LG's HomeChat will let you text your appliances as if they were people LG HomeChat will allow users to issue commands and receive status updates from their smart appliances by texting them and using simple, conversational language Image Gallery (3 images) LG had plenty of eye-catching gadgets at this year's CES, from a massive 105-inch curved 4K display to the bendable G Flex mobile phone, but probably one of the most intriguing new innovations it revealed was the upcoming HomeChat service. Naturally, the service will only work with LG products, but the company seems intent on rolling it out to most of its major home appliances – refrigerators, robotic vacuum cleaners, ovens, washers, dryers, etc. – in the next year. When used in conjunction with the Smart Manager software for refrigerators, HomeChat users will be able to message their fridge from a grocery store to find out what they already have in stock, what they might need, and even if anything is about to expire. Source: LG About the Author Post a CommentRelated Articles
The Mom Song Commercial is Brilliant "Now he smells like a man and they treat him like one.". There in a nutshell you have everything you ever wanted to know about the appeal of the Old Spice products. Old Spice is manly and it makes women treat you like a man. A man, not a boy. Yes, dear reader, we're putting the scalpel on the newest goofy Old Spice commercial which has surreal, frumpy and constantly hovering mums lamenting -in song!- how their little boys have changed gears and are on the way to hell on a handbasket because they changed into Old Spice which draws feminine attention in a way not yet dreamed of. Affectionately referred to as "the mom song" the new Old Spice commercial is in my opinion doing everything it sets out to do (which makes it a success): namely drawing the attention span of young males into seeing an old standby with fresh eyes. As my perceptive reader who sent me the clip, Cacio, puts it: "Old spice was, quintessentially, grampa, certainly not something that could appeal to teens.
Flickr Cofounders Launch Slack, An Email Killer Email glut is a big problem for individuals and companies. A recent Symantec Intelligence Report estimates that about two-thirds of all email sent these days is spam. The Radicati Group reckons that 144 billion emails are sent per day, and that’s ignoring mobile users. Slack, a tool for office collaboration and communication, created by a team of cofounders who designed the web photo-sharing site Flickr, launches today in a preview release. It's meant to reduce or eliminate workplace email, and to compete with services like Yammer and Campfire. Even if spam filters are getting pretty good at catching the unwanted message, there’s a sense in which all email is basically spam, suggests Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield. Then again, they should know better by now, having helped create what is meant to be an email killer. Slack also integrates various external services, bringing all communications into one interface. This is a larger point than you might initially realize.
Dolphin translator chirps out first word Dolphins are believed to be one of the most intelligent animal species on the planet -- although precisely how intelligent is difficult to gauge. That may be about to change. Scientists at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) who have been developing a dolphin translator may have succeeded in getting their software to work. In August 2013, WDP director Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean with a pod of dolphins she has been tracking for 25 years, wearing a prototype of a dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Thad Starner, when one of the dolphin's whistles was translated as the word "sargassum" -- a type of seaweed. Humans have for some time been communicating with dolphins on a rudimentary level. The whistle picked up by CHAT, translated into human speech, was not a whistle from the dolphins' natural repertoire. Of course, this one instance may not necessarily be significant.
Wi-Vi system uses Wi-Fi to see through walls Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed what could become low-cost, X-ray vision. The system, known as "Wi-Vi," is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging, but rather than using high-power signals, this tech uses reflected Wi-Fi signals to track the movement of people behind walls and closed doors. When a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of that signal penetrates through and reflects off any humans that happen to be moving around in the other room. Since only a tiny fraction of the signal passes through the wall, with the rest being reflected, the researchers had to devise a technology that could could cancel out the arbitrary reflections, and keep only those reflecting from moving human bodies. Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her graduate student Fadel Adib have tuned a system that uses two transmission antennas and a single receiver.
8 Unbelievable Twitter Public Relations Disasters (Twitter, campaign, viral, failure The New York Police Department asks its followers for photos and is flooded with police brutality pics The NYPD got far more than they bargained for when they took to Twitter asking people to post pictures of themselves interacting with New York's Finest using the hashtag #myNYPD. The request was innocent enough, but instead of happy pictures of cops posing with tourists, Twitter erupted with hundreds of photos of police brutality. 10,000 people an hour were posting to #myNYPD with more than 110,000 members of the Twitterverse responding. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton actually seemed to be pleased with the response and said, "I kind of welcome the attention. The Twitter backlash spread to other police departments including Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Denver. Singer Susan Boyle's PR team is embarrassed by accidental adult party invite The hashtag read #susanalbumparty. The singer's PR team declined to comment and immediately deleted the tweet. J.P. Banking behemoth J.P.
The Life and Times of ¯_(ツ)_/¯ When Caroline Eisenmann, a young assistant at a New York literary agency, decided to rename her OkCupid profile, she wanted something that would make her stand out—a name that wouldn’t get lost amongst the omnipresent references to indie bands and cute animals, something that was “flippant” but with “a bit of a melancholic undertone” that would attract a suitably urbane mate, Eisenmann told me. Fingers poised over the keyboard, she wrote: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ OkCupid rejected it. The shruggie or “smugshrug,” as it is sometimes called, is what's known as a “kaomoji,” or “face mark” in Japanese. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is fundamentally connected to the experience of being online, in part because it cannot be spoken, only acted or typed. Yet it also transcends the Internet and perhaps language itself, echoing incoherent expressions of sublime rage or terror, like the untranslatable keyboard smash, “asdfasldkvhjasd.” “There's always a bit of a melancholic undertone. Why go on living in our stage-set of a world?
Tic Tock | The Wonderist Does sitting through a movie without your phone give you the shakes? Do you check into Foursquare to become the Mayor of the neighborhood bar before saying hello to the friends meeting you there? Do you check the weather on your phone before looking out the window to see if it’s raining? If you answered yes to any of these questions, two Syracuse University students may be able to help you. They’ve created an anti-social media app called “Tock” to get you off your phone and into the real world! (Is that the most modern oxy moron you’ve ever heard or what!) First you link the app to your social media accounts (Facebook/Twitter). Doesn’t a break-up with your phone sound refreshing? Sure, the smartphone is useful (just ask any tourist in NYC trying to find Times Square without asking for directions). So we challenge you. “Tock” will be available in the Apple store this summer! Laurie is a native New Yorker. Photo Source: Elite