A community blog celebrating Victoria's booming tech sector
Is the dreaded mobile Facebook Messenger app going to secretly document your life and report back to the mother ship? Bud investigates.
Innovation Elsewhere has been taken over by Bud’s Weekly Geek-out, a weekly radio spot on the The Zone @ 91-3 sponsored by the folks at Tectoria (that’s us).
Innovation Elsewhere has been taken over by Bud’s Weekly Geek-out, a weekly radio spot on the The Zone @ 91-3 sponsored by the folks at Tectoria (that’s us).
This week:
Wanna use your desk as a touchpad? Your keyboard? The AIR? Now, you can, with a neat little doohickey called Touch+.
Starting today, Innovation Elsewhere will be taken over by Bud’s Weekly Geek-out, a weekly radio spot on the The Zone @ 91-3 sponsored by the folks at Tectoria (that’s us).
This week, Bud discusses how a drone carrying phones, tobacco, and marijuana was found outside the Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina.
You can play every Game Boy Advance game on your iPhone right now, thanks to GBA4iOS from developer Riley Testut.
Using a loophole in Apple’s app installation systems, this emulator can easily be installed on any iOS device, for free. There is a slight (but seemingly easily) trick you must do to your iPhone settings. After you perform the hack, you can download the app directly from the GBA4iOS website.
The emulator with full support for Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy itself, plus accelerated speed and Dropbox syncing for saves between multiple devices.
We’re not sure if this conforms to the App Store’s terms of service (so watch out) but if you’re missing your long-lost Game Boy this may be fun to play with!
Hasbro has a new idea about how to make money off fan art: 3D-print it. The company has launched a new site called SuperFanArt where My Little Pony fans can buy figurines designed by non-professional artists, created on-demand by Shapeways.
Anyone with a eye for design is encouraged to contact Hasbro to join the list of approved artists.
Hasbro, which owns My Little Pony, Transformers and many other popular toy brands, would start with My Little Pony with other toy lines proposed in the future. Five individual artists that have almost total control over how they design products with Hasbro’s pony toy line. Over time, more brands and artists will be added to the website, which was launched to coincide with Comic-Con.
The marketplace Hasbro is hoping to create is similar to Etsy, a website where more than 19,000 My Little Pony and 4,700 Transformers items are currently listed. Many of those items are made by sellers that likely aren’t paying Hasbro a licensing fee, and so by creating its own marketplace, the toy company can compete with those sellers.
If you ever wanted your own planet, now’s your chance.
The International Astronomical Union has invited the public to suggest official names for 20 to 30 planets found outside of our solar system.
Over 1800 exoplanets have been discovered (1810 planets in 1125 planetary systems including 466 multiple planetary systems.
Astronomy clubs around the world will vote for which of 305 well-studied worlds they feel deserve more exciting names.
Once the list has been nailed down to 20 or 30, the clubs will be invited to suggest names for them through citizen science organisation Zooniverse. But there are strict rules. You can’t suggest anything copyrighted, or anything named after a living person or a person known for political, military or religious activities. Names of pet animals are also forbidden.
To suggest a name, you’ll need to be a member of an astronomical club. Or form one, make a website, and register the group with the IAU as soon as possible.
It turns out that Pied Piper, the company from television’s Silicon Valley, HBO’s satirical take on the tech industry, may actually exists in real life.
General Harmonics is a small startup from Vancouver that’s looking to revolutionize the way we stream media.
In the show Silicon Valley, Pied Piper is a fictional company that makes compression software that makes files incredibly small, allowing for faster downloads and taking up less storage.
Canada’s General Harmonics doesn’t do that – instead of compressing files down to ever smaller sizes, the company’s technology looks at media as “systems of information,” or very detailed descriptions of the parts they’re composed of.
Using their technology, a song is seen in terms of its vocals and the instruments played. The description of each of those elements takes up less space than the actual digital audio file would.
General Harmonics says it can deliver CD-quality music in one-twentieth the original file size.
The implication is companies like Spotify, Pandora, or Apple could significantly cut down on server costs — or, more likely, serve customers better for the same level of spending.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have built a robot that will be able to chart the icy waters found in outer space, such as on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration (BRUIE) is operated through satellite link and designed to cling onto the underside of ice with metal tires, transmitting measurements back to scientists and assessing whether the waters host other life-forms.
BRUIE is currently being tested in frozen Alaska lakes, but engineers hope that the robot will one day be flown to Europa.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY5WQG3-3mo]
Our old friend and honorary Tectorian (at least until he inevitably moves back here) John Mardlin, who moved recently to the Communitech Hub in Kitchener-Waterloo tipped us off on a cool new innovative printing technology.
John is working with a new tech company, Structur3D printing, that has just launched Discov3ry.
It’s an add-on product for desktop 3D printers, that will enable them to print more than just rigid plastics. Now makers can work with more friendly, affordable and flexible materials including silicone, latex, ceramics, icing sugar and even nutella:
The nutella gets Structur3D the press, but the exciting part is when the team will be able to enable printing of silicone for biomedical applications, as well as emergent uses we haven’t yet imagined.
Structur3D is running a kickstarter campaign that has been pretty successful so far, beating our funding goal in the first 24 hours.
Says John Mardlin: “I’m thrilled to be helping to empower the creativity and entrepreneurialism of the maker community.”
>>UPDATE: Amazon Fire Phone: Bing For Search, Nokia For Maps
Amazon has launched its Fire Phone, a $199 smartphone with 3D cameras and all the Amazon services you could ever imagine.
The Fire Phone has a 4.7-inch HD display, aluminum buttons, a Qualcomm processor, Adreno 330 graphics, and 2GB of RAM.
There’s also a 13-megapixel camera, an f/2.0 lens, and optical image stabilization. Bezos compared the Fire Phone to the iPhone 5S and the Samsung Galaxy S5, saying that no matter the situation the Fire Phone will take better shots. There’s a quick-access shutter button on the side, and unlimited cloud storage for your photos.
It all runs on Amazon’s Android-based Fire OS.
The 3D aspect of the phone seems to be aimed at providing “shifting” wallpaper and lockscreen that changes depending on how you look at it.
There are also 3D Maps: looking for a restaurant and at the Empire State Building and the view changes every time you tilt your phone.
It’s also part of the navigation of the device — a tilt of the phone opens up a navigation drawer, or scrolls through options.
No word when the Amazon Fire will make it to Canada, though!
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