High-end DSLRs are pricey and a tad complicated for the everyday user, but that doesn’t stop most folks from wanting to take professional-looking shots of their own. Enter Samsung with a patent application that could add simulated depth-of-field discernment to your average point-and-click and smartphone camera. According to the filing, a dual-lens setup — similar to the 3D cameras we’ve seen hit the market — delegates full-resolution image capture to a primary lens, while its secondary partner calculates object distances. The data is then merged with the initial image “to create a depth map” with simulated blur, saving you from tedious Photoshop drudgery. No word on whether this neat trick will make its way to consumers’ hands — but with 3D still the reigning buzz, we’d upgrade that possibility to a very likely.

Samsung camera patent application adds simulated depth-of-field to point-and-clicks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mobile phones have helped close the gap between people, connecting friends, family and co-workers across wide distances. But the lines of communication don’t follow traditional state and city boundaries and instead reflect different social influences and relationships that are sometimes harder to understand.

But a new data and visualization project called the Connected States of America helps bring some focus into the way mobile phones facilitate communications and shows how conversations and text-messages bind areas and regions together, even ones that are far apart. Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research today have showed off their work, which takes anonymous aggregated AT&T mobile phone data and creates interactive maps illustrating where calls and text messages are placed and where they connect to.

Call connections for San Francisco County

The maps show what areas are likely to be in communication with each other and how some places, sometimes in the same state, remain separated. Metropolitan regions, even ones that spill over state lines, understandably facilitate a lot of communications among people in one area. But there is a lot of back and forth that emerges between states too. For instance, Alabama and Louisiana are sister states because of the cellular traffic between the two, while parts of Tennessee, like Chattanooga break away from the rest of Tennessee and join other neighboring states.

Looking at the map, you can see how mobile phone traffic occurs between the New York and San Francisco regions, which are very connected, but are not so related to Texas, another major population hub. Looking at SMS messages also yields slightly different results, emphasizing closer physical connections than phone calls, which can occur over wider distances. Here’s a look at a video about the project.

This is pretty cool, though some of this is intuitive. I know for instance that many parts of the country make calls to Los Angeles or New York, just because they’re such big places. But it’s interesting to see some of the less obvious connections. And it can have social implications that can help our government better understand how to reach out to people. The lesson is that while mobile phones can create instant communications across the entire country, they’re just tools in our hands and our use of them are guided by many of our existing social relationships, cultural backgrounds and affinities.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• The Future of Workplaces
• Why iMessage won’t kill SMS
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

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The environment is really a hot topic these days. With global warming out of control and human pollution only growing, it is more crucial now than it has ever been before to obtain to a place where people can work to protect the world around use as opposed to causing more damage.

Although there are numerous methods that will allow you to lessen your carbon presence, 1 of the newest additions entails a large truck and a tractor trailer full of car. This carpool for cars is referred to as car or truck shipping and it has allowed people to send cars over lengthy distances without having really driving them. Although it may well not appear like a lot, this basic act has saved numerous tons of carbon from becoming released into the atmosphere over the years.

Vehicle transport is really a simple thing to realize. You are able to assist reduce issues by hiring auto transporters. Once you hire a company to move your car to a brand new location, they come to your home and load the car on a transport truck.

Open transport trucks can hold a lot of cars, while closed transport trucks really place only several people’s cars. Likewise, the fewer cars that are becoming carried, the more protection is offered for every 1 of the cars. Closed shipping prevents the cars from becoming subjected to the elements while in transit, however it is also quite a bit more expensive than a trip on an open transport truck.

You will discover hundreds of different car or truck transport alternatives open to you once you choose this is something that you need for your car. Whether or not you might be moving or you just need to get your car from where it is now to a buyer on the other side of the country, car or truck shipping is the way to go.

Make certain you look into the organizations that operate inside your area, nonetheless, so you can pick 1 that will fit your needs along with your economic spending budget. The study may well take some extra time, however it will be well worth it as soon as you find the business of your dreams.

Our phones are about to undergo another revolution. They have already shifted from devices designed for phone calls to computers that connect us to the web, but in the years ahead, they will also become the means people capture physical and analog data about the world around them and transfer it to the web. Today people are using smartphones as heart monitors, calorie trackers and pedometers, and as more and more people buy smartphones, the number of people trying these apps out will rise.

But to communicate with sensors on your body, in your home, in a medical setting or even with an exercise machine, your handset needs a radio (actually both devices need a radio) and that radio should be able to transmit data over short distances using a minimum of power. Several companies and technologies are vying to provide that radio technology as I detail an article at GigaOM Pro (subscription required). While I provide more information in the GigaOM Pro article, below are a few of the players and their respective PAN technologies hoping to gain a toehold in the handset.

Bluetooth Special Interest Group: Bluetooth, which is a specification for sending data over short distances is the dominant means of connecting headsets to phones. Now it’s also used in a variety of mobile-health applications such as blood pressure and glucose monitors.

Bluetooth has the advantage of already being integrated into most handsets, but its critics claim that it is a battery suck. However, a low-power version of Bluetooth (Bluetooth Low Energy) is on its way and will solve some of the battery life issues, says Mike Foley, the head of the Bluetooth SIG, in an interview. However, most devices today don’t have the Bluetooth Low Energy chips (although they contain other iterations of Bluetooth radios), so it will take a few years until those radios are in most consumers handsets.

Dynastream Innovations (ANT): Dynastream, a subsidiary of personal-navigation powerhouse Garmin, has created a low-power, short-range wireless technology called ANT. The benefit of ANT is that it consumes much less power than Bluetooth or ZigBee chips, but it’s not yet widely available in handsets. However, at this year’s CES, ANT had some wins with TI, introducing a combined Bluetooth and ANT chip, and Sony Ericsson (admittedly not a big player in the smartphone industry), who said it would deploy ANT in its handsets. Other fitness-focused devices such as the Fitbit (see disclosure) also use ANT.

Apple: Apple modified Bluetooth to make it more power-efficient to create its PAN technology, which powers the radio inside the Nike pedometer. It could also end up in other devices designed to attach to Apple gear such as iPads, iPhones and iPods. Apple notes that its proprietary radio technology operates in the 2.4 Ghz band, as does Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ANT and other technologies. In addition to its program with Nike, Apple also has fitness machine makers embedding compatible radios and sensors inside their machines to communicate with iPhones and iPods.

However, the future for personal area networks won’t belong to one standard or one company. Most likely a variety of radios will make it on smartphones. For more on the coming battle for personal area network supremacy and the technologies and players involved, read the full analysis at GigaOM Pro.

Image Source: flickr user Faizuddin

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Supercomputers and the Search for the Exascale Grail
• Pushing Processors Past Moore’s Law
• Thing Converged Infrastructure Means Lock In? Think Again.

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