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Get ready for the new Android L camera updates

Jul04
by on July 4, 2014 at 12:12 am
Posted In: Around the Web

Photo enthusiasts who carry an Android handset in their pockets — as opposed to a photo-centric iPhone — can look forward to vast improvements in performance, control and image quality with the upcoming Android L mobile OS. According to a report by Android Police, the Google team has focused on the OS camera and has a vast number of new capabilities planned. While we’ve known for awhile that the new Android camera API would feature updates, details were scarce. With the new L preview now available, more information is coming into view. Among other things, the new camera API includes a burst mode, a native Digital Negative…

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This restaurant reservation startup is all kinds of sleazy

Jul03
by on July 3, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 2.56.15 PM
I’m not keen to give the recently launched ReservationHop startup attention it doesn’t deserve, but I hope this is a cautionary tale for the startup community. Here’s how the website works: ReservationHop books in-demand restaurant reservations in San Francisco Users can pay money to claim the bookings ReservationHop provides you “with the name the reservation is under.” Wait, what? So you have to impersonate someone in order to use the service? This is no better than tech-enabled scalping. I’m not completely opposed to paying for restaurant reservations. Tables at the best restaurants are a limited and valuable resource for gluttons like myself. For…

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New Android phones are leaking location data via Wi-Fi according to EFF

Jul03
by on July 3, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, eff, Google, Insider

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While you may be fine sharing your location via Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, it’s another issue when your phone is sharing your location without your knowledge. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has discovered an alarming issue with newer Android phones. According to the EFF’s findings, when an Android device with Honeycomb (Android 3.1) or later installed is in Preferred Network Offload (PNO) mode, it broadcast the recent Wi-Fi networks it was connected to. Anyone within Wi-Fi range of the device could snoop those broadcast and know exactly where you were based on the real language names of your previous locations. If you were…

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Habits, not resolutions: Chase goals you can control

Jul03
by on July 3, 2014 at 7:21 pm
Posted In: Analysis and Opinion, Around the Web, LifeHacks

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Belle Beth Cooper is the co-founder of Hello Code. This post originally appeared on her personal blog. Something I noticed around the start of this year was that quite a few people I came across had set goals for big, exciting changes they want to achieve in 2014 that are beyond their control. A good example is getting a new job. I noticed a couple of people who’d set goals to “get a job at x” or “work for x” this year. This reminded me of something I learned as an actor. Actors are, for a large part of the time, at the…

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Russia’s Runa Capital is raising a $200m fund to invest in European startups

Jul03
by on July 3, 2014 at 7:02 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

Russia’s Runa Capital has announced details of a new fund that it plans to close at a figure of $200 million. Although Moscow-based, Runa is keen to position this as a ‘European’ fund. Indeed, the firm has already invested across the continent and will continue to do so. The Runa II fund will invest between $1 million and $10 million per deal, with a focus on cloud computing, hosted services, virtualization, complex software and IT solutions. The fund has made its first closing, although the exact figure raised so far hasn’t been shared. Runa’s recent exits include Capptain (acquired by Microsoft) and StopTheHacker (acquired…

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