Ever since terrorists started using the internet, amateur crusaders, lawmakers and others have tried to fight back, pressuring technology companies to shut out the militants. So it was only a matter of time before the war on terrorist media went social.
Snails with benefits? Our salt shaker might disagree. But some enterprising engineers over at Japan’s Chuo University managed to turn this garden-variety pest into fodder for mechatronic inspiration. Based on the gastropod’s preferred method of ‘galloping’ — wherein waves of foot-to-head muscle contractions propel it forward — researchers at the Mechatronics Lab created TORo II, an omnidirectional robot that could make its way to a hospital near you. Why’s that? Well, the bot’s large gripped surface area makes it ideal for narrow, slippery environments — so it won’t budge if knocked into (though you might wind up on the emergency room floor). Although the unique movement technique has been used to create other mecha-mollusks in the past, the team behind this project made sure to create some of their own ceiling and wall-climbing critters — suction definitely included. We admit, we kind of feel guilty about the sodium chloride transgressions of our youth. And now that we know snails can be useful, it’s only a matter of time before the bedbug gets repurposed. Full omnidirectional video awesomeness after the break.
Continue reading Japanese TORo II gallops ahead at a mechanical snail’s pace (video)
Japanese TORo II gallops ahead at a mechanical snail’s pace (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Joe Belfiore is hardly average, you know — he’s Windows Phone Program Director at Microsoft. And you don’t scale those heights by being the kind of wimp who would just lie down and be trampled over by a herd of new iOS 5 features. No sir. While more timid men might have distracted themselves with minor problems like disappointing sales, Belfiore instead reached deep into that strong place we all discover when we’re backed into a corner and pulled out his Twitter login. What ensued was a list of WP features that he feels “flattered” to see imitated by Apple, starting off with that most original of originals: a dedicated camera button. We’re guessing it’s just a matter of time before Andy Rubin follows suit.
Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore kicks off iOS5 ‘we did it first’ contest, sarcasm meter hits 11 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This week’s Economist cover story, “A New Tech Bubble,” has people abuzz once again about how Silicon Valley is ripe for another fall. According to the article, irrational exuberance has gripped tech industry investors, and it’s only a matter of time before the general public is left holding the check, just like they did in 2001.
But the latest bubble warnings seem to be missing the mark. Are some Internet companies over-hyped and over-funded? Absolutely. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater by making generalizations about the entire industry based on a few flashy examples. I’d argue that the silent majority of businesses and investors in Silicon Valley are much more responsible than they get credit for. For every headline-grabbing Webvan 2.0, there is at least one current startup running a real business by providing a real service. Overall, a healthy amount of the companies that make up the web scene today are built to last.
To illustrate my point, I’ve put together a list of five startups that have been on my radar recently for doing business the old-fashioned way — with revenue, profits and no frothiness in sight. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but if you can think of any others, chime in in the comments!
This maker of the uber-popular Talking Friends apps is growing, profitable, and has no immediate plans to take on a dime of venture capital. “We raise a round of money from our users every month,” CEO Andrej Nabergoj told me recently. “We’re not focused on raising any other kind of funding right now.” The company does not disclose its annual revenue, but Nabergoj says Outfit7 made 0,000 in just one day this past December, as the popularity of its Talking Santa app reached a peak.
“My goal is to spread that message: Charge for something and make more than you spend,” Instapaper CEO Marco Arment told Ryan Kim in a recent interview. The New York-based startup, which makes the very popular Instapaper app that allows users to save articles to read later, is profitable and entirely self-funded.
Last month this geo-location startup rolled out a scalable revenue generation model with the launch of its revenue-sharing API, but CEO Darren Shirazi told me recently that the 2.5-year-old San Francisco-based company had already banked millions of dollars through licensing agreements with big media firms. Shirazi told me he’s determined to keep at least 50 percent of the company in the hands of its founders and employees, so having that income stream allowed Fwix to fend off a number of investment offers with less-than-ideal terms. Fwix closed on its first VC round of .75 million in April 2011.
From its February 2008 inception to the close of its first venture funding round last month, this graphic design marketplace website achieved multi-million dollar revenues and profitability entirely through bootstrapped operations. CTO Lachlan Donald told me that 99Designs’ humble beginnings “brought focus” to the company.
This web-based code repository has been banking self-sustaining revenues from day one with its payment plans. The three-year-old company hasn’t taken on any outside funding, not even from friends and family, CEO Chris Wansrath told me in a recent interview. “Everyone says you can’t make money in developer tools. But I’ve learned to take everything everyone says with a grain of salt,” he said. Solid advice for any entrepreneur.
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Cisco’s doing it in the boardroom, and soon, your children may be taking notes from kiddos situated in a different continent. Skype in the Classroom is a new online platform that aims to make it easier for teachers to find other teachers who are utilizing Skype within their classes, and already there are 3,900+ taking advantage. The goal here is to enable professors to easily reach out and find like-minded individuals who are covering complementary topics, and with a quick email, the two could be cooking up joint lesson plans a dozen time zones apart. As of now, 99 countries have teachers that are signed on, and we’re guessing it’s only a matter of time before a couple more join and push that into triple digits. Next step? Logging into first period from home. Or Fiji.
Continue reading Skype in the Classroom tears down geographic walls, connects pupils the world over
Skype in the Classroom tears down geographic walls, connects pupils the world over originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A screenshot of what appears to be a web-search box at the top of a Facebook page has been making the rounds, with AllFacebook suggesting it is part of a beta test of a new search feature. Facebook has denied this is the case, and the image appears to be a result of Photoshop or some external service adding a box to the page. Regardless of whether the page is a fake or not, the giant social network is almost certain to add more search features. It’s just a matter of time. And yes, Google should be afraid.
Facebook is already involved in search to a certain extent. The company did a deal with Microsoft last fall to add results from its network to the Bing search engine, and Blekko — the search engine startup launched by Rich Skrenta last year — also has a search that includes social results based on Facebook “likes” and other activity. But so far, Facebook’s involvement consists of allowing Bing and Blekko to crawl or index its data rather than doing so itself.
Google, meanwhile, made a big show of launching social and real-time search earlier this year, but the reality is that the majority of what those searches pull in (apart from Google-related social activity) is Twitter results. As Google knows, when it comes to real-time social information, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. The network’s users spend 700 billion minutes a month on the site, and post 30 billion pieces of content, including likes and status updates and comments. But none of that shows up anywhere in Google’s social search, and given the history of tension between the two companies, there is little chance that it will.
You could argue that not indexing Facebook is a good thing, since much of what happens on Facebook is irrelevant or ephemeral and, therefore, doesn’t belong in a search engine. But much of what occurs on Twitter falls into the same category, and yet Google clearly feels there is utility in searching that content.
The reality is that social signals — what people share, what they comment on, what they click the “like” button on — are becoming an increasingly important part of identifying intent, and that’s what Google has built its business on. But Facebook is positioned far better in terms of taking advantage of that aspect of the social web than Google is, and the network was recently awarded a patent that gives some indication of what it is thinking about in terms of combining search and social signals.
Google continues to try to bolt on social elements to its services, including allowing users to vote down search results they don’t like, or adding toolbars and enhanced profiles. But the billions of clicks and uploads and “likes” from Facebook are something Google will never have, and can’t possibly duplicate. It seems obvious the social network will take advantage of all that information in the form of social search, and that has to be something keeping Google awake at night — or should be.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Will Clayton
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