Gadget Blog

Tweetear

Mobile devices, including tablet computers and smartphones are rapidly becoming the computing and communications device platform of choice for consumers and business users. Messaging, gaming, engaging friends on social media, web surfing, reading e-books, and making payments (m-commerce) are just a few of the activities that consumers are doing on their mobile devices, for work and leisure. Just as the world wide web transformed travel distribution forever back in the late 1990s by enabling consumer-direct shopping and booking, mobile apps too will again alter how consumers plan their trips to achieve their travel dreams and experiences, and shop for and book travel.

Mobility devices

Home PC purchases and usage peaked in 2008 and have been on the decline ever since. And the companies that missed out on the mobile computing wave such as Dell and Intel are now feeling the pain. It is more likely to find a traveller in a café or at home on their couch using their Apple iPad, connected to the internet via Wi-Fi, dreaming about their next trip and researching new destinations and the sites and activitiesthat are available once they get there. It took 10 years for smartphones to reach 40 million unit sales, but tablet computers only required 4 years to reach the same level of unit sales. Analysts predict tablet unit sales will reach 100 million by 2015, so the race is now on to build the next generation of travel apps for mobile devices.

The mobile entrants are both large incumbents and new upstarts. Expedia launched their newly redesigned mobile app for iPhone at the 2012 travel industry expo PhoCusWright in Scottsdale, AZ. Critics hailed it as the best new mobile app for booking travel from any of the large OTAs. Also highlighted there was WeHostels, a Mobile Travel Agency (MTA) app that enables youth travellers to find a hostel to lodge for the night that is within their price range, has availability and is located via their mobile phone GPS geo-location feature. WeHostels is 100 per cent mobile -- no call centers, not even a web site -- WeHostels is the perfect offering for the wired up, young traveller on the go seeking shelter! HotelTonight is another immensely popular mobile phone app for the adult traveller who may find themselves stranded away from home overnight on business, or wanting to stay an extra day on a leisure trip for that one more day of fun, and needs a place to stay -- find it and book it in a few easy steps right on your smartphone!

According to research from Expedia and comScore, 58 per cent of mobile users have already booked air travel on a mobile device, and 56 per cent of mobile users have booked a hotel. By the end of next year, mobile bookings will be higher than “classic” desktop bookings, and not only for last minute reservations. But what about before making the booking? Travel begins with an experience in mind that the consumer wants to create with whom, when and where they travel. Two thirds of mobile users surveyed spend time dreaming about travel at least once per month. Forty eight per cent of travellers use their mobile device to research their dream vacations to far flung destinations. The majority of travellers, 49 per cent in developed markets and 66 per cent in emerging markets, are both undecided and budget-focused when they start planning discretionary travel. Seventy eight per cent of travellers planning a quick get away don’t know where they even want to go! Fifty per cent of travellers surveyed refuse to stay in a hotel that has no favorable reviews.

Travellers are first and foremost looking for credible sources of information and curated content (photos, videos, video tours, ratings, reviews and recommendations) from trusted advisors, including family and friends, travel bloggers and experienced travel agents.

Mobile Vacation Planner

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) is a tablet computer-based app by Blue Star Infotech (initially available on the iPad), that will enable travellers to plan their itinerary for a trip or vacation to any destination of their choice. MVP enables consumers to search a wide range of curated content and enjoy a highly-interactive user experience for travel planning using destination photos, videos, maps, and detailed descriptions of hotels, activities, site-seeing opportunities, and ratings, reviews and recommendations of travel content.

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) expedites travel planning and makes the process an enjoyable and hassle-free experience.

From the pre-booking stage to pre-travel itinerary management, as well as intra-trip and post-travel sharing, MVP addresses all of the aspects of planning a trip and telling your friends about it afterward. Simply enter the date and the travel destination, along with your desired activity timing and preferences, and MVP will offer a variety of suggestions for hotels, dining, cultural events, and activities suitable for different types of trips, including family, adventure or romantic getaways. MVP also offers an automated itinerary generation feature complete and the freedom to manually select activities to plan, re-plan, add, rearrange, and delete activities until the customer arrives at his or her perfect vacation travel plan.

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) is designed to be highly interactive and travel content-rich. MVP includes features for seasonal, context & time-sensitive, geo-location-based, pre-and intra-trip planning and post-trip sharing, and offers APIs to integrate with Google Maps & Places, TripAdvisor, Bing Attractions, a  Travel Planning Calendar, including export  to Apple iCal. MVP also offers Travel Booking Engine & Commerce Integration, as well as  the capability to integrate third party travel  content sources. MVP also includes the capability to upload trip details to Social Media, like Facebook, Twitter, and instagram, and the  facility to use the app both online and offline, has enhanced user experience, flexibility, and  ease of use.

Private labelling of MVP is available to companies seeking to engage and add more value to the consumer in their experiential travel planning, including tour operators, traditional & online travel agencies, youth and adult travel management companies, hotels, casinos & resorts, vacation clubs, event management companies, and convention & visitors bureaus. The business benefits of Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) include powerful consumer bonding with your brand and increased customer loyalty, increased long-term revenues, increased travel agent productivity by offloading some of the travel planning activity to the consumer, and reduced computing infrastructure costs by leveraging both open source technologies and cloud computing-based hosting services.

Blue Star Infotech also offers other traveller value-added mobile apps including two for mapping routes to destination locations and providing turn-by-turn directions, one at street level (iRoadGenie) and the other inside large facilities for large resorts, convention centers, casinos and other venues with navigationalchallenges (iMapGenie). The company has also developed mobile native and web apps for booking air, car and hotel services, travel itinerary management, and weather and flight delay information.

The new age of mobile travel apps that increase traveller productivity, enhance their travel and user experiences, and help plan and  realize their dream vacations is upon us, and the forecast looks bright!

Tweetear

Natural Language Processing lies at the  intersection of linguistics  and computer science,  and promises to change  the way we interact with  computers. Forever.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural language, or the language spoken by humans the world over, is  a fascinating construct. Not only does  each language have its own set of rules  concerning grammar and semantics,  but over time these languages spawn  dialects that modify these rules in subtle  ways. Computers, on the other hand are  programmed using a set of instructions that are collectively called a programming  language. These languages have their  own ‘grammar’ (called syntax) and their  own ‘vocabulary’ (called keywords) and  bear little or no resemblance with natural  language. While these programming  languages operate on a very strict set of  rules governed by logic, spoken language  is often far more fexible, and any attempt  to quantify these rules would fall under  the domain of ‘fuzzy logic’.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)  is an attempt to use the concepts of  linguistics and machine learning to  allow computers to understand and  communicate using natural languages.

The earliest attempts at getting computers to understand human languages  were in the 1950s, where machines were  programmed to translate texts between  different languages using a hard-coded  set of rules. However, such attempts failed quickly owing to the imprecise and ever-changing nature of language. Recent developments in the felds of machine  learning using artifcial neural networks  have used statistical models that ‘train’ the software to understand the subtleties  of language. Such systems can interpret  natural languages more accurately, owing  to their probabilistic approach, where  they are trained using a set of known  rules or words, and use this data to inter- pret new, raw data.

This form of NLP that uses machine  learning models has proven far more  successful than earlier approaches which  modelled themselves after computer  languages rather than human languages.

The problem in this approach was that  programming languages have fewer rules  which are enforced more strictly than  natural languages, which follow complex  and ever changing rules of grammar.

Language-specifc semantics is another  hurdle, as the literal meaning of words  may not always be accurate.

Machine learning models the problem from a human perspective. Humans tend  to learn a new language faster using  examples as opposed to strict rules, and  NLP algorithms try to use this very fact to  improve the accuracy of their systems.

Algorithms used in Natural Language Processing:

The Markov Model and Parts of  Speech

Most algorithms that classify text use  complex learning algorithms that involve  statistical models to extract meaning from text.  An older, less accurate but considerably simpler technique used is the Markov  model, which is used in classifers such as  Parts Of Speech (POS)  tagging or sentiment analysis. POS is a system which tries  to assign a tag to each word in a sentence,  identify it as an adjective, verb, noun,  article, singular, plural etc. Sentiment  analysis is a technique that looks for certain words or ‘identifers’ that determine  the overall ‘mood’ or sentiment of the sentence. Such analysis is useful analyzing  social media to gauge group sentiment.

One company putting sentiment  analysis to good use on social media data  is Paraktweet, which has launched two  products. The frst is called Bookvibe  which gives book recommendations based  on positive tweets about a tome, and the  second is TrendFinder which helps enter- tainment companies gauge the audience’s  response to a movie by following the con- versations around a movie or TV series.

Parsing systems have also been developed that analyse online reviews on sites like  Amazon to gauge the overall response to a  product, helping prospective buyers make  an informed choice.

Markov models are a class of probabilistic learning algorithms, where the  sentence is broken down into its individual constituent words, and represented  in the form of a tree or a chain. The system  contains a corpus of pre-classifed words which are used to perform a preliminary POS classifcation. However, one  word may belong to more than one part  of speech, and the classifcation of such  a word can never be completely unambiguous. For e.g. the word ‘train’ can be  used as a noun (a local train) or a verb (to train as a professional athlete). Which of the two is correct in a particular context, is  determined by using probabilities that are  assigned on the words based on historical  data. The words that immediately follow  or precede an ambiguous word may also  be analysed to assign such probabilities.

By repeating this process, the system  ‘learns’ over time; and it’s known as  Machine Learning.

One excellent application of a Markov  chain is in text-prediction, specifcally in  predictive keyboards in smartphones such as the Android 4.1+ keyboard, or Swiftkey. 

These employ a similar Markov model,  where the next word is predicted based on  a probabilistic model, taking into account  previously typed pairs of words as well  as a corpus of word-pairs found in the  training data for accurately predicting the next word that the user might type. Recent  updates to Swiftkey have even allowed  for the prediction of whole sentences  by extrapolating the same algorithm to  groups of words. Swiftkey’s predictions  tend to be eerily accurate, and the app literally ‘gets to know you’ with time.

Swiftkey learns your typing habits over time, which can get slightly... embarrassing

A modifcation of a  Markov chain is called  Tree-traversal, where indi- vidual tokens (letters in a word, words in a sentence  or sentences in a block  of text) act as nodes of a  tree, and each parent node  has a child node for each  allowed permutation. As  an example, a spell-checker  would work by traversing  a tree with 26 parent nodes  (one for each letter of the  alphabet) and upto 26 child  nodes, who in turn will  have at most 26 children  of their own. Each level  of the tree represents the next letter in a  word (so a four letter word would be four  levels long), and the algorithm traverses  the nodes as the letters are entered in the  text document. The number of levels in  the tree would be the size of the biggest  word in the language. Every time the user  enters a combination of letters that is not  a valid path in the tree, the program will fag the word as being incorrectly spelled.

Suggesting an alternate spelling is far more diffcult though, as there is no way  of knowing which letter of the word has  been incorrectly entered, and will require  traversing each letter in the word-tree,  trying to fnd a word that has a spelling  similar to the mistyped word.

LexRank and Automatic Summarization

Thanks to the ubiquity of the Web, people  are fnding themselves at the receiving end of a frehose of new information  everyday, from  email and social  media updates to  news stories or  feeds from blogs  and websites. It is  practically impos- sible to consume and digest all of  this information  in a sane manner,  which has given rise to the need for automatic summarization of texts.

Summly provided summarized versions of news stories in a gorgeous interface. No wonder Yahoo bought it!

Popular iPhone app Summly provided  summaries of top news stories in an elegant, well designed interface until it was  acquired by Yahoo, making the 17 year  old prodigy behind the app richer by $30  million.  Summify, a similar service that  aggregated content from all your social  feeds and delivered it in via email, web or  email was acquired by Twitter last year.

Not to be left behind, Google acquired  Wavii, a startup that offered a personalized, summarized news feed to users by combining stories from social networks and other web content.

One of the most popular algorithms  for performing automatic summariza-tion is the LexRank algorithm which  gets its name from Google PageRank that powers its searchengine. It works by  using a graph-like structure to represent  the sentences and their relationships  with each other. Each node of the graph is represented by a sentence, and the edges  connecting these nodes indicate the similarity between the sentences. The shorter  this edge, (or the closer two nodes are) the  more similar in meaning they are. The  similarity of the sentences is calculated by measuring the frequency of the words occurring in the sentences.

This leads  to low frequency words being assigned  a higher priority in the summary. The  importance of a sentence is determined by the relative importance of the adjacent sentences, similar to how PageRank  calculates the relative importance of a web page. A similarity matrix is then con-structed using this LexRank data, and all sentences with a score below a threshold  value are rejected.

Speech recognition –  Apple’s Siri and Google’s  voice search

While the process of recognising spoken  word and transcribing doesn’t exactly  fall under NLP, training computer systems to respond to the transcribed text is a very exciting application. The process of extracting meaningful and unambiguous text from an audio clip is done using an algorithm similar to the Hidden Markov Models described before.

The audio clip is sent through a Fourier Transform, which splits up the stream  into different frequencies (similar to an  equalizer), and a correlation algorithm  forms an association between the shape  of the curveand the (known) word being  spoken. A corpus of such training data  is formed, which allows the system to assign probabilities to each word spoken by the user. Based on these probabilities,  a Markov chain is constructed which gives a reasonable transcription of the  spoken word into text.

Once the text has been extracted,  virtual assistants like Siri, Google Voice
Search and Siri-like alternatives on  Android such as Iris, Vlingo and Robin  parse the text and break it into parts of speech. The second part of the task  involves extracting useful information  from the text, such as the nature of the query and the best way to respond to it.

These systems use a pre-indexed database  that is used for replying to queries, which can include both offine data as well as online search engines to deliver the most relevant response.

Another age-old problem that is seeing a new lease of life is that of machine translation. Google Translate is a great example of applying the modern techniques of machine learning to automatic translations, as earlier attempts based on hard-coded rules failed while translating beyond simple phrases. This is still an open problem, however, as  translating large chunks of texts (such as  scientifc papers, journals or novels) is far  from perfect.

Google debuted its updated Voice Search in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Not to be dissuaded however, researchers at Carnegie  Mellon University have come  up with a unique crowd-sourcing model of translating  documents on the Internet  using an app called Duolingo.

The website (along with mobile  apps for iOS and Android)  gamifes the process of learning  a new language, where users  are rewarded with points for  completing new lessons. The  service, which is completely  free of cost, tests these newly  acquired language skills of its users by asking them to translate documents from/to  the language they are learning.

A statistical model is employed  that correlates the translated  documents submitted by thou- sands of its users to weed out  any mistranslations.

Facebook’s newest feature, Graph Search employs Markov  Models to break down the search string into a hierarchy  of components that are then  used as commands to query  the database. For e.g., “Friends  who live in Mumbai” will look for a union  of all users who satisfy both conditions  simultaneously. Permutations of this  string such as “Friends in Mumbai” or  “My Mumbai friends” also point to the  same dataset, as the parsing engine is  intelligent enough to distinguish between  the words in the string that are essential  (friends, Mumbai) versus those that are non-essential (living, my). This allows for  highly specifc searches using data your  friends have entered.

As statistical models for processing  natural language data get more effective, the divide between programming  languages and natural languages seems  to be closing. Data scientists are fnding  new ways to parse human languages into  tokens of data, leading to new high level  programming languages being developed that lie very close to to spoken languages on the scale, making programming accessible to a wider audience. Intelligent voice- activated assistants like Siri are indicative of the massive progress that NLP has  made over the years, but localising these  systems into multiple languages, each  with their own idiosyncrasies is another  challenge that engineers are working hard to tackle. 

Apple’s Siri employs highly sophisticated classifers to parse speech input

Facebook’s Graph Search uses NLP to fnd the most relevant search results

Tweetear

Agent 001 goes on a mission to uncover the truth  behind brain training. Is it  truly effective?

I landed myself a rather cushy task this month which involved  spending most of my time in the  offce with a steaming mug of coffee  rather than hunting for a very specifc  motherboard on Lamington Road in a heavy downpour. It all started when my Digit friends came across this brain  training website/app called Lumosity.

Lumosity’s gamifed training program  promises a substantial boost in your  cognitive and reasoning abilities, in  other words it makes you smarter and  more intelligent. These claims kicked off  a huge debate regarding the effcacy of  such brain training programs in actually enhancing your brain’s abilities.

Now, a lot of research is going on in this  particular direction with some of the  world’s best psychologists and neuroscientists working to fnd conclusive  evidence backed by statistics. But unlike  peer reviewed research papers we just  took on to test these claims ourselves,  we decided to use this service and see for ourselves if it enhanced our brains  capabilities. I was to use Lumosity for  a month and get a frst hand encounter  with serious brain training. The next  step was determining how would we  measure my progress – using Lumos-ity’s own numbers didn’t make much  sense here. Hence, I decided to settle on a  standardized battery of tests created by the Medical Research Council at Cambridge University. The results would  give me my position on a bell curve of the  population’s performance in the areas of  memory, reasoning and verbal ability. I  would take the test again after a month  and measure my progress and verify  the validity of claims discussed earlier.

A little background information on  Lumosity before proceeding further: It  was co-founded by one Michael Scanlon,  who abandoned his PhD in neuroscience at Stanford to convert his research  into a fedgling business. Lumosity had  launched in 2005, it has grown 150% year-on-year and as of April 2013 it has  40 million members. Lumosity’s iOS  app has been downloaded more than 10  million times with the app frequently  fnding it’s way to the top positions in its  category. The science behind Lumosity  is what they call ‘neuroplasticity’, which  is defned as the brain’s ability to physically reshape itself when faced with new,  challenging problems. Lumosity also  carries out research by collaborating  with researchers from prestigious universities across the world, which  it calls the Human Cognition Project.

Lumosity

Lumosity’s website and app allow these researchers to conduct experiments over the Internet obviating the need to recruit participants and arranging lab visits.

I took my initial Cambridge Brain Sciences test on 25th of May, it turned out  that I wasn’t as intelligent as I thought.

I was in the 34th percentile for short-term memory, 71st percentile for  reasoning ability and the 46th percentile  for verbal intelligence. My regime was to train with Lumosity in the morning after  or accompanied by my morning cuppa everyday for one month. I would take the Cambridge Brain Science IQ challenge once again at the end of the month to see if I’ve actually made progress or not. Another thing to add here is that I used the free version of the program, which according to Lumosity was not giving me the beneft of a comprehensive training program. The paid subscription service would have given me personalized training,access to all the games that

Lumosity has to offer, anytime and compare my scores with others. A monthly subscription costs $14.95 per month, which according to the current exchange would convert to `887 per month. The charge comes down to $6.7, which is equivalent to `397 per month if you commit for a year or $4.99 that is about `295 per month if you commit for two years. There is an option to purchase the subscription for a lifetime that costs $299.95 that comes to around `17,779.

The app’s interface is incredibly simple and dead easy to follow when you register for the program you  are greeted with a wizard which helps  you build your personalized training  program. The areas where Lumosity  focuses are memory, attention, speed,  fexibility and training. Lumosity offers  different games to improve specifc  aspects in these areas viz., for memory, the aspects on which training is offered are  recalling the location of objects, remembering names after the frst introduction, learning new subjects quickly and  accurately and keeping track of several  ideas at the same time. I wanted to check all the tests that they had to offer thus

I selected every aspect of focus areas  on offer for my personal training.

After a day of training on Lumosity

Alternative Brain training programs/Games

Brain Spade Games
www.brainspade.com
AARP Brain Games
games.aarp.org
Brain Metrix
www.brainmetrix.com
Brain Age Games
www.freebrainagegames.com
Mind Games
www.mindgames.com/brain-games.php
Miniclip
http://www.miniclip.com/games/
genre-476/brain-training/en/

Speed Match is good to sharpen the brain

The games themselves are incredibly polished and well designed. I played ‘Speed Match’, which improves my speed  and memory. I played ‘Eagle Eye’ and  ‘Lost in Migration’ which worked on my attention skills. I played ‘Speed Match’  and ‘Memory Map’ enhancing my short- term memory and ‘Word Bubbles’ and  ‘Rain Drops’ for fexibility and problem  solving skills respectively. In the free  version you can play these games only  once per day. The games are not acces-sible after you’ve completed your daily  dose of brain boosters. Another thing to  note is that these games are assigned to  you on a random basis, thus everyday  is like a lottery. Lumosity’s own scoring  index is called BPI (Brain Power Index),  which it derives by comparing your  game scores with results from other  players, and assigning you an index  based on your relative performance.

Now talking about the results, I tried  to stick to the regime that I came up with,  but quite frankly I was not able to do it  everyday. I stuck to the schedule for the frst two weeks but then the practice session kept on becoming more sporadic. I  found the games slightly juvenile - stars  dancing around the screen, submarines,  monsters and penguins, which made it  quite boring to trudge through the games  everday. Though this is what I felt, and  other people who are playing these games  might not necessarily feel the same. I took  the fnal Cambridge Brain Sciences test  at the same time and same conditions as  the frst one, so there is no discrepancy in  the result. I scored in the 38th percentile  in short-term memory, 78th percentile  in reasoning ability and 49th percentile  in verbal ability, a modicum of progress  in all areas. According to Lumosity itself 

I have been able to bump my BPI from  485 to 672 in the span of one month, with  the largest gains in memory, speed and problem solving. The free version does not  let you see your historical performance  and the detailed breakdown of your  performance, but if you keep the track of  your scores then you can make out your  strengths and weaknesses easily enough.

The most important question, is it  actually effective? I am now supposedly more intelligent than I started out,  but the skeptic in me refuses to believe.

Does intelligence in its truest sense only  mean getting better in these sections? I  couldn’t actually see my performance  on each and every game that I played  but I could make out from the general  progress in scores that the more I played  a particular game, the more I scored.

I played these games repeatedly  for quite some time and the final test  panned out in the same vein, and thus
I believe that I’ve gotten better only at  these particular games and tests. None- theless, it does feel like I have achieved  something even if it’s a few notches  higher in the BPI or hitting a higher  percentile on the tests. Not necessarily  boosting your IQ and making you a  genius, these games in my opinion are  just a form of mental exercise. They just  keep your brain in shape like any other  muscle in the body, the choice of training  is entirely your. It can be Sudoku or a  crossword in your daily paper, riddles  and puzzle, math-based exercises or even brain games such as these.

Tweetear

The fear that our devices are somehow altering our brains might seem exclusively modern. But in 1931, Technology Review published  “Machine-Made Minds: the Psychological effects of Modern technology,” in which John Bakeless explored how machines had transformed the very nature of human thought. here’s what he had to say:

It is a curious fact that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important efect of all—its profound infuence on the modern mind. Anything that shapes our thoughts shapes society also; and the efects of the machine on contemporary thought must, therefore, be at least as signifcant as its effects on contemporary economics or industry, or the life of society in general.



Even our republican form of government is possible only because a few machines—mainly vehicles (railroads, airplanes, and motor cars) and means of communication (mails, telephone, tele- graph, radio, wireless, and machine-made  newspapers)—bring the minds of a continent sufciently close so that we can live  and work together. In fact, if we may trust Shakespeare, who certainly was not a product of the Machine Age, “there is nothing  either good or bad, but thinking makes  it so.” If the machine really controls our thoughts, no wonder it controls all else.

Consider the mental equipment of  the average modern man. Most of the raw  material of his thought enters his mind  by way of a machine of some kind—often  through the agency of several machines.

Newspapers, magazines, moving and talking pictures are the clearest examples.

All this creates an almost incalculable  diference between the modern mind—the  scholar’s in his study, the technologist’s in  his laboratory, the engineer’s in the feld,  as well as the giggling, gum-chewing shop- girl’s on her way down town in the sub- way—and the mind of the Eighteenth or  early Nineteenth Centuries. For the frst  time, thanks to machinery, such a thing as  a world-wide public opinion is possible.

Quite as significant as the machine- made power of the press and of mechanically reproduced art upon our minds, are  the various mechanical devices developed  during the last two decades for pouring ideas into our eyes and ears—movies,  talkies, radio, and television. Some of these  mechanical devices probably have more  efect upon the less literate levels of modern society than the printed word could ever  hope to have.

The danger is that our minds may be tied down to the machine. Our art may  some day be restricted (as advertising art  always has been) to that capable of mechanical reproduction, our music to the requirements of radio, talkie, and phonograph ...

All because we have misused the machine,  or allowed it to misuse us.

If the world ever realizes that hitherto  Utopian vision of a general difusion of the  good things of life—an ample assurance of  food, clothing, and shelter for everyone, to  which is added leisure for art, letters, pure  science, and philosophy, the gorgeous play- things of the mind—it will have to look for  them to the machine.

That is, it will have to  look to the machine for the economic basis  on which these things must inevitably rest. Strangely enough, we have hitherto  been willing to enslave ourselves to the  machine instead of enslaving it. Most of our contemporary troubles arise from that  odd willingness to allow the machine to be  master instead of slave. If we are to build  a great civilization in America, if we are to  win leisure for cultivating the choice things  of the mind and spirit, we must put the  machine in its place.

Tweetear

A venture capital frm throws out intuition and uses computer models to determine investments.

Aldea Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing an emergency treatment for alcohol poisoning, seemed like an attractive investment to venture capitalist David Coats. But he didn’t rely on a hunch—he consulted the computer model he’d built.

Wenjin yang is research vice president at aldea pharmaceuticals, which got funding thanks to software suggesting that its method for speeding up alcohol metabolism was a good investment.

Two weeks and a few phone calls later, he cut the company a $1.25 million check. “A decision like that would have normally taken a minimum of three months,” says Tim Shannon, who is Aldea’s CEO and a partner with the frm that had led Aldea’s $7 million fund-raising round.

The $1.25 million was a follow-on investment from Correlation Ventures, which calls itself a “new breed of venture capital firm”—one driven by predictive analytics software built over the last six years by founder Coats and his partner Trevor Kienzle.

Correlation Ventures asks startups to submit fve basic planning, fnancial, and legal documents. It enters these into a program similar to credit rating software.

Entrepreneurs with low scores can get their rejections in as little time as two days.
High scores lead Correlation to a 30-  minute interview with both the startup CEO and the outside venture frm leading the investment, plus a quick legal review and background check.

Once it makes an investment, Correlation backs of and doesn’t take a board seat.
That policy is itself data driven: the frm’s analytics show that companies with more than two VCs on the board are less likely to be successful.

What’s not yet clear is whether this system works. Correlation Ventures has so far invested in 26 companies in diverse sectors but says it is too early to grade its success.

None of this might have been possible a decade ago. Harvard Business School professor Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, who advises

Correlation Ventures and is an investor in the fund, says the venture capital industry has only recently worked through enough business cycles to look for subtle trends.

There was also no complete, accurate, public set of venture capital data, so Cor-relation Ventures hustled for it. To build and maintain its database, it partnered with Dow Jones, scoured the Internet, signed nondisclosure agreements with more than 20 venture funds to see their internal statistics, and called hundreds of companies.

While so-called Big Data companies have attracted plenty of investors, the reputation-  driven venture capital industry itself has yet to embrace their tools. (There are exceptions, such as Google Ventures, which uses quantitative analysis to help guide decisions.)

One fnding from Coats’s research is that while top-tier frms invest in a disproportionate share of “winning” companies, the majority of successful investments are led by venture frms that don’t even crack the top 50. So it makes logical sense for Cor-relation Ventures to focus equal time and energy on many companies and co-invest with a diverse set of venture capital frms, he says.

To explain his project, Coats cites Money  ball, the book and movie about how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane rejected the conventional wisdom on evaluating baseball players and built a winning franchise by letting a computer tease out variables that others overlooked. He believes the averages will work out. “We’re not claiming to have a magic crystal ball,” he says. “We’re tilting the odds a little in our favor with each investment.”

Tweetear

Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of  humans, robots, and algorithms.

In his new book Automate This, Christopher Steiner tells the story of stockbroker Thomas Peterfy, the creator of the frst automated Wall Street trading system. Using a computer to execute trades, without humans entering them manually on a keyboard, was controversial in 1987—so controversial that Nasdaq pressured him to unplug from its network. Then, with a wink, Peterfy built an automated machine that could tap out the trades on a traditional keyboard—technically obeying Nasdaq rules. Peterfy made $25 million in 1987 and is now a billionaire. Today, automated trading bots account for nearly three-quarters of U.S. equity trading by volume. Trading houses plow millions into fber optics and microwave dishes so their algorithms can send trades a millisecond faster than the next guys’. And although the frst trading robot was built 25  years ago, most of the change on Wall Street  has occurred during just the last few years.

Robots made by Kiva Systems move product shelves on a warehouse foor. Amazon bought the company earlier this year in a step toward automating its distribution system and reducing labor costs.

When it comes to automation, we may be in  the elbow of an exponential curve.

In this business report, we look at this  cutting edge of automation. Consider Amazon. The company not only automated  book buying but also turned the computer  systems it built to do so into a service called  Amazon Web Services, making them avail- able for anyone wanting to repeat the feat.

And now Amazon’s founder, Jef Bezos,  is placing new bets on automation. In  March, Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva  Systems, a company that makes robotic dollies that zip across warehouse foors car- rying shelves full of goods. Kiva found it  was more productive to have the humans who “pick, pack, and stow” items stay in  one place and let intelligent shelves come to  them. Among other reasons, Amazon said,  it bought the robotics frm because the technology ofered the chance to reduce labor  requirements at its dozens of warehouses.


Any work that is repetitive or  fairly well structured can be fully  or partially automated. this may  explain why economic output  has risen while the number of  jobs has fallen.

This is an example of what is going on  in the economy more broadly. As the MIT  economist David Autor has argued, the  job market is being “hollowed out.” High- wage, high-skill employment is still being  created—and so are many poorly compensated service industry jobs for food preparers, home care aides, and others. It’s the  jobs in the middle that are disappearing:  certain clerical, sales, and administrative  jobs and some on factory foors.

Now a combination of growing computing power and advances in data crunching  means automation is primed to threaten  not just tax preparers and travel agents  but higher-rung jobs such as those in the  medical and legal professions, where soft- ware can increasingly do things like analyze images and understand speech more  accurately and in more contexts than ever  before. Any work that is repetitive or fairly  well structured is open to full or partial  automation. Being human confers less and  less of an advantage these days.

Some economists believe automation  may explain why U.S. economic output  has grown since 2007 while the number of jobs has fallen. That kind of dislocation is unusual. The U.S. economy has  evolved from agriculture to manufacturing  to service industries. Each time jobs were  destroyed in one sector, they were replaced  elsewhere. Data from the Bureau of Labor  Statistics provide some clues to what the next economy will look like. Seven of  the 10 fastest-growing new job cat- egories between 2009 and 2011 have  the word “computer” or “software” in  them, according to an analysis by Matt  Beane, a doctoral student at MIT’s  Sloan School of Management.

Some say what’s taking shape is a more productive symbiosis between man and machine—and successful
businesses will be the ones that optimize it. Rodney Brooks, founder of ReThink Robotics in Boston, believes that a new type of general-purpose robot could reinvigorate manufacturing. The machines he’s building aren’t hardwired for any one job; they’re fexible, so many types of businesses could use them for a variety of production tasks. The company aims to democratize automation the way the PC did for computing, spurring similar efciency gains.

There’s defnitely good news here: more people than ever have access to afordable, powerful tools that can help them and their businesses become more productive. Take Todd Ruback, a privacy lawyer in Warren, New Jersey, who handles legal paperwork for companies that have lost sensitive data like credit card numbers. The job involves fling forms and notifying consumers in dozens of states, each with slightly diferent laws and deadlines. He’s been testing software made by a company called Co3 Systems that automates much of the process. It walks attorneys through what they need to do and prints out the right form letters for each state.

Ruback estimates that the software cuts the time it takes him to handle a case by 10 to 20 percent. But lawyers bill by the hour, so why would Ruback want something that makes it all go faster?

It’s pretty simple, he says. The software makes him more efficient. And if he doesn’t automate, the other guy will.

Tweetear

A biotech company is pursuing an approach that could redefne infectious medicine.

For some infectious diseases, traditional  vaccines just don’t cut it. Microbes that  hide inside human cells and cause chronic  illness aren’t stymied by the antibody response  generated by the kinds of vaccines available at  the doctor’s ofce. T-cell vaccines, which acti- vate a diferent type of immune response, could  in theory ofer a better way to prevent or control such infections, but so far nobody has been  successful at bringing T-cell vaccines from the lab bench to the clinic.

A colored scanning electron micrograph depicts a t cell.

Now Genocea, a biotech company in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, thinks it can do it. It will  test the claim this fall with its frst clinical trial,  on an experimental herpes vaccine.

All existing vaccines rouse the body into  creating antibodies that attach to the sur- face of infecting microbes and fag them for  destruction. But pathogens that live inside our  cells, such as the viruses, bacteria, and other microbes that cause AIDS,  malaria, herpes, and chla- mydia, can evade this sur- veillance. “In order to deal  with those types of pathogens, oftentimes we  have to stimulate what we call cellular immunity,” says Genocea cofounder Darren Higgins, a  Harvard biologist. “Unlike antibody immunity,  which recognizes pathogens directly, cellular  immunity has to recognize the infected cell and  get rid of your own infected cells.”

It’s challenging to activate cellular immunity and the family of infection-fghting cells,  known as T cells, that drive it. The trial-and-error method used to develop antibody-based  vaccines has not worked for T-cell vaccines.

Despite years of academic and industry work,  and even clinical trials, there are no T-cell vaccines for infectious disease on the market. “We  don’t know all of the rules yet—if it’s possible  to make a T-cell vaccine, [or] how efective it  would be,” says Robert Brunham of the University of British Columbia, who is developing  a T-cell vaccine against chlamydia.

Indeed, our understanding of how T cells  control infection is still developing. The challenge is to identify the pathogen protein that  will grab a T cell’s attention and signal that a  human cell harbors an infectious agent. “If you can fgure out what those protein pieces are,  then you can use those proteins as a vaccine to  sort of educate your immune system on what  to respond to,” says Higgins.

The challenge gets tougher with pathogens whose genomes encode more proteins. 
There are 80 or so proteins in the herpes simplex 2 genome, about 1,000 in chlamydia, and  5,000 or so in malaria. Genocea has a high- throughput screening method in which it col- lects as many of a pathogen’s proteins as can  reasonably be produced in a lab and then monitors how human immune cells respond to each.

Although Genocea’s herpes vaccine is still  unproven, the work is moving faster than typical vaccine research, which can take 10 years  to go from discovery to proof of concept and  20 years to reach the market.

Tweetear

Are you prepared to manage the distractions inherent in a portal to the internet that you can’t  take your eyes off?

In the previous issue of this publication, Farhad Manjoo made  a plausible case that Google’s new augmented-reality glasses,  known as Project Glass, could make computing less distracting  by replacing every other device in our pockets and laps. Rather  than checking out of a conversation by looking down at our phones,  we could get in and out of our computing environment without  even turning our heads.

Someday, maps and  other applications could come up in your feld of view.

But here’s where human behavior comes in. We are really bad  at ignoring distractions at hand. And the more accessible they  are, the more addictive and distracting they can become. Let’s  take all those distractions and put them on our face, directly in  our line of sight? I don’t know about you, but when I want to  avoid distractions, I often have to physically avoid them. “Out of  sight, out of mind” isn’t just a cliché—it’s a commentary on the  narrow spotlight of human attention and our inability to ignore  something ever-present in our feld of view.

Already, computers grab so much of  our attention that savvy users deploy  apps like SelfControl and Freedom,  which switch of social media, e-mail, and  other distractions. Certainly, we could use  such aids on Google’s Glass. But I’ll bet most of us won’t.

Do you fnd it unnerving when the person next to you at the  grocery store is having a conversation with himself or herself,  and at frst you don’t realize it’s because he or she is speaking  into a phone headset? Google Glass is a camera, headphones,  and a display all in one. So now imagine that the person in the  grocery store seems to be having full-blown visual hallucinations. 

Don’t get me wrong—I fnd the prospect of augmented reality tantalizing. I’m just not sure we yet know how to manage the  ways it’s going to change our interpersonal relations.

Tweetear

Tweetear

Samsung’s latest hi-tech toddler-surveillance system trains an unblinking eye on your offspring…

The Samsung SEW-3037 with 3.5-inch, colour LCD is your baby’s new Big Brother. It keeps a watchful 2x-zooming eye on your babe, while pan and tilt will check twins or scan the playroom for hidden axe-wielding madmen. Just kidding, obvs. A two-way radio with talk-back lets you and your other half
argue remotely over whose turn it is to change Junior. 253,69 USD, samsung.com/uk

THE TECH
Samsung’s SEW-3037 in detail

1/ Babies should be seen...
 Resolution on the “parent hub” monitor is only 320x240, but it’s clear enough even in low light. When lights go out the unit automatically switches to black-and-white, night-vision mode.

2/ …And also heard
Switch to Vox mode and the screen will switch off if all’s quiet. As soon as the wailing begins, the screen switches itself back on.

3/ Even a one-year-old could use it
The screen isn’t a touchscreen, but the menu system is easy to navigate and allows access to all camera options and sound settings.

4/ Surveillance state
You can connect up to four cameras at a  time for full, round-the-clock coverage, with each cam promising to be interference-free up to 300 metres.

Tweetear

Last month the first shots were fired from a 3D printed gun. As expected it sparked debate regarding the future of 3D printed firearms.


For many, 3D printing is a revolution, using a special hardened plastic to print, layer by layer, actual physical objects. While there are many uses for this, for example the printing of spare parts for models or architects
constructing 3D replicas of their projects, American Cody Wilson had other ideas. Starting last year in August he created the non-profit organisation Defense Distributed, with the aim of providing freely available plans for 3D printable firearms.

Shoot ‘em up

In a relatively small amount of time, Wilson’s ideas came to fruition, since last month he managed to fire the first shot from a 3D printed gun. Called the Liberator, the gun is constructed out of 16 pieces, 15 of which were printed on an $8 000 3D printer. The final part is a simple nail that you can buy from a hardware store (the bullets are also shop bought).

Wilson’s success led him to release the plans on his website, even though at this stage the Liberator cannot fire more than one shot at a time. This, while its ability to withstand the pressure associated with shooting more than a few rounds, is in doubt. In the two days before the American State Department ordered him to take it down, the blueprints for the gun were downloaded 100 000 times. And just because it is not available on his site any longer doesn’t mean they are gone – the plans quickly made their way to torrenting networks such as The Pirate Bay.

To the point

The availability of 3D printed guns, and the US government’s attempt to regulate these, brings up numerous difficult questions. On the one side, the Liberator is crude, costs a lot to produce and seems to be as much
of a danger to the person behind the gun as in front – for now at least. For the US government the problems are numerous: Is it at all possible to stop the distribution of these blueprints? Is banning the plans not a violation of freedom of speech? How do you enforce a ban on printing 3D guns? Do you regulate the sale of 3D printers at all? These questions will most probably be answered by US courts.

Tweetear

Eben Upton thought a new generation of youngsters might never develop valuable hardware and software hacking skills unless they had access to cheap, hobbyist-friendly computers. So he set out to build one himself. The resulting tiny box, which sells for just $25, has been a big hit. It could boost computer skills not only among children but among adults in poor countries as well.

Upton came up with the idea in 2006, when he was fnishing his PhD in computer science at the University of Cambridge. Having agreed to help out with undergraduate computer science admissions, he was looking forward to interacting with teenagers who loved messing around with computers as much as he had when he was younger.

Upton had done all that messing around partly for the thrill of bending the machines to his will, and partly because the 1980s boom in video games had made it easy to imagine making a fortune working with
computers. “I was a mercenary child,” he says, sounding a bit apologetic. “One of the things that drew me to computing was that there were 15-year-old kids who made so much money from computing they actually
bought Ferraris.”

To judge by the applicants Upton was looking at, however, kids had lost interest. They were still messing around on computers, but they weren’t messing around with them. They weren’t writing programs and
taking apart circuit boards. They were the kinds of kids who played World of Warcraft and exchanged cat pictures on Facebook.

They had changed from active hackers to passive consumers. Perhaps the dot-com bust had killed some
of the enthusiasm for hacking. But to Upton, one other possible factor loomed large. In the 1980s, he and his friends had learned basic computer science on a BBC Micro, a line of computers built for the British Broad-
casting Corporation by Acorn Computers and installed in most English schools. Small, rugged, inexpensive, and expandable, the Micro introduced a generation of British children to hardware engineering and soft-
ware programming.

There was no contemporary equivalent to the Micro. “Sure, everyone in the middle class has a PC,” Upton says. “But even then, often there is only the one family PC. You won’t let kids screw around with it.” Schools
aren’t going to let students take apart their machines, either. As a result, he observes, “computing” classes teach children how to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. “Even Microsoft wants schools to produce software engineers,” Upton says. To successfully restore literacy in computer tinkering, he decided, the world needed a modern analogue of the BBC Micro.

Being a hardware guy at heart, Upton went ahead and built a prototype of a next-generation hobbyist machine - the sort ofstripped-down device that would enable its users to become acquainted with the guts of
a computer. It would also allow its users to put the machine to work in projects ranging from robotics to wearable computing to gaming. He eventually took up a Cambridge professor’s suggestion to call his device
Raspberry Pi, tipping his hat to the old tech tradition of naming computers after fruit.

But he didn’t immediately see a way to produce Raspberry Pi in sufcient numbers to make a diference, so he reluctantly moth-balled the project.

After fnishing his PhD, Upton went to work at the Cambridge, U.K., ofce of Broadcom, a networking company based in Southern California. (He is now one of the company’s technical directors for Europe.) Upton was instrumental in the creation of Broadcom’s frst microprocessor intended for multimedia applications - the BCM2835. Released in 2011, it is a single chip that’s small enough to ft in a phone
but big enough to contain vital parts such as a central processing unit and a graphics processor. By some measures it was the most powerful chip in the mobile market at the time, and it was a tremendous success
for Broadcom.

It was also, Upton realized, the way to restart Raspberry Pi, given that a singlechip computer would be much less costly to produce. He and half a dozen volunteers worked on the new version on evenings and  weekends. But the BCM2835 wasn’t easy to deal with: it was dauntingly jammed with tiny components, including no fewer than fve power supplies.

To keep Raspberry Pi small and cheap, the team wanted to build it on a   single circuit board that could be stamped out, no further assembly required. But to enable the phone chip to work with computer periph-
erals and run full-scale computer software, they would, it appeared, need to build a board with more than eight stacked layers of circuitry, a prohibitively complex and expensive proposition. Working furiously to simplify the circuitry, the team eventually managed to shave the board design down to six layers.

The first prototypes were ready in December 2011, but Upton discovered, to his horror, that they didn’t work at all. Fighting panic at the thought of all the various subtle faws that might be buried in all those layers of tangled circuitry, the team discovered that one pin on the chip had been inadvertently disconnected. It was a blessedly easy fx, and within minutes, his invention was popping to life.

The Raspberry Pi is strikingly unlike other computers. About the size of an Altoids box, the computer has no keyboard, monitor, or disk drive—it doesn’t even have an internal clock or an operating system.

In other words, the machine requires a fair amount of hardware and software tinkering just to get started. It almost dares you to take it on and try to hack together a robot or gaming system. It can’t get by on looks. Lacking a case,  the Raspberry Pi ofers a dense, bristling cluster of tiny electronics to the owner’s
view, with fve ports: HDMI, to hook the computer up to a television; USB, to hook it to multiple devices; Ethernet, for data; and analog TV and analog stereo. But having to face the guts of the device is a good
thing, according to Upton. “Kids can see what they ordinarily can’t see, unless they smash a phone,” he says.

The really surprising feature of the Raspberry Pi is the $25 price: about a tenth the cost of the lowest-priced computers available in stores (if you ignore tablets, which no one can hack anyway). It was intended for kids, but hackers of all ages wanted it, and so did budding com-puter scientists in poor countries. Almost
the instant the Raspberry Pi went on sale, orders crashed the websites of its two vendors, RS Components and Premier Farnell.

The companies reported that they were taking in orders fast enough to tear through the entire initial stock of 10,000 computers in minutes.

Thrilled with the reception, Upton is making more of the devices through a non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation he put together - his mercenary tendencies having abated over the years. In fact, he says,
he intends to sell two million Raspberry Pis a year in order to reach a critical mass that will support an active community of owners to share tips and applications. He also hopes that the existence of this community
will prompt schools to adopt the Raspberry Pi for courses.

Even more important, Upton hopes, is that kids start to take them apart. “That would be real success,” he says.

Tweetear

1. PRODUCTIVITY BOOSTING NAP POD

Power Naps have been proven to boost productivity efficiently. Aitliough it is always a challenge to not fall back asleep after a 20-minute nap, you will be rewarded for your restraint. The Pod is cushioned for comfort and has a spherical dome for privacy. A timer can be set for a 20-minute nap and slowly brightening lights and vibration gently wake nappers. Music can be played through a built-in speaker or headphone jack. Of course, the question remains as to whether it is wise to spend USD16,000 for perfect power naps.




2. WINDOW WASHING ROBOT

Introducing the world's first robot that automatically cleans glass of any thickness. This robot is equipped with a powerful internal vacuum pump which seals onto the glass while anti- slip thread is driven by two motors so that the robot will not fall while it is cleaning. The Window Washing Robot chooses the most efficient route to clean the glass by calculating the glass size. If you have been planning to join the window cleaning profession, start thinking of another career.


3. NDUR SURVIVAL STRAW

Bear Grylls, the adventurer of the television series 'IVIan VS Wild', is well known for drinking his own urine in almost every episode to survive in the wild. If only he forked out USD30 for an NDuR Survival Straw, he could avoid resorting to drinking his own urine. This straw is not an ordinary one, of course. It is a very effective filtration tool that eliminates up to 99.99% of harmful bacteria, chemicals, viruses, you name it. This is definitely something I'd bring with me on every outdoor

4. BIOFEEDBACK POSTURE TRAINER

Slouching is not only seen as an unattractive habit, it is also the cause of various health problems such as back and breathing problems. Even if you have a very high level of discipline, it can be a real challenge correcting your posture. The Biofeedback

Posture Trainer should make this a lot easier. This device is worn like a backpack to help the user develop a good posture.

Every time the user slouches, the device will buzz and vibrate to alert the user. It might be annoying at first but the results are definitely worth the struggle and certainly more presentable than walking around balancing books on your head.



5. SOLAR POWERED CAT TANTALIZER

A cat tantalizer is a great toy for keeping your cat occupied and for it to practice its hunting skills. It is always better to keep your cat busy when there is no one at home to prevent it from tearing up your couch and what not. Instead of getting a regular cat tantalizer, why not get solar powered one? The Solar Powered Cat Tantalizer moves when it is struck by sunlight, causing a dangling plastic ball with colourful feathers to sway and bounce. It is about time for you to give your fat cat some exercise.




6. TONY STARK LIGHT-UP LED IRON MAN SHIRT

Since the screening of the first Iron Man movie, many people have been intrigued by Tony Stark's arc reactor which powers his Iron Man suit and prevents shrapnel from reaching his heart. After the success of all three movies, I'm sure that many people wouldn't mind owning this shirt at all. The fact that it is powered by three AAA batteries does make me question the comfort of the shirt though. But who cares? As long as you can look a little like the billionaire playboy philanthropist you could only dream of becoming, three batteries dangling somewhere on your shirt is a small price to pay.

 
7. 500X HANDHELD DIGITAL MICROSCOPE

Whether you are a germaphobe or a science enthusiast, you can find a good use for the 500X Handheld Digital Microscope.

This digital microscope magnifies small objects up to 500 times. The magnification can be displayed on its flip-out screen. There are eight built-in LEDs at the front to illuminate subject and images captured can be saved onto a microSD card. The 500X Handheld Digital Microscope operates up to four hours on a three-hour charge. It is so much easier than using a normal microscope.


8. BODY HEAT MIMICKING MOSQUITO TRAP

Did you know that mosquitoes are the deadliest animals on earth?

More deaths are associated with a mosquitoe than any other animal on earth. Most people would also rate it as the most annoying one as well. This is why the Body Heat Mimicking Mosquito Trap was invented, to get these pests away from you.

This USD600 trap (I kid you not) mimics human bodyheat and emits odourless carbon dioxide. The trap also comes with a blue light, giving mosquitoes every reason to be attracted by the trap.

Tweetear

1. BACTRACK MOBILE BREATHALYZER

Driving under tlie influence of alcoliol is still one of the main causes of accidents even to this day. You'd think that after progressing so far technologically, people of this age would have learned to abide by this simple law. With this breathalyzer, all you have to do is blow into it after a night of drinking and your iPhone will receive the stats of your blood alcohol levels. You can then hand the car keys to someone sober enough to get you home safely.


 

2. CANDYSHELL CARD IPHONE 5 CASE

This protective case is a great gear for iPhone 5 users. Its special feature is that it can hold up to 3 cards or folded bills. That's not enough to completely replace your wallet but it is good enough for you to leave your wallet at home if you are going somewhere with a high chance of losing your wallet such as a concert. When you need your cards or money, simply push a thumb release to pop them out. It also comes with a dual-layer casing to ensure your phone is always protected.

 

3. BLUETOOTH BBQ THERMOMETER


I love barbeques because I love to eat. That beautiful sensation of sinking your teeth into that perfectly grilled slab of meat as the juice trickles onto your tongue is what I look forward to in barbeques. However, I never throw any barbeque parties myself because I always burn the meat. If you're an ungifted griller like me, let me introduce to you the Bluetooth BBQ Thermometer. This thermometer monitors a few slabs of meat simultaneously and will alert you via an app on your iOS device up to 200 feet away when your meat is cooked. If you think a perfectly grilled piece of meat is important, get it.

4. SMARTPHONE SECURITY SENSOR

Since many of us nowadays are obsessed with our phones and the thought of being separated from them gives us nightmares, the Smartphone Security Sensor would be a great investment.

This nifty little device is compatible with most smartphones and is powered for up to 3 months from a single charge. Whenever your phone surpasses a 20-metre radius from you, the security sensor will emit a loud siren sound while vibrating and flashing its embedded LED lights.

5. IPHONE CONTROLLED MUSICAL MERCEDES SLS

This is a toy IVIercedes SLS that can be controlled by an app in your iPhone via Bluetooth. As you make it speed across the floor, you can play your favourite songs on your iPhone to comfort yourself about how you can't afford a real Mercedes SLS. Once you stop the car, its gulf wing doors will open and music will stream to the car's onboard speakers. Your Mercedes SLS toy can be controlled by tilting your iPhone. Besides that, your iPhone Controlled Musical Mercedes SLS can also flash its lights on sync with the beat of your music.

6. PORTABLE SOLAR POWERED SPEAKER

Here is a unique speaker that has many great features. It is solar powered, water resistant and shock proof. So you won't need to worry if it rains while you leave it out in the sun to charge or if an earthquake strikes. The Portable Solar Powered Speaker pairs with your devices via Bluetooth to play your tunes. This speaker also has a microUSB cable to charge your devices if you don't have a power outlet nearby You can get up to 8 hours of operation from this speaker after just a 5-hour solar charge.

7. CELL PHONE CALL CLARIFYING TELEPHONE

If you live in an area with a terrible mobile phone reception, you can say goodbye to the days where you have to repeat what you said on your phone numerous times. This amplified cordless telephone not only amplifies and enhances the clarity of mobile phones calls; it also allows users to adjust the tone for the best clarity After pairing the Cell Phone Call Clarifying Telephone with a mobile phone, the telephone will flash its LED lights when a call is incoming. There are additional buttons on the telephone for one-touch dialling.

8. POWEROCK TAROT

Not many people like carrying around a bulky power bank but it gives them the assurance that there will be no need to panic should their phone run out of battery. Well it is time to ditch those bulky power banks because thanks to Powerock, you can now fit a power bank into your wallet. The Powerock Tarot has been announced as the world's thinnest portable power bank. No larger than the size of a credit card but slightly thicker, this life-saver comes with a 1,500 mAh capacity that is enough for emergencies.

Tweetear

Yes, you couldjust tiwn everything off, but we show you the best power-saving methods that actually work

Battery life is one of the biggest issues facing the Android world today. Take your SIM card out, turn off Wi-Fi and never touch it, and your phone will sit there happily, lasting for a whole week on a single charge. But try to use it for anything 'smart' and that's where your problems start.

You have to admit that it's a pretty sorry state of affairs when you're counting the uptime of today's smartphones in hours rather than days: the standard metric of decent battery life being whether a phone can last a whole working day on a single charge. So are there any realistic things that you can do to improve the duration of your smartphone's battery life, other than just switching it off, hiding it away in your sock drawer and hoping no one ever calls you?

Read on to discover some easy, not-too-compromising methods of boosting your Android phone's battery life, so you're not always wondering where the nearest power socket is.

It's not possible to suddenly double your Android smartphone's uptime by magically tweaking a few settings, of course. However, you should be able to squeeze out a few more hours from even the puniest of batteries, which could be the difference between listening to music on your way home and sitting in silence wondering where it all went wrong.

> Set a rigid bedtime

Some of today's smartphones feature automation tools, which enable you to, say, turn off the mobile signal and Wi-Fi after a certain time.

Putting your phone into this sort of induced coma does save power, so if your phone doesn't already support scheduled activities, try installing a management app, such asTasker, and switching off all non-essential stuff overnight. Or you could stick itin airplane mode yourself. You'll sleep better, too.



> Deactivate Wi-Fi when not needed

If your phone's constantly sniffing out and trying to connect to every Wi-Fi signal in the area, like a robot dog on heat, you're wasting battery power.

Switch off Wi-Fi when out and about or when you know that you're not going to be needing it. A homescreen toggle makes this easy. Think of it as something boring but essential you have to do, like always putting your seat belt on.


> Upload and sync only on Wi-Fi

If you're a keen Dropbox user or rely heavily on music syncing services, you'll benefit greatly from only doing your uploading through Wi-Fi. It's vastly quicker, which means your phone isn't working so hard on demanding tasks, and a lot less strain on those battered lithium reserves.

> Uninstall any unnecessary apps

You can never be too sure what's running itself in the background, what with all the multi-tasking, self- uploading, auto-replicating features in today's modern Android apps.

So at least minimise the chances of something randomly hoovering up all your battery by constantly trying to connect to some non-existent server, by deleting any unused or old apps.

> Use push notifications

when possible Android's built-in email application is great and stylish and everything, but having it poll for messages every 15 minutes isn't best for your battery. If your email provider offers push notification support, use it - the excellent standalone Hotmail app does, for example, which will help lessen power drain a little.

> Switch off GPS

Unless you're one of those people who's still using Foursquare to tell the world every time you go out to the corner shop to buy a packet of crisps, there's little reason to have GPS constantly active on your smartphone. Turn it on only when you actually need it, and use the option to have your phone detect your location through the Wi-Fi connection. Wi-Fi location is usually close enough an approximation for most apps.

And if they do need GPS, they're clever enough to tell you anyway.


> Check yourself

Apps such as Battery Doctor give you a much better indication of what's eating away at your smartphone's battery over time than Android's own limited battery life checker does, which could help finger something that is the key culprit in draining your device's power. And if you can live without it. bin it.


> Install a brightness toggle widget

Set your phone to its minimum possible brightness by default, because it's your display that's by far the biggest user of power. Then stick a big brightness high/low toggle widget on the homescreen, in a place you can find it without being able to see it (such as when using your now ultra-gloomy phone outside). Then only max the brightness when you need to. It might help, and even the automatic brightness option uses a marginal amount of power, because the light sensor needs to sense light.

> Dump the widgets

Yes, widgets are a key part of Android, and we're trying to keep this guidepractical and not tell you to nuke everything, but do you really need a constantly updating Facebook widget on a homescreen? It's just full of boring people's boring baby photos anyway, and updating widget content puts a constant strain on your battery throughout the day, even if you just activate your phone for a few seconds to check a text message.

> Remove haptic feedback

Surely your brain's had enough practice using touch devices that it knows if you've pressed something or not by now? If so, turn off all the haptic feedback options. These little bumps and grinds use power each time you press a key, so try to get used to life without physical feedback.

> Put your phone on the windowsill
A strong connection to your phone network requires less power to maintain, so the technical people tell us.

So instead of keeping it in your pocket, stick it somewhere else and point it in the right direction so you see the maximum number of connection strength bars.

Simply flipping your phone 45° on your desk might actually make the battery last longer What a mind-blowing revelation, eh?

> And keep it cool

Batteries work best in cooler temperatures, with prolonged warm periods gradually lowering their efficiency over time. Putting your phone in a looser pocket might help, or perhaps just gently fanning it while it charges.

That might not be the best use of your working day, but at least you'll still be able to get on Twitter on the train home.