Tech. World

Microsoft unveiled its first Lumia phones running Windows 10 back in October, and today it offered up a third and much cheaper variant. If last year’s Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL looked impressive — impressive for phones running on a ‘dead’ platform — then the Lumia 650, which was outed today, is the budget version, coming in as it does at $199 — far cheaper than the $549 and $649 of the 950 and 950 XL. That $199 gets you five-inch OLED screen, eight- and five-megapixel cameras and the front and back, and a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 212 which doesn’t support Microsoft’s ‘Continuum ‘ phone-to-PC feature. http://techcrunch.com/

Even Microsoft’s new image recognition app has no idea what kind of dog I have.  Oh well!  If you don’t own a mixed-breed mutt saved from the kill shelter, however, you might have fun with the company’s latest Microsoft Garage project: Fetch!, a new iPhone app that looks at photos of dogs to identify its breed. Or, in the case when it can’t make an exact match, the app will show you a percentage of the closest match. Oh yes, in case you’re wondering – you can use it with people, too. The app is the latest in a series of fun projects that are meant to highlight machine learning’s potential. In this case, that’s the ability to look at an image and make some sort of determination about its contents – basically, it’s teaching machines to make the sort of intuitive leaps that people naturally do. http://techcrunch.com/

Amazon will acquire startup Emvantage for an undisclosed amount to develop its Indian e-commerce site’s payment platform. In a press announcement, Amazon said the Noida-based company’s employees will start working for Amazon’s payment team after the transaction is completed. Founded in 2012 by chief executive officer Vivek Sagar, Emvantage’s platform includes a payment gateway for online transactions made using credit or debit cards, mobile payment tools that integrate into merchant apps, and a prepaid wallet. Making it easier for customers to pay for online purchases is a key point of focus for India’s top e-commerce businesses, which include Amazon, Snapdeal, and Flipkart. India’s e-commerce market is expected to be worth $100 billion by 2020, but the country’s credit card penetration rate is still extremely low. Instead, many shoppers pay for e-commerce purchases using online wallets that can be topped up at brick-and-mortar stores, pre-paid cards, or...

Reddit has hired Mark S. Luckie, the former news manager at Twitter and the person behind Today in Black Twitter, as its first-ever head of journalism and media. Journalists and media organizations have been using Reddit for years to discover and source content, but sifting through the loads of information on Reddit isn’t the easiest of tasks. Luckie’s new role will entail working with media organizations, as well as government organizations, to understand how they’re currently using Reddit and what their needs are from the platform, Luckie told me. He’ll then take that feedback and build it into Reddit’s product, with the goal of making Reddit more accessible to a broader community of people. “A lot of it is delving into the community and figuring out how news spread within subreddits,” Luckie said. “I’ve been on Reddit for 8 years now as a lurker. It’s crazy. I don’t think I’ve done anything for eight years, including Twitter. Now, I want to look at it in an offic...

Last year was one of great momentum for civic tech. We saw more  people  and  resources  than ever enter the space, garnering interest from startups, corporations, government agencies and investment firms. Kicking off 2016, civic tech is a fast-growing field with tangible potential to improve the relationship between citizens and government. As the field works to become a sustainable, scalable ecosystem, there are three key trends to keep an eye on — areas where civic tech can start to cement its impact and provide critical proof points. The 2016 election effect — proving the power of civic tech This year’s presidential election will usher in a new wave of citizen engagement tools and platforms aimed at educating voters and boosting voter turnout. These tools and platforms deployed on a national scale in 2016 will provide valuable lessons in what works and what doesn’t work when trying to increase citizen participation. With the Iowa caucuses and the ...

As football fans gear up for the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl  this Sunday , we can expect to see not only a great athletic game, but a host of dazzling new technology at play behind the scenes, working to seamlessly bring the game to millions of viewers. To really appreciate how sophisticated this sport has become, here’s a look at some of the ways Super Bowl technology has evolved in the last fifty years. Camera Tech Has Come a Long Way Back in 1967, Super Bowl 1 aired to viewers simultaneously on NBC and CBS—the only game to have been aired by two major networks at the same time. Unfortunately most of the footage from the game was wiped, as was standard practice at the time. Just this year the NFL was able to locate all 145 plays of the game on a few dozen different sources, stitch them together, enhance and color correct the footage, to bring the game  back to life  for the first time. The daytime game features tons of empty seats, despite $12 ticket...

Graphene, the super thin carbon material that’s been exciting scientists in the decade+ since single-atom thick graphene crystallites were successfully extracted from the bulk material, continues to give hints of a promising future blending electronics and biology. In a new study, conducted by researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Centre and the University of Trieste in Italy, and published in the journal ACS Nano, the suggestion is it could be used to make highly effective, flexible brain implants in future — biodevices that avoid the loss of signal problem associated with the scar tissue that can form around modern electrodes made from more rigid substances, such as silicon and tungsten. Point is, human brains are made of soft tissue so it helps if your electrodes can flex too. Graphene is also considered to have excellent biocompatibility properties (although research into potential toxicity is not conclusive at this stage). The implication of the Cambridge-Trieste research...