Lose your keys? Find them with your smartphone. It seems like a simple and logical enough idea that you wonder why it’s never been done before.
The Cobra Tag that we found over at Uncrate definitely gave us of those ‘why didn’t I think of that’ moments. It’s a small dongle that connects to your iPhone, Android or Blackberry by Bluetooth. Then you can attach it to your keys, dog, TV remote or any other object you need to keep track of.
Then, when the object leaves Bluetooth range, you can set it to send you an email or text message with exact GPS coordinates.
There’s another use for the PhoneTag though and that’s what really excites us. Instead of finding your items with the PhoneTag, you can also use it to ring your smartphone. That means no more frantic searches through a house with no land-line for your phone. Just grab your keys and punch the button on the PhoneTag. Ring ring!
I’m sure there’s other uses that you could think up for a Bluetooth location-enabled dongle for your smartphone, let us know what you think in the comments.
Despite a resounding number of Canadians saying that they are against usage-based billing, Shaw Communications is going to forge ahead with a plan to charge its customers via Internet metering.
Vancouver’s News 1130 reports that a conference call that was posted by Open Media, an advocacy group that has petitioned against usage-based billing, has a recording of Shaw’s CEO Bradley Shaw telling shareholders and executives within the company that metered billing plans could be announced as early as later this May. The company had initially put these plans on hold following a public outcry and user complaints.
Open Media, who posted a petition online that saw half a million Canadians sign in protest against metered billing, posted an article on their website that illustrates that Shaw’s decision may have implications for them in the current election race.
“At this point in Canada’s electoral race, citizens have seen three parties firmly adopt stances against the new fees on Internet use: Green, NDP, and Liberal party leaders have signed on as pro-Internet candidates… thereby agreeing to stop the pay meter on our Internet.”
When Shaw begins to implement usage-based billing, their customers would pay a flat rate for Internet usage, as well as extra charges for going over their monthly limit. Other Internet service providers, such as Rogers, Telus and Bell have either held off or altered their plans in rolling out usage-based billing.
“Our customers have said they are willing to pay more for a higher quality of service,” said the CEO.
The Next Web Canada attempted to reach customers who were willing to pay more for Shaw’s Internet service, but were (strangely) unable to find any to comment.
(We’ve embedded the leaked conference call below. The discussion on usage-based billing begins at about five minutes in, but the arrogance starts right from the beginning.)
The explosion of real-time information through social networks and information services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has produced a never-ending firehose of content. It has also created an opportunity for tools such as Storify, the curation service that launched as an open beta Monday. Although the aggregation and filtering of the news is something that has traditionally been done by journalists and major media brands, tools like Storify allow anyone to perform the same kind of function, regardless of whether she’s been trained as a journalist — or even think of what she’s doing as journalism.
Storify is a relatively simple-looking tool that allows a user to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social-media services and create a kind of story stream. As I described in a post after the company’s launch as an invitation-only beta last fall, former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman started the service after thinking about how journalists could use social media during a Knight fellowship (a video interview with Herman is embedded below). I’ve used Storify and it definitely makes social-media curation fast and relatively simple.
There are other, similar services that also pull in Twitter feeds and allow users to create a kind of ongoing story about an event: Storyful is one of them, and Keepstream is another. Storify recently closed a $2-million Series A funding round with legendary Sand Hill Road firm Khosla Ventures, and Herman says Storify collections have been viewed more than 13 million times.
What Storify and similar tools do goes by a number of different name. Some call it “aggregation,” which is a somewhat mechanical-sounding term, and best describes the more automated approach taken by companies like Google with Google News. It’s also a term traditional media sources often use disparagingly when talking about new media, as New York TimesExecutive Editor Bill Keller has when discussing The Huffington Post . Others prefer to call it “curation,” which implies a human being filtering and selecting the best of something and then pulling it together into some kind of coherent whole.
This is the term that many use to describe what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with Twitter in the wake of the revolution in Egypt and popular uprisings in Libya. While he doesn’t actually report the news — since he’s thousands of miles away in an office in Washington, D.C. — Carvin selects, verifies and re-distributes the news from hundreds of different Twitter streams he monitors of people who are actually on the ground or have knowledge of what is occurring there. It’s a little like what a news anchor does on television, but with many different sources.
There are other examples as well. This week sees the publication of a book called Quakebook, which is a collection of memories and reactions related to the earthquakes in Japan and the aftermath of that disaster. All the responses were collected through Twitter, and became first an e-book and now a printed version.
We Need Curation More Than Ever
The rise of real-time information sources such as Twitter has produced such an unstoppable wave of content that we need curation and filtering more than we ever have before. And while that used to be something that only traditional media sources did, now it’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether they went to journalism school or work at a name-brand media outlet like the New York Times.
This is part of the reason why Bill Keller and others have reacted so strongly to what The Huffington Post and other digital media outlets do; it represents competition for them as the gatekeepers of information and the trusted oracles of what is important. And that poses a threat not just to their role in the media ecosystem, but to their financial status as well. Is Storify going to do this all by itself? No. But it is part of a much broader trend that is likely to become an even bigger part of the future of media.
We’ve seen plentyofportablesolar chargers in our time, but few have looked quite as versatile as B-Squares — a new collection of 3D modular energy storage devices that can be arranged in various configurations, according to the kind of gadget you’re looking to juice. Developed by MIT grads Jordan McRae and Shawn Frayne, each solar-powered B-Square features a sticky microsuction surface, along with magnetic and electric contacts at each corner, making it easy to connect and arrange them in different formations. Rotating a single square will change its electrical circuit, depending on its adjacent connection. Some B-Squares, for example, feature LED surfaces, allowing you to create solar-powered lanterns, while others have solar panels, or simply serve as rechargeable battery sources. There’s even a square devoted to Arduino boards, along with another surface designed to dock and charge iPhones. McRae and Frayne have already put together a full “recipe book” of different configurations, though the DIY route seems a lot more enticing to us. Their B-Squares are set to leave the prototype phase on May 1st, at an as yet unspecified price. Check them out in video action after the break.
