Coldplay will stream a live concert today at 4 p.m. ET on YouTube, through the American Express Unstaged performance series.Fans, however, might want to stay home to take advantage of all the digital tools. ~ Dean Kosage
Early online viewers of the concert, which is actually in Madrid, will be treated to a documentary made by Anton Corbijn. American Express has rented four large screens in New York’s Times Square to broadcast the concert with sound, too.
Viewers will be able to switch between several different camera views including a director’s cut, main stage and an aerial camera. The live stream will also feature a chat pulling in comments and posts from people around the world.
YouTube made its foray into live streaming earlier this year. And this isn’t the first time YouTube has tried to make music more social. It used a similar player — complete with variable cameras and a chat stream — during this spring’s Coachella Festival. That live stream proved to be a huge success, drawing in a ton of viewers who might not have otherwise seen the show.
The Coldplay live stream coincides with the band’s recent release of the album, “Mylo Xyloto.” Assuming the live stream doesn’t buckle from traffic, it should be another feather in YouTube’s musical cap.
I love the idea that a thermostat now has to be beautiful and desirable and energy-saving. We can control the thermostat with any Internet-connected device, an iPhone app or an Android app. Cool! ~ Dean Kosage
Tony Fadell, the man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod, announced the first product of his stealth startup Nest Labs Tuesday: a sexy, world-saving … thermostat.
“Nest” is a $249 programmable thermostat that can also program itself.
At first, users might frequently adjust the thermometer when they get up in the morning, leave for work, get home from work and go to sleep. Eventually, however, it will learn their patterns and adjust the temperature to appropriate levels automatically. If they leave on a trip, the thermostat will figure out the house is empty and turn the heat and air conditioning to an energy-saving mode.
90% of programmable thermostats are rarely or never programmed, even though the EPA estimates that programming a thermostat to reduce heating or cooling while out of the house can cut 15% off of a heating and cooling bill. By making it easier to “program” temperature, Fadell’s thermostat could put a much bigger dent reducing energy waste and bills than its traditional counterpart. He has told several publications that users can expect to cut up to 30% of their utility bills.
All this, and Nest is a looker, too.
“If you don’t make it look beautiful, people don’t cherish it,” Fadell told Wired. “I want it to be a jewel on the wall so that it’s a conversation piece. People come over and they go, ‘What’s that on your wall?’ and you go, ‘Oh, you’ve got to check this out.’”
The thermostat is round like a jewel. Instead of faint numbers that make users squint, the temperature on Nest is bold and large, front and center. To adjust, you twist the rim around the “jewel.” It turns blue when it’s cooling things down and red when it’s heating them up. A small leaf image discreetly points users toward energy efficient settings.
Should users forget to make a temperature adjustment before they leave the house, they can control the thermostat with any Internet-connected device, an iPhone app or an Android app.
“The Nest is the iPod of thermostats,” says Levy.
And it is. But it’s also still a thermostat, and a thermostat that costs about $100 more than most competitors. Can an Apple-eye for design turn a traditionally boring product into something for which people pay a premium to display?
Here’s the artificial Super-Skin could transform Phones, Robots and Artificial Limbs and now comes the first robot ever to say “ouch” and mean it. ~ Dean kosage
Using carbon nanotubes bent to act as springs, Stanford researchers have developed a stretchable, transparent skin-like sensor. The sensor can be stretched to more than twice its original length and bounce back perfectly to its original shape. It can sense pressure from a firm pinch to thousands of pounds. The sensor could have applications in prosthetic limbs, robotics and touch-sensitive computer displays.
Touch sensitivity on gadgets and robots is nothing new. A few strategically placed sensors under a flexible, synthetic skin and you have pressure sensitivity. Add a capacitive, transparent screen to a device and you have touch sensitivity. However, Stanford University’s new “super skin” is something special: a thin, highly flexible, super-stretchable, nearly transparent skin that can respond to touch and pressure, even when it’s being wrung out like a sponge.
The brainchild of Stanford University Associate Professor of chemical engineering Zhenan Bao, this “super skin” employs a transparent film of spray-on, single-walled carbon nanotubes that sit in a thin film of flexible silicon, which is then sandwiched between more silicon.
After an initial stretch, which actually aligns the randomly sprayed-on conductive, carbon nanotubes into microscopic spring-like forms, the skin can be stretched and restretched again to twice its original size, without the springs or skin losing their resiliency. Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher who is part of Bao’s research team explained, “None of it causes any permanent deformation.”
This unique makeup allows the malleable skin to measure force response even as it’s being stretched, or “squeezed like a sponge.” Researchers noted that it can also sense touch and force at the same time.
This super skin is not simply a thicker, more flexible version of the touch screen on your iPhone 4S. Virtually all touch-sensitive smartphones feature transparent films that sense touch. However, these capacitive screens are only responding to the tiny electrical charge in your fingertips and do not actually know if you’re touching lightly or hammering the screen.
Flexible touch screens for computers and smartphones is one obvious super skin application idea, but the Stanford researchers have larger goals. They envision future robots wearing this flexible touch and pressure-sensitive skin. From there, the next logical step is replacement of skin on people, especially burn victims or those who have lost limbs.
Learn more in the video and then give us some of your ideas for how industry could use this super skin breakthrough..
Professional athletes make more money in a year’s salary than most people make in a lifetime.When you add in the money made from endorsement deals, some athletes’ total earnings near the billion dollar mark. In fact, a few of these sports figures make more money filming a commercial than playing in a giant stadium. Especially golfers and race car drivers who make most of their money hawking products. ~ Dean Kosage
8 Athletes Who Made More Money Endorsing Products Than Playing Sports This Past Year
Check out the video below to learn about the challenges of powering the new social web. ~ Dean Kosage
Now the transfer of data over the Internet is growing faster than ever, said Vice President of Intel’s Architecture Group Kirk Skaugen during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He also explained how infrastructure is scaling with the increasing transfer of data.
Skaugen said although there are currently 4 billion connected devices around the world, Intel expects that number to increase to 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.
Many servers and computers will face challenges from these increases, including those that support the 48 hours of YouTube videos uploaded each minute, 200 million tweets sent per day and 7.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month.
To support this amount of data sharing around the world, Intel and other computer companies have to find ways to make the Internet hardware cheaper and easier to use. It is an extension of Moore’s Law, and is necessary for the expected increases in data sharing.
“When Intel entered the server market, the average server price was $58,000, and today we’re under $3,800 and dropping,” said Skaugen.
4chan founder Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) says that Google and Facebook “do identity wrong,” and that people should not be tied to just one identity on the web.
In a passionate speech at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Poole claimed that Internet users should have a choice as to whether they want to stay anonymous on the web or use their real identities. The argument comes as Facebook and Google push to remove anonymity from the web.
“Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds,” Poole told the audience. “Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different… Facebook is consolidating identity by making us more simple than we truly are.”
Poole continued, explaining that to some people, he’s a son, and to others he’s a hacker or a friend. Identity is more complex than the world’s largest social networks would like you to believe. “We all have multiple identities,” he declared. “It’s part of being human. We’re all multi-faceted people.”
Poole concluded with his thoughts on how the world’s largest social networks are handling identity. “Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want to think about what the world would be if we did it right,” he said.
GODLEY (CBSDFW.COM) – It’s not easy to remain calm and dial 9-1-1 when you someone you love is in the midst of a medical emergency. But Taylor Martin of Godley Is being hailed as a hero for doing just that. Because she’s only six.
“I’m very proud of her. She’s very brave,” her mother said.
Little Taylor Martin of Godley knows a lot of things like the trampoline and how to count big numbers.
Her eight-year-old brother, Brayson, quizzed her while both of them were jumping on their trampoline out front.
“What’s a hundred plus a hundred?” Brayson asked.
“200!” Taylor shouted back.
Tuesday, she knew three little numbers that saved her mothers life: “9-1-1,” Taylor said.
She called 9-1-1 when her mother had a seizure. “I telled them my momma passed out,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s mother, Liz Miles, said, “Basically, I remember I was breaking up a banana feeding the baby. I blacked out after that. I don’t really know anything.”
“I pushed onto her head but she never did wake up,” Taylor said.
Taylor is only six. Her baby brother 15-months old. They were the only other people in the house at the time.
“It’s just emotional for me to know that happened and I left them alone, you know,” Liz Miles said.
Taylor just started kindergarten this year. 9-1-1 is a lesson she learned from her mom.
“She told us a long time ago and I still remember it,” Taylor said.
“You tell you your kids these things and you expect them to know it but you never really know they’re going to know it until it happens,” her mother said.
Because, after all, they are still children.
Taylor’s mother asks one more time, “What are you going to do if it happens again?”
Taylor responds, “Call 9-1-1.”
In recognition for her heroism, Taylor has been nominated for the National Youth Hero Award.
Centenarian Fauja Singh crosses the finish line in a 100 meter race for centenarians in Toronto, Thursday Oct. 13, 2011. One-hundred-year-old Singh, originally from India now living in London, England, is competing in Toronto’s Waterfront Marathon on Sunday.
TORONTO (AP) — A 100-year-old runner became the oldest person to complete a full-distance marathon when he finished the race in Toronto on Sunday.
Fauja Singh earned a spot in the Guinness World Records for his accomplishment.
It took Singh more than eight hours to cross the finish line — more than six hours after Kenya’s Kenneth Mungara won the event for the fourth straight year — and he was the last competitor to complete the course.
But his time wasn’t nearly as remarkable as the accomplishment.
Event workers dismantled the barricades along the finish line and took down sponsor banners even as Singh made his way up the final few hundred yards of the race.
Family, friends and supporters greeted Singh when he finished the race.
“Beating his original prediction, he’s overjoyed,” his coach and translator Harmander Singh said. “Earlier, just before we came around the (final) corner, he said, ‘Achieving this will be like getting married again.’
“He’s absolutely overjoyed, he’s achieved his lifelong wish.”
Sunday’s run was Singh’s eighth marathon — he ran his first at age 89 — and wasn’t the first time he set a record.
In the 2003 Toronto event, he set the mark in the 90-plus category, finishing the race in 5 hours, 40 minutes and 1 second.
And on Thursday in Toronto, Singh broke world records for runners older than 100 in eight different distances ranging from 100 meters to 5,000 meters.
The 5-foot-8 Singh said he’s hopeful his next project will be participating in the torch relay for the 2012 London Games. He carried the torch during the relay for the 2004 Athens Games.
I’m looking for what is the latest in online games today and I found ’Angry Birds’ is one trending today.. ~ Dean Kosage
Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment may go public as soon as next year and is worth around $1 billion, according to Rovio’s chief marketing officer.
Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio CMO, told Bloomberg Television that the company will launch an IPO “maybe a year from now.”
The company has expressed its intention to go public before but has never been clear on a timeframe. It would presumably join other social media companies, including Zynga, Groupon and Facebook, that plan to test the stock market with an IPO.
Here’s a funny video I have watched from YouTube and I am amazed with this baby! ~ Dean Kosage
Kids today. They think the world revolves around them, that texting trumps face-to-face conversations and that print magazines are actually iPads.
Say what? Well, about that last part: While there are apocryphal stories about toddlers trying to activate their TVs by touching their screens, the same apparently holds true for non-electric objects. As this video demonstrates, to a 1-year-old, Apple‘s iPad is something that’s literally been around of all their lives.
So rather than be amazed at all the things an iPad can do, this child is confounded by what a paper magazine cannot do.
