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Facebook announced big changes to the platform Thursday, including a splashy visual overhaul that puts photos front and center. As we’ve all come to learn, anytime Mark Zuckerberg and Co. change anything, tons of people will hate it. Others will love it. -
We won’t try to tell you that hi-Fun gloves ($70) aren’t “pointless and completely laughable.” But it’s still hard to resist a Bluetooth-enabled glove that hides a microphone in its pinkie finger and a speaker in its thumb so that the wearer needs only to make the “call me” sign to carry on a phone chat.
You must have your smartphone nearby, but you can receive a call or redial a number by merely touching the back of the glove. “If you have cold hands and you hate headsets and you’re cool with looking like a total crazy person, here you go.”
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Yesterday, Google Maps released a crowdsourced view of North Korea, which before was just white space.
The big grey blob you see here? That’s Hwasong Gulag, a 212-square mile concentration camp. It houses 10,000 people, and reportedly, no one has ever escaped.
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Not all drones are killers.
A San Francisco-based lab called Darwin Aerospace has successfully test-launched an automatic delivery service that uses GPS-equipped drone to deliver burritos. (The burrito is loaded into a canister with an attached parachute, and the drone drops it over its target.) The “Burrito Bomber,” as it’s appropriately called, won’t be available for commercial use until meeting FAA approval in 2015.
(Source: theweek.com)
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Water-resistant phones? Yes, please.
Sony’s flagship phone for 2013, the Xperia Z, comes with a 5-inch HD display, runs a glitzy version of Android, and is only 7.9mm thick — stuff we’ve come to expect from most high-end phones. What makes this one special is that its connection ports (Micro USB, micro-SD, and its SIM card) are all hidden under little panels to make the Z water resistant — you can dunk the thing in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes at a time. You’re probably not the type to bring your phone into the tub — or are you? Either way, this sort of water-resistant technology will hopefully become common enough that we don’t have to worry about our phones on rainy days or on trips to the beach.
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The new iTunes has arrived. Here’s why you should download it now
(Source: theweek.com)
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“It’s hard to remember if Steve Jobs ever made an apology to customers,” says Tom Taulli at InvestorPlace. “But perhaps he didn’t have to because he always seemed to launch insanely great products.”
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The decision to drag its feet on a new Apple-approved Google Maps could be the smartest move for Google. Its more reliable mapping program gives Android a leg up on Apple and gives the company a clear advantage that any consumer can easily understand.
—Shara Tibken at CNET.Google chairman Eric Schmidt says the company has no immediate plans to bring Google Maps to Apple’s App Store, much to the annoyance of iOS users. Is this a smart move for Google?(Source: theweek.com)
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All your tweets, emails, and other assorted pieces of data end up being stored in vast centers requiring unfathomable amounts of energy. The New York Times investigated the huge amounts of power that go into the sprawling server farms. Here, a brief look at the eye-popping numbers:
1 — Bytes used to store a single letter or number
1 — Gigabytes required to store for one billion bytes of information
50,000 — Gigabytes used by a “data-intensive customer” who stored a lot of data in server farms 10 years ago
1 million — Gigabytes processed and housed in data centers during the creation of a single 3D-animated movie today
2,000 — Gigabytes of data produced each day by the New York Stock Exchange
30 billion — Watts of electricity used by digital warehouses worldwide, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants
76 billion — Kilowatt-hours used by data centers nationwide in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the United States
(Source: theweek.com)
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PHOTO: ThinkStock/Hemera
Scientists have confirmed with 99.996 percent certainty that dark energy exists, and is causing the universe to expand.
“Our universe is a mysterious place,” says Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News. Roughly 4 percent of it is made of ordinary matter like stars and planets. The rest, according to physicists, is a combination of mysterious dark matter — which functions as an invisible glue that holds the universe together — and an even lesser-understood substance call dark energy, which is “causing the cosmos to expand at an accelerating rate.”
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“Apple made a historic and much-needed step forward today,” says Eric Limer at Gizmodo. It unveiled a set of new headphones called “EarPods.” EarPods sit deeper and more securely in the user’s ear than earlier models, and will come bundled standard with the iPhone 5. Thank goodness Apple’s finally putting its “old, terrible headphones to rest.”
6 other things you need to know about Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement
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“If a supermodel can’t make Project Glass look good, who the hell can?” —Jamie Condliffe at Gizmodo.
Google’s computerized glasses found their way onto the faces of models during Diane von Furstenberg’s show over the weekend. The wearable computers, which run on Android and use a built-in camera to record what the wearer sees, were used to create a documentary called DVF Through Glass, which will be released on the fashion house’s Google+ page Thursday.
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Financial analysts at JPMorgan Chase predict that sales of Apple’s new phone could be so large that they’ll significantly lift the entire U.S. economy. If Apple manages to sell 8 million phones by the end of 2012, it will contribute $3.2 billion to the economy, increasing fourth-quarter gross domestic product by one-third of a percentage point. JPMorgan estimates that the impact could even reach one-half of a percentage point.
