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The best HDTV indoor antenna

By Grant Clauser

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. Read the full article here.

After spending more than 20 hours attaching many antennas to multiple TVs in two different testing locations (one suburban and one urban), watching way too much daytime programming, and compiling objective data from a signal-strength meter, we think the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse is the indoor HD antenna with the best combination of features for most users. It matched or outperformed larger models in pulling in TV signals, required less (basically zero) assembly, and was easy to hide. The omnidirectional antenna includes an attached 12-foot coaxial cable and sticks to your wall without any hardware or tape, which makes finding the right mounting location simpler than with the other antennas we tested.

Who this is for

TV antennas are perfect for people who are fed up with expensive cable TV subscriptions and who get most of their viewing fix from online streaming services such as Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and Sling TV. Streaming gives you lots of great TV programming, but an antenna gives you free, live, HD programs from major networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, The CW, Telemundo, Univision, and PBS.

How we tested

Today, most indoor TV antennas are flat wall-huggers that copy the original Mohu Leaf design. Photo: Michael Berk

We tested the antennas in two locations: Hatfield, Pennsylvania (a suburb north of Philadelphia), and Brooklyn, New York. For test purposes, we evaluated the signal strength and quality of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, The CW, PBS, ION, and UNI, as well as some independent stations.

For our initial tests, we scanned for channels multiple times with each antenna. We then recorded the number of channels each antenna received and the quality and integrity of the picture. We also tested how well the antennas responded to touching, movement, and obstructions by walking near the antennas and covering them.

Next, we connected each antenna to a Silicon Dust HD HomeRun external tuner, which includes software that calculates signal strength and quality on a scale of 1 to 100. We then scanned each antenna again (for more than a few minutes, multiple times) and recorded the signal strength and quality of each of the target channels. We considered signal strength and quality readings of 70 and above to indicate the best-performing channels for a given antenna.

Our pick

The Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse easily attaches to most surfaces without any hardware or tape. Photo: Grant Clauser

In our tests, the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse proved to be the best-performing antenna in our New York City location, and a very good antenna for our Philly-area location. It can pull in free UHF and VHF HDTV channels within about a 15- to 20-mile radius. Its design and extra features, considered alongside its overall strong performance, made it our pick.

The Eclipse takes the flat-antenna concept in a slightly different direction by eliminating much of the plastic casing. It’s essentially a flat, circular piece of plastic with the antenna element inside. The wall side of the Eclipse is tacky, making it easy to attach to any flat surface (and saving you from having to poke holes in your walls or risk pulling off paint or wallpaper). A 12-foot nonremovable cord is included.

A budget option

The Channel Master Flatenna worked pretty well in our tests, but it’s cheaply made (in this photo, you can see the crease that occurred in shipping). Photo: Michael Berk

If you want to save even more money with your cord cutting, or if the Eclipse is unavailable, the Channel Master Flatenna is a good alternative. It’s basic, with the antenna wire embedded in thin plastic, but it held its own against much more expensive antennas (especially in New York City), and the price can’t be beat. Note that the plastic is thinner and flimsier than what you’ll find on the Mohu Leaf models, and that this unit has a short, nonremovable cord. If you plan to mount the Flatenna behind your TV, the length won’t matter, but if you need to move it any farther than 6 feet from your TV, you’ll need to add a cable with a coupler.

Wrapping up

We spent a lot of time trying various antennas, talking to experts, and comparing results, and we feel confident that the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse is the antenna that will satisfy most users’ broadcast-TV needs, as long as they’re not too far from a tower. While a few of the other antennas we tested pulled in a few stations better (depending on the location in which we used them), the Eclipse was consistent in both locations.

This guide may have been updated by The Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

– Repost from: engadget Post

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[immedtech]

Luxe Is Raising Tens Of Millions In A Big New Funding Round From Hertz

Luxe is in talks with a strategic investor that will infuse the company with “tens of millions” in new financing from Hertz, our sources tell us. Our understanding is that the round is still in negotiations — and, of course, could change at any time — but one source says the round could be as high as $50 million.

The Information also reported that the funding round is coming from Hertz, and said the round is coming in at a more than $100 million pre-money valuation. This round, according to our sources, has been in the works for a while — as far back as last quarter when it seemed that it would not be able to close a new round of financing. Our sources stressed that the deal hasn’t closed yet.

It would make sense that the deal would come from Hertz, which could lean on Luxe’s model in multiple markets in order to offer consumers a way to park rental cars on demand.

Luxe offers customers on-demand parking on both a subscription and one-off model for a fee. It’s available in markets like San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and New York. The play here is that these cities are so congested that parking is a pain for drivers to the point that they’ll be willing to pay up for someone else to park their car. From what we understand, the subscription model is quickly becoming one of its largest growth-drivers, and the company may be putting more emphasis on that.

After Two Years In Stealth, Smart Lock Maker Latch Talks Funding, Features Luxe Is Partnering With Tesla, Will Charge Cars As It Valet Parks Them Vallie Takes The Luxe Valet Parking Model And Puts It In London Introducing Disrupt TV Live From Disrupt SF

Luxe’s on-demand parking model has come under a lot of scrutiny given the end of ZIRX’s consumer-facing parking service. However, we do hear from our sources that the company isn’t doing too badly in the San Francisco market, which might be why the company was able to secure a new round of financing — even from a strategic investor like Hertz. Luxe has raised $25.5 million in financing prior to this round of funding.

We’ve sent a request for comment to Luxe and will update the story when we hear back from them.

– Repost from: techcrunch Post

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MasterCard’s selfie security: What could possibly go wrong?

When I read about MasterCard’s plan to do selfie security with purchases, I wondered what the first massive breach of biometric data is going to look like. Unlike passwords, biometrics such as face mapping, fingerprints, and iris scans can’t be changed when a database gets popped. Worse, having that data sold to marketers or snarfed into an authoritarian database isn’t revokable. Manny the cat would not approve.

Fortunately, MasterCard isn’t going to be replacing the password or pin with selfies, but instead wants to make its “Selfie Pay” app part of a two-step security routine when purchases are made or money is withdrawn. MasterCard says users will be required to blink for the app to demonstrate it’s a live image. The company plans to roll it out in the US, Canada, the U.K. and a few European countries by this summer.

Only MasterCard knows I’m Manny the cat

In 2015, MasterCard’s pilot program for Selfie Pay took place with Silicon Valley’s First Tech Federal Credit Union. So I’m going to make a guess that the opportunities to troubleshoot user skin color were few and far between. I say this because facial recognition technology has a well documented problem “seeing” black people.

HP’s webcams got a lot of bad press in 2009 for its cameras’ inability to “see” black faces. Horrifyingly, Google’s facial recognition software in 2015 tagged two African Americans as gorillas. Google’s Yonatan Zunger reacted appropriately, yet noted in a tweet that “Until recently, Google Photos was confusing white faces with dogs and seals. Machine learning is hard.”

Machine learning is indeed hard. So is security.

And don’t let current headlines fool you, the whole selfie-security plan wasn’t entirely a security based decision.

“Selfie Pay” was first aimed at MasterCard’s millennial customers when announced in July, 2015. Ajay Bhalla, MasterCard’s President of Enterprise Security Solutions, told press it would be a way for the company to engage with young people. He added, “The new generation, which is into selfies … I think they’ll find it cool. They’ll embrace it.”

Reassuringly, college students reacted to Mr. Bhalla’s remarks with an appropriate amount of skepticism and mistrust. I just hope everyone in Bhalla’s security chain “is into” encryption as much as selfies.

We may share your password with our advertisers

We can yell “encrypt or GTFO” at MasterCard all we want, and it won’t change our other big problem with all of this: The breach that comes from within. Meaning, when companies sell our personal data in backroom deals to greedy brokers, or let it get siphoned into government databases behind the scenes.

Did you ever think someone might sell your password to advertisers as marketable information about you? That’s the intersection we’re approaching.

Welcome to the entirely messed-up, behind-the-scenes free-for-all of facial recognition technology in the private sector. There is nothing preventing private entities (businesses, app developers, data brokers, or advertisers) from selling, trading, or otherwise profiting from an individual’s biometric information. Distressingly, the US government has only gotten as far as a working group to develop rules around companies using facial recognition. Voluntary rules, that is.

This gets super worrying when you consider that there are companies hell-bent on using every scrap of user data for profit who are pouring money into making facial recognition both accurate and ubiquitous. Like Facebook, whose “DeepFace” project will most likely commingle with its billion-user rich stash of identified photos. Even though its name is a facepalm, DeepFace’s ability to identify dissidents someone by photo alone is up to a remarkable 97% accuracy.

Entities like Facebook are a great example of where facial recognition and data monetization are coming together in ways that are troubling. In fact, Facebook has been using facial recognition to increase the worth of its data since at least 2011 — when the Electronic Privacy Information Center appealed to the FTC to “specifically prohibit the use of Facebook’s biometric image database by any law enforcement agency in the world, absent a showing of adequate legal process, consistent with international human rights norms.”

#NoFilter surveillance

EPIC isn’t alone in its worries about protecting consumers from facial recognition databases. At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in 2012, Senator Al Franken remarked that, “Facebook may have created the world’s largest privately held database of face prints without the explicit knowledge of its users.”

Franken continued, linking the deficits in consumer protections with the FBI’s then-new facial-recognition program designed to identify people of interest called Next Generation Identification (NGI). “The FBI pilot could be abused to not only identify protesters at political events and rallies, but to target them for selective jailing and prosecution, stifling their First Amendment rights,” he said. NGI became fully operational in 2014.

MasterCard’s Ajay Bhalla probably wasn’t thinking about that when he was trying to get down with the kids. He probably also doesn’t know that Selfie Pay might cross-match and compare really well with commercial surveillance products like TrapWire, which is sold to and implemented by private entities, the US Government “and its allies overseas.”

TrapWire combines various intel surveillance technologies with tracking and location data, individual profile histories from various sources (datamining and social media), and image data analysis (such as facial recognition; TrapWire’s video component) to monitor people under the guise of threat detection.

Upon the 2012 release of Wikileaks’ Stratfor documents, news about TrapWire and sibling surveillance technologies (like Europe’s INDECT) were met with surprise, fear, outrage, and protests. A significant number of TrapWire and INDECT’s opponents believe the surveillance systems to be direct threats to privacy, civil freedoms and that their implementation could constitute human rights violations.

MasterCard’s Selfie Pay will very likely be opening the door to consumer level biometric security, and if done properly, that could be a really good thing. I just hope the methods of storing and protecting this data are as shrewd and clever as the people profiting off it by passing it around in the background.

– Repost from: engadget Post

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[immedtech]

Does Amazon’s new ad-supported show hint at a free video service?

Yesterday, Amazon announced that season 3 of Vogue’s The Fashion Fund is now available for streaming through its video library. This series is a little different than the company’s Prime Video offerings, though, as you can watch The Fashion Fund for free thanks to its ads. This is a first for Amazon, breaking from its subscription-based streaming plan to offer free ad-supported content to viewers. The company has offered television shows for free if you were willing to sit through ads before, but usually the selections are limited to the first episode.

Is Amazon prepping a free video service that will get by on revenue from ads? Well, maybe. There are a couple of other explanations, though. First, as we mentioned yesterday, Amazon is selling items from the designers on the show on its site. You’re basically watching one big ad for The Fashion Fund collection, so there’s no doubt the company is looking to drive sales. Amazon could also be using the ad-supported method to test the waters of unscripted original series, too.

“We’re always experimenting on behalf of our customers, including experimenting with ads,” an Amazon spokeswoman told Recode. She went on to explain that using ads to support the production of The Fashion Fund was on the table because of the strong interest from said advertisers. We’d surmise that if Amazon wanted to do an unscripted cooking show, something along the lines of Chopped or Top Chef, the pool of interested brands would be quite deep as well. And if you’re worried, the one thing the spokeswoman did confirm is that ads wouldn’t appear on Prime Video.

As Recode points out, a free streaming tier would likely pull in a lot of people who aren’t willing to pay $99 for Prime or make other movie and TV show purchases. Either way, Amazon isn’t revealing any hints as to its future plans. We’ll have to wait and see how effective Vogue’s show is driving viewers… and sales. A free video service certainly an interesting proposition for the company and one that stands to attract more folks to its streaming library. In the meantime, we’ve reached out to Amazon for more info and will update this post if/when we receive a response.

Source: Recode

– Repost from: engadget Post

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[immedtech]

Meet the Oscar-nominated sound designers behind Kylo’s lightsaber

Skywalker Sound is home to Star Wars. From the first movie in 1977 to episode VII in 2015, the sound effects for the entire saga have been shaped and mixed within the red-bricked walls of George Lucas’ audio post-production facility. The award-winning sound designers that inhabit the studios meticulously convert fictional ideas into believable sounds. Instead of a ready-made digital library, they rely on organic sounds. Mundane objects and creatures are carefully manipulated into powerful spaceships and energized lightsabers.

This year, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has five Academy Award nominations, including two for the Skywalker Sound team. I caught up with co-supervising sound editor David Acord (nominated in the sound editing category) and re-recording mixer Christopher Scarabosio (sound mixing) to learn more about Kylo Ren’s lightsaber and BB-8’s motors.​

– Repost from: engadget Post

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Apple’s $120M patent victory over Samsung overturned on appeal

The never-ending Apple vs. Samsung patent wars just had another chapter written today, long after most of us stopped caring. A US appeals court overturned the $120 million jury-appointed verdict that was awarded to Apple way back in May of 2014. Specifically, the court said that a variety of older Samsung phones (including the Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note 2, a host of Galaxy S II variants and the Galaxy S3) didn’t infringe upon three Apple patents. The patents in question covered swipe to unlock, auto-correct and a quick link feature that lets links in one app open up another app.

As noted by Reuters, the quick link feature made up $99 million of the $120 million in damages awarded to Apple — the jury decided that all 10 Samsung devices in question infringed upon that particular feature. But today’s ruling by a three-judge panel in the Federal Circuit disagreed on that point and vacated the jury’s decision. Specifically, the panel ruled that Samsung didn’t infringe on Apple’s quick links patent and also decided that its “swipe to unlock” and autocorrect patents were invalid based on prior art.

It’s worth noting that the larger decision Apple prevailed on in 2012 isn’t affected by today’s ruling. A separate jury awarded nearly $1 billion in damages to Apple, though eventually that number was cut back to $548 million through a number of appeals. Last summer, a court decision denied Samsung’s request for reconsideration.

Via: Reuters

Source: United States Court of Appeals (PDF)

– Repost from: engadget Post

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[immedtech]

LG G5 يفوز بجائزة أفضل هاتف ذكي خلال ملتقى MWC 2016

الرئيسية | آخر الأخبار العالمية | هواتف محمولة | LG G5 يفوز بجائزة أفضل هاتف ذكي خلال ملتقى MWC 2016

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قبل 35 دقيقة

أعلنت جمعية “جي إس إم” GSM Association أمس الخميس عن أسماء الفائزين في “جوائز المحمول العالمية السنوية” Annual Global Mobile Awards للعام 2016، وتم تكريم الفائزين في حفل أقيم يوم الثلاثاء الماضي.

وتقوم جمعية “جي إس إم” التي تُمثل أكثر من 800 مشغل اتصالات حول العالم، والمُنظِّمة للمؤتمر العالمي للجوال MWC الذي اختتم فعالياته أمس الخميس في مدينة برشلونة الإسبانية، بتوزيع الجوائز بحسب فئات متعددة.

ومن تلك الفئات، أفضل خدمات الأجهزة المحمولة، والتنمية الاقتصادية والاجتماعية، وأفضل التطبيقات، وأفضل الهواتف والأجهزة المحمولة وأفضل تقنيات الأجهزة المحمولة، وهذه الفئات تقسم إلى فئات أخرى.

وعن فئة أفضل الهواتف والأجهزة المحمولة، وبالنسبة للهواتف الذكية فاز بالجائزة لهذا العام الهاتف “سامسونج جالاكسي إس6 إيدج” Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge، وفاز الهاتف “شاومي ردمي 2” Xiaomi Redmi 2 بجائزة أفضل هاتف ذكي منخفض التكلفة، وفاز “سيرفس برو 4” Surface Pro 4 من مايكروسوفت بجائزة أفضل حاسوب لوحي.

وعن فئة أفضل الأجهزة الذكية القابلة للارتداء، فازت سماعات الأذن “أكتيف هارتس” ActivHearts التي تمتاز بقدرتها على قياس نبضات القلب، كما فاز الهاتف الذكي “إل جي جي5” LG G5 بجائزة أفضل هاتف ذكي خلال ملتقى MWC 2016.

وفازت الساعة الذكية “جير إس2” Gear S2 من سامسونج بجائزة أفضل جهاز إلكتروني استهلاكي متصل، وفي فئة تطبيقات المحمول، فاز تطبيق نظارة الواقع الافتراضي “جوجل كاردبورد” Google Cardboard.

ويمكن الاطلاع على كافة الجوائز والفائزين الذين تم اختيارهم في “جوائز المحمول العالمية السنوية” Annual Global Mobile Awards للعام 2016.

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– Repost from: aitnews Post

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[immedtech]

Augmented Reality Computer Vision Startup Wrnch Gets $1.8M Series A Led By Mark Cuban

Talk to anyone in the AR space right now and the phrase “democratizing x” is bound to arise two or three dozen times.

Wrnch CEO Paul Kruszewski says that concept is especially true for the computer vision space with warchest-toting companies like Magic Leap powering their own technologies while dramatically smaller teams are left to piecemeal their own solutions.

Today, his company, Wrnch, announced a Series A raise of $1.8 million led by Mark Cuban’s Radical Ventures. Aligo Innovation, gr0k and TandemLaunch Ventures also participated in the round.

“As a diversified technology investor, I have a ring side seat to watch how AR/VR is set to change the world,” said Cuban in a statement.  “I am excited to help the wrnch become the go-to tool for computer vision development.”

This funding will allow Wrnch to weather the commercialization phase and prove the business model surrounding their core engine Kruszewski says.

Kruszewski told me that it’s early enough in the space that not everyone is fully aware of what computer vision is, but he wants to approach their computer vision engine in a manner similar to how Epic Games approached their video game engine, by helping build actual content to draw attention to their computer vision engine.

“We’re working with the various crackerjack computer vision team units on actual production stuff right now,” Kruszewski said. People running Wrnch’s engine will eventually be able to use it to “make mass market Magic Leap kinds of experiences” across devices.

– Repost from: techcrunch Post

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