Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 29, 2011
Leatherbound: 48-Hour Webapp Compares E-Book Prices Across Formats
There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.
“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”
There are a handful of devotes who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.
Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.
The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)
Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.
According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.
When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.
Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]
jQuery(‘#inf_widget’).load(‘http://www.wired.com/ajax/widgets/related/content/blogPost/gadgetlab_52375′);
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 18, 2010
Android App Uses Cellphone Camera to Measure Air Pollution
If you think there’s something in the air, you could know for sure by just pointing your Android phone at it.
An Android app called Visibility, developed by researchers at University of Southern California, lets users take a photo of the sky and get data on the air quality.
The free app is currently available for phones running Android 2.1 version of the operating system.
“Airborne particulate matter is a serious threat to both our health and the environment,” say the researchers on their blog. “We are working towards an optical technique to measure air visibility, and hence an estimate of some kinds of air pollution, using cameras and other sensors available on smartphones.”
It’s a neat idea and it’s interesting to see how smartphones are giving rise to the trend of citizen science and crowdsourced data.
As smartphones become ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, researchers are increasingly using the devices to do complex computations and use it for crowdsourced data gathering. For instance, as part of a project called ‘Common Sense’ Intel’s research labs developed sensors that could be attached to GPS-enabled phones and measure air quality. The data gathered from these sensors would be brought back and processed to help researchers understand pollution levels.
The Visibility Android app hopes to offer something similar but make the process more user friendly.
With the Visibility app, each user photo of the sky is tagged with location, orientation and time. The data is transferred to a server where the calculations take place. The level of air quality is estimated by calibrating the images sent and comparing their intensity against an existing model of luminance in the sky, say the researchers.
The result is sent back to the user and the data is also used to create pollution maps for the region. An iPhone version of the app is in the works.
Photo: Mobile Sensing/USC Robotics
[via TreeHugger and Gizmag]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 24, 2010
Android Phones Can Substitute for Supercomputers
There’s an app for almost everything. Now add one that can run calculations from a supercomputer on a Nexus One phone in real time and without the need for internet connectivity.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center have created an Android app that can take simulations from the powerful Ranger supercomputer and solve them further on the mobile phone.
“The idea of using a phone is to show we can take a device with one chip and low power to compute a solution so it comes as close to the one solved on a supercomputer,” John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told Wired.com.
Many researchers depend heavily on supercomputers capable of millions of calculations per second to simulate problems and advance their studies. Texas Computing Center’s Ranger supercomputer went live in 2008 with 62,976 CPU cores, 123 terabytes of memory, 1.73 petabytes of disk space and 579.4 teraflops of performance.
But massive machines such as the Ranger are not easily available. Researchers have to book time on them and they aren’t available for computations that need to be done quickly. Supercomputers also can’t be carried into field experiments. Having a device in hand that could help solve a problem quickly can be handy.
That’s where a technique called “certified reduced basis approximation” comes into play. The method lets researchers take a complex problem, define the values that are most relevant to the problem and set the upper and lower bounds. David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and Anthony Patera, a professor at the school, refined the technique to make it work on a smartphone. They did it by including strong error bounds that show how close they are to an actual supercomputer solution.
“Its demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,” says Peterson.
The app is just one half of the solution, though. A supercomputer still has to create the reduced model that can be transferred to the phone as an app. When outside the office, researchers can enter values into the app to find answers quickly or visualize data.
For instance, for a problem in fluid dynamics, researchers will spend a day or two simulating a model using a supercomputer like Ranger. Of that computation, they will take a small amount of data and store it on a server as a reduced model.
This reduced model can be used to perform simulations on a cellphone, offering answers near instantaneously for use in real-world applications.
“The payoff for model reduction is large when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone,” Knezevic told a writer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “Thats a speed up of orders of magnitude.”
There’s one disadvantage though. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not universal.
“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone,” says Peterson. “What he would develop would be specific to the problem.”
For now, the researchers have made their app available through files on SourceForge.
Check out their video showing how the app works:
Photo: Texas Advanced Computing Center
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 21, 2010
Android Phones Can Substitute for Supercomputers
There’s an app for almost everything. Now add one that can run calculations from a supercomputer on a Nexus One phone in real time and without the need for internet connectivity.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center have created an Android app that can take simulations from the powerful Ranger supercomputer and solve them further on the mobile phone.
“The idea of using a phone is to show we can take a device with one chip and low power to compute a solution so it comes as close to the one solved on a supercomputer,” John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told Wired.com.
Many researchers depend heavily on supercomputers capable of millions of calculations per second to simulate problems and advance their studies. Texas Computing Center’s Ranger supercomputer went live in 2008 with 62,976 CPU cores, 123 terabytes of memory, 1.73 petabytes of disk space and 579.4 teraflops of performance.
But massive machines such as the Ranger are not easily available. Researchers have to book time on them and they aren’t available for computations that need to be done quickly. Supercomputers also can’t be carried into field experiments. Having a device in hand that could help solve a problem quickly can be handy.
That’s where a technique called “certified reduced basis approximation” comes into play. The method lets researchers take a complex problem, define the values that are most relevant to the problem and set the upper and lower bounds. David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and Anthony Patera, a professor at the school, refined the technique to make it work on a smartphone. They did it by including strong error bounds that show how close they are to an actual supercomputer solution.
“Its demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,” says Peterson.
The app is just one half of the solution, though. A supercomputer still has to create the reduced model that can be transferred to the phone as an app. When outside the office, researchers can enter values into the app to find answers quickly or visualize data.
For instance, for a problem in fluid dynamics, researchers will spend a day or two simulating a model using a supercomputer like Ranger. Of that computation, they will take a small amount of data and store it on a server as a reduced model.
This reduced model can be used to perform simulations on a cellphone, offering answers near instantaneously for use in real-world applications.
“The payoff for model reduction is large when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone,” Knezevic told a writer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “Thats a speed up of orders of magnitude.”
There’s one disadvantage though. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not universal.
“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone,” says Peterson. “What he would develop would be specific to the problem.”
For now, the researchers have made their app available through files on SourceForge.
Check out their video showing how the app works:
Photo: Texas Advanced Computing Center
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 20, 2010
Droid Eris Phone is Reborn as a Disney Tour Guide
HTC’s Droid Eris phone is getting a second lease on life as a tour guide in a Disney amusement park. Disney has taken the smartphone, added a frame around it to turn it into a device running an app that shows wait times for rides, offers discounts and indicates show times at the park.
The repurposed Eris also gives out tips and tricks and coupons for use in the park.
HTC launched the Droid Eris in November as a $100 smartphone (with a two-year contract) on Verizon Wireless. The Droid Eris had a 3.2-inch display, a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and GPS capability. It also used HTCs Sense custom skin for Android. In June, Verizon said it has retired the Droid Eris.
Meanwhile, last year Disney also launched its Mobile Magic app for mostly feature phones and non-Android smartphones. The app gives users detailed information about the different Disney theme parks in the U.S. Now with the Android version of the app running on the Eris, Disney hopes to connect with those users who are already at the park.
Check out the video to see the Mobile Magic app on the Droid Eris
Ultimately, the Eris phone running the app may be offered as a free or “low cost add-on” for visitors on the trip, says the MickeyUpdates site.
Photo: Mickeyupdates.com
[via Engadget]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 11, 2010
Premium Shazam App Hits Android
Shazam, an amazing app that lets you identify any song by just holding your phone up to it, has turned off the tap for its free users.
It has introduced a premium version of its app called Shazam Encore for $5 on the Android Market. The paid version of the app went live Tuesday evening.
That means Android users who now download the free version will get a seven-day premium trial, and if they don’t upgrade at the end of that they will be limited to identifying and tagging just five songs a month.
Shazam hit prime time when it launched its app on the Apple App store in 2008. Since then it has gained 15 million users on the iPhone aone and has 75 million users overall.
In November 2009, Shazam introduced the paid version of its app for iPhone users. The premium version offers unlimited tagging of music and recommendations that suggest other music similar to the track thats been tagged.
Users who downloaded and used the free app before the introduction of the paid version will continue to get all the features they had, including unlimited access. It’s a smart move on Shazam’s part to keep its existing users happy, while trying to make money off its product.
Photo: (Htwo/Flickr)
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 14, 2010
