Wednesday, April 30, 2014

drag2share: GoPro's Android app now connects to your action cam automatically

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/29/gopro-android-app-update/

GoPro's smartphone apps have been a useful addition to its popular action cams for quite some time, and now the Android version sees a nice update. First, and most importantly, the app now automatically connects to your camera's WiFi signal on launch, nixing a visit to the settings menu as your first stop. Sharing is easier as well, as those captured stills and videos can now be beamed to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and other social repositories directly from your mobile device. There's also an updated UI for those wielding version 4.0 or later of Google's mobile OS and the ability to have the app set the curated Photo of the Day as your wallpaper. Haven't been alerted to version 2.4 yet? Well, jump down to the source link to nab the download now.

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Via: Android Police

Source: GoPro (Google Play)

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drag2share: ​Judges have more discretion to punish patent trolls, but they probably won't

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/29/judges-now-have-more-discretion-to-punish-patent-trolls-but-th/

the supreme court building in...

The US Supreme Court just gave judges a little more leverage to punish patent trolls: it defined the word "exceptional." A provision of federal patent law hinged on the definition of the word, stating that the court could charge a lawsuit's losing party with the winner's attorney fees in "exceptional cases." It sounds straightforward: if a lawsuit is obviously frivolous, the patent troll pays its victim's costs. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court said, precedent from a previous case left the rule with "an inflexible framework onto statutory text that is inherently flexible." In other words, it was too difficult to define exactly how exceptional a case was, making it nearly impossible to implement punitive fee-shifting.

To resolve the issue, the Supreme Court went back to the dictionary, declaring that the Patent Act provision's use of "exceptional" should be interpreted by Webster's definition: uncommon, rare or not ordinary. "An exceptional case," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, "is simply one that stands out from the others." This simplified definition will allow district judges to implement the kind of loser-pays fee-shifting found in patent reform bills like the Innovation Act. That said, most judges tend to rule on the conservative side: unless a troll's foul-play is abundantly clear, there is a good chance they'll still go unpunished.

[Image credit: Shutterstock / trekandshoot]

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Via: SCOTUS Blog, Verge

Source: Supreme Court (1), (2)

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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

drag2share: Acerâs new Chromebook first to use an Intel Core i3 chip

Source: http://gigaom.com/2014/04/29/acers-new-chromebook-first-to-use-an-intel-core-i3-chip/

Acer announced a new Chromebook in its C720 line on Tuesday at a New York City press event and unlike its other models, this one gets a chip boost. Instead of the fairly common Intel Celeron processor found in other Chromebooks from Acer, Dell and HP, Acer is putting an Intel Core i3 processor inside the laptop. Slashgear notes that the new 11.6-inch Chromebook is due out this summer with larger models possibly following. Using the Core i3 should improve performance while not severely impacting battery life.

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drag2share: This space-age insulation company youâve never heard of is planning to go public

Source: http://gigaom.com/2014/04/29/this-space-age-insulation-company-youve-never-heard-of-is-planning-to-go-public/

Things you never thought you wanted to know about: insulation. But here’s why at least one next-gen super-efficient insulation company is interesting.

Screen Shot 2014-04-29 at 10.08.05 AMA company called Aspen Aerogels makes a crazy space-age insulation blanket that is being used to insulate extreme environments like deep-sea oil refineries and astronauts in space. It turns out there’s enough demand for its intense energy-saving insulation out there that it’s planning to go public, and could raise up to $86.25 million in an IPO.

Aspen Aerogels uses nanotechnology to make an ultra-thin durable “aerogel,” which is a basically a blanket made out of pockets of air. Ninety-seven percent of the volume of Aspen’s aerogel is air.

The surrounding structure that makes up the blanket is made of silicon dioxide. Aspen makes the blankets by pouring a stream of ethanol filled with silicon dioxide into a mold and then heats it up to super high temperatures to remove the ethanol, leaving just the silica structure and air.

Air doesn’t transmit heat so well, and the blankets are extremely good at blocking heat or cold from escaping to the other side of the blanket. The aerogels are also very hard to light on fire, as you can see in this awesome video below, so they’re great for intensely hot environments like a power plant:

The majority (87 percent) of Aspen Aerogel’s customers are in the energy infrastructure industry, which use the product to insulate power plants and refineries. But about 10 percent of its customers come from outside of energy, like more traditional building construction companies, train car and plane makers, even some apparel companies (like for astronauts). The aerogel blankets are pretty expensive, or maybe regular homes builders would be using these more readily.

Founded in 2001, Aspen Aerogels isn’t yet profitable, and generated revenue of $86.10 million on a net loss of $47.61 million in 2013. But the company is growing rapidly and wants to raise money to add more factory capacity (they have a factory in East Providence, Rhode Island). It anticipates spending some $80 million to $100 million on new factory space.

This isn’t the first time that Aspen Aerogels has tried to go public. Last spring the company decided to withdraw an IPO filing and raise debt financing instead. Are the markets better this year? We’ll see.

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drag2share: AMD wages benchmark war on Intel's tablet chips

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/29/amd-mullins-tablet-benchmarks-vs-intel/

For all the success AMD has been having in the console and PC graphics spheres, none of it has really translated into the world of Windows-based tablets and ultraportables. The chip maker insists that's going to change in 2014, however, and it has released a number benchmarks showing that its latest processors have a lead not only over AMD's previous generation, but also over the Intel chips that currently reign supreme in these form factors.

We won't bore you with a gabble of numbers when you can check out charts for yourself in the gallery below, but the main curiosity here is probably the 4.5-watt tablet platform, known as "Mullins." This replaces last year's Temash processor, which had impressive gaming skills but failed to catch on in the market. AMD's in-house scores suggest Mullins offers much better performance per watt, with the new A4 Micro-6400T achieving a 15 percent lead over Intel's Bay Trail T (the Atom Z3370) in PCMark 8 -- a lead that could potentially be significant enough to bring the chip into more slim-line (and passively cooled) Windows 8 machines. What AMD doesn't reveal, however, is whether devices equipped with this A4 chip will have comparable battery life to Bay Trail, so it's all academic until actual, commercial devices come around.

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