Your face may be glued to the Uber app while you try to find your driver on a crowded street corner, but once you get inside the car, you probably start using other apps.

Uber sees this behavior, and that's why it introduced a feature for app developers to implement earlier this month called Trip Experiences.

The idea behind Trip Experiences is to make the apps on your phone smarter, or more "magical," during an Uber ride. That could mean Spotify knows how much time you have in the car and queues up the perfect playlist. Or maybe your favorite news app knows to show you a 10-minute briefing of the day's headlines.
It could also mean that Uber becomes a platform for other apps to build upon, just like the iPhone birthed the App Store and, by extension, Uber itself.

"The idea is that you open the app and you have this magical experience," Chris Saad, the head of Uber's developer platform, said. You can fill in "the app" with any app that could potentially benefit from knowing that you're on an Uber ride and where you're headed.

“It’s a really valuable chunk of time," Uber head of business Dmitry Shevelenko said. "For a lot of folks, their time in an Uber is the biggest distraction-free period they get all day long.”

When an app like Facebook Messenger supports Trip Experiences (Messenger already integrates with Uber, but only for requesting a ride), Saad suggests it could be informed that you're on a ride and prompt you to share your ETA in a message thread.
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“Whenever you enable a new platform like this, a new surface area, new startups can get born," Saad says. "New metaphors and new interaction patterns can get born.”  

Family members would rather be in the action, than behind the camera lens capturing the events of parties and celebrations or even daily activity.

To make the process easier, Kiba has launched what it says is the world’s first automated home video maker, a hands-free camera that can be used anywhere in the home. With its long-lasting battery and mount, the device is portable and was designed with families in mind. “Most often when I am capturing these moments, I am not in the frame or by the time I reach for the camera, the magic of the moment is lost,” said Raji Kannan, Kiba’s CEO and co-founder.

Users can plan ahead and set Kiba to record through the free mobile app, or they can use voice commands to film 30-second videos on demand, thereby allowing every member of a family or group to appear in the frame. After clips are filmed, the device analyzes interactions to determine what is most interesting and important to save you the trouble of having to watch and edit the footage yourself. Kiba uses the company’s patented Joy Ranking Algorithm to identify the best memories of the day, and then compiles the clips into a one-minute video collage.

In essence, you could think of the device as our own personal director, that automatically creates a final cut of the best moments from the day ready to watch and share, with as little effort as possible from yourself. This video will show you more.


Clips are stored online so that users can share them easily through the Kiba app, which is compatible with iOS and Android. Alternatively, users can also save video on the Kiba device itself.
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Kiba comes in four colors and is currently available on the Kiba website for pre-order for $199 with a year’s worth of free cloud storage included in the price. After the pre-order period, Kiba’s suggested retail price will be $329, and the devices will begin shipping in spring 2016.

It seems obvious: Wi-Fi already connects most gadgets in your home. So why wouldn’t it connect your smart home (Internet of Things – IoT) gadgets, too? But while it sounds obvious, the companies making these connected gadgets have been reluctant to support Wi-Fi. That’s because Wi-Fi requires a lot of power, and that’s a huge problem for any device that needs to be tiny, cheap, and able to run on a single charge for months or even years at a time.

So now, the group behind Wi-Fi (the Wi-Fi Alliance) is doing something about it. It’s just announced a new type of Wi-Fi officially dubbed 802.11ah "HaLow" (pronounced “halo”).

HaLow devices will operate on the unlicensed 900 megahertz band, which is said to offer almost twice the range of standard 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi networks you’ve likely got at home, and can more easily penetrate thick and layered walls. Perhaps most significantly, HaLow uses dramatically less power than conventional Wi-Fi — an important trait for connected thermostats, motion sensors, and locks that depend on compact batteries for power.

HaLow’s low power requirements are thanks to the way it operates. It doesn’t transfer data quickly, instead sending data in periodic, concentrated bursts. Device makers can up the speed and frequency of transfer, but at the cost of increased battery usage. HaLow’s comparative efficiency has the Wi-Fi Alliance envisioning use cases far beyond smart home appliances and security cameras. Eventually, the alliance sees the new wireless spec supplanting, or at least complementing, Bluetooth in wearables such as fitness trackers and smartwatches.

HaLow’s rollout will likely be prolonged — the Wi-Fi Alliance won’t begin certifying HaLow products until sometime in 2018 — but when products do begin to hit store shelves, most will be tri-band, leveraging the newly designated 900MHz spectrum but retaining support for existing 2.5GHz and 5GHz access points. But compatibility’s a one-way street — laptops and smartphones with current-generation networking chips won’t interface.
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Despite what’s likely to be a slow rollout and the need for updated chips, Wi-Fi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa is convinced that HaLow, just like the many wireless standards that the consortium’s approved before it, will one day reach ubiquity. “HaLow is well suited to meet the unique needs of the smart home, smart city, and industrial markets,” he said in a statement. “HaLow expands the unmatched versatility of Wi-Fi to enable applications from small devices to large-scale industrial facility deployments and everything in between.”
There's no indication yet of when the first 802.11ah devices might begin to hit retail. 

It’s just so easy to grab a pack of batteries off the rack in CVS, Rite Aid, ShopRite or any other supermarket or convenience store. They’re right there by the checkout counter, ready and waiting to power up your gear. But here’s the problem: those brand name batteries are ridiculously overpriced. Even the store brand batteries hanging next to Energizer and Duracell batteries are pricey. Even if you think you’re going to be more frugal and order online with either known retailers or battery specialists, the pricing is still high.

​Take my advice — instead of waiting until you run out of batteries and then overpaying, stock up on batteries now from Amazon and you’ll save a bundle of cash in the process. If you’re a Prime member, you’ll get them with free shipping.

In terms of performance and longevity, the difference between brand names like Duracell and off-brand batteries like the ones sold by AmazonBasics is a much debated topic, but let’s forget about it entirely for a moment. The bottom line is that you pay twice as much or even more for brand names, and they absolutely do not last for twice as long. It’s that simple.

Here’s a chart to show you the comparison.

​Own an iPad and a Mac. Now you can turn your iPad into a slick graphics tablet with an inexpensive piece of software. You’ll need a stylus, but we talk about that later.

Astropad co-founder Matt Ronge thinks his company’s $20 app, when combined with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil or any iPad and stylus, can match and even exceed the current champ of the tablet world, the Wacon Cintiq.

“iPad Pro is an amazing drawing platform but iOS is far too limited for the professional artist,” says Ronge. “So we wanted a way where we could get the best of both worlds, the power and flexibility of the Mac coupled with the touch interface of the iPad.”

Astropad, though, takes it a step further, letting you draw on your iPad Pro with the Pencil using any app on your Mac (even Photoshop) via the magic of your iPad Pro. That’s some slick digital magic right there.

The app’s been out for a while, letting artists draw on their Macs with regular iPads and even iPad Pro, but the latest update adds serious support for the iPad Pro screen size, along with the game-changing Apple Pencil. The way it works is by having the iPad mirror and control what’s happening on the Mac. Astropad’s developers had to make their own screen sharing tech, though, since the existing tech (like AirPlay) has a poor image quality and high latency. “Neither of which are acceptable for a professional artist,” says Ronge. “So we spent over a year creating our custom tech called Liquid that is both low latency and is very high quality. This is what sets us apart from others that have tried to build something like Astropad.”

In the new version of the app, there’s advanced stroke-tuning to remove stray marks and support for tilt with Pencil, letting you simulate brushes more accurately. There’s also a special pressure sensitivity curve for the Apple Pencil that Astropad has tuned to take better advantage of the peripheral, and the team has even improved the image quality on your iPad so whatever you’re working on is in crisp, clean high resolution.

A Wacom tablet needs a wired connection to your Mac, requires you to learn its own set of pen gestures, doesn’t let you draw right on your image, and can cost $1000 or more. Astropad is $20, totally wireless, and uses the Pencil features you already know and love.

Astropad already sees 60% of its new users and 50% of currently active users on iPad Pro, so this addition should make things a lot easier for users both new and old.

The Astropad software supports several different pens. If you have an iPad Pro, just get the Apple Pencil – it’s the best. If you have any other iPad, they recommend the Adonit Jot Touch with Pixelpoint ($100). If you don’t need pressure sensitivity, you can opt for either the Adonit Jot Pro ($30) or the Pogo ($15).
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As a comparison, the Cintiq solution starts at $800 and goes to $2,800. The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are $900 to $1,180.