound; the most you can ask for a speaker is for it to sound “correct” — to approximate real life....
DxOMark says it derives this score through more than 400 subjective and objective tests. The company measures scores in six different fields: readability, color, video, motion, touch, and artifacts (other attributes of display such as notch area, flicker, and ghost touches). You can check out some of the areas of testing performed by the company in the figure below. While sites like DisplayMate rely mostly on the lab-based test to derive their score, DxOMark claims that it also performs perceptual tests for over 20 hours on a phone to score its screen....
As best we can tell based on what’s been revealed so far, it’s shaping up to be a terrifying hormone hijacker capable of potentially giving you forced mental orgasms or making you fall in love. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2020 Musk originally said the goal of Neuralink was to produce a BCI so that humans wouldn’t lose their competitive edge to AI. The big idea here is that keyboards and other peripherals aren’t as efficient as a direct thought-to-action interface....
Matchbox might be single-handedly responsible for getting more kids into cars than anyone, or anything, else. That company is the reason I smile every time I see an E31 era BMW 8 Series. Now, in keeping with the times, Matchbox is releasing a bunch of new models of electric vehicles, including the Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, i8, and an e-Star delivery van. While making models of EVs will surely get youngsters interested in the electric revolution, Matchbox is also taking on some responsibility itself....
HomePod Mini Apple revealed the long-awaited HomePod mini which is… a smaller version of the HomePod. Really small, at just 3-inches tall. Apple claims that ‘computational audio’ allows the speaker to automatically tune itself to different kinds of music to provide optimal performance. It can play music in stereo automatically (assuming you buy two of them), and naturally, it supports Siri as well. Apple claims the tiny speaker has some serious sound quality, but we’ll have to see what it ends up like in person....
The person answering the questions was Andrey Doronichev, Stadia’s Director of Product. Like anyone attempting to hype a new product, he was bright and enthusiastic, but overall the picture he painted of Stadia came across as fairly grounded. He was quick to say it’s not a “Netflix for games,” and said the Stadia Base (the free option) users would not receive the benefits of Pro. Doronichev dropped the tidbit that Stadia won’t support Bluetooth audio at launch, though the Stadia controller would have a headphone jack should you opt for wired audio instead....
If you’re an employee in a company that uses Facebook for Workplace, you’ll see trending topics in your feed similar to the social network’s News Feed on your personal profile. The Intercept’s report notes that recently, Facebook debuted a tool that allows admins to block certain trending topics from that feed. What’s alarming is that one of the examples used to highlight this feature was “unionize.” In response, a Facebook spokesperson told TNW that the company has pulled any plans to roll it out: Some notable companies such as Walmart, Nestle, and Spotify use the social network’s Workplace product....
To tackle all these problems, the company is now looking to build a special version for users under the age of 13. BuzzFeed News reported last night that in an internal note, Instagram’s VP for product, Vishal Shah said that as a priority, the company wants to make the platform safer for teens and also build a version for young kids: For now, to use Instagram, you have to be over 13 years old....
Both Facebook and Instagram first mentioned their interest in banning phony “cures” back in January, as part of their larger plan to banmisinformation surrounding the coronavirus. Facebook confirmed its interest in banning such ads to Business Insider today, saying: [Read: Social media conspiracies blame coronavirus on 5G internet] Last month, Facebook said it would remove “content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them....
This flaw let kids accept new people in a group chat or join a new group without any authorization. The Verge reported that over the last week, the company has been sending parents messages saying a technical error has allowed the child to be part of unauthorized groups, and it has closed these chats: Facebook confirmed to TNW in an email statement that it has found the flaw and sent alerts to thousands of users: There are no details on the nature of the design flaw, or how many children were affected....
If we want to understand how these changes will affect animals around the world, we need a better understanding of how their biology might determine how well they survive these changes. My colleagues and I have just published research that demonstrates how important an animal’s mating system is to this. We found that species whose males compete for mates are more likely to survive damaging changes to their environment. In many species, males try to woo females with signals like calls, coloration or long tails, or they try to monopolize access to females by fighting other males with weaponry like horns or antlers....
Focus Camera just added their name to the growing list of well-known organizations that have fallen victim to similar attacks (British Airways, Newegg, Macy’s) during the last year, with hundreds of thousands of customers typically having their card details stolen. The Magecart credit card skimming approach is often to insert the malicious skimmer’s code into their target’s third-party providers (which has come to be known as web-based supply chain attacks)....
Road transportation is a major consumer of fossil fuels, contributing 16 per cent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which warm up the Earth’s atmosphere and cause changes to the climate. It also pollutes the air, threatening health and costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually. At the same time, electric vehicles are getting cheaper, and vehicle range and the availability of charging stations are improving. This is exciting for many because it seems to suggest an easy and convenient answer to the problem of transportation emissions: if everyone swapped their fossil-fueled vehicle for an electric equivalent, we could all keep driving, safe in the knowledge that we are no longer killing the planet by doing so — and all while enjoying a new car that is quiet, cheap to power and fun to drive....
Speaking at Chinese finance magazine Caijing’s annual conference today in reference to CBDCs, the former chairman Alan Greenspan said: “There’s no point for them to do it,” CNBC reports. Greenspan said that national currencies are backed by all the financial resources of a nation, also known as sovereign credit, and central bodies won’t ever be able to match that. “The fundamental sovereign credit of the United States is far in excess of anything Facebook can imagine,” Greenspan added....
Europe has been cracking down hard on American tech companies, issuing billions of euros in fines and implementing strict privacy laws like GDPR. Under Macron’s leadership, France has tried to take it even further by unilaterally fixing loopholes in global tax rules. “The global tech players do not contribute financially to the funding of the common good, it is not sustainable,” Macron told the press. This tough stance has increased tensions between France and the US ahead of the G7 summit — where representatives of the seven biggest economies in the world and the EU gather to tackle global challenges....
Decisions, decisions. There’s a time to know when to be generous, spread the wealth, and hook up friends from the benefit of your good fortune. And there’s also a time to live well, be greedy and suck up every last possible perk and advantage for yourself. Of course, you’re the only one who can truly decide when it’s best to share and when it’s best to horde. But thankfully, this stackable subscription code bundle for membership with PlayStation Plus gives users the power to choose any option....
It isn’t enough to know how many people came to your website. No, these days, you need to understand why they came to your website. What led them there? What did they want? Where did they explore — and for how long? And what can that person and their experience tell you about your site and, by extension, you or your business? It’s heady stuff that shows the true growth of website analytics....
The objective is to “bring together security researchers, maintainers, and companies across the industry who share our belief that the security of open source is important for everyone,” the Microsoft-owned code repository platform said. Joining the company in this initiative are security professionals from various tech companies, including F5, Google, HackerOne, Intel, IOActive, J.P. Morgan, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Mozilla, NCC Group, Oracle, Trail of Bits, Uber, and VMWare. To that effect, the company is making CodeQL freely available for anyone to find vulnerabilities in open-source code....
Behold: It’s just an M! For (g)Mail! With more Google colors now. It kinda-sorta still looks like an envelope, but it’s less skeuomorphic and more abstract. Yay? The change comes as part of G Suite’s rebranding into Google Workspace and will be rolling out to users “in the coming weeks.” Drive, Calendar, Meet, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are also getting new looks: I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to worry a little that Google’s insistence in using its entire rainbow of colors throughout all its apps is actually starting to make them a little more generic –even if they better match the brand identity....
