It’s hard sending a text message with arms full of groceries or while wearing winter gloves. Voice control is one alternative to using your fingers, but researchers are also working on other hands-free ways to control mobile devices. A team at Dartmouth College has now created an eye-tracking system that lets a user operate a [...]
Recently-launched mobile payments startup, Boku, has announced that they have received a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Boku has declined to reveal the funding amount from this round, but to date the company has raised a whopping $38 million since its launch a year ago. As part of the deal, Marc Andreessen and [...]
Almost nine-in-10 pupils now have a mobile compared with fewer than three-quarters who have their own books in the home, it was disclosed. The study by the National Literacy Trust suggested a link between regular access to books outside school and high test scores.According to figures, some 80 per cent of children with better than [...]
Before iPhones, Foursquare and Facebook, B.J. Fogg envisioned a mobile fitness device that coaches the user, tracks her location, and shows her friends also exercising at that time. The concept appeared in Fogg’s 1997 dissertation about how computing and psychology can merge to change behavior, and people thought the idea sounded “Star Trek-ish.” He went [...]
Fourteen new trash cans at Lodi parks do far more than just serve as garbage receptacles.Through solar power, they compact trash after it’s collected. They even send text messages to city workers when the cans are full and need to be emptied. A single Big Belly solar compactor costs about $4,000, but Lodi officials said [...]
Treating clinical depression on the telephone is nearly as effective as face-to-face consultations, a new Brigham Young University study finds. The trial run included 30 people newly diagnosed with major depression. Instead of eight scheduled visits to the clinic, the participants covered the same material during a series of phone calls with the therapist. Calls [...]
When I recently walked into my local Apple store to buy an iPad accessory, I saw a group of about 20 people huddled around a large LCD screen while an Apple employee was giving a workshop.When I saw the LCD screen full of medical applications (picture on the left), I was shocked. This wasn’t your [...]
LONDON: Texting may be a boon in today’s world, but the concept was visualised more than a century ago. And, it was a pioneering American physicist who had predicted about the portable messaging service, like the SMS , via a hand-held device in the ‘Popular Mechanics’ magazine in 1909, its Technology Editor Seth Porges has [...]
