The low-tech, low-budget solution redirects sound waves from a TV's down-firing speakers towards the viewer.
Here are the new Android apps you need to check out this week.
The perfect cup of coffee might be just a profile, and several hundred dollars, away.
If everything goes according to Uber’s master plan, pretty soon you won’t have to sit through having to make small talk with a human when you take one of their rides. The ride-sharing giant has set up a The modified Ford vehicle spotted in the wild had an Uber logo on the side and a large
Adobe is discontinuing Photoshop Touch mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company The phone-friendly versions are still available for $5, while the tablet-optmized editions are $10 in the
Apple’s long-rumored streaming video service could be slipping away once again, as the company reportedly struggles to get TV programmers on board. Apple wanted to launch the service in the fall with roughly 25 channels, priced around $30 to $40 per month, The biggest hurdle involves local broadcasts from networks such as ABC, CBS, and Fox. Apple is reportedly intent on carrying these networks, but the negotiations for streaming can get complicated because the networks don’t own all their local stations. Some markets rely on affiliates or a franchise system, which leads to rights issues and the need for new infrastructure in certain cases. For these reasons, even the networks themselves can’t easily offer live TV streaming in every market.
If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, it’s filled with acquaintances, close friends, old friends, and a few people who got in due to an errant click. To help you keep everyone straight, Facebook recently announced a new addition it’s dubbing “caller ID for messaging.” When you get a new message from someone it will include context information such as how you’re connected to them or where they’re from. Facebook says it will also include a larger photo. The new context can help jog your memory if an old high school friend is coming into town or an acquaintance from your community wants to say hello. Facebook’s messaging update is rolling out to both Android and iOS users in the U.S. It’s not clear if the new feature will also show up in Facebook’s messaging window on desktop PCs.
Google is reportedly looking to tame the glut of low-power, Internet-connected devices with a new operating system codenamed “Brillo.” The software is aimed at connected light bulbs, doorbells, and other devices that form the so-called Internet of Things,
Mozilla is on a mission to show that online advertising can be done without violating a user’s privacy—or at least not violating it too much. Next week, the beta channel of Firefox will start testing new advertising tiles based on a user’s browsing history. The new advertising feature, called Suggested Tiles, joins Directory Tiles and Enhanced Tiles, which went public in Firefox nightly test builds last summer. All three types of tiles appear on a user’s new tab page. Mozilla says Suggested Tiles will be based on a user’s most “recent and most frequent browsing” in order to deliver more relevant ads. Mozilla believes Suggested Tiles will benefit advertisers since it shows history-based advertising early in the browsing experience when “the user is receptive to hearing from them,” according to a
It’s common sense to reset an Android phone to its factory state before selling or disposing of it. But beware, researchers recently found that this often fails to properly wipe all sensitive user data from the device. A test on 21 second-hand smartphones running Android versions between 2.3.x (Gingerbread) and 4.3 (Jelly Bean) revealed that it’s possible to recover emails, text messages, Google access tokens and other sensitive data after the factory reset function had been used.
Your phone is constantly tracking you and – surprise, surprise – sometimes that's not a good thing!
For many entrepreneurs, crowdfunding is a mystery. Celebrity music videos can flop, while simple, silly ideas can go viral overnight. Some campaigns are all about grassroots fundraising, while others can succeed on the strength of one or two wealthy backers. On closer inspection, however, there are a few signals in the noise. We looked at the thousand most successful Kickstarter projects ever based on percent funded—campaigns that raised more than 15 times as much money as they asked for—then compared those numbers to every Kickstarter campaign in history, over 220,000 in all. The following six trends emerged. If you want your crowdfunding campaign to be a viral hit, consider making a tabletop game. Just under 3% of all Kickstarter campaigns in history have featured tabletop games, and yet nearly 25% of the thousand most successful fall in that category. Compared to the average campaign, tabletop games—
Great movies have the power to record emotions and send them back out into the audience, intact. Sometimes these can be the pondering of life or death, as in several of this week’s movies. Sometimes they can be hope or guilt, the emotions that drive a certain “killer” toward a certain goal. Other times they can feel like nothing, like a lack of connection. Still other times they can make a monster seem human. Other times, they can just make you laugh or give you a little thrill. Regardless of their intentions, all of this week’s movies should make you feel at something. Oakland filmmaker Ryan Coogler made a powerful feature debut with
With Chrome on your phone, there’s no need to dig through menus or take aim at tiny buttons to make the most of your tabs and webpages. Instead, just swipe, flick, tap and hold, or tap and pull to open a new tab, close one you don’t need anymore, copy an interesting URL to the clipboard, reveal all your tabs, and more. Read on for 6 gotta-know Google Chrome gestures, starting with... To see all your open Chrome tabs at once, tap and hold the address bar (the one with the webpage’s URL), then pull it down.