geekery

Esther Zuckerman / The Atlantic Wire: Amazon Wants to Create Appointment TV Online, Not Follow Netflix Binging  —  Though Netflix may have emerged as the frontrunner when it comes to original streaming content, what with the successes of House of Cards and Arrested Development, don't expect Amazon to be following in its footsteps entirely.

Ian Livingstone, the chief executive of BT is stepping down from his role at the head of the company to take up the position of Minister of State for Trade and Investment in the UK.

Livingstone will remain chief executive of the BT Group of companies until he steps down from his post and the board in September, at which point he will be succeeded by Gavin Patterson, head of BT Retail since 2008.

“It has been an incredibly hard decision to leave BT at such an exciting time.  However, the opportunities ahead and the strength of the management team that Gavin will lead mean that the company is in a great position,” Ian Livingstone said. “I am immensely proud to have led this company over the last five years. We have made huge progress over the last few years but I know there is still so much more that BT can and will do.”

Livingstone will take up his front-bench government position in December but will join the House of Lords prior to this. The exact start date of Patterson will be announced in due course, BT said.

The current chief’s departure does indeed come at an interesting time for the company as the BT Wholesale network continues to roll out fiber and copper based fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) superfast broadband to the masses. The company is also in the midst of an intensifying battle with Sky around its TV offerings.

Earlier this year, BT won the rights to broadcast 38 live Premier League football games from later in 2013, including the opening game of the season, putting it in direct competition with Sky’s sports channels. To step up the rivalry even more, BT then announced that its broadband customers could have access to its new sports programming at no extra cost.

Image Credit – Getty Images

Singapore’s telecommunications operator Singtel announced today that it would partner e-commerce platform Shopify in four Asian countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India – in a bid to broaden the Canada-based service’s reach in the region.

Shopify is an online software-as-a-service e-commerce platform that enables entrepreneurs to create digital shopfronts. Despite being available for anyone who wants to sign up for the service, Shopify has been rather passive in Asia. With Singtel’s backing, however, the service seems set to create more footprint in the region.

Mr Loo Cheng Chuan, SingTel Group Digital Life’s Head (LocalL!fe), said:

SingTel is excited by the tremendous growth opportunities in the e-commerce market. By 2015, 35% of Internet users in the Asia Pacific region will make purchases online, and 30% of these transactions will be performed on a mobile device [citing figures from IDC]… With more than 468 million mobile customers in 25 countries, SingTel is uniquely positioned to enable entrepreneurs to seize opportunities.

The company said that it is currently working with payment providers in each country to enable transactions in local currencies by September.

It will also be negotiating with delivery partners to give small businesses competitive shipping rates, and will provide optional add-on services such as search engine marketing, social network integration, inventory management and email marketing capabilities. Enterprises that sign up with Shopify will also be able to seek help via a local hotline technical support 24/7.

Singtel also told TNW that it will promote Shopify to businesses via online marketing and direct sales channels, and it will work on getting a link up on its website in the near future for customers to easily access the service.

The Singapore and India Shopify websites are currently in operation already, and the service is priced from S$17 (US$13.50) per month. The Malaysia and Indonesia sites will likely go live next month, Singtel said.

Merchants can either access Shopify via a Web browser or smartphone app to customize their online stores, keep track of orders and manage customer data.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, Shopify has powered over 16,000 online stores (ranging from Amnesty International to Angry Birds) and a user base that is spread to 79 countries across the globe since its launch in 2007.

Headline image via Thinkstock

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A three year project to explore the possibilities and implications of what the “3D Internet” on a mobile would look like and what benefits it could offer has finished, leading the way for future work in the area.

While 3D on mobile might feel a little excessive to some, you only have to look at the number of apps beginning to integrate 3D modelling or mapping, for example, and it’s a short leap to wonder what the whole of the Internet would be like (and how we could navigate it) if it was in 3D.

The Chiru project (officially known as the ‘3D User eXperience for Mobile Network Virtual Environments’) was carried out by the Center for Internet Excellence (CIE) at the University of Oulu in Finland with backing from Nokia, Intel and Tekes, the Finnish funding agency for technology and innovation. It set out with a clear vision: to study and improve the way people interact with 3D information and also looked at things like how data services can be presented in a virtual space and creating design guidelines for 3D interfaces.

“At CIE, our main focus is accelerating the deployment of 3D Internet services and applications. The most important question is to understand how people interact with three dimensional information and what do we need from technology to create a smooth and immersive user experience”, Mika Ylianttila, Director of the CIE, said on Wednesday.

“From the business perspective, the 3D Internet space is a huge opportunity and we are seeing more and more businesses and research being built around 3D Internet. The Oulu area has unique expertise and provides a living lab environment to test and develop 3D Internet technologies and services,” he added.

The ultimate aim for the ambitious project was “to lay the groundwork for the 3D Internet” but also looked at Mixed Reality, also known as augmented reality (AR).

While a number of the findings have perhaps become more obvious than they were when the researchers set out in 2010, it also found that people are far more comfortable using augmented reality in most situations (a normal view of the world augmented with digital information) but preferred a pure 3D model in cluttered situations as it’s less distracting and omits other “disruptive elements” like shadows.

The project looked at several different elements of technology during the study and investigated things like 3D object capture using Xbox Kinect alongside a 3D capturing module for RealXtend Tundra, visual design aspects of UIs and the user overall experience and things like how to connect multiple concurrent 3D spaces with portals (shown below).

However, perhaps some of the most interesting research was carried out on the visualization of sensor data which they did by using GPS with mobile WiFi and Bluetooth data (as well as some other wearable sensors) for visualization and content creation.

“GPS data was used for controlling an agent in a 3D virtual environment depicting a real city. Also WiFi and Bluetooth connection data was used to measure pedestrian traffic and demonstrate how virtual cities can be populated according to different types of city zones. Furthermore, accelerometer and proximity sensor data was used to capture and visualize elderly patient activities,” the group said on its project page. You can see a video of the elderly patient activities research here.

In addition to the user-side and design requirements of what the 3D Internet might look like and how it could be built, the study also looked at the technology involved such as seeing what impact 3D content (geometry, surface maps, materials, etc.) had on mobile battery life, as well as trying to formulate a mathematical model so that the demands of any 3D space on battery life could easily be calculated.

Building on the project, the CIE said it will now continue its research with new projects focusing on a Tekes-backed Mixed Reality study. It also said it will run projects and training programs with local authorities to turn parts of their research into businesses.

While research into the area is no longer a new topic and we have seen the increasing use of augmented reality in mobile devices, such as Nokia’s City Lens or LiveSight features, but there is clearly room for future development of the technology and a need to increase awareness among users. Projects such as this, while they might have no immediate practical outcome, do just that and are a vital key to innovation in the space.

Image Credit – Getty Images

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: Developers Can Now Ship Hard Drives To Google To Import Large Amounts Of Data To Cloud Storage  —  Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import.

Samsung's Galaxy S 4 continues to be one of the fastest selling phones ever. And if you have bought one then you'll need one of these high-end-ish, luxury cases to protect your lovely new mobile....

TripAdvisor has continued its acquisition spree today by snapping up GateGuru, a mobile app that displays all of the information that a user might need on their day of travel.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s been confirmed that the GateGuru team will continue to work in New York City. Company employees will now report to Bryan Saltzburg, General Manager for New Initiatives and leader of the TripAdvisor Flights product and SeatGuru brand moving forward.

GateGuru is a robust travel app that combines all sorts of useful travel information, including holidaymakers’ itinerary and flight times, a section for information about their chosen airport – tips, amenity information, a visual map and the like – and rental car bookings through Avis.

“Flying is often an essential part of a trip and we have continually developed our suite of flights products, from the pricing and availability search on TripAdvisor, to our award-winning SeatGuru.com, with seat maps and more,” said Steve Kaufer, co-founder and CEO TripAdvisor, Inc.

“GateGuru nicely complements our existing flights products and we look forward to working with the GateGuru team as they continue to manage the GateGuru app and add great functionality to the TripAdvisor mobile experience.”

TripAdvisor acquired Wanderfly, a New York-based “travel inspiration site” last October. It then picked up Tiny Post, a mobile photo storytelling app in March this year, hinting at a renewed push to improve TravelAdvisor’s mobile presence. JetSetter, a service that notifies members of special travel deals, was then added to the list in April, rounding out the company’s rather extensive shopping list.

Image Credit: ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

Modern smartphones and tablets can help you go without printers, but they can also help you print. You could even start print jobs from anywhere and pick up the document when you arrive at home or the office.

If you still haven’t found the elusive paperless office, here’s everything you need to know about printing from your Android phone or tablet. It’s surprisingly easy — certainly easier than setting up Windows networked printers in the past.

Anyone who's tried to tether to their iPhone or iPad will recall how iOS manages to craft its own passwords when used as a personal hotspot. The aim is to ensure that anyone sharing their data connection will get some degree of security, regardless of whether they tinker with the password themselves. However, three researchers from FAU in Germany have now worked the structure behind these auto-generated keys -- a combination of a short english word and a series or random numbers -- and managed to crack that hotspot protection in under a minute. To start, the word list is listed to around 52,500 entries, and once the testers are able to capture a WiFi connection, they used an AMD Radeon HD 6990 GPU to cycle through all those words with number codes, taking just under 50 minutes to crack with rote entry. Following that, they realized that only a small subset (just 1,842) of the word list was being used.

Factor in an even faster GPU -- a cluster of four AMD Radeon HD 7970s -- and they got the hotspot password cracking time to 50 seconds. The Friedrich-Alexander University researchers added that unscrupulous types could use comparable processing power through cloud computing. ""System-generated passwords should be reasonably long, and should use a reasonably large character set. Consequently, hotspot passwords should be composed of completely random sequences of letters, numbers, and special characters," it says in the report, which outlines the trade-off between security and usability. However, as ZDNet notes, Apple's cycled password approach still offers more protection than static options found elsewhere. Check out the full paper at the source.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Apple

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Via: ZDNet

Source: Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander University (PDF)

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

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