India's Tata Motors renames its controversial Zica car Tiago
Indian automaker Tata Motors has rebranded its latest hatchback after its original name Zica attracted controversy for being similar to the mosquito-born Zika virus. The model has now been renamed Tiago.
The name was selected after an international crowdsourcing campaign which invited people to send names for the car. The final name was chosen after a social media poll in which participants were asked to choose between Tiago, Civet and Adore. Tiago received the highest votes among the three entries.
Tata Motors is one of India's largest automobile companies, and owns the iconic British brands Jaguar and Land Rover. It had chosen the name Zica, an abbreviation of zippy car, before the outbreak of the virus in the Americas. The small car was already being promoted in an advertising campaign starring Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi.
While Tata showcased the car under its old name during the Indian Auto Expo 2016 earlier this month, it had said that it would change the name before its market launch. The company said that the decision to rename the car was "the right and responsible action following the hardships caused by the virus outbreak across many countries." It now plans to launch the car by March-end.
If you always get lost in museums or malls, you'll love 3D indoor navigation
BARCELONA — We all use mapping apps to get from one location to another when we're outside, but we could soon use them for indoor navigation, too.
At Mobile World Congress on Monday, I got to experience for myself how indoor navigation works with a Project Tango device. (Google's Project Tango is supposed to help our phones and tablets better understand the 3D world we live in.)
Lenovo invited reporters out to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya for demos. I was expecting to see the final — or a near-final — version of the Project Tango smartphone the company announced at CES, but nope.
Instead, Lenovo used old prototype Tango tablets to show how to navigate from one room to another.
With the tablet held up in my hands, I started my tour looking at a map of the various rooms on the floor. Creating a navigation route was as simple as tapping on a room and setting it as the destination.
A squiggly line then showed the indoor path from my location to the destination. I felt like a kid again following this path through the rooms. If I veered off the path, my location dot also veered off; the tracking was very precise and I didn't notice any lag in tracking when I moved freely around the room.
If I wanted to, I could also tap on a button to turn on an augmented reality first-person perspective view. The app switches on the cameras and constantly scans the room, while overlaying a path of dots for you to follow.
Project Tango
Using the augmented reality view for indoor navigation.
Project Tango reps told me it'll be very easy for developers to create floor plans quickly and getting indoor navigation up and running requires very little coding work.
Once I made it to my desired room, I could then touch the location marker on the screen to bring up a panel with more information on an artist or the artworks inside. Tapping on the play button brought up a slideshow of paintings with an audio summary. Tapping on the play button brought up a slideshow of paintings with an audio summary.
Meanwhile, selecting the AR button activated the Tango tablet's 3D-sensing cameras. With the augmented reality feature on, I could walk up to specific paintings and tap on them to get additional information. On one particularly large painting with many different faces, the app used facial recognition to keep track of all of them; I tapped their faces to bring up more factoids on that specific person.
None of these features are particularly groundbreaking; the Louvre has been using Nintendo 3DS handhelds as interactive guides for years. Though I've never seen anyone use a 3DS as a guide in the few times I've been to the Louvre, you can if you want to.
The museum demo may seem niche, but imagine applying this kind of indoor navigation for use in a huge shopping mall or in an indoor parking lot. We'd never get lost anywhere ever again.
Samsung announces Aussie pricing and dates for Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge
If you're in Australia and hoping to get your hands on one of Samsung's new Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge smartphones, you won't have to wait too long.
On Monday, the company announced that the two products will be on sale Down Under from March 11. The Galaxy S7 will be priced at A$1,149 and the Galaxy S7 Edge will set you back A$1,249. If you're super keen, you can register for pre-sale from February 26.
The latest Samsung smartphones were launched Sunday in Barcelona at the 2016 Mobile World Congress. Both products feature an appealing design with the S7 Edge offering a curved glass face. Each device runs the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, but the S7 Edge comes in a little larger with a 5.5 inch (13.97 centimetres) screen compared to the S7's 5.1 inches (12.95 centimetres). For the clumsy among us, the smartphones also apparently boast around 30 minutes worth of water resistance in up to 1.5 metres of water (5 feet).
If you want to get into the specs, here is Mashable's complete breakdown.
Samsung also launched the Samsung Gear 360 camera in Barcelona, a device that will help average punters create virtual reality video content. The device should also be available in Australia in 2016, but exact dates and pricing have yet to be announced.
U.S. Justice Department files motion to compel Apple to cooperate with FBI
The Department of Justice on Friday filed a motion to compel Apple to help the FBI break into an iPhone used by a gunman in the San Bernardino attack in December.
The motion comes three days after a federal judge ordered Apple to unlock the phone. Apple CEO Tim Cook responded in an open letter opposing the order.
Apple has until Feb. 26 to respond to Tuesday's order from the judge.
A hearing related to the Justice Department's new motion has been scheduled for March 22.
What does this change
Although a new motion from the Department of Justice sounds as if it is adding new information to this case, the truth is, it isn't.
Much of the Department of Justice's filing is a reiteration of its earlier arguments. The substantive arguments are not different.
What is different is that the Department of Justice is directly responding to Apple's open letter. The letter, which is include as evidence with the motion, appears to be the impetus for this filing.
Additional arguments detailed by the Department of Justice that go beyond the facts of the case also appear to answer what it believes Apple's legal objections will be, based on the company's open letter.
In other words, this is a political opportunity for the Department of Justice to reframe the conversation in context with Apple's public statements.
For its part, the Department of Justice has also used this motion to argue that Apple's rationale for objecting to the order "appears to based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy."
ReFlex is the smartphone that you're allowed to bend
There is a smartphone being developed that you can bend, and no, not like the iPhone 6 Plus.
ReFlex uses a Flexible OLED display from LG, similar to some of the rollable screens recently shown at CES this year, allowing you to bend it at your will. It's the first flexible phone that combines bend input with standard multitouch capabilities, meaning you can use touch interaction like a typical smartphone as well as interact with certain apps by bending the phone.
The research team from Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab uses the example of bending ReFlex to play Angry Birds and flip through a comic book.
ReFlex’s hardware isn’t flexible though — it uses an Android KitKat board on the side of the display, so don’t think this phone is completely indestructible.
“It’s the same architecture you would have in an Android smartphone,” researcher Paul Strohmeier told Mashable.
To detect bending input, Strohmeier said the phone uses a strain gauge indicator to measure how much strain is being put on the flexible screen. With that, ReFlex receives over 4,000 data points it can use to do things like control a cursor.
There is also vibration feedback detailed in the team’s study that simulates physical object interaction, similar to the feeling of bending a twig or rubber band.
ReFlex builds off of previous ideas and iterations of flexible devices, an idea that the team started bouncing around over a decade ago.
“We started working on flexible display interfaces 12 years ago with our first prototype PaperWindows,” researcher Roel Vertegaal told Mashable in an email. “We put out the world’s first tethered flexible phone — PaperPhone — five years ago.”
And they don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
“Future plans include detailed design of user interface elements specifically for bend input,” Vertegaal said. “ We also hope the phone will be commercialized within the next three to five years or so. We also hope the phone will be commercialized within the next three to five years or so.”
Strohmeier said the goal isn’t to replace touch input in smartphones with their own technology.
"This is a supplementary input method,” he said. “We don't suggest replacing touch with bending."
Data transmission rates are hitting ludicrous speeds in the lab
Imagine a world without buffering, a world where downloading HD movies takes less than one second, a world where your favorite web pages load before you even take your finger off the enter button. Don’t fret, we’re getting closer.
Researchers at the Optical Network Group at University College London published a study saying they have achieved a data transmission rate of 1.125 terabits per second, which is an absolutely insane amount of data. It also happens break the record for highest rate of data received by a single receiver.
Senior research associate Robert Maher told Mashable in an email that this transmission rate could send/receive the entire Game of Thrones TV series in less than a second.
“The entire five-season box set has a file size of 120 GB in HD,” Maher said. “As there are eight bits in a byte, you could transmit/receive this box set in just one second if the download rate was 960 Gbps.”
To compare, Maher said state-of-the-art commercial systems can usually receive rates around 100 Gbps, whereas the average broadband rate in the U.S. is 11.7 Mbps, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report. The UCL team’s record is over 100,000 times faster than the rate of your average broadband connection The UCL team’s record is over 100,000 times faster than the rate of your average broadband connection.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to go out and buy a 1.125 Tbps router anytime soon — the data was sent directly between the transmitter and receiver, so there's no long-range option at this time.
The team achieved the record by combining 15 lower-rate transmitters into a single super channel.
“This super channel is then routed as a single entity,” Maher said. “However, at the receiver, we detect the entire super channel in one go. Using this very high bandwidth receiver, we can record greater amounts of information.”
The team’s work was the result of a five-year collaborative project.
Google just patented a self-driving delivery truck
Google says it doesn't want to be a car manufacturer. But it never said anything about being a truck-maker.
As first reported by Quartz, a recent patent awarded to Google for an “autonomous delivery platform” hints it might have other aspirations for its self-driving tech.
The thing appears to be a rolling set of secured lockers. The idea is that Google would drive a delivery to a customer, the customer would come out to the truck and unlock their delivery locker with either a code, credit card or Near Field Communication (NFC) reader, which your smartphone likely already has. After the customer retrieves their item, the truck would drive off to the next spot.
The delivery truck is a clear shot across the bow to Amazon's delivery drone plan. Although certainly science-fiction-y, people are much more accustomed to seeing delivery trucks rolling around than they are seeing drones flying overhead. So, by that fact alone, the Google autonomous trucks have that going for them.
Google delivery truck patent
This patent falls just on the heels of a recent revelation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that found Google's self-driving systems can be considered "drivers" under federal law.
With that decision made and this new patent awarded, the chances that Google might have self-driving trucks on the road in the near future just became that much more likely.
What a time to be alive.