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HTC in disarray: staff departures, ‘disastrous’ First, and production problems cloud company’s future
Author: Markus Smith
HTC CEO Peter Chou
The Verge has learned that HTC’s Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC’s overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One.
It’s not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession — most recently Jason Gordon, the company’s vice president of global communications. Other fresh departures include global retail marketing manager Rebecca Rowland, director of digital marketing John Starkweather, and product strategy manager Eric Lin.
It’s not a coordinated poaching effort that’s draining HTC’s Seattle-based North American operations….
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Tags: Cloud, company's, departures, disarray, Disastrous, first, future, problems, Production, staff | 
No Comments »Nokia brings Lumia 925 for T-Mobile to CTIA 2013, we go hands-on
Author: Markus Smith
We’ve already spent some quality time with Nokia’s handsome Lumia 925 and while it’s no secret the company’s Windows Phone flagship is coming to the US courtesy of T-Mobile, we’d never actually seen the carrier-branded model — until now, that is. Nokia brought T-Mobile’s version of the handset to CTIA 2013 where we took it for a brief spin. As you’d expect, the phone is identical to its global twin save for the operator’s logo below the capacitive button and the radios which support T-Mobile’s bands. Unfortunately, the Lumia 925 we played with was not final, so the software was off limits. In terms of hardware, it features the same 4.5-inch 1,280 x 768 AMOLED screen, 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 1GB RAM and 8.7-megapixel camera with OIS. This is definitely one of Nokia’s most attractive designs yet, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on a review unit soon. In the meantime, why not check out the gallery below?
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia, T-Mobile
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Yeah You Did: Another Day, Another Bat-Symbol Mustache
Author: Markus Smith
This is Redditor chrismusaf’s friend’s Bat-symbol mustache. It’s not the first Bat-symbol mustache we’ve seen, but it IS the cleanest cut. Clearly this Batman wannabe knows his way around a razor. Around his apartment in the dark? Not so much (his toes look like little bloody sausages).
Thanks to ChaosLex, who loves chaos so much he once posed as a barber then shaved penises into the back of ever customer’s head.
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WTF Did I Just Watch?: Strangling A Robotic Dinosaur To See If People Empathize With Robot Pain
Author: Markus Smith
This is the video shown to participants in a study conducted by the University of Duisburg-Essen to determine if humans feel empathy towards tortured robots. Basically it’s some guy hanging and beating a Pleo robotic dinosaur for a minute straight. The test is obviously flawed because I hate robots with all my coal-black heart but I still don’t want to see a DINOSAUR getting tortured. A humanoid robot? A humanoid robot I’d pay to take a swing at with a crowbar. Also, not to brag or anything, but I once drop-kicked a friend’s Roomba off his balcony. Didn’t even hurt my foot. He said he was going to make me buy him a new one but I just severed the friendship to save myself the $ $ .
Hit the jump for the sickest fetish video you’ll see all day.
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Acrobotics Wants To Kickstart Smarter Cities With Its Smart Citizen Environment Sensors
Author: Markus Smith
There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.
Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put with onus on the citizens themselves. To that end the team has kicked off a $ 50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.
“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in LA — and it’s not getting any better.
The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a whole host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.
It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.
“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”
As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.
Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the handful of environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $ 155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $ 105 unassembled kit instead.
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Tags: Acrobotics, cities, Citizen, environment, kickstart, sensors, Smart, smarter, Wants |
No Comments »This Video Game Is Destroying Feminism
Author: Markus Smith
Winning is easy, you just have to be the hottest girl around.
This is It Girl, a Facebook game with over 1.7 million users.
Source: crowdstar.com
Basically girls can shop, party, and date to become “the hottest girl in town.”
Yes, this game actually exists.
Source: crowdstar.com
The problem is you have to be popular to shop.
But no worries, you can always BUY more friends.
Source: howinternet.tumblr.com
Having a boyfriend is a big part of the game.
Source: borderhouseblog.com
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Brian Krzanich takes the reigns at Intel today
Author: Markus Smith
Today’s the day, trivia fans, when “Paul Otellini” stops being the answer to the question “Who is the CEO of Intel?” A fortnight ago, after a prolonged bout of speculation, current COO Brian Krznich was anointed as the Silicon Valley giant’s sixth leader — giving him a mere two weeks to order a new desk and buy a fancier sports car. He’ll be joined by Renée James, who is assuming the mantle of company president today. The pair is taking control of a company that is top of the PC food chain, but which has yet to mount a credible challenge to ARM’s mobile dominance — but the strategic stuff can wait until tomorrow, once they’ve settled in.
Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Intel
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Amazon purchases Liquavista display company from Samsung
Author: Markus Smith
Proving rumors correct, Amazon just purchased Liquavista, the touchscreen company previously owned by Samsung. This news comes from The Digital Reader, which discovered the acquisition via new filings from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce (Amazon also confirmed the news). That’s about it as far as details go, but it’s safe to assume that Amazon will employ Liquavista’s low-power color e-paper technology for its Kindle lineup.
Via: Business Insider
Source: The Digital Reader
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Nokia’s next Lumia teased on TV with a metal body and big camera lens
Author: Markus Smith
Nokia announced its latest Lumia 928 handset on Friday, but the company has more planned for an event in London next week. On Sunday, Nokia teased part of this announcement during a commercial break on British TV. The short promo shows the rear of a device with a hump around the large camera lens and an accompanying flash arrangement. “More than your eyes can see,” reads the accompany text between various images of the device.
Nokia’s teaser looks a lot like the leaked photos of its aluminum “Catwalk” device, which The Verge understands are genuine images of an upcoming Nokia flagship. The hump and placement of the flash is identical and the teaser appears to show a device with a metal exterior. However, Nokia is also preparing a 4…
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“Robot is Looking for Love in Black Ops 2″
Author: Markus Smith
4500 LIKES for MOAR Robot!! Trollarch Staff ▻▻ http://www.Youtube.com/BustedBananas Get Your Elgato Capture Card ▻ http://amzn.to/P5yVZX Subscribe to Trolla…
Video Rating: 4 / 5
