YouTube Marketing Ideas for Beginners

How to Fix Windows Errors in 2 Minutes, CLICK HERE

September 30th, 2013 at 7:58 am by Erin Walsh

Online marketing is the “in” thing in the 21st century, so it’s natural that YouTube marketing would be a great place to start a successful affiliate marketing campaign. We live in the age where an online retail store can work as well as a shop across the street. The necessary tools used for the marketing of the products, business, skills, or other stuff are everywhere on the Internet, and video is one that you definitely can’t overlook.

It’s surprising yet fascinating to know that the very same Internet we use for surfing and finding out valuable info can be used as a tool for marketing. As is the case with many other “tools”, you just have to have the right skills and knowledge in using it to its best potential.

YouTube marketing is another brilliant platform to showcase and sell your products, propagate your business and other retail outlets, or even for self-promotion and talent hunt! Being home to the world’s largest collection of videos by the YouTube users from all over the world, YouTube allows its users to upload videos on the site for free.

Gaining Instant Popularity

With YouTube, the users are just a camera and a click away from gaining the power of fame, but even though the process of making and uploading a video is simple, the gaining of views is not as easy.

Hence, a lot of good videos don’t gain as much access as they should but some with a comparatively linear plot and approach end up gaining viral popularity. To help you gain a similar following, you can buy YouTube views from different sites offering various programs.

This may sound tricky or unbelievable, but you will soon discover that it’s not just about giving some extra bucks to gain some views; it’s about giving some to gain a whole lot more!

Get a Succession of Real Views

So what is in store for you if you buy YouTube views? First, it would help build a following for your video. Then, as the video gains more views it becomes popular, promoting your idea or product to different parts of the globe and making your concept reach a wider audience.

Not only that, if you buy YouTube views, you will also be able to choose from the age groups of the people, and target a primary audience if your project or theme requires for you to do so. All you have to do is to pay attention to the important details and key points in making your video more appreciable, professional and better.

As you gain your experience with marketing in the social world, you’ll eventually come to know of your own grits and tricks to use in your future videos.

See the Viewing Bomb Tick and Your Popularity Soar

To buy YouTube views, you will have to take advantage of the various programs and sites on the Internet and peruse the client feedback and site reputation for authenticity and confirmation. And once your transaction is made, you can sit back and relax, watching your video gain views in a timely fashion and healthy succession, which would’ve been impossible to get otherwise.

Check out some of our videos here 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLAinWldIgZfzBkePaL-XcrovWh5vrFdHU&v=j86cca5r_Es&feature=player_embedded#t=0

Tags: buy youtube views, youtube, youtube marketing
Posted in Affiliate Marketing Tips

Boost Software™ INC Winner in 2013 WebAwards

September 23rd, 2013 at 8:06 am by Erin Walsh

In addition to such recent awards as the Best in Biz award (a distinction shared by Epson and Dell) and its status as a Microsoft Gold Partner, Boost Software™ recently won a WebAward from the Web Marketing Association for its PC HealthBoost™ software.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 16, 2013

Boost Software™ INC recently won the Computer: Software Standard of Excellence award from the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward. The young software corporation won the award in relation to the company’s PC HealthBoost™ registry cleaner & PC Optimization software.

“We’re always proud to win a worthy award,” said Erin Walsh, Boost Software’s Director of Public relations. “We have quite a bit to be proud of lately.”

What makes PC Health Boost™ winning software? The program is built to stricter standards than most registry cleaning software on the market. Many registry cleaners are repackaged or rebranded versions of the same whitelabel software.

PC HealthBoost™, however, was built from the ground up. Owners Peter Dunbar and Amit Mehta spent 12 months and over $300,000 in development costs from the software. They also integrated 24/7 customer support for the software, available from first-world call centers.

Aside from being a consumer favorite for the last 3 years, the program also earned Boost Software aMicrosoft Gold: Application Development partnership.

Mehta and Dunbar decided to create PC HealthBoost™ after selling similar products for other merchants online. They soon discovered a dearth of products they felt comfortable selling, and became frustrated at the lack of quality registry cleaners on the market. They discovered that the few that had quality programming typically did not have quality service to match.

So they spent a year and over a quarter of a million dollars developing a quality PC optimization tool. Unlike other registry cleaners—many of which are re-branded versions of the same whitelabel generic software—PC HealthBoost™ was put together from the ground up.

Another distinction the program’s owners wanted to make was that of customer support. Even the few registry cleaners they felt were worth buying lacked adequate support. The two vowed to change this with PC HealthBoost™, which offers 24/7 phone and email support based out of the United States, Australia and the UK.

Among other awards, PC HealthBoost™ has received the distinction of being a Brothersoft Editor’s Pick. According to the Brothersoft site, “PC HealthBoost™ is unique in that it uses a unique Algorithm (called ScanSafe) to clean the PC registry that’s safer and more stable than you’re Garden-variety registry cleaner.”

PC HealthBoost™ has received numerous other accolades, such as Tucows 5-Cow Rating. “With its cutting-edge PC optimization and registry cleaning technology, PC HealthBoost™ is head and shoulders above its competition in delivering speed, performance, and stability to your PC,” said the Tucows editorial review.

Boost Software™ was formed in 2009 by Amit Mehta and Peter Dunbar. Both owners sold software and other products prior to developing PC HealthBoost™. Mehta studied physics at MIT, while Dunbar is an experienced programmer, and was “hands-on involved” in the software’s development. More information about the company can be found at http://www.boostsoftware.com.

As posted on Sept 16, 2013 on PRWeb: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11125399.htm

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BOOST SOFTWARE, CLICK HERE

Tencent’s worth

A Chinese internet firm finds a better way to make money

IS TENCENT one of the world’s greatest internet firms? There are grounds for scepticism. The Chinese gaming and social-media firm started in the same way many local internet firms have: by copying Western success. QQ, its instant-messaging service, was a clone of ICQ, an Israeli invention acquired by AOL of America. And unlike global internet giants such as Google and Twitter, Tencent still makes its money in its protected home market.

Yet the Chinese firm’s stockmarket valuation briefly crossed the $100 billion mark this week for the first time. Given that the valuation of Facebook, the world’s leading social-media firm, itself crossed that threshold only a few weeks ago, it is reasonable to wonder whether Tencent is worth so much. However, Tencent now has bigger revenues and profits than Facebook. In the first half of this year Tencent enjoyed revenues of $4.5 billion and gross profits of $2.5 billion, whereas Facebook saw revenues of $3.3 billion and gross profits of $935m.

The Chinese firm’s market value reflects the phenomenal rise in its share price. A study out this week from the Boston Consulting Group found that Tencent had the highest shareholder total return (share-price appreciation plus dividends) of any large firm globally from 2008 to 2012—topping Amazon and even Apple.

Tencent has created a better business model than its Western peers. Many internet firms build a customer base by giving things away, be they search results or social-networking tools. They then seek to monetise their users, usually turning to online advertising. Google is a glorious example. Other firms try to make e-commerce work. But as the case of revenue-rich but profit-poor Amazon suggests, this can also be a hard slog.

Tencent does give its services away: QQ is used by 800m people, and its WeChat social-networking app (which initially resembled America’s WhatsApp) has several hundred million users. What makes it different from Western rivals is the way it uses these to peddle online games and other revenue-raising offerings.

Once users are hooked on a popular game, Tencent then persuades them to pay for “value-added services” such as fancy weapons, snazzy costumes for their avatars and online VIP rooms. Whereas its peers are still making most of their money from advertising, Fathom China, a research firm, reckons Tencent gets 80% of its revenues from such kit (see chart).

This year China has overtaken America to become the world’s biggest e-commerce market, in terms of sales. It is also now the biggest market for smartphones. This means it may soon have the world’s dominant market in “m-commerce”, purchases on mobile devices.

Tencent’s main rivals in Chinese m-commerce are Baidu, which dominates search on desktop computers (helped by the government’s suppression of Google) and Alibaba, an e-commerce giant now preparing for a huge share offering. All three have gone on acquisition sprees, in an attempt to lead the market. The big worry for investors is the cost of this arms race.

Alibaba recently invested $300m in AutoNavi, an online-mapping firm, and nearly $600m in Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. Baidu has been even more ambitious, spending $1.85 billion to buy 91 Wireless, the country’s biggest third-party store for smartphone apps, and $370m for PPS, an online-video firm.

Tencent may have an edge over its two rivals in m-commerce because of the wild popularity of WeChat, which is used on mobile phones. But to ensure it stays in the race, it is also spending heavily. On September 16th it said it will spend $448m to acquire a big stake in Sogou, an online-search firm; it plans to merge its own flagging search engine (aptly named Soso) into the venture. It had previously invested in Didi Dache, China’s largest taxi-hailing app, and is rumoured to be interested in online travel and dating firms too.

The three Goliaths are buying up innovative firms because they are too big and bureaucratic to create things themselves, mutter some entrepreneurs (presumably not those being bought out handsomely). A more pressing worry for Tencent’s shareholders is that its lavish spending, on top of heavy investment in improving its unimpressive e-commerce offerings, will eat into profits. Worse, the m-commerce arms race risks distracting it from gaming and value-added services, the cash cows that are paying for everything else. A $100 billion valuation might then seem too rich.

Read more at: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21586557-chinese-internet-firm-finds-better-way-make-money-tencents-worth

Intel’s Laser Chips Could Make Data Centers Run Better

Silicon chips with optical technology allow a new form of superfast data connection.



Intel hopes to make computing far more efficient by introducing a technology that replaces conventional copper data cables with faster optical data links. The breakthrough required Intel to fit lasers and other optical components onto silicon chips, which usually deal only with electronic signals.

The initial version of what Intel calls its silicon photonics technology can transmit data at speeds of 100 gigabits per second along a cable approximately five millimeters in diameter. Intel will offer it for use connecting servers inside data centers, where it can take the place of PCI-E data cables that carry data at up to eight gigabits per second and networking cables that reach 40 gigabits per second at best. The latest version of the USB standard common in consumer gadgets can move data at only five gigabits per second.

“We’re launching this in mass production, and Intel has decided to make a significant investment,” says Mario Paniccia, who has led Intel’s silicon photonics research for years and now heads the group commercializing it. “We have lots of customers.” Future versions of the technology are intended to appear outside data centers, perhaps in consumer applications.

Intel’s technology can significantly reduce the costs of running a data center—the large computing clusters that crunch data, run apps, and host websites. That’s because one of Intel’s new optical cables can replace 10 or more of the relatively bulky PCI-E copper cables that connect servers stacked on the same rack. Those cables impede the flow of air used to cool servers. Data centers vary in their efficiency, but it is typical for cooling to account for roughly half the cost of running a data center.

Intel’s silicon photonics technology can also be used to replace conventional Ethernet networking cables. It could allow companies to rethink established ways of organizing computers inside data centers.

Intel has developed a small circuit board that can be added to a server to upgrade it to the optical technology. The most important part of it is a compact module containing one or more silicon chips (Intel won’t say how many) that can convert back and forth between a computer’s electronic signals and optical ones able to travel down a fiber. Among the optical components inside the chips are four silicon lasers that can each stream data at a rate of 25 gigabits per second. A card can have more than one of those optical chips on it, depending on how much bandwidth is needed. Intel worked with Corning, best known for inventing the Gorilla Glass used in many mobile devices, to develop new connectors and cables to link up the new optical boards.

The current form of the technology was shaped by feedback from companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and cloud hosting company Rackspace, some of which have committed to using the technology, says Paniccia. Pricing and availability of the technology has not been announced, but it could create a significant new income stream for Intel. In 2012, a total of 8.1 million servers were shipped worldwide, according to IDC, and many companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are investing heavily in data centers (see “Inside Facebook’s Not-So-Secret New Data Center”).

Intel is also working with operators of extremely powerful computer clusters and super computers, including unspecified U.S. government agencies. Intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and CIA are known to use high-powered computers to process and analyze data collected through surveillance.

Today servers are self-contained computers with processors, memory, and storage that inhabit a single layer of a server rack. The bandwidth boost from silicon photonics makes it possible to instead fill a whole layer of a rack with processors, another with memory, and a third with storage. That can make upgrades faster and help make better use of cooling by directing it onto the components that need it most, says Pannicia.

Some of Intel’s partners are considering a more extreme version of that approach. It would see memory, processors, and data storage being kept in entirely separate cabinets, all linked with optical connections. That could allow further improvements to maintenance and cooling. It could also permit memory to be “virtualized” so that it is dynamically allocated to software and servers as needed, a more efficient approach than having it bound to specific servers.

Read more at: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chips-could-make-data-centers-run-better/

Pressy: A Physical, Programmable Button for Android Devices

By  J.T. Quigley

As the modern smartphone continues its evolution, buttons are becoming a thing of the past. Some of the most talked about handsets right now, including the LG G2 and Google’s Moto X, have gotten rid of physical home buttons in favor of a third capacitive button. Perhaps it will come as a surprise that Pressy, funded in less than 24 hours via a viral Kickstarter campaign, wants to add a physical button to your Android device.

Pressy is a small plug that can slide into a standard 1/8-inch headphone jack. The visible top portion is a small black button. Through a downloadable companion app, Pressy can be programmed to perform an array of basic functions, which the company calls Actions – such as turning on your flashlight, toggling silent mode on and off, and taking photos (these three functions are out-of-the-box defaults, according toPressy’s official Kickstarter page). Basically, if your phone can do it, Pressy will be able to activate it at the touch of a button.

“The way Pressy works is by running on Android as a background service,” said The Verge. “The app monitors the headset jack, but only really does anything when Pressy is clicked, which should prevent the button from draining battery life. The Pressy app, and therefore the actual hardware, works on any device running Android 2.3 or newer. And once the app is set up, users will even be able to use the mic button on a set of headphones to perform the same actions the Pressy button would.”

Beyond performing an Action, Pressy allows each action to be fine-tuned. “For example, you can set Pressy to take a regular photo or to take a discreet photo (with your screen off and without sound or flash),” explained the Kickstarter PR. Developers will also be able to make their own Pressy Actions in future third-party apps.

Pressy’s creators, Nimrod Back and Boaz Mendel, set a goal of $40,000 to bring the Pressy idea to fruition. After being featured on multiple industry-leading tech blogs, their Kickstarter went viral –surpassing $60,000 in the campaign’s first day. With 45 days left before the project is funded, Pressy has a war chest of nearly $105,000 and rising.

“Early adopters snapped up all the Pressy buttons available for $15, making $17 the lowest tier you can get in on the deal,” said The Next Web. The Kickstarter page also offers a $20 option that includes a keychain for safely storing Pressy when headphones are plugged in, as well as a choice of red, white, or blue (aside from the standard black color option).

Back and Mendel expect the Pressy to ship to backers in March 2014.

Read more at: http://thediplomat.com/tech-biz/2013/08/30/pressy-a-physical-programmable-button-for-android-devices/

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MOTO X:THE PHONE THAT REVEALS WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT MOTOROLA

Almost exactly two years ago, Google announced its purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It was the company’s biggest deal ever, far exceeding previous big buys like YouTube for $1.7 billion and DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Both of those acquisitions were hugely successful, but the Motorola purchase seemed baffling. Mainly, it seemed to provide Google with valuable intellectual property that would allow the company to defend itself against a tidal wave of patent lawsuits. Motorola—the inventor of the very first cell phone—had a great patent portfolio indeed. But the estimated worth of those patents was less than half Google’s purchase price. The other portion brought Google a money-bleeding Chicago-area-based hardware business. The purchase would almost double Google’s head count with employees who brought little to the bottom line. Employees who were not Googly, in a business that seemingly didn’t scale. What was Google thinking?

Finally, we have the answer. The Moto X, announced today, marks the arrival, finally, of the Google Phone.

The Moto X is the first in a series of hardware products that Google hopes will supercharge the mother company’s software and services. A svelte slab with smooth curves at its edge, purpose-built to fit in the palm of your hand. It is designed for mass appeal, not just a slice of the population like Star Wars fans. It has its share of features that distinguish it from the pack, particularly in a period where some of the market leaders are reloading their innovation guns. These include persistent notifications, user-customizable design components, instant photo-capture, and hands-free authentication.

But the defining feature of the Moto X is it’s a virtual ear, always straining to hear its owner’s voice say three magic words that will rouse it to action: “Okay, Google Now.”

Utter those, and a Moto X user becomes master of the universe—to the degree that Google, its developers, and the users themselves have digitized it. The Android mobile operating system was always intended as a gateway drug to Google products and ads. (“We don’t monetize the things we create,” Android creator Andy Rubin once told me. “We monetize users.”) And Moto X is a tool to free-base Google. That’s why, after years of Rubin and others saying, “There is no Google phone,” when referring to Android implementations, this one finally qualifies.

Read more at: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/inside-story-of-moto-x/

Hats off

Hackers gather—and mourn a big loss

EVERY summer Las Vegas plays host to Black Hat, a security shindig where spooks, businesspeople and academics rub shoulders with some of the world’s most talented hackers. The event briefly overlaps with DEFCON, a more informal affair where hackers try to impress one another with their exploits. Both events offer a mix of partying and presentations with disconcerting titles such as “Stalking a City for Fun and Frivolity”, “Home Invasion 2.0” and “Dude, WTF in my car?”

But one of hackerdom’s stars did not make it to this year’s jamborees. On July 25th Barnaby Jack was found dead in San Francisco, where he lived. He was only 35. An extremely popular “white hat”—a hacker who specialises in finding security flaws before nefarious “black hats” discover them—he had been due to give a presentation entitled “Implantable Medical Devices: Hacking Humans”.

Mr Jack had said previously that he had found a flaw in medical devices, such as heart pacemakers and defibrillators, made by an unnamed manufacturer, which could allow an outsider to communicate with them wirelessly. He was planning to show how this could be exploited to make the device malfunction or shut down, using a signal sent from up to 30 feet (9 metres) away. In a blog post earlier this year, he noted that an episode of “Homeland”, a popular American television show, in which a terrorist kills one of the characters by gaining control of his pacemaker, was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed.

The San Francisco police have ruled out foul play, but local medical authorities say it could be some time before the cause of death is established. What is clear is Mr Jack’s immense contribution in the field of “embedded” computers, which work inside other single-purpose appliances. Among his other headline-grabbing feats, he showed how some ATMs could be hacked so that they spewed out banknotes—an exploit dubbed “Jackpotting”. He had also highlighted vulnerabilities in insulin pumps, similar to the flaws in other implanted devices that he was planning to expose this year. In all these cases he shared his findings with the manufacturers before publicising them.

Even so, some worry that by trumpeting their findings at events such as Black Hat and DEFCON, white hats give clues which their shady counterparts could exploit in crime, terrorism or espionage. But the hackers’ defenders say the publicity alerts regulators, and ensures that as many companies as possible learn of the risks quickly. They also point out that the presentations typically leave out important steps so others cannot reproduce hacks. Nico Sell, who has been helping organise DEFCON for over a decade, notes, for example, that Mr Jack agreed to delay presenting his Jackpotting findings for a year, when a manufacturer of ATMs said it needed longer to deal with the bug that he had uncovered.

Read more at: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21582577-hackers-gatherand-mourn-big-loss-hats

Malaysian Taxi App TaxiMonger Expands Coverage Outside Kuala Lumpur To Deal With Ongoing Rivalry

Malaysian taxi-booking app TaxiMonger has just expanded its service outside the capital city of Kuala Lumpur to cover Johor Bahru (the state sharing the border with Singapore). Additionally, it will run a Singapore-to-Johor service in a deal with cab operator JB-Tek, which currently runs that route.

The decision to expand its service coverage is set against a backdrop of an ongoing skirmish for smartphone-familiar drivers in Kuala Lumpur. This scene was described to me last month when I visited the state, where two of the main taxi apps, MyTeksi and Rocket-backed Easytaxi, were battling for a larger share of the drivers out there.

TaxiMonger’s CEO and co-founder, Nizran Noordin, said it’s tough getting drivers onboard, in spite of the touted benefits of being hooked up to a central app that alerts you of jobs.

Breaking down the cost, he said a driver makes on average US$40 a day, before deducting $20 for vehicle rental and petrol costs of about $10. With a meager salary, a $100 smartphone is still priced above a comfortable rate for many, he said.

Going through cab operators is tough as well, because of a fragmented market in Malaysia, where 31,000 taxis are opened by 210 companies. The companies aren’t providing Android devices, so TaxiMonger has been approaching individual drivers to try to get them onboard.

Rocket Internet’s Joon Chan also said only about 10 to 15 percent of drivers in the country have smartphones.

It seems TaxiMonger’s decision to expand coverage will provide it some respite for now from the current scene in Kuala Lumpur.

The app is free, and layers on a $0.63 (RM2) booking fee to be paid to the driver. MyTeksi, on the other hand, charges drivers between US$0.16 (50 sen) and US$0.30 (RM1) per successful pick-up.

TaxiMonger went through the SeedStartup program and launched in June 2012. Noordin says the company has 500 taxis registered, and has a deal with the airport taxi operator, covering another 2,000 cars.

Read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/malaysian-taxi-app-taximonger-expands-coverage-outside-kuala-lumpur-to-deal-with-ongoing-rivalry/

The car that parks itself

Autonomous vehicles are arriving piecemeal, as more and more driving tasks are taken out of human hands

CARS that need no driver are just around the corner according to Google, which has been testing vehicles bristling with aerials and cameras on public roads in America. But Google does not make cars (yet), so it will be up to firms that do to bring the technology to market. And carmakers are a conservative bunch. Still, slowly and steadily the autonomous car will arrive, with the help of an increasing number of automated driving aids. Volvo recently demonstrated one such feature: a car that really does park itself.

Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.

In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.

This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.

Look, no hands

Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their weight, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.

Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.

Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.

Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.

The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.

Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.

Policymakers want to see more development before fully autonomous cars are sold to the public. California and a number of other American states have licensed experimental self-driving cars, provided they have someone on board who can take control if needed. For the time being, this is about all that is likely to be allowed. America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said recently that it believes self-driving cars could bring great safety and other benefits, but at this stage it does not think completely autonomous vehicles should be permitted on public roads, other than for testing. Self-parking cars may be one way drivers and regulators gain confidence in the technology.

Read more at:http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580134-autonomous-vehicles-are-arriving-piecemeal-more-and-more-driving-tasks-are

Gorilla Glass May Soon Be Used For Car Windshields

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Gorilla Glass is probably best known as the (somewhat) impervious cover of approximately 1.5 billion smartphone screens.

According to Corning, the company could soon be shipping the mighty glass to automakers, which would be looking to take advantage of its lighter weight and soundproofing capabilities. A Gorilla Glass equipped car would theoretically offer a quieter ride with better gas mileage.

In comments made after MIT Technology Review’s Mobile Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Corning senior vice president Jeffrey Evenson said he expects at least one high-end auto maker to begin building cars that use some Gorilla Glass within the next year.

The installation of Gorilla Glass in cars would bring the Corning project full circle. The company experimentedwith car windshield technology in the 1960s. That research eventually laid the foundation for the development of modern-day Gorilla Glass.

The revelation comes just after Corning announced the release of the next generation of Gorilla Glass technology in May, Corning Gorilla Glass 3 with Native Damage Resistance. James R. Steiner, senior vice president and general manager of Corning’s Specialty Materials department noted that the company is continuing to develop Gorilla Glass technology.

“We aren’t standing still,” he said. “We’ve already introduced three versions of Gorilla Glass since its launch in 2007.”

“We work closely with consumer electronics manufacturers to understand their new designs and additional features for future devices,” he added. “For example, we’ve begun to produce Gorilla Glass at a thinness level that allows it to be curved and formed into shapes without sacrificing any of its toughness. This will allow manufacturers to offer more distinctive devices in the future.”

Steiner also said that future iterations of Gorilla Glass will reduce reflections, addressing the common consumer complaint associated with viewing mobile device screens in bright sunlight: glare.

Some observers have speculated that manufactured sapphire crystal might become a viable alternative to Corning’s Gorilla Glass, citing its use in the production of high-end watches. Corning officials have said that strength tests have shown that sapphire is not as strong as Gorilla Glass.

In his comments this week, Evenson also revealed several other endeavors the company is pursuing. One technology currently in the development stage is “antimicrobial” glass that is scheduled to be certified by the Environmental Protection Agency within the next few months, Evenson said. The groundbreaking material is designed for use in the health-care industry, as a sanitation aid, but could be used in other applications.

“The bacteria are obliterated,” Evenson said. “The number of germs on a smartphone exceeds the number of germs on a public toilet. We think there might be a bigger market.”

“Once we are ready to commercialize this version of Gorilla Glass, the application possibilities are enormous, including hospitals, public spaces, schools, and mobile devices and so forth,” Steiner remarked on the technology in an earlier statement.

Another highly-anticipated Corning product, Willow Glass, is described as being flexible like plastic, as thin as a dollar bill, yet retaining the durability and stability of glass. Evenson said Willow Glass could lead to “hundreds of new products,” from flexible displays to new insulating layers in semiconductors.

Source: Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

Behold: Fighter-Jet Augmented Reality for Your Motorcycle Commute

• BY DAMON LAVRINC

Image: LiveMap

Google Glass has the potential to revolutionize how we get information on the move, but a team of Russian motorcyclists-slash-engineers are going one step further with an augmented reality GPS system built directly into a bike helmet.

Based in Moscow, the LiveMap crew got fed up with paper maps and unintuitive touch-screen navigation systems, so they looked to the world of fighter jets for a solution.

The result is a full-color, translucent image projected onto a helmet’s visor running a version of Android and controlled through voice commands.

Instead of a Google Glass-like setup where the rider would have to look up and to the right to see the next waypoint or turn, the LiveMap system displays everything directly in the middle of the rider’s point-of-view. That might sound dangerous at first, but it’s execution is similar to what you’d find in the latest BMW sports sedans, and with an ambient light sensor, the system can adjust the brightness and contrast to suit the environment.

Even more impressive is the integration of a gyroscope and digital compass, so when the rider turns his head — say, to check a blind spot — the image changes orientation to acclimate to the movement.

Voice controls and point of interest searches will supposedly be provided by Nuance, the top-shelf company that helps Siri understand commands, while mapping software will come from the folks at Navteq.

A pair of 3,000 mAh lithium-ion batteries claim to provide enough juice for a day-long ride and charge up using a standard USB plug. And while LiveMap admits that the helmet will be slightly larger than a standard brain pan, they’re using a carbon fiber shell with injection-molded foam to keep weight in check. All in, the helmet should come in around 2.5 pounds, and will meet all the major crash certifications around the world (DOT, ECE 22.05 and Japan’s JIS T 8133) when it goes on sale in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia in 2014, while Europe and Japan have to wait an additional year to take delivery.

Currently, LiveMap has developed the helmet, software, optics and board with funding from a range of Russian government sources, but it doesn’t have a fully-functional prototype yet. So the team is turning to Indiegogo to raise $150,000, with backers coughing up $1,500 a pop to get their hands on the first round of helmets. After that, LiveMaps says the price will go up to $2,000 each — a seriously steep sticker for something most bike experts suggest you replace every five years.

Considering how much we love our current helmet, we’d be much more inclined to plunk down the coin for a retrofitted system, but considering the lack of intuitive navigation options on the market, we could be swayed.

Read more at: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/06/livemap-ar/

How Cree Perfected The 20-Year Lightbulb

Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda, May 2013. (Credit: Michael J. Bowles for Forbes)

This North Carolina maker of light emitting diodes aims to kill off the incandescent lightbulb. It’s already doubled its market cap to $7 billion in just one year.

In the ad for Cree lightbulbs you see snow whipping across a desolate field as a bagpipe creaks out “Amazing Grace.” An announcer holds up a lightbulb and speaks into the camera. “Mr. Edison , today we lay to rest your creation, the incandescent lightbulb. I know you’re not shocked, sir. You knew that it needed an unreasonable amount of energy to do its job and that it had the life span of a lucky bug.”

He fits the bulb into a tiny wooden casket and places it into a hole in the ground. Then we see Cree’s new LED bulb. “The biggest thing since the lightbulb,” we’re told.

It’s a fun commercial, and Chuck Swoboda, CEO of Cree, means no disrespect. “We made sure the Edison estate was okay with it,” he says. “There’s an Edison quote that has always been inspirational to us: ‘There’s a better way to do it. Find it.’ ”

Swoboda believes his company has done just that. More than 130 years after Thomas Edison created the first salable lightbulb, his design remains little changed. Electricity flows across a resistant wire in an oxygen-free environment and glows. Cree’s lightbulb, on the other hand, uses an array of light-emitting diodes to create a similar kind of rich, warm light without the headache-inducing flicker of compact fluorescent bulbs.

It does so with unassailable economy. A regular incandescent bulb costs $1 and uses $7 of electricity a year if used three hours a day. A Cree bulb may cost $10, but it uses 10% of the electricity, costing $1 a year. And while an old-school bulb will burn out in less than two years at that rate, LED bulbs will keep working for more than 20 years. At a cost of $9.97 for the equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent, or $12.97 for a 60-watt replacement, the Cree bulbs are cheaper than comparable LED offerings from rivals.

That performance is a big reason Cree now boasts $1.3 billion in sales and $70 million in earnings. Its market cap of $7 billion has doubled in less than a year; investors foresee broad adoption of LEDs once federal lighting standards force the phaseout of 40- and 60-watt incandescents in 2014. Nationwide, of roughly 6 billion lightbulbs in American homes, 3.6 billion are incandescents. Lighting sucks up roughly 14% of America’s electricity; replacing all those Edison bulbs with LEDs could cut that demand in half.

The Durham, N.C. company was founded in 1987 and went public in 1993. In those early years it had a good business selling semiconductor chips made of gallium nitride that glow when an electric current is passed through them. But the early light-emitting diodes came in only two colors: red and green.

The industry’s elusive Holy Grail was a “
white” LED. If they could somehow create a bright blue LED they could combine it with the red and green to make what the human eye would perceive as white light. For years physicists thought bright blue was an impossibility, until in 1994 a researcher at Japanese company Nichia proved it could be done.

Cree’s engineers followed soon after with their own bright blue LED chip, made from wafers of silicon carbide. “Everything came from this,” says Swoboda, who joined the company in 1993, when it had only 30 workers. It now boasts over 6,000.

At first Cree just made the chips and sold them to the LED makers; early uses included backlit car dashboards and cellphones. The potential seemed so great that in 2004 analysts were calling Cree the next Intel INTC -0.25%. But white LED lights weren’t ready for the residential market. Early fixtures cost too much and suffered from another then-unsolved problem: LEDs are a directional light source; like a weaker version of lasers, they cast light in only one direction. That’s fine if you want to spotlight something but a nonstarter if your aim is to replace the all-around glow of incandescents.

Playing to their strengths, LED makers started marketing so-called downlights. Cree in 2007 bought Chinese light-fixture maker Cotco and in 2008 acquired LED Lighting Fixtures. It began a relationship with Home Depot HD +1.92% selling downlights under its EcoSmart brand.

It hadn’t even tried developing an incandescent replacement, instead focusing on municipalities and industrial customers. Anchorage, Alaska replaced 16,000 high-pressure sodium streetlights with LEDs; Los Angeles is gradually swapping out 140,000. Wal-Mart installed LEDs at hundreds of its stores . To profit from this industrial market, Cree in 2011 bought fixture manufacturer Ruud for $525 million.

So how to make LEDs mimic incandescents? The key was in redesigning the structure in the middle of the bulb called the filament tower, where 10 or 20 LEDs of varying colors are arranged. Cree’s configuration let the individual light sources overlap, creating an omnidirectional glow.

For now Home Depot is the only place you can buy the Cree, part of an exclusive deal to roll out the bulb in more than 2,000 stores. “The exclusivity is to be negotiated. We will look at other partnerships at some point,” says Swoboda.

Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/05/22/how-cree-perfected-the-20-year-lightbulb/

Malaysia Is Poorly Marketed To Entrepreneurs, Says 500 Durians’ Khailee Ng

Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng.

Ng, who is from Malaysia, was recently hired by 500 Startups as venture partner for Southeast Asia. The Silicon Valley VC also set Ng up with a shiny new $10 million microfund for the region. (The SEC-filing was called 500 Durians.)

Ng was speaking to a roomful of Malaysian startups and the 500 Startups’ Geeks On A Planedelegation that is currently traveling through Southeast Asia.

When I spoke to him on the sidelines of the conference, he said Malaysia has all the makings of a ripe scene to be picked, but he has been watching in dismay as startups flocked to larger, far less Internet-penetrated countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. And Malaysia often gets outshone by its smaller neighbor to the South, Singapore, where plenty of large corporations have set up shop, and seed funding is readily available, backed by government funding.

Malaysia’s situation is the result of an under-marketed set of funding from the government, plus a syndrome where none of its successful entrepreneurs are keen to let others know about them, said Ng. Some government funds that have been around for a decade already. “Nobody knows they exist, or there are misconceptions that it’s hard to get, or there are bureaucratic hoops to jump through,” he said.

For example, the Cradle fund offers up to $160,000 (RM500,000) in seed funding to projects that are younger than three-years-old. Other non-government-linked funds that have just been set up within this year include $10 million from 1337 Accelerator, $150 million from Catcha Group, and $5 million from the Asia Venture Group.

Ng also said that people are often surprised to find that some of the largest tech companies to IPO in the region are from Malaysia. According to a ranking of publicly-listed companies taken about a year ago, Jobstreet had a market cap of $268.2 million, iProperty Group had $178.2, My EG Services had $151.7 and iCar Asia had $56 million. The fifth in the list was the only one not from Malaysia, and was Singapore-based Asiatravel.com, at $40.4 million, he said.

He said the local scene also needs more experienced professionals coming in. “There’s nothing wrong with fresh grads, but sometimes you get one or two guys who have either had a failed startup, or one of those McKinsey, Accenture guys, and you can really feel things getting serious (in the startup),” he said.

Copycats are also the reason why startups in the region need to think outside their home bases from day one, said Ng. While many often think they should conquer one market and slowly expand outwards, it’s often too late by the time the expansion happens. “Be in as many markets as you can afford to be from the beginning,” he said.

The reason why many copycat models fail is not because transplanting models doesn’t work, but because execution is the main difference, he added. Operational excellence and being “super tight” can make or break a startup. “That’s why you get group-buying being crazy profitable in some markets, but bleeding in just the next country. Same model, right? It’s operational issues,” he said.

Check out Ng’s slide presentation on being a startup in Malaysia.

Read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/07/malaysia-is-poorly-marketed-to-entrepreneurs-says-500-durians-khailee-ng/