by Lidia Paulinska | Dec 1, 2015
Audio manufacturer JLab was showing their new EPIC wireless Bluetooth earbuds. Designed for the active user, the earbuds are waterproof for all weather and heavy exercise use. The design has a single wire connecting the two earbuds with an in-line microphone and control for both audio playback and phone call use. The EPIC earbuds are available in several colors to help match the fashion sense of the user.
Following in the path of the over the head headphones, the Epic earbuds are focusing on the quality of the sound. To maintain an even listening experience the earbuds have a clip to hold them in place. The new design is claiming a 10 hour battery life, and the earbuds worked close to that. The 10 hours is based on certain play and pause times, the reality is with waiting, phone calls, and playing music, a single charge will make it a full 8 hour day.
The headphones identified that they use a pair of neodymium drivers, the EPIC earbuds did not identify the driver type, but on a scaled down basis they are similarly clear. The earbuds were pretty clear for talking on the phone, however they did pick up a bit of wind and background noise due to the location of the microphone. Listening to music was fine, and would work well during exercise and on transportation and still make lyrics understandable.
The Epic earbuds are available on-line from the company website and major retailers.
by Lidia Paulinska | Dec 1, 2015
iBaby Labs, is a company that has operated for the last four years in the baby monitoring space, is well known for its unique design, easy setup and user-friendly interface. As well as broadly awarded including Mom’s Choice Award, NAPPA Gold Award, The National Parenting Center Seal of Approval, Creative Child’s Product of the Year 2015.
Now the company is plunging into Connected Home under new brand iFamCare. No wonder when the new product, camera monitoring system, named Helmet, was launched on Indiegogo in July 2015, it surpassed its original goal within few days.
Helmet has elegant design and comes in four colors – white, black, silver and gold. The monitor boasts 1080p HD video, the ability to hear and speak, supports 360 degree horizontal and 110 vertical movement, sound and air quality sensors, smog detector and sound and motion alert. A built-in laser beam allows to interact with family and pets being away from them. They people and pets in the room can hear and speak to the helmet. The helmet also has a connection to social media platform.
The unit is designed to be controlled from a smartphone on iOS or Android systems. The app is easy to find at both iTunes and the Google Play Store. The main functions of the web cam works well. The images are clear and the sound is good. The streaming to the smart phone works when the phone is connected to WiFi, but does not pass images when there is just 3G or 4G coverage on a standard cellular network. The night time mode is not a detailed one but good enough to evaluate what is going on.
The product is available at Amazon, and some other retailers for competitive price 149 dol.
by Lidia Paulinska | Dec 1, 2015
If you ask what BAC means? The answer is Blood Alcohol Content which is now easy to track thanks to BACtrack breathalyzers, that many of you already known.
In 2015 holiday season BACtrack offers two new versions of their breathalyzers: BACtrack Mobile and BACtrack Vio Smartphone (key chain version). Both are supporting our lives being closely connected to smartphones and smartwatches via Bluetooth. There is no more guessing if you and your guests can safely drive because the BACtracks products provide police level alcohol measurement and the BACtrack Vio provides the trends on consumptions as well. The devices are design for a single person to user or multiple users when they use the additional mouthpieces. 
The BACtrack products support iOS and Android systems on our smartphones. Once connected to the free BACtrack app, a user is able to save and track the results over time, as well as add photos and notes to those results, in order to learn valuable information about the drinking habits. The app was easy to find on iTunes or Google Play Stores and easy to install too.
The results of the alcohol content can be easily send to user’s wrist. The new Apple Watch Integration allows for initiating and completing BAC tests via on the Watch. The use of the test results on the watch also make it more convenient to access the estimated alcohol level anytime using the Active ZeroLine feature that gives countdown. This feature is exclusively for the watch app, and not available on the smartphone app.
New BACtrack products are available in the main retailer stores as Costco, Best Buy or Walgreens.
by Tomasz Kolodziejak
by Lidia Paulinska | Dec 1, 2015
The latest version of the MobileLite Wireless product is much more mobile phone centered than past versions. The G2 version starts by adding a Li-ion battery that can provide 13 hours of continuous use for the device or be used to charge your mobile phone. While prior versions were targeted at the whole mobile market which includes laptops, tablets and phones, this new version is very size and feature targeted towards phones.
One of the main new features is the ability to support video streaming to multiple devices as well as camera roll support. The portable device still has a wireless 802.11g/n WiFi and a router capability along with USB and SD card support. The unit was updated to support the SD-XC extended capacity cards that now on the market. For security, the device allows for setting up your own SSID name for the network, and encryption on the WiFi.
The list of mobile device operating systems and platforms has expanded to include iPad2, iPad (3rd & 4th Gen), iPad Air, iPad mini, iPhone 4/4S/5, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Android. As a wire connected product, it works with Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux. The device is available for the holiday season.
by Lidia Paulinska | Nov 28, 2015
The two-day KTech – KGlobal@Silicon Valley 2015 symposium and expo organized by the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning along with KOTRA Silicon Valley; was dedicated to promote Korean technology and its ties with Silicon Valley. The event took place on November 12-13, 2015 at Marriott hotel in Santa Clara, CA. The opening remarks were delivered by Yong Soo Kim, Assistant Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning, ChangYup Na, Managing Director of KOTRA in Sillicon Valley, Jong-Lok Yoon, President of National IT Industry Promotion Agency, Congressman Mike Honda from 17th District of California and Dongman Han and Consul General of Republic of Korea in San Francisco.
The main theme of this year event was “Automated Future: Human + Technology”.
The first keynote speaker Curtis Sasaki, Vice President of Ecosystems and IoT General Manager from Samsung Electronics stated that in 2020 many of our devices will be connected. Sasaki who worked in the past at Apple and Sun Microsystems, and today at Samsung, the most recognizable brand from Korea, described some effort and the products that company offers: Samsung Sleepsense, the sleep monitor, Samsung Gear S2, stylish and smart watch, and Samsung gear VR. According Sasaki, next area where we should expect a lot of traffic is VR (Virtual Reality). And VR is not just for a gaming but may also conquer other territories such as real estate, where surprisingly, people are willing to buy a house without visiting it or in education where the technology can offer the VR tour of the world in every school. Samsung applied the VR in their smartphones, like the Galaxy 5, and just headphones are needed to get a VR experience. In his summary, Sasaki pointed out the challenges that society faces nowadays and summarized the solutions: IoT can be a catalyst, partnerships are critical, technology and innovation are moving at an even faster pace than in the past.
A world experienced wide robotics revolution – stated second keynote speaker Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics – sustaining growth in the face of demographic inversion. Brooks is convinced that time for the robots to interact with humans in the daily life is now. As he described it: It knows what you mean and it does what you want. Radical rethinking of manufacturing strategies is underway. The time is now because of convergence of Industrial Internet (Intelligent devices networked into intelligent systems), Additive manufacturing (Changing the economics of scale), Near-shoring (Benefit of low-cost outsourcing is eroding), Digital revolution (Cheap sensing, cheap computation, pervasive connectivity). As the population enjoys long life expectancy the robotics is going to get pulled into in home for elder care and find it use in the aging population. Brooks showed the statistics from Europe, 1950 when the population reaches 349.8 million and life longevity was 80, in Europe 2050 the population will be 401 million with life longevity to the late 90. The speaker reminded the audience that the first commercial robot was developed was in a GM factory in New Jersey in 1961. Today robotics represents baxter, research robot; the product of robust and growing developer community sharing code and applications, uses the Unified RobotDesriptor Format (URDF) for collaboration across groups, uses open source ROS framework, the standard in academia and corporate research, complete robotics platform with low-level control for custom application development, interface for custom end-effector development.
The keynote speakers set the mood for a vibrant Automated Future: Human + Technology panel discussions over the next two –days of KTech symposium. Meanwhile more than 35 Korean companies in security, wearables, big data, e-learning, hardware and software were presenting their solutions for the world at the expo area along with international job fair at the Marriott hotel in Santa Clara.
Photos of the event can be found at: https://brightblueii.com/photos/ktechsilicon-valley-2015/
More information at the website: http://www.ktechsv.org/
