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Full moon patents: Uber’s pick-up AR, Microsoft’s crime scene AI, and Boeing’s toilet

Mar20
by on March 20, 2019 at 3:15 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


Ugh, the Gregorian calendar is so boring. That’s why we’re disrupting monthly series with a lunar cycle-based series about the best patents of the last synodic month, picked by the PatentYogi team. Get ready when that moon gets gibbous, y’all. This March-ish roundup lands on the icky Worm Moon ! Since my last post, the US patent office issued over 13,028 patents and published over 13,113 patent applications. Each patent asset adds a little something new to the human knowledge base. As I cannot list all these patent assets here, the PatentYogi team has selected the five most interesting patent assets. Enjoy! Patent…

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I wanted to fold Huawei’s foldable phone but they wouldn’t let me

Mar20
by on March 20, 2019 at 2:44 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Mobile, Plugged


After reading and writing pieces about foldable phones for months, I finally got to try Huawei‘s extravagant Mate X foldable phone. I used the phone for a couple of minutes at the company’s briefing in India, and it was a very cool experience. However, there was one catch: I didn’t get to actually fold it. As my colleague Matt has mentioned in his story, the Mate X looks incredible – both in its folded and unfolded avatars. In my couple of minutes with the phone, I felt its build is quite massive and bulky (it weighs 295 grams), making one-handed…

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Apple’s new AirPods include wireless charging, Siri, and a fancy new chip

Mar20
by on March 20, 2019 at 2:06 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Plugged


They’re here! Apple has just announced its new AirPods, and they’re on sale now. We’ve discussed the merits (and pitfalls) of Apple’s popular wireless earbuds before, and this update is definitely a Good Thing. The company put its new H1 chip into the earbuds, which will deliver faster device connections, and an extra hour of talk time – a 50-percent improvement over the previous model’s performance. Another thing Apple has done with the H1 chip is to implement “Hey Siri.” Say this, and you activate the voice assistant, which you can then use to do things like change songs or make…

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North Korean dissidents are using Ethereum to overthrow Kim Jong-un

Mar20
by on March 20, 2019 at 2:03 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Hard Fork


Political dissidents known as the Cheollima Civil Defense (CCD) are selling special “post-liberation blockchain visas” for cryptocurrency in a bid to raise funds for overthrowing Kim Jong-un — and they’ve already collected over $57,000 in Bitcoin. Much like internationally recognized visas, CCD says it will allow anyone who purchases a Free Joseon Genesis Visa (G-VISA) to visit North Korea once it has been “liberated,” reports South China Morning Post. The group insists it will create 200,000 non-fungible Ethereum-based (ERC-721) tokens that represent G-VISAs, sold for 1 Ethereum ($137) each. At pixel time, seven G-VISAs have been issued to five addresses. CCD has been touted as a…

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Why designers create products that are never meant to be real

Mar20
by on March 20, 2019 at 12:59 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev, syndication


Humans are great at telling stories. We use them to teach our children, to learn about ourselves, and to plan paths to the future. Speculative fiction, imagining worlds that are not our own, is a great tool for considering the societal consequences of things that haven’t happened yet, sometimes on a grand scale. Designers also think about possibilities and potentials: What can be created to solve this particular challenge, or to meet this particular need? Often, the process of answering these questions involves building prototypes to test an idea. Once you get your hands on something and start using it, you…

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