Is Facebook Ruining Our Lives?

What started out as a plain old directory for Harvard undergrads and alumni from Mark Zuckerberg and the gang suddenly exploded into a social media network used by almost anyone with access to the internet. Be in front of a computer at work or at home, or even when people are outside and on the go, there’s no denying that a large majority of the online population makes use of the leading social network out there.

Facebook Causes Relationship Issues

Recent studies have shown that Facebook may not be as fun as we think. For starters, it’s been shown that Facebook causes relationship issues not only between “friends”, but among romantic partners as well. As socially positive as the site sets itself to be, these studies only go to show that the social axe can swing both ways as well.

On a more personal note, Facebook has also been seen to cause internal anxieties particularly among young adults, where studies have shown that those who were more active on the popular social network were more likely to develop a susceptibility to depression. Add to this the obvious distraction from schoolwork that Facebook causes and we can see how Facebook can actually also be a tool that could cause problems to the average young adult.

Facebook Ruining Our Lives -Infographic

This infographic from Who Is Hosting This sheds a little more light on the subject to further detail how exactly the leading online pastime can be causing more problems than we’d like to think.

After seeing what the infographic had to say, perhaps you yourself would want to rethink the amount of time you spend online to keep updated on your friends and tend to virtual crops and so on..

Why don’t you head on out and reach out to your friends in person?

Is Facebook Ruining Your Life?

Have you noticed if Facebook, or any other social network, has had a negative impact on your life lately? How many hours a day do you actually spend on social networks?

Source: Social Media Lover

How Google Glass works in simple terms

Google’s Project Glass is an exciting (and controversial) piece of technology. A wearable heads-up display with you at all times makes for a radically new experience, a much more intimate dialog with technology.

But how does it work, how does the image come to be on the little glass display and is it always in the corner of your eye, or could it also be in the center? Those are all interesting questions, that we now have the answer to in a neat infographic by Cody, a member of the Google Glass Explorer program.

Basically, the most interesting piece of technology in Glass is the display. Actually it is a prism onto which a projector sends an image. That image is what your retina focuses on. So this combination of a miniature projector and a prism allows Glass to show you an overlay to reality. The angle of the prism directs the image directly into your fovea, the part of your retina where you have the most visual acuity.

source: Brille-kaufen.org

Whats New: The Ring Clock..! Wrist Watch For Your Finger

Pocket-watch, wrist-watch, finger-watch? Is this the evolutionary path for time-telling devices? The team behind The Ring Clock hopes so, and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring the idea to market.

Despite this being an era where most of us are carrying a mobile phone, dedicated timepieces haven't died out. In fact, there appears to be a healthy demand out there for innovative, unusual and expensive watches and the Ring Clock is the latest to enter the fray.

As its name suggests, The Ring Clock is a watch that you wear as a ring rather than a bracelet. It was originally designed in 2011 by Gusztav Szikszai as part of a competition to create a product that was impossible to make now, but may be feasible in 10 years. Given that the The Ring Clock is becoming reality just two years later, it might already be ahead of its time.

The final product is a chunky stainless steel finger ring made up of an inner ring and an outer ring. The outer ring has three distinct bands on it; the top one has the 24-hour clock markings, the second has minute markings, and the third has dots showing the seconds ticking away.

The Ring Clock sits on your finger in an inert state until you spin the outside ring, at which point the time is revealed by the correct numbers lighting up with LEDs. This keeps battery use to a minimum, which, as the battery only lasts two hours before needing to be recharged via its Qi wireless power charger pad, is a good thing. The battery also only has a lifespan of three years, and is not replaceable.

The team behind the Ring Clock is seeking US$287,000 from crowdfunding advocates on Indiegogo to make the watch a reality. The basic pledge is $195 for a single Ring Clock, with $15 extra added for shipping outside the UK. Currently the designers say a conceptual model has been completed and if all goes well, the first batch will be delivered to backers in April 2014.

Source: Indiegogo

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Great News: Apple TV on its way for a September 10 launch

It is September and that means new iPhone(s). But what else does Apple have up its sleeve? A report from a global shipping intelligence platform company suggests that a new Apple TV might be headed our way.

Apple is planning a big event on September 10, 2013, and there has been a lot of speculation on what could be on the menu. While the exact line-up of products is subject of debate, almost everyone agrees that newer models of the iPhone are likely to take center stage next week. A blog post shared by the  from New York-based global trade intelligence platform Panjiva, suggests that we should add Apple TV to the list.

Using the Panjiva Shipment Search, the company found the original bill of landing data from the US Department of Homeland Security. Based on that information, Panjiva suggests that

• On August 25th, Apple received a shipment described as “Set Top Box with Communication Function” from BYD Precision Manufacture in Shenzhen, China.
• On August 18th, Apple received another shipment, again from BYD, described as “Set Top Boxes.”
• And on August 11th, Apple received its first shipment from BYD of “Set Top Box with Communication Function.

Since Panjiva doesn’t have exact shape and size of the shipments, the best company can do is guess as to what are these mysterious set-top boxes. It could be the newer version of the current Apple TV product, the much speculated-about television product or something brand new we don’t know anything about.

Panjiva report points out that in the past, when Apple received shipments for “set top boxes”  —most recently, on December 5, 2012 – those shipments came from Hon Hai.   A safe bet would be on a new Apple TV device. The last time Apple released a new model of Apple TV (one it calls a little hobby) was in March 2012.

With a new iOS 7 on its way, it wouldn’t be a stretch to expect a newer model of Apple TV that accommodates the increasing number of channel options and brings some of the features of iOS 7 to the big screen.

MacRumors website which follows the device release schedules pretty closely, points out that Apple typically updates Apple TV devices every 377 days, so from that perspective it is long overdue for a makeover. Apple recently cut prices of refurbished Apple TV to $75. In June 2013, Apple had added HBO Go and ESPN to Apple TV channel line-up. Last week, the company bolstered its line-up with Vevo, Disney Channel, Disney XD, the Weather Channel and the Smithsonian channel.

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5G will be launching at Huawei by 2020

Huawei CEO Ken Hu isn’t just promising to deliver a technology that’s nowhere defined. He’s reducing network innovation down to a question of mere speed. The mobile industry should have much bigger priorities.

This week Huawei CEO Ken Hu claimed in a contributed column in Forbes and in other interviews that his company would develop commercial “5G” networks by 2020. That’s a pretty amazing claim considering 5G only exists as a mere concept today.

Sure, you’ve probably heard the term 5G tossed around here and there, including on GigaOM, but there’s a lot of misinformation out there. 5G isn’t LTE-Advanced (and what most people are calling LTE-Advanced isn’t even LTE-Advanced). It’s not a standard. It’s not a benchmark. It’s just a vague idea gradually taking concrete shape. It’s an idea being pursued by thousands of extremely smart engineers and researchers around the world, but certainly nothing Huawei can define and place production goals on. Hu is aiming at a non-existent target.

Hu is simply grubbing for headlines, and he’s doing a horrible disservice to the mobile industry in which Huawei is a leader (Samsung’s not much better). According to Hu, 5G is defined as a network that achieves data rates of 10 Gbps, one hundred times faster than any 4G network deployed today. That may sound impressive,  but Hu has reduced 5G to a mere speed equation. He’s saying the greatest advancement we’re going to make in mobile networking technology is one of pure throughput.

The people trying to define what 5G actually means couldn’t disagree more.

What 5G could — and should — be

Earlier this year I talked to Tod Sizer, a vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, which — along with Huawei — is engaged in global wireless research efforts that could eventually produce an official definition for 5G. When I asked what Sizer to name promising research areas, he said many researchers are looking into ways to make networks slower, not faster.

Speed is certainly nice, and we’ll definitely experience big gains in raw throughput as networks evolve, Sizer said, but the fast-at-all-costs mentality is counterproductive to the types of networks we’ll actually need in the future. As we build the internet of things, billions upon billions of devices will start sporting radio connectivity, outnumbering our smartphones and tablets by a factor of 50 to one. The most efficient way to connect all of those devices is with networks engineered to deliver minutes amount of bandwidth over millions of links, Sizer said.

As we build those different subsets of networks, we’ll be able to optimize not just devices but apps for different connections. When we’re downloading that HD video to our futuristic tablet’s wall projector we’ll tap into Huawei’s über-fast network, but when we’re simply sending messages over a chat app, we can hook into a slower, higher-latency network that can deliver that data far more efficiently.

Different types of connections will come with different price tags (Wi-Fi is the ultimate example of that), and by building networks that don’t just focus on raw speed, we’ll be able to deliver different types of content more cheaply, ensuring that more people have access to basic mobile internet services. We’ll be exploring these new network architectures in greater detail at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference conference in October.

Those ideas are what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seemed to key in on when he launched Internet.org last week — to make the mobile internet better we need to make it much more efficient. In fact, whenever the Silicon Valley heavyweights chime in on future mobile networking technologies they aren’t talking about fat pipes. Google’s Project Loon isn’t about blistering speeds, it’s about supplying 3G-type connectivity to the must underserved regions on Earth.

Say what you will about their motives, but Google and Facebook have their priorities straight when it comes to the direction of our mobile technologies should take, and I believe the rest of the mobile industry shares the same goals.

5G shouldn’t be about mere speed. 5G should be about building more resilient, more consistent, more available networks that not only support tremendous amounts of capacity but delivers connectivity at a fraction of its cost today.

Deep down, Huawei probably shares those exact same goals. But Hu’s misappropriation of the term 5G  just clouds the issues. It sets the wrong priorities and minimizes the actual innovation the mobile industry is trying to accomplish.

Here’s what Samsung’s Galaxy Gear companion app looks like

Confirming prior information, the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch will use NFC and a Gear manager application to pair the watch with a phone and for configuration. It’s looking more and more like the Galaxy Gear will need a Samsung phone.

Let’s see, we know the hardware specifications of the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch and the expected battery life, so why not any info on the companion software? 

The Gear smartwatch will use NFC to easily pair the wearable to a smartphone over Bluetooth. It appears the process will use the watch’s charger based on the screen capture. The Clocks setting likely points to different watch faces and possibly secondary time zones. And the “Find my watch” feature will be handy if you misplace your Galaxy Gear: Tap this and the watch will probably make a sound, provided it is in Bluetooth range of the smartphone.

There’s still an open question on whether the Galaxy Gear will work with non-Samsung handsets, but that’s why we’re going to the press event on September 4! We still thinking this will — at least initially — be exclusive to Samsung smartphones.