Monthly Archives: September 2021

Clubhouse finally makes audio shareable with 30-second previews of rooms

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One week after introducing a new invite system, Clubhouse is introducing a host of new features. The first of those new is Clips, a tool people can use to share previews of public rooms. When creators and hosts enable the feature, you’ll see a new icon that looks like a pair of scissors. Tap it and Clubhouse will capture the last 30 seconds of audio, which you can then share on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, iMessage or WhatsApp. Clubhouse says it’s rolling out Clips in beta to select creators today. In most public and open rooms, you should see the scissors icon there unless the host has gone out of their way to disable the feature.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Clubhouse also plans to introduce a way for people to share archives of past live rooms. The feature is called Replays. As with Clips, it’s something that people will be able to disable if they want. When active, however, it will make past rooms discoverable for as long as a host or creator wants people to find that conversation. Clubhouse says it plans to start rolling out Replays sometime in October.

Rounding things out, Clubhouse is introducing a search tool that allows you to look for specific people, clubs, live rooms and future events. Initially, that functionality will live in the Explore tab for about a week or two before Clubhouse moves it to the hallway sidebar. Last but not least, Android users can look forward to Clubhouse rolling out support for spatial audio. In many ways, the updates Clubhouse announced today address shortcomings that have been in the app for a while. The absence of a way to share audio was a particularly notable omission.  

Clubhouse finally makes audio shareable with 30-second previews of rooms

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One week after introducing a new invite system, Clubhouse is introducing a host of new features. The first of those new is Clips, a tool people can use to share previews of public rooms. When creators and hosts enable the feature, you’ll see a new icon that looks like a pair of scissors. Tap it and Clubhouse will capture the last 30 seconds of audio, which you can then share on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, iMessage or WhatsApp. Clubhouse says it’s rolling out Clips in beta to select creators today. In most public and open rooms, you should see the scissors icon there unless the host has gone out of their way to disable the feature.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Clubhouse also plans to introduce a way for people to share archives of past live rooms. The feature is called Replays. As with Clips, it’s something that people will be able to disable if they want. When active, however, it will make past rooms discoverable for as long as a host or creator wants people to find that conversation. Clubhouse says it plans to start rolling out Replays sometime in October.

Rounding things out, Clubhouse is introducing a search tool that allows you to look for specific people, clubs, live rooms and future events. Initially, that functionality will live in the Explore tab for about a week or two before Clubhouse moves it to the hallway sidebar. Last but not least, Android users can look forward to Clubhouse rolling out support for spatial audio. In many ways, the updates Clubhouse announced today address shortcomings that have been in the app for a while. The absence of a way to share audio was a particularly notable omission.  

The key to a healthier diet starts by redesigning the refrigerator.

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“Displaying vegetables and fruits makes me remember to eat them”, said one of the target users in an interview with designer Tati Ferrucio while she was developing The Fresh Fridge.

The Fresh Fridge relooks the very brief of the refrigerator. Most fridges are designed to perform one prime function – keeping your food fresh for long. The Fresh Fridge, however, also considers other aspects like the contents of the fridge and the behaviors of the user, and promotes a lifestyle that gets you to eat healthier, more nutritious food like fruits and vegetables. With a transparent door, the Fresh Fridge feels like the produce section of the supermarket. The fruits are kept on display, reminding you to eat them when you’re hungry, and the transparent window actually discourages you from wanting to keep unhealthy food in the fridge, in case other people see it and judge your eating habits.

The Fresh Fridge is an ecosystem featuring the fridge itself, and a smart display above it. Designed by IDSA Student Merit Award-winner Tati Ferrucio, the Fresh Fridge focuses on the complex system of a healthier lifestyle, rather than just on individual food items. The smart display above the fridge comes with a touch-sensitive surface and a built-in camera. It acts as a sort of hub for all information, allowing you to manage inventory, order fresh food online, watch recipe tutorials, and bond with friends or family members while you prepare food or while eating (you also get the added bonus of being able to show your mum you’re eating healthy!)

Underneath the smart display sits the main fridge, designed to be a slightly more compact companion to your regular fridge (where you’d store all your day-to-day meals, groceries, drinks, leftovers, etc.) The Fresh Fridge comes with compartments designed specifically for different kinds of healthy foods – leafy greens go on top, where it’s cooler, while fruits and veggies occupy the lower spaces. The trays even account for prepared/cooked items like salads, burrito bowls, smoothie bowls, or cut fruits, with slide-in areas for airtight containers.

The top of the Fresh Fridge becomes the perfect area to prep your food. The ingredients remain easily accessible below, while the smart display on top lets you tick off items from your inventory and even prepare meals by watching recipe videos or chatting with your nonna who guides you with their tips. Plug-points built into the top of the Fresh Fridge let you hook up appliances like blenders, induction stoves, or rice-cookers, while a slide-out tray makes mise en place easy, allowing you to chop, dice, peel, mash, season, or garnish your food.

As you take food from the Fresh Fridge, the smart display on the top lets you tick it off, helping the fridge track inventory for a more planned grocery shopping experience. It’s not entirely clear if the Fresh Fridge also reminds you when food’s spoiling, although that would be an extremely handy feature in making sure you don’t waste anything!

The Fresh Fridge approaches the appliance’s design rather uniquely. The clear (slightly textured) glass on the front really helps inform the interiors, which Ferrucio designed keeping organization in mind. Each of the trays (made from recycled plastic) come with horizontal shelves that help you neatly organize and present your food. The trays feature a modular section on the right too, letting you add containers with dividers, airtight storage boxes, microwave-friendly lunchboxes, etc. Lastly, a mild light on the inside helps illuminate the Fresh Fridge like the refrigerated aisle at supermarkets. The light activates the minute the camera on the smart display notices someone approaching the fridge or walking by, and the fact that the healthy food’s put on display for you really helps condition the mind into eating healthier, more nutritious meals!

Designer: Tati Ferrucio

New FCC rules could force telephone companies to block robocalls to 911 call centers

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Back in 2012, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a special do-not-call registry to protect 911 call centers from robocalls. The system was never implemented in part due to security concerns that came up when the FCC and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started looking into the feasibility of the idea. Specifically, there was a worry that a bad actor could use the registry to flood a call center with automated calls and thereby prevent them from helping people in need.

Fast forward to the present and the FCC says it has a better idea on how to accomplish the goal assigned to it by Congress. On Thursday, the agency proposed new rules that would require telephone companies to block robocalls made to those facilities. As Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel points out, the advantage of this approach is that it would limit access to the do-not-call registry to a select group of verified telephone companies and carriers. And by limiting access to that list, the FCC and FTC can put in place better safeguards to protect it. With today’s decision, the FCC isn’t ready yet to implement that system, but what it does plan to do is collect feedback before moving forward. “We believe this is a promising approach, but we want to get this right,” Rosenworcel said. 

New FCC rules could force telephone companies to block robocalls to 911 call centers

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Back in 2012, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a special do-not-call registry to protect 911 call centers from robocalls. The system was never implemented in part due to security concerns that came up when the FCC and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started looking into the feasibility of the idea. Specifically, there was a worry that a bad actor could use the registry to flood a call center with automated calls and thereby prevent them from helping people in need.

Fast forward to the present and the FCC says it has a better idea on how to accomplish the goal assigned to it by Congress. On Thursday, the agency proposed new rules that would require telephone companies to block robocalls made to those facilities. As Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel points out, the advantage of this approach is that it would limit access to the do-not-call registry to a select group of verified telephone companies and carriers. And by limiting access to that list, the FCC and FTC can put in place better safeguards to protect it. With today’s decision, the FCC isn’t ready yet to implement that system, but what it does plan to do is collect feedback before moving forward. “We believe this is a promising approach, but we want to get this right,” Rosenworcel said. 

Facebook keeps downplaying its own research and lawmakers aren’t buying it

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Yet another Facebook official just spent hours being grilled by members of Congress about the company’s policies, and whether or not it does enough to protect some of its most vulnerable users. And once again, the Facebook executive — today it was Head of Safety Antigone Davis — seemed to do her best to dodge the most difficult questions.

But the latest hearing on teen mental health, which came in response to reporting from The WSJ, was different from past hearings. That’s because, thanks to a whistleblower, members of the Senate Commerce Committee now have access to thousands of internal documents written by the company’s own researchers.

The documents, some of which have been made public, paint a very different picture of Facebook and Instagram’s understanding of how their services impact teens’ mental health than what they’ve publicly portrayed. Those documents are in the hands of lawmakers, making the findings that much harder for Facebook to spin. The disclosures have already forced Facebook to "pause" work on an Instagram Kids app.

“We now have a deep insight into Facebook's relentless campaign to recruit and exploit young users,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said at the start of the hearing. “We now know, while Facebook publicly denies that Instagram is deeply harmful for teens, privately, Facebook, researchers and experts have been ringing the alarm for years.”

This has forced Facebook into the uncomfortable position of trying to downplay the significance of its own research. “This is not bombshell research,” Davis repeated multiple times during the hearing. One day earlier, Facebook released heavily annotated versions of two of the documents, with notes that also tried to explain away its own findings. Those documents, which were just two of the “thousands” Blumenthal said he now has access to, used words like “myopic” and “sensationalizing” to try to minimize findings like the fact that Instagram makes “body images worse for 1 in 3 teen girls.”

The tactic didn’t go over well in the Senate on Thursday. “This research is a bombshell,” Blumenthal said. “It is powerful, gripping, riveting evidence that Facebook knows the harmful effects of its site on children, and that it has concealed those facts and findings.”

As with past hearings, there were some cringey moments. At one point, Blumenthal demanded to know if Facebook would “commit to ending finsta” — a reference to the secondary accounts often used by teens to stay anonymous. That forced Davis to awkwardly explain that so-called “finstas” are not an official Instagram feature. At another point, Sen. Ted Cruz demanded Davis explain why she wasn’t appearing at the hearing in person (she cited COVID-19 protocols).

But even with those moments, it was difficult to ignore the significance of these issues. It may seem obvious, but kids and teens are incredibly important to the company, which is consistently behind rivals like TikTok and Snapchat for that demographic. So much so that a former employee who worked on Messenger Kids recently said that “losing the Teen audience was considered an 'existential threat,'” for Facebook.

Worse for Facebook, there are very likely more bombshells coming. The whistleblower who provided the documents to The Journal and lawmakers, is appearing on 60 MinutesSunday night. And she is testifying at a separate Commerce Committee hearing next week. So while Facebook executives may be able to dodge questions and insist that their researchers’ conclusions have been mischaracterized, it will be much harder to rebut someone who was closely involved with that work.

Some senators hinted that there would be more to come at the next hearing. Senator Ray Luján asked Davis whether “Facebook ever tested whether a change to its platform increases an individual's or a group of users' propensity to post a violent or hateful language.” Davis said that it wasn’t her “area of expertise.”

“We might get more responses to that one next week,” he said.

Facebook keeps downplaying its own research and lawmakers aren’t buying it

Posted on by

Yet another Facebook official just spent hours being grilled by members of Congress about the company’s policies, and whether or not it does enough to protect some of its most vulnerable users. And once again, the Facebook executive — today it was Head of Safety Antigone Davis — seemed to do her best to dodge the most difficult questions.

But the latest hearing on teen mental health, which came in response to reporting from The WSJ, was different from past hearings. That’s because, thanks to a whistleblower, members of the Senate Commerce Committee now have access to thousands of internal documents written by the company’s own researchers.

The documents, some of which have been made public, paint a very different picture of Facebook and Instagram’s understanding of how their services impact teens’ mental health than what they’ve publicly portrayed. Those documents are in the hands of lawmakers, making the findings that much harder for Facebook to spin. The disclosures have already forced Facebook to "pause" work on an Instagram Kids app.

“We now have a deep insight into Facebook's relentless campaign to recruit and exploit young users,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said at the start of the hearing. “We now know, while Facebook publicly denies that Instagram is deeply harmful for teens, privately, Facebook, researchers and experts have been ringing the alarm for years.”

This has forced Facebook into the uncomfortable position of trying to downplay the significance of its own research. “This is not bombshell research,” Davis repeated multiple times during the hearing. One day earlier, Facebook released heavily annotated versions of two of the documents, with notes that also tried to explain away its own findings. Those documents, which were just two of the “thousands” Blumenthal said he now has access to, used words like “myopic” and “sensationalizing” to try to minimize findings like the fact that Instagram makes “body images worse for 1 in 3 teen girls.”

The tactic didn’t go over well in the Senate on Thursday. “This research is a bombshell,” Blumenthal said. “It is powerful, gripping, riveting evidence that Facebook knows the harmful effects of its site on children, and that it has concealed those facts and findings.”

As with past hearings, there were some cringey moments. At one point, Blumenthal demanded to know if Facebook would “commit to ending finsta” — a reference to the secondary accounts often used by teens to stay anonymous. That forced Davis to awkwardly explain that so-called “finstas” are not an official Instagram feature. At another point, Sen. Ted Cruz demanded Davis explain why she wasn’t appearing at the hearing in person (she cited COVID-19 protocols).

But even with those moments, it was difficult to ignore the significance of these issues. It may seem obvious, but kids and teens are incredibly important to the company, which is consistently behind rivals like TikTok and Snapchat for that demographic. So much so that a former employee who worked on Messenger Kids recently said that “losing the Teen audience was considered an 'existential threat,'” for Facebook.

Worse for Facebook, there are very likely more bombshells coming. The whistleblower who provided the documents to The Journal and lawmakers, is appearing on 60 MinutesSunday night. And she is testifying at a separate Commerce Committee hearing next week. So while Facebook executives may be able to dodge questions and insist that their researchers’ conclusions have been mischaracterized, it will be much harder to rebut someone who was closely involved with that work.

Some senators hinted that there would be more to come at the next hearing. Senator Ray Luján asked Davis whether “Facebook ever tested whether a change to its platform increases an individual's or a group of users' propensity to post a violent or hateful language.” Davis said that it wasn’t her “area of expertise.”

“We might get more responses to that one next week,” he said.

Samsung’s digital car keys will soon be available on the Genesis GV60 in Korea

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First announced back in January at Samsung's Galaxy S21 event, Hyundai revealed on Thursday that its upcoming GV60 crossover will be the first to work with the phonemaker's newfangled Digital Key — at least for GV60 owners living in Korea.

The Digital Key utilizes NFC and ultra wideband (UWB) technologies to grant drivers passive access to their vehicles — that is, so long as your Galaxy phone is in your possession, the vehicle will open automatically as you approach. The key can also be shared with "family and friends" according to a Thursday media release from Hyundai, though they'll need to own a Galaxy S21+ or Ultra, Note20 Ultra, or a Z Fold 2 or 3 for it to work. The system is designed to run on Android 12 and later, assuming your phone has a UWB chip, though it will also operate via NFC if you don't. 

Hyundai touts Samsung's embedded Secure Element (eSE) in terms of data protection and notes that the UWB-based transmission system is highly resistant to interception, cloning or jamming. Whether that security scheme will stand up to a mugger bonking you on the head, then taking your phone and your car remains to be seen. The digital key feature is expected to launch in Korea by the end of this year.

Google announced back in May that it planned to begin offering its own digital key system — separate from what Samsung has developed — on "select Pixel and Galaxy phones" with UWB capabilities. We've now seen UWB in the Galaxy, does that mean the Pixel 6 could offer it as well?

Samsung’s digital car keys will soon be available on the Genesis GV60 in Korea

Posted on by

First announced back in January at Samsung's Galaxy S21 event, Hyundai revealed on Thursday that its upcoming GV60 crossover will be the first to work with the phonemaker's newfangled Digital Key — at least for GV60 owners living in Korea.

The Digital Key utilizes NFC and ultra wideband (UWB) technologies to grant drivers passive access to their vehicles — that is, so long as your Galaxy phone is in your possession, the vehicle will open automatically as you approach. The key can also be shared with "family and friends" according to a Thursday media release from Hyundai, though they'll need to own a Galaxy S21+ or Ultra, Note20 Ultra, or a Z Fold 2 or 3 for it to work. The system is designed to run on Android 12 and later, assuming your phone has a UWB chip, though it will also operate via NFC if you don't. 

Hyundai touts Samsung's embedded Secure Element (eSE) in terms of data protection and notes that the UWB-based transmission system is highly resistant to interception, cloning or jamming. Whether that security scheme will stand up to a mugger bonking you on the head, then taking your phone and your car remains to be seen. The digital key feature is expected to launch in Korea by the end of this year.

Google announced back in May that it planned to begin offering its own digital key system — separate from what Samsung has developed — on "select Pixel and Galaxy phones" with UWB capabilities. We've now seen UWB in the Galaxy, does that mean the Pixel 6 could offer it as well?

This lightweight + durable drone can fold down and fit into a small case when not in use!

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A super lightweight drone designed to operate in the most extreme environment and difficult terrain. In a way perfect for explorers who are curious to discover the unknown.

Explorers will go any length trying to satiate their curiosity, and any tool that aids them in this quest is more than welcome. While DJI is the preferred choice for most action sports or adventure activities – it’s time we ask for a drone that’s made specifically for exploration of the nook and crannies of the face of the earth. Yes, I’m talking about the explorers who take all the pain to bring home some of the most breathtaking shots from the jaw-dropping hidden landscapes of the planet.

The Drone Explorer aims to fulfill that little void which demands a drone that’s ultra-resilient, lightweight, has a longer battery life, and can carry advanced camera equipment in the most extreme weather and climatic conditions. Film-making crews who discover and bring to us the majestic never before seen footage of caves, forests, rock walls and more. This drone pushes the limits further, going into dangerous places that have still not been explored due to human limitations. Places like uninhibited islands, rainforests infested with dangerous creatures, or caves that are too risky to venture out into.

All this is possible with the drone’s terrain observation sensors, prior danger warning systems, and high-class connectivity for live streams. Keeping in mind the ease of carrying, the drone has a minimal foldable form factor – so small you can put it inside a small case without even knowing it is there in your backpack. The four propellers fold via hinged structure and fit inside a small carry bag too. Perfect for exploration and research activities with minimal fuzz.

Since the drone has to explore narrow caves or the rough rainforests – for instance – the aerodynamics need to be on point. This is fully proofed with the body line and aerodynamic shape for a stable flight no matter what the conditions or terrain. For complete protection from the elements, the Drone Explorer is made out of lightweight and durable titanium. It gets waterproof coating to make sure it doesn’t have an off day on a rainy afternoon!

Designer: Design One