Posts Tagged ‘blade-runner’
The Google Phone identifies as an early replicant
The Gruber brings us this bit of news : the new GPhone identifies as Nexus One in browsing logs. Five points to anyone who can remember what the Nexus models were
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The Google Phone identifies as an early replicant
CrunchGear in China
Greetings from sunny Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. I’ve spent some time in Asia - at least the tech centers - and have never found a place like this
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CrunchGear in China
CrunchGear in China: Seeing Where the Tech Sausage Is Made
Greetings from sunny Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. I’ve spent some time in Asia - at least the tech centers - and have never found a place like this. It’s like Blade Runner meets 1990s Prague meets the end of the world. I’m here to report on what’s going on here in terms of electronics and how it’s changing the way we think about price, cost, and value. It’s pretty crazy.
Thirty years ago Shenzhen was a rice paddy, a town of about 50,000 souls. Today it is a hive, and a dirty one at that. Smog is a way of life. As the sun goes down over the city, the streets take on an amber cast and the darkness falls quickly. There are no picaresque sunsets here.
HipLogic Raises $7 Million To Bring Smartphone Intelligence to Mass Market Phones
Mobile application platform HipLogic has raised $7 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Stage 1 Ventures, Bay Partners, and Accrue Sports and Entertainment Ventures. HipLogic’s platform helps improve content discoverability and applications on both smartphone and non-smartphones.
Formerly known as Numobiq, the startup raised $4.5 million in Series A funding in 2008. Founded by three veterans from Sun Microsystems, it wants to bring sophisticated applications to the simplest cell phones by keeping all the complexity in the network. In essence, HipLogic is trying to bring the quick, easy interface of the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry to more simple, lightweight phones that are available for the mass market.
HipLogic makes existing phones ’smarter’ by allowing consumers to toggle on a more iPhone like interface complete with real-time content, social networking and apps. This is all done via a free downloadable mobile application that has yet to be launched. Behind the curtains, HipLogic’s application platform features a lightweight, JavaScript virtual machine connected to the cloud and aggregates info from network operators and the web to create mash-ups on mobile devices
HipLogic is currently being deployed through a partnership with The Carphone Warehouse, a European mobile retailer and hopes to partner with retailers and phone developers in the near future. The startup is remaining mum about the intricacies of its platform for now, but HipLogic could be on to something.
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The Crysis engine does a pretty good job of rendering Blade Runner
This is a scene from the movie Blade Runner rendered using CryENGINE 2 , the game engine that powers Crysis . And this is a scene from the movie I am Legend , also rendered using CryENGINE 2
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The Crysis engine does a pretty good job of rendering Blade Runner
Hide your drugs in this high tech medicine cabinet
Designer Robern created what has to be the coolest medicine cabinet I’ve ever seen.
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Hide your drugs in this high tech medicine cabinet
Review: PPC locking HDMI cable
Quickie : An HDMI cable that snaps into place and cannot be pulled out without pressing the little lock.
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Review: PPC locking HDMI cable
Kindle 2 v. iPod Shuffle Text-to-Speech Compared, Results Inconclusive
DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner, acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm.
TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis - Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say - you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct.
Kindle 2 v iPod Shuffle text-to-speech: VIDEO FIGHT!
DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner , acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm. TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis - Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say - you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct.
Waxing poetic about telling time
Time is a funny thing. Sometime you need to know exactly what time it is, and sometimes you really don’t care
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Waxing poetic about telling time