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Posts Tagged ‘Smart Phones’

4Home gives you ultimate control over your electronics, appliances — snags $4.3M

4Home, maker of software that allows you to control all the appliances and electronics in your home from a central dashboard (spanning your television, computers and smart phones), has just raised $4.27 million in fourth-round equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Riding the trend toward greater household automation, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company is poised to become a Smart Grid contender as well as a major home media service.

Right now, its offerings are indirectly related to the Smart Grid, but the potential is there. You can use the software to control some appliances remotely — particularly programmable thermostats. In the future, 4Home’s software could allow you to turn off your clothes dryer, dishwasher or even pool filter from your smart phone when you aren’t at home. The system can also be set up to track how much energy is being used overall or at the device level. This brings it into competition with a bevy of home energy management startups like Control4, Tendril, EnergyHub, OpenPeak and many more.

Still, the product’s coolest capabilities are related to media organization. For example, it can serve as a hub for all of your family’s music, movies, web videos and more — both storing them and delivering them to televisions, computers and even mobile devices on-demand. No longer do 4Home customers have to worry about some music being on one computer and not on another. They can stream any content they want at any time via almost any entertainment device.

A third functionality for the 4Home software is home surveillance. If customers have security cameras installed, recordings can be fed directly to the dashboard where they are accessible from anywhere. Eventually, you could go on vacation and check in to make sure your sprinklers came on at the appointed time, no matter where you are. Home surveillance is also an area of increasing consumer interest, demonstrated by recent investments in RelTel and chip-maker Stretch, and the rise of Ugolog.

Recently, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 4Home announced that it is partnering with Verizon Wireless to use 4G networks, which are set to be rolled out in 25 to 30 markets in 2010. This will give 4Home users even more choices about what and how they can control their household devices from remote, even more distant locales.

4Home has now raised more than $9 million to date. It previously brought in $4.88 million over three rounds of financing from Pond Ventures among others. Most recently, it landed $525 million in convertible promissory notes in September 2009.

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Game developers look forward to making games for Apple tablet

Game developers are starting to get excited about making games for Apple’s tablet computer, which is expected to be announced on Jan. 27.

The tablet is likely to be a hot new platform for games, since it will have more processing power, a bigger touch screen, and other capabilities that dwarf the game experience on the iPhone, which is no slouch when it comes to games.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Electronic Arts was preparing games for the Apple tablet. EA declined to comment, but it makes sense given EA’s heavy focus on making mobile games. There is also plenty of other content in the works, such as apps for reading books, magazines and newspapers, textbooks, TV shows, YouTube and other things. The Journal said the 10-inch or 11-inch screen device would be about $1,000.

Flurry also reported today that the tablet is running the iPhone OS 3.2, which has not been released yet. That means that the device will likely run the current 130,000 apps that are available on the AppStore. About a fifth of those apps are games. And, in fact, Flurry said today that the bulk of the 200 apps that Apple has been testing on 50 new devices at its Cupertino, Calif. headquarters are games.

The tablet will be a significant new test as to whether there is room in the crowded game market for a new gaming device. It comes at a time when there are no new game platforms planned even as consumers are turning to gaming on smart phones in droves.

Games, for instance, are the No. 1 app on the iPhone and iPod Touch. While the iPhone and iPod Touch compete with the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSPgo, this new Apple device will be in virgin territory, along with all of the other tablet devices being created. Analysts believe that there could be a big market for devices that have 5-inch to 15-inch screens and yet are not netbooks or smart phones.

Some of those devices are more like eBook readers, but the Apple tablet will be an interesting jack-of-all-trades. It may launch first as an eBook reader aimed at the Amazon Kindle, but it could also become a popular new gaming platform.

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction.

No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You’re allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you’re never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason.

But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think?

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More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, “Luddite time.” Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you’re with rather than the people you “follow,” time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don’t include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that’s increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, “super” phones and what ever “super duper” devices are in the pipeline.

Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can’t be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web – the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts – to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you’re making more connections between online entities and content, but you’re losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world.

I’m not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial.

Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you’re not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you’ve ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren’t you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so?

And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble’s FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn’t trend on Twitter and hit Digg’s front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters.

Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I’ve spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we’ve all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices.

I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an “overheard” on Twitter. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I’ve certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don’t want every day to be like that.

What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle?

Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock – or of taking periodic furloughs?

Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments.

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Nexus One videos flood the web ahead of Google’s announcement

Perhaps Google will still be able to surprise people with its news about the Android-based, Google-designed Nexus One cell phone that will be announced on Tuesday. But a considerable amount of information has already flooded the web, including videos of how the Nexus One operates.

One of the things you’ll immediately notice is this phone is fast. You click on something to make the screen change and it happens instantly. Whether it’s playing games or taking photos, the phone is very responsive. The phone uses a new Qualcomm chip, and so it may spark an arms race in performance gains in cell phones. That’s sorely needed because smart phones have been particularly slow at loading, and touchscreens, even on the iPhone, aren’t up to the highest standards yet.

The first video is a short one from a French blogger that shows off the game-playing abilities of the phone. The video shows a game playing at a fast speed and getting a Benchmark 3D Neocore score of 26.7 frames per second. That means the 3-D graphics capability of the phone is pretty good compared to other smart phones.

The second video is nearly 10 minutes and shows many more features of the phone. The touchscreen of the Nexus One is clearly more responsive than the original HTC G1 from T-Mobile, which debuted a year ago. As with the iPhone, you can effortlessly swipe sideways on the screen to make the user interface shift. You can tap on the buttons at the bottom of the phone, or tap on the lower corners of the screen itself to make things happen. The screen color is vibrant and the backgrounds, such as one where you are tapping into water, are cool.

Earlier leaks revealed that the unlocked version of the phone will sell for $530 and the T-Mobile version will sell for $180 with a two-year calling plan that costs $79.99 a month.

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5 Sites to Help You Set Up Your New Gadgets

It’s been almost a year since I last worked with DIY repair site FixYa but I still remember the traffic spike we’d see every Christmas. While families would be thrilled to unwrap smart phones, netbooks and flat screen monitors in the early morning, they’d find themselves lost in a sea of instructions by noon. There is nothing worse than having a new shiny toy and not being able to play with it. In addition to FixYa, below are a few resources you can use to help set up your new gadgets.

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1. How Stuff Works: If you’re looking for a basic understanding of your computer or device, you can always check out this site for some helpful videos. The site offers tips on everything from adding RAM to your laptop to deconstructing your wireless mouse.

2. Videojug: This site offers videos on everything from cooking to cars. The site’s technology and cars section offers a variety of how-to information including how to get videos onto your iPod to how to set up your PlayStation.

3. Aardvark: When in doubt, ask the mob. While not specifically a gadget site, Aardvark allows you query your network for answers via email, instant message, iPhone app and web interface. Named ReadWriteWeb’s Best Little Co. of 2009, the beauty of this site is that only those with a self-proclaimed expertise will be asked to solve your gadget problems.

4. Gdgt: Gdgt is a social wiki site where users trade tips and tricks on their favorite gadgets. Launched by former Engadget editors Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, the site offers specs and reviews on some of the newest products on the market. If you can’t solve your gadget-related issue on one of the video sites, it’s probably because the product is too new to have how-to videos. Check Gdgt for the listing and look at the discussion page for details.

5. iFixit Teardowns: And finally, if you’re feeling ambitious and you don’t want to wait on the phone for a manufacturer’s 1-800 number, iFixit offers user-generated teardown guides. The guides give a photo documentation of gadget disassembly as well as commentary on parts and hardware. Check your product documentation before venturing into this territory, you wouldn’t want to void your warranty before getting the device working.

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Verizon: $350 ETFs are a good thing, and they help the poor

Verizon Wireless has replied to the Federal Communications Commission’s letter of inquiry about its super-sized early termination fees for smart phones. The bottom line: $350 ETFs are good and good for you.

“This pricing structure enables Verizon Wireless to offer wireless devices at a substantial discount from their full retail price,” the telco’s 13-page statement (with 64 pages of documents) explains. “By reducing up-front costs to consumers, this pricing lowers the barriers to consumers to obtaining mobile broadband devices. It thus enables many more consumers, including those of more limited means, access to a range of exciting, state of-the art broadband services and capabilities.”

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Future Interfaces: Gestures, Light and the BiDi Screen

In just a few days at the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference, MIT’s Media Lab will present a revolutionary interface that allows users to manipulate on-screen images with the wave of their hand. While we’ve seen gestural interfaces through the accelerometers in our smart phones and gaming-related devices, this system is different. MIT’s bi-directional display interface (BiDi) screen is capable of capturing both touch and off-screen gestures through the use of embedded optical sensors.

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According to the project team, “The BiDi Screen uses a sensor layer, separated a small distance from a normal LCD display. A mask image is then displayed on the LCD. When the bare sensor layer views the world through the mask, information about the distance to objects in front of the screen can be captured and decoded by a computer.”

In the past ReadWriteWeb has covered Pattie Maes presentation of what she describes as “sixth sense” – a wearable interface where users interact with a camera, mirror and colored finger caps. We’ve also looked at other gesture-based interfaces like Microsoft’s Project Natal which encompass sensor-based cameras and voice recognition. Nevertheless, BiDi screen takes a different approach to spatial tracking. The system can be incorporated into a “thin LCD device” like a cellphone and it does not require the use of cameras, lenses, projectors or special gloves.

For a complete list of BiDi project specifications or for a look at some of MIT’s video demos, check out the project website.

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TV remotes may be the gateway to a pervasive wireless mesh

The progress that wireless devices have made in the consumer space is nothing short of breathtaking. In the developed world, nearly everyone has a cellphone, and it’s difficult to go anywhere in an urban center and not have a half-dozen WiFi networks within signal range. A lot of the focus in this space has been on providing more bandwidth to devices like smart phones and routers, but at least some companies are betting that the next frontier in wireless is in cheap, low-power devices. Individually, they’ll use a tiny fraction of the bandwidth of the hardware we’re familiar with; but, if things go according to plan, there will be a lot more of these devices.

The devices themselves are based on the IEEE’s 802.15 standard, which is intended for what the organization terms “personal area networks.” In contrast to WiFi or even Bluetooth, 802.15.4 class devices typically only have a bandwidth of a few hundred Kbps, which puts them decidedly on the low end of the communications scale. That bandwidth, however, is more than sufficient for a wide variety of common uses; the Zigbee standard for wireless smart appliances has been built on top of 802.15.4.

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