First Look At DJI's New, Incredible Drone
The Inspire One drone looks cool flying and offers a ton of new features, including a 360 degree camera that records in 4K. The Verge
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
First Look At DJI's New, Incredible Drone, The Verge
The Inspire One drone looks cool flying and offers a ton of new features, including a 360 degree camera that records in 4K. The Verge
Tony Hawk Rides The Hendo Hoverboard
Tony Hawk Rides The Hendo Hoverboard
Yes, the Hendo is a real honest-to-goodness hoverboard. There's still some kinks to work out, but if Tony Hawk likes riding it, we as a species owe it to him to get the Hendo up to snuff.
Is This 'Free Data Forever' Device Too Good To Be True?
Is This 'Free Data Forever' Device Too Good To Be True?
Lantern claims to be an anonymous portable library that constantly receives free data from space. That sounds crazy, but weirder things have come true.
Toyota Built A Hydrogen-Powered Car
Toyota Built A Hydrogen-Powered Car
Toyota took it upon themselves to build the first mass-market hydrogen-powered car, despite there being no real infrastructure to support it — and public opinion being that it's a pretty ugly vehicle. Either way, we're excited.
Two-thirds of the world’s mobiles are dumb phones. Meet the company getting them online
Two-thirds of the world’s mobiles are dumb phones. Meet the company getting them online
This might be the worst Facebook experience ever.
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And yet U2opia mobile, a Singapore-based company founded by Indian entrepreneurs, has catapulted to 17 million users in 36 countries as a result. To understand why, you have to unlearn Facebook—its blue background, viral videos, photo uploads—as you know it. And put yourself in the position of someone who has never been on the internet before.
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U2opia takes dumb phones and uses the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol to allow such phones to connect to specific internet services such as Twitter and Facebook tailored for the small screen and text-only functionality. This is done through the company’s proprietary platform Fonetwish, which has signed agreements with Facebook and Twitter. An estimated 62% of the phones used in the world are dumb phones, officially called “feature phones” by manufacturers and networks. Their market share is much higher in emerging markers.
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Since its launch in 2011, the platform has steadily acquired users on 53 operator networks in 36 countries. They’re in places as far apart as Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Haiti, Honduras, Columbia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Mauritania, among others. To get online, they dial a short three-digit code and then they use the alphanumeric keypad.
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Operators in several markets, such as Dialog Axiata in Sri Lanka, run promotions allowing Facebook on USSD access for free for a limited period. In India, the platform was used before elections by the think tank Association of Democratic Reforms to make candidate info such as declared assets, education, and criminal records available to rural voters.
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The service is available currently in seven languages—English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Malay, Swahili and Albanian. Vietnamese is on its way. Now, 1.5 million users are signing up each month to use Facebook and Twitter in this manner.
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Those who taste even a barebones Facebook tend to subscribe to data services sooner.Reuters/Feisal Omar
U2opia’s real achievement is not in making Facebook available on feature phones. It is that it used the global lure of Facebook and Twitter to build an emerging markets user base that is of interest and value to all manner of clients. A European football club wants to develop an interactive application for their fans in Africa. A large UK media company wants to reach a far-flung audience. An American health care nonprofit wants to reach parts of the emerging world. A US seed company wants to do a field trial with farmers in Andhra Pradesh. All are in talks with U2opia to build those services on top of U2opia’s technical platform.
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Market research firms are in talks to use Fonetwish to reach a demographic that is typically tough and expensive to survey.
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“The service works as sort of a springboard to data usage. People who use our service, move to data faster,” says Sumesh Menon, CEO of U2opia. He named the company after his favourite rock band, U2.
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USSD is a protocol that is as old as SMS and similarly built into the architecture of mobile phones. This means there is no need to customize the service to suit a handset maker or model. Smartphone users no longer need USSD, but most mobile phone users have used it at some point. It is the same protocol that allows you to dial a code—something like *123#, for instance—to check the credit in your mobile phone.
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“So user friction is very little. Most of our customers are familiar with how USSD works,” Menon says.
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The experience might be barebones, but the functionality is surprisingly full-fledged. A user can access her newsfeed, update status, post on a friend’s wall, review friend requests, read and send messages, and see notifications. When a user dials the code, a session is created and the user can browse using codes for back and forward, and other functions. Most mobile operators offer bite-sized subscription packages. In India, I tried the service using Airtel and was charged Rs10 (17 cents) for a week.
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Menon says that 60% of users who sample the service return to use it. And demographics are favourable for long-term growth—some 90% of users are below the age of 24. Interestingly, 5% of Fonetwish users access the service from smartphones. Many users in emerging markets don’t subscribe to data despite owning smartphones, which they use to watch and record videos.
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U2opia now has 180 employees and offices in New Delhi, Singapore, and Dubai. Menon started the company in 2011 with co-founder Ankit Nautiyal. They used to be colleagues at the Singapore startup Bubble Motion. The company raised a round of funding from Matrix Partners India in 2011. Menon declined to discuss numbers, but said revenues were growing 20% quarter-on-quarter. The company makes money through telecom companies sharing revenue from the Fonetwish platform.
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The company has been profitable since 2013 and is not looking to raise money immediately. U2opia has its immediate task cut out for it—to capture more of the mass market it is targeting. Through the 50 operators worldwide it works with, its services can be accessed by one billion users in emerging markets. In India alone, out of the 900 million-plus mobile subscribers, 550 million can access Fonetwish services, thanks to a slew of deals with several major telcos, including the state-run BSNL.
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In fact its reach has become the main competitive advantage of U2opia. There are others that provide similar services—the French-Swiss company Myriad, for instance. But U2opia’s deals with operators mean it practically has the emerging world covered. It is currently working on launches in Vietnam, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Morocco.
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While operators typically negotiate hard with companies offering value-added services on their network, they like to work with U2opia because people who use Facebook on USSD tend to soon subscribe to mobile data, a business that typically offers higher margins than voice.
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The company is now opening its app-development platform so clients can build and test their applications and select the networks around the world they want to deploy. Because U2opia has bought a USSD code (say *315#)with all these operators, it can easily implement a client’s solution on a sub-code (*315*55#).
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India’s banking regulator has also recommended USSD and SMS Toolkit (a secure form of SMS) as the preferred protocols for the development of mobile banking in India.
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But while the near term appears attractive for U2opia, there is no wishing away the long-term trend—smartphones and data plans will continue to become cheaper, and users will upgrade to better ways of accessing Facebook. For the first time, smartphones outsold feature phones worldwide in the last quarter of 2013,accounting for 57.6% of total sales.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Natural Progression: E-Cigs Pave the Way for New E-Joints
Natural Progression: E-Cigs Pave the Way for New E-Joints
There may not be any need to spark it up anymore.
It was only a matter of time before e-cigs begot e-joints. A Dutch company called E-Njoint BV says it now produces 10,000 electronic joints in fruity flavors every day, which are rolled out across Europe. These E-Njoints contain no THC, tobacco or nicotine, and as such they claim the product is 100 percent legal. Users, though, can fill it with their own cannabis liquid or dry herbs.
via E-Njoint
The firm’s chief executive Menno Contant, said: “Holland is well known in the world for its tolerant and liberal attitude toward soft drugs and the introduction of this new product clearly makes a statement: As long as you don’t bother or disturb other people and stay within the legal boundaries, all is well.”“Developed, manufactured and sold at lightning speed. Everyone should feel fine, because what we are doing is no crime,” Contant continued.E-Njoint BV is currently in negotiations with medical cannabis company Tikun Olam to see if the E-Njoint will work as a health product, which may be particularly appealing to some US states where marijuana has either been decriminalised or made available medicinally.
Don’t get too excited. E-cigs are facing FDA and state/local regulation, and surely E-joints will face the same scrutiny, brah.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Harley-Davidson’s First Electric Motorcycle Surprisingly Doesn’t Suck
Harley-Davidson’s First Electric Motorcycle Surprisingly Doesn’t Suck
Harley-Davidson is more than a motorcycle, or even a brand. It is an icon, one that brings to mind big, loud bikes ridden by burly men with tattoos and beards. The company has long been known for rumbling V-twin engines and the open road. All of which makes the idea of an electric Harley seem downright absurd.
It’s actually pretty cool.
The LiveWire is the first electric two-wheeler out of Milwaukee. We spent an afternoon riding one amongst the weeds and broken glass of an abandoned Marine Corps runway outside Los Angeles last week and came away impressed. The Hell’s Angels aren’t going to be riding them anytime soon, but the bike offers an entertaining blend of power and comfort. It doesn’t sound anything at all like a proper Harley—or a “fighter jet landing on an aircraft carrier” as Harley brass say—but it’s got a futuristic sound that brings to mind an airliner taking to the air.
The LiveWire may not rumble like the Harleys everyone knows, and it doesn’t perform like them. But it’ll hit 60 mph in under four seconds and it’s got more style than other electrics we’ve ridden. Now Harley has to find out if anyone actually wants the thing.
Cutting weight and potatoes
If Harley-Davidson isn’t the world’s most famous motorcycle, it’s close. The company has been building motorcycles since 1903, and typically subscribes to the bigger-is-better school of engineering. But even Harley-Davidson knows the times are changing, and it recognizes the need to diversify a customer base dominated by middle-aged white guys. Upstarts like Zero Motorcycles and Brammo have proven one way to attract younger, urban riders is selling small, compact bikes powered by batteries. Even major players like Yamaha are giving electrics a go. So Harley is trying it out, too.
“Any business has always got to look ahead to see where customers are interested in going, and see where society might be going,” says Mark-Hans Richer, Harley’s top marketing guy.
That said, this isn’t a production model. Not yet, anyway. Harley is taking a few dozen LiveWires on a tour, dubbed Project LiveWire, of the United States and Europe. It will invite people in each city to check out the bike and provide feedback. The tour starts Monday in New York.
The key challenge in building the LiveWire was the shift from building a bike around an engine to building one around a battery. A battery is heavy—Harley wouldn’t say what the pack weighs, but one EV expert told us something with the range and recharge time Harley claims would be around 250 pounds—so engineers had to cut weight elsewhere. The cast aluminum perimeter frame wrapped around the battery box weighs just 14 pounds, which makes it a full eight pounds lighter than the Zero’s frame. The wheels have hollow spokes, and Harley claims they’re among the lightest aluminum wheels it’s ever produced. There’s no need for an exhaust system, which not only saves weight but gives the bike a sleeker look. The result is a clean, tightly packaged bike without frivolous details.
Harley did most of the chassis work—it’s been building bikes since the dawn of internal combustion, so it’s got that down pat—but brought in experts like Mission Motors for help with things like the motor controller.
Speaking of the motor, the LiveWire marks quite a departure from Harley’s signature sound. You don’t get the syncopated “potato, potato, potato” that is synonymous with a 60-degree V-twin engine. But even though it’s electric, and therefore has no engine, the LiveWire had to live up to Harley’s “look, sound, and feel” mantra. That took a lot of work, but company president and COO Matt Levatich insists the result is “not contrived.”
The high-pitched whir of the longitudinally-mounted, three-phase AC induction motor reverberates through the chassis, amplifying the sound. It starts off quietly, then builds in pitch and volume as the bike gains speed. It’s louder than you’d think, and though it’s not going to set off any car alarms, it’ll definitely make you smile.
Harley-DavidsonWhat customers want
The LiveWire offers 74 horsepower, 52 foot-pounds of torque and a (governed) top speed of 92 mph. It’s more powerful and quicker off the line than the $13,000 Zero DS, but it’s got less torque and range. That said, it’s got more torque and power than Harley’s Iron 883.
Still, Harley execs and engineers don’t like talking about specs. They don’t want potential customers making judgments based on what the LiveWire offers right now. The LiveWire is a work in progress, based on “what we think our customers are looking for,” Richer says. The company hopes to glean more info during the LiveWire tour, and iterate accordingly to suit consumer tastes. Think of this as LiveWire v1.0.
Harley isn’t saying much about the drivetrain beyond saying the bike uses a lithium-ion battery with a range of 53 miles. It charges in 3.5 hours at 220 volts. Assuming the bike has a 3.3 kw charging system like other electric motorcycles, some back-of-the-envelope math suggests the LiveWire uses a 10 kilowatt-hour pack. Twist the throttle and the bike leaps forward with authority. Roll off the throttle and the regenerative braking kicks in, bringing the bike down from speed with due efficiency.
Harley-Davidson
Harley emphasizes its excitement over the LiveWire, but downplays its importance. An electric bike is just an idea, something that could draw younger, urban buyers to the brand. Companies like Zero have had some success with that strategy, and even convinced a few police departments to add electrics to their fleets. “This is just part of us understanding where the world might want to go,” Richer says. The upside of so cautious an approach, of course, is there’s less fallout if the bike is a flop.
New direction
That’s not out of the question. Harley’s past forays into the potentially lucrative market for smaller, city-focused bikes have ended poorly. That hasn’t kept it from trying again this year with the launch of the Street, a simpler, cheaper, bike made for city riding. The LiveWire is another step in that direction.
“Why can’t Harley do some of these other cool things, too, and see where it takes us?” Levatich says.
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