According to WHO data, 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide. Whether totally blind or with low vision, they face daily challenges in moving around and interacting with their immediate environment. 

It was in 2014, after a chance encounter with a blind person, that the idea of Horus was born. It's a wearable device aimed at describing the physical world to those who cannot see it. 

"I was with my co-founder Saverio Murgia in Genova, close to the train station," Horus Technology CTO Luca Nardelli says. "We saw a blind person trying to get around following the corners of the buildings. Unfortunately, on that day, there were some works on the street, and he couldn't recognize the landscape." 

Murgia and Nardelli, two biomedical engineers, were both studying how to help robots detect and avoid obstacles using artificial vision. "We stopped and thought: why not apply our knowledge to help people instead?" Nardelli says. 

After two years and some small and not-so-small prizes, Horus is gradually coming closer to having a commercial product. 

Externally, it looks a bit like an old Sony Walkman: a rectangular box, which contains the battery and the GPU, to be worn using a belt hook or kept in the pocket, linked to a headset. 

But the headset, unlike that found on a Walkman or an iPod, does not only emit sounds. Two cameras film the environment, and the information is then sent to the GPU, where the processing is done in real-time, and the visual inputs are converted to verbal messages that help the user detect obstacles, describing pictures and scenes, identifying objects and people, and reading text. 

The presence and location of obstacles is reported using differently modulated sounds. Horus divides the space in front of the user into sectors: lateral obstacles generate high-pitched sounds in one of the two speakers, while central obstacles generate low-pitched centered sounds. 

Just as with intelligent parking systems on cars and trucks, the sounds grow more frequent and more alarming as the obstacle gets closer. It's generally up to the user to decide which of Horus' features to activate through a vocal menu, although some are automatically launched. 

For instance, when the person is walking, the accelerometer detects the movement, and Horus starts giving instructions. The messages are not sent using headphones but with bone conduction, which leaves the ears of the person free to hear the noise of the street as well. 

It sounds great on paper -- but whether Horus will be successful depends mainly on how well the company manages its execution. 

"So far, we're still prototyping, testing the first versions of our electronic components," Nardelli says. "Our goal is to have the device ready for launch by the end of this year." 

The device will be launched initially in Italy, as a first test market, and by spring 2017, it should also reach the UK and other English-speaking countries. 
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The initial price of the device hasn't been set, but it should be in the €1,000 to €2,000 ($1,060 - $2,120) range.

The next time someone asks you for your cell phone number, you may want to think twice about giving it. 
The cell phone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television. 

It has become "kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you," said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator. 

Yet the cell phone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep secret. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don't hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know. 

That is a growing issue for young people, since two sets of digits may well be with them for life: their Social Security number and their cell phone number. 

Among people ages 25 to 29, the share of homes that have only wireless phone service stands at 73%. 

Investigators find that a cell phone number is often even more useful than a Social Security number because it is tied to so many databases and is connected to a device you almost always have with you, said Austin Berglas, a former F.B.I. agent who is senior managing director of K2 Intelligence, a private investigator. 

"The point is the cellphone number can be a gateway to all sorts of other information," said Robert Schoshinski, the assistant director for privacy and identity protection at the Federal Trade Commission. "People should think about it." 

But if a cell phone number and the private computer behind it open the door to new risks, technology, as is so often the case, can also be employed to combat those risks.

 "What you can do with the cell phone number and mobile technology represents a pretty substantial advantage in the ongoing war against fraud and identity theft," said Rajeev Date, a venture investor and former banker, who was previously deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

But a cell-phone-only life presents problems for many independent professionals and workers at start-ups and small businesses, who make business calls on their personal cellphones. But now, professionals and other mobile business people can turn to a new app Sideline to add a second number to their cellphones so their personal number remains personal.
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The service is free for individuals and $10 a month a number for groups of workers in a business, who get extra features like a company directory and voice mail transcription. One of Sideline’s ad mottos is: “Keep your personal number private. Add a second number to your smartphone.”

Remember when consumers first embraced the smartphone and then as demand increased, consumers pushed that technology into the enterprise? Well, the same thing is happening with a home digital product, Echo, as it begins to see software written for it that solves enterprise problems.

Last week, $6 billion software company Atlassian announced that it's bringing its popular HipChat app to the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers — making HipChat the first chat program available on Echo, and possibly marking a milestone in moving virtual assistants from the living room to the boardroom.

Most Amazon Echo services (Amazon calls them "skills") are passive, meaning you need to call on Alexa, the device’s personal digital assistant, before it will do anything. But HipChat on Echo is designed to be active, calling out when certain pre-set conditions are met.

HipChat General Manager, Steve Goldsmith, says that Atlassian teams have been testing Echo internally as an alert system when things go wrong: If an Atlassian site or service goes down, the system automatically sends a message into HipChat, which then triggers the Echo to activate and shout an alert at the team.

Instead of sending alerts to personal smartphones or tablets, Goldsmith says, the Echo is a "neutral piece of hardware." Put one in the corner of the room, and it's a team's communal voice box. In the same way that a family might share an Echo, so too does a software team, Goldsmith says.

Amazon says the Echo will become a key pillar of its business in the future, with thousands of developers tasked to building and improving it. The existence of the forthcoming Google Home device, a direct Echo competitor, is certainly a sign that Amazon is on the right track.
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While, right now, so much of the Echo's use is fun and games, the device's continued popularity, and the overall industry shift towards voice, means that HipChat on Echo could be a sign of things to come.

According to Amazon, the cop of the future won’t just be a robot; it will be one that fits in the palm of your hand.

Recently, the retail giant was granted a patent for a miniature, voice-controlled “unmanned aerial vehicle assistant” to be used by everyone from officers making traffic stops to shoppers just trying to figure out where they parked their cars.

According to the patent, off-board processing could be used to significantly reduce the size of the assistants compared to today’s drones while substantially increasing their capabilities. In one scenario described by Amazon, a UAV assistant would launch from a dock on a police officer’s microphone to act as a mobile dash cam and miniature partner.

 “As shown in [the illustration above], during a routine traffic stop, for example, the officer can command the [drone] to ‘hover’ or ‘follow me,’” reads the patent. “In some examples, if a foot chase develops during a traffic stop, the officer can command the [drone] to follow the suspect so that he can attempt to cut the suspect off in the cruiser. Similarly, if there are two or more suspects, the officer can command the [drone] to follow one the suspects, while he gives chase to the other.”

While the patent’s diagrams focus on law enforcement applications, Amazon believes the assistant could be used “for many other purposes,” including clearing buildings for military forces and even helping people decide if it’s worth waiting in line.

“If a user is waiting in a long line to buy concert tickets, for example, the user may not be able to see over the crowd to see how many total people are in line,” reads the patent. “In this case, the user can just say ‘hover’ to the UAV and the UAV can take up a position at a predetermined distance above the user (e.g., 15 feet).”
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When Amazon began investing in drones, it aimed to make a world where flying robots delivered customers their books and USB cables. Now, it seems, the internet’s biggest retailer has set its sights even higher.