News Update On Navigation : Navigation App Waze Gets A Huge Redesign – Now Less Cluttered, But Still Needs Improvement

The Google-owned navigation app Waze has a number of standout features – its ability to alert you to traffic conditions and speed traps, and re-route you around traffic jams, for example – but its user interface was not one of its better qualities. Today, the company is attempting to change that with the rollout of an entirely made-over version of its iOS application that introduces a cleaner, less-cluttered interface designed to simplify accessing Waze’s key features, and speed up the time it takes to report traffic problems.

While traditional mapping applications, like those from Apple and Google, are still the most popular among smartphone users, Waze has a strong following among drivers and commuters thanks to its ability to alert you to traffic conditions. Beyond just telling you that traffic is slow, Waze can tell you why – maybe there’s an accident ahead, or a stalled vehicle. Users also like it for its ability to alert you when cops have been spotted nearby – something that makes Waze something of an alternative to radar detectors.

Plus, its ability to route you around bad traffic in real-time as conditions change is especially helpful, as is its ability to let you add a stop while planning your route.

Today, Waze has over 50 million active users who log into Waze monthly, the company says.

But despite having a collection of useful features, the app’s interface itself has needed work for some time. Instead of a modern, clean aesthetic, Waze previously relied on a couple of menus – one with a cartoon-ish car icon to access the main menu, and the other map pin-shaped icon with an exclamation point in the middle for reporting incidents. And the map itself was messy and cluttered, making it hard to read.

With the new version of the app, Waze offers a de-cluttered map, and it makes the alerting feature more prominent – it’s an orange icon with a rounder pin. Meanwhile, the car icon with access to the menu and other settings has been relocated to the bottom-left. When you’re in a hurry – as drivers are behind the wheel (they’re not supposed to be using the app in-route, but of course they do) – this makes it easier and faster to participate in the Waze community because it’s more obvious which button to press to add a report.

In addition, the updated app now features quick access to a contacts section (as indicated by the mail envelope icon), where you can share directions with your contacts, send your location, and your ETA with a tap.


A bottom menu also slides up when tapped to offer you easy access to things like alternate routes, the “add a stop” feature, as well as a shortcut to sending your ETA to a friend or family member.

Nearly everything you do in Waze now takes fewer taps, which is another one of the bigger improvements over the prior version. And the menus themselves have been redesigned, too, to be quicker to use. For instance, the reporting menu now uses big, brightly-colored, round buttons for things like reporting accidents, road hazards, police, and more.

Waze 4.0 also lets you sync your Calendar to the app so you can receive alerts reminding you when to leave, based on traffic conditions. The company says it has made other improvements, too, like better battery life.
Waze Still Needs Work

Unfortunately, the new app still relies on its bubbly, cartoon-ish icons. This is a personal preference, of course, but I think it’s time to move away from this sort of juvenile look. It’s frankly just sort of silly to see cars with bows on their head, or pacifiers in their mouth, or wearing little crowns in an app aimed at adults old enough to drive a car.

The new design is certainly an improvement, but Waze still hasn’t delivered a truly sleek look-and-feel. Even now, there’s too much to look at on the screen.

Because Waze already shows things other mapping apps don’t have – like the other cars and graphics like ads for business as little road signs  – it needs to be even more careful about what other buttons should appear. Now it features an orange reporting button, a MPH indicator, the time, ETA, and distance, and a big button for finding your current geo-location. This latter item is positioned to the left and sort of up near the middle of the screen, though Apple and Google Maps put this feature closer to the bottom of the screen.

Plus, when you tap on the screen, tons of other buttons appear, including the compass, sound toggle, zooming feature, and when at a particular zoom level, your location finder. Combined with all the car icons and icons of signs, alert icons, and more, Waze still struggles with offering a truly clean-looking map.

Off the top of my head, I can still spot a number of things I’d change. For starters, Waze needs to ditch the MPH button entirely – drivers look at this on their car’s dashboard anyway. The geo-location feature needs to be much smaller and closer to the bottom of the screen.The bottom of the screen doesn’t need a greeting (e.g. “Good Afternoon”) when no route is in progress. And there’s no need to flag how many new messages you have and add a red dot to indicate you have unread mail – this could all be handled with a push notification and red icon badge on your iOS homescreen.

That said, Waze certainly looks better than before, if not great.
The updated app, Waze 4.0, is live on the iTunes Store now with an Android release soon to follow.

Posted by Unknown Friday, October 23, 2015

News Nvidia Technology Update : NVIDIA FY 2016 Q2 Results - GPU Sales Are Strong But Write Downs Hurt Bottom Line

Today NVIDIA released its quarterly results for the second quarter of their fiscal year 2016 (yes, 2016) and they had excellent sales of their GeForce GPUs, but have decided to write down their Icera modem business, which hit their operating expenses to the tune of around $90 million. Revenue for the quarter was up 5% though as compared to Q2 2015, and came in at $1.153 billion for the quarter. On a GAAP basis, gross margin was 55%, down 110 bps over last year and down 170 bps since last quarter. Net income was just $26 million, down 81% sequentially and 80% year-over-year. This resulted in diluted earnings per share of $0.05, down 77% from Q2 2015’s $0.22.

A big factor in this was the write down of their Icera modem division. NVIDIA had been looking for a buyer for their modem unit, but was unable to find a suitable buyer for the business and is therefore winding down operations in this unit. This caused a hit of $0.19 per diluted share. Also during the quarter, NVIDIA announced a recall of their SHIELD tablets due to overheating batteries, and there have been two cases of property damage due to this. This caused another hit of $0.02 per diluted share. They also had $24 million in expenses related to the Samsung and Qualcomm lawsuit.

NVIDIA’s non-GAAP results “exclude stock-based compensation, product warranty charge, acquisition-related costs, restructuring and other charges, gains and losses from non-affiliated investments, interest expense related to amortization of debt discount, and the associated tax impact of these items, where applicable” which means that they do not reflect either the Icera write-down, nor the tablet recall. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was up 20 bps to 56.6%, with net income up 10% to $190 million. Diluted earnings per share were $0.34, up 13% from Q2 2015’s $0.30 non-GAAP numbers. Despite a significant write-down and a recall, the core business is still doing very well.

For the quarter, NVIDIA paid out $52 million in dividends and repurchased $400 million in stock.

What is driving growth right now is its GPU business. Revenue for GeForce GPUs grew 51%, and NVIDIA has continued to see strength in the PC gaming sector. Fueled by the release of the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, sales of high-end GTX GPUs “grew significantly” year-over-year. The Titan X would certainly fall in there as well, although unlikely at as high of volume. Maxwell has been a very strong performer, and gamers tend to go where the performance is. Souring the results somewhat is a decline in Tesla GPU sales, as well as Quadro GPU sales. Overall, GPU revenue was up 9% year-over-year to $959 million. Even as NVIDIA has tried to diversify with SoCs, their GPU business is still almost 85% of the company.

NVIDIA has found a niche in the automotive infotainment world, and that that area is still strong for them. Tegra has not taken off in the tablet or smartphone space in any meaningful way, but there was still growth in the automotive sales for Tegra. Overall Tegra processor revenue was down 19% year-over-year, which is mainly due to Tegra OEM smartphones and tablets. NVIDIA’s own Tegra sales in the Shield helped offset this loss somewhat, but as the recall filings showed, they only sold 88,000 SHIELD tablets. Margins are likely helped by the fact that they run their own SoC in it though.

NVIDIA’s “Other” segment is a fixed 66 million licensing payment from Intel, and as always, that is flat and does not change. This is from the 2011 settlement of a licensing dispute, and will end in 2017.

For Q3 2016, NVIDIA is expecting revenue to be $1.18 billion, plus or minus 2%, with margins of 56.2% to 56.5%.

NVIDIA is obviously a giant in the GPU space, and that is going very well for them. Sales are very strong, and PC gaming has been a strong point in an otherwise weakening PC market. They are attempting to diversify to mobile, but have found out just how difficult that can be, and had to write down their modem division completely. Without a good integrated modem, it will be difficult to gain traction in the smartphone space, but NVIDIA’s current SoC offerings don’t seem well suited to smartphones anyway. Their strength in GPU knowledge has certainly helped them with the GPU side of the equation, but their first attempt at CPU design has not been as strong. We shall see what their plans are for the SoC space going forward, but for now they are riding a wave of strong GPU sales, and that is a good thing for NVIDIA.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations

Posted by Unknown Friday, August 07, 2015

News Drone Tech Update : This Drone Delivers Beer: ​Flytrex Launches World's First Consumer Delivery UAV

Flytrex, a maker of drone tech for the consumer market, has launched a new drone designed to deliver items including -- if the promotional photos are an accurate representation -- a cold beer. Note to editors: I think I finally get what the drone hype is all about.

"Delivery is one of the possible things you can do with Sky, and it's the thing that makes the most noise," Flytrex co-founder Yariv Bash tells me over the phone when I bring up the photo, "but we're also talking about a cloud-connected drone with web API."

Flytrex has been around for about a year and this is its first foray into ready-to-fly drone hardware. Bash is also a founder of SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit that's competing in the Google Lunar X Prize and has raised more than $50M. He and a friend began playing around with drones and had the idea of trying to gamify the experience. They came up with an idea to create a kind of black box for drones. "You could use it to upload data, see where it's been, what the altitude was," says Bash. "There wasn't anything on the market that you could just plug into your drone."

The black box became Flytrex's first product, and the next logical step was to create a real-time version of the device. The live product became known as Live 3G and is a common add-on for hardcore drone enthusiasts. "With iPhone or Android you can see where you are in real time. So you can fly drones a bit further down the road than line-of-site." Many newer drones offer similar capabilities off-the-shelf. It's a fast-moving market, after all. But the Core 3G remains a robust add-on and is still a big seller for the company.

Flytrex's real breakthrough, though, was realizing that to properly gamify the experience of flying a drone, they had to build a community around flying. With the black box technology sending data to their servers, they decided to start issuing flying badges for various feats -- a badge for reaching a certain altitude, one for flying a minimum distance, etc. Drone enthusiasts took to the idea, and the company embraced an emerging community by logging completed missions on its site and issuing challenges to users.

"We have a lot of interaction with users. It's really become the core part of what we do."

As Bash tells it (he's a good storyteller) he and his friend left the house to fly a drone one day when they realized they had forgotten something. With drone delivery a topic of much speculation in the logistics sector, the pair wondered what it would take to build a drone that could return to the house and carry the item back. Then they started pondering how they would design such a drone from the ground up.

"We thought, 'We have the infrastructure, we've sold thousands of these black box devices, we have users all over the world, why not build a drone designed around the cloud?"

The company is touting the Flytrex Sky, therefore, as more than just a beer delivery device. "It's the first cloud-connected drone," says Bash. The company has created apps to control the drone. One interesting feature, which is geared toward delivery, is the ability to send the drone to a pre-determined location where another user can take over control with their phone, guiding the drone in for a precise landing. The device essentially asks the receiver for permission to land, so there's no loss of control.

The drone can fly about six miles with a light payload, like a smartphone, and can hover about half-an-hour. That means it can easily exceed line-of-sight limits set by agencies such as the FAA in the U.S., which are nonetheless fundamentally difficult to enforce. ("We always tell users to obey all local laws," says Bash.) The maximum payload is about three pounds.

While it's fun to joke about a drone serving as a beer delivery device, Flytrex is turning to its community of users to unlock the real potential of a sub-$600 delivery drone.

"We've already been approached by a few guys in Africa who are thinking of using it to transfer medicine between villages. It's perfect, because there is excellent cell coverage in Africa, which has few overhead phone lines, and medicine is so lightweight."

That sounds like a very worthy use of the technology. In the meantime, I'll be waiting for my flying beer.

Posted by Unknown Saturday, August 01, 2015

News Update Nano Technology : Robo-Wings: Military Drones That Mimic Hawks And Insects

Picking through the rubble of war-damaged buildings in combat zones, looking for enemies, survivors, booby traps or worse is one of the most dangerous jobs in the military.

To take the dirt and danger out of mopping up operations, a Pentagon agency is developing a surveillance robo-hawk that could fly through the detritus of the urban combat jungle at 45mph.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- already famous as the maker of some of the U.S. military's more far-fetched war robots -- aims to develop autonomous drones small enough to fit through an open window.

Speeding through unstable buildings or threatening indoor spaces at 20 meters per second, the unmanned aerial vehicle would obviate the need for physical entry that puts troops or civilian response teams at risk. 

Part of a military brief called the Fast Lightweight Autonomy program, the study is looking at developing new algorithms to allow a small UAV operating without a remote pilot and without use of GPS waypoints to navigate stairways, corridors and other obstacles.

"Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs," said Mark Micire, DARPA's Program Manager. "Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree.

"Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision.

"The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before."

Ultimately, the agency says the algorithms developed in the program could enhance other types of unmanned missions, including underwater environments where GPS systems don't work.

"Urban and disaster relief operations would be obvious key beneficiaries, but applications for this technology could extend to a wide variety of missions using small and large unmanned systems linked together with manned platforms as a system of systems," said Stephanie Tompkins, director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office.

The aim of the program would be to take the grunt work out of repetitive tasks where fatigue can mean the difference between life and death.

"By enabling unmanned systems to learn 'muscle memory' and perception for basic tasks like avoiding obstacles, it would relieve overload and stress on human operators so they can focus on supervising the systems and executing the larger mission."

Miniaturizing drones that could negotiate indoor environments has also been a focus of the U.S. military.

Its Army Research Laboratory, known as ARL, in Adelphi, Maryland, are currently working on a project to develop robotic surveillance insects with wings just 3-5 centimeters in length.

The wings are made of lead zirconium titanate, known as PZT, a material that flaps and bends when a small voltage is applied.

"We demonstrated that we can actually create lift," said Dr Ron Polcawich who heads the team. "So we know this structure has the potential to fly."

Powered by tiny ultrasonic motors that measure just 2 to 3 millimeters, the team has also designed a millipede-like robot that simulates crawling when voltage is applied to the PZT material.

While the team has shown that the project works in principle, Polcawich said that it may take a further 10-15 years of research before the Army has a fully functional robotic surveillance insect.

He said that more research would be needed to establish algorithms that would allow a robotic insect to stabilize itself.

More collaboration with other institutions -- Harvard University, for instance, has a "robo-fly" project three-times larger than the ARL's robotic insect -- would be necessary to make a fully working prototype.

Polcawich said the smaller the mechanical device, the more intricate are its aerodynamic problems.

In a gust of wind a fly "doesn't instantaneously stabilize itself," Polcawich said. "It will tumble, tumble, and then stabilize itself."

Creating this type of artificial intelligence or "cognitive ability" would take time, he said, and a number of different systems must be integrated to develop a robot that functions like an insect.

Posted by Unknown Monday, February 02, 2015

Report : New Products GPS Connects With Smartphones

By now, many motorists are well-acquainted with the amazing things and periodic problems of GPS gadgets. So it's good when GPS producers can create their gadgets take a position out with awesome functions. Magellan has handled to do just that with its RoadMate 5265T-LMB. When combined with a suitable Wireless cellphone, the GPS program enhances as a cellphone, enabling you to communicate with your arms placed strongly on the rim. This operate can come in useful when you're looking for a position to eat. Not only can the product discover a close by cusine identify but it also can "call" the cafe, enabling you to create a booking. It also shows your cell cellular phone's connections in its deal with guide, which enables you to contact someone when you're operating delayed.

With a suitable "SafeTexting" cellphone, the product also can deliver scripted sms information, such as "I'm generating. I'll contact you.'' Because the GPS program knows your position, it can even deliver a concept with your present position ("I am on Midland Avenue" or "I am in Nashville"," for example.) Don't get too thrilled, however, as this "SafeTexting" choice doesn't perform with some well-known designs, such as the iPhone. (A record of suitable designs can be discovered at www.magellangps.com/safetextingcompatibility.)

For those who like to recreation position the car and discover on feet, the product has a great people method that provides guidelines for a strolling trip. Just be cautious not to wander too far, as its inner battery energy will provide out after about Half an hour.

Equipped with a 5-inch contact shade touchscreen technology, the GPS program shows the path, approximated appearance time as well as symbols that let you know when your cellphone is linked or when the visitors aware is performing. The visitors aware operate, by the way, only performs when the GPS program is attached to the car with the involved energy adaptor.

One possibly awesome new operate is the lamps capability to offer guidelines using attractions instead of road titles. Instead of informing you to convert right on Speed Road, for example, it might tell you to convert right at a particular gas position or university. This operate, however, doesn't yet perform in all places. Actually, while generating in regional communities and significant thoroughfares in the New You are able to City position, the GPS program didn't "recognize" any attractions.

Priced at about $200, the RoadMate 5265T-LMB comes pre installed with charts of the U. s. Declares, North america and Puerto Rico.

www.magellangps.com

Cover up that phone :

Kids can be adorable. And children can be…slobs. With the latter factor in thoughts, and as an mature who doesn't want a teenager to ruin a smartphone when they get their jam-encrusted feet on the product, you might consider the KidSafe cellphone secure from Veyl Items. The slip-on nasty secure is developed to secure a smartphone from, well, crapp. That contains viruses and all the other trash children get into. It expenses about $13.

www.veylproducts.com

Desktop PC enhances as tablet :

Desktop PCs can be great, except when you want to use them somewhere other than your desk. That, of course, is why a lot of people use iPads or pills. The new VAIO Tap 20 "mobile desktop" from Panasonic includes the best of both worlds: It is a desk top PC whose portable show can be used on a desk, placed smooth on a desk or shifted around for use anywhere in the home. Costing about $880, the platform design has a 1.80 GHz 3rd creation Apple Primary processer, the Windows 8 64-bit os, a 20-inch LED backlit contact show, a 500-gigabyte disk generate and 4 GB of storage. It will go available in beginning Nov.

www.sony.com

Ninja Turtles discover new beat :

How often do you discover a couple of headphones that can offer as a discussion starter? If you are a Ninja Turtles fan, you're in fortune. Possibilities are that someone will gradually ask, "Where did you get those things?" That's because the headphones are developed to look like the legendary Ninja Turtle animated numbers. The $10 Young Mutant Ninja Turtles Hi - Def Earphones from Sakar Worldwide are available from a wide range of sites, such as Toys and games "R" Us.

www.sakar.com

Posted by Unknown Saturday, October 20, 2012