Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Sonos-Sub Wireless Multi-room Audio Systems
Now Sonos has released a subwoofer to complement its array of wireless Play speakers and Connect amps. It’s simply called Sub. The $700 powered speaker component isn’t cheap but it does add excellent definition and low-end heft to any existing Sonos system.
The Sub’s glossy, piano-black case is shaped like a big, square doughnut with a rectangular hole in the center. That central cavity is where all the sound is directed. Two 4.5-inch by 7-inch rectangular divers, each with its own class-D amp, face each other from opposing sides of the cavity. The speaker enclosures are ported into the cavity, too, with one port at the top and one at the bottom.
Setup is ridiculously easy. If you already have a Sonos system, just plug the Sub into an outlet wherever you want it to live, fire up your Sonos controller app and add it to your system’s existing mesh network. You can tune the output level and the tonal coloring of the speaker using a simple test suite within the controller app. Setting up an entirely new multi-speaker system is equally as easy, and only involves an extra step or two.
The Sub sounds fantastic. Sonos speakers have always sounded excellent to my ears, and if you’re a fan of the audio your Play or Connect system already puts out, the Sub will only make it sound better. It adds just the right amount of subtle depth, driving everything below about 90Hz, and enhances all different kinds of music. The amount of detail in the default settings to be a bit too understated, so its better to use iPhone app to crank up the output levels. All the necessary adjustments can be made using your phone or tablet, which is refreshing.
The price is very high. And you can buy a subwoofer as good as this one for far less than $700. But you’re not paying the premium to get superior audio quality, you’re shelling out for the Sonos experience — the easy setup, the plethora of music choices, and the joy of having multiple powered speaker components all working in concert without wires and without a controller amp.
And since it only works with Sonos systems, it only makes sense if you’re a “Sonos person.” But provided you’re already comfortable with paying the company’s high prices, the Sub is a worthy addition to your wireless rig.
Positeve - Sound is excellent, on par with the rest of Sonos’ speakers. Well-designed dual-driver subwoofer with dual class-D amps offer efficient and distortion-free boom. Sleek looks make the 16-inch-tall box disappear into your ultra-modern decor. Just over 6 inches tall when laid flat, so it can slip under a couch or table.
Negative - That’s a lot of Simoleons. The tall, square-shaped doughnut design can be too bulky for some rooms, even laid flat.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Microsoft Research Team Developed FAR Technology
Microsoft wants to help you sword fight without the physical risks of getting stabbed. The company’s solution? A team at Microsoft Research has created a hardware localization technology that enables you to play a multi-player sword fighting game using only smartphones.
No, you won’t need to attach any crazy lasers or peripheral accessories to make it work. The team’s aptly named SwordFight game requires only the existing hardware in most shipping smartphones. But it’s also not quite as simple as an app like Star Wars: Lightsaber Duel.
“There’s a lot of technology now that allows phones to connect. But if you want to enable games that have a more active flavor, then you need more,” Thomas Moscibroda, a Lead Researcher in the Mobile & Sensing Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia, told Wired. “What you need is a technology that allows mobile devices to localize each other. If I move, I need to know how close your phone is next to me.”
Moscibroda and his colleagues on the Microsoft Research team have developed a technology called FAR. It’s a new sound-ranging scheme that makes it possible for a smartphone to locate another smartphone by measuring sound. One phone sends out a chirp, and a second phone determines the distance and the position of the first phone by measuring the time it takes for the chirp to travel to its speaker.
In SwordFight, two players aim their phones toward each other, and try to jab at the other person’s handset. When one player’s phone strikes within 15 centimeters of the other player’s phone, the second player loses a point. It’s as if there are imaginary swords, albeit very tiny ones, jutting out from each device. With the help of a phone’s accelerometer and digital compass, the game can tell which opponent did the striking. But what’s unique is the fact that the phones can know how close they are to one another.
The process of measuring distance with sound is nothing new. But the Microsoft team created faster, more accurate algorithms built on top of the core processing principles. Traditional techniques can take about one second to turn around a measurement, David Chu, one of the Microsoft researchers on the SwordFight project told us. But in that one second, a person can move his arms up to 4 meters.
“If you think about the fact that you could only take one measurement per second, you could have an error of 4 meters. We’ve been able to improve that, so that we can go 12 samples per second and theoretically up to 22 samples per second,” Chu said. “On average, based on our testing, we can actually achieve within 2-centimeter accuracy.”
In essence, the technology is incredibly fast, allowing users to play an interactive, phone-to-phone game in real time. But it isn’t limited to just a silly sword fighting game. The researchers were first inspired to create this localization technology to make games more interactive, but they see other potential applications.
“Overall, there’s really a broad applicability to it. We’re not simply talking about phones. A fundamental part of the research that we’ve done is not tied to any particular operating system or anything like that,” Chu said.
All a device needs to use the FAR technology is a speaker and a microphone — components that the vast majority of modern-day tablets, PCs and phones come with.
Unfortunately, you won’t get these capabilities on your phone anytime soon. In theory, SwordFight could be released as an app on Windows Phone or other platforms, but the Microsoft Research team has no current plans to release FAR or its SwordFight game to the general public.
The technology still faces challenges. For example, the chirping noises the phone sends are very noticeable, because smartphone mics and speakers only support audible frequency range. (One solution is to make the chirps part of a game’s music.) Another challenge: Users can easily block their mics or speakers, causing inaccurate measurements.
Moscibroda, Chu and the rest of the Microsoft Research team plan on further developing the technology to address these issues and create more prototype games and applications. They’ve already created another game called ChaseCat, which uses the same technology to let you play a two-player running game where one person attempts to get within a certain distance of another user to score points.
“We’ve seen some other developers taking the underlying technology in a completely different direction than what we had thought of,” Chu said. “We think there is a healthy amount of uses in gaming and outside.”
Google Started to Ship Pre-orders Nexus 7 Tablet
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| Nexus 7 Tablet |
Monday, March 12, 2012
Microsoft Will Sell Millions of Surface Tablets
If Surface is to be a hit, Microsoft can’t just position it as yet another iPad or Android competitor. It needs people to think of the Surface as a real mobile computer. It needs people to buy Surfaces instead of laptops. That means competing with its traditional partners like HP, Dell and Acer. Not only is this Microsoft’s best play, there’s not even a downside to it.
The Surface Pro (and to a lesser extent the Surface RT) is clearly a laptop competitor that’s going to cannibalize sales from Microsoft’s traditional hardware partners. But so what? Who cares if Dell or HP or Acer gets pissed off? What are they going to do, sell only Chromebooks? Go all in on Linux boxes? Exit the PC business altogether? HP’s promise to do just that turned out to be tellingly empty.Sure, Microsoft needs its manufacturing partners. But those partners need Microsoft far more.
And then there are tablets. Microsoft isn’t even close to being a player in the tablet business, which is dominated by Apple and Android. (And, in all reality, Android is but a twee little sideshow relative to the iPad.) Many of Microsoft’s desktop partners have gone full-tilt toward Android tablets, so they’re already competing with Microsoft. So Microsoft’s best bet is to prove there’s a market in Windows tablets — which shouldn’t be hard given how abysmal Android tablets are.
Which brings us to phones. Ballmer left the door open to Microsoft rolling out its own phones. Windows Phone 7 has been a commercial failure, despite its UI being a critical darling. These phones just aren’t selling. Microsoft’s big mobile partner is Nokia, and Nokia is a wreck. Its flagship Lumia line has gone nowhere. HTC and Samsung, meanwhile, seem far more focused on Android. So if handset manufacturers and carriers can’t gin up any excitement over Windows Phone, Microsoft has to do that itself. And one clear path to this would be for Microsoft to release its own device.
In the weeks before it announced Surface, Microsoft’s hardware manager Ben Reed was on the pitch circuit talking to reporters. The meetings were odd — puzzling even — as he didn’t have any news to share. Instead, Reed spent an hour talking about Microsoft’s 30-year history in the hardware business, complete with hoary old mice. In retrospect, Reed was priming the pump, doing the groundwork for the Surface launch to plant an idea: Microsoft is a hardware company.
And if Microsoft is going to be a hardware company, it needs to be a hardware company. Microsoft’s biggest consumer success over the past decade has been Xbox. It needs to replicate that success, and the only way it can be assured of doing that, at least in the short term, is to screw its hardware partners. There’s no shame in that. It’s just business.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Telstar 1 The Tiny Aluminum Satellite
Before Telstar was launched, microwave towers could flash TV shows and other communication information from point to point through the air, supplementing the landlines that already crisscrossed the globe. But once these signals reached the ocean, they reached their limit.
Satellite transmission allowed instantaneous communication – such as long-distance phone calls and real-time international TV – to become an everyday reality. The phrase “live, via satellite” is only possible with Telstar and the machines that followed it into space.
So, in tribute to Telstar 1, here we look back on the little satellite that helped make the modern world.
Tiny Satellite
Telstar 1 was built as an international collaboration between AT&T, Bell Labs, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National Post, Telegraph, and Telecom Office. The satellite launched on a Delta rocket on July 10, 1962.
The aluminum satellite was wimpy by modern standards. It used 14 watts of power – roughly one-seventh that of a modern laptop – generated by the 3,600 solar panels on its outer hull. As well, it could only carry 600 phone calls and one black-and-white TV channel, though not much more was really needed at the time.
Telstar 1 was placed in low Earth orbit and circled the planet every two and a half hours, only in the right position to beam transmissions between Europe and the U.S. for 20 minutes each orbit. This is in contrast to contemporary communications satellites, which fly in geosynchronous orbit, staying above one spot on the Earth.
New Mobile Application Released by Twitter for Android and iOS
Twitter released new mobile apps for Android and iOS Tuesday. Main features include “expanded tweets,” better search, more fine-grained push notifications, and enhanced event support. In short, the update adds a lot more multimedia support, and more quickly delivers the information that’s truly important to you. The most interesting feature is probably beefed-up support for push notifications tied to particular accounts. So, for example, you could set up a push notification for your local news channel, a feed like @Emergency_In_SF, or any other source that you want to monitor with vigilance. The other notable upgrade is the ability to expand tweets within the app. Expanded tweets let users play videos, read article summaries and experience other rich media directly in tweets themselves. So, rather than just seeing a link to a story or a video when you tap a tweet, you’ll be able to directly see the pertinent information without leaving the app. This function is already available on the web (and mobile web) but now Twitter is adding app support too. It’s a clever way to keep people in-app, and now MLB, Etsy and Kickstarter join a growing list of partners who provide this rich content. Tuesday’s update also adds event support and better search autocomplete. The former is Twitter’s attempt to be the backchannel go-to-discussion forum during events like NASCAR, while the latter just lets you accomplish what you’d like faster than you previously could.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
SPi Global Won the 2012 European Outsourcing Association Award
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| SPi-Global Officers |
“The judges selected SPi Global as the winner due to its excellent objective, implementation and the fact that it has clearly helped so many. They also have an innovative way of contribution by gain share to the benefit of their clients, their staff and the charities they support.”
SPi Global’s CSR Program “Power to Inspire” was bestowed the highest honors among the many CSR programs of some of the best outsourcing companies in the world. SPi Global won the 2012 European Outsourcing Association (EOA) Award for Corporate Social Responsibility. The event was held June 27 at the prestigious Law Society in Central London.
The competition was tough. Other had resources that SPI Global could not match. And yet, with their simple, unique and effective approach to help the youth wherever they are in the world, Spi Global impressed the judges. Maulik, their president and CEO and their CSR champion was so proud of their achievement. “SPI Global known as a global outsourcing service provider that operates across four continents, they believe that their host communities around the world should benefit and grow along with them. They've created so much impact with the programs that they had for the children and their humble effort to make a difference was recognized. Their CSR program clearly represents the values that define them as an organization – excellence, innovation and malasakit.”
Malasakit in action
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