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IPhone Features Update for 2013: Get Ready For Fingerprints

wilasister — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:28:33 +0000

About a year ago, a post about IPhone features was published in this blog where there were rumors about the iPhone 5 features. Within just about a year, Apple delivered. iPhone 5 did make headlines last year and this year people have started to speculate about the next iterations from Apple: the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6.

What should we expect with these? One of the most interesting features that these phones are expected to have is to have a fingerprint sensor chip installed on the home button. Given the propensity of theft of iPhones, this could be a great deterrent. “Steal This Phone!” Good luck using it. Bloomberg Blames iPhone Thieves for the increase in crime in New York City last year.

The fingerprint sensor technology will enable users of the new iPhone to authenticate themselves without the need for passwords or usernames. Adding such a feature is not just an advantage in innovation but given that it’s hard to replicate, Apple will have a leg-up on Windows Phone and Android.

The fingerprint detection is expected to be highly sophisticated, ensuring that only real fingerprints gain access to devices with skin property recognition.

Apple hasn’t confirmed this so it’s just speculation and rumor for the moment. It is gaining so much attention that it’s worth investigating. We expect more innovation for iPhone features in the upcoming years and we will keep you updated for that.

IPhone Features Update for 2013: Get Ready For Fingerprints

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Reflective Insulation: The Insulation You Didn’t Know About

Jon Singer — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:07:57 +0000

OK. This is really not a technology post. And it isn’t an April Fools prank either. But when I found out about it, I realized that this is something that can save a lot of money and most people don’t know about it. It’s called reflective insulation.

In your attic, you probably have one of the standard types of insulation – fiberglass typically. The pink stuff that, if you get it anywhere on your person, you’re itching for hours. Fiberglass insulation does have it’s purpose. In fact it does a pretty darn good job of reducing heat transfer with two of the three possible methods. Those two are convective and conductive. Conductive heat transfer is where the heat transfers from one body to another by direct physical contact – a pot on an electric burner for example. Convective is heat transfer either through a gas or a liquid – if you put your hand over boiling water, the steam will get your hand pretty darn hot. (Don’t try this at home).

However, fiberglass does very little for something called radiant heat transfer. Radiant heat transfer is where heat moves via electromagnetic waves. That’s how the sun heats our atmosphere. Basically, what happens in the middle of the summer is the heat that comes in through the roof is absorbed into the fiberglass. At some point it becomes “full” and can’t absorb any more. So it radiates that heat out. If you think about it, when you go into your attic in the summer on a hot day, it’s pretty darn hot up there, despite the fiberglass insulation.

Enter reflective insulation. This is so simple, it’s elegant. Radiant insulation is like aluminum foil – it has a reflective surface. When the radiant energy hit is, it simply bounces back off it. This is why aluminum foil around a baked potato keeps it warm. The reflective insulation is installed by stapling it to the rafters, typically. It can reduce your energy bill substantially – more than 20%.

Want to know more about it reflective insulation? Go here: http://www.thediygreenstore.com

Or if you want to see some case studies which show how reflective insulation can save on energy costs, go here: http://www.thediygreenstore.com/how-it-works/case-studies/

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iPhone futures

Jon Singer — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:13:08 +0000

Not everybody has or wants an iPhone, and not every iPhone feature is the best example on the market, but seeing where Apple’s highly popular smart phone is going (and where people would like it to go) is a great way to get a picture of the near future of mobile technology.

With the iPhone 5 due this summer, rumors are flying thick and fast. Even the New York Times weighed in with an article that describes a cheaper, easier to use device. The article shoots down one rumor: a smaller “nano” iPhone model.

The Times article also cited improved (but unspecified) voice control. Individual apps can be controlled by speech today, but a lot of people are looking for system-wide speech control.

Another rumor is that the iPhone 5 will include near field communications (a.k.a. RFID), a capability recently added to Android phones. This lets the phones read electronic tags embedded in everyday objects like product packaging. According to an AppleInsider post, the iPhone 5 near field capability will have a unique (but unspecified) twist.

One of the more interesting rumors is of a greatly improved set of services for streaming content to and from the cloud. A Cult of Mac article describes tantalizing video-streaming, location-aware and geo-tagging capabilities.

Other rumored features include a 4-inch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

If you’re the kind who likes to look further into the future, here are search results for “iPhone” on Patently Apple, a site that tracks the latest patents awarded to Apple.

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Plugging the gaps in WordPress security

Jon Singer — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:23:42 +0000

A few weeks ago a friend of mine found out the hard way that WordPress blogs are vulnerable to hacking. Her blog had been compromised and an uninvited, nasty little piece of JavaScript began assaulting her readers’ browsers.

If you have a WordPress blog you should know that the default configuration leaves you vulnerable to a number of attacks. Fortunately it’s not hard to take the few steps necessary to greatly improve your blog’s security. If you’re the cautious type you can do a lot to build up your WordPress defenses.

Begin with the common sense steps you should take with anything to do with computers: use strong passwords and back up your data regularly. Another piece of general advice is particularly important with WordPress: keep your blog software updated to the latest version. The WordPress developers don’t fix security holes in older versions.

Even if you don’t do anything else, make sure to secure the wp-config file because it contains the access information for the blog’s database in plain text. Move the wp-config file one level up in the file directory. Also add the following to the .htaccess file:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All

You can let one of several WordPress security plug-ins help you with the rest of the heavy lifting. I found WP Security Scan useful.

Here’s the word on improving WordPress security from the WordPress folks themselves: Hardening WordPress.The information here assumes a moderate level of technical knowledge.

Here are some other sites that offer advice on WordPress security:
WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
11 Best Ways to Improve WordPress Security
10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks
WordPress Security – A Comprehensive Guide
20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks

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Free antivirus tools

Jon Singer — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:44:59 +0000

It's not a bad idea to buy a product like Norton or McAfee to protect your computer from viruses. But you can also do pretty well with tools that you can download for free.

Here's a look at some of the more popular free tools:

Avast, AVG and Avira offer free antivirus scanners that check your system in real time and let you schedule scans of your files. Combined with the firewalls built into your network and operating system, these scanners are a strong line of defense. AVG's free version also scans Web links and warns you if a link is a potential threat.

If something does get through, chances are it will install software that tries to steal your passwords, hijack your browser and/or spread viruses. Malwarebytes and Ad-Aware offer free malware scanners that allow you to search your system for rogue software.

Gmer is a free open-source scanner that peers deep into the recesses of your computer looking for rootkit infections. Rootkit viruses are among the most dangerous and most difficult to find and remove.

It's a good idea to use two or more of these tools rather than relying on any one, preferably an antivirus scanner and a malware scanner. It's also important to remember that no tool, even the ones you pay for, are foolproof.

If you think you've been hit, immediately disconnect your computer from the Internet and DON'T click on anything, even messages that look like they're from an antivirus software package. Use keyboard commands instead: Alternate Tab switches among programs and Alternate F4 closes the active program. Then run your scanners, one at a time.

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Affiliate programs: getting a cut of the action

Jon Singer — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:26:04 +0000

I recently wrote about how to monetize your blog or website by carrying ads. Here's a related way to make money: affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing pays you to carry advertisements on your website, but it works differently from traditional advertising. You get paid when your visitors go to your advertisers' websites and buy something like a book, request information like an insurance quote, or sign up for something like a newsletter.

If your visitors buy things, you'll use a cost per sale (CPS) affiliate program. If your visitors request information, you'll use a cost per lead (CPL) program. And if they sign up for something, you'll use a cost per action (CPA) program.

If you have an informational site, you can, for instance, become an affiliate of a major bookseller like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. Or if your website or blog contains product reviews, advice for hobbyists or a shopping guide, you can become an affiliate of a major e-commerce site like eBay or Amazon.com.

If a visitor clicks on an ad and buys a product like a book, you get a sales commission. In the case of Amazon.com, the current commission is 4% for 1 to 6 items per month, 6% for 7 to 30 items, and so on up to 8.5% for 3,131 or more items.

As with regular advertising, you can expand your affiliate marketing options by signing up with an network, which is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. The largest is Commission Junction. AffiliateSeeking.com has an extensive list of affiliate marketing networks.

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Discover rather than find: research strategies for searching

Jon Singer — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:38:32 +0000

There's lots of good advice on the web about using search engines. If all you're trying to do is find a nugget of information, the standard tips are probably enough to get the job done.

Sometimes, however, you need to build a more detailed picture of something — say a technology, market or government practice. For these types of searches you need to use multiple sources, including vertical search engines for topics like news, scholarly papers, patents and finance, and iterate back and forth across them.

Let's say you want to get a sense of a company's intellectual property and R&D strategy for a type of technology. The first step is to search on a patent search engine like the US Patent and Trademark Office database using the company's name and keywords relevant to the technology.

The next step is to glean information from the patents and patent applications you've turned up. Note keywords that more narrowly describe the technology covered by the patents. Also note the inventors' names.

Now search for research papers using the keywords and inventors' names on a vertical search engine like Google Scholar or PubMed. You might find abstracts that give you more or clearer information than you got from the patents.

Do some of the papers have co-authors from academic institutions? Search on their names and the company name, and the institution's name and the company's name in a general search engine. Maybe you'll find that one or more of the academic researchers is on the company's board of scientific advisers. Perhaps the company and the institution have a technology transfer agreement. Or maybe the company funded some of the academic research.

Continue to pursue these leads, by, for example, searching for patents held by the academic researchers. Each piece of information helps build your picture and also helps you continue your search.

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Web Ads: A Map For Website Owners

Jon Singer — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:44:38 +0000

If you're looking to monetize your blog or website by carrying advertising, you'll find that there is Google's Adsense and a dizzying array of alternatives.

Here's an overview of what's out there in the way of ad networks and services.

Services from the major search engines:
Google Adsense
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Microsoft Advertising

Ad networks:
Adify
Advertising.com
Adversal.com
Burst Media
Casale Media
Chitika
Clicksor
MediaMind
MediaPlex
Performancing Ads
Point Roll
Say Media

These ad networks are for content publishers
with lots of traffic or strong niches:
Federated Media
Gorilla Nation
Technorati Media
Tribal Fusion

These services broker your ad space across multiple ad
networks and manage and optimize your ad selling:
adBrite
Doubleclick for Publishers
PubMatic
Rubicon Project
Yieldbuild

These ad networks only deal in text link ads –
ads that are short strings of linked text:
Bidvertiser
Text Link Ads
TextLinkBrokers.com

Pheedo is an ad network for putting ads in your RSS feed.

Some ad networks offer the option of in-text ads. These are the double-underlined words you sometimes see in a website's content. You'll want to be careful with this intrusive ad format because it can annoy your visitors. Make sure you don't do more harm than good. Likewise with ads that pop up new windows under your visitors' browsers.

In-text-only services:
Infolinks
Kontera

Pop-under ads:
AdvertisingZ.com

The key to making the most of any kind of advertising on your site is closely tracking performance using the ad provider's tools and keeping track of traffic statistics using tools like Google Analytics.

When you start out you'll want to experiment to find the best ad formats and placements, but once you get going you'll want to avoid regularly making wholesale changes. Think of it as tuning a machine rather than rebuilding it.

Here are some useful ad network guides:
Understanding Online Ad Networks: A Web Publishers Guide
Publishers Guide to Ad networks
PublisherSpot.com

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Alerts: Your Free Content Monitoring Service

Jon Singer — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:59:59 +0000

Many websites offer to send you e-mail when they update their information and most news sites offer e-mail headlines. These services save you the trouble of going to the sites, but if you have more than a few they can quickly fill your inbox.

What’s more useful is getting alerts from search engines. You can have Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing regularly send you the results of keyword searches on news and other sources.

This saves time by pushing information to you that you’d otherwise have to search for. In essence you can set up your own free content monitoring service. You can track legislation, competitors, industry trends or the goings-on in your hometown.

Bing News alerts, Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts let you receive e-mail alerts for keyword news searches. You can also get Yahoo Alerts via text message and Google Alerts via RSS feed.

Google Alerts are particularly useful because you can set keyword searches for different sources: news, blogs, webpage updates, video, discussions in Google Groups, or all of the above. You could use this to, for example, set two alerts for the same keyword, one on news and the other on blogs. This would let you separately track events and what people are saying about them.

If your focus is news, you can also create custom sections in Google News. This is useful because it lets you see headlines from several alerts at once.

Make sure to set an alert for your company name.

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Utter Command: Speech Command-And-Control That Works

Jon Singer — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:38:29 +0000

If you’ve tried speech recognition software lately you know that it does an impressive job of turning utterances into words on the screen. You probably also found that controlling your computer by speech is pretty clumsy. We’re a long way from Star Trek.

The wife of one of my college buddies has written some nifty software that changes the equation. Her company, Redstart Systems, makes Utter Command — speech command-and-control software that works with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine.

The software came out of one person’s frustration with out-of-the-box speech recognition. If you’re interested in using speech recognition, this could give you a better way of controlling your computer. If you have repetitive strain injuries that make it hard to use the keyboard or mouse this could be a source of serious relief.

Utter Command lets you use a single speech command to open a file or folder or go to a website. It includes commands that make it easy to edit text and navigate documents. It also lets you name mouse clicks for specific locations, which makes it easy to, for example, click toolbar buttons you use regularly.

Redstart Systems takes a different approach to speech command-and-control. They’ve worked out a grammar that makes commands consistent. Because there’s one right way to say a command, commands are easy to learn.

This approach also makes it possible to combine commands, which makes for major productivity gains. The company says that Utter Command averages 1 speech command for every 2.3 keyboard and/or mouse commands.

More Information on Speech Command and Control Software

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